FullReads

While firmly believing my course in this matter to have been justifiable and necessary, I have not been insensible to the domestic odium which it has brought upon me, and could but welcome a device which promised to enable me to regain the esteem of my family while retaining the use of my mind for professional purposes.

As the most convenient conceivable receptacle of hasty memoranda of ideas and suggestions, the indispensable also most strongly commended itself to me as a man who lives by writing. How convenient when a flash of inspiration comes to one in the night-time, instead of taking cold and waking the family in order to save it for posterity, just to whisper it into the ear of an indispensable at one’s bedside, and be able to know it in the morning for the rubbish such untimely conceptions usually are! How often, likewise, would such a machine save in all their first vividness suggestive fancies, anticipated details, and other notions worth preserving, which occur to one in the full flow of composition, but are irrelevant to what is at the moment in hand! I determined that I must have an indispensable.

The bookstore, when we arrived there, proved to be the most extraordinary sort of bookstore I had ever entered, there not being a book in it. Instead of books, the shelves and counters were occupied with rows of small boxes.

“Almost all books now, you see, are phono-graphed,” said Hamage.

“The change seems to be a popular one,” I said, “to judge by the crowd of book-buyers.” For the counters were, indeed, thronged with customers as I had never seen those of a bookstore before.

“The people at those counters are not purchasers, but borrowers,” Hamage replied; and then he explained that whereas the old-fashioned printed book, being handled by the reader, was damaged by use, and therefore had either to be purchased outright or borrowed at high rates of hire, the phonograph of a book being not handled, but merely revolved in a machine, was but little injured by use, and therefore phonographed books could be lent out for an infinitesimal price. Everybody had at home a phonograph box of standard size and adjustments, to which all phonographic cylinders were gauged. I suggested that the phonograph, at any rate, could scarcely have replaced picture-books. But here, it seemed, I was mistaken, for it appeared that illustrations were adapted to phonographed books by the simple plan of arranging them in a continuous panorama, which by a connecting gear was made to unroll behind the glass front of the phonograph case as the course of the narrative demanded.

“But, bless my soul!” I exclaimed, “everybody surely is not content to borrow their books? They must want to have books of their own, to keep in their libraries.”

“Of course,” said Hamage. “What I said about borrowing books applies only to current literature of the ephemeral sort. Everybody wants books of permanent value in his library. Over yonder is the department of the establishment set apart for book-buyers.”

The counter which he indicated being less crowded than those of the borrowing department, I expressed a desire to examine some of the phonographed books. As we were waiting for attendance, I observed that some of the customers seemed very particular about their purchases, and insisted upon testing several phonographs bearing the same title before making a selection. As the phonographs seemed exact counterparts in appearance, I did not understand this till Hamage explained that differences as to style and quality of elocution left quite as great a range of choice in phonographed books as varieties in type, paper, and binding did in printed ones. This I presently found to be the case when the clerk, under Ham-age’s direction, began waiting on me. In succession I tried half a dozen editions of Tennyson by as many different elocutionists, and by the time I had heard

“Where Claribel low lieth”