the edition does not seem to affect the question of their existence in
the long-run. All alike, good, bad, and indifferent, will go down the
long road in time, and our descendants, more or less remote, will only
hear of them in a casual and traditional way. Tacitus was one of the
most popular Roman authors of his time, and yet he only lives to us in
fragments, notwithstanding the fact that thousands upon thousands of
copies of his 'History' were disseminated throughout the empire. Every
public library in Rome was compelled to have at least one copy, and no
fewer than ten transcriptions were made every year at the charge of the
State. Plutarch wrote fourteen biographies that are missing now, and of
251 books quoted by him more than eighty are absolutely unknown. The
Emperor Claudius wrote a 'History of the Etruscans,' which from the very
nature of the case must have had a wide circulation; Julius Caesar, a
slashing criticism of Cato's life and acts; Lucullus, a history of the
Marsi. All these have vanished. Of the forty plays of Aristophanes but
eleven remain. Menander is unknown except by name, and AEschylus is in
rags. Porphyry's diatribe against the Christians, the most important
book of its kind that any Christian could have at his command, has
vanished, and in all likelihood will never be restored.
Nor need we go to ancient Greece or Rome for such instances. Several
poems by Shelley have completely disappeared already, and some of
Byron's have been, more than once, at their last gasp. Old English
ballads and songs have been 'lost' by hundreds at a time, and nearly all
the records dealing with the private life of Oliver Cromwell are
missing. The story of Carlyle's 'Squire Papers' is a characteristic
one, and distinctly to the point. While that author was laboriously
collating the scraps of evidence relative to the great Protector that
had survived the honest but mistaken zeal of triumphing Royalists, he
received a letter from an unknown correspondent, who stated that he
possessed a mass of Parliamentary documents, among them the diary of an
ancestor, one Samuel Squire, a subaltern in the 'Stilton Troop' of
Ironsides. The letter was accompanied by extracts from this diary and
other papers, and went on to say that the writer, who had been brought
up to regard Cromwell in the very worst possible light, and his own
ancestor with shame as the aider and abettor of an atrocious crime, was
undecided what to do with the originals. Several letters passed, and at
last Carlyle wrote to a friend living in the neighbourhood, asking him
to see his correspondent, and persuade him of his undoubted duty, which
was at least to submit documents of such great importance to
examination.
Unfortunately, the friend was absent, and by the time he returned the
papers had been destroyed. They may, of course, have had no existence,
but Carlyle himself was of a contrary opinion, for later on he received
a heavy packet containing copies of thirty-five letters of Oliver
Cromwell, written in a style apparently contemporary, and referring to
incidents that no one who had not made a careful and exhaustive study of
his life and times, and who was not thoroughly conversant with all the
available material, would have been in the least able to reproduce.
The records were destroyed because, as the owner said, he felt that, one
way or another, the manuscripts would be got from him and made public,
and 'what could that amount to but a new Guy Fawkes cellar and infernal
machine to explode the cathedral city where he lived, and all its
coteries, and almost dissolve Nature for the time being?' Either this
man was a learned forger or a singularly narrow-minded and obstinate
type of destroyer whose ravages can be traced through the centuries, and
whose example will never cease to be followed so long as paper remains
unable to resist the assaults of the bigot and the outrages of the Goth.
That will be ever, and hence it is that in all things literary
preservation is the greatest of the virtues. What part of a century's
product to preserve and what to destroy is a problem, not for us, but
for the century to come, and for many centuries after that. In fact, it
is Time's problem, which Time alone can solve.
*CHAPTER V.*
*SOME HUNTING-GROUNDS OF LONDON.*
At the present time there are, if the Post-Office Directory is to be
believed, about 450 booksellers in London; but in this computation are
included publishers, stationers, and even bookbinders--in fact, almost
everyone who has anything whatever to do with books--so that the figures
are by no means to be relied upon. The number of booksellers who make a
speciality of second-hand volumes is very much less than 450, if we
include only those who follow a single business, namely, that of buying
and selling books, and very much greater if we add to the list the army
of general dealers who sell books occasionally, or as an adjunct to some
other occupation.
The real book-hunter does not follow the Directory, but his nose, which
frequently leads him into strange places where there are no recognised
booksellers, yet booksellers in plenty--a seeming paradox, which is
readily explained by the fact that there are multitudes of what may,
without offence, be called 'book-jobbers,' whose names are either not in
the Directory at all, or appear there under some other designation.
A man may buy up a roomful of furniture, taking the books of necessity;
or a houseful, and with the mass of goods and chattels perhaps hundreds
of volumes which are not thought good enough to be disposed of
separately, and are therefore cleared out at a nominal figure, and
retailed anywhere and everywhere as circumstance and opportunity
suggest. Are these dealers, brokers, and what not, booksellers? Heaven
save the mark, no! not in a specific sense; but they sell books,
notwithstanding, and their shops are, in very truth, recognised
hunting-grounds of the Metropolis. There are literally hundreds of
them, and they are to be met with, as a rule, close together, where
rents are low and the footsteps of the income-tax fiend are unknown.
This is one description of bookseller, but there are several others: the
man with the barrow, for instance, who works at his trade all the week,
and comes out on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings in certain
localities, to do what bartering he can with casual passers-by.
To compare these classes with the recognised booksellers, some of whom
have an immense turnover, would, of course, be absurd; but they have
their uses, and instances are not wanting in which mightily successful
dealers have begun in this humble manner, and literally forced their way
up from the pavements of the East End or the Surrey side to more
pleasant places in the West. High or low, rich or poor, their shops or
stalls are alike objects of extreme interest to thousands who have
learned enough to know that the best books are generally the cheapest.
Whatever the size of the premises they own, they contribute in their
several degrees to the wants of all classes of book-men, whose delight
it is to forage for themselves, and to seek that they may find. The
lordly collector who pays by cheque may or may not be a book-hunter. If
not, he misses much of the pleasure that accompanies the tracking down,
step by step, of some coveted volume which is, perhaps, more or less
easily obtainable almost at any time in exchange for plenty of money,
but is rarely met with casually.
It is this tracking down, hunting which is the true book-lover's chief
delight, and, needless to say, his primary object is not to secure books
of great price for a nominal sum. If it were, he would at the end of a
long life have few successes to report, for the search for rarities is
so thorough and systematic that hardly anything of substantial pecuniary
value can run the gauntlet all the way to the shop-board or the barrow.
The harvest has all been gathered long ago, and nothing is now left but
gleanings in fields already raked. The book-lover eliminates as far as
possible the question of value from his walks abroad, and leaves his
gold at home to be expended as opportunity arises in the auction-room,
where open competition holds the market in a virtual equipoise, or in
the shops of recognised dealers, who hold his commissions and are always
on the look-out for important works. He is aware, however, that
intrinsically good books are to be met with continually in all sorts of
places, and it is these that he hopes to obtain, and from these that his
library is most often recruited. Between one edition of some
interesting or instructive book and another there may be an immense
disparity in cost, but very little textual difference, or even none at
all. In some cases the cheaper volume may be the more accurate of the
two, and may also contain additional matter, which renders it more
important and desirable from every point of view, except a sentimental
one.
It is the search for volumes of this kind, sound and honest, yet not
aristocratic, that has kept the bookstalls open for 300 years and more,
for, to be precise, we know that St. Paul's Churchyard and Fleet Street
were, in addition to other less known localities, much frequented by
book-men as far back as the reign of Henry VIII. In these districts
Cardinal Wolsey's agents kept a sharp look-out for copies of 'A
Supplicacyon for the Beggars,' which Simon Fyshe, 'a zealous man for the
reformation of abuses in the Church,' had boldly published and was
scattering abroad in the year 1524, and which seems to have had a
stealthy run for six years, for it was not until 1530 that it was openly
prohibited by proclamation. Neither Fleet Street nor St Paul's
Churchyard is, however, a hunting-ground for book-men now. The former
is wholly given up to newspapers and machinery, and the latter to
drapers and warehousemen, and there is no room anywhere for small
dealers in second-hand books.
Indeed, the whole of London has been turned topsy-turvy so far as they
are concerned. New localities they abhor, and the greater part of
London is new, in the sense that very many old districts and streets
have been rebuilt, or entirely swept away by the march of improvement
and the increasing desire for wide thoroughfares and open spaces. What
place more famous once than Little Britain, which during the last twenty
or thirty years has swallowed up Duck Lane--another book-hunting
locality--bodily? It was here that Thomas Britton, a coal-dealer,
prowled around during his spare moments, pouncing upon anything and
everything that took his fancy; rejoicing especially in works of magic,
witchcraft, and astrology, either printed or in manuscript. The
catalogue of his library is extant, and it is clear that he was a very
far-sighted and keen-scented man, and one, too, who was blessed with a
taste and discrimination most rare among dealers in small coal. In
Little Britain 'Paradise Lost' went begging. The stalls must have been
littered with the very first, or 1667, issue, for in that year the Earl
of Dorset had a copy of it thrust under his nose and pressed upon him by
a bookseller who complained most bitterly that he could not get rid of
his stock. About the year 1760 the whole of the trade had vanished from
Little Britain, though at the present time the once-famous thoroughfare
boasts one bookseller and also one newsagent, the sole representatives
of past times. As for the rest of the denizens, they follow the more
prosaic occupations of builders, bootmakers, butchers, hairdressers,
restaurant-keepers and publicans, the last-named being especially in
evidence. In this locality, as in many others, the thirst for knowledge
has been quenched, and the thirst for beer become almighty.
So, too, Moorfields was once classic ground, as also the Poultry, but
both places have been dead to bookish fame this hundred years. There
are now no booksellers' shops in the Poultry, though Moorfields just
saves itself, for it rejoices in the presence of a music publisher and a
stationer. Speaking generally, the second-hand book trade has been
driven bodily out of the central and eastern parts of London, and has
settled itself in the streets west of Temple Bar and Holborn Viaduct,
always avoiding the Strand, which, for some reason or other, has ever
been regarded as an inhospitable quarter. There are certainly
booksellers' shops in this important thoroughfare, three, I believe, is
the precise number, but they are hardly sufficient to invest it with the
dignity and title of a 'locality.'
In contrast to this, Holborn and the streets adjoining have always been
a good hunting-ground, and are so to-day. 'The Vision of Piers Plowman'
was printed and sold in Ely Rents so long ago as 1550, and Snow Hill and
Gray's Inn Gate were both world-wide localities, though the glory of all
these places has since departed. Up to within five years ago there was
a shop on the right-hand side of Gray's Inn Lane, just out of Holborn,
given up chiefly to the sale of newspapers. It is shut up now, and,
according to all accounts, will never be opened again, which is a pity,
for it is a shop, or more probably the curtailment of much larger
premises, with a notable history. Here, in 1750 or thereabouts, carried
on business one Thomas Osborne, who, although ignorant to a degree,
brutal in his manners, and surly beyond description, managed to build up
the largest business of its kind in London, or, indeed, anywhere else.
Customers ignored Tom Osborne's curses, and bought his books when they
could, for sometimes, when particularly morose, he would shut himself
up, like a hermit, 'with his lumber,' as a historian of the day termed
the thirty whole libraries which he had amassed, and refuse to treat at
all. Nevertheless, Osborne prospered exceedingly, and in the latter
years of his life was the owner of a country house and 'dog and duck
shootings,' all purchased and kept up from the profits derived from this
shop in Gray's Inn Lane. The prices he asked were the most he thought
he had the remotest chance of getting, and were often outrageous and
extortionate, though at other times very much below what he might have
obtained had he known his business properly. He seems to have taken a
bird's-eye view of his stock, and to have appraised the value of
individual books, not by reference to their rarity, but by means of a
fractional calculation based upon the total cost--a rough-and-ready
method of trading which attracted book-buyers from every part of London,
and reconciled them to his insolence. Though Osborne was not the first
dealer to issue a catalogue--one T. Green, of Spring Gardens, being
credited with having revived, in 1729, this time-worn method of selling
books--he carried on a more extensive business in this way than anyone
who had preceded him, and in addition had the supreme honour of being
knocked down by Dr. Johnson with a huge folio which the latter wanted to
buy, and he (Osborne) refused to sell at any price. Either of these
claims to distinction would have made the fortune of any man. It is
stated by Sir John Hawkins that the book which Dr. Johnson wielded with
such effect was the 'Biblia Greeca Septuaginta,' printed at Frankfort in
1594. The identical volume was in the possession of Thorpe, a Cambridge
bookseller, in 1812, but what has become of it since I do not know.
Though Osborne's shop, or what remains of it, is now closed, the
neighbourhood is still as largely interested in the sale of books as
ever, or perhaps even more so, for there has been an immigration from
other quarters of London which improvements have converted into
uncongenial ground.
The new Law Courts and their approaches stand upon the sites of
Butchers' Row, Shire Lane, where Elias Ashmole lived, and countless
courts and alleys beside. Clare Market has vanished within the last two
or three years, and Clement's Inn, with its narrow passages and dingy
chambers, has been entirely rebuilt. Even Drury Lane, sacred to the
memory of an army of general dealers who, up to within a comparatively
short time ago, bought books by weight, is now past praying for to all
appearances, for hardly a book of any kind is to be met with from one
end of this grimy thoroughfare to the other. Let us walk into Bozier's
Court, which is further to the west, and we miss the shop which Lord
Lytton has immortalized in 'My Novel'; in fact, the court itself is
plastered all over with advertisement posters, and awaits the wreckers,
for it is doomed. King William Street, Strand, was a booksellers' resort
for a century and more, but the fraternity are leaving one by one, and
only a very few are to be met there now. Westminster Hall, for
centuries a virtual library, is shut up, and echoes spring from its
stones when any casual stranger, armed with an order, is allowed to
ramble through Rufus's deserted pile. In fact, wherever we stray,
north, south, east, or west, we are forced to the conclusion that London
has changed so utterly within the last twenty or thirty years that it is
to all intents and purposes a different place.
And the booksellers appear to have changed, too, for there are no
'characters' among them, or, at any rate, very few. Every now and then
you will meet with some strange mortal, who looks as though he had been
transported bodily from the last century and tumbled unceremoniously
into a brand new shop, with coloured glass above the portal, and fresh
paint about the front; but you have hardly time to ruminate on the
mutability of things under the sun and he is gone, to make way, perhaps,
for a dealer in something superlatively new. An antiquary of the stamp
of Francis Grose, the 'chiel' who went about taking notes, would stand
aghast, then hasten to depart, could he but see the London of to-day.
It must not, however, be supposed that book-hunting as a pastime is
extinct in modern Babylon. On the contrary, there are yet plenty of
nooks and corners, and pestilential-looking alleys, that Death and the
jerry-builder have apparently forgotten, and these places, we may be
certain, harbour many folios. As a fact, I know they do; for in my
time, and to some extent even yet, I have been and am a wanderer about
such places, and have, on occasion, picked up many interesting mementos
there. What I merely wish to insist upon is that the older and
recognised localities, which our fathers would naturally have visited a
couple of decades or more ago in their search for old books, are not
those which would, as a rule, afford much scope for enterprise now. We
must go further afield, and not expect to find a mass of stalls huddled
together in a single street, as though one locality had tapped and
drained the life-blood of the rest. Circumstances have changed, and at
the close of the nineteenth century booksellers have, to a great extent,
ceased to be gregarious, except in Holywell Street, or, as it is more
generally called, 'Booksellers' Row,' once the abode of literary hacks
and bailiff-haunted debtors, which even yet has an old-world look with
its overhanging houses and narrow roadway. Here there certainly is a
long double procession of bookshops, many open to the street, every one
of them crammed from floor to ceiling with great piles of lore.
And Holywell Street, be it said, is such historic and classic ground,
that it is threatened every day by the improver, who longs to lay its
north side open to the Strand, and will, we may be sure, effect his
purpose in the end. It was here that Lord Macaulay used to take his
walks abroad in search of books. As a rule he began and ended there;
for a whole day's pilgrimage would not suffice to unearth more than a
fractional part of the immense store of volumes that the labour of years
had accumulated, and which was continually being decimated and renewed.
In his day there were more books to be seen and handled there than now,
for some of the shops have since been devoted to other trades. In
Holywell Street John Payne Collier was as well known as his own 'History
of English Dramatic Poetry,' which, nearly sixty years ago, littered the
stalls, doubtless to his great disgust, seeing that to be in evidence
there to any extent was then, as now, proof positive that the
'remainder-man' had been at work, to the bane of the author and
publisher alike. Mr. W. Roberts, in his charming 'Book-hunter in
London,' narrates that Collier once picked up in Holywell Street for the
merest trifle a copy of John Hughes's 'Calypso and Telemachus,' an opera
in three acts, first published in 1712, which contained thirty-eight
unpublished couplets in the handwriting of Pope. Halliwell-Phillipps
was also an inveterate rambler up and down this thoroughfare, and
several of his Shakespearean quartos came from there in days when these
small but almost priceless volumes were not so widely and persistently
sought for as they are now. In fact, we have it in his own words that
when he first began to collect anything and everything that related in
whatever degree to the great dramatist, these early quartos were
frequently to be met with at prices which, comparatively speaking, sound
simply ludicrous in our ears. Should anyone rescue a copy now from some
forgotten lumber-room, the fact is heralded by the press, and accounted
most extraordinary, as indeed it is; for everyone, the world over, is on
the look-out for rarities such as these. Though Holywell Street yet
stands, and does a thriving trade among the bookish, let not anyone
think that much is to be got for nothing there. On the contrary, the
dealers who inhabit it are better versed than most people in the
importance of each and every book they part with or throw into the boxes
which receive the outcasts of literature. There are, however, good and
valuable books by the thousand to be met with by anyone who does not
object to pay a fair and reasonable price for them. To this extent, and
in this particular, is Booksellers' Row the queen of London streets.
From these remarks I except, of course, the extremely important shops of
the West-End dealers into which correspondence flows from every part of
the world.
This chapter is devoted to the 'Hunting-grounds' of London, and I deny
that a collector who gives a standing order either verbally or by letter
to a bookseller for some work he particularly wants is a book-hunter at
all, at least so far as that particular transaction is concerned. To my
mind Nimrod must handle his own bow and not entrust it to a deputy, even
though he might by the rules of the chase be absolutely entitled to the
quarry which the skill of the latter had brought down. Let him go where
he will, East or West, the point of the compass makes no matter, he is a
hunter only when he prosecutes his own inquiries and carries out in
person all his arrangements. So we will avoid the great firms of
book-sellers, although it may be taken for granted that almost any
scarce work could be procured sooner or later from them, and go off on a
chase in which we shall never, in all human probability, meet with any
great prize, and may have to be satisfied with a little, that little,
however, being much from many points of view.