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"At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a book-seller's window with the following label: 'Only £2 2s. Hume's History of England, in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay. I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman.
'And are you not above doing it cheap? The prospect of having something to do, and some human creature to speak a word to, tempted me, and I did a day's dirty work in the book-seller's warehouse for a shilling. More work followed at the same rate. In a week I was promoted to sweep out the shop and put up the shutters.
The ledgers bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted bitterly as he left the room again to his two years' solitary self-instruction in the Shrewsbury book-seller's shop. "If I could only have worked at a business!" he thought.
He had seen his name in staring capitals in the book-seller's window as he came down, and he felt that it was shamefully exposed to the public gaze, and that everybody had seen it. The clerks, however, gave no sign that the event had disturbed them. He had encountered many people he knew on the street, but there had been no recognition of his leap into notoriety.
Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller's hack.
They returned to lunch at the hotel, and the girl, pleading lack of appetite, slipped out alone to buy a copy of Milton's poems. From the book-seller's she wandered into the Embankment Gardens. She was a dutiful daughter, and had resolved to obey without question her father's stern command not to enter again into communication with a man of whom he so strongly disapproved.
I lunched in the City, and afterwards went to a certain well-known book-seller's in Holborn, who had written to tell me that he had for sale a valuable book which he knew I wanted. I have been a collector of rare books ever since I came back to England. I spent an hour or so at the book-seller's shop. I bought the book which I had gone to see paying a very heavy price for it.
I imagine these copies were "ground up" in the manner of worthless stock, for I saw a single example of the book quoted the other day in a book-seller's catalogue at ten dollars, and I infer that it is so rare as to be prized at least for its rarity.
He could find nothing to do; he climbed up the Abbey tower, and wrote his name on the big hand of the clock; he roped up his playbox, tipped the school porter; and still there was an hour and a half to put in. Disconsolately he wandered down town. He strolled into Gisson's, the school book-seller's: it contained nothing but the Home University Library series and numerous Everymans.
The book was not written for critics who desire to have everything summed up in a single sentence, and who are apt to praise the volumes which encumber the book-seller's shelves rather than those which run through seven editions in as many days. Like most other American essayists, she has couched many of her phrases and ideas in the Emersonian mould.
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