Foundations of bibliography—Commencement of advertising books through catalogues and lists at end of other publications—Classes of literature principally in demand—Origin of sales by public competition—A book-lottery in 1661—The book-auction in London makes a beginning—The practice extends to the provinces and Scotland (1680-95)—First sale-catalogue where Caxtons were separately lotted (1682)—Catalogue of a private library appended to a posthumous publication (1704)—Mystery surrounding the sources whence the Harleian Library was supplied with its early English rarities—An explanation—Indebtedness of the Heber Collection to private purchasers on a large scale—Vast additions to our knowledge since Heber's time—The modern auction-marts—Penny and other biddings at auctions—An average auction-room—Watching the Ashburnham sale—The collector behind the scenes—Key to certain prices—The Frost and the Boom—Difficulty of gauging quotations without practical experience—The Court of Appeal—The Duke of Wellington pays £105 for a shilling pamphlet—A few more words about the Frere sale in illustration of the Boom and something else—The Rig.
The earliest method of communication between holders and vendors of books and probable buyers of them related to the issue of new works, or, at most, to such as were not out of date. Maunsell's celebrated folio, of which he was not apparently encouraged to proceed with more than certain sections, and which did not comprise the subjects most interesting to us, came out in 1595 in two parts, and was, notwithstanding its imperfect fulfilment, the most comprehensive enterprise of the kind in our language down to comparatively recent times. These matters usually took the form of notices, accompanying a published volume, of others already in print or in preparation by the same firm. No possessor or observer of old English books can fail to have met with such advertisements; but, as we have said, they limit themselves, as a rule, to current literature and the ventures of the immediate stationer or printer. To some copies of Marmion's Antiquary, 1641, we find attached a slip containing an announcement by Thomas Dring of old plays on sale by him at the White Lion in Chancery Lane, and inserted posterior to the issue of this particular drama, which does not bear Dring's name; and we all know the list of dramatic performances appended to Tom Tyler and his Wife, 1661, and probably emanating from Kirkman the bookseller, where we discern items belonging to an earlier period—of some of which we know nothing further. This catalogue, the material for which Kirkman had personally brought together by the expenditure of considerable time and labour, was re-issued in 1671, and from about that time Clavell and other members of the trade circulated periodical accounts of all the novelties of the season, but almost entirely in those classes which seem to have then appealed to the public: Law, Science, and Divinity—just the sections with which Maunsell in 1595 began and ended.
The absence of the machinery supplied by the auction long necessitated a practice which not only survived sales by inch of candle and under the hammer, but which still prevails, of disposing of libraries and small collections en bloc to the trade, and the dedication by the particular buyer of a serial catalogue to his purchase. Executors and others long possessed no other means of realisation; the Harleian printed books were thus dispersed; and even those of Heber, almost within our own memory, engrossed the resources of two or three firms of salesmen. The conditions under which a library was accumulated in former days were not less different than those under which it passed into other hands; the possibilities of profit were infinitesimal; a heavy loss was almost a certainty. But then men bought more generally for the mere love of the objects or for purposes of study. The speculative element had yet to arise.
Evelyn, in his famous letter to Pepys, August 12, 1689, speaks of Lord Maitland's library as certainly the noblest, most substantial, and accomplished, that ever passed under the spear. This was within two decades or so of the commencement of the system of selling literary effects by auction. We are aware that in the Bristol records of the fourteenth century the trumpet, introduced from France, is mentioned as a medium for the realisation of property in the same way; and there was the much later inch-of-candle principle—a perhaps unconscious loan from King Alfred's alleged time-candles, which are referred to by his biographer Asser—a work suspected of being unauthentic, yet on that account may have none the less suggested the idea to some one.
Abroad the trumpet or the cry appear among the commercial states of the Middle Ages to have been the usual forms. In the particulars of a sale of galleys by auction at Venice in 1332,[6] the property was cried beforehand on behalf of the Government, and the buyer, till he paid the price reached, furnished a surety. This process was known as the incanto; and it is curious enough that in the sale-catalogue of Francis Hawes, Esq., a South Sea Company director, in 1722, the goods are said to be on sale by cant or auction. But the modern Italian still speaks of an auction as an asta (the Roman hasta). Some of these types are illustrated by Lacroix in his Mœurs et Usages. In France they anciently had the bell and the crier (the Roman præco).
In London, firms of commercial brokers long continued to hold their sales of goods by inch of candle; but the Roman practice seems to have survived down to comparatively modern days in Spain and Portugal, if not in France and Italy. In 1554, Junius Rabirius, a French jurist, published at Paris, with a metrical inscription to Henry II. of France, a Latin treatise on the origin of Hastæ and Auctions, in which he enters at some length into the system pursued by the ancients, and still retained in the sixteenth century by the Latin communities of Europe. This is probably the earliest monograph which we possess on the present branch of the subject. It is a tolerably dull and uninforming one.
Some of us are aware by practical experience how deplorably tedious a normal modern auction under the hammer is, although it extends only at the utmost from one to five or six in the afternoon. But, like some of the Continental sales of to-day, the old-fashioned affair spread, with a break for refreshment, over twice the space of time, and was conducted, previous to the introduction of the hammer, by inch of candle. This system was somewhat less inconvenient than it at first sight strikes us as being, since the property was lotted to a much larger extent in parcels and bundles, and the biddings were apt to be comparatively fewer. Another way of saying that the early auction appealed less to private than to professional buyers, and not merely in that, but in every aspect. The same remark still applies to the dispersion of all miscellaneous collections of secondary importance, unless an amateur chooses to compete for a dozen articles, which he does not want, for the sake of one, which he does.
The steadily accumulating volume of literary production in the seventeenth century inspired two successive movements, which we regard to-day as peremptory necessities and matters of course, but which, so long as books were scarcer, and the demand for them correspondingly restricted, failed to strike any one as likely to prove popular and advantageous. These movements were the second-hand department and the auction-room. It is a sufficiently familiar fact that during the reign of Charles II. both sprang into existence, although among the Hollanders the usage of putting up books to public competition had commenced three-quarters of a century prior; but in 1661 there do not appear to have been any facilities for disposing of libraries or collections, as in that year John Ogilby, the historian, arranged to sell his books—the remainder of his own publications—through the medium of a lottery. It was within a very brief interval, however, that the sale by auction is shown to have become an accomplished fact. The earliest of which an actual catalogue has come down to us is that of Dr. Lazarus Seaman, sold by Cooper in 1676; but there were in all probability anterior experiments, and side by side with the auctioneer grew up the professional ancestor of the Thorpes and the Rodds—the men who supplied Burton, Drummond, Evelyn, Pepys, Selden, and many more, with the rarities which are yet associated with their names. The system of selling under the hammer in its various stages of development and different ramifications is not an unimportant factor in our modern social and commercial life; it did not require many years from its introduction into the metropolis to recommend it to the provinces and to Scotland; and we possess catalogues of libraries or properties dispersed in this manner at Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and elsewhere in the last quarter of the last but one century; and in one case at least of this kind of property being offered at a fair.[7] Occasionally, as in the case of Secondary Smith, 1682, a precocious feeling for the early English school reveals itself; but, for the most part, the articles accentuated by the old-fashioned auctioneer are foreign classics, history, and theology—the literary wares, in fact, in vogue. Annexed to the Memoirs of Thomas (or Tom) Brown, 1704, is a very unusual feature—a catalogue of his library.
Within about five-and-twenty years of the supposed starting-point of the auction, the modern practice of the London auctioneer being engaged to conduct sales in the country, even in important provincial towns, seems to have fairly commenced, for in 1700 Edward Millington of Little Britain sold at Cambridge the library of Dr. Cornwall of Clapton in Northamptonshire. In the preliminary matter attached to the catalogue, Millington remarks that "he always esteems it a privilege to exercise his lungs amongst his friends."
A glimpse of the method of collecting by the Hon. John North, one of the sons of Lord North of Kirtling, and born in 1645, is afforded by his brother and biographer, Roger North, who says that he gradually accumulated, commencing about 1666, a large collection of books, principally Greek, and generally bought them himself, spending much time in company with his relation in booksellers' shops, and not objecting to possess duplicates, if other copies in better condition were found or were presented to him by friends. Mr. North flourished during the halcyon days of the classics. The literature of his own country probably interested him little. North, however, was so far a true book-lover, inasmuch as he sought what pleased himself.
