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Tom was one of these, for he had picked up a few books on the United States at second-hand bookstalls at Portsmouth, and this prevented him from finding the voyage monotonous.
The Weekly Fact had become, as people said, quite an interesting and readable paper, brighter than the Nation, more emotional than the New Statesman, gentler than the New Witness, spicier than the Spectator, more chatty than the Athenaeum, so that one bought it on bookstalls and read it in trains.
It was he who commenced the railway bookstall business. Every one knows the familiar look of Smith's bookstalls, with their energetic clerks, and their armies of pushing newsboys, and perchance think they were born with the railways and have grown up with them. But such is not the case. It was not till about 1850 that Mr.
I carried them, one after another, to a bookstall in the City Road one part of which, near our house, was almost all bookstalls and bird shops then and sold them for whatever they would bring. The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scolded by his wife every morning.
Gervaise promised to buy some for him. He owned Louis Blanc's Histoire de Dix Ans, all but the first volume, which he had never had, Lamartine's Les Girondins, The Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew, by Eugene Sue, without counting a pile of incendiary volumes which he had picked up at bookstalls. His old newspapers he regarded with especial respect.
In addition to preaching-stations, there were bookstalls where portions of the Scriptures and Christian tracts and books were disposed of.
Poring over the bookstalls in the Place du Panthéon or the Rue des Grès hurrying along towards this or that college with a huge volume under each arm, about nine o'clock in the morning haunting the cafés at midday and the restaurants at six swinging his legs out of upper windows and smoking in his shirt-sleeves in the summer evenings crowding the pit of the Odéon and every part of the Theatre du Panthéon playing wind instruments at dead of night to the torment of his neighbors, or, in vocal mood, traversing the Quartier with a society of musical friends about the small hours of the morning getting into scuffles with the gendarmes flirting, dancing, playing billiards and the deuce; falling in love and in debt; dividing his time between Aristotle and Mademoiselle Mimi Pinson ... here, and here only, in all his phases, at every hour of the day and night, he swarmed, ubiquitous.
Alas! he will do nothing of the kind, not, at least, if he is one of those in whom the old Adam of the bookstalls still breathes. A public library must always be an abomination. To enjoy a book, you must own it. 'John Jones his book, that is the best bookplate. I have never admired the much-talked-of bookplate of Grolier, which, in addition to his own name, bore the ridiculous advice Et Amicorum.
"The weighty work in which the eminent statesman is so deeply engrossed," he said, "is called 'The Great Rand Robbery. It is a detective novel for sale at all bookstalls." The American raised his eyebrows in disbelief. "'The Great Rand Robbery'?" he repeated, incredulously. "What an odd taste!" "It is not a taste, it is his vice," returned the gentleman with the pearl stud.
Let me give an instance, familiar enough, of that wide-spread opinion. There is a very clever book of pictures now being sold at the railway bookstalls, called 'The British Working Man, by one who does not believe in him, a title and a book which make me both angry and ashamed, because the two express much injustice, and not a little truth in their quaint, and necessarily exaggerated way.
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