Although George Gissing would have denied being a book collector and obliquely did so in his semiautobiographical The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), the last book he published in his lifetime, evidence that he had the turn of mind and habits of book collectors is not lacking. From his early childhood in Wakefield, Yorkshire, to his death in the Basque country he largely equated life with intensive reading. In a letter of 7 November 1899 written from Paris to his friend Edward Clodd he pathetically remarked: "I see interesting books in the new lists, and wish I could get hold of them. If, in the end, all goes well with me (a great If) I shall pass my days in a garden, or by the fireside, merely reading. Now and then I have such a hunger for books that I loathe the work which forbids me to fall upon them...