the case
even of private libraries is becoming, nay, has become, very serious for
all who are possessed by the inexorable spirit of collection, but whose
ardor is perplexed and qualified, or even baffled, by considerations
springing from the balance-sheet.

The purchase of a book is commonly supposed to end, even for the most
scrupulous customer, with the payment of the bookseller's bill. But this
is a mere popular superstition. Such payment is not the last, but the
first term in a series of goodly length. If we wish to give to the block
a lease of life equal to that of the pages, the first condition is that
it should be bound. So at least one would have said half a century ago.
But, while books are in the most instances cheaper, binding, from causes
which I do not understand, is dearer, at least in England, than it was
in my early years, so that few can afford it.[11] We have, however,
the tolerable and very useful expedient of cloth binding (now in some
danger, I fear, of losing its modesty through flaring ornamentation) to
console us. Well, then, bound or not, the book must of necessity be put
into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must
be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be
catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless indeed
things are to be as they now are in at least one princely mansion of
this country, where books, in thousands upon thousands, are jumbled
together with no more arrangement than a sack of coals; where not
even the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has been respected; where
undoubtedly an intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune take
something from the shelves that is a book; but where no particular book
can except by the purest accident, be found.

Such being the outlook, what are we to do with our books? Shall we
be buried under them like Tarpeia under the Sabine shields? Shall
we renounce them (many will, or will do worse, will keep to the most
worthless part of them) in our resentment against their more and more
exacting demands? Shall we sell and scatter them? as it is painful
to see how often the books of eminent men are ruthlessly, or at least
unhappily, dispersed on their decease. Without answering in detail, I
shall assume that the book-buyer is a book-lover, that his love is a
tenacious, not a transitory love, and that for him the question is how
best to keep his books.

I pass over those conditions which are