When Sir Walter Scott lent a book, he put in its place a wooden block bearing the name of the borrower and the date of the loan. Charles Lamb, tired of lending his books, threatened to chain Wordsworth's poems to his shelves, adding, 'For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some neither read nor mean to read, but borrow to give you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow money they never fail to make use of it.' Just as the difference between the book-thief and the book-borrower is of too slight a nature to warrant independent chapters, so the hero who indulges in the luxury of a 'knock-out' is more or less of a thief, and this company is, essentially, a very proper place in which to find him. A 'knock-out,' it may be briefly explained to the uninitiated, is a system by which two or more booksellers--or, for the matter of that, any other tradesmen--combine to procure certain books at a lower than normal auction value. An American paper stated, some time ago, and among many other remarkable things, that 'a private buyer cannot obtain a book by auction in London at any price.' The extreme foolishness of such a statement need not be enlarged upon in this place. That the knock-out system does exist in London no one but a fool would deny. That it does occur now and then at such places as Sotheby's, Christie's, Puttick and Simpson's and Hodgson's, is without any manner of doubt, but not to any extent worth mentioning. Where the system is in vogue is at sales held in private houses, and at auction-rooms where books are not generally sold. At such places books are usually knocked down at absurdly low figures, until the private person steps in, when the prices begin to go up with a bound; they then realize oftentimes figures far above those at which they may be acquired at the shops. After the private bidder has been excited into paying an excessive price for his lots, he realizes that he is doing a foolish thing, and resigns the game into the hands of the trade, when the prices again begin to assume their former very low levels. The knock-out books are taken away by their nominal purchaser, and in a convenient back parlour of some handy 'pub' they are put up again for competition among the clique, when all profits realized are thrown into a pool, and afterwards equally divided.