The "flowery and gilt" binding of these books, so often spoken of in the notices, is wholly a thing of the past. It was made in Holland and Germany; but recent inquiry about it discovered that the stamps and presses used in its manufacture had all been destroyed. An enthusiastic lover of these little books wrote:—
"Talk of your vellum, gold embossed morocco, roan, and calf,
The blue and yellow wraps of old were prettier by half."
They were cheap enough, but a penny apiece, some of them, others sixpence. It is doubtful whether they were ever sold in America in vast numbers. Children lent them to each other. Anna Green Winslow borrowed them, and letters of her day show other children doing likewise. It was a day of book-lending; for circulating libraries were slow of formation. The minister's library was often the largest one in each town, and he lent his precious books to his flock. In the sparse advertisements of colonial newspapers are many advertisements of book owners who have lent books, forgotten to whom, and wish them returned. The only way country children had of reading many books was by borrowing.
Vice in its proper Shape 39
he had lived to years of maturity, kind death was pleaſed to diſpatch him in the twelfth year of his age, by the help of a dozen penny cuſtards, which he greedily conveyed down his throat at one meal, and thereby gorged his stomach, and threw himſelf into a mortal fever. After his
Page of Vice in its proper Shape.
American boys and girls felt till our own day both bewilderment and impatience at forever reading stories whose local color was wholly strange to them. Dr. Holmes thus expresses this condition of things:—
"Books where James was called Jem not Jim as we heard it; where naughty schoolboys got through a gap in the hedge to steal Farmer Giles's red-streaks, instead of shinning over the fence to hook old Daddy Jones's baldwins; where Hodge used to go to the ale-house for his mug of beer, while we used to see old Joe steering for the grocery to get his glass of rum; where there were larks and nightingales instead of yellow-birds and bobolinks; where the robin was a little domestic bird that fed at table instead of a great, fidgety, jerky, whooping thrush."