A Book for All Readers Part 2

In the Public Library of Cleveland, Ohio, there is appointed out of the governing Board a book-committee of three. To one of these are referred English books wanted, to another French, and to the third German books.

This sub-committee approves or amends the Librarian's recommendations, at its discretion; but expensive works are referred to the whole board for determination.

In the New York Mercantile Library, which must keep continually up to date in its supply of new books, the announcements in all the morning papers are daily scanned, and books just out secured by immediate order.

Many publishers send in books on approval, which are frequently bought.

An agent in London is required to send on the day of publication all new books on certain subjects.

The library boards of management meet weekly in New York and Philadelphia, but monthly in most country libraries. The selection of books made by committees introduces often an element of chance, not quite favorable to the unity of plan in developing the resources of the library. But with a librarian of large information, discretion, and skill, there need seldom be any difficulty in securing approval of his selections, or of most of them. In some libraries the librarian is authorized to buy at discretion additions of books in certain lines, to be reported at the next meeting of the board; and to fill up all deficiencies in periodicals that are taken. This is an important concession to his judgment, made in the interest of completeness in the library, saving a delay of days and sometimes weeks in waiting for the board of directors.

All orders sent out for accessions should previously be compared with the alphabeted order-card list, as well as with the general catalogue of the library, to avoid duplication. After this the t.i.tles are to be incorporated in the alphabet of all outstanding orders, to be withdrawn only on receipt of the books.

The library should invite suggestions from all frequenting it, of books recommended and not found in the collection. A blank record-book for this purpose, or an equivalent in order-cards, should be always kept on the counter of the library.

CHAPTER 2.

BOOK BUYING.

The buying of books is to some men a pastime; to others it is a pa.s.sion; but to the librarian and the intelligent book collector it is both a business and a pleasure. The man who is endowed with a zeal for knowledge is eager to be continually adding to the stores which will enable him to acquire and to dispense that knowledge. Hence the perusal of catalogues is to him an ever fresh and fascinating pursuit. However hampered he may be by the lack of funds, the zest of being continually in quest of some coveted volumes gives him an interest in every sale catalogue, whether of bookseller or of auctioneer. He is led on by the perennial hope that he may find one or more of the long-wished for and waited-for _desiderata_ in the thin pamphlet whose solid columns bristle with book-t.i.tles in every variety of abbreviation and arrangement. It is a good plan, if one can possibly command the time, to read every catalogue of the book auctions, and of the second-hand book dealers, which comes to hand. You will thus find a world of books chronicled and offered which you do not want, because you have got them already: you will find many, also, which you want, but which you know you cannot have; and you may find some of the very volumes which you have sought through many years in vain. In any case, you will have acquired valuable information--whether you acquire any books or not; since there is hardly a priced catalogue, of any considerable extent, from which you cannot reap knowledge of some kind--knowledge of editions, knowledge of prices, and knowledge of the comparative scarcity or full supply of many books, with a glimpse of t.i.tles which you may never have met before. The value of the study of catalogues as an education in bibliography can never be over-estimated.

The large number of active and discriminating book-buyers from America has for years past awakened the interest and jealousy of collectors abroad, where it has very largely enhanced the price of all first-cla.s.s editions, and rare works.

No longer, as in the early days of Dibdin and Heber, is the compet.i.tion for the curiosities of old English literature confined to a half-score of native amateurs. True, we have no such omnivorous gatherers of literary rubbish as that magnificent _h.e.l.luo librorum_, Richard Heber, who ama.s.sed what was claimed to be the largest collection of books ever formed by a single individual. Endowed with a princely fortune, and an undying pa.s.sion for the possession of books, he spent nearly a million dollars in their acquisition. His library, variously stated at from 105,000 volumes (by Dr. Dibdin) to 146,000 volumes (by Dr. Allibone) was brought to the hammer in 1834. The catalogue filled 13 octavo volumes, and the sale occupied 216 days. The insatiable owner (who was a brother of Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta) died while still collecting, at the age of sixty, leaving his enormous library, which no single house of ordinary size could hold, scattered in half a dozen mansions in London, Oxford, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent.

Yet the owner of this vast ma.s.s of mingled nonsense and erudition, this library of the curiosities of literature, was as generous in imparting as in acquiring his literary treasures. No English scholar but was freely welcome to the loan of his volumes; and his own taste and critical knowledge are said to have been of the first order.

From this, probably the most extensive private library ever gathered, let us turn to the largest single purchase, in number of volumes, made at one time for a public library. When Dr. J. G. Cogswell went abroad in 1848, to lay the foundations of the Astor Library, he took with him credentials for the expenditure of $100,000; and, what was of even greater importance, a thoroughly digested catalogue of _desiderata_, embracing the most important books in every department of literature and science.

No such opportunity of buying the finest books at the lowest prices is likely ever to occur again, as the fortuitous concourse of events brought to Dr. Cogswell. It was the year of revolutions--the year when the thrones were tottering or falling all over Europe, when the wealthy and privileged cla.s.ses were trembling for their possessions, and anxious to turn them into ready money. In every time of panic, political or financial, the prices of books, as well as of all articles of luxury, are the first to fall. Many of the choicest collections came to the hammer; mult.i.tudes were eager to sell--but there were few buyers except the book merchants, who were all ready to sell again. The result was that some 80,000 volumes were gathered for the Astor Library, embracing a very large share of the best editions and the most expensive works, with many books strictly denominated rare, and nearly all bound in superior style, at an average cost of about $1.40 per volume. This extraordinary good fortune enabled the Astor Library to be opened on a very small endowment, more splendidly equipped for a library of reference than any new inst.i.tution could be today with four or five times the money.

Compared with such opportunities as these, you may consider the experiences of the little libraries, and the narrow means of recruitment generally found, as very literally the day of small things. But a wise apportionment of small funds, combined with a good knowledge of the commercial value of books, and perpetual vigilance in using opportunities, will go very far toward enlarging any collection in the most desirable directions.

Compare for a moment with the results stated of the Astor Library's early purchases, the average prices paid by British Libraries for books purchased from 1826 to 1854, as published in a parliamentary return. The average cost per volume varied from 16_s_ or about $4 a volume, for the University Library of Edinburgh, to 4_s_ 6_d_, or $1.10 a volume for the Manchester Free Library. The latter, however, were chiefly popular new books, published at low prices, while the former included many costly old works, law books, etc. The British Museum Library's average was 8_s_ 5_d_ or about $2.00 per volume. Those figures represent cloth binding, while the Astor's purchases were mostly in permanent leather bindings.

Averages are very uncertain standards of comparison, as a single book rarity often costs more than a hundred volumes of the new books of the day; but in a library filled with the best editions of cla.s.sical and scientific works, and reference books, I presume that two dollars a volume is not too high an estimate of average cost, in these days represented by the last twenty years. For a circulating library, on the other hand, composed chiefly of what the public most seek to read, half that average would perhaps express the full commercial value of the collection. Of its intrinsic value I will not here pause to speak.

There are many methods of book buying, of which we may indicate the princ.i.p.al as follows:

1. By direct orders from book dealers.

2. By compet.i.tion on select lists of wants.

3. By order from priced catalogues.

4. By purchase at auction sales.

5. By personal research among book stocks.

6. By lists and samples of books sent on approval.

Each of these methods has its advantages--and, I may add, its disadvantages likewise. The collector who combines them, as opportunity presents, is most likely to make his funds go the farthest, and to enrich his collection the most. Direct orders for purchase are necessary for most new books wanted, except in the case of the one government library, which in most countries, receives them under copyright provision. An advantageous arrangement can usually be made with one or more book-dealers, to supply all new books at a fairly liberal discount from retail prices. And it is wise management to distribute purchases where good terms are made, as thereby the trade will feel an interest in the library, and a mutuality of interest will secure more opportunities and better bargains.

The submission of lists of books wanted, to houses having large stocks or good facilities, helps to make funds go as far as possible through compet.i.tion. By the typewriter such lists can now be manifolded much more cheaply than they can be written or printed.

Selection from priced catalogues presents a constantly recurring opportunity of buying volumes of the greatest consequence, to fill gaps in any collection, and often at surprisingly low prices. Much as book values have been enhanced of late years, there are yet catalogues issued by American, English and continental dealers which quote books both of the standard and secondary cla.s.s at very cheap rates. Even now English books are sold by the Mudie and the W. H. Smith lending libraries in London, after a very few months, at one-half to one-fourth their original publishing price. These must usually be rebound, but by instructing your agent to select copies which are clean within, all the soil of the edges will disappear with the light tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of the binder.

Purchase at auction supplies a means of recruiting libraries both public and private with many rare works, and with the best editions of the standard authors, often finely bound. The choice private libraries of the country, as well as the poor ones, tend to pour themselves sooner or later into public auctions. The collectors of books, whose early avidity to ama.s.s libraries of fine editions was phenomenal, rarely persist in cultivating the pa.s.sion through life. Sometimes they are overtaken by misfortune--sometimes by indifference--the bibliomania not being a perennial inspiration, but often an acute and fiery attack, which in a few years burns out. Even if the library gathered with so much money and pains descends to the heirs of the collector, the pa.s.sion for books is very seldom an inherited one. Thus the public libraries are constantly recruited by the opportunities of selection furnished by the forced sale of the private ones. Here, public compet.i.tion frequently runs up the price of certain books to an exorbitant degree, while those not wanted often sell for the merest trifle. One should have a pretty clear idea of the approximate commercial value of books, before competing for them at public sale. He may, however, if well persuaded in his own mind as to the importance or the relative unimportance to his own collection of any work, regulate his bids by that standard, regardless of commercial value, except as a limit beyond which he will not go. Few librarians can personally attend auction sales--nor is it needful, when limits can so easily be set to orders. It is never safe to send an unlimited bid, as there may be others without limit, in which case the book is commonly awarded to the most remote bidder.

There are many curiosities of the auction room, one of them being the frequent re-appearance of book rarities which have been through several auctions, sometimes at intervals of years, keenly competed for by rival bibliophiles, and carried off in triumph by some ardent collector, who little thought at the time how soon his own collection would come to the hammer.

There are also many curiosities of compilation in auction catalogues. Not to name errors of commission, like giving the authorship of books to the wrong name, and errors of omission, like giving no author's name at all, some catalogues are thickly strewn with the epithets _rare_--and _very rare_, when the books are sufficiently common in one or the other market.

Do not be misled by these surface indications. Books are often attributed in catalogues to their editor or translator, and the unwary buyer may thus find himself saddled with a duplicate already in his own collection.

There has been much improvement in late years in the care with which auction catalogues are edited, and no important collection at least is offered, without having first pa.s.sed through the hands of an expert, familiar with bibliography. It is the minor book sales where the catalogues receive no careful editing, and where the dates and editions are frequently omitted, that it is necessary to guard against. It is well to refrain from sending any bids out of such lists, because they furnish no certain identification of the books, and if all would do the same, thus diminishing the compet.i.tion and the profit of the auctioneer, he might learn never to print a catalogue without date, place of publication, and full name of author of every book offered.

Never be too eager to acquire an auction book, unless you are very thoroughly a.s.sured that it is one of the kind truly designated _rarissimus_. An eminent and thoroughly informed book collector, with an experience of forty years devoted to book auctions and book catalogues, a.s.sured me that it was his experience that almost every book would turn up on the average about every seven years. Of course there are notable exceptions--and especially among the cla.s.s of books known as _incunabula_, (or cradle-books printed in the infancy of printing) and of early Americana: but it is not these which the majority of libraries are most in search of. Remember always, if you lose a coveted volume, that there will be another chance--perhaps many of them. The private collector, who carries it off against you, has had no former opportunity to get the rare volume, and may never have another. He is therefore justified in paying what is to ordinary judgment an extraordinary price.

Individual collectors die, but public libraries are immortal.

If you become thoroughly conversant with priced catalogues, you will make fewer mistakes than most private buyers. Not only catalogues of notable collections, with the prices obtained at auction, but the large and very copious catalogues of such London book-dealers as Quaritch and Sotheran, are accessible in the great city libraries. These are of the highest use in suggesting the proximate prices at which important books have been or may be acquired. Since 1895, annual volumes ent.i.tled "American Book Prices Current" have been issued, giving the figures at which books have been sold at all the princ.i.p.al auction sales of the year.

There is no word so much abused as the term _rare_, when applied to books. Librarians know well the unsophisticated citizen who wants to sell at a high price a "rare" volume of divinity "a hundred and fifty years old" (worth possibly twenty-five cents to half a dollar,) and the persistent woman who has the rarest old bible in the country, which she values anywhere from fifty to five hundred dollars, and which turns out on inspection to be an imperfect copy of one of Barker's mult.i.tudinous editions of 1612 to '18, which may be picked up at five to eight shillings in any old London book-shop. The confident a.s.sertions so often paraded, even in catalogues, "only three copies known," and the like, are to be received with absolute incredulity, and the claims of ignorant owners of books who fancy that their little pet goose is a fine swan, because they never saw another, are as ridiculous as the laudation bestowed by a sapient collector upon two of his most valued nuggets.

"This, sir, is unique, but not so unique as the other."

Buying books by actual inspection at the book-shops is even more fascinating employment than buying them through catalogues. You thus come upon the most unexpected volumes unawares. You open the covers, scan the t.i.tle-pages, get a glimpse of the plates, and flit from book to book, like a bee gathering honey for its hive. It is a good way to recruit your library economically, to run through the stock of a book-dealer systematically--neglecting no shelf, but selecting throughout the whole stock, and laying aside what you think you may want. When this is done, you will have quite a pile of literature upon which to negotiate with the proprietor. It is cheaper to buy thus at wholesale than by piecemeal, because the bookseller will make you a larger discount on a round lot of which you relieve his shelves.

Another method of recruiting your library is the examination of books "on approval." Most book-dealers will be so obliging as to send in parcels of books for the inspection of a librarian or collector, who can thus examine them leisurely and with more thoroughness than in a book store, without leaving his business.

All books, by whatever course they may be purchased, are indispensably to be collated before they are accepted and paid for. Neglect of this will fill any library with imperfections, since second-hand books are liable to have missing leaves, or plates, or maps, while new books may lack signatures or plates, or be wrongly bound together. In the case of new books, or books still in print, the publisher is bound to make good an imperfection.

In old books, this is usually impossible, and the only remedy is to return the imperfect books upon the seller's hands, unless there may be a reason, such as the rarity of the volume, or its comparative little cost, or the trifling nature of the imperfection, for retaining it. The equities in these cases are in favor of the buyer, who is presumed to have purchased a perfect copy. But the right of reclamation must be exercised promptly, or it may be forfeited by lapse of time. If an imperfection in any book you order is noted in the catalogue, it is not subject to return. I have ever found the book auctioneers most courteous and considerate in their dealings--and the same can be said of the book trade generally, among whom instances of liberality to libraries are by no means rare.

One of the choicest pleasures of the book collector, whether private student or librarian, is to visit the second-hand book-shops of any city, and examine the stock with care. While he may find but few notable treasures in one collection, a search through several shops will be almost sure to reward him. Here are found many of the outpourings of the private libraries, formed by specialists or amateurs, and either purchased by the second-hand dealer _en bloc_, or bid off by him at some auction sale. Even rare books are picked up in this way, no copies of which can be had by order, because long since "out of print." The stock in these shops is constantly changing, thus adding a piquant and sometimes exciting element to the book-hunter, who is wise in proportion as he seizes quickly upon all opportunities of new "finds" by frequent visits. To mourn over a lost chance in rare books is often more grievous to the zealous collector, than to lose a large share out of his fortune; while to exult over a literary nugget long sought and at length found is a pleasure to which few others can be compared.

Of the many _bouquinistes_ whose open-air shops line the quays of Paris along the Seine, numbering once as many as a hundred and fifty dealers in second-hand books, I have no room to treat; books have been written about them, and the _litterateurs_ of France, of Europe, and of America have profited by countless bargains in their learned wares. Nor can I dwell upon the literary wealth of London book-shops, dark and dingy, but ever attractive to the hungry scholar, or the devotee of bibliomania.

Of the many second-hand booksellers (or rather sellers of second-hand books) in American cities, the more notable have pa.s.sed from the stage of action in the last quarter of a century. Old William Gowans, a quaint, intelligent Scotchman, in shabby clothes and a strong face deeply marked with small pox, was for many years the dean of this fraternity in New York. His extensive book-shop in Na.s.sau street, with its dark cellar, was crowded and packed with books on shelves, on stairways and on the floors, heaped and piled in enormous ma.s.ses, amid which the visitor could hardly find room to move. On one of the piles you might find the proprietor seated--

Books to the right of him, Books to the left of him, Books behind him, Volleyed and tumbled,

while he answered inquiries for books from clergymen and students, or gruffly bargained with a boy or an old woman for a dilapidated lot of old books. He had a curious quizzical way with strangers, who at once set him down as an oddity, and his impatience with ignoramuses and bores gave him the repute of crustiness, which was redeemed by suavity enough whenever he met with people of intelligence.

Gowans issued scores of catalogues of his stock, in which t.i.tles were often ill.u.s.trated by notes, always curious and often amusing, credited to "Western Memorabilia," a work which no bookseller or man of letters had ever heard of, but which was shrewdly suspected to have been a projected sc.r.a.p-book of the observations and opinions of William Gowans.

There was another eccentric book-dealer's shop in Na.s.sau street kept by one John Doyle, who aimed so high in his profession as to post over his door a sign reading "The Moral Centre of the Intellectual Universe." This establishment was notably full of old editions of books of English history and controversial theology.

The most famous second-hand book-shop in Boston was Burnham's, whose fore-name was Thomas Oliver Hazard Perry, shortened into "Perry Burnham"

by his familiars. He was a little, pale-faced, wiry, nervous man, with piercing black eyes and very brusque manners. In old and musty books he lived and moved and had his being, for more than a generation. He exchanged a stuffy, narrow shop in Cornhill for more s.p.a.cious quarters in Washington street, near School street, where he bought and sold books with an a.s.siduous devotion to business, never trusting to others what he could do himself. He was proud of his collection and its extent. He bought books and pamphlets at auction literally by the cart-load, every thing that n.o.body else wanted being bid off to Burnham at an insignificant price, almost nominal. He got a wide reputation for selling cheaply, but he always knew when to charge a stiff price for a book, and to stick to it. Once when I was pricing a lot of miscellaneous books picked out for purchase, mostly under a dollar a volume, we came to a copy of "The Const.i.tutions of the Several Independent States of America," 1st edition, Philadelphia, 1781, of which two hundred copies only were printed, by order of Congress. This copy was in the original boards, uncut, and with the autograph of Timothy Pickering on the t.i.tle page. "If the Congress Library wants that book," said Mr. Burnham, "it will have to pay eight dollars for it." I took it, well pleased to secure what years of search had failed to bring. The next year my satisfaction was enhanced when an inferior copy of the same book was offered at twenty dollars.

Burnham died a wealthy man, having ama.s.sed a million dollars in trade and by rise in real estate, as he owned the land on which the Parker House stands in Boston.

Among Philadelphia dealers in second-hand books, one John Penington was recognized as most intelligent and honorable. He was a book-lover and a scholar, and one instinctively ranked him not as a bookseller, but as a gentleman who dealt in books. On his shelves one always found books of science and volumes in foreign languages.

Another notable dealer was John Campbell, a jolly, hearty Irish-American, with a taste for good books, and an antipathy to negroes, as keen as the proverbial hatred of the devil for holy water. Campbell wrote a book ent.i.tled "Negromania," published in 1851, in which his creed was set forth in strong language. He was a regular bidder at book auctions, where his burly form and loud voice made him a prominent figure.