Theres Pippins and Cheese to Come | Page 8

all languages. I wanted to know a
little about the life of the man who wrote Mary Had a Little Lamb,
which, I am told, is known by children over pretty much all the western
world. It needed only a trip to the Public Library. Any attendant would
direct me to the proper shelf. Yet once in the building, my courage
oozed. My question, though serious, seemed too ridiculous to be asked.
I would sizzle as I met the attendant's eye. Of a consequence, I fumbled
on my own devices, possibly to the increase of my general knowledge,
but without gaining what I sought.
They had no book in the Bath shop on piracy in Cornwall. I was
offered instead a work in two volumes on the notorious highwaymen of
history, and for a moment my plot swerved in that direction. But I put it
by. To pay the fellow for his pains--for he had dug in barrels to his
shoulders and had a smudge across his nose--I bought a copy of
Thomson's "Castle of Indolence," and in my more energetic moods I
read it. And so I came away.
On leaving the shop, lest I should be nipped in a neglect, I visited the
Roman baths. Then I took the waters in the Assembly Room. It was
Sam Weller, you may recall, who remarked, when he was entertained
by the select footmen, that the waters tasted like warm flat-irons.
Finally, I viewed the Crescent around which the shirted Winkle ran
with the valorous Dowler breathing on his neck. With such distractions,
as you may well imagine, Cornish pirates became as naught. Such
mental vibration as I had was now gone toward a tale of fashion in the
days when Queen Anne was still alive. Of a consequence, I again
sought the bookshop and stifling my timidity, I demanded such
volumes as might set me most agreeably to my task.
I have in mind also a bookshop of small pretension in a town in Wales.
For purely secular delight, maybe, it was too largely composed of

Methodist sermons. Hell fire burned upon its shelves with a warmth to
singe so poor a worm as I. Yet its signboard popped its welcome when
I had walked ten miles of sunny road. Possibly it was the chair rather
than the divinity that keeps the place in memory. The owner was absent
on an errand, and his daughter, who had been clumping about the
kitchen on my arrival, was uninstructed in the price marks. So I read
and fanned myself until his return.
Perhaps my sluggishness toward first editions--to which I have hinted
above--comes in part from the acquaintance with a man who in a
linguistic outburst as I met him, pronounced himself to be a
numismatist and philatelist. One only of these names would have
satisfied a man of less conceit. It is as though the pteranodon should
claim also to be the spoon-bill dinosaur. It is against modesty that one
man should summon all the letters. No, the numismatist's head is not
crammed with the mysteries of life and death, nor is a philatelist one
who is possessed with the dimmer secrets of eternity. Rather, this man
who was so swelled with titles, eked a living by selling coins and
stamps, and he was on his way to Europe to replenish his wares. Inside
his waistcoat, just above his liver--if he owned so human an
appendage--he carried a magnifying glass. With this, when the business
fit was on him, he counted the lines and dots upon a stamp, the
perforations on its edge. He catalogued its volutes, its stipples, the
frisks and curlings of its pattern. He had numbered the very hairs on the
head of George Washington, for in such minutiae did the value of the
stamp reside. Did a single hair spring up above the count, it would
invalidate the issue. Such values, got by circumstance or
accident--resting on a flaw--founded on a speck--cause no ferment of
my desires.
For the buying of books, it is the cheaper shops where I most often
prowl. There is in London a district around Charing Cross Road where
almost every shop has books for sale. There is a continuous rack along
the sidewalk, each title beckoning for your attention. You recall the
class of street-readers of whom Charles Lamb wrote--"poor gentry,
who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little
learning at the open stalls." It was on some such street that these folk

practiced their innocent larceny. If one shopkeeper frowned at the
diligence with which they read "Clarissa," they would continue her
distressing adventures across the way. By a lingering progress up the
street, "Sir Charles Grandison" might be nibbled down--by such as had
the stomach--without the outlay