The chief reason why the elderly bookseller no longer comes across these advantageous purchases is that he has passed the age (though he does not know it) at which bargains are to be had. But bargains are not encountered, they are made. It is the youthful vigour and enthusiasm of the young collector, prompting him into the byways and alleys of book-land, that bring bargains to his shelves.
So, if you are young and enthusiastic, and not to be deterred by a series of wild-goose chases, happy indeed will be your lot. For over the post-prandial pipe you will be able to hand such and such a treasure to your admiring fellow-spirit, saying: 'This I picked up for _n_-pence in Camden Town; this one cost me _x_-shillings at Poynder's in Reading: Iredale of Torquay let me have this for a florin; I found this on the floor in a corner of Commin's shop at Bournemouth; this was on David's stall at Cambridge, and I nearly lost it to the fat don of King's'; and so on and so on.
Bargains, forsooth! Our book-hunter was once outbid at Sotheby's for a scarce volume which he found, a week later, on a barrow in Clerkenwell for fourpence! The same year he picked up for ten shillings, in London, an early sixteenth-century folio, rubricated and with illuminated initials. It was as fresh as when it issued from the press, and in the original oak and pig-skin binding. He failed to trace the work in any of the bibliographies, nor could the British Museum help him to locate another copy. David's stall at Cambridge once yielded to him a scarce Defoe tract for sixpence. But this being, as Master Pepys said, 'an idle rogueish book,' he sold it to a bookseller for two pounds, 'that it might not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found.' A copy has recently fetched twenty guineas.
Doubtless every bibliophile is perpetually on the look-out for treasures, and it is essential that he learn, early in his career, to make up his mind at once concerning an out-of-the-way book. He who hesitates is lost, and this is doubly true of the book-collector. More than once in his early days of collecting has our book-hunter hesitated and finally left a book, only to dash back--perhaps a few hours later, perhaps next day--and find it gone.