The Book-Hunter in London | Page 8

than the wildest
dreamer could have supposed to exist. Books and pamphlets which
were to be had for the proverbial old song when he first came to this
country quickly became the objects of the keenest competition in the
saleroom, and invariably found buyers at extravagant prices. As an
illustration, although not an American item, we may mention that when
a copy of the Mazarin Bible was offered at Sotheby's in 1847, the
competitors were an agent of Mr. James Lenox (Stevens' client) and Sir
Thomas Phillipps in person; the latter went to £495, but the agent went
£5 better, and secured the prize at the then unheard-of price of £500. At
first Mr. Lenox declined to take the book, but eventually altered his
mind, wisely as it proved, for although at long intervals copies are
being unearthed, the present value of Mr. Lenox's copy cannot be much
short of £4,000. During 1854 and 1855 Mr. Stevens bought books to
the value of over 50,000 dollars for Mr. Lenox, and on reviewing the
invoices of these two years, 'I am confident,' says Mr. Stevens, 'that, if
the same works were now' (1887) 'to be collected, they would cost
more than 250,000 dollars. But can so much and so many rare books
ever be collected again in that space of time?' In December, 1855, Mr.
Stevens offered Mr. Lenox in one lump about forty Shakespeare
quartos, all in good condition, and some of them very fine, for £500, or,
including a fair set of the four folios, £600, an offer which was
accepted, and it may be doubted whether such a set could now be
purchased for £6,000. Mr. Lenox was for over ten years desirous of
obtaining a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalter,' printed by Stephen Daye
at Cambridge, New England, 1640, the first book printed in what is
now the United States, and had given Mr. Stevens a commission of
£100 for it. After searching far and wide, the long-lost 'Benjamin' was
discovered in a lot at the sale of Pickering's stock at Sotheby's in 1855.
'A cold-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing towards the table
behind Mr. Lilly, I quietly bid, in a perfectly neutral tone, "Sixpence";
and so the bids went on, increasing by sixpences, until half a crown
was reached and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up this very
volume, he turned to me and remarked, "This looks a rare edition, Mr.

Stevens; don't you think so? I do not remember having seen it before,"
and raised the bid to 5s. I replied that I had little doubt of its rarity,
though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms, and at the same time
gave Mr. Wilkinson a sixpenny nod. Thenceforward a "spirited
competition" arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until finally the lot
was knocked down to Stevens for 19s.' The volume had cost the late Mr.
Pickering 3s. It became Mr. Lenox's property for £80. Twenty-three
years later another copy was bought by Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for
1,200 dollars.
In a letter to Justin Windsor, the late J. Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps
gave some very curious and interesting information respecting
book-collecting in the earlier half of the present century. 'About the
year 1836,' he wrote, 'when I first began hunting for old books at the
various stalls in our famous London city, black-letter ones and rare
prints were "plenty as blackberries," and I have often found such things
in unlikely places and amidst a mass of commonplace rubbish, exposed
for sale in boxes labelled, "These books and pamphlets 6d. or 1s. each,"
outside an old bookseller's window, where another notice informed the
passer-by that "Libraries were purchased or books bought;" and thus
plainly showed how such now indeed rarities came into the possession
of an ignorant bibliopole. It was not, however, till about 1840 that I
turned my attention to the more special work of collecting Shakespeare
quartos, in which, I may say, I have been very successful. It was at one
of George Chalmers' sales that I first bought one or two, and after that I
hunted for them in all parts of the country, and met with considerable
success, often buying duplicates, and even triplicates, of the same
edition and play. At one time I possessed no less than three copies of
the very rare quarto edition of "Romeo and Juliet," 1609, and
sometimes even had four copies of more than one of the other quartos.
Not so very long before this period, old Jolley, the well-known
collector, picked up a Caxton at Reading, and a "Venus and Adonis,"
1594, at Manchester, in a volume of old tracts, for the ignoble sum of
1s. 3d. Jolley was a wealthy orange-merchant of Farringdon Street,
London, and entertained me often with many stories of