It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two.

Spring was coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain bookseller's shop in the Strand.

And it was Easter, not to say Bank Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling the Quarterly Catalogue.

For it was in the days of his obscurity.
The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with a decorated facade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish cupolas.

It was brutally, tyrannously imposing.