A Monsieur,
Monsieur Galignani,
18 Rue Vivienne,
Paris.
Sir: In various numbers of your journal I have seen mentioned a work entitled The Vampire, with the addition of my name as that of the author. I am not the author, and never heard of the work in question until now. In a more recent paper I perceive a formal annunciation of The Vampire, with the addition of an account of my “residence in the Island of Mitylane,” an island which I have occasionally sailed by in the course of travelling some years ago through the Levant—and where I should have no objection to reside—but where I have never yet resided. Neither of these performances are mine—and I presume that it is neither unjust nor ungracious to request that you will favour me by contradicting the advertisement to which I allude. If the book is clever, it would be base to deprive the real writer—whoever he may be—of his honours—and if stupid I desire the responsibility of nobody’s dulness but my own. You will excuse the trouble I give you—the imputation is of no great importance—and as long as it was confined to surmises and reports—I should have received it as I have received many others—in silence. But the formality of a public advertisement of a book I never wrote, and a residence where I never resided—is a little too much—particularly as I have no notion of the contents of the one—nor the incidents of the other. I have besides a personal dislike to “vampires,” and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets. You did me a much less injury by your paragraphs about “my devotion” and “abandonment of society for the sake of religion”—which appeared in your Messenger during last Lent—all of which are not founded on fact—but you see I do not contradict them, because they are merely personal, whereas the others in some degree concern the reader....
You will oblige me by complying with my request for contradiction. I assure you that I know nothing of the work or works in question—and have the honour to be (as the correspondents to magazines say) “your constant reader” and very
obedt
humble Servt,
Byron.
To the editor of Galignani’s Messenger. Etc., etc., etc. Venice, April 27, 1819.
Curiously enough, the book itself had been published by Galignani in 1828. The cost of our total purchases, a goodly heap, amounted to but five dollars.
The balance in quantity if not in quality in old books is held in Buenos Ayres by three brothers named Palumbo—Italians. The eldest is a surly old man who must be treated with severity from the very beginning. How he manages to support himself we do not know, for whenever we were in his store we were sure to hear him assail some customer most abusively. In a small subsidiary store of his, among a heap of old pamphlets, we came upon the original folios of Humboldt’s account of the fauna and flora of South America. Upon asking the price, the man said thirty-five apiece—we thought he meant pesos, and our surprise was genuine when we found he meant centavos—about fifteen cents. From him we got the first edition of Kendall’s Santa Fé Expedition. One of his brothers was very pleasant and probably, in consequence, the most prosperous of the three. The third was reputed crazy, and certainly acted so, but after an initial encounter we became friends and got on famously. All three had a very fair idea of the value of Argentine books, but knew little or nothing about English.
Another dealer who has probably a better stock than any of the Palumbos is a man named Real y Taylor. His grandmother was English, and his father spent his life dealing in books. At his death the store was closed and the son started speculating in land with the money his father had left him. Prices soared and he bought, but when the crash came he was caught with many others. Bethinking himself of his father’s books, he took them out of storage and opened a small booth. The stock was large and a good part of it has not yet been unpacked. Taylor has only a superficial knowledge of what he deals in. He shears folios, strips off original boards and old leathers to bind in new pasteboard, and raises the price five or ten dollars after the process. In this he is no different from the rest, for after a fairly comprehensive experience in Buenos Ayres we may give it as our opinion that there is not a single dealer who knows the “rules” as they are observed by scores of dealers in America and England. Taylor had only one idea, and that was that if any one were interested in a book, that book must be of great value; he would name a ridiculous price, and it was a question of weeks and months before he would reduce it to anything within the bounds of reason. We never really got very much from him, the best things being several old French books of early voyages to South America and a first edition of Anson’s Voyage Around the World. Just before we left he decided to auction off his stock, putting up five hundred lots a month. The first auction lasted three nights. The catalogue was amusing, giving a description of each book in bombastic fashion—all were “unique in interest,” and about every third was the “only copy extant outside the museums.” He had put base prices on most, and for the rest had arranged with cappers. The attendance was very small and nearly everything was bid in. It was curious to see how to the last he held that any book that any one was interested in must be of unusual worth. There was put up a French translation of Azara’s Quadrupeds of Paraguay. The introduction was by Cuvier, but it was not of great interest to us, for a friend had given us the valuable original Spanish edition. Taylor had asked fifteen dollars, which we had regarded as out of the question; he then took off the original binding, cut and colored the pages, and rebound it, asking twenty dollars. At the auction we thought we would get it, if it went for very little; but when we bid, Taylor got up and told the auctioneer to say that as it was a work of unique value he had put as base price fifteen dollars each for the two volumes. The auction was a failure, and as it had been widely and expensively advertised, the loss must have been considerable.
As a whole, we found the booksellers of a disagreeable temperament. In one case we almost came to blows; luckily not until we had looked over the store thoroughly and bought all we really wanted, among them a first edition of Howells’s Italian Journeys, in perfect condition, for twenty-five cents. There were, of course, agreeable exceptions, such as the old French-Italian from whom, after many months’ intermittent bargaining, we bought Le Vaillant’s Voyage en Afrique, the first edition, with most delightful steel-engravings. He at first told us he was selling it at a set price on commission, which is what we found they often said when they thought you wanted a book and wished to preclude bargaining. This old man had Amsterdam catalogues that he consulted in regard to prices when, as could not have been often the case, he found in them references to books he had in stock. We know of no Argentine old bookstore that prints a catalogue.
In the larger provincial cities of Argentina we met with singularly little success. In Cordoba the only reward of an eager search was a battered paper-covered copy of All on the Irish Shore, with which we were glad to renew an acquaintance that had lapsed for several years. We had had such high hopes of Cordoba, as being the old university town and early centre of learning! There was indeed one trail that seemed to promise well, and we diligently pursued vague stories of a “viejo” who had trunks of old books in every language, but when we eventually found his rooms, opening off a dirty little patio, they were empty and bereft; and we learned from a grimy brood of children that he had gone to the hospital in Buenos Ayres and died there, and that his boxes had been taken away by they knew not whom.