It is said of the elder Wertheimer that, when some one expressed his astonishment at the price which he had given for an item, and even insinuated his want of wisdom, he retorted pleasantly that he might be a fool, but he thought that he knew greater ones than himself.
Do we not under existing conditions view with too uncharitable sentiments the marvellous good fortune of the book-hunters of the last century, at the very outset of a revival of the taste for our own vernacular literature? Does it not seem tantalising to hear that Warton the historian could pick up for sixpence a volume containing Venus and Adonis, 1596, and seven other precious morçeaux, off a broker's counter in Salisbury, when the British Museum gave at the Daniel sale £336 for the Shakespeare alone? What a thrill passes through the veins, as we read of Rodd the bookseller meeting at a marine store-shop on Saffron Hill, somewhere about the thirties, with a volume of Elizabethan tracts, and having it weighed out to him at threepence three-farthings! Our space is far more limited than such anecdotes; but they all strike us as pointing the same moral. If one happens on a Caxton or a quarto Shakespeare to-day for a trifle, it is the isolated ignorance of the possessor which befriends one. But till the market came for these things, the price for what very few wanted was naturally low; and an acquirer like George Steevens, Edward Capell, or Edmond Malone was scarcely apt to feel the keen gratification on meeting with some unique find that a man would now do, seeing that its rarity was yet unascertained, and even had it been so, was not likely to awaken much sensation.
Low prices do not alone establish cheapness. Cheap books are those which are obtained by accident under the current value. In the time of the later Stuarts, Narcissus Luttrell found from one penny to sixpence sufficient to satisfy the shopkeepers with whom he dealt for some of the most precious volumes in our language; and a shilling commanded a Caxton. The Huths of those days could not lay out their money in these things; they had to take up the ancient typography in the form of the classics, or large-paper copies of contemporary historians, or the publications of Hearne.
We do not know that the celebrated Chevalier D'Eon was singular in his views as a collector in the last century. He bought in chief measure, if we may judge from a document before us, what we should now term nondescripts, and in the aggregate gave a very handsome price at a London auction in 1771 for an assemblage of items at present procurable, if any one wanted them, at a far lower rate. There is not a lot throughout which would recommend itself to modern taste, save the Cuisinier François, and perhaps that was not in the old morocco livery considered by judges as de rigueur. We append the auctioneer's account entire, because it exhibits a fair example of the class of book which not only Frenchmen, but ourselves, sought at that time more than those for which we have long learned to compete, and which were then offered under the hammer by the bundle, if not by the basketful. For £8, 4s., a hundred and twenty-five years ago, how many quarto Shakespears could one have acquired?
| £ | s. | d. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Catalogus Librorum MSS. Angl. et Hibern | 0 | 7 | 6 |
| Index Librorum Bibliothecæ Barberinæ, 2 vols. | 0 | 10 | 6 |
| Reading Catal. Lib. in Collegio Sionensi | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| Le Long, Bibliothèque Hist. de la France | 0 | 9 | 0 |
| Voyage Literaire de deux Religieux Benedictins | 0 | 5 | 0 |
| Histoire de Demelez de la Cour de France | 0 | 2 | 6 |
| Memoires sur le Rang entre les Souv. de l'Europe, &c. | 0 | 2 | 6 |
| Discours Politiques sur Tacite, par Josseval | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Dictionnaire Mathematique, par Ozanam | 0 | 5 | 0 |
| Dictionnaire Practique du Bon Menager de Campagne, par Liger, 2 vols. | 0 | 6 | 0 |
| Leland agt. Bolingbroke's Study of History | 0 | 2 | 0[23] |
| Mutel's Causes of the Corruption of Christians | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Bindon on Commerce | 0 | 2 | 6 |
| Essay on Money, Trade, War, Banks, &c. | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| England's Gazetteer, 3 vols. | 0 | 7 | 6 |
| Halifax's Advice to a Daughter | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Tresor de la Pratique de Medecine, 3 vols. | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| Seneque de la Consolation de la Mort | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Tacite (la Morale de) par Houssaie | 0 | 1 | 6 |
| Tite Live reduit en Maximes | 0 | 1 | 0 |
|
Gracien l'Homme
|