A series of questions and answers followed which travelled over a good deal of space, from the habit of book-buying in the two countries to the rights and wrongs involved in copyright, and Lowell drew upon personal experience and observation in a way to confirm emphatically the title which he once gave himself, “I am a bookman.” “My own impression is,” he said in the course of this conversation, “that the gathering of private libraries is diminishing; at least I think it is on the whole, according to my own observation. I mean to say that fewer persons, in proportion to the number of educated people in a community, collect libraries now than formerly, because large libraries are now more readily within the reach of so many people.... There [in England] the collection of libraries has also diminished very much, but is still large in country houses and so on. People who are rich wish to have a handsome copy of a book in their library, and for that purpose this handsome edition is published. But if you will pardon me for digressing for a moment from this subject, it seems to me there are a great many ways in which our laws about books are very disadvantageous to the country. I think, myself, that the tax on books is a barbarism.” Senator Teller here asked him if he meant the revenue tax. “Yes; it has prevented me from buying a great many books in the course of my life which would have been very valuable to me, and the imprints [reprints?][93] were comparatively valueless when I got them. I cannot at this moment as I could if I lived in any other country of the world, even Turkey, subscribe to a foreign society and receive its publications without the trouble of going to the post-office and paying the duty; and, as I happen to live up in the country now, that is very inconvenient. To be sure, as they know me, I am able to get the books sent up to the post-office of the town where I am living and pay my tax there, but it seems to me a very bad system.”