'Deer Sur i begs to state as ou i ave sume bukes their is Boosey anecdoates of fishin for wich five bob and a lang his hanglin skeches hopen to hoffers stackhouse new history of the Holy Bibel to pouns an a lot moar to order deer Sur if you be willin and i wil sen to luke at for 2£ on the nale your respectabul——.'A 'bob,' I may explain for the benefit of my American readers, is the slang equivalent of a shilling, or twenty-four cents.The following reply, full of facetiousness and loaded with cunning, came from a village near Kirkby Stephen, in Westmoreland:'SIR'Seeing your advt in the Gazete I hasten to copie out the titles of some books which have been in my family for I dont know how long. A Bookseller come up from Lancaster last Toosday and wanted to have them sore but as I could see he wanted to cheat me I thought it better tell him so in plain English which is the way of yours truly who is a wrestling man and champion chucker out of these parts round about. Am open to good offer for the lot but will sell any at following and no discount. Ellicot Lectures on J. Christ, 10s. Durny Histoir de Romans, vol. 4, 6s. Stock Exchange year Book for 1884, 7s; Ante Baccus a choise volume bound in calf, 17s. 6d. Scrope Days and Nights of Fishing 1843, 12s. The Female Parson 4s, and plenty more too numerous till I see what you are made of. Please write at once if you want any.'Yours truly——.'The upshot of this was that we said we should like to see Scrope and the 'Female Parson,' but our bellicose correspondent refused to part with either till he got the money, for he did not, he said, intend to trouble himself about useless references. So the money was sent, and in due course the books arrived, carriage not paid. The 'Female Parson,' which we had never heard of before, proved to be worthless, but Scrope's 'Salmon Fishing' was really a beautiful copy of the first edition in the original cloth, and this it was that had doubtless tempted the Lancaster bookseller.Then there was a lady in Somersetshire who kept up a correspondence for over a month. She had a splendid copy, so she said, of Sturm's 'Reflections,' which she was ready to sell for 15s. In vain was she informed that the book was not of a kind to interest us; she knew better, and persistently lowered the price, 1s. at a bid, till her letters had in sheer desperation to be put in the waste-paper basket. We found ladies, as a rule, distressing correspondents, who flatly refused to be put off with a courteous negative. With them it was simply a question of price, and had we been persuaded by their blandishments, we should soon have had a cellar full of sermons, Gospel Magazines, and all the rubbish that Time refuses to annihilate and men to buy.One of the most extraordinary letters we ever received came from a clergyman in the Midlands, whose disgust for Pierce Egan and his school was so great that he had determined to sacrifice 'Tom and Jerry' for 20s.:'DEAR SIR,'I much regret troubling you with a book which has, to me, been a source of grievous disappointment, and positive danger to my children. How anyone could have written such a wicked history of debauchery and human extravagance is indeed surprising, and I have thought many a time of consigning it to the flames, so that in a measure it might follow its disreputable author. I allude to "Life in London; or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis," by Pierce Egan. This work has, I regret to say, been in my family for very many years—more than I care to count—and I would willingly part with it, although there is nothing I dislike so much as severing old associations, however much to my distaste they may be. If you like, I will dispose of the book for £1, which perhaps, from a marketable point of view, it may be worth.'I am, dear sir,'Yours very truly——.'There is, of course, no denying that the morality of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend would have to be searched for in case its existence were seriously disputed; but it seems passing strange that so small a sum as 20s. should be able to smooth away all remembrance of the orgies of Drury Lane and the crapulence of its dirty gin vaults, cider cellars and night-houses, which had so mortally offended the worthy clergyman.He was indeed quite right in removing the book from the reach of his children; but what about our morality, and that of the person to whom, for anything he knew to the contrary, we might sell Pierce Egan's free and easy romance? The book came, and proved, as was half suspected, to be Hotten's reprint of 1869, with which lovers of this class of literature will have nothing whatever to do.Such are a few of the experiences of the Forgotten Lore Society in its efforts to rescue good but unfortunate books from the apathy of neglect. The object was a good one, though the reward was practically nil. Let us reflect for a moment that even the few books of antiquity which have come down to make us richer are for the most part imperfect, and we shall see the necessity of taking extreme care of the important ones that are written now, and of doing everything in our power to prevent their destruction at the hands of unappreciative owners.The mere fact of printed books being published in large quantities to the edition does not seem to affect the question of their existence in the long-run. All alike, good, bad, and indifferent, will go down the long road in time, and our descendants, more or less remote, will only hear of them in a casual and traditional way. Tacitus was one of the most popular Roman authors of his time, and yet he only lives to us in fragments, notwithstanding the fact that thousands upon thousands of copies of his 'History' were disseminated throughout the empire. Every public library in Rome was compelled to have at least one copy, and no fewer than ten transcriptions were made every year at the charge of the State. Plutarch wrote fourteen biographies that are missing now, and of 251 books quoted by him more than eighty are absolutely unknown. The Emperor Claudius wrote a 'History of the Etruscans,' which from the very nature of the case must have had a wide circulation; Julius Cæsar, a slashing criticism of Cato's life and acts; Lucullus, a history of the Marsi. All these have vanished. Of the forty plays of Aristophanes but eleven remain. Menander is unknown except by name, and Æschylus is in rags. Porphyry's diatribe against the Christians, the most important book of its kind that any Christian could have at his command, has vanished, and in all likelihood will never be restored.Nor need we go to ancient Greece or Rome for such instances. Several poems by Shelley have completely disappeared already, and some of Byron's have been, more than once, at their last gasp. Old English ballads and songs have been 'lost' by hundreds at a time, and nearly all the records dealing with the private life of Oliver Cromwell are missing. The story of Carlyle's 'Squire Papers' is a characteristic one, and distinctly to the point. While that author was laboriously collating the scraps of evidence relative to the great Protector that had survived the honest but mistaken zeal of triumphing Royalists, he received a letter from an unknown correspondent, who stated that he possessed a mass of Parliamentary documents, among them the diary of an ancestor, one Samuel Squire, a subaltern in the 'Stilton Troop' of Ironsides. The letter was accompanied by extracts from this diary and other papers, and went on to say that the writer, who had been brought up to regard Cromwell in the very worst possible light, and his own ancestor with shame as the aider and abettor of an atrocious crime, was undecided what to do with the originals. Several letters passed, and at last Carlyle wrote to a friend living in the neighbourhood, asking him to see his correspondent, and persuade him of his undoubted duty, which was at least to submit documents of such great importance to examination.Unfortunately, the friend was absent, and by the time he returned the papers had been destroyed. They may, of course, have had no existence, but Carlyle himself was of a contrary opinion, for later on he received a heavy packet containing copies of thirty-five letters of Oliver Cromwell, written in a style apparently contemporary, and referring to incidents that no one who had not made a careful and exhaustive study of his life and times, and who was not thoroughly conversant with all the available material, would have been in the least able to reproduce.The records were destroyed because, as the owner said, he felt that, one way or another, the manuscripts would be got from him and made public, and 'what could that amount to but a new Guy Fawkes cellar and infernal machine to explode the cathedral city where he lived, and all its coteries, and almost dissolve Nature for the time being?' Either this man was a learned forger or a singularly narrow-minded and obstinate type of destroyer whose ravages can be traced through the centuries, and whose example will never cease to be followed so long as paper remains unable to resist the assaults of the bigot and the outrages of the Goth.That will be ever, and hence it is that in all things literary preservation is the greatest of the virtues. What part of a century's product to preserve and what to destroy is a problem, not for us, but for the century to come, and for many centuries after that. In fact, it is Time's problem, which Time alone can solve.CHAPTER V.SOME HUNTING-GROUNDS OF LONDON.At the present time there are, if the Post-Office Directory is to be believed, about 450 booksellers in London; but in this computation are included publishers, stationers, and even bookbinders—in fact, almost everyone who has anything whatever to do with books—so that the figures are by no means to be relied upon. The number of booksellers who make a speciality of second-hand volumes is very much less than 450, if we include only those who follow a single business, namely, that of buying and selling books, and very much greater if we add to the list the army of general dealers who sell books occasionally, or as an adjunct to some other occupation.The real book-hunter does not follow the Directory, but his nose, which frequently leads him into strange places where there are no recognised booksellers, yet booksellers in plenty—a seeming paradox, which is readily explained by the fact that there are multitudes of what may, without offence, be called 'book-jobbers,' whose names are either not in the Directory at all, or appear there under some other designation.A man may buy up a roomful of furniture, taking the books of necessity; or a houseful, and with the mass of goods and chattels perhaps hundreds of volumes which are not thought good enough to be disposed of separately, and are therefore cleared out at a nominal figure, and retailed anywhere and everywhere as circumstance and opportunity suggest. Are these dealers, brokers, and what not, booksellers? Heaven save the mark, no! not in a specific sense; but they sell books, notwithstanding, and their shops are, in very truth, recognised hunting-grounds of the Metropolis. There are literally hundreds of them, and they are to be met with, as a rule, close together, where rents are low and the footsteps of the income-tax fiend are unknown.This is one description of bookseller, but there are several others: the man with the barrow, for instance, who works at his trade all the week, and comes out on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings in certain localities, to do what bartering he can with casual passers-by.To compare these classes with the recognised booksellers, some of whom have an immense turnover, would, of course, be absurd; but they have their uses, and instances are not wanting in which mightily successful dealers have begun in this humble manner, and literally forced their way up from the pavements of the East End or the Surrey side to more pleasant places in the West. High or low, rich or poor, their shops or stalls are alike objects of extreme interest to thousands who have learned enough to know that the best books are generally the cheapest. Whatever the size of the premises they own, they contribute in their several degrees to the wants of all classes of book-men, whose delight it is to forage for themselves, and to seek that they may find. The lordly collector who pays by cheque may or may not be a book-hunter. If not, he misses much of the pleasure that accompanies the tracking down, step by step, of some coveted volume which is, perhaps, more or less easily obtainable almost at any time in exchange for plenty of money, but is rarely met with casually.It is this tracking down, hunting which is the true book-lover's chief delight, and, needless to say, his primary object is not to secure books of great price for a nominal sum. If it were, he would at the end of a long life have few successes to report, for the search for rarities is so thorough and systematic that hardly anything of substantial pecuniary value can run the gauntlet all the way to the shop-board or the barrow. The harvest has all been gathered long ago, and nothing is now left but gleanings in fields already raked. The book-lover eliminates as far as possible the question of value from his walks abroad, and leaves his gold at home to be expended as opportunity arises in the auction-room, where open competition holds the market in a virtual equipoise, or in the shops of recognised dealers, who hold his commissions and are always on the look-out for important works. He is aware, however, that intrinsically good books are to be met with continually in all sorts of places, and it is these that he hopes to obtain, and from these that his library is most often recruited. Between one edition of some interesting or instructive book and another there may be an immense disparity in cost, but very little textual difference, or even none at all. In some cases the cheaper volume may be the more accurate of the two, and may also contain additional matter, which renders it more important and desirable from every point of view, except a sentimental one.It is the search for volumes of this kind, sound and honest, yet not aristocratic, that has kept the bookstalls open for 300 years and more, for, to be precise, we know that St. Paul's Churchyard and Fleet Street were, in addition to other less known localities, much frequented by book-men as far back as the reign of Henry VIII. In these districts Cardinal Wolsey's agents kept a sharp look-out for copies of 'A Supplicacyon for the Beggars,' which Simon Fyshe, 'a zealous man for the reformation of abuses in the Church,' had boldly published and was scattering abroad in the year 1524, and which seems to have had a stealthy run for six years, for it was not until 1530 that it was openly prohibited by proclamation. Neither Fleet Street nor St Paul's Churchyard is, however, a hunting-ground for book-men now. The former is wholly given up to newspapers and machinery, and the latter to drapers and warehousemen, and there is no room anywhere for small dealers in second-hand books.Indeed, the whole of London has been turned topsy-turvy so far as they are concerned. New localities they abhor, and the greater part of London is new, in the sense that very many old districts and streets have been rebuilt, or entirely swept away by the march of improvement and the increasing desire for wide thoroughfares and open spaces. What place more famous once than Little Britain, which during the last twenty or thirty years has swallowed up Duck Lane—another book-hunting locality—bodily? It was here that Thomas Britton, a coal-dealer, prowled around during his spare moments, pouncing upon anything and everything that took his fancy; rejoicing especially in works of magic, witchcraft, and astrology, either printed or in manuscript. The catalogue of his library is extant, and it is clear that he was a very far-sighted and keen-scented man, and one, too, who was blessed with a taste and discrimination most rare among dealers in small coal. In Little Britain 'Paradise Lost' went begging. The stalls must have been littered with the very first, or 1667, issue, for in that year the Earl of Dorset had a copy of it thrust under his nose and pressed upon him by a bookseller who complained most bitterly that he could not get rid of his stock. About the year 1760 the whole of the trade had vanished from Little Britain, though at the present time the once-famous thoroughfare boasts one bookseller and also one newsagent, the sole representatives of past times. As for the rest of the denizens, they follow the more prosaic occupations of builders, bootmakers, butchers, hairdressers, restaurant-keepers and publicans, the last-named being especially in evidence. In this locality, as in many others, the thirst for knowledge has been quenched, and the thirst for beer become almighty.So, too, Moorfields was once classic ground, as also the Poultry, but both places have been dead to bookish fame this hundred years. There are now no booksellers' shops in the Poultry, though Moorfields just saves itself, for it rejoices in the presence of a music publisher and a stationer. Speaking generally, the second-hand book trade has been driven bodily out of the central and eastern parts of London, and has settled itself in the streets west of Temple Bar and Holborn Viaduct, always avoiding the Strand, which, for some reason or other, has ever been regarded as an inhospitable quarter. There are certainly booksellers' shops in this important thoroughfare, three, I believe, is the precise number, but they are hardly sufficient to invest it with the dignity and title of a 'locality.'In contrast to this, Holborn and the streets adjoining have always been a good hunting-ground, and are so to-day. 'The Vision of Piers Plowman' was printed and sold in Ely Rents so long ago as 1550, and Snow Hill and Gray's Inn Gate were both world-wide localities, though the glory of all these places has since departed. Up to within five years ago there was a shop on the right-hand side of Gray's Inn Lane, just out of Holborn, given up chiefly to the sale of newspapers. It is shut up now, and, according to all accounts, will never be opened again, which is a pity, for it is a shop, or more probably the curtailment of much larger premises, with a notable history. Here, in 1750 or thereabouts, carried on business one Thomas Osborne, who, although ignorant to a degree, brutal in his manners, and surly beyond description, managed to build up the largest business of its kind in London, or, indeed, anywhere else. Customers ignored Tom Osborne's curses, and bought his books when they could, for sometimes, when particularly morose, he would shut himself up, like a hermit, 'with his lumber,' as a historian of the day termed the thirty whole libraries which he had amassed, and refuse to treat at all. Nevertheless, Osborne prospered exceedingly, and in the latter years of his life was the owner of a country house and 'dog and duck shootings,' all purchased and kept up from the profits derived from this shop in Gray's Inn Lane. The prices he asked were the most he thought he had the remotest chance of getting, and were often outrageous and extortionate, though at other times very much below what he might have obtained had he known his business properly. He seems to have taken a bird's-eye view of his stock, and to have appraised the value of individual books, not by reference to their rarity, but by means of a fractional calculation based upon the total cost—a rough-and-ready method of trading which attracted book-buyers from every part of London, and reconciled them to his insolence. Though Osborne was not the first dealer to issue a catalogue—one T. Green, of Spring Gardens, being credited with having revived, in 1729, this time-worn method of selling books—he carried on a more extensive business in this way than anyone who had preceded him, and in addition had the supreme honour of being knocked down by Dr. Johnson with a huge folio which the latter wanted to buy, and he (Osborne) refused to sell at any price. Either of these claims to distinction would have made the fortune of any man. It is stated by Sir John Hawkins that the book which Dr. Johnson wielded with such effect was the 'Biblia Greeca Septuaginta,' printed at Frankfort in 1594. The identical volume was in the possession of Thorpe, a Cambridge bookseller, in 1812, but what has become of it since I do not know.Though Osborne's shop, or what remains of it, is now closed, the neighbourhood is still as largely interested in the sale of books as ever, or perhaps even more so, for there has been an immigration from other quarters of London which improvements have converted into uncongenial ground.The new Law Courts and their approaches stand upon the sites of Butchers' Row, Shire Lane, where Elias Ashmole lived, and countless courts and alleys beside. Clare Market has vanished within the last two or three years, and Clement's Inn, with its narrow passages and dingy chambers, has been entirely rebuilt. Even Drury Lane, sacred to the memory of an army of general dealers who, up to within a comparatively short time ago, bought books by weight, is now past praying for to all appearances, for hardly a book of any kind is to be met with from one end of this grimy thoroughfare to the other. Let us walk into Bozier's Court, which is further to the west, and we miss the shop which Lord Lytton has immortalized in 'My Novel'; in fact, the court itself is plastered all over with advertisement posters, and awaits the wreckers, for it is doomed. King William Street, Strand, was a booksellers' resort for a century and more, but the fraternity are leaving one by one, and only a very few are to be met there now. Westminster Hall, for centuries a virtual library, is shut up, and echoes spring from its stones when any casual stranger, armed with an order, is allowed to ramble through Rufus's deserted pile. In fact, wherever we stray, north, south, east, or west, we are forced to the conclusion that London has changed so utterly within the last twenty or thirty years that it is to all intents and purposes a different place.And the booksellers appear to have changed, too, for there are no 'characters' among them, or, at any rate, very few. Every now and then you will meet with some strange mortal, who looks as though he had been transported bodily from the last century and tumbled unceremoniously into a brand new shop, with coloured glass above the portal, and fresh paint about the front; but you have hardly time to ruminate on the mutability of things under the sun and he is gone, to make way, perhaps, for a dealer in something superlatively new. An antiquary of the stamp of Francis Grose, the 'chiel' who went about taking notes, would stand aghast, then hasten to depart, could he but see the London of to-day.It must not, however, be supposed that book-hunting as a pastime is extinct in modern Babylon. On the contrary, there are yet plenty of nooks and corners, and pestilential-looking alleys, that Death and the jerry-builder have apparently forgotten, and these places, we may be certain, harbour many folios. As a fact, I know they do; for in my time, and to some extent even yet, I have been and am a wanderer about such places, and have, on occasion, picked up many interesting mementos there. What I merely wish to insist upon is that the older and recognised localities, which our fathers would naturally have visited a couple of decades or more ago in their search for old books, are not those which would, as a rule, afford much scope for enterprise now. We must go further afield, and not expect to find a mass of stalls huddled together in a single street, as though one locality had tapped and drained the life-blood of the rest. Circumstances have changed, and at the close of the nineteenth century booksellers have, to a great extent, ceased to be gregarious, except in Holywell Street, or, as it is more generally called, 'Booksellers' Row,' once the abode of literary hacks and bailiff-haunted debtors, which even yet has an old-world look with its overhanging houses and narrow roadway. Here there certainly is a long double procession of bookshops, many open to the street, every one of them crammed from floor to ceiling with great piles of lore.And Holywell Street, be it said, is such historic and classic ground, that it is threatened every day by the improver, who longs to lay its north side open to the Strand, and will, we may be sure, effect his purpose in the end. It was here that Lord Macaulay used to take his walks abroad in search of books. As a rule he began and ended there; for a whole day's pilgrimage would not suffice to unearth more than a fractional part of the immense store of volumes that the labour of years had accumulated, and which was continually being decimated and renewed. In his day there were more books to be seen and handled there than now, for some of the shops have since been devoted to other trades. In Holywell Street John Payne Collier was as well known as his own 'History of English Dramatic Poetry,' which, nearly sixty years ago, littered the stalls, doubtless to his great disgust, seeing that to be in evidence there to any extent was then, as now, proof positive that the 'remainder-man' had been at work, to the bane of the author and publisher alike. Mr. W. Roberts, in his charming 'Book-hunter in London,' narrates that Collier once picked up in Holywell Street for the merest trifle a copy of John Hughes's 'Calypso and Telemachus,' an opera in three acts, first published in 1712, which contained thirty-eight unpublished couplets in the handwriting of Pope. Halliwell-Phillipps was also an inveterate rambler up and down this thoroughfare, and several of his Shakespearean quartos came from there in days when these small but almost priceless volumes were not so widely and persistently sought for as they are now. In fact, we have it in his own words that when he first began to collect anything and everything that related in whatever degree to the great dramatist, these early quartos were frequently to be met with at prices which, comparatively speaking, sound simply ludicrous in our ears. Should anyone rescue a copy now from some forgotten lumber-room, the fact is heralded by the press, and accounted most extraordinary, as indeed it is; for everyone, the world over, is on the look-out for rarities such as these. Though Holywell Street yet stands, and does a thriving trade among the bookish, let not anyone think that much is to be got for nothing there. On the contrary, the dealers who inhabit it are better versed than most people in the importance of each and every book they part with or throw into the boxes which receive the outcasts of literature. There are, however, good and valuable books by the thousand to be met with by anyone who does not object to pay a fair and reasonable price for them. To this extent, and in this particular, is Booksellers' Row the queen of London streets. From these remarks I except, of course, the extremely important shops of the West-End dealers into which correspondence flows from every part of the world.This chapter is devoted to the 'Hunting-grounds' of London, and I deny that a collector who gives a standing order either verbally or by letter to a bookseller for some work he particularly wants is a book-hunter at all, at least so far as that particular transaction is concerned. To my mind Nimrod must handle his own bow and not entrust it to a deputy, even though he might by the rules of the chase be absolutely entitled to the quarry which the skill of the latter had brought down. Let him go where he will, East or West, the point of the compass makes no matter, he is a hunter only when he prosecutes his own inquiries and carries out in person all his arrangements. So we will avoid the great firms of book-sellers, although it may be taken for granted that almost any scarce work could be procured sooner or later from them, and go off on a chase in which we shall never, in all human probability, meet with any great prize, and may have to be satisfied with a little, that little, however, being much from many points of view.At the present day books of all sorts are to be met with in great profusion in Farringdon Street. 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. Personally I never met with a really scarce book in Farringdon Street, but three years ago—and I mention this at the risk of being charged with travelling from the subject—I bought there the undoubtedly original study by Sir Joshua Reynolds for the portrait of the Right Honourable George Seymour Conway, afterwards Lord George Seymour Conway. The portrait was painted in 1770, and engraved in mezzotint by Edward Fisher the year following. The study is in oils, on thick paper of about twelve inches in height, and is so remarkable as a work of art, that it is a wonder it could have escaped recognition for an hour, instead, as was the fact, for a whole morning.Should Farringdon Street prove unpropitious, Sunday morning in any week will see Lambeth Marshes and the New Cut, both on the Surrey side, crowded with barrows, and the same remark applies to the streets about the Elephant and Castle on Saturday evenings when the weather is fine. Generally speaking, the peripatetic book-seller is only to be met with on the first and last days of the week, but that he does manage to turn over a considerable part of his stock in the short time available is not to be doubted. He may not change—many of these men have haunted the same spot for years, and have their recognised stands—but his stock is, in one sense, ever new. A few months ago I saw in the Whitechapel Road a hand-cart full of small vellum-bound volumes, which proved to be Greek and Latin classics, printed in Paris a couple of centuries ago. The covers were remarkably fresh and clean, and somebody or other, or rather a succession of owners, must have taken the greatest care of these little books, which had thus ignobly fallen into the gutter at last. Next week at the same hour, they had all gone, having been disposed of to the more learned inhabitants of Bethnal Green at 2d. apiece.If, however, wandering about the East End of London is not to the taste of the picker-up of unconsidered trifles, there is still the more primitive kind of shops to be visited. Great Turnstile still boasts a bookseller or two, and it was here, it will be remembered, that John Bagford, many years ago, divided his attention between making boots and shoes and ripping out the title-pages of the books that fell into his sacrilegious hands. He failed as a cobbler, but succeeded in amassing the most disreputable collection of titles that has ever been got together. The arch-Vandal failed in everything but his Vandalism, and surely any success is better than none at all. It is said of him that he searched all his life for one of Caxton's impossible title-pages, and died of disappointment, a story which is probably a gross libel on his accomplishments, for Bagford was not by any means an uneducated man.Then, Little Turnstile hard by is worth a casual visit, and there are many shops in the streets extending east and west of St. Martin's Lane where books are to be bought in almost any number. The newly-built Charing Cross Road appears to be under a cloud; in fact, at this point we must turn back again, and make direct for Holborn, Bury Street, and the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square and Queen Square.In Red Lion Passage there are several of the quaintest shops imaginable, one of them kept by a dealer who appears to have a mania for the very largest folios, though I notice that of late he has somewhat fallen away from his traditional custom in this respect. The books stand on their sides on the floor in columns of about six feet high; they are piled on and under the counter, and are seen peeping out of the black darkness of a room beyond. Petrarch would have avoided this shop lest history should repeat itself, and a folio break, not his leg merely this time, but his neck.On the other side of the Passage is another temple of gloom and mystery, for it must be observed that the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square is generally in semi-darkness all the year round, except in the winter, and then it is frequently impossible to see at all when once the streets are left. The proprietors of this shop issue a periodical catalogue, which can be taken from a box at the door, and it may safely be said that there is no catalogue issued in London by anyone which is better worth glancing over than this, notwithstanding an occasional misprint or two. The books are, generally speaking, of such an unusual and out-of-the-way kind that one cannot help wondering where they all come from. For instance, 'Ben Johnson's English Dictionary, 8vo., 1732,' must be a remarkable volume, and the 'Wuremberg Chronicle, folio, numerous wood-cuts, 1493,' equally curious. Then there is 'Peasson on the Creed,' 'Jewels, ——, Works, folio, 1611,' 'Locke, Humane Understanding, folio, 1706,' 'Staunton: Shakispear,' and so onad infinitum. Throughout the prices are moderate, extremely moderate; that, at any rate, is a fact worthy of distinct recognition, and some of the books, too, are anything but easy to procure, as witness Chaucer's Works, folio, 1602, which is priced at £1 10s., Grafton's Chronicle, folio, 1569, £1 5s., Swan's 'Speculum Mundi,' 4to., 1670, 3s., and many others. Dark though this shop may be to gaze upon, I regard it as a typical book-man's paradise.Paternoster Row, further east still, is now of course, the headquarters of the publishers, though several second-hand booksellers still linger there. Before the Great Fire reduced the whole district to ashes they had it all their own way, and when the Row was rebuilt they flocked there once more, to be gradually elbowed out by giant houses which sell books wholesale. There is one shop in this thoroughfare so completely wedged up with books that it is a somewhat difficult matter to enter in at the door. Nobody who is not in the daily habit of passing by could avoid stopping to glance at the rows of volumes which the proprietor has reared up against a wall round the corner that leads into St. Paul's Churchyard, for he has decorated them with innumerable strips of paper writ large with pieces of advice on things in general, quotations from classical writers, the Bible and the Koran, which, though they have for the most part nothing whatever to do with the sale of books of any kind, attract by reason of their quaintness and the strangeness of their being.And so we might go wandering for ever about New London, passing on every side the shadows of the old, but seeing little of the substance. Book-men of the true stamp are antiquaries, to whom novelty is abhorrent. The pleasantest places are to them those which time has consecrated with a gentle touch, and which reflect all their imaginings, even as they echo their footsteps. These are departing under the mandate of an inexorable law, and we go with them.CHAPTER VI.VAGARIES OF BOOK-HUNTERS.Ten or fifteen years ago it was quite usual to meet with collections of title-pages formed by followers of the immortal Bagford. These were to be seen quoted in booksellers' catalogues and displayed in the auction rooms, and were commonly disposed of for small sums of money—small, that is to say, in comparison with what would have been realized for the books themselves had they been allowed to remain in that state of life to which the author and others had called them. Of late, collections of title-pages have not been very much in evidence anywhere, for it is universally felt that there is little or no romance surrounding the slaughter even of folios, to say nothing of smaller-sized victims, and for that reason these scrappy collections are huddled out of sight like family skeletons. The book-hunter of the present day has his foibles, it is true, but he has learned by experience and from the expostulatory remarks of others that wild freaks are completely out of place in a library, and so it has come to pass that books are treated in a different way from what they were only a couple of decades ago, and no one who has the smallest respect either for himself or his vocation would now either care or dare to form a collection of title-pages. Should he happen to own one either by purchase or under circumstances beyond his control, he will produce it, if at all, with apologies and sighs. It is abundantly manifest that the wicked man hath turned away from much of his wickedness.The reason of this tremendous transformation must be put down to the credit of a rule which, though formulated and preached at one time by the elite only, has been insisted upon with such pertinacity that it has gradually become diffused throughout the whole world of collectors, no matter to what objects of interest they may direct their attention. This rule is, that taste and the pocket alike demand that be a book good, bad, or indifferent in its externals, it shall, nevertheless, be left untouched by its owner, who is but its temporary custodian, and a trustee for others who shall come after him. To rip out the title-page, no matter with what object, is an outrage on decency which, it is pleasant to find, is now appraised at its proper pitch of enormity. If the stamp-collector rejoice in the possession of a specimen with 'original gum,' and rate its interest and value higher on that account, shall the book-collector, who is the oldest, the most learned, and the most aristocratic of all collectors, give place in the matter of common-sense and discretion to the product of a frivolous age? Shall he cut initial letters from missals and other manuscripts, and insult the shades of Fust and Schoeffer by making a senseless collection of colophons? These things were in vogue at one time, but are now frowned down even by the most ignorant of mortals, since, to put the matter on no higher ground, the money value of old books has considerably increased of late years to his certain knowledge, and he believes that anything with curious type, the f's made so—ƒ, and villainous prints scattered about the text, mustex necessitate reibe worth its weight in gold, and perhaps more. What a contrast is this little false, but preventative, store of knowledge to the crass stupidity of the early years of the present century, as exemplified in the persons of the Bishops, Canons, and Chaplains of Lincoln Cathedral, who permitted the choir-boys to collect illuminated initials, and with that object to cut up with their pen-knives scores of vellum manuscripts. A good many of the Caxtons from this same Cathedral were purchased by Dibdin for the Althorpe collection, and will be found catalogued in 'A Lincolne Nosegaye.' The Dean and Chapter, knowing little about books, and caring less, had disposed of them all for a 'consideration,' and thus without thought stripped themselves of their choicest possessions next to the Cathedral itself.Of a truth, books have only recently come to be regarded as possessing a sentimental value altogether distinct from considerations of utility, and it is only within the compass of a comparatively few years that collectors have sprung up from the very stones to cry aloud, and to protest against such wanton acts of mutilation or destruction as the records of past days almost choke themselves in the echoing of. Only a little while ago 'Grangerizing' was the favourite pastime of thousands of persons of elegant leisure, as Griswold called the lazy dullards of his generation, and what this involved would be whispered in corners but for the fact that it was for 200 years unblushingly shouted in the open day.During all that period the teachings of the genuine bibliophiles had so passed from deed and truth into mere monotony of unbelieved phrase that no English was literal enough to convert the persons who went about seeking material, at vast expense, wherewith to extra-illustrate some inane book of polemics or proverbs.Nicholas Ferrar, who kept the 'Protestant Nunnery' at Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, was, I believe, the inventor of a system which was not fully developed until the publication of Granger's 'Biographical History of England,' but which is, nevertheless, directly or indirectly responsible for the condition of most of the imperfect volumes which are met with at every turn. The story of Nicholas Ferrar, assuming it to be true, which there is little reason to doubt, makes it clear that King Charles I. was as bad as or worse than anybody in this matter, for, had he not affected to admire the handiwork of this first and chief of sinners, the baneful practice of mutilating books for the sake of their illustrations, title-pages, or frontispieces, might never have become an aristocratic amusement, sanctified by tradition, and ennobled far beyond its deserts by kingly patronage. The Concordance which Ferrar showed the King escaped the wrath of the fanatic Hugh Peters and his crew, and, after many vicissitudes, is now safely lodged in the British Museum, a warning to all who may at any time seek to revive a practice which would, in these days of emulation and competition, burn with a white heat.In Wordsworth's 'Ecclesiastical Biography' the story of Nicholas Ferrar is set out at length. There is no need to enter into minute details, as the tale has since become stereotyped, and is found reproduced in a dozen different places at least. Shortly, it appears that in June, 1634, King Charles I. was staying with the Earl of Westmorland at Apethorpe, and from thence sent one of his gentlemen to the home of Nicholas Ferrar, hard by, to 'intreat' a sight of a Concordance which he had heard had recently been completed. When Ferrar was on the Continent some time previously, he had bought up a great number of prints by the best masters, illustrative of historical passages of the Old and New Testaments, and these he afterwards used for ornamenting various compilations of the Scriptures, among them a 'full harmony or concordance of the four Evangelists, adorned with many beautiful pictures, which required more than a year for the composition, and was divided into 150 heads or chapters.'This was the Concordance that King Charles was so anxious to look at, and which, indeed, he admired so much that he never rested until he had obtained one like it for his own library. Both books are now in the British Museum, the original having been acquired about three years ago, and the one in the King's Library from George II., who had inherited the royal collection of books and manuscripts.From the point of view of Nicholas Ferrar, there was certainly no harm in this process of extra-illustrating. There is no reason to believe that he had gone about tearing out plates from books, or done anything else which in any respect, save one, could be regarded as objectionable in the slightest degree. There was, and is, however, one objection to his procedure, namely, the very bad example he set to unscrupulous people who, in after years, rose up in their thousands and commenced to rip and tear with diabolical enterprise. These were the days of Granger's 'Biographical History of England'—hence the verb to Grangerize—when people went about searching for portraits of celebrities mentioned in the text to paste between the leaves in their proper places. If Granger incidentally mentioned that someone had been conveyed to the Tower, and subsequently had the good fortune to escape out of a certain window, books would be ransacked and mutilated to provide illustrations of (1) the Tower of London from the N., S., E. or W., as the case might be; (2) portrait of the prisoner; (3) view of the window from which he let himself down; and finally, if, Laus Deo, a letter in his handwriting or a section of the rope which had made his escape possible could only be unearthed, great was the joy in the camp of the Philistine.This mania for Grangerizing grew till it assumed enormous proportions. One enthusiast tried to illustrate Rees' 'Cyclopaedia,' but died before he had accomplished very much in comparison with what remained to be done. Mr. Crowle's copy of Pennant's 'History of London' cost that gentleman £7,000 from first to last, and there is a book of this kind in the Bodleian which has engulfed nearly double that amount. It consists of Clarendon's 'History of the Rebellion' swollen to sixty-seven large volumes, representing forty years of intense application. The vagaries of a whole army of book-collectors are reflected from every page of works such as these, for a man must necessarily be a book-collector first, and a Grangerizer after, else would material fail him. Happily for the peace of books, the mania for extra-illustrating has practically died out. The expense is too great, life too short, the knowledge and taste—of a kind—too laborious to acquire, to endow this pastime with a permanent and stable interest.And yet there is another vagary, eccentricity, freak, or what you will, which, for cool, deliberate folly, has never been equalled even among Ferrar's admirers. The fun in this case consists in wilfully destroying a certain number of scarce and valuable books in order to heighten the importance and value of the survivors. Three or four collectors whose tastes are similar—that is to say, who accumulate works by the same author—will take stock of their belongings. 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. They make a 'pool' of all the volumes which are not immaculate; complete or perfect as many of them as possible, apportion them, and destroy the remainder. They will burn a work which is perfect, provided each has a copy in better condition, and this is to prevent you or me, or anyone else, from sharing in their sacrilegious joy. When we reflect that, from the nature of things, it is only the scarcest books that can be so treated with effect, we shall begin to realize the sinister importance of the act. Practices such as these are the product of the present age; they are not common, far from it, but they are not unusual. And yet the perpetrators mean no harm, for, as they would very truly say, if their practices were generally known and complaint were made, 'You can, if you like, read So-and-so without the least difficulty, for his works have been reprinted many times, and it is not either essential or advisable that the very scarcest edition of all should be in your hands.' There is in this argument a little logical force, but no decency for anyone to dissect.Bookmen of the present day, or at least those among them who aspire to the highest seats in the collectors' Pantheon, are invariably bound by rule, and it is this hard and fast bondage that makes them do things which, if left to themselves, they would probably be the first to deprecate. To accumulate any considerable number of really scarce books is the labour of a lifetime, and to obtain immaculate copies necessitates not merely the possession of plenty of money, but a very great deal of energy, discrimination, and tact. The old school of general lovers is dying out. People now very seldom buy up whole libraries, or send out colossal orders to gratify a mere love of possession. They work by the book of arithmetic, cautiously, slowly, and with one main object ever in view. In this they are right, but in this also they fail, a paradox which is no paradox at all when it is remembered that book-hunters are of many kinds and of varying degrees of intelligence.For instance, though there is undoubtedly something unique and strange about the very appearance of a library of extremely diminutive books, the collector of works of this kind is 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd,' within the compass of about two square inches at the most, and probably does not expect to derive either instruction or amusement from their pages when he has succeeded in reading them with the aid of a microscope. His rule is inflexible. Shakespeare in folio must give place to 'The Mite'; 'The English Bijou Almanac' for 1837 is, in his eyes one of the choicest of all volumes. Here literature and the rule are in conflict, and books become bric-à-brac, as they must do when any rule is too rigidly applied to them. Yet there are many collectors of small books both here and abroad, and prices rule inordinately high in consequence.Very probably 'The Mite' is the smallest book printed from movable type in the world. Its size is only 3/8 in. by 3/4 in., and it would certainly be an exceedingly difficult matter to reduce this measurement. If anybody could do so, it would be M. Salomon of Paris, who has long been a collector of these microscopical curiosities, or the trustees of the British Museum, who have a box full of them. In 1781 a little book called the 'Alarm Almanac' made its appearance in Paris, and though printed with movable type and not engraved, like nearly all these little works are, measured only 19 millimetres by 14. There are very nearly 25-1/2 millimetres to the inch, and this specimen consequently runs 'The Mite' very close indeed. The 'English Bijou Almanac' for 1837, however, completely eclipses both, but unfortunately it is engraved and not printed from type. This book measures 3/4 in. in height, 1/2 in. wide, and 1/8 in. in thickness. The authoress was 'L.E.L.,' Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an almost forgotten poetess, whose sad marriage and untimely death are known to only a few students of Victorian literature. Some of her poems were printed in the 'Bijou' for the first and only time, so that this tiny volume is of some literary importance. Its title is so minute that a magnifying glass is necessary to read it. Its thirty-seven leaves are devoted,inter alia, to several pages of music and some portraits, including one of James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist. Even small books have a history and an importance of their own, but to collect them to the exclusion of every other book is surely a pronounced 'vagary.'M. Salomon has more than 200 specimens, but then he does not absolutely confine his attention to midgets. I never knew nor heard of more than one collector who was so infatuated as to do so, and he had forty-five volumes of the kind, all different, in which he took such extreme delight that he was ever on the look out for more.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.He has a book bound in what looks like dry and hard parchment, warped with damp, and stained here and there with reddish brown. It is a copy of Johnson's 'Lives and Adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, and Street Robbers, etc.,' printed in folio in 1736, a scarce book at any time, but under existing circumstances past praying for. The parchment is human cuticle, stripped from the back of a criminal who had swung at Tyburn for a series of atrocious butcheries, which are chronicled with considerable minuteness in the pages of the 'Newgate Calendar.' When the corpse was cut down it was, according to the custom then prevailing, carted 'home,' and exhibited to gaping crowds at so much a head, and finally sold to the surgeons. From them a prior owner of this delightful volume obtained the skin, which, when tanned, formed an appropriate and never-to-be-forgotten binding, to all appearances sweating great smears of blood. It is only the damp, of course, or perhaps some defect in the curing process, which is responsible for these blemishes; but they seem to cry for vengeance, still greater and greater vengeance, against an inhuman wretch long since departed more or less in peace.This is the only gruesome thing in the library, and I know as a fact that it excites more interest than all the rest of the books put together, though many, not to say most, of them are distinctly worthy of the closest attention. One volume belonged to Charles Lamb, who has made a perfect wreck of it, and half a dozen or more have the signature of 'Will Shakespere' scribbled in an Elizabethan hand on the title-pages, and in all sorts of places. These were once among the choicest possessions of Samuel Ireland, of Norfolk Street, Strand, the father of William Henry Ireland, a liar and a solicitor's clerk, who, as all the world knows, was for a time, and in very truth, mistaken for the great dramatist himself. Then there are books with inscriptions, undoubtedly genuine, of Bradshaw the regicide, Algernon Sidney, and many other persons of the highest political eminence in their day; books, too, which have belonged to Young the poet—distinguishable at a glance by the multitude of turned-down leaves—and the unfortunate Louis XVI.This library is, of its kind, perhaps as important as any that has ever been formed, and yet it only numbers some 250 volumes, so supremely difficult is it, as a rule, to trace the possession even of books for more than a generation or two. Great men have ever been chary of their names, or at least it would seem so from the number of unimportant signatures and inscriptions we meet with day by day.A long and very interesting chapter might be written on 'Inscriptions in Books,' and it must be confessed that a really important signature or comment adds so very appreciably to the sentimental value of the volume in which it is found, that it is not surprising that Oliver Wendell Holmes conjured up a pleasant train of reflection, in his inimitable style, based upon the name of a former owner of his own copy of the 'Colloquies of Erasmus,' which, by the way, my friend is extremely anxious to possess himself of, but will probably never obtain. In this instance the personality of the 'Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table' obscures all else, and gives the book a distinct history of its own—a history that invests it with an importance and value it could never claim of itself. To find out all we can about the former owners of books which we ourselves take pleasure in is no frivolous task, and the pity is that our opportunities for doing so are limited. The book-plate has very nearly put an end to owner's autographs, and being easy to remove, affords little or no guarantee of ownership. And book-plates have been in use in this country for more than 200 years.No doubt everyone who has anything to do with books, whether as writer, producer, or collector, can call to mind the eccentricities of his neighbours with regard to them. I call it extremely eccentric conduct on the part of any man to persist in collecting odd volumes, and to studiously ignore complete sets. Yet I knew an old gentleman—now dead, and his books littering the stalls of Farringdon Street and elsewhere—who did this, year after year, and for many years, with the inevitable result. He was fond of literature, and the pleasure he derived in reading was part and parcel of his existence.It was an axiom with him, however, that anything which is worth having, and any knowledge worth acquiring, must be laboriously worked for; and he would instance numerous authorities who have taught this truth by example as well as by precept. He would say, 'If I go out and buy a Bible for £500, because it is old and scarce, do you think I shall derive as much benefit and solace from its pages as if I had invested a trifle with the fixed determination to read what I had acquired and to follow its teachings?''No, certainly not,' is the obvious and truthful reply to that; but this would appear to be different from buying one volume of, say, Pope's works when there ought to be twenty, and trusting to enterprise not unmingled with luck to discover the remaining nineteen. To this, however, he would not agree, and, to do him justice, he did not preach one thing and perform another. His theory was that, if the perusal of an odd volume leads the reader to long for the possession of its fellows, it is better that he should search for them until he finds them, than that he should have them to his hand, as it were, ready made.Carlyle intimated that a man had far better study the title-page of any book worth the trouble of looking at than read the whole text with a vacant mind, and no doubt he was right, though this, too, seems to be an entirely distinct matter from the general principle that nothing can be learned without a maximum of inconvenience. Such a conclusion is rather a straining of the position insisted upon by Nero's tutor, that no one should collect more books than he can read, and that a multitude of books only distracts the mind. Therefore was it that Francis Bissari in the year 1750 designed a plate, which he pasted in the few volumes he possessed, and which consequently is now extremely scarce. 'Ex-Libris civis Francisci Bissari,' he says, 'Distrahit animum librorum multitude, itaque cum legere non possis quantum habueris, sat est habere quantum legas. Seneca. Ep. 2.'Still, as I have intimated, the old gentleman had his way and his day, and when he died his books were all despatched to the auction rooms. It took three men more than a week to pack them in boxes. There were books under every bed in the house, and every nook and cranny was full of them. There were, altogether, many thousands of volumes, and nearly all were odd. If a series were found to be complete, as sometimes happened, it was sure to be made up of volumes belonging to different editions, and, naturally enough, in different bindings. The auctioneers did what they could, and sold the vast majority in 'parcels' for a mere song, which in truth was all they were worth.This peculiar form of book-collecting, though apparently strange, is, and always has been, very usual, for the vast majority of readers are poor. One volume will cost less, proportionately, than the complete set of which it forms part; and, moreover, we are again face to face with the argument that it is better to master the contents of one volume than to have a mere superficial knowledge of a dozen or more. The only thing is that, as the world wags at present, the advice is erratic, and the system of buying books in sections one that cannot be recommended. If we could be sure of a hundred years of life, then things might be different.Sed Ars longa, vita brevis est.And so it happens that the vagaries of book-hunters are often passing strange. Some, like Sir Thomas Phillipps, will buy largely, and never even open the cases in which they arrive. 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. Some collectors—realbonâ-fidecollectors these—start life with strong opinions as to the usefulness of books, and, after the manner of Grolier, though without his discretion, open their doors to all sorts and conditions of men, only to close them later with a firm resolve that, come what come may, they will never again allow any friend whomsoever even to gaze upon their store. Some, too, are so deeply immersed in their all-absorbing hobby that they have no clear conception of the difference betweenmeumandtuum. Estimable in every respect but one, and scrupulously honest to a degree in all matters of daily intercourse, they yet fail in this one supreme trial. And yet they are absolved; for these unfortunates are not thieves but eccentrics, who would no more think of selling the objects they have mistaken for their own, than they would of getting wealth by false pretences. Pope Innocent X., when still Monsignor Pamphilio, was found in the possession of a book he could not satisfactorily account for, and the ludicrous part of the matter was that Du Moustier, who claimed that it had been abstracted from his library, was subsequently proved to have stolen it himself. Then, again, Catherine de Medici sequestered the entire library of Marshal Strozzi, and on complaint promised to pay for it by instalments, which, of course, she never did. Hearne hints more than once that Sir Thomas Bodley was eccentric, and when Moore, Bishop of Ely, and father of English Black-Letter Collectors, went to dine with a bibliophile, as was his wont, the latter would, if he were wise, spend the morning in removing out of sight, and, therefore, out of temptation's way, the choicest of his possessions. But the king of all these suspicious characters was Libri, who, as Inspector-General of French Libraries, under Louis Philippe, presented himself, from first to last, with books of the value of more than £20,000, among them a fine MS. of the Pentateuch, which he sold to the late Lord Ashburnham on condition that it was not to be published for twenty years. In 1868 the time expired, and then the matter was traced home, to his memory's shame.This conduct of Libri in selling what did not belong to him puts him, indeed, on a level, in point of turpitude, with the young divinity student of Chicago commonly called 'The Champion Biblioklept of America.' In vastness of conception the latter was a mere tyro, for he only stole a few hundred books of small value from the Chicago Public Library. The motive of both men was, however, the same, and it was that which, according to some consciences, made them thieves. After all, it is this motive that must be primarily considered in all ethical questions such as those which underlie, to some extent at least, the vagaries of every book-hunter who ever was born to hunger and thirst for Caxton's types, and paper white as snow, bound in a dream by the Gascon's magic touch.
'Deer Sur i begs to state as ou i ave sume bukes their is Boosey anecdoates of fishin for wich five bob and a lang his hanglin skeches hopen to hoffers stackhouse new history of the Holy Bibel to pouns an a lot moar to order deer Sur if you be willin and i wil sen to luke at for 2£ on the nale your respectabul——.'
A 'bob,' I may explain for the benefit of my American readers, is the slang equivalent of a shilling, or twenty-four cents.
The following reply, full of facetiousness and loaded with cunning, came from a village near Kirkby Stephen, in Westmoreland:
'SIR
'Seeing your advt in the Gazete I hasten to copie out the titles of some books which have been in my family for I dont know how long. A Bookseller come up from Lancaster last Toosday and wanted to have them sore but as I could see he wanted to cheat me I thought it better tell him so in plain English which is the way of yours truly who is a wrestling man and champion chucker out of these parts round about. Am open to good offer for the lot but will sell any at following and no discount. Ellicot Lectures on J. Christ, 10s. Durny Histoir de Romans, vol. 4, 6s. Stock Exchange year Book for 1884, 7s; Ante Baccus a choise volume bound in calf, 17s. 6d. Scrope Days and Nights of Fishing 1843, 12s. The Female Parson 4s, and plenty more too numerous till I see what you are made of. Please write at once if you want any.
'Yours truly——.'
The upshot of this was that we said we should like to see Scrope and the 'Female Parson,' but our bellicose correspondent refused to part with either till he got the money, for he did not, he said, intend to trouble himself about useless references. So the money was sent, and in due course the books arrived, carriage not paid. The 'Female Parson,' which we had never heard of before, proved to be worthless, but Scrope's 'Salmon Fishing' was really a beautiful copy of the first edition in the original cloth, and this it was that had doubtless tempted the Lancaster bookseller.
Then there was a lady in Somersetshire who kept up a correspondence for over a month. She had a splendid copy, so she said, of Sturm's 'Reflections,' which she was ready to sell for 15s. In vain was she informed that the book was not of a kind to interest us; she knew better, and persistently lowered the price, 1s. at a bid, till her letters had in sheer desperation to be put in the waste-paper basket. We found ladies, as a rule, distressing correspondents, who flatly refused to be put off with a courteous negative. With them it was simply a question of price, and had we been persuaded by their blandishments, we should soon have had a cellar full of sermons, Gospel Magazines, and all the rubbish that Time refuses to annihilate and men to buy.
One of the most extraordinary letters we ever received came from a clergyman in the Midlands, whose disgust for Pierce Egan and his school was so great that he had determined to sacrifice 'Tom and Jerry' for 20s.:
'DEAR SIR,
'I much regret troubling you with a book which has, to me, been a source of grievous disappointment, and positive danger to my children. How anyone could have written such a wicked history of debauchery and human extravagance is indeed surprising, and I have thought many a time of consigning it to the flames, so that in a measure it might follow its disreputable author. I allude to "Life in London; or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis," by Pierce Egan. This work has, I regret to say, been in my family for very many years—more than I care to count—and I would willingly part with it, although there is nothing I dislike so much as severing old associations, however much to my distaste they may be. If you like, I will dispose of the book for £1, which perhaps, from a marketable point of view, it may be worth.
'Yours very truly——.'
There is, of course, no denying that the morality of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend would have to be searched for in case its existence were seriously disputed; but it seems passing strange that so small a sum as 20s. should be able to smooth away all remembrance of the orgies of Drury Lane and the crapulence of its dirty gin vaults, cider cellars and night-houses, which had so mortally offended the worthy clergyman.
He was indeed quite right in removing the book from the reach of his children; but what about our morality, and that of the person to whom, for anything he knew to the contrary, we might sell Pierce Egan's free and easy romance? The book came, and proved, as was half suspected, to be Hotten's reprint of 1869, with which lovers of this class of literature will have nothing whatever to do.
Such are a few of the experiences of the Forgotten Lore Society in its efforts to rescue good but unfortunate books from the apathy of neglect. The object was a good one, though the reward was practically nil. Let us reflect for a moment that even the few books of antiquity which have come down to make us richer are for the most part imperfect, and we shall see the necessity of taking extreme care of the important ones that are written now, and of doing everything in our power to prevent their destruction at the hands of unappreciative owners.
The mere fact of printed books being published in large quantities to the edition does not seem to affect the question of their existence in the long-run. All alike, good, bad, and indifferent, will go down the long road in time, and our descendants, more or less remote, will only hear of them in a casual and traditional way. Tacitus was one of the most popular Roman authors of his time, and yet he only lives to us in fragments, notwithstanding the fact that thousands upon thousands of copies of his 'History' were disseminated throughout the empire. Every public library in Rome was compelled to have at least one copy, and no fewer than ten transcriptions were made every year at the charge of the State. Plutarch wrote fourteen biographies that are missing now, and of 251 books quoted by him more than eighty are absolutely unknown. The Emperor Claudius wrote a 'History of the Etruscans,' which from the very nature of the case must have had a wide circulation; Julius Cæsar, a slashing criticism of Cato's life and acts; Lucullus, a history of the Marsi. All these have vanished. Of the forty plays of Aristophanes but eleven remain. Menander is unknown except by name, and Æschylus is in rags. Porphyry's diatribe against the Christians, the most important book of its kind that any Christian could have at his command, has vanished, and in all likelihood will never be restored.
Nor need we go to ancient Greece or Rome for such instances. Several poems by Shelley have completely disappeared already, and some of Byron's have been, more than once, at their last gasp. Old English ballads and songs have been 'lost' by hundreds at a time, and nearly all the records dealing with the private life of Oliver Cromwell are missing. The story of Carlyle's 'Squire Papers' is a characteristic one, and distinctly to the point. While that author was laboriously collating the scraps of evidence relative to the great Protector that had survived the honest but mistaken zeal of triumphing Royalists, he received a letter from an unknown correspondent, who stated that he possessed a mass of Parliamentary documents, among them the diary of an ancestor, one Samuel Squire, a subaltern in the 'Stilton Troop' of Ironsides. The letter was accompanied by extracts from this diary and other papers, and went on to say that the writer, who had been brought up to regard Cromwell in the very worst possible light, and his own ancestor with shame as the aider and abettor of an atrocious crime, was undecided what to do with the originals. Several letters passed, and at last Carlyle wrote to a friend living in the neighbourhood, asking him to see his correspondent, and persuade him of his undoubted duty, which was at least to submit documents of such great importance to examination.
Unfortunately, the friend was absent, and by the time he returned the papers had been destroyed. They may, of course, have had no existence, but Carlyle himself was of a contrary opinion, for later on he received a heavy packet containing copies of thirty-five letters of Oliver Cromwell, written in a style apparently contemporary, and referring to incidents that no one who had not made a careful and exhaustive study of his life and times, and who was not thoroughly conversant with all the available material, would have been in the least able to reproduce.
The records were destroyed because, as the owner said, he felt that, one way or another, the manuscripts would be got from him and made public, and 'what could that amount to but a new Guy Fawkes cellar and infernal machine to explode the cathedral city where he lived, and all its coteries, and almost dissolve Nature for the time being?' Either this man was a learned forger or a singularly narrow-minded and obstinate type of destroyer whose ravages can be traced through the centuries, and whose example will never cease to be followed so long as paper remains unable to resist the assaults of the bigot and the outrages of the Goth.
That will be ever, and hence it is that in all things literary preservation is the greatest of the virtues. What part of a century's product to preserve and what to destroy is a problem, not for us, but for the century to come, and for many centuries after that. In fact, it is Time's problem, which Time alone can solve.
CHAPTER V.
SOME HUNTING-GROUNDS OF LONDON.
At the present time there are, if the Post-Office Directory is to be believed, about 450 booksellers in London; but in this computation are included publishers, stationers, and even bookbinders—in fact, almost everyone who has anything whatever to do with books—so that the figures are by no means to be relied upon. The number of booksellers who make a speciality of second-hand volumes is very much less than 450, if we include only those who follow a single business, namely, that of buying and selling books, and very much greater if we add to the list the army of general dealers who sell books occasionally, or as an adjunct to some other occupation.
The real book-hunter does not follow the Directory, but his nose, which frequently leads him into strange places where there are no recognised booksellers, yet booksellers in plenty—a seeming paradox, which is readily explained by the fact that there are multitudes of what may, without offence, be called 'book-jobbers,' whose names are either not in the Directory at all, or appear there under some other designation.
A man may buy up a roomful of furniture, taking the books of necessity; or a houseful, and with the mass of goods and chattels perhaps hundreds of volumes which are not thought good enough to be disposed of separately, and are therefore cleared out at a nominal figure, and retailed anywhere and everywhere as circumstance and opportunity suggest. Are these dealers, brokers, and what not, booksellers? Heaven save the mark, no! not in a specific sense; but they sell books, notwithstanding, and their shops are, in very truth, recognised hunting-grounds of the Metropolis. There are literally hundreds of them, and they are to be met with, as a rule, close together, where rents are low and the footsteps of the income-tax fiend are unknown.
This is one description of bookseller, but there are several others: the man with the barrow, for instance, who works at his trade all the week, and comes out on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings in certain localities, to do what bartering he can with casual passers-by.
To compare these classes with the recognised booksellers, some of whom have an immense turnover, would, of course, be absurd; but they have their uses, and instances are not wanting in which mightily successful dealers have begun in this humble manner, and literally forced their way up from the pavements of the East End or the Surrey side to more pleasant places in the West. High or low, rich or poor, their shops or stalls are alike objects of extreme interest to thousands who have learned enough to know that the best books are generally the cheapest. Whatever the size of the premises they own, they contribute in their several degrees to the wants of all classes of book-men, whose delight it is to forage for themselves, and to seek that they may find. The lordly collector who pays by cheque may or may not be a book-hunter. If not, he misses much of the pleasure that accompanies the tracking down, step by step, of some coveted volume which is, perhaps, more or less easily obtainable almost at any time in exchange for plenty of money, but is rarely met with casually.
It is this tracking down, hunting which is the true book-lover's chief delight, and, needless to say, his primary object is not to secure books of great price for a nominal sum. If it were, he would at the end of a long life have few successes to report, for the search for rarities is so thorough and systematic that hardly anything of substantial pecuniary value can run the gauntlet all the way to the shop-board or the barrow. The harvest has all been gathered long ago, and nothing is now left but gleanings in fields already raked. The book-lover eliminates as far as possible the question of value from his walks abroad, and leaves his gold at home to be expended as opportunity arises in the auction-room, where open competition holds the market in a virtual equipoise, or in the shops of recognised dealers, who hold his commissions and are always on the look-out for important works. He is aware, however, that intrinsically good books are to be met with continually in all sorts of places, and it is these that he hopes to obtain, and from these that his library is most often recruited. Between one edition of some interesting or instructive book and another there may be an immense disparity in cost, but very little textual difference, or even none at all. In some cases the cheaper volume may be the more accurate of the two, and may also contain additional matter, which renders it more important and desirable from every point of view, except a sentimental one.
It is the search for volumes of this kind, sound and honest, yet not aristocratic, that has kept the bookstalls open for 300 years and more, for, to be precise, we know that St. Paul's Churchyard and Fleet Street were, in addition to other less known localities, much frequented by book-men as far back as the reign of Henry VIII. In these districts Cardinal Wolsey's agents kept a sharp look-out for copies of 'A Supplicacyon for the Beggars,' which Simon Fyshe, 'a zealous man for the reformation of abuses in the Church,' had boldly published and was scattering abroad in the year 1524, and which seems to have had a stealthy run for six years, for it was not until 1530 that it was openly prohibited by proclamation. Neither Fleet Street nor St Paul's Churchyard is, however, a hunting-ground for book-men now. The former is wholly given up to newspapers and machinery, and the latter to drapers and warehousemen, and there is no room anywhere for small dealers in second-hand books.
Indeed, the whole of London has been turned topsy-turvy so far as they are concerned. New localities they abhor, and the greater part of London is new, in the sense that very many old districts and streets have been rebuilt, or entirely swept away by the march of improvement and the increasing desire for wide thoroughfares and open spaces. What place more famous once than Little Britain, which during the last twenty or thirty years has swallowed up Duck Lane—another book-hunting locality—bodily? It was here that Thomas Britton, a coal-dealer, prowled around during his spare moments, pouncing upon anything and everything that took his fancy; rejoicing especially in works of magic, witchcraft, and astrology, either printed or in manuscript. The catalogue of his library is extant, and it is clear that he was a very far-sighted and keen-scented man, and one, too, who was blessed with a taste and discrimination most rare among dealers in small coal. In Little Britain 'Paradise Lost' went begging. The stalls must have been littered with the very first, or 1667, issue, for in that year the Earl of Dorset had a copy of it thrust under his nose and pressed upon him by a bookseller who complained most bitterly that he could not get rid of his stock. About the year 1760 the whole of the trade had vanished from Little Britain, though at the present time the once-famous thoroughfare boasts one bookseller and also one newsagent, the sole representatives of past times. As for the rest of the denizens, they follow the more prosaic occupations of builders, bootmakers, butchers, hairdressers, restaurant-keepers and publicans, the last-named being especially in evidence. In this locality, as in many others, the thirst for knowledge has been quenched, and the thirst for beer become almighty.
So, too, Moorfields was once classic ground, as also the Poultry, but both places have been dead to bookish fame this hundred years. There are now no booksellers' shops in the Poultry, though Moorfields just saves itself, for it rejoices in the presence of a music publisher and a stationer. Speaking generally, the second-hand book trade has been driven bodily out of the central and eastern parts of London, and has settled itself in the streets west of Temple Bar and Holborn Viaduct, always avoiding the Strand, which, for some reason or other, has ever been regarded as an inhospitable quarter. There are certainly booksellers' shops in this important thoroughfare, three, I believe, is the precise number, but they are hardly sufficient to invest it with the dignity and title of a 'locality.'
In contrast to this, Holborn and the streets adjoining have always been a good hunting-ground, and are so to-day. 'The Vision of Piers Plowman' was printed and sold in Ely Rents so long ago as 1550, and Snow Hill and Gray's Inn Gate were both world-wide localities, though the glory of all these places has since departed. Up to within five years ago there was a shop on the right-hand side of Gray's Inn Lane, just out of Holborn, given up chiefly to the sale of newspapers. It is shut up now, and, according to all accounts, will never be opened again, which is a pity, for it is a shop, or more probably the curtailment of much larger premises, with a notable history. Here, in 1750 or thereabouts, carried on business one Thomas Osborne, who, although ignorant to a degree, brutal in his manners, and surly beyond description, managed to build up the largest business of its kind in London, or, indeed, anywhere else. Customers ignored Tom Osborne's curses, and bought his books when they could, for sometimes, when particularly morose, he would shut himself up, like a hermit, 'with his lumber,' as a historian of the day termed the thirty whole libraries which he had amassed, and refuse to treat at all. Nevertheless, Osborne prospered exceedingly, and in the latter years of his life was the owner of a country house and 'dog and duck shootings,' all purchased and kept up from the profits derived from this shop in Gray's Inn Lane. The prices he asked were the most he thought he had the remotest chance of getting, and were often outrageous and extortionate, though at other times very much below what he might have obtained had he known his business properly. He seems to have taken a bird's-eye view of his stock, and to have appraised the value of individual books, not by reference to their rarity, but by means of a fractional calculation based upon the total cost—a rough-and-ready method of trading which attracted book-buyers from every part of London, and reconciled them to his insolence. Though Osborne was not the first dealer to issue a catalogue—one T. Green, of Spring Gardens, being credited with having revived, in 1729, this time-worn method of selling books—he carried on a more extensive business in this way than anyone who had preceded him, and in addition had the supreme honour of being knocked down by Dr. Johnson with a huge folio which the latter wanted to buy, and he (Osborne) refused to sell at any price. Either of these claims to distinction would have made the fortune of any man. It is stated by Sir John Hawkins that the book which Dr. Johnson wielded with such effect was the 'Biblia Greeca Septuaginta,' printed at Frankfort in 1594. The identical volume was in the possession of Thorpe, a Cambridge bookseller, in 1812, but what has become of it since I do not know.
Though Osborne's shop, or what remains of it, is now closed, the neighbourhood is still as largely interested in the sale of books as ever, or perhaps even more so, for there has been an immigration from other quarters of London which improvements have converted into uncongenial ground.
The new Law Courts and their approaches stand upon the sites of Butchers' Row, Shire Lane, where Elias Ashmole lived, and countless courts and alleys beside. Clare Market has vanished within the last two or three years, and Clement's Inn, with its narrow passages and dingy chambers, has been entirely rebuilt. Even Drury Lane, sacred to the memory of an army of general dealers who, up to within a comparatively short time ago, bought books by weight, is now past praying for to all appearances, for hardly a book of any kind is to be met with from one end of this grimy thoroughfare to the other. Let us walk into Bozier's Court, which is further to the west, and we miss the shop which Lord Lytton has immortalized in 'My Novel'; in fact, the court itself is plastered all over with advertisement posters, and awaits the wreckers, for it is doomed. King William Street, Strand, was a booksellers' resort for a century and more, but the fraternity are leaving one by one, and only a very few are to be met there now. Westminster Hall, for centuries a virtual library, is shut up, and echoes spring from its stones when any casual stranger, armed with an order, is allowed to ramble through Rufus's deserted pile. In fact, wherever we stray, north, south, east, or west, we are forced to the conclusion that London has changed so utterly within the last twenty or thirty years that it is to all intents and purposes a different place.
And the booksellers appear to have changed, too, for there are no 'characters' among them, or, at any rate, very few. Every now and then you will meet with some strange mortal, who looks as though he had been transported bodily from the last century and tumbled unceremoniously into a brand new shop, with coloured glass above the portal, and fresh paint about the front; but you have hardly time to ruminate on the mutability of things under the sun and he is gone, to make way, perhaps, for a dealer in something superlatively new. An antiquary of the stamp of Francis Grose, the 'chiel' who went about taking notes, would stand aghast, then hasten to depart, could he but see the London of to-day.
It must not, however, be supposed that book-hunting as a pastime is extinct in modern Babylon. On the contrary, there are yet plenty of nooks and corners, and pestilential-looking alleys, that Death and the jerry-builder have apparently forgotten, and these places, we may be certain, harbour many folios. As a fact, I know they do; for in my time, and to some extent even yet, I have been and am a wanderer about such places, and have, on occasion, picked up many interesting mementos there. What I merely wish to insist upon is that the older and recognised localities, which our fathers would naturally have visited a couple of decades or more ago in their search for old books, are not those which would, as a rule, afford much scope for enterprise now. We must go further afield, and not expect to find a mass of stalls huddled together in a single street, as though one locality had tapped and drained the life-blood of the rest. Circumstances have changed, and at the close of the nineteenth century booksellers have, to a great extent, ceased to be gregarious, except in Holywell Street, or, as it is more generally called, 'Booksellers' Row,' once the abode of literary hacks and bailiff-haunted debtors, which even yet has an old-world look with its overhanging houses and narrow roadway. Here there certainly is a long double procession of bookshops, many open to the street, every one of them crammed from floor to ceiling with great piles of lore.
And Holywell Street, be it said, is such historic and classic ground, that it is threatened every day by the improver, who longs to lay its north side open to the Strand, and will, we may be sure, effect his purpose in the end. It was here that Lord Macaulay used to take his walks abroad in search of books. As a rule he began and ended there; for a whole day's pilgrimage would not suffice to unearth more than a fractional part of the immense store of volumes that the labour of years had accumulated, and which was continually being decimated and renewed. In his day there were more books to be seen and handled there than now, for some of the shops have since been devoted to other trades. In Holywell Street John Payne Collier was as well known as his own 'History of English Dramatic Poetry,' which, nearly sixty years ago, littered the stalls, doubtless to his great disgust, seeing that to be in evidence there to any extent was then, as now, proof positive that the 'remainder-man' had been at work, to the bane of the author and publisher alike. Mr. W. Roberts, in his charming 'Book-hunter in London,' narrates that Collier once picked up in Holywell Street for the merest trifle a copy of John Hughes's 'Calypso and Telemachus,' an opera in three acts, first published in 1712, which contained thirty-eight unpublished couplets in the handwriting of Pope. Halliwell-Phillipps was also an inveterate rambler up and down this thoroughfare, and several of his Shakespearean quartos came from there in days when these small but almost priceless volumes were not so widely and persistently sought for as they are now. In fact, we have it in his own words that when he first began to collect anything and everything that related in whatever degree to the great dramatist, these early quartos were frequently to be met with at prices which, comparatively speaking, sound simply ludicrous in our ears. Should anyone rescue a copy now from some forgotten lumber-room, the fact is heralded by the press, and accounted most extraordinary, as indeed it is; for everyone, the world over, is on the look-out for rarities such as these. Though Holywell Street yet stands, and does a thriving trade among the bookish, let not anyone think that much is to be got for nothing there. On the contrary, the dealers who inhabit it are better versed than most people in the importance of each and every book they part with or throw into the boxes which receive the outcasts of literature. There are, however, good and valuable books by the thousand to be met with by anyone who does not object to pay a fair and reasonable price for them. To this extent, and in this particular, is Booksellers' Row the queen of London streets. From these remarks I except, of course, the extremely important shops of the West-End dealers into which correspondence flows from every part of the world.
This chapter is devoted to the 'Hunting-grounds' of London, and I deny that a collector who gives a standing order either verbally or by letter to a bookseller for some work he particularly wants is a book-hunter at all, at least so far as that particular transaction is concerned. To my mind Nimrod must handle his own bow and not entrust it to a deputy, even though he might by the rules of the chase be absolutely entitled to the quarry which the skill of the latter had brought down. Let him go where he will, East or West, the point of the compass makes no matter, he is a hunter only when he prosecutes his own inquiries and carries out in person all his arrangements. So we will avoid the great firms of book-sellers, although it may be taken for granted that almost any scarce work could be procured sooner or later from them, and go off on a chase in which we shall never, in all human probability, meet with any great prize, and may have to be satisfied with a little, that little, however, being much from many points of view.
At the present day books of all sorts are to be met with in great profusion in Farringdon Street. 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. Personally I never met with a really scarce book in Farringdon Street, but three years ago—and I mention this at the risk of being charged with travelling from the subject—I bought there the undoubtedly original study by Sir Joshua Reynolds for the portrait of the Right Honourable George Seymour Conway, afterwards Lord George Seymour Conway. The portrait was painted in 1770, and engraved in mezzotint by Edward Fisher the year following. The study is in oils, on thick paper of about twelve inches in height, and is so remarkable as a work of art, that it is a wonder it could have escaped recognition for an hour, instead, as was the fact, for a whole morning.
Should Farringdon Street prove unpropitious, Sunday morning in any week will see Lambeth Marshes and the New Cut, both on the Surrey side, crowded with barrows, and the same remark applies to the streets about the Elephant and Castle on Saturday evenings when the weather is fine. Generally speaking, the peripatetic book-seller is only to be met with on the first and last days of the week, but that he does manage to turn over a considerable part of his stock in the short time available is not to be doubted. He may not change—many of these men have haunted the same spot for years, and have their recognised stands—but his stock is, in one sense, ever new. A few months ago I saw in the Whitechapel Road a hand-cart full of small vellum-bound volumes, which proved to be Greek and Latin classics, printed in Paris a couple of centuries ago. The covers were remarkably fresh and clean, and somebody or other, or rather a succession of owners, must have taken the greatest care of these little books, which had thus ignobly fallen into the gutter at last. Next week at the same hour, they had all gone, having been disposed of to the more learned inhabitants of Bethnal Green at 2d. apiece.
If, however, wandering about the East End of London is not to the taste of the picker-up of unconsidered trifles, there is still the more primitive kind of shops to be visited. Great Turnstile still boasts a bookseller or two, and it was here, it will be remembered, that John Bagford, many years ago, divided his attention between making boots and shoes and ripping out the title-pages of the books that fell into his sacrilegious hands. He failed as a cobbler, but succeeded in amassing the most disreputable collection of titles that has ever been got together. The arch-Vandal failed in everything but his Vandalism, and surely any success is better than none at all. It is said of him that he searched all his life for one of Caxton's impossible title-pages, and died of disappointment, a story which is probably a gross libel on his accomplishments, for Bagford was not by any means an uneducated man.
Then, Little Turnstile hard by is worth a casual visit, and there are many shops in the streets extending east and west of St. Martin's Lane where books are to be bought in almost any number. The newly-built Charing Cross Road appears to be under a cloud; in fact, at this point we must turn back again, and make direct for Holborn, Bury Street, and the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square and Queen Square.
In Red Lion Passage there are several of the quaintest shops imaginable, one of them kept by a dealer who appears to have a mania for the very largest folios, though I notice that of late he has somewhat fallen away from his traditional custom in this respect. The books stand on their sides on the floor in columns of about six feet high; they are piled on and under the counter, and are seen peeping out of the black darkness of a room beyond. Petrarch would have avoided this shop lest history should repeat itself, and a folio break, not his leg merely this time, but his neck.
On the other side of the Passage is another temple of gloom and mystery, for it must be observed that the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square is generally in semi-darkness all the year round, except in the winter, and then it is frequently impossible to see at all when once the streets are left. The proprietors of this shop issue a periodical catalogue, which can be taken from a box at the door, and it may safely be said that there is no catalogue issued in London by anyone which is better worth glancing over than this, notwithstanding an occasional misprint or two. The books are, generally speaking, of such an unusual and out-of-the-way kind that one cannot help wondering where they all come from. For instance, 'Ben Johnson's English Dictionary, 8vo., 1732,' must be a remarkable volume, and the 'Wuremberg Chronicle, folio, numerous wood-cuts, 1493,' equally curious. Then there is 'Peasson on the Creed,' 'Jewels, ——, Works, folio, 1611,' 'Locke, Humane Understanding, folio, 1706,' 'Staunton: Shakispear,' and so onad infinitum. Throughout the prices are moderate, extremely moderate; that, at any rate, is a fact worthy of distinct recognition, and some of the books, too, are anything but easy to procure, as witness Chaucer's Works, folio, 1602, which is priced at £1 10s., Grafton's Chronicle, folio, 1569, £1 5s., Swan's 'Speculum Mundi,' 4to., 1670, 3s., and many others. Dark though this shop may be to gaze upon, I regard it as a typical book-man's paradise.
Paternoster Row, further east still, is now of course, the headquarters of the publishers, though several second-hand booksellers still linger there. Before the Great Fire reduced the whole district to ashes they had it all their own way, and when the Row was rebuilt they flocked there once more, to be gradually elbowed out by giant houses which sell books wholesale. There is one shop in this thoroughfare so completely wedged up with books that it is a somewhat difficult matter to enter in at the door. Nobody who is not in the daily habit of passing by could avoid stopping to glance at the rows of volumes which the proprietor has reared up against a wall round the corner that leads into St. Paul's Churchyard, for he has decorated them with innumerable strips of paper writ large with pieces of advice on things in general, quotations from classical writers, the Bible and the Koran, which, though they have for the most part nothing whatever to do with the sale of books of any kind, attract by reason of their quaintness and the strangeness of their being.
And so we might go wandering for ever about New London, passing on every side the shadows of the old, but seeing little of the substance. Book-men of the true stamp are antiquaries, to whom novelty is abhorrent. The pleasantest places are to them those which time has consecrated with a gentle touch, and which reflect all their imaginings, even as they echo their footsteps. These are departing under the mandate of an inexorable law, and we go with them.
CHAPTER VI.
VAGARIES OF BOOK-HUNTERS.
Ten or fifteen years ago it was quite usual to meet with collections of title-pages formed by followers of the immortal Bagford. These were to be seen quoted in booksellers' catalogues and displayed in the auction rooms, and were commonly disposed of for small sums of money—small, that is to say, in comparison with what would have been realized for the books themselves had they been allowed to remain in that state of life to which the author and others had called them. Of late, collections of title-pages have not been very much in evidence anywhere, for it is universally felt that there is little or no romance surrounding the slaughter even of folios, to say nothing of smaller-sized victims, and for that reason these scrappy collections are huddled out of sight like family skeletons. The book-hunter of the present day has his foibles, it is true, but he has learned by experience and from the expostulatory remarks of others that wild freaks are completely out of place in a library, and so it has come to pass that books are treated in a different way from what they were only a couple of decades ago, and no one who has the smallest respect either for himself or his vocation would now either care or dare to form a collection of title-pages. Should he happen to own one either by purchase or under circumstances beyond his control, he will produce it, if at all, with apologies and sighs. It is abundantly manifest that the wicked man hath turned away from much of his wickedness.
The reason of this tremendous transformation must be put down to the credit of a rule which, though formulated and preached at one time by the elite only, has been insisted upon with such pertinacity that it has gradually become diffused throughout the whole world of collectors, no matter to what objects of interest they may direct their attention. This rule is, that taste and the pocket alike demand that be a book good, bad, or indifferent in its externals, it shall, nevertheless, be left untouched by its owner, who is but its temporary custodian, and a trustee for others who shall come after him. To rip out the title-page, no matter with what object, is an outrage on decency which, it is pleasant to find, is now appraised at its proper pitch of enormity. If the stamp-collector rejoice in the possession of a specimen with 'original gum,' and rate its interest and value higher on that account, shall the book-collector, who is the oldest, the most learned, and the most aristocratic of all collectors, give place in the matter of common-sense and discretion to the product of a frivolous age? Shall he cut initial letters from missals and other manuscripts, and insult the shades of Fust and Schoeffer by making a senseless collection of colophons? These things were in vogue at one time, but are now frowned down even by the most ignorant of mortals, since, to put the matter on no higher ground, the money value of old books has considerably increased of late years to his certain knowledge, and he believes that anything with curious type, the f's made so—ƒ, and villainous prints scattered about the text, mustex necessitate reibe worth its weight in gold, and perhaps more. What a contrast is this little false, but preventative, store of knowledge to the crass stupidity of the early years of the present century, as exemplified in the persons of the Bishops, Canons, and Chaplains of Lincoln Cathedral, who permitted the choir-boys to collect illuminated initials, and with that object to cut up with their pen-knives scores of vellum manuscripts. A good many of the Caxtons from this same Cathedral were purchased by Dibdin for the Althorpe collection, and will be found catalogued in 'A Lincolne Nosegaye.' The Dean and Chapter, knowing little about books, and caring less, had disposed of them all for a 'consideration,' and thus without thought stripped themselves of their choicest possessions next to the Cathedral itself.
Of a truth, books have only recently come to be regarded as possessing a sentimental value altogether distinct from considerations of utility, and it is only within the compass of a comparatively few years that collectors have sprung up from the very stones to cry aloud, and to protest against such wanton acts of mutilation or destruction as the records of past days almost choke themselves in the echoing of. Only a little while ago 'Grangerizing' was the favourite pastime of thousands of persons of elegant leisure, as Griswold called the lazy dullards of his generation, and what this involved would be whispered in corners but for the fact that it was for 200 years unblushingly shouted in the open day.
During all that period the teachings of the genuine bibliophiles had so passed from deed and truth into mere monotony of unbelieved phrase that no English was literal enough to convert the persons who went about seeking material, at vast expense, wherewith to extra-illustrate some inane book of polemics or proverbs.
Nicholas Ferrar, who kept the 'Protestant Nunnery' at Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, was, I believe, the inventor of a system which was not fully developed until the publication of Granger's 'Biographical History of England,' but which is, nevertheless, directly or indirectly responsible for the condition of most of the imperfect volumes which are met with at every turn. The story of Nicholas Ferrar, assuming it to be true, which there is little reason to doubt, makes it clear that King Charles I. was as bad as or worse than anybody in this matter, for, had he not affected to admire the handiwork of this first and chief of sinners, the baneful practice of mutilating books for the sake of their illustrations, title-pages, or frontispieces, might never have become an aristocratic amusement, sanctified by tradition, and ennobled far beyond its deserts by kingly patronage. The Concordance which Ferrar showed the King escaped the wrath of the fanatic Hugh Peters and his crew, and, after many vicissitudes, is now safely lodged in the British Museum, a warning to all who may at any time seek to revive a practice which would, in these days of emulation and competition, burn with a white heat.
In Wordsworth's 'Ecclesiastical Biography' the story of Nicholas Ferrar is set out at length. There is no need to enter into minute details, as the tale has since become stereotyped, and is found reproduced in a dozen different places at least. Shortly, it appears that in June, 1634, King Charles I. was staying with the Earl of Westmorland at Apethorpe, and from thence sent one of his gentlemen to the home of Nicholas Ferrar, hard by, to 'intreat' a sight of a Concordance which he had heard had recently been completed. When Ferrar was on the Continent some time previously, he had bought up a great number of prints by the best masters, illustrative of historical passages of the Old and New Testaments, and these he afterwards used for ornamenting various compilations of the Scriptures, among them a 'full harmony or concordance of the four Evangelists, adorned with many beautiful pictures, which required more than a year for the composition, and was divided into 150 heads or chapters.'
This was the Concordance that King Charles was so anxious to look at, and which, indeed, he admired so much that he never rested until he had obtained one like it for his own library. Both books are now in the British Museum, the original having been acquired about three years ago, and the one in the King's Library from George II., who had inherited the royal collection of books and manuscripts.
From the point of view of Nicholas Ferrar, there was certainly no harm in this process of extra-illustrating. There is no reason to believe that he had gone about tearing out plates from books, or done anything else which in any respect, save one, could be regarded as objectionable in the slightest degree. There was, and is, however, one objection to his procedure, namely, the very bad example he set to unscrupulous people who, in after years, rose up in their thousands and commenced to rip and tear with diabolical enterprise. These were the days of Granger's 'Biographical History of England'—hence the verb to Grangerize—when people went about searching for portraits of celebrities mentioned in the text to paste between the leaves in their proper places. If Granger incidentally mentioned that someone had been conveyed to the Tower, and subsequently had the good fortune to escape out of a certain window, books would be ransacked and mutilated to provide illustrations of (1) the Tower of London from the N., S., E. or W., as the case might be; (2) portrait of the prisoner; (3) view of the window from which he let himself down; and finally, if, Laus Deo, a letter in his handwriting or a section of the rope which had made his escape possible could only be unearthed, great was the joy in the camp of the Philistine.
This mania for Grangerizing grew till it assumed enormous proportions. One enthusiast tried to illustrate Rees' 'Cyclopaedia,' but died before he had accomplished very much in comparison with what remained to be done. Mr. Crowle's copy of Pennant's 'History of London' cost that gentleman £7,000 from first to last, and there is a book of this kind in the Bodleian which has engulfed nearly double that amount. It consists of Clarendon's 'History of the Rebellion' swollen to sixty-seven large volumes, representing forty years of intense application. The vagaries of a whole army of book-collectors are reflected from every page of works such as these, for a man must necessarily be a book-collector first, and a Grangerizer after, else would material fail him. Happily for the peace of books, the mania for extra-illustrating has practically died out. The expense is too great, life too short, the knowledge and taste—of a kind—too laborious to acquire, to endow this pastime with a permanent and stable interest.
And yet there is another vagary, eccentricity, freak, or what you will, which, for cool, deliberate folly, has never been equalled even among Ferrar's admirers. The fun in this case consists in wilfully destroying a certain number of scarce and valuable books in order to heighten the importance and value of the survivors. Three or four collectors whose tastes are similar—that is to say, who accumulate works by the same author—will take stock of their belongings. 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. They make a 'pool' of all the volumes which are not immaculate; complete or perfect as many of them as possible, apportion them, and destroy the remainder. They will burn a work which is perfect, provided each has a copy in better condition, and this is to prevent you or me, or anyone else, from sharing in their sacrilegious joy. When we reflect that, from the nature of things, it is only the scarcest books that can be so treated with effect, we shall begin to realize the sinister importance of the act. Practices such as these are the product of the present age; they are not common, far from it, but they are not unusual. And yet the perpetrators mean no harm, for, as they would very truly say, if their practices were generally known and complaint were made, 'You can, if you like, read So-and-so without the least difficulty, for his works have been reprinted many times, and it is not either essential or advisable that the very scarcest edition of all should be in your hands.' There is in this argument a little logical force, but no decency for anyone to dissect.
Bookmen of the present day, or at least those among them who aspire to the highest seats in the collectors' Pantheon, are invariably bound by rule, and it is this hard and fast bondage that makes them do things which, if left to themselves, they would probably be the first to deprecate. To accumulate any considerable number of really scarce books is the labour of a lifetime, and to obtain immaculate copies necessitates not merely the possession of plenty of money, but a very great deal of energy, discrimination, and tact. The old school of general lovers is dying out. People now very seldom buy up whole libraries, or send out colossal orders to gratify a mere love of possession. They work by the book of arithmetic, cautiously, slowly, and with one main object ever in view. In this they are right, but in this also they fail, a paradox which is no paradox at all when it is remembered that book-hunters are of many kinds and of varying degrees of intelligence.
For instance, though there is undoubtedly something unique and strange about the very appearance of a library of extremely diminutive books, the collector of works of this kind is 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd,' within the compass of about two square inches at the most, and probably does not expect to derive either instruction or amusement from their pages when he has succeeded in reading them with the aid of a microscope. His rule is inflexible. Shakespeare in folio must give place to 'The Mite'; 'The English Bijou Almanac' for 1837 is, in his eyes one of the choicest of all volumes. Here literature and the rule are in conflict, and books become bric-à-brac, as they must do when any rule is too rigidly applied to them. Yet there are many collectors of small books both here and abroad, and prices rule inordinately high in consequence.
Very probably 'The Mite' is the smallest book printed from movable type in the world. Its size is only 3/8 in. by 3/4 in., and it would certainly be an exceedingly difficult matter to reduce this measurement. If anybody could do so, it would be M. Salomon of Paris, who has long been a collector of these microscopical curiosities, or the trustees of the British Museum, who have a box full of them. In 1781 a little book called the 'Alarm Almanac' made its appearance in Paris, and though printed with movable type and not engraved, like nearly all these little works are, measured only 19 millimetres by 14. There are very nearly 25-1/2 millimetres to the inch, and this specimen consequently runs 'The Mite' very close indeed. The 'English Bijou Almanac' for 1837, however, completely eclipses both, but unfortunately it is engraved and not printed from type. This book measures 3/4 in. in height, 1/2 in. wide, and 1/8 in. in thickness. The authoress was 'L.E.L.,' Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an almost forgotten poetess, whose sad marriage and untimely death are known to only a few students of Victorian literature. Some of her poems were printed in the 'Bijou' for the first and only time, so that this tiny volume is of some literary importance. Its title is so minute that a magnifying glass is necessary to read it. Its thirty-seven leaves are devoted,inter alia, to several pages of music and some portraits, including one of James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist. Even small books have a history and an importance of their own, but to collect them to the exclusion of every other book is surely a pronounced 'vagary.'
M. Salomon has more than 200 specimens, but then he does not absolutely confine his attention to midgets. I never knew nor heard of more than one collector who was so infatuated as to do so, and he had forty-five volumes of the kind, all different, in which he took such extreme delight that he was ever on the look out for more.
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.
He has a book bound in what looks like dry and hard parchment, warped with damp, and stained here and there with reddish brown. It is a copy of Johnson's 'Lives and Adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, and Street Robbers, etc.,' printed in folio in 1736, a scarce book at any time, but under existing circumstances past praying for. The parchment is human cuticle, stripped from the back of a criminal who had swung at Tyburn for a series of atrocious butcheries, which are chronicled with considerable minuteness in the pages of the 'Newgate Calendar.' When the corpse was cut down it was, according to the custom then prevailing, carted 'home,' and exhibited to gaping crowds at so much a head, and finally sold to the surgeons. From them a prior owner of this delightful volume obtained the skin, which, when tanned, formed an appropriate and never-to-be-forgotten binding, to all appearances sweating great smears of blood. It is only the damp, of course, or perhaps some defect in the curing process, which is responsible for these blemishes; but they seem to cry for vengeance, still greater and greater vengeance, against an inhuman wretch long since departed more or less in peace.
This is the only gruesome thing in the library, and I know as a fact that it excites more interest than all the rest of the books put together, though many, not to say most, of them are distinctly worthy of the closest attention. One volume belonged to Charles Lamb, who has made a perfect wreck of it, and half a dozen or more have the signature of 'Will Shakespere' scribbled in an Elizabethan hand on the title-pages, and in all sorts of places. These were once among the choicest possessions of Samuel Ireland, of Norfolk Street, Strand, the father of William Henry Ireland, a liar and a solicitor's clerk, who, as all the world knows, was for a time, and in very truth, mistaken for the great dramatist himself. Then there are books with inscriptions, undoubtedly genuine, of Bradshaw the regicide, Algernon Sidney, and many other persons of the highest political eminence in their day; books, too, which have belonged to Young the poet—distinguishable at a glance by the multitude of turned-down leaves—and the unfortunate Louis XVI.
This library is, of its kind, perhaps as important as any that has ever been formed, and yet it only numbers some 250 volumes, so supremely difficult is it, as a rule, to trace the possession even of books for more than a generation or two. Great men have ever been chary of their names, or at least it would seem so from the number of unimportant signatures and inscriptions we meet with day by day.
A long and very interesting chapter might be written on 'Inscriptions in Books,' and it must be confessed that a really important signature or comment adds so very appreciably to the sentimental value of the volume in which it is found, that it is not surprising that Oliver Wendell Holmes conjured up a pleasant train of reflection, in his inimitable style, based upon the name of a former owner of his own copy of the 'Colloquies of Erasmus,' which, by the way, my friend is extremely anxious to possess himself of, but will probably never obtain. In this instance the personality of the 'Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table' obscures all else, and gives the book a distinct history of its own—a history that invests it with an importance and value it could never claim of itself. To find out all we can about the former owners of books which we ourselves take pleasure in is no frivolous task, and the pity is that our opportunities for doing so are limited. The book-plate has very nearly put an end to owner's autographs, and being easy to remove, affords little or no guarantee of ownership. And book-plates have been in use in this country for more than 200 years.
No doubt everyone who has anything to do with books, whether as writer, producer, or collector, can call to mind the eccentricities of his neighbours with regard to them. I call it extremely eccentric conduct on the part of any man to persist in collecting odd volumes, and to studiously ignore complete sets. Yet I knew an old gentleman—now dead, and his books littering the stalls of Farringdon Street and elsewhere—who did this, year after year, and for many years, with the inevitable result. He was fond of literature, and the pleasure he derived in reading was part and parcel of his existence.
It was an axiom with him, however, that anything which is worth having, and any knowledge worth acquiring, must be laboriously worked for; and he would instance numerous authorities who have taught this truth by example as well as by precept. He would say, 'If I go out and buy a Bible for £500, because it is old and scarce, do you think I shall derive as much benefit and solace from its pages as if I had invested a trifle with the fixed determination to read what I had acquired and to follow its teachings?'
'No, certainly not,' is the obvious and truthful reply to that; but this would appear to be different from buying one volume of, say, Pope's works when there ought to be twenty, and trusting to enterprise not unmingled with luck to discover the remaining nineteen. To this, however, he would not agree, and, to do him justice, he did not preach one thing and perform another. His theory was that, if the perusal of an odd volume leads the reader to long for the possession of its fellows, it is better that he should search for them until he finds them, than that he should have them to his hand, as it were, ready made.
Carlyle intimated that a man had far better study the title-page of any book worth the trouble of looking at than read the whole text with a vacant mind, and no doubt he was right, though this, too, seems to be an entirely distinct matter from the general principle that nothing can be learned without a maximum of inconvenience. Such a conclusion is rather a straining of the position insisted upon by Nero's tutor, that no one should collect more books than he can read, and that a multitude of books only distracts the mind. Therefore was it that Francis Bissari in the year 1750 designed a plate, which he pasted in the few volumes he possessed, and which consequently is now extremely scarce. 'Ex-Libris civis Francisci Bissari,' he says, 'Distrahit animum librorum multitude, itaque cum legere non possis quantum habueris, sat est habere quantum legas. Seneca. Ep. 2.'
Still, as I have intimated, the old gentleman had his way and his day, and when he died his books were all despatched to the auction rooms. It took three men more than a week to pack them in boxes. There were books under every bed in the house, and every nook and cranny was full of them. There were, altogether, many thousands of volumes, and nearly all were odd. If a series were found to be complete, as sometimes happened, it was sure to be made up of volumes belonging to different editions, and, naturally enough, in different bindings. The auctioneers did what they could, and sold the vast majority in 'parcels' for a mere song, which in truth was all they were worth.
This peculiar form of book-collecting, though apparently strange, is, and always has been, very usual, for the vast majority of readers are poor. One volume will cost less, proportionately, than the complete set of which it forms part; and, moreover, we are again face to face with the argument that it is better to master the contents of one volume than to have a mere superficial knowledge of a dozen or more. The only thing is that, as the world wags at present, the advice is erratic, and the system of buying books in sections one that cannot be recommended. If we could be sure of a hundred years of life, then things might be different.Sed Ars longa, vita brevis est.
And so it happens that the vagaries of book-hunters are often passing strange. Some, like Sir Thomas Phillipps, will buy largely, and never even open the cases in which they arrive. 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. Some collectors—realbonâ-fidecollectors these—start life with strong opinions as to the usefulness of books, and, after the manner of Grolier, though without his discretion, open their doors to all sorts and conditions of men, only to close them later with a firm resolve that, come what come may, they will never again allow any friend whomsoever even to gaze upon their store. Some, too, are so deeply immersed in their all-absorbing hobby that they have no clear conception of the difference betweenmeumandtuum. Estimable in every respect but one, and scrupulously honest to a degree in all matters of daily intercourse, they yet fail in this one supreme trial. And yet they are absolved; for these unfortunates are not thieves but eccentrics, who would no more think of selling the objects they have mistaken for their own, than they would of getting wealth by false pretences. Pope Innocent X., when still Monsignor Pamphilio, was found in the possession of a book he could not satisfactorily account for, and the ludicrous part of the matter was that Du Moustier, who claimed that it had been abstracted from his library, was subsequently proved to have stolen it himself. Then, again, Catherine de Medici sequestered the entire library of Marshal Strozzi, and on complaint promised to pay for it by instalments, which, of course, she never did. Hearne hints more than once that Sir Thomas Bodley was eccentric, and when Moore, Bishop of Ely, and father of English Black-Letter Collectors, went to dine with a bibliophile, as was his wont, the latter would, if he were wise, spend the morning in removing out of sight, and, therefore, out of temptation's way, the choicest of his possessions. But the king of all these suspicious characters was Libri, who, as Inspector-General of French Libraries, under Louis Philippe, presented himself, from first to last, with books of the value of more than £20,000, among them a fine MS. of the Pentateuch, which he sold to the late Lord Ashburnham on condition that it was not to be published for twenty years. In 1868 the time expired, and then the matter was traced home, to his memory's shame.
This conduct of Libri in selling what did not belong to him puts him, indeed, on a level, in point of turpitude, with the young divinity student of Chicago commonly called 'The Champion Biblioklept of America.' In vastness of conception the latter was a mere tyro, for he only stole a few hundred books of small value from the Chicago Public Library. The motive of both men was, however, the same, and it was that which, according to some consciences, made them thieves. After all, it is this motive that must be primarily considered in all ethical questions such as those which underlie, to some extent at least, the vagaries of every book-hunter who ever was born to hunger and thirst for Caxton's types, and paper white as snow, bound in a dream by the Gascon's magic touch.