buried. On the flyleaf are the names of three successive owners, and on the margin are lead pencil notes in which the reader criticises the author. Their spirits are now shrouded together and entombed in this pile, where the mould never fails and the moths never die. They too are fallen a prey to the worms of the earth. A secondhand bookshop always reminds me of a Necropolis. It is a kind of Serapeum where lies buried the kings and princes with the helots and underlings of literature. Ay, every book is a mortuary chamber containing the remains of some poor literary wretch, or some mighty genius. … A book is a friend, my brothers, and when it ceases to entertain or instruct or inspire, it is dead. And would you sell a dead friend, would you throw him away? If you can not keep him embalmed on your shelf, is it not the wiser part, and the kinder, to cremate him?”
And Khalid tells old Jerry, that if everyone buying and reading books, disposed of them in the end as he himself does, secondhand bookshops would no longer exist. But old Jerry never despairs of business. And the idea of turning his Serapeum into a kiln does not appeal to him. Howbeit, Khalid has other ideas which the old man admires, and which he would carry out if the police would not interfere. “If I were the owner of this shop,” thus the neophite to the master, “I would advertise it with a bonfire of pamphlets. I would take a few hundreds from that mound there and give them the match right in front of that Church, or better still before the Stock Exchange. And I would have two sandwich-men stand about the bonfire, as high priests of the Temple, and chant the praises of secondhand Jerry and his secondhand bookshop. This will be the sacrifice which you will have offered to the god of Trade right in front of his sanctuary that he might soften the induration in the breasts of these worthy citizens, your rich neighbours. And if he does not, why, shut up shop or burn it up, and let us go out peddling together.”