The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

The day’s sale embraced another lot of a somewhat mysterious character, as regarded a portion of the contents. I refer to two letters from Sir Christopher Hatton in his own hand to a lady, couched in most familiar and affectionate terms, and subscribed with the same fictitious signature as Hatton employed in corresponding with the Queen herself.

It is so usual to associate the ownership of a library in middle-class hands with a single generation—scarcely that very often—that events like the Auchinleck, Astle, and Frere sales strike and impress us, and often, indeed generally, produce results gratifying to the beneficiaries; and so it was with the Berners Street and Way affairs. Volumes, which were known to exist somewhere, at last emerged from their places of concealment. Mr Swainson had bought many of his books at the sale of George Steevens in 1800; the Way lot belonged to about the same date. Among the latter were such prizes as the original editions of Arthur of Little Britain and England’s Helicon. The Berners Street business took place on the premises; there was of course a settlement; and John Payne Collier, who looked in, could get nothing. I was offered, some time after, a rare little treatise, which I declined; and I subsequently heard a queer story about a copy of it (? the same) having been removed from Joseph Lilly’s tail-pocket, while he was attending the auction. I put this and that together.

It was certainly much the same thing at the Osterley Park, Beckford, and Fountaine sales. The quotations are suggestive of lunacy, not on the part of the immediate purchasers, who are middlemen, but on that of the ulterior acquirer behind the scenes. What could be more childishly extravagant or absurd than 610 guineas for Henry VIII.’s Prayer Book on vellum, 1544, with MSS. notes by the king and members of his family? What could be indeed? Why, the £435 paid for a third folio Shakespear, 1663-4, with both titles—a book which has been repeatedly sold for £60 or £70, and which the auctioneers misdescribed, as if it had been something unique and unknown. The Beckford books realised perfectly insane prices, and were afterward resold for a sixth or even tenth of the amount to the serious loss of somebody, when the barometer had fallen. The Thuanus copy of Buchanan’s Poems, 1579, which was carried to £54, was offered to me in October, 1886, for £15. Of course there have always been inflations of value for special articles or under particular circumstances here and elsewhere; and I must confess to an instance of malice prepense at one of the Corser sales at Sotheby’s, when I made Ellis pay £100 for Warren’s Nursery of Names, 1581, by sitting next to Addington at the table, and whispering in his ear the praises of the book and its fabulous rarity. He left it at £99. There was no other competitor within a fifty-pound note’s distance. The Museum could not have gone beyond £30 or £35.

I stood behind Quaritch at Sir John Simeon’s sale in Wellington Street, and when it came to two lots, the first being the History of Oliver of Castile, printed at York in 1695, and the second one of David Laing’s publications, I told him that if he would let me have the first, I would not bid on the second. He was so amiable as to assent, and the almost unique little volume fell to me at 7s. Unhappily some one else opposed him for the Laing, which realised its normal value. I looked as grieved as I could, when he good-humouredly turned round to inquire what he had got.

I have said that 1861 marked the date, when I graduated at Sotheby’s as a bibliographer. As a private buyer to a sparing and experimental extent I had known that house since 1857, when I was baulked, as I have elsewhere related, in my attempt to obtain an unique copy of the Earl of Surrey’s English version of the Fourth Book of Virgil’s Æneid, which was unique in a second sense—in being the only lot of value among a mass of rubbish.

The auctioneer’s world is classifiable into two sections: Buyers and Sellers. If you do not belong to one of these divisions, the profession scarcely knows where you come in in the economy of nature. You enter into the nondescript species. The man with the hammer views his commission as the elixir of life, as the sole object, for which men and women are born and exist; he has no other motive or seeing-point; and he does not expect others to have it. Your friends, as a rule, estimate you according to the house, in which you live, and the undertaker by the order, which he gets for your funeral; but the auctioneer appraises you by your value to him as a bidder at his table and by the marketable quality of the property, which you leave behind. If it happens that you are only a scholar, occasionally picking up a cheap lot, or a bibliographer, taking notes for the benefit of others without profit and without thanks, he eyes you with a mixture of commiseration and surprise, and has a private feeling, perhaps, that there is a percentage somewhere. And so there is—in Fame, for which he cares nothing except as an advertisement for his business; and it is natural enough, that the staff takes its cue from the principal, and unless you distribute largesse, sets you down as a troublesome nondescript.

I think that I am right in saying that it was the member of the firm of Walford Brothers, who attended the sales, who was referring at the table to the knock-out system, and Mr Hodge, who was in the rostrum, disclaimed any knowledge of such a thing, whereupon says Mr Walford to him, ‘You are the only person who does not know about it, then.’ The other day at the sale of the Boyne coins nine continental dealers were counted—confrères indeed. Had it not been for the English competition, the result would have been absolutely disastrous.

Thus much may be confidently affirmed of Sotheby’s. As commission-agents they are implicitly trustworthy. I have had a long and large experience, and where I have not been able, or have not deemed it politic, to attend in person, I have found that I could depend on the discretion of the auctioneer. Let one instance suffice. In 1882 there appeared in a catalogue published by the firm The Famous and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington, octavo, 1656, a mediocre copy, but twenty years earlier than any on record. I left a commission of five guineas, and the lot fell to me at as many shillings. Only three copies are known, all of different issues: and every one has been in turn mine. Two are now in the British Museum; the other, from the Daniel sale, is in the Huth library.

There was an imperfect copy of the first edition of the Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576, in a catalogue issued by the firm in 1889. It was described as probably unique, as wanting A 4, which had been supplied from the next earliest edition in the British Museum, and as bound by F. Bedford; it was further stated, that every possible search had been made for a second copy without success. This was a tissue of romantic inventions on the part, not of the auctioneer, I apprehend, but on that of the ingenious and candid owner, who was rewarded for his pains by seeing his property fetch £100!

Some time before, Mr Burt the facsimilist came up to me at the Museum, and shewed me the copy, asking me whether I could refer him to another, whence the missing leaf might be supplied. I did so; but he eventually took it, not from the next earliest issue, which was not in the library, but from that of 1596. Bedford was dead, when the volume was bound. I leave the judicial reader to sum up!