: The Book-Hunter at Home by Allan P B M Philip Bertram Murray - Book collecting Bibliomania

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ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS

'Thou shalt make castels thanne in Spayne.'

CHAUCER.

IT is a sad truth that bargains are met with more frequently in our youth than in our age. The sophist may argue that age begets philosophy, and that philosophy contemns all worldly things; yet certain it is that the book-hunter, one of the most philosophical of beings, remains on the look-out for bargains to the very end of his career. Nevertheless, it is a fact that in youth alone do we make those great bargains which lay the foundations of our careers as book-hunters.

It is this sad truth which fosters in most of us the belief that we live in a decadent age, and that the days of our youth were infinitely more seemly than those which we now endure. But it is we who have changed: the bargains are still there, and may still be had at the cost of youthful energy and enthusiasm.

'Ah, but you can't get the bargains nowadays that you could when I was a young man,' says the elderly bookseller, with a knowing shake of his head. Can't you! Then mankind must have changed strangely since the period of this sage's youth. Bargains, and rich ones too, in everything that is bought and sold, are made every day and will continue to be made so long as human nature endures, bargains in books no less among them.

The chief reason why the elderly bookseller no longer comes across these advantageous purchases is that he has passed the age at which bargains are to be had. But bargains are not encountered, they are made. It is the youthful vigour and enthusiasm of the young collector, prompting him into the byways and alleys of book-land, that bring bargains to his shelves.

Bargains, forsooth! Our book-hunter was once outbid at Sotheby's for a scarce volume which he found, a week later, on a barrow in Clerkenwell for fourpence! The same year he picked up for ten shillings, in London, an early sixteenth-century folio, rubricated and with illuminated initials. It was as fresh as when it issued from the press, and in the original oak and pig-skin binding. He failed to trace the work in any of the bibliographies, nor could the British Museum help him to locate another copy. David's stall at Cambridge once yielded to him a scarce Defoe tract for sixpence. But this being, as Master Pepys said, 'an idle rogueish book,' he sold it to a bookseller for two pounds, 'that it might not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found.' A copy has recently fetched twenty guineas.

Doubtless every bibliophile is perpetually on the look-out for treasures, and it is essential that he learn, early in his career, to make up his mind at once concerning an out-of-the-way book. He who hesitates is lost, and this is doubly true of the book-collector. More than once in his early days of collecting has our book-hunter hesitated and finally left a book, only to dash back--perhaps a few hours later, perhaps next day--and find it gone.

Once upon a time a spotlessly clean little square octavo volume of Terence, printed in italics, caught his eye upon a bookstall. One shilling was its ransom, but it was not the price that deterred him so much as the fact that every available nook and corner of his sanctum was already filled to overflowing with books. 'A nice clean copy of an early-printed book,' he mused. But early-printed books were not in his line--then; had they been in those early days of book-hunting, his library would have been slow indeed of growth. So he passed on and left it.

Next morning he awoke sane and conscious of his folly. An early visit to the bookstall followed, but the little volume had gone; and it was not comforting to learn that it had been sold shortly after our bookman saw it, to a man who 'knew a lot about that kind of books.' Let us hope that the purchaser treasures the little square volume, printed in italics, as much as our friend would.

For many years he had searched in vain for that rarest of all English heraldry books , the 'De Studio Militari, Libri Quatuor' of Master Nicholas Upton. It was edited by Sir Edward Bysshe, and printed in folio at London in 1654. The numerous booksellers in London and the country from whom he sought it had never seen it; indeed, most of them were unaware of its existence, though it is well known to all heralds.

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