The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections

by A. Edward Newton

After his death his books were sold at auction (1864). This was during our Civil War, and several times the sale was suspended owing to the noise of a passing regiment in the street. Notwithstanding that times were not propitious for book-sales, his friends were astonished at the prices realized: the Burns fetched $106. It was probably a poor copy. A generation or two ago not as much care was paid to condition as now. Very few uncut copies are known. One is owned by a man as shouldn’t. Another is in the Burns Museum in Ayrshire, which cost the Museum Trustees a thousand pounds; the Canfield, which was purchased by Harry Widener for six thousand dollars, and the Van Antwerp copy, which, at the sale of his collection in London in 1907, brought seven hundred pounds; but much bibliographical water has gone over the dam since 1907, and for some reason the Van Antwerp books, with the exception of one or two items, did not bring as good prices as they should have done. They were sold at an unfortunate moment and perhaps at the wrong place. In Walter Hill’s current catalogue there is a Kilmarnock Burns, in an old binding, which looks very cheap to me at $2600. At the Allan sale an Eliot Bible brought the then enormous sum of $825. Supposing an Eliot Bible were obtainable to-day, it would bring, no doubt, five thousand dollars, perhaps more.

This is a long digression. There are other desired volumes besides Burns. Here is a “Paradise Lost,” perhaps not so fine a copy as Sabin is now offering for four hundred pounds; but the price is only thirty pounds; and this reminds me that in Beverly Chew’s copy, an exceptionally fine one, as all the books of that fastidious collector are, there is an interesting note made by a former owner to this effect: “This is the first edition of this book and has the first title-page. It is worth nearly ten pounds and is rising in value. 1857.”

Alphabetically speaking, it is only a step from Milton to Moore, George. Here is his “Flowers of Passion,” for which I paid fifteen dollars ten or more years ago—priced at half a crown.

But let us take up another catalogue, one which issued from the world-famous shop in Piccadilly, Quaritch’s. Forty years ago Quaritch thought it almost beneath his dignity as a bookseller to offer for sale any except the very rarest books in English; very much as, up to within the last few years, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge did not think it worth their while to refer more than casually to the glories of English literature. When we open an old Quaritch catalogue, we step out of this age into another, which leads me to observe how remarkable is the change in taste which has come over the collecting world in the last fifty years. Formerly it was the fashion to collect extensively books of which few among us now know anything: books in learned or painful languages, on Philosophy or Religion, as well as those which, for the want of a better name, we call “Classics”; books frequently spoken of, but seldom read.

Such books, unless very valuable indeed, no longer find ready buyers. We have come into our great inheritance. We now dip deep in our “well of English undefyled”; Aldines and Elzevirs have gone out of fashion. Even one of the rarest of them, “Le Pastissier François,” is not greatly desired; and I take it that the reason for this change is chiefly due to the difference in the type of men who are prominent among the buyers of fine books to-day. Formerly the collector was a man, not necessarily with a liberal education, but with an education entirely different from that which the best educated among us now receive. I doubt if there are in this country to-day half a dozen important bookbuyers who can read Latin with ease, let alone Greek. Of French, German, and Italian some of us have a working knowledge, but most of us prefer to buy books which we can enjoy without constant reference to a dictionary.

The world is the college of the book-collector of to-day. Many of us are busy men of affairs, familiar, it may be, with the price of oil, or steel, or copper, or coal, or cotton, or, it may be, with the price of the “shares” of all of these and more. Books are our relaxation. We make it a rule not to buy what we cannot read. Some of us indulge the vain hope that time will bring us leisure to acquaint ourselves fully with the contents of all our books. We want books written in our own tongue, and most of us have some pet author or group of authors, or period, it may be, in which we love to lose ourselves and forget the cares of the present. One man may have a collection of Pope, another of Goldsmith, another of Lamb, and so on. The drama has its votaries who are never seen in a theatre; but look into their libraries and you will find everything, from “Ralph Roister Doister” to the “Importance of Being Earnest.” And note that these collections are formed by men who are not students in the accepted sense of the word, but who, in the course of years, have accumulated an immense amount of learning. Clarence S. Bement is a fine example of the collector of to-day, a man of large affairs with the tastes and learning of a scholar. It has always seemed to me that professors of literature and collectors do not intermingle as they should. They might learn much from each other. I yield to no professor in my passion for English literature. My knowledge is deficient and inexact, but what I lack in learning I make up in love.

But we are neglecting the Quaritch catalogue. Let us open it at random, as old people used to open their Bibles, and govern their conduct by the first text which met their eyes. Here we are: “Grammatica Graeca,” Milan, 1476; the first edition of the first book printed in Greek; one of six known copies. So it is possible for only six busy men to recreate themselves after a hard day’s work with a first Greek Grammar. Too bad! Here is another: Macrobius, “The Saturnalia”—“a miscellany of criticism and antiquities, full of erudition and very useful, similar in their plan to the ‘Noctes Atticæ’ of Aulus Gellius.” No doubt, but as dead as counterfeit money. Here is another: Boethius, “De Consolatione Philosophiæ.” Boethius! I seem to have heard of him. Who was he? Not in “Who’s Who,” obviously. Let us look elsewhere. Ah! “Famous philosopher and official in the Court of Theodoric, born about 475 A.D., put to death without trial about 524.” They had a short way with philosophers in those days. If William the Second to None in Germany had adopted this method with his philosophers, the world might not now be in such a plight.

Note: A college professor to whom I was in confidence showing these notes the other day, remarked, “I suggest that you soft-pedal that Boethius business, my boy.” (How we middle-aged men love to call each other boys; very much as young boys flatter themselves with the phrase, “old man.”) “The ‘Consolation of Philosophy’ was the best seller for a thousand years or so. Boethius’s reputation is not in the making, as yours is, and when yours is made, it will in all probability not last as long.” I thought I detected a slight note of sarcasm in this, but I may have been mistaken.