“You should have let me get your book,” I said shamefacedly. “You might have broken your leg!”
“I would risk breaking two legs for this book,” he growled back, and we drove on.
In the years which followed I have known men to hazard their fortunes, go long journeys halfway about the world, forget friendship, even lie, cheat, and steal, all for the gain of a book. Improbable as it sounds, there was a man once who murdered so that he might possess a volume for which he had long yearned.
It was in the valuable library of the monastery at Poblet, near Tarragona, just a century ago, that Don Vincente, a Spanish monk, developed his unholy love for books. Years of religious training did not prevent him from seizing every chance to plunder his own and other monastery libraries which were thrown open in a political upheaval of the time. As confusion spread, he found opportunities to take the books he coveted most, and then he vanished. But sometime later he appeared in Barcelona, the proprietor of a bookshop. The one volume he had worshiped at a distance and longed to own was a work of Lamberto Palmart, published in Valencia in 1482. It had been in the collection of a Barcelona advocate for years, and at the dispersal of his estate was offered at auction. It was understood to be the only one of its kind known.
Don Vincente went to the sale and staked every cent he possessed on it; but a competitor, Augustino Paxtot, outbid him by fourteen pesetas. The ex-monk grew white with fury, threatening revenge as he left the room. When, a few nights later, Paxtot’s house burned to the ground and he perished with it, several friends recalled Don Vincente’s threats. He was reported to the police, his shop searched, and the rare Palmart volume found. Even when he was arrested, Don Vincente made no effort to deny his guilt. All he seemed interested in was the fate of the little book which had brought disgrace upon him. During the trial his lawyer, making a valiant effort to save him, announced that another copy of the Palmart volume had been found in a Paris library, a few days previous to the alleged crime. It could not be proved, he argued, that the copy in question was the one recently auctioned. But Don Vincente, hearing his book was not unique, burst into violent weeping and showed no further interest in the trial. Alone at night in his cell, and before the court during the final days of his trial, his only words of regret were, “Alas, alas! My copy is not unique!”
To-day book collectors are less violent, although they have their moments when they seethe and writhe inwardly! Just go to any book sale and observe the expressions of competitive buyers—faces that are usually marvelous poker portraits become sharply distorted; eyes which ordinarily indulge in an almost studied innocence shoot sudden darts of fire. Whenever I attend an important sale I make it a point to look neither to the right nor to the left!
I have often been asked why collectors are so enamored of first editions. This is almost unanswerable, because the whole question of first editions hinges on a matter of sentiment, of feeling, almost of emotion. How can one explain the sentimental affections? A first edition is almost as much the original work of its author as the painting is of an artist. I suppose there are people—I’ve been told there are intelligent people—who would just as soon have an edition of Keats’s Poems, for example, well printed on good paper, in a handsome modern binding, as a first edition in its original boards! I only hope I shall never meet them.
Collectors are very ardent on the subject of association copies, or books inscribed or annotated by the authors themselves. To think that John Keats may have held in his slender white fingers your first edition of his poems; that his luminous eyes, already sunken from the inroads of his fatal illness, may have lingered over the very pages of the copy you possess—this is enough to thrill the Devil himself!
Miss Amy Lowell was, as all the world knows, devoted to Keats. She believed herself spiritually attuned to him. I shall never forget the last time I visited at her home near Boston. After a delightful dinner, we went into her library, where we lighted our cigars and talked. She told me of her colossal work on Keats, which, fortunately for her peace of mind, she lived to see published. Then followed a silence as the blue haze of smoke enveloped her. Suddenly she leaned toward me and, with an excited brightness in her eyes, said, “Doctor, there is a certain book I want more than anything in the world! Keats’s own copy of Shakespeare, with his notes through it.”
I put my hand in my pocket and smiled. By one of those unusual chances which really do make truth stranger than fiction, I had that very volume in my pocket. She caught her breath and grew quite pale with joy as I handed it to her.