And then he proceeded to show me some of his treasures. “Who do you think buys this sort of books in our day? Dealers, nobody but dealers. And they sell them again to dealers. Finally they find their way into the auction rooms and are bought again by a dealer.” Mr. Custer has traveled all over Europe and is a lover of beautiful paintings. Original Corots, Millets, original drawings by Aubrey Beardsley lean against piles of books, hang in cobwebbed corners. “Are you not afraid that someone will steal them?” I asked him, commenting on his carelessness. “They don’t know enough,” was his answer. “Some months ago I had a wonderful painting of Corot’s in the show window. A man whom I knew as a notorious miser came in and asked if it was genuine. I said in a matter-of-fact way that I have no proof but the picture, and that I would sell it for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. I myself had paid for it three thousand. He looked at it for a long time and then said he would come in again. The following day he brought his wife and brother-in-law to look at it. They examined it very carefully and went out. The following week I sent the painting to an auction sale where it realized eight thousand eight hundred dollars, notwithstanding the bad times on account of the war. On the very day that I received my check in payment for the picture, the man came in again and proposed to buy it for one hundred dollars. I showed him the check, and it pleases me even today to think how disappointed and crestfallen he was; because I never told him that I would not have sold him the picture even if he had given me a hundred and twenty-five dollars at the time I offered it to him. “I have my worries, but I also have a lot of enjoyment watching my contemporaries and noting their faults.” Mr. Custer is a small man with a kindly smile, and after I saw him chatting with the ragamuffins swarming around his bookstalls, and talking kindly to a girl who wanted some information, his piercing dark eyes did not seem so very misogynic and his pessimism seemed of the kind of the dog who barks but does not bite. A Whitman Enthusiast Little Max Breslow, who isn’t taller than a good-sized doll and has such tiny hands that he can hardly hold two books at the same time, is so vivacious and young looking that everybody must like him if for no other reason than his continuous smile. He is the last of his guild on Twenty-third Street. Max sold books since his earliest youth; he sold his school books. When a boy he used to go about “picking up” books and selling them to book dealers; he started in as apprentice in an out-of-the-way bookshop on Eighth Avenue, and then opened up the cellar which he has made so attractive since.