The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections

by A. Edward Newton

The possession of rare books is a delight best understood by the owners of them. They are not called upon to explain. The gentle will understand, and the savage may be disregarded. It is the scholar whose sword is usually brandished against collectors; and I would not have him think that, in addition to our being ignorant of our books, we are speculators in them also. Let him remember that we have our uses.

Unlearned men of books assume the care,
As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair.

It may as well be admitted that we do not buy expensive books to read. We may say that it is a delight to us to look upon the very page on which appeared for the first time such a sonnet as “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” or to read that bit of realism unsurpassed, where Robinson Crusoe one day, about noon, discovered the print of a man’s naked foot upon the sand; but when we sit down with a copy of Keats, we do not ask for a first edition; much less when we want to live over again the joys of our childhood, do we pick up a copy of Defoe which would be a find at a thousand dollars. But first editions of Keats’s Poems, 1817, in boards, with the paper label if possible, and a Defoe unwashed, in a sound old calf binding, are good things to have. They are indeed a joy forever, and will never pass into nothingness. I cannot see why the possession of fine books is more reprehensible than the possession of valuable property of any other sort.

In speaking of books as an investment, one implies first editions. First editions are scarce; tenth editions, as Charles Lamb stutteringly suggested, are scarcer, but there is no demand for them. Why, then, first editions? The question is usually dodged; the truth may as well be stated. There is a joy in mere ownership. It may be silly, or it may be selfish; but it is a joy, akin to that of possessing land, which seems to need no defense. We do not walk over our property every day; we frequently do not see it; but when the fancy takes us, we love to forget our cares and responsibilities in a ramble over our fields. In like manner, and for the same reason, we browse with delight in a corner of our library in which we have placed our most precious books. We should buy our books as we buy our clothes, not only to cover our nakedness, but to embellish us; and we should buy more books and fewer clothes.

I am told that, in proportion to our numbers and our wealth, less money is spent on books now than was spent fifty years ago. I suppose our growing love of sport is to some extent responsible. Golf has taken the place of books. I know that it takes time and costs money. I do not play the game myself, but I have a son who does. Perhaps when I am his age, I shall feel that I can afford it. My sport is book-hunting. I look upon it as a game, a game requiring skill, some money, and luck. The pleasure that comes from seeing some book in a catalogue priced at two or three times what I may have paid for a copy, is a pleasure due to vindicated judgment. I do not wish to rush into the market and sell and secure my profit. What is profit if I lose my book? Moreover, if one thinks of profit rather than of books, there is an interest charge to be considered. A book for which I paid a thousand dollars a few years ago, no longer stands me at a thousand dollars, but at a considerably greater sum. A man neat at figures could tell with mathematical accuracy just the actual cost of that book down to any given minute. I neither know nor want to know.

There is another class of collector with whom I am not in keen sympathy, and that is the men who specialize in the first published volumes of some given group of authors. These works are usually of relatively little merit, but they are scarce and expensive: scarce, because published in small editions and at first neglected; expensive, because they are desired to complete sets of first editions. Anthony Trollope’s first two novels have a greater money value than all the rest of his books put together—but they are hard to read. In like manner, a sensational novel, “Desperate Remedies,” by Hardy, his first venture in fiction, is worth perhaps as much as fifty copies of his “Woodlanders,” one of the best novels of the last half century. George Gissing, when he was walking our streets penniless and in rags, could never have supposed that a few years later his first novel, “Workers in the Dawn,” would sell for one hundred and fifty dollars, but it has done so. I have a friend who has just paid this price.

Just here I would like to remark that for several years I have been seeking, without success, a copy of the first edition of that very remarkable book, Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh.” Booksellers who jauntily advertise, “Any book got,” will please make a note of this one.

Nor do I think it necessary to have every scrap, every waif and stray, of any author, however much I may esteem him. My collection of Johnson is fairly complete, but I have no copy of Father Lobo’s “Abyssinia.” It was an early piece of hack-work, a translation from the French, for which Johnson received five pounds. It is not scarce; one would hardly want to read it. It was the recollection of this book, doubtless, that suggested the “Prince of Abissinia” to Johnson years later, when he wanted to write “fiction,” as the dear old ladies in “Cranford” called “Rasselas”; but it has never seemed necessary to my happiness to have a copy of “Lobo.” On the other hand I have “stocked” “Rasselas” pretty considerably, and could supply any reasonable demand. Such are the vagaries of collectors.