It was at this time, too, that I made my first Lamb pilgrimage, going to every place of interest I could find, from Christ’s Hospital, then in Newgate Street, where I saw the Blue-Coat boys at dinner, to the neglected grave in Edmonton Churchyard, where Charles and Mary Lamb lie buried side by side. The illustration facing page 54 is made from a negative I procured in 1890, of the house at Enfield in which Lamb lived from October, 1829, until May, 1833.
A good story is told of my friend, Edmund D. Brooks, the bookseller of far-off Minneapolis. Brooks, who knows his way about London and is as much at home with the talent there as any other man, set out one day to make a “quick turn,” in stock-market parlance. Armed with a large sum of money, the sinews of book-buying as well as of war, he casually dropped in on Walter Spencer, who was offering for sale the manuscript of Dickens’s “Cricket.” The price was known to be pretty steep, but Brooks was prepared to pay it. What he did not know was that, in an upper room over Spencer’s shop, another bookseller, also with a large sum in pocket, was debating the price of this very item, raising his offer by slow degrees. But it did not take Brooks long to discover that negotiations were progressing and that quick action was necessary. Calling Spencer aside, he inquired the price, paid the money, and took the invaluable manuscript away in a taxi. The whole transaction had occupied only a couple of minutes. Spencer then returned to his first customer, who continued the attack until, to close the argument, Spencer quietly remarked that the manuscript had been sold, paid for, and had passed out of his possession.
It reminds one of the story of how the late A. J. Cassatt, the master mind of the railroad presidents of his time, bought the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railway right under the nose of President Garrett of the Baltimore & Ohio. There were loud cries of anguish from the defeated parties on both occasions, but the book-selling story is not over yet, for a few hours later Sabin, the bookseller de luxe, had the Dickens manuscript displayed in his shop-window in Bond Street, and Brooks had a sheaf of crisp Bank of England notes in his pocket, with which to advance negotiations in other directions.
I take little or no interest in bindings; I want the book as originally published, in boards uncut, in old sheep, or in cloth, and as clean and fair as may be.
I am not without a sense for color, and the backs of books bound in various colored leathers, suitably gilt, placed with some eye for arrangement on the shelves, are to me as beautiful and suggestive as any picture; yet, as one cannot have everything, I yield the beauty and fragrance of leather for the fascination of the “original state as issued.”
