To humour him, Amaryllis rose, and appeared to look carefully along the shelves which she had scanned so many times before. They contained very good books indeed, such books as were not to be found elsewhere throughout the whole town of Woolhorton, and perhaps hardly in the county, old and rare volumes of price, such as Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Co. delight to offer to collectors, such as Bernard Quaritch, that giant of the modern auction room, would have written magnificent cheques for.
Did you ever see the Giant Quaritch in the auction-room bidding for books? It is one of the sights of London, let me tell you, to any one who thinks or is alive to the present day. Most sights are reputations merely—the pale reflection of things that were real once. This sight is something of the living time, the day in which we live. Get an Athenæum in the season, examine the advertisements of book auctions, and attend the next great sale of some famous library.
You have a recollection of the giant who sat by the highway and devoured the pilgrims who passed? This giant sits in the middle of the ring and devours the books set loose upon their travels after the repose of centuries.
What prices to give! No one can withstand him. From Paris they send agents with a million francs at their back; from Berlin and Vienna come the eager snappers-up of much considered trifles, but in vain. They only get what the Giant chooses to leave them.
Books that nobody ever heard of fetch £50, £60, £100, £200; wretched little books never opened since they were printed; dull duodecimos on the course of the river Wein; nondescript indescribable twaddling local books in Italian, Spanish, queer French, written and printed in some unknown foreign village; read them—you might as well try to amuse yourself with a Chinese pamphlet! What earthly value they are of cannot be discovered. They were composed by authors whose names are gone like the sand washed by the Nile into the sea before Herodotus. They contain no beautiful poetry, no elevated thought, no scientific discovery; they are simply so much paper, printing, and binding, so many years old, and it is for that age, printing, and binding that the money is paid.
I have read a good many books in my time—I would not give sixpence for the whole lot.
They are not like a block-book—first efforts at printing; nor like the first editions of great authors; there is not the slightest intrinsic value in them whatever.
Yet some of them fetch prices which not long ago were thought tremendous even for the Shakespeare folio.
Hundreds and hundreds of pounds are paid for them. Living and writing authors of the present day are paid in old songs by comparison.
Still, this enormous value set on old books is one of the remarkable signs of the day. If any one wishes to know what To-Day is, these book-auctions are of the things he should go to see.