Bibliomania begins
Virtual book fairs; and Thomas Hearne at the British Library
About four years ago, the terrible thought came to me that here on Substack I could start writing about books and book-collecting . . .
I then spent as long as I could not starting but dithering. The Covid-19 pandemic became a reason (read: an excuse) not to get going; there were no book fairs to attend, for one thing, and little opportunity to go rummaging around second-hand bookshops. Further excuses all too readily presented themselves. But here it is – here it goes – I could delay my plans no longer.
Here it is: Bibliomania, Part the First. Welcome. I hope this newsletter will grow into a useful if subjective account of book-collecting (other people’s, but also mine), via brief reports, longer essays, interviews with both booksellers and book collectors, and a spot of “window-shopping” (based on sales catalogues, that is, rather than literally pressing my nose up against the glass of Maggs Bros or Bernard Quaritch).
Further parts may, I fear, follow this first instalment. Let’s see.
Two book fairs are under way – virtually under way, that is. The ABAA’s Virtual Book Fair: Holiday edition runs until December 2; Firsts Online runs until December 3. Virtual fairs became a modest way for the rare book trade to operate under lockdown, and they persist now despite the obvious advantages and disadvantages (no plodding around the stalls, occasionally haggling over a price, etc). I quite like the chatter that comes with browsing around a fair, even if purchasing isn’t an option. As in some (but not all) bookshops. But virtual fairs can be useful in other ways, if not amazingly enjoyable – the extent of your enjoyment of such things perhaps depends on how much time you spend sitting in front of a computer screen.
A glance at the highlights of these two virtual fairs wasn’t without interest, at least for me. (And relatively few booksellers, by the way, are maintaining a virtual presence at both fairs.) Listed among the highlights of the ABBA fair, for example, is a near fine first American edition of The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (Knopf, 1931); this happens to be the copy that belonged to the Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts. It was auctioned off at Christie’s in London at the end of September, and realized, at £2,142, a little more than its estimate. Vagabond Books is offering the Watts copy of The Glass Key for $15,000. It turns out that Vagabond is offering several of the great man’s books, in fact, such as first editions of The Name of Action by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1930; $12,000) and A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie (Collins, 1953; $10,000), the latter inscribed to Christie’s amanuensis, secretary and friend Charlotte “Carlo” Fisher.
More to our taste, meanwhile, is the copy of . . . And Blondes Prefer Paris by Jacques Deval (Chemins de fer de l’État, 1930), offered by Ash Rare Books for £500. Deval’s short book, a witty response to Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), was commissioned as a publicity exercise for French railways and businesses. It seems not to have survived in great quantities. The associative appeal of this particular copy is “from the library of Anita Loos”. See above for her chic bookplate, designed by Frank Walts.
It is a nice touch that Firsts Online preserves the notion of its exhibitions occupying “stands”. Ash occupies stand 36, for example. The ABAA, meanwhile, has its exhibitors occupying virtual “booths”, though they are not numbered. Gosh, it’s almost like being there.
Who’s afraid of Thomas Hearne? Quite a few people, it turns out – were hostile to him, that is, if not exactly afraid of him.
Hearne spent most of his life (1678–1735) in Oxford, doing a great deal of what he called the “drudgery” of cataloguing, shelving and generally trying to organize books and manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. Fellow scholars knew him as a formidable, combative expert in medieval history, although his range was wider than that, taking in editions of Pliny (1703) and William Camden (1717), as well as numerous English chronicles.
To Alexander Pope, Hearne was “Wormius”, “Of sober face, with learned dust besprent” – the Dunciad drops into fittingly archaic language at this point – “On parchment scraps y-fed”. Hearne also happened to be a non-juror – he refused to take the oath of allegiance, that is, to a successor of rulers he believed to have unlawfully usurped the throne that should have belonged to James II and the Stuart line.
On Tuesday evening Henry Woudhuysen delivered the first of this year’s Panizzi lectures at the British Library; his subject was Hearne as librarian. (The second and third lectures – on December 7 and 14, and free to attend in person or online – will cover Hearne’s activities as a collector and publisher, respectively.) Professor Woudhuysen’s audience heard about Hearne’s difficult relationship with certain colleagues (ah, the joys of intra-Oxonian bickering) and his reluctance to venture to London (seemingly for fear of sensitive materials in his keeping being discovered in his absence); there was also the extensive research gathered Remarks and Collections (to give one of the names by which his notebooks have become known) and the miscellany of material he collected and inserted among those volumes (a lock of hair; a medieval poem about which he might hazard an attribution: “Perhaps Chaucer”).
First appointed as a library assistant in 1701, Hearne increasingly ran into trouble during the 1710s. Woudhuysen avoided labouring this point but presented plenty of evidence nonetheless that Hearne had a priggish side that combined with his political beliefs to make him a number of enemies in the university. (He also managed to spar with the Vice-Principal of his own college, St Edmund Hall, over the disputed origin of its name.)1 He fell out with the classicist John Hudson, his superior and former ally at the Bodleian, and was dismissed from his post for “neglect of duty”; as he saw it, the move had really been prompted by his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to George I. Hudson had the library’s locks changed to keep him out.
Woudhuysen’s Hearne makes a sympathetic but also difficult figure, certainly worthy of reassessment as the subject of the Panizzi lectures. That long-standing series of lectures at the BL is named for another librarian, Antonio Panizzi, who couldn’t seem to keep out of scraps or scrapes.
A horribly minor point: this informative piece by James Howarth mentions that there was some correspondence in the TLS about St Edmund Hall’s name in 1927. The argument started earlier, though, in late 1924, and went on into the spring of 1925, with three correspondents continuing the dispute in the tradition of pedantic quarrelling that Hearne himself would have readily recognized. Plus ça change, and all that.
Welcome to Substack, Michael! This promises to be a fascinating series.