nius to the man who had raised that
mighty pile, the Gin Palace of Art. Those stately premises, with their
clustering lights, their carpeted floors, their polished fittings,
were very different from the dark little house in Paternoster Row
where Keith first saw what light there was to be seen. When Isaac grew
great and moved further west, the little shop was kept on and devoted
to the sale of Bibles, hymn-books and Nonconformist literature. For
Isaac, life was a compromise between the pious Wesleyan he was and the
successful tradesman he aspired to be. There were, in fact, two
Rickman's: Rickman's in the City and Rickman's in the Strand.
Rickman's in the Strand bore on its fore-front most unmistakeably the
seal of the world; Rickman's in the City was sealed with the Lord's
seal.

So that now there was not a single need of the great book-buying,
book-loving Public that Rickman's did not provide for and represent.
It pandered to (Isaac said "catered for") the highest and the lowest,
the spirit as well as the flesh. Only Isaac was wise enough to keep
the two branches of the business separate and distinct. His right hand
professed complete ignorance of the doings of his left.

It may be that Isaac's heart was in his City shop. But there was
something in him greater than his heart, his ambition, which was
colossal. He meant, he always had meant, to be the founder of a great
House, which should make the name of Rickman live after him. He aimed
at nothing less than supremacy. He proposed to spread his nets till
they had drawn in the greater part of the book trade of London; till
Rickman's had reared its gigantic palaces in every district of the
capital. In '92 there was some talk of depression in the book trade.
Firms had failed. Isaac did not join in the talk, and he had his own
theory of the failure. Men went smash for want of will, for want of
brains, for want of courage and capital. Above all for want of
capital. As if any man need want capital so long as he had the pluck
to borrow, that is to say, to buy it. So ran his dream. And Isaac
believed in his dream, and what was more, he had made Mr. Richard
Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue, believe in it.
"Rickman's," backed by Pilkington, would stand firm, firm as a rock.

Courage and capital are great, but brains are greater. It was not only
by shrewdness, energy and an incomparable audacity that Isaac Rickman
had raised himself from those obscure beginnin