The Wonder Of It All Comes In When We Find That These
Books, However Old And Comparatively Worthless They May Be,
Are Practically Never Wholly Out Of Date.
When a new work is
brought out (dozens appear annually) and, say, five thousand
copies sold, it does not throw as many, or indeed any, copies
of the old book out of circulation:
It supersedes nothing. If
any man can indulge in the luxury of a new up-to-date guide to
any place, and gets rid of his old one (a rare thing to do),
this will be snapped up by poorer men, who will treasure it
and hand it down or on to others. Editions of 1860-50-40, and
older, are still prized, not merely as keepsakes but for study
or reference. Any one can prove this by going the round of a
dozen second-hand booksellers in his own district in London.
There will be tons of literary rubbish, and good stuff old and
new, but few guidebooks - in some cases not one. If you ask
your man at a venture for, say, a guide to Hampshire, he will
most probably tell you that he has not one in stock; then, in
his anxiety to do business, he will, perhaps, fish out a guide
to Derbyshire, dated 1854 - a shabby old book - and offer it
for four or five shillings, the price of a Crabbe in eight
volumes, or of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in six volumes, bound
in calf.
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