The Romance of Book-Collecting

by J. Herbert Slater

And this home is among time-tried and intrinsically valuable books, and not among those which are temporarily in vogue. It is a home which existed in Greece, and in Rome, and all through the so-called Dark Ages, during the Renaissance, and down the centuries which succeeded right to this present year of grace—a home furnished with genius and perfumed with sentiment. Look there at Paul Lacroix snatching from a Paris stall the very copy of 'Le Tartuffe' which had belonged to King Louis XIV., and later on sheltering not merely the great Pixérécourt founder of the Société des Bibliophiles Français, but his whole library as well, until such time as his creditors had drawn off their legions and departed. Sentiment, as well as a passion for literature, was at the bottom of these acts, for that very copy of 'Le Tartuffe' had been in Molière's coat-pocket, and Pixérécourt had a tale to tell of every scholarly volume he possessed. You cannot manufacture genuine sentiment, nor is the quality to be evolved from anything except genius.

Accordingly, we find that every book which excites the cupidity of the true bibliophile derives its magic power primarily from within, and that this power is often materially increased by reason of extraneous considerations. The instances in which external matters have at any time been capable of investing an inferior book with a halo of importance or romance are so extremely rare that they might almost be counted on the fingers. A mere fleeting craze cannot do it, and it is the greatest mistake in the world to suppose that a scarce book would be sought for, and prized when found, merely because it is scarce, and for no other reason. As every book-collector is aware, there are hundreds and thousands of volumes lying neglected on the book-stalls to-day which would never be there if this were not so. Some are scarce in the sense of being difficult to meet with when wanted, but, if that be their only merit, it has never yet been acknowledged.

But fashion, though it can never make a bad book good, has the power to subordinate one good book to another, notwithstanding, and to play shuttlecock with the names of authors and printers alike. It was fashion in excelsis which lived with the Elzevirs when men were saying to one another, 'I have all the poets they ever printed. I have ten examples of every volume, and all have red letters, and are of the right date.' It was fashion, too, which assessed the value of Longpierre's copy of Montaigne's 'Essais' (1659), with the buffalo's head on the preface and at the commencement of each chapter, at 5,100 francs, and only the other day (March 20, 1896) flung away a fine tall copy, bound by Bozerian, for the paltry sum of £6 15s.

The same capricious mistress assessed Sir Walter Raleigh's 'Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana,' 1626, at a comparatively low rate—£3 3s., if the late Mr. Henry Stevens is to be believed, and no one had a greater knowledge of such books than he—in 1858, notwithstanding the fact that it must be credited to Shakespeare's library, as the 'still vex'd Bermoothes,' and his knowledge of the breaking of the sea on the rugged rocks by which the Bermuda Islands are surrounded, sufficiently demonstrate. Thirty years ago Smith's 'Generall Historie of Virginia,' published for M. Sparkes in 1625, could have been got for a twentieth part of the sum that would be asked for it now, and this too is by Fashion's decree.

But in these and any number of typical instances there is no change in the estimation in which good literature is held; no lifting a book from an abyss of mediocrity and placing it on a pinnacle of fame. Fashion may swing men's minds to this or to that, and so indirectly and for the time being cause those ups and downs in the book-market which are the despair of everyone who has endeavoured to account for them, but further than this she cannot go.

And therefore, when I said that book-men are swayed by fashion, I meant that their tastes and inclinations are capricious, and not that they would, even if they could, enter upon the task of passing judgment upon the verdict of the world. Fashion may and does make rules which cannot be broken with impunity, so far as the pocket is concerned; it may even create an extraordinary and exceptional interest in one author to-day, and abandon him to-morrow, and do many other wonderful things to cause our unsympathetic neighbours to blaspheme; but the romance of book-collecting would be no romance were it stolidly kept at one dead level of insensibility. To employ a homely illustration—Fashion may decorate a house, it can neither build one nor raze one to the ground.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE RULES OF THE CHASE.

There was a time, and that not so very many years ago, when old books were, if only you got out of the central mart, difficult to procure, and by no means easy to store. They were frequently in folio, huge ponderous works which, unless they were of the very best, challenged the courage of all but veterans, as they looked down from their dark corners. There was no escaping them, no getting away from their costly presence, and no reading them either without sitting at a table; for 'literary machines' were not then invented, and no one seemed to care about lingering with arched back over a fire, with sixty or eighty pounds weight of paper on his knees. Such a discipline would have been valuable, no doubt, but learning grew lazy when it left the monasteries, and a table became a virtual necessity for most folk. After a time folios were turned into octavos, and the price cheapened. The 'extraneous Tegg,' as Carlyle calls the well-known bookseller, and our friends Cooke, Walker, Bell, and many more, commenced to cut the throat of the trade, and to ruin the honest author, by printing favourite books at such a very cheap rate that the public soon became totally demoralized. Cooke made an enormous fortune—for a book-seller—and died amid the plaudits of the mob and the curses of his competitors, for he had out-Heroded Herod in prostituting 'Tom Jones,' a thing deemed impossible, by publishing the text in numbers, verbatim et literatim, at a scandalously cheap price. Then he approached other 'British novelists' in turn, and went through the entire pantheon, winding up with a series of sacred classics. Cooke was a man of immense resource, and no scruples; he got the author out of the way (I don't say he murdered him), sold up his rivals, and positively lived to an advanced age—three crimes which procured him hosts of enemies, but nevertheless altered the whole system of publishing, and solved for ever the problem whether it is better or worse for the producer to sell fifty articles at a penny each, or a single one of the same kind for four and two.

Now, Cooke's procedure, and that of the other booksellers who were wise enough to follow his lead, not only had great influence in moulding the character of the bibliophiles of that day, but is directly responsible even now for many of those rules and regulations which their descendants are sticklers in the preservation of. A folio had always been bound in a manner suitable to its bulk, and in such a way as to render a new binding unnecessary for a very long time, and there was, consequently, little or no necessity for rules of any kind for its preservation. When the folio was hoisted to its place, there it would stop, or, if taken down, it would be with a considerable amount of caution.