is the reply. "I wouldn't read a book of
his." You see, a great writer must be dead. A common error of book
buyers is to confuse the words edition and copy. "Let me have a clean
edition of this," is frequently asked. Once a lady asked for something
"bound in gingham." No one, it is our belief, ever sold a light book
to a Japanese. They are the book clerk's dread. Terribly intelligent,
somewhat unintelligible in their handling of our language, they always
want something exceedingly difficult to find, something usually on
military or political science, harbour construction or the most
recondite form of philosophy.

Then there are the remarkable people who "keep up" with the flood of
fiction; who say, "Oh, I've read that," in a tone which implies that
they are not so far behind as that! "Have you no new novels?" they
inquire. Novels get "old," one might suppose, like eggs, in a couple
of days. The quest of these seekers of books suggests the story of the
lady at a public library who, upon being told that seven new novels had
come in that morning, said, "Give me, please, the one that came in
last." There are, too, those singular folks who appear regularly every
year just before Christmas, buy a great quantity of books for presents,
and disappear again until the next year just before the holiday season.
What, we have wondered, do they do about books the rest of the time?
Ministers are always very trying characters to book clerks. "Beware of
the gallery," says a fellow serf to us, "there's a minister browsing
around up there." The official servants of the Lord fall, in the book
clerk's mind, into that class technically described by him as
"stickers." All gentlemen wearing high hats also belong to this
classification. Deaf customers are embarrassing, for the reason that
one always addresses one's next customer as though he were deaf, too.
Foreigners are invariably very polite to clerks. They bow when they
enter and take off their hats upon leaving. Very respectful people.
"There," said a fellow thrall, "come two old women in at the door.
Now, if I were my ancestor, I'd dance around that table with a stone
club and brain them." As it is, they ask, "Have you Hopkinson Smith's
'Gondola Days'?" He says, "I think so." A lady, very rich and
important looking, wants a book "without an unpleasant ending." "I
wonder how this is" (looking at the last page). "No" (closing the book
with a thump), "that won't do." A