The Start of a Collection

1

THE collector who is a specialist is always, at a certain point, asked the same question. As he puts a book back on the shelf or replaces an object in a cabinet, his wondering visitor, after a pause, asks it. In my own case the question is: “ How did you get started on Horace Walpole?”

The collector has answers of varying lengths to this question, but none of them is complete. He may answer, “It was largely luck”; or he may relate the circumstances which launched him, an account beginning, perhaps, with a chance encounter or a coincidence; but to give a full and accurate answer is beyond his powers of memory. Of the inner compulsions which have confirmed him as a collector he probably knows little. And almost certainly he cannot say why he chose, of all the avenues open to him, the particular one he did, why his subject — whether it is Horace Walpole or clocks or sea shells — appealed to him so strongly that he dedicated himself to its pursuit and lived happily ever after.

Forty years ago all my contemporaries collected something. Most boys went in for cigar bands and election cards. I regarded these collections as of little interest and less value, and at the age of ten went all-out for the ultimate, stamps.

My album is before me, “The International Postage Stamp Album. Illustrated with Engravings. 4,000. 1901 Edition. New York. The Scott Stamp & Coin Co., Limited.” Its decorated green boards are so worn that the boy on the left who is innocently holding a banner of Imperial Germany is all but effaced below the waist, while his companion’s banner can only just be identified as Spain’s.

The album came to me from my much older brothers, who had long since lost interest in it. I printed my name on the inside cover with ornamental flourishes, and below wrote, “ 1625 Central Ave., Alameda, Cal.” On the opposite flyleaf I added, “Mar. 31 '06 Began — 300,” and the unfolding statistics:

Jan. 1, ‘07 — 1,630

Collection worth Feb. 1 — $180.93

Feb. 16 — 2,359

Mar. 1 — 2,650

April 1 — 2,930

The spectacular development of the first year was partly owing to the abandonment of his collection by an older boy, who generously gave his book to me. This meant that I had a great many duplicates and it put me in a position of advantage to barter and sell at Christ Church, where I was employed in the choir. Certain of my colleagues were stamp collectors, but not enough of them, and I set about converting the remainder.

The choir, except for the Rector’s too long and noisy sermons, was delightful. Dressed in cassock and cotta, you were the center of attention moving solemnly along behind the crucifer, consulting your hymnal briefly from time to time before raising your head in replenished song. It was particularly satisfactory to pass the family pew and to meet the family’s eyes without acknowledgment. The choir was a man’s world, ritualistic, and competitive. It was a world in which a business note had been introduced.

As time went on I became the second highest paid boy in the choir, receiving fifty cents a month and the distinction of wearing a silver cross. Only one boy was higher paid: he got seventy-five cents a month and wore a gold cross. He sang all the solos and was one of the last to become a stamp collector.

The duplicates of my stamps I tipped into oblong gray-green notebooks; the prices of each, according to Scott, were written beneath — or, rather, half Scott’s price, since everyone knew that for some reason Scott was inflated. I took my entire stock to church on paydays and for several months managed to collect all I he choir money, which in a good month would run as high as $3.65.

After each payday I would take my new money across the Bay to San Francisco, out to Van Ness Avenue (it was then after the Fire) to a dealer who should have been the embodiment of God, but who wasn’t. He was a large, disagreeable man and all he ever said was, “Well, how much have you got this time?” Then he would hand me the next stamp in the series known as the Hawaiian Island Provisional Government, 1893. When I protested feebly that far from being half Scott’s price it was actually in advance of it, the man would reply that Scott didn ’t know everything and I could take it or leave it. I always took it and would peer into the little envelope a dozen times on the trip home.

All this, philately and the Church, came to a sudden and dramatic end. The choirmaster decided that I should have a solo in the Te Deum, that I should bear witness all by myself that the Cherubim and Seraphim Continually Do Cry. Even the organ was to remain mute during this testimony. My family, whose attendance at church had been spotty of late, owing to the new automobile, came again to the family pew, but their nervous and prideful smiles faded when my great opportunity came, for I also remained mute, and on that day the seraphic conduct went unrecorded in Alameda. I had read in the San Francisco Chronicle just before church about prima donnas in general and Mme. Tetrazzini, who was then singing in San Francisco, in particular. Prima donnas, it appeared, did not sing if they didn’t feel like it. As a result of my silence I lost my silver cross and my salary was reduced. Whereupon (the Tetrazzini touch again) I left the choir. There were still four blank spaces in the Provisional Government, 1893, which is proof of my immaturity as a collector, for a seasoned collector will endure any humiliation to attain his ends.

In three years I became a numismatist. My mother and I were at Leamington, in Warwickshire. I was unhappy and homesick for California and far underweight and I went on a semi-hunger strike: that is,

I became a problem. There was nothing, apparently, for me to do at Leamington except to get on a I ram and go 1o Warwick, four miles away. After several trips to the Castle, the Beauchamp Chapel, and Leicester’s Hospital, Warwick began to pall.

And then I found an antique shop with a collection of English coins. They were not expensive, but they were beyond my reach. There was a musty and mysterious atmosphere in the shop, the first antique shop 1 had ever been in. Relics of former ages stretched away into the dim distance out of which the proprietor would emerge with a wan face and narrow steel spectacles which might have been taken from the collection of spectacles, snuffboxes, and teaspoons in a glass case opposite the front door. I had to find a way to bridge the barrier between me and the coins, and a way at once suggested itself, for in the solution of such problems lies a collector’s peculiar skill: my mother was worried by my not eating; I was worried by not being able to buy the coins; so 1 proposed that I be paid a dollar a week for eating. This was done, I bought the coins one by one, time passed quickly and pleasantly while I rode back and forth to Warwick, I put on a little weight and lived to get. back to California.

For my last collection of this period I turned to butterflies, Lepidoptera, a scientific interlude. I had a net without gaps or holes, a bottle of cyanide, black pins, glass plates, forceps, a. scalpel, and a cabinet. These supplied the delights of the laboratory and gave me a sense of the precise beauties of system, but the great excitement was in the field. After thirt v-five years I can still feel my hot anxiety as a “new” butterfly sailed into view, darted off over the warm summer fields, and finally came to rest, opening and closing its wings. This is what collecting is — the all but unbearable excitement when the longed-for quarry appears, the fierce and crafty pursuit, the cyanide bottle, the black pins, the cabinet, and the one further item I began by mentioning, the admiring and — supreme felicity — envious visitors.

2

I BOUGHT my first book as a collector when I was a Sophomore at Yale. It was a copy of Alice in Wonderland which I was under the impression was a first edition. Subsequently, it was pointed out to me that the title-page bore a New York imprint and the line, “Seventy-seventh thousand.” The ensuing disillusionment lasted until I returned to Yale after the war and began, along with half of New Haven, to collect t he works of John Masefield.

1 had met him when he came to Yale lo lecture in 1917 and in the next year when he turned up at Camp Kearney, San Diego, to talk about AngloAmerican relations in a Y.M.C.A. hut. (He followed an Australian lady who gave birdcalls.) We visited the theosophical community at Point Loma, and although we failed to meet the Purple Mother we did meet the community’s poet, who led us about

with pilgrim steps in amice grey

among the buildings of purple glass, rendering homage to Masefield the while. As we drove away, my guest said in his high little voice which did not drop at the end of the sentence, “If one had to choose between that sort of thing and the Prussian sort of thing, I think one would choose the Prussian sort of t hing.”

A few weeks later we met again on the pier in New York at the gangplank of the Aquitania. The third night out I came down, ingloriously, with mumps, but the future Laureate called at my crowded cabin twice a day with books and comfort. Naturally, I collected Masefield when I returned from the war.

In the summer of 1922, while in England, I bought other books. I did so without plan or knowledge, traveling up and down the country. Nearly every town had a bookshop and they all sold the same books — the voyages, sporting books, biographies, poetry, and fiction of English literature. At Newbury an American friend had discovered a shop which was so filled with treasures that not only his library and mine, but that of two other friends, could be made by them.

The shop was not, strictly speaking, a bookshop at all. It was a draper’s shop, presided over by the widow of the man who had collected the books. We gathered that although the books might have formed the stock of a small provincial bookseller, the deceased booklover had not had the heart to part with them.

The four of us started up the narrow stairs and on the landing I picked off the shelves what I took lo be a first edition of Maud. Beside it was a first edition of the Idylls of the King. The other three made equally sensational discoveries. Sinbad in the cave of diamonds could not have been more dazzled.

A large upper room was crowded with books from floor to ceiling. Books tumbled over themselves on the floor. We each took a quarter of the room as our particular claim. As time went on we specialized; one took nineteenth-century poetry, another nineteenth-cenlurv fiction, and 1 appropriated the eighleenth-century. We were generous and gave up nuggets from our claims which “belonged" to another. This went on for nearly four hours, and we got very, very dirty.

On the following day we came again. There were four things we learned to look for: the author, the title, the date, and the bookplates or autographs of former owners. Our knowledge of dates was sketchy, but we were not pedantic. Our knowledge of bibliography was even less — we had not yet heard the word: in my pile I had not hesitated to include a. set of Fielding, three volumes of which were missing. The summer sun filtered through the windows of the attic; motes rose in the shafts of light, dust from the great hooks which were passing into our possession.

When we finally came to leave we had to face the delicate question of price. We had broached it tentatively to our hostess once or twice, but she urged us to go ahead and take what we wanted, it would be time enough to talk about the price later on. After we had washed the grime off under a cold tap for the last time she asked if eight pence a volume would be satisfactory. I bought two hundred and fifty volumes for the equivalent of about forty dollars. We all had twinges of conscience, but. what collector can resist a bargain? Arrangements to ship the books to America were made with surprising ease, and we went away filled with the new importance which our libraries gave us.

Before that summer was out I began to suspect that we had paid just about what the books were worth, but even now, after more than twenty years of book collecting, I still regard those intoxicating hours at Newbury as one of the great, moments of my collecting life. The ecstatic discoveries of “old " editions of English authors, our luck in getting there first, ahead of the great dealers of New York and London, the bloom of youthful ignorance and enthusiasm unbrushed by the realities of the Trade, all this still hangs about my copies of the Fourth Edition of Robinson Crusoe and Bruce’s Travels the only volumes I have kept of our great Newbury find.

3

N THE following summer I went back to England and made a point of returning to the most benign and fatherfy of booksellers, Mr. Godfrey of the Stonegate, York. He guided me in the purchase of a considerable number of books “suitable for a gentleman’s library’.”Among them was John Heneage Jesse’s George Selwyn and His Contemporaries, 4vols., 1843, a series of letters addressed to Selwyn, “by persons who, in their dayr, moved in the first ranks of wit, genius, and fashion.”On a flyleaf of ihe lirst volume was written, “With Manuscript Notes by Lady Louisa Stuart,”and in a pocket attached to the fronl cover were Lady Louisa’s notes, covering thirty-four octavo pages in her firm small hand. Each volume bore the bookplate of The Hirsel, a place which meant, no more to me than did George Selwyn or Lady* Louisa herself. This was a work, said Mr. Godfrey, which should he in every gentleman’s library, and on his say-so 1 bought it, for thirty-five shillings.

At home in Farmington that fall I. sat one night waiting for three dinner guests. In front of me were ihe hundreds of hooks I had bought, during the past two years. They were for the most part inexpensive editions of the English Classics, together with my Masefield collection, which l had completed in England with the purchase, long desired, of Salt Water Ballads, IHtH. A completed collection is a journey ended, and although I had heard of Masefield manuscripts and corrected proof-sheets which disclosed new and unattainable heights of collecting, the lighi was fading from my Masefield shelf. “Here,”I thought, “is all English literature spread out before me. Somewhere in it there must be a person in whom I can become absorbed and around whom I can build a collection which will be outstanding.”

After dinner my guests asked to see the books I had bought, during the summer, before we settled down to the business of the evening, bridge. I gave the first volume of Jesse’s Selwyn to one of them and pointed out Lady Louisa’s notes. After my guest had read a few pages she began reading them aloud : —

“The Coventry children—Lady Maria was ‘marked for life,’ and, I think, the ugliest young woman I ever beheld. Lady Anne had not the same strong appearance of disease but was scarcely pretty, nor would have been held at all so, if — if — one must speak out — if a modest woman, a part she disdained playing from her first, beginning. Both sislers married, and both were divorced.”

“Poor Miss Pelham had always been fond of play, at which the impatience of her disposition made her always sure to lose. As she grew old, all other passions merged in that of gaming, carried to a height equal to what it ever was in any man. She ruined herself’ and would have ruined her sister, if the mild and excellent Miss Mary’s friends had not risen in a body, and almost forced the latter to leave the house where they lived together, and withdraw to one of her own; which the other never forgave. Poor, poor Miss Pelham! She was a person one could not help pitying with all her faults. I have myself seen her at that villainous faro-table, putting the guinea she had perhaps borrowed on a card — with the tears running down her face — the wreck of what had been high-minded and generous.”

“Mr. Fox. Lord Holland’s education of him will account for many of his faults, but also for some of his virtues. It was a system of the most unlimited indulgence of every passion, whim, and caprice. A great dinner was given at Holland House to all the foreign ministers. The children came in at the dessert; Charles, then in petticoats, spying a large bowl of cream in the middle of the table, had a desire to get into it. Lord Holland insisted he should be gratified and in spite of Lady Holland’s remonstrances, had it placed on the floor for the child to jump in and splash about at his pleasure.”

We spent the evening listening to these accounts which had in them the very accents of one then living, a relative of my guests, a lady who in her day had also “moved in the first ranks of wit, genius, and fashion.” The parallel was so startling, the likeness so close, that it translated us to the eighteenth century; Lady Louisa and her contemporaries came alive because we knew her reincarnation.

When my guests left I turned to my small collection of books on eighteenth-century life to find out about this Lady Louisa Stuart who had come so magically in answer to my wish for a person to collect. And then occurred one of those coincidences which collectors come to accept. I took Austin Dobson’s Eighteenth Century Vignettes, Second Series, off the shelf, opened it at random, and there before my eyes was this passage: “Lady Louisa Stuart was one of those writers whose silence is a positive misfortune to the literature of the Memoir. Living to a great age, for she died in 1851, at ninety-four, she had accumulated a store of memories, and she had inspected life with the keenest perceptions and with unusual advantages of position. ... It was she who wrote the introduction to Lord Wharncliffe’s edition of the letters of her grandmother. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu — an introduction which sparkles with unpublished eighteenth-century anecdote of the most brilliant character, and she contributed many of die more interesting notes to the Selwyn Correspondence. ... It is not too much to say that, in some respects. Lady Louisa could give points even to that inimitable gossip Horace Walpole himself.”

The following morning I hurried down to New Haven to get advice and help. The question was; Had Lady Louisa’s notes on the Selwyn Correspondence been published? Austin Dobson’s remark seemed to indicate that they had been, but he might have seen them in manuscript. Professor Tinker suggested that I find out about The Hirsel, from the library of which Lady Louisa’s notes had come; Mr. Keogh, the University Librarian, suggested that I look through Notes and Queries, a periodical which I discovered to my dismay had been in existence for upwards of eighty years. The Library catalogue disclosed the books Austin Dobson referred to and others by Lady Louisa, but it took me months to find out that a selection of her remarks on the Selwyn Correspondence had been printed as footnotes by James A. Home in his privately printed Letters and Journal of Lady Mary Coke, that The Hirsel was the seat of his brother, the Earl of Home, and that Lord Home had recently sold some books, among them my copy of Jesse’s Selwyn. By the time I had the answer, I had, through Lady Louisa, an acquaintance with the great world of the eighteenth century, and had encountered there its chief chronicler, Horace Walpole.

4

ONE of the commonest calumnies invented against book collectors is that they do not read their books. It is true that much of the pleasure they get from owning a book comes from outside its text and that if the book is a valuable one and in fine condition they will probably read its text in some other edition, bul keen collectors know their books inside and out. Furthermore, they are led on from book to book and from person to person.

Thus it was that when I had a chance to buy some original letters of Horace Walpole in the following year I did so, together with Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting and his Letters. Months later I began reading the Letters.

What caught me at first was the ease and naturalness of Walpole’s style and his wit. The eighteenth century had meant for me George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, a revival of She Stoops to Conquer,

pretty china and furniture. It was a fancy-dress party with everyone self-conscious in powdered wigs and silks. To read Horace Walpole was to walk into a picture gallery and find that the subjects had stepped down from their frames and become human beings.

Other, more special, attractions presently appeared: Walpole’s startling gift of prophecy, his passion for collecting, his unexpectedness. There grew in me the sense of this “trifler’s” extraordinary energy and singleness of purpose, and then came the revelation of his life-project: the transmission to posterity of a true and exhaustive picture of his own time. This he had triumphantly carried through; he had hung on for years tortured and racked by illness to make his lifework as notable an achievement as possible, and the posterity he had toiled for had repaid him chiefly with contempt. To repair this injustice seemed to me then, and continues to do so today, a task worth doing.

At just that moment the Beverley Chew Sale took place in New York. Among the books was Walpole’s copy of Gray’s Odes, the first book Walpole printed at his private press, with a few notes in his hand. With it was Garrick’s “Ode to Mr. Gray,” which was also printed at Strawberry Hill, in what the catalogue said was an edition of six copies.

I paced up and down at Farmington enjoying the onslaught of temptation. Then I went down to New York to savor it more strongly.

On the way to the Anderson Gallery 1 met the lady who was in three years to be my bride. She was walking two Scotties, Ginger and Jamie, and we all went to look at the Walpoliana. I asked at the office what they thought the Odes would bring, and was told $4000, a sum Dr. Rosenbach subsequently came within $100 of paying.

The visit ended in dismay. My future wife and her Scotties went uptown and I strolled down Fifth Avenue. At Scribner’s I paused, debated going in, and started on, only to be stopped by one of those occult forces which guide collectors. This one led me into the shop and up the stairs to the mezzanine floor, where the old books were then kept. Had they any books from the Strawberry Hill Press: Yes, they had a nice copy of Gray’s Odes and the rare Garrick leaflet, one of six copies. Also, they had a. little collection of eight other “detached pieces" from the Press. The price? One hundred and fifteen dollars for the lot.

I replied that I’d think about it, and walked back to the University Club, where I was lunching with one of my brothers. “There is no point in my buying those things,” I said to my brother, “and stopping there. If I buy them I shan’t stop until I have the finest collection of Walpole in the world.”

This was the valor of ignorance; I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was talking about. I didn’t know how many books and leaflets were printed at the Strawberry Hill Press and of course nothing of the forgeries and reprints of them —or how rare some of them are. I didn’t even know how many books, pamphlets, essays, and verses Walpole wrote, let alone whether or not the manuscripts of them and his letters existed in any number. As for the contents of Strawberry Hill, the books in its libraries, the prints, pictures, enamels, curiosities, medals, coins, china, furniture, and objects of art which crowded its walls and rooms to the amazement and edification of Europe, all that was equally unknown to me. I didn’t know what collections, great or small, existed of Walpole, or whether he was actively collected; that is, what competition, if any, I should have. 1 was completely unaware of the vastness of the subject and the difficulties which lay in the way of attaining supremacy in it. This was fortunate, forbad I known, I should not have had the temerity to make the attempt. Put I must have sounded impressive, for my brother looked grave.

“Well,” he said, “it’s your own money, but I hope you won’t do this.”

So, as soon as lunch was over, I went back to Scribner’s and bought the lot.