Collector's Progress

by WILMARTH SHELDON LEWIS

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IN 1911 Alexander Cochran gave to Yale a notable collection of Elizabethan books. Among them were some of the most celebrated books in existence, a dozen Shakespeare quartos from famous libraries, pedigreed copies mentioned with awe in the book world. The Elizabethan Club was founded with these books and forthwith altered the tone of Yale undergraduate life.

The safe where the treasures were stored was open on Tuesdays at tea-time and visitors were taken in to look at the books and hold them while speculating upon their cost, but that was the end of it. My favorite book was the first edition of Paradise Lost, not because I knew or cared anything about the poem, but because of its binding, an olive green affair with a gilt cypress tree on it. This was the work of an expensive London binder of the 1890’s and I had reached the end of the first stage of my journey as a collector when I saw that, far from being an object of beauty, that binding was a blight upon the book. Even a handsome binding, I learned, was little better than a frill. “Why bother with husks?” was the way one eminent collector put it to me, which was perhaps a little austere and would certainly be disputed by the ardent collectors of the great binders, Meame, Derome, Payne, and the others.

The second stage in many collectors’ journeys is the one which is marked by devotion to “association items,” the books given or owned by their authors or other persons of note. An example of an association item (about the best one I know) is a book in Professor Tinker’s library, Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661, the copy given by Browning to Matthew Arnold, the very copy which moved Arnold to write “The Scholar-Gipsy.”

Lovers of association books, if they care anything for one of the most beautiful poems in the language, regard that copy with veneration.

Like most young collectors, I bought association items whenever I could afford to do so and indulged in sentimental speculation upon the persons who had given or owned the books. One such book was Mrs. Agmondesham Vescy’s copy of Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray, 1753. Mrs. Vcsey was one of the Blue Stockings (among whom she was known as “The Sylph”); she was gay, but she was also deaf. I pictured her putting down her ear trumpet with some relief after what I gathered was almost unremitting gaiety and intellectual exercise to enjoy this new book, but for all I really know she never looked at it. Still, the book led, as will almost any book printed in the eighteenth century, to Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole, both of whom were Mrs. Vesey’s friends.

Dr. Johnson thought little of the book: it was proof of the slightness of Gray’s poetry, he held, that it had to have elaborate designs and be printed on only one side of the page. Walpole, on the other hand, regarded it highly; it was, in fact, he who inspired it. Gray and Bentley were his friends and his enthusiasm for his friends’ talents knew no bounds. Gray wrote sublime poetry; Bentley was capable of equally great productions in the arts. It was obvious that they should collaborate and that the result of their collaboration would be a book beyond price. The Elegy (which Walpole had also chaperoned into the world) had made Gray famous two years earlier, but Bentley was unknown outside the Strawberry Hill circle and Walpole set to work to establish his reputation. The new book would do it. Walpole wrote the Explanation of the Prints and paid the costs of the book’s publication. It was his life-long practice to do everything he could do (which was a great deal) to enhance the fortunes and reputations of his friends, even if he had to run down those of possible rivals to do it.

Bentley’s Designs turned out to be a landmark in the history of English book-illustration. It was the earhest English book to illustrate the work of a contemporary poet and after long eclipse it has been rediscovered. Sir Kenneth Clark has called it “the most graceful monument to Gothic rococo,” and Sir Osbert Sitwell, “Exquisite.” Bentley’s reputation is brighter today than it was two centuries ago.

Mrs. Vesey’s copy of the Designs, in short, opened to me wide and animated prospects of the eighteenth century. I hold it in special affection even though I have since acquired other association items of greater general interest. Among them is Walpole’s copy of the Designs and the original designs themselves bound elaborately by Walpole and annotated, suo more, for posterity.

Nowhere does coincidence play a more dramatic part than in this branch of collecting. The young collector of association items is led to believe that he possesses occult powers and that the person he is collecting arranges for the transmission to him of books, MSS, prints, snuffboxes, etc., which belong in his collection.

This exciting possibility seemed confirmed in me in the spring of 1925, when Professor Tinker asked me, on my departure for England, to get him a first edition of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. I hadn’t one myself at that time and said so. Mr. Tinker replied that he would be content with a good ordinary copy, and then, knowing my fondness for books of association he added, “And you can have the copy Walpole gave to William Cole.” He said Cole rather than anyone else because Walpole’s two most illuminating passages on the Castle of Otranto were written in letters to Cole, one of them going with a copy of the book. Apart from Walpole’s copy it would probably be, from an association point of view, the most desirable copy in existence — if it still existed.

The first edition of the Castle of Otranto was a small one and I was able to find only one copy of it in London, in the shop of Messrs. Maggs. This presented me with a problem: should I give the book to Mr. Tinker or keep it for myself? In the end generosity prevailed over rapacity and I asked Mr. Ernest Maggs to let me know when the next copy of the book came in. On my return to Farmington from New Haven after giving the book to Mr. Tinker I found a letter from Mr. Maggs saying that he thought I would be interested in a copy of the Castle of Otranto which had just come in — the copy Walpole gave to William Cole.

Cole, it turned out, had transcribed on its flyleaves some complimentary verses “To the Honourable and Ingenious Author” and the long passages which Walpole had written him about the composition of the book. “You will laugh at my earnestness,” Walpole concluded, “but if I have amused you, by retracing with any fidelity the manners of ancient days, I am content, and give you leave to think me as idle as you please.” These words contain the whole “point” of Horace Walpole; few authors can ever have seen and summed up their goal in life so succinctly and characteristically.

The consuming passion of Walpole’s life was to transmit to posterity a faithful report upon his time in his own unofficial and entertaining way. Posterity might think him frivolous and gossipy (it has thought him so), but that was of small moment to him so long as posterity also believed that his report was accurate. If it did so, he would gain the immortality on earth which was the only immortality he believed in. Cole, he knew, was filling scores of folio volumes with antiquarian notes for the benefit of posterity, including copies of the Walpole-Cole correspondence. He would doubtless have been pleased to know that Cole took this additional step to ensure his privatelyindited epitaph’s being read in the twentieth century. In any event, I felt that Walpole had rewarded me for my virtuous renunciation of the first copy of the Castle of Otranto that had come my way.

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THE third stage in the collector’s journey is reached when he becomes aware of “condition.” All copies of the same edition of a book have not the same value; the variation in price depends largely upon the condition of the copy. The new book collector soon learns to read what a bookseller has to say about the condition of his wares after he has bought a book or two in poor condition. “Loose in joints,” “rubbed,” “foxed,” “piece tom from top of titlepage,” are warnings not to be ignored. It usually takes the collector longer to see why a book in “mint” state is worth ten times as much as a “good, sound” copy.

A. W. Evans, that most avuncular of booksellers, opened my eyes to the importance of condition when he told me that he would rather have an uncut copy of Bentley’s Designs in its original boards than Mrs. Vesey’s copy which had been bound in contemporary calf. Association items, it appeared, were all right for the beginner, but those who really knew what they were about wanted to have copies “pristine,” unprofaned by the binder; if possible, not only uncut (that is, with the margins untrimmed) and in the original boards or wrappers, but “unopened” (that is, the top or side leaves uncut), and so, of course, unread. The cognoscenti measured their books in millimeters, a procedure which offered greater nicety and a scientific flavor. An extra millimeter might advance the price of a book by pounds. “Condition” was all.

This was in 1925, in the dawn of the age of bibliography, a science recently enunciated by R. B. McKerrow. The word bibliography was (and is) confusing, because it is used to mean different things. A list of books on a subject is called a bibliography of that subject; a list of an author’s written work is also called a bibliography. A century earlier Dibdin used the word to mean bookcollecting, and later, Rive used it as a description of books “and other literary arrangements.” But McKerrow and his coadjutors when they talk of bibliography have in mind something more definite and complex. They are talking about the mechanics of book-production, the part played and the techniques used by compositor and pressman and “the relation of the text as it finally appears to the author’s MS, especially dealing with the errors which may be introduced by the processes through which it has passed.” “Each book,” said McKerrow, “presents its own problems and has to be investigated by methods suited to its particular case. . . . With almost every book we take up we are in new country.”

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. New facts were discovered every day in old books, not merely the teasing “points” of unscholarly collectors and booksellers, not just a dropped letter here, a misspelling there, but more important matters involving paper, “cancels” (pages which have been suppressed during publication), the rearrangement of “the order and relative value of different editions of a book,” and, finally, and most excitingly, the discovery and demonstration of forgeries. A book as it issued from the press became the great desideratum, for when it was rebound some of the evidence essential to seeing what actually took place when it was printed was lost.

At first I had only bought association copies of the books printed by Horace Walpole at the Strawberry Hill Press, his own copies of them or copies he had given to his friends. But it became clear that was not good enough for a collection which hoped to be unrivalled, and so I added copies in pristine state. This meant a good many duplicates, but among them were certain “variants” which had been noticed by booksellers and others. A particularly puzzling variant occurred in Gray’s Odes, 1757, “The Bard” and “Progress of Poesy,” the first work printed at the Press. It had recently been pointed out that a few copies were printed on thick paper with two misprints, a puzzle which engaged some of the best bibliographical minds for years. Doubtless, I reflected, there were variants in other Strawberry Hill books, as well. Bibliographically, the Press was promising.

But the collector’s work is only partly done when he has formed his collection. Unless it is used it is like bric-a-brac in a cabinet. Since I was not a bibliographer I invited Dr. Allen T. Hazen to finish the task for me. The result was his Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press, a book which has been justly called an advancement in the study of bibliography.

Once Dr. Hazen was embarked upon it I was seized by an acute attack of bibliomania. The great Folger Shakespeare Library was the shining example of what wholesale collecting may produce. Mr. Folger had bought 77 copies of the First Folio, about half the known copies, to aid students of textual problems in Shakespeare. This was a much higher percentage of the whole than I aspired to, but 10 per cent of the number of copies printed at the Strawberry Hill Press did not seem too fantastic a goal. Since Walpole kept a journal of the Press (the MS of which I owned) we had his word for the number of copies of each of his printed books. There were 34 of them (several were of only a few pages) and, in addition, 78 “Detached Pieces” which included title pages, labels for books, and cards of address. The number of copies ran from Gray’s Odes (2000 copies) to four or five copies only. I succeeded in reaching my goal in less than half the books, but in most there were duplicates — in some cases more than twenty copies — which Dr. Hazen was able to use for collation and comparison. He was able to discover unrecorded variants in nearly every book. His efforts were rewarded with the discovery that Walpole’s printersecretary, Thomas Kirgate, was a forger, and he was able to prove that among the works manufactured by Kirgate out of wedlock were the thick paper Odes.

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ONE does not have to be a bibliographer to reach and enjoy the fourth stage of collecting, the one called “provenance.” This is the detailed history of individual copies. It is perhaps the most difficult matter of all to explain to the non-collector, but to know that your copy of a book was formerly in a famous library, to know when and for how much it was sold, who bought it, and what then became of it, step by step, until it reached your own shelf, to recognize the marks of ownership of these former owners, perhaps to find the lot numbers of the various auction sales through which the book has passed, is a source of the greatest satisfaction to a seasoned collector. “Such well-attested descent,” wrote Horace Walpole, “is the genealogy of the objects of virtu — not so noble as those of peerage, but on a par with those of race-horses. In all three, especially the pedigrees of peers and rarities, the line is often continued by many insignificant names.”

To enter fully into this most personal and rewarding of all the stages of book-collecting one must have access to auction and booksellers’ catalogues. There are regrettably few collections of these in this country and the specialist will do well to make his own collection of them. “Descriptive” bibliographers have learned that “provenance” is an indispensable tool in their work, but one does not have to know what a forme is or understand the mysteries of imposition to taste its joys.

There has recently come into my possession a book which passes in review the three last stages of the collector’s journey, a copy of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales, 1785, one of seven copies he printed at his Press. Although I had the original MS of this delightful little work I lacked a copy of the book. Three of the seven copies are in public institutions, three have disappeared. I knew where the seventh was and after waiting twenty years I acquired it. It is the copy Walpole gave to Thomas Barrett, the man he saw carrying on the Gothic tradition into the nineteenth century. It is uncut, in the original wrappers, as fresh as it was the day it came from the Press, for it has been preserved in the wrapping paper in which it was then placed and on which Walpole wrote, “A Strawberry Edition to be delivered on my death to Thomas Barrett Esq. of Lee in Kent. H. W.” It is thus an association item of great interest and its condition is such, after 160 years, as has to be seen to be believed. Finally, nearly all of its subsequent history is known from its appearance at Sotheby’s, 12 July 1859, in the sale of Barrett’s library, lot 513, when it was sold to Boone, the dealer, for five guineas, down to the other day. One of the missing links was the place where its late owner bought it. This was supplied by Mr. John Carter of Scribner’s, who, when he saw it, recognized the Scribner price in code inside the front cover and kindly translated it for me.

Many holders of the Ph.D. degree look upon collectors with suspicion and dislike. Collectors, they believe, are shrewd, unprincipled persons who by their wealth and cunning have been able to acquire books and MSS and other objects which “ought” to be in the hands of persons qualified to make “proper” use of them, that is, holders of the Ph.D. degree. There have been, of course, collectors who refused to share their treasures with scholars, just as there have been scholars who have accepted help from collectors and not acknowledged it. Both of these types are unattractive, but it is a mistake to assume that all collectors and all scholars fit into them.

The ideal — which is frequently achieved — is when the collector and the scholar join forces, each bringing to the union contributions which the other cannot supply. The self-consciousness which they may also bring gradually disappears, and then one day the collector will hear himself described as a scholar. It is a metamorphosis, some would say, not unlike the one which occurs at the end of Mr. George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs turn into men.

Not that the collector should even then get ideas above his station. When H. H. Furness, the editor of the Variorum Shakespeare, was asked if there was anything left to explore or discover in Shakespearean scholarship, he answered his own question by quoting John Barclay, the anatomist, in one of his Edinburgh lectures. “Gentlemen,” said Barclay, “anatomy may be likened to a harvest field. First come the reapers, who, entering upon untrodden ground, cut down great stores of corn from all sides of them. These are the early anatomists of modern Europe. Then come the gleaners, who gather up cars enough from the bare ridges to make a few loaves of bread. Such were the anatomists of the last century. Last of all come the geese, who still continue to pick up a few grains scattered here and there among the stubble, and waddle home in the evening, poor things, cackling with joy because of their success. Gentlemen, we are the geese.”

The collector at the end of his journey must be content with the place he has earned in the academic procession, a place not without honor at the rear of the geese.