At the Frederickson sale in New York, nearly thirty years ago, Mr. Harry B. Smith bought Shelley’s own copy of Queen Mab. The poet had presented this to his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with the wooing inscription, “You see, Mary, I have not forgotten you.” When Mr. Smith was going out of the salesroom, an old gentleman whom he had never seen before stopped him. Brushing tears from his eyes, he asked if he might merely hold the book in his hands for a moment. The history of this same copy, I think, is interesting. General Brayton Ives bought it in 1888 from a London dealer for £20—less than $100. Three years afterward it was sold at the dispersal of the General’s library to Mr. Frederickson for not quite one hundred per cent gain—$190. But when Mr. Smith, the next possessor, bought it, the price jumped to $650. Sometime later I purchased his “Sentimental Library,” as he gracefully termed it, and I also trembled when first holding this Queen Mab in my hands. In 1914 I sold it to Mr. William K. Bixby of St. Louis for $12,500. Then it finally passed, as so many of the finest books did, into Mr. Huntington’s collection, where it will remain for all time.
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF KEATS’S FAMOUS
“SONNET TO HAYDON”
Buxton Forman’s copy of Queen Mab, the one Shelley had kept for himself and inestimably enriched by changes and additions for a later edition, is now in the remarkable collection of Mr. Jerome D. Kern of New York.
FROM A LETTER OF SHELLEY SPEAKING OF KEATS
Still another, also containing Shelley’s precious notes in his own hand, is in that treasure-house of rarities, the library of Mr. Thomas J. Wise. His catalogue, now wanting only the last volume, is more absorbingly interesting to book lovers than most works of fiction.
When I was in London in 1925 a friend told me a story which he thought something of a joke on me. As he browsed, one fine spring day, through some books in a bookstall, he noticed a young man also reading. Suddenly a clerk from inside the shop came out, exhibiting a cheap dog’s-eared copy of Margot Asquith’s autobiography.
“How much?” asked the young man cautiously. The clerk replied, “Fourpence.”
“Fourpence,” repeated the other, scandalized. “Who do you think I am—Dr. Rosenbach?”