  Produced by Al Haines. [image] Cover art [image] Facsimile of original cover of Poe's Tamerlane. Frontispiece. See page THE ROMANCE OF BOOK-COLLECTING. BY J. H. SLATER, EDITOR OF 'BOOK PRICES CURRENT;' AUTHOR OF 'EARLY EDITIONS,' NEW YORK: CONTENTS. CHAPTER.
CHAPTER I. IN EULOGY OF CATALOGUES. There are plenty of people—in fact, they are in the great majority even among bookish men—who regard antiquated sale-catalogues in the light of so much rubbish, and yet, when intelligently consulted, these memorials of a bygone day not only have their uses, but are positively interesting. Truly enough they are not popular, like the last new novel which, for one reason or another, has taken the town by storm, and it would not pay to reprint a single one of them, even the best or most important that has ever held the frequenters of auction-rooms spell-bound. Sometimes a 'parcel' will be sold for what it will fetch, and on investigation may prove to contain a few simple-minded pamphlets on subjects of no importance, 'and others,' the latter consisting of book-catalogues of the last or the earlier portion of the present century. This happens sufficiently often to make it possible for a bookish enthusiast of an antiquarian turn of mind to lose himself with marvellous rapidity in a maze of old-time dispersions. But the enthusiast, unless very determined indeed, knows better than to choke his library with such material. He is aware that an exhaustive index is indispensable to the proper appreciation of such literature, and to make that would occupy his nights indefinitely. And so it comes to pass that old sale-catalogues of books are consigned for the most part to the rubbish-heap, or perhaps sent to the mills, to reappear later on in another guise. They may be scarce in the sense that, if you wanted a particular one, it could only be got with great difficulty, and at considerable expense (here the art of selling to advantage comes in), or perhaps not at all. This, however, makes no matter, for the fact remains that such things are not inquired for as a general rule, and that an occasional demand is insufficient to give them any kind of a status in the world of letters. Some five or six years ago a member of the Johnson Club, a literary society which meets at intervals in various parts of London, but more particularly in Fleet Street, discovered a catalogue of the sale of the old Doctor's library, neatly marked with the prices each book had brought. Whether this was a sale post mortem or a casual interlocutory dispersal at the instance of some soulless creditor, I do not know. In any case the relic was a find—a fact which the bookseller who bought it was not slow to appreciate, for he at once assessed its value, to the society man, at something like forty shillings. This was paid without demur, because at the time all the other Johnson catalogues were in mufti, and it had struck no one to exhibit them, and also because it was, under the circumstances of the case, a very desirable memorial to present to the society which flourishes on the fame of the great lexicographer. Here, at any rate, is one exceptional instance of an old catalogue possessing a distinct pecuniary value up to £2, and though the noise this discovery made in certain circles led to a general search and the rescue of other copies, the circumstances are not in the least affected on that account. From a literary or even a sentimental standpoint, a long story, full of speculation and romance, might be written on Dr. Johnson's long-forgotten catalogue. We might, for instance, trace, by the aid of Boswell, many of the books mentioned in it to the very hand of the master himself. We might conjecture the use he made of this volume or that in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 'The Vanity of Human Wishes,' or in the ponderous Dictionary that cemented his fame, and by way of interlude beguile an hour occasionally by contrasting the character of the books he affected with the quality of those on the shelves of some modern Johnson, assuming, of course, that his counterpart is to be found. Then we might look at the prices realized, and compare them with those ruling at the present day. Some books then in fashion are, we may be sure, now despised and rejected, others have not been appreciably affected by the course of time, while others, again, are now sought after throughout the world, and are hardly to be met with at all. There is no old catalogue whatever which is not capable of affording considerable instruction if we only read between the lines. Then, again, there is one speculation that no true book-lover can stifle; it haunts him as he passes the barrows with their loads of sermons and scholastic primers, and it is this: 'Time works wonders.' Some day may not this heterogeneous mass of rubbish produce as fine a pearl as ever a diseased oyster was robbed of? May not fashion go off at a tangent, and dote on lexicons or what not? There have been men—Rossi, for example, who was so saturated with the suspicion that fashion might change any moment that the stalls by which he passed were 'like towns through which Attila or the Tartars had swept, with ruin in their train'—who would buy any book whatever, whether they wanted it or not, on the bare chance of someone else wanting it, either at the time or in the days to come. Such may be the outcome of a too eager perusal of catalogues, focussed till it produces an absorbing passion, which only departs with life itself. After a time discrimination, naturally enough, becomes impossible, and whole masses of books are bought up for what they may become, not for what they are. This may appear to be an ignoble sort of pastime, but in reality it is far otherwise, since wholesale purchasers of this stamp are invariably well read, and know more about their author than his mere name. I personally was acquainted with a bookworm who absorbed whole collections at a time. His house was full of books; they were under the beds, in cupboards, piled up along the walls, under the tables and chairs, and even on the rafters under the roof. If you walked without due care, you would, more likely than not, tumble over a folio in the dark, or bring down a wall of literature, good, bad, or indifferent, on your head. This library was chaotic to the general, though the worm himself knew very well where to burrow for anything he required, and, what is more to the point, would feed for hours on volumes that few people had ever so much as heard of. The monetary value of his treasures did not trouble him, though one of his favourite anecdotes related to the hunting down of a fourth folio Shakespeare, which, after much haggling, he purchased for a song from a poor woman who lived in an almshouse. When the delight of the chase was over, he recompensed her to the full market value, thereby proving that, in his case at least, a greed for books does not necessarily carry with it a stifled conscience. Sad to relate, this bibliophile died like other men, and the collection of a lifetime came to the inevitable hammer. Most of his books then proved to be portions of sets. If a work were complete in, say, ten volumes, he would perhaps possess no more than five or six of the full number in various bindings and editions, while others, though complete, were imperfect, and many were in rags. Yet among the whole there were some pearls of great price. Even in his day the fashion had changed in his favour. Now, this changing of fashion which is always going on cannot be prophesied at haphazard, or perhaps even at all; but if there is a way of forestalling it, it is by the careful comparison of prices realized for books of a certain kind at different periods of time, and this can only be accomplished by a study of catalogues. The book-man likes to think that history repeats itself in this as in other matters, and that what has happened once will probably occur again in process of time. Nay, he might, without any great stretch of credulity. persuade himself that it must occur, if only he live long enough. That's the rub, for half a dozen lifetimes might not be sufficient to witness a return to favour of, say, the ponderous works of the Fathers, which were in such great demand a couple of centuries ago. As of them, so of many other kinds of books which are only read now by the very few. Some day they will rise again after their long sleep, but not for us. As a corollary to this eulogy of catalogues, let us take a few of them and see where the book-man's steps are leading him. In his wanderings abroad he must many a time be painfully conscious of the fact that his own quest is that of everyone else whose tastes are similar to his own. Let a first edition of the immortal 'Angler' so much as peep from among the grease and filth of a rag-and-bone shop, and a magnetic current travels at lightning speed to the homes of a score or more of pickers-up of unconsidered trifles, who forthwith race for the prize. How they get to know of its existence is a mystery. Perhaps some strange psychological influence is at work to prompt them to dive down a pestilential alley for the first and last time in their lives. Did you ever see a millionaire groping in the gutter for a dropped coin? His energy is nothing to that of the book-man who has reason to suspect—why he knows not—that here or there may perhaps lie hid and unrecognised a volume which fashion has made omnipotent. And his energy is not confined to himself alone, for one decree of a naughty world changes not—it is ever the same: What many men want, more men will search for; what one man only has, many will want. The path of the book-hunter is trodden flat and hard with countless footsteps, and this is the reason why it is so unsatisfactory to look specially for anything valuable. We may take it, therefore, that, though hunting for books may be a highly exhilarating pastime, it is seldom remunerative from a pecuniary point of view. There are, no doubt, hundreds of thousands of good and useful volumes which can be bought at any time for next to nothing; but they have no halo round them at the moment, and so they are abandoned to their fate by the typical collector, who insists not only on having the best editions in exchange for his money, but that his books shall be of a certain description—that is to say, of a kind to please him, or which for the time being is in great demand. And men are pleased at various times by books of a widely different character, as the old catalogues tell us plainly enough. In 1676, when William Cooper bookseller, dwelling at the Sign of the Pelican in Little Britain, held the first auction sale ever advertised in England—that of the library of Dr. Lazarus Seaman—works critical of the Fathers and Schoolmen; learned and critical volumes of distressing profundity, appealed to the comparative few who could read and write sufficiently well to make reading a pleasurable experience. Poetry is absent entirely. Shakespeare and Milton are elbowed out by Puritan fanatics who fulminate curses against mankind. No doubt, if a book-man of those days had been asked what kind of literature would be in vogue a couple of centuries hence, he would have pointed to Seaman's collection and replied, 'Books like those can never die. So long as learning holds its sway over the few, they will be bought and treasured by the many.' In this he would have been wrong, for few people care nowadays for volumes such as these. The times have changed utterly, and we with them. At this same sale was a book which sold for less than almost any other, and it lay hidden away under this bald and misleading title: 'Veteris et Novi Testamenti in Ling. Indica, Cantabr. in Nova Anglia.' Simply this, and nothing more. No statement as to date, condition or binding appears in Cooper's catalogue, and yet this Bible is none other than John Eliot's translation into the Indian language, with a metrical version of the Psalms in the same vernacular, published at Cambridge, Mass., in 1663-61. An auctioneer of the present day would print the title of this volume in large capitals, and tell us whether or no it had the rare dedication to King Charles II., of pious memory, which was only inserted in twenty copies sent to England as presents. If it had, then this book, wherever it may be, is now worth much more than its weight in gold, for at Lord Hardwicke's sale, held in London on June 29, 1888, such a desirable copy was knocked down for £580. Why this immense advance in price, seeing that probably there is no man in England to-day who could read a single line of John Eliot's free translation? The reason is plain. Since 1661 sleepy New England has vanished like the light canoes of countless Indians, and in the busy United States there has grown up a great demand for anything which illustrates the early history of North America. Had such a contingency struck old Lazarus Seaman, he would have made his will to suit the exigences of the case, and perhaps taken more interest in John Eliot and his missionary enterprises than anyone did at the time, or has done since. It may perhaps be said that Seaman's library must have been of a special kind, one which such a learned divine might be expected to gather within his walls; but as a matter of fact this was not so. Between 1676 and 1682, October to October in each of those years, exactly thirty sales of books were held by auction in London, among them the libraries of Sir Kenelm Digby, Dr. Castell, the author of the 'Lexicon Heptaglotton,' Dr. Gataker, Lord Warwick, and other noted persons. The general character of all the seventeenth-century catalogues which time has spared for our perusal is substantially the same. Every one of them reflects the taste and fashion of the day, as did Agrippa's magic glass the forms of absent friends. Still harping chiefly on theology! as Polonius might say, these catalogues are crammed with polemics and books of grave discourse. Anything which could not, by hook or by crook, be dragged, as to its contents, within the circumference of the fashionable craze, was disposed of for a trifling sum. Even in 1682 the learned world, or at least our narrow corner of it, was inhabited almost entirely by crop-eared Puritans, with sugar-loaf hats on their heads and broad buckles to their shoes, and by Philosophers. True! Cromwell had gone to his account, and Charles II. held Court at St. James's and elsewhere, but the King and his merry companions were not reading men unless a profound knowledge of 'Hudibras,' that book which Pepys could not abide the sight of, could make them so. The anti-Puritans patronized Butler, and doted on Sir Charles Sedley, the Earl of Rochester and a few more, who scribbled love-verses by day, and gambled and fought and drank at night. But these worshipped Thalia and Erato only, with music and dancing and other delights, and knew nothing of solid hard work by the midnight oil. They had no books to speak of, and the few they had were light and airy like themselves, and for the most part as worthless. On November 25, 1678, a great sale was held at the White Hart, in Bartholomew Close. The books were 'bought out of the best libraries abroad, and out of the most eminent seats of learning beyond the seas,' or, more truthfully, had been removed from the shops of seven London book-sellers who had combined to rig the market. Books of all kinds were dispersed at this sale, which continued de die in diem till the heptarchy was satisfied. Were the members of this pioneer combination alive now, they would weep to think that they gave away on that occasion—practically gave away—scores of what have long since become aristocrats among books. Americana were there in plenty, and some of these are now so extremely rare and valuable that they are hardly to be procured for love or money; some few, indeed, have completely disappeared, tossed lightly aside, probably by disgusted purchasers, or carted back again to the shops from whence they came, to be stacked once more till they perished utterly of damp and neglect, moth, mice and rust. On the other hand our old friends, the Puritans, revelled in grim folios bought up at prices which, the change in the value of money notwithstanding, would hardly be exceeded now. Walton's 'Biblia Sacra Polyglotta' was an immense favourite, a distinction it doubtless deserved, and, indeed, deserves yet, though we can see that Walton must have 'gone down' woefully in the last hundred years, when we come to calculate the necessaries of life that could be bought then with a piece of gold, and to contrast them with the meagre display such a sum would purchase now. The truth perhaps, is that, although education was less widely diffused in the days of the Stuarts, it was more deep and thorough. A savant was then like a huge octopus that devastates whole districts, and daily grows fatter and more bloated at the expense of everything that moves within reach of its spreading tendrils. To this effect are we taught by these ancient catalogues, which, however, do not exhaust all their interest in mere matters of prices and fashion. We can learn much from their pages and advertisements of the manners and customs of our ancestors in Bookland. It seems that there were travelling auctioneers a couple of centuries ago who prefaced their remarks with eulogies of the Mayor and Corporation of each town at which they stopped, by way, no doubt, of securing their patronage. Sales began at eight o'clock in the morning then, and went on, with a mid-day interval for refreshment, until late at night. Sometimes the auctioneer sold by the candle-end; that is to say, lit a morsel of candle on putting up some coveted volume for competition, and knocked it down to him who had bid the most when the light flickered out. This was, distinctly, an excellent method for bolstering up excitement, for every splutter must have been good for a hasty advance, regretted very possibly when the modicum of tallow entered on a fresh lease of life. When not selling by the candle-end, an auctioneer would dispose of about thirty lots in the course of an hour, and was quite willing to accept the most trifling bids. Business is more rapidly conducted now, for few auctioneers stop to curse their fate, or to regale their audience with anecdotes, as one George Smalridge, who in 1689 wrote and published a skit on the prevalent way of doing business, says was quite the usual custom in his day. His tract is written in Latin, under the title 'Auctio Davisiana,' and gives a fanciful account of the extraordinary proceedings that took place at the sale of the books of Richard Davis, an ancient bookseller of Oxford, who had fallen into the clutches of the bailiffs. The auctioneer commences with a dirge said, or perhaps sung, over the miserable Davis: 'O the vanity of human wishes! O the changeableness of fate and its settled unkindness to us,' etc. Each book is extolled at length, and there are pages of lamentation and woe as Hobbes of Malmesbury, his 'Leviathan,' 'a very large and famous beast,' is knocked down, by mistake, for the miserable sum of five pieces of silver. An exhaustive chapter on early book auctions would necessarily commence with the dispersion of the stock of Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir at Leyden in April, 1653; but the Elzevirs must look to themselves, nor are these remarks intended to be even approximately full. Rather are they discursive, and in praise of catalogues in the mass; intended merely to put someone else with more space and time at his disposal in the way of rescuing them from the neglect into which they have fallen. The next chapter is more specific, for in that we will take a very famous sale of less antiquity, and endeavour to draw comparisons between then and now. And these comparisons will perhaps be very odious, for they will necessarily appeal directly to the cupidity of every bookworm that breathes, to every book-hunter who prowls around in search of rarities, and returns home—empty handed. CHAPTER II. A COMPARISON OF PRICES. The important sale to which reference was made in the last chapter is that of the library of John, Duke of Roxburghe, which was dispersed on May 18, 1812, and forty-one following days, by Robert H. Evans, a bookseller of Pall Mall. This sale is of extreme interest for two reasons. In the first place, the collection was the most extensive, varied, and important that had hitherto been offered for sale in England, or indeed, anywhere else; and, secondly, it may fairly be regarded in the light of a connecting-link between the old state of things and the new. The Roxburghe library was not 'erected,' as Gabriel NaudÆus has it, on traditional principles; it was of a general character that appealed to all classes of book-men. On the other hand, it was not quite such a library as a collector of large means might be expected to get together at the present day, for the tendency is now to specialize, and in any case many of the books that the Duke obviously took an interest in are of such little importance now, and so infrequently inquired for, that they would most assuredly be refused admission to any private library of equal importance and magnitude. Even a general lover would hardly be likely to manifest much interest in a number of volumes on Scots law or to hob-a-nob with Cheyne, who in 1720 wrote a book on the gout, or with Sir R. Blackmore, notwithstanding that eminent physician's great experience of the spleen and vapours. That lore of this kind has its merits I dispute in no way, but it is not exactly of a kind to interest the modern collector, who, even if he aim at all branches of literature alike, would much prefer to have his legal and medical instruction boiled down, so to speak, to the compass of a good digest or cyclopÆdia. Nevertheless, May 18, 1812, is among the fasti of those who to a love of letters add a passion for books. It is the opening day of the new rÉgime—the birthday, in fact, of those who revel in first editions and early English texts. Brunet said that the 'thermometer of bibliomania'—objectionable word!—'attained its maximum in England' during these forty-two days of ceaseless hammering, and Dibdin went perfectly insane whenever he thought of this 'Waterloo among book-battles,' as he called it. Everyone of course knows the chief episode; that struggle between Earl Spencer and the Marquis of Blandford for the 1471 Boccaccio, in its faded yellow morocco binding, and how the latter carried it off for £2,260, a most idiotic price to pay, as subsequent events abundantly proved; for seven years later, when Lord Blandford's library came to be sold, the coveted volume was acquired by his former rival for considerably less than half the money. It now reposes in state at Manchester, or, as some choose to say, is in prison there, though it is perhaps too much to expect that all good things should be forcibly removed to London, as some greedy Metropolitans wish them to be. The Duke of Roxburghe's library comprised rather more than 10,000 works in about 30,000 volumes, and the auctioneer's method of classifying this large assortment was so peculiar that he feels constrained to apologize for it in a rather extensive preface. 'For instance,' says he, 'the Festyvale of Caxton, printed in two columns, of which no other copy is at present known, may be found classed with a small edition of the Common Prayer of one shilling value.' The 'Festyval' brought £105, and the little Prayer-Book, which proves to have been printed at London in 1707, 8s. 6d., which is more than it would be at all likely to sell for now. But what about Caxton's lordly tome; how much might that be expected to bring in case it should once again find its way into the open market? Judging from the present price of Caxtons, perhaps five or six times the money would not be an impossible figure, but there is no telling. It might bring more, even though it has the misfortune to belong to the second edition, for only six copies are known, and several of those are imperfect. Of the first edition of 1483, only three perfect copies are to be met with, and that is, of course, quite a different matter. The auctioneer need not, as it happens, have sought to excuse himself so energetically for placing good and bad books side by side, for the whole catalogue is arranged under subjects, and to do otherwise would have been manifestly impossible. He might, however, have entered somewhat more fully into detail as to condition and binding, for some of the books were, confessedly, 'thumbed to tatters,' and a suspicion that this or that 'lot' may be so afflicted lurks in every page of the catalogue. The first book brought to the hammer at this sale; the preliminary bombshell which, to pursue Dibdin's metaphor, was the signal for a furious cannonade, consisted of the 'Biblia Sacra GrÆca,' printed by Aldus in 1518. This is the first complete edition of the Bible in Greek, and an important book on that account. It brought £4 15s., and any book-hunter might heartily pray for half a dozen copies now, on the same terms, for the present auction value runs to about six times as much. In fact, a sound copy sold only the other day for £27. So, too, Schoiffer's Latin Bible, printed at Mayence in 1472, folio, would be considered cheap now at £8 8s., assuming nothing was wrong with it. In 1893 a copy in oak boards brought £20 exactly. On the other hand, Baskerville's Bible, Cambridge, 1763, was excessively dear at £10 15s., seeing that a very fair copy can be got at the present time for about £1 10s. Collectors of Bibles are responsible for much of the terrible confusion that takes place when we begin to draw comparisons in matters of filthy lucre. If a Bible come from a noted press, or is an original edition of its version, or very old indeed, then up goes the price, especially if it be printed in English. One would have thought that Baskerville being an Englishman, and a fine printer in his way, would have been good for much more than £1 10s. But no; he has not been dead long enough, for the collectors have made it a rule that no English Bible printed after 1717 is any good at all, and consequently that the 'Vinegar Bible' is the last book of the kind in point of date worth looking at, unless, indeed, exception be made in favour of one of the six large-paper copies of Bentham's Cambridge Bible of 1762, which are reported to have luckily escaped a conflagration. The late Mr. Dore, who was a strong man on the subject of old Bibles, says that a little research would reveal the existence of many more than the traditional half-dozen copies, so perhaps, after all, the conflagration is a myth. But if Baskerville's Bible brought what we should now consider to be an outrageous sum, what shall be said of 'The Holy Bible, illustrated with Prints, published by T. Macklin, six volumes, folio, 1800,' which went for £43, incomplete though it was. Some £2 10s. for the whole seven volumes is not at all an uncommon auction price at the present day, and this amount and more would most certainly be swallowed up by the binding alone. What it comes to is that among all these books of theology, Biblical comment, criticism, polemics, sermons, and works of the Fathers, prices have fallen since 1812, except in those cases where collectors have stepped in to rescue old Bibles, works associated with some great religious revolution, or specimens of rare typography from the presses of old and noted printers. For instance, there was here another Caxton called 'The Prouffytable boke for Mane's Soul,' folio, described as 'a beautiful copy,' which went for £140, and 'A Lytell Treatyse called Lucydarye,' 4to., Wynkyn de Worde, which brought £10. During the last dozen years the former book has appeared twice. At the Earl of Aylesford's sale in March, 1888, it brought (in company with 'The Tretyse of the Love of Jhesu Christ,' by Wynkyn de Worde, 1493) £305, and in July, 1889, an inferior copy, badly wormed, sold for £100. These are the sort of books beloved by large public libraries, which are fast swallowing up the few that remain. From a pecuniary point of view it would perhaps pay some rich book-hunter of the Lenox type to buy up everything of the kind he could lay his hands on, though the worst of speculations such as these is that the interest on the money invested has a tendency to swell the principal, and so to add enormously to the original cost. Among books that have gone down in price since the Duke of Roxburghe made his famed collection are those classical works of the ancients which were at that time all the rage. Virgil is no longer a name to conjure with, unless he happen to rank as a sound copy of the editio princeps. The first edition of Virgil was printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome, without date (1469?), and the Duke, notwithstanding the search of a lifetime, never came across a copy of that. Not more than seven copies can now be traced, and only two of these have come to the hammer for more than a hundred years. One, though imperfect, realized 4,101 francs at the La ValliÈre sale held at Paris in 1784, and the other £590 at the Hopetoun House sale at London in February, 1889. Then Homer is also a most desirable companion if he happen to have been printed at Florence, in two volumes, folio, 1488. About £100 is his price under those circumstances. Speaking generally, however, unless the printer comes to the rescue of a Greek or Latin classic, it may fairly be said to have fallen on an unappreciative generation. Scores upon scores of volumes, the very flowers of classic days, edited by Cunningham, Heyne, Person, and other first-rate scholars of the last century, are to be met with in this bulky catalogue at sums varying from £2 to £3 each. In an old book of this class, a copy of Epictetus, edited by Heyne, and published at Dresden in 1756, was a slip of paper with a memorandum of the price at which it had been purchased in 1760. It was a bookseller's bill for £1 12s., made out to one 'Mr. Richard Cosgrove,' doubtless a good customer in his day. I have the book now, and it cost me fourpence, as much as it was worth. At the Duke of Roxburghe's sale a copy of this same edition brought £1 4s. This, no doubt, is rather an extreme case, but it will serve to illustrate the general principle sought to be enunciated, namely, that eighteenth-century classics are, for the most part, but wastepaper, for the simple reason that only a comparatively small number of people can read them. The learning of the schools may be deep and thorough—to assert the contrary would be to offend many excellent scholars of our own day; but it is nevertheless extremely probable, to say the least, that there are more books of the kind than there is any demand for, and so they litter the stalls, braving the wind and rain, till they are rescued by the merest chance and given house-room for a brief space. In the opinion of many collectors the word 'poetry' only embraces English verse of a certain period, or written by certain people. The Duke's library was particularly rich in ancient English verse, lyric and dramatic, and some of the prices realized were very high. Webbe's 'A Discourse of English Poetrie,' 4to., 1586, brought £64, and 'The Paradyse of Daintie Devises,' 4to., 1580, £55. A curious collection of some thousands of ancient ballads, in three large folio volumes, sold for £477 15s. This collection, which was stated to be the finest in England, was originally formed for the celebrated library of the Earl of Oxford in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was even then supposed to excel the Pepys collection at Cambridge. It came from the Harleian Library, and was purchased and afterwards largely added to by the Duke, who managed to secure a ballad printed by Leprevik at Edinburgh in 1570, a ballad quoted in 'Hamlet,' of which no other copy was known to exist, and many other extraordinary rarities. Dibdin was present when the 'poetry' was competed for, and bought several hundred pounds' worth of books, either on his own or somebody else's account, the whole of which he could easily have stowed away in his capacious pockets. Naturally enough, the works of Shakespeare would first be turned to by anyone who held this catalogue in his hand for the first time. There are nearly three pages of closely printed entries referring to the great dramatist, and the only conclusion that can be arrived at is that in 1812 the early quartos must have been, if not exactly common, at any rate of no great rarity. It would be impossible to argue that Shakespeare was not then appreciated, for the contrary is well known to have been the fact. The late Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in after-years talked of picking up early quartos for a few shillings each, and lamented that, for some mysterious reason which he found himself unable to explain, they had suddenly become scarce. Very likely he himself had excited a keen desire to possess them in the breasts of those who read his numerous books, or—publish it not in Gath!—the bulk of them may have fallen into unappreciative hands, and been used to light the fires withal. However this may be, the early Shakespearian quartos, now of great price, were disposed of at the Roxburghe sale for only a little more, and occasionally for less, than the first editions of Marlowe, Massinger, and several other of the chief Elizabethan dramatists. A copy of the first folio sold, it is true, for £100, but the second only brought £15, the third £35, and the fourth £6 6s. This record, in the face of £84 for Boydell's edition in nine volumes, folio, 1802—a work which may now be expected to sell for £5 or £6, even with some of the illustrations after Smirke and others in proof state—is most extraordinary. But let us get to the quartos and compare the prices of then and now. The first-named are those realized at the Roxburghe sale; those in brackets are modern, and authenticated with dates and items complete. There is more scope for reflection here, and a whole volume might be written on the mutability of fashion. 'Much a-doe about Nothing,' first edition, 4to., London, 1600, £2 17s. (the Gaisford sale, April 23, 1890, £130); 'A Midsommer Night's Dreame,' first edition, 4to., 1600, £3 3s. (ibid., £116); 'The Merchant of Venice,' by Roberts, first edition, 4to., 1600, £2 14s. (the Cosens sale, November 11, 1890, £270); 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre,' 4to., 1619, 5s. (the Lakelands Library, March 12, 1891, £37); 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre,' 4to., 1635, 14s. (ibid., £15); 'Romeo and Juliet,' second, or first complete edition, 4to., 1599, £12 12s. (the Perkins sale, July 10, 1889, £164); 'King Lear,' 4to., 1608, £6 12s. (the Brayton-Ives sale, New York, March 5, 1891, $425); 'Sir John Oldcastle,' first edition, 4to., 1600, 19s. (the Gaisford sale, April 23, 1890, £46). These modern prices are small in comparison with what might have been, for none of the copies above mentioned were in the finest condition. If we want first-rate records we must go further back—to the Daniell sale, for instance, held in 1864, when thousands of pounds were paid as a matter of course for a selection of these little quarto volumes, which had successfully eluded the greasy fingers of generations of playgoers, the fires of disgusted Puritans, and the ignorance of our own people. Never shall we see nearly three thousand distinct lots of English poetry as previously defined disposed of at one single sale again, never again will prices rule so low. Many of these books are not to be met with at all in our generation, no matter what price may be offered for them, seeing that, as an old book-hunting friend used to say, they have become 'scandalously uniquitous.' In addition to early English texts, the great Duke had amassed a splendid collection of romances of the Quixotic school, known in polite circles as the Table Ronde. He was not content, it seems, with the printed editions, but also collected many manuscripts on vellum, illustrated with beautiful illuminations. Among these curious manuscripts were several which had been used and translated by the celebrated Walter de Mapes for the entertainment of his Sovereign, Henry II. The printed books of this character, some of which occasionally, though very rarely, gladden the hearts of romantic bibliophiles, included the twenty-four small volumes recounting the exploits of Amadis of Gaul, published at Lyons and Paris in 1577, etc., and also several duplicates, £16 16s. A fairly good set, without the duplicates, brought £4. 4s. in April, 1887—a dreadful drop, considering the demand there is for books of the kind. Still, this particular work has undoubtedly fallen, for another copy produced only £6 the June following. Nor, should I imagine, would 'L'Histoire du Noble Chavelier Berinus,' a quarto book printed at Paris, without date, sell for as much as £7 7s. at the present time, or 'Le Livre de Beufves de Hautonne,' folio, Paris, 1502, for £13 13s., or 'L'Histoire Merveilleuse du Grand Chan de Tartarie,' folio, 1524, for £22. The twelve pages devoted to the enumeration of works of chivalry and romance glow with the martial achievements of Palmerin of England, Godeffroy de Boulion, Perceforest, Roy de la Grande Bretaigne, Perceval le Galleys, and scores of other champions who went about rescuing damsels in distress, sleeping in enchanted castles, and challenging the whole civilized race of men, one at a time, to mortal combat. Perceforest, by the way, in six folio volumes, Paris, 1528, went for £30, a fact worthy of note, inasmuch as another copy sold, a few months ago, for £10 l0s. Of all the knights of ancient days, the regal Perceforest was the least worthy of credence, which is saying a great deal. His folios bristle with dragons, necromancers of the worst type, heroic rescues, combats with giants, devils, and all kinds of monsters who strove, and in vain, to destroy this past-master of Quixotic enterprise. That such books did at one time exercise considerable influence over adventurous spirits is undoubted. They were the only novels of the day, the only bit of light reading to be had in the interval between one tourney and another. Passing by a large and almost complete collection of the separately published works of Robin Greene, that unfortunate who bought a groat's worth of wit with a million of repentance, we come to the Voyages and Travels, and note, as before, the differences in prices. Hakluyt's 'Collection of Voyages,' 2 vols., folio, 1589-99, brought £4. 14s. 6d. (the Holding sale, January 17, 1895, £16; the Langham sale, June 19, 1894, £375, second edition, 3 vols., folio, which contained the map by Molyneux, of which only twelve copies are known. This copy belonged to the first issue, without the cartouche about Sir Francis Drake, which was subsequently added); 'Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas his Pilgrimes,' 5 vols., folio, 1625-26, £42 (the Toovey sale, February 26, 1894, £51); 'Sir Francis Drake Revived,' 1652, and 'The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake,' 1652, the two pieces 7s. (the Hawley sale, July 2, 1894, £6 5s.); 'Cooke's Voyages,' 8 vols., 4to., 1773-84, with the large plates bound in two folio volumes, £63 (December 5, 1893, at Christie's, £3 12s., and on many other occasions for about the same amount); Eden's 'History of Travayle in the West and East Indies,' London, 1577, £6 10s. (the Thornhill sale, April 15, 1889, £10 5s.; the Wimpole Sale, June 29, 1888, £18 10s., original binding); Vancouver's 'Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean,' 3 vols., 4to., and folio atlas of plates, 1798, £8 18s. (the Holding sale, January 17; l895, £5 5s.). It would be more than tedious to pursue this comparative analysis further. Suffice it to say that as a rule the prices realized in 1812 for books of travel were greater than would be realized now under similar circumstances, especially when the journeys undertaken were about the foot-worn Continent of Europe or in the various English counties. Pennant's 'Journey from Chester to London,' for example, is now a book of small account, yet the Duke of Roxburghe's copy sold for £7 15s. Works relating to America are, curiously enough, almost absent from the Duke's catalogue, and it may fairly be taken for granted that at the beginning of the present century no one cared much about them. This will explain the extreme scarcity of many of these books now, for what people think lightly of they take no care to preserve. Hundreds and thousands of Americana must have been torn to fragments or otherwise destroyed in past days. Often of small size, they would escape the notice of lovers of folios, nor is their general appearance sufficiently imposing to appeal to those who value a book strictly in proportion to its external beauty. The Duke had only a few works of travel in any way relating to America, and as the list may be interesting, I have thought it best to transcribe it verbatim et literatim: |
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