Voyages and travels--Their strong American interest--Maryland and
Pennsylvania--New Plymouth--Sir John Mandeville--Columbus and
Vespucci--Early medical literature--Harvey and the circulation of
the blood--Occult literature--Phenomena--Technical works--The
paddle-wheel--Books printed in a special
manner--Chapbooks--Garlands--Ballads--Broadsides--Street
advertisements--General or miscellaneous collections--Omnivorous
buyers--Richard Heber, Sir Thomas Phillipps, James Crossley--A
moral deduced--Most interesting types of collector--Advantages
connected with restriction to personal tastes or wants--Dangers
of emulation and servility--Mr. Quaritch's _Dictionary of
Collectors_--Various sorts of genuine collector.
VOYAGES and Travels have always engaged a large share of attention and
study, and comprise the central and very interesting feature of almost
the entire body of early Americana, dealing with the discovery and
colonisation of that continent. This part of the subject before us has
received, owing to recent political occurrences, a further development
in the direction of Africa. To the purely American collector, who of
course takes in Canada, his own literary heirlooms are unexceptionally
material; and if he works on a comprehensive principle, he admits
every item relevant to the series, however costly and however
individually trivial. An Englishman, as a rule, is content with
typical or representative examples. The late Mr. Huth long remained
unpersuaded that books of this character were _desiderata_.
There can be no doubt, however--and Mr. Huth concurred so far from the
outset--that there are certain Anglo-American works which are, so to
speak, indispensable to a library of any pretensions. For instance, it
must not be without such capital productions as those written or
published in elucidation of the history of the New World by Drake,
Cavendish, Hakluyt, and Purchas; or such, again, as contribute to
throw light on the settlement of New England and the progress of the
Pilgrim Fathers. This group of literature has grown within the last
twenty years almost unattainable by the less opulent bibliophile; its
commercial value has risen to four times that to which the previous
generation was accustomed. The most signal feature in the whole series
is, however, out of the pale of commerce. The precious manuscript
found at Fulham Palace in 1896, giving a detailed account of the
settlement of New Plymouth, has by a graceful international act been
restored, as it were, to its fittest home, although many of us in Old
England would have, no doubt, preferred to see it deposited in Great
Russell Street.
There is another source of association with the mother country which
commends to the notice of many, not exclusively American in their
tastes or objects, the literary memorials of Maryland and
Pennsylvania, so intimately associated with the English families of
Calvert and Penn. There is no rarer volume among the first
Anglo-American monuments than Hariot's _Virginia_, 1588, which is
worth from L100 to L120.
Among the favourite books of travel are Sir John Mandeville's
_Voyages_, of which there are ancient editions in English, French,
Italian, and German, and which is being constantly reproduced with the
quaint illustrations. The narratives of Pinto, "prince of liars," and
Bruce are gaining increased credit and confidence. Leo's _Description
of Africa_, in the English version of 1600, has a map already showing
the source of the Nile in an inland lake. The labours of the Hakluyt
and Geographical Societies have conferred respectively great benefits
on the cause of discovery and verification.
In the famous _Letter of Columbus_, 1493, in its various forms, the
_Mundus Novus_ and _Paesi Retrovate_ (1507) of Vespucci, and a few
other leading publications, there is a recognised interest regardless
of the countries of origin.
We owe to the entrance into the lists of sundry members of the medical
profession a temporary emergence from oblivion and respite from the
waste-basket of what the booksellers describe in their catalogues as
"Rare Early Medical." There is no doubt that among these obsolete
publications may be detected many curious points and many evidences of
former acquaintance with supposed latter-day inventions or ideas. A
prominent feature in the series is Harvey's Latin treatise on the
circulation of the blood, of which he was the (rather late British)
discoverer. But, on the whole, the group of early works dealing with
medicine and surgery is of questionable interest outside the purely
practical range as a comparative study, and those which treat of
anatomy and other cognate topics are in the last degree gruesome. They
are the antipodes to the _belles lettres_.
_Occult Literature_ is susceptible of a division into several classes
or sections: Religious Cults, Necromancy, Magic, Second Sight,
Divination, Astrology, Palmistry, of which all have their special
literatures and bibliographies. Major Irwin recently sold an extensive
series of works on these and kindred topics. Cornelius Agrippa,
Ashmole, Bulwer, Lilly, Partridge, Gadbury are among the foremost
names of older writers in the present categories. But for the faiths
and worships of antiquity which may be ranked in the first order of
importance and solid interest, we chiefly depend on modern books, such
as Payne, Knight, Inman, Davies, Forlong; and there is quite a small
library on that branch which touches on theosophy and similar
speculations--all having a common source in the grand principle of
Agnosticism. Further information will be found collected on this and
the topics which we notice below in Hazlitt's _Popular Antiquities_,
1870.
For those who are interested in Portents, Phenomena, _Lusus Naturae_,
Murders, Earthquakes, Fires, there is the catalogue of MR. NASSAU,
1824. The British Museum has in recent times grown more complete in
the same direction. The founders and earlier curators of the
institution appear to have regarded such _nugae_ as beneath the dignity
of a national library; but in fact the information which they, and
possibly they alone, convey, is frequently of historical,
biographical, or topographical relevance.
There has been a rather marked tendency to a rise in the value of a
section of technical publications which deals with the earliest
notices in English literature of such subjects as Electricity, the
Microscope, the Steam-Engine, the Paddle-Wheel, and the Telephone, and
the books identified with these subjects are now commanding very high
prices. An uncut copy of Thomas Savery's _Navigation Improved_, 1698,
where the principle of the paddle-wheel is discussed, fetched at
Sotheby's in June 1896, L16, 15s.
This is a somewhat fresh departure, but it is not an unsound or
unreasonable one, and the series is limited. An almost invariable
incidence of these artificial figures is to draw out other copies, and
then the barometer falls.
The name of MR. EYTON is identified with copies of books printed on
vellum or on some special paper, not unfrequently for his own use or
pleasure; and this gentleman's catalogue is serviceable to such as
desire to follow his precedent, of which the modern _Edition de Luxe_
is an outgrowth. Eyton would have proved an invaluable friend to
Japanese vellum, had he belonged to a later decade of the century.
The CHAP-BOOK, which dates from the reign of Elizabeth, and was sold
for a silver penny of her Highness, becomes less rare under the
Stuarts, and common to excess at a later period down to our own days.
A large proportion of this species of literature consists of
abridgments of larger works or of new versions on a scale suited to
the penny History and Garland. Pepys was rather smitten with those
which appeared in and about his own time, and at Magdalen, Cambridge,
with the rest of his library, a considerable number of them is bound
up in volumes, lettered _Penny Merriments_ and _Penny Godlinesses_
respectively. The Huth Collection possesses many which were formerly
in the Heber and Daniel libraries. All these productions share the
common attributes of very coarse paper, very rough cuts, and very poor
type. They are interesting as eminently _folk-books_--books printed
for the multitude, and now, especially when the article happens to be
of unusual importance and rarity, worth several times their weight in
gold. Two catalogues of Chap-Books and Popular Histories were edited
by Mr. Halliwell for the Percy Society in 1848-49.
In the present writer's bibliographical works, to which there is a
General Index, will be found an account of all that have come into the
market between 1866 and 1892. Thousands upon thousands have
unquestionably perished.
The most fascinating member of the Chap-Book series is undoubtedly the
_Garland_--not so much a volume by a given author, such as the _Court
of Venus_ (1558) and Deloney's _Garland of Good Will_, 1596, as a
miscellany by sundry hands. The next earliest of these collections
known to us at present are the _Muses' Garland_, 1603, and _Love's
Garland_, 1624. Those in Pepys's library at Cambridge are of much
later date, yet of some no duplicates can be quoted, so vast has been
the destruction of these _ephemerides_. Of the Pepysian Garlands a
certain proportion are reprints of older editions or repositories of
songs and ballads belonging to an anterior date, and here and there we
meet with lyrics extracted from contemporary dramatic performances.
Besides Pepys, Narcissus Luttrell the Diarist displayed a taste for
fugitive and popular publications, and the copies acquired by him
eventually found their way, for the most part, into Heber's hands,
whence they have drifted in large measure either into the British
Museum or the Miller and Huth collections. Numerous unique examples of
the popular literature of his own day, again, are preserved among
Robert Burton's books in the Bodleian.
Allied to the chap-book are the broadsides of various classes,
including the Ballad, popular and political, the Advertisement and the
Proclamation. So far as we know, the second division exhibits the most
ancient specimen in our own literature, and is a notification on a
single leaf by Caxton respecting Picas of Salisbury use. This
precious relic, of which only two copies are recorded, appeared about
1480. It must have been soon after the introduction of printing into
London and Westminster that resort was had to the press for making
public at all events matters of leading importance; but we do not seem
to possess any actual evidence of the issue of such documents save in
isolated instances till toward the end of the century, and they are
chiefly in the shape of indulgences and other ecclesiastical
manifestos, circulated in all probability in the most limited numbers
and peculiarly liable to disappearance.
The Ballad proper cannot be said to be anterior to the closing years
of Henry VIII., subsequently to the fall of Cromwell, Earl of Essex,
when the composition relative to that incident printed in the
collections appeared, and was followed by the series preserved in the
library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and reprinted in the
writer's _Fugitive Tracts_, 1875. From the time of Elizabeth onward
the broadside in its varied aspects grew abundant, and served as a
substitute for newspaper notices, so long as the press remained an
insufficient medium. The British Museum and Society of Antiquaries
possess large collections of this kind. Lord Crawford has printed a
catalogue of his _Proclamations_, and in the writer's _Collections_,
1867-92, occur thousands of these ephemerides arranged under what
appeared to be their appropriate heads.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sheet _format_
lent itself largely and conveniently to teachers, quack doctors,
astrologers, announcing their addresses, qualifications, and terms, no
less than to the official, municipal, or parochial authorities, and to
private persons who desired to give publicity to some current matter
by the exhibition of the placard on a wall or a church door. There was
yet another purpose which the broadside was made to serve:
prospectuses of schemes and reports of companies' or societies'
proceedings. The purely temporary interest of such publications
accounts for their survival in unique examples and even fragments.
There is a general notion that the _Harleian Miscellany_ and the
_Somers Tracts_ represent between them a very large proportion of the
extant pamphlets and broadsheets published during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. But, as a matter of fact, they do nothing of
the sort. Even in or about 1695 William Laycock of the Inner Temple
drew attention to the unsuspected importance of these fugitive
publications in his printed proposal for buying them up by a public
subscription; but even in the National Library, with all its immense
accumulations, and in Hazlitt's _Collections_, many thousands of items
are probably deficient; while the two sets of books above mentioned
contain a very slender percentage of the whole--in fact, mere
representative selections.
There have been men who coupled with a general plan a speciality or
two. For instance, Dyce, who laid a collateral stress on
_Shakespeariana_; Ireland, who made himself strong in Leigh Hunt and
Hazlitt; Crossley, who had a peculiar affection for Defoe; Bliss, who
collected books of characters and books printed at Oxford or just
before the Great Fire of 1666; Bandinel, who was smitten by the charms
of the Civil War literature; Corser, whose bibliographical sweethearts
were Nicholas Breton and Richard Brathwaite; and Rimbault, who had
two, Old Music and Old Plays. Mr. G. L. Gomme is similarly situated:
anthropology and folklore are his foibles. It goes without saying that
the Shakespearian and dramatic student, from Sir Thomas Hanmer
downward, has usually made a stand on the literary remains and works
tending to illustrate their own labours; but of course the relevance
may be direct or indirect, and in the latter case the specialist is
found to cast his net surprisingly wide.
Specialism, whether on the principle of personal taste or of
particular studies, has manifest advantages in an age where the
multitude and choice of books are so bewildering, where of every work
of any sort of value or interest a man may have, not a single
edition--all that in a majority of instances was once available--but a
hundred or a thousand in all sorts of sizes and at all sorts of
prices. With the discontinuance of the older paucity of literature,
the facilities for lodging within a modest bookcase a coterie of
literary favourites have sorrowfully decreased, and a collector finds
it imperative to draw the line more and more rigidly, if he does not
care to fall into one of two perils--excessive outlay or excessive
bulk. For we have not, as regards the former, to go very far before we
incur a serious expense, if it happens that the run is on the rarer
English section or on what constitutes a picked library of the French
type.
Of the miscellaneous group there are graduated and varying types. The
omnivorous accumulator, especially where he does not insist on
condition or binding, is the dealer's idol. In the forefront of this
class stand _facile principes_ Richard Heber and Sir Thomas Phillipps,
for the reason that they bought everything--whole libraries and
catalogues at a swoop. Yet both these distinguished men have to be
placed on a distinct footing from the normal promiscuous buyer, such
as Thomas Jolley, Joseph Tasker, Edward Hailstone, Edward Solly, and a
legion of others, to whom anything in the guise of a book was a sure
bait, and who spurned Evelyn's motto: "_Meliora retinete_." Ascending
a step or two higher, we come to the men who repudiate specialism as
narrowing and troublesome, and who impose on themselves no restraint
save perchance in the direction of theology, science, and _arcana_.
They stop peremptorily at the _belles lettres_. Singer, Mitford,
Bliss, Bandinel, Forster, Cosens, Ireland, Crossley, Sir John Simeon,
were more or less of this school. At a still greater altitude we meet
with a yet stronger tendency to draw the line at character or
condition, and there occur to us the names, under the former head, of
Capell, Malone, Douce, Bright, Chalmers, Collier, Ouvry, Bolton
Corney, David Laing, E. F. Rimbault, Halliwell-Phillipps, Frederick
Locker, W. H. Miller, Henry Cunliffe, R. S. Turner, and Henry Huth.
From the same point of view, nearly in the clouds are discovered a
small knot of fastidious _dilettanti_, who purchase a volume in the
same spirit as they might do a picture or a piece of majolica; and of
this minority Sir Andrew Fountaine, Sir David Dundas, and Samuel
Addington may perhaps be accepted as types.
The most interesting, and it may with permission be added, intelligent
type of book-collector, however, seems to be that where, after a
certain measure of preparatory thought and training, one confines
acquisitions for permanent ownership to volumes for which the acquirer
has a genuine personal relish. In general, the principle of forming a
library on this wholesome basis would be found not only more useful,
but more economical, since the rarest and costliest articles are by no
means, on the whole, the most interesting or the most instructive. In
any case, the inconsiderate emulation by one collector of others, who
may have different objects and perhaps ampler resources, is a course
to be avoided. Even here there is more than a single source or ground
of inducement to purchase. Setting aside the mere book of reference,
which has to be multiplied to suit various exigencies, there may be
said to be three classes of literary property which rationally appeal
to our sympathy: (i) the volume which commends itself by its
intrinsic value and charm; (ii) that which has grown dear from
lengthened companionship and possibly hereditary link; (iii) and that
which, unimportant so far as its internal claims and merits are
concerned, bears on its face the evidence of having once belonged to a
favourite of our own or a world's hero.
One persuasive argument in favour of adopting the miscellaneous or
typical course in the choice of a library is the rapid growth of the
difficulty of meeting with the rarer items in all important
specialities. It is the general plan on the part of every follower of
particular lines to commence, very often casually, by bringing home
from time to time a few volumes on a certain topic, or in a given
class of literature, or by one or two of a school of writers; and such
a proceeding succeeds tolerably well, till the owner makes discovery
of volumes positively essential to his object, and unattainable save
by a heavy outlay--perchance not even to be had at any price. It is
nearly always the _lacunae_ for which we yearn; one or two of our
richer friends have them, and we have not. What we possess anybody can
get in a morning's walk; we find that we have travelled a long
distance, and have come to an _impasse_. It is very seldom indeed that
a man is satisfied with the cheaper and commoner articles in a series,
if he is aware of the existence of those which just constitute the
corner-stones of such a collection as his.
On the contrary, by the process of sampling or picking out here and
there, now and again, a book or a set of books which chance or
circumstances may throw in our path, we may gradually acquire a
caseful of most desirable specimens, against which it is out of the
question to raise any charge of incompleteness, where incompleteness
is the governing aim. Book-buying under these conditions is a humour.
We are at liberty to take or leave. Because we conceive a fancy for a
work by this or that author, we feel under no obligation to
accommodate every scrap which he has printed, or which his friends or
followers have penned. The object of our personal selection suffices
us; and there perhaps we begin and we end. It is our humour.
The auctioneers' and booksellers' catalogues of the present day supply
an instructive demonstration of the gradual withdrawal from the market
of many thousands of articles, in Early English literature more
particularly, which at one time seemed to be of fairly frequent
recurrence. They have been taken up into public collections all over
the world; and the very few copies, not to speak of unique examples,
which time had spared, are beyond the reach of the private purchaser
of to-day. We have only to study with attention the Heber and other
leading records of former libraries existing in this and other
countries to become convinced that the facilities for acquiring an
approximately complete library of the rarer books grow narrower year
by year.
There is, I submit, far too prevalent a tendency in collectors to
follow suit, to attach themselves to leaders of temporary fashions. I
plead for a greater independence of opinion, where the taste is in any
reasonable measure cultivated and developed, or, again, where an
individual knows what pleases himself. By all means, if it happens
that he does not admire Shakespeare and Bacon, Sydney and Jonson,
Dryden and Pope, Byron and Shelley, Scott's novels or Lamb's _Elia_,
let him leave them alone, and make his own free choice, even if it be
to go in for _John Buncle_, the _Adventures of a Guinea_, or
Luttrell's _Letters to Julia_. There is always the room for hope that
he may quit those pastures after a time and seek more fruitful ones.
What is important and desirable, however, is that each person should
be his own caterer. Schools are only useful where some writer of real
genius has been neglected or overlooked, or been boycotted by the
press, and attention to his works is only a fair service to him, or a
becoming, if tardy, tribute to his memory.
Apropos of the increasing difficulty of obtaining certain old books
noted above, the extensive scale on which reproductions of original
editions of Early English literature have of recent years been made is
certainly a boon to literary inquirers, since the presence of such
reissues in our circulating libraries, if we do not choose to buy
them, tends at every step in many branches of work to help us, and to
render our undertakings more complete. It frequently occurs that
volumes and tracts, which are of very slight literary or intrinsic
value, contain valuable allusions and illustrations, which we might
miss in the absence of available copies. It is worth while to take in
one's hand even some puerile trifle by the author of _Adonais_, if one
is not obliged to buy it or asked to become the possessor. One feels a
curiosity to glance for a moment at a volume which, we are constantly
assured in the catalogue, the writer did his utmost to obliterate; and
we sometimes wish that he had fully succeeded.
Any of us, taking in his hands the series of _English Book-Collectors_
in course of issue by Mr. Quaritch (Nos. 1-12), will perceive without
difficulty, if he go no farther, the two distinct camps, so to speak,
into which the collecting fraternity may be, and is, broadly divided
and classifiable. You have, on the one hand, the men who followed
their personal taste, and amused their leisure in late years after a
busy life by purchasing such works or such descriptions of literature
as appealed to them and fell within their resources; again, the
scholar or investigator who assembled round him what illustrated his
studies, not merely with an aim at emulating others; or, once more,
the gentleman of fortune, who evolved from his school-day acquisitions
a feeling or a passion for higher things, and made it the business of
his maturer time--even made it his career--to carry out on a scale and
on lines dictated and governed by circumstances the predilection
formed in boyhood. On the contrary, there are for our consideration
and instruction the libraries which owed their existence to less
interesting motives, to the vague and untrained pursuit of rare and
expensive books and MSS., on the judgment of others in rivalry of
others, and the enterers into the field of competition with a
practical eye and a financial side-look. Of all these great divisions
there are varieties naturally arising from personal character; but of
the collector pure and simple of the older school, that type, we avow,
most warmly and potently attracts us which limited itself to the small
and unpretentious book-closet, with just those things which the master
loved for their own sakes or for the sakes of the donors--where the
commercial element was wanting, and where the library was not viewed
in the same light as railway or mining stock. It is a famous principle
to invest money prudently and well; but happy is he who is wise enough
to keep his library within narrow limits, and rich enough to leave it,
such as it may be, out of the category of realisable assets.
Mr. Quaritch's project possesses in our eyes the incidental merit of
providing us with personal accounts in a succinct form of many of the
past proprietors of English and American libraries, and enables us to
see at once how varied and fortuitous were the conditions under which
the task was begun and accomplished, with what different measures of
success and financial means; and in what a preponderance of instances
it was an individual rather than an hereditary trait. Broadly
speaking, we recognise two varieties of collector from all time: the
one who confers his name on a library, and the other whose library
confers a name on him.
Even the family of genuine book-lovers--neither virtuosos nor
speculators--presents more than a single type to our notice. We have
the student who takes a subject for treatment, and forms a small
gathering of the literary material necessary for his purpose, shooting
it back perchance into the market, his immediate task accomplished.
There is the man like Coleridge, who regarded the volumes which fell
in his way as casual and welcome visitors, of whom he asked questions,
or who answered his, and whose margins gave themselves up to his
untiring habit of registering whatever occurred to him, before the
passing--possibly borrowed--volume went on its way again. There is
Lamb, who was less addicted to annotating his acquisitions, but who
gave them a permanent home, if they had come to him _jure emptionis_,
and were of the elect--not presentation--copies, cold and crude,
thrust into his hand by some well-meaning acquaintance. There is
Edward Fitzgerald, dissimilar from all these, yet so far cognate that
he bought only the books which struck him as worth reading, if not
turning to some practical account. Nor should we in strict fairness
refuse admittance within this highest circle even to such as Selden,
Burton, Pepys, and others who might be easily enumerated, who may
have been little more than curiosity-hunters, but who had a genuine
relish for pieces of old popular literature, the greatest rarities in
the language inclusive, when there was barely any competition for
them. The man of the old school, who ransacked the shops and the
stalls, and even attended the auction, may have been a faddist and a
superficial student; but his was an honest sort of zeal and affection;
there was no vanity or jealousy; and we meet with cases where one
collector would surrender to another an acquisition which the latter
happened to have missed, and to want very badly indeed. So Isaac Reed
gave up to George Steevens Marlowe's _Dido_, and so George III.
enjoined his agent not to bid for him against a student or a scholar.
I have not yet quite done with this aspect of the matter. I have to
speak of the personages who have thought fit to impose on themselves a
chronological or a financial limit, who drew the line at a given year,
or would not go beyond a certain figure. Mr. Henry Pyne laid down 1600
as the latest date which he would admit, and rarely exceeded a
sovereign or two for a single article (Dr. Doran gave me to understand
that fourpence was _his maximum_). It may appear strange to suggest
that the higher the sum paid for a book (assuming it to be worth the
money), the slighter the risk grows of the purchase proving
pecuniarily unprofitable. Yet at the same time outlay on a library is
a relative term, and one individual may account himself as frugal in
expending L30,000 in the course of a lifetime, as another may do in
expending L300. The late Earl of Ashburnham bought in chief measure
during the forties and fifties, when the reaction from the bibliomania
still more or less sensibly prevailed, and considering his Lordship's
position and resources, he was not much more lavish than the
above-mentioned Mr. Pyne, or indeed any other amateur of average
calibre, while he was to the full extent as genuine a follower of the
pursuit for its mere sake as anybody whom we could name--as the Duke
of Roxburghe, Mr. Heber, Mr. Corser, or Mr. Crossley.
In my _Rolls of Collectors_ I specify a type under the designation of
_Book-Recipients_, and I instance such cases as Dickens and Thackeray;
but in fact there are many who would never go in pursuit of anything
of the kind beyond a work of reference, and whose utmost exploit is
the payment of a friendly subscription. The only title to admittance
into my category of such doubtful enthusiasts is the sentimental
enhancement of value arising from the transformation of the margins of
a common-place volume into a repository for manuscript remarks or
graphic embellishments, which may send it back into the market some
day a three-figure item in a catalogue.
In attempting to indicate in a sort of tentative manner the
publications to which a private collection might be advantageously and
comfortably limited, one does not contemplate the shelf or so of mere
works of reference, which have to be obtained even by such as are not
amateurs in this direction, and, moreover, there is an obvious
difficulty in prescribing for persons of infinitely varied ideas and
prepossessions. Now, as to volumes for reference, the class and extent
of course depend on individual requirements, and the books outside
this radius are apt to be subject in their selection to local
circumstances, since a man associated with a district or county
naturally contracts a sympathy with its special history or its
archaeological transactions, as well as any miscellaneous monographs
relating to particular places or celebrated persons. With such
specialities and preferences we cannot presume to interfere; but, as a
rule, the aggregate body comprised in them need not be large or very
expensive, and in catholic or general literature it becomes almost
surprising when we have taken the pains to winnow from literary
remains of real and permanent interest the preponderant mass, of which
the facilities for occasional examination at a public library ought to
suffice, how comparatively slender the residuum is.