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the fashion for the moment, and for which he competes with others as wise as himself, till the prices become ridiculous? English and American millionaires acquire specimens of early typography, poetry, binding, or what not, because they hear that it is the thing to do. One gentleman will give L100 more for a copy, because he is credibly informed that it is three-eighths of an inch taller than any other known; and a second will take something from the vendor on the assurance that no library of any pretensions is complete without it. This sort of child's-play is not Book-Collecting. The true book-closet and its master have to be kinsfolk, not acquaintances introduced by some bookseller in waiting. Humanly speaking, the poor little catalogue made by Hearne of his own books and MSS. comes nearer home to our affections than those of Grenville and Huth. In speaking and thinking of real books, it is necessary again to distinguish between articulate productions of two classes--between such a work, for example, as Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ and such an one as Thoreau's _Walden_, or between Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ and Sir Thomas Browne's _Urn-Burial_. The present is an enterprise directed toward the indication to collectors of different views and tastes of the volumes which they should respectively select for study or purchase. There are millions who have passed through life unconsciously without having read a book, although they may have seen, nay, possessed thousands. Those which might have been recommended to them with advantage, and perused with advantage, were too obscure, too dull, too cheap, too unfashionable. It is of no use to read publications with which your acquaintances have no familiarity, and to the merits of which it might be a hard task to convert them. But, as we have said, we want space to enter into these details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in Book-Form--Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age--what Thoreau call its "tit-men." We might readily instance masterpieces of erudition or industry which leave nothing to be desired in the way of information and safe guidance, and which, at the same time, do not distantly realise our conception of Books--rea
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