Buying Books One Cannot Read

 WHAT the old French officer had delivered upon travelling, bringing Polonius’s advice to his son upon the same subject into my head, and that bringing in Hamlet; and Hamlet, the rest of Shakespeare’s works, I stopped at the Quai de Conti, in my return home, to purchase the whole set.
   The bookseller said he had not a set in the world. Comment! said I; taking one up out of a set which lay upon the counter betwixt us. He said, they were sent him only to be got bound, and were to be sent back to Versailles in the morning to the Count de B—.
   And does the Count de B—, said I, read Shakespeare? C’est un Esprit fort, replied the bookseller.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey & The Journal to Eliza (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1966; 1788), pp. 68-69.