The astonishing demand for the first editions of our modern poets and novelists has, as was generally anticipated, subsided, and in some cases almost ceased; and it is extremely doubtful whether the taste will ever assume again the same unhealthy proportions. For one result of the matter has been to make it perfectly clear that copies of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and so forth, exist in much greater plenty than was at first supposed, though very little reflection should have sufficed to establish the fact as an eminent probability; and all that was needed to draw them from their resting-places was the series of paragraphs in the press conveying to holders how valuable their property had unexpectedly become. Shall we not have more copies of Shelley's poor little brochure of 1810 offered for sale ere long, as well as of Thackeray's Exquisites and King Glumpus?
At the same time, while we insist that the survival of means of supply is too large, and the market too limited, to sustain the extravagant quotations of recent years, there will ever remain persons prepared to give generous prices for absolutely first-class examples of the best modern authors. There must be no qualification, nothing secondary, nothing dubious; and with these provisos, we do not venture to predict that the competition might not become keener than ever. The same experience will result here and there, whenever a book forming a desideratum in more than one cabinet occurs for sale, and is perhaps the first copy which has been offered. At Sotheby's in June 1896, Shelley's Œdipus Tyrannus, 1820, it is said, was carried under these circumstances to £130. It was, we believe, one of two copies, picked up by a well-known amateur for fourpence each. On another account—its perfectly immaculate state in boards—a large-paper copy of Byron's poems, 1807, was thought by Mr. Edward Huth not too dear at £105. It had been acquired by a London bookseller in exchange for one in morocco from a correspondent in Yorkshire, the latter receiving the bound book (which cost the vendor £27) and £18 difference, so that there was a profit on the transaction of £60. Seriously speaking, the purchase was extravagantly dear, for the book on large paper is at all events not scarcer than on small. One of the most signal incidents, however, in modern auctioneering annals was the sale of MSS. copies of the Endymion and Lamia of Keats in the poet's handwriting for £1000, and the subsequent offer to the purchasers at that figure of a large advance for their bargain. These two items are printed, and the written copies were those employed by the printer, as upon the first leaf of each MS. were the directions as to size. They were in the familiar round schoolboy hand, and presented occasional corrections. We heard a suggestion that there might have once, at all events, been a duplicate copy in existence. If the lots were worth the money, what would the manuscript of Venus and Adonis or Hamlet fetch?
The mischief which proceeds from the advertisements through the press of sensational sale prices is not one for which either the buyers or the sellers are responsible. It is due to the notorious circumstance that very few persons are able to discriminate accurately between an important item in an auction or elsewhere, and another submitted to their approval, ostensibly and professedly identical, but actually very different. A certain familiar type of bookseller will tell you that a copy of such or such a work fetched £50 under the hammer last week, but that he can let you have his—same edition, same date, same nearly everything—for fifty shillings. Of course it is no such matter; yet the bait is often swallowed, and the poor (or possibly rich) fish caught.
The relatively cheap literature of the present day has been thought to be a revival rather than an invention. We meet with tracts published in the reign of Elizabeth with the express notation of the price of issue, namely, one penny. The Book of Common Prayer, 1549, was to be sold at 2s. 2d. unbound, and 4s. in paste or boards. The ordinary amount charged for a tract extending to thirty or forty pages, and for a quarto play, was 4d. or a groat. The first folio Shakespeare, 1623, cost the original purchaser 20s.; Percival's Spanish Dictionary, 1599, appears to have come out at 12s. There are lists of advertisements attached to publications of the later Stuart era showing that a large variety of popular productions brought the printer or stationer twopence or a penny. A curious little edition of Coffee-House Jests, 1760, bears the imprint:—
"Drogheda. Printed for the sake of a Penny:
Sold in Waterford, Cork, and Kilkenny."
But throughout these statistics, which are capable, of course, of infinite augmentation, we have to keep before us the difference in the value of money, and the purchasing power of the same amount in other and more practical directions; and it follows that the printed matter offered to-day for threepence or sixpence had no real parallel in former times, and that the absolutely cheap book is a product of modern facilities for manufacture.
The published price not unfrequently presents itself at the foot of the title on books of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries. The simplicity of some individuals who are ranked among occasional or casual buyers was illustrated many years since by a man going into a shop in Fleet Street and putting down eighteenpence in payment of Hubert's Edward II., 1721, in the window. The bookseller explained to him that his price was 5s. "But," insisted the customer, "look at the title-page; it was published at 1s. 6d." "Then you had better go to the publisher," observed the other, replacing the volume.
Book-collecting seems scarcely to concern very closely those who regard the pursuit from a severely practical point of view, or in the aspect of absolute intrinsic importance. It is true enough that one may form, not only a library, but a remarkably extensive one, of books of reference and study; but this does not quite answer to the idea of a bibliophile—in fact, it is little more than the digestion into book-form of a mass of learning and useful information. Again, if, without embracing such classes of volumes, we limit ourselves to those which, as we express the matter above, are positively important, we of course find on our shelves all the capital authors, ancient and modern; yet how many we should have to reject which are accounted indispensable to a choice cabinet! And such is apt to be more peculiarly the case in a selection formed on Anglo-French lines, as anybody may readily judge by examining a catalogue of this kind, where pages and pages are occupied by irritating trifles of no solid pretensions whatever, not even those evident in personal or heraldic accessories.
The general rule may be applied to our modern books, that, whatever they may be for purposes of instruction or entertainment, they seldom represent the outlay, and still more rarely a profit upon it when the day arrives for realising. During some time past we have witnessed the rise and fall, or at least disappearance from the front rank, of individuals and schools of individuals whose writings no amount of friendly support in the press was capable of propping up beyond three or four seasons. It is not that some of them may not hereafter, like our older authors, return to notice and currency; but they will suffer that intermediate period of neglect which has been experienced by well-nigh all our greatest names in letters. There is for literature, in common with its buyers, an earth, a purgatory, and a heaven—or something else. The public cannot keep pace with the vast and unbroken succession of literary produce, and the favourites of the day pass over to neutral ground, with very few exceptions, when their honeymoon has expired, to await the deliberate verdict of posterity on their merit and their station. To the investor for a more or less immediate return, however, they are precarious possessions, unless the market be carefully watched. The wealthy and absolutely uncommercial amateur disregards these risks and these counsels; and he is in a sense to be envied.
