Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside, whither he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treasures--to Beardsley the supreme treasure. It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that Cheapside bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occasional visitor, but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he became an almost daily frequenter. The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheapside, which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so well--indeed the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly called the University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth--was but a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of one of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans. Here Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as at the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won into the friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in him. They also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to Frederick Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to owe two of the finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at the height of his achievement and his vogue. Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly a footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of Beardsley did more for his development at this time than it is well possible to calculate. At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next to Beardsley a young clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley made many visits to picture galleries and the British Museum, and both youngsters haunted the bookshop in Cheapside. “We know by the _Scrap Book_, signed by him on the 6th of May 1890, what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that time, and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the pictorial idea--only an increasing sense of selection--that is all. His “juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “puerilia” were wretched; but there begins to appear a certain personal vision.