That this feeling is general, accounts, I take it, for the excessively high prices now being paid for first editions of modern authors like Shelley, Keats, Lamb, and, to come right down to our own day, Stevenson. Would not these authors be amazed could they know in what esteem they are held, and what fabulous prices are paid for volumes which, when they were published, fell almost stillborn from the press? We all know the story of Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat”: how a “remainder” was sold by Quaritch at a penny the copy. It is now worth its weight in gold, and Keats’s “Endymion,” once a “remainder” bought by a London bookseller at fourpence, now commands several hundred dollars. I paid three hundred and sixty dollars for mine—but it was once Wordsworth’s and has his name on the title-page.
But it is well in book-collecting, while not omitting the present, never to neglect the past. “Old books are best,” says Beverly Chew, beloved of all collectors; and I recall Lowell’s remark: “There is a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.” It was a recollection of these sayings that prompted me, if prompting was necessary, to pay a fabulous price the other day for a copy of “Hesperides, or the Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq.,” a beautiful copy of the first edition in the original sheep.
We collectors know the saying of Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested”; but the revised version is, Some books are to be read, others are to be collected. Mere reading books, the five-foot shelf, or the hundred best, every one knows at least by name. But at the moment I am concerned with collectors’ books and the amenities of book-collecting; for, frankly,—
I am one of those who seek
What Bibliomaniacs love.
Some subjects are not for me. Sydney Smith’s question, “Who reads an American book?” has, I am sure, been answered; and I am equally sure that I do not know what the answer is. “Americana”—which was not what Sydney Smith meant—have never caught me, nor has “black letter.” It is not necessary for me to study how to tell a Caxton. Caxtons do not fall in my way, except single leaves now and then, and these I take as Goldsmith took his religion, on faith.
Nor am I the rival of the man who buys all his books from Quaritch. Buying from Quaritch is rather too much like the German idea of hunting: namely, sitting in an easy chair near a breach in the wall through which game, big or little, is shooed within easy reach of your gun. No, my idea of collecting is “watchful waiting,” in season and out, in places likely and unlikely, most of all in London. But one need not begin in London: one can begin wherever one has pitched one’s tent.
I have long wanted Franklin’s “Cato Major.” A copy was found not long ago in a farmhouse garret in my own county; but, unluckily, I did not hear of it until its price, through successive hands, had reached three hundred dollars. But if one does not begin in London, one ends there. It is the great market of the world for collectors’ books—the best market, not necessarily the cheapest.
