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Excerpt from Bertram Dobell: Bookseller and Man of Letters
Whatever of distinction or incompatibility in general between booksellers and men of letters may be implied in the title of this article, no one will be likely to deny that Bertram Dobell has earned - literally earned - as much right to the latter term as to the former. His shop, in the heart of London, is known to every bibliophile, and is the best of starting-points for one of those rambles amongst the many old book-shops of the city in which the soul of the book-hunter delights. And the owner of that shop is himself an author and publisher also; a poet of no mean order - one who has even dared to resent (in verse) the imputation of being a minor poet; he is an "excavator of royal mummy-pits of verse," to whose labours therein, certain "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" - unfulfilled for nearly three centuries at least - owe their heritage to-day; he is a critic of great insight and sympathy - an authority even in certain fields which he has made his own - whose contributions to our knowledge of Elia and his contemporaries make up a most delightful volume; and it is mainly owing to his efforts that the author of "The City of Dreadful Night" has obtained to-day that recognition of his genius denied to him, or at least given only in scanty measure, during his lifetime. Such are a few of Bertram Dobell's claims to the title of a man of letters.
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