The Romance of Book-Collecting

by J. Herbert Slater

Then, again, there is one speculation that no true book-lover can stifle; it haunts him as he passes the barrows with their loads of sermons and scholastic primers, and it is this: 'Time works wonders.' Some day may not this heterogeneous mass of rubbish produce as fine a pearl as ever a diseased oyster was robbed of? May not fashion go off at a tangent, and dote on lexicons or what not? There have been men—Rossi, for example, who was so saturated with the suspicion that fashion might change any moment that the stalls by which he passed were 'like towns through which Attila or the Tartars had swept, with ruin in their train'—who would buy any book whatever, whether they wanted it or not, on the bare chance of someone else wanting it, either at the time or in the days to come.

Such may be the outcome of a too eager perusal of catalogues, focussed till it produces an absorbing passion, which only departs with life itself. After a time discrimination, naturally enough, becomes impossible, and whole masses of books are bought up for what they may become, not for what they are. This may appear to be an ignoble sort of pastime, but in reality it is far otherwise, since wholesale purchasers of this stamp are invariably well read, and know more about their author than his mere name. I personally was acquainted with a bookworm who absorbed whole collections at a time. His house was full of books; they were under the beds, in cupboards, piled up along the walls, under the tables and chairs, and even on the rafters under the roof. If you walked without due care, you would, more likely than not, tumble over a folio in the dark, or bring down a wall of literature, good, bad, or indifferent, on your head. This library was chaotic to the general, though the worm himself knew very well where to burrow for anything he required, and, what is more to the point, would feed for hours on volumes that few people had ever so much as heard of. The monetary value of his treasures did not trouble him, though one of his favourite anecdotes related to the hunting down of a fourth folio Shakespeare, which, after much haggling, he purchased for a song from a poor woman who lived in an almshouse. When the delight of the chase was over, he recompensed her to the full market value, thereby proving that, in his case at least, a greed for books does not necessarily carry with it a stifled conscience. Sad to relate, this bibliophile died like other men, and the collection of a lifetime came to the inevitable hammer. Most of his books then proved to be portions of sets. If a work were complete in, say, ten volumes, he would perhaps possess no more than five or six of the full number in various bindings and editions, while others, though complete, were imperfect, and many were in rags. Yet among the whole there were some pearls of great price. Even in his day the fashion had changed in his favour.

Now, this changing of fashion which is always going on cannot be prophesied at haphazard, or perhaps even at all; but if there is a way of forestalling it, it is by the careful comparison of prices realized for books of a certain kind at different periods of time, and this can only be accomplished by a study of catalogues. The book-man likes to think that history repeats itself in this as in other matters, and that what has happened once will probably occur again in process of time. Nay, he might, without any great stretch of credulity. persuade himself that it must occur, if only he live long enough. That's the rub, for half a dozen lifetimes might not be sufficient to witness a return to favour of, say, the ponderous works of the Fathers, which were in such great demand a couple of centuries ago. As of them, so of many other kinds of books which are only read now by the very few. Some day they will rise again after their long sleep, but not for us.

As a corollary to this eulogy of catalogues, let us take a few of them and see where the book-man's steps are leading him. In his wanderings abroad he must many a time be painfully conscious of the fact that his own quest is that of everyone else whose tastes are similar to his own. Let a first edition of the immortal 'Angler' so much as peep from among the grease and filth of a rag-and-bone shop, and a magnetic current travels at lightning speed to the homes of a score or more of pickers-up of unconsidered trifles, who forthwith race for the prize. How they get to know of its existence is a mystery. Perhaps some strange psychological influence is at work to prompt them to dive down a pestilential alley for the first and last time in their lives. Did you ever see a millionaire groping in the gutter for a dropped coin? His energy is nothing to that of the book-man who has reason to suspect—why he knows not—that here or there may perhaps lie hid and unrecognised a volume which fashion has made omnipotent. And his energy is not confined to himself alone, for one decree of a naughty world changes not—it is ever the same: What many men want, more men will search for; what one man only has, many will want. The path of the book-hunter is trodden flat and hard with countless footsteps, and this is the reason why it is so unsatisfactory to look specially for anything valuable.

We may take it, therefore, that, though hunting for books may be a highly exhilarating pastime, it is seldom remunerative from a pecuniary point of view. There are, no doubt, hundreds of thousands of good and useful volumes which can be bought at any time for next to nothing; but they have no halo round them at the moment, and so they are abandoned to their fate by the typical collector, who insists not only on having the best editions in exchange for his money, but that his books shall be of a certain description—that is to say, of a kind to please him, or which for the time being is in great demand.

And men are pleased at various times by books of a widely different character, as the old catalogues tell us plainly enough. In 1676, when William Cooper bookseller, dwelling at the Sign of the Pelican in Little Britain, held the first auction sale ever advertised in England—that of the library of Dr. Lazarus Seaman—works critical of the Fathers and Schoolmen; learned and critical volumes of distressing profundity, appealed to the comparative few who could read and write sufficiently well to make reading a pleasurable experience. Poetry is absent entirely. Shakespeare and Milton are elbowed out by Puritan fanatics who fulminate curses against mankind. No doubt, if a book-man of those days had been asked what kind of literature would be in vogue a couple of centuries hence, he would have pointed to Seaman's collection and replied, 'Books like those can never die. So long as learning holds its sway over the few, they will be bought and treasured by the many.' In this he would have been wrong, for few people care nowadays for volumes such as these. The times have changed utterly, and we with them.

At this same sale was a book which sold for less than almost any other, and it lay hidden away under this bald and misleading title: 'Veteris et Novi Testamenti in Ling. Indica, Cantabr. in Nova Anglia.' Simply this, and nothing more. No statement as to date, condition or binding appears in Cooper's catalogue, and yet this Bible is none other than John Eliot's translation into the Indian language, with a metrical version of the Psalms in the same vernacular, published at Cambridge, Mass., in 1663-61. An auctioneer of the present day would print the title of this volume in large capitals, and tell us whether or no it had the rare dedication to King Charles II., of pious memory, which was only inserted in twenty copies sent to England as presents. If it had, then this book, wherever it may be, is now worth much more than its weight in gold, for at Lord Hardwicke's sale, held in London on June 29, 1888, such a desirable copy was knocked down for £580.

Why this immense advance in price, seeing that probably there is no man in England to-day who could read a single line of John Eliot's free translation? The reason is plain. Since 1661 sleepy New England has vanished like the light canoes of countless Indians, and in the busy United States there has grown up a great demand for anything which illustrates the early history of North America. Had such a contingency struck old Lazarus Seaman, he would have made his will to suit the exigences of the case, and perhaps taken more interest in John Eliot and his missionary enterprises than anyone did at the time, or has done since.

It may perhaps be said that Seaman's library must have been of a special kind, one which such a learned divine might be expected to gather within his walls; but as a matter of fact this was not so. Between 1676 and 1682, October to October in each of those years, exactly thirty sales of books were held by auction in London, among them the libraries of Sir Kenelm Digby, Dr. Castell, the author of the 'Lexicon Heptaglotton,' Dr. Gataker, Lord Warwick, and other noted persons. The general character of all the seventeenth-century catalogues which time has spared for our perusal is substantially the same. Every one of them reflects the taste and fashion of the day, as did Agrippa's magic glass the forms of absent friends. Still harping chiefly on theology! as Polonius might say, these catalogues are crammed with polemics and books of grave discourse. Anything which could not, by hook or by crook, be dragged, as to its contents, within the circumference of the fashionable craze, was disposed of for a trifling sum. Even in 1682 the learned world, or at least our narrow corner of it, was inhabited almost entirely by crop-eared Puritans, with sugar-loaf hats on their heads and broad buckles to their shoes, and by Philosophers. True! Cromwell had gone to his account, and Charles II. held Court at St. James's and elsewhere, but the King and his merry companions were not reading men unless a profound knowledge of 'Hudibras,' that book which Pepys could not abide the sight of, could make them so. The anti-Puritans patronized Butler, and doted on Sir Charles Sedley, the Earl of Rochester and a few more, who scribbled love-verses by day, and gambled and fought and drank at night. But these worshipped Thalia and Erato only, with music and dancing and other delights, and knew nothing of solid hard work by the midnight oil. They had no books to speak of, and the few they had were light and airy like themselves, and for the most part as worthless.

On November 25, 1678, a great sale was held at the White Hart, in Bartholomew Close. The books were 'bought out of the best libraries abroad, and out of the most eminent seats of learning beyond the seas,' or, more truthfully, had been removed from the shops of seven London book-sellers who had combined to rig the market. Books of all kinds were dispersed at this sale, which continued de die in diem till the heptarchy was satisfied. Were the members of this pioneer combination alive now, they would weep to think that they gave away on that occasion—practically gave away—scores of what have long since become aristocrats among books. Americana were there in plenty, and some of these are now so extremely rare and valuable that they are hardly to be procured for love or money; some few, indeed, have completely disappeared, tossed lightly aside, probably by disgusted purchasers, or carted back again to the shops from whence they came, to be stacked once more till they perished utterly of damp and neglect, moth, mice and rust. On the other hand our old friends, the Puritans, revelled in grim folios bought up at prices which, the change in the value of money notwithstanding, would hardly be exceeded now. Walton's 'Biblia Sacra Polyglotta' was an immense favourite, a distinction it doubtless deserved, and, indeed, deserves yet, though we can see that Walton must have 'gone down' woefully in the last hundred years, when we come to calculate the necessaries of life that could be bought then with a piece of gold, and to contrast them with the meagre display such a sum would purchase now. The truth perhaps, is that, although education was less widely diffused in the days of the Stuarts, it was more deep and thorough. A savant was then like a huge octopus that devastates whole districts, and daily grows fatter and more bloated at the expense of everything that moves within reach of its spreading tendrils.