The booksellers are apt to complain nowadays of their inability to move or place items with which they cannot give a certificate of character. It will not always suffice to allege that they have realised a great deal of money heretofore, as vouched by Lowndes; they must carry with them some definite recommendation; they must exhibit remarkable allusions; they may be written by an ancestor or namesake of the buyer in view; at all events, if they are not by a good author, they must be on a good subject. Their interest must be (1) personal; (2) local; or (3) topical. There is a drift on the part of collectors of the purer type toward accredited and certified securities--toward recognised writers. Established character goes for more than mere rarity. The trade can always place fine copies of authors who have made their personality standard: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Sydney, Jonson, Milton, Butler, Swift, Thomson, Goldsmith, Miss Burney, Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Thackeray, George Eliot. If to the more fastidious or self-diffident amateur an excessively rare item is introduced without credentials, it is in danger of being rejected; the same principle applies to certain foreign writers, such as Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Corneille, La Fontaine. But in almost all these cases the demand is not for collected or library editions, or even for first copies of everything coming from the pens of those writers. Chaucer has to be served up in the types of Caxton or De Worde or Pynson; Spenser is only sought in quarto and octavo; Shakespeare means the four folios and certain quartos, and the Poems in octavo; the leading aim in Sydney is the _Arcadia_ of 1590; Jonson is just admissible in folio (the right one), but is preferred in quarto; by Milton we mean the _Comus_, _Lycidas_, _Poems_, _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_ in the original issues. Butler is only represented by his _Hudibras_; Swift by his _Gulliver_; Defoe by his _Crusoe_ (some must have all three volumes, although the first is worth nearly all the money); Thomson by the _Seasons_; Goldsmith by the _Vicar of Wakefield_; Miss Burney by one or two of her Novels in boards; Dr. Johnson by his _Rasselas_; Scott by the _Waverley_ series with uncut edges, and so forth.