The Mind on the Wing/Book-Collecting as a Hobby

THIS is the day of the perfectionist, and the amateur has become the expert. Professor West is an exponent of the bent-pin school among fishers for books. In The Mind, on the Wing he has prefaced eight, papers on literature in various fields with a chapter “On Reading and Collecting,” which offers advice and information for the beginning collector. Unfortunately the information is not always correct, and covers the same ground that many of his predecessors (notably Mr. Winterich) have adequately described. In his résumé of the study of bibliography, Professor West has perpetrated one serious error. The signature mark is to help the binder in “gathering” or “collating” the folded sheets, not “to guide the binder in folding.” And it should also be noted that while the Grabhorn Press, the Anthoensen Press, and the Yale University Press are printers, the Nonesuch Press, the Limited Editions Club, and the Heritage Club are publishers, not printers at all.

The body of the book describes seven fields for consideration of the collector. There are chapters on mountaineering literature, a fascinating source of excitement for the armchair as well as the genuine climber; on travel books, war books, and nature writers. I was warmed by the author’s tribute to Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, still a neglected American classic, and while the paper on war books becomes at times little more than a catalogue, it will serve as a useful preliminary list for anyone who wants to make a start with the literature of World War II. There is an appreciative chapter on Robert Frost (with verbatim quotations of the inscriptions by Mr. Frost in the books in Professor West’s Frost collection), an unsatisfactory catalogue of the Mencken collection in the Dartmouth Library, and an account of the published writings of Henry Miller. And there is a concluding chapter containing a list of Professor West’s hundred favorite books. Here again inaccuracies distressing in the work of a scholar have crept in. Lawrence’s name does not appear on the title page of his translation of the Odyssey, though the preface is signed “T. E. Shaw,” and Mr. West’s date for the first printing of De Rerum Natura is out by a couple of centuries. With its faults, stylistic and factual, The Mind on the Wing is a useful but not an essential contribution to the literature of book-collecting.

Percy Muir is one of the more imaginative cataloguers in the English book-trade, and a guidebook for collectors from his hand is sure to command attention. His Book-Collecting as a Hobby is a valuable little treatise which, though it parallels to a certain extent the work of other writers, should not be overlooked by any collector, whether beginner or experienced. Though short, it is packed with information with which every real bookman ought to be familiar, and the letter entitled “What Shall I Collect?” does add a few fresh ideas to a subject that almost every bibliophile-author has had a fling at.

This book is not, however, primarily propaganda for collecting as a hobby. In it will be found answers to most of the questions a layman invariably asks when confronted with a bookseller’s catalogue or caught unawares in the library of a collector. In it also will be found many of those odd bits of knowledge which every bookseller and book-collector ought to possess but often doesn’t. Some of Mr. Muir’s chapter titles are, perhaps, deceptive. If “How to Tell a First Edition” really told all in thirteen pages, we could throw away a lot of our valuable reference libraries. And while “How to Tell If a Book Is Perfect” does cover its subject thoroughly, it also includes a simple explanation of the whys and meaning of such terms as “8vo,” “signature,” and the like. There is a very sound chapter on books about books, masquerading as “Mountains into Molehills.”

The book’s value for reference use might have been increased if the index had been expanded a little, and some readers may find the epistolary style of exposition irritating. A typographical error on page 106 is likely to embarrass Messrs. Scribner with a rush of bargain hunters.

It is a joy to see an addition to the small number of really worth-while books on a subject that has, unfortunately, inspired an incredible quantity of mediocre ones.

GEORGE T. GOODSPEED