on books unsold.  He may inform you that his rival has entirely ceased to stock books of any sort, and that he alone stands for letters in the midst of forty thousand people.  In a town of sixty thousand there will be a largeish stationer’s with a small separate book department.  Contents similar to the other shop, with a fair selection of cheap reprints, and half a dozen of the most notorious new novels, such as novels by Marie Corelli, Max Pemberton, Mrs. Humphry Ward.  That is all.  Both the shops described will have two or three regular book-buying clients, not more than ten in a total of a hundred thousand.  These ten are book-lovers.  They follow the book lists.  They buy to the limit of their purses.  And in the cult of literature they keep themselves quite apart from the society of the town, despising it.  The town is simply aware that they are “great readers.”

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Another agency for the radiation of light in the average town first mentioned is the Municipal Free Library.  The yearly sum spent on it is entirely inadequate to keep it up to date.  A fraction of its activity is beneficial, as much to the artisan as to members of the crust.  But the chief result of the penny-in-the-pound rate is to supply women old and young with outmoded, viciously respectable, viciously sentimental fiction.  A few new novels get into the Library every year.  They must, however, be “innocuous,” that is to say, devoid of original ideas.  This, of course, is inevitable in an institution presided over by a committee which has infinitely less personal interest in books than in politics or the price of coal.  No Municipal Library can hope to be nearer than twenty-five years to date.  Go into the average good home of the crust, in the quietude of “after-tea,” and you will see a youthful miss sitting over something by Charlotte M. Yonge or Charles Kingsley.  And that something is repulsively foul, greasy, sticky, black.  Remember that it reaches from thirty to a hundred such good homes every year.  Can you wonder that it should carry deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt?  You cannot.  But you are entitled to wonder why the Municipal Sanitary Inspector does not inspect it and order it to be destroyed....  That youthful miss in torpidity over that palimpsest of filth is what the Free Library has to show as the justification of its existence.  I know what I am talking about.

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A third agency is the book-pedlar.  There are firms of publishers who never advertise in any literary weekly or any daily, who never publish anything new, and who may possibly be unknown to Simpkins themselves.  They issue badly printed, badly bound, showy editions of the eternal Scott and the eternal Dickens, in many glittering volumes with scores of bleared illustrations, and they will sell them up and down the provinces by means of respectably dressed “commission agents,” at prices much in excess of their value, to an ingenuous, ignorant public that has never heard of Dent and Routledge.  The books are found in houses where the sole function of literature is to flatter the eye.  The ability of these subterranean firms to dispose of deplorable editions to persons who do not want them is in itself a sharp criticism of the commercial organization of the more respectable trade.