Even where the object and ruling law are strict practical selections of what pleases the buyer, the range of difference is very wide. One man prefers the modern novelists, prose essayists, or verse writers; a second, collections of caricatures and prints in book-form; a third, topography; a fourth, the occult sciences, and so forth. I offer no objection to these partialities; but I entertain an individual preference for volumes chosen from nearly all branches of the belles lettres, each for its own sake. I do not vote of necessity in all cases for a book because it is rare, or because it is old, or because it is the best edition; but I do not think that I should like any scholar my friend to have the opportunity of pointing out to me (as he would, wouldn't he?) that I lacked any real essential, as the child tried to satisfy Longfellow that his shelves were not complete without a copy of the undying romance of Jack the Giant-killer.
It cannot fail to strike any one opening such books as Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum or Markham's Way to Get Wealth, for how comparatively, indeed absolutely, small a consideration it is possible to obtain two works so brimful of interest and curiosity on all subjects connected with gardening, agriculture, and rural pursuits or amusements. But both these works long remained—the Bacon yet does so—outside the collector's pale and cognisance, and the real cause was that they were alike common; they had been the favourites of successive generations; edition upon edition had been demanded; and the survival of copies was too great to suit the book-hunter, who aims at shyer quarry.
Take again, as a sample, a noble old work like the English Bayle, five substantial folios; it was a question of more than a five-pound note to become the master of a good, well-bound copy; one in morocco or russia by Roger Payne twice that amount could once scarcely have brought down; and now it is articulo mortis. The connoisseur finds it too bulky, and he hears that its matter has been superseded. At any rate, it is no longer the mode, and the mill begins to acquire familiarity with it. Let the taste return for such big game, and copies will be as Caxtons are. Most part of the editions will ere then have been served up again in the form of cheap book-drapery.
The ne plus ultra of interest and respect seems to us to centre in such collections of books as those of Samuel Pepys, Narcissus Luttrell, the Rev. Henry White of Lichfield, and Charles Lamb, where the volumes reflect the personal tastes of their owners, and are, or have been, objects to them of personal regard. What is to be thought or said of the man who simply buys works which happen to be in the fashion for the moment, and for which he competes with others as wise as himself, till the prices become ridiculous? English and American millionaires acquire specimens of early typography, poetry, binding, or what not, because they hear that it is the thing to do. One gentleman will give £100 more for a copy, because he is credibly informed that it is three-eighths of an inch taller than any other known; and a second will take something from the vendor on the assurance that no library of any pretensions is complete without it. This sort of child's-play is not Book-Collecting. The true book-closet and its master have to be kinsfolk, not acquaintances introduced by some bookseller in waiting. Humanly speaking, the poor little catalogue made by Hearne of his own books and MSS. comes nearer home to our affections than those of Grenville and Huth.
In speaking and thinking of real books, it is necessary again to distinguish between articulate productions of two classes—between such a work, for example, as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and such an one as Thoreau's Walden, or between Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Sir Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial. The present is an enterprise directed toward the indication to collectors of different views and tastes of the volumes which they should respectively select for study or purchase. There are millions who have passed through life unconsciously without having read a book, although they may have seen, nay, possessed thousands. Those which might have been recommended to them with advantage, and perused with advantage, were too obscure, too dull, too cheap, too unfashionable. It is of no use to read publications with which your acquaintances have no familiarity, and to the merits of which it might be a hard task to convert them. But, as we have said, we want space to enter into these details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in Book-Form—Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age—what Thoreau call its "tit-men."
We might readily instance masterpieces of erudition or industry which leave nothing to be desired in the way of information and safe guidance, and which, at the same time, do not distantly realise our conception of Books—real bonâ fide Books. They may be the best editions by the best binders, or they may be antiquarian periodicals or sets of Learned Transactions, reducing much of the elder lore cherished and credited by our ancestors to waste-paper; we feel that it is a sort of superstition which influences us in regarding them; but we fail to shake off the prejudice, or whatever it may be, and we hold up, on the contrary, to the gaze of some sceptical acquaintance a humble little volume in plain mellow sheep—say, a first Walton, or Bunyan, or Carew, nay, by possibility a Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde—which a roomful of perfectly gentlemanly books should not buy from us. It may strike the reader as a heresy in taste and judgment to pronounce the four Shakespeare folios of secondary interest from the highest point of view, as being posthumous and edited productions. But so it is; yet Caxton's first impression of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, if we were to happen upon it by accident, is a possession which we should not be easily persuaded to coin into sovereigns, and such a prize as the Evelyn copy of Spenser's Faëry Queen, 1590, with the Diarist's cypher down the back and his note of ownership inside the old calf cover, is worth a library of inarticulate printed matter. So, again, Aubrey, in his Miscellanies, Remains of Gentilism and Judaism, History of Surrey, and Natural History of Wiltshire, presents us with works very imperfect and empirical in their character—even foolish and irritating here and there; but between those undertakings and such as Manning and Bray's or Brayley and Britton's Surrey there is the difference that the latter are literary compilations, and the former personal relics inalienably identified with an individual and an epoch.
It is the same with certain others, ancient as well as modern writers. Take Herodotus, Athenæus, and Aulus Gellius on the one hand, and Bishop Kennett's Parochial Antiquities, White's Selborne, Knox's Ornithological Rambles in Sussex, or Lucas's Studies in Nidderdale on the other. All these equally tell you, not what some one else saw or thought, but what they saw or thought themselves, and in a manner which will never cease to charm.
There are works, again, which, without professing to entertain for the authors any strong personal regard, we read and re-peruse, as we admire a fine piece of sculpture or porcelain, an antique bronze or cameo, as masterpieces of art or models of style. We are perfectly conscious, as we proceed, that they are not to be trusted as authorities, and perhaps it is so on the very account which renders them irresistibly attractive. Some of the most celebrated literary compositions in our language are more or less strongly imbued with the spirit of partisanship or a leaven of constitutional bias; yet we like to have them by us to steal half-an-hour's delight, just as we resort sometimes to alluring but dangerous stimulants. We have in our mind, not volumes of fiction, not even the historical novel, but serious narratives purporting to describe the annals of our country and the lives of our countrymen and countrywomen. We take them up and we lay them down with pleasure, and it is agreeable to feel that they are not far away; and they will not do us greater harm, if we combine an acquaintance with their deficiencies and faults as well as with their beauties, than the fascinating associates with whom we exchange civilities in the drawing-room or at the club, and with whose haunts and opinions we are alike unconcerned. Of the romances under the soberer names of history, biography, and criticism, which abound in all the literatures of nearly all times, we are at liberty to credit as much or as little as we choose; but in how many instances we should regret to lose, or not to have inherited, these; and the personal partiality which constitutes the blemish here and there equally constitutes the merit.
What makes us return again and again to certain books in all literatures, forgetful of chronology and biographical dictionaries? What draws us irresistibly for the twentieth time to works of such different origin and character as Herodotus, Cæsar, Aulus Gellius, Browne's Urn-Burial and Religio Medici, Pepys's Diary, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and a handful of authors nearer to our own day? Is it not their breadth, catholicism, and sincerity? Is it not precisely those qualities which no sublunar systems of computing time can affect or delimit? If we take successively in hand the Odyssey, the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Gil Blas de Santillane, and Robinson Crusoe, do we without some reflection realise that between the first and the last in order of production thousands of years intervened? Most of the romances of chivalry and the Faëry Queen strike us as more antiquated than Homer, assuredly more so than Chaucer. The secret and the charm seems to lie in the fact that all great books are pictures of human nature, which is and has been always the same; and we are able to account in a similar manner for the stupendous popularity of such works as the Imitatio Christi and the Pilgrim's Progress. Above all things, they are strictly bonâ fide. They are no catch-pennies.
We find ourselves with hundreds, nay, thousands of other books at our elbow or at our command, living in communion with half-a-dozen minds. We read our favourite books, and when we have reached the end of our tether, we recommence as if we were in the Scilly Islands, and there were no more obtainable or permissible. We never wax tired of conning over Bayle St. John's Montaigne the Essayist, Thoreau's Walden, Howell's Venetian Life and Italian Journeys. Cuique suum. We have known those who never let the sun set without dipping into Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or who have some pet volume with which they renew their intimacy every year, as Francis Douce did with Reynard the Fox. There must usually be an unconscious sympathy in these cases, a pleasing revelation of extended identity, as if these other productions were what we should have liked to claim as our own, and as if we felt we should have said the same things and thought the same thoughts, if they had been ours.