And Holywell Street, be it said, is such historic and classic ground, that it is threatened every day by the improver, who longs to lay its north side open to the Strand, and will, we may be sure, effect his purpose in the end. It was here that Lord Macaulay used to take his walks abroad in search of books. As a rule he began and ended there; for a whole day's pilgrimage would not suffice to unearth more than a fractional part of the immense store of volumes that the labour of years had accumulated, and which was continually being decimated and renewed. In his day there were more books to be seen and handled there than now, for some of the shops have since been devoted to other trades. In Holywell Street John Payne Collier was as well known as his own 'History of English Dramatic Poetry,' which, nearly sixty years ago, littered the stalls, doubtless to his great disgust, seeing that to be in evidence there to any extent was then, as now, proof positive that the 'remainder-man' had been at work, to the bane of the author and publisher alike. Mr. W. Roberts, in his charming 'Book-hunter in London,' narrates that Collier once picked up in Holywell Street for the merest trifle a copy of John Hughes's 'Calypso and Telemachus,' an opera in three acts, first published in 1712, which contained thirty-eight unpublished couplets in the handwriting of Pope. Halliwell-Phillipps was also an inveterate rambler up and down this thoroughfare, and several of his Shakespearean quartos came from there in days when these small but almost priceless volumes were not so widely and persistently sought for as they are now. In fact, we have it in his own words that when he first began to collect anything and everything that related in whatever degree to the great dramatist, these early quartos were frequently to be met with at prices which, comparatively speaking, sound simply ludicrous in our ears. Should anyone rescue a copy now from some forgotten lumber-room, the fact is heralded by the press, and accounted most extraordinary, as indeed it is; for everyone, the world over, is on the look-out for rarities such as these. Though Holywell Street yet stands, and does a thriving trade among the bookish, let not anyone think that much is to be got for nothing there. On the contrary, the dealers who inhabit it are better versed than most people in the importance of each and every book they part with or throw into the boxes which receive the outcasts of literature. There are, however, good and valuable books by the thousand to be met with by anyone who does not object to pay a fair and reasonable price for them. To this extent, and in this particular, is Booksellers' Row the queen of London streets. From these remarks I except, of course, the extremely important shops of the West-End dealers into which correspondence flows from every part of the world.
This chapter is devoted to the 'Hunting-grounds' of London, and I deny that a collector who gives a standing order either verbally or by letter to a bookseller for some work he particularly wants is a book-hunter at all, at least so far as that particular transaction is concerned. To my mind Nimrod must handle his own bow and not entrust it to a deputy, even though he might by the rules of the chase be absolutely entitled to the quarry which the skill of the latter had brought down. Let him go where he will, East or West, the point of the compass makes no matter, he is a hunter only when he prosecutes his own inquiries and carries out in person all his arrangements. So we will avoid the great firms of book-sellers, although it may be taken for granted that almost any scarce work could be procured sooner or later from them, and go off on a chase in which we shall never, in all human probability, meet with any great prize, and may have to be satisfied with a little, that little, however, being much from many points of view.
At the present day books of all sorts are to be met with in great profusion in Farringdon Street. Every Saturday morning throughout the year light hand-carts to the number, perhaps, of thirty or forty, stand in a long line against the curb, and each is packed with works of all kinds. I am bound to admit that obsolete school-books and forgotten sermons constitute the great majority of these waifs and strays, but there is always a wide choice of useful books to be got for purely nominal sums, and occasionally one that is rare and valuable. Personally I never met with a really scarce book in Farringdon Street, but three years ago—and I mention this at the risk of being charged with travelling from the subject—I bought there the undoubtedly original study by Sir Joshua Reynolds for the portrait of the Right Honourable George Seymour Conway, afterwards Lord George Seymour Conway. The portrait was painted in 1770, and engraved in mezzotint by Edward Fisher the year following. The study is in oils, on thick paper of about twelve inches in height, and is so remarkable as a work of art, that it is a wonder it could have escaped recognition for an hour, instead, as was the fact, for a whole morning.
Should Farringdon Street prove unpropitious, Sunday morning in any week will see Lambeth Marshes and the New Cut, both on the Surrey side, crowded with barrows, and the same remark applies to the streets about the Elephant and Castle on Saturday evenings when the weather is fine. Generally speaking, the peripatetic book-seller is only to be met with on the first and last days of the week, but that he does manage to turn over a considerable part of his stock in the short time available is not to be doubted. He may not change—many of these men have haunted the same spot for years, and have their recognised stands—but his stock is, in one sense, ever new. A few months ago I saw in the Whitechapel Road a hand-cart full of small vellum-bound volumes, which proved to be Greek and Latin classics, printed in Paris a couple of centuries ago. The covers were remarkably fresh and clean, and somebody or other, or rather a succession of owners, must have taken the greatest care of these little books, which had thus ignobly fallen into the gutter at last. Next week at the same hour, they had all gone, having been disposed of to the more learned inhabitants of Bethnal Green at 2d. apiece.
If, however, wandering about the East End of London is not to the taste of the picker-up of unconsidered trifles, there is still the more primitive kind of shops to be visited. Great Turnstile still boasts a bookseller or two, and it was here, it will be remembered, that John Bagford, many years ago, divided his attention between making boots and shoes and ripping out the title-pages of the books that fell into his sacrilegious hands. He failed as a cobbler, but succeeded in amassing the most disreputable collection of titles that has ever been got together. The arch-Vandal failed in everything but his Vandalism, and surely any success is better than none at all. It is said of him that he searched all his life for one of Caxton's impossible title-pages, and died of disappointment, a story which is probably a gross libel on his accomplishments, for Bagford was not by any means an uneducated man.
Then, Little Turnstile hard by is worth a casual visit, and there are many shops in the streets extending east and west of St. Martin's Lane where books are to be bought in almost any number. The newly-built Charing Cross Road appears to be under a cloud; in fact, at this point we must turn back again, and make direct for Holborn, Bury Street, and the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square and Queen Square.
In Red Lion Passage there are several of the quaintest shops imaginable, one of them kept by a dealer who appears to have a mania for the very largest folios, though I notice that of late he has somewhat fallen away from his traditional custom in this respect. The books stand on their sides on the floor in columns of about six feet high; they are piled on and under the counter, and are seen peeping out of the black darkness of a room beyond. Petrarch would have avoided this shop lest history should repeat itself, and a folio break, not his leg merely this time, but his neck.
On the other side of the Passage is another temple of gloom and mystery, for it must be observed that the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square is generally in semi-darkness all the year round, except in the winter, and then it is frequently impossible to see at all when once the streets are left. The proprietors of this shop issue a periodical catalogue, which can be taken from a box at the door, and it may safely be said that there is no catalogue issued in London by anyone which is better worth glancing over than this, notwithstanding an occasional misprint or two. The books are, generally speaking, of such an unusual and out-of-the-way kind that one cannot help wondering where they all come from. For instance, 'Ben Johnson's English Dictionary, 8vo., 1732,' must be a remarkable volume, and the 'Wuremberg Chronicle, folio, numerous wood-cuts, 1493,' equally curious. Then there is 'Peasson on the Creed,' 'Jewels, ——, Works, folio, 1611,' 'Locke, Humane Understanding, folio, 1706,' 'Staunton: Shakispear,' and so on ad infinitum. Throughout the prices are moderate, extremely moderate; that, at any rate, is a fact worthy of distinct recognition, and some of the books, too, are anything but easy to procure, as witness Chaucer's Works, folio, 1602, which is priced at £1 10s., Grafton's Chronicle, folio, 1569, £1 5s., Swan's 'Speculum Mundi,' 4to., 1670, 3s., and many others. Dark though this shop may be to gaze upon, I regard it as a typical book-man's paradise.
Paternoster Row, further east still, is now of course, the headquarters of the publishers, though several second-hand booksellers still linger there. Before the Great Fire reduced the whole district to ashes they had it all their own way, and when the Row was rebuilt they flocked there once more, to be gradually elbowed out by giant houses which sell books wholesale. There is one shop in this thoroughfare so completely wedged up with books that it is a somewhat difficult matter to enter in at the door. Nobody who is not in the daily habit of passing by could avoid stopping to glance at the rows of volumes which the proprietor has reared up against a wall round the corner that leads into St. Paul's Churchyard, for he has decorated them with innumerable strips of paper writ large with pieces of advice on things in general, quotations from classical writers, the Bible and the Koran, which, though they have for the most part nothing whatever to do with the sale of books of any kind, attract by reason of their quaintness and the strangeness of their being.
And so we might go wandering for ever about New London, passing on every side the shadows of the old, but seeing little of the substance. Book-men of the true stamp are antiquaries, to whom novelty is abhorrent. The pleasantest places are to them those which time has consecrated with a gentle touch, and which reflect all their imaginings, even as they echo their footsteps. These are departing under the mandate of an inexorable law, and we go with them.