What is known among book lovers as the greatest little find in history occurred at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, England, in 1867. Charles Edmunds, a London bookseller, while visiting Lamport Hall, the ancient seat of the Isham family, accidentally came upon the old lumber room. His curiosity was immediately aroused, for among the piles of wood and discarded furniture he beheld stacks and stacks of dust-covered books. There were hundreds of them of various sizes and dates; some were chewed to bits, having furnished banquets for generations of mice, descendants of which scampered about as Edmunds searched and hoped for something interesting. Just as he was beginning to believe that they all were valueless, he chanced upon a copy of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Imagine his surprise when he found it to be a hitherto unknown edition dated 1599, and “Imprinted at London for William Leake, dwelling in Paule’s Churchyard at the signe of the Greyhound.” Inclosed within the same vellum cover were The Passionate Pilgrim and Davies’s and Marlowe’s Epigrams and Elegies. The only other copy known of the former is in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge. The third tract in this volume was also an entirely unrecorded edition.
This Venus and Adonis was a fourth edition. It sold at the Britwell Court sale at Sotheby’s, in 1919, for £15,100—about $75,000. George D. Smith bought it for Mr. Huntington, and it was the highest price ever paid for a book up to that time. Whenever a great sale such as this one is held, prices reverberate throughout the world. Immediately there follows a cleaning out of old attics, a thorough brushing of odd closets; cupboards and lumber rooms are scoured; and a general sorting over of places where odd things have been relegated for years takes place. Naturally, the enormous price of the Venus and Adonis caused a sensation when it was sold in London. News of this sale quickly appeared in every paper in England.
A pretty story is told of how, one afternoon, two young Englishmen were playing archery on an estate near Shrewsbury. Perhaps they didn’t have a target, or if they did they mislaid it. Anyway, they picked up an old book they found somewhere in one of the buildings on the place, and stuck it against the lower branches of a tree to use for a bull’s-eye. About to draw his bow, one of them was not quite satisfied with the angle at which they had placed their target. So he walked forward and turned it around. As he did so, some of the pages fell back, and he read the magic name, “Venus.” Looking at the volume further, he exclaimed to his companion, “I believe this old thing is similar to that book which sold for £15,100 yesterday!” It soon sold privately for more than £10,000, or about $50,000. Mr. H. C. Folger of New York, the greatest collector of Shakespeareana, was the buyer.
With these stories indelibly impressed on my mind, my delight was unbounded when I espied on the library shelves of Dorchester House, London, the residence of Sir George Holford, a matchless copy of Venus in the second edition, 1594, five years earlier than these famous “fourths.” Only three other copies were known. Be assured that this was one of the first volumes I selected when, the following year, I purchased the greater part of his collection. From a monetary point of view this is the most valuable book that has ever been sold.
To bring these stories down to date, an almost equally interesting find was made after the sale of a signature of Button Gwinnett, at the Anderson Galleries in New York last winter, for which I paid $22,500. Gwinnett was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence from Georgia. His signature is very rare, as his life was snuffed out suddenly in a duel with General Lachlan MacIntosh in 1777, when he was still young. There are but thirty-three of these signatures known. I bought my first Gwinnett, incidentally the first to be sold in many years, in Philadelphia two years ago for $14,000. Some wag figured, at the time, that it was worth exactly $1000 per letter. Mrs. Arthur W. Swann, of New York, happened to read about my purchase in a morning paper, and began to think over the various items of a collection of autograph letters which her grandfather, Theodore Sedgwick, had made, and which she inherited. The more she thought about it, the more significant a hazy remembrance became; she believed her grandfather had secured a Button Gwinnett similar to the one I bought. After carefully searching through the collection she found, much to her surprise and delight, a most beautiful example of Gwinnett’s signature. In November, 1926, she sold the entire collection, and I bought the Button Gwinnett for $28,500. This was then a record price for any signature in the world’s history, the young signer’s autograph having jumped to $2000 per letter! After a while, selling a famous man’s handwriting by the letter will be as common as selling antique silver by the ounce.
About four years ago a firm of auctioneers in London was requested to sell a great mass of ordinary music belonging to the estate of a late English noblewoman. The manager and his assistants were not very keen about it, as the music was unsorted and on its face almost worthless. But they finally agreed to do it on the condition it should not require sorting. During the sale a dealer bought one of the bundles. Later he sold some of it to other dealers, saving several sheets for himself to take home. Some time passed and one night he chanced to glance over the titles of these songs, catches, and other musical compositions. As he turned one of the pages he fairly started from his seat. He could hardly believe his eyes. A quarto pamphlet it was, and most probably had been placed there years and years before—perhaps as a bookmark—by someone who did not realize its worth. It was a copy of Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson by Shelley! The author’s name was not mentioned, but it was edited by “Fitzvictor,” one of Shelley’s pen names. Here it lay before him, in the original wrappers in which it was first published. Of course, the news of the discovery spread like wildfire. Later, this work sold for £1210, approximately $6000.
Propagandist pamphlets written by Shelley are extremely rare, and have turned up in the most extraordinary places. They were generally of an inflammatory or seditious nature, and he and Harriet had the habit of throwing them from the windows wherever they might be staying at the time, in the hope of hitting sympathetic targets. I should like to be struck by one of those missiles!
Shortly after the War began I was informed of a letter written by Amerigo Vespucci, to be offered in the Morrison sale in London. It was the only known letter written by the man who gave his name to two continents. Previous to its finding, the only record of Vespucci’s own writing was a receipt bearing his signature. Now, the early stages of the Great War were not exactly propitious times for auctions or any other sales. The buying public of England, as well as auctioneers, dealers, and collectors, all found their minds preoccupied with but one subject—war. Objets d’art, books, and manuscripts were put aside as playthings of a leisured hour; nor were they to be considered when relatives and friends were fast becoming a part of the war machinery daily departing for France. So prices did the logical thing—tumbled.
Although I was aware of the situation, I believed it impossible that this Vespucci letter could go for a low figure. Here was an unusual, magnificent autograph more than four centuries old. War? Why, it had known a hundred wars! With little hope and less expectation, I cabled a bid of £2500—about $12,500. The arrival of a reply a few hours later caused me pangs of fear. I tortured myself a few moments with delectable suspense. Was the letter mine or not? A momentous question! At last I gathered courage and read words which were too curt, too few, to seem true. Not only was I the possessor of this most precious historical letter, but at what a price—a measly £395! It was almost impossible to realize that I had secured for less than $2000 one of the greatest bargains in history.
