A Passion for Books Page 17

  It is well known that some ten or twelve years ago Mr. Chew disposed of his library—the greater part of it, that is—to Mr. Huntington. The transaction was a difficult one; Mr. Huntington wanted the books, and Mr. Chew—getting on in years, and never a very rich man—thought that he could not afford to decline a liberal offer. After some delay, due to Mr. Chew’s reluctance to part with his books, the proposition was accepted; but when the hour of separation came, it was too much of a wrench. Mr. Chew, with tears in his eyes, went to Mr. Huntington and told him he could not bring himself to part with the volumes, but he said, “If ever I can bring myself to sell, I shall sell only to you.” Mr. Huntington was disappointed but understood Mr. Chew’s feeling and, fine gentleman that he is, instantly released Mr. Chew from his bargain. Several years passed; the books were becoming increasingly valuable; another offer was made—and accepted— and as Mr. Huntington handed Mr. Chew a very large check, he said, “And, Mr. Chew, I would gladly hand you a check for double the amount for your knowledge.” Such a compliment is twice blest: “It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” And taking a thought from Omar’s Rubaiyat, I often wonder what a man does with his money when he has exchanged his library for it. I know what Mr. Chew did: he at once began collecting again, and at the time of his death he had a small but very choice collection—he would have been the last to call it a library—for he could not live without books.

  A pretty story is told of Mr. Chew’s love for a rare book. Hearing that Mr. Huntington had secured two copies of the first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets with the two different imprints, he called upon him and asked for the privilege of holding the two books— they are perhaps two of the most valuable books in the language— in his hands at the same time, one in each hand. I would like to have had a photograph taken of him at this moment, but I have an excellent picture of him, looking at a copy of Herrick, one of his favorite books, the one I saw him examining when I was last with him in Geneva.

  Another story. During the last years of Mr. Chew’s life in New York it was his habit not to go downtown on Saturdays, but to spend the morning quietly among his books in his apartment in the Royalton; knowing this, it became my custom, when in New York on a Saturday, to call upon him. One morning we had spent several hours together when I suddenly remembered that Drake, the bookseller in Fortieth Street, had asked me to call to look at some books just in from London. So cutting my visit short, more especially as Mr. Chew too pleaded an engagement, with professions of mutual regard and regret we parted and I went at once to Drake’s. I had not been there more than ten minutes when in walked Mr. Chew; his engagement was the same as mine. We laughed heartily at each other and turned to the books. “Here is something you should buy, if you haven’t it,” said Mr. Chew, taking up a copy of Piers Plowman in old binding, calling attention to the corrected date, 1550. “But it is out of my line,” I replied. “It shouldn’t be,” said he. Then my eye chanced to light upon a copy of Blake’s Poetical Sketches, George Cumberland’s copy with his so-called bookplate, one of Blake’s last engravings, therein. “And you should have this,” I said, knowing that his copy had gone into the Huntington Library. Mr. Drake looked on with amusement. “Go to it, gentlemen; I cannot afford salesmen such as you”; and when a little later we left the shop to lunch together, I was the owner of Piers Plowman and Mr. Chew had a copy of Blake’s Poetical Sketches in his pocket.

  Looking back, one recollects that the year 1918 was a particularly pleasant one for book-buyers, and booksellers too. It saw the end of the war, money was plentiful, and several fine libraries were dispersed at Mitchell Kennerley’s Anderson Galleries. I have in mind especially the Hagen collection, sold in May, and the Herschel V. Jones library in December. There was a feeling of good-fellowship abroad, and after these sales a group of us were wont to forgather at the Plaza around a well-spread table, there to fight our battles o’er again. Mr. Chew, who would always be invited to join these parties, was an old friend of Mr. Hagen, and had written an introduction to his sale catalogue, and was especially interested in the sale of his library. In the introduction he had written: “If I were asked what is the scarcest item in the sale, I should unhesitatingly say that charming little volume containing four of the poems of John Skelton, Poet Laureate to King Henry VII. Two of these little booklets were in the Hoe library, but this lot of four from the Locker library is probably unique.” It was not often that Mr. Chew would give a “tip” on a book, but this was a sure thing, and the item realized just a trifle short of ten thousand dollars. The high prices pleased but did not surprise him. “They will go higher still,” he said. At both of these sales I bought—for me—largely, being guided, as far as my means would allow, by Mr. Chew’s judgment. Once again I record that my extravagances were investments, and my economies proved to be a willful waste of money.

  Our friend is gone, if any man can die,

  Who lived so pure a life, whose purpose was so high.

  When his will was opened, it was found that Mr. Chew had followed in the steps of the great French collector Edmond de Goncourt, who left instructions that his drawings, his prints, his curiosities, his books—in a word, all those things which had been the joy of his life—should not be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum, to be subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by; but required that they should be dispersed under the hammer of the auctioneer, so that the pleasure which the acquiring of them had given him should in turn be given someone of his own taste.

  Thus to his friend Mitchell Kennerley, the president of the Anderson Galleries, passed—for sale—Mr. Chew’s entire collection, with the exception of four paintings: his portraits of Ben Jonson by Gerard Honthorst, Pope and Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and a pastel of Dryden by Edward Lutterel; and his fine collection of German, Dutch, and Flemish silver bindings, of which he had some fifty or more specimens; these he bequeathed to the Grolier Club. No doubt he felt, and correctly, that there they would receive the same loving care that they had in his own library and would serve to link his name with those of other benefactors of the Club, which is the most important, successful, and authoritative book-club in the world. Long may it continue to flourish!

  When the announcement was made that Mr. Chew’s library would be sold, the book-collecting world was agog. What books had he, and what would they fetch? I knew pretty well what I wanted and had made up my mind to pay the price. Someday I shall write a paper on the psychology of the auction room: such curious things happen there. Important items are frequently almost given away; occasionally they bring more than they are worth. Who can tell why? At last the expected evening came; the sale was well attended.

  First let me say that an important book sale in New York is very different from a similar event in London. In London it is hardly apt to be a thrilling affair, no matter how important the items. At Sotheby’s the auctioneer stands or sits in a large pulpit, while in front of him is a long, narrow table, one end of which abuts upon the pulpit, while ranged on each side of the table are the important members of “the trade,” as the booksellers are always called. The book, if it be an important one, is handed by the auctioneer’s assistant to the first man on the right-hand side, who glances at it and passes it to his next neighbor, who also looks at it and passes it on. At the end of the table it crosses over to the man on the left and gradually makes its way back to the auctioneer, who then knocks it down to the highest bidder with as much enthusiasm as though he were selling a cabbage. Enthusiasm is never good form in England. But let us assume that the knock-out is in operation, as it may well be, and that an outsider, a collector, seeing an item bringing half what it is worth, ventures to bid. His bid will be accepted, of course, but instantly there is competition: someone in the trade will bid quietly but persistently against the outsider until either he drops out or the book is his at three times what it is worth. He has made his experience; if he has secured the treasure, he is likely to hate himself and it; if he has lost it, the booksel
lers are likely to hate him; in any event he is unlikely to bid again. “The trade” is a ring, and a ring is something which has neither beginning nor end.

  A book auction in New York is a very different affair: it may well be a social event, a game in which you may join, if you think you have the skill; but remember that here, too, you are playing against professionals. An amateur swordsman with a broomstick may be able to disconcert a professional with a rapier, but the chances are against it. My own plan, after years of experience, is to give my bids to the particular bookseller most likely to buy, for stock or for a client, the item that I especially covet. For example, if an item like Robinson Crusoe is coming up, to free myself from Dr. Rosenbach’s competition I will give my bid to him with the highest limit I am willing to pay. He in turn will have to outbid Lathrop Harper and Walter Hill and Gabriel Wells. If, on the other hand, I want a Songs of Childhood by Walter Ramal, De la Mare’s first book of poems and now much sought—or A Shropshire Lad—a slender volume which brought over two hundred dollars at Anderson’s not long since, whereas I paid only one hundred and thirty for mine less than a year ago—I would give my bid to James F. Drake and take my chance with Rosy. If then, having secured the good will of the trade, some little odds and ends come up of no special importance, I do not hesitate to bid myself. But an important item I would never attempt to buy myself; and I have seen thousands of dollars spent uselessly by persons giving important commissions to the wrong agent.

  But this is a digression. On the first evening of the Chew sale the room was crowded; all the leading booksellers and many distinguished librarians and collectors were there. I noticed many ladies, particularly Miss Greene and Miss Thurston representing the Pierpont Morgan library, Miss Granniss of the Grolier Club, and Miss Henrietta Bartlett. A few hours before the sale began Mitchell Kennerley received a telegram from the erstwhile collector Mr. Jones of Minneapolis, reading: “I shall attend the Chew sale not to buy but to pay my respects to a great collector”; the same spirit, I fancy, prompted other collectors to attend. Frank B. Bemis of Boston was there, but I did not see him bidding, and it was not until the sale was over that we exchanged confidences and I learned that several important items would find a resting-place in his lovely home on the North Shore.

  Who shall say what a book is worth? I suppose there cannot be a better criterion than the price paid. A Paradise Lost in original binding attracted much attention. The volume had a famous pedigree and had a pencil note dated September 6, 1857, written on the fly leaf by a former owner, Sir M. Digby Wyatt, which read: “This edition is the first and has the first title-page; it is worth nearly £10 and is rapidly rising in value.” It certainly is: it brought the record price, fifty-six hundred dollars. Mr. Chew had bought the volume from Quaritch not many years ago for fifteen hundred. I was glad to see a first Robinson Crusoe, three volumes, original binding, a fine copy but in no way better than my own, bring fifty-three hundred and fifty dollars, while a Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience, for which Mr. Chew paid seventeen hundred and fifty dollars, brought also the record price for that item, fifty-five hundred dollars. The Cumberland copy of Blake’s Poetical Sketches, which I sold him that day at Drake’s for four hundred and fifty dollars, brought nine hundred; while a copy of Piers Plowman, quite as good as the copy he sold me on the same occasion, brought two-thirds less than the price I paid, thus confirming a belief that I have long had: that the tendency in the New York auction rooms is for star items to bring more and less important items frequently to bring less than they are worth. By a fluke I lost a superb first edition of Hudibras in three volumes, in original calf, which I had intended to buy, and I discovered later that this desired item went to Jerome Kern; I congratulate him upon its acquisition.

  Nevertheless, my “bag” was satisfactory, if not splendid; I especially wanted and secured Hooke’s Amanda. It is an excessively scarce little volume of poems published “by a gentleman of Trinity College in Cambridge” in 1653 and perhaps owes its vogue among collectors to the lines in Andrew Lang’s “Ballade of the Bookman’s Paradise”:

  There treasures bound for Longpierre

  Keep brilliant their morocco blue,

  There Hooke’s Amanda is not rare,

  Nor early tracts upon Peru!

  I had seen this identical copy sold years ago at the Hoe sale, and since that time only one other copy has come upon this market. I also bought, through “Rosy,” a fine Chapman’s Homer dedicated “To the Imortal Memorie of the Incomparable Heroe, Henrye Prince of Wales”—my “royal book-collector,” the edition which suggested to Keats his famous sonnet; a large paper Killigrew with the fine portrait, which Mr. Chew and I have so often admired; and a little Coryat, Greeting to His Friends in England, which I have long searched for. These, with a few pick-ups of no great importance, constituted my lot. It seems rather curious to see them in my own library; although I paid for them promptly, I have observed that it usually takes some time for an old book to become accustomed to new surroundings.

  When a book-collector dies and his books are disposed of, that ends the matter—except in memory. I have referred to Mr. Chew as “the last of his race”; this is not strictly so. There yet remains one, the last leaf, so to speak, on the noble tree which in its prime was so splendid. I refer to my friend Mr. W. A. White of Brooklyn: he yet remains to us. He is a more distinguished collector than Mr. Chew, and perhaps a better scholar, but his influence has not been so great. He is known the world over for his Blakes, but—with a few other outstanding volumes—chiefly for his Elizabethans. When in 1916, the three hundredth anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, the Public Library of New York determined to keep the event by an exhibition of books by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, a superb exhibition was made. Miss Bartlett, an undoubted authority on the subject, had the matter in charge, and not everyone then knew that the exhibit was, in effect, a case or two of books from the library of Mr. White. He is so modest, so retiring, so seemingly the scholar, that no one would suspect he is a man of large business interests, yet ever and always ready to place himself, his knowledge, and his library at the disposal of those truly interested in his subject. With his passing, the second and greatest era in American book-collecting will come to an end—an era in which, no doubt, the honored name of Pierpont Morgan ranks highest, as the recent gift by his son of the great library formed by the father so abundantly proves.

  Mr. Huntington yet remains to us, but he is not an individual; already he is an institution, and a noble one. Since he began collecting a few years ago, he has bought twenty million dollars’ worth of books and given them away—to the State of California—“therefore of him no speech.” If nowhere else in the world do we find such fortunes as in America, certain it is that nowhere else are these fortunes so immediately and freely shared with the public.

  A new generation of book-collectors is in the making: the names of William Andrew Clark, Jr., R. B. Adam, Frank B. Bemis, Jerome Kern, Carl Pforzheimer, J. A. Spoor, J. L. Clawson, and others, occur to me. I hope, I earnestly hope, that they and others like them will keep alight the torch of learning—bibliographical and other— which, if not originally lit, was for so many years kept aglow by Beverly Chew and kindred spirits of the Grolier Club.

  Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries . . . and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

  —THOMAS B. MACAULAY

  The Perfect Book

  BY WILLIAM KEDDIE

  The Foulis’s editions of classical works were much praised by scholars and collectors in the nineteenth century. The celebrated Glasgow publishers once attempted to issue a book which should be a perfect specimen of typographical accuracy. Every precaution was taken to secure the desired result. Six experienced proof-readers were employed, who devoted hours to the reading of each page; and after it was thought to be perfect, it was posted up in the hall of the university, with a not
ification that a reward of fifty pounds would be paid to any person who could discover an error. Each page was suffered to remain two weeks in the place where it had been posted, before the work was printed, and the printers thought that they had attained the object for which they had been striving. When the work was issued, it was discovered that several errors had been committed, one of which was in the first line of the first page.

  Books Are the Windows of the Soul

  BY HENRY WARD BEECHER

  Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows. No man has the right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices. Let us pity these poor rich men who live barrenly in great bookless houses! Let us congratulate the poor that, in our day, books are so cheap that a man may every year add a hundred volumes to his library for the price which his tobacco and his beer would cost him. Among the earliest ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen, and, indeed, among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, is that of forming and continually adding to a library of good books. A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.

  How Reading Changed My Life

  BY ANNA QUINDLEN