Rare book

“ The second-hand bookseller, having the whole range of printed literature for his field, has a great advantage in dealing with book collectors over the average dealer, who has to offer only new books, or such as are "in print."
It may be owned that the love of rare books is chiefly sentimental. He who delights to spend his days or his nights in the contemplation of black-letter volumes, quaint title-pages, fine old bindings, and curious early illustrations, may not add to the knowledge or the happiness of mankind, but he makes sure of his own. ”

“ A rare book is, strictly speaking, only one which is found with difficulty, taking into view all the principal book markets of various countries. Very few books printed since 1650 have any peculiar value on account of their age. Of many books, both old and new, the reason of scarcity is that only a few copies actually remain, outside of public libraries, and these last, of course, are not for sale. This scarcity of copies is produced by a great variety of causes, most of which are here noted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has been pointed out that rarity itself does not make for value, if there is no demand. An unique copy of a book is necessarily rare, but if no one wants it, it will not bring a price in proportion to its scarcity. ”

“ The instances in which external matters have at any time been capable of investing an inferior book with a halo of importance or romance are so extremely rare that they might almost be counted on the fingers. A mere fleeting craze cannot do it, and it is the greatest mistake in the world to suppose that a scarce book would be sought for, and prized when found, merely because it is scarce, and for no other reason. As every book-collector is aware, there are hundreds and thousands of volumes lying neglected on the book-stalls to-day which would never be there if this were not so. ”

“ It is possible to sympathize with him when he exclaims, ‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here!’ In making love there are other resources; all wooers are not as ill equipped as Slender was. But in hunting rare books the time will be sure to come when a man may well cry, ‘I had rather than forty dollars I had my list of first editions with me!’
The Bibliotaph carried much accurate information in his head, but he never traveled without a thesaurus in his valise. It was a small volume containing printed lists of the first editions of rare books. ”

“ They were submitted to the authorities [167] of the British Museum, who gave a high price for them. One was Sir Anthony Sherley's 'Wits New Dyall,' published in 1604, of which only one other copy is known to be in existence. As a rule, offers of rare books come from booksellers, who do not always say how they become possessed of them. Among the private people who offer books to the Museum for sale are a large proportion who think that a book must necessarily be rare because it is a hundred years old or more. ”

“ A volume may be unique—may stand quite alone in the world—but whether it is so, or one of a numerous family, is never known, for no one has ever desired to possess it, and no one ever will.
But it is a curious phenomenon in the old-book trade, that rarities do not always remain rare; volumes seeming to multiply through some cryptogamic process, when we know perfectly that no additional copies are printed and thrown off. The fact is, that the rumour of scarcity, and value, and of a hunt after them, draws them from their hiding-places. ”

“ Frequently they are sumptuous works and presentation copies, and they always command high prices. In a word, they are aristocrats among books. They are not necessarily rare volumes, though frequently they are large-paper copies, and for the true collector they do not offer so much attraction as the Second Class, in which we place those books that are more eagerly sought after. These are generally rare books, such as incunabula and the higher class English literature of the seventeenth century, and are to be found in the libraries of wealthy collectors who are also learned men. ”

“ The destruction of books in private hands is natural and inevitable enough, and goes on continually. Whole editions of books, now sought with avidity as the rarest volumes known to literature, have been gradually destroyed in innumerable fires, worn out in the hands of readers, used for waste paper by grocers and petty tradesmen, swallowed up in the sack of towns, or consumed by dampness, mould, or, in rare instances, by the remorseless tooth of time. ”

“ What then are the associations and qualities which give books value in the eyes of a collector? We may answer the question negatively in the first instance by reducing to their proper importance the two qualities which are popularly supposed to be the most attractive to the book-hunter—rarity and age. If a book is otherwise uninteresting, what is it the better for being rare? In passing it may be noted that unless a book is interesting for other reasons its rarity is necessarily an unknown 8 quantity. ”

“ I am not partial to the “books which no gentleman’s library should be without,” fashionable a generation or two ago. The works of Thomas Frognall Dibdin do not greatly interest me, and where will one find room to-day for Audubon’s “Birds” or Roberts’s “Holy Land” except on a billiard-table or under a bed?
The very great books of the past have become so rare, so high-priced, that it is almost useless for the ordinary collector to hope ever to own them, and fashion changes in book-collecting as in everything else. ”

“ Classical books grow scarcer every day, and the love of literature, and of possessing rare and interesting works, increases in an equal ratio. Hungry bibliographers meet, at sales, with well-furnished purses, and are resolved upon sumptuous fare! Thus the hammer vibrates, after a bidding of forty pounds, where formerly it used regularly to fall at four! But we lose sight of Dr. Askew's rare editions, and large paper copies. The following, gentle reader, is but an imperfect specimen! ”

“ 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 ”

“ Following an erratic course in this chapter, we will now pass on to books, manuscripts and autographs, a branch with many devotees and all kinds of collectors, in which trickery and faking find an almost incredibly large sphere of action.
Book collectors are of two kinds, the one who prizes the work for the rarity of the edition, and the other who is attracted by the binding. The former is the true book collector, the latter is really only a collector of rare and artistic bindings. ”

“ BOOK-COLLECTING, the bringing together of books which in their contents, their form or the history of the individual copy possess some element of permanent interest, and either actually or prospectively are rare, in the sense of being difficult to procure. This qualification of rarity, which figures much too largely in the popular view of book-collecting, is entirely subordinate to that of interest, for the rarity of a book devoid of interest is a matter of no concern. ”

“ These he sorted out into nationalities and towns, and so, with a lot of hand-bills, manuscript notes, and miscellaneous collections of all kinds, formed over a hundred folio volumes, now preserved in the British Museum. That they are of service as materials in compiling a general history of printing cannot be denied, but the destruction of many rare books was the result, and more than counter-balanced any benefit bibliographers will ever receive from them. ”

“ A rate-supported library should be practical in its aims, and not a mere curiosity shop for a collection of curious and rare books—their only merit being their rarity, their peculiar binding, singular type, or quaint illustrations. ”

“ The true literary detective will tell you at a glance if anything is wrong with a printed page. This is a rare faculty, and in the book business amounts almost to genius. Some booksellers are never able to tell, during their entire careers, which are facsimile leaves and which aren’t. Only a few are adept at it.
Another trick is to supply original covers when they are missing from old and precious volumes. [Pg 133] Sometimes a copy of an English classic appears in the auction room minus its blue or gray or yellow paper wrappers. ”

“ At this present time (1879) more than one public library in Paris could be mentioned in which thousands of books are received annually, all of which will have disappeared in the course of 50 years or so for want of binding; there are rare books, impossible to replace, falling to pieces because no care is given to them, that is to say, they are left unbound, a prey to dust and the worm, and cannot be touched without dismemberment."
"All history shows that this neglect belongs not to any particular age or nation. ”

“ A Paris publisher found it recently in a magazine and asked M. France to write a preface to it, that it might be issued as a book. Quoth France: “It would be an excess of literary vanity on my part to resurrect the story. But my vanity would, perhaps, be greater were I to try to suppress it.”
Reference books, as is well known, improve like wine with age, and the efficiency of our proof room is to be accounted for, in part, by the vintage volumes that line its library shelf. There are sixty of these rare old tomes, and five of them are useful; these being, we think, first editions. ”

“ Such depredations are not frequent, and only occur with books easily replaced, and do not therefore call for more than a passing mention; but it is a serious matter when Nature produces such a wicked old biblioclast as John Bagford, one of the founders of the Society of Antiquaries, who, in the beginning of the last century, went about the country, from library to library, tearing away title pages from rare books of all sizes. ”

“ These latter, however, are usually limited, at best, to picking up some good first edition of a modern author, worth, perhaps, five dollars, and carelessly marked, with numbers of other books, at about twenty-five cents. Better fortune sometimes attends. For example, one may sometimes find a really rare and valuable book which, in dim but inadequate realization of its value, has been marked higher than its neighbors—perhaps up to about one-tenth of its real value. ”

“ Every Saturday morning throughout the year light hand-carts to the number, perhaps, of thirty or forty, stand in a long line against the curb, and each is packed with works of all kinds. I am bound to admit that obsolete school-books and forgotten sermons constitute the great majority of these waifs and strays, but there is always a wide choice of useful books to be got for purely nominal sums, and occasionally one that is rare and valuable. ”

“ Now that all of us have settled among ourselves what books are rare, and desirable to possess on that account, as well as for many other reasons, everyone is, of course, naturally anxious to obtain the credit and still more the solid advantages of a startling discovery. ”

“ The possession of a few rare books by the great authors would have had all the advantages, without the drawbacks, of the many; but collecting for its own sake was part of the attraction. No sale of books at Thomas and Sons' auction rooms, in South Fourth Street, was ever missed; and here my father came into intercourse with men of like tastes, and competed with them for the possession of coveted volumes. The fascinating habit grew until at last no available space for more volumes could be found. ”

“ The examination and collation of books to discover whether they are perfect and in their original condition are especially important in the case of rare books, like incunabula and first editions, piracies and spurious imprints. Photographic forgeries of books can usually be detected by the tendency of all photographic reproduction to thicken letters and exaggerate every kind of defect. ”

“ In the matter of rare books, demand has now almost killed supply. The wish to possess them is more general than ever, but the means of gratifying it become from day to day more restricted by the tendency of such books to drift into public libraries, or into large private collections where they may be locked up indefinitely, and especially by the competition of America. ”

“ Looking at the imperfect and unconsecutive condition in which much of our most precious early literature has been received by us, we are apt to reflect to how narrow and close an accident we owe two classes of existing remains: the unique book and the unique fragment. Of course to term a volume or production unique is a perilous business; the bookseller and the auctioneer may do so ex officio; an inexperienced amateur may resort to the term as a pleasant and harmless self-deception; but no responsible writer or critic dares to pronounce anything whatever unique without an emphatic caveat. ”