William Carew Hazlitt

“ The analogy arises and grows possible when we compare such writers as Montaigne, Molière, Corneille, or again, certain of the Elzevir series, with our corresponding foremost names. If we meet with the latter in vellum or in sheep, we only too gladly preserve them as we find them, provided that the outward garb is irreproachable. Of how many gems do we not know, in all the peerless glory of their pristine life, tenderly ensconced in morocco envelopes. Let them never be acquainted with another existence! Let no binder's unholy hand come near them! ”

“ Do we not under existing conditions view with too uncharitable sentiments the marvellous good fortune of the book-hunters of the last century, at the very outset of a revival of the taste for our own vernacular literature? Does it not seem tantalising to hear that Warton the historian could pick up for sixpence a volume containing Venus and Adonis, 1596, and seven other precious morçeaux, off a broker's counter in Salisbury, when the British Museum gave at the Daniel sale £336 for the Shakespeare alone? ”

“ A copy of a book, it does not signify how valuable intrinsically it may be, is worth nothing in the eyes of Monsieur and Monsieur d'Angleterre son ami, unless it is in a particular vesture, with a particular ex libris, and of a particular measurement in millesimes. MM. les amateurs reject not merely calf, but that vellum wrapper and that stitched paper envelope so dear to us English—so dear that when one of us has given hundreds of pounds for a book thus clothed, rather than commit it to a binder, we employ him to make us a case for the gem. ”

“ If one happens on a Caxton or a quarto Shakespeare to-day for a trifle, it is the isolated ignorance of the possessor which befriends one. But till the market came for these things, the price for what very few wanted was naturally low; and an acquirer like George Steevens, Edward Capell, or Edmond Malone was scarcely apt to feel the keen gratification on meeting with some unique find that a man would now do, seeing that its rarity was yet unascertained, and even had it been so, was not likely to awaken much sensation.
Low prices do not alone establish cheapness. ”

“ He is not asked to take any trouble; his library is an object of solicitude to everybody who has anything to sell; the order on his bankers is all that his humble servants desire. He finds himself, after the lapse of a decade or so, the master of a splendid collection, without having once known what it was to get disagreeably warm or anxious in the pursuit of a volume, to deliberate whether he could afford to buy it, or to submit to the ordeal of attending an auction, one of a motley throng in a fetid atmosphere. ”

“ A visit to some old church or parish, or even cathedral, library nowadays may afford a notion of the external aspect of the early book-closet of the English student or amateur. The glass case is conspicuously absent; the shelf on which the volumes are ranged has to our eyes a ragged, slatternly look; and nothing can well be more opposite to modern taste. ”

“ Nevertheless, to buy with other people's eyes and judgment is not, after all, the best form; all that can be pleaded for it is, that it is the sole resource of the individual who has no time to devote to the practical side, or who, if he has, distrusts his own knowledge; and as everything has its compensation, such are the customers on whom the trade mainly leans. If the amateur expert were to be too much multiplied, the professional bookseller would inevitably be a grave sufferer. ”

“ The spirit of collecting, like a delicate germ, is at first easily extinguished; but an incident as trivial and fortuitous as the one just suggested has ere now constituted the nucleus and starting-point of a large library. It may, indeed, be a favourable symptom and augury when a man begins circumspectly and deliberately; he is more apt, other circumstances favouring, to prosecute his scheme to the end, and to prove a valuable friend to the trade. ”

“ Of all these great divisions there are varieties naturally arising from personal character; but of the collector pure and simple of the older school, that type, we avow, most warmly and potently attracts us which limited itself to the small and unpretentious book-closet, with just those things which the master loved for their own sakes or for the sakes of the donors—where the commercial element was wanting, and where the library was not viewed in the same light as railway or mining stock. It is a famous principle to invest money prudently and well ”

“ Specialism, whether on the principle of personal taste or of particular studies, has manifest advantages in an age where the multitude and choice of books are so bewildering, where of every work of any sort of value or interest a man may have, not a single edition—all that in a majority of instances was once available—but a hundred or a thousand in all sorts of sizes and at all sorts of prices. ”

“ The accidental and almost miraculous survival of literary relics of past ages is curious on account of the purely casual manner in which they present themselves from season to season, as well as from the strange hands in which many of them are found—often persons of obscure character and in humble life, who have one, two, or half-a-dozen books of which all had somehow eluded the researches of every collector. ”

“ A second copy in shabby attire may plead in vain its merits of production; but it fares as ill as a person of the highest respectability who labours under the misfortune of being badly dressed.
There is no point of distinction on the part of our own countrymen more marked and enduring than the very qualified allegiance which they give to the Parisian book-binding code. It is true enough that in England we admire not merely the old French School, but the modern one; but our loyalty and liking are by no means unreserved. ”

“ A study of the writer's Rolls of Book-Collectors, which embrace over two thousand names, will satisfy any one that the hereditary or transmitted collections in this country are very few, if we limit ourselves to libraries of note, and do not compensate for the long catalogue of old libraries which have been dispersed even in our own time. Are there really more than the Miller and the Huth, unless we add the Spencer or Althorp, kept intact and amplified, yet in the hands of a stranger? Book-collecting by individuals is, then, mainly a personal affair, which begins and ends with a life. ”

“ There are not unreasonably people who may not see in an ordinary copy of a volume much tangible interest, yet who are prepared to recognise the value, and even importance, of one with the autograph and memoranda of some illustrious personage, of some great warrior or statesman, or of a famous man of letters, artist, or sculptor. ”

“ In Great Britain we may be said to be much more cosmopolitan in our book-collecting tastes than many of our contemporaries on the Continent of Europe, Germany perhaps excepted. In France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and elsewhere, the demand is almost exclusively for native authors; but the Germans, Americans, and ourselves take a pride, and a just one, in being more catholic and broad: we see the advantage, no doubt, and no doubt we reap the fruit, of such a policy. ”

“ Men acquired a handful or so of volumes, which came into their hands by gift or otherwise; from the absence or paucity of public institutions there were few individuals of any culture whatever without a few books besides the family Bible and Pilgrim's Progress; but such a colossal accumulation as was formed under the auspices of the second Lord Oxford, and still more that of Richard Heber, was as undreamt of as the vast and multifarious contents of the building in Great Russell Street as it now exists. ”

“ No [280] account of an old book is, in the first place, entitled to credence unless it has been drawn up by the describer with the book itself before him; and when it is considered that not one individual in ten thousand can even then be trusted to copy what is under his eyes, and that there are, and always have been, those who have thought fit to exercise their ingenuity by falsifying dates and other particulars, there cannot be much room for surprise that our bibliographies, and those of every other people, are partly made up of material which never existed. ”

“ Errors are heirlooms, of which it is hard to get rid.
The extent to which rare books are multiplied, as regards varieties of impression, by misdescriptions in catalogues, is remarkable and serious, and the bibliographer is not unfrequently confronted with statements of his ignorance of copies in sales of which he has not thought it worth while to indicate the true facts. But it is our individual experience that it is impossible to be too minute in pointing out snares for the unwary, and indeed for all who work at second-hand. ”

“ But the demand for the costlier rarities and curiosities is so narrow, that the fresh aspirant is soon the central object of attention to the few who can provide him with what he imagines he wants. As a rule, where a man has no personal knowledge, and finds that he is gradually becoming a milch-cow for the trade, the hobby is not of long duration; it is only where the buyer can control and check the vendor that satisfactory relations are likely to continue, perhaps for years, perhaps for a lifetime. There is ever a tendency, on the part of the bookish commissariat, to strike the iron too hard. ”

“ Artistic and historical book-covers have more than a special and technical importance, inasmuch as they contribute to enrich a pursuit which might otherwise become more limited in its interest than it is. For gay or splendid bindings assist in bringing the Book, manuscript or printed, within the category of antiquities or curiosities, where it awakens sentiments in the breasts of persons, neither literary nor bibliographical in their tastes, akin to those which they entertain for a specimen of old furniture or old porcelain ”

“ It is better, if a gentleman leans a little to the practical side, and chooses to admit literature for actual reading, to have two cases, one for Books, the other for Bibliographical Simulacra. For it is not for one till he has graduated to lay his prentice fingers on a tome in the pristine mutton, or to endanger the maidenhood of a Clovis Eve, a Padeloup, or a Derome, which you must handle as if it were the choicest and daintiest proof medal or etching. ”

“ The market consists of a couple or trio of individuals, who might be insensible to the excitement which they have occasioned if it were not for the offers from all sides which pour in upon them from day to day; and in a season or so it is all over; quotations are as before; and the running is on something different. Books of Emblems, Catholic Literature, Gardening and Agriculture, Occult Sciences, Early Poetry, Old Plays, Americana, Bewick, Cruikshank, the modern novelists, have all had their day. But the cry and the want are largely artificial. The customers are few; the caterers are many. ”

“ On the contrary, the English and American collections are cosmopolitan, like those who have formed them. At the British Museum a volume in Icelandic, Chinese, Hawaian, or any other character is welcomed nearly as much as one in the vernacular. In Germany, at all events at Berlin and Vienna, English books of importance are recognised. But at the Bibliothèque in Paris it is not so. The French collect only the classics and their own literature, just as they ignore in coins all but the Greek and Roman and national series. ”

“ A man who traces on the covers and back of a volume [229] lines, curves, circles, crescents, scrolls, and other figures without harmony and without significance—in other words, without mind or esprit—is no true artist, but either an unskilful copyist or a rude beginner. Different schools naturally adopted new ideas of the beautiful or the elegant; some of our most ancient patterns were scriptural or mathematical; the age ruled the prevailing taste and fashion, and everything in and out of Nature has had its turn and its day. ”

“ It is of no use to read publications with which your acquaintances have no familiarity, and to the merits of which it might be a hard task to convert them. But, as we have said, we want space to enter into these details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in Book-Form—Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age—what Thoreau call its "tit-men." ”

“ Where the goods on sale are of a prevailingly low standard, the scene varies in compliance with the circumstances, and the purchasers' names in the priced catalogue are almost without exception the names of booksellers, who make their account by going in for heavy lots and rough stuff—an excellent vocation thirty years ago, but now a fairly forlorn hope and quest. The bargain is no longer to the man who can buy for a shilling and sell for a pound, but to him who has the courage and means to buy for fifty pounds what he can sell for five times fifty by virtue of his knowledge and connection. ”

“ There may be certain authors and authoresses whom our descendants will like to have by them, even though they may no longer exert a sensible influence on literature and thought, just as we prize many of the older schools and types for characteristics and allusions which strike us as curious or entertaining; and soon, as decade follows decade, and the twentieth century has well opened, men and women, who were our grandsires' contemporaries, will seem through the lengthening vista almost as remote as they were from the Stuart epoch with its Elizabethan and Shakespearian traditions. ”

“ The most interesting, and it may with permission be added, intelligent type of book-collector, however, seems to be that where, after a certain measure of preparatory thought and training, one confines acquisitions for permanent ownership to volumes for which the acquirer has a genuine personal relish. In general, the principle of forming a library on this wholesome basis would be found not only more useful, but more economical, since the rarest and costliest articles are by no means, on the whole, the most interesting or the most instructive. ”

“ Propriety and sympathy of costume go very far indeed to establish and augment the estimation of printed volumes with manuscript tokens of former proprietorship. The collector who chooses this field of activity has to weigh the correlation and harmony between the volume itself and the individual or individuals to whom it once appertained. We have usually to content ourselves with the interest resident in an autograph, with or without further particulars; it is a book, perhaps, which formed part of the library of a distinguished Elizabethan or Jacobean writer or public character ”

“ But in the case of books, as of all analogous property, the next best thing to acting for oneself is to employ a high-class dealer, or, if the line is very special, one who enjoys a reputation for conversance with the particular branch of inquiry. Where a collector who [308] does not possess personal knowledge, and takes into his service a bookseller who is not much more informed, or who has not studied certain classes of literature, it is bound to be an exemplification of the blind leading the blind, and one, at all events, unless he has a very long purse, falling into the ditch. ”

“ The periodical reinforcement of the ranks of the book-collecting world, in the higher latitudes at least, is obviously imperative, as individuals do not usually commence investments of such a kind till they are well on in life and have put by a fortune, or at all events retired from business. Some purely accidental matter directs attention to a line of bibliography which appears attractive and important; the money is there, and the expert will undertake the rest. It is not the interest of those engaged in the business to be critical; they are merely executive agents. ”

“ Entire and large impressions of books, pamphlets, and broadsides have succumbed, not to the sacrilegious hand of the spoiler, but to the too affectionate, and not too cleanly, fingering of the multitude of men and women who read and then cast the sources of entertainment away. If we remember that certain of the Bibles ordered to be kept in churches for general use chiefly survive in crumbling fragments, or at best woefully dilapidated copies, we cease to be surprised at the easy prey which more fugitive compositions have formed to a succession of careless and indifferent owners. ”