The Book-Hunter
Perhaps it would be a good practical distribution of the class of
persons under examination, to divide them into private prowlers and
auction-hunters. There are many other modes of classifying them, but
none so general. They might be classified by the different sizes of
books they affect--as folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos--but this
would be neither an expressive nor a dignified classification. In
enumerating the various orders to which Fitzpatrick Smart did _not_
belong, I have mentioned many of the species, but a great many more
might be added. Some collectors lay themselves out for vellum-printed
volumes almost solely. There are such not only among very old books, but
among very new; for of a certain class of modern books it frequently
happens that a copy or two may be printed on vellum, to catch the class
whose weakness takes that direction.
It may be cited as a signal instance of the freaks of book-collecting,
that of all men in the world Junot, the hard-fighting soldier, had a
vellum library--but so it was. It was sold in London for about L1400.
"The crown octavos," says Dibdin, "especially of ancient classics, and a
few favourite English authors, brought from four to six guineas. The
first virtually solid article of any importance, or rather of the
greatest importance, in the whole collection, was the matchless Didot
Horace, of 1799, folio, containing the original drawings from which the
exquisite copperplate vignettes were executed. This was purchased by the
gallant Mr George Hibbert for L140. Nor was it in any respect an
extravagant or even dear purchase." It now worthily adorns the library
of Norton Hall.
Some collectors may be styled Rubricists, being influenced by a sacred
rage for books having the contents and marginal references printed in
red ink. Some "go at" flowered capitals, others at broad margins. These
have all a certain amount of magnificence in their tastes; but there are
others again whose priceless collections are like the stock-in-trade of
a wholesale ballad-singer, consisting of chap-books, as they are
termed--the articles dealt in by pedlars and semi-mendicants for the
past century or two. Some affect collections relating to the drama, and
lay great store by heaps of play-bills arranged in volumes, and bound,
perhaps, in costly russia. Of a more dignified grade are perhaps those
who have lent themselves to the collection of the theses on which
aspirants after university honours held their disputations or
impugnments. Sometimes out of a great mass of rubbish of this kind the
youthful production of some man who has afterwards become great turns
up. Of these theses and similar tracts a German, Count Dietrich,
collected some hundred and forty thousand, which are now in this
country.
Those collectors whose affections are invested in the devices or trade
emblems of special favourites among the old printers must not be passed
without a word of recognition.
Men who have had the opportunity of rummaging among old libraries in
their boyhood are the most likely to cultivate pets of this kind. There
is a rich variety of choice in the luxuriantly floral Gothic, the cold
serene classic, and that prolific style combining both, which a popular
writer on the AEsthetics of Art has stigmatised by the term "sensual,"
ordering all his votaries to abjure it accordingly. To intellects not
far enough advanced to acknowledge the influence of such terms, or to
comprehend their application to what we should or should not like and
admire, there is a fortunate element even in their deficiencies. They
can admire the devices of the old printers from association with the
boyish days when they were first noticed, from an absolute liking for
their fantastic fancies, and possibly from an observation in some of
them of the indications of the gradual development of artistic purity
and beauty. In many of them in which the child has seen only an
attractive little picture, the man has afterwards found a touch of
poetic or religious thought.
There is the hand pouring oil into a lamp of pure Etruscan shape,
symbolical of the nutriment supplied to the intellectual flame. In
another, the gardener carefully plants the seedlings which are to bear
the fruit of knowledge to the coming generations; in another, the sun
rising bright over the eastern sea signifies the dawn of the restoration
of classical learning to the European nations.
Other interpretations of the kind, called quaint conceits, can be read
from these printers' devices. There is Gesner's Bibliotheca swarming
with frogs and tadpoles like a quagmire in honour of its printer, a
German Frog, latinised Christopherus Froshoverus. The _Quae Extant_ of
Varro, printed at Dort, are adorned with many lively cuts of bears and
their good-humoured cubs, because the printer's name is Joannis
Berewout. So the Aulus Gellius, printed by Gryphius of Lyons, more than
a hundred years earlier, begins and ends with formidable effigies of
griffins. The device of Michael and Phillip Lenoir is a jet-black
shield, with an Ethiopian for crest, and Ethiopians for supporters; and
Apiarius has a neat little cut representing a bear robbing a bee's nest
in a hollow tree. Most instructive of them all, Ascensius has bequeathed
to posterity the lively and accurate representation, down to every nail
and screw, of the press in which the great works of the sixteenth
century were printed, with the brawny pressman pulling his proof.
Collectors there have been, not unimportant for number and zeal, whose
mission it is to purchase books marked by peculiar mistakes or errors of
the press. The celebrated Elzevir Caesar of 1635 is known by this, that
the number of the 149th page is misprinted 153. All that want this
peculiar distinction are counterfeits. The little volume being, as
Brunet says, "une des plus jolies et plus rares de la collection des
Elsevier," gave a temptation to fraudulent imitators, who, as if by a
providential arrangement for their detection, lapsed into accuracy at
the critical figure. How common errors are in editions of the classics,
is attested by the one or two editions which claim a sort of
canonisation as immaculate--as, for instance, the Virgil of Didot, and
the Horace of Foulis. A collector, with a taste for the inaccurate,
might easily satiate it in the editions so attractive in their deceptive
beauty of the great Birmingham printer Baskerville.
The mere printers' blunders that have been committed upon editions of
the Bible are reverenced in literary history; and one edition--the
Vulgate issued under the authority of Sixtus V.--achieved immense value
from its multitude of errors. The well-known story of the German
printer's wife, who surreptitiously altered the passage importing that
her husband should be her lord (Herr) so as to make him be her fool
(Narr), needs confirmation. If such a misprint were found, it might
quite naturally be attributed to carelessness. Valarian Flavigny, who
had many controversies on his hand, brought on the most terrible of them
all with Abraham Ecchellensis by a mere dropped letter. In the rebuke
about the mote in thy brother's eye and the beam in thine own, the first
letter in the Latin for eye was carelessly dropped out, and left a word
which may be found occasionally in Martial's Epigrams, but not in books
of purer Latin and purer ideas.[29]
[Footnote 29: A traditional anecdote represents the Rev. William
Thomson, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, as having got into a
scrape by a very indecorous alteration of a word in Scripture. A young
divine, on his first public appearance, had to read the solemn passage
in 1st Corinthians, "Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all
sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an
eye, at the last trump." Thomson scratched the letter _c_ out of the
word changed. The effect of the passage so mutilated can easily be
tested. The person who could play such tricks was ill suited for his
profession, and being relieved of its restraints, he found a more
congenial sphere of life among the unsettled crew of men of letters in
London, over whom Smollett had just ceased to reign. He did a deal of
hard work, and the world owes him at least one good turn in his
translation of Cunningham's Latin History of Britain from the Revolution
to the Hanover Succession. The value of this work, in the minute light
thrown by it on one of the most memorable periods of British history, is
too little known. The following extract may give some notion of the
curious and instructive nature of this neglected book. It describes the
influences which were in favour of the French alliance, and against the
Whigs, during Marlborough's campaign. "And now I shall take this
opportunity to speak of the French wine-drinkers as truly and briefly as
I can. On the first breaking out of the Confederate war, the merchants
in England were prohibited from all commerce with France, and a heavy
duty was laid upon French wine. This caused a grievous complaint among
the topers, who have great interest in the Parliament, as if they had
been poisoned by port wines. Mr Portman Seymour, who was a jovial
companion, and indulged his appetites, but otherwise a good man; General
Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough's brother, a man of courage, but a
lover of wine; Mr Pereira, a Jew and smell-feast, and other hard
drinkers, declared, that the want of French wine was not to be endured,
and that they could hardly bear up under so great a calamity. These were
joined by Dr Aldridge, who, though nicknamed the priest of Bacchus, was
otherwise an excellent man, and adorned with all kinds of learning. Dr
Ratcliffe, a physician of great reputation, who ascribed the cause of
all diseases to the want of French wines, though he was very rich, and
much addicted to wine, yet, being extremely covetous, bought the cheaper
wines; but at the same time he imputed the badness of his wine to the
war, and the difficulty of getting better. Therefore the Duke of
Beaufort and the Earl of Scarsdale, two young noblemen of great interest
among their acquaintance, who had it in their power to live at their
ease in magnificence or luxury, merrily attributed all the doctor's
complaints to his avarice. All those were also for peace rather than
war. And all the bottle-companions, many physicians, and great numbers
of the lawyers and inferior clergy, and, in fine, the loose women too,
were united together in the faction against the Duke of
Marlborough."--ii. 200.]
Questions as to typographical blunders in editions of the classics are
mixed up with larger critical inquiries into the purity of the
ascertained text, and thus run in veins through the mighty strata of
philological and critical controversy which, from the days of Poggio
downwards, have continued to form that voluminous mass of learning which
the outer world contemplates with silent awe.
To some extent the same spirit of critical inquiry has penetrated into
our own language. What we have of it clusters almost exclusively around
the mighty name of Shakespeare. Shakespearian criticism is a branch of
knowledge by itself. To record its triumphs--from that greatest one by
which the senseless "Table of Greenfield," which interrupted the
touching close of Falstaff's days, was replaced by "'a babbled of green
fields"--would make a large book of itself. He who would undertake it,
in a perfectly candid and impartial spirit, would give us, varied no
doubt with much erudition and acuteness, a curious record of blundering
ignorance and presumptuous conceit, the one so intermingling with the
other that it would be often difficult to distinguish them.[30]
[Footnote 30: Without venturing too near to this very turbulent arena,
where hard words have lately been cast about with much reckless