and why he should prefer the comparatively rude first Walton’s Angler to Pickering’s edition, the handsomest of this century, with its monumental title page. But why a first edition of a popular novel should be more desirable than a late one, which is usually the more elegant, I confess I cannot understand. It is one of those things which, like the mystery of religion, we must take on trust. So when a bookseller tells me that a copy of the first issue of “The Scarlet Letter” has sold for seventy-five dollars, and that a copy of the second, with the same date, but put out six months later, is worth only seventy-five cents, I open my eyes but not my purse, especially when I consider that the second is greatly superior to the first on account of its famous preface of apology, and when I read of some one’s bidding $1875 for a copy of Poe’s worthless “Tamerlane,” I am flattered by the reflection that there is one man in the world whom I believe to be eighteen hundred and seventy-five times as great a fool as I am!
IV.
THE SIZE OF BOOKS.
ere I a despotic ruler of the universe I would make it a serious offense to publish a book larger than royal octavo. Books should be made to read, or at all events to look at, and in this view comfort and ease should be consulted. Any one who has ever undertaken to read a huge quarto or folio will sympathize with this view. The older and lazier the Book-Worm grows the more he longs for little books, which he can hold in one hand without getting a cramp, or at least support with arms in an elbow chair without fatigue. Darwin remorselessly split big books in two. Mr. Slater says in “Book Collecting:” “When the library at Sion College took fire the attendants, at the risk of their lives, rescued a pile of books from the flames, and it is said that the librarian wept when he found that the porters had taken it for granted that the value of a book was in exact proportion to its size.” Few of us, I suspect, ever read our family Bible, and all of us probably groan when we lift out the unabridged dictionary. The “Century Dictionary” is a luxury because it is published in small and convenient parts. I cannot conceive any good in a big book except that the ladies may use it to press flowers or mosses in, or the nurses may put it in a chair to sit the baby on at table. I have heard of a gentleman who inherited a mass of folio volumes and arranged them as shelves for his smaller treasures, and of another who arranged his 12-mos on a stand made up of the seventeen volumes of Pinkerton’s “Voyages” and Denon’s “Egypt” for shelves. What reader would not prefer a dainty little Elzevir to the huge folio, Cæsar’s “Commentaries,” even with the big bull in it, and the wicker idol full of burning human victims? What can be more pleasing than the modern Quantin edition of the classics? Or, to speak of a popular book, take the “Pastels in Prose,” the most exquisite book for the price ever known in the history of printing
