arger (or your charge account), and gallop away. Be a little knightly,
you book-lovers!

The lack of intelligence with which people use bookshops is, one
supposes, no more flagrant than the lack of intelligence with which we
use all the rest of the machinery of civilization. In this age, and
particularly in this city, we haven't time to be intelligent.

A queer thing about books, if you open your heart to them, is the
instant and irresistible way they follow you with their appeal. You know
at once, if you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, one
might say), when you have met your book. You may dally and evade, you
may go on about your affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell
upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the spirit and flavour of
the volume, more divined than reasonably noted, will follow you. A few
lines glimpsed on a page may alter your whole trend of thought for the
day, reverse the currents of the mind, change the profile of the city.
The other evening, on a subway car, we were reading Walter de la Mare's
interesting little essay about Rupert Brooke. His discussion of
children, their dreaming ways, their exalted simplicity and absorption,
changed the whole tenor of our voyage by some magical chemistry of
thought. It was no longer a wild, barbaric struggle with our fellowmen,
but a venture of faith and recompense, taking us home to the bedtime of
a child.

The moment when one meets a book and knows, beyond shadow of doubt, that
that book must be his--not necessarily now, but some time--is among the
happiest excitements of the spirit. An indescribable virtue effuses from
some books. One can feel the radiations of an honest book long before
one sees it, if one has a sensitive pulse for such affairs. Its honour
and truth will speak through the advertising. Its mind and heart will
cry out even underneath the extravagance of jacket-blurbings. Some
shrewd soul, who understands books, remarked some time ago on the
editorial page of the _Sun's_ book review that no superlative on a
jacket had ever done the book an atom of good. He was right, as far as
the true bookster is concerned. We choose our dinner not by the
wrappers, but by the veining and gristle of the meat within. The other
day, prowling about a bookshop, we came upon two paper-bound copies of a
little book of poems by Alice Meynell. They had been there for at least
two years. We had seen them before, a year or more ago, but ha