Читать книгу The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections - A. Edward Newton - Страница 4

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IF my early training has been correct, which I am much inclined to doubt, we were not designed to be happy in this world. We were simply placed here to be tried, and doubtless we are—it is a trying place. It is, however, the only world we are sure of; so, in spite of our training, we endeavor to make the best of it, and have invented a lot of little tricks with which to beguile the time.

The approved time-killer is work, and we do a lot of it. When it is quite unnecessary, we say it is in the interest of civilization; and occasionally work is done on so high a plane that it becomes sport, and we call these sportsmen, “Captains of Industry.” One of them once told me that making money was the finest sport in the world. This was before the rules of the game were changed.

But for the relaxation of those whose life is spent in a persistent effort to make ends meet, games of skill, games of chance, and kissing games have been invented, and indoor and outdoor sports. These are all very well for those who can play them; but I am like the little boy who declined to play Old Maid because he was always “it.” Having early discovered that I was always “it” in every game, I decided to take my recreation in another way. I read occasionally and have always been a collector.

Many years ago, in an effort to make conversation on a train—a foolish thing to do—I asked a man what he did with his leisure, and his reply was, “I play cards. I used to read a good deal but I wanted something to occupy my mind, so I took to cards.” It was a disconcerting answer.

It may be admitted that not all of us can read all the time. For those who cannot and for those to whom sport in any form is a burden not to be endured, there is one remaining form of exercise, the riding of a hobby—collecting, it is called; and the world is so full of such wonderful things that we collectors should be as happy as kings. Horace Greeley once said, “Young man, go West.” I give advice as valuable and more easily followed: I say, Young man, get a hobby; preferably get two, one for indoors and one for out; get a pair of hobby-horses that can safely be ridden in opposite directions.

We collectors strive to make converts; we want others to enjoy what we enjoy; and I may as well confess that the envy shown by our fellow collectors when we display our treasures is not annoying to us. But, speaking generally, we are a bearable lot, our hobbies are usually harmless, and if we loathe the subject of automobiles, and especially discussion relative to parts thereof, we try to show an intelligent interest in another’s hobby, even if it happen to be a collection of postage-stamps. Our own hobby may be, probably is, ridiculous to some one else, but in all the wide range of human interest, from postage-stamps to paintings—the sport of the millionaire—there is nothing that begins so easily and takes us so far as the collecting of books.

And hear me. If you would know the delight of book-collecting, begin with something else, I care not what. Book-collecting has all the advantages of other hobbies without their drawbacks. The pleasure of acquisition is common to all—that’s where the sport lies; but the strain of the possession of books is almost nothing; a tight, dry closet will serve to house them, if need be.

It is not so with flowers. They are a constant care. Some one once wrote a poem about “old books and fresh flowers.” It lilted along very nicely; but I remark that books stay old, indeed get older, and flowers do not stay fresh: a little too much rain, a little too much sun, and it is all over.

Pets die too, in spite of constant care—perhaps by reason of it. To quiet a teething dog I once took him, her, it, to my room for the night and slept soundly. Next morning I found that the dog had committed suicide by jumping out of the window.

The joys of rugs are a delusion and a snare. They cannot be picked up here and there, tucked in a traveling-bag, and smuggled into the house; they are hard to transport, there are no auction records against them, and the rug market knows no bottom. I never yet heard a man admit paying a fair price for a rug, much less a high one. “Look at this Scherazak,” a friend remarks; “I paid only nine dollars for it and it’s worth five hundred if it’s worth a penny.” When he is compelled to sell his collection, owing to an unlucky turn in the market, it brings seventeen-fifty. And rugs are ever a loafing place for moths—But that’s a chapter by itself.

Worst of all, there is no literature about them. I know very well that there are books about rugs; I own some. But as all books are not literature, so all literature is not in books. Can a rug-collector enjoy a catalogue? I sometimes think that for the over-worked business man a book-catalogue is the best reading there is. Did you ever see a rug-collector, pencil in hand, poring over a rug-catalogue?

Print-catalogues there are; and now I warm a little. They give descriptions that mean something; a scene may have a reminiscent value, a portrait suggests a study in biography. Then there are dimensions for those who are fond of figures and states and margins, and the most ignorant banker will tell you that a wide margin is always better than a narrow one. Prices, too, can be looked up and compared, and results, satisfactory or otherwise, recorded. Prints, too, can be snugly housed in portfolios. But for a lasting hobby give me books.

Book-collectors are constantly being ridiculed by scholars for the pains they take and the money they spend on first editions of their favorite authors; and it must be that they smart under the criticism, for they are always explaining, and attempting rather foolishly to justify their position. Would it not be better to say, as Leslie Stephen did of Dr. Johnson’s rough sayings, that “it is quite useless to defend them to any one who cannot enjoy them without defense”?

I am not partial to the “books which no gentleman’s library should be without,” fashionable a generation or two ago. The works of Thomas Frognall Dibdin do not greatly interest me, and where will one find room to-day for Audubon’s “Birds” or Roberts’s “Holy Land” except on a billiard-table or under a bed?

The very great books of the past have become so rare, so high-priced, that it is almost useless for the ordinary collector to hope ever to own them, and fashion changes in book-collecting as in everything else. Aldines and Elzevirs are no longer sought. Our interest in the Classics being somewhat abated, we pass them over in favor of books which, we tell ourselves, we expect some day to read, the books written by men of whose lives we know something. I would rather have a “Paradise Lost” with the first title-page,[1] in contemporary binding, or an “Angler,” than all the Aldines and Elzevirs ever printed.

That this feeling is general, accounts, I take it, for the excessively high prices now being paid for first editions of modern authors like Shelley, Keats, Lamb, and, to come right down to our own day, Stevenson. Would not these authors be amazed could they know in what esteem they are held, and what fabulous prices are paid for volumes which, when they were published, fell almost stillborn from the press? We all know the story of Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat”: how a “remainder” was sold by Quaritch at a penny the copy. It is now worth its weight in gold, and Keats’s “Endymion,” once a “remainder” bought by a London bookseller at fourpence, now commands several hundred dollars. I paid three hundred and sixty dollars for mine—but it was once Wordsworth’s and has his name on the title-page.

But it is well in book-collecting, while not omitting the present, never to neglect the past. “Old books are best,” says Beverly Chew, beloved of all collectors; and I recall Lowell’s remark: “There is a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.” It was a recollection of these sayings that prompted me, if prompting was necessary, to pay a fabulous price the other day for a copy of “Hesperides, or the Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq.,” a beautiful copy of the first edition in the original sheep.

We collectors know the saying of Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested”; but the revised version is, Some books are to be read, others are to be collected. Mere reading books, the five-foot shelf, or the hundred best, every one knows at least by name. But at the moment I am concerned with collectors’ books and the amenities of book-collecting; for, frankly—

I am one of those who seek

What Bibliomaniacs love.

Some subjects are not for me. Sydney Smith’s question, “Who reads an American book?” has, I am sure, been answered; and I am equally sure that I do not know what the answer is. “Americana”—which was not what Sydney Smith meant—have never caught me, nor has “black letter.” It is not necessary for me to study how to tell a Caxton. Caxtons do not fall in my way, except single leaves now and then, and these I take as Goldsmith took his religion, on faith.

Nor am I the rival of the man who buys all his books from Quaritch. Buying from Quaritch is rather too much like the German idea of hunting: namely, sitting in an easy chair near a breach in the wall through which game, big or little, is shooed within easy reach of your gun. No, my idea of collecting is “watchful waiting,” in season and out, in places likely and unlikely, most of all in London. But one need not begin in London: one can begin wherever one has pitched one’s tent.

I have long wanted Franklin’s “Cato Major.” A copy was found not long ago in a farmhouse garret in my own county; but, unluckily, I did not hear of it until its price, through successive hands, had reached three hundred dollars. But if one does not begin in London, one ends there. It is the great market of the world for collectors’ books—the best market, not necessarily the cheapest.

My first purchase was a Bohn edition of Pope’s Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey in two volumes—not a bad start for a boy; and under my youthful signature, with a fine flourish, is the date, 1882.

I read them with delight, and was sorry when I learned that Pope is by no means Homer. I have been a little chary about reading ever since. We collectors might just as well wait until scholars settle these questions.

I have always liked Pope. In reading him one has the sense of progress from idea to idea, not a mere floundering about in Arcady amid star-stuff. When Dr. Johnson was asked what poetry is, he replied, “It is much easier to say what it is not.” He was sparring for time and finally remarked, “If Pope is not poetry it is useless to look for it.”

Years later, when I learned from Oscar Wilde that there are two ways of disliking poetry—one is to dislike it, and the other, to like Pope—I found that I was not entirely prepared to change my mind about Pope.

In 1884 I went to London for the first time, and there I fell under the lure of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. After that, the deluge!

The London of 1884 was the London of Dickens. There have been greater changes since I first wandered in the purlieus of the Strand and Holborn than there were in the hundred years before. Dickens’s London has vanished almost as completely as the London of Johnson. One landmark after another disappeared, until finally the County Council made one grand sweep with Aldwych and Kingsway. But never to be forgotten are the rambles I enjoyed with my first bookseller, Fred Hutt of Clement’s Inn Passage, subsequently of Red Lion Passage, now no more. Poor fellow! when, early in 1914, I went to look him up, I found that he had passed away, and his shop was being dismantled. He was the last of three brothers, all booksellers.

From Hutt I received my first lesson in bibliography; from him I bought my first “Christmas Carol,” with “Stave 1,” not “Stave One,” and with the green end-papers. I winced at the price: it was thirty shillings. I saw one marked twenty guineas not long ago. From Hutt, too, I got a copy of Swinburne’s “Poems and Ballads,” 1866, with the Moxon imprint, and had pointed out to me the curious eccentricity of type on page 222. I did not then take his advice and pay something over two pounds for a copy of “Desperate Remedies.” It seemed wiser to wait until the price reached forty pounds, which I subsequently paid for it. But I did buy from him for five shillings an autograph letter of Thomas Hardy to his first publisher, “old Tinsley.” As the details throw some light on the subject of Hardy’s first book, I reproduce the letter, from which it will be seen that Hardy financed the publication himself.

When, thirty years ago, I picked up my Hardy letter for a few shillings, I never supposed that the time would come when I would own the complete manuscript of one of his most famous novels. Yet so it is. Not long since, quite unexpectedly, the original draft of “Far from the Madding Crowd” turned up in London. Its author, when informed of its discovery, wrote saying that he had “supposed the manuscript had been pulped ages ago.” One page only was missing; Mr. Hardy supplied it. Then arose the question of ownership, which was gracefully settled by sending it to the auction-room, the proceeds of the sale to go to the British Red Cross. I cannot say that the bookseller who bought it gave it to me exactly, but we both agree that it is an item which does honor to any collection. Although it is the original draft, there are very few corrections or interlineations, the page reproduced (see next page) being fairly representative.

LETTER OF THOMAS HARDY TO HIS FIRST PUBLISHER, “OLD TINSLEY”

I paid five shillings for this letter many years ago, in London. Maggs, in his last catalogue, prices at fifteen guineas a much less interesting letter from Hardy to Arthur Symons, dated December 4, 1915, on the same subject.

Only those who are trying to complete their sets of Hardy know how difficult it is to find “Desperate Remedies” and “Under the Greenwood Tree” “in cloth as issued.”

My love for book-collecting and my love for London have gone hand in hand. From the first, London with its wealth of literary and historic interest has held me; there has never been a time, not even on that gloomy December day twenty years ago, when, with injuries subsequently diagnosed as a “compound comminuted tibia and fibula,” I was picked out of an overturned cab and taken to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for repairs, that I could not say with Boswell, “There is a city called London for which I have as violent an affection as the most romantic lover ever had for his mistress.”

The book-shops of London have been the subject of many a song in prose and verse. Every taste and pocket can be satisfied, I have ransacked the wretched little shops to be found in the by-streets of Holborn one day, and the next have browsed in the artificially stimulated pastures of Grafton Street and Bond Street, and with as much delight in one as in the other.

FACSIMILE OF A PAGE OF HARDY’S “FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD,” MUCH REDUCED IN SIZE

BERNARD QUARITCH

“The extensive literature of catalogues is probably little known to most readers. I do not pretend to claim a thorough acquaintance with it but I know the luxury of reading good catalogues and such are those of Bernard Quaritch.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes.

I cannot say that “I was ‘broke’ in London in the fall of ’89,” for the simple reason that I was not in London that year; but I am never long in London without finding myself as light in heart and pocket as Eugene Field—the result of yielding to the same temptations.

I knew the elder Quaritch well, and over a cup of tea one winter afternoon years ago, in a cold, dingy little room filled with priceless volumes in the old shop in Piccadilly, he confided to me his fears for his son Alfred. This remarkable old man, who has well been called the Napoleon of booksellers, was certain that Alfred would never be able to carry on the business when he was gone. “He has no interest in books, he is not willing to work hard as he will have to, to maintain the standing I have secured as the greatest bookseller in the world.” Quaritch was very proud, and justly, of his eminence.

How little the old man knew that this son, when the time came, would step into his father’s shoes and stretch them. Alfred, when he inherited the business, assumed his father’s first name and showed all his father’s enthusiasm and shrewdness. He probably surprised himself, as he surprised the world, by adding lustre to the name of Bernard Quaritch, so that, when he died, the newspapers of the English-speaking world gave the details of his life and death as matters of general interest.

The book-lovers’ happy hunting-ground is the Charing Cross Road. It is a dirty and sordid street, too new to be picturesque; but almost every other shop on both sides of the street is a bookshop, and the patient man is frequently rewarded by a find of peculiar interest.

One day, a few years ago, I picked up two square folio volumes of manuscript bound in old, soft morocco, grown shabby from knocking about. The title was “Lyford Redivivus, or A Grandame’s Garrulity.”

Examination showed me that it was a sort of dictionary of proper names. In one volume there were countless changes and erasures; the other was evidently a fair copy. Although there was no name in either volume to suggest the author, it needed no second glance to see that both were written in the clear, bold hand of Mrs. Piozzi. The price was but trifling, and I promptly paid it and carried the volumes home. Some months later, I was reading a little volume, “Piozziana,” by Edward Mangin—the first book about Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi—when, to my surprise, my eye met the following:—

BERNARD ALFRED QUARITCH “He probably surprised himself as he surprised the world by adding lustre to the name of Bernard Quaritch.”

Early in the year 1815, I called on her [Mrs. Piozzi] then resident in Bath, to examine a manuscript which she informed me she was preparing for the press. After a short conversation, we sat down to a table on which lay two manuscript volumes, one of them, the fair copy of her work, in her own incomparably fine hand-writing. The title was “Lyford Redivivus”; the idea being taken from a diminutive old volume, printed in 1657, and professing to be an alphabetical account of the names of men and women, and their derivations. Her work was somewhat on this plan: the Christian or first name given, Charity, for instance, followed by its etymology; anecdotes of the eminent or obscure, who have borne the appellation; applicable epigrams, biographical sketches, short poetical illustrations, &c.

I read over twelve or fourteen articles and found them exceedingly interesting; abounding in spirit, and novelty; and all supported by quotations in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Celtic, and Saxon. There was a learned air over all, and in every page, much information, ably compressed, and forming what I should have supposed, an excellent popular volume. She was now seventy-five; and I naturally complimented her, not only on the work in question, but on the amazing beauty and variety of her hand-writing. She seemed gratified and desired me to mention the MS. to some London publisher. This I afterwards did, and sent the work to one alike distinguished for discernment and liberality, but with whom we could not come to an agreement. I have heard no more of “Lyford Redivivus” since, and know not in whose hands the MS. may now be.

A moment later it was in mine, and I was examining it with renewed interest.

My secret is out. I collect, as I can, human-interest books—books with a provenance, as they are called; but as I object to foreign words, I once asked a Bryn Mawr professor, Dr. Holbrook, to give me an English equivalent. “I should have to make one,” he said. “You know the word whereabouts, I suppose.” I admitted that I did. “How would whenceabouts do?” I thought it good.

In recent years, presentation, or association, books have become the rage, and the reason is plain. Every one is unique, though some are uniquer than others. My advice to any one who may be tempted by some volume with an inscription of the author on its fly-leaf or title-page is, “Yield with coy submission”—and at once. While such books make frightful inroads on one’s bank account, I have regretted only my economies, never my extravagances.

I was glancing the other day over Arnold’s “Record of Books and Letters.” He paid in 1895 seventy-one dollars for a presentation Keats’s “Poems,” 1817, and sold it at auction in 1901 for five hundred.[2] A few years later I was offered a presentation copy of the work, with an inscription to Keats’s intimate friends, Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, for a thousand dollars, and while I was doing some preliminary financing the book disappeared, and forever; and I have never ceased regretting that the dedication copy of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” to Sir Joshua Reynolds, passed into the collection of my lamented friend, Harry Widener, rather than into my own. “I shall not pass this way again” seems written in these volumes.

But my record is not all of defeats. The “whenceabouts” of my presentation “Vanity Fair” is not without interest—its story is told in Wilson’s “Thackeray in the United States.”

The great man took particular delight in schoolboys. When, during his lecturing tour, he visited Philadelphia, he presented one of these boys with a five-dollar gold-piece. The boy’s mother objected to his pocketing the coin, and Thackeray vainly endeavored to convince her that this species of beneficence was a thing of course in England. After a discussion the coin was returned, but three months later the lad was made happy by the receipt of a copy of “Vanity Fair,” across the title-page of which he saw written, in a curiously small and delicate hand, his name, Henry Reed, with W. M. Thackeray’s kind regards, April, 1856.

One day, some years ago, while strolling through Piccadilly, my attention was attracted by a newspaper clipping posted on the window of a bookshop, which called attention to a holograph volume of Johnson-Dodd letters on exhibition within. I spent several hours in careful examination of it, and, although the price asked was not inconsiderable, it was not high in view of the unusual interest of the volume. I felt that I must own it.

When I am going to be extravagant I always like the encouragement of my wife, and I usually get it. I determined to talk over with her my proposed purchase. Her prophetic instinct in this instance was against it. She reminded me that the business outlook was not good when we left home, and that the reports received since were anything but encouraging. “That amount of money,” she said, “may be very useful when you get home.” The advice was good; indeed, her arguments were so unanswerable that I determined not to discuss it further, but to buy it anyhow and say nothing. Early the next morning I went back, and to my great disappointment found that some one more forehanded than I had secured the treasure. My regrets for a time were keen, but on my return to this country I found myself in the height of the 1907 panic. Securities seemed almost worthless and actual money unobtainable; then I congratulated my wife on her wisdom, and pointed out what a fine fellow I had been to follow her advice.

Six months later, to my great surprise, the collection was again offered me by a bookseller in New York at a price just fifty per cent in advance of the price I had been asked for it in London. The man who showed it to me was amazed when I told him just when he had bought it and where, and the price he had paid for it. I made a guess that it was ten per cent below the figure at which it had been offered to me. “I am prepared,” I said, “to pay you the same price I was originally asked for it in London. You have doubtless shown it to many of your customers and have not found them as foolish in their enthusiasm over Johnson as I am. You have had your chance to make a big profit; why not accept a small one?” There was some discussion; but as I saw my man weakening, my firmness increased, and it finally ended by my handing him a check and carrying off the treasure.

PORTRAIT OF DR. JOHNSON BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. PAINTED ABOUT 1770 FOR JOHNSON’S STEPDAUGHTER, LUCY PORTER

Engraved by Watson

The collection consists of original manuscripts relating to the forgery of Dodd, twelve pieces being in Dr. Johnson’s handwriting. In 1778 Dr. William Dodd, the “unfortunate” clergyman, as he came to be called, was condemned to death for forging the name of his pupil, Lord Chesterfield, to a bond for forty-two hundred pounds. Through their common friend Edmund Allen, Johnson worked hard to secure Dodd’s pardon, writing letters, petitions, and addresses, to be presented by Dodd, in his own or his wife’s name, to the King, the Queen, and other important persons, Johnson taking every care to conceal his own part in the matter. In all there are thirty-two manuscripts relating to the affair. They were evidently used by Sir John Hawkins in his “Life of Johnson,” but it is doubtful whether Boswell, although he quotes them in part, ever saw the collection.[3]

Pearson, from his shop in Pall Mall Place, issues catalogues which for size, style, and beauty are unexcelled—they remind one more of publications deluxe than of a bookseller’s catalogue. It is almost vain to look for any item under a hundred pounds, and not infrequently they run to several thousand. A catalogue now on my writing table tells me of a Caxton: “Tully, His Treatises of Old Age and Friendship,” one of four known copies, at twenty-five hundred pounds; and I’d gladly pay it did my means allow.

From Pearson I secured my holograph prayer of Dr. Johnson, of which Birkbeck Hill says: “Having passed into the cabinet of a collector it remains as yet unpublished.” It is dated Ashbourne, September 5, 1784 (Johnson died on December 13 of that year), and reads:—

Almighty Lord and Merciful Father, to Thee be thanks, and praise for all thy mercies, for the awakening of my mind, the continuance of my life, the amendment of my health, and the opportunity now granted of commemorating the death of thy Son Jesus Christ, our Mediator and Redeemer. Enable me O Lord to repent truly of my sins—enable me by thy Holy Spirit to lead hereafter a better life. Strengthen my mind against useless perplexities, teach me to form good resolutions and assist me that I may bring them to effect, and when Thou shalt finally call me to another state, receive me to everlasting happiness, for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.

Prayers in Dr. Johnson’s hand are excessively rare. He wrote a large number, modeled evidently upon the beautiful Collects—prose sonnets—of the Church of England Prayer Book; but after publication by their first editor, Dr. George Strahan, in 1785, most of the originals were deposited in the Library of Pembroke College, Oxford; hence their scarcity.

From Pearson, too, came my beautiful uncut copy of “A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,” with a receipt for one hundred pounds in Johnson’s handwriting on account of the copyright of the book, and, more interesting still, a brief note to Mrs. Horneck (the mother of Goldsmith’s “Jessamy Bride”), reading: “Mr. Johnson sends Mrs. Horneck and the young ladies his best wishes for their health and pleasure in their journey, and hopes his Wife [Johnson’s pet name for the young lady] will keep him in her mind. Wednesday, June 13.” The date completes the story. Forster states that Goldsmith, in company with the Hornecks, started for Paris in the middle of July, 1770. This was the dear old Doctor’s good-bye as the party was setting out.

To spend a morning with Mr. Sabin, the elder, in his shop in Bond Street is a delight never to be forgotten. The richest and rarest volumes are spread out before you as unaffectedly as if they were the last best-sellers. You are never importuned to buy; on the contrary, even when his treasures are within your reach, it is difficult to get him to part with them. One item which you particularly want is a part of a set held at a king’s ransom; some one has the refusal of another. It is possible to do business, but not easy.

JOHN KEATS’S COPY OF SPENSER’S WORKS

His son, Frank, occasionally takes advantage of his father’s absence to part with a volume or two. He admits the necessity of selling a book sometimes in order that he may buy another. This, I take it, accounts for the fact that he consented to part with a copy of “The Works of that Famous English Poet, Mr. Edmond Spenser”—the fine old folio of 1679, with the beautiful title-page. A “name on title” ordinarily does not add to a book’s value; but when that name is “John Keats” in the poet’s hand, and in addition, “Severn’s gift, 1818,” one is justified in feeling elated.

John Keats! who in the realm of poetry stands next to the great Elizabethans. It was Spenser’s “Fairy Queen” which first fired his ambition to write poetry, and his lines in imitation of Spenser are among the first he wrote. At the time of the presentation of this volume, Severn had recently made his acquaintance, and Keats and his friends were steeped in Elizabethan literature. The finest edition of the works of Spenser procurable was no doubt selected by Severn as a gift more likely than any other to be appreciated by the poet.

Remember that books from Keats’s library, which was comparatively a small one, are at the present time practically non-existent; that among them there could hardly have been one with a more interesting association than this volume of Spenser. Remember too that Keats’s poem—

Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,

And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song—

was addressed to my great-great-uncle, George Felton Mathew; and let me refer to the fact that on my first visit to England I had spent several days with his sister, who as a young girl had known Keats well, and it will be realized that the possession of this treasure made my heart thump.

Stimulated and encouraged by this purchase, I successfully angled for one of the rarest items of the recent Browning sale, the portrait of Tennyson reading “Maud,” a drawing in pen and ink by Rossetti, with a signed inscription on the drawing in the artist’s handwriting:—

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood.

Browning’s inscription is as follows:—

Tennyson read his poem of Maud to E.B.B., R.B., Arabel and Rossetti, on the evening of Thursday, Septr. 27, 1855, at 13 Dorset St., Manchester Square. Rossetti made this sketch of Tennyson as he sat reading to E.B.B., who occupied the other end of the sofa.

R.B. March 6, ’74.

19 Warwick Crescent.

W. M. Rossetti and Miss Browning were also present on this famous evening, which is vivaciously described by Mrs. Browning in an autograph letter to Mrs. Martin inserted in the album.

One of the pleasantest things which has happened to us here is the coming down on us of the Laureate, who, being in London for three or four days from the Isle of Wight, spent two of them with us, dined with us, smoked with us, opened his heart to us (and the second bottle of port), and ended by reading “Maud” through from end to end, and going away at half-past two in the morning. If I had had a heart to spare, certainly he would have won mine. He is captivating with his frankness, confidingness, and unexampled naïveté! Think of his stopping in “Maud” every now and then—“There’s a wonderful touch! That’s very tender. How beautiful that is!” Yes, and it was wonderful, tender, beautiful, and he read exquisitely in a voice like an organ, rather music than speech.

PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON, READING “MAUD” TO ROBERT AND MRS. BROWNING, BY ROSSETTI

Thus are linked indissolubly together the great Victorians: Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Mrs. Browning. It would be difficult to procure a more interesting memento.

At 27 New Oxford Street, West, is a narrow, dingy little shop, which you would never take to be one of the most celebrated bookshops in London—Spencer’s. How he does it, where he gets them, is his business, and an inquiry he answers only with a smile; but the fact is, there they are—just the books you have been looking for, presentation copies and others, in cloth and bound. Spencer owes it to book-collectors to issue catalogues. They would make delightful reading. He has always promised to do it, but he, as well as we, knows that he never will.

But he is kind in another way, if kindness it is: he leaves you alone for hours in that wonderful second-story room, subjected to temptation almost too great to be resisted. Autograph letters, first drafts of well-known poems, rare volumes filled with corrections and notes in the hand of the author, are scattered about; occasionally, such an invaluable item as the complete manuscript of “The Cricket on the Hearth.”

It was from the table in this room that I picked up one day a rough folder of cardboard tied with red tape and labeled “Lamb.” Opening it, I found a letter from Lamb to Taylor & Hessey, “acknowledging with thanks receit of thirty-two pounds” for the copyright of “Elias (Alas) of last year,” signed and dated, June 9, 1824. I felt that it would look well in my presentation “Elia,” in boards, uncut, and was not mistaken.

My acquaintance with Mr. Dobell I owe to a paragraph that I read many years ago in Labouchere’s “Truth.” One day this caught my eye:—

From the catalogue of a West End Bookseller I note this: “Garrick, David. ‘Love in the Suds. A Town Eclogue,’ first edition. 1772. Very rare. 5 guineas.” The next post brought me a catalogue from Bertram Dobell, the well-known bookseller in the Charing Cross Road. There I read, “Garrick, David. ‘Love in the Suds. A Town Eclogue,’ first edition, 1772, boards, 18 pence.” The purchaser of the former might do well to average by acquiring Mr. Dobell’s copy.

Old Dobell is in a class by himself—scholar, antiquarian, poet, and bookseller.[4] He is just the type one would expect to find in a shop on the floor of which books are stacked in piles four or five feet high, leaving narrow tortuous paths through which one treads one’s way with great drifts of books on either side. To reach the shelves is practically impossible, yet out of this confusion I have picked many a rare item.

Don’t be discouraged if, on your asking for a certain volume, Mr. Dobell gently replies, “No, sorry.” That means simply that he cannot put his mental eye on it at the moment. It, or something as interesting, will come along. Don’t hurry; and let me observe that the prices of this eighteenth-century bookshop are of the period.

I once sought, for years, a little book of no particular value; but I wanted it to complete a set. I had about given up all hope of securing a copy when I finally found it in a fashionable shop on Piccadilly. It was marked five guineas, an awful price; but I paid it and put the volume in my pocket. That very day I stumbled across a copy in a better condition at Dobell’s, marked two and six. I bethought me of Labby’s advice and “averaged.”

From Dobell came Wordsworth’s copy of “Endymion”; likewise a first edition of the old-fashioned love-story, “Henrietta Temple,” by Disraeli, inscribed, “To William Beckford with the author’s compliments,” with many pages of useless notes in Beckford’s hand; he seems to have read the volumes with unnecessary care. Nor should I forget a beautiful copy of Thomson’s “Seasons,” presented by Byron “To the Hon’ble Frances Wedderburne Webster,” with this signed impromptu:—

Go!—volume of the Wintry Blast,

The yellow Autumn and the virgin Spring.

Go!—ere the Summer’s zephyr’s past

And lend to loveliness thy lovely Wing.

The morning’s mail of a busy man, marked “personal,” takes a wide scope, ranging all the way from polite requests for a loan to brief statements that “a prompt remittance will oblige”; but at the bottom of the pile are the welcome catalogues of the second-hand booksellers—for books, to be interesting, must at least be second-hand. Indeed, as with notes offered for discount, the greater the number of good indorsers the better. In books, indorsements frequently take the form of bookplates. I am always interested in such a note as this: “From the library of Charles B. Foote, with his bookplate.”

Auction catalogues come, too. These also must be scanned, but they lack the element which makes the dealers’ catalogues so interesting—the prices. With prices omitted, book-auction catalogues are too stimulating. The mind at once begins to range. Doubt takes the place of certainty.

The arrival of a catalogue from the Sign of the Caxton Head, Mr. James Tregaskis’s shop in High Holborn, in the parish of St.-Giles’s-in-the-Fields, always suspends business in my office for half an hour; and while I glance rapidly through its pages in search of nuggets, I paraphrase a line out of Boswell, that “Jimmie hath a very pretty wife.” Why shouldn’t a book merchant have a pretty wife? The answer is simple: he has, nor are good-looking wives peculiar to this generation of booksellers.

Tom Davies, it will be remembered, who, in the back parlor of his little bookshop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, first introduced Boswell to Johnson, had a wife who, we are told, caused the great Doctor to interrupt himself in the Lord’s Prayer at the point, “Lead us not into temptation,” and whisper to her, with waggish and gallant good humor, “You, my dear, are the cause of this.” Like causes still produce like effects.