Читать книгу The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections - A. Edward Newton - Страница 7

This copy is a genuine specimen of the first edition, uncut and unopened, signed and certified by the editor.

Chauncey Brewster Tinker.

No copy is now known to exist of the suppressed first state of the first edition—that in which, instead of the present entry in the index, under Pope, Alexander, page 111, occurred the words, “Pope Alexander 111.”

How much more valuable this copy would have been if this blunder—“point,” the judicious would call it—had not been corrected until the second edition!

The work of my office was interrupted one summer morning several years ago by the receipt of a cable from London, apparently in code, which, I was advised, would not translate. Upon its being submitted to me I found that it did not require translating, but I was not surprised that it was somewhat bewildering to others. It read, “Johnson Piazza Dictionary Pounds Forty Hut.” To me it was perfectly clear that Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi’s copy of Johnson’s Dictionary in two volumes folio was to be had from my friend Hutt for forty pounds. I dispatched the money and in due course received the volumes. Inserted in one of them was a long holograph letter to the Thrales, giving them some excellent advice on the management of their affairs.

I think it very probably in your power to lay up eight thousand pounds a year for every year to come, increasing all the time, what needs not be increased, the splendour of all external appearance, and surely such a state is not to be put in yearly hazard for the pleasure of keeping the house full, or the ambition of outbrewing Whitbread. Stop now and you are safe—stop a few years and you may go safely on thereafter, if to go on shall seem worth the while.

Johnson’s letters, like his talks, are compact with wisdom, and many of them are as easy as the proverbial old shoe. Fancy Sam Johnson, the great lexicographer, writing to Mrs. Thrale and telling her to come home and take care of him and, as he says, to

Come with a whoop, come with a call,

Come with a good will, or come not at all.

I own thirty or forty Johnson letters, including the one in which he describes what she called his “menagerie”—dependents too old, too poor, or too peevish to find asylum elsewhere. He writes, “We have tolerable concord at home, but no love. Williams hates everybody. Levet hates Desmoulines, and does not love Williams. Desmoulines hates them both. Poll loves none of them.”

But I must be careful. I had firmly resolved not to say anything which would lead any one to suspect that I am Johnson-mad, but I admit that such is the case. I am never without a copy of Boswell. What edition? Any edition. I have them all—the first in boards uncut, for my personal satisfaction; an extra-illustrated copy of the same, for display; Birkbeck Hill’s, for reference, and the cheap old Bohn copy which thirty years ago I first read, because I know it by heart. Yes, I can truly say with Leslie Stephen, “My enjoyment of books began and will end with Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson.’ ”

“Thou fool! to seek companions in a crowd!

Into thy room and there upon thy knees,

Before thy bookshelves, humbly thank thy God,

That thou hast friends like these!”