brings down the average.  Were Russia left out in the cold, we might, were our books to be divided amongst our population per capita, rely upon having two volumes apiece.  This would not afford Mr. Gosse (the title of one of whose books I have stolen) much material for gossip, particularly as his two books might easily chance to be duplicates.  There are no habits of man more alien to the doctrine of the Communist than those of the collector, and there is no collector, not even that basest of them all, the Belial of his tribe, the man who collects money, whose love of private property is intenser, whose sense of the joys of ownership is keener than the book-collector’s.  Mr. William Morris once hinted at a good time coming, when at almost every street corner there would be a public library, where beautiful and rare books will be kept for citizens to examine.  The citizen will first wash his hands in a parochial basin, and then dry them on a parochial towel, after which ritual he will walk in and stand en queue until it comes to be his turn to feast his eye upon some triumph of modern or some miracle of old typography.  He will then return to a bookless home proud and satisfied, tasting of the joy that is in widest commonalty spread.  Alas! he will do nothing of the kind, not, at least, if he is one of those in whom the old Adam of the bookstalls still breathes.  A public library must always be an abomination.  To enjoy a book, you must own it.  ‘John Jones his book,’ that is the best bookplate.  I have never admired the much-talked-of bookplate of Grolier, which, in addition to his own name, bore the ridiculous advice Et Amicorum.  Fudge!  There is no evidence that Grolier ever lent any man a book with his plate in it.  His collection was dispersed after his death, and then sentimentalists fell a-weeping over his supposed generosity.  It would be as reasonable to commend the hospitality of a dead man because you found amongst his papers a vast number of unposted invitations to dinner upon a date he long outlived.  Sentiment is seldom in place, but on a bookplate it is peculiarly odious.  To paste in each book an invitation to steal it, as Grolier seems to have done, is foolish; but so also is it to invoke, as some book-plates do, curses upon the heads of all subsequent possessors—­as if any man who wanted to add a volume to his collection would be deterred by such braggadocio.  But this is a digression.  Public libraries can never satisfy the longings of book-collectors any more than can the private libraries of other people.  Whoever really cared a snap of his fingers for the contents of another man’s library, unless he is known to be dying?  It is a humorous spectacle to watch one book-collector exhibiting his stores to another.  If the owner is a gentleman, as he usually is, he affects indifference—­’A poor thing,’ he seems to say, ‘yet mine own’; whilst the visitor, if human, as he always is, exhibits disgust.  If the volume proffered for the visitor’s examination is a genuine rarity, not in his own collection, he surlily inquires how it was come by; whilst if it is no great thing, he testily expresses his astonishment it should be thought worth keeping, and this although he has the very same edition at home.