[109] Cf. Jackson’s Bibl. Géog., no. 684, and pp. 185, 199. Also see Vol. III. 361.
[110] His catalogues are spiced with annotations signed “Western Memorabilia.” Sabin (Dictionary, vii. 369) quotes the saying of a rival regarding Gowans’s catalogues, that their notes “were distinguished by much originality, some personality, and not a little bad grammar.” His shop and its master are drawn in F. B. Perkins’s Scrope, or the Lost Library. A Novel. Mr. Gowans died in November, 1870, at sixty-seven, leaving a stock, it is said, of 250,000 bound volumes, besides a pamphlet collection of enormous extent. Mr. W. C. Prime told the story of his life, genially, in Harper’s Magazine (1872), in an article on “Old Books in New York.” Speaking of his stock, Mr. Prime says: “There were many more valuable collections in the hands of booksellers, but none so large, and probably none so wholly without arrangement.” Mr. Gowans was a Scotchman by birth, and came to America in 1821. After a varied experience on a Mississippi flat-boat, he came to New York, and in 1827 began life afresh as a bookseller’s clerk. Cf. American Bibliopolist, January, 1871, p. 5.
[111] Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., p. xxx.
[112] Jackson, Bibl. Géog., nos. 670-676.
[113] Jackson, no. 687. See Vol. IV. p. 435. Munsell issued privately, in 1872, a catalogue of the works printed by him. Sabin, Bibl. of Bibl., p. cv. Cf. a Biographical Sketch of Joel Munsell, by George R. Howell, with a Genealogy of the Munsell Family, by Frank Munsell. Boston, 1880. This was printed (16 pp.) for the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
[114] Jackson, no. 669.
[115] They have been issued in 1869, 1871, 1873, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1879, 1883. Jackson, nos. 705-711. Lesser lists have been issued in Cincinnati by William Dodge. The chief dealer in Americana in Boston, who issues catalogues, is, at the present time, Mr. George E. Littlefield.
[116] Another is now in progress.
[117] With these canons Mr. Quaritch’s prices can be understood. The extent and character of his stock can be inferred from the fact that his purchases at the Perkins sale (1873) amounted to £11,000; at the Tite sale (1874), £9,500; at the Didot sales (1878-1879), £11,600; and at the Sunderland sales (1883), £32,650, out of a total of £56,851. At the recent sales of the Beckford and Hamilton collections, which produced £86,444, over one half, or £44,105, went to Mr. Quaritch. These figures enable one to understand how, in a sense, Mr. Quaritch commands the world’s market of choice books. A sketch, B. Q., a biographical and bibliographical Fragment (1880, 25 copies), in the privately printed series of monographs issued to a club in London, of which Mr. Quaritch is president, called “The Sette of Odd Volumes,” has supplied the above data. The sketch is by C. W. H. Wyman, and is also reprinted in his Bibliography of Printing, and in the Antiquarian Magazine and Bibliographer, November, 1882. One of the club’s “opuscula” (no. iii.) has an excellent likeness of Mr. Quaritch prefixed. Cf. also the memoir and portrait in Bigmore and Wyman’s Bibliography of Printing, ii. 230.
[118] Jackson, nos. 643-649; Trübner, Bibliographical Guide, p. xix.