Mr. Bemerton is a kind-looking man of about sixty, a bachelor. He is very short, clean-shaven, with silver-rimmed spectacles and white hair. An alert and contented man. He has been in the second-hand book business, he tells me, all his life, having begun as an errand boy at Sotheby's. He set up for himself thirty years ago, and has done well enough, never rising quite to a first folio nor descending much to remainders, but maintaining a steady mean between these two extremes. He has probably never read through a whole volume in his life; but he knows something about most. He has a knack of dipping which had he been born an author instead of a bookseller might have made his fortune as a popular scholar and even now would qualify him for a librarianship almost anywhere. Libraries, however, he does not much esteem. People should own their books, he holds; but that, of course, is a counsel of perfection, or would be were it not for the multitude of reprints that are now to be had at the price of a cigar. Mr. Bemerton's only sign of impatience or intolerance is displayed when he is reminded by customers of the cheapness of the modern reprint; but I must do him the justice to explain that it is not for an instant the result of any commercial self-protection on his part, for his soul is without clay, but the genuine distaste of the born explorer for a well-mapped country. What can become of book-hunting, he asks, if everything is reprinted in uniform binding for a shilling or sixpence? He does not often make an epigram--his mind is too candid--but he came near it when he said the other day that the test of a good book was that it was not reprintable in any series. "Let us pray," he said, "that the best things continue to drop through this net." How a man who can afford a few shillings can read in a modern mechanical reprint an old book still accessible in its stout original honest paper and clear print, with the good smell of years about it, he fails to understand. "Do you know," he says, "that most of the books published to-day--and all the cheap ones--will have perished in less than a hundred years? The paper will fall to pieces." I should say that not the least interesting part of his shop is the case in which he keeps those books which are too good to be reprinted for a shilling. What are they? Not for anything would I divulge their titles; but we know, he and I. The time has come for book-lovers to keep secrets.