profusion in Farringdon Street. Every Saturday morning throughout the
year light hand-carts to the number, perhaps, of thirty or forty, stand
in a long line against the curb, and each is packed with works of all
kinds. I am bound to admit that obsolete school-books and forgotten
sermons constitute the great majority of these waifs and strays, but
there is always a wide choice of useful books to be got for purely
nominal sums, and occasionally one that is rare and valuable.
Personally I never met with a really scarce book in Farringdon Street,
but three years ago--and I mention this at the risk of being charged
with travelling from the subject--I bought there the undoubtedly
original study by Sir Joshua Reynolds for the portrait of the Right
Honourable George Seymour Conway, afterwards Lord George Seymour Conway.
The portrait was painted in 1770, and engraved in mezzotint by Edward
Fisher the year following. The study is in oils, on thick paper of
about twelve inches in height, and is so remarkable as a work of art,
that it is a wonder it could have escaped recognition for an hour,
instead, as was the fact, for a whole morning.
Should Farringdon Street prove unpropitious, Sunday morning in any week
will see Lambeth Marshes and the New Cut, both on the Surrey side,
crowded with barrows, and the same remark applies to the streets about
the Elephant and Castle on Saturday evenings when the weather is fine.
Generally speaking, the peripatetic book-seller is only to be met with
on the first and last days of the week, but that he does manage to turn
over a considerable part of his stock in the short time available is not
to be doubted. He may not change--many of these men have haunted the
same spot for years, and have their recognised stands--but his stock is,
in one sense, ever new. A few months ago I saw in the Whitechapel Road a
hand-cart full of small vellum-bound volumes, which proved to be Greek
and Latin classics, printed in Paris a couple of centuries ago. The
covers were remarkably fresh and clean, and somebody or other, or rather
a succession of owners, must have taken the greatest care of these
little books, which had thus ignobly fallen into the gutter at last.
Next week at the same hour, they had all gone, having been disposed of
to the more learned inhabitants of Bethnal Green at 2d. apiece.
If, however, wandering about the East End of London is not to the taste
of the picker-up of unconsidered trifles, there is still the more
primitive kind of shops to be visited. Great Turnstile still boasts a
bookseller or two, and it was here, it will be remembered, that John
Bagford, many years ago, divided his attention between making boots and
shoes and ripping out the title-pages of the books that fell into his
sacrilegious hands. He failed as a cobbler, but succeeded in amassing
the most disreputable collection of titles that has ever been got
together. The arch-Vandal failed in everything but his Vandalism, and
surely any success is better than none at all. It is said of him that
he searched all his life for one of Caxton's impossible title-pages, and
died of disappointment, a story which is probably a gross libel on his
accomplishments, for Bagford was not by any means an uneducated man.
Then, Little Turnstile hard by is worth a casual visit, and there are
many shops in the streets extending east and west of St. Martin's Lane
where books are to be bought in almost any number. The newly-built
Charing Cross Road appears to be under a cloud; in fact, at this point
we must turn back again, and make direct for Holborn, Bury Street, and
the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square and Queen Square.
In Red Lion Passage there are several of the quaintest shops imaginable,
one of them kept by a dealer who appears to have a mania for the very
largest folios, though I notice that of late he has somewhat fallen away
from his traditional custom in this respect. The books stand on their
sides on the floor in columns of about six feet high; they are piled on
and under the counter, and are seen peeping out of the black darkness of
a room beyond. Petrarch would have avoided this shop lest history
should repeat itself, and a folio break, not his leg merely this time,
but his neck.
On the other side of the Passage is another temple of gloom and mystery,
for it must be observed that the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square is
generally in semi-darkness all the year round, except in the winter, and
then it is frequently impossible to see at all when once the streets are
left. The proprietors of this shop issue a periodical catalogue, which
can be taken from a box at the door, and it may safely be said that
there is no catalogue issued in London by anyone which is better worth
glancing over than this, notwithstanding an occasional misprint or two.
The books are, generally speaking, of such an unusual and out-of-the-way
kind that one cannot help wondering where they all come from. For
instance, 'Ben Johnson's English Dictionary, 8vo., 1732,' must be a
remarkable volume, and the 'Wuremberg Chronicle, folio, numerous
wood-cuts, 1493,' equally curious. Then there is 'Peasson on the
Creed,' 'Jewels, ----, Works, folio, 1611,' 'Locke, Humane
Understanding, folio, 1706,' 'Staunton: Shakispear,' and so on _ad
infinitum_. Throughout the prices are moderate, extremely moderate;
that, at any rate, is a fact worthy of distinct recognition, and some of
the books, too, are anything but easy to procure, as witness Chaucer's
Works, folio, 1602, which is priced at L1 10s., Grafton's Chronicle,
folio, 1569, L1 5s., Swan's 'Speculum Mundi,' 4to., 1670, 3s., and many
others. Dark though this shop may be to gaze upon, I regard it as a
typical book-man's paradise.
Paternoster Row, further east still, is now of course, the headquarters
of the publishers, though several second-hand booksellers still linger
there. Before the Great Fire reduced the whole district to ashes they
had it all their own way, and when the Row was rebuilt they flocked
there once more, to be gradually elbowed out by giant houses which sell
books wholesale. There is one shop in this thoroughfare so completely
wedged up with books that it is a somewhat difficult matter to enter in
at the door. Nobody who is not in the daily habit of passing by could
avoid stopping to glance at the rows of volumes which the proprietor has
reared up against a wall round the corner that leads into St. Paul's
Churchyard, for he has decorated them with innumerable strips of paper
writ large with pieces of advice on things in general, quotations from
classical writers, the Bible and the Koran, which, though they have for
the most part nothing whatever to do with the sale of books of any kind,
attract by reason of their quaintness and the strangeness of their
being.
And so we might go wandering for ever about New London, passing on every
side the shadows of the old, but seeing little of the substance.
Book-men of the true stamp are antiquaries, to whom novelty is
abhorrent. The pleasantest places are to them those which time has
consecrated with a gentle touch, and which reflect all their imaginings,
even as they echo their footsteps. These are departing under the
mandate of an inexorable law, and we go with them.
*CHAPTER VI.*
*VAGARIES OF BOOK-HUNTERS.*
Ten or fifteen years ago it was quite usual to meet with collections of
title-pages formed by followers of the immortal Bagford. These were to
be seen quoted in booksellers' catalogues and displayed in the auction
rooms, and were commonly disposed of for small sums of money--small,
that is to say, in comparison with what would have been realized for the
books themselves had they been allowed to remain in that state of life
to which the author and others had called them. Of late, collections of
title-pages have not been very much in evidence anywhere, for it is
universally felt that there is little or no romance surrounding the
slaughter even of folios, to say nothing of smaller-sized victims, and
for that reason these scrappy collections are huddled out of sight like
family skeletons. The book-hunter of the present day has his foibles,
it is true, but he has learned by experience and from the expostulatory
remarks of others that wild freaks are completely out of place in a
library, and so it has come to pass that books are treated in a
different way from what they were only a couple of decades ago, and no
one who has the smallest respect either for himself or his vocation
would now either care or dare to form a collection of title-pages.
Should he happen to own one either by purchase or under circumstances
beyond his control, he will produce it, if at all, with apologies and
sighs. It is abundantly manifest that the wicked man hath turned away
from much of his wickedness.
The reason of this tremendous transformation must be put down to the
credit of a rule which, though formulated and preached at one time by
the elite only, has been insisted upon with such pertinacity that it has
gradually become diffused throughout the whole world of collectors, no
matter to what objects of interest they may direct their attention.
This rule is, that taste and the pocket alike demand that be a book
good, bad, or indifferent in its externals, it shall, nevertheless, be
left untouched by its owner, who is but its temporary custodian, and a
trustee for others who shall come after him. To rip out the title-page,
no matter with what object, is an outrage on decency which, it is
pleasant to find, is now appraised at its proper pitch of enormity. If
the stamp-collector rejoice in the possession of a specimen with
'original gum,' and rate its interest and value higher on that account,
shall the book-collector, who is the oldest, the most learned, and the
most aristocratic of all collectors, give place in the matter of
common-sense and discretion to the product of a frivolous age? Shall he
cut initial letters from missals and other manuscripts, and insult the
shades of Fust and Schoeffer by making a senseless collection of
colophons? These things were in vogue at one time, but are now frowned
down even by the most ignorant of mortals, since, to put the matter on
no higher ground, the money value of old books has considerably
increased of late years to his certain knowledge, and he believes that
anything with curious type, the f's made so--f, and villainous prints
scattered about the text, must _ex necessitate rei_ be worth its weight
in gold, and perhaps more. What a contrast is this little false, but
preventative, store of knowledge to the crass stupidity of the early
years of the present century, as exemplified in the persons of the
Bishops, Canons, and Chaplains of Lincoln Cathedral, who permitted the
choir-boys to collect illuminated initials, and with that object to cut
up with their pen-knives scores of vellum manuscripts. A good many of
the Caxtons from this same Cathedral were purchased by Dibdin for the
Althorpe collection, and will be found catalogued in 'A Lincolne
Nosegaye.' The Dean and Chapter, knowing little about books, and caring
less, had disposed of them all for a 'consideration,' and thus without
thought stripped themselves of their choicest possessions next to the
Cathedral itself.
Of a truth, books have only recently come to be regarded as possessing a
sentimental value altogether distinct from considerations of utility,
and it is only within the compass of a comparatively few years that
collectors have sprung up from the very stones to cry aloud, and to
protest against such wanton acts of mutilation or destruction as the
records of past days almost choke themselves in the echoing of. Only a
little while ago 'Grangerizing' was the favourite pastime of thousands
of persons of elegant leisure, as Griswold called the lazy dullards of
his generation, and what this involved would be whispered in corners but
for the fact that it was for 200 years unblushingly shouted in the open
day.
During all that period the teachings of the genuine bibliophiles had so
passed from deed and truth into mere monotony of unbelieved phrase that
no English was literal enough to convert the persons who went about
seeking material, at vast expense, wherewith to extra-illustrate some
inane book of polemics or proverbs.
Nicholas Ferrar, who kept the 'Protestant Nunnery' at Little Gidding, in
Huntingdonshire, was, I believe, the inventor of a system which was not
fully developed until the publication of Granger's 'Biographical History
of England,' but which is, nevertheless, directly or indirectly
responsible for the condition of most of the imperfect volumes which are
met with at every turn. The story of Nicholas Ferrar, assuming it to be
true, which there is little reason to doubt, makes it clear that King
Charles I. was as bad as or worse than anybody in this matter, for, had
he not affected to admire the handiwork of this first and chief of
sinners, the baneful practice of mutilating books for the sake of their
illustrations, title-pages, or frontispieces, might never have become an
aristocratic amusement, sanctified by tradition, and ennobled far beyond
its deserts by kingly patronage. The Concordance which Ferrar showed
the King escaped the wrath of the fanatic Hugh Peters and his crew, and,
after many vicissitudes, is now safely lodged in the British Museum, a
warning to all who may at any time seek to revive a practice which
would, in these days of emulation and competition, burn with a white
heat.
In Wordsworth's 'Ecclesiastical Biography' the story of Nicholas Ferrar
is set out at length. There is no need to enter into minute details, as
the tale has since become stereotyped, and is found reproduced in a
dozen different places at least. Shortly, it appears that in June,
1634, King Charles I. was staying with the Earl of Westmorland at
Apethorpe, and from thence sent one of his gentlemen to the home of
Nicholas Ferrar, hard by, to 'intreat' a sight of a Concordance which he
had heard had recently been completed. When Ferrar was on the Continent
some time previously, he had bought up a great number of prints by the
best masters, illustrative of historical passages of the Old and New
Testaments, and these he afterwards used for ornamenting various
compilations of the Scriptures, among them a 'full harmony or
concordance of the four Evangelists, adorned with many beautiful
pictures, which required more than a year for the composition, and was
divided into 150 heads or chapters.'
This was the Concordance that King Charles was so anxious to look at,
and which, indeed, he admired so much that he never rested until he had
obtained one like it for his own library. Both books are now in the
British Museum, the original having been acquired about three years ago,
and the one in the King's Library from George II., who had inherited the
royal collection of books and manuscripts.
From the point of view of Nicholas Ferrar, there was certainly no harm
in this process of extra-illustrating. There is no reason to believe
that he had gone about tearing out plates from books, or done anything
else which in any respect, save one, could be regarded as objectionable
in the slightest degree. There was, and is, however, one objection to
his procedure, namely, the very bad example he set to unscrupulous
people who, in after years, rose up in their thousands and commenced to
rip and tear with diabolical enterprise. These were the days of
Granger's 'Biographical History of England'--hence the verb to
Grangerize--when people went about searching for portraits of
celebrities mentioned in the text to paste between the leaves in their
proper places. If Granger incidentally mentioned that someone had been
conveyed to the Tower, and subsequently had the good fortune to escape
out of a certain window, books would be ransacked and mutilated to
provide illustrations of (1) the Tower of London from the N., S., E. or
W., as the case might be; (2) portrait of the prisoner; (3) view of the
window from which he let himself down; and finally, if, Laus Deo, a
letter in his handwriting or a section of the rope which had made his
escape possible could only be unearthed, great was the joy in the camp
of the Philistine.
This mania for Grangerizing grew till it assumed enormous proportions.
One enthusiast tried to illustrate Rees' 'Cyclopaedia,' but died before
he had accomplished very much in comparison with what remained to be
done. Mr. Crowle's copy of Pennant's 'History of London' cost that
gentleman L7,000 from first to last, and there is a book of this kind in
the Bodleian which has engulfed nearly double that amount. It consists
of Clarendon's 'History of the Rebellion' swollen to sixty-seven large
volumes, representing forty years of intense application. The vagaries
of a whole army of book-collectors are reflected from every page of
works such as these, for a man must necessarily be a book-collector
first, and a Grangerizer after, else would material fail him. Happily
for the peace of books, the mania for extra-illustrating has practically
died out. The expense is too great, life too short, the knowledge and
taste--of a kind--too laborious to acquire, to endow this pastime with a
permanent and stable interest.
And yet there is another vagary, eccentricity, freak, or what you will,
which, for cool, deliberate folly, has never been equalled even among
Ferrar's admirers. The fun in this case consists in wilfully destroying
a certain number of scarce and valuable books in order to heighten the
importance and value of the survivors. Three or four collectors whose
tastes are similar--that is to say, who accumulate works by the same
author--will take stock of their belongings. Thanks to the
Grangerizers, a portrait will perhaps be missing from one volume, and a
plate from another; some disciple of an ancient Goth may have removed a
title-page or two; one copy may be fairer to look upon than another; a
leaf or two may be injured which in another copy, imperfect perhaps in
other respects, may be above suspicion. Our collectors have duplicates,
for they have been striving all their lives to prevent anyone else from
obtaining any copy, good, bad or indifferent, of the scarcest works of
the author or authors they think they honour by their notice. They make
a 'pool' of all the volumes which are not immaculate; complete or
perfect as many of them as possible, apportion them, and destroy the
remainder. They will burn a work which is perfect, provided each has a
copy in better condition, and this is to prevent you or me, or anyone
else, from sharing in their sacrilegious joy. When we reflect that,
from the nature of things, it is only the scarcest books that can be so
treated with effect, we shall begin to realize the sinister importance
of the act. Practices such as these are the product of the present age;
they are not common, far from it, but they are not unusual. And yet the
perpetrators mean no harm, for, as they would very truly say, if their
practices were generally known and complaint were made, 'You can, if you
like, read So-and-so without the least difficulty, for his works have
been reprinted many times, and it is not either essential or advisable
that the very scarcest edition of all should be in your hands.' There
is in this argument a little logical force, but no decency for anyone to
dissect.
Bookmen of the present day, or at least those among them who aspire to
the highest seats in the collectors' Pantheon, are invariably bound by
rule, and it is this hard and fast bondage that makes them do things
which, if left to themselves, they would probably be the first to
deprecate. To accumulate any considerable number of really scarce books
is the labour of a lifetime, and to obtain immaculate copies
necessitates not merely the possession of plenty of money, but a very
great deal of energy, discrimination, and tact. The old school of
general lovers is dying out. People now very seldom buy up whole
libraries, or send out colossal orders to gratify a mere love of
possession. They work by the book of arithmetic, cautiously, slowly,
and with one main object ever in view. In this they are right, but in
this also they fail, a paradox which is no paradox at all when it is
remembered that book-hunters are of many kinds and of varying degrees of
intelligence.
For instance, though there is undoubtedly something unique and strange
about the very appearance of a library of extremely diminutive books,
the collector of works of this kind is 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd,'
within the compass of about two square inches at the most, and probably
does not expect to derive either instruction or amusement from their
pages when he has succeeded in reading them with the aid of a
microscope. His rule is inflexible. Shakespeare in folio must give
place to 'The Mite'; 'The English Bijou Almanac' for 1837 is, in his
eyes one of the choicest of all volumes. Here literature and the rule
are in conflict, and books become bric-a-brac, as they must do when any
rule is too rigidly applied to them. Yet there are many collectors of
small books both here and abroad, and prices rule inordinately high in
consequence.
Very probably 'The Mite' is the smallest book printed from movable type
in the world. Its size is only 3/8 in. by 3/4 in., and it would
certainly be an exceedingly difficult matter to reduce this measurement.
If anybody could do so, it would be M. Salomon of Paris, who has long
been a collector of these microscopical curiosities, or the trustees of
the British Museum, who have a box full of them. In 1781 a little book
called the 'Alarm Almanac' made its appearance in Paris, and though
printed with movable type and not engraved, like nearly all these little
works are, measured only 19 millimetres by 14. There are very nearly
25-1/2 millimetres to the inch, and this specimen consequently runs 'The
Mite' very close indeed. The 'English Bijou Almanac' for 1837, however,
completely eclipses both, but unfortunately it is engraved and not
printed from type. This book measures 3/4 in. in height, 1/2 in. wide,
and 1/8 in. in thickness. The authoress was 'L.E.L.,' Letitia Elizabeth
Landon, an almost forgotten poetess, whose sad marriage and untimely
death are known to only a few students of Victorian literature. Some of
her poems were printed in the 'Bijou' for the first and only time, so
that this tiny volume is of some literary importance. Its title is so
minute that a magnifying glass is necessary to read it. Its
thirty-seven leaves are devoted, _inter alia_, to several pages of music
and some portraits, including one of James Fenimore Cooper, the
novelist. Even small books have a history and an importance of their
own, but to collect them to the exclusion of every other book is surely
a pronounced 'vagary.'
M. Salomon has more than 200 specimens, but then he does not absolutely
confine his attention to midgets. I never knew nor heard of more than
one collector who was so infatuated as to do so, and he had forty-five
volumes of the kind, all different, in which he took such extreme
delight that he was ever on the look out for more.
Another collector with whom I am personally acquainted has read this
chapter through at my express request, and consequently cannot
reasonably say that I have endeavoured to question the soundness of his
discretion behind his back. He accumulates books with a history. If a
book has no history, he will have none of it. In his library are many
volumes which I must confess I have a great regard for, but which I know
can never be mine, for each is unique, and the whole collection is
destined for a public museum in the end.
He has a book bound in what looks like dry and hard parchment, warped
with damp, and stained here and there with reddish brown. It is a copy
of Johnson's 'Lives and Adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen,
Murderers, and Street Robbers, etc.,' printed in folio in 1736, a scarce
book at any time, but under existing circumstances past praying for.
The parchment is human cuticle, stripped from the back of a criminal who
had swung at Tyburn for a series of atrocious butcheries, which are
chronicled with considerable minuteness in the pages of the 'Newgate
Calendar.' When the corpse was cut down it was, according to the custom
then prevailing, carted 'home,' and exhibited to gaping crowds at so
much a head, and finally sold to the surgeons. From them a prior owner
of this delightful volume obtained the skin, which, when tanned, formed
an appropriate and never-to-be-forgotten binding, to all appearances
sweating great smears of blood. It is only the damp, of course, or
perhaps some defect in the curing process, which is responsible for
these blemishes; but they seem to cry for vengeance, still greater and
greater vengeance, against an inhuman wretch long since departed more or
less in peace.