The Library
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Andrew Lang >> The Library
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9 This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1881 Macmillan and Co. edition.
THE LIBRARY
Contents:
PREFATORY NOTE
AN APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK-HUNTER
THE LIBRARY
THE BOOKS OF THE COLLECTOR
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
Books, books again, and books once more!
These are our theme, which some miscall
Mere madness, setting little store
By copies either short or tall.
But you, O slaves of shelf and stall!
We rather write for you that hold
Patched folios dear, and prize "the small,
Rare volume, black with tarnished gold."
A. D.
PREFATORY NOTE
The pages in this volume on illuminated and other MSS. (with the
exception of some anecdotes about Bussy Rabutin and Julie de
Rambouillet) have been contributed by the Rev. W. J. Loftie, who has
also written on early printed books (pp. 94-95). The pages on the
Biblioklept (pp. 46-56) are reprinted, with the Editor's kind
permission, from the Saturday Review; and a few remarks on the moral
lessons of bookstalls are taken from an essay in the same journal.
Mr. Ingram Bywater, Fellow of Exeter College, and lately sub-
Librarian of the Bodleian, has very kindly read through the proofs
of chapters I., II., and III., and suggested some alterations.
Thanks are also due to Mr. T. R. Buchanan, Fellow of All Souls
College, for two plates from his "Book-bindings in All Souls
Library" (printed for private circulation), which he has been good
enough to lend me. The plates are beautifully drawn and coloured by
Dr. J. J. Wild. Messrs. George Bell & Sons, Messrs. Bradbury,
Agnew, & Co., and Messrs. Chatto & Windus, must be thanked for the
use of some of the woodcuts which illustrate the concluding chapter.
A. L.
AN APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK-HUNTER
"All men," says Dr. Dibdin, "like to be their own librarians." A
writer on the library has no business to lay down the law as to the
books that even the most inexperienced amateurs should try to
collect. There are books which no lover of literature can afford to
be without; classics, ancient and modern, on which the world has
pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be
able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the
smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and
Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and
Gibbon, Swift and Scott,--these every lover of letters will desire
to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list
of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the
tastes of men begin to differ very widely. An assortment of
broadsheet ballads and scrap-books, bought in boyhood, was the
nucleus of Scott's library, rich in the works of poets and
magicians, of alchemists, and anecdotists. A childish liking for
coloured prints of stage characters, may be the germ of a theatrical
collection like those of Douce, and Malone, and Cousin. People who
are studying any past period of human history, or any old phase or
expression of human genius, will eagerly collect little contemporary
volumes which seem trash to other amateurs. For example, to a
student of Moliere, it is a happy chance to come across "La Carte du
Royaume des Pretieuses"--(The map of the kingdom of the
"Precieuses")--written the year before the comedian brought out his
famous play "Les Precieuses Ridicules." This geographical tract
appeared in the very "Recueil des Pieces Choisies," whose authors
Magdelon, in the play, was expecting to entertain, when Mascarille
made his appearance. There is a faculty which Horace Walpole named
"serendipity,"--the luck of falling on just the literary document
which one wants at the moment. All collectors of out of the way
books know the pleasure of the exercise of serendipity, but they
enjoy it in different ways. One man will go home hugging a volume
of sermons, another with a bulky collection of catalogues, which
would have distended the pockets even of the wide great-coat made
for the purpose, that Charles Nodier used to wear when he went a
book-hunting. Others are captivated by black letter, others by the
plays of such obscurities as Nabbes and Glapthorne. But however
various the tastes of collectors of books, they are all agreed on
one point,--the love of printed paper. Even an Elzevir man can
sympathise with Charles Lamb's attachment to "that folio Beaumont
and Fletcher which he dragged home late at night from Barker's in
Covent Garden." But it is another thing when Lamb says, "I do not
care for a first folio of Shakespeare." A bibliophile who could say
this could say anything.
No, there are, in every period of taste, books which, apart from
their literary value, all collectors admit to possess, if not for
themselves, then for others of the brotherhood, a peculiar
preciousness. These books are esteemed for curiosity, for beauty of
type, paper, binding, and illustrations, for some connection they
may have with famous people of the past, or for their rarity. It is
about these books, the method of preserving them, their enemies, the
places in which to hunt for them, that the following pages are to
treat. It is a subject more closely connected with the taste for
curiosities than with art, strictly so called. We are to be
occupied, not so much with literature as with books, not so much
with criticism as with bibliography, the quaint duenna of
literature, a study apparently dry, but not without its humours.
And here an apology must be made for the frequent allusions and
anecdotes derived from French writers. These are as unavoidable,
almost, as the use of French terms of the sport in tennis and in
fencing. In bibliography, in the care for books AS books, the
French are still the teachers of Europe, as they were in tennis and
are in fencing. Thus, Richard de Bury, Chancellor of Edward III.,
writes in his "Philobiblon:" "Oh God of Gods in Zion! what a rushing
river of joy gladdens my heart as often as I have a chance of going
to Paris! There the days seem always short; there are the goodly
collections on the delicate fragrant book-shelves." Since Dante
wrote of -
"L'onor di quell' arte
Ch' allumare e chiamata in Parisi,"
"the art that is called illuminating in Paris," and all the other
arts of writing, printing, binding books, have been most skilfully
practised by France. She improved on the lessons given by Germany
and Italy in these crafts. Twenty books about books are written in
Paris for one that is published in England. In our country Dibdin
is out of date (the second edition of his "Bibliomania" was
published in 1811), and Mr. Hill Burton's humorous "Book-hunter" is
out of print. Meanwhile, in France, writers grave and gay, from the
gigantic industry of Brunet to Nodier's quaint fancy, and Janin's
wit, and the always entertaining bibliophile Jacob (Paul Lacroix),
have written, or are writing, on books, manuscripts, engravings,
editions, and bindings. In England, therefore, rare French books
are eagerly sought, and may be found in all the booksellers'
catalogues. On the continent there is no such care for our curious
or beautiful editions, old or new. Here a hint may be given to the
collector. If he "picks up" a rare French book, at a low price, he
would act prudently in having it bound in France by a good
craftsman. Its value, when "the wicked day of destiny" comes, and
the collection is broken up, will thus be made secure. For the
French do not suffer our English bindings gladly; while we have no
narrow prejudice against the works of Lortic and Cape, but the
reverse. For these reasons then, and also because every writer is
obliged to make the closest acquaintance with books in the direction
where his own studies lie, the writings of French authorities are
frequently cited in the following pages.
This apology must be followed by a brief defence of the taste and
passion of book-collecting, and of the class of men known
invidiously as book-worms and book-hunters. They and their simple
pleasures are the butts of a cheap and shrewish set of critics, who
cannot endure in others a taste which is absent in themselves.
Important new books have actually been condemned of late years
because they were printed on good paper, and a valuable historical
treatise was attacked by reviewers quite angrily because its outward
array was not mean and forbidding. Of course, critics who take this
view of new books have no patience with persons who care for
"margins," and "condition," and early copies of old books. We
cannot hope to convert the adversary, but it is not necessary to be
disturbed by his clamour. People are happier for the possession of
a taste as long as they possess it, and it does not, like the demons
of Scripture, possess them. The wise collector gets instruction and
pleasure from his pursuit, and it may well be that, in the long run,
he and his family do not lose money. The amusement may chance to
prove a very fair investment.
As to this question of making money by collecting, Mr. Hill Burton
speaks very distinctly in "The Book-hunter:" "Where money is the
object let a man speculate or become a miser. . . Let not the
collector ever, unless in some urgent and necessary circumstances,
part with any of his treasures. Let him not even have recourse to
that practice called barter, which political philosophers tell us is
the universal resource of mankind preparatory to the invention of
money. Let him confine all his transactions in the market to
purchasing only. No good comes of gentlemen-amateurs buying and
selling." There is room for difference of opinion here, but there
seems to be most reason on the side of Mr. Hill Burton. It is one
thing for the collector to be able to reflect that the money he
expends on books is not lost, and that his family may find
themselves richer, not poorer, because he indulged his taste. It is
quite another thing to buy books as a speculator buys shares,
meaning to sell again at a profit as soon as occasion offers. It is
necessary also to warn the beginner against indulging extravagant
hopes. He must buy experience with his books, and many of his first
purchases are likely to disappoint him. He will pay dearly for the
wrong "Caesar" of 1635, the one WITHOUT errors in pagination; and
this is only a common example of the beginner's blunders.
Collecting is like other forms of sport; the aim is not certain at
first, the amateur is nervous, and, as in angling, is apt to
"strike" (a bargain) too hurriedly.
I often think that the pleasure of collecting is like that of sport.
People talk of "book-hunting," and the old Latin motto says that
"one never wearies of the chase in this forest." But the analogy to
angling seems even stronger. A collector walks in the London or
Paris streets, as he does by Tweed or Spey. Many a lordly mart of
books he passes, like Mr. Quaritch's, Mr. Toovey's, or M.
Fontaine's, or the shining store of M.M. Morgand et Fatout, in the
Passage des Panoramas. Here I always feel like Brassicanus in the
king of Hungary's collection, "non in Bibliotheca, sed in gremio
Jovis;" "not in a library, but in paradise." It is not given to
every one to cast angle in these preserves. They are kept for dukes
and millionaires. Surely the old Duke of Roxburghe was the happiest
of mortals, for to him both the chief bookshops and auction rooms,
and the famous salmon streams of Floors, were equally open, and he
revelled in the prime of book-collecting and of angling. But there
are little tributary streets, with humbler stalls, shy pools, as it
were, where the humbler fisher of books may hope to raise an
Elzevir, or an old French play, a first edition of Shelley, or a
Restoration comedy. It is usually a case of hope unfulfilled; but
the merest nibble of a rare book, say Marston's poems in the
original edition, or Beddoes's "Love's Arrow Poisoned," or Bankes's
"Bay Horse in a Trance," or the "Mel Heliconicum" of Alexander Ross,
or "Les Oeuvres de Clement Marot, de Cahors, Vallet de Chambre du
Roy, A Paris, Ches Pierre Gaultier, 1551;" even a chance at
something of this sort will kindle the waning excitement, and add a
pleasure to a man's walk in muddy London. Then, suppose you
purchase for a couple of shillings the "Histoire des Amours de Henry
IV, et autres pieces curieuses, A Leyde, Chez Jean Sambyx (Elzevir),
1664," it is certainly not unpleasant, on consulting M. Fontaine's
catalogue, to find that he offers the same work at the ransom of 10
pounds. The beginner thinks himself in singular luck, even though
he has no idea of vending his collection, and he never reflects that
CONDITION--spotless white leaves and broad margins, make the market
value of a book.
Setting aside such bare considerations of profit, the sport given by
bookstalls is full of variety and charm. In London it may be
pursued in most of the cross streets that stretch a dirty net
between the British Museum and the Strand. There are other more shy
and less frequently poached resorts which the amateur may be allowed
to find out for himself. In Paris there is the long sweep of the
Quais, where some eighty bouquinistes set their boxes on the walls
of the embankment of the Seine. There are few country towns so
small but that books, occasionally rare and valuable, may be found
lurking in second-hand furniture warehouses. This is one of the
advantages of living in an old country. The Colonies are not the
home for a collector. I have seen an Australian bibliophile
enraptured by the rare chance of buying, in Melbourne, an early work
on--the history of Port Jackson! This seems but poor game. But in
Europe an amateur has always occupation for his odd moments in town,
and is for ever lured on by the radiant apparition of Hope. All
collectors tell their anecdotes of wonderful luck, and magnificent
discoveries. There is a volume "Voyages Litteraires sur les Quais
de Paris" (Paris, Durand, 1857), by M. de Fontaine de Resbecq, which
might convert the dullest soul to book-hunting. M. de Resbecq and
his friends had the most amazing good fortune. A M. N- found six
original plays of Moliere (worth perhaps as many hundreds of
pounds), bound up with Garth's "Dispensary," an English poem which
has long lost its vogue. It is worth while, indeed, to examine all
volumes marked "Miscellanea," "Essays," and the like, and treasures
may possibly lurk, as Snuffy Davy knew, within the battered
sheepskin of school books. Books lie in out of the way places.
Poggio rescued "Quintilian" from the counter of a wood merchant.
The best time for book-hunting in Paris is the early morning. "The
take," as anglers say, is "on" from half-past seven to half-past
nine a.m. At these hours the vendors exhibit their fresh wares, and
the agents of the more wealthy booksellers come and pick up
everything worth having. These agents quite spoil the sport of the
amateur. They keep a strict watch on every country dealer's
catalogue, snap up all he has worth selling, and sell it over again,
charging pounds in place of shillings. But M. de Resbecq vows that
he once picked up a copy of the first edition of La Rochefoucauld's
"Maxims" out of a box which two booksellers had just searched. The
same collector got together very promptly all the original editions
of La Bruyere, and he even found a copy of the Elzevir "Pastissier
Francais," at the humble price of six sous. Now the " Pastissier
Francais," an ill-printed little cookery-book of the Elzevirs, has
lately fetched 600 pounds at a sale. The Antiquary's story of
Snuffy Davy and the "Game of Chess," is dwarfed by the luck of M. de
Resbecq. Not one amateur in a thousand can expect such good
fortune. There is, however, a recent instance of a Rugby boy, who
picked up, on a stall, a few fluttering leaves hanging together on a
flimsy thread. The old woman who kept the stall could hardly be
induced to accept the large sum of a shilling for an original quarto
of Shakespeare's "King John." These stories are told that none may
despair. That none may be over confident, an author may recount his
own experience. The only odd trouvaille that ever fell to me was a
clean copy of "La Journee Chretienne," with the name of Leon
Gambetta, 1844, on its catholic fly-leaf. Rare books grow rarer
every day, and often 'tis only Hope that remains at the bottom of
the fourpenny boxes. Yet the Paris book-hunters cleave to the game.
August is their favourite season; for in August there is least
competition. Very few people are, as a rule, in Paris, and these
are not tempted to loiter. The bookseller is drowsy, and glad not
to have the trouble of chaffering. The English go past, and do not
tarry beside a row of dusty boxes of books. The heat threatens the
amateur with sunstroke. Then, says M. Octave Uzanne, in a prose
ballade of book-hunters--then, calm, glad, heroic, the bouquineurs
prowl forth, refreshed with hope. The brown old calf-skin wrinkles
in the sun, the leaves crackle, you could poach an egg on the cover
of a quarto. The dome of the Institute glitters, the sickly trees
seem to wither, their leaves wax red and grey, a faint warm wind is
walking the streets. Under his vast umbrella the book-hunter is
secure and content; he enjoys the pleasures of the sport unvexed by
poachers, and thinks less of the heat than does the deer-stalker on
the bare hill-side.
There is plenty of morality, if there are few rare books in the
stalls. The decay of affection, the breaking of friendship, the
decline of ambition, are all illustrated in these fourpenny
collections. The presentation volumes are here which the author
gave in the pride of his heart to the poet who was his "Master," to
the critic whom he feared, to the friend with whom he was on terms
of mutual admiration. The critic has not even cut the leaves, the
poet has brusquely torn three or four apart with his finger and
thumb, the friend has grown cold, and has let the poems slip into
some corner of his library, whence they were removed on some day of
doom and of general clearing out. The sale of the library of a late
learned prelate who had Boileau's hatred of a dull book was a scene
to be avoided by his literary friends. The Bishop always gave the
works which were offered to him a fair chance. He read till he
could read no longer, cutting the pages as he went, and thus his
progress could be traced like that of a backwoodsman who "blazes"
his way through a primeval forest. The paper-knife generally ceased
to do duty before the thirtieth page. The melancholy of the book-
hunter is aroused by two questions, "Whence?" and "Whither?" The
bibliophile asks about his books the question which the
metaphysician asks about his soul. Whence came they? Their value
depends a good deal on the answer. If they are stamped with arms,
then there is a book ("Armorial du Bibliophile," by M. Guigard)
which tells you who was their original owner. Any one of twenty
coats-of-arms on the leather is worth a hundred times the value of
the volume which it covers. If there is no such mark, the fancy is
left to devise a romance about the first owner, and all the hands
through which the book has passed. That Vanini came from a Jesuit
college, where it was kept under lock and key. That copy of Agrippa
"De Vanitate Scientiarum" is marked, in a crabbed hand and in faded
ink, with cynical Latin notes. What pessimist two hundred years ago
made his grumbling so permanent? One can only guess, but part of
the imaginative joys of the book-hunter lies ' in the fruitless
conjecture. That other question "Whither?" is graver. Whither are
our treasures to be scattered? Will they find kind masters? or,
worst fate of books, fall into the hands of women who will sell them
to the trunk-maker? Are the leaves to line a box or to curl a
maiden's locks? Are the rarities to become more and more rare, and
at last fetch prodigious prices? Some unlucky men are able partly
to solve these problems in their own lifetime. They are constrained
to sell their libraries--an experience full of bitterness, wrath,
and disappointment.
Selling books is nearly as bad as losing friends, than which life
has no worse sorrow. A book is a friend whose face is constantly
changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness,
and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change
in yourself. As a man's tastes and opinions are developed his books
put on a different aspect. He hardly knows the "Poems and Ballads"
he used to declaim, and cannot recover the enigmatic charm of
"Sordello." Books change like friends, like ourselves, like
everything; but they are most piquant in the contrasts they provoke,
when the friend who gave them and wrote them is a success, though we
laughed at him; a failure, though we believed in him; altered in any
case, and estranged from his old self and old days. The vanished
past returns when we look at the pages. The vicissitudes of years
are printed and packed in a thin octavo, and the shivering ghosts of
desire and hope return to their forbidden home in the heart and
fancy. It is as well to have the power of recalling them always at
hand, and to be able to take a comprehensive glance at the emotions
which were so powerful and full of life, and now are more faded and
of less account than the memory of the dreams of childhood. It is
because our books are friends that do change, and remind us of
change, that we should keep them with us, even at a little
inconvenience, and not turn them adrift in the world to find a dusty
asylum in cheap bookstalls. We are a part of all that we have read,
to parody the saying of Mr. Tennyson's Ulysses, and we owe some
respect, and house-room at least, to the early acquaintances who
have begun to bore us, and remind us of the vanity of ambition and
the weakness of human purpose. Old school and college books even
have a reproachful and salutary power of whispering how much a man
knew, and at the cost of how much trouble, that he has absolutely
forgotten, and is neither the better nor the worse for it. It will
be the same in the case of the books he is eager about now; though,
to be sure, he will read with less care, and forget with an ease and
readiness only to be acquired by practice.
But we were apologising for book-hunting, not because it teaches
moral lessons, as "dauncyng" also does, according to Sir Thomas
Elyot, in the "Boke called the Gouvernour," but because it affords a
kind of sportive excitement. Bookstalls are not the only field of
the chase. Book catalogues, which reach the collector through the
post, give him all the pleasures of the sport at home. He reads the
booksellers' catalogues eagerly, he marks his chosen sport with
pencil, he writes by return of post, or he telegraphs to the vendor.
Unfortunately he almost always finds that he has been forestalled,
probably by some bookseller's agent. When the catalogue is a French
one, it is obvious that Parisians have the pick of the market before
our slow letters reach M. Claudin, or M. Labitte. Still the
catalogues themselves are a kind of lesson in bibliography. You see
from them how prices are ruling, and you can gloat, in fancy, over
De Luyne's edition of Moliere, 1673, two volumes in red morocco,
double ("Trautz Bauzonnet"), or some other vanity hopelessly out of
reach. In their catalogues, MM. Morgand and Fatout print a
facsimile of the frontispiece of this very rare edition. The bust
of Moliere occupies the centre, and portraits of the great actor, as
Sganarelle and Mascarille (of the "Precieuses Ridicules"), stand on
either side. In the second volume are Moliere, and his wife
Armande, crowned by the muse Thalia. A catalogue which contains
such exact reproductions of rare and authentic portraits, is itself
a work of art, and serviceable to the student. When the shop of a
bookseller, with a promising catalogue which arrives over night, is
not too far distant, bibliophiles have been known to rush to the
spot in the grey morning, before the doors open. There are
amateurs, however, who prefer to stay comfortably at home, and pity
these poor fanatics, shivering in the rain outside a door in Oxford
Street or Booksellers' Row. There is a length to which enthusiasm
cannot go, and many collectors draw the line at rising early in the
morning. But, when we think of the sport of book-hunting, it is to
sales in auction-rooms that the mind naturally turns. Here the
rival buyers feel the passion of emulation, and it was in an
auction-room that Guibert de Pixerecourt, being outbid, said, in
tones of mortal hatred, "I will have the book when your collection
is sold after your death." And he kept his word. The fever of
gambling is not absent from the auction-room, and people "bid
jealous" as they sometimes "ride jealous" in the hunting-field.
Yet, the neophyte, if he strolls by chance into a sale-room, will be
surprised at the spectacle. The chamber has the look of a rather
seedy "hell." The crowd round the auctioneer's box contains many
persons so dingy and Semitic, that at Monte Carlo they would be
refused admittance; while, in Germany, they would be persecuted by
Herr von Treitschke with Christian ardour. Bidding is languid, and
valuable books are knocked down for trifling sums. Let the neophyte
try his luck, however, and prices will rise wonderfully. The fact
is that the sale is a "knock out." The bidders are professionals,
in a league to let the volumes go cheap, and to distribute them
afterwards among themselves. Thus an amateur can have a good deal
of sport by bidding for a book till it reaches its proper value, and
by then leaving in the lurch the professionals who combine to "run
him up." The amusement has its obvious perils, but the presence of
gentlemen in an auction-room is a relief to the auctioneer and to
the owner of the books. A bidder must be able to command his
temper, both that he may be able to keep his head cool when tempted
to bid recklessly, and that he may disregard the not very carefully
concealed sneers of the professionals.
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