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Updated: May 15, 2025
The octavos as they were flung on their way uttered a solemn sound, sank to the bottom, and only rose up again with great difficulty, hindered as they were by duodecimos and works of smaller bulk which floated on the top and melted into light foam.
It is not without the usual piquancy and the usual cynicism, but he had nothing particular to say, except to tell his audience that a small house is no excuse for absence of books, inasmuch as a set of shelves, thirteen feet by ten, and six inches deep, will accommodate nearly a thousand octavos; and to hint that a man making a thousand a year, who spends less than a pound a week on books, ought to be ashamed of himself.
The octavos as they were flung on their way uttered a solemn sound, sank to the bottom, and only rose up again with great difficulty, hindered as they were by duodecimos and works of smaller bulk which floated on the top and melted into light foam.
It would be as absurd, of course, to appear in folio as to step abroad in the small-clothes and queue of our great-grandfathers' day, and even quarto is reserved for science and some departments of the law. But then, on the other hand, octavos are growing as large as some of the folios of the seventeenth century, and a solid roomy-looking book is still practicable.
Her books were arranged in a beautiful order; the quartos were fenced off by a pile of bottles that rose in a delightful pyramid; the octavos were bounded by tea-dishes of all shapes and sizes; 'and at the end of the folios were great jars of china placed one above the other in a very noble piece of architecture.
Then, my poetical public, we should have Anacreon Moore singing his "Rich and rare were the gems she wore," in some such place as the Quadrant, or Opera Colonnade; and Sir Walter Scott celebrating the Field of Waterloo, not in the broad-margined octavos of Paternoster-row, but about the purlieus of the Horse Guards. Wordsworth would be his own Skylark.
A man of only ordinary nerve and diligence would have taken a ten years' rest upon the completion of only one of his ponderous octavos; and the wonder is the greater, that London wrought in his later years under all the disadvantages of appeals from rapacious creditors and the infirmities of a broken constitution.
His orthodoxy appears from the very library which he selected and brought with him for the congregation in New York, consisting of twenty folios, fifty-two quartos, twenty-three octavos, and six duodecimos, among them Calovius's Biblia Illustrata, Balduinus's Commentarius in Epistolas S. Pauli, Dedekennus's Consilia, Huelsemann's De Auxiliis Gratiae, Brochmand's Systema, etc.
The Gadshill collection of thin octavos, comprising the whole series of Readings, includes within it two copies of "Mrs. Gamp" and two copies of "Nicholas Nickleby." Whereas, on comparing the duplicates of Mrs. Gamp, the two versions appear to be so slightly different that they are all but identical, a marked contrast is observable at a glance between the two Nicklebys.
This was at afternoon tea in the library, where the brass-wired bookcases, filled with mighty folios and handsome octavos in old bindings, looked as if they had not been opened for a century. The literature of past ages furnished the room, and made a delightful background.
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