The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

There was a somewhat parallel incident at the sale of Lord Selsey’s books at Sotheby’s in 1871. I took down from a shelf at random an old Italian book, and perceived at the foot of the title the signature of Montaigne the essayist. I instantaneously closed it, and put it back, for I saw Mr Toovey approach. I waited to see it sold; it fell to me at 2s. F. S. Ellis came into the room a moment after, and heard of the find. He explained to me that he had a Montaigne client, and wished me to let him have my bargain, which I surrendered for a consideration.

I consider Mr Huth answerable for my conversion from a pure amateur into a commercial speculator in books. He was the prime mover in producing the change in my views and arrangements—one which certainly responded to my convenience in working out my great project as a bibliographer, by supplying me in the interval, where the direct practical result was nil, with ways and means, rather than to my natural feeling, which would have kept me outside the market as a buyer and seller. My unconquerable and boundless ambition to become the creator of an entirely new bibliographical system, so far as the early literature of Great Britain and Ireland was concerned, reconciled me, to some extent, to the unwelcome, though profitable, labour of utilising for my own purposes the stores which I accumulated and distributed from year to year, commencing with that which immediately succeeded my introduction to Mr Huth.

I had already fulfilled that gentleman’s own express desire, that I should co-operate in the extension of his library in the direction which I was beginning to study in earnest; but my first notable achievement was a purchase which found another destination. Jeffreys of Bristol sent me up, in the winter of 1868, a beautiful copy of Caxton’s Golden Legend, wanting sixteen leaves, which were supplied from one by Wynkyn de Worde. It was an edition of which the Althorp copy was the only perfect one known. The owner asked £85. I hardly understood why he sent it to me, as I had never had any transaction with him. It was on a Friday. I called at B. M. Pickering’s the next morning, and casually stated that I had had such a book offered to me, and that I intended, on the Sunday, to name the matter to Mr Huth, who did not then possess the volume. Pickering begged to see it first; he came down to my house the same evening, and took it away under his arm at £150. If it had not been for John Pearson persuading Jeffrey to raise his price, I should have had it £40 cheaper. Mr Huth subsequently procured another imperfect copy, and at my request Lord Spencer very kindly forwarded his own to London to enable a facsimilist to complete both.

Mr Huth had some very strong preferences—favourite authors and topics. Anything by Wither or Quarles, with curious woodcuts, on an educational theme, or in exceptionally fine state, was sure game. He did not care for theology, unless it was by such a man as Fuller or Jeremy Taylor; and of folios he was shy, in the absence of a valid reason; there were so many which it was imperative to tolerate, commencing with the four Shakespears. To Americana he became at last a convert, but I knew him when he put the question—a pertinent question, too—what he had to do with that sort of book? Henry Stevens, however, and then others, made the interest clearer to him, and he gave way till, in the end, he was master of a fairly good collection, including such capital features as Hariot’s Virginia, 1588, and such unique morçeaux as Rich’s News from Virginia, 1610. I was fortunate enough to enter on the scene, when in numerous respects his shelves were very deficient, and when some of the leading poets of the seventeenth century were conspicuous by their absence. He had not, at the time I refer to, even Beaumont and Fletcher, or Jonson, or Carew, or Lovelace, by way of example. As I run through his catalogue, I notice hundreds and hundreds of volumes which he had been quietly and patiently waiting to receive from someone, as he never went in quest of anything in his life, beyond calling at Lilly’s, Ellis’s, or Quaritch’s, on his way home; and nearly all his dramatic acquisitions, except the quarto Shakespears and other rarities from the Daniel and Charlemont sales in 1864-5, were late additions, obtained for him by myself, as scarcely a second individual would have dreamed of him not having them, or being willing to take them. All his Shirleys, Massingers, Fords, and the rest, came to him at prices which, compared with current figures, make them appear almost nominal. Massinger’s Virgin Martyr, 1622, cost him most; for B. M. Pickering charged me £7, 7s. for the copy, and I have not met with another since that time.

His Beaumont and Fletcher, 1647, which has been lately trotted up to a startling figure by the Americans, cost me 30s. and is one of the finest I ever saw; one leaf was torn, and a second copy was bought for £1 to make the defect good. In the same way his Ben Jonson, 1616-31, the most complete one in existence, with a duplicate title and a cancel leaf, was obtained from Stibbs for 36s. It had been Colonel Cunningham’s, and was spotless in the original calf binding.

Mr Huth was not a Heber; but he liked to look into his books, and of many he had a fair knowledge. He was a linguist and a scholar, and was led by the circumstances of his origin (his father being a German and his mother a Spaniard) to contract a partiality for the literature of those two countries. The ancient Spanish romance, the early German book with woodcuts, were well represented. One of the former, in its pristine stamped livery, was among his earliest purchases, when he frequented Payne & Foss’s establishment with his brother Louis, just toward the close of the career of that distinguished firm, which supplied Heber and his contemporaries—Grenville, Hibbert, the Freelings, and others—and the price was £8. It might at present be £80, if Mr Quaritch were in the right cue.

Although Mr Huth cannot be said to have been a mere amasser of old books, without an interest in their characteristics and literary value, it is curious that he never, so far as I am aware, inserted a MS. note of any kind in a volume, or his autograph, or a bookplate or ex libris. He seemed to shrink from asserting his personality in these respects, and was so far the reverse of Heber, whose memoranda accompanied thousands of the items in his immense library, and manifested his earnestness and indefatigability in obtaining and perpetuating information—nothing else. Of conceit or pedantry no one ever had less.

Toward the last, while the catalogue was in course of preparation by Mr F. S. Ellis and myself, an unpleasant contretemps produced a coolness between Mr Huth and the writer, and I saw nothing farther of him, although we occasionally corresponded down to the period of his death in 1878, the melancholy circumstances of which I have narrated in my Four Generations of a Literary Family. He made additions to his library rather languidly in later years; but he bought here and there to fill up gaps or otherwise, and some of the entries belonging to the earlier letters of the alphabet form an appendix to the above-mentioned work. There used to be a little drawer at Quaritch’s, where any book thought to be acceptable to Mr Huth was deposited day by day against his arrival about five in the afternoon. Once it was an unique tract of King Edward the Fourth and the Tanner of Tamworth, for which he was asked £16, 16s., and he held it up between two fingers, and exhibited it to an acquaintance with him as rather a dear pennyworth. But he took it, and at the same time he rejected an equally unique and far more curious metrical account of the martyrdom of two churchmen in the time of Henry VIII., which the British Museum was glad enough to secure. As he has said to me frankly enough, it was a toss up, whether he bought or did not buy; of course it was a mere fancy, and it is only a piece of history at present that one or two of the booksellers, acquainted with his peculiarity, passed on volumes now and then from one to the other, and what had not pleased in King Street, caught the fish in Garrick Street at an advanced quotation.

Mr Huth was not only vacillating in his pursuit of books, and so missed many which he ought to have secured, but his health began to fail some time prior to his decease, and he was either abroad or in a frame of mind unequal to the discussion of literary questions and the transaction of unnecessary business. His library, as it appears from the printed catalogue, is a very different monument from that which he might have left, had he been more consistent or been more willing to repose confidence in others. The precious volumes, which went elsewhere through his periodical apathy or indisposition, are barely numerable, and it was the more to be regretted, since the outlay was immaterial and the grand nucleus was there.

I suspect that the cause of wavering was one which is common to so many collectors in all departments, and leads in a majority of instances to the abrupt dispersion of the property. I allude to the almost ostentatious indifference of relatives and friends to the treasures, unless, perhaps, they are pictures or china, which a man gathers round him. In this instance £120,000 had been expended in books, MSS., drawings and prints, and the worthy folks who came to the house, what did they know about them? what did they care? A man might well hesitate and wonder whether there was any good in persevering with a hobby personal to himself.