Treasured Tocqueville

Woudhuysen talks about Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville famously characterized bookshops in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840): "When a traveller goes into a bookseller's shop in the United States, and examines the American books upon the shelves, the number of works appears extremely great; whilst that of known authors appears, on the contrary, to be extremely small". The image of the French political theorist examining the contents of the shelves, with their "enormous quantity of religious works" and "the long catalogue of political pamphlets", is a pleasing one.