The Bibliotaph, and Other People

And Other People
LEON H. VINCENT
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1899
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY LEON H. VINCENT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO MY FATHER THE REV. B. T. VINCENT, D.D. THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS Dedicated WITH LOVE AND ADMIRATION
Four of these papers—the first Bibliotaph, and the notes on Keats, Gautier, and Stevenson’s St. Ives —are reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly by the kind permission of the editor.
I am also indebted to the literary editor of the Springfield Republican and to the editors of Poet-Lore , respectively, for allowing me to reprint the paper on Thomas Hardy and the lecture on An Elizabethan Novelist .
THE BIBLIOTAPH AND OTHER PEOPLE
A popular and fairly orthodox opinion concerning book-collectors is that their vices are many, their virtues of a negative sort, and their ways altogether past finding out. Yet the most hostile critic is bound to admit that the fraternity of bibliophiles is eminently picturesque. If their doings are inscrutable, they are also romantic; if their vices are numerous, the heinousness of those vices is mitigated by the fact that it is possible to sin humorously. Regard him how you will, the sayings and doings of the collector give life and color to the pages of those books which treat of books. He is amusing when he is purely an imaginary creature. For example, there was one Thomas Blinton. Every one who has ever read the volume called Books and Bookmen knows about Thomas Blinton. He was a man who wickedly adorned his volumes with morocco bindings, while his wife ‘sighed in vain for some old point d’Alençon lace .’ He was a man who was capable of bidding fifteen pounds for a Foppens edition of the essays of Montaigne, though fifteen pounds happened to be ‘exactly the amount which he owed his plumber and gas-fitter, a worthy man with a large family.’ From this fictitious Thomas Blinton all the way back to Richard Heber, who was very real, and who piled up books as other men heap together vulgar riches, book-collectors have been a picturesque folk.