A Book-Lover's Paradise

— When a lonely little girl in a dull London lodging - house, I thought of unknown Mr. Mudie as the happiest man in the big city. The library was only a few steps away, and I used to glue my longing eyes to the show-windows, craving greedily to devour the second-hand volumes displayed in long, tempting rows within. The vans labeled “ Mudie’s Library,” which were constantly being laden and emptied before the entrance, seemed to my hungry child-heart vessels of pure delight, and I used to wonder, as children dumbly do, who Mudie might be, owning all this wealth for which my imagination cried out ; feeling somehow that the Great Unknown and I had a bond of sympathy, — he with his caravansary of literature, and I with my love for the dear books. So it was with a thrill of vivid recollection that, years after, at a Roman party, I met the Mudies, initiated a friendship since become too dear to be described here, and learned to know something of a man who was a blessing in his generation.

As the stately river, followed back to its source, resolves itself into a tiny brook hiding its head under overhanging elder blossoms, the extensive library on Oxford Street runs its roots back to a little bookshop in Cheyne Walk, where, early in the century, a young man had the grace to recognize that many people without the means to buy them loved the best books. At first he loaned his own standard books to his friends, and then, finding how eagerly they were sought after, he put a notice in his window that other young men might come and borrow. Soon he found it best to charge a penny a volume for repairing the books. So the wee stream grew and broadened. The volumes circulated now number about three and a half millions. Five to six thousand are delivered daily by the great vans which have supplanted the little cart of early days, and the staff employed includes two hundred and fifty-four persons, many of them veteran servants who take an intense family pride in everything connected with the library. I was amused at being told that the burly old soldier who acts as usher, and who worships every one of the name of Mudie, had been in their employ only fifteen years. Eight or nine hundred boxes of books are weekly dispatched to the provinces by rail, and about one hundred and twenty by carrier. The “ hospital,” where at first a man and a boy repaired torn, broken-backed volumes, has developed into a bookbinding department, in which nearly a hundred persons are employed and beautiful work is done. A specialty of the house is a binding called “ Mudie calf,” and for the preparation of this leather the head man shuts himself up alone, to preserve the secret process.

Though best known as a library, Mudie’s is also a large bookselling concern, supplying libraries in Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand,South Africa, Zanzibar, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast ; and some of the tin-lined cases in which books are sent to all quarters of the globe have been recovered after shipwrecks, and their contents found quite uninjured. One room in the library is devoted to the Pegasus Club, whose object is to bring together all the members of the staff and promote good-fellowship. Newspapers and magazines are provided for the members, and the whist and chess tournaments, in which the managers award prizes, are prominent features of the symposium.

It may be interesting to Atlantic readers that the only book ever published by Mudie was Lowell’s Poems. Lowell could not find an English publisher for them, and Mr. Mudie, who was his friend and believed in them, undertook their publication, which proved a success. The fate of a new book is largely affected by the number of copies subscribed for by Mudie.

It is interesting to visit the “ catacombs ” of the queen of circulating libraries, in which are stacked whole editions of the books whose day is dead. Mudie subscribed for thirty-five hundred copies of Disraeli’s Endymiou, and on the day it was to be issued a large crowd in the street awaited the opening of the library. It is curious what fluctuations the literature market is subject to. The ebb of Stanley’s popularity threw back on the library a dead weight of about twenty-five hundred uncalled-for copies of In Darkest Africa. It is difficult to say how long a book will live. Often, one book of an author is in constant demand, and another is entirely relegated to the dark lower regions. Browning’s Asolando, issued on the day of the poet’s death, brought twelve shillings instead of the publisher’s price of five shillings.

Mr. Mudie must have derived many of his strong qualities from his Norse forefathers away up in the Orkney Islands. His ancestors were laid out, not buried, in a sea cave, where some peculiarity of the air preserved the bodies from decay, and kept them as intact as the stone knights on old English tombs. Mothers in those weird, seagirt places hushed their children with the words, “ Be still, or the dead Mudies will catch you,” until, about a hundred years ago, one of the living Mudies, a prim old lady, thinking it a disgrace to have dried ancestors, up and buried them like other commonplace folk, with all the rites of bell and book. On one of the marble lions of the Venice Piazzetta, a Mudie soldier, who came down with the Normans, carved his name in runes which may yet be read. But, joined to his strong northern qualities of energy and initiative, Mr. Mudie had the genial grace of a nature “ sloping to the southern side,” open to all that was best in men of every nationality and opinion. He was Tennyson’s friend and Sehliemann’sfriend, but he was also the friend of the Tyrolese villager who every year drove the happy family through byways of Italy and Austria. His home came to be a centre for the flower of artistic, scientific, and literary London. Seapieces by Henry Moore, tender early bits by Fred Walker, Dogberry’s Charge to the Watch, which enabled Stokes to marry, and many another picture by young artists, whose future he discerned graced the walls of the golden drawing-room which was the realization of his wife’s girlish dreams. The men and women whose books he sold and circulated loved to gather there, and Mazzini, with other lonely exiles, found this genial atmosphere a sunny Italy of sympathy in the midst of gray London fogs.