[Illustration:  Signature:  Lyman Abbott]

BOOK-STORES AND BOOKS

From ‘Star Papers’

Nothing marks the increasing wealth of our times, and the growth of the public mind toward refinement, more than the demand for books.  Within ten years the sale of common books has increased probably two hundred per cent., and it is daily increasing.  But the sale of expensive works, and of library editions of standard authors in costly bindings, is yet more noticeable.  Ten years ago such a display of magnificent works as is to be found at the Appletons’ would have been a precursor of bankruptcy.  There was no demand for them.  A few dozen, in one little show-case, was the prudent whole.  Now, one whole side of an immense store is not only filled with admirably bound library books, but from some inexhaustible source the void continually made in the shelves is at once refilled.  A reserve of heroic books supply the places of those that fall.  Alas! where is human nature so weak as in a book-store!  Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon vivant’s relish for a dinner!  What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, those yearnings of the imagination, those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller’s temptation-hall?

How easily one may distinguish a genuine lover of books from a worldly man!  With what subdued and yet glowing enthusiasm does he gaze upon the costly front of a thousand embattled volumes!  How gently he draws them down, as if they were little children; how tenderly he handles them!  He peers at the title-page, at the text, or the notes, with the nicety of a bird examining a flower.  He studies the binding:  the leather,—­russia, English calf, morocco; the lettering, the gilding, the edging, the hinge of the cover!  He opens it and shuts it, he holds it off and brings it nigh.  It suffuses his whole body with book magnetism.  He walks up and down in a maze at the mysterious allotments of Providence, that gives so much money to men who spend it upon their appetites, and so little to men who would spend it in benevolence or upon their refined tastes!  It is astonishing, too, how one’s necessities multiply in the presence of the supply.  One never knows how many things it is impossible to do without till he goes to Windle’s or Smith’s house-furnishing stores.  One is surprised to perceive, at some bazaar or fancy and variety store, how many conveniences he needs.  He is satisfied that his life must have been utterly inconvenient aforetime.  And thus too one is inwardly convicted, at Appletons’, of having lived for years without books which he is now satisfied that one cannot live without!