“To me,” writes Khalid in the K.L. MS. , “there is always something pathetic in a secondhand book offered again for sale. Why did its first owner part with it? Was it out of disgust or surfeit or penury? Did he throw it away, or give it away, or sell it? Alas, and is this how to treat a friend? Were it not better burned, than sold or thrown away? After coming out of the press, how many have handled this tattered volume? How many has it entertained, enlightened, or perverted? Look at its pages, which evidence the hardship of the journey it has made. Here still is a pressed flower, more convincing in its shrouded eloquence than the philosophy of the pages in which it lies 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.