'If any Gentleman have a desire to view or see any or all of these Books in this Catalogue, or to satisfie themselves in the Conditions and Editions of any of them, they shall be very Welcome to the place aforenamed at any time before the day that the Sale begins.'
To facilitate this inspection subsequent sales were held, not at the deceased collector's house, but at some more convenient place, that from which this rule is quoted, Kidner's sale (February 6, 1677), taking place 'at the sign of the King's head in Little Britain,' possibly a tavern, but more probably the name of the bookseller's shop. It is to Dr. Seaman's house, however, in Warwick Court, that we must take our way at nine o'clock on the morning of October 31, 1676, if we wish to be present at the first English book sale. We shall have Cooper's catalogue in our hands, and note that he has inaugurated the practice, which still makes auction catalogues as difficult to consult as a Bradshaw, of dividing according to their sizes books in folio, in quarto, in octavo, and in duodecimo. He further divides each size of books according to their subjects: 'Patres Graeci,' 'Patres Latini,' 'Biblia,' 'Libri Theologici,' 'Theologi Scholastici,' 'Scriptores in Scripturam,' etc., so that we have no little difficulty in finding out if the particular books of which we are in want are included in the good Doctor's library. As we enter the house we probably find it very full. There are friends of Dr. Seaman's anxious for his books to sell well; poor Divinity students hopeful of picking up a few volumes cheaply; professed book-collectors, who care little for theology, but have an eye on some of the classics, and are curious to see how this new departure will succeed; and a little knot of booksellers, also curious, but on the whole unfriendly. Will. Cooper ascends an impromptu rostrum, an assistant hands up a long set of the works of S. Chrysostom, in Greek and Latin (Paris, 1636), and the bidding begins. If any invocation would persuade the Muse of Learning to tell us 'who first, who last upraised his voice to bid,' that invocation should duly be made. But in the absence of documents the Muse usually abandons us severely to our own imagination, and we are left to wonder whether it was friend, or poor student, or rich collector who made the first bid at the first English book auction. Probably it was one of the last class who secured the prize, for the great Chrysostom fetched no less than £8, 5s., nearly a quarter's income for some of the poorer clergy of those days. This was the highest price fetched by any book in the sale, but its immediate successors were all respectable. A set of the records of General and Provincial Councils (Paris, 1636) fetched £5, 3s.; the works of S. Cyril (Paris, 1638), £5, 1s.; of Theodoret (1642), £4, 8s., and of Epiphanius (1622), £3, 2s. 6d. Thus the first five lots produced twenty-six pounds all but sixpence, and it may greatly be doubted whether, despite the smaller purchasing power of money in these days, they would fetch as much as this if put up to auction at any of our modern sales.
The next twenty books averaged something over a pound apiece, and the prices languished till this division of the sale was over, and the 'Patres Graeci' were succeeded by the 'Patres Latini,' the works of S. Augustine (Froben's edition, 1569) heading the list at £5, 15s. Among the editions of the Bible, 'Bibliae variae,' as the auctioneer called them, the London Polyglot of 1657 was facile princeps, fetching no less than £8, 2s., or within three shillings of the top price of the sale. Rabbinical literature was the next division taken, and here it is curious to note that no single work fetched as much as a sovereign. Then came long rows of classics and theology, with nothing to call for remark till we come to the books of English divinity, among which Fox's 'Martyrs' (London, 1641) fetched as much as £3, 5s. Among the English philologists, a very miscellaneous section, Raleigh's 'History of the World' went for £1, 6s., and Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy' (Oxford, 1638) for 6s. Even the latter was not much of a bargain, for it is the first edition (1621), the one in quarto, which is now so highly prized.
When the folios were all sold, the smaller sizes were taken in their order, but either the collectors of the seventeenth century (very unlike in this to their modern successors) valued a book in proportion to its bulk, or else the novelty of the bidding was exhausted. Certainly we have no more high prices to record, and the auctioneer, after a time, had recourse to selling books in bundles or batches. The Oriental works went badly, probably because few could read them; the English divinity, which were sold ten and twenty together, at from a florin to fifteen shillings the lot, even worse, because Dr. Seaman's theology was now discountenanced by Churchmen, and the pockets of the Dissenters were ill furnished. We note a few pearls among these dusty tomes. Fletcher's 'Purple Island' (1633) was sold with six dull tracts for 5s., and Bacon's 'Advancement of Learning' (1605) for 1s. The pamphlets of the Civil War went fairly well, but a collection, which would now be held priceless, of thirty-two tracts on the relation of England and Spain from 1585 to 1591 realised no more than 8s.
The total sum gained by the sale is stated as about £700, a result which I have not had the industry to check by adding together the prices of all the different lots. My impression is that it is rather an under-estimate. Taking it as correct, we may guess the average sum realised by each book as about 3s., for there are 137 pages in the Catalogue, and from 35 to 40 books catalogued on each page, or a total of somewhere about 5,000. A scholar's library, especially a theological scholar's, always sells badly—unless I am mistaken, Bishop Thirwall's books only averaged about 2s. each—and Dr. Seaman's executors probably congratulated themselves on the result of this new method of disposing of old books. They had realised more than could possibly have been obtained on an enforced sale to a single bookseller, and on the other hand, after the ardour of competition for the first few lots had subsided, buyers were able to make bargains which the booksellers would never have allowed them. Every one, save the booksellers, was pleased, and both the general satisfaction and the one discordant note which marred it, are reflected in the preface which the auctioneer wrote for the second book sale, which took place some four months after the first. Here he says:
'The first Attempt in this kind (by the Sale of Dr. Seaman's Library) having given great Content and Satisfaction to the Gentlemen who were the Buyers, and no great Discouragement to the Sellers, hath Encouraged the making this second Trial, by the exposing (to Auction or Sale) the Library of Mr. Tho. Kidner, in hopes of receiving such Encouragement from the Learned as may prevent the Stifling of this manner of Sale, the Benefit (if rightly considered) being equally Balanced between Buyer and Seller.'
There was a danger, we see, of this manner of sale being 'stifled,' and subsequent prefaces show us that the danger came from reports spread by the retail booksellers that the bidding was not always genuine. To meet these reports the auctioneers for a long time refused to accept commissions to bid themselves, lest they should be accused of bidding when there was no commission behind them, merely to run up prices against genuine purchasers. A new rule was also passed, obliging strangers from the country either to pay for and remove books as soon as they were knocked down to them, or else to bid through citizens of reputation, 'and this is the rather desired that all suspicions may be removed of any Strangers appearing there to bid and enhance the Price to others without ever intending to send for what they so buy themselves.'
Fenced round with these regulations, the institution of selling books by auction grew and flourished, so that, as we have said, at the end of the first ten years of its existence no fewer than seventy-three such auctions had taken place. It has certainly made book-collecting a more exciting and more picturesque practice than it could otherwise have been, and enables us not only to reconstruct the library of any famous collector, but often to trace the history of a particular book in a very pleasant and interesting manner. Thus the copy of Dr. Seaman's Catalogue and the two Elegies on his death, at which we have been looking, all once belonged to Narcissus Luttrell, the author of 'Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs,' 1678-1714. According to the crabbed notes of the antiquary Hearne, whom he had offended by refusing to lend him books, Luttrell was not only a book-collector but a miser, who would not have given the judges and other dignitaries who attended his funeral (in 1732) 'a meal's meat' while he was alive. But he was 'well-known for his curious library, especially for the number and scarcity of [books on] English history and antiquities, which he collected in a lucky hour at very reasonable rates.' After Luttrell's death, his copy of Seaman's Catalogue passed into the collection of the antiquary Gough, and then into that of the celebrated Richard Heber, perhaps the greatest of all English book-collectors. At Heber's sale it was acquired by the British Museum, and its literary pedigree thereby closed. But the possession of such a pedigree adds very greatly to the interest of a book in the eyes of book-lovers, and so far as the institution of sales by auction has increased our knowledge of the book-collectors of the past, we have every reason to be grateful to Dr. Joseph Hill who, to return to our text, 'first advised and effectually set on foot that admirable and universally approved of way of selling libraries.'
[JOHN DURIE'S 'REFORMED LIBRARIE-KEEPER'][19]
FROM time to time attention has been called to the letter in which John Durie put together, for the first time in England, a series of suggestions on the duties of a Librarian, but, so far as I am aware, Durie's letter has never been reprinted in full, and I propose here to preface it with a few notes on the author's own career as a librarian, for which the Calendars of State Papers offer some materials. Of Durie's long life—he was born in 1596 and did not die till 1680—we need concern ourselves with only a very few months. As we shall see, his employer Whitelock asserts that he was a German, but this is a mistake, for he was born in Edinburgh, although the persecuted life of his father, Robert Durie, caused him to be educated abroad, chiefly at Sedan. From an early period he devoted himself to the cause of religious unity among the Protestant Churches of Europe, and in this cause he laboured all his life, possibly with more zeal than wisdom. When he found how hardly religious unity was to be achieved he was ready, we are told, to regard the acceptance of the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, and the Ten Commandments as the sole requirement for intercommunion. In the seventeenth century this certainly amounted to latitudinarianism, and it is not easy to acquit Durie of a disposition to run both with hare and hounds, which did not escape the observation of his contemporaries. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was a Royalist and acted for some time as Chaplain to the Princess Mary of Orange at the Hague. But he wearied of this employment, returned to England, served the Commonwealth, both as librarian and as literary hack in offices peculiarly distasteful to the Royalists, and yet after the Restoration did not fail to endeavour to explain away his defection. A political comprehensiveness such as this may perhaps explain the reason why, despite his journeyings all over the north of Europe, Durie's efforts after religious unity so signally failed to attract theologians of any party. The believers in black and the believers in white will hardly admire the man who adopts grey as the only wear, and endeavours to make it serve for each in turn.