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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2011
The giving a bookseller his price for his books has this advantage: He that will do so shall have the refusal of whatsoever comes to the bookseller's hand; and so by that means get many things which otherwise he never should have seen.
Selden, Table Talk, § Books.Stalls are not to be despised. …… How many curious and useful books are there, which no collector has yet cried up, ‥ no Evans or Sotheby has yet knocked down.
Nares' Correspondence (Literary Illustrations, vii, 643).BOOK I. Chapter VI. Purchases.
§ 1. CHOICE OF AUTHORS AND OF EDITIONS.
No task is more likely to strip a man of self-conceit than that of having to frame, and to carry out in detail, a plan for the formation of a large Library. When he has once got beyond those departments of knowledge in which his own pursuits and tastes have specially interested him, the duty becomes a difficult one, and the certainty that, with his best efforts, it will be very imperfectly performed is embarrassing and painful. If, on the other hand, the task be imposed upon a “Committee,” there ensues almost the certainty that its execution will depend at least as much on chance as on plan; that responsibility will be so attenuated as to pass off in vapour; and that the collection so brought together will consist of parts bearing but a chaotic sort of relation to the whole.
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