Memories of a Bookseller "Forty Years 1x Booxsuop." By Walter T. Spencer.
Constable. 25s.
All the world—or the better part of it—loves a second-hand bookseller, and Mr. Thomas Moult writes in a vein of natural tenderness in introducing this book of memories by a master of the trade.
Mr, Spencer was lucky to know Miss Hogarth, Dickens's sister-inlaw, who, in her need of money, used to sell him Dickens's relics to the value of about £40 a week. For the MSS. of "The Cricket, on the Hearth" he paid her £1,000. He afterwards si.2 it for £2,000. It is now worth £3,500. _'He telsl us, incidentally, of an interesting Dickens MSS. that. has never yet been published. Dickens gave the advice to each of his children in turn—to "study the New Testament as the one unfailing guide in life." He prepared a simplified New Testament in the form of a smal! book, and for this Sir Henry Fielding Dickens was offered any sum he cared to demand by an American publisher. As Dickens had left strict injunctions that the work was never to be published, the money had to be refused.
As for Dickens Mr. letters, Spencer calls for a new and fuller edition, observing that he alone has in his possession at least 200 that, have never been published.
Stevenson is among the great writers who visited Mr. Spencer in his shop. He entered with a leaking shoe, and was supplied with brandy and water.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.