GENERAL NOTES
THE Christie-Miller sale at Messrs. Sotheby's, postponed from November 28th to December 16th, realised the enormous total of £110,356, thus more than doubling the previous "record" for a single day's book-sale achieved at the Yates-Thompson sale last summer, the total of which was £52,000. The great majority of the items were acquired by Mr. G. D. Smith, the American buyer, who seemed to have learnt to think so imperially about book prices that very few English dealers or collectors were able to compete with him. For the most part the bidding resolved itself into a duel between Mr. Smith and Mr. Quaritch, Mr. Smith being almost invariably the victor.
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The highest price for a single lot—the highest price ever given for a single book or manuscript—was £15,100, which was paid for the minute vellum-bound volume containing Venus and Adonis, The Passionate Pilgrim, and Epigrammes and Elegies, by J. D. (Sir John Davies) and C. M. (Christopher Marlowe). The Venus and Adonis is the only copy known of the fourth edition of the poem; six copies of the first three editions exist, all of which are in public libraries. The Passionate Pilgrim is one of the three known copies of the first edition (1599), while only two or three copies are known to exist of the Epigrammes and Elegies, published at Middleborough (? 1598).
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Other Elizabethan books fetched very large prices. Greene's Arbasto (1584), a unique copy, went for £820; Gwydonius (1584) for £770; Morando (1584) for £680; Planetomachia (1585) for £900; and the unique copy of A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) for £1200. A copy of Tottel's Miscellany, second edition, fetched £2400; Nash's Unfortunate Traveller (1594), £680; and the first edition of The Paradyse of Dainty Devises, £1700. Copies of the Arcadia (1590) and of Astrophel and Stella (circa 1595) were sold for £1000 and £2700 respectively.
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The other Shakespeare lots were sold at less astonishing figures. A copy of the First Folio, slightly defective, sold for £2300; £2400 was given for a fine copy of the Third Folio, Much Ado About Nothing, the Quarto of 1600, sold for £2200; and The True Tragedie of Richard the Third, the anonymous play used by Shakespeare in producing his own Richard III., for £2000.
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The Heber Collection of broadsheets and ballads was purchased by Mr. Smith for £6400. This collection, comprising eighty-eight pieces, is a portion of the great collection, a larger collection, half of which passed, under the terms of Mr. Huth's will, to the British Museum. It contains many pieces of remarkable beauty and interest.
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Other interesting items in the sale were three minor works of the "Laureate," John Skelton, printed by Pynson, the three bound together in a single volume, which was bought for £1780; the Amoretti and Epithalamium of Spenser (1595), £1200; The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), £1280; Reynard the Fox (Caxton, 1481), £5900; The Cordyale, or the Four Last Things (Caxton, 1479), £1900; Tullye of Old Age (Caxton, 1481), £1800; Gray's Elegy (1751), £750; Paradise Lost (1667), £460.
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This sale marks the triumph and the reduction to the absurd of book-collecting. The absurdity of picture-dealing is already manifest; prices have long ceased to have the least relation to the merit of the work purchased. It is out of mere snobisme and not from any love of art that people will give fifty thousand pounds for a picture by a second-rate eighteenth-century artist. The same spirit has invaded the book-collecting world. The amateur who collects books out of a genuine love of literature had better retire as gracefully as he may. There is no place for him in the topsy-turvy universe where fifteen thousand pounds is paid for a little volume of poems. One left the sale with a curious feeling of bewilderment and indignation, almost vowing that one would never look at an old book again.
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The centenary of George Eliot was celebrated at Messrs. Hodgsons' by the sale of a first edition of Scenes of Clerical Life, a fine uncut copy. It went for £17. The library of the late James Nicol Dunn was disposed of at the same rooms. Mr. Dunn was a journalist whose career included the editorship of the Morning Post and that of the Johannesburg Star. In earlier years—he always retained some flavour of that association—he was Henley's assistant on the National Observer. He was thus in a position to obtain books, manuscripts, and autograph letters which have since become valuable. His Edinburgh set of Stevenson (accompanied by a note from Charles Baxter, "Louis will have nett complete about £5200 over this") went for £65, and a set of the Scots Observer and National Observer for £47. An inscribed copy of Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies sold for ten guineas, and three first editions, with letters, of John Davidson £5—which suggests that Davidson is at last getting a little notice from collectors.
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Among the autographs were several corrected proofs and typescripts of Mr. Kipling's. A freely corrected typescript of Tomlinson fetched £81, the MS. of Fuzzy-Wuzzy £50. Three manuscript poems of Henley's, with a letter from Mr. Yeats thrown in, brought only £6 10s. Still more surprising was the sale of Mr. Yeats's MS. of The Lake Isle of Innisfree, with another, for £5 15s. In a sale on the following day a first edition of The Shropshire Lad turned up: it was sold for £4.
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The Arbury Library, a portion of which is to be sold at Sotheby's on January 22nd, has an interest apart from the high rarity of many of the books which are to be sold; for these found their way to Arbury, not at the fancy of any individual collector of rare volumes—none of the Newdigates have been great book-collectors in this modern sense—but simply as current literature of the period in which they were published. The First Folio Shakespeare, for instance, which is described as "probably the largest available," has been at Arbury since 1660, when it belonged to Serjeant Newdegate, who was Chief Justice under Cromwell and was made a Baronet at the Restoration; and it is likely that it came into his possession or into that of the elder brother whom he succeeded soon after its publication in 1623. Sir Richard Newdegate's mother was Anne Fitton, sister to Mary Fitton, Queen Elizabeth's frolicsome and wayward maid-of-honour, whom a modern edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets has sought to identify with the Dark Lady. Family papers at Arbury give no support to the late Mr. Tyler's theory, and Mary Fitton's portraits there show her to have been fair rather than dark. It is probable that some of the volumes which are to be sold at Sotheby's were at Arbury when Mary Fitton found a home there with her sister, Lady Newdigate, after her disgrace at Court. No one whose interest in old books lies in their character, their history, and their associations rather than in the price which they may fetch under the hammer can fail to regret the fate by which these precious volumes are at length taken from the home in which they have stood side by side for some three centuries.
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Sounds unheard are the sweetest, and the books that were never written and the books that once existed and have been lost are by far the world's best books. Those chapters on Chambermaids and Buttonholes would have been the most amusing in Tristram Shandy; Milton's epic on King Arthur, great and glorious in itself, would also have nipped The Idylls of the King in the bud, thus earning our gratitude as well as our admiration. The lost books of the Satyricon were the best things Petronius ever wrote, and the vanished poems of Sappho—one dare not think of them.
And now we have news of yet another little work that has joined the great army of the lost. But not, we hope, for ever; for the volume can hardly fail to turn up some time, sooner or later, in some bookseller's shop or some collector's library. The history of this lost volume is not uninteresting, and we propose to quote at some length from an account of it furnished by the owner, Miss E. M. Green, of Modbury, Ivy Bridge, South Devon:
"In 1913 a MS. book fell into my hands, thought first to be a manuscript of Little Gidding, which proved, however, to be the work of the Rev. Richard White, Chaplain to the English nuns of St. Monica in Louvain from 1630 to 1687. This I published with Messrs. Longmans under the title of Celestial Fire. This volume contains in the preface an account of these Louvain Manuscripts, which are singularly beautiful specimens of seventeenth-century script. Consequent on this publication, the community of St. Augustine's Priory, Newton Abbot, who fled to England during the French Revolution, sent me a similar manuscript, Cordial Prayer, to be published also. It was a leather volume, 4 inches by 2¾ inches, 1 inch in depth, bound in holland with quaint brass clasps, and the top of the pages was a beautiful blue. Taking it from the inspection of the Keeper of MSS., British Museum, and from the MSS. Room home with me, I found on entering an omnibus in Sloane Street that I had lost it. It was tied in white paper with my address on the outside."
All efforts have so far, Miss Green tells us, proved unavailing, and no word can be heard of the lost volume. Perhaps some of our readers may have seen or heard of this interesting little manuscript.
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The hand-press and type used by the late Dr. Daniel in the production of the well-known Daniel editions have been presented by Mrs. Daniel to the Bodleian Library. The press has now been set up in the Picture Gallery of the Library with the chase, containing the last pages set up, still in place. A small collection of some of the more interesting books printed on it has been arranged on an adjoining table.
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We recently had the fortune to come across a copy of that very interesting edition of Louise Labé's works, published at Lyons in 1824. Printed at the expense of a local literary society, the edition was limited to 600 copies, a number of which were printed on coloured paper. Our copy was one of the four "coquille rose." One copy exists in which the colour of the paper varies at every sheet.