The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

At the Auction-Rooms—Their Changeable Temperature—My Finds in Wellington Street—Certain Conclusions as to the Rarity of Old English Books—Curiosities of Cataloguing and Stray Lots—A Little Ipswich Recovery—A Narrow Escape for some Very Rare Volumes in 1865—A Few Remarkable Instances of Good Fortune for Me—Not for Others—Three Very Severe ‘Frosts’—A Great Boom—Sir John Fenn’s Wonderful Books at last brought to Light—An Odd Circumstance about One of Them—The Writer moralises—A Couple of Imperfect Caxtons bring £2900—The Gentlemen behind the Scene and Those at the Table—Books converted into Vertu—My Intervention on One or Two Occasions—The Auctioneers’ World—The ‘Settlement’ Principle—My Confidence in Sotheby’s as Commission-Agents—My Three Sir Richard Whittingtons.—A Reductio ad Absurdum—The House in Leicester Square and Its Benefactions in My Favour—Change from the Old Days—Unique A.B.C.’s and Other Early School-Books—The Somers Tracts—Mr Quaritch and His Bibliographical Services to Me—His Independence of Character—The British Museum—My Resort to It for My Venetian Studies Forty Years Ago—The Sources of Supply in the Printed Book Department—My Later Attitude toward It as a Bibliographer—The Vellum Monstrelet and Its True History—Bookbinders—Leighton, Riviere, Bedford, Pratt—Horrible Sight which I witnessed at a Binder’s—My Publishers—Dodsley’s Old Plays—My Book on the Livery Companies of London—Presentation-Copies.

I now proceed to speak a few words about the two auctions, with which I have been familiar—Sotheby’s and Puttick & Simpson’s. Both these distributing agencies repay careful study. You must consider the circumstances, and bear in mind Selden’s maxim, Distingue Tempora. The rooms are very variable in their temperature. Now it is high, now low. It is not always necessarily what is being sold, but what is being asked for. For instance, just at the present moment there is a desperate run on sixteenth and seventeenth century English books and on capital productions, because a few Americans have taken the infection; they know nothing of values, so long as the article is right; and therefore the price is no object. It is merely necessary to satisfy yourself that your client wants the book or books, and you may without grave risk pose at the sale-room table and in the papers as a model of intrepidity. But the game does not usually last very long; the wily American soon grows weary or distrustful; and the call for these treasures subsides, and with it the courage of the bidders. The market resumes its normal tranquillity, till a fresh fad is set afloat with similar results. No prudent buyer loses himself in these whirlpools. He watches his opportunities, and they periodically recur amid all the feverish competition arising from temporary causes.

At Sotheby’s my finds have been endless. It is in those rooms that ever since 1861, when I made notes at the Bandinel sale, I have figured as an inevitable feature in the scene, when anything remarkable, either bibliographically or commercially, has been submitted to the hammer; and I have not often had reason to lament oversights on one score or the other. When I have missed a lot, of which I desired the particulars for my collections, it has illustrated my conviction of the immense unsuspected rarity of a preponderance of the national fugitive literature. This accident occurred in the case of a tract called The Declaration of the Duke of Brabant (Philip III. of Spain) proffering a Truce with the Netherlands, 1607, and I have not since met with a second copy. It is over twenty years ago. I have occasionally registered the title of a piece, which I have found in the warehouse in the hands of a cataloguer; and it was fortunate that I did so as regarded A Farewell to Captain (afterward Sir Walter) Gray, on his departure for Holland, 1605, as the article was never again seen. There has been a good deal of this sort of miscarriage. Quite at the outset of my bibliographical career, the most ancient printed English music-book, 1530, was bought for the British Museum at the price of £80; it was only the Bassus part with that to Triplex bound up at the end; and the cataloguer had put it into a bundle. Attention was drawn to the mistake in time, and the lot was re-entered with full honours. On the other hand, I have been repeatedly indebted to Sotheby’s staff for useful and valuable help. Mr John Bohn never failed to point out whatever he supposed to be of service, and in 1891 Mr A. R. Smith shewed me a small volume printed at Ipswich by John Owen about 1550, entitled An Invective against Drunkenness, so far known only from Maunsell’s catalogue, 1598.

In quite the earlier portion of my experience here occurred the disastrous and destructive fire of 1865, which made a holocaust of the Offor library, and proved fatal to much of Lord Charlemont’s. It was a most fortunate circumstance that just at the moment Halliwell-Phillipps had some of the rarest of the Charlemont books on loan from the auctioneers at his private house in Old Brompton, and they were thus saved.

I was away, when Mr Bolton Corney’s books were sold at Sotheby’s, and did not see them. But one was returned by the buyer as imperfect; it was Drayton’s Odes and Eglogs (1605), and was said to want two leaves. I examined it, and found that it was complete, and had two duplicate leaves with variations in the text. I bought it for £1, 11s., and sold it to John Pearson on my way home for £8. 8s. A somewhat analogous incident befel me at the Burton-Constable auction in 1889, where a volume containing the Theatre of Fine Devices, 1614, the only copy known, and several other rare pieces in the finest state, was sold with all faults, because a copy of Wither’s Motto, 1621, at the end, was slightly cropped. I left a commission of £8, 8s. for this, and saw it knocked down for £1, 12s. I put the Wither in the waste-paper basket, and divided the rest between the British Museum and Messrs Pearson & Co. There were two other dispersions of curious old books, which I may exemplify. At the Auchinleck sale the prices were not low, but were extremely moderate, considering the character of many of the early Scotish tracts there offered; but the other instance, where a gentleman had with the assistance of John Pearson and others formed a collection of early English poetry, making the Bibliotheca Anglo-poetica the nucleus, was a deplorable fiasco. Books went for fewer shillings than they were worth pounds. I bought Drayton’s Mortimeriados, 1596, clean and uncut, which Mr Quaritch had acquired for the late owner for £17, for 16s. No one particularly wanted that class of books just at the moment, and the field was open to the opportunist. The proprietor, who was living, must have been gratified. I never witnessed a more thorough frost than this except at the Pyne sale already described and at those of the dramatic libraries of Mr Kershaw and Dr Rimbault, although I believe that the firm is steadfastly persuaded that the most signal collapse, in recent times at least, was the two-days’ auction of Prince Lucien Bonaparte’s philological stores, which realised £70! The Kershaw and Rimbault affairs were rather notable as yielding a large crop between them of old English plays, which were not in the Huth library, and which dropped to myself at nominal prices. The slaughter of Rimbault’s property took place on a Saturday afternoon. I recollect the buzz in the room, when Shirley’s Lady of Pleasure was carried to 14s. I bought nearly everything worth buying.

Then there was the other side of the picture, as when the Frere, or rather Fenn, books came to the hammer at Sotheby’s in 1896. As nothing in the before-mentioned auctions seemed too low, so nothing here seemed to be too extravagant. There was a kind of mysterious halo round the affair. People had heard of such books being in existence, and longed to put the report to a practical test. Herbert, in his revision of Ames, had quoted Sir John Fenn, the John Fenn Esquire of his day, as the owner of certain rarities, of which nothing absolutely reliable was known. But the items really material to myself amounted to no more than twenty, of which several were mere verifications.

Mr Quaritch was in great form. He made himself master of all the principal lots, as any one can do by bidding long enough. A copy of Herbert’s Typographical Antiquities with an extra volume of original specimens, of which the chief portion was of very slight significance, produced £255. A volume of tracts, of which nearly all the title-pages had been mutilated by Fenn for the sake of the printer’s marks, and of which the central interest lay in the first edition of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, 1592, fetched £80. The first might have been worth £40 and the second (with the defects indicated) £15. A really valuable lot, which belonged to Sir John Fenn, and which had gone somehow equally astray, was subsequently offered for sale at another room, and brought £81. It was Nicholas Breton’s Works of a Young Wit (1577), and was one of my bibliographical desiderata. I took a full note of it of course, and should have willingly gone to £42 as a matter of purchase. Mr Quaritch trusted to the prevailing American boom, and was there to win the day against all comers with the feeling that those who opposed him had with him only a common market. Failing one or two wealthy enthusiasts, the volume might lie on his shelves, so long as he lived, at that figure. This is what Mr Quaritch himself has characterised as a species of gambling. What is to be said or thought of the two imperfect copies of Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales bringing in 1895-6 £1020 and £1880 respectively? All that can be argued is, that the worth is positively artificial, and that to the individuals, for whom Mr Quaritch destines them, money is a drug or a form of speaking.

Then there was the second folio Shakespear which fetched the unheard-of price of £540, and the third, to which I presently advert. The disregard of precedents in such cases brings a certain type of early literature within the magical circle of objets de vertu, when economic laws cease to operate, and books seem to lose their true dignity in the hands of the virtuoso. Beyond a certain financial altitude there are no bonâ fide bookmen.

A sale, which might in its way deserve to be classed with the Frere-Fenn one at Sotheby’s, fell to the lot of the Leicester Square house in 1894. It was bipartite, and rather on the incongruous principle discountenanced in the Horatian Epistle to the Pisos. For the first division consisted of MSS. and printed books formerly belonging to Thomas Astle the antiquary, and chiefly relating to Suffolk, the Tower, and America; while the second was a series of autograph letters, particularly a small parcel addressed by Mottley the historian to Prince Bismarck between 1862 and 1872. The auctioneers looked on the day’s sale as worth £150; it realised four times as much. A single lot of Americana brought £216. The Mottley correspondence was highly interesting, and indeed important, and some of the allusions were almost droll from their homely familiarity. The nine letters were knocked down en bloc for £60.

The first item in this remarkable series, written from Vienna, the Hague, and London, found the Prussian statesman at a watering-place in the South of France, and at that time the two men appear to have been well known to each other; for Mottley subscribes himself ‘Always most sincerely your old friend;’ and the next of 1864 starts with ‘My dear old Bismarck.’ There was evidently much cordiality and sympathy. A good deal of pleasantry arises out of some photographs of the great German’s family and himself, which were a long time in arriving. But a singular interest centres in a letter of 1870, urging the desirability of mediation between the two then belligerent Powers; it is marked Private and Confidential; and I do not imagine that anything came of it.