This is an age of great publicity. Not only are our streets well
lighted, but also our lives. The cosy nooks and corners, crannies, and
dark places where, in old-fashioned days, men hugged their private
vices without shamefacedness have been swept away as ruthlessly as
Seven Dials. All the questionable pursuits, fancies, foibles of silly,
childish man are discussed grimly and at length in the newspapers and
magazines. Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and
made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who
read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a
foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of
time--the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy'
denounced this pastime, and made merry over a _virtuoso's_ whim.
Somebody else--Mr. Slater, I think it was--thought fit to put in a
defence, and thereupon a dispute arose as to why men bought first
editions dear when they could buy last editions cheap. Brutal,
domineering fellows bellowed their complete indifference to
Shakespeare's Quartos till timid _dilettanti_ turned pale and fled.
The fact, of course, is that in such a dispute as this there is but
one thing to do--namely, to persuade the Attorney-General of the day
to enter up a _nolle prosequi_, and for him who collects first
editions to go on collecting. There is nothing to be serious about in
the matter. It is not literature. Some of the greatest lovers of
letters who have ever lived--Dr. Johnson, for example, and Thomas de
Quincey and Carlyle--have cared no more for first editions than I do
for Brussels sprouts. You may love Moliere with a love surpassing your
love of woman without any desire to beggar yourself in Paris by
purchasing early copies of the plays. You may be perfectly content to
read Walton's _Lives_ in an edition of 1905, if there is one; and as
for _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver_ and the _Vicar of Wakefield_--are
they not eternal favourites, and just as tickling to the fancy in
their nineteenth-century dress as in their eighteenth? The whole thing
is but a hobby--but a paragraph in one chapter of the vast, but most
agreeable, history of human folly. If John Doe is blankly indifferent
to Richard Roe's Elizabethan dramatists, it is only fair to remember
how sublime is Richard's contempt for John's collection of old musical
instruments. If these gentlemen are wise they will discuss, when they
meet, the weather, or the Death Duties, or some other extraneous
subject, and leave their respective hobbies in the stable. Never mind
what your hobby is--books, prints, drawings, china, scarabaei,
lepidoptera--keep it to yourself and for those like-minded with you.
Sweet indeed is the community of interest, delightful the intercourse
which a common foible begets; but correspondingly bitter and
distressful is the forced union of nervous zeal and pitiless
indifference. Spare us the so-called friends who come and gape and
stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur
as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a
secret sin--the great pushing public must be kept out. It is sheer
madness to puff and praise your hobby, and to invite Dick, Tom, and
Harry to inspect your stable: such conduct is to invite rebuff, to
expose yourself to just animadversion. Keep the beast in its box. This
is my first advice to the hobby-hunter.
My second piece of advice is equally important, particularly at the
present time, when the world is too much with us, and it is
this--never convert a taste into a trade. The moment you become a
tradesman you cease to be a hobbyist. When the love of money comes in
at the window the love of books runs out at the door. There has been
of late years a good deal of sham book-collecting. The morals of the
Stock Exchange have corrupted even the library. Sordid souls have been
induced by wily second-hand booksellers to buy books for no other
reason than because the price demanded was a high one. This is the
very worst possible reason for buying a book. Whether it is ever wise
to buy a book, as Aulus Gellius used to do, simply because it is
cheap, and regardless of its condition, is a debatable point, but to
buy one dear at the mere bidding of a bookseller is to debase
yourself. The result of this ungodly traffic has been to enlarge for
the moment the circle of book-buyers by including in it men with
commercial instincts, sham hobbyists. But these impostors have been
lately punished in the only way they could be punished--namely, in
their pockets--by a heavy fall of prices. The stuff they were induced
to buy has not, and could not, maintain its price, and the shops are
now full of the volumes which, seven or ten years ago, fetched fancy
sums.
If a young book-collector does but bear in mind the two bits of advice
I have proffered him, he may safely be bidden godspeed and
congratulated on his choice of a hobby, for it is, without a shadow of
a doubt, the cheapest he could have chosen. Even without means to
acquire the treasures of a Quaritch or a Pickering, he may yet derive
infinite delight from the perusal of the many hundreds of catalogues
that now weekly issue from the second-hand booksellers in town and
country. He may write an imaginary letter, ordering the books he has
previously selected from the catalogue, and then he has only to forget
to post it to avoid all disagreeable consequences.
The constant turnover of old books is amazing. There seems no rest in
this world even for folios and quartos. The first edition of old
Burton's _Anatomy_, printed at Oxford in a small quarto in 1621, rises
to the surface as a rule no less than four times a year; so, too, does
Coryat's _Crudities_, hastily gobbled up in five months' travels in
France, Savoy, Italy, Germany, etc., 1611. What a seething, restless
place this world is, to be sure! The constant recurrence of copies of
the same books is almost startling. Hardly a year passes but every
book of first-rate importance and interest is knocked down to the
highest bidder. No doubt there are still old libraries where, buried
in dust and cobwebs, the folios and quartos lie undisturbed; but to
turn the pages or examine the index of _Book Prices Current_ is to
have a vision before your eyes of whole regiments of books passing
and repassing across the stage amidst the loud cries of auctioneers
and the bidding of booksellers.
In the auction-mart taste is pretty steady. The old favourites hold
their own. Every now and again an immortal joins their ranks. Puffing
and pretension may win the ear of the outside public, and extort
praise from the press, but inside the rooms of a Sotheby, a Puttick,
or a Hodgson, these foolish persons count for nothing, and their names
are seldom heard. Were an author to turn the pages of _Book Prices
Current_, he could hardly fail, as he there read the names of famous
men of old, to breathe the prayer, 'May my books some day be found
forming part of this great tidal wave of literature which is for ever
breaking on Earth's human shores!' But the vanity of authors is
endless, and their prayers are apt to be but empty things.