"Bookstall" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is not the case. It was not till about 1850 that Mr. W.H. Smith secured the entire bookstall rights on the London and North-Western Railway, much against his father's advice. The vast improvement in the selection of books and the service of papers, however, induced other companies to desire to have a similar arrangement, till the chief portion of all the English railways came to be girdled ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... for five minutes; and to pass the interval of waiting, Toni strolled over to the bookstall in search of a paper. As she stood turning over a few magazines, a familiar voice accosted her, and she moved ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... that fine talk, without some further exposition, goes to sustain Mr. Rockefeller's simple human love of property, and the woman and child sweating manufacturer in his fight for the inspector-free home industry. I bought on a bookstall the other day a pamphlet full of misrepresentation and bad argument against Socialism by an Australian Jew, published by the Single-Tax people apparently in a disinterested attempt to free the land from the landowner by the simple expedient of abusing ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... hard-toiling father. So when he visited Ottoxeter, he determined to show his sorrow and repentance. He went into the market-place at the time of business, uncovered his head, and stood there for an hour in the pouring rain, on the very spot where the bookstall used to stand. "This," he says, "was an act of contrition for my disobedience to ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... I will even go so far as to say that we ought not to get books too cheaply. No book, I believe, is ever worth half so much to its reader as one that has been coveted for a year at a bookstall, and bought out of saved halfpence; and perhaps a day or two's fasting. That's the way to get at the cream of a book. And I should say more on this matter, and protest as energetically as I could against the plague of cheap literature, with which we are just now afflicted, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Englishman walking through the streets of Camberwell, as the boys played in the gutters, was Browning, not then the master poet of the Victorian Era, but the young man who could 'pass a bookstall and find no thrill in beholding on a placard the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... never thought of reading French for pleasure. He had construed Xavier de Maistre's "Voyage autour de ma Chambre" for marks, assuredly not for pleasure. "Are there any books in this style to be got on that bookstall in Hanbridge Market?" ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... editor, and tracing his papers: of this I thought there was no chance. I posted this letter on my way home, at a Post Office in the Hampstead Road at the junction with Edward Street, on the opposite side of which is a bookstall. Lounging for a moment over the exposed books, sicut meus est mos,[95] I saw, within a few minutes of the posting of the letter, a little catch-penny book of anecdotes of Macaulay, which I bought, and ran over for a minute. My eye was soon caught by ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... half-pence which Tom was enabled to save from his scanty earnings at a laborious trade, he regularly expended at the bookstall; and on one occasion was highly delighted at picking up a small book on anatomy. The work was one of those that had long been superseded by more modern and better treatises, and the little plates were as ill and coarsely done as possible. Nevertheless, ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... he began to pace up and down by the bookstall. Then he stood to gaze again, scouring, as it seemed, the far distance with eyes straining their utmost. Our ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... cropped out early in Rice. I remember to have heard him tell how one time, when he was a young man, he was shuffling over a lot of tracts in a bin in front of a Boston bookstall. His eye suddenly fell upon a little pamphlet entitled "The Cow-Chace." He picked it up and read it. It was a poem founded upon the defeat of Generals Wayne, Irving, and Proctor. The last stanza ran in ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... telegraph. Do both. There is Smith's bookstall. They will let you have a sheet of paper, and I always carry stamps." Miss Buff was prompt in action. Six lines were written for the post and one line for the telegraph, and both were despatched in ten minutes or less. "Now all is done that can be done to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... of fact, laddie, I didn't get beyond the third page, because the scurvy knave at the bookstall said he wasn't running a free library, and in one way and another there was a certain amount of unpleasantness. Still, it seemed bright and interesting up to page three. But let's settle down and talk business. I've got a scheme for you, Garny old man. Yessir, the idea of a thousand ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... one discover on an old bookstall? Who would have supposed I should have had the luck to pick up the extraordinary collection of newspaper-cuttings which are ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... lingered around the well-kept bookstall before the train left, he saw a long row of Hodden's new novel, and then his heart gave a jump as he caught sight of two copies of his own work in the row labelled "New Books." He wanted to ask the clerk whether any of them had been sold yet, but in ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... after a hotly—contested ..." while on the other side I saw that "... condition offers the gravest anxiety to his numerous friends and ..." I threw the paper away, for it did not interest me, and walked up to the bookstall to select a magazine. I had to remove my left glove in order to get at my money, and in pulling it off I noticed a shred of cotton come away with it. This meant an inside seam gone somewhere; and they were new gloves, too. I threw a coin to the paper-boy, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... the station and watched trains for what was, to Mhor at least, a blissful hour. It was thrilling to stand in the half-light of the big station and see great trains come in, and the passengers jump out and tramp about the platform and buy books and papers from the bookstall, or fruit, or chocolate, or tea and buns from the boys in uniform, who went about crying their wares. And then the wild scurrying of the passengers—like hens before a motor, Jock said—when the flag was waved and the train about to ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... amazingly when threatened with extinction. Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before his time and a full week after, as it seemed to him. He stood at the appointed bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a Harris tweed suit exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his thumping heart. He read the names of the novels on the book-stall, and bought one at last, to avoid being regarded ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and the gates of Greece, to Pater Noster Row and the Old Corner Book Store—nearly all of them trying to make the wrong connections with the right things or the right connections with things they have no connection with, and only now and then a straggler lagging behind perhaps, at some left-over bookstall, who truly knows how to read, or some beautiful, over-grown child let loose in a library—making connections for himself, who knows the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... had taken a through ticket to Siena, third class to Dover, first on the boat, second in France and Italy. She got to Victoria in good time, had her luggage labelled, secured a corner seat, and, having twenty minutes to spare, strolled round the bookstall, eyeing the illustrated weeklies and the cheap reprints. The blue and gold of a shilling edition of Keats lay ready to her hand and she picked it up and ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Wentworth insisted on making the presentation, so one morning I called for my cousin and her chaperone, took the Wentworth barge at Blackfriars water stairs, and proceeded by river up to Westminster stairs, where we disembarked. I left my companions in a bookstall in the Abbey and went to fetch Mary, who lived near by in a house called Little Hamilton House, under the shadow of Great Hamilton House, which was the home ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... was enormous this Christmas Eve, and for the most part laden with parcels; the platforms surged with folk, and each bookstall, blazing with lights (for it was after seven o'clock), was a center of a kind of whirlpool. There was sensational news in the evening papers, and everyone was anxious to get at the full details of which the main facts were tantalizingly ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... surprised and delighted, feeling as if it were a new book to him. (I have before me a letter which illustrates this feeling on Huxley's part. He had lamented to me that he did not possess a copy of the first edition of the "Principles", when, shortly afterwards, I picked up a dilapidated copy on a bookstall; this I had bound and sent to my old teacher and colleague. His ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... wholly cheering to tell one who, among women of letters, was almost alone in her freedom from a lettered vanity. You are not a very popular author: your volumes are not found in gaudy covers on every bookstall; or, if found, are not perused with avidity by the Emmas and Catherines of our generation. 'Tis not long since a blow was dealt (in the estimation of the unreasoning) at your character as an author by the publication of your familiar letters. The editor of these ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... At the bookstall upon the platform Drake bought a copy of the Times, and whilst taking his change he was attracted by a grayish-green volume prominently displayed upon the white newspapers. The sobriety of the binding caught his fancy. He picked it up, and read the gold-lettered ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... opinions, even at Nancy, I happen to know. For, one day while the war was still new, I chanced in rooting in an old bookstall in Paris, to find a book which was written by an officer of the Twentieth ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... imaginations. As it was, there was no escape. She must always see and know and never escape. She could never escape. There she was, placed before the clock-face of life. And if she turned round as in a railway station, to look at the bookstall, still she could see, with her very spine, she could see the clock, always the great white clock-face. In vain she fluttered the leaves of books, or made statuettes in clay. She knew she was not REALLY reading. She was not REALLY working. She was watching the fingers ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... is said, he read through the Metaphysics of Aristotle, till the words were imprinted on his memory; but their meaning was hopelessly obscure, until one day they found illumination from the little commentary by F[a]r[a]b[i] (q.v.), which he bought at a bookstall for the small sum of three dirhems. So great was his joy at the discovery, thus made by help of a work from which he had expected only mystery, that he hastened to return thanks to God, and bestowed an alms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... He devoured books. He did not read them carefully, but quickly, tearing the heart out of them. He cared for nothing else but reading, and once when his father was ill and unable to attend to his bookstall, he asked his son to do it for him. Samuel refused. But the memory of his disobedience and unkindliness stayed with him, and more than fifty years after, as an old and worn man, he stood bare-headed in the wind and rain for an hour in the market-place, upon the spot where his father's ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... 1918. I was looking in a hurry for something to read. One magazine on the bookstall told me it was exactly what I wanted for a railway journey. It had a picture of a large gun to make its cover attractive. The next advertised its claims in another way. A girl's face was the decorative ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... was somewhat devoid of books, except in Mr. Goschen's study. I remember J.R.G.'s laughing fling when Mrs. Goschen complained that she could not get Pride and Prejudice, which he had recommended to her, "from the library." "But you could have bought it for sixpence at the railway bookstall," said J.R.G. Mr. Goschen himself, however, was a man of wide cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligent German bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe. His biography of his grandfather in ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mrs. Hornby," I said, "that in answer to the first question, 'Whence did you obtain the "Thumbograph"?' you say, 'I do not remember clearly; I think I must have bought it at a railway bookstall.' Now I understood that it was brought home and given to you ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... destroy. So he telephoned to March, asking him, with many apologetic curses and faint damns, to take the boat down the river as arranged, that they might meet at Willowood by the time settled; then he went outside and hailed a taxicab to take him to the railway station. There he paused at the bookstall to add to his light luggage a number of cheap murder stories, which he read with great pleasure, and without any premonition that he was about to walk into as strange a story ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... first of several pleasant evenings, and Mr. Price, who had bought a book dealing with Australia from a second-hand bookstall, no longer denied them an account of his adventures there. A gold watch and chain, which had made a serious hole in his brother-in-law's Savings Bank account, lent an air of substance to his waistcoat, and a pin of excellent paste sparkled ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... same that David Copperfield describes as in the City Road; and the account of the sales, as they actually occurred and were told to me long before David was born, was reproduced word for word in his imaginary narrative: "The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... that most touching melody, "Going back to Dixie," greatly to the delight of our sociable and talented neighbours. Daylight next morning brought us to Bloemfontein and civilization, and what impressed me most was the fact of daily newspapers being sold at a bookstall, which sight I had not seen for many months. On arriving at Cape Town, I was most hospitably entertained at Groot Schuurr by Colonel Frank Rhodes, in the absence of his brother. This mansion had been a convalescent home for many officers ever since the war began. There ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... either side that were constantly swinging to let people in or out; through them could be seen the hurrying throng of people on the station, rushing to and fro under the great electric lights, gathered round the bookstall, struggling along under luggage, or—very occasionally—moving in the wake of a porter with a barrow heaped with trunks. There were soldiers everywhere, British and Australian, and officers in every ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... men standing by the bookstall attracted our attention, from their constant bursts of laughter. There was evidently a good joke amongst them, and they were enjoying it to the full. The time was up, and the train was just about to start, when one of them rushed forward and jumped into my carriage. The guard slammed the door, his ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... with what patience she could muster. She walked up Corporation Street and round by the Town Hall, peeped into the Parish Church and the Free Library, then finding herself close to the railway station, decided to go and buy a copy of Home Chat or Tit Bits at the bookstall. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... This is a question very difficult to answer. Probably no two grown-up people will attack a new author, or a new language, in quite the same way. The present writer began Dante with very little knowledge of Italian; but knowing French and Latin pretty well. Being in Florence one day, he went to a bookstall and bought for one lira a secondhand copy of a little text published in 1811; and began to puzzle out bits here and there with the help of a small dictionary. In the following winter he went through the whole poem in Bianchi's edition with a friend, ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... it must be a mistake for the Era of Volterra, or the Esino, north of Ancona," he said to himself, and he went to his book closet and brought out an old folio geography which he had once bought for a few pence on a Roman bookstall, spread it open before him, and read one by one the names of all the streams of the peninsula, from the Dora Baltea to the Giarretta. There was no other Edera river. Unless it were indeed a misprint altogether, the stream which flowed under his church walls ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... you meet him and say Good day, and you suppose he answers with something about the weather, ten to one he's asking you what you think of Hazlitt's essays on Shakespeare, or Leigh Hunt's Italian Poets, or Lamb's roast pig, or Barry Cornwall's songs. He couldn't get by a bookstall without stopping—for half an hour, at any rate. He knows just when all the new books in town are to be published, and when each bookseller is to get his invoice of old English books. He has no particular ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... meant, and laughed. But there is no end to the list of people whom I have been able to recognize, and before I had got through it myself, I found I had walked some distance, and had involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand bookstall. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... time a totally unknown work, bearing the very title mentioned by Beatrice, was accidentally rescued from oblivion by the Rev. J. J. Conybeare, who, it is said by Dunlop, picked up the treasure at a bookstall. This was no other than ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... at the station, and consequently Lucian bought the Confessions of an English Opium Eater which he saw on the bookstall. When his father did drive up, Lucian noticed that the old trap had had a new coat of dark paint, and that the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... turned up at the tip. As we have been informed, he was a cabinet-maker. He worked for very good shops, and earned about two pounds a week. He read books, but he did not know their value, and often fancied he had made a great discovery on a bookstall of an author long ago superseded and worthless. He belonged to a mechanic's institute, and was fond of animal physiology; heard courses of lectures on it at the institute, and had studied two or three elementary ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... is interested in the punctuality or otherwise of the train, and will perhaps verify this by frequent reference to his time-table. Possibly he will amuse himself by reading an English magazine or novel from the bookstall. Yet, in spite of this outward conformity to the English model, he is still as completely an Indian, and as little of an Englishman, as when he wore his dhota, or even when he thought his loin-cloth sufficient clothing. The result of this is that, except where the crowded ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... the bookstall with contempt, wondering how people found the time and patience to read. One side was packed with the forgotten lumber of bookshelves—an odd volume of sermons, a collection of scientific essays, a technical work out of date. And the men, anxious to improve their minds, stared at the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... other, and persons within this shelter could see the storming of the train to great advantage. Carmichael, the young Free Kirk minister of Drumtochty, who had been tasting the civilisation of Muirtown overnight and was waiting for the Dunleith train, leant against the back of the bookstall, watching the scene with frank, boyish interest. Rather under six feet in height, he passed for more, because he stood so straight and looked so slim, for his limbs were as slender as a woman's, while women (in Muirtown) had envied his ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Wesley preached in the marketplace, in the centre of which was a fountain erected to the memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the distinguished lexicographer. His father, whose home was at Lichfield, was a bookseller and had a bookstall in Uttoxeter Market, which he attended on market days. The story is told that on one occasion, not feeling very well, he asked his son, Samuel, to take his place, who from motives of pride flatly refused to do so. From this illness the old man never recovered, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... charges. Everything interested them; the black face of the Sudanese engine driver who looked down from his huge British locomotive, the display of English, French and German literature mingled with Greek, Italian, Arab, or Turkish papers on the bookstall; the ebony and copper-coloured luggage carriers who seemed eager to take one another's lives, but in reality desired no more than to snatch each other's jobs, under the eyes of the uniformed hotel-porters. To me, the busy place was a desert, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... city was thrilled by a loud explosion. No one was killed: above a hundred persons were injured, and the cause of the disturbance was traced to a bag left by the General on the platform close to the bookstall. For the next two or three days the station wore a blackened, distracted, and generally intermingled appearance. The big drum suffered the most severely, and shreds of parchment were wafted to a great distance, and gathered up, many of them, by adherents of the Army, as relics of ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... faculty really creative. "You don't seem able to keep a character together," this pitiless monitor had somewhere else remarked. Peter Baron, as he sat in his corner while the train stopped, considered, in the befogged gaslight, the bookstall standard of literature and asked himself whose character had fallen to pieces now. Tormenting indeed had always seemed to him such a fate as to have the creative head ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... boy at the bookstall," I said, "let's go and change some of them, though I believe you have only picked out the ones which Mrs Faulkner wouldn't read. I let the boy ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... acquiescence, and soon returning, brought back word that they would be happy to see him in the first floor as soon as convenient; that Mrs Kenwigs had, upon the instant, sent out to secure a second-hand French grammar and dialogues, which had long been fluttering in the sixpenny box at the bookstall round the corner; and that the family, highly excited at the prospect of this addition to their gentility, wished the initiatory ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... train crawl out of the station, waved his hand in farewell, forced a greeting upon the reluctant Brightman, whom he passed examining the magazines upon a bookstall, and, summoning a taxi, was duly deposited at the Alhambra Theatre. He made his way ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... world too well To dream that such would buy or sell. He had his poets, 'pure gold,' he said, But the man at the bookstall shook his head, And offered a grudging half-a-crown For the five the poet ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... gone off to Brighton in an excellent temper. Mrs. Delaport Green trod on air in pretty buckled shoes, and patted the toy terrier under her arm and felt as if all the society papers on the bookstall knew that they would soon have to tell whither she ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward |
