The Bookseller as Teacher

by WILMARTH SHELDON LEWIS

1

THE literature of book-collecting is filled with advice to the beginner. Lord Chesterfield wrote his son: “When you return here, I am apt to think that you will find something better to do, than to run to Mr. Osborne’s at Gray’s-Inn, to pick up scarce books. Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads; for they may profit of the former. But take care not to understand editions and titlepages too well. It always smells of pedantry, and not always of learning. . . . Beware of the Bibliomanie.” I am sorry to have to record that in his copy of Chesterfield’s Letters, Horace Walpole has pencilled after the line, “The best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best,” a mark of approval.

But Chesterfield is right to warn against the bibliomanie, for when book-madness is firmly lodged the victim of it may become indifferent to his own welfare and that of his family and friends; he may become not unlike practitioners of the more familiar vices and manias,

There are book-collectors who arrange their purchases so that their families don’t know about them. They smuggle their new books into their own houses or send them to secret addresses, in the spirit of a dipsomaniac hiding bottles for his clandestine use. When a collector is sufficiently far gone in bibliomania he may think nothing of lying and cheating, and stealing and forgery may climax his case. Bibliomania is an incurable disease, but most book-collectors avoid the madhouse and the jail.

The first antiquarian bookshop I ever entered, so far as I can recall, was the Brick Row in New Haven. It had been established in the belief that Yale undergraduates should have an opportunity to build up libraries of their own choosing. Its books were mostly inexpensive editions of the English and American classics, live books, not textbooks, which have the chill of death upon them.

In that shop many of us overcame the awe or resentment we had of books. It was one thing to be told in class, “The assignment for next Monday is 101 pages of Hazlitt,” and another to find an early edition of Hazlitt for yourself. The assignment was a chore, the discovery a pleasure. We were left alone in the Brick Row and were free to wander about, taking books down from the shelves and putting them back. The books we had encountered in the classroom assumed a new meaning with each new guise in which we found them. Even the greatest books, even Shakespeare, gradually became familiar and unpretentious.

So it was that when I went to England in the summer of 1922, I found it easy and natural to enter whatever bookshop I came across and to spend hours taking books down from the shelves and putting most, but not all of them, back. Such grazing on the common of literature can be more rewarding than an entire English “major.” One moves from clump to clump, from Defoe, Gay, and Garth to Collins, Cowper, and Hayley, or to a thousand other authors, earlier or later, without plan or direction, according to the arrangement of the shelves. In those shops I first saw, over and over again, the multitude of books which never get into an English “major” — the household books of the last century, the angling and sporting books, the colored-plate books, and books of travel. Bookshops ceased being Poets’ Corners and booksellers were discovered to be human beings, a fortunate discovery.

Booksellers are business men, but they are also scholars and teachers. Their learning is prodigious and it is matched by their understanding of persons who have the bibliomanie. Any bookshop might place over its door the inscription on the proscenium of the old Lampson Lyceum at Yale, “Here we learn not studies, but life.”

2

THE “old-time” bookseller is dying out. He was a man with a vast knowledge of moderately priced books, of their dates and their comparative rarity, and he knew their value to a penny. He had not read them and he was ignorant of the bibliographical niceties discriminated in recent years. He was a tradesman who was content to make a very modest profit. His turn-over was rapid, but he complained that it was harder all the time (which it was) to replenish his stock. There is a picture of him in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps. London had many such men, but they were not the ones meant when their provincial counterparts spoke of “the big London people.” “You won’t find ‘The Cries of London’ here,” Mr. Godfrey of York once told me. “You’ll have to go to Maggs for that sort of thing, and,” he paused significantly, “pay for it.”

Few old-time booksellers were as good salesmen as was Mr. Godfrey; many of them made no effort at all to sell their books; some of them even seemed to regard customers as an intrusion upon their privacy. “Take it or leave it,” was their attitude, but, on acquaintance, most of them had a sense of being coadjutors in learned enterprise.

The most celebrated of these men was David of Cambridge. I had the misfortune to find his shop shut when I came upon it in 1922, and I did not know until years later that I had missed, not just another bookshop, but one visited as a shrine by scholars. Whereas most of the libraries recruited there were formed by Cambridge dons, their bookcollecting colleagues at the sister university would never fail to visit David when at Cambridge, nor would the “scouts” of the big London dealers. His books were “sound,” often “mint,” and were very, very cheap.

The only time I saw David was just at the end of his life. I was staying at Cambridge with a friend who had great affection for David, from whom my friend had bought a large portion of his collection of eighteenth-century literature — a collection distinguished for condition as well as range. David kept a stall in the market at which he had a few shillings’ worth of books and from which he was never absent on market-day. Since I had reached Cambridge on a market-day, it was necessary to seek David out at his stall. “You really should see him,” said my friend. We found David under his umbrella, a heavy-set man in a bowler hat, comfortably dozing beside his books. About him was the friendly bustle of the market, the buying and selling of vegetables and boot-laces, which he had witnessed all his life. We gazed respectfully on David from a distance; he might have been Mr. Gladstone. “I just wanted you to see him,” said my friend, “a bit of history passing.”

Mr. Bayntun of Bath, on the other hand, I knew well. Although he fitted into the “old-time” bookseller pattern in some respects, the scale of his business placed him in another category. He was a binder of “standard works,” which he turned out at a prodigious rate for the trade. His stand was Lamb’s: “To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a volume. Magnificence comes after.” Mr. Bayntun was content with a ten per cent profit and a turn-over so rapid that the great authors of the literature fairly galloped through his shop. Shakespeare, Milton, Fielding, and Thackeray were on an assembly line which moved without a hitch from the country auctions and stately mansions of England to the big bookstores of America. Mr. Bayntun would make up a set of anything you wanted on demand, using the full calf or morocco he had salvaged from books in poor condition. If you wanted a personal touch in your new set he would paste into it armorial bookplates removed from still other volumes. He sold sets of Smollett and Dickens as other tradesmen sold haddock or peas, but only after he had made certain that each book was up to the standard of craftsmanship that had carried his name around the earth. The books he loved were colored-plate books, the Ackerman histories of Oxford and Cambridge and the Colleges, the Microcosm of London, Pyne’s Royal Residences, Natte’s Bath, and Repton. He always had them on hand, together with Punishments of China and the Costumes of Russia and Hindoostan.

Mr. Bayntun was a spare man, older than he looked, with thin sandy hair. He wore a smock in the shop and after selling a certain number of books he took snuff. The sneeze released fresh energies which were not required to send me on to renewed extravagance. In a few years I was to hear him spoken of with dispraise by bibliographers and bibliophiles as a destroyer of original bindings and a perverter of history, but he was too good a business man to destroy the valuable. He was a popularizer with a large and appreciative audience. I still have many of the books I bought from him, including a Repton, uncut and in the original boards, in a box of his manufacture. After twenty years his books are “sound,” and with any kind of care they will remain so forever. From one end of this country to the other will be found sets of Gibbon and Johnson in the plain, workmanlike old calf which is the hall-mark of Bayntun’s work. He realized that his books were more often than not merely part of the furniture of a house, but he was not a cynical man; the Rambler was “not everybody’s cup of tea.” Those over whom he shook his head were people who failed to glow when shown the Punishments of China; he shook his head, and after taking snuff perhaps asked, “Well, then, sir, what are you interested in?”

3

IN February, 1924, I met in London a bookseller so well known that he is called “X” in print. He induced bibliomania by hypnotism and spells. His shop was a valley of diamonds.

I succumbed completely to X. He made no effort to sell me anything; in fact, he made it hard to buy, for his steady flow of reminiscence demanded respectful attention. “Excuse me, sir,” he would interrupt, with his gray appraising eye upon his visitor, “but that chair you’re sitting in. Many’s the time I’ve seen Swinburne in it or his friend Captain Burton. They would come here after a rather wild night out, I’m afraid. Meredith used to pop in and out, and Watts-Dunton came looking for Swinburne.”

I learned a great deal from him. The golden world of books, it appeared, had a darker side in which a discreet use of artifice and even guile was required for survival. When I went to Hodgson’s to see X bid for me, he insisted that we go separately and not indicate in any way that we knew each other. If “they” were to realize that he was bidding for me “it could be very serious”; in what way I don’t yet understand, since at that time I was unknown to the trade. X told me about the “knockout” which he genteelly called “a settlement.” Certain dealers, it seemed, did not bid against each other in “the rooms,” but when the sale was over they retired to a public-house, constituted one of their number auctioneer, put up the lots they had bought for stock at the prices they had fetched at the public auction, and continued the sale among themselves. The additional sum thus spent went into a pool which was divided among the participants. X made me feel I had become an initiate in a trade whose complexity was hidden behind an innocent appearance.

The climax of our friendship was reached when I asked about some furniture on the top floor of the shop. “Oh, that, sir, that is not ordinary furniture. Those Sheraton chairs, that pair, belonged to Dr. Johnson.”

“Dr. Johnson!”

“And that easel, that was Gainsborough’s. This tea caddy was Charles Lamb’s, and this sofa pillow was worked by Mrs. Blake for Blake.”

I was staggered, but I tried not to lose my head. “What,” I asked delicately, “is the pedigree of these remarkable pieces?”

“Well,” X replied roguishly, “I never saw Dr. Johnson sitting in them chairs.” Then he became serious. “They belonged to a very distinguished gentleman, Professor Jackson, a great authority. When he died the contents of his house were sold on the premises. They would have gone for nothing if I hadn’t been there. I felt I should rescue what I could,” and he told me again of his fondness for the treasures of the past.

Professor Jackson, the friend of Pater and authority on Lamb, was good enough for me, but I couldn’t let it go at that. I conferred with a Johnsonian lady who thought the furniture must be all right and that £200 was not a bit too much for it. So I hurried back to X and bought the lot.

And then I had the sinking spell which often follows acute attacks of bibliomania. Just what had I got for my $1000? I went to a man I should have consulted earlier.

“Oh, my dear boy!” he said when I had faltered out my story. He gave me the name of a man who would certainly know about the chairs, and then, to make me feel better he added, “The tea caddy might be all right. Jackson knew a lot about Lamb. But Jackson at the end was on the optimistic side; in fact,” he paused to let me have the full force of his next remark, “he was absolutely mad.”

“Dr. Johnson? Sheraton?” The pince-nez of the furniture man glittered. “But Sheraton didn’t make any chairs before 1790.” And Dr. Johnson had died in 1784.

I screwed up my courage and returned to X.

“About those chairs, Mr. X,”— he regarded me fixedly, - “I’ve decided not to take them, after all. I believe that they were Dr. Johnson’s, but,” I didn’t find it easy, “as you said, you never saw Dr. Johnson sitting in them.”

“Just as you say, sir, of course. I told you you could return anything at any time.”

“It’s very generous of you. I am also returning Gainsborough’s easel and Mrs. Blake’s pillow. But,” I added brightly, “I am keeping Lamb’s tea caddy.”

“Of course, sir, you are not expecting me to return your money?”

“Oh, no! I’ll take something else.”

This proved to be difficult. The prices of the books I looked at either lacked the code initials which indicated their price (the translation of which had been confided to me), or the initials no longer applied. Everything had gone up, had trebled and quadrupled. At this rate I was losing rapidly on the exchange. There was a marked drop in the warmth of our friendship. Reminiscence ceased altogether. I realized I had become that bane of a shopkeeper’s existence, the weak-minded customer who takes back the things he has bought.

It was therefore with relief that I stumbled over a large gray box and was told that it had belonged to Lewis Carroll. It contained fifty-two books and forty-four photographs of little girls (the inventory is before me), a box of wooden draughtsmen, two dice boxes, four dice, a small inlaid trick box, and two match boxes and one side of a match box, and I gratefully took it in exchange for what was left from the chairs, the easel, and the pillow.

When, however, in the following year I returned to England, the Lewis Carroll box preceded me. X’s reception was very cool indeed. “Certainly, sir,” he said, “I told you you could return anything at any time. You will remember that, sir. What will you have now?”

I was now, I explained, a collector of Horace Walpole and I should be glad to see whatever Walpoliana he had. I was told to return in a week, and when I did so X had put out a few books, the most interesting of which was Walpole’s copy of an obscure French book, worth, perhaps, ten shillings. The price of it was £60.

“But, Mr. X,” I protested, “I have just bought a large paper copy of the King of Poland’s Works, with Walpole’s arms on the sides, for £4.10!”

“Very well, then,” said X, and we were not friendly at all. “Thirty pounds. That’s the kind of a man I am!” The furniture on the top floor was eventually transmuted into a few books priced at several times their real value.

On my next London visit I did not call on X, owing to a correspondence which temporarily suspended our relations, but I bought from him, through another dealer, a book which is, I believe, the most important book in my collection, the original drawings of Strawberry Hill. In the following year, 1927, I returned to him and ever after so long as he lived I paid him an early call on arriving in London.

He continued to turn up remarkable things for me. Once, for example, he produced a colored drawing of an eighteenth-century boy of possibly ten years of age. On the back of the drawing was written, “Horace Walpole, afterwards Earl of Orford,” in an eighteenth-century hand. The day after I bought it I went down to visit the descendant of Walpole’s favorite niece, to whose son Walpole left Strawberry Hill and its contents. Most of the contents had been sold at auction in 1842, but the family had kept a few things. Among the books retained was one with water-color miniature drawings. These had been collected by Walpole’s deputy at the Exchequer, Charles Bedford. They included a copy of the drawing I had just bought from X and beneath it, in the same hand which appeared at the back of my drawing, Bedford had written, “from an original colored drawing in my possession.”

The last time I saw X he said with a smile as I was leaving, “Oh, Mr. Lewis, if I could only get you on to another man!” But his teaching did not go that far.

4

THE lessons taught by A. W. Evans were of quite a different nature. His instruction was bibliographical and critical and the lessons he taught could be summarized: (a) buy books as near as possible to the condition in which they first appeared, and (b) any book published between 1751 and 1825 is a good book.

When I met Evans in March, 1925, he had just revived the old firm of Elkin Mathews at 4a Cork Street. It was a small shop filled with books printed between 1751 and 1825. Evans with two much younger partners had just issued a catalogue. This catalogue is a milestone in the history of bookselling, for in it appeared books priced from ten shillings to two guineas which had never appeared in any West End catalogue before. Hannah More, William Mason, Anna Seward, and dozens more were raised from the dead.

Eighteenth-century books were not highly regarded before 1914. Almost any book printed after 1640 was mentioned with condescension. The standing of a collector tended to be measured by the antiquity of the books he collected: the aristocrats of the book world were the collectors of fifteenth-century books; those who specialized in the eighteenth century were the bourgeoisie. Except for Robinson Crusoe, Gray’s Elegy, the Kilmarnock Burns, and various Blakes, no books published in the eighteenth century fetched more than $1000 at auction. The nineteenth century’s disapproval of the eighteenth century lingered on into the twentieth.

Evans was a Johnsonian, as were all the leaders of the new eighteenth-century cult. He was a “clubable” man who loved “to stretch his legs and have his talk out.” In his shop the eighteenth century was the sole reality. The disappearance of the pre-war world was of little concern to him. Locarno and slum clearance were subjects lost in the distance; the reason behind Dr. Johnson’s effort to save Dr. Dodd from the gallows was of present concern. (Evans had his theory about it — that Johnson and Dodd were Masons.)

A young American who was consumed with zeal for the works and reputation of Horace Walpole was an object of interest to Evans, quite apart from the young man’s buying a large proportion of the books in the famous new catalogue. Evans instinctively disliked Walpole, who was the antithesis of Johnson, but Walpole did live in the eighteenth century and did write books. He was, in fact, a major figure whether one liked him or not. He was a pro-American Whig, and it was fitting that he should have a champion from America a century and a half after the Declaration of Independence. Walpole had feared and disliked Johnson and had said discourteous things about him, but he said them out of loyalty to his friend Gray whom, Evans acknowledged, Johnson had belittled. It was to Walpole’s credit that he resented such treatment, and in the world where Shenstone and Lyttelton and Soame Jenyns were important figures, Horace Walpole was a colossus.

I would drop in at 4a Cork Street at tea-time. “Come in, come in,” Evans would say; “a cup for Mr. Lewis, Miss Matson.” A small clearing would be made among the books on the table. “Well, what have you found today?”

I had always found something. In 1925 books from Walpole’s library and presentation copies of the Strawberry Hill Press publications were lying about in London shops. Evans would congratulate me gravely in his low, somewhat un-English voice. What his accent was I never did make out, nor did I ever learn much of his life. Trinity College, Dublin, had come into it many years earlier, I gathered, and, in spite of his Welsh name, he had the warmth we associate with the Irish. I was awed by the fact that he had written literary articles for the Observer over the pseudonym Penguin, but whatever he had been was of small interest to what he was. The coal smoke of London filtered into the shop and mingled with the smell of old books and tobacco, and nothing mattered but the eighteenth century.

Elkin Mathews prospered. New and affluent partners joined the firm and the old-fashioned shop in Cork Street was abandoned for a shop in Conduit Street expensively done up by Lord Gerald Wellesley. Cinderella had gone to the ball. During this period of the firm’s history Evans moped. Selling Surtees in parts to the wealthy was a less congenial employment for him than selling Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses in boards, and Warburton became more and more the subject of his talk. Things got better when, during the depression, the firm was obliged to move to more modest quarters in Grosvenor Street, and better still when it had to give up its ground floor there and confine itself to the room above; Warburton fitted into reduced circumstances.

Once when I hurried around to see Evans on arriving in London his reception was startling. He stood up and, instead of greeting me as usual, said, “Horace Walpole was an insufferable cad,” adding darkly, “I shall be about the galley-pots and washes of his toilet.” This I recognized was what Warburton had said towards the end of his life when he suspected Walpole of laughing at him, and I rejoiced that Evans’s book on Warburton was nearing completion. Having delivered himself of this testament Evans’s conscience was cleared and we had tea as usual. When his book appeared there was nothing in it that could offend the most sensitive Walpolian.

Evans left the book world suddenly. When his wife died he returned to his profession, the Church, a profession I had not known was his. He spent his last days buried in a parish in the south of England. Not only would he not come up to London, he would not reply to letters from his former associates. He could not have been more inaccessible if he had returned to the eighteenth century. With him, so far as I was concerned, went much of the pleasure and excitement of book-collecting in London.

Some years later I came upon a selection from the works of Carlyle which I had used in Freshman English. To my surprise its editor was A. W. Evans. Although I had not realized it, he had been my teacher for half my life.