READER, were you ever afflicted with that hopelessly incurable disease, ycleped bibliomania, — that disease which sends its victim daily to Appleton’s or Scribner’s to empty his pocket-book freely in the purchase of rare and curious editions, or, perhaps, luxurious modern editions, of favorite old authors, flaunting in the bravery of large, clear type, with snow-white paper, — a rivulet of ink in a meadow of margin? Do you know what it is to be drawn to the book salesroom with an attraction like that of the steel to the magnet, and to find the tap of the auctioneer’s hammer as irresistible as is the roll of the roulette-ball to the gambler, or the music of cork-drawing to the toper? Did you ever stand for hours wistfully turning over the pages of some coveted volume, vainly racking your brains for some art by which, with your limited funds, to make it your own? Did you ever feel your heart sink within you when, through your hesitation, or, more likely, the depletion of your purse, some ardently-coveted volume, on which you had fastened with longing eyes, — which, in imagination, you had already seen snugly stowed in a corner of your library, — passed by the inexorable law of the hammer to some luckier individual? Have you not deplored a thousand times the fatality that led you to haunt these marts of literature, and resolved, and re-resolved, and resolved again, never more to be seduced by the witchery of tree-calf, fine tooling, 337 or luxurious type and paper? And yet, if the book-buying disease had fairly seized on you, did you ever succeed in extirpating it, stern as might be the necessity for economy? If you got it under for a week, or possibly for a month, did you not invariably find, in the very ecstasy of your triumph, that it had temporarily abated only to break forth with tenfold fury?
If you have ever experienced the feelings we have described, we can sympathize with you. We have been a life-long victim of the disease, which early became chronic and incurable. Our ruin dated from the hour when we bought our first duplicate. This downward step, as John Hill Burton says, is fraught with fearful consequences; it is like the first secret dram swallowed in the forenoon, or the first pawning of the silver spoons; there is no hope for the patient after this: “It rends at once the veil of decorum spun out of the flimsy sophisms by which he has been deceiving his friends, and partially deceiving himself, into the belief that his previous purchases were necessary, or, at all events, serviceable for professional and literary purposes. He now becomes shameless and hardened; and it is observable, in the career of this class of unfortunates, that the first act of duplicity is immediately followed by an access of the disorder, and a reckless abandonment to its propensities.”
Shall we ever forget the evenings passed in “lang syne” at Leonard’s, in the American Athens, — at Bangs’s, in Gotham, — or at Lord’s, in the city of Brotherly Love, mobs, and firemen’s fights, in watching the sale of those darlings in calf or turkey-morocco, on which we had set our affections? How, like many a lover by the side of flesh-and-blood mistresses, did we sigh for wealth for their 338 sake! The beauties! we would have embraced them all; but, alas! a terrible presentiment weighed upon our mind touching the number we should be able to secure in the awful conflict of the evening. The Duke of York, naming the select courtiers whom he wished to be saved from the wreck of the Gloucester frigate, leaving the rest to perish, was but a faint type of our gloomy self, deciding among scores of coveted volumes upon the few choicest and most fondly-prized ones, which we were most anxious to carry to the dry land of our own snug bookcase at home. Then how anxiously we weighed the chances, — how profoundly we estimated the probabilities, — of securing, or not securing, the favorites! Perhaps our capital was enough only to warrant the hope of winning one goodly-sized volume, — a fine old copy of Selden, Fuller, Burton, or Sir Thomas Browne; should we concentrate all our financial resources upon that, or should we divide our affections and our cash among two or three smaller volumes? Perhaps, — hateful thought! — the very book or books we yearned for might be eyed and coveted by some richer rival, who could outbid us. The work came early in the catalogue; there would be few present; it would go cheap. It was in the middle of the list, — the very noon of the sale; it would go dear. Oh! how we dreaded to see certain well-known faces peering through the crowd! Never have we had rivals whom we feared or hated more than rival book-buyers. Even when we neither saw nor heard any person who had fixed his affections on the book we longed for, there was sure to be some lynx-eyed Burnham, or other ‘Antique-Bokestore’ man, who would fight to the last dollar, or, at least, make us pay dearly for the treasure if we won it. With what perfect malignity 339 did we regard these cruel, remorseless, but crafty, old fellows, — these tyrants, — who bid off the precious volumes, not from any love of them, but from the mean and sordid motive of making money!
There are some persons who have no sympathy with the inveterate book-buyer; who cannot appreciate the miser-like feeling which prompts a man to accumulate on his shelves hundreds of volumes which he can never read. There are those to whom the artificial refinements which have grown up about the outside of literature yield no pleasure, — to whom one of Pickering’s gorgeous editions, or even one of Aldus himself, has no greater charms than the same work on flimsy paper and in shabby sheep. They read purely for information. A book to them is a storehouse of ideas and facts, or a mine to be quarried and worked, after which they care not what happens to it. The volumes they have read are to them shells without kernels, oranges that have been squeezed. They never acquire a love for a book, as a true smoker does for his pipe, apart from its uses. No pleasant associations or delicious memories cluster about their volumes, which the bare sight of them, after absence, conjures up. No pets or darlings of the heart have they; their souls never warm to a book. They cannot understand the feeling which prompted Charles Lamb to kiss a long-coveted old folio which he had found at a bookstall. The best books in the world, after they have sucked out all its marrow, is to these cold-blooded, matter-of-fact readers, nothing but printed paper between boards; just as, to some persons, the grandest old cathedral, with its fretwork and tracery, is only a pile of stone and mortar, and the music of Rubinstein only the regulated 340 tinkling of piano wires. There are persons who will walk down the finest nave in Christendom and see there no poem in stone, and there are those who can gaze on the superb alcoves of Trinity College library, Cambridge, without an emotion. Of such a man we may say, in the language of Wordsworth:
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose is to him.
And it is nothing more.”
There is another and a larger class of readers, who have a still lower esteem for books. These are the helluones librorum, the literary gluttons, who devour whole libraries, and prize books only as a means of amusement, or of killing time. Volumes of history, novels, travels, to these men are mere mile-posts to a swift and hurried traveler. When they close a work, they have the same hazy, confused recollection of its contents that a passenger in a “lightning-express” railway train has of the brooks, meadows, hills, dales, and other objects, by which he has been whirled. Each volume they race through acts as a sponge to wipe out the impressions made by its predecessors. Readers of this stamp have even less real love for books than the utilitarians first mentioned. They never say with Macaulay: “I have no pleasure from books which equals that of reading over for the hundredth time great productions which I know almost by heart.” They never say of these silent teachers, with De Bury: “Hi sunt magistri qui nos instruunt sine vergis et ferula, sine verbis et colera, sine pane et pecunia”; nor will you ever catch them exclaiming, as did Theodore Beza to his loved volumes:
“Salvete, incolumes mei libelli,
Meae deliciae, meae salutes!”
341Wth all such users of books, who are indifferent to their dress, — whether grim utilitarians, who prize only their thoughts, or pleasure-hunters who read to avoid thought, — we have no sympathy, yet no quarrel. With Horace, we bid them stultos esse libenter, and wish them, in the words of the Archbishop of Granada to Gil Blas, “all sorts of prosperity, with a little more taste.” We envy not the disposition that leads a man to prize not the jewel more for its brilliant setting; that looks upon books over which the eye has hung from childhood as mere bricks in a wall, and that, without a pang or sigh, could replace them by others from the nearest shop. Almost every man has his hobby, — his pet taste, — which he loves, at whatever cost of time or money, to gratify. The hobby of one man is shells; another spends all his spare cash for pictures; a third doats on old coins; a fourth, on bugs and butterflies; and a fifth rides a musical hobby, and goes merrily through the world to the sound of fiddle, flute, French horn, and double bass. The hobby of another is books, — books old and new, in vellum and in calf, gilt-edged and marbled, with headbands and without, — with which, perhaps, he packs his cases, loads his what-nots, stuffs his drawers, and piles his floors, till his whole house becomes a library, a wilderness of books! He is a black-letter man, or a tall copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edged man, or an early-dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a pasquinader, or a tawny moroccoite, or a gilt-topper, or a marbled insider, or an editio princeps man, or any other of the innumerable species which the author of “The Book-Hunter” has defined. Who will say that this is not as innocent a hobby as any of the list?
It is true that the book-hunter, the mere bibliomane 342 or bibliotaphe, as distinguished from the bibliophile, the true lover of books, — is often an utter stranger to the contents of the volumes he amasses;
“Horace he has by many different hands,
But not one Horace that he understands.”
It was a genuine bibliomane who is reported to have said contemptuously of a well-known scholar, — “He know about books! Nothing, nothing at all, I assure you, unless, perhaps, about their insides.” The value of a book, with this class, lies solely in its rarity, and they feel as did the English auctioneer, who, when the high bids at a book sale began to slacken, remonstrated pathetically: “Going so low as thirty shillings, gentlemen, — this curious book, — so low as thirty shillings, and quite imperfect.” While we can pardon these enthusiasts, and even the bibliognostes, who are learned only in title-pages and editions, and presses, and places of issue, we entertain no such feeling toward the bibliotaphes, long-pursed wretches, who get possession of a unique copy and lock it up. “There were known,” says Mr. Burton, in his admirable volume, “The Book-Hunter,” “to be just two copies of a spare quarto, called ‘Rout upon Rout, or the Rabblers Rabbled,’ by Felix Nixon, Gent. A certain collector possessed one copy; the other, by indomitable perseverance, he also got hold of, and then his heart was glad within him; and he felt it glow with well-merited pride when an accomplished scholar, desiring to complete an epoch in literary history on which that book threw some light, besought the owner to allow him a sight of it, were it but for a few minutes, and the request was refused. ‘I might as well ask him,’ said the animal, who was rather proud of his firmness than ashamed of his churlishness, 343 ‘to make me a present of his brains and reputation.’ ” It is said the same fiendish spirit sometimes enters the mild bosom of the Dutch tulip fancier; and he has been known to pay thousands of dollars for a duplicate tuber, that he may have the satisfaction of crushing it beneath his heel. Dibdin warmed his convivial guests at a fire fed by the wood-cuts which had been printed from the impression of the “Bibliographical Decameron,” so that the subscribers to his costly volumes might not be troubled with the ghost of a doubt that poor men would ever participate in their privilege.
The prices which bibliomanes are sometimes reported as paying for their coveted treasures almost stagger belief. At the sale of Mr. Perkins’s library, in London, in 1873, a “first folio” of Shakspeare sold for £585; Christine de Pisan’s “Cent Histories de Troie,” an “exquisite vellum manuscript full of miniatures,” was knocked down for £650; and a fine manuscript copy of John Lydgate’s “Siege of Troy,” for £1,620! But the most “fabulous” price was that paid on the last day of the sale for a vellum copy of the famous Gutenberg and Fust Bible, of which only eight other copies are known to exist. For this precious book, — “the most important and distinguished work in the annals of typography,” — the first edition of the Holy Scriptures, — the first book printed with movable metal type by the inventors of the art of printing, — the enormous sum of £3,400 was paid! Seventeen thousand dollars for a single book! — enough money to buy a large private library. This surpasses the sale, made immortal by Dibdin, of the copy of Boccaccio published by Valdarfer, at Venice, in 1471. The sale of the Duke of Roxburgh’s library, to which it belonged, 344 took place in May, 1812, and lasted forty-two days. Among the distinguished company who attended the sale were the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of Marlborough, then Marquis of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred guineas. “A thousand guineas,” said Earl Spencer. “And ten,” added the Marquis. You might have heard a pin drop. All eyes were turned, — all breathing well nigh stopped, — every sword was put home within its scabbard, except that which each of these two champions brandished in his valorous hand. “Two thousand pounds,” said the Marquis. The Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed and waste of powder, and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord Althorp with long steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a fresh lance to renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and Earl Spencer exclaimed, “Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!” An electric shock went through the assembly. “And ten,” quietly added the Marquis. This ended the strife. Mr. Evans, ere he let the hammer fall, paused; the ebony instrument seemed to be charmed or suspended “in mid air”; the spectators stood aghast when the hammer fell, and the echo of its fall sounded on the farthest shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries of Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio started in his sleep of five hundred years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain amidst the royal alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.”*
The most discouraging feature of the mania for book-collecting is, that it grows by what it feeds on, and becomes the more insatiable the more it is gratified. It is 345 hard for ordinary book-lovers to comprehend a desire for books so devouring as that which consumed Richard Heber. The number of his books was stated in six figures, and the catalogue of them filled five thick octavo volumes. He built a library at his house in Hodnet, which was said to be full. His residence at Pimlico, London, was filled, like Magliabecchi’s at Florence, with books from the top to the bottom, — every chair, table, and passage containing piles of erudition. He had another house in York street, laden from the ground floor to the garret with curious books. He had a library in High street, Oxford; an immense library in Paris; another at Antwerp; another at Brussels; another at Ghent; and yet others at other places in the Low Countries and in Germany. When any one raised a cui bono query of wonder at this, his answer was ready: “Why, sir, you see no man can comfortably do without three copies of a book. One he must have for a show-copy, and he will probably keep it at his country-house; another he will require for his own use and reference; and, unless he is inclined to part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends.”
It is said that, some years ago, a book-hunting Archdeacon in England, going up to London to be examined on some question before the House of Commons, suddenly disappeared, with all his money in his pocket, and his friends, with many misgivings of foul play, wondered what had become of him. Suddenly he returned home one day, penniless, followed by a wagon containing three hundred and seventy-two copies of rare editions of the Bible. Who will judge harshly of a case like this? How 346 glaring the contrast between the victim of such a mania and the de grege Epicuri porcus, who squanders his money upon the luxuries of the table, or him who wastes it upon ostentatious upholstery, — upon wall-papers that cost $3 a roll, or carpets that cost $5 a yard!
But is there no cure for the disease? None that we have heard of, except downright “impecuniosity.” It is, indeed, hydra-headed; extirpate one of its manifestations and it crops out in fifty new forms and ways. Generally it rages more and more fiercely in the patient, until he has gathered together more books, and “things in books’ clothing,” as Lamb calls them, than he can find convenient room for; or, if he has wisely collected on some single branch of literature or science, he finds, sooner or later, an impenetrable barrier to the progress of his hobby, with whatever spirit he may spur its stuffed sides. He opens his eyes some day to the fact that, although one book, and yet another, and another, fill but little space, yet an aggregate of volumes may clamor as loudly for more room as an aggregate of more vulgar wares, and that heaps of books never read nor consulted may be as much in the way as heaps of other lumber. If he lives in a hired house, this fact is more deeply impressed on his mind by a migratory May-day; soon after which, if he can screw up his courage to the sticking-point, he ransacks his hecatombs of musty old tomes, prunes out those which are dear to him as “the ruddy drops that visit his sad heart,” and packs off the rest to an auction room, to be fought for by a fresh horde of enthusiastic bibliomaniacs.
* Dibdin’s “Biographical Decameron.”