n any other--through exhaustive popular demand.
Entire and large impressions of books, pamphlets, and broadsides have
succumbed, not to the sacrilegious hand of the spoiler, but to the too
affectionate, and not too cleanly, fingering of the multitude of men
and women who read and then cast the sources of entertainment away. If
we remember that certain of the Bibles ordered to be kept in churches
for general use chiefly survive in crumbling fragments, or at best
woefully dilapidated copies, we cease to be surprised at the easy prey
which more fugitive compositions have formed to a succession of
careless and indifferent owners. The illiterate inscriptions on many
books, which have thus become valuable, point to the hands through
which they have passed, and tell a story of prolonged neglect, too
often culminating in appropriation to domestic requirements.

It is, anyhow, perfectly undeniable that of the miscellaneous early
literature of all countries, the proportion which exists is in very
numerous instances no more than a simple voucher for the work having
passed the press. A single copy has formerly occurred or occurs
fortuitously, and no duplicate can be cited. This is the position of
thousands of volumes, and of many it is the chief merit.

Infinitely numerous are the strange tales, sometimes drawing up the
moisture into the mouth, sometimes sufficient to make one's hair
rigid, of books of price hung up for use at country railway stations,
or employed by a tobacconist to wrap up his pennyworths of snuff, or
converted by a lady of quality into curl-papers. What has become of
the Caxtons sent over to the Netherlands in the last century by a
confiding English gentleman their owner, for the inspection of a
nameless Mynheer his friend, who, when he was invited to restore them,
lamented their disappearance in a fire?

There was beyond a question an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the
mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off
literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons,
Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a
thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper in the
Borough. We may surmise how his Caxtons came to him, and at what
rates!

These episodes appertain to the romantic and speculative aspect of
book-collecting; but they really have another side. Here, at a time
when the first-fruits of the English press were unregarded, we f