that it excites more interest than all the rest of the books put
together, though many, not to say most, of them are distinctly worthy of
the closest attention. One volume belonged to Charles Lamb, who has
made a perfect wreck of it, and half a dozen or more have the signature
of 'Will Shakespere' scribbled in an Elizabethan hand on the
title-pages, and in all sorts of places. These were once among the
choicest possessions of Samuel Ireland, of Norfolk Street, Strand, the
father of William Henry Ireland, a liar and a solicitor's clerk, who, as
all the world knows, was for a time, and in very truth, mistaken for the
great dramatist himself. Then there are books with inscriptions,
undoubtedly genuine, of Bradshaw the regicide, Algernon Sidney, and many
other persons of the highest political eminence in their day; books,
too, which have belonged to Young the poet--distinguishable at a glance
by the multitude of turned-down leaves--and the unfortunate Louis XVI.
This library is, of its kind, perhaps as important as any that has ever
been formed, and yet it only numbers some 250 volumes, so supremely
difficult is it, as a rule, to trace the possession even of books for
more than a generation or two. Great men have ever been chary of their
names, or at least it would seem so from the number of unimportant
signatures and inscriptions we meet with day by day.
A long and very interesting chapter might be written on 'Inscriptions in
Books,' and it must be confessed that a really important signature or
comment adds so very appreciably to the sentimental value of the volume
in which it is found, that it is not surprising that Oliver Wendell
Holmes conjured up a pleasant train of reflection, in his inimitable
style, based upon the name of a former owner of his own copy of the
'Colloquies of Erasmus,' which, by the way, my friend is extremely
anxious to possess himself of, but will probably never obtain. In this
instance the personality of the 'Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table'
obscures all else, and gives the book a distinct history of its own--a
history that invests it with an importance and value it could never
claim of itself. To find out all we can about the former owners of
books which we ourselves take pleasure in is no frivolous task, and the
pity is that our opportunities for doing so are limited. The book-plate
has very nearly put an end to owner's autographs, and being easy to
remove, affords little or no guarantee of ownership. And book-plates
have been in use in this country for more than 200 years.
No doubt everyone who has anything to do with books, whether as writer,
producer, or collector, can call to mind the eccentricities of his
neighbours with regard to them. I call it extremely eccentric conduct
on the part of any man to persist in collecting odd volumes, and to
studiously ignore complete sets. Yet I knew an old gentleman--now dead,
and his books littering the stalls of Farringdon Street and
elsewhere--who did this, year after year, and for many years, with the
inevitable result. He was fond of literature, and the pleasure he
derived in reading was part and parcel of his existence.
It was an axiom with him, however, that anything which is worth having,
and any knowledge worth acquiring, must be laboriously worked for; and
he would instance numerous authorities who have taught this truth by
example as well as by precept. He would say, 'If I go out and buy a
Bible for L500, because it is old and scarce, do you think I shall
derive as much benefit and solace from its pages as if I had invested a
trifle with the fixed determination to read what I had acquired and to
follow its teachings?'
'No, certainly not,' is the obvious and truthful reply to that; but this
would appear to be different from buying one volume of, say, Pope's
works when there ought to be twenty, and trusting to enterprise not
unmingled with luck to discover the remaining nineteen. To this,
however, he would not agree, and, to do him justice, he did not preach
one thing and perform another. His theory was that, if the perusal of
an odd volume leads the reader to long for the possession of its
fellows, it is better that he should search for them until he finds
them, than that he should have them to his hand, as it were, ready made.
Carlyle intimated that a man had far better study the title-page of any
book worth the trouble of looking at than read the whole text with a
vacant mind, and no doubt he was right, though this, too, seems to be an
entirely distinct matter from the general principle that nothing can be
learned without a maximum of inconvenience. Such a conclusion is rather
a straining of the position insisted upon by Nero's tutor, that no one
should collect more books than he can read, and that a multitude of
books only distracts the mind. Therefore was it that Francis Bissari in
the year 1750 designed a plate, which he pasted in the few volumes he
possessed, and which consequently is now extremely scarce. 'Ex-Libris
civis Francisci Bissari,' he says, 'Distrahit animum librorum multitude,
itaque cum legere non possis quantum habueris, sat est habere quantum
legas. Seneca. Ep. 2.'
Still, as I have intimated, the old gentleman had his way and his day,
and when he died his books were all despatched to the auction rooms. It
took three men more than a week to pack them in boxes. There were books
under every bed in the house, and every nook and cranny was full of
them. There were, altogether, many thousands of volumes, and nearly all
were odd. If a series were found to be complete, as sometimes happened,
it was sure to be made up of volumes belonging to different editions,
and, naturally enough, in different bindings. The auctioneers did what
they could, and sold the vast majority in 'parcels' for a mere song,
which in truth was all they were worth.
This peculiar form of book-collecting, though apparently strange, is,
and always has been, very usual, for the vast majority of readers are
poor. One volume will cost less, proportionately, than the complete set
of which it forms part; and, moreover, we are again face to face with
the argument that it is better to master the contents of one volume than
to have a mere superficial knowledge of a dozen or more. The only thing
is that, as the world wags at present, the advice is erratic, and the
system of buying books in sections one that cannot be recommended. If
we could be sure of a hundred years of life, then things might be
different. _Sed Ars longa, vita brevis est_.
And so it happens that the vagaries of book-hunters are often passing
strange. Some, like Sir Thomas Phillipps, will buy largely, and never
even open the cases in which they arrive. Others will hide them in all
sorts of out-of-the-way places, while others again will cut them to
pieces, or in some other way destroy them utterly. It is the most usual
thing, for me, at any rate, and therefore presumably for others who are
known to write about books, or to give the reports of the auction-rooms,
to receive a bundle of title-pages as samples of the volumes to which
they belong, with a request for information as to how they ought to be
bound, and what they are worth. Some collectors--real _bona-fide_
collectors these--start life with strong opinions as to the usefulness
of books, and, after the manner of Grolier, though without his
discretion, open their doors to all sorts and conditions of men, only to
close them later with a firm resolve that, come what come may, they will
never again allow any friend whomsoever even to gaze upon their store.
Some, too, are so deeply immersed in their all-absorbing hobby that they
have no clear conception of the difference between _meum_ and _tuum_.
Estimable in every respect but one, and scrupulously honest to a degree
in all matters of daily intercourse, they yet fail in this one supreme
trial. And yet they are absolved; for these unfortunates are not
thieves but eccentrics, who would no more think of selling the objects
they have mistaken for their own, than they would of getting wealth by
false pretences. Pope Innocent X., when still Monsignor Pamphilio, was
found in the possession of a book he could not satisfactorily account
for, and the ludicrous part of the matter was that Du Moustier, who
claimed that it had been abstracted from his library, was subsequently
proved to have stolen it himself. Then, again, Catherine de Medici
sequestered the entire library of Marshal Strozzi, and on complaint
promised to pay for it by instalments, which, of course, she never did.
Hearne hints more than once that Sir Thomas Bodley was eccentric, and
when Moore, Bishop of Ely, and father of English Black-Letter
Collectors, went to dine with a bibliophile, as was his wont, the latter
would, if he were wise, spend the morning in removing out of sight, and,
therefore, out of temptation's way, the choicest of his possessions.
But the king of all these suspicious characters was Libri, who, as
Inspector-General of French Libraries, under Louis Philippe, presented
himself, from first to last, with books of the value of more than
L20,000, among them a fine MS. of the Pentateuch, which he sold to the
late Lord Ashburnham on condition that it was not to be published for
twenty years. In 1868 the time expired, and then the matter was traced
home, to his memory's shame.
This conduct of Libri in selling what did not belong to him puts him,
indeed, on a level, in point of turpitude, with the young divinity
student of Chicago commonly called 'The Champion Biblioklept of
America.' In vastness of conception the latter was a mere tyro, for he
only stole a few hundred books of small value from the Chicago Public
Library. The motive of both men was, however, the same, and it was that
which, according to some consciences, made them thieves. After all, it
is this motive that must be primarily considered in all ethical
questions such as those which underlie, to some extent at least, the
vagaries of every book-hunter who ever was born to hunger and thirst for
Caxton's types, and paper white as snow, bound in a dream by the
Gascon's magic touch.
*CHAPTER VII.*
*HOW FASHION LIVES.*
The dim haze which, in the imagination of the populace, once floated
above the head of every hungry book-man, was never in those days
identified with a mass of tangled, waving hair, which, aureola-like,
'girt his occiput about,' for he was no minor poet, with pale, eager
face and love-locks everywhere, but a man, with a rugged front such as
Ben Jonson wore, and a heart that beat within. The haze in which he
moved was from the dust of old-world tomes; it settled on his coat, and,
had he worn a bob-wig, it would have settled on that also, but, since
wigs had escaped the fashion of fifty years before, it merely clung to
his hair instead, and powdered it gray before its time. Half a century
ago the England which for the most part was free from the shriek of the
railway-whistle and the rumble of traffic harboured such men as these in
their hundreds. They came from the last century, and the further their
pilgrimage in this the more they haunted the rustic element in which
they moved. They were, in their way, magicians, wearing the consecrated
pentacles of Agrippa, 'that man of parts, who dived into the secrets of
all arts, that second Solomon, the mighty Hee, that try'de them all, and
found them Vanity.'
Naturally enough, when one of these old-time bookworms left his
seclusion to mix with the whirl and throng of the London thoroughfares,
he was swallowed up, as though he had never been, in a huge vortex of
unappreciative apathy, for the man in the street never has time to
dream, and such books as he affects are ledgers. But he might have
strayed into some square which the tide, ebbing westward, had left
desolate, and met his counterpart sitting, as he himself did when at
home, in the midst of vellum-bound classics far into the night. Indeed,
when he came to London, which was but seldom, it would be to visit
another bookworm, just as the stage-doorkeeper of the present day spends
his evening off at the entrance to another theatre, because he cannot
get away, even in spirit, from his life's work and enterprise. Were we
to look for these old book-men now, we should look in vain, for the
century is fast drawing to its close, and a younger generation has
occupied their seats.
The transition from the old to the new in the matter of books and all
that pertains to them, has been very gradual. It commenced about fifty
years ago, or a little earlier, and was due, perhaps, to the spirit of
unrest fostered by an improved and quicker system of communication in a
country of very small area, absolutely incapable of enlargement. We see
a mighty change in everything external, and it is not surprising that
our social habits should have experienced a revolution. Round goes the
wheel, slowly and persistently, and we go with it, though daily custom
and daily experience has a tendency to mask its motion. One day, sooner
or later, we start up and look for the familiar landmarks. They are
gone. New ones, not at all familiar, but still recognisable, have taken
their place, and then we know that time has slipped away while we were
dreaming, and that nothing can possibly be done but to take the future
by the forelock, and to rush on for a brief space with the rest.
And so it is with books, and ever has been. Fifty years and more ago,
time waited upon them and stood still; now they are carried along
unceasingly, and have no rest. Every year the speed increases. Old
companions of the shelf are whirled into space and parted for ever; the
very men who buy them are changed in their aspirations, their tastes,
and their desires, and in a very short time they will change again, and
yet again. They are swayed and driven by Fashion, and this is how
Fashion lives.
There was something about the dry-as-dust bookworm which, however
consonant with antiquated modes of thought and action, was nevertheless
felt to be utterly unsuitable to changed conditions. Men must and will
read, and to accumulate is equally natural. A life of easy contentment
engenders one mode of thought, a life of enterprise another; and the
transition from the narrow limits of a prison-bound study to the open
air is precisely what might have been expected to occur.
Men there were, as I have said, in plenty, who refused to quit the
time-honoured traditions of their race; but on every side of them were
being born lighter spirits, to whom colossal and intricate volumes were
as heavy as lead. We see the changed nature of their tastes in the
craving for art, and the outcome of it in scores and hundreds of
miscellanies which began to be published about the year 1830, and held
imperial sway on drawing-room tables for ten years or more.
Fisher's 'Scrap-Book,' and numerous other artistically got up volumes
full of excerpts and elegant extracts, illustrated by some of the first
engravers of the time, were extremely fashionable in those days, and for
light and casual reading very probably supplied all that was necessary.
The poets, from the Earl of Surrey onward, were served up in dainty
plats, and the best prose authors were disembowelled with remarkable
skill. The ingenious Martin Tupper, observing this transformation scene,
brought joy into many households by laying down, in the form of explicit
statements, matters of theological controversy which had in their day
fed the Smithfield fires till they roared and blazed like those of
Moloch.
These books were for the cultured, to whom the random books of Pierce
Egan and William Combe were positively distasteful, and who, having
neither the time nor the inclination to bury themselves deeply in
classic lore, eagerly welcomed anything which appealed to their better
selves and, at the same time, did not too severely tax their brains.
The very style and nature of the books which were published at this
period show as conclusively as anything can do the great change which
was gradually creeping over the public mind.
Smollett and Swift were becoming coarse, and Hogarth, in his realm of
art, was already much worse. Mrs. Radcliffe and the Rev. Mr. Maturin
stalked like a couple of terrifying ghosts hung about with chains,
wailing their lost home. They invariably spoke of haunted caverns, and
the wind rumbling itself to sleep in the recesses of ruined chimneys.
Their novels were the delight of these same dry-as-dusts, to whom the
new age had said farewell, but who, in their impenetrable fastnesses,
still revelled, though in numbers yearly decreasing, in 'The Raven,'
with its soul-quaking refrain, in the 'Castle of Otranto,' and 'The
Bravo of Venice.' Things of graver mood they could not find had they
searched the entire catalogue of English literature, from the metrical
poems of Caedmon, chanted to the winds of Whitby, down to the newest
poem or novel.
The new school called the old 'unhealthy,' that being a not inapt
adjective with which to express the absence of brightness and chic,
qualities which came, as everything else comes, when called for, and
which were embodied to a nicety in 'Sketches by "Boz,"' 'The Pickwick
Papers,' and later on in 'The Yellowplush Correspondence,' and 'The
Paris Sketch-Book.' The new poetry was represented by Tennyson,
Browning, Longfellow, and many more, and essays of better, or, at any
rate, more taking, style than those of the Rev. Vicessimus Knox, were
published every day, and what is more to the point, extensively read and
hoarded.
Collections which had their beginnings in materials such as these
authors afforded were, and necessarily must be, totally different in
every possible way from those of the prior century; this we find to be
the case on looking at the catalogues of sales by auction which were
issued under the new regime. Fashion had indeed changed, and at this
particular period Hakluyt and Coryat, to say nothing of curious authors
like Brathwaite and Seller, were comparatively neglected. They have
recovered themselves since, because a revulsion of feeling has taken
place in their favour, and many of the old books which were of immense
importance sixty or seventy years ago are, after suffering a period of
neglect, once more in vogue, and can hardly be met with when sought
after, so great is the demand for them. That is the case now, but there
is a wide intervening period which needs to be analyzed.
In my opinion, Dickens among novelists, and Tennyson among poets, had
the greatest amount of influence upon modern collectors as a body. The
former was the more powerful at first, since he had the good fortune to
meet with extremely talented artists like George Cruikshank, Hablot
Browne, Seymour and Leech, to illustrate his works. Cruikshank was
fresh from the glories of 'Life in London,' and 'The Life of Napoleon,'
which had between them carried his name far and wide, and Browne hit off
the meaning of the author in such a marvellous way, that he may almost
be said to have discovered him. Seymour's opportunities were few, as his
seven etchings for the 'Pickwick Papers' were all he ever accomplished
for Dickens; but these were, in their way, masterly, and no doubt
contributed greatly to the success of the earlier parts in which they
appeared.
Slowly but surely the collectors began to turn their thoughts to the new
author and the artists who were assisting him, and to accumulate the
numbers in which it was the fashion to issue illustrated novels at that
time. We often see them now, almost as clean and fresh as when they
were first published, showing conclusively that every care has been
bestowed upon them. In later days, up to within a year or two in fact,
there was a great rush for any books or parts by popular authors
containing first-rate illustrations. There is a demand for them now, but
only when their condition is immaculate, for fashion has recently
changed in a marked degree, owing, perhaps, to the number of rich
collectors, who would have these things at any price, and, of course,
had their way to the exclusion of the vast majority who were not
sufficiently well off to compete with them. And this fashion was the
parent, not of another fashion, but of a craze, which raged for two
years or more.
The years 1893 and 1894 I take to be those in which people, despairing
of obtaining their heart's desire, turned their attention to what were
known 'Limited Editions,' and raged furiously. Nothing but a thorough
grasp of the state of the book-market at the time, and a deep insight
into human nature, could have hit upon the 'Limited Edition' as a
stop-gap, and those who invented it are entitled to every credit for
their enterprise. The apology for the life of the 'Limited Edition'
brought to its logical conclusion was this: Times have changed, and,
moreover, more people buy books than formerly, whether to read or to
store. With the readers we have nothing to do, except incidentally; but
so far as the collectors are concerned, it is obvious that only about
one out of every ten can afford to pay the extremely high prices
demanded for most of the first editions of the authors of repute which
they affect.
Now comes the point, and upon this the whole argument succeeds or fails.
Do they want these coveted books to read or to accumulate? If they wish
to read them they can do so at any time, for there are more editions
than one in the majority of instances, and the demand for the later and
cheaper ones is of a different character altogether; ergo, they really
want them, though they would perhaps be highly indignant if we said so,
to possess and not necessarily to read. Let us, therefore, make new
books in the image of the old, decorating them artistically, and
printing them in the best possible style. Let us cut down the edition
to a very small number of copies, in order to keep it out of the hands
of all but just enough buyers to make the venture pay well, and we ought
to succeed in establishing a furore that will continue precisely as long
as the strenuous efforts to obtain time-tried poems and essays remain
futile by reason of their cost.
The venture was purposely confined to poems and essays, because literary
wares of this kind good enough for the purpose could be bought for next
to nothing. A novel, in order to compete on this particular ground with
the older works of Ainsworth, Thackeray, and the rest, would be costly
to buy in manuscript, and difficult as well as expensive to produce;
and, moreover, novels never pay unless they are sold in large
quantities. This argument was sound throughout, and, moreover, a fresh
departure of some kind was inevitable, if only to stem the tide that
flowed so aggressively in favour of the rich. The venture succeeded,
for almost on the instant the collector, casting a lingering look behind
on the expensive works for which he craved, turned away from them, and
welcomed the 'dainty volumes of delicious verse' which came tumbling
down in almost endless variety. There was a scramble for them which
continued exactly as long as had been predicted, namely, until the
prices of once coveted books began to fall, and then the 'Limited
Editions' fell too, and the craze was over, for the present at least.
One would have thought that the direct result of this procedure would
have been a fresh rush to former fields, but the fact is otherwise.
Original editions of the works of older poets and essayists of the
highest repute are still as costly as ever, but the general ruck have
fallen in the market, and remain fallen to this present day. More than
that, the 'Limited Edition' brought within reasonable access innumerable
better books, now become cheaper, provided they are not in the very
finest condition.
Just at the moment there is no great 'boom' observable in the English
market, no great craze for books of a certain special kind, though some,
as usual, are sought for unceasingly, as, for example, many of those
older works of English literature which were seen in such profusion in
the collection of Mr. Charles B. Foote, dispersed in New York at the
beginning of 1895.