Cover art

Facsimile of original cover of Poe’s Tamerlane.

Frontispiece. See page 138.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER.

1. IN EULOGY OF CATALOGUES

2. A COMPARISON OF PRICES

3. SOME LUCKY FINDS

4. THE FORGOTTEN LORE SOCIETY

5. SOME HUNTING-GROUNDS OF LONDON

6. VAGARIES OF BOOK-HUNTERS

7. HOW FASHION LIVES

8. THE RULES OF THE CHASE

9. THE GLAMOUR OF BINDINGS

10. THE HAMMER AND THE END

CHAPTER I.

IN EULOGY OF CATALOGUES.

There are plenty of people—in fact, they
are in the great majority even among
bookish men—who regard antiquated
sale-catalogues in the light of so much rubbish, and
yet, when intelligently consulted, these memorials
of a bygone day not only have their uses, but
are positively interesting. Truly enough they are
not popular, like the last new novel which, for
one reason or another, has taken the town by
storm, and it would not pay to reprint a single
one of them, even the best or most important
that has ever held the frequenters of
auction-rooms spell-bound.

Sometimes a ‘parcel’ will be sold for what it
will fetch, and on investigation may prove to
contain a few simple-minded pamphlets on
subjects of no importance, ‘and others,’ the
latter consisting of book-catalogues of the last
or the earlier portion of the present century.
This happens sufficiently often to make it
possible for a bookish enthusiast of an antiquarian
turn of mind to lose himself with marvellous
rapidity in a maze of old-time dispersions. But
the enthusiast, unless very determined indeed,
knows better than to choke his library with such
material. He is aware that an exhaustive index
is indispensable to the proper appreciation of such
literature, and to make that would occupy his
nights indefinitely.

And so it comes to pass that old sale-catalogues
of books are consigned for the most part to the
rubbish-heap, or perhaps sent to the mills, to
reappear later on in another guise. They may
be scarce in the sense that, if you wanted a
particular one, it could only be got with great
difficulty, and at considerable expense (here the art
of selling to advantage comes in), or perhaps not
at all. This, however, makes no matter, for the
fact remains that such things are not inquired for
as a general rule, and that an occasional demand
is insufficient to give them any kind of a status
in the world of letters.

Some five or six years ago a member of the
Johnson Club, a literary society which meets at
intervals in various parts of London, but more
particularly in Fleet Street, discovered a catalogue
of the sale of the old Doctor’s library, neatly
marked with the prices each book had brought.
Whether this was a sale post mortem or a casual
interlocutory dispersal at the instance of some
soulless creditor, I do not know. In any case the
relic was a find—a fact which the bookseller who
bought it was not slow to appreciate, for he at once
assessed its value, to the society man, at
something like forty shillings. This was paid without
demur, because at the time all the other Johnson
catalogues were in mufti, and it had struck no
one to exhibit them, and also because it was,
under the circumstances of the case, a very
desirable memorial to present to the society
which flourishes on the fame of the great
lexicographer. Here, at any rate, is one exceptional
instance of an old catalogue possessing a distinct
pecuniary value up to £2, and though the
noise this discovery made in certain circles led
to a general search and the rescue of other
copies, the circumstances are not in the least
affected on that account.

From a literary or even a sentimental standpoint,
a long story, full of speculation and romance,
might be written on Dr. Johnson’s long-forgotten
catalogue. We might, for instance, trace, by the
aid of Boswell, many of the books mentioned in
it to the very hand of the master himself. We
might conjecture the use he made of this volume
or that in his ‘Lives of the Poets,’ ‘The Vanity
of Human Wishes,’ or in the ponderous Dictionary
that cemented his fame, and by way of interlude
beguile an hour occasionally by contrasting the
character of the books he affected with the quality
of those on the shelves of some modern Johnson,
assuming, of course, that his counterpart is to be
found. Then we might look at the prices realized,
and compare them with those ruling at the
present day. Some books then in fashion are,
we may be sure, now despised and rejected, others
have not been appreciably affected by the course
of time, while others, again, are now sought after
throughout the world, and are hardly to be met
with at all. There is no old catalogue whatever
which is not capable of affording considerable
instruction if we only read between the lines.

Then, again, there is one speculation that no
true book-lover can stifle; it haunts him as he
passes the barrows with their loads of sermons
and scholastic primers, and it is this: ‘Time
works wonders.’ Some day may not this heterogeneous
mass of rubbish produce as fine a pearl
as ever a diseased oyster was robbed of? May
not fashion go off at a tangent, and dote on
lexicons or what not? There have been men—Rossi,
for example, who was so saturated with
the suspicion that fashion might change any
moment that the stalls by which he passed were
‘like towns through which Attila or the Tartars
had swept, with ruin in their train’—who would
buy any book whatever, whether they wanted it or
not, on the bare chance of someone else wanting
it, either at the time or in the days to come.

Such may be the outcome of a too eager perusal
of catalogues, focussed till it produces an absorbing
passion, which only departs with life itself. After
a time discrimination, naturally enough, becomes
impossible, and whole masses of books are bought
up for what they may become, not for what they are.
This may appear to be an ignoble sort of pastime,
but in reality it is far otherwise, since wholesale
purchasers of this stamp are invariably well read,
and know more about their author than his mere
name. I personally was acquainted with a
bookworm who absorbed whole collections at a time.
His house was full of books; they were under
the beds, in cupboards, piled up along the walls,
under the tables and chairs, and even on the
rafters under the roof. If you walked without
due care, you would, more likely than not, tumble
over a folio in the dark, or bring down a wall of
literature, good, bad, or indifferent, on your head.
This library was chaotic to the general, though
the worm himself knew very well where to burrow
for anything he required, and, what is more to
the point, would feed for hours on volumes
that few people had ever so much as heard of.
The monetary value of his treasures did not
trouble him, though one of his favourite anecdotes
related to the hunting down of a fourth folio
Shakespeare, which, after much haggling, he
purchased for a song from a poor woman who lived
in an almshouse. When the delight of the chase
was over, he recompensed her to the full market
value, thereby proving that, in his case at least,
a greed for books does not necessarily carry with
it a stifled conscience. Sad to relate, this
bibliophile died like other men, and the collection of a
lifetime came to the inevitable hammer. Most
of his books then proved to be portions of sets.
If a work were complete in, say, ten volumes, he
would perhaps possess no more than five or six of
the full number in various bindings and editions,
while others, though complete, were imperfect,
and many were in rags. Yet among the whole
there were some pearls of great price. Even in
his day the fashion had changed in his favour.

Now, this changing of fashion which is always
going on cannot be prophesied at haphazard, or
perhaps even at all; but if there is a way of
forestalling it, it is by the careful comparison of prices
realized for books of a certain kind at different
periods of time, and this can only be accomplished
by a study of catalogues. The book-man likes to
think that history repeats itself in this as in other
matters, and that what has happened once will
probably occur again in process of time. Nay,
he might, without any great stretch of credulity.
persuade himself that it must occur, if only he
live long enough. That’s the rub, for half a
dozen lifetimes might not be sufficient to witness
a return to favour of, say, the ponderous works of
the Fathers, which were in such great demand a
couple of centuries ago. As of them, so of many
other kinds of books which are only read now by
the very few. Some day they will rise again after
their long sleep, but not for us.

As a corollary to this eulogy of catalogues, let us
take a few of them and see where the book-man’s
steps are leading him. In his wanderings abroad
he must many a time be painfully conscious of
the fact that his own quest is that of everyone
else whose tastes are similar to his own. Let a
first edition of the immortal ‘Angler’ so much as
peep from among the grease and filth of a
rag-and-bone shop, and a magnetic current travels at
lightning speed to the homes of a score or more
of pickers-up of unconsidered trifles, who
forthwith race for the prize. How they get to know
of its existence is a mystery. Perhaps some
strange psychological influence is at work to
prompt them to dive down a pestilential alley for
the first and last time in their lives. Did you
ever see a millionaire groping in the gutter for a
dropped coin? His energy is nothing to that of
the book-man who has reason to suspect—why
he knows not—that here or there may perhaps
lie hid and unrecognised a volume which fashion
has made omnipotent. And his energy is not
confined to himself alone, for one decree of a
naughty world changes not—it is ever the same:
What many men want, more men will search for;
what one man only has, many will want. The
path of the book-hunter is trodden flat and hard
with countless footsteps, and this is the reason
why it is so unsatisfactory to look specially for
anything valuable.

We may take it, therefore, that, though
hunting for books may be a highly exhilarating
pastime, it is seldom remunerative from a
pecuniary point of view. There are, no doubt,
hundreds of thousands of good and useful volumes
which can be bought at any time for next to
nothing; but they have no halo round them at
the moment, and so they are abandoned to their
fate by the typical collector, who insists not only
on having the best editions in exchange for his
money, but that his books shall be of a certain
description—that is to say, of a kind to please him,
or which for the time being is in great demand.

And men are pleased at various times by books
of a widely different character, as the old
catalogues tell us plainly enough. In 1676, when
William Cooper bookseller, dwelling at the Sign
of the Pelican in Little Britain, held the first
auction sale ever advertised in England—that
of the library of Dr. Lazarus Seaman—works
critical of the Fathers and Schoolmen; learned and
critical volumes of distressing profundity,
appealed to the comparative few who could read
and write sufficiently well to make reading a
pleasurable experience. Poetry is absent entirely.
Shakespeare and Milton are elbowed out by
Puritan fanatics who fulminate curses against
mankind. No doubt, if a book-man of those days
had been asked what kind of literature would
be in vogue a couple of centuries hence, he
would have pointed to Seaman’s collection and
replied, ‘Books like those can never die. So
long as learning holds its sway over the few, they
will be bought and treasured by the many.’ In
this he would have been wrong, for few people
care nowadays for volumes such as these. The
times have changed utterly, and we with them.

At this same sale was a book which sold for
less than almost any other, and it lay hidden
away under this bald and misleading title:
‘Veteris et Novi Testamenti in Ling. Indica,
Cantabr. in Nova Anglia.’ Simply this, and
nothing more. No statement as to date,
condition or binding appears in Cooper’s catalogue,
and yet this Bible is none other than John Eliot’s
translation into the Indian language, with a
metrical version of the Psalms in the same
vernacular, published at Cambridge, Mass., in
1663-61. An auctioneer of the present day would
print the title of this volume in large capitals, and
tell us whether or no it had the rare dedication to
King Charles II., of pious memory, which was
only inserted in twenty copies sent to England as
presents. If it had, then this book, wherever it
may be, is now worth much more than its weight
in gold, for at Lord Hardwicke’s sale, held in
London on June 29, 1888, such a desirable copy
was knocked down for £580.

Why this immense advance in price, seeing
that probably there is no man in England to-day
who could read a single line of John Eliot’s free
translation? The reason is plain. Since 1661
sleepy New England has vanished like the light
canoes of countless Indians, and in the busy
United States there has grown up a great demand
for anything which illustrates the early history of
North America. Had such a contingency struck
old Lazarus Seaman, he would have made
his will to suit the exigences of the case, and
perhaps taken more interest in John Eliot and his
missionary enterprises than anyone did at the
time, or has done since.

It may perhaps be said that Seaman’s library
must have been of a special kind, one which such
a learned divine might be expected to gather
within his walls; but as a matter of fact this
was not so. Between 1676 and 1682, October
to October in each of those years, exactly thirty
sales of books were held by auction in London,
among them the libraries of Sir Kenelm Digby,
Dr. Castell, the author of the ‘Lexicon
Heptaglotton,’ Dr. Gataker, Lord Warwick, and other
noted persons. The general character of all the
seventeenth-century catalogues which time has
spared for our perusal is substantially the same.
Every one of them reflects the taste and fashion
of the day, as did Agrippa’s magic glass the
forms of absent friends. Still harping chiefly
on theology! as Polonius might say, these
catalogues are crammed with polemics and books of
grave discourse. Anything which could not, by
hook or by crook, be dragged, as to its contents,
within the circumference of the fashionable craze,
was disposed of for a trifling sum. Even in 1682
the learned world, or at least our narrow corner
of it, was inhabited almost entirely by
crop-eared Puritans, with sugar-loaf hats on their
heads and broad buckles to their shoes, and
by Philosophers. True! Cromwell had gone to
his account, and Charles II. held Court at
St. James’s and elsewhere, but the King and his
merry companions were not reading men
unless a profound knowledge of ‘Hudibras,’ that
book which Pepys could not abide the sight
of, could make them so. The anti-Puritans
patronized Butler, and doted on Sir Charles
Sedley, the Earl of Rochester and a few more,
who scribbled love-verses by day, and gambled
and fought and drank at night. But these
worshipped Thalia and Erato only, with music and
dancing and other delights, and knew nothing of
solid hard work by the midnight oil. They had
no books to speak of, and the few they had were
light and airy like themselves, and for the most
part as worthless.

On November 25, 1678, a great sale was held at
the White Hart, in Bartholomew Close. The
books were ‘bought out of the best libraries
abroad, and out of the most eminent seats of
learning beyond the seas,’ or, more truthfully, had
been removed from the shops of seven London
book-sellers who had combined to rig the
market. Books of all kinds were dispersed at
this sale, which continued de die in diem till the
heptarchy was satisfied. Were the members of
this pioneer combination alive now, they would
weep to think that they gave away on that
occasion—practically gave away—scores of what
have long since become aristocrats among books.
Americana were there in plenty, and some of these
are now so extremely rare and valuable that they
are hardly to be procured for love or money; some
few, indeed, have completely disappeared, tossed
lightly aside, probably by disgusted purchasers, or
carted back again to the shops from whence they
came, to be stacked once more till they perished
utterly of damp and neglect, moth, mice and rust.
On the other hand our old friends, the Puritans,
revelled in grim folios bought up at prices which,
the change in the value of money notwithstanding,
would hardly be exceeded now. Walton’s ‘Biblia
Sacra Polyglotta’ was an immense favourite, a
distinction it doubtless deserved, and, indeed,
deserves yet, though we can see that Walton
must have ‘gone down’ woefully in the last
hundred years, when we come to calculate the
necessaries of life that could be bought then with
a piece of gold, and to contrast them with the
meagre display such a sum would purchase now.
The truth perhaps, is that, although education
was less widely diffused in the days of the Stuarts,
it was more deep and thorough. A savant was
then like a huge octopus that devastates whole
districts, and daily grows fatter and more bloated
at the expense of everything that moves within
reach of its spreading tendrils.

To this effect are we taught by these ancient
catalogues, which, however, do not exhaust all
their interest in mere matters of prices and
fashion. We can learn much from their pages
and advertisements of the manners and customs
of our ancestors in Bookland. It seems that
there were travelling auctioneers a couple of
centuries ago who prefaced their remarks with
eulogies of the Mayor and Corporation of each
town at which they stopped, by way, no doubt, of
securing their patronage. Sales began at eight
o’clock in the morning then, and went on, with a
mid-day interval for refreshment, until late at
night. Sometimes the auctioneer sold by the
candle-end; that is to say, lit a morsel of candle
on putting up some coveted volume for
competition, and knocked it down to him who had bid
the most when the light flickered out. This was,
distinctly, an excellent method for bolstering up
excitement, for every splutter must have been
good for a hasty advance, regretted very possibly
when the modicum of tallow entered on a fresh
lease of life. When not selling by the candle-end,
an auctioneer would dispose of about thirty lots
in the course of an hour, and was quite willing
to accept the most trifling bids. Business
is more rapidly conducted now, for few
auctioneers stop to curse their fate, or to regale
their audience with anecdotes, as one George
Smalridge, who in 1689 wrote and published a
skit on the prevalent way of doing business, says
was quite the usual custom in his day. His tract
is written in Latin, under the title ‘Auctio
Davisiana,’ and gives a fanciful account of the
extraordinary proceedings that took place at the
sale of the books of Richard Davis, an ancient
bookseller of Oxford, who had fallen into the
clutches of the bailiffs. The auctioneer commences
with a dirge said, or perhaps sung, over the
miserable Davis: ‘O the vanity of human wishes! O
the changeableness of fate and its settled unkindness
to us,’ etc. Each book is extolled at length,
and there are pages of lamentation and woe as
Hobbes of Malmesbury, his ‘Leviathan,’ ‘a very
large and famous beast,’ is knocked down, by
mistake, for the miserable sum of five pieces of silver.

An exhaustive chapter on early book auctions
would necessarily commence with the dispersion of
the stock of Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir
at Leyden in April, 1653; but the Elzevirs must
look to themselves, nor are these remarks
intended to be even approximately full. Rather are
they discursive, and in praise of catalogues in
the mass; intended merely to put someone else
with more space and time at his disposal in the
way of rescuing them from the neglect into which
they have fallen. The next chapter is more
specific, for in that we will take a very famous
sale of less antiquity, and endeavour to draw
comparisons between then and now. And these
comparisons will perhaps be very odious, for they
will necessarily appeal directly to the cupidity of
every bookworm that breathes, to every book-hunter
who prowls around in search of rarities,
and returns home—empty handed.

CHAPTER II.

A COMPARISON OF PRICES.

The important sale to which reference was
made in the last chapter is that of the
library of John, Duke of Roxburghe, which
was dispersed on May 18, 1812, and forty-one
following days, by Robert H. Evans, a bookseller
of Pall Mall. This sale is of extreme interest for
two reasons. In the first place, the collection
was the most extensive, varied, and important
that had hitherto been offered for sale in England,
or indeed, anywhere else; and, secondly, it may
fairly be regarded in the light of a connecting-link
between the old state of things and the new.
The Roxburghe library was not ‘erected,’ as
Gabriel Naudæus has it, on traditional principles;
it was of a general character that appealed to all
classes of book-men. On the other hand, it was
not quite such a library as a collector of large
means might be expected to get together at the
present day, for the tendency is now to specialize,
and in any case many of the books that the Duke
obviously took an interest in are of such little
importance now, and so infrequently inquired for,
that they would most assuredly be refused
admission to any private library of equal importance
and magnitude. Even a general lover would
hardly be likely to manifest much interest in a
number of volumes on Scots law or to hob-a-nob
with Cheyne, who in 1720 wrote a book on the
gout, or with Sir R. Blackmore, notwithstanding
that eminent physician’s great experience of the
spleen and vapours. That lore of this kind has
its merits I dispute in no way, but it is not
exactly of a kind to interest the modern collector,
who, even if he aim at all branches of literature
alike, would much prefer to have his legal and
medical instruction boiled down, so to speak, to
the compass of a good digest or cyclopædia.

Nevertheless, May 18, 1812, is among the
fasti of those who to a love of letters add a
passion for books. It is the opening day of the
new régime—the birthday, in fact, of those who
revel in first editions and early English texts.
Brunet said that the ‘thermometer of
bibliomania’—objectionable word!—’attained its maximum
in England’ during these forty-two days of
ceaseless hammering, and Dibdin went perfectly insane
whenever he thought of this ‘Waterloo among
book-battles,’ as he called it. Everyone of course
knows the chief episode; that struggle between
Earl Spencer and the Marquis of Blandford for
the 1471 Boccaccio, in its faded yellow morocco
binding, and how the latter carried it off for
£2,260, a most idiotic price to pay, as subsequent
events abundantly proved; for seven years later,
when Lord Blandford’s library came to be sold,
the coveted volume was acquired by his former
rival for considerably less than half the money.
It now reposes in state at Manchester, or, as
some choose to say, is in prison there, though it
is perhaps too much to expect that all good
things should be forcibly removed to London, as
some greedy Metropolitans wish them to be.

The Duke of Roxburghe’s library comprised
rather more than 10,000 works in about 30,000
volumes, and the auctioneer’s method of classifying
this large assortment was so peculiar that he
feels constrained to apologize for it in a rather
extensive preface.

‘For instance,’ says he, ‘the Festyvale of
Caxton, printed in two columns, of which no
other copy is at present known, may be found
classed with a small edition of the Common
Prayer of one shilling value.’

The ‘Festyval’ brought £105, and the little
Prayer-Book, which proves to have been printed at
London in 1707, 8s. 6d., which is more than it
would be at all likely to sell for now. But what
about Caxton’s lordly tome; how much might
that be expected to bring in case it should once
again find its way into the open market? Judging
from the present price of Caxtons, perhaps five
or six times the money would not be an impossible
figure, but there is no telling. It might
bring more, even though it has the misfortune to
belong to the second edition, for only six copies
are known, and several of those are imperfect.
Of the first edition of 1483, only three perfect
copies are to be met with, and that is, of
course, quite a different matter. The auctioneer
need not, as it happens, have sought to excuse
himself so energetically for placing good and
bad books side by side, for the whole catalogue
is arranged under subjects, and to do otherwise
would have been manifestly impossible. He
might, however, have entered somewhat more
fully into detail as to condition and binding, for
some of the books were, confessedly, ‘thumbed to
tatters,’ and a suspicion that this or that ‘lot’
may be so afflicted lurks in every page of the
catalogue.

The first book brought to the hammer at this
sale; the preliminary bombshell which, to pursue
Dibdin’s metaphor, was the signal for a furious
cannonade, consisted of the ‘Biblia Sacra Græca,’
printed by Aldus in 1518. This is the first
complete edition of the Bible in Greek, and an
important book on that account. It brought £4 15s.,
and any book-hunter might heartily pray for half
a dozen copies now, on the same terms, for the
present auction value runs to about six times as
much. In fact, a sound copy sold only the other
day for £27. So, too, Schoiffer’s Latin Bible,
printed at Mayence in 1472, folio, would be
considered cheap now at £8 8s., assuming nothing was
wrong with it. In 1893 a copy in oak boards
brought £20 exactly. On the other hand, Baskerville’s
Bible, Cambridge, 1763, was excessively
dear at £10 15s., seeing that a very fair copy can
be got at the present time for about £1 10s.
Collectors of Bibles are responsible for much of
the terrible confusion that takes place when we
begin to draw comparisons in matters of filthy
lucre. If a Bible come from a noted press, or is an
original edition of its version, or very old indeed,
then up goes the price, especially if it be printed
in English. One would have thought that
Baskerville being an Englishman, and a fine printer
in his way, would have been good for much more
than £1 10s. But no; he has not been dead long
enough, for the collectors have made it a rule that
no English Bible printed after 1717 is any good at
all, and consequently that the ‘Vinegar Bible’ is
the last book of the kind in point of date worth
looking at, unless, indeed, exception be made in
favour of one of the six large-paper copies of
Bentham’s Cambridge Bible of 1762, which are
reported to have luckily escaped a conflagration.
The late Mr. Dore, who was a strong
man on the subject of old Bibles, says that a
little research would reveal the existence of many
more than the traditional half-dozen copies, so
perhaps, after all, the conflagration is a myth.
But if Baskerville’s Bible brought what we should
now consider to be an outrageous sum, what shall
be said of ‘The Holy Bible, illustrated with
Prints, published by T. Macklin, six volumes,
folio, 1800,’ which went for £43, incomplete
though it was. Some £2 10s. for the whole seven
volumes is not at all an uncommon auction price
at the present day, and this amount and more
would most certainly be swallowed up by the
binding alone. What it comes to is that among
all these books of theology, Biblical comment,
criticism, polemics, sermons, and works of the
Fathers, prices have fallen since 1812, except in
those cases where collectors have stepped in to
rescue old Bibles, works associated with some great
religious revolution, or specimens of rare
typography from the presses of old and noted printers.

For instance, there was here another Caxton
called ‘The Prouffytable boke for Mane’s Soul,’
folio, described as ‘a beautiful copy,’ which went
for £140, and ‘A Lytell Treatyse called
Lucydarye,’ 4to., Wynkyn de Worde, which brought
£10. During the last dozen years the former book
has appeared twice. At the Earl of Aylesford’s
sale in March, 1888, it brought (in company with
‘The Tretyse of the Love of Jhesu Christ,’ by
Wynkyn de Worde, 1493) £305, and in July, 1889,
an inferior copy, badly wormed, sold for £100.

These are the sort of books beloved by large
public libraries, which are fast swallowing up
the few that remain. From a pecuniary point of
view it would perhaps pay some rich book-hunter
of the Lenox type to buy up everything of the
kind he could lay his hands on, though the worst
of speculations such as these is that the interest
on the money invested has a tendency to swell
the principal, and so to add enormously to the
original cost.

Among books that have gone down in price
since the Duke of Roxburghe made his famed
collection are those classical works of the ancients
which were at that time all the rage. Virgil is
no longer a name to conjure with, unless he
happen to rank as a sound copy of the editio
princeps. The first edition of Virgil was printed
by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome, without
date (1469?), and the Duke, notwithstanding the
search of a lifetime, never came across a copy of
that. Not more than seven copies can now be
traced, and only two of these have come to the
hammer for more than a hundred years. One,
though imperfect, realized 4,101 francs at the La
Vallière sale held at Paris in 1784, and the other
£590 at the Hopetoun House sale at London in
February, 1889. Then Homer is also a most
desirable companion if he happen to have been
printed at Florence, in two volumes, folio, 1488.
About £100 is his price under those circumstances.
Speaking generally, however, unless the
printer comes to the rescue of a Greek or Latin
classic, it may fairly be said to have fallen on an
unappreciative generation. Scores upon scores
of volumes, the very flowers of classic days, edited
by Cunningham, Heyne, Person, and other first-rate
scholars of the last century, are to be met
with in this bulky catalogue at sums varying from
£2 to £3 each. In an old book of this class, a
copy of Epictetus, edited by Heyne, and
published at Dresden in 1756, was a slip of paper
with a memorandum of the price at which it had
been purchased in 1760. It was a bookseller’s
bill for £1 12s., made out to one ‘Mr. Richard
Cosgrove,’ doubtless a good customer in his day.
I have the book now, and it cost me fourpence, as
much as it was worth. At the Duke of Roxburghe’s
sale a copy of this same edition brought
£1 4s. This, no doubt, is rather an extreme case,
but it will serve to illustrate the general principle
sought to be enunciated, namely, that eighteenth-century
classics are, for the most part, but wastepaper,
for the simple reason that only a comparatively
small number of people can read them.
The learning of the schools may be deep and
thorough—to assert the contrary would be to
offend many excellent scholars of our own day;
but it is nevertheless extremely probable, to say
the least, that there are more books of the kind
than there is any demand for, and so they litter
the stalls, braving the wind and rain, till they are
rescued by the merest chance and given house-room
for a brief space.

In the opinion of many collectors the word
‘poetry’ only embraces English verse of a certain
period, or written by certain people. The Duke’s
library was particularly rich in ancient English
verse, lyric and dramatic, and some of the prices
realized were very high. Webbe’s ‘A Discourse
of English Poetrie,’ 4to., 1586, brought £64,
and ‘The Paradyse of Daintie Devises,’ 4to.,
1580, £55. A curious collection of some
thousands of ancient ballads, in three large folio
volumes, sold for £477 15s. This collection,
which was stated to be the finest in England,
was originally formed for the celebrated library
of the Earl of Oxford in the beginning of the
eighteenth century, and was even then supposed
to excel the Pepys collection at Cambridge. It
came from the Harleian Library, and was
purchased and afterwards largely added to by the
Duke, who managed to secure a ballad printed by
Leprevik at Edinburgh in 1570, a ballad quoted
in ‘Hamlet,’ of which no other copy was known
to exist, and many other extraordinary rarities.
Dibdin was present when the ‘poetry’ was
competed for, and bought several hundred pounds’
worth of books, either on his own or somebody
else’s account, the whole of which he could easily
have stowed away in his capacious pockets.

Naturally enough, the works of Shakespeare
would first be turned to by anyone who held this
catalogue in his hand for the first time. There
are nearly three pages of closely printed entries
referring to the great dramatist, and the only
conclusion that can be arrived at is that in 1812
the early quartos must have been, if not exactly
common, at any rate of no great rarity. It would
be impossible to argue that Shakespeare was not
then appreciated, for the contrary is well known
to have been the fact. The late Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps
in after-years talked of picking up early
quartos for a few shillings each, and lamented
that, for some mysterious reason which he found
himself unable to explain, they had suddenly
become scarce. Very likely he himself had
excited a keen desire to possess them in the
breasts of those who read his numerous books,
or—publish it not in Gath!—the bulk of them may
have fallen into unappreciative hands, and been
used to light the fires withal.

However this may be, the early Shakespearian
quartos, now of great price, were disposed of at
the Roxburghe sale for only a little more, and
occasionally for less, than the first editions
of Marlowe, Massinger, and several other of the
chief Elizabethan dramatists. A copy of the first
folio sold, it is true, for £100, but the second only
brought £15, the third £35, and the fourth £6 6s.
This record, in the face of £84 for Boydell’s
edition in nine volumes, folio, 1802—a work which
may now be expected to sell for £5 or £6, even
with some of the illustrations after Smirke and
others in proof state—is most extraordinary.

But let us get to the quartos and compare the
prices of then and now. The first-named are those
realized at the Roxburghe sale; those in brackets
are modern, and authenticated with dates and
items complete. There is more scope for
reflection here, and a whole volume might be written
on the mutability of fashion. ‘Much a-doe about
Nothing,’ first edition, 4to., London, 1600,
£2 17s. (the Gaisford sale, April 23, 1890, £130);
‘A Midsommer Night’s Dreame,’ first edition,
4to., 1600, £3 3s. (ibid., £116); ‘The Merchant
of Venice,’ by Roberts, first edition, 4to., 1600,
£2 14s. (the Cosens sale, November 11, 1890,
£270); ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre,’ 4to., 1619,
5s. (the Lakelands Library, March 12, 1891, £37);
‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre,’ 4to., 1635, 14s.
(ibid., £15); ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ second, or first
complete edition, 4to., 1599, £12 12s. (the
Perkins sale, July 10, 1889, £164); ‘King Lear,’
4to., 1608, £6 12s. (the Brayton-Ives sale, New
York, March 5, 1891, $425); ‘Sir John Oldcastle,’
first edition, 4to., 1600, 19s. (the Gaisford sale,
April 23, 1890, £46).

These modern prices are small in comparison
with what might have been, for none of the copies
above mentioned were in the finest condition. If
we want first-rate records we must go further
back—to the Daniell sale, for instance, held in
1864, when thousands of pounds were paid as a
matter of course for a selection of these little
quarto volumes, which had successfully eluded
the greasy fingers of generations of playgoers, the
fires of disgusted Puritans, and the ignorance of
our own people. Never shall we see nearly three
thousand distinct lots of English poetry as
previously defined disposed of at one single sale again,
never again will prices rule so low. Many of these
books are not to be met with at all in our generation,
no matter what price may be offered for them,
seeing that, as an old book-hunting friend used to
say, they have become ‘scandalously uniquitous.’

In addition to early English texts, the great
Duke had amassed a splendid collection of
romances of the Quixotic school, known in polite
circles as the Table Ronde. He was not
content, it seems, with the printed editions, but also
collected many manuscripts on vellum,
illustrated with beautiful illuminations. Among
these curious manuscripts were several which
had been used and translated by the celebrated
Walter de Mapes for the entertainment of
his Sovereign, Henry II. The printed books of
this character, some of which occasionally, though
very rarely, gladden the hearts of romantic
bibliophiles, included the twenty-four small volumes
recounting the exploits of Amadis of Gaul,
published at Lyons and Paris in 1577, etc., and
also several duplicates, £16 16s. A fairly good
set, without the duplicates, brought £4. 4s. in
April, 1887—a dreadful drop, considering the
demand there is for books of the kind. Still,
this particular work has undoubtedly fallen, for
another copy produced only £6 the June following.
Nor, should I imagine, would ‘L’Histoire du
Noble Chavelier Berinus,’ a quarto book printed
at Paris, without date, sell for as much as £7 7s. at
the present time, or ‘Le Livre de Beufves de
Hautonne,’ folio, Paris, 1502, for £13 13s., or
‘L’Histoire Merveilleuse du Grand Chan de
Tartarie,’ folio, 1524, for £22.

The twelve pages devoted to the enumeration
of works of chivalry and romance glow with the
martial achievements of Palmerin of England,
Godeffroy de Boulion, Perceforest, Roy de la
Grande Bretaigne, Perceval le Galleys, and scores
of other champions who went about rescuing
damsels in distress, sleeping in enchanted castles,
and challenging the whole civilized race of men,
one at a time, to mortal combat. Perceforest, by
the way, in six folio volumes, Paris, 1528, went
for £30, a fact worthy of note, inasmuch as
another copy sold, a few months ago, for £10 l0s.
Of all the knights of ancient days, the regal
Perceforest was the least worthy of credence, which is
saying a great deal. His folios bristle with
dragons, necromancers of the worst type, heroic
rescues, combats with giants, devils, and all kinds
of monsters who strove, and in vain, to destroy
this past-master of Quixotic enterprise. That
such books did at one time exercise considerable
influence over adventurous spirits is undoubted.
They were the only novels of the day, the only bit
of light reading to be had in the interval between
one tourney and another.

Passing by a large and almost complete collection
of the separately published works of Robin
Greene, that unfortunate who bought a groat’s
worth of wit with a million of repentance, we
come to the Voyages and Travels, and note, as
before, the differences in prices. Hakluyt’s
‘Collection of Voyages,’ 2 vols., folio, 1589-99, brought
£4. 14s. 6d. (the Holding sale, January 17, 1895,
£16; the Langham sale, June 19, 1894, £375,
second edition, 3 vols., folio, which contained
the map by Molyneux, of which only twelve
copies are known. This copy belonged to the
first issue, without the cartouche about Sir
Francis Drake, which was subsequently added);
‘Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas his
Pilgrimes,’ 5 vols., folio, 1625-26, £42 (the Toovey
sale, February 26, 1894, £51); ‘Sir Francis
Drake Revived,’ 1652, and ‘The World Encompassed
by Sir Francis Drake,’ 1652, the two
pieces 7s. (the Hawley sale, July 2, 1894, £6 5s.);
‘Cooke’s Voyages,’ 8 vols., 4to., 1773-84, with
the large plates bound in two folio volumes, £63
(December 5, 1893, at Christie’s, £3 12s., and on
many other occasions for about the same amount);
Eden’s ‘History of Travayle in the West and
East Indies,’ London, 1577, £6 10s. (the Thornhill
sale, April 15, 1889, £10 5s.; the Wimpole
Sale, June 29, 1888, £18 10s., original binding);
Vancouver’s ‘Voyage of Discovery to the North
Pacific Ocean,’ 3 vols., 4to., and folio atlas of
plates, 1798, £8 18s. (the Holding sale, January
17; l895, £5 5s.). It would be more than tedious
to pursue this comparative analysis further.
Suffice it to say that as a rule the prices realized in
1812 for books of travel were greater than would
be realized now under similar circumstances,
especially when the journeys undertaken were
about the foot-worn Continent of Europe or in
the various English counties. Pennant’s ‘Journey
from Chester to London,’ for example, is now a
book of small account, yet the Duke of Roxburghe’s
copy sold for £7 15s.

Works relating to America are, curiously enough,
almost absent from the Duke’s catalogue, and it
may fairly be taken for granted that at the
beginning of the present century no one cared much
about them. This will explain the extreme
scarcity of many of these books now, for what
people think lightly of they take no care to
preserve. Hundreds and thousands of Americana
must have been torn to fragments or otherwise
destroyed in past days. Often of small size, they
would escape the notice of lovers of folios, nor is
their general appearance sufficiently imposing to
appeal to those who value a book strictly in
proportion to its external beauty. The Duke had
only a few works of travel in any way relating to
America, and as the list may be interesting, I have
thought it best to transcribe it verbatim et literatim:

Schmidel ‘Navigatio in Americam,’ 4to., Norib.,
1599. £1 6s.

Las Casas’s ‘Discoveries, etc., of the Spaniards
in America,’ Lond., 1699, 3s. 6d.

‘History of the Bucaniers of America,’ 4to.,
Lond., 1684, £2 6s.

Hennepin’s ‘Discoveries in America,’ 8vo.,
Lond., 1698, 3s.

‘Voyage dans l’Amerique,’ par La Hontan, 2 vols.,
8vo. La Haye, 1703, and ‘Dialogues avec un
Sauvage de l’Amerique,’ par La Hontan, 8vo.,
Amst., 1704, the two volumes 7s. 6d.

Hontan’s ‘Voyages to North America,’ 2 vols.,
8vo., Lond., 1735, 6s. 6d.

Joutel’s ‘Voyage to the Missisippi,’ 8vo., Lond.,
1714, 4s.

Jones’ ‘Present State of Virginia,’ 8vo., Lond.
1724, 2s.

Carver’s ‘Travels in N. America,’ with plates,
8vo., Lond., 1778, 10s.

Long’s ‘Voyages and Travels in N. America,’
4to., Lond., 1791, 11s. 6d.

‘Histoire des Antilles,’ par Père du Tertre,
3 vols., 4to., Paris, 1667, £2 2s.

Blome’s ‘Description of Jamaica,’ etc., 8vo.,
Lond., 1678, 8s.

Gage’s ‘Travels in America and the W. Indies,’
8vo., Lond., 1699, 2s. 6d.

Wafer’s ‘Description of the Isthmus of
America,’ 8vo., Lond., 1699, 9s.

‘Collectio Peregrinationum in Indiam
Orientalem et in Indiam Occidentalem, 19 partibus
comprehensa, cum multis figuris Fratrum
De Bry, 4 vols., folio, Francof., £51 9s.

This ‘Collectio Peregrinationum,’ or Grands
Voyages of Theodore de Bry, nearly always
makes its appearance in the auction-room in
sections. Nine of the parts, including the
Additamentum, all first editions, with the plates
and maps, sold on July 1, 1895, for £18 10s.

And now we must take a final leave of the
Duke of Roxburghe and the collection which he
got together during the course of a long life of
painstaking and critical research. His catalogue
is worth comparing with several important records
of the present day, but to do this thoroughly
would involve a tabulated analysis quite out of
keeping with a work such as I am engaged upon.
There is magic in comparisons, for they tell us
what to avoid, and it may be that by their aid we
could in a measure take fashion by the forelock
and jump the years to come. Such a consummation
is possible, but life is rounded too narrowly
by the present, and therefore too short to make
it worth anyone’s while to endeavour to peep into
futurity.

CHAPTER III.

SOME LUCKY FINDS.

The book-hunter whose heart is in his quest
never tires of tales of lucky discoveries,
and of rare books bought for a song.
This is natural enough, and, moreover, authentic
details of some great find invariably stimulate his
eagerness, and encourage him to persevere in the
search for what he is repeatedly being told—as
though he of all men did not know it already—is
only to be met with casually, and by the merest
of accidents. Now that all of us have settled
among ourselves what books are rare, and desirable
to possess on that account, as well as for many
other reasons, everyone is, of course, naturally
anxious to obtain the credit and still more the solid
advantages of a startling discovery. It is each
man for himself, and that perhaps is the reason
why book-men of the old school invariably dressed
in staid and sober black, like Sisters of Charity,
to show the world at large that charity in matters
that relate to their pursuit is dead. What man
among the whole fraternity would give away his
suspicions that, in such and such a place,
something may lie hidden? Rather would he make
his way to the spot, in fear lest some other explorer
might not, after all, have forestalled him, and
during his journey there look to the right and
the left of him, and get lost in crowds, as part of
a deep design to shake off any other bookworm
who, knowing his hunting instincts and great
experience, might perchance be shadowing his
footsteps. It has, indeed, been seriously
questioned more than once by learned divines whether
any collector, and more especially a collector of
books, can by any possibility reach the kingdom
of heaven, seeing that the inestimable gift of
charity is by him regarded of such little account
that he would do anything rather than practise it.
It were best, however, to leave such polemical
discussions to those who take an interest in them,
and content ourselves with saying that the
bookman’s ways are necessarily tortuous, and his
route through life circuitous.

It is next to impossible to open any book about
books without meeting with instances of lucky
finds, and the most curious part of the matter is
that the stories are invariably more or less the
same. Like the literary man’s collection of stock
phrases, which he uses with or without variation
as occasion may require, and at judicious intervals,
so these records of the chase strike us as being
peculiarly liable to recur. From their opening
sentences we know them—nay, the very mention
of a place or a name is often sufficient to make
an adept take up his parable and finish the
narration. Let a man but whisper Hungerford Market,
and we know that he is going to tell us of the
fishmonger’s shop where about half a century ago
‘autograph signatures of Godolphin, Sunderland,
Ashley, Lauderdale, Ministers of James II.;
Accounts of the Exchequer Office, signed by
Henry VII. and Henry VIII.; Wardrobe Accounts
of Queen Anne; Secret Service Accounts, marked
with the “E.G.” of Nell Gwynne; a treatise on
the Eucharist, in the boyish hand of Edward VI.;
and a disquisition on the Order of the Garter in
the scholarly writing of Elizabeth,’ were rescued
from the eaters of fried plaice, and the tender
mercies of the barbaric tradesman who supplied
them. Mr. Rogers Rees, of ‘Diversions of a
Bookworm’ fame, got this story from somewhere,
though he perhaps would not know it now, for it
has been altered and added to in a score or more
of competing publications. Then there are stories
of Resbecque, who had a nose for a book second
to that of no hound for a fox, of Naude, Colbert,
the great Pixerecourt, and many more. It would
be a shame to dish up these plats again, for
to make them palatable they would have to
be seasoned with imaginative details—an
objectionable, not to say fraudulent, practice at its
best.

There is one story, however, which must be
raked up, and then decently buried again, for it is
to be hoped that we shall hear no more of it. It
is perhaps not so well known as many of the rest,
but in any case would not be mentioned here
except as an almost unique illustration of the
vicissitudes to which any book, however scarce
and valuable it may be, is occasionally liable. It
is, stripped of its glosses, to the following effect:
When the library at Thorneck Hall was weeded
of its superfluous books, the butler, who
superintended the operation, came across a perfect copy
of Dame Juliana Berners’ ‘Boke of St. Albans,’
printed by an unknown typographer in 1486.
One would have thought that the quaintness of
the type, to say nothing of the extraordinary
character of the coloured coats of arms and other
illustrations, would at least have prompted inquiry;
but no! it was thrown lightly aside, and in due
course disposed of to a pedlar for ninepence. He
in his turn sold it to a chemist at Gainsborough
for four times the amount, and the chemist got
£2 for his bargain from a bookseller, who,
notwithstanding the fact that a very imperfect copy had
been disposed of at the Duke of Roxburghe’s sale
many years before, positively sold it to another
bookseller for £7. He, at any rate, was
somewhat better informed, though not much, for once
more the volume changed hands, this time to Sir
Thomas Grenville, for £80. These transactions
did not take place in the Middle Ages, but in the
forties of the present century, and the wonder
is that anyone with the slightest knowledge of
books could have flown in the face of Dibdin’s
valuation of £420, which was at the time a matter
of common knowledge. The butler may be
honestly forgiven, and the pedlar commiserated
with, the chemist even excused; but the two
booksellers have no hope of redemption. The
imperfect Roxburghe copy brought £147, and was
resold at the White Knights sale for £84. In
1882 a perfect copy made its appearance at
Christie’s, and was knocked down for £630, being
about a third less than the purchaser had made
up his mind to pay for it had circumstances
compelled. The life of a book is more often than not
like the life of a horse. You use it, and little by
little strip it of its value till it becomes a wreck
and can be used no more. The ‘Boke of St. Albans,’
in company with many other treasured
volumes, is not, however, for use, but a thing of
sentiment, with a value that will probably continue
to increase, till the leaves crumble before the
touch of time.

Stories such as this are the book-man’s tonic;
they pick him up from the despondency into
which he has fallen through lack of sustenance,
and encourage him to believe that extreme
scarcity is not always the reason of failure, but
rather that all things come at last to him who
can work and can wait, as indeed they do, for
instances of good luck in the matter of discovering
books, though perhaps not numerous when
personal experience alone is considered, are
common enough in the aggregate. Here is a
comparatively recent instance of good fortune:

In the summer of the year 1893 a London
bookseller, who must be nameless, was offered a
small library, then stored in a provincial town
some thirty miles away. The owner copied the
title-pages of a few of the books, and these were
of such a character that the bookseller went over
and eventually paid the price asked. What that
amount was I am unable to state, but have good
reason to suppose that it was less than £50. The
majority of the volumes were, as is usually the
case with old-fashioned and not particularly
noticeable libraries, almost worthless. There
were sermons preached in the long-ago to
sleeping congregations, tracts and pamphlets on
nothing in particular, an old and well-thumbed
Prayer-Book or two of no importance, and the
usual ponderous family Bible in tarnished gilt.
On a casual survey, the whole of the books might
have passed muster at a third-rate auction, and
yet the bookseller was only too glad to see them
safely housed in London. The reason was this:
Among the refuse were Americana, some of
extreme rarity, such as those who deal in such
books are perpetually on the look-out for, and
rarely find, even at their full value. As these
books were publicly sold the following December,
we are in a position to see what the bookseller got
in return for his money, which, as I have said, was
probably less than £50. The prices realized are
given, so that there may be no mistake about the
matter:

1. An Act for Exportation of Commodities,
Incourage Manufactures, Trade, Plantations,
four sheets, printed on one side only, in Black
Letter, 1657, 8vo. £1 10s.

2. Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages,
Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English
Nation, 3 vols. in 2, Black Letter, 1599-1600,
folio. £6 5s.

3. Josselyn’s Account of Two Voyages to New
England, 1674, 12mo. £6 15s.

4. Gabriel’s Historical and Geographical Account
of the Province and Country of Pennsilvania,
and of New Jersey, 1698, 12mo. £31.

5. The Book of the General Lawes and Liberties
concerning the Inhabitants of Massachusetts,
1658. Printed according to the order of the
Court, Cambridge (Mass.), 1660, small folio. £109.

6. Heath’s A Journal of Travels from New
Hampshire to Caratuck, on the Continent of North
America, 1706, 4to. £5 15s.

7. Frampton’s Joyfull Newes out of the
New-found Worlde, 1596, 4to. £4 15s.

8. Brereton’s Briefe and True Relation of the
Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia, 1602,
4to. £179. This copy had a few leaves
mended.

9. Captain John Smith’s Description of New
England, 1613, 4to. £5.

10. Mourt’s Relation or Journal of the Beginning
and Proceedings of the English Plantation
Settled at Plimoth in New England, 1622,
4 to. £40. Title and corner of the first leaf
mended.

11. A Briefe Relation of the Discovery and
Plantation of New England, 1622, 4to. £40.

12. Captain Thomas James’s Strange and
Dangerous Voyage in his intended Discovery
of the North-West Passage, 1633, 4to. £17.

13. A Relation of Maryland, together with a Map
of the Country. These Bookes are to be had
at Master William Deasley, Esq., his house
on the back side of Drury Lane, neere the
Cockpit Playhouse; or, in his absense, at
Master John Morgan’s House in High Holborne,
over against the Dolphin, London, Sept. 8,
A.D. 1635. £76. This copy had the rare map.

14. Captain Luke Fox. North-West Fox, or
Fox from the North-West Passage, 1635,
4to. £18.

15. Castell’s A Short Discoverie of the Coast and
Continent of America, 1644, 4to. £17.

16. Morton’s New England’s Memorial, printed
at Cambridge (Mass.), 1669, 4to. £47.

17. Lederer’s Discoveries in Three Several
Marches from Virginia to the West of
Carolina, 1672, 4to. £36.

And a few others, realizing a grand total of £658
odd for twenty-four works.

This remarkable collection of books of American
interest is probably the most important that has
ever been met with in such a way. It may have
been formed a couple of centuries ago by someone
who took a burning interest in the ‘New-found
Worlde,’ as old Frampton calls America, and for
various reasons was unable to go there. Or it
may be that it was got together at a later date,
as the presence of Heath’s ‘Journal of Travels’
seems to suggest, by some bookish prophet, with
an eye to the main chance. If so, it is a pity that he
did not live long enough to reap the reward of his
foresight and energy, though, after all, even had
he done so, cui bono? Suppose he gave £5 for
the whole collection a hundred years ago—and
surely this is on the right side, for Hakluyt’s
‘Principal Navigations’ would itself be worth as
much in those days—even then he would be woefully
out of pocket for his pains, for his £5 would,
at compound interest, have increased to the best
part of £2,500. It is this little matter of interest
that upsets all calculations, and makes us all lying
prophets, so far as money is concerned.

Another extremely fortunate find was made, in
1896, in Hampshire. Can such things be? Can
any man be born to such a heritage of luck? It
seems that Mr. M. H. Foster, who recently bought
the Cams Hall estate in the county named, took
it into his head to explore the mansion, and in
doing so came across a number of old volumes
which had been abandoned by the late proprietor.
They lay, dusty and cobwebbed, in an old
cupboard, and instead of consisting of forgotten
ledgers and day-books, as would have been the
case if any less fortunate gentleman had been
concerned, proved to be of the greatest value.
There was Caxton, writ large, among them—several
Caxtons in fact, one being ‘Justinian’s
Law,’ such an exceedingly scarce book that a
later edition once sold in London for £1,000—so
at least it is said, though I have no record of the
circumstance. At any rate, there is very little
doubt that the volume in question would bring
that amount or near it, and again let it be asked,
Can any mortal living enjoy such favour from the
gods? As in the case of the Thorneck Hall
‘Boke of St. Albans,’ so in that of the Cams Hall
‘Justinian’s Law ‘; how can such books be
overlooked? Their very type betrays them
sufficiently, one would think, to make it impossible
for anyone, however careless, to pass them by.

Wholesale and very valuable discoveries like
these are naturally of such infrequent occurrence
that when one is made the news of it is disseminated
far and wide, and commented upon in all
the newspapers, which are nothing now if not
literary, at least to some extent. Isolated finds,
the picking up of some single object of interest or
value, is the most the book-man reasonably hopes
for in these days, and so long as he confines his
desires within such narrow bounds it is hard
indeed if he never reap an occasional success,
such as that reported of a Melbourne gentleman,
who only a few months ago picked out of a box
labelled ‘Fourpence each’ a first edition of
‘Sordello,’ with an inscription in the handwriting of
the author himself. Browning had written on
the flyleaf, ‘To my dear friend, R. H. Horne,
from R. B.,’ which, though certainly autographically
less important than if he had signed his
name in full, is yet a very pretty and cheap
souvenir of an eminent poet. This R. H. Horne,
who was himself a versifier, and once celebrated
as the author of ‘Orion,’ emigrated to Australia
in 1852, and became a Goldfields Commissioner
at Ballarat. When he left there and came to
England again, the book must have been left to
the mercies of the Melbourne streets, in which
presumably it existed till rescued from the low
depth of misery which the miscellaneous box is
supposed to imply.

Amongst a lot of old paper recently received at
a mill in Andover, Connecticut, was a Bible
which some Goth had sold by weight. In it was
an inscription, ‘This Bible was used in the pulpit
by Rev. Stephen West, pastor in Stockbridge,
Mass., from 1759 to 1818.’ This book was
perhaps not so important from a worldly point of
view as ‘The Art of Cookery made Plain and
Easy; By a Lady,’ which the late Mr. Sala
rescued from oblivion in the Lambeth Marshes, as
will shortly be related; but the Rev. Stephen
West was a very noted personage in his day, and
there are hundreds of people, more particularly in
America, who would be very glad to possess a
memorial of him. He was the author of the
well-known ‘Essay on Moral Agency,’ 1794, the
‘Sketches of the Life of the Rev. S. Hopkins,’
1805, and other books which in their day enjoyed
a very extensive circulation.

Mr. Sala’s discovery of Mrs. Glasse’s cookery-book
was due to his habit of prowling round the
old bookstalls of the Metropolis, particularly those
which line the narrow streets of Lambeth Marshes
and the New Cut. On a Sunday morning these
places are like a fair, and, literally, scores of
peripatetic booksellers, who for the most part follow
another occupation the remaining days of the
week, take their stand with barrows piled high
with lore. The mob pull the volumes about, and
haggle over the prices, so that the stock displayed
is not, on the whole, in the best possible
condition. Still, sometimes you do meet with a
well-preserved rarity, as Mr. Sala did when he
purchased ‘The Art of Cookery made Plain and
Easy,’ 1747, thin folio, for six humble pennies.
He had the book bound by a first-rate craftsman,
and when it came at last to the inevitable hammer
some two or three years ago, it sold for £10, and
was reasonably worth considerably more. Only
five or six copies of this edition are known to be
in existence, but of the second edition, which also
appeared in 1747, only one copy is known,
according to the Rev. Richard Hooper, whose unique
specimen contains an inscription worth
reproducing. It runs as follows:

‘Steal not this Book my honest Frend for Fear

the Galowss should be your hend and when

you Die the Lord will say and wares that Book

you stole away.’

Cooks are proverbially greasy people, and a
book passing through their hands is apt to return
like ‘Tom and Jerry’ from those of a prize-fighter
or sporting publican. Still, 201 persons
subscribed to the first edition of Mrs. Glasse, and
282 to the second, and some were neither cooks
nor publicans, but members of the aristocracy,
who might be expected to treat their books with
some show of respect. But perhaps they
expressly bought them for the use of their cooks,
and handed them over to the kitchen authorities,
in which case their rarity is accounted for. All
old cookery-books, and not merely Mrs. Glasse’s
famous work, are rare, because they are books of
practical utility meant to be consulted in a
republic of pots and pans, and grease and litter;
but Mrs. Glasse’s guide is more desirable than
most other English books of the kind, because
there is a sentiment hanging around it like a
halo, by reason of words which are not to be found
therein, ‘First catch your hare.’

For my part, whenever I see a cookery-book
flaunting it on a street barrow, I rescue it at once,
for I have a belief, rightly or wrongly, that some
of these days there will be a very great demand
for old works of the kind. There is a present
disposition to return to ancestral dishes which
means the resuscitation of ‘The Skilful Cook,’
‘The Good Housewife’s Jewel,’ ‘The Queen’s
Closet Opened,’ ‘The Ladies’ Practice,’ and many
other volumes where the necessary recipes are to
be found. For some time past, indeed, recipe-books
of all kinds have practically disappeared
from the stalls where once they were so numerous.
‘They’re miking a lot of ’em hup at the West
Hend,’ said a stall proprietor, jerking his thumb
in the direction of Belgravia, from which it must
be understood, not that any manufactory of
forgeries is as yet established there, but merely
that the upper ten think a great deal of old
recipe-books, and are buying them up for their cooks to
practise with.

It is sadly to be feared that the paper-mills
grind many good books exceeding small at times.
This is to be conjectured by reason of the fact
that every now and then a consignment is stopped
and rescued just as it is about to be transformed
into pulp. What happens once, is, we may be
sure, repeated at intervals, though direct evidence
may be wanting to convict the paper-maker.
Evidence of this character is, however, occasionally
forthcoming, as, for example, in the case of
the sixth volume of Dr. Vallancey’s ‘Collectanea
de Rebus Hibernicis,’ which was published in two
divisions in 1804. The previous five volumes are
comparatively common, but both parts of volume
six are very scarce, nearly all the copies having
been accidentally sold for waste-paper, and treated
as such. Charles Dickens’s ‘Village Coquettes’
and also Swinburne’s ‘A Song of Italy’ were
once much rarer books than they are now, and
commanded a great deal more money in the
market. Neither book sold well when published,
and a very considerable ‘remainder’ was stacked
in quires in the publishers’ cellars. One day these
Augean stables were cleaned out, and the ‘Village
Coquettes’ and ‘A Song of Italy’ were saved
from the mill by the merest of accidents, with the
result that the former book went down fifty per
cent. in the market, and the latter to next to
nothing. These finds were noised abroad, with
the result that they were robbed of most of their
importance. Imagine, if we can, a great
discovery of a hundred copies of Shakespeare’s first
folio. And imagine also a journal of credit
getting hold of the news and noising it abroad, as
it would do when it had satisfied itself that there
was at least a substratum of truth in the story.
The result we know. Half the value of the find
would vanish away on the instant, and rightly
so, too, as a strict moralist would doubtless
insist.

Sometimes, though not often, some of the
literary auctioneers will make a mistake, and in
the most unaccountable manner include a rarity
in a ‘parcel’ of rubbish. A good copy of the
first edition of Cocker’s ‘Decimal Arithmetic,’
1685, was picked up in this way a short time
ago, though not in London, and at Leeds a
dealer bought an original and very interesting
letter in Shelley’s autograph, which had
somehow or other slipped among a number of school-books
of trifling value. It is the easiest thing in
the world to make a mistake where books are
concerned, more particularly when they consist
of pamphlets and other works which lie in a
small compass. Folios can take care of
themselves, but a man needs to have a first-rate
all-round knowledge who would essay to catalogue
a good old-fashioned miscellaneous library.

In France, sale-catalogues are prepared by
experts, who are called in to assist the auctioneers;
in London the auctioneers keep their own
cataloguers, and in the country towns they seek the
assistance of booksellers, or do the work
themselves. If a sale is advertised to be held at a
house where furniture is the chief attraction, the
presence of a comparatively small number of
books acts like a magnet, and people are
attracted from far and near in the hope that
something good will fall to their share. Sometimes
they are rewarded, more frequently not; for what
everybody is looking for is almost sure to be
detected by several, if it exist at all, and then, of
course, the price is run up. Still, occasionally,
a whole roomful of experts will miss a
bargain which stares them in the face.
Unaccountable as it may seem, I myself once bought
for £1 a first-rate copy of Alken’s ‘National Sports
of Great Britain,’ 1821, a scarce folio book full of
coloured plates. It was wedged in among a
quantity of furniture, and had escaped observation,
although there were several booksellers in
the room.

The highest form of genius to be met with in
book-men is, however, the capacity possessed by
a very few of them to detect the author of an
anonymous book by reference to the style in
which it is written. If we happened to meet
with ‘Swellfoot the Tyrant’ for a trifling sum,
and passed it by, we should deserve our fate, for
the authorship is so generally and widely known
that there is no excuse for any book-man who
is unacquainted with the facts surrounding it.
But were we to discover another poem by Shelley,
which no one had ever heard of before, and also
be able to prove conclusively that he must, ex
necessitate, have been the author of it, that indeed
would be a triumph of skill. Some few books
have been rescued in this way, ‘Alaric at Rome,’
for instance, which was discovered and assigned
to Matthew Arnold simply and solely by reference
to the style. ‘Alaric at Rome’ made a sensation
when the authorship came to be known, and
book-hunters were searching high and low, and giving
commissions in hot haste. A few copies were
unearthed in this way, but the number was exceedingly
small, not more than two or three, I believe,
and the pamphlet, for it is nothing more, is at
this moment an object of deep interest to the
few, who are in reality very many, when we come
to reflect that none but perhaps half a dozen can
ever hope to possess it.

When we get into bookland, more particularly
into that secluded corner of it where specialists
assemble to compare notes and exhibit their
treasures, confusion springs up on the instant.
The specialist cannot always know his business
thoroughly. If you mention a particular book
which comes within his purview, he will probably
tell you how many copies of it are known to exist,
and where they are, how many of the total number
are cropped, and to what extent, and whether the
titles have been ‘washed’ or otherwise renovated.
He knows accurately the original cost in money
of each, and how much each would be likely to
sell for in case it were brought to the hammer.
All this is, of course, good and solid information,
but it is too microscopically minute and exact to
interest anyone outside a very small circle. To
most of us these details are unimportant, and
yet every lucky find must pass some specialist, who
assigns to it its proper position in point of
excellence, and makes it keep its place. For this
reason I have been charged with the offence of
speaking about him as though he were a common
bookworm, ready to feed on anything that came
in his way, which is, of course, flat treason, not
by any means to be silently borne by the elite.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FORGOTTEN LORE SOCIETY.

Common-sense tells us that ‘finds,’ as
they are popularly called, must necessarily
be made by the purest of accidents.
Valuables of any kind, though frequently lost or
mislaid, seldom remain unappropriated for long,
and to search for them with intent is to be too
late in such a large preponderance of cases that
it is not worth while to go to the trouble of doing
so. A ‘find,’ as I take the word to mean in a
popular sense, is the discovery of something of
special interest or value, followed by its acquisition
at a price which is, at market rates, very much
less than it is worth. The price paid is the gist
of the find in the popular eye, though there is no
denying that, in the case of genuine literature,
this is about the most unsatisfactory view that
can be taken of the matter.

If an extremely scarce or interesting book, for
which one has, perhaps, been searching for years,
is at last acquired at any price whatever, the
‘find’ is none the less real, merely because the
cost is great, though we should have hard work
to convince the ordinary book-buyer that this is
so. He is of opinion that money can buy
anything, books not excepted, and in that he is
assuredly wrong, for there are many books which
are not to be procured at any price, simply
because they have disappeared as though they
had never been. We know they once lived,
because they are referred to by name in contemporary
reviews, or have perhaps been reprinted;
but now they are as dead as the ‘Original Poetry’
of Victor and Cazire, which can be traced to the
pages of the Morning Chronicle of September 18,
1810, and to a couple of reviews of the day, but
of which no copy is now known.

It was this ‘Original Poetry’ that first suggested
the idea of a society to promote the systematic
search for ‘rare and curious volumes of forgotten
lore,’ as Edgar Poe felicitously has it. These
poems were the production of Shelley and a
friend—probably his cousin, Harriet Grove—but had
hardly been published a week when Stockdale,
the publisher, inspecting the book with more
attention than he previously had leisure to bestow,
recognised one of the pieces as having been taken
bodily from ‘The Monk.’ Shelley then suppressed
the entire edition in disgust, but not before nearly
a hundred copies had been put into circulation.
The question is, Where are these derelicts now?
It is incomprehensible that all can have been
consigned to the flames or torn to pulp.
Most probably one at least has survived the wrack
of time and neglect, and may be lying perdu in the
garret or rubbish-heap of some old farmhouse,
in which Shelley is but little known, and ‘Victor’
and ‘Cazire’ absolute strangers both. And if
this particular book, why not many others, which,
though not absolutely lost, are yet so very rarely
met with that it is the ambition of every
book-hunter, great or small, to track them down?

As the world is not inhabited entirely by specialists,
the inference is that books of all kinds, good
as well as indifferent, lie hidden away in obscure
places, waiting the coming of some appreciative
explorer who will rescue them from the neglect of
many years, and restore them to the world from
whence they came. It is no use advertising in these
cases. Every week, year in and year out,
stereotyped advertisements appear in all sorts of likely
and unlikely journals, and nothing ever seems to
come of them. They are read, doubtless, by the
very people whose goods and chattels stand in
need of a thorough overhauling; but they do not
know the real extent of their possessions, and
usually have a fine contempt for articles of small
bulk—a by no means unusual circumstance, be it
said, even in educated circles, for it is on record
that, when Sion College was burned down, many
priceless volumes in the library were destroyed
simply because the attendants, at the risk of their
lives, devoted all the time available to the rescue
of folios.

Thus it came to pass that Prynne’s miscellaneous
writings were for the most part saved,
while other treatises, of far more importance, but
smaller in size, were licked up by the flames, and
so perished. The natural instinct of human beings
is to place confidence in weight, and to ascribe
wisdom to bulk. For centuries this idea
prevailed throughout Europe, and doubtless prompted
Nicolai de Lyra to write those hundreds of folios
of commentary on the New Testament which
at one time were the mournful heritage of
thousands. So also the great Baxter reaped much
renown by reason of his seventy folios or quartos,
causing Bayle to remark, ‘Perhaps no copying
clerk who ever lived to grow old amidst the dust
of an office ever transcribed so much as this
author has written.’

The real book-hunter of to-day is, however,
fortunately free of the ancient superstition, and
knows very well that as a general rule the scarcest
printed books are those which are small in size. To
the people at large this is not so, and thus it is that
pamphlets of extreme rarity, small volumes which
you can hold in your hand with ease, or carry in
an inner pocket with comfort, are neglected and
eventually forgotten, and doubtless destroyed in
sheer ignorance, more often than we care to think
of. It was with the object of rescuing some of
these that the Forgotten Lore Society first saw
the light seven years ago. This, indeed, was not
its real name, but the title is a good one, and as
descriptive of the objects sought to be attained
as any other that could be invented. The idea
was to search the country for neglected books in
the hope that something at least might be
discovered among the heaps of ancestral rubbish
that time and the elements are fast bringing to
decay.

Now, I venture to state that the more anyone
of impartial judgment considers facts and
probabilities, the more he must be satisfied that this
was no Quixotic scheme. In some instances it is
plain that even the most protracted and thorough
search would be mere waste of time, as, for
instance, in the case of Byron’s ‘Fugitive Pieces,’
1806, which is known to have been entirely
destroyed, with the exception of three copies, all of
which can be accounted for. But, then, the
operations of the society were not confined to odd
volumes, but to rarities of any kind and in any
number that Providence might see fit to throw in
its way. If not Byron, then Shelley, or Burns,
or those older authors whose very names are
synonyms for extreme scarcity, such, for example,
as Brereton, Whitbourne, W. Hamond, Bullinger,
and the scores who have written seventeenth-century
poems and composed old music to sing
them to. Have all practically vanished, or are
they merely under the lock of a combination of
indifference and ignorance for a time? That was
the question.

With this society I was connected as an
ordinary member, and allotted a certain acreage
over which to roam, on the distinct understanding
that any advantage was to accrue to the benefit
of the members as a whole. Elaborate rules were
drawn up, and every imaginable contingency fully
provided for. There was no lack of money, and
no want of enterprise or enthusiasm; yet the
project failed for the simplest of all reasons—but
one which had apparently never entered into the
calculations of the promoters. Spread over
England, and some parts of Scotland and Ireland,
were over a hundred book-men, all of them
thoroughly well versed in literature of a certain
kind, but, with few exceptions, rigorous specialists,
who affected particular authors or subjects, and
knew little outside the restricted circle they had
made their own. Let any one of these be drawn
within the vortex of his favourite branch of study,
and I am sure that he would have acquitted
himself admirably; but what was wanted in a
matter of this kind was a general and extensive
acquaintance with the market, and not a
knowledge, however deep or profound, of the lives of
authors long since dead, and of what they wrote,
and the circumstances that attended the
publication of their works. This, unfortunately, was
the information with which most of the members
set out to search the countryside, and the
mistakes they made would be sufficient to excite the
laughter of even the tyro were they but published.
A perfect Iliad of woes tracked the footsteps of each
member of this society wherever he went, and it is
not at all surprising that it eventually languished
and was finally dissolved. A few of these
mistakes may, however, be set down with the object
of showing how easy it is to tumble into error,
and at the same time to be perfectly satisfied that
the mistake, if any, is on the wrong shoulders.

Every collector of Mr. Ruskin’s works knows
that on December 14, 1864, he delivered a lecture
at the Town Hall, Manchester, and that this
lecture was printed and published in that city, in
pamphlet form, under the title of ‘The Queens’
Gardens.’ He is also aware that only three
copies of the pamphlet are known to exist, and if
he is very well informed indeed he will know who
has them, and where they got them from, and at
what price. A portion of this information was in
the possession of a member at Bath, who, as he
said, had accidentally discovered a copy of the
‘book’ in a parcel of odds and ends that was to
be sold by auction the following day. In his
letter he requested a reply by telegram first thing
in the morning saying to what price he was to go,
as he had reason to believe that other persons
beside himself were aware of the circumstance.
There was no time for explanations, so the wire
was sent, though the word ‘book’ came with a
very suspicious ring. It was as well perhaps that
the limit was intentionally put low, or there is no
telling to what absurd price the parcel of
miscellanea might not have been forced by his
eagerness. As it was, it was bought for £2 10s., or
about six or seven times as much as it was worth,
for ‘The Queens’ Gardens’ was not the coveted
pamphlet at all, but the book known as ‘Sesame
and Lilies’ (and not even the first edition of that),
published by Smith, Elder and Co. in 1865, which
contains the reprints of the two lectures (1) ‘Of
Kings’ Treasuries,’ (2) ‘Of Queens’ Gardens.’ It
was evident that this sort of thing had
only to become general and the society would
be ruined, for all payments came from the
common fund. When the error was pointed out,
the member cavilled and argued, but could not be
convinced. He was certain that he had bought
the true and original ‘Queens’ Gardens,’ and
darkly hinted at secession.

On another occasion a member bought
‘Friendship’s Offering,’ for 1840, merely because
it contains ‘The Scythian Guest.’ He, too, could
not be persuaded that the error was his rather
than that of the bookseller who sold it him.
Times without number one edition was mistaken
for another; over and over again were imperfect
or tattered volumes bought at prices that would
have been impossible but for the London treasury
of this secret society. ‘No good comes,’ says old
John Hill Burton, ‘no good comes of gentlemen
buying and selling’—a dictum which was
manifestly applicable here. Had the confident
purchaser of ‘Queens’ Gardens’ been confronted with
Nichols’s ‘Herald and Genealogist,’ he would have
been in his element, for he was an adept in the lore
of armorials and pedigrees, and had a fine collection
of volumes of that kind. Outside these subjects
he knew but little, which for all practical purposes
is infinitely worse than knowing nothing at all.

Another grievous error resulted in the purchase
of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ‘The
Rape of Lucrece,’ ‘The Passionate Pilgrim,’ and
‘Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musick,’ at a good
round sum. The pieces were bound up together
in dilapidated calf, and as each had a separate
pagination there may have been just a shadow of
excuse for the payment of £2, which was the
price demanded. But this book was merely
Lintott’s first collected edition, a work which
might have been manufactured expressly for the
behoof of innocent purchasers, so antiquated and
primitive does it look. Had it been Cote’s
collected edition of 1640, instead of Lintott’s
comparatively worthless, and certainly very careless,
production, which he took good care not to date,
all would have been well; but this was never at
any time likely to be the case, for the price was
dead against a supposition of the kind. Price
is, indeed, often a most valuable guide to the
real worth of a book; though this is not always
the case, as the following anecdote of a
circumstance that happened to myself abundantly
proves. I took the greatest pains to trace every
step in the history I am about to unfold, and
know that the details are true.

It is the custom of many booksellers to send
out their catalogues in alphabetical order, and had
only my name been Abbot, or even Abrahams, this
account of an accident which can hardly fade
from my memory would probably have never been
written. The Forgotten Lore Society would
have reaped most of the benefit certainly, but, on
the other hand, I should have been rich in the
consciousness of having obtained for a mere trifle
one of the finest known copies of an extremely rare
piece, and one of the few of any quality that have
ever come into the market at any price.

The society had not been in working order a
month, when one of those extraordinary strokes of
luck which often fall to the share of the gambler
at the commencement of his career, and as
certainly desert him at the end of it, happened to
me. It was brought late one evening by a
bookseller’s catalogue which I, being much occupied
at the time, threw aside till a more convenient
season. They say that strange psychological
influences often work out the destiny of men,
although they know it not, and some such
influence must have been haunting me then, for
contrary to all custom, and notwithstanding the
fact that to catch the last post was a matter of
imperative necessity, I found that the catalogue
had an altogether exceptional if not unique
attraction. Do what I might, I could not forget its
existence, nor could I make satisfactory progress
with the work which had, whether I liked it or
not, to be finished and out of the house half an
hour before midnight at the latest. So the
catalogue was opened, curiously enough, at a place
at which there was no reason it should open, for
after a while I lost it and had some difficulty in
finding it again. It had opened, however, at
page 8, and the first entry that caught my eye was
this, word for word exactly:

114. Hornem (Horace) The Waltz: an Apostrophic
Hymn. By Horace Hornem, Esq.: 410., 1813, unbound.
3s. 6d.

Now, there are, of course, two early editions of
‘The Waltz,’ one the quarto above-named, and
the other an octavo published in 1821, and it was
quite likely, and indeed more than probable, that
the bookseller, with his mind’s eye fixed on the
excessively scarce issue of 1813, might have
unconsciously written it down instead of the
comparatively common octavo. Another hypothesis
suggested itself, namely, that the entry was
designed to bring customers to his place of
business, and that ‘The Waltz’ of 1813 had no
existence there in fact. Such devices for making
trade are not unknown, and this might very well
be one of them. Nevertheless, I determined to
test the matter, and though the laugh is greatly
to my discomfort even at this distance of time, I
do not mind admitting that I was, metaphorically
speaking, glued to the doorstep long before the
shop opened in the morning. To sit there in
reality I could not for shame, so I walked about
Oxford Street within bowshot, ready to besiege
the door in case any other snapper-up of unconsidered
trifles should show an anxiety to forestall
his brethren of the chase. Even when the shop
opened, I did not walk in immediately, nor when
there did I brutally ask point-blank for the coveted
treasure. An uneasy conscience pointed out that,
if there were anything in the matter, too great
an anxiety might give rise to suspicion, and
‘The Waltz’ would in that case be difficult to
find. I bought another book, which I did not
want, and not till then suggested number 114.

‘Gone,’ said the clerk, looking at his copy of
the catalogue.

‘Gone?’ said I.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘sold yesterday.’

I thought at the time that a trace of a smile
played about the corners of his mouth as he said
this, and I should not wonder if that were so, for
the bookseller afterwards told me that his place
had been besieged for many days by hungry
bookworms, who had sauntered in one after the other
in the most careless manner imaginable, and asked
for this very ‘Waltz.’ ‘They positively danced
on the pavement,’ he said, ‘when they found it
had gone,’ and with this small joke he was fain to
mollify himself, for it was the literal truth that in
an evil moment he had sold a pearl of great
price for the beggarly sum of 3s. 6d. He did not
know to whom; he had never seen the man
before, and ‘in all probability,’ he added with a
sigh, ‘I shall never see him again.’

The subsequent history of one of the finest, if
not the finest, copies of Byron’s quarto ‘Waltz’
in existence is as follows: The original purchaser
sold it to a dabbler in books for 10s., and he
in his turn disposed of it for £4 to a man who,
though not a bookseller, occasionally acted as
such, and was thoroughly conversant with every
move of the market. He had no difficulty in
selling it by telegram, and the price paid—£60—was
not, under the circumstances, in the least too
high, for the copy was as fresh and clean as when
it left the publishing offices of Sherwood, Neely,
and Jones more than eighty years ago, and had
not been tampered with in any way.

The suggestion that the price demanded for a
book is often a test of its real worth is both proved
and avoided by this story. As I did not, as it
happened, secure the ‘Waltz,’ I feel sorry for the
bookseller, and would point out to him that it is
impossible for anyone, bookseller or not, to be
acquainted with every volume and pamphlet that
has ever been published. He made a mistake of
such grave consequences to himself that he is not
at all likely to make another of the same kind. His
sin merely consisted in either not knowing who
‘Horace Hornem, Esq.,’ really was, or more
probably in momentarily and yet irrevocably
confusing that pseudonym with some other which he
may have had in his mind at the time. This is a
very common source of error, and very probably
accounts for the incident. On the other hand,
the action of the intermediate holder in selling the
book for £4 is inexplicable and inexcusable. Had
he said 10s. 6d., and thus made 6d. on the
transaction, he would have had the excuse of absolute
ignorance in his favour, but £4 is such a curious
and yet significant amount that there can be no
question that he at any rate knew sufficiently well
what he was about to make the absence of proper
inquiry on his part a positive crime. Any such
value as £4 placed on a pamphlet of twenty-seven
pages is in itself such an indication of value that
no anxious would-be purchaser of any scarce and
yet insignificant-looking book dare offer anything
like the amount for it. He must either pay the
full price or near it, which is more honest, as well
as more satisfactory in the long-run or swallow
his principles and tender next to nothing with a
nonchalant air.

Personally I feel sorry that the gotten Lore
Society had such a small measure of success, for
it deserved well. The management was too
vicarious for the times, and, moreover, its object
was not the buying and selling of books, which
one man, if he have sufficient capital, can do as
well as twenty. To rescue mean-looking but
valuable literature from certain destruction
was its one and only study, and the realization of
its dreams was only accomplished very partially
because, as I have hinted, the members of the
association were specialists moving in narrow
grooves. The few successes that can be placed to
its credit would, however, have been its curse
had it dealt hardly and uncharitably with the
ignorant people who on more than one occasion
parted with small fortunes (to them) for the price
of a day’s subsistence. To buy a perfectly clean
copy of Thackeray’s ‘Second Funeral of
Napoleon’ for 2s. was a work of art, for the old
woman who sold it, in order to buy tea, as it
subsequently transpired, wanted more, and yet
was so thoroughly saturated with suspicion that
she would probably have refused to sell at any
price had more been offered. The book was
acquired for that sum, as I have said, after much
discussion and with many misgivings, at least on
one side; but when bought, the circumstances
altered, and she found herself possessed of more
money than she had had the control of at one
time in her life before, for it is, I think, to the
credit of the Forgotten Lore Society that it
voluntarily paid into the Post-Office Savings
Bank a sum of £10 to the order of the
seller a few days after the transaction was
carried through. Such finds as these were,
however, few and far between. In nearly every case
such books as the ignorant are possessed of are
very inferior, and, what is perhaps not surprising,
assessed by their owners at ridiculous prices.

It was part of the business of the society to
advertise for books in country journals, and to
while away a few moments I give the gist or the
actual text of some of the replies received. One
correspondent wrote to say that he hadn’t got no
books, but would sell us a fox-terrier pup, if that
would do instead, and then he proceeded to
enumerate at great length what he called its
‘pints,’ concluding with the remark that he had
sent it off that very evening by passenger, train.
It turned up, sure enough, in the morning,
sorrowful of countenance, a snarling, disreputable
cur, which we were only too glad to feed and
return to its home without delay.

This was an instance, fortunately very rare, of
the wilful substitution of one article for another
of a totally different kind; but nearly every letter
we took the trouble to answer proved to be
misleading in one way or another, and not a
few contained a series of palpable untruths.
There would be no advantage in reproducing
many of these epistles, and, moreover, the
circumstances surrounding them are not of
sufficient interest to warrant more than a passing
notice. Suffice it to say that they were mere
vendors’ glosses, not to be taken au serieux. The
number of books with ‘magnificent plates’ or in
‘splendid condition’ that turned out on
inspection to be the tramps and tatterdemalions of
bookish society was very surprising. Some few,
however, were very curious, and others so quaint
in diction that I have no hesitation in copying
them either wholly or in part. Here is one:

‘Deer Sur i begs to state as ou i ave sume
bukes their is Boosey anecdoates of fishin for wich
five bob and a lang his hanglin skeches hopen to
hoffers stackhouse new history of the Holy Bibel
to pouns an a lot moar to order deer Sur if you
be willin and i wil sen to luke at for 2£ on the
nale your respectabul——.’

A ‘bob,’ I may explain for the benefit of my
American readers, is the slang equivalent of a
shilling, or twenty-four cents.

The following reply, full of facetiousness and
loaded with cunning, came from a village near
Kirkby Stephen, in Westmoreland:

‘SIR

‘Seeing your advt in the Gazete I hasten to
copie out the titles of some books which have
been in my family for I dont know how long. A
Bookseller come up from Lancaster last Toosday
and wanted to have them sore but as I could see
he wanted to cheat me I thought it better tell
him so in plain English which is the way of yours
truly who is a wrestling man and champion
chucker out of these parts round about. Am
open to good offer for the lot but will sell any at
following and no discount. Ellicot Lectures on
J. Christ, 10s. Durny Histoir de Romans, vol. 4,
6s. Stock Exchange year Book for 1884, 7s;
Ante Baccus a choise volume bound in calf,
17s. 6d. Scrope Days and Nights of Fishing
1843, 12s. The Female Parson 4s, and plenty
more too numerous till I see what you are made
of. Please write at once if you want any.

‘Yours truly——.’

The upshot of this was that we said we should
like to see Scrope and the ‘Female Parson,’ but
our bellicose correspondent refused to part with
either till he got the money, for he did not, he
said, intend to trouble himself about useless
references. So the money was sent, and in due
course the books arrived, carriage not paid. The
‘Female Parson,’ which we had never heard of
before, proved to be worthless, but Scrope’s
‘Salmon Fishing’ was really a beautiful copy of
the first edition in the original cloth, and this it
was that had doubtless tempted the Lancaster
bookseller.

Then there was a lady in Somersetshire who
kept up a correspondence for over a month. She
had a splendid copy, so she said, of Sturm’s
‘Reflections,’ which she was ready to sell for 15s.
In vain was she informed that the book was not
of a kind to interest us; she knew better, and
persistently lowered the price, 1s. at a bid, till her
letters had in sheer desperation to be put in the
waste-paper basket. We found ladies, as a rule,
distressing correspondents, who flatly refused to
be put off with a courteous negative. With them
it was simply a question of price, and had we
been persuaded by their blandishments, we should
soon have had a cellar full of sermons, Gospel
Magazines, and all the rubbish that Time refuses
to annihilate and men to buy.

One of the most extraordinary letters we ever
received came from a clergyman in the Midlands,
whose disgust for Pierce Egan and his school was
so great that he had determined to sacrifice ‘Tom
and Jerry’ for 20s.:

‘DEAR SIR,

‘I much regret troubling you with a book
which has, to me, been a source of grievous
disappointment, and positive danger to my children.
How anyone could have written such a wicked
history of debauchery and human extravagance is
indeed surprising, and I have thought many a
time of consigning it to the flames, so that in a
measure it might follow its disreputable author.
I allude to “Life in London; or the Day and
Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his
Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied
by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and
Sprees through the Metropolis,” by Pierce Egan.
This work has, I regret to say, been in my family
for very many years—more than I care to count—and
I would willingly part with it, although there
is nothing I dislike so much as severing old
associations, however much to my distaste they
may be. If you like, I will dispose of the book
for £1, which perhaps, from a marketable point
of view, it may be worth.

‘I am, dear sir,

‘Yours very truly——.’

There is, of course, no denying that the morality
of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend
would have to be searched for in case its existence
were seriously disputed; but it seems passing
strange that so small a sum as 20s. should be
able to smooth away all remembrance of the orgies
of Drury Lane and the crapulence of its dirty
gin vaults, cider cellars and night-houses, which
had so mortally offended the worthy clergyman.

He was indeed quite right in removing the
book from the reach of his children; but what
about our morality, and that of the person to
whom, for anything he knew to the contrary, we
might sell Pierce Egan’s free and easy romance?
The book came, and proved, as was half
suspected, to be Hotten’s reprint of 1869, with
which lovers of this class of literature will have
nothing whatever to do.

Such are a few of the experiences of the
Forgotten Lore Society in its efforts to rescue good
but unfortunate books from the apathy of neglect.
The object was a good one, though the reward
was practically nil. Let us reflect for a moment
that even the few books of antiquity which have
come down to make us richer are for the most
part imperfect, and we shall see the necessity of
taking extreme care of the important ones that
are written now, and of doing everything in our
power to prevent their destruction at the hands
of unappreciative owners.

The mere fact of printed books being published
in large quantities to the edition does not seem to
affect the question of their existence in the
long-run. All alike, good, bad, and indifferent, will go
down the long road in time, and our descendants,
more or less remote, will only hear of them in a
casual and traditional way. Tacitus was one of
the most popular Roman authors of his time, and
yet he only lives to us in fragments,
notwithstanding the fact that thousands upon thousands
of copies of his ‘History’ were disseminated
throughout the empire. Every public library in
Rome was compelled to have at least one copy,
and no fewer than ten transcriptions were made
every year at the charge of the State. Plutarch
wrote fourteen biographies that are missing now,
and of 251 books quoted by him more than eighty
are absolutely unknown. The Emperor Claudius
wrote a ‘History of the Etruscans,’ which from
the very nature of the case must have had a wide
circulation; Julius Cæsar, a slashing criticism of
Cato’s life and acts; Lucullus, a history of the
Marsi. All these have vanished. Of the forty plays
of Aristophanes but eleven remain. Menander is
unknown except by name, and Æschylus is in
rags. Porphyry’s diatribe against the Christians,
the most important book of its kind that any
Christian could have at his command, has vanished,
and in all likelihood will never be restored.

Nor need we go to ancient Greece or Rome
for such instances. Several poems by Shelley
have completely disappeared already, and some
of Byron’s have been, more than once, at their
last gasp. Old English ballads and songs have
been ‘lost’ by hundreds at a time, and nearly all
the records dealing with the private life of Oliver
Cromwell are missing. The story of Carlyle’s
‘Squire Papers’ is a characteristic one, and
distinctly to the point. While that author was
laboriously collating the scraps of evidence
relative to the great Protector that had survived the
honest but mistaken zeal of triumphing Royalists,
he received a letter from an unknown correspondent,
who stated that he possessed a mass of
Parliamentary documents, among them the diary
of an ancestor, one Samuel Squire, a subaltern in
the ‘Stilton Troop’ of Ironsides. The letter was
accompanied by extracts from this diary and
other papers, and went on to say that the writer,
who had been brought up to regard Cromwell in
the very worst possible light, and his own ancestor
with shame as the aider and abettor of an atrocious
crime, was undecided what to do with the originals.
Several letters passed, and at last Carlyle wrote
to a friend living in the neighbourhood, asking
him to see his correspondent, and persuade him
of his undoubted duty, which was at least to
submit documents of such great importance to
examination.

Unfortunately, the friend was absent, and by the
time he returned the papers had been destroyed.
They may, of course, have had no existence, but
Carlyle himself was of a contrary opinion, for
later on he received a heavy packet containing
copies of thirty-five letters of Oliver Cromwell,
written in a style apparently contemporary, and
referring to incidents that no one who had not
made a careful and exhaustive study of his life
and times, and who was not thoroughly conversant
with all the available material, would have been in
the least able to reproduce.

The records were destroyed because, as the
owner said, he felt that, one way or another, the
manuscripts would be got from him and made
public, and ‘what could that amount to but a
new Guy Fawkes cellar and infernal machine to
explode the cathedral city where he lived, and all
its coteries, and almost dissolve Nature for the
time being?’ Either this man was a learned forger
or a singularly narrow-minded and obstinate type
of destroyer whose ravages can be traced through
the centuries, and whose example will never cease
to be followed so long as paper remains unable to
resist the assaults of the bigot and the outrages
of the Goth.

That will be ever, and hence it is that in all
things literary preservation is the greatest of the
virtues. What part of a century’s product to
preserve and what to destroy is a problem, not
for us, but for the century to come, and for many
centuries after that. In fact, it is Time’s problem,
which Time alone can solve.

CHAPTER V.

SOME HUNTING-GROUNDS OF LONDON.

At the present time there are, if the
Post-Office Directory is to be believed, about
450 booksellers in London; but in this
computation are included publishers, stationers,
and even bookbinders—in fact, almost everyone
who has anything whatever to do with books—so
that the figures are by no means to be relied
upon. The number of booksellers who make a
speciality of second-hand volumes is very much
less than 450, if we include only those who follow
a single business, namely, that of buying and
selling books, and very much greater if we add
to the list the army of general dealers who sell
books occasionally, or as an adjunct to some
other occupation.

The real book-hunter does not follow the
Directory, but his nose, which frequently leads him
into strange places where there are no recognised
booksellers, yet booksellers in plenty—a seeming
paradox, which is readily explained by the fact
that there are multitudes of what may, without
offence, be called ‘book-jobbers,’ whose names
are either not in the Directory at all, or appear
there under some other designation.

A man may buy up a roomful of furniture,
taking the books of necessity; or a houseful, and
with the mass of goods and chattels perhaps
hundreds of volumes which are not thought good
enough to be disposed of separately, and are
therefore cleared out at a nominal figure, and
retailed anywhere and everywhere as circumstance
and opportunity suggest. Are these dealers,
brokers, and what not, booksellers? Heaven
save the mark, no! not in a specific sense; but
they sell books, notwithstanding, and their shops
are, in very truth, recognised hunting-grounds
of the Metropolis. There are literally hundreds
of them, and they are to be met with, as a
rule, close together, where rents are low and
the footsteps of the income-tax fiend are unknown.

This is one description of bookseller, but there
are several others: the man with the barrow,
for instance, who works at his trade all the week,
and comes out on Saturday afternoons and
Sunday mornings in certain localities, to do what
bartering he can with casual passers-by.

To compare these classes with the recognised
booksellers, some of whom have an immense
turnover, would, of course, be absurd; but they
have their uses, and instances are not wanting
in which mightily successful dealers have begun
in this humble manner, and literally forced
their way up from the pavements of the East
End or the Surrey side to more pleasant places
in the West. High or low, rich or poor, their
shops or stalls are alike objects of extreme interest
to thousands who have learned enough to know
that the best books are generally the cheapest.
Whatever the size of the premises they own,
they contribute in their several degrees to the
wants of all classes of book-men, whose delight
it is to forage for themselves, and to seek that
they may find. The lordly collector who pays
by cheque may or may not be a book-hunter.
If not, he misses much of the pleasure that
accompanies the tracking down, step by step, of
some coveted volume which is, perhaps, more or
less easily obtainable almost at any time in
exchange for plenty of money, but is rarely met with
casually.

It is this tracking down, hunting which is the
true book-lover’s chief delight, and, needless to
say, his primary object is not to secure books of
great price for a nominal sum. If it were, he
would at the end of a long life have few successes
to report, for the search for rarities is so thorough
and systematic that hardly anything of substantial
pecuniary value can run the gauntlet all the way
to the shop-board or the barrow. The harvest
has all been gathered long ago, and nothing is
now left but gleanings in fields already raked.
The book-lover eliminates as far as possible the
question of value from his walks abroad, and
leaves his gold at home to be expended as
opportunity arises in the auction-room, where open
competition holds the market in a virtual equipoise,
or in the shops of recognised dealers, who hold
his commissions and are always on the look-out
for important works. He is aware, however, that
intrinsically good books are to be met with
continually in all sorts of places, and it is these that
he hopes to obtain, and from these that his
library is most often recruited. Between one
edition of some interesting or instructive book
and another there may be an immense disparity
in cost, but very little textual difference, or even
none at all. In some cases the cheaper volume
may be the more accurate of the two, and may
also contain additional matter, which renders it
more important and desirable from every point
of view, except a sentimental one.

It is the search for volumes of this kind, sound
and honest, yet not aristocratic, that has kept
the bookstalls open for 300 years and more, for,
to be precise, we know that St. Paul’s Churchyard
and Fleet Street were, in addition to other
less known localities, much frequented by
book-men as far back as the reign of Henry VIII.
In these districts Cardinal Wolsey’s agents
kept a sharp look-out for copies of ‘A Supplicacyon
for the Beggars,’ which Simon Fyshe, ‘a
zealous man for the reformation of abuses in
the Church,’ had boldly published and was
scattering abroad in the year 1524, and which
seems to have had a stealthy run for six years,
for it was not until 1530 that it was openly
prohibited by proclamation. Neither Fleet Street
nor St Paul’s Churchyard is, however, a hunting-ground
for book-men now. The former is wholly
given up to newspapers and machinery, and the
latter to drapers and warehousemen, and there
is no room anywhere for small dealers in
second-hand books.

Indeed, the whole of London has been turned
topsy-turvy so far as they are concerned. New
localities they abhor, and the greater part of
London is new, in the sense that very many old
districts and streets have been rebuilt, or entirely
swept away by the march of improvement and
the increasing desire for wide thoroughfares and
open spaces. What place more famous once
than Little Britain, which during the last twenty
or thirty years has swallowed up Duck Lane—another
book-hunting locality—bodily? It was
here that Thomas Britton, a coal-dealer, prowled
around during his spare moments, pouncing upon
anything and everything that took his fancy;
rejoicing especially in works of magic, witchcraft,
and astrology, either printed or in manuscript.
The catalogue of his library is extant, and it is
clear that he was a very far-sighted and
keen-scented man, and one, too, who was blessed with
a taste and discrimination most rare among
dealers in small coal. In Little Britain ‘Paradise
Lost’ went begging. The stalls must have been
littered with the very first, or 1667, issue, for in
that year the Earl of Dorset had a copy of it
thrust under his nose and pressed upon him by
a bookseller who complained most bitterly that
he could not get rid of his stock. About the
year 1760 the whole of the trade had vanished
from Little Britain, though at the present time
the once-famous thoroughfare boasts one
bookseller and also one newsagent, the sole
representatives of past times. As for the rest of the
denizens, they follow the more prosaic
occupations of builders, bootmakers, butchers,
hairdressers, restaurant-keepers and publicans, the
last-named being especially in evidence. In this
locality, as in many others, the thirst for
knowledge has been quenched, and the thirst for beer
become almighty.

So, too, Moorfields was once classic ground, as
also the Poultry, but both places have been dead
to bookish fame this hundred years. There are
now no booksellers’ shops in the Poultry, though
Moorfields just saves itself, for it rejoices in the
presence of a music publisher and a stationer.
Speaking generally, the second-hand book trade
has been driven bodily out of the central and
eastern parts of London, and has settled itself in
the streets west of Temple Bar and Holborn
Viaduct, always avoiding the Strand, which, for
some reason or other, has ever been regarded as
an inhospitable quarter. There are certainly
booksellers’ shops in this important thoroughfare,
three, I believe, is the precise number, but they
are hardly sufficient to invest it with the dignity
and title of a ‘locality.’

In contrast to this, Holborn and the streets
adjoining have always been a good hunting-ground,
and are so to-day. ‘The Vision of Piers
Plowman’ was printed and sold in Ely Rents so long
ago as 1550, and Snow Hill and Gray’s Inn Gate
were both world-wide localities, though the glory
of all these places has since departed. Up to
within five years ago there was a shop on the
right-hand side of Gray’s Inn Lane, just out of
Holborn, given up chiefly to the sale of
newspapers. It is shut up now, and, according to all
accounts, will never be opened again, which is a
pity, for it is a shop, or more probably the
curtailment of much larger premises, with a notable
history. Here, in 1750 or thereabouts, carried on
business one Thomas Osborne, who, although
ignorant to a degree, brutal in his manners, and
surly beyond description, managed to build up
the largest business of its kind in London, or,
indeed, anywhere else. Customers ignored Tom
Osborne’s curses, and bought his books when
they could, for sometimes, when particularly
morose, he would shut himself up, like a hermit,
‘with his lumber,’ as a historian of the day
termed the thirty whole libraries which he had
amassed, and refuse to treat at all. Nevertheless,
Osborne prospered exceedingly, and in the latter
years of his life was the owner of a country house
and ‘dog and duck shootings,’ all purchased and
kept up from the profits derived from this shop
in Gray’s Inn Lane. The prices he asked were
the most he thought he had the remotest chance
of getting, and were often outrageous and
extortionate, though at other times very much below
what he might have obtained had he known his
business properly. He seems to have taken a
bird’s-eye view of his stock, and to have appraised
the value of individual books, not by reference to
their rarity, but by means of a fractional
calculation based upon the total cost—a rough-and-ready
method of trading which attracted book-buyers
from every part of London, and reconciled them
to his insolence. Though Osborne was not the
first dealer to issue a catalogue—one T. Green, of
Spring Gardens, being credited with having
revived, in 1729, this time-worn method of selling
books—he carried on a more extensive business in
this way than anyone who had preceded him, and
in addition had the supreme honour of being
knocked down by Dr. Johnson with a huge folio
which the latter wanted to buy, and he (Osborne)
refused to sell at any price. Either of these
claims to distinction would have made the fortune
of any man. It is stated by Sir John Hawkins
that the book which Dr. Johnson wielded with
such effect was the ‘Biblia Greeca Septuaginta,’
printed at Frankfort in 1594. The identical
volume was in the possession of Thorpe, a
Cambridge bookseller, in 1812, but what has become
of it since I do not know.

Though Osborne’s shop, or what remains of it,
is now closed, the neighbourhood is still as largely
interested in the sale of books as ever, or perhaps
even more so, for there has been an
immigration from other quarters of London which
improvements have converted into uncongenial
ground.

The new Law Courts and their approaches
stand upon the sites of Butchers’ Row, Shire
Lane, where Elias Ashmole lived, and countless
courts and alleys beside. Clare Market has
vanished within the last two or three years, and
Clement’s Inn, with its narrow passages and
dingy chambers, has been entirely rebuilt. Even
Drury Lane, sacred to the memory of an army of
general dealers who, up to within a comparatively
short time ago, bought books by weight, is now
past praying for to all appearances, for hardly a
book of any kind is to be met with from one end
of this grimy thoroughfare to the other. Let us
walk into Bozier’s Court, which is further to the
west, and we miss the shop which Lord Lytton
has immortalized in ‘My Novel’; in fact, the court
itself is plastered all over with advertisement
posters, and awaits the wreckers, for it is doomed.
King William Street, Strand, was a booksellers’
resort for a century and more, but the fraternity
are leaving one by one, and only a very few are
to be met there now. Westminster Hall, for
centuries a virtual library, is shut up, and echoes
spring from its stones when any casual stranger,
armed with an order, is allowed to ramble through
Rufus’s deserted pile. In fact, wherever we
stray, north, south, east, or west, we are forced
to the conclusion that London has changed so
utterly within the last twenty or thirty years
that it is to all intents and purposes a different
place.

And the booksellers appear to have changed,
too, for there are no ‘characters’ among them,
or, at any rate, very few. Every now and then
you will meet with some strange mortal, who
looks as though he had been transported bodily
from the last century and tumbled unceremoniously
into a brand new shop, with coloured
glass above the portal, and fresh paint about the
front; but you have hardly time to ruminate on
the mutability of things under the sun and he is
gone, to make way, perhaps, for a dealer in
something superlatively new. An antiquary of the
stamp of Francis Grose, the ‘chiel’ who went
about taking notes, would stand aghast, then
hasten to depart, could he but see the London of
to-day.

It must not, however, be supposed that
book-hunting as a pastime is extinct in modern Babylon.
On the contrary, there are yet plenty of nooks
and corners, and pestilential-looking alleys, that
Death and the jerry-builder have apparently
forgotten, and these places, we may be certain,
harbour many folios. As a fact, I know they do;
for in my time, and to some extent even yet, I
have been and am a wanderer about such places,
and have, on occasion, picked up many interesting
mementos there. What I merely wish to insist
upon is that the older and recognised localities,
which our fathers would naturally have visited a
couple of decades or more ago in their search for
old books, are not those which would, as a rule,
afford much scope for enterprise now. We must
go further afield, and not expect to find a mass
of stalls huddled together in a single street, as
though one locality had tapped and drained the
life-blood of the rest. Circumstances have
changed, and at the close of the nineteenth
century booksellers have, to a great extent,
ceased to be gregarious, except in Holywell Street,
or, as it is more generally called, ‘Booksellers’
Row,’ once the abode of literary hacks and
bailiff-haunted debtors, which even yet has an old-world
look with its overhanging houses and narrow
roadway. Here there certainly is a long double
procession of bookshops, many open to the street,
every one of them crammed from floor to ceiling
with great piles of lore.

And Holywell Street, be it said, is such historic
and classic ground, that it is threatened every
day by the improver, who longs to lay its north
side open to the Strand, and will, we may be sure,
effect his purpose in the end. It was here that
Lord Macaulay used to take his walks abroad in
search of books. As a rule he began and ended
there; for a whole day’s pilgrimage would not
suffice to unearth more than a fractional part of
the immense store of volumes that the labour of
years had accumulated, and which was continually
being decimated and renewed. In his day
there were more books to be seen and handled
there than now, for some of the shops have since
been devoted to other trades. In Holywell Street
John Payne Collier was as well known as his own
‘History of English Dramatic Poetry,’ which,
nearly sixty years ago, littered the stalls, doubtless
to his great disgust, seeing that to be in evidence
there to any extent was then, as now, proof
positive that the ‘remainder-man’ had been at
work, to the bane of the author and publisher
alike. Mr. W. Roberts, in his charming
‘Book-hunter in London,’ narrates that Collier once
picked up in Holywell Street for the merest trifle
a copy of John Hughes’s ‘Calypso and Telemachus,’
an opera in three acts, first published in
1712, which contained thirty-eight unpublished
couplets in the handwriting of Pope. Halliwell-Phillipps
was also an inveterate rambler up and
down this thoroughfare, and several of his
Shakespearean quartos came from there in days
when these small but almost priceless volumes
were not so widely and persistently sought for as
they are now. In fact, we have it in his own
words that when he first began to collect anything
and everything that related in whatever degree
to the great dramatist, these early quartos were
frequently to be met with at prices which,
comparatively speaking, sound simply ludicrous in
our ears. Should anyone rescue a copy now
from some forgotten lumber-room, the fact is
heralded by the press, and accounted most
extraordinary, as indeed it is; for everyone, the world
over, is on the look-out for rarities such as these.
Though Holywell Street yet stands, and does a
thriving trade among the bookish, let not anyone
think that much is to be got for nothing there.
On the contrary, the dealers who inhabit it are
better versed than most people in the importance
of each and every book they part with or throw
into the boxes which receive the outcasts of
literature. There are, however, good and valuable
books by the thousand to be met with by anyone
who does not object to pay a fair and reasonable
price for them. To this extent, and in this
particular, is Booksellers’ Row the queen of London
streets. From these remarks I except, of course,
the extremely important shops of the West-End
dealers into which correspondence flows from
every part of the world.

This chapter is devoted to the ‘Hunting-grounds’
of London, and I deny that a collector
who gives a standing order either verbally or by
letter to a bookseller for some work he particularly
wants is a book-hunter at all, at least so far
as that particular transaction is concerned. To
my mind Nimrod must handle his own bow and
not entrust it to a deputy, even though he might by
the rules of the chase be absolutely entitled to the
quarry which the skill of the latter had brought
down. Let him go where he will, East or West,
the point of the compass makes no matter, he is
a hunter only when he prosecutes his own
inquiries and carries out in person all his
arrangements. So we will avoid the great firms of
book-sellers, although it may be taken for granted that
almost any scarce work could be procured sooner
or later from them, and go off on a chase in which
we shall never, in all human probability, meet
with any great prize, and may have to be satisfied
with a little, that little, however, being much
from many points of view.

At the present day books of all sorts are to be
met with in great profusion in Farringdon Street.
Every Saturday morning throughout the year
light hand-carts to the number, perhaps, of thirty
or forty, stand in a long line against the curb, and
each is packed with works of all kinds. I am
bound to admit that obsolete school-books and
forgotten sermons constitute the great majority of
these waifs and strays, but there is always a wide
choice of useful books to be got for purely
nominal sums, and occasionally one that is rare
and valuable. Personally I never met with a
really scarce book in Farringdon Street, but three
years ago—and I mention this at the risk of being
charged with travelling from the subject—I
bought there the undoubtedly original study by
Sir Joshua Reynolds for the portrait of the Right
Honourable George Seymour Conway, afterwards
Lord George Seymour Conway. The portrait
was painted in 1770, and engraved in mezzotint
by Edward Fisher the year following. The study
is in oils, on thick paper of about twelve inches
in height, and is so remarkable as a work of art,
that it is a wonder it could have escaped recognition
for an hour, instead, as was the fact, for a
whole morning.

Should Farringdon Street prove unpropitious,
Sunday morning in any week will see Lambeth
Marshes and the New Cut, both on the Surrey
side, crowded with barrows, and the same remark
applies to the streets about the Elephant and
Castle on Saturday evenings when the weather is
fine. Generally speaking, the peripatetic book-seller
is only to be met with on the first and last
days of the week, but that he does manage to
turn over a considerable part of his stock in the
short time available is not to be doubted. He
may not change—many of these men have haunted
the same spot for years, and have their recognised
stands—but his stock is, in one sense, ever new.
A few months ago I saw in the Whitechapel
Road a hand-cart full of small vellum-bound
volumes, which proved to be Greek and Latin
classics, printed in Paris a couple of centuries ago.
The covers were remarkably fresh and clean, and
somebody or other, or rather a succession of
owners, must have taken the greatest care of these
little books, which had thus ignobly fallen into
the gutter at last. Next week at the same hour,
they had all gone, having been disposed of to
the more learned inhabitants of Bethnal Green
at 2d. apiece.

If, however, wandering about the East End
of London is not to the taste of the picker-up
of unconsidered trifles, there is still the more
primitive kind of shops to be visited. Great
Turnstile still boasts a bookseller or two, and it
was here, it will be remembered, that John
Bagford, many years ago, divided his attention
between making boots and shoes and ripping out
the title-pages of the books that fell into his
sacrilegious hands. He failed as a cobbler, but
succeeded in amassing the most disreputable
collection of titles that has ever been got together.
The arch-Vandal failed in everything but his
Vandalism, and surely any success is better than
none at all. It is said of him that he searched
all his life for one of Caxton’s impossible
title-pages, and died of disappointment, a story which
is probably a gross libel on his accomplishments,
for Bagford was not by any means an uneducated
man.

Then, Little Turnstile hard by is worth a
casual visit, and there are many shops in the
streets extending east and west of St. Martin’s
Lane where books are to be bought in almost
any number. The newly-built Charing Cross
Road appears to be under a cloud; in fact, at
this point we must turn back again, and make
direct for Holborn, Bury Street, and the
neighbourhood of Red Lion Square and Queen Square.

In Red Lion Passage there are several of the
quaintest shops imaginable, one of them kept by
a dealer who appears to have a mania for the
very largest folios, though I notice that of late
he has somewhat fallen away from his traditional
custom in this respect. The books stand on
their sides on the floor in columns of about six
feet high; they are piled on and under the
counter, and are seen peeping out of the black
darkness of a room beyond. Petrarch would
have avoided this shop lest history should repeat
itself, and a folio break, not his leg merely this
time, but his neck.

On the other side of the Passage is another
temple of gloom and mystery, for it must be
observed that the neighbourhood of Red Lion
Square is generally in semi-darkness all the year
round, except in the winter, and then it is frequently
impossible to see at all when once the streets
are left. The proprietors of this shop issue a
periodical catalogue, which can be taken from a
box at the door, and it may safely be said that
there is no catalogue issued in London by
anyone which is better worth glancing over than this,
notwithstanding an occasional misprint or two.
The books are, generally speaking, of such an
unusual and out-of-the-way kind that one cannot
help wondering where they all come from. For
instance, ‘Ben Johnson’s English Dictionary,
8vo., 1732,’ must be a remarkable volume, and
the ‘Wuremberg Chronicle, folio, numerous
wood-cuts, 1493,’ equally curious. Then there is
‘Peasson on the Creed,’ ‘Jewels, ——, Works,
folio, 1611,’ ‘Locke, Humane Understanding,
folio, 1706,’ ‘Staunton: Shakispear,’ and so on
ad infinitum. Throughout the prices are moderate,
extremely moderate; that, at any rate, is a fact
worthy of distinct recognition, and some of the
books, too, are anything but easy to procure, as
witness Chaucer’s Works, folio, 1602, which is
priced at £1 10s., Grafton’s Chronicle, folio, 1569,
£1 5s., Swan’s ‘Speculum Mundi,’ 4to., 1670, 3s.,
and many others. Dark though this shop may
be to gaze upon, I regard it as a typical
book-man’s paradise.

Paternoster Row, further east still, is now of
course, the headquarters of the publishers, though
several second-hand booksellers still linger there.
Before the Great Fire reduced the whole district
to ashes they had it all their own way, and when
the Row was rebuilt they flocked there once
more, to be gradually elbowed out by giant
houses which sell books wholesale. There is one
shop in this thoroughfare so completely wedged
up with books that it is a somewhat difficult
matter to enter in at the door. Nobody who is
not in the daily habit of passing by could avoid
stopping to glance at the rows of volumes which
the proprietor has reared up against a wall round
the corner that leads into St. Paul’s Churchyard,
for he has decorated them with innumerable
strips of paper writ large with pieces of advice
on things in general, quotations from classical
writers, the Bible and the Koran, which, though
they have for the most part nothing whatever to
do with the sale of books of any kind, attract by
reason of their quaintness and the strangeness
of their being.

And so we might go wandering for ever about
New London, passing on every side the shadows of
the old, but seeing little of the substance.
Book-men of the true stamp are antiquaries, to whom
novelty is abhorrent. The pleasantest places are
to them those which time has consecrated with a
gentle touch, and which reflect all their
imaginings, even as they echo their footsteps. These
are departing under the mandate of an inexorable
law, and we go with them.

CHAPTER VI.

VAGARIES OF BOOK-HUNTERS.

Ten or fifteen years ago it was quite usual to
meet with collections of title-pages formed
by followers of the immortal Bagford.
These were to be seen quoted in booksellers’
catalogues and displayed in the auction rooms,
and were commonly disposed of for small sums of
money—small, that is to say, in comparison with
what would have been realized for the books
themselves had they been allowed to remain in that
state of life to which the author and others had
called them. Of late, collections of title-pages
have not been very much in evidence anywhere,
for it is universally felt that there is little or no
romance surrounding the slaughter even of folios,
to say nothing of smaller-sized victims, and for
that reason these scrappy collections are huddled
out of sight like family skeletons. The book-hunter
of the present day has his foibles, it is true,
but he has learned by experience and from the
expostulatory remarks of others that wild freaks
are completely out of place in a library, and so it
has come to pass that books are treated in a
different way from what they were only a couple
of decades ago, and no one who has the smallest
respect either for himself or his vocation would
now either care or dare to form a collection of
title-pages. Should he happen to own one either
by purchase or under circumstances beyond his
control, he will produce it, if at all, with apologies
and sighs. It is abundantly manifest that the
wicked man hath turned away from much of his wickedness.

The reason of this tremendous transformation
must be put down to the credit of a rule which,
though formulated and preached at one time by
the elite only, has been insisted upon with such
pertinacity that it has gradually become diffused
throughout the whole world of collectors, no
matter to what objects of interest they may direct
their attention. This rule is, that taste and the
pocket alike demand that be a book good, bad, or
indifferent in its externals, it shall, nevertheless,
be left untouched by its owner, who is but its
temporary custodian, and a trustee for others who
shall come after him. To rip out the title-page,
no matter with what object, is an outrage on
decency which, it is pleasant to find, is now
appraised at its proper pitch of enormity. If the
stamp-collector rejoice in the possession of a
specimen with ‘original gum,’ and rate its interest
and value higher on that account, shall the
book-collector, who is the oldest, the most learned, and
the most aristocratic of all collectors, give place in
the matter of common-sense and discretion to the
product of a frivolous age? Shall he cut initial
letters from missals and other manuscripts, and
insult the shades of Fust and Schoeffer by making
a senseless collection of colophons? These things
were in vogue at one time, but are now frowned
down even by the most ignorant of mortals, since,
to put the matter on no higher ground, the money
value of old books has considerably increased
of late years to his certain knowledge, and he
believes that anything with curious type, the f’s
made so—ƒ, and villainous prints scattered about
the text, must ex necessitate rei be worth its weight
in gold, and perhaps more. What a contrast is
this little false, but preventative, store of
knowledge to the crass stupidity of the early years of
the present century, as exemplified in the persons
of the Bishops, Canons, and Chaplains of Lincoln
Cathedral, who permitted the choir-boys to collect
illuminated initials, and with that object to cut
up with their pen-knives scores of vellum
manuscripts. A good many of the Caxtons from this
same Cathedral were purchased by Dibdin for the
Althorpe collection, and will be found catalogued
in ‘A Lincolne Nosegaye.’ The Dean and
Chapter, knowing little about books, and caring
less, had disposed of them all for a ‘consideration,’
and thus without thought stripped themselves of
their choicest possessions next to the Cathedral
itself.

Of a truth, books have only recently come to
be regarded as possessing a sentimental value
altogether distinct from considerations of utility,
and it is only within the compass of a comparatively
few years that collectors have sprung up
from the very stones to cry aloud, and to protest
against such wanton acts of mutilation or
destruction as the records of past days almost choke
themselves in the echoing of. Only a little while
ago ‘Grangerizing’ was the favourite pastime
of thousands of persons of elegant leisure, as
Griswold called the lazy dullards of his
generation, and what this involved would be
whispered in corners but for the fact that it was
for 200 years unblushingly shouted in the open day.

During all that period the teachings of the
genuine bibliophiles had so passed from deed and
truth into mere monotony of unbelieved phrase
that no English was literal enough to convert the
persons who went about seeking material, at vast
expense, wherewith to extra-illustrate some inane
book of polemics or proverbs.

Nicholas Ferrar, who kept the ‘Protestant
Nunnery’ at Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire,
was, I believe, the inventor of a system which
was not fully developed until the publication of
Granger’s ‘Biographical History of England,’
but which is, nevertheless, directly or indirectly
responsible for the condition of most of the
imperfect volumes which are met with at every turn.
The story of Nicholas Ferrar, assuming it to be
true, which there is little reason to doubt, makes
it clear that King Charles I. was as bad as
or worse than anybody in this matter, for, had
he not affected to admire the handiwork of this
first and chief of sinners, the baneful practice of
mutilating books for the sake of their illustrations,
title-pages, or frontispieces, might never have
become an aristocratic amusement, sanctified by
tradition, and ennobled far beyond its deserts
by kingly patronage. The Concordance which
Ferrar showed the King escaped the wrath of the
fanatic Hugh Peters and his crew, and, after
many vicissitudes, is now safely lodged in the
British Museum, a warning to all who may at any
time seek to revive a practice which would, in
these days of emulation and competition, burn
with a white heat.

In Wordsworth’s ‘Ecclesiastical Biography’
the story of Nicholas Ferrar is set out at length.
There is no need to enter into minute details, as
the tale has since become stereotyped, and is
found reproduced in a dozen different places at
least. Shortly, it appears that in June, 1634,
King Charles I. was staying with the Earl of
Westmorland at Apethorpe, and from thence sent
one of his gentlemen to the home of Nicholas
Ferrar, hard by, to ‘intreat’ a sight of a
Concordance which he had heard had recently been
completed. When Ferrar was on the Continent
some time previously, he had bought up a great
number of prints by the best masters, illustrative
of historical passages of the Old and New
Testaments, and these he afterwards used for ornamenting
various compilations of the Scriptures, among
them a ‘full harmony or concordance of the four
Evangelists, adorned with many beautiful pictures,
which required more than a year for the composition,
and was divided into 150 heads or chapters.’

This was the Concordance that King Charles
was so anxious to look at, and which, indeed, he
admired so much that he never rested until he
had obtained one like it for his own library. Both
books are now in the British Museum, the original
having been acquired about three years ago, and
the one in the King’s Library from George II.,
who had inherited the royal collection of books
and manuscripts.

From the point of view of Nicholas Ferrar,
there was certainly no harm in this process of
extra-illustrating. There is no reason to believe
that he had gone about tearing out plates from
books, or done anything else which in any respect,
save one, could be regarded as objectionable in
the slightest degree. There was, and is, however,
one objection to his procedure, namely, the very
bad example he set to unscrupulous people who,
in after years, rose up in their thousands and
commenced to rip and tear with diabolical
enterprise. These were the days of Granger’s
‘Biographical History of England’—hence the
verb to Grangerize—when people went about
searching for portraits of celebrities mentioned
in the text to paste between the leaves in their
proper places. If Granger incidentally mentioned
that someone had been conveyed to the Tower,
and subsequently had the good fortune to escape
out of a certain window, books would be
ransacked and mutilated to provide illustrations of
(1) the Tower of London from the N., S., E. or
W., as the case might be; (2) portrait of the
prisoner; (3) view of the window from which he
let himself down; and finally, if, Laus Deo, a
letter in his handwriting or a section of the rope
which had made his escape possible could only
be unearthed, great was the joy in the camp of
the Philistine.

This mania for Grangerizing grew till it
assumed enormous proportions. One enthusiast
tried to illustrate Rees’ ‘Cyclopaedia,’ but died
before he had accomplished very much in
comparison with what remained to be done.
Mr. Crowle’s copy of Pennant’s ‘History of London’
cost that gentleman £7,000 from first to last, and
there is a book of this kind in the Bodleian which
has engulfed nearly double that amount. It
consists of Clarendon’s ‘History of the Rebellion’
swollen to sixty-seven large volumes, representing
forty years of intense application. The
vagaries of a whole army of book-collectors are
reflected from every page of works such as these,
for a man must necessarily be a book-collector
first, and a Grangerizer after, else would material
fail him. Happily for the peace of books, the
mania for extra-illustrating has practically died
out. The expense is too great, life too short, the
knowledge and taste—of a kind—too laborious to
acquire, to endow this pastime with a permanent
and stable interest.

And yet there is another vagary, eccentricity,
freak, or what you will, which, for cool, deliberate
folly, has never been equalled even among Ferrar’s
admirers. The fun in this case consists in wilfully
destroying a certain number of scarce and valuable
books in order to heighten the importance and
value of the survivors. Three or four collectors
whose tastes are similar—that is to say, who
accumulate works by the same author—will take
stock of their belongings. Thanks to the
Grangerizers, a portrait will perhaps be missing
from one volume, and a plate from another;
some disciple of an ancient Goth may have
removed a title-page or two; one copy may be
fairer to look upon than another; a leaf or two
may be injured which in another copy, imperfect
perhaps in other respects, may be above
suspicion. Our collectors have duplicates, for they
have been striving all their lives to prevent
anyone else from obtaining any copy, good, bad
or indifferent, of the scarcest works of the author
or authors they think they honour by their notice.
They make a ‘pool’ of all the volumes which are
not immaculate; complete or perfect as many of
them as possible, apportion them, and destroy the
remainder. They will burn a work which is
perfect, provided each has a copy in better
condition, and this is to prevent you or me, or
anyone else, from sharing in their sacrilegious
joy. When we reflect that, from the nature of
things, it is only the scarcest books that can be
so treated with effect, we shall begin to realize the
sinister importance of the act. Practices such as
these are the product of the present age; they
are not common, far from it, but they are not
unusual. And yet the perpetrators mean no
harm, for, as they would very truly say, if their
practices were generally known and complaint
were made, ‘You can, if you like, read So-and-so
without the least difficulty, for his works have
been reprinted many times, and it is not either
essential or advisable that the very scarcest
edition of all should be in your hands.’ There
is in this argument a little logical force, but no
decency for anyone to dissect.

Bookmen of the present day, or at least those
among them who aspire to the highest seats in
the collectors’ Pantheon, are invariably bound by
rule, and it is this hard and fast bondage that
makes them do things which, if left to themselves,
they would probably be the first to deprecate.
To accumulate any considerable number of really
scarce books is the labour of a lifetime, and to
obtain immaculate copies necessitates not merely
the possession of plenty of money, but a very
great deal of energy, discrimination, and tact.
The old school of general lovers is dying out.
People now very seldom buy up whole libraries,
or send out colossal orders to gratify a mere love
of possession. They work by the book of
arithmetic, cautiously, slowly, and with one main
object ever in view. In this they are right, but in
this also they fail, a paradox which is no paradox
at all when it is remembered that book-hunters
are of many kinds and of varying degrees of
intelligence.

For instance, though there is undoubtedly
something unique and strange about the very
appearance of a library of extremely diminutive
books, the collector of works of this kind is
‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d,’ within the compass of
about two square inches at the most, and probably
does not expect to derive either instruction or
amusement from their pages when he has
succeeded in reading them with the aid of a
microscope. His rule is inflexible. Shakespeare
in folio must give place to ‘The Mite’; ‘The
English Bijou Almanac’ for 1837 is, in his eyes
one of the choicest of all volumes. Here
literature and the rule are in conflict, and books
become bric-à-brac, as they must do when any rule
is too rigidly applied to them. Yet there are
many collectors of small books both here and
abroad, and prices rule inordinately high in
consequence.

Very probably ‘The Mite’ is the smallest book
printed from movable type in the world. Its
size is only 3/8 in. by 3/4 in., and it would certainly
be an exceedingly difficult matter to reduce this
measurement. If anybody could do so, it would
be M. Salomon of Paris, who has long been a
collector of these microscopical curiosities, or the
trustees of the British Museum, who have a box
full of them. In 1781 a little book called the
‘Alarm Almanac’ made its appearance in Paris,
and though printed with movable type and not
engraved, like nearly all these little works are,
measured only 19 millimetres by 14. There are
very nearly 25-1/2 millimetres to the inch, and this
specimen consequently runs ‘The Mite’ very close
indeed. The ‘English Bijou Almanac’ for 1837,
however, completely eclipses both, but
unfortunately it is engraved and not printed from type.
This book measures 3/4 in. in height, 1/2 in. wide,
and 1/8 in. in thickness. The authoress was
‘L.E.L.,’ Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an almost
forgotten poetess, whose sad marriage and
untimely death are known to only a few students of
Victorian literature. Some of her poems were
printed in the ‘Bijou’ for the first and only time,
so that this tiny volume is of some literary
importance. Its title is so minute that a magnifying
glass is necessary to read it. Its thirty-seven
leaves are devoted, inter alia, to several pages of
music and some portraits, including one of James
Fenimore Cooper, the novelist. Even small
books have a history and an importance of
their own, but to collect them to the exclusion
of every other book is surely a pronounced
‘vagary.’

M. Salomon has more than 200 specimens, but
then he does not absolutely confine his attention
to midgets. I never knew nor heard of more
than one collector who was so infatuated as to do
so, and he had forty-five volumes of the kind, all
different, in which he took such extreme delight
that he was ever on the look out for more.

Another collector with whom I am personally
acquainted has read this chapter through at my
express request, and consequently cannot
reasonably say that I have endeavoured to question the
soundness of his discretion behind his back. He
accumulates books with a history. If a book has
no history, he will have none of it. In his library
are many volumes which I must confess I have
a great regard for, but which I know can never
be mine, for each is unique, and the whole
collection is destined for a public museum in the
end.

He has a book bound in what looks like dry
and hard parchment, warped with damp, and
stained here and there with reddish brown. It
is a copy of Johnson’s ‘Lives and Adventures of
the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, and
Street Robbers, etc.,’ printed in folio in 1736, a
scarce book at any time, but under existing
circumstances past praying for. The parchment
is human cuticle, stripped from the back of a
criminal who had swung at Tyburn for a series
of atrocious butcheries, which are chronicled with
considerable minuteness in the pages of the
‘Newgate Calendar.’ When the corpse was cut down
it was, according to the custom then prevailing,
carted ‘home,’ and exhibited to gaping crowds
at so much a head, and finally sold to the surgeons.
From them a prior owner of this delightful volume
obtained the skin, which, when tanned, formed
an appropriate and never-to-be-forgotten binding,
to all appearances sweating great smears of blood.
It is only the damp, of course, or perhaps some
defect in the curing process, which is responsible
for these blemishes; but they seem to cry for
vengeance, still greater and greater vengeance,
against an inhuman wretch long since departed
more or less in peace.

This is the only gruesome thing in the library,
and I know as a fact that it excites more interest
than all the rest of the books put together, though
many, not to say most, of them are distinctly
worthy of the closest attention. One volume
belonged to Charles Lamb, who has made a
perfect wreck of it, and half a dozen or more have
the signature of ‘Will Shakespere’ scribbled in
an Elizabethan hand on the title-pages, and in
all sorts of places. These were once among the
choicest possessions of Samuel Ireland, of
Norfolk Street, Strand, the father of William Henry
Ireland, a liar and a solicitor’s clerk, who, as all
the world knows, was for a time, and in very
truth, mistaken for the great dramatist himself.
Then there are books with inscriptions,
undoubtedly genuine, of Bradshaw the regicide,
Algernon Sidney, and many other persons of the
highest political eminence in their day; books,
too, which have belonged to Young the poet—distinguishable
at a glance by the multitude of turned-down
leaves—and the unfortunate Louis XVI.

This library is, of its kind, perhaps as
important as any that has ever been formed, and
yet it only numbers some 250 volumes, so
supremely difficult is it, as a rule, to trace the
possession even of books for more than a generation
or two. Great men have ever been chary
of their names, or at least it would seem so from
the number of unimportant signatures and
inscriptions we meet with day by day.

A long and very interesting chapter might be
written on ‘Inscriptions in Books,’ and it must be
confessed that a really important signature or
comment adds so very appreciably to the sentimental
value of the volume in which it is found, that it is
not surprising that Oliver Wendell Holmes conjured
up a pleasant train of reflection, in his inimitable
style, based upon the name of a former owner
of his own copy of the ‘Colloquies of Erasmus,’
which, by the way, my friend is extremely anxious
to possess himself of, but will probably never
obtain. In this instance the personality of the
‘Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table’ obscures all
else, and gives the book a distinct history of its
own—a history that invests it with an importance
and value it could never claim of itself. To find
out all we can about the former owners of books
which we ourselves take pleasure in is no frivolous
task, and the pity is that our opportunities for
doing so are limited. The book-plate has very
nearly put an end to owner’s autographs, and
being easy to remove, affords little or no guarantee
of ownership. And book-plates have been in use
in this country for more than 200 years.

No doubt everyone who has anything to do
with books, whether as writer, producer, or
collector, can call to mind the eccentricities of his
neighbours with regard to them. I call it extremely
eccentric conduct on the part of any man to
persist in collecting odd volumes, and to studiously
ignore complete sets. Yet I knew an old
gentleman—now dead, and his books littering the stalls
of Farringdon Street and elsewhere—who did
this, year after year, and for many years, with the
inevitable result. He was fond of literature, and
the pleasure he derived in reading was part and
parcel of his existence.

It was an axiom with him, however, that
anything which is worth having, and any knowledge
worth acquiring, must be laboriously worked for;
and he would instance numerous authorities who
have taught this truth by example as well as by
precept. He would say, ‘If I go out and buy a
Bible for £500, because it is old and scarce, do
you think I shall derive as much benefit and
solace from its pages as if I had invested a trifle
with the fixed determination to read what I had
acquired and to follow its teachings?’

‘No, certainly not,’ is the obvious and truthful
reply to that; but this would appear to be different
from buying one volume of, say, Pope’s works
when there ought to be twenty, and trusting to
enterprise not unmingled with luck to discover
the remaining nineteen. To this, however, he
would not agree, and, to do him justice, he did
not preach one thing and perform another. His
theory was that, if the perusal of an odd volume
leads the reader to long for the possession of
its fellows, it is better that he should search
for them until he finds them, than that he
should have them to his hand, as it were, ready made.

Carlyle intimated that a man had far better study
the title-page of any book worth the trouble of
looking at than read the whole text with a vacant mind,
and no doubt he was right, though this, too, seems
to be an entirely distinct matter from the general
principle that nothing can be learned without a
maximum of inconvenience. Such a conclusion
is rather a straining of the position insisted upon
by Nero’s tutor, that no one should collect more
books than he can read, and that a multitude of
books only distracts the mind. Therefore was it
that Francis Bissari in the year 1750 designed a
plate, which he pasted in the few volumes he
possessed, and which consequently is now
extremely scarce. ‘Ex-Libris civis Francisci
Bissari,’ he says, ‘Distrahit animum librorum
multitude, itaque cum legere non possis quantum
habueris, sat est habere quantum legas. Seneca.
Ep. 2.’

Still, as I have intimated, the old gentleman
had his way and his day, and when he died his
books were all despatched to the auction rooms.
It took three men more than a week to pack them
in boxes. There were books under every bed in
the house, and every nook and cranny was full of
them. There were, altogether, many thousands
of volumes, and nearly all were odd. If a series
were found to be complete, as sometimes
happened, it was sure to be made up of volumes
belonging to different editions, and, naturally
enough, in different bindings. The auctioneers
did what they could, and sold the vast majority
in ‘parcels’ for a mere song, which in truth was
all they were worth.

This peculiar form of book-collecting, though
apparently strange, is, and always has been, very
usual, for the vast majority of readers are poor.
One volume will cost less, proportionately, than
the complete set of which it forms part; and,
moreover, we are again face to face with the
argument that it is better to master the contents
of one volume than to have a mere superficial
knowledge of a dozen or more. The only thing is
that, as the world wags at present, the advice is
erratic, and the system of buying books in sections
one that cannot be recommended. If we could be
sure of a hundred years of life, then things might
be different. Sed Ars longa, vita brevis est.

And so it happens that the vagaries of book-hunters
are often passing strange. Some, like
Sir Thomas Phillipps, will buy largely, and never
even open the cases in which they arrive. Others
will hide them in all sorts of out-of-the-way
places, while others again will cut them to pieces,
or in some other way destroy them utterly. It
is the most usual thing, for me, at any rate, and
therefore presumably for others who are known
to write about books, or to give the reports of the
auction-rooms, to receive a bundle of title-pages
as samples of the volumes to which they belong,
with a request for information as to how they
ought to be bound, and what they are worth.
Some collectors—real bonâ-fide collectors these—start
life with strong opinions as to the usefulness
of books, and, after the manner of Grolier, though
without his discretion, open their doors to all sorts
and conditions of men, only to close them later
with a firm resolve that, come what come may,
they will never again allow any friend whomsoever
even to gaze upon their store. Some, too, are so
deeply immersed in their all-absorbing hobby that
they have no clear conception of the difference
between meum and tuum. Estimable in every
respect but one, and scrupulously honest to a
degree in all matters of daily intercourse, they yet
fail in this one supreme trial. And yet they are
absolved; for these unfortunates are not thieves
but eccentrics, who would no more think of
selling the objects they have mistaken for their
own, than they would of getting wealth by false
pretences. Pope Innocent X., when still
Monsignor Pamphilio, was found in the possession of
a book he could not satisfactorily account for, and
the ludicrous part of the matter was that Du
Moustier, who claimed that it had been abstracted
from his library, was subsequently proved to have
stolen it himself. Then, again, Catherine de
Medici sequestered the entire library of Marshal
Strozzi, and on complaint promised to pay for it
by instalments, which, of course, she never did.
Hearne hints more than once that Sir Thomas
Bodley was eccentric, and when Moore, Bishop
of Ely, and father of English Black-Letter
Collectors, went to dine with a bibliophile, as was
his wont, the latter would, if he were wise, spend
the morning in removing out of sight, and,
therefore, out of temptation’s way, the choicest of his
possessions. But the king of all these suspicious
characters was Libri, who, as Inspector-General
of French Libraries, under Louis Philippe,
presented himself, from first to last, with books of
the value of more than £20,000, among them a
fine MS. of the Pentateuch, which he sold to the
late Lord Ashburnham on condition that it was
not to be published for twenty years. In 1868
the time expired, and then the matter was traced
home, to his memory’s shame.

This conduct of Libri in selling what did not
belong to him puts him, indeed, on a level, in
point of turpitude, with the young divinity student
of Chicago commonly called ‘The Champion
Biblioklept of America.’ In vastness of conception
the latter was a mere tyro, for he only stole
a few hundred books of small value from the
Chicago Public Library. The motive of both
men was, however, the same, and it was that
which, according to some consciences, made
them thieves. After all, it is this motive that
must be primarily considered in all ethical
questions such as those which underlie, to some
extent at least, the vagaries of every book-hunter
who ever was born to hunger and thirst for
Caxton’s types, and paper white as snow, bound
in a dream by the Gascon’s magic touch.

CHAPTER VII.

HOW FASHION LIVES.

The dim haze which, in the imagination of
the populace, once floated above the head
of every hungry book-man, was never in
those days identified with a mass of tangled,
waving hair, which, aureola-like, ‘girt his occiput
about,’ for he was no minor poet, with pale, eager
face and love-locks everywhere, but a man, with
a rugged front such as Ben Jonson wore, and
a heart that beat within. The haze in which
he moved was from the dust of old-world tomes;
it settled on his coat, and, had he worn a bob-wig,
it would have settled on that also, but, since wigs
had escaped the fashion of fifty years before, it
merely clung to his hair instead, and powdered it
gray before its time. Half a century ago the
England which for the most part was free from
the shriek of the railway-whistle and the rumble
of traffic harboured such men as these in their
hundreds. They came from the last century,
and the further their pilgrimage in this the more
they haunted the rustic element in which they
moved. They were, in their way, magicians,
wearing the consecrated pentacles of Agrippa,
‘that man of parts, who dived into the secrets of
all arts, that second Solomon, the mighty Hee,
that try’de them all, and found them Vanity.’

Naturally enough, when one of these old-time
bookworms left his seclusion to mix with the
whirl and throng of the London thoroughfares, he
was swallowed up, as though he had never been,
in a huge vortex of unappreciative apathy, for the
man in the street never has time to dream, and
such books as he affects are ledgers. But he
might have strayed into some square which the
tide, ebbing westward, had left desolate, and met
his counterpart sitting, as he himself did when at
home, in the midst of vellum-bound classics far
into the night. Indeed, when he came to London,
which was but seldom, it would be to visit another
bookworm, just as the stage-doorkeeper of the
present day spends his evening off at the entrance
to another theatre, because he cannot get away,
even in spirit, from his life’s work and enterprise.
Were we to look for these old book-men now, we
should look in vain, for the century is fast drawing
to its close, and a younger generation has occupied
their seats.

The transition from the old to the new in the
matter of books and all that pertains to them, has
been very gradual. It commenced about fifty
years ago, or a little earlier, and was due,
perhaps, to the spirit of unrest fostered by an
improved and quicker system of communication in a
country of very small area, absolutely incapable
of enlargement. We see a mighty change in
everything external, and it is not surprising that
our social habits should have experienced a
revolution. Round goes the wheel, slowly and
persistently, and we go with it, though daily
custom and daily experience has a tendency
to mask its motion. One day, sooner or later,
we start up and look for the familiar
landmarks. They are gone. New ones, not at
all familiar, but still recognisable, have taken
their place, and then we know that time has
slipped away while we were dreaming, and that
nothing can possibly be done but to take the
future by the forelock, and to rush on for a brief
space with the rest.

And so it is with books, and ever has been.
Fifty years and more ago, time waited upon them
and stood still; now they are carried along
unceasingly, and have no rest. Every year the
speed increases. Old companions of the shelf are
whirled into space and parted for ever; the very
men who buy them are changed in their aspirations,
their tastes, and their desires, and in a very
short time they will change again, and yet again.
They are swayed and driven by Fashion, and this
is how Fashion lives.

There was something about the dry-as-dust
bookworm which, however consonant with
antiquated modes of thought and action, was
nevertheless felt to be utterly unsuitable to changed
conditions. Men must and will read, and to
accumulate is equally natural. A life of easy
contentment engenders one mode of thought, a
life of enterprise another; and the transition from
the narrow limits of a prison-bound study to
the open air is precisely what might have been
expected to occur.

Men there were, as I have said, in plenty, who
refused to quit the time-honoured traditions of
their race; but on every side of them were being
born lighter spirits, to whom colossal and intricate
volumes were as heavy as lead. We see the
changed nature of their tastes in the craving for
art, and the outcome of it in scores and hundreds
of miscellanies which began to be published about
the year 1830, and held imperial sway on drawing-room
tables for ten years or more.

Fisher’s ‘Scrap-Book,’ and numerous other
artistically got up volumes full of excerpts and
elegant extracts, illustrated by some of the first
engravers of the time, were extremely fashionable
in those days, and for light and casual
reading very probably supplied all that was
necessary. The poets, from the Earl of Surrey onward,
were served up in dainty plats, and the best prose
authors were disembowelled with remarkable skill.
The ingenious Martin Tupper, observing this
transformation scene, brought joy into many
households by laying down, in the form of explicit
statements, matters of theological controversy
which had in their day fed the Smithfield
fires till they roared and blazed like those of
Moloch.

These books were for the cultured, to whom
the random books of Pierce Egan and William
Combe were positively distasteful, and who,
having neither the time nor the inclination
to bury themselves deeply in classic lore, eagerly
welcomed anything which appealed to their better
selves and, at the same time, did not too severely
tax their brains. The very style and nature of the
books which were published at this period show
as conclusively as anything can do the great
change which was gradually creeping over the
public mind.

Smollett and Swift were becoming coarse, and
Hogarth, in his realm of art, was already much
worse. Mrs. Radcliffe and the Rev. Mr. Maturin
stalked like a couple of terrifying ghosts hung
about with chains, wailing their lost home. They
invariably spoke of haunted caverns, and the wind
rumbling itself to sleep in the recesses of ruined
chimneys. Their novels were the delight of these
same dry-as-dusts, to whom the new age had said
farewell, but who, in their impenetrable fastnesses,
still revelled, though in numbers yearly decreasing,
in ‘The Raven,’ with its soul-quaking refrain, in
the ‘Castle of Otranto,’ and ‘The Bravo of
Venice.’ Things of graver mood they could not find had
they searched the entire catalogue of English literature,
from the metrical poems of Cædmon, chanted
to the winds of Whitby, down to the newest poem
or novel.

The new school called the old ‘unhealthy,’
that being a not inapt adjective with which to
express the absence of brightness and chic, qualities
which came, as everything else comes, when
called for, and which were embodied to a nicety
in ‘Sketches by “Boz,”‘ ‘The Pickwick Papers,’
and later on in ‘The Yellowplush Correspondence,’
and ‘The Paris Sketch-Book.’ The new poetry
was represented by Tennyson, Browning,
Longfellow, and many more, and essays of better, or,
at any rate, more taking, style than those of the
Rev. Vicessimus Knox, were published every day,
and what is more to the point, extensively read
and hoarded.

Collections which had their beginnings in
materials such as these authors afforded were,
and necessarily must be, totally different in every
possible way from those of the prior century;
this we find to be the case on looking at the
catalogues of sales by auction which were issued
under the new régime. Fashion had indeed
changed, and at this particular period Hakluyt
and Coryat, to say nothing of curious authors
like Brathwaite and Seller, were
comparatively neglected. They have recovered
themselves since, because a revulsion of feeling has
taken place in their favour, and many of the
old books which were of immense importance
sixty or seventy years ago are, after suffering a
period of neglect, once more in vogue, and can
hardly be met with when sought after, so great is
the demand for them. That is the case now,
but there is a wide intervening period which
needs to be analyzed.

In my opinion, Dickens among novelists, and
Tennyson among poets, had the greatest amount
of influence upon modern collectors as a body.
The former was the more powerful at first, since
he had the good fortune to meet with extremely
talented artists like George Cruikshank, Hablot
Browne, Seymour and Leech, to illustrate his
works. Cruikshank was fresh from the glories
of ‘Life in London,’ and ‘The Life of Napoleon,’
which had between them carried his name far
and wide, and Browne hit off the meaning of
the author in such a marvellous way, that he
may almost be said to have discovered him.
Seymour’s opportunities were few, as his seven
etchings for the ‘Pickwick Papers’ were all he
ever accomplished for Dickens; but these were,
in their way, masterly, and no doubt contributed
greatly to the success of the earlier parts in which
they appeared.

Slowly but surely the collectors began to turn
their thoughts to the new author and the artists
who were assisting him, and to accumulate the
numbers in which it was the fashion to issue
illustrated novels at that time. We often see
them now, almost as clean and fresh as when
they were first published, showing conclusively
that every care has been bestowed upon them.
In later days, up to within a year or two in fact,
there was a great rush for any books or parts by
popular authors containing first-rate illustrations.
There is a demand for them now, but only when
their condition is immaculate, for fashion has
recently changed in a marked degree, owing,
perhaps, to the number of rich collectors, who
would have these things at any price, and, of
course, had their way to the exclusion of the vast
majority who were not sufficiently well off to
compete with them. And this fashion was the
parent, not of another fashion, but of a craze,
which raged for two years or more.

The years 1893 and 1894 I take to be those in
which people, despairing of obtaining their heart’s
desire, turned their attention to what were known
‘Limited Editions,’ and raged furiously.
Nothing but a thorough grasp of the state of
the book-market at the time, and a deep insight
into human nature, could have hit upon the
‘Limited Edition’ as a stop-gap, and those who
invented it are entitled to every credit for their
enterprise. The apology for the life of the
‘Limited Edition’ brought to its logical
conclusion was this: Times have changed, and,
moreover, more people buy books than formerly,
whether to read or to store. With the readers
we have nothing to do, except incidentally; but
so far as the collectors are concerned, it is obvious
that only about one out of every ten can afford
to pay the extremely high prices demanded for
most of the first editions of the authors of repute
which they affect.

Now comes the point, and upon this the whole
argument succeeds or fails. Do they want these
coveted books to read or to accumulate? If
they wish to read them they can do so at any
time, for there are more editions than one in the
majority of instances, and the demand for the later
and cheaper ones is of a different character
altogether; ergo, they really want them, though they
would perhaps be highly indignant if we said so,
to possess and not necessarily to read. Let us,
therefore, make new books in the image of the
old, decorating them artistically, and printing them
in the best possible style. Let us cut down the
edition to a very small number of copies, in
order to keep it out of the hands of all but just
enough buyers to make the venture pay well, and
we ought to succeed in establishing a furore that
will continue precisely as long as the strenuous
efforts to obtain time-tried poems and essays
remain futile by reason of their cost.

The venture was purposely confined to poems
and essays, because literary wares of this kind
good enough for the purpose could be bought for
next to nothing. A novel, in order to compete on
this particular ground with the older works of
Ainsworth, Thackeray, and the rest, would be
costly to buy in manuscript, and difficult as well
as expensive to produce; and, moreover, novels
never pay unless they are sold in large quantities.
This argument was sound throughout, and,
moreover, a fresh departure of some kind was
inevitable, if only to stem the tide that flowed so
aggressively in favour of the rich. The venture
succeeded, for almost on the instant the collector,
casting a lingering look behind on the expensive
works for which he craved, turned away from
them, and welcomed the ‘dainty volumes of
delicious verse’ which came tumbling down in
almost endless variety. There was a scramble
for them which continued exactly as long as had
been predicted, namely, until the prices of once
coveted books began to fall, and then the ‘Limited
Editions’ fell too, and the craze was over, for the
present at least.

One would have thought that the direct result
of this procedure would have been a fresh rush
to former fields, but the fact is otherwise. Original
editions of the works of older poets and essayists of
the highest repute are still as costly as ever, but
the general ruck have fallen in the market, and
remain fallen to this present day. More than
that, the ‘Limited Edition’ brought within
reasonable access innumerable better books, now become
cheaper, provided they are not in the very finest
condition.

Just at the moment there is no great ‘boom’
observable in the English market, no great craze
for books of a certain special kind, though some,
as usual, are sought for unceasingly, as, for
example, many of those older works of English
literature which were seen in such profusion in
the collection of Mr. Charles B. Foote, dispersed
in New York at the beginning of 1895.

Whatever hard things may be said of collectors,
however much they may be likened to literary
jackdaws, or to what extent their tastes may be
criticised and compared with those of other
people, they have a virtue—and a great one—one
undisputed virtue, which, like charity, covereth a
multitude of sins. This cardinal virtue is, that
now, as in past times, their primary aim is to
appraise literature at its true worth, and to make
that the raison d’être of their enterprise. The
inevitable red herring may lead them, for the
moment, away from the pleasant places they have
made their home, but it has never yet prevented
their return.

And this home is among time-tried and intrinsically
valuable books, and not among those which
are temporarily in vogue. It is a home which
existed in Greece, and in Rome, and all through
the so-called Dark Ages, during the Renaissance,
and down the centuries which succeeded right
to this present year of grace—a home furnished
with genius and perfumed with sentiment.
Look there at Paul Lacroix snatching from a
Paris stall the very copy of ‘Le Tartuffe’ which
had belonged to King Louis XIV., and later on
sheltering not merely the great Pixérécourt
founder of the Société des Bibliophiles Français,
but his whole library as well, until such time as
his creditors had drawn off their legions and
departed. Sentiment, as well as a passion for
literature, was at the bottom of these acts, for
that very copy of ‘Le Tartuffe’ had been in
Molière’s coat-pocket, and Pixérécourt had a tale
to tell of every scholarly volume he possessed.
You cannot manufacture genuine sentiment, nor
is the quality to be evolved from anything except
genius.

Accordingly, we find that every book which
excites the cupidity of the true bibliophile derives
its magic power primarily from within, and that
this power is often materially increased by reason
of extraneous considerations. The instances in
which external matters have at any time been
capable of investing an inferior book with a halo
of importance or romance are so extremely rare
that they might almost be counted on the fingers.
A mere fleeting craze cannot do it, and it is the
greatest mistake in the world to suppose that a
scarce book would be sought for, and prized when
found, merely because it is scarce, and for no
other reason. As every book-collector is aware,
there are hundreds and thousands of volumes
lying neglected on the book-stalls to-day which
would never be there if this were not so. Some
are scarce in the sense of being difficult to meet
with when wanted, but, if that be their only merit,
it has never yet been acknowledged.

But fashion, though it can never make a bad
book good, has the power to subordinate one
good book to another, notwithstanding, and to
play shuttlecock with the names of authors and
printers alike. It was fashion in excelsis which
lived with the Elzevirs when men were saying to
one another, ‘I have all the poets they ever
printed. I have ten examples of every volume,
and all have red letters, and are of the right
date.’ It was fashion, too, which assessed the value of
Longpierre’s copy of Montaigne’s ‘Essais’ (1659),
with the buffalo’s head on the preface and at the
commencement of each chapter, at 5,100 francs,
and only the other day (March 20, 1896) flung
away a fine tall copy, bound by Bozerian, for the
paltry sum of £6 15s.

The same capricious mistress assessed Sir
Walter Raleigh’s ‘Discoverie of the Large, Rich
and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana,’ 1626, at a
comparatively low rate—£3 3s., if the late Mr. Henry
Stevens is to be believed, and no one had a greater
knowledge of such books than he—in 1858,
notwithstanding the fact that it must be credited to
Shakespeare’s library, as the ‘still vex’d
Bermoothes,’ and his knowledge of the breaking of
the sea on the rugged rocks by which the Bermuda
Islands are surrounded, sufficiently demonstrate.
Thirty years ago Smith’s ‘Generall Historie of
Virginia,’ published for M. Sparkes in 1625, could
have been got for a twentieth part of the sum that
would be asked for it now, and this too is by
Fashion’s decree.

But in these and any number of typical
instances there is no change in the estimation in
which good literature is held; no lifting a book
from an abyss of mediocrity and placing it on
a pinnacle of fame. Fashion may swing men’s
minds to this or to that, and so indirectly and for
the time being cause those ups and downs in
the book-market which are the despair of
everyone who has endeavoured to account for them,
but further than this she cannot go.

And therefore, when I said that book-men are
swayed by fashion, I meant that their tastes and
inclinations are capricious, and not that they
would, even if they could, enter upon the task
of passing judgment upon the verdict of the
world. Fashion may and does make rules which
cannot be broken with impunity, so far as the
pocket is concerned; it may even create an
extraordinary and exceptional interest in one
author to-day, and abandon him to-morrow,
and do many other wonderful things to cause
our unsympathetic neighbours to blaspheme;
but the romance of book-collecting would be no
romance were it stolidly kept at one dead level
of insensibility. To employ a homely
illustration—Fashion may decorate a house,
it can neither build one nor raze one to the
ground.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE RULES OF THE CHASE.

There was a time, and that not so very
many years ago, when old books were, if
only you got out of the central mart, difficult
to procure, and by no means easy to store.
They were frequently in folio, huge ponderous
works which, unless they were of the very best,
challenged the courage of all but veterans, as they
looked down from their dark corners. There
was no escaping them, no getting away from their
costly presence, and no reading them either without
sitting at a table; for ‘literary machines’ were
not then invented, and no one seemed to care about
lingering with arched back over a fire, with sixty
or eighty pounds weight of paper on his knees.
Such a discipline would have been valuable, no
doubt, but learning grew lazy when it left the
monasteries, and a table became a virtual
necessity for most folk. After a time folios were
turned into octavos, and the price cheapened.
The ‘extraneous Tegg,’ as Carlyle calls the
well-known bookseller, and our friends Cooke, Walker,
Bell, and many more, commenced to cut the throat
of the trade, and to ruin the honest author, by
printing favourite books at such a very cheap rate
that the public soon became totally demoralized.
Cooke made an enormous fortune—for a
book-seller—and died amid the plaudits of the mob
and the curses of his competitors, for he had
out-Heroded Herod in prostituting ‘Tom Jones,’ a
thing deemed impossible, by publishing the text
in numbers, verbatim et literatim, at a scandalously
cheap price. Then he approached other ‘British
novelists’ in turn, and went through the entire
pantheon, winding up with a series of sacred
classics. Cooke was a man of immense resource,
and no scruples; he got the author out of the
way (I don’t say he murdered him), sold up his
rivals, and positively lived to an advanced
age—three crimes which procured him hosts of enemies,
but nevertheless altered the whole system of
publishing, and solved for ever the problem whether it
is better or worse for the producer to sell fifty
articles at a penny each, or a single one of the same
kind for four and two.

Now, Cooke’s procedure, and that of the other
booksellers who were wise enough to follow his
lead, not only had great influence in moulding
the character of the bibliophiles of that day, but
is directly responsible even now for many of
those rules and regulations which their descendants
are sticklers in the preservation of. A folio
had always been bound in a manner suitable to its
bulk, and in such a way as to render a new
binding unnecessary for a very long time, and
there was, consequently, little or no necessity for
rules of any kind for its preservation. When the
folio was hoisted to its place, there it would stop,
or, if taken down, it would be with a considerable
amount of caution.

Not so Cooke’s cheap and easily handled
productions. They were light and airy, and bound
in millboard, which, after a moderate use, never
failed to come to pieces. As a matter of fact,
nearly all Cooke’s books met with on the stalls
to-day show unmistakable evidence of honest
handling. They are thumbed, perhaps torn, and
always very feeble in the cover. Should it have
been worth anyone’s while to rebind one of
these cheap little volumes, we may be sure that
it will show a stout leather cover, and be
scrupulously cut down to the headlines for the sake of
the shavings. This cropping of margins was no
crime then, because there was no rule to the
contrary, and Cooke turned out his books in such
numbers that they were really of very trifling
value at any time. Before his day, it was a
common practice for the publishers themselves to
have their books bound in leather, and for the
binders to cut as much of the margins away as
they decently could.

For instance, let us revert to ‘Tom Jones,’ one
of the first books experimented upon by the
first of really cheap publishers. When this
novel came out, in 1749, it made its appearance
in six small volumes bound uniformly in leather,
with edges more or less cropped. This cropping
process seems to have pleased Fielding immensely,
or at any rate there is no doubt in the world that
he preferred to see his handiwork issued in the
way common to folios, rather than in boards with
ragged edges, for a sample set of volumes was
done up in the latter style and rejected.

We think him foolish, because not very long
ago the sample set was discovered in an old
farmhouse, and, after changing hands once or twice,
packed off to the auction-rooms, where it realized
the handsome sum of £69. A little bit of paper
made an immense difference in this case, for its
presence was in conformity with an imperative
rule that has grown up since Fielding’s day, and
which lays it down that never—no, never—must
a book be denuded of its margins if you wish
to make the most of it. Whatever its quality,
do not deprive it of the minutest fraction of
its legitimate area of paper. Of course, this
drastic regulation came into force when books
began to be generally published, not in folio
or quarto, but in a smaller and more handy size.

Collectors, whether of books or anything else,
are content at first with a little. Their
requirements are indeed boundless, so far as number is
concerned; but they have not yet become solicitous
of technical or minute distinctions. A book
is a book, and a coin is a coin, and they are
satisfied without it, provided it is substantially
the same as some other copy of the same edition,
or some other coin struck from the same die,
which they happen to have. After a while,
however, a very natural desire to excel produces its
inevitable result, and all sorts of arbitrary
variations are catalogued and insisted upon by those
who have plenty of money, and at the same time
pride themselves on their discrimination and
taste. Thus it is that a comparatively scarce
book, this first edition of ‘Tom Jones,’ for
instance, may become excessively scarce under
exceptional circumstances. True, the collector
who is a terrible stickler for detail may, and
probably will, be charged sooner or later with
being a fool for his pains; but that penalty he
is content to accept, happy in the consciousness,
that, when everything is said and done, he has
chosen the better part, which in all these cases
consists in leaving well alone.

Not long ago a London newspaper, which
ought to have known better, was very angry
with a collector of the circumspect school because
he had boasted that all the books in his library
were ‘uncut.’ ‘This shows,’ said the sage who
wrote the article, ‘that he has a hundred or more
books which he has never read, and, what is
worse, has no intention of reading.’ He thought
that ‘uncut’ meant ‘not cut open,’ and perhaps
thinks so still, for it was worth no one’s while
to teach him his business, and so the matter
dropped.

The cropping of books has, indeed, become
as iniquitous as the old Star Chamber practice
of cropping of ears, or perhaps even more so, for
some at least of the delinquents who appeared to
the usual Writ of Rebellion, which it was the
practice of that tribunal to issue from time to
time, richly deserved all they got. The proper
way to deal with a book is to burn it if it be
wicked, and if not, to leave it alone; though, if
this fact had always been recognised, there would
have been no scope for us in the matter of broad
expanse of margin, since what everybody has no
one craves for.

Fine bindings are a law unto themselves, and
require separate consideration; but there is a
matter connected with bindings generally, or,
rather, with the advisability of binding at all, which
has created a considerable amount of scandal in
times past. Let us take that scarce book, ‘The
English Dance of Death,’ which William Combe
wrote in the safe seclusion of the King’s Bench
Prison. It appeared originally in 1815 in parts,
each with its wrapper, and afterwards was bound
up in two volumes, whereupon it at once lost,
according to present-day ideas on the subject,
five-sixths of its value.

The ‘Tale of Two Cities’ when in the original
eight parts is worth three times as much, at
least, as when in the publisher’s cloth binding,
and nearly all Thackeray’s more important works
are subject to a very considerable reduction under
identical circumstances. Curiously enough, the
rule is imperative in certain specific instances,
while in others it has no application at all. The
question whether to apply it or not depends on the
character of the book. We should insist upon the
parts being left unbound in the case of ‘Bells and
Pomegranates,’ but not in that of Trusler’s 1833
edition of ‘Hogarth Moralized,’ for here the
twenty-six parts are a positive nuisance unless
they are bound. Trusler’s melancholy production
is not much good, bound or unbound, but it will
serve as an illustration, and certain it is that the
cost of binding will have to be taken into
consideration when estimating the worth of the
numbers, in case anyone thrusts them upon a
long-suffering purchaser, and will not be denied.

‘Fools you are!’ says Sir Ensor Doone, under
other circumstances, and ‘Idiots!’ adds the man
in the street when he reads that somebody has
paid a large sum for ‘Ask Mamma’ in the
‘original thirteen parts,’ when he could, had he
been so minded, have got the entire book, nicely
bound, for a fourth of the money—plates, text,
and all. This is the cry whenever a sum which
appears exorbitant on the face of it is paid for
anything.

A short time ago £445 was obtained for a
fiddle by Stradivari; £798 for an imperfect silver
cup made by Jacob Frolich, master of Nuremberg
in 1555; and £246 odd for a rose-point flounce
of Venetian lace three yards long. Nothing was
said about the enormity of these sums, but let a
fiftieth part of the smallest amount be realized at
any time for a book ‘in parts,’ and there is a
chorus of disapprobation, for which, however, it
must be confessed, there is just a modicum of
warrant.

It is really not at all easy to see why a series of
numbers, liable at any moment to injury, and
always inconvenient to handle, should, the quality
of the plates, if there are any, and other
accessories being equal, be so greatly preferred to a
volume bound in a proper manner. Perhaps it is
a matter of sentiment, perhaps of pure scarcity, or
perhaps the bonâ-fide book-collector likes to give
himself as much trouble as he possibly can, by
way of purifying his life and chastening his soul.
However this may be, there is no question that
some books are thought more highly of when in
sections, and that the public in their blindness
fail to see the reason why.

Well, there is, at any rate, much less reason,
one would think, in paying £246 for a lace flounce
wherewith to minister to the vanity of some
middle-aged dame than there is for incurring a
fractional obligation for classic works, which will
outlast us by many a day, even though they may
have the fortune to be uncut and in parts as
issued. And besides, O shade of Mr. Burgess! did
you not ignore in your lifetime the rule that it
were best to let well alone, and were not the
consequences terrible in the extreme?[#]

[#] The library of the late Mr. Frederick Burgess was sold
by Messrs. Sotheby on May 31 and three subsequent
days, 1894. It consisted almost entirely of then
‘Fashionable’ books, illustrated by Cruikshank and other talented
artists. Parts had been bound up, original cloth covers
removed, and expensive bindings substituted, not merely in
a few instances, but as a general rule. The collection,
though an excellent one of its kind, was disposed of at an
enormous sacrifice.

Whether any regulations are really necessary
for the proper preservation of books old or new
let the bibliophiles determine; but so long as they
exist it is folly to ignore them. Nay, further, to
be as far upon the safe side as possible, we must
prefer to buy our books with due regard to those
rules and orders which our progenitors have in
their wisdom drawn up, selecting the very best
copies we can afford to pay or obtain credit for,
and even going to the length of investing in
‘parts’ which shall not shame us, or cause us
loss when the inevitable hour of parting arrives.

The cardinal rule of the game is triple-headed,
and it is this: Buy the best you can, spend what
you find convenient without stint, and, above all,
keep to the track you have mapped out for yourself
and have so far followed. Then will it be
well with you now and hereafter in all things
bookish. Act the contrary throughout, and every
stiver you spend will swell the total of your
confusion; drop by drop the clepsydra of your
fortunes will run out to your bane.

But the rules which hem in the book-buyer,
and direct his course, are not solely confined
to technical points and details such as those
mentioned. On the contrary, they are equally
stringent in many other respects, and in
particular as to the description of book to buy, its
condition, and so on; for it is taken for granted
that no man, or at least no bookman worthy the
name, would purchase a bad or inferior edition
when he could get a better, or a volume that was
imperfect or had been shamefully used by a
succession of careless owners. Between the
quality of one edition and another there is often
an immense difference, as all the world knows, or
ought to know. That edition of ‘”Paradise
Lost,” a Poem in twelve books, the author John
Milton, Printed for the Proprietors and sold by
all the Booksellers,’ no date, but about 1780, is
one of the very worst that any misguided man
ever picked up from a street stall. The mistakes,
not merely in punctuation, but in spelling, are
too gross and scandalous for mention; entire lines
are not infrequently missing, and whole sentences
often perverted. Contrast this with any copy of
the first edition, no matter which title-page may
have heralded it into the world, and we have a
different book entirely. The rule says that,
though an ordinary copy of the first edition may
be three thousand times as valuable in money as
this gutter abortion, you must nevertheless not
be attracted by the latter because it is cheap—no,
not even though you should think it good enough
for everyday use.

Naturally enough there are free-lances among
book-men, people who are a law unto themselves,
and insist upon doing precisely as they like, but
it will be noticed that they very rarely fly in the
face of any rule in important cases. Your
free-lance has the courage of the Seven Champions of
Christendom when face to face with Stackhouse’s
‘History of the Bible,’ but let him, for example,
come across ‘Tamerlaine, and other Poems, By
a Bostonian;’ not Herne Shepherd’s London
reprint, but the original tract which Calvin
F. S. Thomas printed at Boston in 1827. Let us
suppose also that it is in its original tea-tinted
paper covers, just as Edgar Allen Poe sent it
forth into the world. What would our free-lance
do? Have it rebound in defiance of the rule?
Hardly, for if he did he would reduce the
importance of his exceptionally fortunate find, and
therefore its value, to such a considerable extent
that even he would hesitate long before
committing himself to an act that could never be
recalled. Moreover, he would have direct
evidence with regard to a copy of this very
Pamphlet before his eyes, for a collector once
really did pick one up for a few pence. In the
first place, let it be stated that only three copies
of ‘Tamerlaine’ can now be traced. One is in
the British Museum, which acquired it from the
late Mr. Henry Stevens for one shilling. A second
was found on a stall in America for the equivalent
of something less, and it is this latter copy which
furnishes the evidence referred to. The fortunate
finder sent it to Messrs. C. F. Libbie and Co.,
the auctioneers of Boston, who sold it by auction
in 1893 for the equivalent of £370 to the agents
of Mr. George F. Maxwell, of New York, who had
the pamphlet rebound in magnificent style by
Lortic Fils, at a cost of several hundred dollars.
Moreover, the covers were bound in, and the
edges left untrimmed. No expense was spared;
everything was done in proper order according to
rule of thumb. Yet in April, 1895, when
Mr. Maxwell’s valuable library was sold by the same
auctioneers, this copy of ‘Tamerlaine,’ vastly
improved as one might think, dropped to £290,
showing a clear loss of £80, irrespective altogether
of the amount paid for binding, auctioneers’
commission, and so on.

It may, of course, be said that it is a common
thing for the same book to bring different amounts
at different times, even when the sales take place
within a few months of each other. A bookseller,
dissatisfied with the amount bid for some scarce
work he has put on the market, will frequently
buy it in and offer it again later on with
satisfactory results.

But ‘Tamerlaine’ is an altogether exceptional
piece, and, moreover, where were the gentlemen
who respectively bid £360 and £365 on the
occasion when Mr. Maxwell secured it for a slightly
larger sum? Wherever they were, they seem to
have been fully alive to the fact that
‘Tamerlaine’ was not as it was when Poe sent it out for
review ever so many years ago. ‘Ah, broken is
the golden bowl,’ and it is to be feared by that
talented binder, Lortic Fils. If ever I find
‘Tamerlaine,’ I shall keep every binder at arm’s
length, and not be tempted to paint the lily—no,
not even though Derome himself should rise from
the dead and offer to array it gratuitously in
morocco, tooled to a heavenly pattern, and
powdered all over with the fleurs-de-lys of imperial
France. In this spirit let us reproduce the
title-page of ‘Tamerlaine,’ as a Frontispiece to this
Romance, so that we shall know it on the instant
if the gods should only guide our feet to where
a fourth copy lies hidden away. Then let us
remember the rule to let well alone, and be thankful,
for it is a rule of gold, the first and foremost
of them all.

Never to outrage sentiment, always to identify
one’s self with the author as far as possible, is to
respect both the living and the dead, and to make
life comparatively easy, even though its path be
strewn with flints and cobble-stones. May the
person who has the maximum of respect for the
private life and character of one of the greatest
of modern poets eventually acquire the shabby
copy of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ which the
luckless half-immortal thrust into his pocket as
the Don Juan was sent to the bottom of the Gulf
of Genoa. It will come with a train of associations
that will on the instant forbid the elimination
of a single stain, or the slightest repair of its
sea-swept cover.

The book-hunter who has the feelings and
aspirations of an ancient race properly diffused
through his system would almost give his head
for a relic such as this, for his passion is not to
be stifled. He likes to think that the books he
reads and handles have a pedigree, that they
come to him laden with the fears and aspirations
of the past, that they are ghost-haunted, and that
they who wrote them, though dead, yet speak, not
as man to man, but as soul to soul.

CHAPTER IX.

THE GLAMOUR OF BINDINGS.

There being in very truth no new thing
under the sun, it would be egotistical in
the highest degree, and absurd, to assert
positively that the argument about to be advanced
is at all novel, though it may certainly appear
strange. It is, however, original so far as I am
concerned, for I have not seen it hinted at before
by anyone, much less carried to a conclusion.
Whether there be any warrant for it or no is a
point for others, who have a greater capacity for
distinguishing reason in probabilities than I can
lay claim to, to determine for themselves.

It is admitted by all writers who have studied
the subject of bookbinding from its historical
aspect, that, as the monks of the Middle Ages
were the sole producers of books, so also they
were the only binders, and that the record of
their achievements dates from about 520 A.D.,
when Dagæus, the Irish monk, practised his art,
to the invention of printing from movable types by
Gutenberg and Fust nearly a thousand years later.
Not merely in England, but all over Europe, the
monks were practically the sole custodians of
knowledge during the earlier part of this period;
they alone produced books, they alone bound
them, they alone could read them. There were,
no doubt, laymen who could read and write, but
neither accomplishment was general in the outer
world. King Alfred (A.D. 870) was a scholar;
William the Conqueror, two centuries later, could
neither read nor write.

The Stowe MS. No. 960 contains all that
remains of the register of Hyde Abbey,
Winchester, from the time of King Canute, one of its
earliest benefactors, to the Dissolution. Among
the many interesting articles in this Stowe
manuscript there is one which exceeds all the rest
in interest, for it bears the actual cross, sign
or signature made by William in testimony that
he had granted 9 hides of land to the monks, in
exchange for the site of the cemetery in the city of
Winchester. The King has drawn with a quill a
rude and most illiterate cross, if such a thing can
be imagined. The ink has not flown evenly from a
pen evidently held in a perpendicular position with
tremulous and infirm grip. Each line begins with
a splutter, and at the point of intersection there is
what looks suspiciously like a blot. It is obvious
at the first glance that King William, though a
man of many accomplishments eminently useful
in those days, was accustomed to wield the
battle-axe rather than the pen. And this was so general
for centuries after his day that, but for the monks,
there would have been no learning at all, and no
books all that time.

It is unnecessary to refer to this phase of the
matter further than to say that all the ancient and
medieval European manuscripts which still exist
were written by ecclesiastics, and doubtless bound
by them as well. Manuscripts of the ninth
century, beautifully encased in ivory, silver and
gold, and sometimes encrusted with precious
stones, are still extant. These are undoubtedly
monkish, and the question arises, What has
become of the vast bulk of which these are but a
remnant? What has become of the old English
libraries that existed in hundreds at the time of
the Reformation? Were they, all but a very
few, wantonly destroyed by those who undertook
the spoliation of the monasteries, or did many
escape them? and if so, where are they now?
The suggestion that innumerable volumes, particularly
those which were handsomely and expensively
bound, would never be seen by the raiders at all
is not so improbable as it may at first sight appear,
when we come to consider the facts.

In November, 1534, an Act of Parliament
declared that ‘the King’s Highness was the
supreme head of the Church of England, and had
authority to reform and redress all errors, heresies,
and abuses in the same.’ This Act was speedily
followed up, for in 1535 Cromwell, in his capacity
of Vicar-General, proceeded to make a visitation
of the monasteries, where he is said to have found
such evidences of shameless immorality that
another Act was passed, transferring such of
these establishments to the Crown as were not of
the annual value of £200.

The number of religious houses at this time
dissolved, raided and sacked amounted to 376.
With diabolical minuteness the revenues of each
and all were estimated to the last penny. Bangor
was worth £151 3s., and was accordingly seized
on the spot. St. David easily escaped for the time
being, for the revenue of that monastery proved
to be £426 2s. 1d. St. Asaph, being assessed at
£202 10s., escaped an early wreck by £2 10s. It
was the same all over England and Wales. The
revenue was estimated, and if it fell below £200,
the monastery was at once filled with armed men,
while Cromwell’s experts stripped the walls of
their arras, seized the gold and silver vessels,
tore up the books, scoured the neighbourhood
round about for game, tapped the vintage, and
thoroughly enjoyed themselves in their own
peculiar way.

It is recorded that priceless books and
manuscripts were wantonly destroyed, tombs
sacrilegiously broken to pieces for the sake of the
metal, often merely lead or brass, that extolled
the virtues or the lineage of those who slept
below; silver and gold plate of exquisite
workmanship, and of a degree of antiquity rarely, if
ever, seen now, were melted down and sold by
weight; buildings of an architectural beauty
unsurpassed anywhere were wantonly defaced, and
in many cases dismantled, for the sake of the
materials, and in the midst of this disgraceful
scene of plunder and desecration, the destroyers
fought with one another as desperately as Roman
gladiators of the days of Nero, for the possession
of some coveted jewel or ornament that all wanted
and only one could have.

Now here comes the crux of the argument.
Only the smaller houses were dissolved at this
time, and unless human nature were totally
different in the days of Henry VIII. from what it
is now, unless the Abbots of Furness, Bolton,
Fountains, and other large and extremely rich
monasteries, looked on unmoved while their
humbler brethren were stripped to the skin and
flung destitute into the lanes and ditches to die,
then it is morally certain that they would take
steps to protect themselves, as far as lay in their
power, from the fury of the storm which they
must have known would shortly burst over their
heads. Unless they were wholly infatuated, they
would cautiously and gradually remove their
choicest possessions, their basins, images,
censers, crucifixes and chalices, and above all their
precious volumes, with which the very history and
fortunes of the abbey were associated, and bury
them deep down, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet,
under the walls.

The ruin brought at this time upon all that was
priceless by reason of its antiquity and associations
is incalculable, and the only ray of consolation
let in upon these dark days’ doings is that
the Abbots of the larger monasteries, taking
warning from what they saw going on all around,
may have buried their choicest possessions, where,
perhaps, they will be found some of these days,
when the plough shall furrow up the dust of
Furness or Denever.

Many of the inventories taken by the King’s
agents are extant. One of them, that of Fountains,
taken just before the Dissolution, will suffice
to show what is meant. The value of all the plate,
gold and silver, amounted to £708 5s. 9-3/4d.—a
comparatively small sum, seeing that the cattle,
sheep and swine belonging to the abbey were of
much greater value. Not a single book of any
kind is scheduled, and yet the library of Fountains
was at one time the most extensive and important
in Yorkshire. As the Knights Templars buried
their gold under the high altar in the church of
the New Temple, yet standing within sound of the
roar of Fleet Street, in order to protect it against
the rapacity of Edward I., so it is suggested that
the Abbots of Fountains and other surviving
houses buried their treasures in the most sacred
place they could think of, thereby handing them
over, as it were, to God and the right, rather
than abandon them to the tender mercies of man.

Now, this is merely an argument based upon
probability; it cannot, from the very nature of
the case, be supported by a scrap of evidence, and
yet it carries with it such a ring of truth in my
ears that, were I the happy owner of one of those
fast-crumbling piles which still rear their rugged
fronts to the sky, I would, by all the enamels of
Limoges, by the ivory, gold and silver, and rubies
which make up this glamour of bindings unseen,
put the argument to the test without hesitation
and regardless of cost.

Monastic bindings of English workmanship
are not, as we may well understand, distinguished
as a rule for extreme beauty. The gorgeous
covers that protected illuminated manuscripts,
themselves extremely valuable, were in vogue at a
very early period, long before the invention of
printing, and the vast majority were probably
either hidden away as suggested, or destroyed.
In any case, however, they must have been rare
even a thousand years ago—as rare, indeed, as
the exceptionally fine missals and breviaries they
protected, some of which would take a monk his
lifetime to produce. We find that by the
fourteenth century monastic bindings were usually
serviceable and plain, and that it was only
occasionally that rich materials were employed, as,
for example, when a King’s library was added
to, or some important monastery gave a special
order by way of continuing the traditions of the
house, and showing that time had not in any
way curtailed its glories. The most interesting
ancient bindings that yet survive to us consist of
a specimen of the work of the monk Dagæus,
which dates from about 520 A.D., and a
manuscript known as the ‘Textus Sanctus Cuthberti,’
bound in velvet with a broad silver border, and
inlaid with gems, by the first English binder, one
Bilfred, a monk of Durham, who was living at the
beginning of the eighth century. This is the
holy volume that was swallowed up by the sea,
and, according to the old legend, restored out of
respect for the memory of the saint, or perhaps
that of the monk or both.

We have, therefore, two styles of monastic
bindings—one resplendent in gold, ivory, and
precious stones, and the other of a more sober
character for ordinary and daily use. The latter
were of wood covered with embossed leather, or
with plain shark skin, or even seal. They were
ponderous, massive folios of great weight and
durability, protected in vulnerable parts with
brass or iron bosses and corner-plates. We find
them produced as a matter of course to about the
time of the Renaissance, when they gradually
gave place to smaller books bound in velvet or
silk, and embroidered by abbesses and nuns, and
so the custom prevailed until the days of the first
printers, when calf and morocco were introduced
from the East by the Venetians, and pigskin or
thick parchment became fashionable. Prior to
this time oaken boards formed the groundwork of
every binding, and to this day the word ‘boards’
is in general use, although the reason for its
existence obtains no longer.

The Italians were the first to awaken to a
sense of the propriety of things, and the modern
collector to whom bindings appeal with an irresistible
force instinctively turns to the first Italian
era to supply him with some of the rarest and
choicest examples of the art. The commoner
monastic bindings have no beauty in his eyes, and
those of a superior order and more costly finish
are practically interred within the walls of great
public institutions, from which they will, in the
nature of things, never emerge. For some reason
or other the finest binding loses its glamour, if
not its interest, when exhibited in a glass case.
We must have these things for our own before
we can appreciate them to the full. What more
melancholy mortal than a public curator trying
to work himself up into a state of enthusiasm as
he describes the objects committed to his care?
They are mere pots and pans and ‘things,’ but
yet how different if he had them all at home!

But to return to our bindings. Let it be
observed that with the invention of printing, and
the consequent production of books in a more
portable form, the modern style of binding was
gradually introduced. These were the days of
deep-toned leathers, ornamented in gold and
variegated colours, and executed for wealthy and
powerful Italian families, who employed skilful
artists to draw the designs, often consisting of
geometrical interfacings or foliage, such as Maioli
and Grolier rejoiced in.

This style of ornamenting leather came from
the East, as did the Saracenic rope ornament,
which was perhaps the first design to take the
fancy of Italian workmen. The general appearance
of this rope design reminds one of the
frontispiece to a certain ‘Biography of Jack Ketch,’
which someone brought out a few years ago. The
half-length portrait of the hero is within a
graceful border of ropes intertwined, there are ropes
tumbling from the clouds, and he holds a rope in
his hand, as if ready to begin. Behind, so far as
my memory serves me, there is the frowning
portal of Newgate, festooned with fetters. A
panel of Saracenic rope-design set on end reminds
one of this frontispiece, and we listen instinctively
for the tolling of the prison bell.

The celebrated printer Aldus Manutius seems
to have been the first to rebel against such
sinister designs as these, and, moreover, he was
the friend of Jean Grolier and Thommaso Maioli,
princes among book-lovers, and artists by nature.
Aldus often bound the books he printed in smooth,
rich morocco, tooled in gold to various patterns
of elaborate design, and to him we doubtless owe
much of the improvement in binding which
became so marked at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. His were, indeed, publishers’
bindings produced by rule of thumb, but they are
not on that account less worthy of interest, for the
name of Aldus is one to conjure with in all things
bookish.

The Thommaso Maioli to whom reference has
been made exercised a much greater influence
than Aldus ever did in the matter of bindings, for
his were the models on which were fashioned the
designs of later collectors, not merely of Italy,
but of France and other European countries.
Maioli’s designs are free and open, in a style
suggestive of Eastern influence, but reduced to
earth and reality by perpendicular and perfectly
straight lines. His library was open to his friends,
and most of his books were lettered on the covers
‘Tho. Maioli et amicorum,’ qualified sometimes
by other words of different import, ‘Ingratis
servire nephas.’ Very likely Maioli was on
occasion the victim of some too ardent bibliophile,
who would think nothing of borrowing, and
perhaps also of some Philistine, who left ruin in
the trail of his dirty or heavy fingers.

So, too, Jean Grolier, whom Dibdin ludicrously
turns into a bookbinder, but who was, in fact, the
French contemporary and twin soul of Maioli,
chose to follow the traditions of all true
book-lovers, and his covers also bear the courteous
invitation to friends, ‘Io Grolierii et amicorum,’
though he too found occasion to alter it from time
to time.

The bindings of Maioli and Grolier, worked out
and finished most probably at Venice for the most
part, are highly valued by collectors all over the
world, and they are indeed worthy of all the
attention they receive.

The bindings of Maioli are more difficult to
meet with than those of Grolier, because the
library of the latter numbered some 8,000 volumes,
and was eventually sold by auction and dispersed
broadcast. Grolier’s descendants had no false
sentiment in their composition; the ‘amici’ were
themselves, and they acted in their own interests,
in strict accordance with their interpretation of
the family motto. Besides, in those days, though
the love of books raged furiously in isolated
breasts, in general it was cold, and no one could
probably have been found to take over the entire
library, or even that considerable portion of it
which at the last lay among the dust and cobwebs
of the Hôtel de Vic.

Rarer than any of this period, however, are the
medallion bindings of Demetrio Canevari, physician
to Pope Urban VII., who was living in the year
1600. In all probability Canevari merely inherited
his books, for their covers belong to an earlier
period. Still, whatever the fact in this respect,
they are called after his name, and are very scarce,
notwithstanding that the whole library was intact
at Genoa until 1823. Libri thought that these
delicate and elaborate bindings had never been
surpassed, and certainly they are very beautiful,
with their cameos in gold, silver, and colours
enriched with classical portraits and mythological
scenes.

But to the lover of bindings it is Grolier, Grolier,
Grolier; from the haunting music of that name
there is no escape, and, moreover, Grolier even in
death was great. The Emperor Charles V. did
not disdain to follow his taste, while Francis I. was
completely carried away by it, his bindings,
as soon as he could shake off the early influence
of Etienne Roffet, being magnificently Grolieresque,
blazing with gold and the brightest colours.
Then came Henri II. and the accomplished
Diane de Poictiers, whose emblems, the crescent
moon, the bow, quiver and arrows of the chase,
are invariably found associated with the initial of
the King. Diane was the royal mistress, and
seems to have had a passion for blending the two
linked D’s with the regal H. This joint
monogram was on the walls and furniture of her
Château of Anet, and still stares us out of
countenance occasionally from behind glass doors.
Diane, however, so long as she had it in her
power—that is to say, until 1559, when the King
died—did everything she could to introduce a
taste for magnificent and sumptuous bindings
into France; to eclipse once and for all time the
efforts of every book-lover who had preceded her.
In a measure she succeeded, and certainly no good
books come to us, when they come at all, which
is but seldom, breathing more of romance than
these volumes which Diane treasured till her
dying day, in spite of Court frowns and
persecution. Her library, which was a very extensive
one, remained intact at Anet until 1723, when it
was sold.

It would be almost an endless task to name all
the patrons of artistic bindings who lived in
France up to about the time of the Revolution.
There was the legitimate Queen of Henri II.,
Catherine de Medicis, a descendant of the great
Lorenzo, called the Magnificent, whose books are
often covered in white calf, powdered with golden
flowers. This lady was an enthusiastic book-lover,
who, when she died, left a library of some
4,000 volumes, most of which are still to be seen
in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Then we must not forget her son, Francis II.,
who married the unfortunate Mary, Queen of
Scots. His bindings, whether stamped with the
golden dolphin or with a monogram in which his
own and the Queen’s initials are interlaced, are
extremely scarce, and worth much gold. Francis
was only seventeen when he died, and had,
consequently, no time to become thoroughly saturated
with the intense longing for beautiful decorations
which probably did much to set Catherine de
Medicis and the fair Diane by the ears. His
younger brother, afterwards Henri III., had
greater opportunities for indulging his tastes in
this respect, and the history of his bibliopegic
life, so to speak, is full of strange surprises.

Like all other bindings with a history, specimens
from the library of this gloomy and taciturn
monarch are very rarely met with. They are
distinctly worth looking at, however, especially by
those of a morbid turn of mind. They are more
suggestive than the Saracenic rope style, and
infinitely more eloquent of woe. Henri ought to
have married the Princess Condé, but she died,
and the young King, then about twenty-four years
old, and apparently influenced by the example of
his father and mother, turned for consolation to
his library, and the designing of emblems
congenial to his mood.

These consist, at least at this period, when his
grief was young and fresh, of skulls garnished with
cross-bones, tears, and other emblems of the
grave. They are, in their way, absolutely unique,
and much more remarkable than the curled snake
of Colbert or the three towers of Madame de
Pompadour. The bindings of Henri III., though
uncongenial to most tastes, are of excellent design
and workmanship, for Nicholas and Clovis Eve
were living in his day, and better artists than
they proved themselves to be it would be hopeless
to look for. It was one or other of the brothers
who introduced the fanfare style, which resolved
itself finally into a profusion of small flourished
ornaments, so closely worked together that a
volume bound in this way looked as though
picked out ethereally with sprays, scrolls, and
showers of golden rain. The fanfare style was,
so it is said, introduced to put an end to the
suicidal gloom that had overtaken the Court of
Henri III.

That monarch, though a bad man, was probably
the most original thinker in the matter of
bindings who ever lived, for De Thou’s plan of
inventing a fresh design every time he got married
resolved itself into nothing more than a series of
heraldic changes, and De Thou is generally credited
with a considerable amount of ingenuity, and
regarded as a person distinctly worth collecting on
account of the variations in which he is found,
and for other reasons. Every book which touches,
however remotely, on the subject of bindings
never fails to give the armorial bearings of
De Thou at different periods of his life; and we
must pass on to Marguerite de Valois; not the
celebrated Queen of Navarre who wrote the
‘Heptameron’ in her youth, but the daughter of
Henri II., already mentioned as a great lover of
bindings. Marguerite very appropriately, having
regard to the origin of her name, chose designs of
daisies, which she placed in oval compartments
bearing the quarterings of Valois, the whole being
surrounded with leafy and branching scroll-work.
Clovis Eve was her binder, and the work he
turned out at this period is in his best style.

The history of bookbinding takes a curious turn
at this epoch. Hitherto we have heard more of
the patron than of the artist, a state of things
which from this time forth exists no longer. I
would not commit myself to the assertion that
Marguerite de Valois, who, by the way, died in
1615, was the last of the great collectors who
eclipsed the reputation of the binders they
employed; but I know that about this period we
begin to hear more of the workman and less of
the patron. When everybody of the least
importance begins to collect books, and to have
them bound in specially designed covers, the
artist rises on the ashes of the amateur, whose
day is from that time forth over and gone, except
in the limited circle in which he moves. So it
was at the epoch which immediately followed the
death of Marguerite de Valois. The Eves had
forced their way into notice in spite of the
overwhelming presence of Henri II., Diane de
Poictiers and Charles IX., Henri III. and IV.,
and other less-exalted persons; and now Le
Gascon made his presence felt still more forcibly
than they.

Le Gascon, who is identified with one Florimond
Badier, introduced a style of ornamentation
known as pointillé, consisting of graceful
geometrical designs worked out with innumerable
minute gold dots, usually on a ground of bright
scarlet. The effect of a perfectly fresh and bright
binding by Le Gascon must have been brilliant in
the extreme; but, alas! the cost was something
phenomenal, and the style, after being parodied
and imitated by mechanical process, finally died
out in France some thirty-five years after its
introduction. Mazarin was the great patron of
Le Gascon, and many books which once
belonged to the great Cardinal are found with
ornamentation, arms and motto—’His Fulta
Manebunt’—laboriously picked out in the
beautiful pointillé style.

During the latter part of the sixteenth century,
and during the whole of the seventeenth, the
French bookbinders had no equal, and if they
afterwards deteriorated, they had still many
great names among their ranks. Padeloup’s
binding of a ‘Daphne et Chloe’ of 1718, with the
arms of the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of
France, is a masterpiece; and then there are his
bindings in mosaic, looking like lace-work, and
the masterly designs worked out for Madame de
Pompadour, Queen Maria Leczinska, and many
other celebrities. Derome, the Abbé Du Sueil,
and Monnier were all fine binders, whose work is
eagerly sought for. And then comes the French
Revolution, which for the time being seems to
have utterly demoralized art in all its branches.
Most modern collectors who affect notable
bindings have to look to later days, when the surge
and storm of the turmoil had passed away, and
when Thouvenin, Bauzonnet, Duru, Trantz, Lortic,
Marius-Michel, and many more, were in their prime.

English bindings, so far as past times are
concerned, were never remarkable for refinement or
taste. Velvet or silk, frequently embroidered and
tasselled, was often used for royal books, and we
also meet with pasteboard covered with leather
and studded with gilt ornaments on the back.
There is, however, not a trace of the genius of
Le Gascon or Derome in any of these productions,
and the designs show very little originality.
Occasionally, however, an English binding is
produced which, bound in morocco—the introduction
of which is placed to the credit of James I.—has
an extremely good effect, as in the case of the
‘Pontificale Romanum,’ 1595, now in the British
Museum. This specimen is elaborately gold-tooled
with the arms and badges of the King. A
facsimile of it will be found facing page 228 of
Mr. W. Salt Brassington’s ‘History of the Art of
Bookbinding.’ It is a clever and characteristic
piece of work in brown morocco, and gives a
very good idea of the highest form of English
art of the period which it was possible to produce.

The English, however, have never been at any
period particularly conspicuous for their talent in
the art of designing book-covers, and it is
probable that the majority of well-informed persons
who have not made a study of this branch of art
would, in case they were asked to enumerate half
a dozen good binders of English nationality, find
themselves unable to mention more than one.
They would begin and end with the talented but
eccentric and thirsty Roger Payne, whose
bindings are often original and elegant, and who
might, had he been able to keep himself respectable,
have attained an excellence worthy of the
palmy days of France. But Payne chose to live
in a tumbledown garret, denuded of plaster, and
spent his money in the proportion of

For bacon …. 1 half-penny

For liquor … 1 shilling

He was, moreover, dirty and ill-conditioned,
and the only thing that saved him from utter ruin
even in his youth was the painful necessity of
having to work for a very long time in order to
earn what any binder of the present day would
look upon as a trifle. Nevertheless, Payne was,
when he applied himself, a most conscientious
artist, and, although the owner of some costly
manuscript or volume would certainly have been
horrified to find it lying in a corner of his garret,
waiting its turn in company with an old shoe or
two, and the remains of the food which Payne
had been consuming a week or two before, yet he
might be sure that he would get his treasure back
in the end, not the worse for its company, but
bound in a style that could not be equalled
anywhere but in Paris, and not even there at the
same small cost.

Some of Payne’s bindings—for he had his
moods—are beautiful, classical, and surprisingly
artistic, and, notwithstanding his failing, it is clear
that he worked hard on occasion. In fact, it is the
opinion of many authorities that no English-born
binder has ever succeeded, from that day to this,
in approaching the genius of Payne. Walther,
Staggemeier, and Kalthoeber, though they worked
in London, were all Germans. Lewis may or
may not have equalled his predecessor, and the
same remark applies to Rivière and Bedford,
whose names, however, are too contemporary
to invite comparison. Besides, the question is
one of individual preference, after all, and any
binder, however excellent, may have to yield the
palm to another in some specific matters of
detail.

The glamour of a binding, indeed, vanishes
when criticism steps forward. The indescribable
something, which is at the same time everything,
falls to pieces the instant dissecting implements
are produced, and the effect is gone on the instant.
The whole work of art must be regarded, and no
single part of it, and we may then dream, if we
like, of all the strange things that happened when
it was ushered into the world. It is a pity that
antique and historic bindings are so extremely
difficult to procure. No one but a millionaire
could hope to stock his shelves with a representative
assortment of bindings of different epochs
and schools, and even he might spend his whole
life in searching for them.

There is something in a binding which fascinates,
and yet hurls back the inspired sneer of
Robbie Burns with interest:

‘Through and through the inspired leaves,

Ye maggots, make your windings;

But, oh! respect his lordship’s taste,

And spare his golden bindings.’

Yes! some bindings are of greater interest, from
every possible point of view, than the leaves they
protect, and but for their kindly care other leaves
which exist among our choicest possessions might
have been utterly destroyed. Many a book has
been saved from death by the glamour of its
cover, and will yet be saved.

CHAPTER X.

THE HAMMER AND THE END.

The past ten years have witnessed rather
more than 600 high-class sales of books
by auction in London alone, and the vast
majority of the collections dispersed to the winds
during that period of time were not fifty, nor
forty, and, at a venture, not thirty years old.
Nay! it would be tolerably safe to go still further,
and to say that the life of a library is, as a rule, less
than half that of a man. Though it may consist
of the products of antiquity, it has but a short
period of existence before it as a whole; and as
book is added to book, and manuscript to
manuscript, and the sum total of volumes of either
kind continues to increase, so, too, it is all but
certain that the closing scene of its dissolution
draws nearer and nearer to the end.

Generally speaking, the larger and more important
a collection, the shorter its life. There
are exceptions, but they only prove the rule, which
may fairly be described as universal. Books are
a valuable species of personal property, and
next-of-kin often prove unsympathetic and
unsentimental in the custody of them; besides, books
cannot be divided so satisfactorily as coin, and
the first and almost necessary step is to turn them
into money when an estate has to be distributed
among many. This is the reason why there are
so few great collections in the hands of private
individuals, and why they are in jeopardy every
day and hour.

In this respect, then, the life of a book is even
less than that of a man—an analogy which in no
wise minimizes the value of existence to either.
A good deal of enjoyment can be crowded into a
compass of thirty years, and much information
may be obtained in that period if only it be sought
for aright. To ask cui bono? is a beggarly
interrogatory which might with equal force be thrust
before all life’s actions, and I would not have it
supposed that in my opinion it is a proper or even
a satisfactory question to put where books are
concerned. I only deplore the fact that to
accumulate is usually to scatter the seeds of a
short-lived enjoyment which dies in October. Hence
it is that lovers of books have been known to
cheat time and the hour, and to gratify their own
inclinations as fully as possible, taking steps to
secure their treasures from the hammer and the
end, and have with these objects established
national libraries of the very utmost
importance—libraries which may certainly be destroyed in
some great conflagration or by the rush of shot
and shell, but can never be dispersed for the sake
of the money they would produce, and will
practically, therefore, remain intact for many
centuries.

This, it would seem, is really the only effectual
way of preserving the good and permanent things
of this life for the benefit of those who come
after us, for the hammer, though it never destroys
directly, does so indirectly, if it be a fact that the
whole is greater in every quality, save number,
than the parts which compose it. Here is an
instance of the contrary plan of hedging round
our possessions with stipulations and directions
designed for their preservation. Among the great
failures of book-men let this be chronicled.

The mind travels back some five or six years
to one of the high-priests of a fast-decaying cult.
He lodged at a farm-house which, being in the
direct path of advancing streets, has perhaps by
this time been pulled down. At the time of
which I speak it stood in an ocean of mud, not
far from the highroad—a relic in the midst of
surroundings so painfully new that few strangers
who wandered that way failed to pause at the
wicket-gate, and gaze on the thatched roof and
warped windows that time had doomed. Once
or twice a year, seldom oftener—for book-men of
the type of the one who held sway there hate to be
disturbed—I used to claim admission to the one
moderately large room that the house possessed.
Its walls were lined with books from floor to
ceiling, and a number of movable cases mapped
out the surface into narrow alleys. Some
thousands of volumes, all bound alike, and consisting
chiefly of historical works in English and Latin,
must have been here stored. There were many
rare books, and all were good of their kind, and
most had been well read. The ways of their
owner, the lifelong occupant of this crumbling
cottage, were peculiar. He would get up at ten
in the morning to the minute, and after breakfast
take a walk in the fields, or perhaps to the city,
returning at five precisely, winter and summer
alike. He was so accurate in his movements
that people used to set their watches by him, the
new clock being generally out of gear. At
half-past five he drank tea out of an enormous basin,
and smoked a clay pipe, which it was his pleasure
to light with a burning coal or at the chimney of
his lamp. Matches he detested, on account of
the sulphur, which, he said, fouled the tobacco
and made it unbearable. At seven the business
of the day commenced, and was continued till
two, and sometimes three, in the morning—the
business of reading hard without cessation, except
to take a pull at the basin or to fill and light the
pipe. Very pleasant were the winter evenings,
when the wind howled round the gables of the
house, as it often did, and the night was as black
as pitch. This had gone on for thirty years
without much, if any, variation, until one day the
bookworm was found dead at his post,
surrounded by the only real friends he had in the
world, for the safety of which he had provided as
follows:

By his will, made some twelve months previously,
he directed that the whole of his property
of every description, books excepted, should be
turned into money and divided between two
persons named in equal shares. The books he
bequeathed to another worm, who lived a mile or
two away, and who used occasionally to drop in
to compare notes, subject, however, to the express
condition that they should neither be sold nor
otherwise parted with, and be kept in the same
state in which they then were. For their further
preservation he directed that the legatee should
have the use of the books for his life only, and
that after his death they should become the
absolute property of a third person, at that time
comparatively young in years, a good scholar, and a
man of money. One would certainly have thought
that these precautions would have sufficed to
preserve this library intact for a very considerable
length of time; but, as events turned out, it was
carted off within a month and sold piecemeal by
auction to the highest bidders.

In the first place, it seems, the owner for life
had looked over the books, and not finding them
sufficiently representative of the particular branch
of study to which he devoted himself, went to the
reversioner and proposed a joint sale. The latter
demurred, not, indeed, to the general principle, but
to the suggested division of the proceeds. He said
that a life interest in the hands of a man of fifty
was worth less than a prospective inheritance of
the whole by one much younger, and in this he
was right. An actuary very quickly calculated
the shares, and then came the hammer and the end.

There are hundreds and thousands of such
cases, but not many bookworms of the type I
have mentioned. They are fast dying out, for
they belong to a very old school, which has no
part or lot in these go-ahead days. It would be
pitiable to hear a graybeard say farewell to a
class of boys, and to see him totter to the door,
which, as Epictetus says, is always open; and
still more pitiable would it be if we could enter
into his thoughts and regrets. Fortunately, we
are as yet spared the pain of such partings as
these, for our school is new—brand new—and
what few old-time book-men are left feel out of
place therein. Rather do they regard us in the
light of merry roisterers growing wise by painful
stages, whose presence is not as yet mellowed by
experience, nor sanctified by the touch of time.

And so there are two schools of book-men, one
closed to all but the very few, the other open to
all who choose to enter, and in each there is a
table laden with delights. But at the head of each
alike sits the skeleton of Egyptian orgies, veiled,
perhaps, after the manner of later and more
effeminate times, but still there. It is the same
skeleton that startled the Epicurean in the
heyday of his pleasures, and threatened him ere the
banquet was half over. So also it menaces us,
for it clutches a hammer, and we know that it
will very shortly proclaim

THE END.

Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London.

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF BOOK-COLLECTING ***