The Library | Page 9

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.
In book-hunting the nature of the quarry varies with the taste of the
collector. One man is for bibles, another for ballads. Some pursue plays,
others look for play bills. "He was not," says Mr. Hill Burton, speaking
of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, "he was not a black- letter man, or a tall copyist,
or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man, or an early-English dramatist, or
an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a pasquinader, or an old brown calf
man, or a Grangerite, {1} or a tawny moroccoite, or a gilt topper, or a
marbled insider, or an editio princeps man." These nicknames briefly
dispose into categories a good many species of collectors. But there are
plenty of others. You may be a historical-bindings man, and hunt for
books that were bound by the great artists of the past and belonged to
illustrious collectors. Or you may be a Jametist, and try to gather up the
volumes on which Jamet, the friend of Louis Racine, scribbled his
cynical "Marginalia." Or you may covet the earliest editions of modern
poets--Shelley, Keats, or Tennyson, or even Ebenezer Jones. Or the
object of your desires may be the books of the French romanticists,
who flourished so freely in 1830. Or, being a person of large fortune
and landed estate, you may collect country histories. Again, your heart

may be set on the books illustrated by Eisen, Cochin, and Gravelot, or
Stothard and Blake, in the last century. Or you may be so old-fashioned
as to care for Aldine classics, and for the books of the Giunta press. In
fact, as many as are the species of rare and beautiful books, so many
are the species of collectors. There is one sort of men, modest but not
unwise in their generations, who buy up the pretty books published in
very limited editions by French booksellers, like MM. Lemerre and
Jouaust. Already their reprints of Rochefoucauld's first edition, of
Beaumarchais, of La Fontaine, of the lyrics attributed to Moliere, and
other volumes, are exhausted, and fetch high prices in the market. By a
singular caprice, the little volumes of Mr. Thackeray's miscellaneous
writings, in yellow paper wrappers (when they are first editions), have
become objects of desire, and their old modest price is increased twenty
fold. It is not always easy to account for these freaks of fashion; but
even in book-collecting there are certain definite laws. "Why do you
pay a large price for a dingy, old book," outsiders ask, "when a clean
modern reprint can be procured for two or three shillings?" To this
question the collector has several replies, which he, at least, finds
satisfactory. In the first place, early editions, published during a great
author's lifetime, and under his supervision, have authentic texts. The
changes in them are the changes that Prior or La Bruyere themselves
made and approved. You can study, in these old editions, the alterations
in their taste, the history of their minds. The case is the same even with
contemporary authors. One likes to have Mr. Tennyson's "Poems,
chiefly Lyrical" (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange,
Cornhill, 1830). It is fifty years old, this little book of one hundred and
fifty-four pages, this first fruit of a stately tree. In half a century the
poet has altered much, and withdrawn much, but already, in 1830, he
had found his distinctive note, and his "Mariana" is a masterpiece.
"Mariana" is in all the collections, but pieces of which the execution is
less certain must be sought only in the old volume of 1830. In the same
way "The Strayed Reveller, and other poems, by A." (London: B.
Fellowes, Ludgate Street, 1849) contains much that Mr. Matthew
Arnold has altered, and this volume, like the suppressed "Empedocles
on Etna, and other Poems, by A." (1852), appeals more to the collector
than do the new editions which all the world may possess. There are
verses, curious in their way, in Mr. Clough's "Ambarvalia" (1849),

which you will not find in his posthumous edition, but which "repay
perusal." These minutiae of literary history become infinitely more
important in the early editions of the great classical writers, and the
book-collector may regard his taste as a kind of handmaid of critical
science. The preservation of rare books, and the collection of materials
for criticism, are the useful functions, then, of book-collecting. But it is
not to be denied that the sentimental side of the pursuit gives it most of
its charm. Old books are often literary relics, and as dear and sacred to
the lover