Excerpt from No; 5 John Street The publication of this book has brought me many questions as to aims, purposes, and lesser things. The book should, no doubt, answer all of them worth answering for itself. But this is high doctrine, and I have ofttimes been compelled to stand and deliver to the interviewer. Now comes my Publisher with a more authoritative request for a Preface to a new edition. The questions of general interest, as I find them in the reviews, and in the letters of correspondents, turn mainly on three points. How much of the book is "real" - in the sense, I take it, of a mere photographic verisimilitude? Why was it written? What should we do? The more realistic interrogatories are sometimes singularly bald. Is the house known to the London Directory? In which of the innumerable John Streets does it stand? Did the writer actually live in it? Would Low Covey like a situation? Was Tilda the young person who broke the window at Girls' Club in Seven Dials? Is Nance's employer to be identified with firm of - ? It is needless to say that all this is much beside the mark. The book, I take it, is only the more truly real by virtue of its freedom from such entangling niceties. Everything related in it is as true as I could make it, but its "photographs" are only of the composite order, and the results of an effort to work from the variation to the type. If books were but inventories, our occupation would be gone. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.