Theres Pippins and Cheese to Come | Page 6

blinder moments when you were fixed wholly on the shelf--a man
in a slightly faded overcoat of mixed black and white, a man just past
the nimbleness of youth, whose head is plucked of its full commodity
of hair. It was myself. I admit the portrait, though modesty has curbed
me short of justice.
Doubtless, we have met. It was your umbrella--which you held
villainously beneath your arm--that took me in the ribs when you
lighted on a set of Fuller's Worthies. You recall my sour looks, but it
was because I had myself lingered on the volumes but cooled at the
price. How you smoothed and fingered them! With what triumph you
bore them off! I bid you--for I see you in a slippered state, eased and
unbuttoned after dinner--I bid you turn the pages with a slow thumb,
not to miss the slightest tang of their humor. You will of course go first,
because of its broad fame, to the page on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson
and their wet-combats at the Mermaid. But before the night is too far
gone and while yet you can hold yourself from nodding, you will
please read about Captain John Smith of Virginia and his "strange
performances, the scene whereof is laid at such a distance, they are

cheaper credited than confuted."
In no proper sense am I a buyer of old books. I admit a bookish quirk
maybe, a love of the shelf, a weakness for morocco, especially if it is
stained with age. I will, indeed, shirk a wedding for a bookshop. I'll go
in "just to look about a bit, to see what the fellow has," and on an
occasion I pick up a volume. But I am innocent of first editions. It is a
stiff courtesy, as becomes a democrat, that I bestow on this form of
primogeniture. Of course, I have nosed my way with pleasure along
aristocratic shelves and flipped out volumes here and there to ask their
price, but for the greater part, it is the plainer shops that engage me. If a
rack of books is offered cheap before the door, with a fixed price upon
a card, I come at a trot. And if a brown dust lies on them, I bow and
sniff upon the rack, as though the past like an ancient fop in peruke and
buckle were giving me the courtesy of its snuff box. If I take the dust in
my nostrils and chance to sneeze, it is the fit and intended observance
toward the manners of a former century.
I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. It presents to the
street no more than a decent front, but opens up behind like a swollen
bottle. There are twenty rooms at least, piled together with such
confusion of black passages and winding steps, that one might think
that the owner himself must hold a thread when he visits the remoter
rooms. Indeed, such are the obscurities and dim turnings of the place,
that, were the legend of the Minotaur but English, you might fancy that
the creature still lived in this labyrinth, to nip you between his toothless
gums--for the beast grows old--at some darker corner. There is a story
of the place, that once a raw clerk having been sent to rummage in the
basement, his candle tipped off the shelf. He was left in so complete
darkness that his fears overcame his judgment and for two hours he
roamed and babbled among the barrels. Nor was his absence discovered
until the end of the day when, as was the custom, the clerks counted
noses at the door. When they found him, he bolted up the steps, nor did
he cease his whimper until he had reached the comforting twilight of
the outer world. He served thereafter in the shop a full two years and
had a beard coming--so the story runs--before he would again venture
beyond the third turning of the passage; to the stunting of his

scholarship, for the deeper books lay in the farther windings.
Or it may appear credible that in ages past a jealous builder contrived
the place. Having no learning himself and being at odds with those of
better opportunity, he twisted the pattern of the house. Such was his
evil temper, that he set the steps at a dangerous hazard in the dark, in
order that scholars--whose eyes are bleared at best--might risk their
legs to the end of time. Those of strict orthodoxy have even suspected
the builder to have been an atheist, for they have observed what double
joints and steps and turnings confuse the passage to the devouter
books--the Early Fathers in particular being up a winding stair where
even the soberest reader might break his neck.