The book stalls are, perhaps, the only really picturesque shops, reminding one of the olden time, extant. There is a keeping about these stalls which is quite delightful; all the books seem to have acquired by companionship such a family likeness; such a dingy old-world appearance. It would be too great a stretch for the brain to imagine the time when they were wet from the press, and guiltless of those old mouldy stains, like maps of out-of-the-way countries, scattered over their pages. And then the stallkeepers — they say that foxes and other wild animals of the desert grow to the colour of the sand; so it is with the old stall-keeper, there he stands, his face the colour of a vellum MS., and his body bound in cloth the hue of that musty volume of "Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs."
The only thing out of keeping with the book-stalls is that sharp little face peering out of a peep-hole between the books, like a spider watching for a heedless fly. There is a cunningness about the book-stall boy unworthy of the old-fashioned, trustful, respectable dulness of the presiding spirit in ancient spectacles. And then the old pinched-up faces that daily poke over the books, withered men, in camlet cloaks up to their knees, with great bunching umbrellas under their arms, poking out to the infinite danger of passers-by. How they moon over the ragged, dirty surface of the book-range, "Anything new to-day, Mr. Maggott?" "Nothing particular, Mr. Wormy." The same question and the same answer have been exchanged every day these last twenty years. "Anything new to-day?" Lord love you; none of those camlet gentry would look at anything that was not drilled through like a honeycomb, and as old as the parish steeple. But, alas! the genuine old book-stall is getting rarer and rarer; the gloomy hollow space, in the dim distance of which the old tomes were faintly discovered, have been parted off from us by glaring plate glass.
The very books in some of the new shops seem to have suffered a resurrection: old editions, published "at ye Sunne, over against ye Conduit, in Fleete Street," issue afresh from the press ; the genuine originals, that have lain on dusty shelves for a couple of centuries, are aghast at seeing the very counterparts of themselves arise, in all the pristine beauty of youth, and push them from their stools. It is a wonder to me that Tonson and other ancient publishers don't bustle out of their graves at the sight of their old copyrights revived again, and kicking, in this low, degenerate age, when cabmen and others of the vulgar can command the books that, in their time, were soiled by no thumbs meaner than those of dukes and duchesses.
Andrew Wynter 1865