ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers, to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune to find a copy of the extremely scarce Lyric Poems of Philip Ayres (1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early printed books.
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Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite. Barnabee's Journall, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced at £48, and Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture, 1640, at £25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of Dekker's Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London (1631), at £14. A copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page, is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's History of the Civil Wars, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I., printed by J. Hughs and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's Carmen Deo Nostro in the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of Herbert's Temple, and a first edition of Hesperides, or the works, both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq., £140.
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It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the others early issues, is offered for £37 10s.
On the other hand, a first edition of Friendship's Garland can be bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10s. 6d., and a first edition of Buchanan's Book of Orm for half-a-crown.
People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10s. and two first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece.
A first edition of Trilby (1895) can be purchased for 7s. 6d. at Messrs. Dobell's, and of Daniel Deronda (1876) at 18s. Evan Harrington, in the twelve original parts of Once a Week, is offered at 25s. at the Serendipity Shop.
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Mr. Everard Meynell has a curiosity of nineteenth-century literature for sale in the shape of Coventry Patmore's Odes, dated 1868, but never published, for the following reason: "Early in 1868 he had written nine odes, which in the April of that year he printed for private circulation. Afterwards, keenly mortified at the coldness of their reception by friends, he made a fire in the hall and cast on it (as he thought) all the copies remaining in his hand, while he calmly sat and watched them burn. A friend, who had heard of the intended bonfire, persuaded his daughter Emily to abstract a copy or two, and these, with the few which had been sent to friends, were all that remained of the edition." The price of this soul saved from the burning is £8 10s., and a first edition of The Unknown Eros (1878), with inscription from the author to Richard Garnett, is priced £2 10s.
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Having recently picked up cheap a third edition (1872) of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám (Quaritch, 1872), we are interested to see that a copy of the fourth edition (1879) is for sale at three guineas. We suspect ourselves of having made a bargain, but are not yet quite sure.
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Messrs. Dobell have an interesting collection of first editions of works by Victor Hugo, most of them presentation copies, with Hugo's autograph inscription, to Mademoiselle Louise Jung.
A. L. H.