Specialism, whether on the principle of personal taste or of particular studies, has manifest advantages in an age where the multitude and choice of books are so bewildering, where of every work of any sort of value or interest a man may have, not a single edition—all that in a majority of instances was once available—but a hundred or a thousand in all sorts of sizes and at all sorts of prices. With the discontinuance of the older paucity of literature, the facilities for lodging within a modest bookcase a coterie of literary favourites have sorrowfully decreased, and a collector finds it imperative to draw the line more and more rigidly, if he does not care to fall into one of two perils—excessive outlay or excessive bulk. For we have not, as regards the former, to go very far before we incur a serious expense, if it happens that the run is on the rarer English section or on what constitutes a picked library of the French type.
Of the miscellaneous group there are graduated and varying types. The omnivorous accumulator, especially where he does not insist on condition or binding, is the dealer's idol. In the forefront of this class stand facile principes Richard Heber and Sir Thomas Phillipps, for the reason that they bought everything—whole libraries and catalogues at a swoop. Yet both these distinguished men have to be placed on a distinct footing from the normal promiscuous buyer, such as Thomas Jolley, Joseph Tasker, Edward Hailstone, Edward Solly, and a legion of others, to whom anything in the guise of a book was a sure bait, and who spurned Evelyn's motto: "Meliora retinete." Ascending a step or two higher, we come to the men who repudiate specialism as narrowing and troublesome, and who impose on themselves no restraint save perchance in the direction of theology, science, and arcana. They stop peremptorily at the belles lettres. Singer, Mitford, Bliss, Bandinel, Forster, Cosens, Ireland, Crossley, Sir John Simeon, were more or less of this school. At a still greater altitude we meet with a yet stronger tendency to draw the line at character or condition, and there occur to us the names, under the former head, of Capell, Malone, Douce, Bright, Chalmers, Collier, Ouvry, Bolton Corney, David Laing, E. F. Rimbault, Halliwell-Phillipps, Frederick Locker, W. H. Miller, Henry Cunliffe, R. S. Turner, and Henry Huth. From the same point of view, nearly in the clouds are discovered a small knot of fastidious dilettanti, who purchase a volume in the same spirit as they might do a picture or a piece of majolica; and of this minority Sir Andrew Fountaine, Sir David Dundas, and Samuel Addington may perhaps be accepted as types.
The most interesting, and it may with permission be added, intelligent type of book-collector, however, seems to be that where, after a certain measure of preparatory thought and training, one confines acquisitions for permanent ownership to volumes for which the acquirer has a genuine personal relish. In general, the principle of forming a library on this wholesome basis would be found not only more useful, but more economical, since the rarest and costliest articles are by no means, on the whole, the most interesting or the most instructive. In any case, the inconsiderate emulation by one collector of others, who may have different objects and perhaps ampler resources, is a course to be avoided. Even here there is more than a single source or ground of inducement to purchase. Setting aside the mere book of reference, which has to be multiplied to suit various exigencies, there may be said to be three classes of literary property which rationally appeal to our sympathy: (i) the volume which commends itself by its intrinsic value and charm; (ii) that which has grown dear from lengthened companionship and possibly hereditary link; (iii) and that which, unimportant so far as its internal claims and merits are concerned, bears on its face the evidence of having once belonged to a favourite of our own or a world's hero.
One persuasive argument in favour of adopting the miscellaneous or typical course in the choice of a library is the rapid growth of the difficulty of meeting with the rarer items in all important specialities. It is the general plan on the part of every follower of particular lines to commence, very often casually, by bringing home from time to time a few volumes on a certain topic, or in a given class of literature, or by one or two of a school of writers; and such a proceeding succeeds tolerably well, till the owner makes discovery of volumes positively essential to his object, and unattainable save by a heavy outlay—perchance not even to be had at any price. It is nearly always the lacunæ for which we yearn; one or two of our richer friends have them, and we have not. What we possess anybody can get in a morning's walk; we find that we have travelled a long distance, and have come to an impasse. It is very seldom indeed that a man is satisfied with the cheaper and commoner articles in a series, if he is aware of the existence of those which just constitute the corner-stones of such a collection as his.
On the contrary, by the process of sampling or picking out here and there, now and again, a book or a set of books which chance or circumstances may throw in our path, we may gradually acquire a caseful of most desirable specimens, against which it is out of the question to raise any charge of incompleteness, where incompleteness is the governing aim. Book-buying under these conditions is a humour. We are at liberty to take or leave. Because we conceive a fancy for a work by this or that author, we feel under no obligation to accommodate every scrap which he has printed, or which his friends or followers have penned. The object of our personal selection suffices us; and there perhaps we begin and we end. It is our humour.
The auctioneers' and booksellers' catalogues of the present day supply an instructive demonstration of the gradual withdrawal from the market of many thousands of articles, in Early English literature more particularly, which at one time seemed to be of fairly frequent recurrence. They have been taken up into public collections all over the world; and the very few copies, not to speak of unique examples, which time had spared, are beyond the reach of the private purchaser of to-day. We have only to study with attention the Heber and other leading records of former libraries existing in this and other countries to become convinced that the facilities for acquiring an approximately complete library of the rarer books grow narrower year by year.
There is, I submit, far too prevalent a tendency in collectors to follow suit, to attach themselves to leaders of temporary fashions. I plead for a greater independence of opinion, where the taste is in any reasonable measure cultivated and developed, or, again, where an individual knows what pleases himself. By all means, if it happens that he does not admire Shakespeare and Bacon, Sydney and Jonson, Dryden and Pope, Byron and Shelley, Scott's novels or Lamb's Elia, let him leave them alone, and make his own free choice, even if it be to go in for John Buncle, the Adventures of a Guinea, or Luttrell's Letters to Julia. There is always the room for hope that he may quit those pastures after a time and seek more fruitful ones. What is important and desirable, however, is that each person should be his own caterer. Schools are only useful where some writer of real genius has been neglected or overlooked, or been boycotted by the press, and attention to his works is only a fair service to him, or a becoming, if tardy, tribute to his memory.
Apropos of the increasing difficulty of obtaining certain old books noted above, the extensive scale on which reproductions of original editions of Early English literature have of recent years been made is certainly a boon to literary inquirers, since the presence of such reissues in our circulating libraries, if we do not choose to buy them, tends at every step in many branches of work to help us, and to render our undertakings more complete. It frequently occurs that volumes and tracts, which are of very slight literary or intrinsic value, contain valuable allusions and illustrations, which we might miss in the absence of available copies. It is worth while to take in one's hand even some puerile trifle by the author of Adonais, if one is not obliged to buy it or asked to become the possessor. One feels a curiosity to glance for a moment at a volume which, we are constantly assured in the catalogue, the writer did his utmost to obliterate; and we sometimes wish that he had fully succeeded.
Any of us, taking in his hands the series of English Book-Collectors in course of issue by Mr. Quaritch (Nos. 1-12), will perceive without difficulty, if he go no farther, the two distinct camps, so to speak, into which the collecting fraternity may be, and is, broadly divided and classifiable. You have, on the one hand, the men who followed their personal taste, and amused their leisure in late years after a busy life by purchasing such works or such descriptions of literature as appealed to them and fell within their resources; again, the scholar or investigator who assembled round him what illustrated his studies, not merely with an aim at emulating others; or, once more, the gentleman of fortune, who evolved from his school-day acquisitions a feeling or a passion for higher things, and made it the business of his maturer time—even made it his career—to carry out on a scale and on lines dictated and governed by circumstances the predilection formed in boyhood. On the contrary, there are for our consideration and instruction the libraries which owed their existence to less interesting motives, to the vague and untrained pursuit of rare and expensive books and MSS., on the judgment of others in rivalry of others, and the enterers into the field of competition with a practical eye and a financial side-look. Of all these great divisions there are varieties naturally arising from personal character; but of the collector pure and simple of the older school, that type, we avow, most warmly and potently attracts us which limited itself to the small and unpretentious book-closet, with just those things which the master loved for their own sakes or for the sakes of the donors—where the commercial element was wanting, and where the library was not viewed in the same light as railway or mining stock. It is a famous principle to invest money prudently and well; but happy is he who is wise enough to keep his library within narrow limits, and rich enough to leave it, such as it may be, out of the category of realisable assets.
Mr. Quaritch's project possesses in our eyes the incidental merit of providing us with personal accounts in a succinct form of many of the past proprietors of English and American libraries, and enables us to see at once how varied and fortuitous were the conditions under which the task was begun and accomplished, with what different measures of success and financial means; and in what a preponderance of instances it was an individual rather than an hereditary trait. Broadly speaking, we recognise two varieties of collector from all time: the one who confers his name on a library, and the other whose library confers a name on him.
