A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 5
In a 1951 essay titled “Passages from the Autobiography of a Bibliomaniac,” Sadleir told how a 1922 book of his, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, emerged from an “examination of my captures,” which he further explained were the otherwise “un-sought-for and therefore cheaply priced” books he was able to acquire with little competition.
After the publication of Excursions, I settled to the writing of a biography of Anthony Trollope and his mother. This was the first full-length application of a principle which had from the beginning influenced my book-collecting policy and was to become an integral part of it. I have never undertaken the intensive collection of any author or movement without the intention of ultimately writing the material collected into biography, bibliography or fiction.
Sadleir’s writing over the next thirty-five years included such influential books as Anthony Trollope: A Commentary (1927), Trollope: A Bibliography (1928), Things Past (1944), and XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based on His Own Collection (1951), as well as a number of dated and largely forgotten novels. After his death in 1957, Sadleir’s collection of nineteenth-century fiction was sold en bloc to the University of California at Los Angeles.
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Centuries before Sigmund Freud gave scope and substance to the study of the mysteries of the mind, people had been mad about books, yet it was not until 1809 that a name for this curious malady came into widespread use. That year, the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847) popularized the word bibliomania when he published a lighthearted “bibliographical romance” he titled The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness; containing some account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of This Fatal Disease. Although Dibdin became the faithful book scout and chief cataloguer for George John, second earl of Spencer, the man who created what the noted French bibliographer A.A. Renouard called “the finest and most beautiful private library in Europe,” he is remembered best as the unrepentant eavesdropper who chronicled with hyperbole and delight the Heroic Age of Book Collecting, the first half of the nineteenth century.
“It has raged chiefly in palaces, castles, halls, and gay mansions,” Dibdin wrote in The Bibliomania, “and those things which in general are supposed not to be inimical to health, such as cleanliness, spaciousness, and splendour, are only so many inducements toward the introduction and propagation of the BIBLIOMANIA! What renders it particularly formidable is that it rages in all seasons of the year, and at all periods of human existence.”
What gives Dibdin’s treatise an extra measure of charm is that it cited a legitimate medical authority as source for the designation of the illness. A few months before his book was released, a respected Manchester physician, Dr. John Ferriar, published a satirical poem with the same title and addressed it as an “epistle” to his good friend Richard Heber, a collector who filled eight houses in four countries with upwards of 200,000 books. An active member of his city’s Literary and Philosophical Society, Dr. Ferriar wrote a number of learned studies on many subjects, medical as well as literary. His last published work, “An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions,” is said to contain “ingenious views on mental hallucinations.” But the “diagnosis” he offered for bibliomania was all in fun:
What wild desires, what restless torments seize
The hapless man, who feels the book-disease.…
In later verses, Dr. Ferriar described how those afflicted display a manic interest in bibliographical features that have nothing to do with literary content:
The Bibliomane exclaims, with haggard eye,
“No Margin!” turns in haste, and scorns to buy….
At ev’ry auction, bent on fresh supplies,
He cons his Catalogue with anxious eyes:
Where’er the slim Italics mark the page,
“Curious and rare” his ardent mind engage.
A year after Dibdin released his treatise, a pseudonymously published pamphlet titled Bibliosophia; or, Book-Wisdom appeared in England that proposed an alternative name. The amusing work extrolled the “pride, pleasure, and privileges of that glorious vocation, book-collecting,” and was addressed directly to the good pastor himself. “Bibliomania, Mr. D.!— and is this the softest title which you can afford to the noble passion for literary accumulation—that passion, to which, throughout the very book in which it is thus stigmatized, you almost avow that you are, yourself, a voluntary, if not an exulting Victim?” The author—whom William A. Jackson, Harvard’s Houghton librarian, identified in his definitive Dibdin bibliography as one James Beresford—proposed his coinage as a suitable corrective: “BIBLIOSOPHIA,—which I would define—an appetite for COLLECTING Books,—carefully distinguished from, wholly unconnected with, nay absolutely repugnant to, all idea of READING them.”
The Oxford English Dictionary lists more than twenty biblio-words in the English language: biblioclasm, bibliognost, bibliolatry, bibliogony, bibliomancy, bibliopegy, bibliophobia, bibliopoesy, bibliotaph, bibliophagist, bibliopole, and bibliomania among them—but no bibliosophia. Bibliomania it was and bibliomania it would remain. It is worth adding that neither Dibdin nor Dr. Ferriar gets credit for the first recorded use of the word in English. This distinction goes to Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield, the respected statesman, orator, wit, man of letters, and contemporary of Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope. Lord Chesterfield is remembered most for the erudite correspondence he maintained for thirty years with his son, also Philip Stanhope, his illegitimate child with a Frenchwoman.
Lord Chesterfield took profound interest in young Philip’s welfare, and his letters invariably included nuggets of advice on a variety of concerns. “Do you take care to walk, sit, stand, and present yourself gracefully?” he asked on March 19, 1750, when the lad was sixteen years old. “Are you sufficiently upon your guard against awkward attitudes, and illiberal, ill-bred, and disgusting habits, such as scratching yourself, putting your fingers in your mouth, nose and ears?” In the same letter, the concerned father also responded to reports that Philip was developing a taste for rare books. “Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads, for they may profit from the former. But take care not to understand editions and title-pages too well. It always smells of pedantry, and always of learning. What curious books I have, they are indeed but few, shall be at your service.” He concluded the lecture with a succinct warning: “Beware of the Bibliomanie.”
Lord Chesterfield died in 1773 at the age of seventy-eight; the following year, the correspondence he had maintained so faithfully with his son was sold for £1,575 and published in two volumes. By 1800, The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son had gone through eleven editions, and the peer’s wry counsel was well known in the circles frequented by Dr. Ferriar and Reverend Dibdin.
In a 1966 essay prepared for a psychiatric jounal, the psychoanalyst Dr. Norman S. Weiner of Philadelphia described the bibliomaniac as a person with an “inordinate desire” for books who will “pursue a volume in an active or seductive way; he will use intrigue and stealth; he will hazard his fortune and he will journey around the world, or even marry for the gain of a coveted book.” On the basis of the evidence he had gathered, Dr. Weiner suggested that bibliomania is “a problem-solving complex of activity that relieves anxiety or directly gratifies certain instinctual drives.”
In the “literature on bibliomania,” he continued, “mention is made that the book functions as a talisman for its owner but it is a temporary and fleeting passion.” A further curiosity is that the bibliomaniac invariably must then
Set out on another quest for a great book as soon as his anxiety returns. The quality of the boasting, the constant search for new conquests, and the delight in recounting the tales of acquisition and success bring to mind the activities of the hypersexual male hysteric who must constantly reassure himself that he has not been castrated. It seems germane to this point that Casanova, afte
r his many amatory adventures, settled down as a librarian in the castle of Count Waldstein at Dux, in Bohemia.
The psychoanalyst’s conclusion—that some collectors use books as a “fetish” to provide “gratification of oral, anal, and phallic strivings”— involves “castration anxiety” and applies strictly to men. To support this position, he relied heavily on Eugene Field’s sweeping assertion of a century ago: “It has never been explained to my satisfaction why women as a class are the enemies of books and are particularly hostile to bibliomania.” By accepting the validity of this dictum, psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Dr. Weiner was able to confine his “symptomology” to men.
Of course, women too have collected throughout history. Rosenbach devoted a chapter of A Book Hunter’s Holiday to “Mighty Women Book Hunters,” paying particular attention to the female companions of several French monarchs. “It speaks rather well, I think, for the kings of France that they chose for friends beautiful ladies who loved beautiful books,” he wrote. Gabrielle d’Estrées, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de’ Médicis all had notable collections. Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henri II, had the exquisitely bound books she kept at Château d’Anet embossed with the interlaced initials H and D. In 1558 she lobbied successfully for passage of an ordinance that required French publishers to present copies of every book they issued to the libraries of Blois and Fontainebleau; this “copy tax” quickly added eight hundred volumes to the national collections. Catherine de’ Médicis was less subtle; when one of her kinsmen, Marshal Strozzi, died while in French service, she simply ordered the confiscation of his library. “Let us forgive her,” Rosenbach suggested. “She was a genuine bibliophile.”
Among history’s more dogged collectors was Christina, the daughter of King Gustavus II and queen of Sweden from 1644 to 1654. Shortly after assuming power at the age of eighteen, she dedicated herself to forming a strong national library and began by consolidating the books her generals had seized from conquered cities during the Thirty Years’ War. She then authorized the purchase of precious manuscripts and acquired the libraries of several private collectors, the French theologian Denys Petau, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, and the Dutch theologian Gerhard Vossius among them. She also brought to Stockholm Gabriel Naudé, the former librarian to Cardinal Mazarin, to supervise the installation of her books.
In 1649, Christina invited René Descartes to visit Sweden and be her tutor. The famous philosopher quickly found the queen’s petulance disagreeable, especially her insistence that lessons begin promptly at five o’clock in the morning. The Scandinavian winter was characteristically harsh, and he died in February 1650 after coming down with a fever. The queen continued to forge alliances with other authors, among them Blaise Pascal, who forwarded for her inspection a model of his calculating machine.
Two years before her abdication in 1654, Christina wrote to one of her Dutch agents, Nicholas Heinsius, who was then locating books for her in Italy: “Continue to send me lists of all that is beautiful and rare; but do not embark in any purchase: as long as I know of the rarities, I will manage the rest.” According to one early biographer, Christina’s great library in Stockholm “was arranged in four great halls, in which besides a multitude of printed books, were at least eight thousand manuscripts in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew.”
After leaving Sweden, Christina converted to Catholicism and stayed in Antwerp for a while before settling in Rome. Traveling with two hundred attendants, she led a spectacular cavalcade of book-bearing wagons into the Eternal City. There, she founded two academies and allowed scholars the use of her books. At Christina’s death in 1689, her library, known as the Bibliotheca Alessandrina (she considered herself a female Alexander the Great), was transferred to the Vatican Library, where it was installed in an ornate room added by Pope Alexander VIII.
In his study Dr. Weiner made no mention of these women, and he ignored entirely Estelle Doheny, the California heiress whose great library earned $37.4 million for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles at a series of Christie’s sales in the 1980s, qualifying it as the most lucrative book auction in history. He also had omitted Amy Lowell (1874–1925), which is surprising, since the eminent Boston collector’s fondness for large cigars might have made an unusually tempting target for a probing psychoanalyst. But such an attack would have opened the way for an interesting rebuttal, as Peter Gay made clear in his biography of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis: “If Freud’s helpless love for cigars attests to the survival of primitive oral needs, his collecting of antiquities reveals residues in adult life of no less primitive anal enjoyments.” Freud, as it happened, admitted to his own doctor that the collecting of old objects, including books, was for him “an addiction second in intensity” only to nicotine.
Dr. Rosenbach, at any rate, considered Amy Lowell the greatest of all American women collectors. “Miss Lowell had a well-defined plan in the formation of her library,” the Philadelphia bookseller wrote.
She wanted unpublished [John] Keats material first and foremost, and the Keats manuscripts in her collection speak more eloquently of her successful endeavors than anything I can say of her. If she desired a particular item, she would not rest until she secured it. It was not unusual for her to call me from Boston at any hour of the night to learn if I had purchased something for her at one of the auction sales. The cost was nothing, the book everything.
Today, the Amy Lowell Collection is housed in its own room on the second floor of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, a tribute suggested by the donor of the building, Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., whose own Keats items are there with hers. The collection that Lowell gave in 1925 includes holographic manuscripts for “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “To Autumn,” and was gathered initially as primary research material for her two-volume biography of the Romantic poet. But her collection also included the manuscript copy of Charles Lamb’s Grace Before Meat and Samuel Johnson’s signed personal copy of Rasselas, along with handwritten manuscripts by Walt Whitman, Ludwig van Beethoven, and George Eliot.
Regrettably, visitors to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York will not find a room named for Brooklyn’s Abbie Ellen Hanscom Pope, but several titles gathered by her during the late nineteenth century are esteemed among the finest in the building, including the only perfect copy known of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, printed at Westminster, London, in 1485 by William Caxton. She acquired the prize in 1885 after outbidding the British Museum; she was twenty-seven years old at the time. After Mrs. Pope’s unexpected death in 1894, the man regarded by many as America’s greatest book collector, Robert Hoe III, bought her choicest items for the then unheard-of sum of $250,000. On Hoe’s death in 1909, her books were among the fourteen thousand lots sold at his landmark sale.
In the spring of 1990, the Grolier Club mounted an exhibition in New York called “Fifteen Women Book Collectors,” which honored the accomplishments of woman book collectors through five centuries, from Diane de Poitiers to Frances Hooper. Hooper was a Chicago journalist and advertising executive who built several distinguished collections that are now owned by various institutions. To open the exhibition, Mary Hyde Eccles, one of the world’s great living collectors, gave an address that began with a tribute to the “origin of a new species,” female bibliophiles: “The fascinating question raised by all this is why, in five centuries, in six countries, do there seem to have been so few women book collectors? The answer is obvious: a serious collector on any scale must have three advantages: considerable resources, education, and freedom. Until recently, only a handful of women have had all three, but times are changing!”
Starting in 1940, Mary Hyde Eccles and her first husband, the late Donald Hyde, built a monumental collection of primary materials relating to Samuel Johnson and his circle at Four Oaks Farm, their home in New Jersey. Respected everywhere, the collection has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies. Eccles’s talk that night recalled their
“greatest collecting coup,” the acquisition in 1948 of the finest Johnson collection “on either side of the Atlantic.” Assembled over two generations by Robert B. Adam and his nephew and heir, Robert B. Adam II, owners of a department store in Buffalo, New York, the materials were placed on the market three days after the Crash of 1929.
Despite the undisputed importance of the material and the concerted efforts of Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach to sell it for the Adams, few serious offers were made. In 1936, the New York State Banking Authority ordered that the collection, which included several hundred letters, many pages of manuscripts, and numerous translations, be placed at the University of Rochester as security for a bank loan for the Adams. There they remained, until finally, in 1948, a deal was struck with Donald and Mary Hyde. She told what happened next:
On December 16, 1948—more than nineteen years after the Adam Library was first offered for sale—the collection arrived at the Gladstone, New Jersey, railway station in a blinding snowstorm. Fifty packing cases and two trunks were lifted into farm trucks and driven to Four Oaks Farm. Johnson in enormous bulk had come to live with us. One thing was immediately apparent: he needed a room of his own.
With the death of Donald Hyde in 1966, Mrs. Eccles acknowledged that she “lost a great deal of heart in the library,” but slowly, deliberately, she “returned to collecting as a way of life.” As the years passed, a combination of mutual interests—book friends, books, and libraries—occasioned her marriage to David Eccles of Great Britain. When she delivered the Grolier Club lecture in 1990, Mrs. Eccles was embarked on editing a new volume of Johnson’s letters. “Oh, how I wish I could find just one more Johnson letter— any scrap whatsoever,” she said. “That is still the … unending pursuit.”