Book collecting

“ 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. ”

“ Do all book-collecting doctors garner only herbals and early medical works? Does the poet-collector specialise in poetry, the freemason in masonic books, the angler in works dealing only with his pastime?
Not always, perhaps; but doubtless this is the case with the great majority of collectors. Sometimes a chance purchase may shape the entire course of a man's collecting, sometimes he is led to the subject to which he devotes his collecting energies by devious byways. Our book-hunter has a friend who began to collect old French books on Chivalry through a touch of influenza. ”

“ There are many varieties of the ignorant collector type. The most fruitful source is the nouveau riche. Book-collecting is greatly a matter of fashion; and most of us will remember what Benjamin Franklin said of this prevailing vice: 'There are numbers that, perhaps, fear less the being in hell, than out of the fashion.' The enterprising individual who, on receipt of a catalogue of medical books, wired to the bookseller, 'What will you take for the lot?' and on a price being quoted, again telegraphed, 'Send them along,' was clearly a person who wished to be fashionable. ”

“ We must now turn to another important matter—perhaps the most important subject to the collector after the housing of his volumes—namely, the binding of his books. It is a subject that is naturally of the greatest moment to the [135] bibliophile, for it is as essentially a part of his volumes as are their leaves and print. It is constantly before him, and will continue to occupy his thoughts to the end of his book-collecting career. ”

“ Others collect early children's books, gipsy literature, Egyptology, books on inventions, ballooning, etc. But most of these are more in the nature of sub-headings to the subjects in our list, and offer a more restricted field of collecting. Indeed I am in some doubt as to whether the large-paper collector should be included here, for his penchant is as far removed from true book-collecting as is that of the specialist in bindings. His hobby can have nothing to do with literature, since it is only the external characteristics of a book which appeal to him. ”

“ Another collector with whom I am personally acquainted has read this chapter through at my express request, and consequently cannot reasonably say that I have endeavoured to question the soundness of his discretion behind his back. He accumulates books with a history. If a book has no history, he will have none of it. In his library are many volumes which I must confess I have a great regard for, but which I know can never be mine, for each is unique, and the whole collection is destined for a public museum in the end. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The book-collectors are of a higher order,—not that their pursuit necessarily implies knowledge; it is the love of possessing rarities, or the pleasure of pursuit, which in most cases actuates them;—one person who had spent many years in collecting large paper copies, having obtained nearly all which had ever been thus printed, sold the whole collection for the sake of beginning to collect them again. ”

“ Even the wise collector, however, runs some risk of being engulfed by his hobby and swept away by the flood of books. There is but one remedy, or rather alleviation, for book-collecting is quite incurable and follows a man to his grave (unless, of course, he be cast upon a desert island) , and that is specialism.
Every collector should become a specialist. It will give him a definite ambition, something to look for among other books, something to complete ”

“ English and American millionaires acquire specimens of early typography, poetry, binding, or what not, because they hear that it is the thing to do. One gentleman will give £100 more for a copy, because he is credibly informed that it is three-eighths of an inch taller than any other known; and a second will take something from the vendor on the assurance that no library of any pretensions is complete without it. This sort of child's-play is not Book-Collecting. ”

“ Book collectors, I make no exceptions, are buzzards who stretch their wings in anticipation as they wait patiently for a colleague’s demise; then they swoop down and [Pg 18] ghoulishly grab some long-coveted treasure from the dear departed’s trove.
Two years before my uncle’s death I gave up my fellowship in English at the University of Pennsylvania to enter professionally the sport of book collecting and the business of selling. Uncle Moses was extremely pleased to have me as a competitor. ”

“ All these and many others are necessary if we are to acquire a thorough knowledge of old books. They are, or should be, in every large public library; and we may read them through and through at our leisure, learning more from each perusal.
There are certain works, however, which the book-collector should himself possess, for he will have continual recourse to them throughout his book-collecting career. Doubtless some of them will make an inroad upon his purse, but it will be money well spent, and the knowledge which he will gain from them will save him many a shilling. ”

“ This troubled the entomologist greatly, for it was a point of view that had never occurred to him, and, like the rich young man, 'he went away grieved.'
So it is sometimes in book-collecting: there is a temptation to 'restore' an incomplete book. Should the collector find [118] that his copy of a certain work lacks a portrait, what is more natural than to go to the print-shop and purchase a portrait of the same individual for insertion in his copy? ”

“ Few collectors, who are not specialists, care very much for the utility of their libraries; in many cases, indeed, it is not a question of utility at all, but of extent, though I apprehend that no one would wish to crowd his shelves with rubbish merely for the sake of filling them. As an immense proportion of the books which have been published during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries clearly come under that category, the collector has much to avoid, and stands in need of considerable experience to enable him to make a selection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Keep out damp, let the shelves be lined if possible with good leather, and last, but by no means least, look at the insides of your books as well as at the outsides.
Collectors of books are continually being asked to lend volumes which happen to take the passing fancy of a friend or even chance acquaintance, and it is frequently a matter of some delicacy to refuse. Not one person in a hundred knows how to treat a book properly, and the borrower is therefore usually regarded as but one degree removed from an enemy. ”

“ One thing, however, the majority of book-collectors agree in, and that is in regarding their own generation as a revolution—they have, as Butler has described it in his picture of an antiquary, 'a great value for that which is past and gone, like the madman that fell in love with Cleopatra.'
Differing in many, and often material, points as one book-collector does from another, the entire passion for collecting may be said to focus itself into two well-defined grooves. A [xvii] man either collects books for his own intellectual profit, or out of pure ostentatious vanity. ”

“ Others will hide them in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, while others again will cut them to pieces, or in some other way destroy them utterly. It is the most usual thing, for me, at any rate, and therefore presumably for others who are known to write about books, or to give the reports of the auction-rooms, to receive a bundle of title-pages as samples of the volumes to which they belong, with a request for information as to how they ought to be bound, and what they are worth. ”

“ People do not always have to invest in high-priced books to form an interesting collection. Many unusual collections have been made through small but exceedingly careful and, of course, thoughtful expenditure. [Pg 180] Yet this is a fact very difficult to thump into the young collector’s head. It has taken some men I know—men with slender purses—several years to realize this. Meanwhile they lose both time and bargains. But vision in book buying does not come so readily when you are first suffering from the febrile mania of collecting. ”

“ Thanks to the Grangerizers, a portrait will perhaps be missing from one volume, and a plate from another; some disciple of an ancient Goth may have removed a title-page or two; one copy may be fairer to look upon than another; a leaf or two may be injured which in another copy, imperfect perhaps in other respects, may be above suspicion. Our collectors have duplicates, for they have been striving all their lives to prevent anyone else from obtaining any copy, good, bad or indifferent, of the scarcest works of the author or authors they think they honour by their notice. ”

“ As I have said elsewhere, it has been no part of my object in writing my book to advocate indiscriminate collecting. But for those who are already collectors I have one word of advice on the subject of the arrangement of their treasures. Some enthusiasts advocate a chronological arrangement, others a genealogical, others a topographical: and the advocates of each theory paste down their specimens in scrap-books or other volumes in adherence to their own views. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He should be satisfied to eat his cake and have it; books selected with any judgment will almost certainly afford this satisfaction, and of what other hobby can this be said with the same assurance?
The possession of rare books is a delight best understood by the owners of them. They are not called upon to explain. The gentle will understand, and the savage may be disregarded. It is the scholar whose sword is usually brandished against collectors ”

“ Folios can take care of themselves, but a man needs to have a first-rate all-round knowledge who would essay to catalogue a good old-fashioned miscellaneous library.
In France, sale-catalogues are prepared by experts, who are called in to assist the auctioneers; in London the auctioneers keep their own cataloguers, and in the country towns they seek the assistance of booksellers, or do the work themselves. ”

“ All collectors of out of the way books know the pleasure of the exercise of serendipity, but they enjoy it in different ways. One man will go home hugging a volume of sermons, another with a bulky collection of catalogues, which would have distended the pockets even of the wide great-coat made for the purpose, that Charles Nodier used to wear when he went a book-hunting. ”

“ Sometimes it seems as if that was the one thing we were leaving out of our thought—the book, not as a material object, paper, printing, binding, to all of which we pay much attention, but the book as literature. Is the library, too, becoming materialized? As the authorized custodians of the wisdom of the past, we stand in an important and dignified relation to the present. How can we share our treasures with a public that too often fails to appreciate its need for them? ”

“ But facsimiles and other aids have been greatly multiplied of late years; many a book can be run down and the identification verified in a few minutes, and the possibility of hunting successfully in one’s own library presupposes the purchase of many books giving full information as to their origin. These, while offering the means of identifying other books, will themselves raise no questions, so that the collector’s life need not be unceasingly strenuous. ”

“ When he is not of the omnivorous kind, but one who desires to possess a particular book, and, having got it, dips into the contents before committing it to permanent obscurity on his loaded shelves, there is, as we have [162] already seen, a certain thread of intelligent association linking the items of his library to each other. The collector knows what he wants, and why he wants it, and that why does not entirely depend on exteriors, though he may have his whim as to that also. ”