feel an interest in the
library, and a mutuality of interest will secure more opportunities and
better bargains.

The submission of lists of books wanted, to houses having large stocks or
good facilities, helps to make funds go as far as possible through
competition. By the typewriter such lists can now be manifolded much more
cheaply than they can be written or printed.

Selection from priced catalogues presents a constantly recurring
opportunity of buying volumes of the greatest consequence, to fill gaps
in any collection, and often at surprisingly low prices. Much as book
values have been enhanced of late years, there are yet catalogues issued
by American, English and continental dealers which quote books both of
the standard and secondary class at very cheap rates. Even now English
books are sold by the Mudie and the W. H. Smith lending libraries in
London, after a very few months, at one-half to one-fourth their original
publishing price. These must usually be rebound, but by instructing your
agent to select copies which are clean within, all the soil of the edges
will disappear with the light trimming of the binder.

Purchase at auction supplies a means of recruiting libraries both public
and private with many rare works, and with the best editions of the
standard authors, often finely bound. The choice private libraries of the
country, as well as the poor ones, tend to pour themselves sooner or
later into public auctions. The collectors of books, whose early avidity
to amass libraries of fine editions was phenomenal, rarely persist in
cultivating the passion through life. Sometimes they are overtaken by
misfortune--sometimes by indifference--the bibliomania not being a
perennial inspiration, but often an acute and fiery attack, which in a
few years burns out. Even if the library gathered with so much money and
pains descends to the heirs of the collector, the passion for books is
very seldom an inherited one. Thus the public libraries are constantly
recruited by the opportunities of selection furnished by the forced sale
of the private ones. Here, public competition frequently runs up the
price of certain books to an exorbitant degree, while those not wanted
often sell for the merest trifle. One should have a pretty clear idea of
the approximate commercial value of books, before competing for them at
public sale. He may, however, if well persuaded in his own mind as to the
importance or the relative unimportanc