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BOOK COLLECTING
A GUIDE FOR AMATEURS
BY
J. H. SLATER
Editor of _Book Prices Current_; formerly Editor of _Book Lore_;
Author of _The Library Manual_; _Engravings and their Value_; _The
Law relating to Copyright and Trade Marks_, etc., etc.
LONDON
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1892
[Illustration: AN OLD PRINTING PRESS.
From the _Quintilian of Vascosan_, folio, _Paris_, 1538.]
THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.
CONTENTS. Page.
CHAPTER I. 1
CHAPTER II. 12
CHAPTER III. 20
CHAPTER IV. 25
CHAPTER V. 34
CHAPTER VI. 44
CHAPTER VII. 51
CHAPTER VIII. 62
CHAPTER IX. 74
CHAPTER X. 100
CHAPTER XI. 112
PRINCIPAL SECOND-HAND BOOKSELLERS IN THE
UNITED KINGDOM WHO PUBLISH CATALOGUES. 121
CHAPTER I.
AN ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT--THE LIBRARY OF THE MEMNONIUM--THE
ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY--GREECE AND ROME--MONASTIC MANUSCRIPTS--THE
DISCOVERY OF PRINTING--THE BOOK HUNTERS OF THE PAST--THE BOOK
HUNTERS OF TO-DAY--BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AIDS.
The Bibliophile, as he is somewhat pedantically termed, probably dates
his existence from the time when books began to be multiplied in
sufficient quantities to render the acquisition of duplicate copies by
the public a matter of possibility, but his opportunities of amassing a
large number of volumes can hardly be said to have arisen until many
years after the invention of printing.
The most ancient manuscript extant has been identified with the reign of
Amenophis, who ruled in Egypt no less than 1600 years before the
Christian era, and this manuscript, old as it is, shows such superior
execution that there can be little, if any, doubt that caligraphy in its
oldest--that is, its hieroglyphic--form must be referred for its origin
to a period still more remote. Diodorus Siculus relates that Rameses II.
founded a library in one of the chambers of the Memnonium at Thebes, and
deposited therein the 42 sacred books of Thoth, which had they been in
existence now would be nearly 5000 years old. In those days, however,
education was looked upon as the peculiar property of the priesthood;
the library had sealed doors; even the very books themselves must have
been wholly unintelligible to all but the favoured few whose duty it was
to preserve them with religious care. All the early Egyptian manuscripts
extant have served in their day an ecclesiastical rather than a secular
object, and all of them abound with mythological stories more or less
recondite. To use the art of writing for any less sacred purpose would
have been held disrespectful to the educated class and resented
accordingly. Ptolemy Sotor, who reigned over Egypt about the year 280
B.C., appears to have been the first to break through the artificial
barrier which the priestcraft of age upon age had succeeded in building
up; and his magnificent twin library at Alexandria, known as the
Bruchium and Serapeum, which was partly stocked with the confiscated
books of travellers who touched at the port, became in course of time
the most famous in the world, and would most probably have been so at
this day had it not been destroyed by Theodosius and his army, as a
sacrifice at the shrine of ignorance and superstition. With the
destruction of the library at Alexandria, containing, as it did, books
which can never be replaced, the literary importance of the Egyptians
came to an end; thenceforward all that remained was the consciousness of
having instructed others better able to preserve their independence than
they were themselves. Yet after all it is somewhat extraordinary that
Egypt should have been not merely the first to encourage a love of
literature, but also the last; for simultaneously with the destruction
of the Bruchium and Serapeum were ushered in the first centuries of the
dark ages, when the ability to read and write was looked upon as
unworthy the status of a free man, unless indeed he were a priest, and
when fire and sword were brought into requisition for the purpose of
annihilating everything that suggested mental culture.
In the eras which intervened between the reign of Rameses the
Constructor and that of Theodosius the Destroyer, Pisistratus had
founded his public library at Athens, and collected the poems of Homer
which had previously been scattered in detached portions throughout
Greece; and Plato, the prince of ancient book hunters, had given no less
than 100 attic minae--nearly L300 of our money--for three small treatises
of Philolaus the Pythagorean. Aristotle too, unless he has been sadly
maligned, thought 300 minae a fair exchange for a little pile of books
which had formerly belonged to Speusippus, thereby setting an example to
that French king of after ages who pawned his gold and silver plate to
obtain means wherewith to purchase a coveted copy of Lacertius, as
Gabriel Naude calls the great Epicurean biographer. In Rome also
Lucullus had furnished his house with books and thrown open his doors
to all who wished to consult them. Atticus the famous publisher had
turned out a thousand copies of the second book of Martial's _Epigrams_,
with its 540 lines of verse, bound and endorsed in the space of a single
hour, and the booksellers carried on a flourishing trade in their shops
in the Argeletum and the Vicus Sandalarius, exhibiting catalogues on the
side posts of their doors exactly as the second-hand dealers in London
and elsewhere do now. Of all this vast enterprise of Greece and Rome not
a trace remains: only the sepulchral writings of mother Egypt and the
clay tablets of Assyria.
History tells us how the luxurious rich of Athens and Rome regarded
their books as so many pieces of furniture, and engaged learned slaves
to read aloud at their banquets; and if the example of Plato were
followed to any extent, doubtless large sums of money were spent on rare
originals which had passed through the hands of a succession of
dilettanti, and acquired thereby a reputation for genuineness, which
they could not have gained in any other manner. Seneca indeed ridicules
the vulgar emulation which prompted some of his contemporaries to
collect volumes of which, he says, they knew nothing except the
outsides, many of them possibly barely that. It has been ever so: in
England to-day there are many who would have felt the lash of Nero's
tutor across their shoulders.
When the public no longer took pleasure in mental culture, and the whole
world was overrun with hordes of barbarians intent upon destruction,
learning of every kind was banished to the monasteries, and the monks
became the only book lovers, making it their business to transcribe,
generation after generation, the volumes which had been saved from the
general conflagration. It is entirely through their efforts that the old
classics have been preserved to our day; we have to thank them, and them
alone, for the preservation of the Bible itself. Even in the
monasteries, however, the same spirit of emulation which had prompted
Greek to compete with Greek, and Roman with Roman, became apparent in
course of time. Ordinary transcripts, though never numerous, began to be
looked upon as hardly pretentious enough, and the larger houses
established _scriptoria_, where trained monks sat the livelong day,
painfully tracing letter after letter on the purest vellum, while
Bibliolatrists added illuminated borders and miniatures in a style that
would task the skill of our best artists of to-day. This competition
led to the exchange of manuscripts, or to their loan for a brief period,
so that by degrees monastic libraries assumed large proportions,
numbering many hundreds of neatly bound volumes, which, on being opened,
looked as though printed, so accurately and carefully had the copying
been done. This explains how Fust, the inventor, or one of the
inventors, of printing, was enabled to deceive the people of Paris, for
he flooded the market there with printed copies of the Bible which he
sold for 50 crowns each, instead of for 400 or 500 crowns, which would
have been a fair price had they been in manuscript. The book buyers of
Paris _thought they were in manuscript_, until the recurrence of one or
two defective types cast from the same matrix caused an inquiry. Fust
was arrested, not for the fraud but for witchcraft, and to save his life
he explained his process. Thus did the old order give place to the new.
In a very few years after the discovery of Fust's secret the whole of
the western portion of Europe was dotted with printing presses. Before
1499 there were 236 in operation; and six years after Gutenberg had
completed his Bible of 42 lines there were no less than 50 German cities
and towns in which presses had been established. Considering that this
only brings us down to about the year 1462, it is evident with what
rapidity the art of printing was seized upon through the length and
breadth of the country of its probable origin.
In 1475 our own famous printer Caxton was being instructed in the office
of Colard Mansion at Bruges, and in 1477, if not earlier,[1] he settled
as a printer at Westminster, thus laying the foundation of our English
industry and establishing a native press which has continued to grow
year by year until it has assumed its present enormous proportions.
Authorities, however, point out that improvement in the art of printing
did not come by age or experience, for, curiously enough, the
science--for such it really is--was almost perfect from its origin, and,
so far as this country is concerned, has distinctly deteriorated since
the death of Caxton and his pupils Wynkyn de Worde, Faques, and Pynson.
The typefounders of that early period were as expert as many at the
present day and immeasurably superior to most. The greatest care appears
to have been exercised in the casting, and competition did not engender
the slovenly haste which is only too apparent in many of our modern
publications. It is probable that, simultaneously with the introduction
of printing into England, a certain limited few, most likely
ecclesiastics and powerful nobles, would commence to collect works from
the press of Caxton, and subsequently from the foreign presses. In 1545
the Earl of Warwick's library consisted of 40 printed books, in 1691
that of the Rev. Richard Baxter of 1448. It is not until a comparatively
modern period that any single man has been able to mass together
thousands of volumes during the course of a single lifetime, for it is
only recently that printing has been used on every trivial occasion, and
in the manufacture of books which would originally have been deemed
unworthy of the application of the art.
At the present day books constitute one of the necessities of life and
private libraries one of its luxuries. The collector has such ample
scope for the exercise of his favourite pursuit that it has long since
become a question not so much of accumulating a large number of
miscellaneous volumes, as of exercising a rigid discrimination and
confining one's attention to works of a certain class, to the almost
entire exclusion of all others. Thus, some book hunters collect first,
or, at any rate, early, editions of popular modern authors, such, for
example, as Dickens, Thackeray, and Lever; others collect old editions
of the Scriptures, a few, the expensive early printed volumes which are
every year becoming absorbed into the public libraries, and consequently
growing more scarce. A small number attempt to form an extensive
all-round library, but they rarely, if ever, succeed, partly because
life is too short for the purpose, and money too limited in quantity.
Occasionally a large collection comes to the auctioneer's hammer, but in
nearly every instance it will be found that it represents the labours of
several generations of owners, each of whom has contributed the
principal publications of his day or taken advantage of any proffered
bargain which he may have happened to come across during the course of
his lifetime.
The book lover however is not content with mere acquisition, he feels it
his duty to know something of the inner life, so to speak, of each
volume on his shelf--something, that is to say, beyond the outside
lettering. He wishes to know the chief incidents in the history of the
person who wrote it, under what circumstances it was written and why,
how many editions have been published, whether the particular copy is
perfect, how much it is worth from a pecuniary point of view, and
occasionally the nature of the contents. The word "occasionally" may be
considered by some as used in an objectionable sense, implying in fact
that book lovers are not always in the habit of reading what they
possess. Let the collector of Bibles say whether he is in the habit of
reading the various editions which he has been at such pains to collect,
and it will then be time enough to inquire into the practices of other
collectors who, like himself, though in different departments, may not
consider themselves justified in spending the amount of time necessary
for careful and satisfactory study. In truth, if all books were read, it
is only reasonable to suppose that all libraries would be small; and, as
we know the contrary to be the fact, we must acknowledge the truth of
the main proposition to a very large extent. The happiness of the book
lover, as we know him when in the plenitude of his glory, consists by no
means in reading, but in the contemplation of his possessions from afar;
an inane treatise on theology becomes the object of his daily prayers
when bound in morocco and stamped with the Golden Fleece of Longepierre.
In this short dissertation we have but little to do with the contents of
any book. This knowledge can be acquired as circumstances and
opportunity offer; we deal rather with extraneous details which are
necessary to be known by everyone who aspires to form a collection of
books for himself and would know something of the history of each.
Every bibliographer, and also every collector of any eminence, has
within reach certain books of reference which experience has shown to be
absolutely necessary. Chief among these is Lowndes' _Bibliographer's
Manual_ of which two editions have been issued. The first was published
in 1834; the second in seven parts from 1857-61, with an appendix volume
in 1864, having been re-issued from the stereotype plates without a date
in 1871. The latter may frequently be picked up at auction sales for
about 25s., but there is this peculiarity about the work, that it really
would not seem to be very material which edition is purchased. The book
is imperfect and full of errors: it cannot be relied on, and the second
edition, which was edited by the late Mr. H. G. Bohn, the eminent
bookseller, is as untrustworthy as the first edition. The original plan,
which has never been departed from, was to give the names of English
authors in alphabetical order, placing under each the title of the works
he wrote, with the date of each edition, number of volumes, in many
cases the collation, and finally the sums realised at auction. Nothing
fluctuates so greatly as auction values, and it is not surprising,
therefore, to find that not a single entry in Lowndes under this head
can be accepted at the present day. Some of the variations between past
and present prices are ludicrous in the extreme, and there is no doubt
that anyone who attempted to obtain his knowledge of the value of books
from Lowndes' _Manual_ would find himself in possession of a mass of
old-time information which would be rather a hindrance to him than
otherwise. The _Manual_ is useful because it gives a full and tolerably
complete list of English authors, and collates many of their works with
considerable care; it is, moreover, the authority quoted by cataloguers,
and, being a copyright publication, practically bars the way to any
rival work on the same subject. For these and other reasons it is
indispensable.
To ascertain the value of a book is an exceedingly difficult operation;
in fact, there are many who assert that it is impossible to do so.
Booksellers' prices, as disclosed in their catalogues, are not much to
go by, for it is notorious that a West End dealer will often charge more
than one who is established further East. Again, some London booksellers
charge more or less than provincial ones, according to circumstance and
the character of their customers. Until recently there were only two
ways of becoming an adept in this department, the first and best by
practical experience, a method which is not, of course, available to any
but dealers and their assistants; and the second, by indexing retail
catalogues and striking an average. A third method, that of taking the
average of auction sales, was not available until recently, for it is
too troublesome, for any save those whose business it is, to attend
sales by auction all day long for nine months out of the twelve, in
order to obtain the necessary materials.
In 1886, I conceived the idea of fully reporting all sales of any
importance taking place either in London or the provinces, and in
December of that year the necessary arrangements were completed, with
the modification that for the present, at any rate, no notice was to be
taken of any book which did not realise at least 20s. by auction. This
publication, the success of which amply demonstrates the necessity for
its existence, is named _Book Prices Current_, and already five volumes
are published, and a sixth will be ready at the beginning of next year
(1893). As a book of this kind would be useless without a full index,
the greatest possible care has been taken to make it as complete and as
accurate as possible. From _Book Prices Current_ a very good idea of the
average value of almost any book may be obtained. Careful note of the
way in which the particular volume is bound must, of course, be taken,
for this, as might be expected, makes a great difference in the price.
The French are supposed to be much better bibliographers than our own
countrymen, and if the character of the authoritative works published in
either country is a criterion of national merit there cannot be much, if
any, doubt that this is so. Lowndes' _Bibliographer's Manual_ takes no
notice of books published abroad, and, as they are in the majority, it
becomes necessary to seek an additional guide. This is afforded by
Brunet's _Manuel du Libraire et de l'Amateur de Livres_, published at
Paris in 6 vols. from 1860-65, and usually found, with the Appendix on
_Geographie_, 1870, and 2 vol. _Supplement_, 1878-80. In its place it is
a much better book than Lowndes', but it is very expensive, frequently
bringing as much as L10 and L12 by auction. Here again, however, the
values are quite unreliable, and, as in the case of Lowndes', there is
no index of subjects whatever. From the three works mentioned very much
may undoubtedly be learned about almost any book provided the author's
name be known; but as it frequently happened that many authors chose,
for reasons satisfactory to themselves, to conceal their names
altogether, or in the much commoner instance of the name being forgotten
by or unknown to the searcher, an index of subjects becomes a necessity.
This is partly supplied by Watt's _Bibliotheca Britannica_ in 4 vols.
4to, 1824, two volumes being devoted to authors and two to subjects,
there being also cross references from one to the other. This
inestimable work occupied the author the greater portion of his life,
and is a monument of industry and research. The auction value amounts to
L3 within a fraction, this being one of the few books which has a fixed
market price all over the kingdom. Good copies in handsome bindings
frequently occur, and are worth L4 to L5. The _English Catalogue_,
initiated by the late Mr. Sampson Low, is a periodical which makes its
appearance annually, and, unlike all the other works I have mentioned,
is confined entirely to current literature. The title of every work
published during the year is given, with the month in which it was
issued, the price, and publisher's name, the whole being arranged in one
line under the name of the author. At intervals, which do not appear to
be strictly defined, collective editions of these annual catalogues,
arranged in one alphabet, are published, as well as of the indexes of
the _titles_ which are appended to each annual issue.[2]
It is obvious that a work of this kind must be of the greatest utility,
and as the _English Catalogue_ is merely a continuation of the _London
Catalogue_ and the _British Catalogue_, the former of which commenced so
far back as the year 1811, it will be seen that a comprehensive view can
be taken of the whole range of English literature from that date to the
present. The _Catalogue_ has not, however, always been so carefully
prepared as it is now, and consequently in the earlier days many
publications were omitted. When this is the case Lowndes and Watt will
be found of material assistance, the latter especially. A complete set
of these catalogues, unfortunately, is very difficult to obtain, and as
the earlier ones are not indispensable, it may be perhaps advisable to
forego them and to commence in 1814. The volumes to be acquired
therefore would be _London Catalogue_, 1816-51; _English Catalogue_,
1835-63, 1863-71, 1872-80, 1881-89; with the accompanying subject
indexes to the _London Catalogue_, 1814-46; and to the _English
Catalogue_, 1835-55, 1856-75, 1874 (_sic_)-80. It will be noticed that
the dates sometimes overlap each over, but this is an advantage rather
than a drawback. Among the other books frequently consulted by both
dealers and amateurs are Mr. Swan Sonnenschein's _The Best Books_; the
_Reference Catalogue of Current Literature_, and Halkett & Laing's
_Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain_,
in 4 vols. These are mentioned together because they are essentially
subject indexes and the best of their kind.
Sonnenschein's _The Best Books_, already in a second and vastly improved
edition, is a comparatively recent publication, in which, under subjects
arranged systematically, are placed the best current books, whether
ancient or modern, on each subject, with the prices, sizes, publisher's
name and dates of the first and last editions of each. There are about
50,000 works included, and they together give a very good idea of all
the material in the various departments of research which the specialist
is likely to have occasion to read or refer to. Old books are included
where they are of actual present-day value to the student. The selection
is not, of course, entirely made by the author, as it is impossible for
him to have read a hundredth part of the books recommended; most
probably the list has been compiled from the works of specialists, the
various encyclopaedias, and so forth; but however this may be, it is a
very useful one in the hands of a person capable of discrimination
(towards which the numerous critical and bibliographical notes and the
system of asterisks are a great help), especially if he live near one or
other of the large libraries now springing up in different parts of the
country.
The _Reference Catalogue of Current Literature_, a cumbrous and unwieldy
tome, the last issue of which was out of print within a couple of months
of its publication, consists of a large number of publishers' catalogues
arranged in alphabetical order. Each work mentioned is indexed, and this
has been accomplished so fully and accurately that almost any book to be
bought new in the market makes its appearance here.
Halkett & Laing's _Dictionary_ is, as the title implies, a record of the
anonymous and pseudonymous literature of Great Britain. If an author
wrote under an assumed name or anonymously, his real name will be found
here, together with a short account of his publications. This work can
hardly be said to be indispensable, but it is, notwithstanding,
exceedingly useful, and well worth the three and a half guineas which
will have to be expended upon it.
Among other works which at one time were thought more of than they are
now is Quaritch's _Catalogue of Books_, in one thick volume, 1880, and a
supplement which is back-dated 1875-7. The chief value of this lay not
only in the prices, which were, as in every other bookseller's
catalogue, appended to the items, but in the extraordinary number of the
entries, which cover the whole range of British and foreign literature.
Even now the work is useful, but there is no doubt that it is gradually
decreasing in importance, owing to the high-class works of reference
which have lately made their appearance. As to values, _Book Prices
Current_ gives them much more satisfactorily than any bookseller can
pretend or afford to do, while most of the bibliographical notes and
references are to be found in one or other of the works I have
mentioned.
The collector who, as yet, is not sufficiently advanced to fully realise
the difficulties he will have to surmount before he can bring together a
judicious assortment of books, will at any rate begin to see that the
knowledge requisite to enable him to do so is of no mean order. The
preliminaries will take him a long time to master, and he will find that
the expense is a factor by no means to be despised. Even the books
mentioned are not all that he may have to procure, for if, after
consideration, he should decide to devote his attention exclusively to
one branch of Bibliography, there are other books of reference to be
purchased, and a special course of study must be entered upon and
carefully followed, if he would hope to be successful. Thus, should he
decide to make Dickens or Thackeray his one author, as so many people
are doing now, he will need a guide to direct his course. Memory is so
treacherous that he can take nothing on trust, and time so short that he
cannot afford to journey two sides of the triangle when he might have
taken the third. These special works for special departments are set out
and enlarged upon in the following chapter, but before referring to them
it may not be superfluous to remind the reader that a book of reference
only possesses a relative value. It is quite possible to have a whole
library within reach and yet to be ignorant of the proper method of
using it. Some of our best writers had no library worthy the name, but
the few books they had they knew--knew, that is to say, how to extract
the information they required, which book to consult, how it was
arranged, and what might be expected of it. Though a book collector is
not necessarily a book reader, he will have to be absolute master of his
works of reference, or he will find every volume on his shelf a useless
incumbrance. Where to possess all the absolute facts is of importance,
the newest works are, generally speaking, most likely to be the best;
but this is very far from being applicable to a library in all its
departments. Yet even in the case of works of a general nature a careful
and economic selection may be made, so as to cover, in a small compass,
much valuable ground.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophers_, Caxton's first book
which bears a date, was finished in November, 1477; and it is upon the
strength of this that the Caxton Quarcentenary Festival was held in
1877. There can be little doubt, however, that he printed many books of
which no copies remain, some of which were probably earlier than _The
Dictes_.
[2] In the annual volume for 1891 a new scheme has been started, the
authors and titles entries appearing in _one_ alphabet in "dictionary
form".