Judge Methuen tells me that one of the most pleasing delusions he has
experienced in his long and active career as a bibliomaniac is that
which is born of the catalogue habit. Presuming that there are among
my readers many laymen,--for I preach salvation to the heathen,--I will
explain for their information that the catalogue habit, so called, is a
practice to which the confirmed lover of books is likely to become
addicted. It is a custom of many publishers and dealers to publish and
to disseminate at certain periods lists of their wares, in the hope of
thereby enticing readers to buy those wares.
By what means these crafty tradesmen secure the names of their
prospective victims I cannot say, but this I know full well--that there
seems not to be a book-lover on the face of the earth, I care not how
remote or how secret his habitation may be, that these dealers do not
presently find him out and overwhelm him with their delightful
temptations.
I have been told that among booksellers there exists a secret league
which provides for the interchange of confidences; so that when a new
customer enters a shop in the Fulham road or in Oxford street or along
the quays of Paris, or it matters not where (so long as the object of
his inquiry be a book), within the space of a month that man's name and
place of residence are reported to and entered in the address list of
every other bookseller in Christendom, and forthwith and forever after
the catalogues and price-lists and bulletins of publishers and dealers
in every part of the world are pelted at him through the unerring
processes of the mails.
Judge Methuen has been a victim (a pleasant victim) to the catalogue
habit for the last forty years, and he has declared that if all the
catalogues sent to and read by him in that space of time were gathered
together in a heap they would make a pile bigger than Pike's Peak, and
a thousandfold more interesting. I myself have been a famous reader of
catalogues, and I can testify that the habit has possessed me of
remarkable delusions, the most conspicuous of which is that which
produces within me the conviction that a book is as good as mine as
soon as I have met with its title in a catalogue, and set an X over
against it in pencil.
I recall that on one occasion I was discussing with Judge Methuen and
Dr. O'Rell the attempted escapes of Charles I. from Carisbrooke Castle;
a point of difference having arisen, I said: "Gentlemen, I will refer
to Hillier's 'Narrative,' and I doubt not that my argument will be
sustained by that authority."
It was vastly easier, however, to cite Hillier than it was to find him.
For three days I searched in my library, and tumbled my books about in
that confusion which results from undue eagerness; 't was all in vain;
neither hide nor hair of the desired volume could I discover. It
finally occurred to me that I must have lent the book to somebody, and
then again I felt sure that it had been stolen.
No tidings of the missing volume came to me, and I had almost forgotten
the incident when one evening (it was fully two years after my
discussion with my cronies) I came upon, in one of the drawers of my
oak chest, a Sotheran catalogue of May, 1871. By the merest chance I
opened it, and as luck would have it, I opened it at the very page upon
which appeared this item:
"Hillier (G.) 'Narrative of the Attempted Escapes of Charles the First
from Carisbrooke Castle'; cr. 8vo, 1852, cloth, 3/6."
Against this item appeared a cross in my chirography, and I saw at a
glance that this was my long-lost Hillier! I had meant to buy it, and
had marked it for purchase; but with the determination and that
pencilled cross the transaction had ended. Yet, having resolved to buy
it had served me almost as effectively as though I had actually bought
it; I thought--aye, I could have sworn--I HAD bought it, simply because
I MEANT to buy it.
"The experience is not unique," said Judge Methuen, when I narrated it
to him at our next meeting. "Speaking for myself, I can say that it is
a confirmed habit with me to mark certain items in catalogues which I
read, and then to go my way in the pleasing conviction that they are
actually mine."
"I meet with cases of this character continually," said Dr. O'Rell.
"The hallucination is one that is recognized as a specific one by
pathologists; its cure is quickest effected by means of hypnotism.
Within the last year a lady of beauty and refinement came to me in
serious distress. She confided to me amid a copious effusion of tears
that her husband was upon the verge of insanity. Her testimony was to
the effect that the unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of
a large library, the fact being that the number of his books was
limited to three hundred or thereabouts.
"Upon inquiry I learned that N. M. (for so I will call the victim of
this delusion) made a practice of reading and of marking booksellers'
catalogues; further investigation developed that N. M.'s great-uncle on
his mother's side had invented a flying-machine that would not fly,
and that a half-brother of his was the author of a pamphlet entitled
'16 to 1; or the Poor Man's Vade-Mecum.'
"'Madam,' said I, 'it is clear to me that your husband is afflicted
with catalogitis.'
"At this the poor woman went into hysterics, bewailing that she should
have lived to see the object of her affection the victim of a malady so
grievous as to require a Greek name. When she became calmer I
explained to her that the malady was by no means fatal, and that it
yielded readily to treatment."
"What, in plain terms," asked Judge Methuen, "is catalogitis?"
"I will explain briefly," answered the doctor. "You must know first
that every perfect human being is provided with two sets of bowels; he
has physical bowels and intellectual bowels, the brain being the
latter. Hippocrates (since whose time the science of medicine has not
advanced even the two stadia, five parasangs of Xenophon)--Hippocrates,
I say, discovered that the brain is subject to those very same diseases
to which the other and inferior bowels are liable.
"Galen confirmed this discovery and he records a case (Lib. xi., p.
318) wherein there were exhibited in the intellectual bowels symptoms
similar to those we find in appendicitis. The brain is wrought into
certain convolutions, just as the alimentary canal is; the fourth
layer, so called, contains elongated groups of small cells or nuclei,
radiating at right angles to its plane, which groups present a
distinctly fanlike structure. Catalogitis is a stoppage of this fourth
layer, whereby the functions of the fanlike structure are suffered no
longer to cool the brain, and whereby also continuity of thought is
interrupted, just as continuity of digestion is prevented by stoppage
of the vermiform appendix.
"The learned Professor Biersteintrinken," continued Dr. O'Rell, "has
advanced in his scholarly work on 'Raderinderkopf' the interesting
theory that catalogitis is produced by the presence in the brain of a
germ which has its origin in the cheap paper used by booksellers for
catalogue purposes, and this theory seems to have the approval of M.
Marie-Tonsard, the most famous of authorities on inebriety, in his
celebrated classic entitled 'Un Trait sur Jacques-Jacques.'"
"Did you effect a cure in the case of N. M.?" I asked.
"With the greatest of ease," answered the doctor. "By means of
hypnotism I purged his intellectuals of their hallucination, relieving
them of their perception of objects which have no reality and ridding
them of sensations which have no corresponding external cause. The
patient made a rapid recovery, and, although three months have elapsed
since his discharge, he has had no return of the disease."
As a class booksellers do not encourage the reading of other
booksellers' catalogues; this is, presumably, because they do not care
to encourage buyers to buy of other sellers. My bookseller, who in all
virtues of head and heart excels all other booksellers I ever met with,
makes a scrupulous practice of destroying the catalogues that come to
his shop, lest some stray copy may fall into the hands of a mousing
book-lover and divert his attention to other hunting-grounds. It is
indeed remarkable to what excess the catalogue habit will carry its
victim; the author of "Will Shakespeare, a Comedy," has frequently
confessed to me that it mattered not to him whether a catalogue was
twenty years old--so long as it was a catalogue of books he found the
keenest delight in its perusal; I have often heard Mr. Hamlin, the
theatre manager, say that he preferred old catalogues to new, for the
reason that the bargains to be met with in old catalogues expired long
ago under the statute of limitations.
Judge Methuen, who is a married man and has therefore had an excellent
opportunity to study the sex, tells me that the wives of bibliomaniacs
regard catalogues as the most mischievous temptations that can be
thrown in the way of their husbands. I once committed the imprudence
of mentioning the subject in Mrs. Methuen's presence: that estimable
lady gave it as her opinion that there were plenty of ways of spending
money foolishly without having recourse to a book-catalogue for
suggestion. I wonder whether Captivity would have had this opinion,
had Providence ordained that we should walk together the quiet pathway
of New England life; would Yseult always have retained the exuberance
and sweetness of her youth, had she and I realized what might have
been? Would Fanchonette always have sympathized with the whims and
vagaries of the restless yet loyal soul that hung enraptured on her
singing in the Quartier Latin so long ago that the memory of that song
is like the memory of a ghostly echo now?
Away with such reflections! Bring in the candles, good servitor, and
range them at my bed's head; sweet avocation awaits me, for here I have
a goodly parcel of catalogues with which to commune. They are messages
from Methuen, Sotheran, Libbie, Irvine, Hutt, Davey, Baer, Crawford,
Bangs, McClurg, Matthews, Francis, Bouton, Scribner, Benjamin, and a
score of other friends in every part of Christendom; they deserve and
they shall have my respectful--nay, my enthusiastic attention. Once
more I shall seem to be in the old familiar shops where treasures
abound and where patient delving bringeth rich rewards. Egad, what a
spendthrift I shall be this night; pence, shillings, thalers, marks,
francs, dollars, sovereigns--they are the same to me!
Then, after I have comprehended all the treasures within reach, how
sweet shall be my dreams of shelves overflowing with the wealth of
which my fancy has possessed me!
Then shall my library be devote
To the magic of Niddy-Noddy,
Including the volumes which Nobody wrote
And the works of Everybody.