Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/190

156 CONSTABLE, CAD ELL, AND BLACK. or wherever they at the moment might be stowed; Placing a high value on many things in this hetero- geneous mass, and feeling assured in his own mind that strange hands would only render confusion worse confounded, he would allow no one to endeavour to put the things in order. Indeed, if anything could have ruffled his gentle nature into the use of an angry vord it would have been the attempt to meddle with these papers. They very rapidly increased, and every search after missing copy or proofs made matters worse. When a dead block occurred his invariable practice was to build them up, as they lay, against the wall of the room, and, as a consequence, every- thing went astray. A few extracts from notes to Mr. tfogg will show the labour, suffering, and worry which this state of chaos entailed : " My dear Sir, It is useless to trouble you with the ins and outs of the process the result is, that, working through most part of the night, I have not yet come to the missing copy. I am going on with the search, yet being walled up in so narrow an area (not larger than a postchaise as regards the free space), I work with difficulty, and the stooping kills me. I greatly fear that the entire day will be spent in the search." "Yesterday, suddenly, I missed the interleaved volume. I have been unrolling an immense heap of newspapers, &c., ever since six a.m. How so thick a vol. can have hidden itself, I am unable to explain." " The act of stooping has for many years caused me so much illness, that in this search, all applied to papers lying on the floor, entangled with innumerable newspapers, I have repeatedly been forced to pause. I fear that the seventeen or eighteen missing pages may have been burned suddenly lighting candles ;