So that now there was not a single need of the great book-buying, book-loving Public that Rickman’s did not provide for and represent.  It pandered to (Isaac said “catered for”) the highest and the lowest, the spirit as well as the flesh.  Only Isaac was wise enough to keep the two branches of the business separate and distinct.  His right hand professed complete ignorance of the doings of his left.

It may be that Isaac’s heart was in his City shop.  But there was something in him greater than his heart, his ambition, which was colossal.  He meant, he always had meant, to be the founder of a great House, which should make the name of Rickman live after him.  He aimed at nothing less than supremacy.  He proposed to spread his nets till they had drawn in the greater part of the book trade of London; till Rickman’s had reared its gigantic palaces in every district of the capital.  In ’92 there was some talk of depression in the book trade.  Firms had failed.  Isaac did not join in the talk, and he had his own theory of the failure.  Men went smash for want of will, for want of brains, for want of courage and capital.  Above all for want of capital.  As if any man need want capital so long as he had the pluck to borrow, that is to say, to buy it.  So ran his dream.  And Isaac believed in his dream, and what was more, he had made Mr. Richard Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue, believe in it.  “Rickman’s,” backed by Pilkington, would stand firm, firm as a rock.

Courage and capital are great, but brains are greater.  It was not only by shrewdness, energy and an incomparable audacity that Isaac Rickman had raised himself from those obscure beginnings.  Isaac was an artist in his own enormous way, and he had made an exhaustive study of the Public.  With incredible versatility he followed every twist and turn of the great mind; the slow colossal movements which make capital, the fitful balancing, the sudden start and mad rush forward by which, if you can but foresee and keep pace with it, you reap the golden harvest of the hour.  He never took his eye off the Public.  He laid his finger, as it were, on that mighty pulse and recorded its fluctuations in his ledger.

But there was a region beyond those fluctuations.  With new books there was always a pound’s worth of risk to a pennyworth of profit; but there was no end of money to be got out of old ones, if only you knew how to set about it.  And Isaac did not quite know how.  In his front shop it was the Public, in his side shop it was the books that mattered, and knowledge of the one, however exhaustive, was no guide to the other.  Isaac by himself cut a somewhat unfortunate figure; he stood fully equipped in the field where there was much danger and but little gain; he was helpless where the price of knowledge ruled immeasurably high.  In the second-hand department audacity without education can do nothing.  What he still wanted, then, was brains and yet more brains; not the raw material, mind you, he had plenty of that, but the finished product, the trained, cultured intellect.  Isaac was a self-made man, a man ignorant of many things, religious, but uneducated.