Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/41

 Record of Bibliography and Library Literature. 31 larger public to which a writer on books can appeal in France than in England, enabling the publisher to reckon on a far greater market for his venture and reduce its price accordingly. To read M. Uzanne in any other language than his own, is to deprive oneself of the pleasure offered by a very charming style, but the translator, as far as we can see, has done his work well, and his version reads well enough. A touch of classicism is natural in a Frenchman, and the author, in his 'historic prolegomena,' reminds us that the bookstall is not an invention of modern Europe. Aulus Gellius, in his Nodes Attica, tells us how, on landing at Brindisi, on his return from Greece to Italy, soon after leaving his ship he noticed a bookstall : " Immediately, with the eagerness of a book-lover, I ran to examine it. There was a collection of Greek books, full of fables, prodigies, strange and incredible narratives ; the authors were old writers whose names are of but mediocre authority; I found there Aristaeus of Proconesus, Isigonos of Nicsea, Ctesias, Onesicritus, Polystephanus, Hegesias and others. These books, much dilapidated and covered with ancient dust, looked wretched enough, but I asked the price of them. Its unexpected reasonableness led me at once to purchase them, and I carried away a great number of volumes, which I looked through during the two following nights." The purchaser who buys shabby books because they are cheap, has ever been the bookstall-man's best patron, and in the absence of confessions from earlier bookmen, Aulus Gellius must be reckoned as the father of all these. In France the tribe of Snuffy Davies found their earliest haunt on the Pont Neuf, which was at one time covered with stalls. But in 1649 the more regular bookseller complained of their competition, and a royal edict was issued, whose preamble dwelt on the necessity to " restore to honour the printing and book trades, and to suppress whatever tends to their debasement." Despite the protests of the stall-keepers, this edict was enforced the following year, and amid the great lamentation of the humbler class of book-lovers the stalls were all swept away. As M. Uzanne justly observes, the contents of one of these old stalls, if it could now be resuscitated, might help to furnish a fashionable library ! Ejected from the Pont Neuf, the stall-keepers some twenty years later are found established on the banks of the Seine, where, in despite of edicts, they have managed to maintain their position down to the pre- sent day. Of the stall-keepers, both of the last generation and of the present, M. Octave Uzanne gives a graphic account. Naturally this is less interesting to English readers, to whom the names are but names and nothing more, than to the French book-lovers to whom the poor fellows of whom he writes are familiar personages. But the narrative is studded with little pictures, and these come to the aid of our imagination. The earnings of the stall-keepers are very small, fifteen francs being an average day's taking. Of this about one-half may be reckoned as gross profit, against which there must be many sets-off for books which have at length to be sold as waste-paper, and for the depredations of the book-thieves, to whose exploits a special chapter is devoted. The stall- keepers are not without their friends, among the chief of whom must have been M. Xavier Marmier, who not only paid royally for his occasional bargains, but in his will left a thousand francs to provide a grand dinner for his old friends, which was duly celebrated at Vefour's restaurant on the 2oth November, 1892. M. Uzanne reckons that there are now 156 stall-keepers on the quays, who own between them 1,636 boxes, which, on an average of sixty volumes, may be guessed to contain 97,260 books, and, on a taking of only ten francs a day for each proprietor, to yield a turnover of half-a-million francs a year