Bibliomania In France Circa. 1892; Books and Bookmen, A Story About Collecting

BIBLIOMANIA CIRCA 1892 - THE OVERVIEW FROM A VICTORIAN ISSUE OF "BOOKS AND BOOKMEN"

I'VE WRITTEN MUCH ABOUT BOOK COLLECTING, BUT HERE'S A MUCH MORE LEARNED OPINION ON THE MATTER FROM ANOTHER CENTURY


     I've spent a good portion of my life, trying to reclaim history; as both an antique dealer and as an historian. Sometimes it's elusive and often, with some disappointment, I have to live with failure in this regard. The likelihood, I may never understand it, or come to own a portion of its antiquity. No matter how many times I might feel thwarted in these pursuits, I am never overwhelmed by the adventure, and will often move on to the next project, without a trace amount of remorse all the ends weren't tied-up. Of course, it means I don't give up either, believing that a day and time will come, when a greater clarity will exist, in order to re-activate my original mission. I've spent the same amount of time, hunting and gathering, in the company of many of our region's most ardent collectors, and veteran antique dealers, and shared openly, our mutual interests in certain periods of history, and physical antiquity. It happens you see, when you have to spend hours at auction and estate sales, to bid and pick through the large inventories of items placed for sale. When I write these blogs, based on antique hunting, for example, I do so as a Muskoka dealer, who has had good company from others in the profession for all these years; many still operating decades after we first met out on the hustings, trying to build unique and interesting inventories for our respective shops, or online sites (which many have resorted to in this modern era). We all have distinct specialities, (not to mention peculiarities) and our own shops reflect these interests. We network as much as possible, because although we're competitors in the business sense, we are collectors in heart, so there is an embedded sensitivity to help one another in the chase. They know my specialties are books, art and Muskoka memorabilia, and I am clearly aware that these collector / dealers, as an example, desire silver, china, vintage glass, pottery, Canadiana, primitives and old toys. We often sell to each other, and extend dealer courtesies frequently, to promote ongoing friendships amongst those, who admittedly, sometimes get lost, and turned around, in the history they love to explore. We are frequently reminded that there is strength in numbers, and how it never hurts to have friends in the profession, when old fashioned advice is needed.

     There is something so wonderfully alluring about the feel of a finely bound old book, when caressed by a bibliophile's outstretched fingers, that is almost impossible to relate, to someone who has no interest in books whatsoever. Antiquarian and rare books, released in the period of time its author was still writing, puts 'the possessor,' at that precise moment, in touch with the spirit of creativity, as it was generated from the printed word, and respectfully bound into a strikingly handsome text. There have been many times in my years working as a collector of old relics, that I had to choose between investing limited funds in books, or general antiques; and nine times out of every ten, as a young book buyer / seller, I would invest in the printed word as a good return for my money.
     I first became interested in books, because of my desire to write them as a budding author. I had a chance, as an editor, working for a small publisher in Muskoka, to see printing presses in action, putting an author's work into book form. I watched as our newspaper came off the giant presses, and never tired of following the process through to completion, when the weekly publication was ready for news-stands. I watched as printers worked the manual presses, at Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia, and fell in love with the print process generally, whether for newspapers, magazines, or for the publication of books. I have a written five so far, of modest proportion, without fancy binding, and have enjoyed many years of being published in newsprint in Canada. Writing and being published is addictive, without question. When it comes to collecting print heritage and antiquarian books, it comes rather naturally at this point; that seeing as I've been in print myself, for many years, I should want to acquire the creative and scholarly work of others. As a bibliophile, however, most of the books I purchase, are for their content, more so than their attractive packaging, or binding. There are many reasons to collect books, going back through the centuries, and here are a few examples, of what bibliophiles have, and continue to look for, in the books they most covet above all else.
     "The love of books for their own sake, for their paper, print, binding, and for their associations, as distinct from the love of literature, is a stronger and more universal passion in France than elsewhere in Europe. In England publishers are men of business; in France they aspire to be artists. In England people borrow what they read from the libraries, and take what gaudy cloth-binding chance chooses to send them. In France people buy books, and bind them to their heart's desire with quaint and dainty devices on the morocco covers. Books are lifelong friends in that country; in England they are the guests of a week or a fortnight." (""Books and Bookmen," by Andrew Lang, Longmans, Green & Co., 1892 - a new edition)

     "The greatest French writers have been collectors of curious editions; they have devoted whole treatises to the love of books. The literature and history of France are full of anecdotes of the good and bad fortunes of bibliophiles, of their bargains, discoveries, disappointments. There lies before us at this moment a small library of books about books - 'Bibliophile Francais,' in seven large volumes, 'Les Sonnets d'un Bibliophile,' 'La Bibliomanie en 1878,' and a dozen other works of Janin, Nodier, Beraldi, Picters, Didot, great collectors who have written for the instruction of beginners and the pleasure of every one who takes delight in printed paper," wrote Andrew Lang in his popular book, "Books and Bookmen," in the closing years of the Victorian era.
     "The passion for books, like other forms of desire, has its changes of fashion. It is not always easy to justify the caprices of taste. The presence or absence of half an inch of paper in the uncut margin of a book makes a difference of value, that ranges from five shillings to a hundred pounds. Some books are run after because they are beautifully bound; some are competed for with equal eagerness because they never have been bound at all. The uninitiated often make absurd mistakes about these distinctions. Some time ago the 'Daily Telegraph,' reproached a collector because his books were uncut, whence, argued the journalist, it was clear he had never read them. 'Uncut,' of course, only means that the margins have not been curtailed by the binder's plough. It is a point of sentiment to like books just as they left the hands of the old printers, of Estienne, Aldus, or Louis Elzevir.
     "It is because the passion for books is a sentimental passion that people who have not felt it, always fail to understand it. Sentiment is not an easy thing to explain. Englishmen especially find it impossible to understand tastes and emotions that are not their own; the wars of Ireland (till quite recently), the aspirations of Eastern Roumelia, the demands of Greece. If we are to understand the book hunter, we must never forget that to him books are, in the first place, relics. He likes to think that the great writers whom he admires, handled just such pages and saw such arrangement of type as he now beholds. Moliere, for example, corrected the proofs for this edition of the 'Precieuses Ridicules,' when he first discovered 'what a labour it is to publish a book, and how green an author is the first time they print him.' Or it may be that Campanella turned over, with hands unstrung, and still broken by the torture, these leaves that contain his passionate sonnets. Here again is the copy of Theocritus from which some pretty page may have been read aloud to charm the pagan and pontifical leisure of Leo X. The Gargantua is the counterpart of that which the martyred Dolet printed for (or pirated from, alas) Maitre Francois Rabelais. The woeful ballade with the woodcut of three thieves hanging from one gallows, came near being the 'Last Dying Speech and Confession of Francois Villon.' This shabby copy of 'The Eye of St. Agnes,' is precisely like that which Shelley doubled up, and thrust into his pocket when the prow of the piratical felucca crashed into the timbers of the Don Juan. Some rare books have these associations, and they bring you nearer to the authors than do the modern reprints. Bibliophiles will tell you that it is the early readings they care for, - the author's first fancies, and those more hurried expressions which he afterwards corrected. These readings have their literary value, especially in the masterpieces of the great; but the sentimental after all is the main thing."
     The author notes, "Other books come to be relics in another way. They are the copies which belonged to illustrious people, - to the famous collectors who make a kind of catena (a golden chain of bibliophiles) through the centuries since printing was invented. There are Grolier (1479-1565), - not a bookbinder, as an English newspaper supposed (probably when Mr. Sala was on his travels), - De Thou (1553-1617), the Great Colbert, the Duc de la Valliere (1708-1780), Charles Nodier, a man of yesterday, M. Didot, and the rest, too numerous to name." Mr. Lang adds to this, "Surely in all these things there is a human interest, and our fingers are faintly thrilled, as we touch these books, with the far-off contact of the hands of kings and cardinals, scholars and coquettes, pendants, poets and precicuses, the people who are unforgotten in the mob that inhabited dead centuries. So universal and ardent has the love of magnificent books been in France, that it would be possible to write a kind of bibliomaniac history of that country. All the rulers, kings, cardinals, and ladies have had time to spare for collecting. Without going too far back, to the time when Bertha span Charlemagne was an amateur, we may give a few specimens of an anecdotal history of the French biblioltary, beginning, as is courteous with a lady. 'Can a woman be a bibliophile?' is a question which was once discussed at the weekly breakfast party of Guilbert de Pixerecourt, the famous booklover and playwright, the "Corneille of the Boulevards.' The controversy glided into a discussion as to 'how many books a man can love at one time,' but historical examples prove that French women (and Italian, witness the Princess d'Este) may be bibliophiles of the true strain."
      Andrew Lang, in his book on "bookmen" and "women", writes that "when Napoleon became Emperor, he strove in vain to make the troubled and feverish years of his power produce a literature. He himself was one of the most voracious readers of novels that ever lived. He was always asking for the newest of the new, and, unfortunately, even the new romances of the period were hopelessly bad. Barbier, his librarian, had orders to send parcels of fresh fiction to his majesty wherever he might happen to be, and great loads of novels followed Napoleon to Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia. The conqueror was very hard to please. He read in his travelling carriage, and, after skimming a few pages, would throw a volume that bored him out of the window into the highway. He might have been tracked by his trail of romances, as was Hop-o-my-Thumb,' in the fairy tale, by the white stones he dropped behind him. Poor Barbier, who ministered to a passion for novels that demanded twenty volumes a day, was at his wit's end. He tried to foist on the Emperor the romances of the year before last; but these Napoleon had generally read, and he refused with imperial scorn, to look at them again. He ordered a travelling library of three thousand volumes to be made for him, but it was proved that the task could not be accomplished in less than six years. The expense, if only fifty copies of each example had been printed, would have amounted to more than six million francs. A Roman emperor would not have allowed these considerations to stand in his way; but Napoleon after all, was a modern. He contented himself with a selection of books, conveniently small in shape, and packed in sumptuous cases. The classical writers of france could never content Napoleon and even from Moscow, in 1812, he wrote to Barbier clamorous for new books and good ones."
     "Napoleon was the last of the book-lovers who governed France," wrote Andrew Lang in summation. He concluded his chapter on the Bibliophiles of France, by suggesting that, "Let the enthusiast, in conclusion, throw a handful of lilies on the grave of the martyr of the love of books, - the poet Albert Glatigny. Poor Glatigny was the son of a garde champetre; his education was accidental and his poetic taste and skill extraordinarily fine and delicate. In his life of starvation (he had often to sleep in omnibuses and railway stations), he frequently spent the price of a dinner on a new book. He lived to read and to dream, and if he bought books he had not the wherewithall to live. Still, he bought them, and he died! His own poems were beautifully printed by Lemerre, and it may be a joy to him, if he knows it, that they are now so highly valued that the price of a copy would have kept the author alive and happy for a month."
     My book collector colleague, David Brown, of Hamilton, was a case in point. He had such a mania for what he called "good" books, that he neglected his personal and residential needs, in order to finance his collecting passion. As his biographer, as he had appointed me, shortly before his death, I had a great deal of inside information on David Brown, that I didn't use, primarily because the book was mostly about Dave's years of service as an Outdoor Education Instructor; having mentored hundreds of thousands of regional students, over his long career in teaching. Dave's off-hours interest, was to pursue old books wherever he could find them, and this is where our paths crossed, at our former antique shop, on the main street of Bracebridge. One day I came back to the shop after being downtown with Andrew and Robert, and I saw bare legs protruding from the hatchback of our small car. Before I spoke to the chap digging through my boxes of old books, I asked Suzanne for an explanation first. "That's they guy I've been telling you about, who comes in regularly and wants to see any old books we've got." It was true, she had mentioned this to me in the past. "I told him about the boxes of books we just brought in, that were still in the car; so I just let him have a look to see if there was anything he might be interested in." This was how I met Dave Brown. He would have buried himself in anyone's trunk, even if there were alligators in the same space, if he thought he could snag a good book for a decent price. But I will never forget my first sighting of the legendary Dave Brown, hanging out of the back of my car, with his bare legs swinging in the summer sun. Yes, he found some books, and I made a profit that day, of which I was grateful.
     I've written volumes about Dave Brown, so you can, at your leisure, archive back and read some or all of the blogs written over the past four years. My point here, now, in relation to the last paragraph offered by Andrew Lang, is that I too, have known, quite intimately, a man of this same character; who was prepared to sacrifice in order to get the antiquarian books he desired; even at the expense of his own health and home comforts. On one hot summer day, for all of Ontario, Dave phoned me in quite a panic, that his refrigerator had just quit, and he didn't know what he should do about it. I made the rookie mistake, of not understanding Dave's actual living conditions. He was living in a small bungalow in the urban area of Hamilton, jammed with more than 100,000 books, which were actually, in the basement, "load bearing," stacked up to meet the floor joist. The executors found out how significant this was, when they began taking books out of the basement first, without appreciating how much support was needed, to handle the many thousands of books stacked on the floor above. The snap and shift of the floor all of a sudden, made them realize the floor to ceiling stacks of books below, were keeping the first floor where it was situated. There could have been a deadly collapse into the basement, of a huge volume of books and household appliances from the first floor. So when Dave angrily explained, that he would have to move thousands upon thousands of books, this day, in order to get the older refrigerator out of the kitchen, I should have shown more sensitivity. I was trying to imagine this household debacle; but gradually understanding of course, at this point, why his wife had given him an option when they were still relative newlyweds; "the books or marriage." Dave obviously then, took the books as being a better lifelong companion.
     Dave mortgaged his house, late in his teaching career, just to finance more books. When his water system began to fail in the kitchen, Dave just began washing his dirty dishes in the bathtub, and that's what the executors found, when they tried to assess the breadth of work to settle the estate. Dave ate at restaurants frequently, and refused to eat vegetables. He was sick for quite a period of time, and most of his friends, close to him on a daily or weekly basis, saw the changes in his physical prowess, but he refused to see a doctor until it was too late, leukemia having ravaged his body. He had poor eyesight but would never go to an optometrist, and his teeth were broken off and undoubtedly abscessed, but he wouldn't afford a trip to the dentist to get the matter resolved. His father, by the way, was a doctor, in charge of Hamilton's General Hospital, and his mother, a long time secretary at McMaster University, was generally happy to loan him money. Dave had a good pension as a retired teacher, and had few serious bills, other than the typical property taxes, hydro expenses, fuel needs for his truck, and general living costs which weren't staggering by any means. But he would take every penny he had, to invest in books, and sometimes didn't make the best investment; or look after them properly once he did bring his finds home. When he stored them in his bungalow, he didn't pay a lot of attention to the inherent risks of environmental contamination, and improper storage, which damaged spines, and may, because of stacks, caused a stagnation of the air, mold growth due to dampness and poor air circulation. For a man of his intelligence, and knowledge of nature, science and biology, he did not practice what he was preaching, with his own living circumstance, which it can be said, was grossly compromised by his passion for books.
     I remember Dave telling me about a near dust-up he had, with a book seller at a large show, of antiquarian and rare texts, and heritage paper, when the vendor refused to let him handle a very old book, profiling the whaling industry; as written about, in the early 1800's. The reason? Dave's appearance made the man suspect he was a bum, who somehow had snuck into the show for whatever reason. While one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, it's also true that he did have the appearance of someone down on their luck, who couldn't afford a change of clothes or the occasional bath. It is known that Dave would where his clothes into the bathtub, thus killing two birds with one stone. His running shoes always smelled, and he thought nothing of wearing camping attire to attend community events. He knew when to wear a suit and tie, but for most of his interactions and business transactions he didn't feel compelled to doll himself up that's for sure. So he immediately reacted to the book vendor's refusal to let him see the book, by explaining who he was, and that he had friends in high places, in the old book profession. He wasn't kidding about this either, as this gentleman would soon find out.
     The bookseller finally relented, but wouldn't take his eyes off Dave and the book, making my good friend feel rather uncomfortable and singled out (Dave hated to be singled out in any fashion); which was a giant mistake on the vendor's part. When Dave decided to buy the book, the vendor was going to apply a tax fee on top, something that Dave hated with an equal passion. When the bookman became indignant and uncooperative, at least to Dave's way of thinking, he handed the book back, and suggested that he was appalled by the his inconsideration to a collector of his stature. I felt kind of sorry for the dealer, because Dave wanted to be recognized as an astute and accomplished collector, but he didn't dress, or act the part; his eccentricities getting the best of him. Before he left the man's booth, Dave let him have it with both barrels, and threatened him with a boycott of gigantic proportion. Dave followed through, as he knew other dealers and book scouts who dealt with the booth vendor. Dave poisoned quite a few of the man's sources for old books, just as he warned would be the outcome. The only thing that would have spared the bookseller at this point, would have been, to present the subject book to Mr. Brown, as a gift, with a hearty apology for earlier treatment, as someone unworthy of handling such a rare book. Dave had thousands of rare books, and many on natural history and whaling. Instead of upgrading his wardrobe, and general appearance, Dave put his money into what he thought was a better, sounder investment. Yet many small time book dealers felt the same about his shabby appearance; but according to Dave, he felt most vendors would just feel sorry for him, judging his hobo attire as meaning he was penniless, and give him a good price on what he wanted to purchase from them, in the way of old books. I saw this happen in front of my face, when I met Dave at a second hand shop in Washago, that I had recommended to him, as having a selection of books of which he might be interested. He arrived at the shop before me, and when I arrived at the business, and greeted the owner, who I knew from many visits in the past, she asked me if I could help her keep an eye on the "bum" was roaming around the back of the building, looking at the books. I had seen Dave's red truck out front, so I knew it had to be my old friend. I think she was worried he was going to steal something, or pull a knife on her. I didn't explain Dave's situation at that moment, and refrained from having much to do with him until he had checked out with the books he wanted. She gave him a good deal, and with a modest overview, he had found five hundred dollars in antiquarian books, but paid no more than twenty bucks for the box load. I introduced him to the vendor, after the transaction was complete, as "my book collector friend from Hamilton." I used to love seeing their mouths hanging open, when I'd make these introductions, as we travelled together looking for old books at yard and estate sales. The introductions were never to be made before the books were found and paid for! There were dozens of situations like this, when the vendor would be shocked to silence, finding out the man in the dirty shirt and shorts, with smelly shoes, was a major and well connected book collector. A fellow, who would invest every nickel he had, to buy books he wanted, even if it meant he had to bum lunch and dinner off his friends. Suzanne and I knew all about his friendly mooching, and he never left Birch Hollow (our Gravenhurst residence) without being well fed for the next leg of his book hunting journey.
     Collectors are a strange lot, no doubt about it. And I count myself amongst the most eccentric of the lot. But I have a hell of a lot of fun; that certainly has to count for something. The difference between myself and the good Mr. Brown, is that I have my own accountant, my wife, who has no reservation about telling me, when I've over-spent my book buying budget. Or telling me, my books must never cross the threshold of her kitchen, or else!
     Thanks for visiting with me today, during a period of considerable adverse weather bringing freezing rain across the region, best suited sitting in a comfortable chair, in a cozy environs, in company of a good book. See you again soon.