You Know All About Books

1

THE collector is credited by his non-collector friends with bibliographical omniscience. “You know all about books,” he will be told, and the expression on the face of his informant is that of one looking into illimitable distances.

If you try to disabuse your friend you will not succeed. He wants to think of you as being omniscient so that he (or more probably she) can shine in your reflected rays. Besides, there are the books in the attic that came from Aunt Emily.

“I don’t suppose they are worth anything,” your friend says as you head for the attic, “but I’ve always heard that Aunt Emily’s father was great reader.” Excitement mounts as you proceed. “I saw where Dr. Rosenbach paid $30,000 for book the other day,” your friend tosses over her shoulder, and the cat is out of the bag. “This is one of the oldest ones,” she says, “The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, 1821, printed in Philadelphia. Over a hundred years old,”“Would Dr. Rosenbach give $30,000 for it ? He is from Philadelphia.” The question, unasked, hovers on the air. You, the omniscient, are now at the crisis. Your next words will mean $30,000 half-invested already, or else disappointment, which will be turned upon you. You must be banker, judge, and priest.

One way out is to say, as you put the book in your hand carefully down, “Do you want me to tell you the truth?”

The answer, on a falling note, is, “Why, yes, of course.”

Then you say that the collection is not really valuable in the book market, that the prices given for books do not in many cases reflect their intrinsic worth, that this collection, for example, which came from her Aunt Emily, and so on, and so forth. The final question is usually, “Well, what shall I do with them?” and then you suggest that they be sent to a library, since a library can always find something it wants in any assemblage of books and it has ways and means of disposing of the rest.

But not all such visits are awkward. “Mother would be awfully pleased if you would look at her library and tell her if it is worth anything,” a friend once told me, and my heart sank. When we walked into the library I saw the rows and rows of “standard sets” I had expected, but in one section there were many of the most sought-after books in English literature: Herrick, George Herbert, Shakespeare’s Poems, 1640, an uncut copy of Gray’s Elegy. They had been collected, I learned, by the lady’s late husband.

Mother and son were delighted by my enthusiasm. “And do you collect anything?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes! I collect a man named Blake. I’ll show you some.” She got down on the floor, opened a drawer below the bookcase and began tugging at a portfolio that was lodged behind some bulky books. A final wrench was successful, and the portfolio containing original drawings by Blake forced out upon the floor the first four folios of Shakespeare.

Treasures may be found in attics and other unlikely places. There was, for example, the sleeping porch where my attention was called to a dress box filled with printed matter that had been dismissed by the appraisers of the estate of which it formed an apparently ignoble part as of “no value.” In it was an eighteenth-century New Haven pamphlet of which only one other copy is known. Shortly after a Button Gwinnett signature was sold for $32,000, a friend went up to her attic to see if by any chance there was a Gwinnett signature in the collection of autographs made by a deceased aunt. There was one, together with letters of all the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. These she sold and built a house with the proceeds.

Gain may be in the minds of those who ask you to look at their books. “I understand you are a book-collector, sir,” the barber at Brown’s Hotel in London said to me one day; “I have some of my collection here to show you.” He had waited until my hair was half cut. “I collect all kinds of books, sir; here is my Barrie.” He handed me a copy of Quality Street, which I opened cautiously to keep the back cover on. The title page was torn in half and a child or an idiot had made zigzags throughout the book with colored crayons. I was not the first person who had been shown the book while its owner cut hair. “And here,” he went on, with his scissors suspended, “is part of a sporting work, Jorrocks, sir.” “Part” was accurate, for not only was there but one volume present, half of that was missing. “Oh, yes,” I murmured, not knowing what else to say.

“I can’t stay out of bookshops,” the barber resumed his snipping, “no more than you, sir. Of course I don’t bother with the West End people, Quaritch, and such, but I like to browse along Charing Cross Road,” the snipping ceased. “By the way, sir, would you care to buy my library? I’d let it go cheap, sir, to you.” I thanked him, said no, I thought not, but added that I would be glad to have a shampoo. As I stepped out of the chair the barber looked at me coldly. “Is it that my collection is not good enough for America?” he asked.

A less subtle approach, but one fraught with danger, is when someone writes to the collector to say that he has a book he would like to sell; the collector is to fix the price, about which the writer is sure there will be no difficulty. If it is a book that the collector wants he must proceed with caution, for the owner will assume that any price the collector offers is too low. In only one way can the collector be certain of avoiding an unpleasant experience and that is by not mentioning a price and by suggesting instead that his correspondent have the book appraised by the best-known dealer in his community.

To illustrate how this works: a stranger wrote to me to offer a book that I wanted. My guess was that it was worth about a dollar. I was tempted to tell my correspondent that I would give her five dollars for it, but instead I suggested that she take it to the nearest rare book dealer for his advice. She did so and was surprised to learn that he would pay her only fifty cents for it and would sell it for a dollar. Would I give her two dollars for it? I gave her the two dollars and was considered generous, whereas if I had offered her five she might have thought the book was worth ten or fifty.

Perhaps the last place one expects to find unsuspected treasures is under the roof of a famous dealer, but unsuspected treasures are everywhere. One morning I called on Mr. Milton Samuels of French and Co., in 57th Street, to see two miniatures of Mary and Agnes Berry. As I was about to leave without buying them (a mistake I’ve since regretted), Mr. Samuels said he thought they had a book in the library that would interest me. It was probably, I said to myself, a copy of the Strawberry Hill Sale Catalogue, of which I already owned at least twenty copies, and I hesitated. Should I be polite or should I make up an excuse and leave? I decided to be polite. “It’s a copy of the Strawberry Hill Sale Catalogue,” said Mr. Samuels, as we rose in the elevator.

The librarian produced the book with pleasure. There were other catalogues bound with it, and I opened the book to two pages covered with Horace Walpole’s writing, his notes in the sale catalogue of Lady Elizabeth Germaine’s collection. In the Description of Strawberry Hill Walpole had written, “The following collection was made out of the spoils of many renowned cabinets: as Dr. Mead’s, Lady Elizabeth Germaine’s, Lord Oxford’s, the Duchess of Portland’s.” I had already acquired Walpole’s copies of the sale catalogues of the last two collections, as of course I told Mr, Samuels. He then insisted that I must have the Germaine catalogue as a present, that a photostat of the catalogue would serve their purpose just as well as the original, and he forthwith sent the volume to Macdonald, the binder, to have the Germaine catalogue removed and given to me.

Again, one afternoon Dr. Rosenbach showed me the treasures of his house in Philadelphia. The tour ended in his bedroom; the last object we looked at was to the left of the door. It was a colored caricature of an auctioneer selling his wares and was labelled, “Eloquence, or the King of Epithets.” Below it was an eighteenth-century manuscript note, “Christie, the auctioneer, 1782.”

“Why,” I asked my host, “have you never told me you had this? ”

He was puzzled. “Why should I?”

“Because of that note!”

He looked again, and then expressed himself with all the vigor of which he is a master, adding, “I’ve looked at that print for twenty years without taking it in, yet anyone could see that is Horace Walpole’s handwriting! Here,” and he unhooked the picture impatiently from the wall, “take it, it’s yours.”

2

THERE are also the occasions when the collector is asked what to do with collections of family papers. “We have all of my grandfather’s letters,” you may be told, “and we don’t know what to do with them. The children aren’t interested, and we hate to destroy them.” These, too, are probably in an attic, and are in the condition that you thought they would be in, all mixed up in an old trunk with labels of famous European hotels on it.

You are on even more delicate ground than you were with the books, but presumably grandfather was a person of importance. With the increased interest in American history such papers are now prized by scholars as source material. Again, I usually say that in my opinion the place for them is in a library.

The question is then, Which library? In this country there are live types of libraries to consider: municipal libraries, university libraries, state libraries, historical societies, and “special" libraries, such as the Clements, Huntington, and John Carter Brown. Also, and perhaps first of all, there is the Library of Congress. Which is the best library to give a collection of family papers will depend upon their character, whether they are primarily concerned with domestic or foreign affairs, or literature and the arts, or purely local matters, such as the logs of sailing ships or the diaries of pioneers, or papers that throw light on living conditions, such as tradesmen’s bills or firm accounts. If the papers deal primarily with local matters, the state library or historical society is perhaps the place for them, yet one cannot be dogmatic about it.

The important question is, Where will they be put to the best use? It may be that a great research library far from the scene of the papers’ setting will be the best place for them. Manuscripts are quite useless without large collections of reference books, journals, and all the apparatus of scholarship, and these are seldom found in small libraries.

Perhaps the question is not Where to give the papers, but Whether to let Professor X use them. When strangers ask the owners of such papers if they may use them the owners are often at a loss what to reply. It is flattering to receive such requests from scholars, particularly when they come from overseas: everyone likes to feel that he owns something important enough to be put in a book, and if what is wanted concerns one’s family the request titillates family pride. But the owner probably knows nothing about this stranger who has asked to see the family papers, and little about academic research; therefore, he feels ignorant and at a disadvantage.

Most owners want to do the right thing in such circumstances, but they don’t know what that is. In their bewilderment they may turn to a collectorfriend for advice. “You know all about these things,” they will say to him, and then they may ask some pertinent and difficult questions, such as, If Dr. X publishes the papers, how will if affect their salability? Should he be allowed to publish whatever he wants from them? Can he be trusted not to steal them while he is having them copied or photostated ?

Large collections of family papers are not usually salable unless they concern a collected literary figure. The average collector does not want family papers; collectors like Huntington and Clements who did buy family papers are rare. The letters and papers of a man who was an early governor of Arkansas or Minister in Vienna under Polk may prove that he played a more significant part in our history than has been usually suspected, but most collectors dislike bulk, and collectors make the book market.

I think it is true that if the papers are chiefly of political interest, publication of them will have little influence upon their salability unless they concern a figure of major consequence who is collected, such as Washington and Lincoln, but that if the papers concern a literary figure of importance publication may affect their value considerably. Booksellers are divided in their opinion as to how publication affects the value of a manuscript. Some booksellers are convinced that publication lowers the value of a manuscript, and decline to give a photostat of an unpublished manuscript belonging to their firms unless the buyer agrees not to publish it. Other booksellers will let scholars print their unpublished manuscripts, and apparently do not feel that they are worth less money in consequence of their publication. There are some collectors who think better of a manuscript if it has been printed and others who think less well of it. In general, I think this can be said: a literary manuscript increases in value with its printed fame. If one of the three known manuscripts of Gray’s Elegy, for example, came upon the market it might fetch $10,000. If the manuscript of an unpublished poem by Gray should be discovered, even though critics may decide that it is a finer poem than the Elegy, it probably would not fetch one tenth as much.

But the final answer to the question, Does publication of an unpublished manuscript hurt its value in the open market? cannot be answered categorically, “Yes,” or “No.” The circumstances connected with each manuscript must be weighed, and the bemused owner will be fortunate it he gets intelligible advice.

3

MOST owners of family papers are unwilling to have discreditable facts in the family’s recent history published. A family whose papers go back to the fifteenth century presumably does not care a hoot what is discovered about them at that time; it may. in fact, be amused and even proud of any kind of hanky-panky, but how far back does “good taste” require the protection of reputations? Suppose your grandfather were a great poet and you discovered in his papers that the famous Helen of his love poems was something more substantial than allegory. Suppose Dr. Y of the University of Utrecht or Cambridge or South Dakota wrote you and told you that he was writing a book on this problem and would like to examine your grandfather’s papers, what would you reply?

I can see that if you had sat on the great man’s knee and listened to his tick-tock you might feel that it was none of Dr. Y’s business, and, even, perhaps make up your mind, in order to settle the question once and for all, to put the letters in the fire. But what if grandfather had died years before you were born? What, if instead of his being your grandfather, he had been your great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather? When is it no longer bad taste to permit publication of something discreditable about a relative of historic importance?

I once discovered how strong feeling can be about people who lived as far back as the eighteenth century. An elderly in-law of the Walpole family had in his possession a long unpublished account by Horace Walpole of a family row in which Horace did not appear at all well. This I was permitted to take only on the condition that I would publish it, for the elderly in-law hated Horace Walpole.

The owner will be influenced in his decision whether or not to turn his papers over to Dr. X by the letter the petitioner has written, by its tone, by the way the request is expressed, by the handwriting, by the paper. The English, being more formal than we are, note more things in a letter than we do. They have a ritual in letter-writing, which should be mastered before dealing with them. Breaking any of the rules of this ritual may convince the English owner that he does not want to have anything to do with the violator: the infractions are proof of his incompetence. The late Duke of Richmond and Gordon, for example, was not predisposed in favor of the American scholar who wrote to him for permission to see the papers at Goodwood and addressed his letter to “Messrs Richmond and Gordon.”

Owners of any country are annoyed by a trait that is rather common in scholars. This is the assumption that all the papers relating to “their” men really belong to them and that the people who temporarily control the papers (through the accident of inheritance or purchase) should hand them over without delay. To a man who seems to be a nuisance British owners may reply, if they do reply, that the papers are no longer in their possession. Americans are more apt not to reply at all.

The question of Dr. X’s trustworthiness will rarely be raised by American owners, to whom his Ph.D. gown is a mantle of honor; but it may be asked in England. To the average British owner, American universities and colleges are pretty much alike. One of the most familiar reasons given by English owners for the disappearance of family papers is that they were borrowed by an American scholar and never returned. This is too bad, for whatever Dr. X’s fault may be, he will not steal. And he may be sound, accurate, and imaginative; in short, it is quite possible that he is just the person to give the papers to the world.

I used to wonder if there were not some way of making it easier for scholars to meet owners. Could there be a committee in this country to which a man might write for help in paving the way to a private owner of papers the scholar wanted to see? The committee would have a London office that would forward the request to the English owners. I saw it working like this; Dr. Jones of Oklahoma states his case to the committee in New York. He is writing a book on A, a minister of state in the reign of Charles II; he has reason to believe that A’s descendants in Yorkshire have unpublished papers of importance to him. Would the committee, through its London office, arrange with the present A for Dr. Jones to see the papers? I was assured by English owners that they would be delighted with such an arrangement. When the committee told them, “Dr. Jones of Oklahoma is O.K.” they would let down the drawbridge, raise the portcullis, and welcome Jones to the muniment room, but when the committee said, “We do not recommend Dr. Smith of Kansas,” they would leave their defenses unbreached until a worthier applicant appeared.

In the last week of 1937 I talked on this subject to the Modern Language Association in the ballroom of the Hotel Drake in Chicago. It was rumored that there was to be some sort of amplifier on the platform. Beside the lectern was a small crystal globe on the lop of a brass rod. It had no receiving or sending device that I could see and I wondered if it did not have some connection with the Christmas season, but the other speakers and I were students of English literature, not of electricity. One and all we addressed ourselves conscientiously to the crystal ball. When I finished I followed the wire that came out of the brass rod and stretched along the stage. The wire ended quite far from any base plug. What it would have done if it had been plugged in I have no idea, but as it was it seemed to me not without symbolic significance, for nothing came of my proposal, and I doubt if anything ever will. There are too many difficulties.

Even supposing that one of the Foundations were willing to finance such a clearing-house, would it not be impossible for the committee to exercise any discrimination in its recommendations? They could not go into every applicant’s history and decide whether or not his Ph.D. covered a deserving candidate; if they attempted to discriminate, would they not get into hot water? The rejected would write direct to owners as before and until the owners knew about the Clearing-House for Deserving Scholars the undeserving would continue to mess things up. One older scholar who heard my talk at Chicago told me that it was better to let people flounder along, that the deserving would ultimately be successful, and the undeserving would fail. Perhaps this is so, but if the English-Speaking Union or some other Hands-Across-the-Sea society should solve the problem they would contribute to the peace of mind of British and American owners and to the reputations of scholars.