For a good many years I was deeply interested in British politics. I
was converted to Liberalism, so-called, by an incident which I deem
well worth relating. One afternoon I entered a book-shop in High
Holborn, and found that the Hon. William E. Gladstone had preceded me
thither. I had never seen Mr. Gladstone before. I recognized him now
by his resemblance to the caricatures, and by his unlikeness to the
portraits which the newspapers had printed.
As I entered the shop I heard the bookseller ask: "What books shall I
send?"
To this, with a very magnificent sweep of his arms indicating every
point of the compass, Gladstone made answer: "Send me THOSE!"
With these words he left the place, and I stepped forward to claim a
volume which had attracted my favorable attention several days previous.
"I beg your pardon, sir," said the bookseller, politely, "but that book
is sold."
"Sold?" I cried.
"Yes, sir," replied the bookseller, smiling with evident pride; "Mr.
Gladstone just bought it; I haven't a book for sale--Mr. Gladstone just
bought them ALL!"
The bookseller then proceeded to tell me that whenever Gladstone
entered a bookshop he made a practice of buying everything in sight.
That magnificent, sweeping gesture of his comprehended
everything--theology, history, social science, folk-lore, medicine,
travel, biography--everything that came to his net was fish!
"This is the third time Mr. Gladstone has visited me," said the
bookseller, "and this is the third time he has cleaned me out."
"This man is a good man," says I to myself. "So notable a lover of
books surely cannot err. The cause of home rule must be a just one
after all."
From others intimately acquainted with him I learned that Gladstone was
an omnivorous reader; that he ordered his books by the cart-load, and
that his home in Hawarden literally overflowed with books. He made a
practice, I was told, of overhauling his library once in so often and
of weeding out such volumes as he did not care to keep. These
discarded books were sent to the second-hand dealers, and it is said
that the dealers not unfrequently took advantage of Gladstone by
reselling him over and over again (and at advanced prices, too) the
very lots of books he had culled out and rejected.
Every book-lover has his own way of buying; so there are as many ways
of buying as there are purchasers. However, Judge Methuen and I have
agreed that all buyers may be classed in these following specified
grand divisions:
The reckless buyer.
The shrewd buyer.
The timid buyer.
Of these three classes the third is least worthy of our consideration,
although it includes very many lovers of books, and consequently very
many friends of mine. I have actually known men to hesitate, to
ponder, to dodder for weeks, nay, months over the purchase of a book;
not because they did not want it, nor because they deemed the price
exorbitant, nor yet because they were not abundantly able to pay that
price. Their hesitancy was due to an innate, congenital lack of
determination--that same hideous curse of vacillation which is
responsible for so much misery in human life.
I have made a study of these people, and I find that most of them are
bachelors whose state of singleness is due to the fact that the same
hesitancy which has deprived them of many a coveted volume has operated
to their discomfiture in the matrimonial sphere. While they
deliberated, another bolder than they came along and walked off with
the prize.
One of the gamest buyers I know of was the late John A. Rice of
Chicago. As a competitor at the great auction sales he was invincible;
and why? Because, having determined to buy a book, he put no limit to
the amount of his bid. His instructions to his agent were in these
words: "I must have those books, no matter what they cost."
An English collector found in Rice's library a set of rare volumes he
had been searching for for years.
"How did you happen to get them?" he asked. "You bought them at the
Spencer sale and against my bid. Do you know, I told my buyer to bid a
thousand pounds for them, if necessary!"
"That was where I had the advantage of you," said Rice, quietly. "I
specified no limit; I simply told my man to buy the books."
The spirit of the collector cropped out early in Rice. I remember to
have heard him tell how one time, when he was a young man, he was
shuffling over a lot of tracts in a bin in front of a Boston bookstall.
His eye suddenly fell upon a little pamphlet entitled "The Cow-Chace."
He picked it up and read it. It was a poem founded upon the defeat of
Generals Wayne, Irving, and Proctor. The last stanza ran in this wise:
And now I've closed my epic strain,
I tremble as I show it,
Lest this same warrior-drover, Wayne,
Should ever catch the poet.
Rice noticed that the pamphlet bore the imprint of James Rivington, New
York, 1780. It occurred to him that some time this modest tract of
eighteen pages might be valuable; at any rate, he paid the fifteen
cents demanded for it, and at the same time he purchased for ten cents
another pamphlet entitled "The American Tories, a Satire."
Twenty years later, having learned the value of these exceedingly rare
tracts, Mr. Rice sent them to London and had them bound in Francis
Bedford's best style--"crimson crushed levant morocco, finished to a
Grolier pattern." Bedford's charges amounted to seventy-five dollars,
which with the original cost of the pamphlets represented an
expenditure of seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents upon Mr.
Rice's part. At the sale of the Rice library in 1870, however, this
curious, rare, and beautiful little book brought the extraordinary sum
of seven hundred and fifty dollars!
The Rice library contained about five thousand volumes, and it realized
at auction sale somewhat more than seventy-two thousand dollars. Rice
has often told me that for a long time he could not make up his mind to
part with his books; yet his health was so poor that he found it
imperative to retire from business, and to devote a long period of time
to travel; these were the considerations that induced him finally to
part with his treasures. "I have never regretted having sold them," he
said. "Two years after the sale the Chicago fire came along. Had I
retained those books, every one of them would have been lost."
Mrs. Rice shared her husband's enthusiasm for books. Whenever a new
invoice arrived, the two would lock themselves in their room, get down
upon their knees on the floor, open the box, take out the treasures and
gloat over them, together! Noble lady! she was such a wife as any good
man might be proud of. They were very happy in their companionship on
earth, were my dear old friends. He was the first to go; their
separation was short; together once more and forever they share the
illimitable joys which await all lovers of good books when virtue hath
mournfully writ the colophon to their human careers.
Although Mr. Rice survived the sale of his remarkable library a period
of twenty-six years, he did not get together again a collection of
books that he was willing to call a library. His first collection was
so remarkable that he preferred to have his fame rest wholly upon it.
Perhaps he was wise; yet how few collectors there are who would have
done as he did.
As for myself, I verily believe that, if by fire or by water my library
should be destroyed this night, I should start in again to-morrow upon
the collection of another library. Or if I did not do this, I should
lay myself down to die, for how could I live without the companionships
to which I have ever been accustomed, and which have grown as dear to
me as life itself?
Whenever Judge Methuen is in a jocular mood and wishes to tease me, he
asks me whether I have forgotten the time when I was possessed of a
spirit of reform and registered a solemn vow in high heaven to buy no
more books. Teasing, says Victor Hugo, is the malice of good men;
Judge Methuen means no evil when he recalls that weakness--the one
weakness in all my career.
No, I have not forgotten that time; I look back upon it with a shudder
of horror, for wretched indeed would have been my existence had I
carried into effect the project I devised at that remote period!
Dr. O'Rell has an interesting theory which you will find recorded in
the published proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol.
xxxiv., p. 216). Or, if you cannot procure copies of that work, it may
serve your purpose to know that the doctor's theory is to this
effect--viz., that bibliomania does not deserve the name of bibliomania
until it is exhibited in the second stage. For secondary bibliomania
there is no known cure; the few cases reported as having been cured
were doubtless not bibliomania at all, or, at least, were what we of
the faculty call false or chicken bibliomania.
"In false bibliomania, which," says Dr. O'Rell, "is the primary stage
of the grand passion--the vestibule to the main edifice--the usual
symptoms are flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, a bounding pulse, and
quick respiration. This period of exaltation is not unfrequently
followed by a condition of collapse in which we find the victim pale,
pulseless, and dejected. He is pursued and tormented of imaginary
horrors, he reproaches himself for imaginary crimes, and he implores
piteously for relief from fancied dangers. The sufferer now stands in
a slippery place; unless his case is treated intelligently he will
issue from that period of gloom cured of the sweetest of madnesses, and
doomed to a life of singular uselessness.
"But properly treated," continues Dr. O'Rell, "and particularly if his
spiritual needs be ministered to, he can be brought safely through this
period of collapse into a condition of reenforced exaltation, which is
the true, or secondary stage of, bibliomania, and for which there is no
cure known to humanity."
I should trust Dr. O'Rell's judgment in this matter, even if I did not
know from experience that it was true. For Dr. O'Rell is the most
famous authority we have in bibliomania and kindred maladies. It is he
(I make the information known at the risk of offending the ethics of
the profession)--it is he who discovered the bacillus librorum, and,
what is still more important and still more to his glory, it is he who
invented that subtle lymph which is now everywhere employed by the
profession as a diagnostic where the presence of the germs of
bibliomania (in other words, bacilli librorum) is suspected.
I once got this learned scientist to inject a milligram of the lymph
into the femoral artery of Miss Susan's cat. Within an hour the
precocious beast surreptitiously entered my library for the first time
in her life, and ate the covers of my pet edition of Rabelais. This
demonstrated to Dr. O'Rell's satisfaction the efficacy of his
diagnostic, and it proved to Judge Methuen's satisfaction what the
Judge has always maintained--viz., that Rabelais was an old rat.