I cannot quite understand Stevenson’s immense vogue. Perhaps it is the rare personality of the man. Try as we may, it is impossible to separate the personality of a man from his work. Why is one author “collected” and another not? I do not know. Practically no one collects Scott, or George Eliot, or Trollope; but Trollope collectors there will be, and “The Macdermots of Ballycloran” and “The Kellys and the O’Kellys” will bring fabulous prices some of these days—five hundred dollars each; more, a thousand, I should say; and when you pay this sum, look well for the errors in pagination and see that Mortimer Street is spelt Morimer on the title-page of volume three of the former. And remember, too, that this book is so rare that there is no copy of it in the British Museum—at least so I am told; but you will find one on my shelves, in the corner over there, together with everything else this great Victorian has written—of all novelists my favorite. Trollope proved the correctness of Johnson’s remark, “A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly at it.” This we know Trollope did, we have his word for it. His personality was too sane, too matter of fact, to be attractive; but his books are delightful. One doesn’t read Trollope as Coleridge did Shakespeare—by flashes of lighting (this isn’t right, but it expresses the idea); but there is a good, steady glow emanating from the author himself, which, once you get accustomed to it, will enable you to see a whole group of mid-Victorian characters so perfectly that you come to know them as well as the members of your own family, and, I sometimes think, understand them better.

But for one collector who expresses a mild interest in Trollope, there are a thousand who regard the brave invalid, who, little more than twenty years ago, passed away on that lonely Samoan island in the Pacific, as one of the greatest of the moderns, as certain of immortality as Charles Lamb. They may be right. His little toy books and leaflets, those which

The author and the printer
With various kinds of skill
Concocted in the Winter
At Davos on the Hill,

and elsewhere, are simply invaluable. The author and the printer were one and the same—R. L. S., assisted, or perhaps hindered, by S. L. O., Mrs. Stevenson’s son, then a lad. Of these Stevensons, “Penny Whistles” is the rarest. But two copies are known. One is in a private collection in England; the other was bought at the Borden sale in 1913 by Mrs. Widener, for twenty-five hundred dollars, in order to complete, as far as might be, the Stevenson collection now in the Widener Memorial Library. It was a privately printed forerunner of “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” published several years later.

It is a far cry from these bijoux to Stevenson’s regularly published volumes; but when it is remembered that these latter were printed in fairly large editions and relatively only a few years ago, it will be seen that no other author of yesterday fetches such high prices as Stevenson.

In recent years there have been published a number of bibliographies without which no collector can be expected to keep house. We are indebted to the Grolier Club for some of the best of these. Its members have the books and are most generous in exhibiting them, and it must indeed be a churlish scholar who cannot freely secure access to the collections of its members.

Aside from the three volumes entitled “Contributions to English Bibliography,” published and sold by the Club, the handbooks of the exhibitions held from time to time are much sought, for the wealth of information they contain. The Club’s librarian, Miss Ruth S. Granniss, working in coöperation with the members, is largely responsible for the skill and intelligence with which these little catalogues are compiled. The time and amount of painstaking research which enter into the making of them is simply enormous. Indeed, no one quite understands the many questions which arise to vex the bibliographer unless they have attempted to make for themselves even the simplest form of catalogue. Over the door of the room in which they work should be inscribed the text, “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Some blunders are redeemed by the laughter they arouse. Here is a famous one:—

Shelley—Prometheus—unbound, etc.
“—Prometheus—bound in olive morocco, etc.

But for the most part the lot of the bibliographer, as Dr. Johnson said of the dictionary-maker, is to be exposed to censure without hope of praise.