Bibliophily is on the increase. It is a constatation which I make with
regret; for the bibliophile’s point of view is, to me at least,
unsympathetic and his standard of values unsound. Among the French,
bibliophily would seem to have become a kind of mania, and, what is
more, a highly organized and thoroughly exploited mania. Whenever I get
a new French book I turn at once—for in what disgusts and irritates one
there is always a certain odious fascination—to the fly-leaf. One had
always been accustomed to finding there a brief description of the
“vingt exemplaires sur papier hollande Van Gelder”; nobody objected to
the modest old Dutchman whose paper gave to the author’s presentation
copies so handsome an appearance. But Van Gelder is now a back number.
In this third decade of the twentieth century he has become altogether
too simple and unsophisticated. On the fly-leaf of a _dernière
nouveauté_ I find the following incantation, printed in block capitals
and occupying at least twenty lines:
Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage, après impositions spéciales, 133
exemplaires in-4. Tellière sur papier-vergé pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, au
filigrane de la _Nouvelle Revue Française_, dont 18 exemplaires hors
commerce, marqués de A à R, 100 exemplaires réservés aux Bibliophiles
de la _Nouvelle Revue Française_, numérotés de I à C, 15 exemplaires
numérotés de CI à CXV; 1040 exemplaires sur papier vélin pur-fil
Lafuma-Navarre, dont dix exemplaires hors commerce marqués de a à j,
800 exemplaires réservés aux amis de l’Edition originale, numérotés de
1 à 800, 30 exemplaires d’auteur, hors commerce, numérotés de 801 à
830 et 200 exemplaires numérotés de 831 à 1030, ce tirage constituant
proprement et authentiquement l’Edition originale.
If I were one of the hundred Bibliophiles of the _Nouvelle Revue
Française_ or even one of the eight hundred Friends of the Original
Edition, I should suggest, with the utmost politeness, that the
publishers might deserve better of their fellow-beings if they spent
less pains on numbering the first edition and more on seeing that it was
properly produced. Personally, I am the friend of any edition which is
reasonably well printed and bound, reasonably correct in the text and
reasonably clean. The consciousness that I possess a numbered copy of an
edition printed on Lafuma-Navarre paper, duly watermarked with the
publisher’s initials, does not make up for the fact that the book is
full of gross printer’s errors and that a whole sheet of sixteen pages
has wandered, during the process of binding, from one end of the volume
to the other—occurrences which are quite unnecessarily frequent in the
history of French book production.
With the increased attention paid to bibliophilous niceties, has come a
great increase in price. Limited _éditions de luxe_ have become absurdly
common in France, and there are dozens of small publishing concerns
which produce almost nothing else. Authors like Monsieur André Salmon
and Monsieur Max Jacob scarcely ever appear at less than twenty francs a
volume. Even with the exchange this is a formidable price; and yet the
French bibliophiles, for whom twenty francs are really twenty francs,
appear to have an insatiable appetite for these small and beautiful
editions. The War has established a new economic law: the poorer one
becomes the more one can afford to spend on luxuries.
The ordinary English publisher has never gone in for Van Gelder,
Lafuma-Navarre and numbered editions. Reticent about figures, he leaves
the book collector to estimate the first edition’s future rarity by
guesswork. He creates no artificial scarcity values. The collector of
contemporary English first editions is wholly a speculator; he never
knows what time may have in store.
In the picture trade for years past nobody has pretended that there was
any particular relation between the price of a picture and its value as
a work of art. A magnificent El Greco is bought for about a tenth of the
sum paid for a Romney that would be condemned by any self-respecting
hanging-committee. We are so well used to this sort of thing in picture
dealing that we have almost ceased to comment on it. But in the book
trade the tendency to create huge artificial values is of a later
growth. The spectacle of a single book being bought for fifteen thousand
pounds is still sufficiently novel to arouse indignation. Moreover, the
book collector who pays vast sums for his treasures has even less excuse
than has the collector of pictures. The value of an old book is wholly a
scarcity value. From a picture one may get a genuine æsthetic pleasure;
in buying a picture one buys the unique right to feel that pleasure. But
nobody can pretend that _Venus and Adonis_ is more delightful when it is
read in a fifteen thousand pound unique copy than when it is read in a
volume that has cost a shilling. On the whole, the printing and general
appearance of the shilling book is likely to be the better of the two.
The purchaser of the fabulously expensive old book is satisfying only
his possessive instinct. The buyer of a picture may also have a genuine
feeling for beauty.
The triumph and the _reductio ad absurdum_ of bibliophily were witnessed
not long ago at Sotheby’s, when the late Mr. Smith of New York bought
eighty thousand pounds’ worth of books in something under two hours at
the Britwell Court sale. The War, it is said, created forty thousand new
millionaires in America; the New York bookseller can have had no lack of
potential clients. He bought a thousand guinea volume as an ordinary
human being might buy something off the sixpenny shelf in a second-hand
shop. I have seldom witnessed a spectacle which inspired in me an
intenser blast of moral indignation. Moral indignation, of course, is
always to be mistrusted as, wholly or in part, the disguised
manifestation of some ignoble passion. In this case the basic cause of
my indignation was clearly envy. But there was, I flatter myself, a
superstructure of disinterested moral feeling. To debase a book into an
expensive object of luxury is as surely, in Miltonic language, “to kill
the image of God, as it were in the eye” as to burn it. And when one
thinks how those eighty thousand pounds might have been spent.... Ah,
well!