If any man can indulge in the luxury of a new up-to-date guide to any place, and gets rid of his old one (a rare thing to do), this will be snapped up by poorer men, who will treasure it and hand it down or on to others.

Editions of 1860-50-40, and older, are still prized, not merely as keepsakes but for study or reference.

Any one can prove this by going the round of a dozen second-hand booksellers in his own district in London.

There will be tons of literary rubbish, and good stuff old and new, but few guidebooks--in some cases not one.

If you ask your man at a venture for, say, a guide to Hampshire, he will most probably tell you that he has not one in stock; then, in his anxiety to do business, he will, perhaps, fish out a guide to Derbyshire, dated 1854--a shabby old book--and offer it for four or five shillings, the price of a Crabbe in eight volumes, or of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in six volumes, bound in calf.