The Book-Hunter at Home | Page 2

that is bought and sold, are made every day and will continue to be made so long as human nature endures, bargains in books no less among them.
The rich finds of which the aged bookseller dreams are bargains only in the light of present-day prices. As a matter of fact, the great majority of them were not really bargains at all. He may bitterly lament having parted with a copy of the first edition of the 'Compleat Angler,' in the 'sixties for twenty guineas, but he overlooks the fact that that was then its market value. Had he asked a thousand pounds for it, his sanity would certainly have been open to question. 'Why, when I was a boy,' he says, 'you could buy first editions of Shelley, Keats, or Scott for pence.' Precisely: which was their current value; by no stretch of the imagination can they be considered bargains. His business is, and has always been, to buy and sell; not to hoard books on the chance that they will become valuable 'some day.' Neither can it be urged that 'people' (by which he means collectors) 'did not know so much about books fifty years ago.' Collectors know, and have ever known, all that they need for the acquisition of their particular desiderata. If they were ignorant of the prices which volumes common in their day would realise at some future period, why, so were the dealers and every one else concerned! Judging by analogy, we have every reason to believe that many volumes which we come across almost daily on the bookstalls, marked, perhaps, a few pence, will be fought for one day across the auction-room table.
The chief reason why the elderly bookseller no longer comes across these advantageous purchases is that he has passed the age (though he does not know it) at which bargains are to be had. But bargains are not encountered, they are made. It is the youthful vigour and enthusiasm of the young collector, prompting him into the byways and alleys of book-land, that bring bargains to his shelves.
So, if you are young and enthusiastic, and not to be deterred by a series of wild-goose chases, happy indeed will be your lot. For over the post-prandial pipe you will be able to hand such and such a treasure to your admiring fellow-spirit, saying: 'This I picked up for n-pence in Camden Town; this one cost me x-shillings at Poynder's in Reading: Iredale of Torquay let me have this for a florin; I found this on the floor in a corner of Commin's shop at Bournemouth; this was on David's stall at Cambridge, and I nearly lost it to the fat don of King's'; and so on and so on.
Bargains, forsooth! Our book-hunter was once outbid at Sotheby's for a scarce volume which he found, a week later, on a barrow in Clerkenwell for fourpence! The same year he picked up for ten shillings, in London, an early sixteenth-century folio, rubricated and with illuminated initials. It was as fresh as when it issued from the press, and in the original oak and pig-skin binding. He failed to trace the work in any of the bibliographies, nor could the British Museum help him to locate another copy. David's stall at Cambridge once yielded to him a scarce Defoe tract for sixpence. But this being, as Master Pepys said, 'an idle rogueish book,' he sold it to a bookseller for two pounds, 'that it might not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found.' A copy has recently fetched twenty guineas.
Doubtless every bibliophile is perpetually on the look-out for treasures, and it is essential that he learn, early in his career, to make up his mind at once concerning an out-of-the-way book. He who hesitates is lost, and this is doubly true of the book-collector. More than once in his early days of collecting has our book-hunter hesitated and finally left a book, only to dash back--perhaps a few hours later, perhaps next day--and find it gone.
Once upon a time a spotlessly clean little square octavo volume of Terence, printed in italics, caught his eye upon a bookstall. One shilling was its ransom, but it was not the price that deterred him so much as the fact that every available nook and corner of his sanctum was already filled to overflowing with books. 'A nice clean copy of an early-printed book,' he mused. But early-printed books were not in his line--then; had they been in those early days of book-hunting, his library would have been slow indeed of growth. So he passed on and left it.
All that evening the memory of the little square volume would keep recurring most absurdly. He didn't want it, it was not