Gothic disregard!
Motives for collecting; and calling cards in books
Why collect books?
If you do collect books, that is. (And perhaps trying to answer that question will bring such activities to a juddering halt.) I ask because I’m not sure of the answer myself, and have been weighing up some alternatives.
I’m writing this first newsletter of 2024, incidentally, amid the evidence of my own unfortunate mania for books about books (my meta-bibliomania?). The books in question being: two volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Time’s Witness: History in the age of Romanticism by Rosemary Hill. Essays and Papers by A. N. L. Munby (“I am incurable book-collector and have haunted the antiquarian bookshops for forty-five years”). Thomas Frognall Dibdin: Bibliographer and bibliomaniac extraordinary 1776–1847 by E. J. O’Dwyer.
Such books that can’t help but witter at one another. Time’s Witness suggests that the Reverend Dibdin (“Dibden” at first) “may have coined” the term “bibliomania”. Not so, says O’Dwyer: Dibdin himself acknowledges in the opening pages of his book Bibliomania (1809; second, vastly edition 1811) that Dr John Ferriar, a Scottish physician and poet, got there first. (Other Bibliomanias are available, such as the sensational early story by Flaubert; my own Bibliomania takes inspiration from all of them.)
If Dr Ferriar (or Ferrier) was confessing (in his poem Bibliomania, also 1809) to a disease he’d caught himself, he wasn’t the only medical man who could have done so. Richard Mead, William Hunter and Hans Sloane all preceded him, as one of those Cambridge volumes informs me. All kinds of people were succumbing as, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the trade in rare books responded to demand and grew in sophistication.
Yet a “Bibliomaniac” of 1831 could still complain that manuscripts were being “literally thrown to the dunghill” after failing to sell at an auction in Ipswich.
Nothing is much more to be regretted than such a gothic disregard to the interests of literature, unless it be the selfish and narrowminded principle of exclusion, which renders many valuable and interesting collections either inaccessible, or what is tantamount to it, only to be obtained through such cringing servility and teasing importunity as few men of real genius or talents can descend to practise.1
That fuming phrase about “gothic disregard” sets up the collecting of books as a “self-consciously modern occupation” (in the words of David McKitterick). “Knowledge of editions, of literary history and of rarity” were essential acquirements; the swipe at “narrowminded . . . exclusion”, I’d add, implies that a civil sense of community, or at least intellectual dialogue, was ideally to be incorporated into the modern, bibliophilic formula.
In this hifalutin scenario, collecting books becomes a matter of cultural survival and enrichment – a project that sounds both awfully lofty and straightforwardly useful. It belongs to a period in which the “antiquarian book collector was . . . commonly depicted as making a valuable contribution to the preservation of literature and learning for the benefit of society as a whole” – and more broadly speaking “the commodification of the literary past had reached a new level of maturity and sophistication”, through anthologies, cheap reprints and the like. “Bibliomania was thus symptomatic of a much broader process of cultural change in Romantic Britain”, Peter Connell writes; and Dibdin’s Bibliomania represents that phenomenon in “complex, contradictory” ways.2
Around that same period, however, book-collecting was also gaining a reputation as a noticeably dubious passion. The duc de La Vallière (1708–1780) bought entire libraries with a regularity that also led him to sell off books at a high rate – as many as 20,000 books a year had to go, according to one source. William Beckford (1760–1844) bought Edward Gibbon’s library, among many other extravagant acquisitions, and apparently attempted to read it “in a marathon session lasting several days”. Beckford was “still ordering books from his death-bed”.3 Richard Heber (1773–1833), the addressee of both Dr Ferriar’s and Dibdin’s Bibliomanias, ended up with at least 150,000 books (the total has also been put at 200,000 books), spread over eight different houses; and like Beckford it seems that he did read, or try to read, an impressive number of them.
One more for now: Antoine Marie Henri Boulard (1754–1825), to whom quantity apparently mattered more than quality. A jurist and translator, Boulard was rich enough to give up his office in order to devote himself to voracious book-hunting. “He had his tailor make him a special coat with many pockets, each a specific size for various books – octavo, quarto and folio.”
His wife suspected some love affair, perhaps with a tenant in one of her husband’s houses, and sent the maid after him to spy. The girl reported that her employer remained for hours in one house, always the same one. Madame Boulard hurried there to wrest her poor husband from the claws of some bad woman. She found no tenants, not to mention tenantesses; the house, however, was stuffed from top to bottom with books.
You get the idea. Boulard might even have died of bibliomania, since he caught pneumonia after one particularly exhausting session lumping books around. He ended up with 800,000 of the things – mostly folios. And what happened to them? “One hundred and fifty thousand were sold to grocers for paper-bags” (just one step up from the dunghill). The rest were auctioned, after five years of cataloguing.4
These are extreme cases – not, perhaps, the kind that led Nicholas A. Basbanes to identify book-collecting as a “gentle madness”. (John Carter, another authority on the subject, goes a little further, defining a bibliomaniac as “a book-collector with a slightly wild look in his eye”.) Such excesses might have been difficult to frame as valuable contributions to society.
Why collect books? Returning to the question now I’ve got the bibliomaniac cases out of the way, one possible comparison comes to mind: between collecting and writing.
In an essay of ten years ago, Joyce Carol Oates suggested five motives for writing: commemoration (“identical, for me, with setting”); bearing witness; self-expression; propaganda or “moralizing”; and “aesthetic object” (“Writing as purely gestural”).5 Qualifications ensue, although maybe not enough of them – aren’t the first and third motives here closely linked, as are the second and fourth? – but there may be some similarities here with motives for collecting books. Collecting can be a means of commemorating a particular place, time or culture. Witness and moral purpose might be seen as a driving force for a collector such as Lord William Howard of Cumberland (1563–1640), whose library exposes a deep commitment to Catholicism in a time of religious persecution.6 And so on.
This approach doesn’t seem so far removed from that of another essay written around the same time, this time by the poet and academic Catharine Savage Brosman, called “Four Modes of Book Collecting”.7
Brosman begins with book dealers who are also collectors – an unnamed husband and wife whose stock has taken over their flat.
Crates of books are stacked on the stairs (theirs is the top floor, and the staircase leading to their door is used by no one else), in the hallway, on the floor elsewhere; shelves line the walls of the sitting room and adjoining dining room, where one cannot dine, the table groaning with heavy tomes instead of food (we always ate out); there are piles on end tables and footstools, a few in the loo, and many in the back exit intended for fire emergencies but nearly obstructed. Probably the kitchen contains boxes and shelves, though I’ve never seen that part of the flat. The visitor steps cautiously, as if playing hopscotch. One even sits with care, since the sofa and chairs likewise sport volumes that seem to have migrated there, looking for comfort. The impression one receives is quite the opposite of that, say, in Bauman Rare Books in Manhattan, a beautifully arranged shop, where you have only to mention a title that interests you and an elfin clerk is ready with a ladder to get it . . .
Next comes Brosman’s grandfather, a physician whose reading led to the purchase of thousands of volumes, the process accelerating after his retirement, their range eclectic. Brosman’s husband has “a bit of bibliomania in him”: “He has professed never to have discarded a book when he was young . . . When he gives away a work from his library, it is a second or third copy”. He has twenty-nine bookcases, and “there are numerous dealers who solicit his custom”.
The author herself is a collector in a fourth, “erratic” mode: that of a scholar (in French literature), well served by a university library, but given to bouts of book-buying, all the same. She is fond of her many Gallimards, despite their deterioration (“the spines are illegible, if not missing, the covers are torn or lost, pages have fallen out, and the paper has yellowed, nay, turned brown and, in some cases, brittle”). Nostalgia is at play here. “Paul Valéry’s poems are better printed by far in the Pléiade edition and have notes (the editors’ and my own).” “To reread them there”, however, “with my early glosses on difficult words and, among other marginalia, Professor M.’s remarks summarized, is to return briefly to student years, to see again through the wondering eyes of the uninitiated. How else can I read Charmes again for the first time?”
Next time someone asks you why you’re hanging on to your old books, maybe quote Brosman’s answer at them.
Calling and collecting
William Blake, “Calling card” (N. p.: n. d.), $795
Tenuously apropos bookplates, as mentioned last week: among the new arrivals at John Windle Antiquarian Books is listed the notable item pictured above. It’s not exactly or certainly a bookplate, but an “enigmatic version” of Blake’s last engraving.
Blake designed this image in 1827, the year of his death, for his friend and fellow artist George Cumberland. The location of the original plate is unknown and copies are “quite rare in commerce” (and Mr Windle should know, having long specialized in the works of William Blake, and offered a “Cumberland cards” in a Blake catalogue twenty years ago). This particular copy is pasted into a much later book – one given by the Blake authority Geoffrey Keynes to the poet and academic Robin Skelton – John Hayward’s English Poetry: A descriptive catalogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the National Book League, 1947). The bookseller’s listing offers a persuasive theory explaining how this copy of the Cumberland card got there, as well as what it really is.
Of the original Cumberland card, Windle also notes:
Opinions vary on the purpose of this plate but it should be noted that at the time (1827) it was not uncommon to paste a calling card into a book as proof of ownership. However, no book once owned by Cumberland has been located with his card pasted in.
I admit that this is not a phenomenon to which I’ve devoted a great deal of thought, even by my rather low standards. Those who dabble in books published in the great age of calling cards must find examples of them pasted against marbled endpapers often enough; at present there are several examples on the market, some of them seemingly quite new to it.
There is the “very rare” copy of Jack London’s card, signed and dated, pasted into a first edition copy of John Barleycorn (New York: Century, 1913), beneath the author’s lupine bookplate. Knut Hamsun’s card sits above a reader’s bookplate in a copy of Hamsun’s tenebrous Chapter the Last (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929). Edith Roosevelt gave a copy of Alphonse Daudet’s Souvenirs d’un Homme de Lettres (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, n. d.) to her husband’s friend and fellow politican Henry Cabot Lodge with a card inscribed “Dear Cabot I hope you will care to read a very unprofitable little book”. And The History of Hyder Shah, alias Hyder Ali Khan Bahadur: And of his son, Tippoo Sultaun (London: W. Thacker, 1855), with the card of Tipu Sultan’s son and heir Prince Gholam Mohammed Sultan of Calcutta proudly pasted in.
It’s especially fine to learn that the calling card of the Dutch journalist and resistance fighter Jean Lenglet is pasted into a copy of his autobiographical novel Barred (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932). Published under the pseudonym Edward de Néve, this work has a slightly hazy history, but it purports to record to Lenglet’s experiences in prison. It is, nonetheless, a book said to be “essentially or almost completely rewritten” by his wife, Jean Rhys. Who presumably didn’t have a calling card of her own . . .
Quoted in David McKitterick, “Second-hand and old books”, pp. 635–673, in David McKitterick, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume VI: 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 635.
Philip Connell, “Bibliomania: Book collecting, cultural politics, and the rise of literary heritage in Romantic Britain”, Representations , Summer 2000, No. 71 (Summer, 2000), pp. 24-47, 27ff.
Richard Landon, “Collecting and the antiquarian book trade”, pp. 711–722, in Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and Michael L. Turner, eds. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 720.
Max Sander, “Bibliomania”, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep.–Oct., 1943), pp. 155–161, 160–1.
Joyce Carol Oates, “This I Believe: Five motives for writing”, The Kenyon Review, New Series, Fall 2014, Vol. 36. No. 4, pp. 3–7.
See Martha W. Driver, “Morgan MS M. 956 and an Important Early Collector”, pp. 381–404 in The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, edited by Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal and John Scahill (Cambridge D. S. Brewer and Tokyo: Yushodo Press, 2004).
Catharine Savage Brosman, “Four Modes of Book Collecting”, The Sewanee Review, Fall 2012, Vol. 120, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 537–545.