The Romance of Book-Collecting

by J. Herbert Slater

This mania for Grangerizing grew till it assumed enormous proportions. One enthusiast tried to illustrate Rees' 'Cyclopaedia,' but died before he had accomplished very much in comparison with what remained to be done. Mr. Crowle's copy of Pennant's 'History of London' cost that gentleman £7,000 from first to last, and there is a book of this kind in the Bodleian which has engulfed nearly double that amount. It consists of Clarendon's 'History of the Rebellion' swollen to sixty-seven large volumes, representing forty years of intense application. The vagaries of a whole army of book-collectors are reflected from every page of works such as these, for a man must necessarily be a book-collector first, and a Grangerizer after, else would material fail him. Happily for the peace of books, the mania for extra-illustrating has practically died out. The expense is too great, life too short, the knowledge and taste—of a kind—too laborious to acquire, to endow this pastime with a permanent and stable interest.

And yet there is another vagary, eccentricity, freak, or what you will, which, for cool, deliberate folly, has never been equalled even among Ferrar's admirers. The fun in this case consists in wilfully destroying a certain number of scarce and valuable books in order to heighten the importance and value of the survivors. Three or four collectors whose tastes are similar—that is to say, who accumulate works by the same author—will take stock of their belongings. Thanks to the Grangerizers, a portrait will perhaps be missing from one volume, and a plate from another; some disciple of an ancient Goth may have removed a title-page or two; one copy may be fairer to look upon than another; a leaf or two may be injured which in another copy, imperfect perhaps in other respects, may be above suspicion. Our collectors have duplicates, for they have been striving all their lives to prevent anyone else from obtaining any copy, good, bad or indifferent, of the scarcest works of the author or authors they think they honour by their notice. They make a 'pool' of all the volumes which are not immaculate; complete or perfect as many of them as possible, apportion them, and destroy the remainder. They will burn a work which is perfect, provided each has a copy in better condition, and this is to prevent you or me, or anyone else, from sharing in their sacrilegious joy. When we reflect that, from the nature of things, it is only the scarcest books that can be so treated with effect, we shall begin to realize the sinister importance of the act. Practices such as these are the product of the present age; they are not common, far from it, but they are not unusual. And yet the perpetrators mean no harm, for, as they would very truly say, if their practices were generally known and complaint were made, 'You can, if you like, read So-and-so without the least difficulty, for his works have been reprinted many times, and it is not either essential or advisable that the very scarcest edition of all should be in your hands.' There is in this argument a little logical force, but no decency for anyone to dissect.

Bookmen of the present day, or at least those among them who aspire to the highest seats in the collectors' Pantheon, are invariably bound by rule, and it is this hard and fast bondage that makes them do things which, if left to themselves, they would probably be the first to deprecate. To accumulate any considerable number of really scarce books is the labour of a lifetime, and to obtain immaculate copies necessitates not merely the possession of plenty of money, but a very great deal of energy, discrimination, and tact. The old school of general lovers is dying out. People now very seldom buy up whole libraries, or send out colossal orders to gratify a mere love of possession. They work by the book of arithmetic, cautiously, slowly, and with one main object ever in view. In this they are right, but in this also they fail, a paradox which is no paradox at all when it is remembered that book-hunters are of many kinds and of varying degrees of intelligence.

For instance, though there is undoubtedly something unique and strange about the very appearance of a library of extremely diminutive books, the collector of works of this kind is 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd,' within the compass of about two square inches at the most, and probably does not expect to derive either instruction or amusement from their pages when he has succeeded in reading them with the aid of a microscope. His rule is inflexible. Shakespeare in folio must give place to 'The Mite'; 'The English Bijou Almanac' for 1837 is, in his eyes one of the choicest of all volumes. Here literature and the rule are in conflict, and books become bric-à-brac, as they must do when any rule is too rigidly applied to them. Yet there are many collectors of small books both here and abroad, and prices rule inordinately high in consequence.

Very probably 'The Mite' is the smallest book printed from movable type in the world. Its size is only 3/8 in. by 3/4 in., and it would certainly be an exceedingly difficult matter to reduce this measurement. If anybody could do so, it would be M. Salomon of Paris, who has long been a collector of these microscopical curiosities, or the trustees of the British Museum, who have a box full of them. In 1781 a little book called the 'Alarm Almanac' made its appearance in Paris, and though printed with movable type and not engraved, like nearly all these little works are, measured only 19 millimetres by 14. There are very nearly 25-1/2 millimetres to the inch, and this specimen consequently runs 'The Mite' very close indeed. The 'English Bijou Almanac' for 1837, however, completely eclipses both, but unfortunately it is engraved and not printed from type. This book measures 3/4 in. in height, 1/2 in. wide, and 1/8 in. in thickness. The authoress was 'L.E.L.,' Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an almost forgotten poetess, whose sad marriage and untimely death are known to only a few students of Victorian literature. Some of her poems were printed in the 'Bijou' for the first and only time, so that this tiny volume is of some literary importance. Its title is so minute that a magnifying glass is necessary to read it. Its thirty-seven leaves are devoted, inter alia, to several pages of music and some portraits, including one of James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist. Even small books have a history and an importance of their own, but to collect them to the exclusion of every other book is surely a pronounced 'vagary.'

M. Salomon has more than 200 specimens, but then he does not absolutely confine his attention to midgets. I never knew nor heard of more than one collector who was so infatuated as to do so, and he had forty-five volumes of the kind, all different, in which he took such extreme delight that he was ever on the look out for more.

Another collector with whom I am personally acquainted has read this chapter through at my express request, and consequently cannot reasonably say that I have endeavoured to question the soundness of his discretion behind his back. He accumulates books with a history. If a book has no history, he will have none of it. In his library are many volumes which I must confess I have a great regard for, but which I know can never be mine, for each is unique, and the whole collection is destined for a public museum in the end.

He has a book bound in what looks like dry and hard parchment, warped with damp, and stained here and there with reddish brown. It is a copy of Johnson's 'Lives and Adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, and Street Robbers, etc.,' printed in folio in 1736, a scarce book at any time, but under existing circumstances past praying for. The parchment is human cuticle, stripped from the back of a criminal who had swung at Tyburn for a series of atrocious butcheries, which are chronicled with considerable minuteness in the pages of the 'Newgate Calendar.' When the corpse was cut down it was, according to the custom then prevailing, carted 'home,' and exhibited to gaping crowds at so much a head, and finally sold to the surgeons. From them a prior owner of this delightful volume obtained the skin, which, when tanned, formed an appropriate and never-to-be-forgotten binding, to all appearances sweating great smears of blood. It is only the damp, of course, or perhaps some defect in the curing process, which is responsible for these blemishes; but they seem to cry for vengeance, still greater and greater vengeance, against an inhuman wretch long since departed more or less in peace.

This is the only gruesome thing in the library, and I know as a fact that it excites more interest than all the rest of the books put together, though many, not to say most, of them are distinctly worthy of the closest attention. One volume belonged to Charles Lamb, who has made a perfect wreck of it, and half a dozen or more have the signature of 'Will Shakespere' scribbled in an Elizabethan hand on the title-pages, and in all sorts of places. These were once among the choicest possessions of Samuel Ireland, of Norfolk Street, Strand, the father of William Henry Ireland, a liar and a solicitor's clerk, who, as all the world knows, was for a time, and in very truth, mistaken for the great dramatist himself. Then there are books with inscriptions, undoubtedly genuine, of Bradshaw the regicide, Algernon Sidney, and many other persons of the highest political eminence in their day; books, too, which have belonged to Young the poet—distinguishable at a glance by the multitude of turned-down leaves—and the unfortunate Louis XVI.

This library is, of its kind, perhaps as important as any that has ever been formed, and yet it only numbers some 250 volumes, so supremely difficult is it, as a rule, to trace the possession even of books for more than a generation or two. Great men have ever been chary of their names, or at least it would seem so from the number of unimportant signatures and inscriptions we meet with day by day.