For some years Farringdon Road has enjoyed the distinction of being the best locality in London for bookstalling. Its stalls are far more numerous, and the quality of the books here exposed for sale is of a much higher class, than those which are to be met with in other places. There are between thirty and forty bookstalls or barrows here, and the place has what we may describe as a bibliopolic history, which goes back for a period of twenty years. The first person to start in the bookselling line was a coster of the name of Roberts, who died somewhat suddenly either in December of 1894 or early in January of the present year. Roberts appears to have been a fairly successful man at the trade, and had a fairly good knowledge of cheap books. The doyen of the Farringdon Road bibliopoles is named Dabbs—a very intelligent man, who started first in the hot-chestnut line. Mr. Dabbs has generally a fairly good stock of books, which varies between one and two thousand volumes, a selection of which are daily displayed on four or five barrows, and varying from two a penny ('You must take two') up to higher-priced volumes. Curiously enough, he finds that theological books pay the best, and it is of this class that his stock chiefly consists. Just as book-hunters have many 'finds' to gloat over, so perhaps booksellers have to bewail the many rarities which they have let slip through their fingers. It would be more than could be expected of human nature, as it is at present constituted, to expect booksellers to make a clean or even qualified confession in this respect. Our friend Dabbs, however, is not of this hypersensitive type, and he relates, with a certain amount of grim humour, that his greatest lost opportunity was the selling of a book for 1s. 6d. which a few days afterwards was sold in Paris for £50. He consoles himself with the reflection that at all events he made a fair profit out of this book. If we could all be as philosophical as this intelligent book-barrow-keeper, doubtless the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune would impress fewer wrinkles on our brows, and help us to think kindly of the friends who put us 'up' to good things in the way of gold-mines and generously left us to pay the piper.
However picturesque may be the calling of the bookstall-keeper to the person who experiences a fiendish delight in getting a 6d. book out of him for 5-1/2d., the calling is on the whole a very hard one. Exposed to all weathers, these men have a veritable struggle for existence. Their actual profits rarely exceed 30s. or £2 weekly. They vary greatly, of course, according to weather, and a wet Saturday makes a very material difference to their takings. Many weeks throughout the year these takings do not average more than 8s. or 10s. We have made inquiries among most of the bookstall-keepers in the Metropolis, and the above facts can be depended upon. When these men happen upon a rare book, they nearly invariably sell it to one of the better-class booksellers. By this means they make an immediate profit and effect a ready sale. There is beyond this a numerous class of what may be described as 'book-ghouls,' or men who make it a business to haunt the cheap bookstalls and bag the better-class or more saleable books and hawk them around to the shops, and so make a few shillings on which to support a precarious existence, in which beer and tobacco are the sole delights. We once met a man who did a roaring trade of this description, chiefly with the British Museum. He took notes of every book that struck him as being curious or out of the way, and those which he discovered to be absent from the Museum he would at once purchase. He was great in the matter of editions, such as Pope, Junius, Coleridge, and so forth. The Museum is naturally lacking in hundreds of editions of English authors; but as these editions, almost without exception, possess no literary value, their presence (or absence) was not a matter of importance. For some months the 'collector' referred to inundated the Museum with these unimportant editions. Our friend discovered that the Museum authorities, ignoring the prices which he placed on his wares, would only have them at their own figures—which showed a curious similarity to those at which the vendor had obtained them—and this, coupled with the fact that they refused to purchase many of the items offered at any price, led him to the conclusion that he was serving his country at too cheap a rate. It is scarcely necessary to add that he is now following a vocation which, if less agreeable, is certainly more profitable to himself. Occasionally one of these professional bookstallers blossoms into a shopkeeper in some court or alley off Holborn; but more generally they are too far gone in drink and dilapidation to get out of the rut.
One of the most curious characters who ever owned a bookstall was Henry Lemoine, the son of a French Huguenot. He was born in 1756, and for many years kept a stall in Bishopsgate Churchyard. He wrote many books, and did much hack-work for various publishers, chiefly in the way of translations from the French. He gave up shopkeeping in 1795, and became a pedestrian bookseller or colporteur of pamphlets. In 1807 he again set up a small stand of books in Parliament Street, and died in April, 1812. He might have achieved success, and become a respectable member of society, but his great failing was an all-consuming thirst.
Writing over forty years ago in 'London Labour and the London Poor,' 1851, Henry Mayhew remarked: 'There has been a change, and in some respects a considerable change, in the character or class of books sold at the street stalls, within the last forty or fifty years, as I have ascertained from the most experienced men in the trade. Now sermons, or rather the works of the old divines, are rarely seen at these stalls, or if seen, rarely purchased. Black-letter editions are very unfrequent at street bookstalls, and it is twenty times more difficult, I am assured, for street-sellers to pick up anything really rare and curious, than it was in the early part of the century. One reason assigned for this change by an intelligent street-seller was, that black-letter or any ancient works were almost all purchased by the second-hand booksellers, who have shops and issue catalogues, as they have a prompt sale for them whenever they pick them up at book-auctions or elsewhere.' As we have already pointed out, the same rule which obtained forty years ago applies with equal force to-day, and in the chief instances in which we have met with books well known to be rare, on bookstalls, their condition has been so bad as to render them valueless, except, perhaps, for the purpose of helping to complete imperfect copies.
At one time the bookstall-keepers had fairly good opportunities of making a haul of a few rare books—that was when they were called in to clear out offices and old houses. As the world has grown wiser in respect to books as well as other things, executors, legatees, and so forth, have acquired unreasonable views as to the value of old books, and everything in the shape of a volume is sent to the regular book-auctioneers. When it is remembered that practically all the books which now occur on the various bookstalls of the Metropolis are purchased under the hammer at Hodgson's, the chances of obtaining anything rare are reduced to a minimum. These books are the refuse of the various bookshops, after, perhaps, having passed from one shop to another for several years without finding a purchaser outside the trade. At Hodgson's, of course, these books find their level, after repeated appearances; they are here sold, not quite by the cartload, but certainly in lots sufficiently large to fill a moderate sized wheelbarrow. The tastes of the bookbuying public are so infinite that there would seem to be a sale, at some time or another, for every species of printed matter; but the habitual haunter of the bookstalls meets with the same water-soaked dog-eared volumes month after month, and year after year, so that he is forced to the conclusion that the right purchaser has not yet come along. These volumes appeal to the bookbuyer with a piteousness which is scarcely less than positively human. In the words of George Peele, written over three centuries ago, these books seem to say,
