Even the family of genuine book-lovers—neither virtuosos nor speculators—presents more than a single type to our notice. We have the student who takes a subject for treatment, and forms a small gathering of the literary material necessary for his purpose, shooting it back perchance into the market, his immediate task accomplished. There is the man like Coleridge, who regarded the volumes which fell in his way as casual and welcome visitors, of whom he asked questions, or who answered his, and whose margins gave themselves up to his untiring habit of registering whatever occurred to him, before the passing—possibly borrowed—volume went on its way again. There is Lamb, who was less addicted to annotating his acquisitions, but who gave them a permanent home, if they had come to him jure emptionis, and were of the elect—not presentation—copies, cold and crude, thrust into his hand by some well-meaning acquaintance. There is Edward Fitzgerald, dissimilar from all these, yet so far cognate that he bought only the books which struck him as worth reading, if not turning to some practical account. Nor should we in strict fairness refuse admittance within this highest circle even to such as Selden, Burton, Pepys, and others who might be easily enumerated, who may have been little more than curiosity-hunters, but who had a genuine relish for pieces of old popular literature, the greatest rarities in the language inclusive, when there was barely any competition for them. The man of the old school, who ransacked the shops and the stalls, and even attended the auction, may have been a faddist and a superficial student; but his was an honest sort of zeal and affection; there was no vanity or jealousy; and we meet with cases where one collector would surrender to another an acquisition which the latter happened to have missed, and to want very badly indeed. So Isaac Reed gave up to George Steevens Marlowe's Dido, and so George III. enjoined his agent not to bid for him against a student or a scholar.
I have not yet quite done with this aspect of the matter. I have to speak of the personages who have thought fit to impose on themselves a chronological or a financial limit, who drew the line at a given year, or would not go beyond a certain figure. Mr. Henry Pyne laid down 1600 as the latest date which he would admit, and rarely exceeded a sovereign or two for a single article (Dr. Doran gave me to understand that fourpence was his maximum). It may appear strange to suggest that the higher the sum paid for a book (assuming it to be worth the money), the slighter the risk grows of the purchase proving pecuniarily unprofitable. Yet at the same time outlay on a library is a relative term, and one individual may account himself as frugal in expending £30,000 in the course of a lifetime, as another may do in expending £300. The late Earl of Ashburnham bought in chief measure during the forties and fifties, when the reaction from the bibliomania still more or less sensibly prevailed, and considering his Lordship's position and resources, he was not much more lavish than the above-mentioned Mr. Pyne, or indeed any other amateur of average calibre, while he was to the full extent as genuine a follower of the pursuit for its mere sake as anybody whom we could name—as the Duke of Roxburghe, Mr. Heber, Mr. Corser, or Mr. Crossley.
In my Rolls of Collectors I specify a type under the designation of Book-Recipients, and I instance such cases as Dickens and Thackeray; but in fact there are many who would never go in pursuit of anything of the kind beyond a work of reference, and whose utmost exploit is the payment of a friendly subscription. The only title to admittance into my category of such doubtful enthusiasts is the sentimental enhancement of value arising from the transformation of the margins of a common-place volume into a repository for manuscript remarks or graphic embellishments, which may send it back into the market some day a three-figure item in a catalogue.
In attempting to indicate in a sort of tentative manner the publications to which a private collection might be advantageously and comfortably limited, one does not contemplate the shelf or so of mere works of reference, which have to be obtained even by such as are not amateurs in this direction, and, moreover, there is an obvious difficulty in prescribing for persons of infinitely varied ideas and prepossessions. Now, as to volumes for reference, the class and extent of course depend on individual requirements, and the books outside this radius are apt to be subject in their selection to local circumstances, since a man associated with a district or county naturally contracts a sympathy with its special history or its archæological transactions, as well as any miscellaneous monographs relating to particular places or celebrated persons. With such specialities and preferences we cannot presume to interfere; but, as a rule, the aggregate body comprised in them need not be large or very expensive, and in catholic or general literature it becomes almost surprising when we have taken the pains to winnow from literary remains of real and permanent interest the preponderant mass, of which the facilities for occasional examination at a public library ought to suffice, how comparatively slender the residuum is.
CHAPTER VI
The safest course—Consideration of the relative value and interest of books in libraries—The intrinsic and extrinsic aspects—Consolation for the less wealthy buyer—The best books among the cheapest—A few examples—Abundance of printed matter in book-form—Schedule of Books which are Books—Remarks on English translations of foreign literature.
When we inspect a great library, filling three or four apartments lined with cases, the first impression is that the possession of such an assemblage of literary monuments is a privilege reserved for the very wealthy; and to some extent so it is. But certain elements enter into the constitution of all extensive accumulations of property of any kind, whether it be books, prints, medals, or coins, which inevitably swell the bulk and the cost without augmenting in anything approaching an equal ratio the solid value. Not to wander from our immediate field of inquiry and argument, the literary connoisseur, starting perhaps with a fairly modest programme, acquires almost insensibly an inclination to expand and diverge, until he becomes, instead of the owner of a taste, the victim of an insatiable passion. He not merely admits innumerable authors and works of whom or which he originally knew nothing, but there are variant impressions, copies with special readings or an unique provenance, bindings curious or splendid; and nothing at last comes amiss, the means of purchase presumed.
Yet, at the same time, he does not substantially possess, perhaps, much more than the master of a petite bibliothèque, on which the outlay has not been a hundredth part of his own. A considerable proportion of his shelf-furniture are distant acquaintances, as it were, and those acquisitions with which he is intimate are not unlikely to prove less numerous than the belongings of his humbler and less voracious contemporary.