Every other old building in Boston, and many churches bear honor tablets, telling us that here assembled revolutionists of 1776. The Boston of today, with all its laws of restriction and of censorship, is proud of its ancient rebels. How paradoxical! In talking about laws, a new one has just been enacted. The police apply to the sale of second-hand books the same rule as to the sale and buying of second-hand clothing. A dealer, purchasing books from anyone, has to report the purchase to the police, describe the article purchased and has to wait thirty days before he can sell it. The law requires that each book dealer must pay five dollars for a license. A similar law had been enacted 60 years ago, as a civil war protective measure. Oh, Athens of America! Selling books with a second-hand clothes dealer’s license! Books in Ice Box Opposite the Copley-Plaza, in a fashionable little building of its own, is the Dorado of America’s rejected poets and poetesses, essayists, novelists, free verse artists and of everybody else Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound would press to their bosom. Here is the book shop of the Four Seas Publishing Company, and never was there a greater collection of literary atrocities in one room than in this airy, inviting “Hall of Fame.” The soul of Amy Lowell greets one uncannily articulate from the page of each book. A very ambitious clerk praised the authors of the books higher than genius has ever been praised in America. “We have bought 81 titles from the Badger Publishing Company only recently and have not spared any expense to print the most attractive title and jackets for this new addition to our stock.” Everybody knows the Badger books. The Badger Publishing Company gladly accommodates authors of novels and extends to them the privileges of their printing establishment, provided they are willing to pay for publication. I descended to the basement to see the enormous stock of books the Four Seas Company had acquired. The store must have been occupied by a wholesale florist previously, and the most tremendous ice box I ever saw in my life filled the whole basement. The Badger books, thousands of them, were neatly piled up in the ice box. They were in the proper place, indeed. The Mysterious Book Shop On Washington Street is a very attractive book store, conducted by a blind couple. Man and wife about thirty years of age, both totally blind. The shop is scrupulously clean. If you ask for a book, the proprietor will find it in a miraculous way, provided it is on the shelves. If you are browsing about, picking up a book here or there, he will ask you to read off to him the title, and then tell you the price. Both look happy, contented, and seem prosperous. I wondered how it had happened that they started in the book business, that both of them were blind; had they been blind before they married or had misfortune overtaken them after their marriage? They’re in a strange and mysterious place, but peaceful and harmonious.