d themselves into the windows, where the
boldest and most gorgeous display themselves as if calling to the
passers-by to come in and purchase.

One cannot help wondering, sometimes, where all these books come from.
Who are their makers? What reason is there for their existence? Under
what circumstances were they thrust upon the world? For, really, eight
out of ten count as nothing in the literary race for fame or money.
Either the publisher or the author--nowadays, as a rule, the
latter--must suffer. The book--representative of the hopes, the
wearisome labors, and, sometimes, of the brains of the author--leaps
into being with the air of "Who will not buy me?" which soon changes
into that of "Who will buy me?" and goes out finally to stand at the
doors of the second-hand bookstores on a dirty shelf, to get its covers
blistered in the sun, its binding dampened by the rain, all the while
shamefully conscious of the legend displayed above,--"Anything on this
shelf for 25 cents."

[Illustration: FOREST OF ARDENNES.

[From Childe Harold.]]

There are, however, books that achieve success, and that publishers
thrive upon. Books that are "a joy forever," companions, counsellors,
and friends, the value of whose printed pages is aided and added to by
the hand of the draughtsman, and in which text and illustration
harmoniously blend to make the perfect book.

It speaks well for the growing taste of the American public that these
books, whose cost of manufacture often reaches many thousands of
dollars, always meet with popular favor, and so exacting has the public
taste become that no publisher of reputation dares leave a stone
unturned in the carrying-out of any literary project in which
illustration bears part.

[Illustration: STAMBOUL.

[From Childe Harold.]]

It is only by putting the work of twenty years ago by the side of that
of to-day that one can realize what wonderful strides have been made in
every department of bookmaking, more especially in that of illustration.
The art of wood-engraving has been carried, one could almost say, to
perfection. In its marvellous capability of imitation it has, perhaps,
lost individuality, but it has proved its adaptability to the production
of the most diverse and beautiful effects. In the hands of artistic
workmen,--for an engraver must nowadays be an artist as well as a
workman,--a wood cut may imitate a true engraving, an etching, a
mezzotint, a charcoal or crayon drawing, or