The Book-Hunter
could be realised at a profit of 200 per cent, he was ready to alter the
existing disposal of his capital."
It is true that amateur purchasers do not, in the long-run, make a
profit, though an occasional bargain may pass through their hands. It
is not maintained that, in the general case, the libraries of collectors
would be sold for more than they cost, or even for nearly so much; but
they are always worth something, which is more than can be said of the
residue of other hobbies and pursuits. Nay, farther; the scholarly
collector of books is not like the ordinary helpless amateur; for
although, doubtless, nothing will rival the dealer's instinct for
knowing the money-value of an article, though he may know nothing else
about it, yet there is often a subtle depth in the collector's educated
knowledge which the other cannot match, and bargains may be obtained off
the counters of the most acute.
A small sprinkling of these--even the chance of them--excites him, like
the angler's bites and rises, and gives its zest to his pursuit. It is
the reward of his patience, his exertion, and his skill, after the
manner in which Monkbarns has so well spoken; and it is certain that, in
many instances, a collector's library has sold for more than it cost
him.
No doubt, a man may ruin himself by purchasing costly books, as by
indulgence in any other costly luxury, but the chances of calamity are
comparatively small in this pursuit. A thousand pounds will go a great
way in book-collecting, if the collector be true to the traditions of
his pursuit, such as they are to be hereafter expounded. There has been
one instance, doubtless, in the records of bibliomania, of two thousand
pounds having been given for one book. But how many instances far more
flagrant could be found in picture-buying? Look around upon the world
and see how many men are the victims of libraries, and compare them with
those whom the stud, the kennel, and the preserve have brought to the
Gazette. Find out, too, anywhere, if you can, the instance in which the
money scattered in these forms comes back again, and brings with it a
large profit, as the expenditure of the Duke of Roxburghe did when his
library was sold.
But it is necessary to arrest this train of argument, lest its tenor
might be misunderstood. The mercenary spirit must not be admitted to a
share in the enjoyments of the book-hunter. If, after he has taken his
last survey of his treasures, and spent his last hour in that quiet
library, where he has ever found his chief solace against the wear and
worry of the world, the book-hunter has been removed to his final place
of rest, and it is then discovered that the circumstances of the family
require his treasures to be dispersed,--if then the result should take
the unexpected shape that his pursuit has not been so ruinously costly
after all--nay, that his expenditure has actually fructified--it is
well. But if the book-hunter allow money-making--even for those he is to
leave behind--to be combined with his pursuit, it loses its fresh
relish, its exhilarating influence, and becomes the source of wretched
cares and paltry anxieties. Where money is the object, let a man
speculate or become a miser--a very enviable condition to him who has
the saving grace to achieve it, if we hold with Byron that the
accumulation of money is the only passion that never cloys.
Let not the collector, therefore, ever, unless in some urgent and
necessary circumstances, part with any of his treasures. Let him not
even have recourse to that practice called barter, which political
philosophers tell us is the universal resource of mankind preparatory to
the invention of money as a circulating medium and means of exchange.
Let him confine all his transactions in the market to purchasing only.
No good ever comes of gentlemen amateurs buying and selling. They will
either be systematic losers, or they will acquire shabby, questionable
habits, from which the professional dealers--on whom, perhaps, they look
down--are exempt. There are two trades renowned for the quackery and the
imposition with which they are habitually stained--the trade in horses
and the trade in old pictures; and these have, I verily believe, earned
their evil reputation chiefly from this, that they are trades in which
gentlemen of independent fortune and considerable position are in the
habit of embarking.
The result is not so unaccountable as it might seem. The professional
dealer, however smart he may be, takes a sounder estimate of any
individual transaction than the amateur. It is his object, not so much
to do any single stroke of trade very successfully, as to deal
acceptably with the public, and make his money in the long-run. Hence he
does not place an undue estimate on the special article he is to dispose
of, but will let it go at a loss, if that is likely to prove the most
beneficial course for his trade at large. He has no special attachment
to any of the articles in which he deals, and no blindly exaggerated
appreciation of their merits and value. They come and go in an equable
stream, and the cargo of yesterday is sent abroad to the world with the
same methodical indifference with which that of to-day is unshipped. It
is otherwise with the amateur. He feels towards the article he is to
part with all the prejudiced attachment, and all the consequent
over-estimate, of a possessor. Hence he and the market take incompatible
views as to value, and he is apt to become unscrupulous in his efforts
to do justice to himself. Let the single-minded and zealous collector
then turn the natural propensity to over-estimate one's own into its
proper and legitimate channel. Let him guard his treasures as things too
sacred for commerce, and say, _Procul, o procul este, profani_, to all
who may attempt by bribery and corruption to drag them from their
legitimate shelves. If, in any weak moment, he yield to mercenary
temptation, he will be for ever mourning after the departed unit of his
treasure--the lost sheep of his flock. If it seems to be in the decrees
of fate that all his gatherings are to be dispersed abroad after he is
gone to his rest, let him, at all events, retain the reliance that on
them, as on other things beloved, he may have his last look; there will
be many changes after that, and this will be among them. Nor, in his
final reflections on his conduct to himself and to those he is to leave,
will he be disturbed by the thought that the hobby which was his
enjoyment has been in any wise the more costly to him that he has not
made it a means of mercenary money-getting.[36]
[Footnote 36: Atticus was under the scandal of having disposed of his
books, and Cicero sometimes hints to him that he might let more of them
go his way. In truth, Atticus carried this so far, however, that he
seems to have been a sort of dealer, and the earliest instance of a
capitalist publisher. He had slaves whom he occupied in copying, and was
in fact much in the position of a rich Virginian or Carolinian, who
should find that the most profitable investment for his stock of slaves
is a printing and publishing establishment.]
The Desultory Reader or Bohemian of Literature.
Having so put in a plea for this pursuit, as about the least costly
foible to which those who can afford to indulge in foibles can devote
themselves, one might descant on certain auxiliary advantages--as, that
it is not apt to bring its votaries into low company; that it offends no
one, and is not likely to foster actions of damages for nuisance,
trespass, or assault, and the like. But rather let us turn our attention
to the intellectual advantages accompanying the pursuit, since the
proper function of books is in the general case associated with
intellectual culture and occupation. It would seem that, according to a
received prejudice or opinion, there is one exception to this general
connection, in the case of the possessors of libraries, who are under a
vehement suspicion of not reading their books. Well, perhaps it is true
in the sense in which those who utter the taunt understand the reading
of a book. That one should possess no books beyond his power of
perusal--that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight
through what he has already bought--is a supposition alike preposterous
and unreasonable. "Surely you have far more books than you can read," is
sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume
by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them
all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may
be sure that he has got the value of his money.
It is true that there are some books--as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton,
Shakespeare, and Scott--which every man should read who has the
opportunity--should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. To neglect
the opportunity of becoming familiar with them is deliberately to
sacrifice the position in the social scale which an ordinary education
enables its possessor to reach. But is one next to read through the
sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bollandist Lives of the Saints, and
the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and
the Gentleman's Magazine from the beginning, each separately, and in
succession? Such a course of reading would certainly do a good deal
towards weakening the mind, if it did not create absolute insanity.
But in all these just named, even in the Statutes at large, and in
thousands upon thousands of other books, there is precious honey to be
gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower.
In fact, "a course of reading," as it is sometimes called, is a course
of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give
to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life
allotted to man there is but a certain number of books that it is
practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make a selection
that will not, in a manner, wall in the mind from a free expansion over
the republic of letters. The being chained, as it were, to one intellect
in the perusal straight on of any large book, is a sort of mental
slavery superinducing imbecility. Even Gibbon's Decline and Fall,
luminous and comprehensive as its philosophy is, and rapid and brilliant
the narrative, will become deleterious mental food if consumed straight
through without variety. It will be well to relieve it occasionally with
a little Boston's Fourfold State, or Hervey's Meditations, or Sturm's
Reflections for Every Day in the Year, or Don Juan, or Ward's History of
Stoke-upon-Trent.
Isaac D'Israeli says, "Mr Maurice, in his animated memoirs, has recently
acquainted us with a fact which may be deemed important in the life of a
literary man. He tells us, 'We have been just informed that Sir William
Jones _invariably_ read through every year the works of Cicero.'" What a
task! one would be curious to know whether he felt it less heavy in the
twelve duodecimos of Elzevir, or the nine quartos of the Geneva edition.
Did he take to it doggedly, as Dr Johnson says, and read straight
through according to the editor's arrangement, or did he pick out the
plums and take the dismal work afterwards? For the first year or two of
his task, he is not to be pitied perhaps about the Offices, or the
Dialogue on Friendship, or Scipio's Dream, or even the capital speeches
against Verres and Catiline; but those tiresome Letters, and the
Tusculan Questions, and the De Natura! It is a pity he did not live till
Angelo Mai found the De Republica. What disappointed every one else
might perhaps have commanded the admiration of the great Orientalist.