The Bookstall
By T. R. GLOVER.
FROM time to time, for a good century now, books have appeared that have dealt most readably with the amenities of book-collecting. Sometimes it has been the collector, sometimes the bookseller who has told of his lucky finds (or sales) and gossiped cheerily of other collectors and of authors, of first editions and auto- graphed books and " association books " ; and some- times a sidelight is thrown on the history of literature, or of English taste, fashion or fancy as it may be. The gossip is very pleasant, and if it is not supreme literature, it is at least as interesting as the sports gossip that other books and all newspapers lavish upon us—and perhaps as valuable.
A book to be interesting—so says A. Edward Newton, the writer of one of the most charming of these confessions —must be at least second-hand. In other words, a real part of a book is its marginalia and its fly-leaf. The famous author has a tremendous handicap over his modern competitor ; so many people have quoted him, have used him, have loved him, that his book is not merely his own story but has human history written into it. So with the second-hand book. Millions of them are nothing at all, and here on a sudden comes one trailing clouds of glory, and the bookstall is lit up with it. You see, as William Bateson, the biologist, once said of David's famous bookstall in Cambridge market place, that to haunt it is n liberal education. Is that nonsense ? Thirty years of it, and hundreds of thousands of books to handle at leisure. Well, an American scholar has sug- gested that the reader who has no second-hand bookshop becomes uncritical.
Here pause. One thing that strikes the English visitor in the New World is the poverty of the towns (outside Boston and New York) in bookshops. Of course, there is the drugstore with its dollar line, and that enemy of - authors and booksellers alike, the Book of the Month Club. Let us take a famous instance. A well-known book on Arabia was published (with shrewd if subdued trumpet notes from publisher and perhaps author) in this country at thirty shillings. The American firm that " handled " it offered it to the Book of the Month Club. Not at seven and a half dollars (30s. then), said the astute managers ; but at three dollars we will take sixty thous- and. So three dollars was the price for the world, and now you can have it new, on a smaller page, from the same plates, at a dollar in the drugstore. Month by month, sixty thousand readers or more, headed away from the bookshop, their reading selected for them kle schoolchildren l A friend of Longfellow's once said that the weakness of American letters was the lack of " leaf- mould." Culture, said Matthew Arnold (and was duly criticized for it), is acquaintance with the best that has been said. How can you have culture without back- ground ? All art, it has been said, is co-operation. We do not know who " co-operated " with Homer ; but how Shakespeare and Cervantes gain when we know their antecedents 1 The history of our culture is to be found in the second. hand shops, if you will take the trouble. You need luck, of course ; but luck comes to those who are ready for it. Here is what we find : A volume of Erasmus in English, date 1548 ; his Commentary on St. Paul's Epistles ; on the Cambridge market place. Might one consult the University Library ? There proved to be there seven copies of the work, which represented five distinct settings of the type, all dated 1548 ; and the copy brought in was a different one again. What was the explanation ? It needs explaining. When Aldis Wright edited Bacon's Essays for the Golden Treasury Series he used the first edition ; but he added copy to copy till he had six, and he found differences in them that left no two alike. The explana- tion lies in the hand-press, and the ways and tastes of the time. When Mr. le Gallienne's first volume of poems came out, a friend reviewed it for a leading evening paper ; One of the sunniest volumes of the season," he said. He waited for his paper near the office, but—alas 1—the typographer had set up " funniest." He dashed in ; could it not be corrected ? No ; the machines could not be stopped for re-setting. Well,—it came to a moment's pause for each machine, and a chisel ; and the book was announced to the world as " one of the unniest of the season." A hand-press may turn out one " signature of a book to the number of 200 an hour ; a machine 2,200 ; and the old authors used their chance and worked in after-thoughts.
Editions count, as one need hardly say ; the first edition brings the writer so near you. Taken with the others it may give you a new light on him. The trans- actions of the Pickwick Club show that the Club met on May 12th, 1817 ; five pages later, Mr. Pickwick left Goswell Street on May 13th, 1827, and shortly met Mr. Jingle, who told him of his amazing adventures in the French Revolution of 1880. This was observed ; so the careful lawyers, Dodson and Fogg, dated their writ August 28th, 1880 ; and Pickwick and his friends changed the year of their adventures, only to enable Mr. Jingle to tell them in May of what he had done in the following July. When the volume came out, they went back to 1827 ; and when the series of novels was collected the dates were re-shuffled badly, and a note added to lay all the blame on " the prophetic force of Jingle's imagina- tion." But what with Buss and the uncertainty of the Wellers as to whether the inn-sign should spell the name with a " V " or a " W," the bibliography of Pickwick is a literature in itself.
But get your Pickwick or your Newcomes in parts, if you can afford it, with the advertisements ;. and you are in a new world. The binders cut them away. But here you are from The Newcomes, Part IV ; Mr. Jeffreys's Respirators ; that " important family medicine " Norton's camomile pills (three pages) ; Godfrey's extract of elder flowers (for a clear complexion) ; Simco's essence of linseed for influenza ; T. Madgwick's furniture (with pictures of it, gloriously Victorian, 1854) ; Sir Bulwer Lytton's novels newly added to a Railway Library of none but First Class Works (including Harris, Curling, Mrs. Crowe, Miss Goldsmid, and others) ; the Edinburgh Guardian, every Saturday morning ; How to keep a Horse ; the endless publications of Arthur Hall (Virtue and Co.) ; 'Phillips' tea, and a quiet page of A. and C. Black. Is there no history in that ? Do you not learn more from the advertisements of any American magazine than from any story or article in it—all about B.O. and Halitosis and bathrooms, the romance and realities of a great people's life ?
Quidquid agunt homines—and the second-hand counter tells you what they read, and how they thought ; what your grandfather and grandmother thought so won- derful, and how oddly your parent reacted to stuff as intolerable ; how wrong reviewers are, with their snorts of contempt for Lavengro and the unobtainable Romany Rye ; and how authors get back at their critics in second editions ; and what strange tastes collectors once had compared with our own better judgement. And then you will read bibliographies, and wonder with Dr. Geoffrey Keynes why bookbinders rage so furiously against half- titles, and he will tell you how to detect copies faked by evil booksellers.
And after that—for this is only beginning—well, it goes on for ever, and means a happy life.
Previous page
