POVERTY AS A MEANS OF ENJOYMENT IN COLLECTING.

Poor collectors are not only not at a disadvantage in enjoyment, but they have a positive advantage over affluent rivals. If I were rich, probably I should not throw my money away just to experience this superiority, but it nevertheless exists. I do not envy, but I commiserate my brother collector who has plenty of money. He who only has to draw his check to obtain his desire fails to reach the keenest bliss of the pursuit. If diamonds were as common as cobble stones there would be no delight in picking them up

To constitute a bibliomaniac in the true sense, the love of books must combine with a certain limitation of means for the gratification of the appetite The consciousness of some extravagance must be always present in his mind; there must be a sense of sacrifice in the attainment; in a rich man the disease cannot exist; he cannot enter the kingdom of the Bibliomaniac’s heaven. There is the same difference of sensation between the acquirement of books by a wealthy man and by him of slender purse, that there is between the taking of fish in a net and the successful result of a long angling pursuit after one especially fat and evasive trout. When a prince kills his preserved game, with keepers to raise it for him and to hand him guns ready loaded, so that all he has to do is to squint and pull the trigger, this is not hunting; it is mere vulgar butchery What knows he of the joys of the tramper in the forest, who stalks the deer, or scares up smaller game, singly, and has to work hard for his bag? We read in Dibdin’s sumptuous pages of the celebrated contest between the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquis of Blandford for the possession of the Valdarfar Decameron; we read with admiration, but we also read of the immortal battle of Elia with the little squab-keeper of the old book-stall in Ninety-four alley, over the ownership of a ragged duodecimo for a sixpence; we read with affection So we read Leigh Hunt’s confession that when he “cut open a new catalogue of old books, and put crosses against dozens of volumes in the list, out of the pure imagination of buying them, the possibility being out of the question.” Poverty hath her victories no less renowned than wealth. To haunt the book-stores, there to see a long-desired work in luxurious and tempting style, reluctantly to abandon it for the present on account of the price; to go home and dream about it, to wonder, for a year, and perchance longer, whether it will ever again greet your eyes; to conjecture what act of desperation you might in heat of passion commit toward some more affluent man in whose possession you should thereafter find it; to see it turn up again in another book-shop, its charms slightly faded, but yet mellowed by age, like those of your first love, met in later life—with this difference, however, that whereas you crave those of the book more than ever, you are generally quite satisfied with yourself for not having, through the greenness of youth, yielded untimely to those of the lady; to ask with assumed indifference the price, and learn with ill-dissembled joy that it is now within your means; to say you’ll take it; to place it beneath your arm, and pay for it (or more generally order it “charged”); to go forth from that room with feelings akin to those of Ulysses when he brought away the Palladium from Troy; to keep a watchful eye on the parcel in the railway coach on your way home, or to gloat over the treasures of its pages, and wonder if the other passengers have any suspicion of your good fortune; and finally to place the volume on your shelf, and thenceforth to call it your own—this is indeed a pleasure denied to the affluent, so keen as to be akin to pain, and only marred by the palling which always follows possession and the presentation of your book-seller’s account three months afterwards.