A heady stage of development has been reached: Bibliomania is now two months old. (It began around the time of the Panizzi lectures at the beleaguered British Library.) To everyone who’s liked, shared, responded, recommended or just plain old read any of these miscellaneous jottings – thank you. Hecklings, suggestions etc, for the next two months and beyond, are very much welcome, via the comments.
And if you happen to be in the mood to boast about a book or books of your own: I’m keen to hear from folks keen to discuss their own collections, for future editions of this newsletter. Whether that’s a matter of one shelf of intensely read early science fiction or a personal temple of incunabula – or something in between. Give me a nudge in one of the usual social-media ways (I’m still here on the unspeakable X/Twitter), and let’s talk.
Why talk about them? Just for fun of it would do as an answer for me. But if you want a slightly less frivolous answer: one way in which you can tell that a book collection really is becoming a book collection, I suggest, is that a story starts to emerge that only these aligned artefacts reveal to those with eyes to see. In miniature, that might begin with, say, two hardback novels between which you’ve spotted a connection. And that connection leads to further connections . . .
As recently mentioned by Sheila Markham on Instagram, a fairly grand example of the kind of collection I mean is Edith Wharton’s working library, as reconstructed by the York bookseller George Ramsden. The history of Wharton’s books isn’t wholly straightforward, as is revealed by Sheila Liming in What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the will to collection books (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). In the 1980s, though, as Markham remarks, Ramsden managed to acquire “around 2,000” of Wharton’s books, many of them annotated, from the family of the art historian Sir Kenneth Clarke, a friend of hers, via Maggs. Ramsden added a further 600 Wharton volumes over the years; and eventually, in 2006, the reconstructed library went back to The Mount, the house she built in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1902.
The time and resources for such feats aren’t exactly available to all. I’d like to think it’s possible nonetheless to do something interesting along these lines (if only interesting to some). The Ramsden-style swoop on thousands of books at one opportunity also sounds, to me, little like the kind of ongoing, leisurely diversion that many collectors enjoy and don’t take too seriously. Collectors also tell stories about themselves, I suppose, through their hobbies/obsessions and how they go about their business. And both kinds of stories may be revealed when book-dealers and auctioneers’ catalogues come along, often containing as they do some testimony to years of acute accumulation – not just purchasing for the mindless sake of purchasing, that is, but careful acquisition – the gradual expansion of a narrative.
Maybe some biblio-inspiration is to be found in some of the collections that are now (or soon) set to change hands . . .
As a single entity, Daniel Crouch Rare Books is offering the Petros G. Pelos Collection. The 100 items in this catalogue, “From Sea to Shining Sea!”: The great American library, tell “the story of the building of a nation” through “exceptionally rare first-hand printed and manuscript travel accounts, atlases, portfolios, and governmental proclamations”. Perry Pelos’s aim was to bring together “the best examples of the narrative or map obtainable”, collecting works “in the earliest incarnation possible – first states, uncut, and in original parts and/or wrappers where possible”. The first item listed here is John Long’s Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader (London: Printed for the author, 1791) and the last is James Knox Polk’s history of the war with Mexico in the 1840s, Message from the President of the United States to the two houses of Congress . . . (Washington: Wendell and von Benthuysen, 1848). It’s a collection that should remain intact, both to be studied and to be gawped at.
(For those who aren’t in the market for the great American library: Daniel Crouch Rare Books is also holding a sale, until February 14. Prices start from £6 and maps from Ptolemy.)
Temporarily on display at the Winter Show in New York, meanwhile, courtesy of Peter Harrington, are twenty-five rare books and related items of the Winston S. Churchill Collection put together by Steve Forbes. Like Pelos’s grand history of nation-building, this isn’t my speed at all; but, collecting-wise, I cannot help but admire Forbes’s tenacity in chasing after everything from Churchill’s desk and his oil paintings (“The Entrance to the Gorge at Todhra”, painted during a trip to Morocco, 1935–6) to the proof copies, typescripts etc for The Second World War ($750,000). Pictured below is the second edition of a book has become “virtually impossible to acquire”: Mr Brodrick’s Army (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1903). Copies of this collection of speeches are “extravagantly rare”. (Only three institutional libraries appear to have copies of the first edition, published in the same year.) If you happen to stumble across this black tulip – stranger things have happened, I like to tell myself – remember that it could sell for $150,000. As the Harrington copy just did.
Forum Auctions continues its gradual sale of the Fox Pointe Manor Library next week, on January 31. This is a fifth instalment from the mighty collection of English books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on diverse subjects, that was built up over several decades by Linda and Howard Knohl. (There’s probably a less whacky source of information about the Knohls out there, but for starters there’s this manic homage to Howard Knohl, who died last year.) This time round, the highlights include Poems by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death (London: printed by M. F. for John Marriot, 1633) – the first collected edition of John Donne’s poems, that is, a little water-stained and soiled, estimated to sell for £9,000–11,000. Estimated in the same range, at £7,000–10,000, is the first edition of another title in which Donne figures: a copy of Coryats Crudities (London: [William Stansby], 1611). Forum’s summary of this remarkable anthology is worth a glance, I think:
[Thomas] Coryate (?1577–1617) studied at Oxford without taking a degree and ended up at the court of James I, where he gained considerable popularity as a wit and buffoon. He used money inherited from his father to travel, setting off in 1608 and visiting some 45 cities in 7 countries in 5 months on foot, by cart, boat and horse. It is reckoned he covered almost 2,000 miles, over half of which was accomplished in one pair of shoes, mended only once and, on his return, hung up in the church at Odcombe in Somerset (his place of birth), where they remained for over a century.
Despite his achievements, he found it difficult to get the account of his journeys published and so appealed to all he knew to write commendatory verses about himself and the book. Among the more than 60 contributors of mock-heroic verse were Ben Jonson (acrostic on b4), John Donne, Inigo Jones, George Chapman and Michael Drayton.
At the other end of the scale, price-wise, I see a copy of James Wallace’s Account of the Islands of Orkney (London: Jacob Tonson, 1700), complete with a “folding engraved map”, estimated at £100–150; and prophesied to go for the same sort of price, a late edition of William Wycherley’s comedy Love in a Wood, or, St James’s Park (London: Henry Herringman, 1694). Such volumes are made to seem modest in relation to the most scarce volumes gathered by the Knohls (not mention the Forbeses and the Peloses of this world). But in the context of another collection, in the future, perhaps they will tell a different story altogether.
So many wonderful links to follow. I love the book as an object - so I love bindings, illuminations, illustrations and that sort of thing. I'm not a collector, but I try to buy beautiful books when I can, even if it's only pretty J.M. Dent editions. If I *could* buy an entire library like the ones you mention, I think the Library of Robin de Beaumont that's selling next week at Bonham's would be a good start!