III
OLD CATALOGUES AND NEW PRICES
THE true book-lover is usually loath to destroy an old book-catalogue. It would not be easy to give a reason for this, unless it is that no sooner has he done so than he has occasion to refer to it. Such catalogues reach me by almost every mail, and I while away many hours in turning over their leaves. Anatole France in his charming story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” makes his dear old book-collector say, “There is no reading more easy, more fascinating, and more delightful than that of a catalogue”; and it is so, for the most part; but some catalogues annoy me exceedingly: those which contain long lists of books that are not books; genealogies; county (and especially town) histories, illustrated with portraits; obsolete medical and scientific books; books on agriculture and diseases of the horse. How it is that any one can make a living by vending such merchandise is beyond me—but so are most things.
Living, however, in the country, and going to town every day, I spend much time on the trains, and must have something to read besides newspapers,—who was it who said that reading newspapers is a nervous habit?—and it is not always convenient to carry a book; so I usually have a few catalogues which I mark industriously, thus presenting a fine imitation of a busy man. One check means a book that I own, and I note with interest the prices; another, a book that I would like to have; while yet another indicates a book to which under no circumstances would I give a place on my shelves. When my library calls for a ridding up, these slim pamphlets are not discarded as they should be, but are stored in a closet, to be referred to when needed, until at last something must be done to make room for those that came to-day and those that will come to-morrow.
On one of these occasional house-clearings I came across a bundle of old catalogues which I have never had it in me to destroy. One of them was published in 1886, by a man I knew well years ago, Charles Hutt, of Clement’s Inn Gateway, Strand. Hutt himself has long since passed away; so has his shop, the Gateway; and, indeed, the Strand itself—his part of it, that is. I sometimes think that the best part of old London has disappeared. Need I say that I refer to Holywell Street and the Clare Market district which lay between the Strand and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which Dickens knew and described so well? Hutt in his day was a man of considerable importance. He was the first London bookseller to realize the direction and value of the American market. Had he lived, my friends Sabin and Spencer and Maggs would have had a serious rival.
All the old catalogues before me are alike in one important respect, namely, the uniformly low prices. From the standpoint of to-day the prices were absurdly low—or are those of to-day absurdly high? I, for one, do not think so. When a man puts pen to paper on the subject of the prices of rare books, he feels—at least I feel—that it is a silly thing to do,—and yet we collectors have been doing it always, or almost always,—to point out that prices have about reached top notch, and that the wise man will wait for the inevitable decline before he separates himself from his money.
Now, it is my belief that books, in spite of the high prices that they are bringing in the shops and at auction, have only just begun their advance, and that there is no limit to the prices they will bring as time goes on. The only way to guess the future is to study the past; and such study as I have been able to make leads me to believe that for the really great books the sky is the limit.
“The really great books!” What are they, and where are they? I am not sure that I know; they do not often come my way, nor, when they do, am I in a position to compete for them; but as I can be perfectly happy without an ocean-going yacht, contenting myself with a motor-boat, so can I make shift to get along without a Gutenberg Bible, without a first folio of Shakespeare, or any of the quartos, in short, sans any of those books which no millionaire’s library can be without. But this I will say, that if I could afford to buy them, I would pay any price for the privilege of owning them.
A man may be possessed of relatively small means and yet indulge himself in all the joys of collecting, if he will deny himself other things not so important to his happiness. It is a problem in selection, as Elia points out in his essay “Old China,” when a weighing for and against and a wearing of old clothes is recommended by his sister Bridget, if the twelve or sixteen shillings saved is to enable one to bring home in triumph an old folio. As a book-collector, Lamb would not take high rank; but he was a true book-lover, and the books he liked to read he liked to buy. And just here I may be permitted to record how I came across a little poem, in the manuscript of the author, which exactly voices his sentiments—and mine.
I was visiting Princeton not long ago, that beautiful little city, with its lovely halls and towers; and interested in libraries as I always am, had secured permission to browse at will among the collections formed by the late Laurence Hutton. After an inspection of his “Portraits in Plaster,”—a collection of death-masks, unique in this country or elsewhere,—I turned my attention to his association books. It is a difficult lot to classify, and not of overwhelming interest; not to be compared with the Richard Waln Meirs collection of Cruikshank, which has just been bequeathed to the Library; but nothing which is a book is entirely alien to me, and the Hutton books, with their inscriptions from their authors, testifying to their regard for him and to his love of books, are well worth examination.
I had opened many volumes at random, and finally chanced upon Brander Matthews’s “Ballads of Books,” a little anthology of bookish poems, for many years a favorite of mine. Turning to the inscription, I found—what I found; but what interested me particularly was a letter from an English admirer, one Thomas Hutchinson, inclosing some verses, of which I made a copy without the permission of any one. I did not ask the librarian, for he might have referred the question to the trustees, or something; but I did turn to a speaking likeness of “Larry” that hung right over the bookcase and seemed to say, “Why, sure, fellow book-lover; pass on the torch, print anything you please.” And these are the verses:—