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William Carew Hazlitt
Published by Good Press, 2021
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A careful survey of the Heber Catalogue leads to the conclusion, from the immense number of rarities there offered for sale for the first time, that the owner succeeded in obtaining a notable proportion of his early books direct from the trade or from private sources by that most powerful of inducements—the known willingness to pay promptly and well for everything brought to him. The note to Thorpe the bookseller, enclosing an order on his bankers for £200 for the Ballads, of which the Daniel volume was merely a selection, is still extant; the money seems to have reached Thorpe’s hands before the purchase left them, in consequence of Heber being from home; even he speaks there of being ashamed of himself for his extravagance, and he asks the vendor whether it was the inheritance of the Stationers’ Company. He was not aware that the lot came from Helmingham Hall through Fitch of Ipswich, and that it had been milked by Daniel.
My association with the London Library and gradual contact with the British Museum, with collectors, and with the book trade, tended to stimulate a natural affection for old books, while it gradually and, at first, unconsciously gave to the movement a bibliographical and commercial direction. I conceived in my mind, apart from any collateral matters, a grand literary scheme. I saw before me all that former men, Heber included, had achieved toward a British Bibliography; and I determined to combine and collate the whole, and make it the nucleus of a New Work. The result was the appearance in 1867 of the Handbook of Early English Literature.
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