The sales of the last quarter of the seventeenth century are of the greatest interest in the history of the subject, but they are not of any great value as guides to present prices, for circumstances and tastes have greatly changed. The sales were largely those of the working libraries of theologians, and the books which their owners found of use in their studies sold well, while books in other classes which have now taken their place in public esteem fetched prices which seem to us very small. Among the number of sales noticed in the last chapter, two only stand out as the libraries of true collectors in the modern acceptation of the term, that is, of those who collect for love of the books rather than from an appreciation of their utility. Much the same conditions ruled during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, although the library of Charles Bernard, serjeant-surgeon to Queen Anne and brother of Dr. Francis Bernard, previously referred to, was sold in March 1711 at the Black Boy Coffee-House in Ave Maria Lane, and the sale of the vast collection of Thomas Rawlinson commenced in 1721. Then followed the sale of John Bridges’ library in February 1726, but the middle of the century was passed when the great sale of Dr. Richard Mead occurred. This (1754-55), when compared with Askew’s sale in 1775, may be said to mark an era in bibliography. These two great physicians were friends with similar tastes. We are, therefore, able to gauge the considerable growth of the taste for book-collecting during the few years that parted these two sales. Askew bought many books at Mead’s sale, and when the same volumes came to be sold at his own sale they realised twice and thrice the prices he had given. We shall see in the register of the sales after Askew’s day how the prices gradually advanced, until we arrive at the culmination of the bibliomaniacal spirit in the Roxburghe sale of 1812.
We will now enumerate some of the principal sales which took place during the eighteenth century, which led up to the long list of sales which have formed so marked a feature of the nineteenth century.
Charles Bernard’s library, sold in 1711, was said by Oldys to contain “the fairest and best editions of the classics.” Swift, in his “Journal to Stella” (19th March) wrote, “I went to-day to see poor Charles Bernard’s books, and I itch to lay out nine or ten pounds for some fine editions of fine authors”; and on the 29th he adds, “I walked to-day into the city and went to see the auction of poor Charles Bernard’s books. They were in the middle of the Physic books, so I bought none; and they are so dear, I believe I shall buy none.”
The sale of the library of Thomas Britton, the well-known small-coal man of Clerkenwell, in January 1715, deserves mention on account of the worthiness of its owner. The books were sold by auction at St. Paul’s Coffee-House by Thomas Ballard, and the sale catalogue consists of forty closely-printed pages in quarto. There were 664 lots in octavo, 274 in quarto, and 102 in folio, besides 50 pamphlets and 23 manuscripts. This was the second library Britton had collected, for some years before his death he sold the first one by auction.
Thomas Rawlinson (1681-1725) was one of the most insatiable of book collectors, and he left the largest library that had been collected up to his time. His chambers were so filled that his bed had to be moved into a passage, and he took London House, in Aldersgate Street, to accommodate his ever-increasing library. Oldys says of him—
“If his purse had been much wider he had a passion beyond it, and would have been driven to part with what he was so fond of, such a pitch of curiosity or dotage he was arrived at upon a different edition, a fairer copy, a larger paper than twenty of the same sort he might be already possessed of. In short, his covetousness after those books he had not increased with the multiplication of those he had, and as he lived so he died in his bundles, piles, and bulwarks of paper, in dust and cobwebs, at London House.”[46]
He did, in fact, commence the sale of his library before his death, and the first part was sold in December 1721. The catalogue of the whole library occupied sixteen parts, the last being sold in 1734. A complete set of these catalogues is very rare, and the lists of them in the various bibliographical works are mostly incomplete. There is, however, a set in the Bodleian Library. The books in the first five parts sold for £2409, and the manuscripts alone took sixteen days of March 1734 to sell, and went cheap. Hearne writes in his Diary (9th November 1734)—
“The MSS. in Dr. Rawlinson’s last auction of his brother Thomas’s books went extraordinary cheap, and those that bought had great penny worths. The Doctor purchas’d many himself, at which here and there one were disgusted, tho’ all the company supported the Doctor in it, that as a creditor he had a right equal to any other. My friend Mr. Tom Brome, that honest gentleman of Ewithington in Herefordshire in a letter to the Doctor, says that he cannot but wonder at the low rates of most of the MSS., and adds ‘had I been in place I should have been tempted to have laid out a pretty deal of money, without thinking myself at all touched with bibliomania.’”[47]
On 10th November Hearne further writes—