The Romance of Book-Collecting

by J. Herbert Slater

To compare these classes with the recognised booksellers, some of whom have an immense turnover, would, of course, be absurd; but they have their uses, and instances are not wanting in which mightily successful dealers have begun in this humble manner, and literally forced their way up from the pavements of the East End or the Surrey side to more pleasant places in the West. High or low, rich or poor, their shops or stalls are alike objects of extreme interest to thousands who have learned enough to know that the best books are generally the cheapest. Whatever the size of the premises they own, they contribute in their several degrees to the wants of all classes of book-men, whose delight it is to forage for themselves, and to seek that they may find. The lordly collector who pays by cheque may or may not be a book-hunter. If not, he misses much of the pleasure that accompanies the tracking down, step by step, of some coveted volume which is, perhaps, more or less easily obtainable almost at any time in exchange for plenty of money, but is rarely met with casually.

It is this tracking down, hunting which is the true book-lover's chief delight, and, needless to say, his primary object is not to secure books of great price for a nominal sum. If it were, he would at the end of a long life have few successes to report, for the search for rarities is so thorough and systematic that hardly anything of substantial pecuniary value can run the gauntlet all the way to the shop-board or the barrow. The harvest has all been gathered long ago, and nothing is now left but gleanings in fields already raked. The book-lover eliminates as far as possible the question of value from his walks abroad, and leaves his gold at home to be expended as opportunity arises in the auction-room, where open competition holds the market in a virtual equipoise, or in the shops of recognised dealers, who hold his commissions and are always on the look-out for important works. He is aware, however, that intrinsically good books are to be met with continually in all sorts of places, and it is these that he hopes to obtain, and from these that his library is most often recruited. Between one edition of some interesting or instructive book and another there may be an immense disparity in cost, but very little textual difference, or even none at all. In some cases the cheaper volume may be the more accurate of the two, and may also contain additional matter, which renders it more important and desirable from every point of view, except a sentimental one.

It is the search for volumes of this kind, sound and honest, yet not aristocratic, that has kept the bookstalls open for 300 years and more, for, to be precise, we know that St. Paul's Churchyard and Fleet Street were, in addition to other less known localities, much frequented by book-men as far back as the reign of Henry VIII. In these districts Cardinal Wolsey's agents kept a sharp look-out for copies of 'A Supplicacyon for the Beggars,' which Simon Fyshe, 'a zealous man for the reformation of abuses in the Church,' had boldly published and was scattering abroad in the year 1524, and which seems to have had a stealthy run for six years, for it was not until 1530 that it was openly prohibited by proclamation. Neither Fleet Street nor St Paul's Churchyard is, however, a hunting-ground for book-men now. The former is wholly given up to newspapers and machinery, and the latter to drapers and warehousemen, and there is no room anywhere for small dealers in second-hand books.

Indeed, the whole of London has been turned topsy-turvy so far as they are concerned. New localities they abhor, and the greater part of London is new, in the sense that very many old districts and streets have been rebuilt, or entirely swept away by the march of improvement and the increasing desire for wide thoroughfares and open spaces. What place more famous once than Little Britain, which during the last twenty or thirty years has swallowed up Duck Lane—another book-hunting locality—bodily? It was here that Thomas Britton, a coal-dealer, prowled around during his spare moments, pouncing upon anything and everything that took his fancy; rejoicing especially in works of magic, witchcraft, and astrology, either printed or in manuscript. The catalogue of his library is extant, and it is clear that he was a very far-sighted and keen-scented man, and one, too, who was blessed with a taste and discrimination most rare among dealers in small coal. In Little Britain 'Paradise Lost' went begging. The stalls must have been littered with the very first, or 1667, issue, for in that year the Earl of Dorset had a copy of it thrust under his nose and pressed upon him by a bookseller who complained most bitterly that he could not get rid of his stock. About the year 1760 the whole of the trade had vanished from Little Britain, though at the present time the once-famous thoroughfare boasts one bookseller and also one newsagent, the sole representatives of past times. As for the rest of the denizens, they follow the more prosaic occupations of builders, bootmakers, butchers, hairdressers, restaurant-keepers and publicans, the last-named being especially in evidence. In this locality, as in many others, the thirst for knowledge has been quenched, and the thirst for beer become almighty.

So, too, Moorfields was once classic ground, as also the Poultry, but both places have been dead to bookish fame this hundred years. There are now no booksellers' shops in the Poultry, though Moorfields just saves itself, for it rejoices in the presence of a music publisher and a stationer. Speaking generally, the second-hand book trade has been driven bodily out of the central and eastern parts of London, and has settled itself in the streets west of Temple Bar and Holborn Viaduct, always avoiding the Strand, which, for some reason or other, has ever been regarded as an inhospitable quarter. There are certainly booksellers' shops in this important thoroughfare, three, I believe, is the precise number, but they are hardly sufficient to invest it with the dignity and title of a 'locality.'

In contrast to this, Holborn and the streets adjoining have always been a good hunting-ground, and are so to-day. 'The Vision of Piers Plowman' was printed and sold in Ely Rents so long ago as 1550, and Snow Hill and Gray's Inn Gate were both world-wide localities, though the glory of all these places has since departed. Up to within five years ago there was a shop on the right-hand side of Gray's Inn Lane, just out of Holborn, given up chiefly to the sale of newspapers. It is shut up now, and, according to all accounts, will never be opened again, which is a pity, for it is a shop, or more probably the curtailment of much larger premises, with a notable history. Here, in 1750 or thereabouts, carried on business one Thomas Osborne, who, although ignorant to a degree, brutal in his manners, and surly beyond description, managed to build up the largest business of its kind in London, or, indeed, anywhere else. Customers ignored Tom Osborne's curses, and bought his books when they could, for sometimes, when particularly morose, he would shut himself up, like a hermit, 'with his lumber,' as a historian of the day termed the thirty whole libraries which he had amassed, and refuse to treat at all. Nevertheless, Osborne prospered exceedingly, and in the latter years of his life was the owner of a country house and 'dog and duck shootings,' all purchased and kept up from the profits derived from this shop in Gray's Inn Lane. The prices he asked were the most he thought he had the remotest chance of getting, and were often outrageous and extortionate, though at other times very much below what he might have obtained had he known his business properly. He seems to have taken a bird's-eye view of his stock, and to have appraised the value of individual books, not by reference to their rarity, but by means of a fractional calculation based upon the total cost—a rough-and-ready method of trading which attracted book-buyers from every part of London, and reconciled them to his insolence. Though Osborne was not the first dealer to issue a catalogue—one T. Green, of Spring Gardens, being credited with having revived, in 1729, this time-worn method of selling books—he carried on a more extensive business in this way than anyone who had preceded him, and in addition had the supreme honour of being knocked down by Dr. Johnson with a huge folio which the latter wanted to buy, and he (Osborne) refused to sell at any price. Either of these claims to distinction would have made the fortune of any man. It is stated by Sir John Hawkins that the book which Dr. Johnson wielded with such effect was the 'Biblia Greeca Septuaginta,' printed at Frankfort in 1594. The identical volume was in the possession of Thorpe, a Cambridge bookseller, in 1812, but what has become of it since I do not know.

Though Osborne's shop, or what remains of it, is now closed, the neighbourhood is still as largely interested in the sale of books as ever, or perhaps even more so, for there has been an immigration from other quarters of London which improvements have converted into uncongenial ground.

The new Law Courts and their approaches stand upon the sites of Butchers' Row, Shire Lane, where Elias Ashmole lived, and countless courts and alleys beside. Clare Market has vanished within the last two or three years, and Clement's Inn, with its narrow passages and dingy chambers, has been entirely rebuilt. Even Drury Lane, sacred to the memory of an army of general dealers who, up to within a comparatively short time ago, bought books by weight, is now past praying for to all appearances, for hardly a book of any kind is to be met with from one end of this grimy thoroughfare to the other. Let us walk into Bozier's Court, which is further to the west, and we miss the shop which Lord Lytton has immortalized in 'My Novel'; in fact, the court itself is plastered all over with advertisement posters, and awaits the wreckers, for it is doomed. King William Street, Strand, was a booksellers' resort for a century and more, but the fraternity are leaving one by one, and only a very few are to be met there now. Westminster Hall, for centuries a virtual library, is shut up, and echoes spring from its stones when any casual stranger, armed with an order, is allowed to ramble through Rufus's deserted pile. In fact, wherever we stray, north, south, east, or west, we are forced to the conclusion that London has changed so utterly within the last twenty or thirty years that it is to all intents and purposes a different place.

And the booksellers appear to have changed, too, for there are no 'characters' among them, or, at any rate, very few. Every now and then you will meet with some strange mortal, who looks as though he had been transported bodily from the last century and tumbled unceremoniously into a brand new shop, with coloured glass above the portal, and fresh paint about the front; but you have hardly time to ruminate on the mutability of things under the sun and he is gone, to make way, perhaps, for a dealer in something superlatively new. An antiquary of the stamp of Francis Grose, the 'chiel' who went about taking notes, would stand aghast, then hasten to depart, could he but see the London of to-day.

It must not, however, be supposed that book-hunting as a pastime is extinct in modern Babylon. On the contrary, there are yet plenty of nooks and corners, and pestilential-looking alleys, that Death and the jerry-builder have apparently forgotten, and these places, we may be certain, harbour many folios. As a fact, I know they do; for in my time, and to some extent even yet, I have been and am a wanderer about such places, and have, on occasion, picked up many interesting mementos there. What I merely wish to insist upon is that the older and recognised localities, which our fathers would naturally have visited a couple of decades or more ago in their search for old books, are not those which would, as a rule, afford much scope for enterprise now. We must go further afield, and not expect to find a mass of stalls huddled together in a single street, as though one locality had tapped and drained the life-blood of the rest. Circumstances have changed, and at the close of the nineteenth century booksellers have, to a great extent, ceased to be gregarious, except in Holywell Street, or, as it is more generally called, 'Booksellers' Row,' once the abode of literary hacks and bailiff-haunted debtors, which even yet has an old-world look with its overhanging houses and narrow roadway. Here there certainly is a long double procession of bookshops, many open to the street, every one of them crammed from floor to ceiling with great piles of lore.