The Romance of Book-Collecting

by J. Herbert Slater

If an extremely scarce or interesting book, for which one has, perhaps, been searching for years, is at last acquired at any price whatever, the 'find' is none the less real, merely because the cost is great, though we should have hard work to convince the ordinary book-buyer that this is so. He is of opinion that money can buy anything, books not excepted, and in that he is assuredly wrong, for there are many books which are not to be procured at any price, simply because they have disappeared as though they had never been. We know they once lived, because they are referred to by name in contemporary reviews, or have perhaps been reprinted; but now they are as dead as the 'Original Poetry' of Victor and Cazire, which can be traced to the pages of the Morning Chronicle of September 18, 1810, and to a couple of reviews of the day, but of which no copy is now known.

It was this 'Original Poetry' that first suggested the idea of a society to promote the systematic search for 'rare and curious volumes of forgotten lore,' as Edgar Poe felicitously has it. These poems were the production of Shelley and a friend—probably his cousin, Harriet Grove—but had hardly been published a week when Stockdale, the publisher, inspecting the book with more attention than he previously had leisure to bestow, recognised one of the pieces as having been taken bodily from 'The Monk.' Shelley then suppressed the entire edition in disgust, but not before nearly a hundred copies had been put into circulation. The question is, Where are these derelicts now? It is incomprehensible that all can have been consigned to the flames or torn to pulp. Most probably one at least has survived the wrack of time and neglect, and may be lying perdu in the garret or rubbish-heap of some old farmhouse, in which Shelley is but little known, and 'Victor' and 'Cazire' absolute strangers both. And if this particular book, why not many others, which, though not absolutely lost, are yet so very rarely met with that it is the ambition of every book-hunter, great or small, to track them down?

As the world is not inhabited entirely by specialists, the inference is that books of all kinds, good as well as indifferent, lie hidden away in obscure places, waiting the coming of some appreciative explorer who will rescue them from the neglect of many years, and restore them to the world from whence they came. It is no use advertising in these cases. Every week, year in and year out, stereotyped advertisements appear in all sorts of likely and unlikely journals, and nothing ever seems to come of them. They are read, doubtless, by the very people whose goods and chattels stand in need of a thorough overhauling; but they do not know the real extent of their possessions, and usually have a fine contempt for articles of small bulk—a by no means unusual circumstance, be it said, even in educated circles, for it is on record that, when Sion College was burned down, many priceless volumes in the library were destroyed simply because the attendants, at the risk of their lives, devoted all the time available to the rescue of folios.

Thus it came to pass that Prynne's miscellaneous writings were for the most part saved, while other treatises, of far more importance, but smaller in size, were licked up by the flames, and so perished. The natural instinct of human beings is to place confidence in weight, and to ascribe wisdom to bulk. For centuries this idea prevailed throughout Europe, and doubtless prompted Nicolai de Lyra to write those hundreds of folios of commentary on the New Testament which at one time were the mournful heritage of thousands. So also the great Baxter reaped much renown by reason of his seventy folios or quartos, causing Bayle to remark, 'Perhaps no copying clerk who ever lived to grow old amidst the dust of an office ever transcribed so much as this author has written.'

The real book-hunter of to-day is, however, fortunately free of the ancient superstition, and knows very well that as a general rule the scarcest printed books are those which are small in size. To the people at large this is not so, and thus it is that pamphlets of extreme rarity, small volumes which you can hold in your hand with ease, or carry in an inner pocket with comfort, are neglected and eventually forgotten, and doubtless destroyed in sheer ignorance, more often than we care to think of. It was with the object of rescuing some of these that the Forgotten Lore Society first saw the light seven years ago. This, indeed, was not its real name, but the title is a good one, and as descriptive of the objects sought to be attained as any other that could be invented. The idea was to search the country for neglected books in the hope that something at least might be discovered among the heaps of ancestral rubbish that time and the elements are fast bringing to decay.

Now, I venture to state that the more anyone of impartial judgment considers facts and probabilities, the more he must be satisfied that this was no Quixotic scheme. In some instances it is plain that even the most protracted and thorough search would be mere waste of time, as, for instance, in the case of Byron's 'Fugitive Pieces,' 1806, which is known to have been entirely destroyed, with the exception of three copies, all of which can be accounted for. But, then, the operations of the society were not confined to odd volumes, but to rarities of any kind and in any number that Providence might see fit to throw in its way. If not Byron, then Shelley, or Burns, or those older authors whose very names are synonyms for extreme scarcity, such, for example, as Brereton, Whitbourne, W. Hamond, Bullinger, and the scores who have written seventeenth-century poems and composed old music to sing them to. Have all practically vanished, or are they merely under the lock of a combination of indifference and ignorance for a time? That was the question.

With this society I was connected as an ordinary member, and allotted a certain acreage over which to roam, on the distinct understanding that any advantage was to accrue to the benefit of the members as a whole. Elaborate rules were drawn up, and every imaginable contingency fully provided for. There was no lack of money, and no want of enterprise or enthusiasm; yet the project failed for the simplest of all reasons—but one which had apparently never entered into the calculations of the promoters. Spread over England, and some parts of Scotland and Ireland, were over a hundred book-men, all of them thoroughly well versed in literature of a certain kind, but, with few exceptions, rigorous specialists, who affected particular authors or subjects, and knew little outside the restricted circle they had made their own. Let any one of these be drawn within the vortex of his favourite branch of study, and I am sure that he would have acquitted himself admirably; but what was wanted in a matter of this kind was a general and extensive acquaintance with the market, and not a knowledge, however deep or profound, of the lives of authors long since dead, and of what they wrote, and the circumstances that attended the publication of their works. This, unfortunately, was the information with which most of the members set out to search the countryside, and the mistakes they made would be sufficient to excite the laughter of even the tyro were they but published. A perfect Iliad of woes tracked the footsteps of each member of this society wherever he went, and it is not at all surprising that it eventually languished and was finally dissolved. A few of these mistakes may, however, be set down with the object of showing how easy it is to tumble into error, and at the same time to be perfectly satisfied that the mistake, if any, is on the wrong shoulders.

Every collector of Mr. Ruskin's works knows that on December 14, 1864, he delivered a lecture at the Town Hall, Manchester, and that this lecture was printed and published in that city, in pamphlet form, under the title of 'The Queens' Gardens.' He is also aware that only three copies of the pamphlet are known to exist, and if he is very well informed indeed he will know who has them, and where they got them from, and at what price. A portion of this information was in the possession of a member at Bath, who, as he said, had accidentally discovered a copy of the 'book' in a parcel of odds and ends that was to be sold by auction the following day. In his letter he requested a reply by telegram first thing in the morning saying to what price he was to go, as he had reason to believe that other persons beside himself were aware of the circumstance. There was no time for explanations, so the wire was sent, though the word 'book' came with a very suspicious ring. It was as well perhaps that the limit was intentionally put low, or there is no telling to what absurd price the parcel of miscellanea might not have been forced by his eagerness. As it was, it was bought for £2 10s., or about six or seven times as much as it was worth, for 'The Queens' Gardens' was not the coveted pamphlet at all, but the book known as 'Sesame and Lilies' (and not even the first edition of that), published by Smith, Elder and Co. in 1865, which contains the reprints of the two lectures (1) 'Of Kings' Treasuries,' (2) 'Of Queens' Gardens.' It was evident that this sort of thing had only to become general and the society would be ruined, for all payments came from the common fund. When the error was pointed out, the member cavilled and argued, but could not be convinced. He was certain that he had bought the true and original 'Queens' Gardens,' and darkly hinted at secession.

On another occasion a member bought 'Friendship's Offering,' for 1840, merely because it contains 'The Scythian Guest.' He, too, could not be persuaded that the error was his rather than that of the bookseller who sold it him. Times without number one edition was mistaken for another; over and over again were imperfect or tattered volumes bought at prices that would have been impossible but for the London treasury of this secret society. 'No good comes,' says old John Hill Burton, 'no good comes of gentlemen buying and selling'—a dictum which was manifestly applicable here. Had the confident purchaser of 'Queens' Gardens' been confronted with Nichols's 'Herald and Genealogist,' he would have been in his element, for he was an adept in the lore of armorials and pedigrees, and had a fine collection of volumes of that kind. Outside these subjects he knew but little, which for all practical purposes is infinitely worse than knowing nothing at all.

Another grievous error resulted in the purchase of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis,' 'The Rape of Lucrece,' 'The Passionate Pilgrim,' and 'Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musick,' at a good round sum. The pieces were bound up together in dilapidated calf, and as each had a separate pagination there may have been just a shadow of excuse for the payment of £2, which was the price demanded. But this book was merely Lintott's first collected edition, a work which might have been manufactured expressly for the behoof of innocent purchasers, so antiquated and primitive does it look. Had it been Cote's collected edition of 1640, instead of Lintott's comparatively worthless, and certainly very careless, production, which he took good care not to date, all would have been well; but this was never at any time likely to be the case, for the price was dead against a supposition of the kind. Price is, indeed, often a most valuable guide to the real worth of a book; though this is not always the case, as the following anecdote of a circumstance that happened to myself abundantly proves. I took the greatest pains to trace every step in the history I am about to unfold, and know that the details are true.