Andrew Lang - The Library

There is plenty of morality, if there are few rare books in the stalls. The decay of affection, the breaking of friendship, the decline of ambition, are all illustrated in these fourpenny collections. The presentation volumes are here which the author gave in the pride of his heart to the poet who was his “Master,” to the critic whom he feared, to the friend with whom he was on terms of mutual admiration. The critic has not even cut the leaves, the poet has brusquely torn three or four apart with his finger and thumb, the friend has grown cold, and has let the poems slip into some corner of his library, whence they were removed on some day of doom and of general clearing out. The sale of the library of a late learned prelate who had Boileau’s hatred of a dull book was a scene to be avoided by his literary friends. The Bishop always gave the works which were offered to him a fair chance. He read till he could read no longer, cutting the pages as he went, and thus his progress could be traced like that of a backwoodsman who “blazes” his way through a primeval forest. The paper-knife generally ceased to do duty before the thirtieth page. The melancholy of the book-hunter is aroused by two questions, “Whence?” and “Whither?” The bibliophile asks about his books the question which the metaphysician asks about his soul. Whence came they? Their value depends a good deal on the answer. If they are stamped with arms, then there is a book (“Armorial du Bibliophile,” by M. Guigard) which tells you who was their original owner. Any one of twenty coats-of-arms on the leather is worth a hundred times the value of the volume which it covers. If there is no such mark, the fancy is left to devise a romance about the first owner, and all the hands through which the book has passed. That Vanini came from a Jesuit college, where it was kept under lock and key. That copy of Agrippa “De Vanitate Scientiarum” is marked, in a crabbed hand and in faded ink, with cynical Latin notes. What pessimist two hundred years ago made his grumbling so permanent? One can only guess, but part of the imaginative joys of the book-hunter lies ‘ in the fruitless conjecture. That other question “Whither?” is graver. Whither are our treasures to be scattered? Will they find kind masters? or, worst fate of books, fall into the hands of women who will sell them to the trunk-maker? Are the leaves to line a box or to curl a maiden’s locks? Are the rarities to become more and more rare, and at last fetch prodigious prices? Some unlucky men are able partly to solve these problems in their own lifetime. They are constrained to sell their libraries – an experience full of bitterness, wrath, and disappointment.

Selling books is nearly as bad as losing friends, than which life has no worse sorrow. A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself. As a man’s tastes and opinions are developed his books put on a different aspect. He hardly knows the “Poems and Ballads” he used to declaim, and cannot recover the enigmatic charm of “Sordello.” Books change like friends, like ourselves, like everything; but they are most piquant in the contrasts they provoke, when the friend who gave them and wrote them is a success, though we laughed at him; a failure, though we believed in him; altered in any case, and estranged from his old self and old days. The vanished past returns when we look at the pages. The vicissitudes of years are printed and packed in a thin octavo, and the shivering ghosts of desire and hope return to their forbidden home in the heart and fancy. It is as well to have the power of recalling them always at hand, and to be able to take a comprehensive glance at the emotions which were so powerful and full of life, and now are more faded and of less account than the memory of the dreams of childhood. It is because our books are friends that do change, and remind us of change, that we should keep them with us, even at a little inconvenience, and not turn them adrift in the world to find a dusty asylum in cheap bookstalls. We are a part of all that we have read, to parody the saying of Mr. Tennyson’s Ulysses, and we owe some respect, and house-room at least, to the early acquaintances who have begun to bore us, and remind us of the vanity of ambition and the weakness of human purpose. Old school and college books even have a reproachful and salutary power of whispering how much a man knew, and at the cost of how much trouble, that he has absolutely forgotten, and is neither the better nor the worse for it. It will be the same in the case of the books he is eager about now; though, to be sure, he will read with less care, and forget with an ease and readiness only to be acquired by practice.

But we were apologising for book-hunting, not because it teaches moral lessons, as “dauncyng” also does, according to Sir Thomas Elyot, in the “Boke called the Gouvernour,” but because it affords a kind of sportive excitement. Bookstalls are not the only field of the chase. Book catalogues, which reach the collector through the post, give him all the pleasures of the sport at home. He reads the booksellers’ catalogues eagerly, he marks his chosen sport with pencil, he writes by return of post, or he telegraphs to the vendor. Unfortunately he almost always finds that he has been forestalled, probably by some bookseller’s agent. When the catalogue is a French one, it is obvious that Parisians have the pick of the market before our slow letters reach M. Claudin, or M. Labitte. Still the catalogues themselves are a kind of lesson in bibliography. You see from them how prices are ruling, and you can gloat, in fancy, over De Luyne’s edition of Molière, 1673, two volumes in red morocco, doublé (“Trautz Bauzonnet”), or some other vanity hopelessly out of reach. In their catalogues, MM. Morgand and Fatout print a facsimile of the frontispiece of this very rare edition. The bust of Molière occupies the centre, and portraits of the great actor, as Sganarelle and Mascarille (of the “Précieuses Ridicules”), stand on either side. In the second volume are Molière, and his wife Armande, crowned by the muse Thalia. A catalogue which contains such exact reproductions of rare and authentic portraits, is itself a work of art, and serviceable to the student. When the shop of a bookseller, with a promising catalogue which arrives over night, is not too far distant, bibliophiles have been known to rush to the spot in the grey morning, before the doors open. There are amateurs, however, who prefer to stay comfortably at home, and pity these poor fanatics, shivering in the rain outside a door in Oxford Street or Booksellers’ Row. There is a length to which enthusiasm cannot go, and many collectors draw the line at rising early in the morning. But, when we think of the sport of book-hunting, it is to sales in auction-rooms that the mind naturally turns. Here the rival buyers feel the passion of emulation, and it was in an auction-room that Guibert de Pixérécourt, being outbid, said, in tones of mortal hatred, “I will have the book when your collection is sold after your death.” And he kept his word. The fever of gambling is not absent from the auction-room, and people “bid jealous” as they sometimes “ride jealous” in the hunting-field. Yet, the neophyte, if he strolls by chance into a sale-room, will be surprised at the spectacle. The chamber has the look of a rather seedy “hell.” The crowd round the auctioneer’s box contains many persons so dingy and Semitic, that at Monte Carlo they would be refused admittance; while, in Germany, they would be persecuted by Herr von Treitschke with Christian ardour. Bidding is languid, and valuable books are knocked down for trifling sums. Let the neophyte try his luck, however, and prices will rise wonderfully. The fact is that the sale is a “knock out.” The bidders are professionals, in a league to let the volumes go cheap, and to distribute them afterwards among themselves. Thus an amateur can have a good deal of sport by bidding for a book till it reaches its proper value, and by then leaving in the lurch the professionals who combine to “run him up.” The amusement has its obvious perils, but the presence of gentlemen in an auction-room is a relief to the auctioneer and to the owner of the books. A bidder must be able to command his temper, both that he may be able to keep his head cool when tempted to bid recklessly, and that he may disregard the not very carefully concealed sneers of the professionals.