A. Edward Newton

“ It may as well be admitted that we do not buy expensive books to read. We may say that it is a delight to us to look upon the very page on which appeared for the first time such a sonnet as “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” or to read that bit of realism unsurpassed, where Robinson Crusoe one day, about noon, discovered the print of a man’s naked foot upon the sand; but when we sit down with a copy of Keats, we do not ask for a first edition; much less when we want to live over again the joys of our childhood, do we pick up a copy of Defoe which would be a find at a thousand dollars. ”

“ The world is the college of the book-collector of to-day. Many of us are busy men of affairs, familiar, it may be, with the price of oil, or steel, or copper, or coal, or cotton, or, it may be, with the price of the “shares” of all of these and more. Books are our relaxation. We make it a rule not to buy what we cannot read. Some of us indulge the vain hope that time will bring us leisure to acquaint ourselves fully with the contents of all our books. ”

“ Book-collecting soon became with him a very serious matter, a matter to which everything else was subordinated. He began, as all collectors do, with unimportant things at first; but how rapidly his taste developed may be seen from glancing over the pages of the catalogue of his library, which, strictly speaking, is not a library at all—he would have been the last to call it so. It is but a collection of perhaps three thousand volumes; but they were selected by a man of almost unlimited means, with rare judgment and an instinct for discovering the best. ”

“ Nothing is more evanescent than the reputation of an actor. Every age lingers lovingly over the greatness of the actors of its own youth; thus it was that the theatre-goer of the eighteen-eighties only yawned when told of the grace of Miss Kelly’s Ophelia, of the charm of her Lydia Languish, or of her bewitchingness in “breeches parts.” To some she was the old actress for whom the government was being solicited to do something; a few thought of her as the old maiden lady who was obsessed with the idea that Charles Lamb had once made her an offer of marriage. ”

“ I sat with Harry Widener at Anderson’s auction rooms a few years ago, on the evening when George D. Smith, acting for Mr. Huntington, paid fifty thousand dollars for a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. No book had ever sold for so great a price, yet I feel sure that Mr. Huntington secured a bargain, and I told him so; but for the average collector such great books as these are mere names, as far above the ordinary man as the moon; and the wise among us never cry for them; we content ourselves with—something else.
In collecting, as in everything else, experience is the best teacher. ”

“ I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having that character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day is hardly possible ”

“ What collector does not enjoy showing his treasures to others as appreciative as himself? Many delightful hours his intimates have passed in his library, which was also his bedroom,—for he wanted his books about him, where he could play with them at night and where his eye might rest on them the first thing in the morning,—but this was a privilege extended only to true book-lovers. ”

“ I cannot say that “I was ‘broke’ in London in the fall of ‘89,” for the simple reason that I was not in London that year; but I am never long in London without finding myself as light in heart and pocket as Eugene Field—the result of yielding to the same temptations.
I knew the elder Quaritch well, and over a cup of tea one winter afternoon years ago, in a cold, dingy little room filled with priceless volumes in the old shop in Piccadilly, he confided to me his fears for his son Alfred. ”

“ I admit that there is very little blood and no thunder; but not all of us care for blood and thunder. Trollope interests one in a gentler way; in fact, you may not know that you have been interested until you look at your watch and find it past midnight. And you can step from one book to another almost without knowing it. The characters, the situations repeat themselves over and over again; your interest is not always intense, but it never entirely flags. ”

“ It is not necessary for me to study how to tell a Caxton. Caxtons do not fall in my way, except single leaves now and then, and these I take as Goldsmith took his religion, on faith.
Nor am I the rival of the man who buys all his books from Quaritch. Buying from Quaritch is rather too much like the German idea of hunting: namely, sitting in an easy chair near a breach in the wall through which game, big or little, is shooed within easy reach of your gun. No, my idea of collecting is “watchful waiting,” in season and out, in places likely and unlikely, most of all in London. ”

“ Now poor Charles Lamb, now dear Charles Lamb, “Saint Charles,” if you will! Our hearts go out to him; we would comfort him if we could. But read slowly one of the finest letters in all literature: a letter in which he accepts defeat instantly, but with a smile on his face; tears there may have been in his eyes, but she was not to see them. See Lamb in his supreme rôle—of a man. How often had he urged his friends to play that difficult part—which no one could play better than he. The letter reads:—
Dear Miss Kelly,—
Your injunctions shall be obeyed to a tittle. ”

“ No paper dealing with the prices of books would be complete without the remark that condition is everything. Any rare book is immensely more valuable if in very fine condition. Imagine for a moment a book worth, say, six hundred dollars in good condition,—for example, the “Vicar of Wakefield,”—and then imagine—if you can—a copy of this same book in boards uncut. Would twenty-five hundred dollars be too high a price for such a copy? I think not.
Another point to be remembered is that the price of a book depends, not only on its scarcity, but also on the universality of the demand for it. ”

“ Could I be satisfied with being Baron of Auchinleck, with a good income for a gentleman in Scotland, I might, no doubt, be independent. What can be done to deaden the ambition which has ever raged in my veins like a fever?
But the highest spirits will sometimes flag. Boswell, the friendly, obliging, generous roué, was getting old. He begins to speak of the past.
Do you remember when you and I sat up all night at Cambridge, and read Gray with a noble enthusiasm; when we first used to read Mason’s “Elfrida,” and when we talked of that elegant knot of worthies, Gray, Mason and Walpole? ”

“ As Eckel says in his “Bibliography of Dickens,” “The tendency of the modern collector has steadily moved toward books in their original state,—books as they were when created,—and it is doubtful if there will be much deviation from this taste in the future.”
Only the very immature book-buyer will deprive himself of the pleasure of “collecting,” and buy a complete set of some author he much esteems, in first editions, assembled and bound without care or thought other than to produce a piece of merchandise and sell it for as much as it will fetch. ”

“ Driving along a flat and monotonous country road, one comes on the old gate almost suddenly, and experiences a feeling, not of disappointment but of surprise. The gate does not span the road, but is set back a little in a hedge on one side of it, and seems large for its setting. One is prepared for a dark, grimy portal, whereas the soot and smoke of London have been erased from it, and, instead, one sees an antique, creamy-white structure tinted and toned with the green of the great trees which overhang it. ”

“ I take little or no interest in bindings; I want the book as originally published, in boards uncut, in old sheep, or in cloth, and as clean and fair as may be.
I am not without a sense for color, and the backs of books bound in various colored leathers, suitably gilt, placed with some eye for arrangement on the shelves, are to me as beautiful and suggestive as any picture; yet, as one cannot have everything, I yield the beauty and fragrance of leather for the fascination of the “original state as issued.” ”

“ But, speaking generally, we are a bearable lot, our hobbies are usually harmless, and if we loathe the subject of automobiles, and especially discussion relative to parts thereof, we try to show an intelligent interest in another’s hobby, even if it happen to be a collection of postage-stamps. Our own hobby may be, probably is, ridiculous to some one else, but in all the wide range of human interest, from postage-stamps to paintings,—the sport of the millionaire,—there is nothing that begins so easily and takes us so far as the collecting of books. ”

“ The joys of rugs are a delusion and a snare. They cannot be picked up here and there, tucked in a traveling-bag, and smuggled into the house; they are hard to transport, there are no auction records against them, and the rug market knows no bottom. I never yet heard a man admit paying a fair price for a rug, much less a high one. “Look at this Scherazak,” a friend remarks; “I paid only nine dollars for it and it’s worth five hundred if it’s worth a penny.” When he is compelled to sell his collection, owing to an unlucky turn in the market, it brings seventeen-fifty. ”

“ In it Godwin fell foul of everything. He assailed all forms of government. The common idea that blood is thicker than water, is wrong: all men are brothers; one should do for a stranger as for a brother. The distribution of property is absurd. A man’s needs are to be taken as the standard of what he should receive. He that needs most is to be given most—by whom, Godwin did not say.
Marriage is a law and the worst of all laws: it is an affair of property, and like property must be abolished. The intercourse of the sexes is to be like any other species of friendship. ”

“ For the most part, people in Trollope’s stories lead lives very like our own, dependent upon how our fortunes may be cast. They have their failures and their successes, and fall in love and fall out again, very much as we do. At last we begin to know their peculiarities better than we know our own, and we think of them, not as characters in a book, but as friends and acquaintances whom we have grown up with. Some we like and some bore us exceedingly—just as in real life. His characters do not lack style,—the Duke of Omnium is a very great person indeed,—but Trollope himself has none. ”

“ Johnson, once remarked that no man but a block-head writes a book except for money. At some risk, then, I admit that I have done so. I have written for fun, and my papers should be read, if read at all, for the same purpose, not that the reader will or is expected to laugh loud. The loud laugh, in Goldsmith’s phrase, it may be remembered, bespeaks the vacant mind. But I venture to hope that the judicious will pass a not unpleasant hour in turning my pages. ”

“ The pleasure that comes from seeing some book in a catalogue priced at two or three times what I may have paid for a copy, is a pleasure due to vindicated judgment. I do not wish to rush into the market and sell and secure my profit. What is profit if I lose my book? Moreover, if one thinks of profit rather than of books, there is an interest charge to be considered. A book for which I paid a thousand dollars a few years ago, no longer stands me at a thousand dollars, but at a considerably greater sum. ”

“ CHARLES LAMB’S HOUSE AT ENFIELD
Nor am I unmindful how invariably in binding a book, in trimming, be it ever so little, and gilding its edges, one lops off no small part of its value. This fact should be pointed out to all young collectors. They should learn to let their books alone, and if they must patronize a binder, have slip-cases or pull-cases made. They serve every purpose. The book will be protected if it is falling apart and unpresentable, and one’s craving for color and gilt will be satisfied. ”

“ My subject is a somewhat difficult one, and it is not easy to speak of Wilde without overturning some of the more or less fixed traditions we have grown up with. We all have a lot of axioms in our systems, even if we are discreet enough to keep them from our tongues; and to do Wilde justice, it is necessary for us to free ourselves of some of these. To make my meaning clear, take the accepted one that genius is simply the capacity for hard work. This is all very well at the top of a copy-book, or to repeat to your son when you are didactically inclined ”

“ Let there be an end to a discussion of the weaknesses of Boswell. They have been sufficiently advertised and his good qualities overlooked. If a man is a genius, let his personal shortcomings be absorbed in the greatness of his work. The worst that can be fairly said of Boswell is that he was vain, inquisitive, and foolish. Let us forget the silly questions he sometimes put to Johnson, and remember how often he started something which made the old Doctor perform at his unrivaled best. ”

“ It may be admitted that there are dreary places in Trollope, as there are dreary reaches on the lovely Thames, but they can be skipped, and more rapidly; and, as Dr. Johnson says, “Who but a fool reads a book through?”
The reason so many American girls marry, or at least used to marry, Englishmen, was because they found them different from the men whom they had grown up with; not finer, not as fine, perhaps, but more interesting. It is for some such reason as this that we get more pleasure out of Trollope than we do out of Howells, whose work, in some respects, resembles his. ”

“ But for a lasting hobby give me books.
Book-collectors are constantly being ridiculed by scholars for the pains they take and the money they spend on first editions of their favorite authors; and it must be that they smart under the criticism, for they are always explaining, and attempting rather foolishly to justify their position. Would it not be better to say, as Leslie Stephen did of Dr. Johnson’s rough sayings, that “it is quite useless to defend them to any one who cannot enjoy them without defense”? ”

“ In the study of rare books, as in the study of an exact science, authority usually comes only with years. With Harry Widener it was different. He had been collecting only since he left college, but his intense enthusiasm, his painstaking care, his devotion to a single object, his wonderful memory, and, as he gracefully says in the introduction to the catalogue of some of the more important books in his library, “The interest and kindness of my grandfather and my parents,” had enabled him in a few years to secure a number of treasures of which any collector might be proud. ”