A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Read online

  Shortly after going to work for Robert Harley, Wanley acquired the library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, the collector who recorded the “anguish and grief” suffered by Sir Robert Cotton twenty-two years earlier. By 1708 Wanley was on the job full time, and seven years later he began his diary. With the death of the first earl of Oxford in 1724, the library passed on to Edward Harley, the second earl of Oxford, an amiable dilettante and patron of the arts who retained Wanley’s services and added more rare books and manuscripts.

  Unlike his father, Edward Harley enjoyed his collection and often allowed his good friends Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift to use it as well. Edward Harley left no male heir on his death in 1740, and since his widow, the dowager countess, had no interest in her husband’s library, immediate plans were made for its dispersal. The government haggled over the extremely reasonable asking price of £20,000 for the manuscripts, and finally secured them for half that figure. In 1753, the Harleian manuscripts, along with the Cottonian Library, the Sir Hans Sloane Library, and the Royal Library, formed the core collections of the newly formed British Museum Library, and they share prominence to this day among the nation’s irreplaceable artifacts.

  Meanwhile, Harley’s printed books were sold to the London bookseller Thomas Osborne II, who paid £13,000 for the fifty thousand volumes, some £5,000 less than the Harley family had spent to have them bound. But Osborne did not reap immediate riches from the shrewd purchase. It had taken more than forty years for the Harleys to build their library, and the sudden availability of so many books meant that the market was inundated. Twenty years later much of the stock remained unsold, partly because Osborne refused to lower his prices. Some of the titles were listed in subsequent catalogues as coming from the libraries of other “collectors” later discovered to be fictitious. Today, books bound in red morocco with gold-tooled borders surrounding lozenge-shaped decorations— Harleian bindings—can be found in libraries all over the world.

  Even though the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin declared Thomas Osborne to be “the most celebrated bookseller of his day,” he was the object of widespread derision. Alexander Pope lampooned him in The Dunciad as the losing participant in a urinating contest who had to walk home in defeat with a chamberpot on his head. He was generally judged to be an unusually coarse man who enjoyed bragging over wine about his many successes. “Young man,” he would say, “I have been in business more than forty years, and am now worth more than forty thousand pounds. Attend to your business, and you will be as rich as I am.” One undocumented bit of gossip claims that Osborne once commissioned a translation into English of an epic poem he had come across that was printed in French; the bookseller was unaware, the story goes, that John Milton’s Paradise Lost was already available in his native tongue.

  Other dealers were annoyed by Osborne’s insistence on charging five shillings for each of the first two Harley catalogues, an “avaricious innovation” on his part, according to some. He also was accused of pricing his books too high, a charge that led him to publish a haughty rebuttal in his preface to the third volume of the catalogue. “If I have set a high value upon books, if I have vainly imagined literature to be more fashionable than it really is, or idly hoped to revive a taste well-nigh extinguished, I know not why I should be persecuted with clamor and invective, since I shall only suffer by my mistake, and be obliged to keep the books I was in the hope of selling.”

  As a young man, Samuel Johnson did some bibliographic work for Osborne. Because Osborne was not respected for his intellectual acuity, most observers are convinced that Johnson, who was only thirty-one at the time of the Harley purchase, prepared this eloquent reply for him. Johnson is known to have written in Latin the first two volumes of Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae, Osborne’s five-volume catalogue of the collection, and to have worked like a “lion in harness” writing descriptive entries for the others, which appeared in English. He also performed numerous other jobs for the bookseller, one of which led to an incident that has become the stuff of legend. Annoyed by the “unnecessary delay” Johnson apparently was taking to finish editing a “work of some consequence,” Osborne one day foolishly “abused” the young scholar with a salvo of criticism given “in a most illiberal manner.” After listening to the man rant on for “some time unmoved,” Johnson “seized a huge folio he was at that time consulting, and, aiming a blow at the bookseller’s head,” sent his employer “sprawling on the floor.” Rising quickly from his chair, Johnson clapped a foot on the terrified man’s breast and declared: “Lie there, thou son of dullness, ignorance and obscurity.”

  For all the “clamor and invective” directed at Osborne by his colleagues, however, nobody suggested that the objects he acquired were worthless. Instead, the prevailing complaint was that he priced his books too high and refused to accept less than he felt they were worth. There can be little doubt that Osborne’s willingness to invest heavily in a library that would take years to return a profit must have bred jealousy among other dealers, but what all the grousing demonstrates most dramatically is how competitive book collecting had become among Britain’s affluent elite by the middle of the eighteenth century. Dibdin’s Bibliomania was published and the word found its way into general usage. Dibdin later served as librarian and cataloguer for George John, the second earl of Spencer (1758–1834), the man frequently cited as the greatest collector of incunabula and early printed books that the world has ever seen.

  Dibdin’s signature work followed by a matter of weeks the appearance of Dr. John Ferriar’s satiric poem, also titled “Bibliomania,” which was published as an “Epistle to Richard Heber, Esq.” Both works appeared in 1809, when Heber was thirty-five years old and already famous for his unbridled book passion. The son of a wealthy rector, Heber (1773– 1833) is remembered today as the man who left eight houses, four in England and one each at Ghent, Paris, Brussels, and Antwerp, all filled with books. A. N. L. Munby, the esteemed biographer of Sir Thomas Phillipps, conservatively estimated the total holdings at 150,000 volumes. The respected Paris bookseller and bibliographer Seymour de Ricci’s guess was between 200,000 and 300,000, but he added that whatever the specific number, “It is doubtful whether any private individual has ever owned so large a library.”

  An affable man often praised for his kindness and generosity, Heber purportedly said that no gentleman “can comfortably do without three copies of a book. One he must have for his show copy, and he will probably keep it at his country house. Another he will require for his own use and reference; and unless he is inclined to part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends.” Heber had a full range of literary and historic interests, and his collections of foreign-language books, most notably works in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, and Latin, were superior. But the real strength of his library was early English literature, especially poetry and drama. From 1800 to 1830 he and his agents bought heavily at every major London auction, and he was an ardent practitioner of the en bloc purchase. “His name occurs as a buyer in every priced sale-catalogue of that period,” de Ricci wrote. Though it can be argued that Heber was out of control, he was not an indiscriminate hoarder. “He studied his books carefully,” de Ricci wrote, and “on several occasions started to catalogue them.”

  Though Heber’s accomplishment is renowned, his “awakening bibliomania” remained largely unexamined until A. N. L. Munby probed the collector’s formative years in an essay completed shortly before his death in 1976. “Father and Son” drew on family letters now in the Bodleian Library that were written when Heber was a student at an exclusive boarding school in Greenford, and his tolerant father was rector of Malpas in Cheshire. Munby noted that Reverend Reginald Heber was a man of “simplicity and sweetness of disposition” who became alarmed when he discerned “a rapidly growing tendency” in his son that augured “pernicious consequences.”

  A frail and delicate child who was unable to
compete in outdoor games, Richard demonstrated a “precocious gravity and interest in learning” at an early age. By the time he was ten years old, the boy already was gathering large numbers of books. In one early letter from school, he asked his father to attend a sale on his behalf where “the best editions of the classics of all sizes” were being offered. A few months later, he asked his father to help him buy 109 volumes of poetry, for which he already had saved eight guineas.

  By the time Richard was twelve, his father was becoming increasingly concerned about the bills he was getting from booksellers. “I must not allow dear Richard to be so extravagant,” Reverend Heber wrote his sister Elizabeth in London on February 27, 1786, instructing her to pay one outstanding obligation to a dealer, “but tell Dicky I will have no more debts contracted with booksellers or bookbinders.” Eleven months later, the father was writing again, this time directly to his son: “There is no end, my Dear, of the expense of buying superfluous books.”

  Oblivious to these pleas, Richard soon was writing his father about the exciting news that an important library was being shipped from Italy to be sold at auction in London. “I cannot say I rejoice,” Reverend Heber wrote back on April 15, 1789. “Of multiplying books, my dear Richard, there is neither end nor use.” The time had come for the rector to advance some sound moral advice:

  It is an itch which grows by indulgence and should be nipt in the bud. All extravagance originates in the lust of acquiring superfluities which are ruinous, superfluous Servants, superfluous Horses, superfluous Carriages, superfluous Pictures, superfluous Libraries are the daily source of misery and beggary. A small collection of well chosen books is sufficient for the entertainment and instruction of any man, and all else are useless Lumber.

  Three months later the father’s tone took on a much sharper edge. “After my repeated Commands and your repeated promises not to order any more Books without my previous knowledge and approbation, I am hurt to find that you pay so little regard either to your own word or my injunctions. Your Booksellers’ Bills within these two last years amount to the sum of £70, and I am determin’d to put a stop to this extravagance.” He thereupon announced he was instructing school officials to monitor his son’s activities more closely. “In short I will not pay for another Book that you buy without my previous knowledge and approbation.”

  The anxiety brought on by excessive book purchases receded somewhat, though not entirely, once Richard was admitted to Brasenose College, his father’s alma mater at Oxford. Reginald Heber died in 1804, passing the family manors of Marston in Yorkshire and Hodnet in Shropshire on to his son, along with the wherewithal to amass a private library of printed books that would have no equal in the world. Among the thousands of manuscripts Heber owned was the holograph copy of Sir Walter Scott’s The Monastery. Sir Walter was a friend who not only dedicated the sixth canto of Marmion to the collector, but made reference to his library:

  Thy volumes, open as thy heart,

  Delight, amusement, science, art,

  To every ear and eye impart;

  Yet who, of all who thus employ them,

  Can like the owner’s self enjoy them?—

  But, hark! I hear the distant drum!

  The day of Flodden Field is come.—

  Adieu, dear Heber! Life and health,

  And store of literary wealth.

  Heber’s homosexual relationship with a young protégé caused a scandal in the 1820s, yet sexual preference did not stop him from proposing marriage to Richardson Currer (1785–1861) of Eshton Hall, Craven, regarded by some as England’s first great female bibliophile. Heber is said to have particularly coveted her copy of The Book of St. Albans, a volume of essays on hawking, hunting, coat-armor, and blazoning of arms first published in 1486. Currer kept her books to herself and never married; her library was sold at auction in 1862 and realized nearly £6,000. Heber died alone on October 4, 1833, surrounded by books. “Poor man,” the Reverend Mr. Dyce wrote to his friend Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, “he expired at Pimlico, in the midst of his rare property, without a friend to close his eyes, and from all I have heard I am led to believe he died brokenhearted: he had been ailing for some time, but took no care of himself, and seemed indeed to court death. Yet his ruling passion was strong to the last.”

  In his Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836), Dibdin described his first look at Heber’s library, a visit he was able to arrange only after the insatiable collector had died.

  I looked round me with amazement. I had never seen rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors, so choked, so suffocated with books. Treble rows were there, double rows were there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos, reaching from one extremity of shelf to another. Up to the very ceiling the piles of volumes extended; while the floor was strewed with them, in loose and numerous heaps.

  Because Heber left no testamentary instructions, his heirs wasted little time authorizing a series of sixteen sales in London, Paris, and Ghent, which began in 1834 and continued for five years. “The market was absolutely glutted and there were practically no new buyers,” de Ricci wrote; receipts in London totaled £56,774 “for books which had cost their late owner a good deal over £100,000.”

  Heber was just one of many nineteenth-century collectors who suffered from what Dibdin lightheartedly diagnosed as a “fatal disease.” In one twelve-month period alone—from November 1806 to November 1807—no fewer than 149,200 volumes were sold in London auctions by three different firms. But the era’s defining moment came in a three-way contest for the right to own a single book at the Roxburghe sale. (Dibdin was a founding member of the bibliophiles’ Roxburghe Club in 1812.) Dibdin would write about the fray in his Bibliographical Decameron, a three-volume work that loosely took the form of Boccaccio’s comic poem. Because a good deal of Dibdin’s writings were serious attempts at bibliography—and because a good deal of his bibliography is seriously flawed—it has been fashionable to dismiss the man as a dilettante; this is a pity, since he did chronicle a pivotal period in book collecting with spunk, élan, and a splash of excitement that remains vibrant to this day.

  When Dibdin wrote about “the far-famed Roxburghe Fight” in 1817, memories of the sale of the Roxburghe collection were fresh and passions were still hot. The collector John Ker, the duke of Roxburghe, was, like his good friend King George III, an ardent bibliophile, and among his treasures were rarities printed by Caxton, Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, and Julian Notary. There were superb editions of French romances, and a strong collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic works. Of special interest was a 1471 copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, printed in Venice by Christopher Valdarfer. The dispersal of Roxburghe’s books began eight years after his death, on May 18, 1812. When it closed triumphantly on July 4, 1814, £23,397, ten shillings, and six pence had been spent on 9,353 lots.

  Dibdin wrote that anticipation for the sale was great, and added with an impertinence that was typical of him that the publication of a certain earlier work—his own Bibliomania—had “probably stirred up the mettle and hardened the sinews of the contending Book-Knights.” The duke’s house in St. James’s Square was so crowded that nothing but “standing upon a contiguous bench” saved Dibdin “from suffocation.” But he would not have missed the action for anything.

  For two and forty successive days—with the exception only of Sundays—was the voice and the hammer of Mr. Evans heard, with equal efficacy, in the dining-room of the late Duke—which had been appropriated to the vendition of the books: and within that same space (some thirty-five feet by twenty) were such deeds of valour performed, and such feats of book-heroism achieved, as had never been previously beheld: and of “the like” will probably never be seen again. The shouts of the victors, and the groans of the vanquished stunned and appalled you as you entered. The throng and the press, both of idle spectators and determined bidders, was unprecedented.

  Dibdin implied that the emperor
Napoleon was represented at the sale by an unidentified agent. France and England were at diplomatic variance at the time, but this didn’t faze the French emperor: the Valdarfer Boccaccio was thought to be a unique book, and Napoleon was an ardent bibliophile. Nevertheless, the battle over the Boccaccio that developed was waged by three Englishmen: George Spencer, the marquis of Blandford; William Cavendish, the duke of Devonshire; and Dibdin’s patron, George John, the second earl of Spencer (Viscount Althorp). As the climactic moment drew near, Mr. Evans, the auctioneer, called for silence. Dibdin described the action that followed:

  On his right hand, leaning against the wall, stood Earl Spencer; a little lower down, and standing at right angles with his Lordship, appeared the Marquis of Blandford. The Duke, I believe, was not then present; but my Lord Althorp stood a little backward to the right of his father, Earl Spencer. Such was “the ground taken up” by the adverse hosts. The honor of firing the first shot was due to a gentleman of Shropshire, unused to this species of warfare, and who seemed to recoil from the reverberation of the report himself had made!—“One hundred guineas,” he exclaimed. Again a pause ensued; but anon the biddings rose rapidly to 500 guineas. Hitherto, however, it was evident the firing was but masked and desultory. At length all random shots ceased; and the champions before named stood gallantly up to each other resolving not to flinch from a trial of their respective strengths.