BOOKS AND BIDDERS

PAGE OF THE GUTENBERG BIBLE, SHOWING THE TEN
COMMANDMENTS

BOOKS AND BIDDERS

THE ADVENTURES OF A BIBLIOPHILE

BY

A. S. W. ROSENBACH

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1927

Copyright, 1927,
By A. S. W. Rosenbach

All rights reserved

Published November, 1927
Reprinted November, 1927

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS PUBLICATIONS
ARE PUBLISHED BY
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
PHILIP H. ROSENBACH

FOREWORD

It is a pleasant duty to record my appreciation of the assistance rendered me in the writing of these articles by Miss Avery Strakosch (Mrs. W. K. Denham). It was she who, at the suggestion of the editors of the Saturday Evening Post, persuaded me to dictate the series of eight articles that appeared in the Post in the first part of 1927. The ninth was published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1927.

I cannot tell how much I am indebted to her, not only for the form of the articles, but for a friendship that began with the first article and will continue, I trust, long after the last ceases to be read.

A. S. W. R.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

BOOKS AND BIDDERS

I

TALKING OF OLD BOOKS

“Genius?” The tall old man with the fan-shaped beard looked eagerly at his companion, then settled back more heavily against the rows and rows of old books lining the walls to the ceiling on all sides of the room. “Of course Edgar was a genius, but in spite of being a gambler and a drunkard—in spite of it, I tell you!”

The other, a thin man of lesser years, his long, inquiring face meditative in the twilight, nodded.

“You are right,” he agreed. “But what difference did it make? The only question is, would ‘The Raven’ have been any greater without his gambling and drinking? I doubt it.”

The argument was on, and my uncle, Moses Polock, would lean forward now and again, waving his coatless arms—he handled books easier in shirt sleeves—in an effort to gain a point. His peculiarly young and penetrating blue eyes glistened. Opposite, George P. Philes, a noted editor and book collector, twirled a gray moustache and goatee while balancing in a tilted chair, listening calmly, and patiently relighting a half-smoked cigar which went out often as the verbal heat increased.

I would watch these two, dazed with their heated words concerning authors and their works; hear them make bookish prophecies, most of which came true. A favorite subject was their neurotic friend, Edgar Allan Poe. Both had befriended this singularly unfortunate and great writer, and each had certain contentions to make which led through the fire of argument to the cooler and more even discussion of reminiscences. But they did agree that it would take less than fifty years after Poe’s death to make first editions of his works the most valuable of all American authors.

It was in 1885, when I was nine years old, that I first felt the haunting atmosphere of Uncle Moses’ bookshop on the second floor of the bulging, red-brick building on Commerce Street in old Philadelphia. At that age I could hardly realize, spellbound as I was, the full quality of mystery and intangible beauty which becomes a part of the atmosphere wherever fine books are brought together; for here was something which called to me each afternoon, just as the wharves, the water, and the ships drew other boys who were delighted to get away from books the moment school was out. Whatever it was,—some glibly speak of it as bibliomania,—it entered my bones then, and has grown out of all proportion ever since. The long walk from the bookshop to my home in the twilight, the moon, just coming up, throwing long shadows across the white slab of Franklin’s grave which I had to pass, was sometimes difficult; but as I grew older I learned to shut my eyes against imaginary fears and, in a valiant effort to be brave, hurried past darkened corners and abysmal alleyways, inventing a game by which I tried to visualize the only touches of color in Uncle Moses’ musty, dusty shop—occasional brilliantly bound volumes. Running along, I also cross-examined myself on quotations and dates from books and manuscripts through which I had prowled earlier in the day, unwittingly developing a memory which was often to stand me in good stead.

My uncle’s appreciation of books showed itself long before he took over the publishing and bookselling business established in Philadelphia in 1780, just before the close of the Revolution. Throughout his youth books had been dear to him, and his father, noting this, encouraged him to keep together the volumes he prized most. Yet he gained local attention, not as a book collector but as a publisher, when with a certain amount of initiative he brought out the works of the first American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown. But I early had my suspicions of him as a publisher. It seemed to me that he used the publishing business as a literary cat’s-paw by which he might conceal his real interest and love—searching for, finding, and treasuring rare books.

After all, if one is in a trade, certain expectations are held by the public; and the older Uncle Moses grew the less willing he became to meet these expectations. To publish books and sell them was one phase; but to collect, and then to sell, he considered a different and entirely personal affair. A poor young man, Uncle Moses had acquired the business in an almost magical manner. Jacob Johnson, the original founder, began by publishing children’s books only. But in 1800 he decided to branch out, and took a partner, Benjamin Warner. Fifteen years later the firm was sold out to McCarty and Davis. After several successful years McCarty retired, and it was then that Moses Polock was employed as a clerk. They had spread out and were now publishing all sorts of books. Davis became very fond of his clerk, and when he died, in 1851, left him sufficient money in his will to purchase the business for himself. Luck was evidently with my uncle, for he made a great deal of money in publishing Lindley Murray’s Grammar and other schoolbooks of the time.

First as a publishing house and bookstore combined, Uncle Moses’ shop became a meeting place for publishers and writers. Here it was that the ill-fed Poe came in 1835 to talk modestly of his writings and hopes.

Such men as James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Noah Webster, and Herman Melville might be seen going up or coming down the narrow staircase leading to the second floor. George Bancroft, the historian, came, too, and Eaton, who wrote the Life of Jackson; George H. Boker, a distinguished Philadelphia poet, Charles Godfrey Leland, of Hans Breitmann Ballads note, and Donald G. Mitchell, who wrote as Ik. Marvel, and many others—they found their way along the uneven brick sidewalks of Commerce Street. Gradually, however, it developed into a rendezvous for the more leisured group of collectors.

MOSES POLOCK IN HIS BOOKSHOP

Men—and occasionally a woman—who owned many an interesting and valuable volume came to browse and talk. Silent or voluble, enthusiastic or suspiciously conservative, each had in mind some book, of Uncle Moses’ he hoped one day to possess. For it took something more than money and coercion to make this old man give up his treasures. Even when he occasionally fell to this temptation and sold the precious volume, in place of the original he would make a pen-and-ink copy of the book, word for word, so that it was typographically perfect. This would take weeks to do, and only when he needed money badly did he consent to part with the original. I have some of these copies and treasure them as curiosities. Not only months but very often years of tireless perseverance were necessary to make him sell a favorite volume. Equally interesting was that other group which came daily—a group composed of impecunious and peculiarly erratic book lovers, found in book haunts the world over: a poverty-stricken intellectual class, who in filling their minds often forget to provide for their stomachs as well.

All the memories of my childhood centre around the secluded and dusty corners of this shop, where I eavesdropped and prowled to my heart’s content. My uncle, at first annoyed at having a little boy about the place prying into musty papers and books, eventually took delight in showing me rare editions purchased by him at auctions and private sales. As he grew older he became somewhat eccentric, and, despite my extreme youth, insisted upon treating me as a book lover and connoisseur, his own equal. Although he lived to be a very old man, he retained the most marvelous memory I have ever known. He could tell without a moment’s hesitation the date of a book, who the printer was, where it had been found, any physical earmarks it might have, its various vicissitudes, and how it had reached its final destination.

Among the noted collectors who came to match their wits and learning with my uncle was a younger man, Clarence S. Bement, who developed into one of the greatest American book experts. Even at that time he had a wonderful collection, and I well remember his subtle efforts to add to it constantly. He would talk in a firm, low, rather musical voice, obviously toned with persuasion, hoping to make his friend part with some cherished volume he coveted. As I watched Uncle Moses refuse, I saw a curiously adamant and at the same time satisfied expression spread over his features; I noticed, too, the dignity of movement as he gravely took the volume from Bement’s fingers to look at it, with that expressive pride in ownership that verges on madness with many people to whom possession can mean but one thing—books.

Samuel W. Pennypacker, who in later years became governor of Pennsylvania, was another avid book collector and constant habitué of the old Commerce Street bookshop. His hobby was anything he could lay his hands upon from the Franklin press. He also collected all data relating to the early Swedish settlers of Pennsylvania and his German and Dutch ancestors, as well as any material concerning the development of the state. A large man he was, with serious eyes set in a rather square-shaped head. But his voice fascinated me most of all as it boomed about the shelves when he grew excited, and took on an unforgettable Pennsylvania-Dutch twang.

Pennypacker was a fervent admirer of George Washington, and he had once heard of a letter which General Washington wrote from one of the scenes of his childhood, Pennypacker’s Mills. He couldn’t seem to forget this letter, for he was always talking about it, hoping to trace it to its owner and eventually make it his own.

I shall never forget the day Uncle Moses told him he had found and bought this letter. He handed it to Pennypacker with a light of triumphant amusement in his eyes. After reading it, Pennypacker put it down on the table before him and, without raising his eyes, said in a peculiarly exhausted way, “Polock, I must have this letter. You can make any bargain you choose, but I must have it!” Hardly waiting for the other to reply, he rushed down the stairs, to return a few moments later with two books under his arm. My uncle’s blue eyes were but mocking questions as he pushed them aside after glancing at their title pages. They were two valuable books, but not unusually so. Pennypacker had by this time unbuttoned his coat, and I saw him take from an inner pocket a thin, yellow envelope.

“These”—Pennypacker pointed to his two books “and this.” He opened the envelope and gave my uncle its contents. It, too, was a letter from George Washington, yet no sign of emotion swept the old man’s features as he read. But the exchange was made rather quickly, I thought, and it would have been, difficult to decide which bargainer was the more satisfied. I have read both letters many times since. The Pennypacker’s Mills letter was dated September 29, 1777, and addressed: “On public service, to the Honorable John Hancock, President of Congress, Lancaster.” George Washington wrote in part:—

I shall move the Army four or five miles lower down today from where we may reconnoitre and fix upon a proper situation at such distance from the enemy as will enable us to make an attack should we see a proper opening, or stand upon the defensive till we obtain further reinforcements. This was the opinion of a Council of General Officers which I called yesterday.

I congratulate you upon the success of our Arms to the Northward and if some accident does not put them out of their present train, I think we may count upon the total ruin of Burgoyne.

The letter which my uncle received was written four years later from Philadelphia, in 1781, to Abraham Skinner, Commissary General of Prisoners, and was easily the more important, historically, of the two, as General Washington discussed throughout the surrender of Cornwallis and the exchange of prisoners at Yorktown. He instructed General Skinner not to consent to the exchange of Lord Cornwallis under any conditions.

Even I, with but a short experience as a mere onlooker in the collecting game, realized its greater value. After my uncle’s death this Washington letter sold for $925, and it rests to-day as one of the treasures in the Pierpont Morgan collection.

THE INFANT BIBLIOPHILE

A few years ago I bought back the Pennypacker’s Mills letter for $130 from Governor Pennypacker’s estate. Because of the incident it recalls I would never part with it.

When I was eleven years old I began book collecting on my own. My first purchase was at an auction in the old Henkels’s auction rooms on Chestnut Street. It was an illustrated edition of Reynard the Fox, and was knocked down to me for twenty-four dollars. My enthusiasm rather than my financial security swept me into this extravagance, and after the sale I had to go to the auctioneer, Mr. Stan V. Henkels, and confess that I was not exactly solvent. At the same time I explained I was Moses Polock’s nephew, instinctively feeling, I suppose, that such a relationship might account for any untoward action concerning books. I had hardly got the words out of my frightened mouth when Mr. Henkels burst into a fit of laughing which—although I was too young, too scared and self-conscious to realize it at the time—was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between us.

When he ceased laughing, he looked down at me, a sombre little boy with a book under his shaking arm, and said, “I’ve seen it start at an early age, and run in families, but in all my experience this is the very first baby bibliomaniac to come my way!” With this admission he kindly consented to extend credit, and trusted me for further payments, which I was to make weekly from my school allowance. Giving him all the money I possessed, ten dollars, I marched from the auction room, feeling for the first time in my life that swooning yet triumphant, that enervating and at the same time heroic combination of emotions the born bibliomaniac enjoys so intensely with the purchase of each rare book.

Stan V. Henkels—no one dared to leave out the middle initial—was a remarkable man. Even in his young days he resembled an old Southern colonel, the accepted picture we all have, a man of drooping moustache, rather patrician nose, and longish hair which he decorated with a large-brimmed, rusty black hat of the Civil War period. He insisted he was an unreconstructed rebel and was always willing to take on anyone in a verbal battle about the Civil War.

By profession an auctioneer of books, Mr. Henkels was the first person to make the dreary, uninteresting work of auction catalogues into living, fascinating literature, almost as exciting reading as fiction. Previous to this, anyone wanting to find out what was in a collection had little luck when searching through a catalogue, beyond discovering names and dates.

Observing this, and that certain items whose contents were of exceptional interest did not sell well, Henkels decided to find out for himself what was between the covers of the books he sold, and to learn what was often told so confidentially in the literary manuscripts and letters, and then to print the most interesting data he could find about each item. This was a great work in itself, and how he found the leisure to give to it was a mystery. Thus he brought in color and life, a human-interest setting, which added thousands of dollars yearly to his business, and which awakened feelings of gratitude in many collectors.

STAN V. HENKELS

Seven years after buying Reynard the Fox on the installment plan, I made my first valuable literary discovery. I was studying then at the University of Pennsylvania, and books enthralled me to a disastrous extent. I attended book sales at all hours of the day and night; I neglected my studies; I bought books whether I could afford them or not; I forgot to eat, and did not consider sleep necessary at all. The early stages of the book-collecting germ are not the most virulent, but nevertheless they make themselves felt!

This night I went to the Henkels’s auction room several hours before the sale. I looked at many of the books with great delight, sighed when I estimated the prices they would bring, and was beginning to feel rather despondent, when I happened to see a bound collection of pamphlets in one corner of the room.

Now for some unknown reason pamphlets, even from my boyhood, have been a passion with me. I cannot resist reading a pamphlet, whether it has value or not. The potentialities between slim covers play the devil with my imagination. It is true that books are my real love, but pamphlets flaunt a certain piquancy which I have never been able to resist. One might call them the flirtations of book collecting. I crossed to the corner, disturbed that I had not seen the volume earlier in the evening, that I had so little time to devote to it. But hurried as I felt,—it was almost time for the sale to begin,—I came upon a copy of Gray’s Odes. It was not only a first edition, but the first book from Horace Walpole’s famous Strawberry Hill Press, printed especially for him. Walpole had a weakness for gathering fame to his own name by printing the works of certain famous contemporaries. Delighted at finding this, I observed the title page of a pamphlet, which was bound with it. I could hardly believe my eyes! For in my hands I held, quite by accident, the long-lost first edition of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous Prologue, which David Garrick recited the opening night of the Drury Lane Theatre in London in 1747. Although advertisements in the General Advertiser and Gentleman’s Magazine of Doctor Johnson’s day announced the sale of this work for the modest sum of sixpence, no one had ever heard of a copy of this original edition being in existence before or since. Boswell made an allusion to it in his Life of Johnson, but that was all that was known of this first issue of the little masterpiece of “dramatick criticism.”

I closed my eyes in an effort to steady myself, leaning heavily against the wall. I wanted to buy this pamphlet more than I had ever wanted anything in the world. A wealthy and noted collector entered the room. I gave up hope. Again I looked at the pamphlet, and as I read Doctor Johnson’s famous line on Shakespeare, “And panting Time toil’d after him in vain,” I wished that I might be weak enough to take something which did not belong to me.

Suddenly my plans were made. I would have the Prologue! I would do anything honorable to obtain it. Having nothing but my future to mortgage I desperately decided to offer that, whoever the purchaser might be.

Mr. Henkels announced the usual terms of the sale and I gazed cautiously about the room; every member of the audience was just waiting for that volume of pamphlets, I knew. Finally it was put up, and the very silence seemed to bid against me; when, after two or three feeble counter bids, it became really mine for the sum of $3.60, I sat as one in a trance. The news soon spread among the experts of the exceptional find I had made, and I had many offers for it. Several years later, during my postgraduate course at college, when I needed money very badly, a noted collector dandled a check for $5000 before my eyes. It was a difficult moment for me, but I refused the offer. In my private library I retain this treasured volume.

One day previous to this I was in the auction rooms when a white-haired negro said Mr. Henkels had something interesting to show me if I would go to the top floor. I found him standing by an open window fronting Chestnut Street, exhibiting to several curious customers a small gold locket which had belonged to George Washington. It had been authenticated by his heirs, and also the gray lock of hair enclosed within it. As I joined the others, Mr. Henkels opened the locket and held it out for inspection. At that moment an unexpected gust of wind blew into the room, and, sweeping about, took the curl very neatly from its resting place. So quickly did it happen it was a moment or so before we realized that the prized lock had been wafted out of the window. Then suddenly we all ran to the stairs and raced four flights into the street below. Up and down, searching the block, the gutters, and the crevices of stone and brick, we sought the lost lock of the Father of our Country. After an hour, or so it seemed, we gave it up as useless. As we returned to the entrance of the rooms the old negro employé came out.

“Wait a minute!” Henkels exclaimed, as an idea came to him.

He grabbed the ancient and surprised servant by the hair. Selecting a choice curly ringlet, he clipped it off with his pocketknife, then placed it carefully in George Washington’s locket, closing it tightly.

Several days later I saw the locket put up for sale. The bidding was brisk, and the buyer later expressed himself as being exceptionally lucky. But Henkels, who was the soul of honor, could not listen quietly for long. He told of his, as well as Nature’s prank with the original lock of hair, and offered to refund the money. The purchaser refused, saying he had given no thought to the contents anyway; that his interest lay only in the locket.

It is almost incredible, the number of stories that circulate about the civilized world containing misstatements and garbled information about the values and prices of old books. I am sometimes amused, at other times annoyed, to read in the daily papers statements of prices I and other collectors are supposed to have bought and sold books for. Reporters who descend upon us hurriedly to verify the story of some unusual sale can be divided into two classes—overenthusiastic and bored. The former often exaggerate the amount paid for a book and its value; the latter are likely to be careless about details and set them down incorrectly.

When I bought a Gutenberg Bible for $106,000 last spring, I was careful to read and correct the original announcement made of the purchase. Such an event was too important in the history of book collecting to be misstated. Even then, many papers carried a story which gave the impression that this was the only Gutenberg Bible in existence, when there are about forty-two known copies—differing in condition, of course. But collectors themselves have often been at fault for the broadcasting of misinformation, for they seldom take time to go out of their way to correct wrong impressions.

It is only in the past few generations that collectors have taken great care of their treasures—a lucky change, too, for had they all pawed books about, wearing them to shreds in the scholastic manner, few rare volumes would have been saved for us to-day. Acquisitiveness, that noble urge to possess something the other fellow hasn’t or can’t get, is often the direct cause of assembling vast, extraordinary libraries.

Book lovers who were contemporaries of Moses Polock treated him as though he would live forever. It has been noted that those who collect things outlive people who do not. No one notices this so much, perhaps, as the collector himself who has his eye on the collection of another, or the book collector who cannot sleep well at night for the thought of a valuable first edition he would like to own. Book collectors, I make no exceptions, are buzzards who stretch their wings in anticipation as they wait patiently for a colleague’s demise; then they swoop down and ghoulishly grab some long-coveted treasure from the dear departed’s trove.

Two years before my uncle’s death I gave up my fellowship in English at the University of Pennsylvania to enter professionally the sport of book collecting and the business of selling. Uncle Moses was extremely pleased to have me as a competitor. He often said he believed I had all the necessary requisites for collecting, an excellent memory, perseverance, taste, and a fair knowledge of literature. Alas, all requisites but one—money! He thought if I were fortunate enough to acquire that, I would also have the other virtue—courage: the courage to pay a high price for a good book and to refuse a poor one at any price. And I was fortunate. Two gentlemen whose interest in books was as intense as mine made it possible for me to establish myself as a bookseller. The first, Clarence S. Bement, possessed a glorious collection over which he had spent years of constant study and search. All collectors were eager to secure his volumes, each being fine and rare. As a silent partner he was invaluable to me in many ways, and with the second, Joseph M. Fox, spurred me on to collecting the choicest books and manuscripts as they came on the market, pointing out the fact that at all times there is a demand for the finest things. Mr. Fox, one of the most lovable of men, lived in a very old Colonial house called Wakefield, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in which he had discovered wonderful Revolutionary letters and documents.

MOSES POLOCK

It is difficult to know at what moment one becomes a miser of books. For many years preceding his death, Uncle Moses kept a fireproof vault in the rear of his office, where he secreted rarities no one ever saw. His books were as real to him as friends. He feared showing the most precious lest he part with one in a moment of weakness. One of the amusing incidents of his life was that he had sold a copy of the Bradford Laws of New York, published in 1694, to Doctor Brinley for sixteen dollars, and many years later he had seen it sell at the Brinley sale for $1600. The money consideration did not cause his regret so much as the fact that he had felt an affection for this volume, which had rested upon his shelves for more than thirty years. By an amusing turn of the wheel of chance, which my uncle might have foreseen, the same volume would be worth to-day $20,000!

At the death of my uncle, in 1903, I came into possession of some of his wonderful books; others were purchased by private buyers and are to-day parts of various famous libraries. I was greatly thrilled when, as administrator of his estate, I entered his secret vault for the first time in my life. In the half light I stumbled against something very hard on the floor. Lighting a match, I looked down, to discover a curious bulky package. Examining it more closely, I found it was a bag of old gold coins. A reserve supply cautiously hoarded, no doubt, to buy further rarities.

My uncle’s estate included several books from the library of George Washington, the finest of which was a remarkable copy of the Virginia Journal, published in Williamsburg, which I still have. Washington was one of the three presidents who collected books in an intelligent manner. There have been presidents who loved books—the late Theodore Roosevelt, for example—but who were not real collectors. It is always interesting to hazard a guess at a great man’s personal likes by noting the titles in his library. In the past years I have bought other books from Washington’s collection. There is The History of America by William Robertson, in two volumes, Brown’s Civil Law, Inland Navigation, Jenkinson’s Collections of Treaties, eight volumes of the Political State of Europe, a four-volume course of lectures by Winchester on the Prophecies That Remain to be Fulfilled—in this last Washington wrote: “From the author to G. Washington.” These are a heavy literary diet, somewhat one-sided when placed next to Epistles for the Ladies, which was also his. Each volume has the signature on the title page—“George Washington”—with his armorial bookplate pasted inside the front cover. There were doubtless book borrowers in those days, too, whose memories and consciences might be jogged at sight of the owner’s name. Another, a gift to Washington, is a collection of poems “written chiefly during the late war,” by Philip Freneau, one of the few very early American poets whose work has survived. On the title page in Freneau’s hand, with his signature, is written: “General Washington will do the author the honor to accept a copy of his poems, as a small testimony of the disinterested veneration he entertains for his character.”

The books belonging to Martha Washington are few, merely because she was not a great reader, and the common-sense title of the one book of hers which I have—Agriculture of Argyll County—would lead one to think of her as a practical woman rather interested in rural activities.

The collecting passion is as old as time. Even book collecting, which many believe to be a comparatively recent development, can be traced back to the Babylonians. They, with their passion for preserving records on clay tablets, could hardly go in for all the little niceties, such as original paper boards or beautifully tooled bindings, but they were collectors nevertheless.

Among the early individual book collectors such colorful names as Jean Grolier, De Thou, Colbert, and the Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin shine forth. Jean Grolier, a collector of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, now considered the patron saint of modern book collectors, showed unusual vision in selecting his books. Though many libraries of that time are both remarkable and valuable, their worth varies. But every collector is keen to possess a Grolier volume, and at each sale the prices increase. He evidently read what he selected, and his taste showed that he had education and discernment. Aldus Manutius, the most famous printer of that day, dedicated books to him and printed certain works for him on special paper. Aldus was the first to popularize the small-sized book, and that is why many from the Grolier collection are easier to handle than the more gross volumes from other early libraries.

Grolier’s generous disposition is indicated by the fact that he has either written in, or had stamped on the outside of the truly exquisite bindings, “Io Grolierii et Amicorum”—his books were for himself and his friends too. Many people have since copied this inscription on their bookplates. The Grolier family were book lovers, and his library was kept intact for three generations. Not until one hundred and sixteen years after his death was it sold, and although many were bought by other famous collectors, old records show that some disappeared entirely. It is just such knowledge that keeps the true bibliophile living in hopes—a long-missing Grolier might turn up any time, anywhere.

About the time of the discovery of America a book came out called The Ship of Fools, by one Sebastian Brant. In it was an attack on the book fool: a satire on the passion of collecting, in which the author said that the possession of books was but a poor substitute for learning. That phrase which the layman reader asks the book collector so often with a smirk of condescension, “So you really read them?” undoubtedly originated then. The real book collector, with suppressed murder in his heart, smiles acquiescence, assuming an apologetic air for his peculiar little hobby. His invisible armor is his knowledge, and he has been called a fool so often he glories in it. He can afford to have his little joke. So much for this threadbare gibe.

GROLIER BINDING

Cardinal Richelieu, according to history, sought relaxation from the cares of state in his love of books. His huge library was got together in many ways. Sometimes he bought books; he sent two learned men on the road, one to Germany and the other to Italy, to collect both printed and manuscript works. Often he would exchange volumes with other collectors, and one can imagine the covert smile of satisfaction on this ecclesiastical politician’s lips whenever he got the better of a bargain.

Of course there was always a way to get a rare work, whether the owner cared to part with it or not, by an off-with-his-head policy of intimidation. After the taking of La Rochelle the red-robed Richelieu topped off the victory by helping himself to the entire library of that city. Even though he was something of a robber, his ultimate motive was good—he planned to establish a reference library for all qualified students. Yet it was his nephew, the inheritor of his library, who carried out these plans posthumously. He willed it to the Sorbonne, with a fund to keep up the collection and to add to it according to the needs and progress of the times.

Cardinal Mazarin had the appreciation of books instilled in him from his boyhood, when he attended a Jesuit school in Rome. Following in the footsteps of the famous Richelieu, it was necessary to carry out many of his predecessor’s policies. One of these was to weaken the French nobles, who ruled enormous country estates, by destroying their feudal castles. Thus Mazarin, a great but wily character, took his books where he found them. Eventually his library grew to be a famous one, which he generously threw open to the literary men of the day. Fortunately the men who followed Mazarin kept his collection intact, and to-day, in Paris, one may see the great Mazarin Library on the left bank of the Seine.

Colbert, first as Mazarin’s secretary, and later a great political leader on his own account, also collected a fine library in perhaps a more legitimate manner than his patron. He arranged for the consuls representing France in every part of Europe to secure any remarkable works they might hear of. Colbert not only offered the use of his collection to such of his contemporaries as Molière, Corneille, Boileau, and Racine, but pensioned these men as well.

De Thou, also a Frenchman, of the latter half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, had the finest library of his time. His thousands upon thousands of volumes included many bought from the Grolier collection, and collectors’ interest in them has never lessened. De Thou was the truest type of book lover. He had not one but several copies of each book he felt a particular affection for; he ordered them printed on the best paper obtainable, expressly for himself. His bindings are richly beautiful, of the finest leathers, exquisitely designed. They are easily recognizable, as his armorial stamp, with golden bees, is on the sides, and the back is marked with a curious cipher made from his initials. Most of the contents treat of profound but interesting subjects. He was a real student, and wrote an extensive history of his time in Latin. Here is an example of inherited passion for books. His mother’s brother and his father were both book lovers.

It is a general belief that books are valuable merely because they are old. Age, as a rule, has very little to do with actual value. I have never announced the purchase of a noted old book without having my mail flooded for weeks afterward with letters from all over the world. Each correspondent tells me of opportunities I am losing by not going immediately to his or her home to see, and incidentally buy, “a book which has been in my family over one hundred years.”

I receive more than thirty thousand letters about books every year. Each letter is read carefully and answered. There are many from cranks. But it is not hard to spot these even before opening the envelope, when addressed, as one was recently from Germany,“Herrn Doktor Rosenbach, multi-millionaire, Amerika.” Indeed, the greater number of letters about books are from Germany. One man in Hamburg wrote me of a book he had for sale, then ended by saying he also had a very fine house he would like me to buy, because he felt sure, if I saw it, his elegant garden would appeal to me for the use of my patients! Many people write me, after I have purchased a book at a high price, and say they have something to offer “half as old at half the price!”

Yet one out of every two thousand letters holds a possibility of interest. I followed up a letter from Hagenau not long ago, to discover—the copy was sent me on approval—a first edition of Adonais, Shelley’s lament on the death of Keats, in the blue paper wrappers in which it was issued. There are only a few copies known in this original condition. I bought it by correspondence for a reasonable price. It is worth at least $5000. On the other hand, I have often made a long journey to find nothing but an inferior copy of a late edition of some famous work. I once heard of a first edition of Hubbard’s Indian Wars, in Salem, Massachusetts. When I arrived there the family who owned it brought out their copy, unwrapping it with much ceremony from swathings of old silk. Immediately I saw it was a poor reprint made in the nineteenth century, although the original was printed in 1677.

But luck had not deserted me entirely that day. As my train was not due for an hour, I wandered about the city. In passing one of the many antique shops which all New England cities seem to possess by the gross, I noticed a barrow on the sidewalk before it. In this barrow were thrown all sorts and conditions of books. Yet the first one I picked up was a first edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, worth about $150, which I bought for two dollars.

Speaking of this copy of Moby Dick reminds me of another, a more valuable one, which I prize in my private library. One day about five years ago John Drinkwater, the English poet and dramatist, and I were lunching at his home in London. Talking of books and the ever-interesting vicissitudes of collecting them, he told me of his Moby Dick, found one day, by chance, in a New York bookstore for but a few dollars. It was a presentation copy from the author to his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the book was dedicated, and had Hawthorne’s signature on the dedication leaf. When Mr. Drinkwater told me of this I became restless; I wanted this copy as much as I had ever wanted any other book, and there was nothing for me to do but tell him so. I offered him twenty times what he had paid for it, and to my surprise and delight he generously let me have it.

Why age alone should be thought to give value to most collectible objects, including furniture, pictures, and musical instruments, I don’t know. However, it is a great and popular fallacy. The daily prayer of all true collectors should begin with the words, “beauty, rarity, condition,” and last of all, “antiquity.” But books differ from other antiques in that their ultimate value depends upon the intrinsic merit of the writer’s work. A first edition of Shakespeare, for instance, will always command an ever-increasing price. The same is true of first editions of Dante, Cervantes, or Goethe. These writers gave something to the world and to life—something of which one always can be sure.

Very often the greatness of an author, the value of what he has written, is not realized until years have gone by. Vital truths are sometimes seen more clearly in perspective. A first folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies was sold in 1864 to the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who paid what was considered an enormous price—£716—for it. Yet only fifty-eight years later my brother Philip bought the same folio for me at Sotheby’s in London for £8600, Shakespeare’s writings having increased in value more than twelve times in a little more than half a century.

The fallacy of thinking that age is of major importance in judging a book should be corrected by every book lover. Age? Why, there are many books of the fifteenth century which command small prices in the auction rooms to-day, while certain volumes brought out a decade ago are not only valuable but grow more so with each passing year. A first edition of A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, printed two years ago, is already more precious than some old tome, such as a sermon of the 1490’s by the famous teacher, Johannes Gerson, the contents of which are and always will be lacking in human or any other kind of interest.

The inception of any great movement, whether material or spiritual, is bound to be interesting, according to its relative importance. The Gutenberg Bible, leaving aside the question of its artistic merit and the enormous value of its contents, as the first printed book is of the greatest possible significance. But it so happens that this wonderful Bible is also one of the finest known examples of typography. No book ever printed is more beautiful than this pioneer work of Gutenberg, the first printer, although it was issued almost five hundred years ago. It has always seemed an interesting point to me that printing is the only art which sprang into being full-blown. Later years brought about a more uniform appearance of type, but aside from this we have only exceeded the early printers in speed of execution. Enormous value is added to some of these earliest books because they are the last word in the printer’s art.

The first books printed on subjects of universal interest are the rarest “firsts” of all for the collector. These include early romances of chivalry, of which few copies are found to-day. They are generally in very poor condition, as their popular appeal was tremendous, and they were literally read to pieces. They were really the popular novels of the period. The ones which come through the stress of years successfully are extremely rare. For instance, there are the Caxtons.

William Caxton was the first printer in England, and the first to print books in the English language. When he brought out the second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1484, with its fascinating woodcut illustrations, it was literally devoured by contemporary readers. This and other publications of Caxton were very popular—he evidently had a good eye for best sellers—and now a perfect Caxton is difficult to find.

One of the finest Caxtons in existence is Le Morte d’ Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, published in 1485. This perfect copy, this jewel among Caxtons, sold at the dispersal of the library of the Earl of Jersey in 1885 for £1950, approximately $9500. Now this is an excellent example of a book increasing in value for its pristine, perfect state as well as for its alluring contents. Twenty-six years later it brought $42,800 at the Hoe sale. It is now one of the treasures adorning the Pierpont Morgan Library.

The first editions of books which have that quality so glibly called to-day sex appeal, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, and his Amore di Florio e di Bianchafiore—a wicked old romance of the fifteenth century, truly the first snappy story—are firsts of which there are but few left for our edification. They are extremely precious to the collector, no matter what their condition. The first book on murder; the first book on medicine or magic; the first Indian captivity; the first music book, the first newspaper, the first published account of lace making, or the comparatively modern subject, shorthand—the first book on any subject marking the advance of civilization, is always valuable.

One of the rarest and most interesting books is the first sporting book, The Book of Hunting and Hawking, printed at St. Albans, in 1486, by an unknown man, called, for convenience of classification, the Schoolmaster Printer. Women were sports writers even in those days, for this record was written by a woman, Dame Juliana Barnes, sometimes known as Berners. A copy was sold in the Hoe sale in 1911, for $12,000, to Mr. Henry E. Huntington, who formed one of the few great collections of the world. Nearly all of the few existing copies of this work are now in this country. Another one, the Pembroke copy, which I now own, sold for £1800 in 1914. As it is the last one that can ever come on the market, heaven only knows what it is worth to-day. Like some other famous firsts, it has several novel merits, being one of the first books to contain English poetry, and the first English book to be illustrated with pictures printed in color. This and Walton’s The Compleat Angler are the two greatest sporting books of all time. Yet, because there are more copies of the latter in existence, a fine copy of the first edition in the original binding is worth not more than $8500 to-day.

Another tremendously rare book is the much-read Pilgrim’s Progress. No work, with the exception of the Bible, has enjoyed greater popularity all through the years than this powerful imaginative and moral tale. I have almost every edition of it, in every language. A best seller for years after the author’s death, and a very good seller to-day, too, the early editions were really read to bits. So it is hardly surprising that only six perfect copies of the first edition exist. A few months ago a copy sold at Sotheby’s in London for £6800. The most beautiful one in existence is that famed copy I purchased eighteen months ago from Sir George Holford. I believe if one of the half-dozen perfect first editions were offered in public sale to-day it would easily bring from $40,000 to $45,000.

About five years ago the illness of an English barber’s wife brought to light a first edition of Pilgrim’s Progress which was in good condition, except that it lacked two pages. In the little town of Derby lived this barber, daily plying the trade of his ancestors. Between the lathering and the gossiping he found little time and inclination to read, but sometimes when business was not so brisk as usual he listlessly ran through a small stack of books which he inherited along with the shop. Old-fashioned in text, some with odd pictures, and leaves missing, he thought them rather funny, and occasionally showed them to customers who shared his amusement. One day someone suggested the books were interesting because they were old, and—following the popular fallacy of which I have spoken—must be valuable. He had heard of a man who once paid two pounds for a book!

But the barber shrugged his shoulders and said he had plenty to do without chasing about trying to sell old, worn-out books. Then came a day when his wife took to her bed and the doctor was hurriedly sent for. While waiting for him the barber tried to think of some way he might amuse his wife. As he went into the shop his eyes fell first upon the books on a low shelf. When the doctor arrived he found his patient’s bed loaded down with books, and she was reading a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The doctor was a lover of books in a small way; he felt there was something unusual about this copy. He insisted it should be sent to Sotheby’s in London for valuation. Even then the barber believed he was wasting both time and money.

Finally Sotheby’s received a package accompanied by a letter, painstakingly written in an illiterate hand, with small i’s throughout, and guiltless of punctuation. He was sending this copy, he wrote, because a friend was foolish enough to think it might be worth something. Of course it wasn’t. He had inherited it from his people, and his people were poor. They couldn’t have had anything valuable to leave him. If, as he believed, it was worthless, would they please throw it away, and not bother to return it, or waste money answering him? I don’t know what his direct emotional reaction was when they replied saying his old book was worth at least £900—more than $4000—and that they would place it in their next sale. Perhaps he was stunned for a time. Anyway, weeks passed before they received a rather incoherent reply. I happened to be in London when it was sold, and I paid £2500—about $12,000—for the copy. I later learned that the barber was swamped for months with letters from old friends he had never heard of before, each with a valuable book to sell him.

As collectors grow older, they find it is better to buy occasionally and at a high price than to run about collecting tuppenny treasures. There is seldom any dispute about the worth of a rare book. Many collectors, however, feel collecting has a value other than monetary; it keeps men young, and as the years pass it proves to be a new type of life insurance.

The late Mr. W. A. White of New York, until his death a few months ago, was as vigorous at eighty-three as he had been thirty years before. He combined a quality of youth with his extraordinary knowledge of books and literature. His wonderful library would take away the load of years from a Methuselah. Even to read over the partial list of his treasures, which was recently published, would have a distinctly rejuvenating effect. Mr. Henry E. Huntington was another successful man who practically gave up his business interests to devote himself to the invigorating pastime of book collecting. He collected so rapidly that no young man could follow in his steps! Even my uncle Moses grew younger and younger as he sat year after year surrounded by books.

Rare books are a safe investment; the stock can never go down. A market exists in every city of the world. New buyers constantly crop up. The most ordinary, sane, and prosaic type of business man will suddenly appear at your door, a searching look in his eye, a suppressed tone of excitement in his voice. Like the Ancient Mariner, he takes hold of you to tell his story—for he has suddenly discovered book collecting. And if it happens to be at the end of a very long day, you feel like the Wedding Guest, figuratively beating your breast the while you listen. He returns again and again, enthralled by this new interest which takes him away from his business. If he is wealthy, he already may be surfeited with luxuries of one sort or another; but here is something akin to the friendship of a charming and secretive woman. He takes no risk of becoming satiated; there is no possibility of being bored; always some new experience or unexpected discovery may be lurking just around the corner of a bookshelf.

II

A MILLION DOLLAR BOOKSHELF

One of my early memories concerns a cold winter night in Philadelphia. I was a little boy of thirteen. Uncle Moses and I had been together undisturbed the entire evening, for the weather was so bitterly cold not one of his book-loving cronies dared venture out. With the shop door locked and the shutters tightly drawn, we sat close to the little wood stove, in the dim light of an oil lamp, while I listened, fascinated, to endless tales about books—how this one was lost and that one found. To this handsome old patriarch books were more vital than people; with ease he held my boyish imagination until I was almost afraid to glance back at the shadowed shelves.

He told me the story of a man in England, a collector, who heard of some Shakespeare folios in Spain; of how, after months of inquiries and exciting adventures, he at last journeyed to a castle in the Pyrenees. There he found an ancient Spanish grandee leaning forward before a great fireplace, feeding the fire with torn bits of paper on which, to his horror, he beheld English printing; how he tore them from the old man’s fingers—the remains of a second Shakespeare folio he had sought and found too late! As Uncle Moses spoke, he arose to throw casually some sheets of an old Pennsylvania Journal into the stove, while I watched, tense and frightened for fear they, too, might be of value!

At last, as the clock in Independence Hall struck midnight, we felt our way down the dark narrow stairs to the street. In his hand Uncle Moses clasped a cherished volume of the first edition of Fielding’s Tom Jones, to read when he reached home. The uneven sidewalks were dangerously glazed with ice; as we crept unsteadily toward the corner we were relieved to see a lonely carriage passing, and hailed it. The streets were even worse than the sidewalks, and the horse went his way skiddingly. We came to a bridge which shone like a polished mirror in the moonlight. We were halfway across when suddenly the horse lurched, and both Uncle Moses and I were thrown forward. In the confusion Uncle Moses dropped his precious book. Out it went, slithering along the icy way. I started to climb down after it, but was stopped by a firm hand.

Slowly Uncle Moses got out, walked uncertainly forward. He had not gone two steps before he lost his balance. As he fell I cried aloud in alarm and the driver turned, amazed. Up Uncle Moses got, and down he went again; yet with each fall he came nearer and nearer his book, which lay open face downward in the frozen gutter. At last he reached it and, after securely placing it in his overcoat pocket, started the perilous way back. But he had learned the trick; instead of trying to walk, he crouched down on all fours, and, dignified dean of booksellers that he was, crawled cautiously toward the carriage. Suddenly the sight of him there struck me as being the funniest thing I had ever seen! The glassy bridge, the unreal light, and statuesque Uncle Moses telescoping like a huge caterpillar toward me! I snickered, then burst out laughing. The old driver followed suit, and our rude guffaws echoed across the bridge, through the deserted streets. Uncle Moses’ dark eyes snapped as he reached the carriage.

“You should have let me get your book,” I said shamefacedly. “You might have broken your leg!”

“I would risk breaking two legs for this book,” he growled back, and we drove on.

In the years which followed I have known men to hazard their fortunes, go long journeys halfway about the world, forget friendship, even lie, cheat, and steal, all for the gain of a book. Improbable as it sounds, there was a man once who murdered so that he might possess a volume for which he had long yearned.

It was in the valuable library of the monastery at Poblet, near Tarragona, just a century ago, that Don Vincente, a Spanish monk, developed his unholy love for books. Years of religious training did not prevent him from seizing every chance to plunder his own and other monastery libraries which were thrown open in a political upheaval of the time. As confusion spread, he found opportunities to take the books he coveted most, and then he vanished. But sometime later he appeared in Barcelona, the proprietor of a bookshop. The one volume he had worshiped at a distance and longed to own was a work of Lamberto Palmart, published in Valencia in 1482. It had been in the collection of a Barcelona advocate for years, and at the dispersal of his estate was offered at auction. It was understood to be the only one of its kind known.

Don Vincente went to the sale and staked every cent he possessed on it; but a competitor, Augustino Paxtot, outbid him by fourteen pesetas. The ex-monk grew white with fury, threatening revenge as he left the room. When, a few nights later, Paxtot’s house burned to the ground and he perished with it, several friends recalled Don Vincente’s threats. He was reported to the police, his shop searched, and the rare Palmart volume found. Even when he was arrested, Don Vincente made no effort to deny his guilt. All he seemed interested in was the fate of the little book which had brought disgrace upon him. During the trial his lawyer, making a valiant effort to save him, announced that another copy of the Palmart volume had been found in a Paris library, a few days previous to the alleged crime. It could not be proved, he argued, that the copy in question was the one recently auctioned. But Don Vincente, hearing his book was not unique, burst into violent weeping and showed no further interest in the trial. Alone at night in his cell, and before the court during the final days of his trial, his only words of regret were, “Alas, alas! My copy is not unique!”

To-day book collectors are less violent, although they have their moments when they seethe and writhe inwardly! Just go to any book sale and observe the expressions of competitive buyers—faces that are usually marvelous poker portraits become sharply distorted; eyes which ordinarily indulge in an almost studied innocence shoot sudden darts of fire. Whenever I attend an important sale I make it a point to look neither to the right nor to the left!

I have often been asked why collectors are so enamored of first editions. This is almost unanswerable, because the whole question of first editions hinges on a matter of sentiment, of feeling, almost of emotion. How can one explain the sentimental affections? A first edition is almost as much the original work of its author as the painting is of an artist. I suppose there are people—I’ve been told there are intelligent people—who would just as soon have an edition of Keats’s Poems, for example, well printed on good paper, in a handsome modern binding, as a first edition in its original boards! I only hope I shall never meet them.

Collectors are very ardent on the subject of association copies, or books inscribed or annotated by the authors themselves. To think that John Keats may have held in his slender white fingers your first edition of his poems; that his luminous eyes, already sunken from the inroads of his fatal illness, may have lingered over the very pages of the copy you possess—this is enough to thrill the Devil himself!

Miss Amy Lowell was, as all the world knows, devoted to Keats. She believed herself spiritually attuned to him. I shall never forget the last time I visited at her home near Boston. After a delightful dinner, we went into her library, where we lighted our cigars and talked. She told me of her colossal work on Keats, which, fortunately for her peace of mind, she lived to see published. Then followed a silence as the blue haze of smoke enveloped her. Suddenly she leaned toward me and, with an excited brightness in her eyes, said, “Doctor, there is a certain book I want more than anything in the world! Keats’s own copy of Shakespeare, with his notes through it.”

I put my hand in my pocket and smiled. By one of those unusual chances which really do make truth stranger than fiction, I had that very volume in my pocket. She caught her breath and grew quite pale with joy as I handed it to her.

At the Frederickson sale in New York, nearly thirty years ago, Mr. Harry B. Smith bought Shelley’s own copy of Queen Mab. The poet had presented this to his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with the wooing inscription, “You see, Mary, I have not forgotten you.” When Mr. Smith was going out of the salesroom, an old gentleman whom he had never seen before stopped him. Brushing tears from his eyes, he asked if he might merely hold the book in his hands for a moment. The history of this same copy, I think, is interesting. General Brayton Ives bought it in 1888 from a London dealer for £20—less than $100. Three years afterward it was sold at the dispersal of the General’s library to Mr. Frederickson for not quite one hundred per cent gain—$190. But when Mr. Smith, the next possessor, bought it, the price jumped to $650. Sometime later I purchased his “Sentimental Library,” as he gracefully termed it, and I also trembled when first holding this Queen Mab in my hands. In 1914 I sold it to Mr. William K. Bixby of St. Louis for $12,500. Then it finally passed, as so many of the finest books did, into Mr. Huntington’s collection, where it will remain for all time.

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF KEATS’S FAMOUS
“SONNET TO HAYDON”

Buxton Forman’s copy of Queen Mab, the one Shelley had kept for himself and inestimably enriched by changes and additions for a later edition, is now in the remarkable collection of Mr. Jerome D. Kern of New York.

FROM A LETTER OF SHELLEY SPEAKING OF KEATS

Still another, also containing Shelley’s precious notes in his own hand, is in that treasure-house of rarities, the library of Mr. Thomas J. Wise. His catalogue, now wanting only the last volume, is more absorbingly interesting to book lovers than most works of fiction.

When I was in London in 1925 a friend told me a story which he thought something of a joke on me. As he browsed, one fine spring day, through some books in a bookstall, he noticed a young man also reading. Suddenly a clerk from inside the shop came out, exhibiting a cheap dog’s-eared copy of Margot Asquith’s autobiography.

“How much?” asked the young man cautiously. The clerk replied, “Fourpence.”

“Fourpence,” repeated the other, scandalized. “Who do you think I am—Dr. Rosenbach?”

A few days before, I had bought in London, at auction, a copy of Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, at the Royal Society’s sale. I had to pay £6800, or about $34,000, for it. It was a beautiful copy, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1664, and the only one known. Translated into the Indian language, it was entitled Wehkomaonganoo Asquam Peantogig, and was the painstaking work of that picturesque early missionary, Apostle John Eliot, who a few years before had translated the Bible for the Indians’ use too. The auction price of this book—Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted—was quick to take hold of the public imagination; of course it was colorful news, and English editors made the most of it.

The story was cabled over here, and one afternoon soon after my return a man telephoned saying he had a book he must show me. His voice was shaking with excitement, so I could not refuse him. He soon called, a dignified elderly gentleman. Under his arm he held tightly an old book.

“What is this?” he demanded as he proudly waved the volume before my eyes. I glanced at it and answered, “It looks very much like a Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted.” I had hardly spoken when he gave a short gasp and pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. As I read, I understood this poor fellow’s hopes; he believed he had made a great find. The most significant fact about my purchase was not mentioned in the clipping. Its great value lay in that it was the only known copy of Eliot’s translation of Baxter’s work into the Indian language. When I told him this, and that editions in English were as common as blackberries, he suddenly grew pale and, as he turned away in disappointment, said in a dejected tone, “I feel $34,000 poorer than when I came in!”

It is extremely unfortunate that the price of first editions should occupy so predominant a place in the public mind. The true book lover gives the question of monetary value the last as well as the least important place in his passion for collecting. If the average reader finds it easier to remember books by their prices in lieu of other earmarks, he can look forward to a time in the near future when he must revalue his entire mental collection. Prices of fine books are rising to new heights. Old records show they have advanced continually since the middle of the seventeenth century. Prices are now bound to go much higher. The world is filled with books, but the number of desirable ones is limited.

BOOKROOM AT 1320 WALNUT STREET, PHILADELPHIA

During the past decade many wonderful rarities have been taken off the market forever. They have found a final resting place in public institutions. Two of the greatest private collections in this country, those of Mr. Henry E. Huntington and the late Pierpont Morgan, have been dedicated forever to the people. These splendid gifts comprise, at a very rough estimate, more than one hundred thousand of the world’s choicest literary treasures. Mr. William L. Clements, of Bay City, Michigan, has donated his library of Americana to the University of Michigan, and Mr. William A. Clark, Jr., of Los Angeles, his splendid collection to the southern branch of the University of California, thus removing all possibility of their books ever being offered for sale. Mr. Clark is held in grateful esteem by scholars and lovers of books for his superb series of facsimiles of great English classics in his collection.

The magnificent gift of the library of Harry Elkins Widener to Harvard University is another case in point. Born in Philadelphia, Harry Elkins Widener spent his childhood on the large estate of his grandfather, the late P. A. B. Widener, in a home filled with treasures brought together from all parts of the world. The collector’s spirit was his through both inheritance and environment. When a young boy he showed an interest in books, and as he grew older proved himself a born student of bibliography. Books were his life work, his recreation, his passion.

I think if Harry Elkins Widener had lived he would have been the greatest collector the world has ever known. Of course he began as all collectors do, gathering rather unimportant works. But he weeded them out sooner than most enthusiasts, and by the time he was twenty-six had a library of three thousand volumes; each one of these showed a most fastidious, exacting, and exquisite taste, which he had found possible to gratify through the sympathy and generosity of his grandfather and his mother. When abroad attending various book sales, because of his youth and remarkable learning he attracted the attention of many older collectors. After the Huth sale in 1912 in London, he slipped a volume of Bacon’s Essays in his pocket—a second edition which is almost as rare as a first—and, turning to a friend, said, “I think I’ll take that little Bacon with me in my pocket, and if I am shipwrecked it will go down with me.” With what prophecy he spoke they little knew. A few days later he was one of the victims of the Titanic disaster. His books may be enjoyed by students forever, but they will never again be offered for sale.

To-day there are twice as many people collecting books in this country as there were five years ago. Every year they increase in numbers, and the competition is keener for the best things. Naturally, prices must go up. The much-maligned business man who collects books will at last come into his own. He has been held for many years responsible for musical-comedy successes, but nothing is said of his books and his collecting. It is restful to think of him in his library of an evening instead of in the first row of a crowded theatre.

A. EDWARD NEWTON

The increasing number of scholars in this country, with their insistent demands for the original sources of history and literature, is another cause for advancing prices. After all, contemporary documents are the only authentic tools for the student. The collector renders a real service to scholarship when he uncovers valuable unpublished material. A dear friend of mine has been also largely responsible for the modern esteem of old authors. A. Edward Newton, through his popular and appealing books about books, has inspired many to collect them. His Amenities of Book Collecting is the bibliophile’s Bible; and his unbounded enthusiasm for Doctor Johnson is so intense that it is now contagious. Everyone has become infected with it. A new Johnsonian interest has spread over the country, and a first edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, published in London in 1791, which used to sell for seventy-five dollars, now brings $450, and in its original covers twice this price.

Certain books have sold for too little in the past. They remind me of people who plod along for years, then, through actual worth or a turn of the wheel, suddenly blossom out, much to their friends’ astonishment. As material as it may sound, the increasing wealth in this country is bringing about a new appreciation not only of books but of old prints, paintings, and antique furniture. Books are the final appeal; when the collector is through with the things that decorate his house, he turns to the things that decorate his mind—and these last forever.

LETTER OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON TO DAVID GARRICK, SUGGESTING
AN EPITAPH FOR HOGARTH WHICH LATER, WITH
CHANGES, WAS ENGRAVED ON HOGARTH’S TOMB

The formation of university libraries and historical societies also adds to the value of books. They take them out of reach of the individual collector and place them in their ultimate home. No wonder these libraries are considered tombs by the ardent gatherer of books. New seats of learning, such as Duke University at Durham, North Carolina, will certainly need adequate libraries. Book clubs, too, are adding fuel to the flames. The Grolier Club of New York has a fine library; the Elizabethan Club at Yale is the enviable possessor of a tiny volume that ranks among the great books of the world. It is a first edition of Bacon’s Essays, printed in London in 1597. Fifteen years ago, at the Huth sale, it brought £1950—more than $9000. If it were offered for sale to-day it would bring at least $25,000. There are only about five copies of this edition known. One is in the British Museum, Cambridge University has two, and a fourth is in the Huntington Library. Thus, no private collector has the good fortune to own a single copy.

Even though many rare volumes have retired permanently from the salesrooms, it has always been a peculiarity of the collector that he lives in hope. Just as there has always been a great search for ancient manuscripts, so there always will be an endless hunt for important early books. If there were wonderful discoveries in the past, why not others of equal importance in the future? Within twenty years after the invention of printing—about 1475—books became so accessible that even the poorest scholars could afford them. Tracts of various kinds were marketed for a few pennies which at first had sold for pounds. There was so much printing done that some printers were ruined because the supply quickly outgrew the demand. The best printers in Germany perfected their craft and went southward into Italy, where their work took on an added beauty. The city of Venice became a regular hotbed of printing.

When, in the latter part of the fifteenth century, Italian noblemen saw how common printing had become, they regarded it as vulgar. Although they had at first been the patrons of printing, now some of them ignored it and endowed scriptoriums, in the hope that printing would fall into disfavor. In these scriptoriums men worked tediously on illuminated manuscripts, trying to make them finer than printed books. But of course printing went on, continuing its tremendous strides. Hope springs eternal in the book collector’s breast. He will never allow himself to believe that the wonderful old volumes of hundreds of years ago have all been found. To-day, to-morrow, or next week, he must surely unearth some unrecorded book.

What is known among book lovers as the greatest little find in history occurred at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, England, in 1867. Charles Edmunds, a London bookseller, while visiting Lamport Hall, the ancient seat of the Isham family, accidentally came upon the old lumber room. His curiosity was immediately aroused, for among the piles of wood and discarded furniture he beheld stacks and stacks of dust-covered books. There were hundreds of them of various sizes and dates; some were chewed to bits, having furnished banquets for generations of mice, descendants of which scampered about as Edmunds searched and hoped for something interesting. Just as he was beginning to believe that they all were valueless, he chanced upon a copy of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Imagine his surprise when he found it to be a hitherto unknown edition dated 1599, and “Imprinted at London for William Leake, dwelling in Paule’s Churchyard at the signe of the Greyhound.” Inclosed within the same vellum cover were The Passionate Pilgrim and Davies’s and Marlowe’s Epigrams and Elegies. The only other copy known of the former is in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge. The third tract in this volume was also an entirely unrecorded edition.

This Venus and Adonis was a fourth edition. It sold at the Britwell Court sale at Sotheby’s, in 1919, for £15,100—about $75,000. George D. Smith bought it for Mr. Huntington, and it was the highest price ever paid for a book up to that time. Whenever a great sale such as this one is held, prices reverberate throughout the world. Immediately there follows a cleaning out of old attics, a thorough brushing of odd closets; cupboards and lumber rooms are scoured; and a general sorting over of places where odd things have been relegated for years takes place. Naturally, the enormous price of the Venus and Adonis caused a sensation when it was sold in London. News of this sale quickly appeared in every paper in England.

A pretty story is told of how, one afternoon, two young Englishmen were playing archery on an estate near Shrewsbury. Perhaps they didn’t have a target, or if they did they mislaid it. Anyway, they picked up an old book they found somewhere in one of the buildings on the place, and stuck it against the lower branches of a tree to use for a bull’s-eye. About to draw his bow, one of them was not quite satisfied with the angle at which they had placed their target. So he walked forward and turned it around. As he did so, some of the pages fell back, and he read the magic name, “Venus.” Looking at the volume further, he exclaimed to his companion, “I believe this old thing is similar to that book which sold for £15,100 yesterday!” It soon sold privately for more than £10,000, or about $50,000. Mr. H. C. Folger of New York, the greatest collector of Shakespeareana, was the buyer.

With these stories indelibly impressed on my mind, my delight was unbounded when I espied on the library shelves of Dorchester House, London, the residence of Sir George Holford, a matchless copy of Venus in the second edition, 1594, five years earlier than these famous “fourths.” Only three other copies were known. Be assured that this was one of the first volumes I selected when, the following year, I purchased the greater part of his collection. From a monetary point of view this is the most valuable book that has ever been sold.

To bring these stories down to date, an almost equally interesting find was made after the sale of a signature of Button Gwinnett, at the Anderson Galleries in New York last winter, for which I paid $22,500. Gwinnett was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence from Georgia. His signature is very rare, as his life was snuffed out suddenly in a duel with General Lachlan MacIntosh in 1777, when he was still young. There are but thirty-three of these signatures known. I bought my first Gwinnett, incidentally the first to be sold in many years, in Philadelphia two years ago for $14,000. Some wag figured, at the time, that it was worth exactly $1000 per letter. Mrs. Arthur W. Swann, of New York, happened to read about my purchase in a morning paper, and began to think over the various items of a collection of autograph letters which her grandfather, Theodore Sedgwick, had made, and which she inherited. The more she thought about it, the more significant a hazy remembrance became; she believed her grandfather had secured a Button Gwinnett similar to the one I bought. After carefully searching through the collection she found, much to her surprise and delight, a most beautiful example of Gwinnett’s signature. In November, 1926, she sold the entire collection, and I bought the Button Gwinnett for $28,500. This was then a record price for any signature in the world’s history, the young signer’s autograph having jumped to $2000 per letter! After a while, selling a famous man’s handwriting by the letter will be as common as selling antique silver by the ounce.

About four years ago a firm of auctioneers in London was requested to sell a great mass of ordinary music belonging to the estate of a late English noblewoman. The manager and his assistants were not very keen about it, as the music was unsorted and on its face almost worthless. But they finally agreed to do it on the condition it should not require sorting. During the sale a dealer bought one of the bundles. Later he sold some of it to other dealers, saving several sheets for himself to take home. Some time passed and one night he chanced to glance over the titles of these songs, catches, and other musical compositions. As he turned one of the pages he fairly started from his seat. He could hardly believe his eyes. A quarto pamphlet it was, and most probably had been placed there years and years before—perhaps as a bookmark—by someone who did not realize its worth. It was a copy of Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson by Shelley! The author’s name was not mentioned, but it was edited by “Fitzvictor,” one of Shelley’s pen names. Here it lay before him, in the original wrappers in which it was first published. Of course, the news of the discovery spread like wildfire. Later, this work sold for £1210, approximately $6000.

Propagandist pamphlets written by Shelley are extremely rare, and have turned up in the most extraordinary places. They were generally of an inflammatory or seditious nature, and he and Harriet had the habit of throwing them from the windows wherever they might be staying at the time, in the hope of hitting sympathetic targets. I should like to be struck by one of those missiles!

Shortly after the War began I was informed of a letter written by Amerigo Vespucci, to be offered in the Morrison sale in London. It was the only known letter written by the man who gave his name to two continents. Previous to its finding, the only record of Vespucci’s own writing was a receipt bearing his signature. Now, the early stages of the Great War were not exactly propitious times for auctions or any other sales. The buying public of England, as well as auctioneers, dealers, and collectors, all found their minds preoccupied with but one subject—war. Objets d’art, books, and manuscripts were put aside as playthings of a leisured hour; nor were they to be considered when relatives and friends were fast becoming a part of the war machinery daily departing for France. So prices did the logical thing—tumbled.

Although I was aware of the situation, I believed it impossible that this Vespucci letter could go for a low figure. Here was an unusual, magnificent autograph more than four centuries old. War? Why, it had known a hundred wars! With little hope and less expectation, I cabled a bid of £2500—about $12,500. The arrival of a reply a few hours later caused me pangs of fear. I tortured myself a few moments with delectable suspense. Was the letter mine or not? A momentous question! At last I gathered courage and read words which were too curt, too few, to seem true. Not only was I the possessor of this most precious historical letter, but at what a price—a measly £395! It was almost impossible to realize that I had secured for less than $2000 one of the greatest bargains in history.

BOOKROOM AT 273 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK

I was under a constant nervous tension until its arrival. When it finally came I went with it into my library, locked the door, and settled down to decipher the old and decorative handwriting. Vespucci had written in Latin a somewhat grave and formal filial epistle to his father. He was in Trivio Mugelli at the time, October 18, 1476. He comments on a commonplace book, belonging to his uncle, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci. These commonplace books were frequently kept in the fifteenth century. They were used to note down Greek and Latin quotations, the common information of the period. I had hardly finished reading this before some mental click went off in my mind. I left my comfortable chair and walked suddenly to a corner of my bookcase. Quickly I picked out an old manuscript in a fifteenth-century binding. I held in my hands an ancient commonplace book. There on the title page was the written name—Giorgio Antonio Vespucci!

Side by side in my library were Amerigo’s only letter and Uncle Giorgio’s commonplace book! I was thrilled by it all. In something of a daze I placed the two on the table before me. Separated for nearly five hundred years, they were again together. Where had they been those five centuries? What had they seen and heard? If someone had thrown a diamond into the middle of the ocean, to recover it years later, it could not have been a greater miracle than this almost impossible literary remating. Now the letter and the volume are in the Pierpont Morgan library, united forever.

Some collectors, to my eternal amazement, are completely satisfied with small libraries. This desire for a limited number of exquisite books originated in France centuries ago. Many of the wealthiest and most meticulous book lovers went in for what is known as cabinet collecting. They liked small books which they could handle easily, and found no interest in the first edition of even an important classic if it were large. Diane de Poitiers was one of the first cabinet collectors. The beloved of Henry II, she would doubtless be forgotten by collectors to-day if she had not, like Cardinal Wolsey, loved her books more than her king. When she became a widow, Diane immediately stamped her volumes with a laurel springing from a tomb, with the motto, “I live alone in grief.” But when she began her friendship with Henry she suppressed both the tomb and the legend.

In her boudoir in the Château d’Anet, just outside of Paris, long after her death a small case was found filled with the most precious volumes, all in beautiful bindings of red and citron morocco, decorated with the crescents of Diana the book huntress. This little nest of bookish nuggets was not found until 1723, but was in perfect condition. The diversity of its contents was amusing. The fathers of the Church nestled close to some of the most risqué stories of that time, and the poets stood side by side with treatises on medicine and the management of the household. It has always been of interest to me that in the small collection of Diane de Poitiers were two books relating to this country, thus making her one of the earliest collectors of Americana. The first was Servete’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, dated 1541, and the other, Les Singularitez de la France Antartique autrement nommée Amerique, brought out seventeen years later.

Perhaps the man who makes a covenant with himself to buy only a small number of books, imitating the French collectors, is the happiest and wisest of us all. He knows in his mind the location of every volume on his shelves. At least he runs little chance of finding himself in the position which was forced upon me several years ago. I had purchased a first edition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, for which I paid $2500. Along with thousands of other volumes on my shelves, I had not thought for months of poor old Crusoe and his man Friday.

One day, however, a stranger came to see me, announcing with a great air of assurance he had a really fine book which he knew would delight me. Just how much, neither of us realized until it was removed from its brown-paper wrapping. Then I recognized the binding, and that it was my own Robinson Crusoe! I concealed my surprise as I asked for its history and how he had come by it. With charming facility he explained that it was left by his father-in-law to his wife, and I became furious when he wound up with the worn tale of its having been in his family “for over one hundred years.”

After he had finished his finely embroidered story I excused myself from the room for a moment to telephone police headquarters. Returning, I directly accused him of having acquired the book dishonestly. Looking me in the eye, more in sorrow than in anger, he stood by his guns. But when he heard the echo of heavy footsteps beyond my study door he broke down, and told me a sordid hard-luck story which made me feel rather sorry for him. I learned then that he had also bought other volumes from a man who had been employed by me some months before. He paid a few dollars for each book—I asked him for the names of the others, and was relieved that they did not compare in value to the Robinson Crusoe—and they were delivered to his junk shop. There was some wistful quality about this fellow; aside from his dishonesty, he spoke of books as though he loved them. I could not prosecute him. Again I left the room, this time to tell the two detectives who were waiting that I would not press the charge. And it did seem most unfortunate for him that he came to me, of all people in the world, with that Robinson Crusoe!

The modern book lover who gratifies his taste with a small collection usually starts off with what he calls a logical reason for his fixed policy. Some men will collect everything they can find which has been written by or associated with an author they love, generally some writer who has had a definite influence upon their lives. Thus there are men who gather every edition, pamphlet, manuscript, autograph, or personal relic of Burns, Shelley, Thackeray, or Dickens, to mention only a few. Other sentimentalists must have every line of verse by the poet whose rhythmic genius has struck sparks of music or passion in their own souls. On the other hand, a practical person, such as an Arctic explorer, will hunt out every known document mentioning the Arctic, while his colleague, the African explorer, follows suit with his desires for all works concerning his favorite quarter of the globe.

For years I have had a charming customer who is a romanticist if ever there was one. Her enthusiasm is for books on those idealistic lands beyond the mountains or behind the moon about which English writers of all centuries have delighted to weave strange fantastic tales, such as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Then there is another customer, with his vivid remembrance of old vintages, whose standing order since the passing of the Volstead Act has kept us busy gathering all editions and early works mentioning ardent spirits. He smacks his lips with gusto when he obtains a particularly rare one. Another great amateur’s favorite subject is everything relating to tobacco. English authors from Ben Jonson to Charles Lamb allowed their love of tobacco to permeate their works, and it is therefore a delightful task, especially to an inveterate smoker, to pick up, here and there, old books in which the authors endearingly mention perique and “cigars of the Havana.” I recently owned a rare little volume on which Charles Lamb had spilled some ale, and in which were found remnants of tobacco. This might have caused a battle royal between the two friends above mentioned, and, as I could not divide the volume, I, like King Solomon on a more famous occasion, sold it to a collector who was interested in gentle Elia for his dear self alone.

Very often these specialists have a change of heart. Their tastes broaden and they develop into the maddest collectors of all. Perhaps they suddenly realize the limited span of even a collector’s life, and find they are missing many enchanting bypaths along the highroad of books. When Richard Heber, the greatest bibliomaniac who ever lived, began his library, he was interested only in purely classical works. This English gentleman, although he has been dead for nearly one hundred years, still survives, enshrined in every true bookman’s heart. To recognize in oneself the symptoms of becoming “the fiercest and strongest of all bibliomaniacs”—so Heber is described—what secret joy and satisfaction! Heber’s library grew to enormous proportions, and when he died he left more than one hundred and fifty thousand volumes. Like Earl Spencer, it was necessary for him to have many houses, just to hold his books. Eight establishments there were, on the Continent and in England, each overrun with books. It was he who started the craze for duplicate copies, explaining that no one could afford to be without three copies of a book: one for show, the second for use, and the third for borrowers!

Everybody knows it is never quite safe to lend an umbrella, even to one’s dearest friend; the very act of lending seems to demoralize the borrower, who thinks not of the rainy days to come. If there is scant hope of ever seeing the umbrella again, how much less is there for a borrowed book—unless it happens to be a rare one! In that case it may be discovered several generations later, when the worried and loving owner, who by this time is reclining in some bookish Nirvana, cares little for earthly treasures. How many great literary finds have been made as a result of careless borrowers, I wonder!

PAGE FROM ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF CHARLES LAMB’S
“THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE”

There is the case of a certain Englishman who, several years ago, “borrowed” some early English books, printed by Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde, from the libraries of Lincoln and Peterborough Cathedrals. Lest they should be missed immediately, he left behind him the covers of the books, stuffed with newspapers and replaced on the shelves; the contents he carried away in his pockets. But one day someone browsing about chanced to take down these skeleton books. The fraud was discovered and reported to all book dealers and collectors in England, so they should be on the lookout. Some of the volumes, minus bindings, have already turned up at various sales, but where they all are no one knows. They may be discovered again somewhere, some day.

One day before the War a stranger called on Quaritch, one of the most celebrated and astute booksellers in London, to whose shop many rare books, in those days, naturally drifted. This man said he had an old book, but didn’t know its value. Quaritch looked at it, and immediately recognized it as the long-lost and valuable edition of the laws of Massachusetts, known to collectors as The General Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, collected out of the Records of the General Courts, and printed at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1648. Inquiring of the owner what he thought he should receive for it, the man would not say; he desired Quaritch to make him an offer.

Quaritch was known far and wide for his fair dealing. Now he took into consideration various facts, the most important of which was that he might have to keep the volume for some years before reselling it. He therefore offered what he felt to be a perfectly fair price—£2500. The man looked at him in “wild surmise,” then gasped. He would have accepted fifty pounds for it! But now, he said, as he put on his hat, with the layman’s suspicious look in his eye, he would have to think it over. He was too frightened to make up his mind just then. He never went back to Quaritch, but shopped around a long time, selling it eventually for £5000—a little less than $25,000. Alfred Quaritch told me that it was this experience which cured him forever of making offers on books.

It is amazing how many of these first American editions have been found across the Atlantic. Several years ago, while in England, I was invited by a noted collector to inspect his library. We had been talking books for hours, and as the twilight approached, did not think to turn on the lights. I got up to leave and stumbled against a folio volume which someone had carelessly left on the floor. I carried it quickly to the window to see what it was. Opening the old calf binding in the fading light, I read the written inscription on the title page: “This book was used in the Trial of the Earl of Bellomont, Governor of New York.” It was, to my astonishment, my uncle Moses’ old bête-noir, the very rare First Laws of New York, printed by William Bradford in 1694. I was extremely pleased with this volume, and suggested to the owner that inasmuch as it was a New York book, and not particularly interesting to him, he might care to part with it, which to my joy he gracefully did.

Printer Bradford has the distinction of being the first in both Philadelphia and New York. His earlier works, published in Philadelphia, loudly proclaim the hatred he had for some of the Quakers of his day. He was constantly bringing out tracts against them. When they threatened to jail him he found it necessary to leave the City of Brotherly Love, and settled in New York. Several years ago I attended a sale in Philadelphia and came across a book which no one seemed to know anything about. I showed it to several other collectors, who pushed it aside, believing it worthless, merely an old book. The name of the printer or the place was not upon the title page; I recognized it, however, as coming from Bradford’s famous press.

It was a scurrilous attack on one Samuel Jennings, Quaker, printed by Bradford in New York in 1693. Entirely composed in rhyme, by John Philley, it was lengthily titled: A Paraphrastical Exposition in a Letter from a Gentleman in Philadelphia to his Friend in Boston concerning a certain Person who compared himself to Mordecai. I could not remember ever having seen an earlier-dated book published in New York. Here, then, was a first, which was valuable from three standpoints. It was the only copy known; it was probably the first book printed in New York; it was the earliest poetical production of the New York press. I am having a reprint made, so that it will be accessible to all students of history.

I am sometimes given credit for discoveries which I am not in the least entitled to. There are many old bookmen, true ferrets, who are always on the lookout for unusual things. They often bring their finds to me. In Paris there is a whole tribe of book seekers who infest the quays along the Seine, where quaint volumes are occasionally found. Collectors do not often have the good fortune to find great rarities there, but my friend Mitchell Kennerley has the distinction of making one of the greatest finds in bookish history. Many years ago, while walking on the left bank of the Seine, he picked up, for a few sous, Champlain’s first book on the Indians of Canada, entitled Des Sauvages, issued in Paris in 1603. He kept it in his box at the Lotos Club in New York for more than two years. The whole matter was forgotten until someone, accidentally mentioning old books on the American Indians, recalled to his attention the little volume resting so quietly in its solitary nook. Mr. Kennerley put it into an auction sale in 1907, and no one was more greatly surprised and elated than he when it sold for $2900.

This leads me to remember one of the most colorful incidents of my collecting career, an experience brought about through the consideration of a fellow bookman. It happened when I was in Boston, attending the dedication of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library in 1914. I had arrived on an early train, so I decided to spend several pleasant hours on Park Street with my friend Charles Goodspeed. As I entered his shop he came forward with the exclamation, “I have a manuscript in which you will be interested, I am sure!” He disappeared into the back of his shop, and I waited, filled with curiosity. After a few moments he returned and handed me a small piece of paper. As I read it I could hardly believe that this was the first draft of Benjamin Franklin’s famous epitaph, which is so dear to every lover of old books. At first I was suspicious that it might be a clever forgery. But when Goodspeed explained that it came from the old and noted Aspinwall collection, I needed no further assurance. It was absolutely authentic, and eagerly I purchased it.

This was Franklin’s first attempt at writing his epitaph, dated 1728, and differed slightly in the wording from the fair copy which has been for many years in the Library of Congress in Washington. I brought it back to Philadelphia in great glee and showed it to Eddie Newton. In an ill-starred moment for him, and to his everlasting regret, he refused it. This is the only time—with one exception, which is another story—that I knew him to fall down. This epitaph has found its resting place in the magnificent Franklin collection of William S. Mason, of Evanston, Illinois.

Nothing better reveals the great American, the man whose sayings have helped the destinies of the New World, than this faded sheet of paper, where the master printer gives, in the parlance of his trade, this noble colophon:—

The Body of B. Franklin,
Printer,
Like the Cover of an Old Book,
Its Contents torn out
And
Stript of its Lettering & Gilding
Lies here
Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be lost;
For it will, as he believ’d
appear once more
In a new and more elegant Edition
Revised and corrected
By the Author.

III

SOLD TO DR. R!

The gas lamps in Stan V. Henkels’s auction rooms in Philadelphia were being extinguished. An exciting sale of books had just ended, and I was left a rather bitter young man. The purchaser of the one book I had so eagerly hoped to secure was a thin, wiry man, with a face of rare charm. He was not an auction habitué, at least not at Henkels’s, or I should have recognized him. One gets used to the same old faces in an auction room. Earlier that evening I had noticed him two rows ahead of me, a distinguished-looking person; but once the auctioneer’s hammer had struck, giving him the final decision on his bid, I changed my opinion, and he now appeared highly distasteful to me.

As I went to open the street door I passed him. He stood showing the book to a group of other buyers. I would have died rather than ask his permission to look at that ancient missal, which I felt he had deliberately taken from me. And what a copy! As perfect as the day it came from the scriptorium in Touraine nearly four hundred years ago. More important still, it had belonged at one time to the exquisite and altogether enchanting Gabrielle d’Estrées. She may have treated her lovers negligently, but to her books she gave the gentlest care. If the truth were known, she had a more tender regard for her books than for Henry IV. Perhaps she abandoned him to find change and relaxation in looking at the pictures in this volume. I was nineteen; the ephemeral love affairs of great court beauties catch the imagination at that age as they never do in later years.

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF HANDEL’S “MESSIAH”

And lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them and the Glory of the
Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid

[[audio/mpeg]] [[MusicXML]]

You see, I had been saving every penny I could lay my hands on to buy this book. I had read about it in the sale catalogue. It is not exactly clear to me to-day why I so desperately wanted to own this particular missal. Perhaps it was one of those waxing obsessions which seize book lovers at all seasons of the year. I remember it was a warm, languorous spring. The night air was sweet. As I walked along I asked myself many questions: What good had come of my hoarding every cent to purchase it? Wasn’t it unfair of wealthy men who attend auctions never to give the poor student a chance? I had gone to that sale with fifty-seven dollars in my pocket. It was an enormous sum for me to invest in one book, and I really doubted that anyone would want this particular volume badly enough to pay more than fifty dollars for it. Imagine my surprise when this stranger overbid me by three dollars!

Depressed, I wandered for some time along the ill-lighted street before I was aware of quick steps behind me. It was my successful competitor. And from another direction I saw a horse and cab drive toward me. A dim street light revealed the blurred outlines of a rickety worn-out nag whose driver slouched above on the box. It was Wee-hicle.

Now Wee-hicle was a coachman of local renown. His thin, emaciated, Don Quixotic figure had always attracted my attention. Wee-hicle knew more individuals of prominence in Philadelphia than did the mayor himself. Further, Wee-hicle had vision. To be carried home in the early hours by Wee-hicle boded good. In this way he had sponsored the early careers of more youths who later became distinguished citizens than any Harvard professor. This night he drove to the curb and recognized me. At the same time the footsteps in the darkness quickened and an anxious voice shouted, “Cabby!” Now I wanted to go home with Wee-hicle myself. With a rude bound, I reached the cab door before the person behind me.

“Which way are you going?” he asked me as he came close to the cab. His voice was clear and friendly, nor was the dark too thick to hide the kindliness of his expression. With that forced reciprocal politeness which often overtakes one in the heat of anger or disappointment, I battled with a desire to grab the book and run off into the darkness.

“I can take you anywhere you care to go,” I answered. He heard the vindictive note in my voice, as I meant him to. He looked at me uneasily. Perhaps he feared I had been drinking.

“I feel like having a bite,” he began. “I’d like to go to McGowan’s. Perhaps you will join me.” Without waiting for a reply, he leaned forward and called out our destination to Wee-hicle.

Those were the days when McGowan’s was an all-night meeting place where convivial souls gathered to eat, drink, and to be quietly merry. It was famous for its terrapin; in fact, it was at that time one of the great restaurants of America. Situated at the corner of Fifteenth and Sansom streets, it had an entrance on either side. When we arrived I told Wee-hicle to wait.

After ordering supper my host picked up the Gabrielle d’Estrées volume and exhibited it in a most tantalizing manner.

“You paid a very high price for that little missal,” I ventured.

He looked up, surprised. “How do you know?”

“I was there—at the auction.” At that moment the waiter brought two long-stemmed glasses filled with a golden-brown liquid. It was bitter and warming. “I was the underbidder,” I said.

“You bid me up?” The waiter replaced our glasses with others. We drank silently. “So you wanted this book? Well, well! You love books?” I nodded. His face seemed to soften. “And what would you have given for it?” He handed the volume across the table to me and my fingers trembled.

“All that I have in the world,” I said dramatically. “Fifty-seven dollars.” The waiter came forward with our supper. It was a beautiful repast worthy of the skill of Dennis McGowan himself.

As we ate I listened to my new friend through an ever-thickening haze. He told me of his interest in books and manuscripts. He was not a collector exactly, he explained, but a man who bought intermittently as the desire came upon him.

PAGE FROM ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF WAGNER’S
“DIE MEISTERSINGER”

“And now,” said he, “since you wanted this book so badly, will you accept it as a proof of our newly made friendship?” He leaned across the table and I grasped his hand. He insisted upon my accepting the volume as a gift! Then we talked of books and bookmen until far into the night. We walked home in the early morning air.

The next day at noon, as I crossed the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, I was aware of a familiar figure who waved and attracted great attention with a coach whip. It was Wee-hicle.

“Say, young Rosenbach,” he holloed, “what do you mean, keepin’ me waitin’ all night on Sansom Street?” He came toward me on a run, accusingly. “Sneakin’ out on Fifteenth Street, you and your friend! I want my money! I waited outside all night long. Twenty-five dollars, night rates!” To quiet his shouting, I motioned him to follow me to my room. I had forgotten him completely. Had the preceding night been a dream or a nightmare? Surely it was neither, for there on my bookshelf was the missal in its old gilt binding—the book which had been forced so generously upon me. I paid Wee-hicle gladly and figured his services cheap at the price. As to the gentleman who presented me with the volume, it was Joseph M. Fox. He later became my partner in the book business.

The auction business is an old, old game. Herodotus, somewhere in his writings, describes the auctions which took place once a year in all Babylonian villages. In those days, before the advent of the bachelor girl, despairing parents hopefully offered their surplus maidens in the auction mart, where they disposed of them in marriage to the highest bidders. Then there were the auctions which followed military victories. The Romans solved the problem of dividing captives and other spoils of war in this popular manner.

But the first book auctions, as far as records show, began in the latter part of the seventeenth century in Holland. The enterprising Dutchman who originated the idea of selling literary works by competitive bid, whether he was a book lover or interested only in cold commercial hope of gain, should have his memory appreciatively marked by periods of celebration down the years. Can’t you imagine every true book lover bowing to the name of this fellow who brought a new and sharp-edged enjoyment into the book game?

Of all the branches of the sport connected with book collecting, that of attending book auctions is the greatest, the most stirring. I presume some patient mathematician knows the number of facets of the Koh-i-nur diamond, but no one will ever be able to count the emotional reflections which take place during a book auction in the hearts and minds of men and women who are enamored of books. The book auction is an adventure. Other adventures may lose their glamour if you repeat them, but each experience at a sale of books brings a delightful thrill never to be duplicated.

Other experiences in your life may have been exciting, and you will always shrink from repeating them, in the fear, perhaps, that they may lose some one quality. But the book auction, which includes the sale of literary manuscripts and letters, continues to offer those very elements which first fascinated you. Don’t be surprised when you find yourself one of the habitual adventurers. Unsympathetic, misunderstanding friends may accuse you of being a book-auction fiend, but you will listen indulgently and let it go at that.

Most of the great books of the world have found their way to the auction room at one time or another. Bibliophiles of renown have sat restlessly out front bidding against one another. It is these, rare books and the buyers of them, who have given to the auction its illustrious background. Nearly every collector enters the auction field to enjoy its seductive pleasures some time during the period of his fever.

When you first go to an auction you firmly believe that prices are at their highest. The complaint of high prices is as old as the auction game itself. The morning after every sale you read the same old story in your newspaper, of the “crazy,” “mad,” and “exorbitant” prices which were paid. Present prices always seem high. If you keep a record of them you will find, in ten years’ time, that these prices are extremely low. As a matter of fact, prices will never be lower than they are to-day. Certain items may fluctuate, but in general the great classics of all literature can be revalued upward every ten years. Very often you may have the feeling that you paid too much for some book—in other words, you were stung; and it may be so. But the beauty of it all is that an auction holds fair play for all sides. Even the experienced buyer is liable to get stung. You are in good company. And joy of joys, the auctioneer, your arch enemy, sometimes gets charmingly stung himself! For who can say when some bargain will drop unexpectedly into the collector’s maw?

BOOK AUCTION AT THE ANDERSON GALLERIES, NEW YORK, WITH DR. ROSENBACH ATTENDING

I remember a case in point. It was during the third part of the Hoe sale in April 1912. In the catalogue a celebrated autograph play by Lope de Vega was listed. Entitled Carlos V, it had been written in Toledo and was dated November 20, 1604. Now manuscript plays by this famous Spanish writer are extremely desirable. Although the greatest book dealers and collectors of England, France, Italy, and Germany were present that night, they either slighted or forgot its value. I purchased it on my first bid, $125.

A collector in Philadelphia had given me a bid of $7500 on it! He was even then sitting at his telephone impatiently waiting to hear if I had secured it for him. The above story is at the expense of a New York house. My next will be on a British concern, in order to balance honors.

At the sale of the Britwell Court Library in London in 1923, I noticed a little book lying sandwiched between Paice’s Fortune’s Lottery, or How a Ship of Bristoll Called the Angel Gabriel Fought Against the Spanish, and Pallinganius’s The Zodyacke of Lyfe. It was Philip Paine’s Dailey Meditations, or Quotidian Preparations for and Consideration of Death and Eternity, printed at Cambridge by Marmaduke Johnson in 1668. As it was passed around the room all my bookman friends looked at it and shook their heads. Of value, they thought, comparatively slight. Only a dull theological work. As I reread the lengthy title something back in my brain made me concentrate more carefully upon it. Somewhere those printed words struck a vaguely familiar chord in my memory. All during the sale I kept turning forward to that page in my catalogue where it was listed. Suddenly I knew! Marmaduke Johnson it was who printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first Holy Scriptures issued for the North American Indians—the Eliot Indian Bible.

The little book was put up for sale and I asked leave to examine it again for a moment before bidding. I knew at once it was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not England. This made it tremendously rare, because it was the only known copy, hitherto unrecognized, of the first volume of verse printed in North America. Those present took it for granted from the catalogue description that the little work was printed in Cambridge, England, and as such, was certainly worth less than the price at which it was soon knocked down to me, fifty-one pounds. After the sale several people, including a great Americana expert and the auctioneer, met me and rather twitted me for paying $250 for a stupid old religious tract worth but a few shillings. They were amazed that I had shown such a lapse of judgment.

When I informed them what the book really was, the auctioneer sadly asked, “Doctor, what would you really have given for it?”

When I said £8000 or £9000—between $40,000 and $50,000—he was not any too happy. During the following year, when the little tract by Baxter in the Indian dialect appeared for sale, they catalogued it Cambridge, Massachusetts! Thus listed, it sold for $34,000, as I have mentioned before.

You see, we are always reading of record prices and it is very rare to hear of the valuable things that slip through unobserved. It is these latter that give book auctions their zest. And the auction houses, if they only knew it, benefit also by the chance bargain, for it is this very thing that attracts the public.

On the other hand, the most experienced buyer never knows when he will have to pay a really high price. It is the average, after all, that counts. Yet here is a phenomenon which has always seemed peculiar to me. When times are bad and prices in Wall Street are tumbling, when Steel sells far below its worth and the oils go begging, rare volumes continue to command an ever-increasing price. In 1907, the year of the panic, books sold for record sums at auctions, while so-called standard securities dipped sharply in a helpless market. Two years later, when national finances were again wobbly, when the bears were having a picnic with the lambs, old books went for higher prices than ever before.

In the Henry W. Poor sale, held in New York in this same year, record prices were established, despite the prediction of the wiseacres, who said that prices must go down. It is for this reason that some of the most discerning men in Wall Street purchase rare books as an investment. I know many a captain of industry who quietly hides away in the secrecy of his strong box rare little volumes, such as Shakespeare quartos, small pamphlets by Shelley, and even first editions of Joseph Conrad. These rich men realize—and rightly, too—that such treasures will always sell at a premium, even though the market is tumbling and Wall Street is in a panic. Owners of precious books always find they do not have to wait for the chance buyer. Their volumes can be sent to the auction mart at any time, where they will realize, as a rule, their full value.

America has had two really great auctioneers: Stan V. Henkels, of beloved memory, and the late Thomas E. Kirby. The latter in many respects exerted the greatest influence of any person in the auction world of this country. He was the founder of the American Art Association, and his opinions on objects of art were accepted as gospel by the most meticulous collectors, including the late P. A. B. Widener, William A. Clark, and Henry C. Frick. He was really brilliant on the block, and his remarks were frequently the wittiest imaginable. I remember as a youth going to his auctions and being fascinated by his repartee and the rapidity with which he sold.

Stan V. Henkels was the only auctioneer who catalogued every work himself and cried his own sales too. His humor was irresistible, and the audience would often break out in guffaws of laughter at his many bright sallies.

THOMAS E. KIRBY ON THE ROSTRUM

In 1902 I attended a sale at Henkels’s where the price of a certain volume caused the book world to hum for months afterward. I was late, and entered the room as the bidding began on a little book which was placed in full view of the audience. I asked one of the employés for its number in the catalogue and found that it was The Dying Words of Ockanickon, an Indian King, and was published in London in 1682. It did not seem to be a volume of much importance. I was acquainted somewhat with its history. The highest price it had ever brought was $52.50, at the Barlow sale in 1890. I leaned forward to whisper to a friend in the row ahead of me and he said $200 would be an enormous price for it.

Suddenly the air seemed charged with electricity, and I looked about to see who was bidding. On one side of the room sat a man I knew, A. J. Bowden, who represented George H. Richmond and Company, of New York. On the other I saw Mr. Robert Dodd, of Dodd, Mead and Company. Both were experienced auction bidders, with the set expression of the mouth and the feverish, alert look. I did not know at the time that both had received instructions to buy this particular work at any price. Each had that most dangerous weapon of the auction game, the unlimited bid.

From sixty dollars the price rapidly jumped. Stan V. Henkels, colorful, suave, provocative, naïve, and humorous, kept egging them on. Up and up the price went, until it reached the $900 mark. Then a murmur of consternation swept the room, followed by a hush. Robert Dodd broke the silence with a $100 raise. Bowden followed with another $100 and Dodd added $100 more. When Bowden finally shouted, “Thirteen hundred dollars,” Dodd smiled.

“Fourteen hundred,” he said sweetly.

Just at this moment poor old Bowden exhibited his first sign of weakness. He stopped bidding in hundreds and raised the bid twenty-five.

Dodd saw his chance and brought up his battalion with a crash. Little Ockanickon was wrested from Bowden at the freak price of $1450. When Richmond read in the paper next morning the price at which he had so nearly bought Ockanickon, he fell out of bed!

Speaking of freak prices, think of my surprise when I went to an auction one day last year and saw with amused amazement a little volume of book mysteries I once wrote. I felt self-conscious, uncomfortable, and pleased, all rolled into one, when the bids on The Unpublishable Memoirs jumped up, and it finally sold for sixteen dollars. The joke is that this volume is still obtainable at its published price of $2.50.

The enormous and ever increasing attendance at auction sales in the established city auction rooms is caused by the hope that sometime a real bargain will come your way. This is the lure, the real bait. It has an appeal all its own. But for the young enthusiast it is often a costly and dangerous game. It is wiser to begin your bidding under the guidance of an experienced agent. There are several collectors and owners of great private libraries in this country whose names are entirely unknown in the auction room. They may enter the salesroom incognito, to enjoy watching their agent at battle with others, but they are careful not to run any risks themselves through careless, inexperienced bidding. One of the greatest book collectors in the world, Mr. Henry E. Huntington, never bid. In all the years during which he was buying he never entered the lists to joust for himself.

THE BIBLIO-FIENDS

Drawing by Oliver Herford for Dr. Rosenbach’s “Unpublishable
Memoirs”

In the forty years I have been bidding I have found a new thrill in every sale. From my earliest years at Henkels’s auctions to the most recent sales in London, Paris, and New York, I have repeatedly known a fine exhilaration. I sniff the air like an old war horse at the smell of powder. How often have I felt my pulses race, my temperature rise with the rising bids! But as I grow older I find I have to fight that deadliest of maladies—conservatism. This is one thing in the world that the collector should pray to be delivered from. Of course it is awfully difficult to pay $500 to-day for a book that in your youth you could have picked up for only twenty, or to buy a book for $1000 which two years ago passed through your fingers for one third as much.

The late George D. Smith, a spectacular figure in the auction mart for more than twenty years, was the only man I ever knew entirely immune from conservatism. I can remember him at the Hoe sale in 1911-12. There he was constantly bidding against the sharpest and most astute members of both the European and the American book trade. How cool and collected he was in the very midst of battle! The comments of his competitors remained unnoticed by him when he paid what were then considered extravagant prices for books and manuscripts. And his judgment was right. To-day these same items can’t be bought for two or three times the sums he paid. When he purchased, toward the end of the sale, a Gutenberg Bible for $50,000, everyone said he had gone quite mad. They did not realize that the same remarks were made sixty-five years earlier, when, in 1847, James Lenox had given £500—about $2500—for it. This copy is now in the New York Public Library. In my opinion the Gutenberg Bible was then worth every dollar of the $50,000 which G. D. S. paid for it. Ten years from now it will be cheap at $250,000.

There have been many notable auctions during the past twenty years, but I shall never forget my first one in England, in 1907. A dear friend of mine, and a most intelligent collector of exquisite taste, Mr. William C. Van Antwerp, of San Francisco, had gathered together a small but delectable library, which he decided to sell at Sotheby’s in March of that year. I crossed on the Oceanic with Alfred Quaritch, who occupied a commanding position in the book world.

I was but one of the small fry, out of college only a few years. Quaritch and I had been drawn to each other by the magnet of books. On the way over we talked of the sale, and I dwelt with especial emphasis on the fine first folio of Shakespeare in Van’s collection. In a way, I was sounding out Quaritch, for I knew instinctively that it would be useless to bid against this giant of the auction room if he wanted the folio himself. I grew very nervous as we sat in the smoking room one evening when we were about five days out. I decided I had hemmed and hawed long enough. Finally I worked up courage to ask him to execute a bid for me on the folio.

SOTHEBY’S AUCTION ROOM IN LONDON

He seemed surprised, and did not answer for some moments. Then he asked me, “How much do you intend to bid? I warn you, if it’s too low I’ll buy it myself.”

I answered weakly, “Five thousand pounds.”

He opened his eyes wide. “That is a bid,” he said, “and I’ll get it for you.”

Then came the day of the auction in London. I remember sitting next to Quaritch, witnessing the battle of wits and bids at Sotheby’s. I was shaking like the proverbial aspen leaf, to a degree that I have never done since. The bidding on the folio opened at £500. After what seemed an interminable length of time, it was knocked down to Quaritch for £3600. I was so completely overcome with joy that I had to walk around the block for air and refreshment to buck me up. This was a handsome copy, bound in morocco by Bedford, a celebrated craftsman of the 70’s.

I recall, too, Harry Elkins Widener’s pleasure when this folio passed finally into his possession. I think of all the books of his fine collection, he valued this one the most. Years later, when we paid £8600—a little under $43,000—at the Baroness Burdett-Coutts’s sale, the record price for a Shakespeare folio, I received my brother Philip’s cable, advising me of our luck, without a tremor.

Fifteen years had rolled by; much water had run under the bridge. Poor Quaritch, my dearest friend in the book business, had passed away, only forty-two years old when he died. His death was a great loss to the world of rare books.

The price of a first folio indicates the trend of values in the English market, just as the Boucher Molière, 1734, shows the state of the French market, while the Dante printed in Foligno, 1472, tells the tale of the Italian market. These books are always rising in value, and it is the rapidity of their change in price that shows which way the wind is blowing. To-day, when the condition of a book is everything and collectors pay more attention to it than to anything else, fine first folios of Shakespeare are judged by these three points: First, the copy must have its full number of leaves, each page perfect, without facsimile. Second, the binding. It is, of course, more desirable in the original binding, or, next, rebound in the eighteenth century, or, lastly, in a good modern binding. In years to come the original binding will be the chief of all desiderata. Third, the folio must be of adequate size, about thirteen by eight and a quarter inches. A quarter of an inch one way or another can spell tragedy to the fanatical collector. If you are lucky enough to find a first folio having all three of these qualities, the gods are with you. I have been fortunate to procure such an one, the celebrated copy from Sir George Holford’s library. It is perfect in every detail. It is exceptional in having the blank leaves, known in no other copy; its original old calf binding is without a single blemish.

This is the finest first folio known to exist. It is the cornerstone of a collection of Shakespeare’s works which I have been gathering for many years. I remember the excitement when we exhibited in our Philadelphia show window the four folios, each in its original binding, the Poems, in a similar binding, and forty-one of the early quarto plays. The passionate interest shown by the man in the street indicated his never-flagging enthusiasm for anything pertaining to the greatest writer the world has known.

SHAKESPEARE WINDOW AT 1320 WALNUT STREET, PHILADELPHIA

In 1905, Mr. Bernard Buchanan MacGeorge, of Glasgow, sold four Shakespeare folios in their original binding to Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island. He doubtless believed he was using his cunning Scotch wisdom to a high degree when he steadfastly held out for £10,000. At this price he figured he was doing himself a neat turn, because he had paid only £1700 for them six years before. But if he had been a bit cannier, a little more patient, he would have received two or three times the sum Mr. Perry paid him. When the balance of the MacGeorge Library was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in July 1924, all the bibliophiles in bookdom would have torn one another to bits to get the Shakespeare folios at the old price. But I was lucky enough to procure them when I purchased en bloc the Perry Library, and to-day they are in the library of Mr. Joseph Widener, at Lynnewood Hall, near Philadelphia.

Thank goodness, they are at least near home, where I can look at them to my heart’s content.

The history of the Shakespeare folios is an interesting one. Shakespeare’s genius was so overwhelming that even the least of the nitwits of his day appreciated him. His greatest contemporaries were the most eager to preserve his works. Immediately after his death in 1616 steps were taken to issue a complete edition of his plays. His manuscripts were probably collected, but, alas, not saved, and scholars of the time, many of whom had known him well, labored to procure a perfect text.

Three years passed. Then, in 1619, the English public was surprised to see issued a single volume containing nine plays. No one knows how many copies composed this edition, but it is a strange circumstance that but one copy is in existence to-day. I once owned it, but it finally passed to Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, who added it to his remarkable collection of Shakespeareana. This one surviving copy is in its original binding. It has an index, too, in the quaint old handwriting of its first owner, Edward Gwynne, who proudly stamped his name in gilt on the outside cover. Even though I should not care to be dubbed a prophet in my own country, I do not hesitate to say that this book would bring at least $200,000 if it were sold on the block to-day.

This 1619 volume was but a makeshift, playing for its sale upon the magic name of Shakespeare. John Heminge and Henry Condell, both true and tried friends of the great Bard, and fellow actors, mentioned in his will, undertook to give the world a complete and correct edition of his plays. William Jaggard and his son Isaac were responsible for the printing, a laborious task when you consider that the volume consisted of one thousand double-column pages. Thus, the great first folio was finally issued in 1623, in a plain calf binding. It contained a portrait of William Shakespeare, with a leaf of verses on the opposite page by his famous contemporary, Ben Jonson. These are among the finest lines ever written concerning Shakespeare, and perhaps the greatest from Jonson’s pen. The original price of the first folio was five dollars a copy.

One pound in 1623! And yet in the years between 1700 and 1750 it had only advanced to ten, which reminds me of a good story. In 1790 the copy belonging to John Watson Reed was offered for sale. That astute collector, the Duke of Roxburghe, wanted it and commissioned an agent to buy it for him. The bidding started at five pounds and rose to the enormous sum of twenty guineas! Everyone was astounded. The duke’s agent grew faint-hearted and passed a slip of paper to him suggesting that His Grace retire from the contest. The duke replied with these memorable and appropriate words:—

Lay on, Macduff;

And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

The folio finally fell to the duke for thirty-five pounds. How often, when I feel myself weakening at a sale, do I think of the old duke’s quotation from Macbeth. It should be the motto of every auction bidder.

The Duke of Roxburghe’s library was sold at Sotheby’s in 1812, and it included the first folio. It brought an advance of almost three hundred per cent, being purchased by the Duke of Devonshire for £100. It can be seen now in the Henry E. Huntington Library. The sale of this collection more than one hundred and fifteen years ago provided a sensation which is still talked about, and was not equaled until the auction of the Gutenberg Bible a year ago last February. As Thomas Frognall Dibdin said, it reverberated around the world. The Valdarfer Boccaccio was the high light in the Roxburghe sale. This notorious volume was the only perfect copy of the first edition of the Decameron. I have always thought that his flowery description of the bidding which took place in that “grand æra of Bibliomania,” as he was so pleased to term it, applies exactly to the tactics used in the modern auction room. Dibdin wrote as follows:—

The room was crowded to excess; and a sudden darkness which came across gave rather an additional interest to the scene. At length the moment of sale arrived. Mr. Evans prefaced the putting up of the article by an appropriate oration, in which he expatiated upon its excessive rarity, and concluded by informing the company of the regret and even “anguish of heart” expressed by Mr. Van Praet that such a treasure was not at that time to be found in the imperial collection at Paris. However, it should seem Bonaparte’s agent was present. Silence followed the address of Mr. Evans. On his right hand, leaning against the wall, stood Earl Spencer; a little lower down, and standing at right angles with His Lordship, appeared the Marquis of Blandford. The Duke, I believe, was not then present; but my Lord Althorp stood a little backward to the right of his father Earl Spencer. Such was “the ground taken up” by the adverse hosts.

The honor of firing the first shot was due to a gentleman of Shropshire, unused to this species of warfare, and who seemed to recoil from the reverberation of the report himself had made! “One hundred guineas,” he exclaimed. Again a pause ensued; but anon the biddings rose rapidly to 500 guineas. Hitherto, however, it was evident that the firing was but masked and desultory. At length all random shots ceased, and the champions before named stood gallantly up to each other, resolving not to flinch from a trial of their respective strengths.

“A thousand guineas” were bid by Earl Spencer—to which the Marquis added “ten.” You might have heard a pin drop. All eyes were turned, all breathing well nigh stopped ... every sword was put home within its scabbard, and not a piece of steel was seen to move or to glitter save that which each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand. See, see! They parry, they lunge, they hit; yet their strength is undiminished, and no thought of yielding is entertained by either.... “Two thousand pounds are offered by the Marquis.” ...

Then it was that Earl Spencer, as a prudent general, began to think of an useless effusion of blood and expenditure of ammunition—seeing that his adversary was as resolute and “fresh” as at the onset. For a quarter of a minute he paused; when my Lord Althorp advanced one step forward, as if to supply his father with another spear for the purpose of renewing the contest. His countenance was marked by a fixed determination to gain the prize—if prudence, in its most commanding form, and with a frown of unusual intensity of expression, had not bade him desist. The father and son for a few seconds converse apart; and the biddings are resumed.

“Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds,” said Lord Spencer. The spectators are now absolutely electrified. The Marquis quietly adds his usual “ten” ... and there is an END OF THE CONTEST! Mr. Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a due pause—and indeed, as if by something præternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended “in midair.” However, at length down dropt the hammer ... and, as Lisardo has not merely poetically expressed himself, “the echo” of the sound of that fallen hammer “was heard in the libraries of Rome, of Milan, and St. Mark.”

The name Dibdin has come to be almost synonymous with “bibliomaniac.” Although Pennypacker, twenty-five years ago, said that the true bibliomaniac was a rarissimo,—nearly as scarce as the dodo,—a new generation of Dibdin men is springing up. There are young men to-day who find it as difficult to pass an old bookstore or a junk shop as did those in years gone by; young fellows who will travel miles to enrich their knowledge of books. I’m afraid it’s the old-timer, though, who lives among his books, sleeps among them, surrounded by folios, quartos, books of every size, who thrives in an atmosphere that is musty, who frowns upon cleanliness as a vice. Of course, such peculiarities are hardly necessary or desirable, but such men have lived. The modern Dibdin takes a course in bibliography at college and attends all book sales. He marks down prices, learns the various methods experienced bidders use, thus supplementing his college training with all that he learns in the auction room.

Many years ago I knew a young married man who lived in Orange. He was auction mad. One New York sale we both attended continued for twelve evenings. On the twelfth his bride appeared with him and he introduced her to the other maniacs. In those days it was quite unusual for a woman to appear at a book auction.

“Why did you bring Mrs. Blank to-night?” I inquired.

“Oh,” said he, “it came to the point where I just had to prove there were such things as book auctions!”

Although the following tale has nothing to do with book auctions, I am reminded of it because it has distinctly to do with wives. And wives, there is no doubt about it, have their niche in the book world, if only for the influence they have upon their book-mad consorts.

A small man with a shy, walruslike look came to see me one day in Philadelphia. His meek appearance was in marked contrast to the determined manner with which he greeted me. He introduced himself as a piano tuner from Harrisburg.

“I have here, doctor,” he said, pulling out of an inner pocket a blue envelope, “something which will interest you. I found it in a secondhand-furniture store among a bundle of papers on its way to the pulp mill. I rescued it.” He opened the envelope and drew out a pamphlet in brown paper wrappers. It was Poe’s Prose Romances. No. I. Containing The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in Philadelphia in 1843. There are only three or four copies known to exist.

“What do you want for it?” I asked him.

“Three thousand eight hundred,” he said quite calmly. Naturally I was surprised that a man who made his living tinkering with refractory pianos should know the value of this work. In answer to further questions, he told me that he spent all his evenings and some of his days browsing in secondhand stores, in the hope of making a book find.

“And now my dream’s come true. I’m always picking up old books. It makes my wife wild. She always nags me. Wasting time and throwing away good cash, she calls it!”

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF OSCAR WILDE’S SONNET,
“ON THE SALE BY AUCTION OF KEATS’ LOVE-LETTERS”

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

I had to have this book. While I wrote out the check I asked him why he wanted this peculiar sum, and what he would do with it. He answered without hesitation.