Sometimes when passing along the quays, writes a correspondent, I linger for a little while at the bookstalls and barrows. Being only an amateur in these matters, I have never succeeded in picking up first editions of any value; perhaps because the experts have an uncanny knack of getting there first. It is possible, of course, if one has patience to wade through piles of legal, political, and religious manuals, to come across something quite interesting at the cost of a few pence. At one time I used to wonder what happened to the ninety per cent of the volumes that nobody bought, until the solution came to me quite by accident. Having some business in another quarter of the city, while detained in a side street I chanced to look through the ground floor window of what appeared to be a stationery factory. Several women, working with great rapidity, were cutting the bindings of all kinds of books and packing the separate leaves into sacks. I learned afterwards that the disintegrated volumes are pulped and go to the making of pasteboard and millboard. It would be interesting to consider how many of the 14,000 novels published each year come to this in the end. And it would be even more curious to contemplate how many copies of those first editions of Shaw, Galsworthy, etc., that fetch such fabulous prices in New York, have gone to the literary slaughterhouse; because I am afraid the collectors do not really get them all.
The Irish Times, July 9th, 1929.