In speaking and thinking of real books, it is necessary again to distinguish between articulate productions of two classes--between such a work, for example, as Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ and such an one as Thoreau's _Walden_, or between Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ and Sir Thomas Browne's _Urn-Burial_. The present is an enterprise directed toward the indication to collectors of different views and tastes of the volumes which they should respectively select for study or purchase. There are millions who have passed through life unconsciously without having read a book, although they may have seen, nay, possessed thousands. Those which might have been recommended to them with advantage, and perused with advantage, were too obscure, too dull, too cheap, too unfashionable. It is of no use to read publications with which your acquaintances have no familiarity, and to the merits of which it might be a hard task to convert them. But, as we have said, we want space to enter into these details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in Book-Form--Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age--what Thoreau call its "tit-men."
We might readily instance masterpieces of erudition or industry which leave nothing to be desired in the way of information and safe guidance, and which, at the same time, do not distantly realise our conception of Books--real _bonâ fide_ Books. They may be the best editions by the best binders, or they may be antiquarian periodicals or sets of Learned Transactions, reducing much of the elder lore cherished and credited by our ancestors to waste-paper; we feel that it is a sort of superstition which influences us in regarding them; but we fail to shake off the prejudice, or whatever it may be, and we hold up, on the contrary, to the gaze of some sceptical acquaintance a humble little volume in plain mellow sheep--say, a first Walton, or Bunyan, or Carew, nay, by possibility a Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde--which a roomful of perfectly gentlemanly books should not buy from us. It may strike the reader as a heresy in taste and judgment to pronounce the four Shakespeare folios of secondary interest from the highest point of view, as being posthumous and edited productions. But so it is; yet Caxton's first impression of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, if we were to happen upon it by accident, is a possession which we should not be easily persuaded to coin into sovereigns, and such a prize as the Evelyn copy of Spenser's _Faëry Queen_, 1590, with the Diarist's cypher down the back and his note of ownership inside the old calf cover, is worth a library of inarticulate printed matter. So, again, Aubrey, in his _Miscellanies_, _Remains of Gentilism and Judaism_, _History of Surrey_, and _Natural History of Wiltshire_, presents us with works very imperfect and empirical in their character--even foolish and irritating here and there; but between those undertakings and such as Manning and Bray's or Brayley and Britton's _Surrey_ there is the difference that the latter are literary compilations, and the former personal relics inalienably identified with an individual and an epoch.