Willis & Sotheran’s in the Strand was known to me by tradition. My father had bought books of Willis in early times, when the latter was in Prince’s Street and in the Piazza, before he joined Mr Sotheran. The shop in the Strand united with Pickering’s and one or two more to supply me with a handful or so of curiosities, while I remained what is termed an amateur. Later, it was one of the marts, to which I regularly resorted with advantage in quest of the wants of Mr Huth or the British Museum. An old-established business, it mechanically attracted year by year an endless succession of private parcels and single lots, which generally rendered the monthly catalogues remunerative reading. It is more than a quarter of a century ago, since I received one of these lists at Kensington, and spied out two unique items in the shape of Cookery Books of the Elizabethan period at 10s. 6d. each. I was on the top of the next omnibus going Londonward, and entered the premises with a nervous uncertainty not legible on my countenance. I applied for the lots; they brought them to me; they were in splendid state; I clapped them in my pocket, and I left the place with a lightened heart. I met some of my friends, who were coming in, as I walked out, and I guessed their mission. How sorry I was for them! Mr Pyne was one. There came into my thoughts a saying of Mr Huth’s elucidatory of the success of his firm: ‘We do not profess,’ quoth he, ‘to be cleverer than other folks; but we get up earlier in the morning.’
Mr Huth owed his copy of Caxton’s Game of Chess to Willis & Sotheran. An individual brought it into the shop, and offered it for sale. It was in vellum, but wanted A i. and A viii., the former a blank leaf. What the firm gave, I never heard; but when Lilly approached them on behalf of Mr Huth, the demand was £1000. It is always wise to start with a margin. The ultimate figure was £300. It was the second edition, of which Trinity College, Cambridge, the Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Tollemache, have perfect copies.
It was the buyer (Francis), whom Willis & Sotheran employed about 1860, to whom we were all indebted for discovering at or near Plymouth the unique tragedy of Orestes, 1567, which went to the Museum, and for a duplicate of which Payne Collier safely offered at the time fifty guineas, and the equally rare copy of Drayton’s Harmony of the Church, 1610, which was acquired by Mr Corser, and at his sale by Mr Christie-Miller. I have not heard that the West of England has of recent years yielded many such finds as it formerly did. It was long a profitable hunting ground.
Speaking of Drayton, of whose early editions it has fallen to my lot to secure several at different times, I am reminded that in Willis & Sotheran’s 1862 catalogue appeared that eminent writer’s Tragical Legend of Robert Duke of Normandy, 1596, of which only three copies are known; the volume turned out on examination to want a leaf; but luckily in another list issued by the firm there was a second example misdescribed as Drayton’s Poems, which, though elsewhere imperfect, supplied the immediate deficiency; and the duplicate, which had served me so well, was wasted. I had been about the same time disappointed by missing at a shop in Old Bond Street (not Boone’s) the English Ape, 1588, in the original binding at £2, 12s. 6d.; and curiously enough the house in the Strand purchased it, bound it in red morocco, and put it in a subsequent monthly circular at £5, 5s. I had to stretch my purse-strings, and go to the higher figure.
I have elsewhere given Willis himself credit for introducing me to a small literary commission, which if it did not yield much money, did not entail much labour. The only other experience of the same class afforded me the labour without any result. It was a parson of independent fortune, who called me in for my opinion on certain Diaries of Travel, which he had written, and which he thought (most correctly) in need of editorship. The negotiation came to nothing, and so did my fee. It was not my province to inform the reverend gentleman that his MSS. were waste-paper, nor would the mention of his name be of any utility. He was unconsciously one of those sempiternal caterers for the paper-mill, whose unprinted effusions generally figure in the auctions among the bundles in the wane of the season, and they resemble in their inevitable doom the processions through the streets of the drover’s charges on their way to our shambles. Let us pray that from the pulp of this holy man’s derelicta, swept out by his executors, something worthier and more durable may evolve.
There is quite a group of minor or secondary dealers, whose absolute rank to me was indifferent, and from whom it has been my fortune in the course of my career as a bibliographical huntsman to bring away spoils of the chase neither few nor unimportant.
An odd case of rather shallow misrepresentation occurred, when I went to an emporium in Conduit Street in search of a copy of Stapylton’s Musœus, 1647. It was marked 5s. 6d. in the catalogue, but, said the owner, ‘that is a misprint for 15s.’ I put down the larger sum, merely inquiring how the odd sixpence crept in!
The Wallers of Fleet Street, originally next to Saint Dunstan’s Church, subsequently higher up, had known my grandfather. The younger was my more particular acquaintance, and helped me to many choice items. I recollect that I refused a spotless copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear, in old sheep, 1807, for 7s. 6d., which Waller assured me that Mr George Daniel had seen, and estimated at a guinea; and I regret this more than I congratulate myself on the acquisition of an unique folio MS. of Edmond Waller’s Poems, which his namesake had got from a furniture sale for one shilling, and let me have for fifty, of an unknown impression of A Description of Love, 1629, tenderly and mercifully swaddled between two imperfect books in a volume, and itself (the sole thing of value) as clean as a new penny, and several other ungratefully forgotten blessings. It was to the Waller volume that the last editor of the poet was indebted for the unprinted and otherwise undescribed dedication to Queen Henrietta Maria, of which I furnished the earliest notice an age since to Notes and Queries. By the way, I must not overlook the matchless copy in boards uncut of the Papers relating to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, published at Boston, 1769, for which I tendered Waller 5s., and for which an American house gave £8.
I had not much to do with the Rimells and the Walfords. The former put in my way two or three rarities, and I furnished them with a couple of valuable Americana for the Carter-Brown library at New York. The books which I associate with this firm are Philipot’s Elegies on the Death of William Glover, Esquire of Shalston in Buckinghamshire, 1641, which cost me 4s., and Gardyne’s Theatre of the Scottish Kings, 1709, both alike scarce to excess. Of neither are more than two copies known, and the Grenville one of the second is mutilated. Mr Christie-Miller would have been glad to possess the Philipot; but it went to the national library; the Gardyne passed into the Huth collection.
The Walfords were instrumental in enabling me to track out a pamphlet by Taylor the Water Poet relative to a murder at Ewell in 1620, of which I had been on the scent for years, and of which a copy at last occurred in a huge pile of miscellanies at Sotheby’s tied up together at the close of a season. I found that Walford was the buyer; and when I waited on him, it turned out that it was a commission. For whom? Well, a customer in Scotland. But he did not want the account of a transaction at Ewell! Well; he would write, if I would name my price. I offered 10s. The tract came up; I took all the particulars; and the Museum relieved me of it at £4, 4s. No duplicate has ever been seen, I believe.