Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

"THE NEWSPAPER MAN'S NEWSPAPER"

151

sistibly funny pictures with his pen and colored inks.
They appeared too seldom in print, but were lavished in
private correspondence and are treasured.
His biographer, Mr. Slason Thompson-and few geniuses really deserving a biography have had a betternotes that Eugene Field's bibliomania, the passion that
exercised so strong an influence upon his habits during
the last six or seven years of life, began about September
of 1888 to show symptoms in the literary output. This
chronology of the disease coincides in date with the letter
to me in August of that year proposing a combined attack
the next February upon the shelves of Bouton's shop in
Broadway. His first acquaintance with Bouton's must
have occurred earlier than the time set for this excursion.
In a letter dated February 10 of 1888, a month before the
great blizzard, Field wrote Mr. Dana that he would
be at The Sun office next Tuesday bringing an alleged
folio of old English ballads recently discovered. "These
ballads," he said, "are very ancient and they treat of
Chicago society in its beginning-of the legends and traditions upon which our culture has been reared. I mix in
pathetic with humorous, so as to suit every taste."
Chiefly after chapbooks, but with eyes wide open for
anything bizarre in the printed works of the fous litteraires
of all sorts, of which there was so rich a stock in Mr.
Bouton's second-story shop in Broadway nearly opposite
the old New York Hotel, was Field on such expeditions.
He had an uncanny flair as a book hunter. He seemed to
go by instinct to the right spot on the right shelf; even to
the volumes tucked away in the hinterland. He was
capable at times of pranks like the pretence of ignorance
of values; excessive respect for volumes of stupid content

because they were bound in tree calf; contempt for scraggly
things which he knew as well as the dealer to be worth
their weight in platinum. It was always polite comedy,
never broad farce, and it served to amuse, without at all