Part 9 (1/2)
Even where an English collection may not enter the Continental lines, but preserves its national character, there are numerous cla.s.ses of books of foreign origin and from foreign presses, which are fairly ent.i.tled to consideration and admittance. These publications embrace not merely religious and controversial literature, but a large and important body of material for English and Scotish biography and history, and for the elucidation of Irish affairs. Every season brings to light some new features in this immense series, which is, of course, susceptible of a cla.s.sifying process, and may be ranged under such sections as we have above indicated, besides a considerable residue which falls under the head of poetry and typography, the latter const.i.tuting a branch of the History of English Printing, and the former being worthy of notice as embracing some of the rarest metrical productions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which owed their issue from presses in Germany and the Low Countries to various agencies, but chiefly to the exigencies of foreign military service by English and Scotish officers during the English operations in the Netherlands under Elizabeth and during the Thirty Years' War.
The foreign sources of English books, or books written by or about English, Scotish, and Irish folk, have been--
Aire Amsterdam Antwerp Arras Augsburg Basle Bologna Boulogne Breda Bruges Brussels Constantinople Dort Florence Flus.h.i.+ng Geneva Ghent Gouda Haarlem Leipsic Leyden Lyons Malines Middelburg Milan Munich Munster Paris Parma Pisa Rome Rotterdam Strasburg-in-Elsa.s.s The Hague Tournai Utrecht Venice Vevey Wesel Zurich
It is always to be borne in mind that these adjuncts at the foot of t.i.tle-pages in troubled periods are not unfrequently fict.i.tious; and we have elsewhere equally shown that Greenwich and Waterford are names appended to early controversial works of which the writers desired to conceal the real parentage.
Of English presses it might seem almost superfluous to speak; but in fact the typographical fortunes of London have experienced their flux and reflux. At first we find the City itself in sole possession of the industry and privilege; then Westminster came; thirdly, Southwark. Of the provincial places of origin, Oxford appears to have been the foremost, and was followed at intervals by York, Cambridge, Canterbury, Ipswich, Worcester, and other centres, of which some preserved their reputation down to comparatively recent times, while Oxford and Cambridge of course remain important and busy seats of printing. Beverley, Nottingham, Derby, Northampton, Bristol, Birmingham, Gateshead, and Newcastle-on-Tyne have never been more than occasional sources of literary production, and certain towns, such as Lincoln and Gainsborough, are only known from local or small popular efforts; there is an edition of _Robin Hood's Garland_ with the Gainsborough imprint. One or two publications purporting to have been executed at Sherborne in Dorsets.h.i.+re belong to the firm of William Bowyer of London.
There was a distinct centralising tendency at a later period, by which the English metropolis absorbed the princ.i.p.al share of work, and it was followed, owing to economical causes, by a reaction which we know to be at present in full force, and which has restored to the provinces, but to new localities, Bungay, Guildford, Bristol, no less than Edinburgh and Aberdeen, an appreciable proportion of the custom of the London publis.h.i.+ng houses; nor is it unusual to send MSS. abroad for the sake of the advantage accruing from cheaper labour. We not long since secured this boon in Scotland; but Scotland has grown as dear as London.
The SCOTISH SERIES is a difficult and costly one to handle. The early vernacular literature of that country has suffered from two cla.s.ses of destructive agency, neglect and fanaticism, to a greater extent than England, and the disappearance of the more popular books and tracts has been wholesale. The attempt on the part of a collector, however rich and persevering he might be, to form a complete series of original editions of the poetical and romantic writers of North Britain, could only be made in ignorance of the utter impossibility of success. The late David Laing abundantly ill.u.s.trated this fact in his numerous publications, and further evidence of it may be found throughout the bibliographical works of the present writer.
The old Scotish presses were Edinburgh, Leith, St. Andrew's, Glasgow, Stirling, and Aberdeen; but a large proportion of the literary productions of Scotish authors, including much of the historical group relative to Mary Queen of Scots, proceeded from foreign places of origin, where the writers had settled or were temporarily resident.
The princ.i.p.al channels through which we have in modern times augmented our information of their products are the catalogues of Fraser of Lovat, Boswell of Auchinleck, the Duke of Roxburghe, Pitcairn, Constable, Chalmers, Maidment, Gibson-Craig, David Laing, and the Rev.
William Makellar, the last a cousin of Sir William Stirling Maxwell of Keir, and a collector from 1838 to 1898.
A purely IRISH LIBRARY would inherently differ both from one limited to English or to Scotish books. There is no early typography or poetry, no works printed on vellum, no masterpieces of binding. The collectors in that part of the empire have always been few in number, and in fact Irish books have been chiefly collected by persons who were not Irishmen, nor even residents in that country. It used to be the case that, where a book was remarkably successful in England, the Dublin booksellers reprinted it, and, as these reproductions are generally scarcer than the originals, doubtless in limited numbers.
The series consists of a handful of books and tracts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods (1570-1625); of publications relative to the Civil War (1644-48); of others relative to the Commonwealth and Jacobite troubles (1650-90); of literary ill.u.s.trations of the state of Ireland under the Houses of Orange, Stuart, and Brunswick or Hanover, and of modern days. The bibliographical writings of Sir James Ware are usually quoted and consulted for the literature within his time, but they have become almost obsolete. The two other works of reference for amateurs and students are those by Charles Vallancey (_Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis_, 1786-1807, 7 vols.) and Charles O'Conor (_Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres_, 1814-26, 4 vols.).
But we have to go to more recent authorities to discover that the typographical productions of Ireland in the first decade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comprise a few books of the greatest rarity and one or two of which no copies are at present known. On the other hand, certain Elizabethan volumes, purporting to have proceeded from Irish presses, are generally believed to have an English origin, while others with German imprints of a later date (second half of the seventeenth century) are absolutely proved to have been clandestinely executed at home.
A very fair and comprehensive idea of the salient features in the present series may be gained from the Grenville and Huth catalogues and from Hazlitt's _Collections_ (General Index). Considerable stress is laid by collectors on a large-paper copy with the _Decisions_ filled in in MS., the Memorandum, &c., of the _List of Claims_, 1701, in connection with the Irish forfeitures. But in fact a copy of this work is always available, when any one wants it, which is seldom enough.
There was no _regular_ printing here till the beginning of the seventeenth century, although one or two Marian tracts falsely purport to have come from the Waterford press. Dublin had a printer, John Frankton, who worked from 1601 to 1620 or thereabout, and produced many books, tracts, and broadsheets, some not yet recovered; the city also boasted a Society of Stationers in 1608, and many volumes appeared at London ”Printed for the Partners of the Irish Stock,”
referring to the Plantation of Ulster. The places in Ireland itself, where the art of typography was pursued, were Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Drogheda, Kilkenny, and Belfast (as in the section just dismissed).
But the rarest articles in the earlier series emanated from London or from Continental presses, the writings of Nicholas French and Cranford's _Tears of Ireland_, 1642, taking a prominent rank in the latter category.
The leading collectors on Irish lines have been Sir Robert Peel, Mr.
Grenville, Mr. Huth, Mr. Bradshaw, Canon Tierney, Mr. s.h.i.+rley, and Bishop Daly.
In the English series I have supposed the admission of a certain number or proportion of foreign books, which are of catholic interest, and have acquired a standing among many cla.s.ses of collectors whose bias is princ.i.p.ally national. But there are two other series of very unequal extent, importance, and costliness, which more directly appeal to the buyers of these islands, namely, the earlier Anglo-American literature belonging to the Colonial period, and the American reproductions of the favourite books of Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Thackeray, and others in the present century. The latter category enters into the department of curiosities, and has yet to acquire bibliographical importance. In one or two cases, works issued at home in numbers have been published in the States in book-form prior to their appearance here. This happened with the _Yellow-Plush Correspondence_, reprinted direct from _Fraser's Magazine_ at Philadelphia in 1838, and curious as the writer's earliest separate publication. These papers were not collected in England till 1841.
The products of the Colonial period include all the books emanating from American presses between 1640, the date of the _Bay Psalm-Book_ at Cambridge, N.E., from the press of Stephen Day, and the Declaration of Independence. There has been a disposition to treat the whole of this output of printed matter with a special tenderness and reverence on political grounds; but it obviously is of a very mixed and unequal character, and, as time goes on, there must be a continuous winnowing process, and a consignment to oblivion of a vast a.s.sortment of the dullest theology and of political _ephemerides_. There will always remain a rich heirloom to our American kinsfolk and ourselves of historical nuggets in the shape of narratives of the fortunes and careers of the Pilgrim Fathers, their experiments in statecraft, their religious trials, their early superst.i.tions and strange intolerance of personal liberty in a land chosen by its settlers for liberty's sake; and of course there is a section of literary products appertaining to the New World, namely, ritualistic ordinances, liturgical manuals, and collections of statutes, which derive what one is bound to term an artificial interest from the local circ.u.mstances, or, in other words, from the place of origin. A theological treatise, a Bible, a volume of prayers, or a law-book, published in England in the second half of the seventeenth century, may be worth from sixpence to a sovereign; if it bears the imprint of Boston, Cambridge (N.E.), New York, Philadelphia, or New London, its value may be computed in bank-notes. The _Laws of Ma.s.sachusetts_, 1660, was lately sold for 109, and the _Papers Relating to Ma.s.sachusetts Bay_, 1769, for 8, the latter in boards.
The reason (so far as there is any) for this inflation is twofold: the patriotic sentiment which leads American amateurs to desire the oldest and most precious typographical and historical monuments of their country, and, secondly, the perhaps less justifiable enthusiasm of some Englishmen for books which, as they may plead, are the offspring of the States while they were still English settlements. A copious and fairly contemporary view of the extensive family of works belonging to the earlier Anglo-American library may be found in the bibliographies of Stevens, Sabin, and Harrisse, and in the Grenville, Huth, Lenox, and Tower catalogues. There is not only no line of collecting which is more difficult and more costly than the present, but none which, within the last twenty years, has, so far as first-rate rarities are concerned, more seriously advanced, even inferior copies of certain books fetching at times five times as much as good ones did in the seventies. Just lately the call appears to come from the other side of the Atlantic. There are two or three new bidders. That is sufficient.
CHAPTER IX
The Modern Side--Words of advice--The place and functions of Free Libraries--Coleridge and Byron period--Unhealthy state of the market--The d.i.c.kens and Thackeray movement--Fas.h.i.+ons in books--A valuable suggestion--Slight actual demand for costly modern productions--Two often make a market--Effect of time in settling value--Forecast of the durability of a few names--A large-paper copy of Byron's poems, 1807--Cheap literature not a modern invention--The published price noted on the face of early volumes--An episode--Practical buyers not to be considered collectors--The first edition considered from editorial and other points of view.
IN the acquisition of modern books, far greater caution is requisite than in that of the older literature, since the output is so enormous, and the changes in taste and depreciation in value so rapid and so capricious. The Free and other Circulating or Reference Libraries throughout the country must prove of immense service in superseding the necessity of purchasing volumes of temporary interest or of expensive character; and the average collector will, and does, find that a certain number of dictionaries of various kinds, and of works which happen to be favourites, suffice to exhaust his s.p.a.ce and resources. The Free Library is an undoubted boon in two ways: in enabling us to read or consult books which we do not care to buy; and again, in affording us an opportunity at leisure of judging whether such and such a volume merits more than a pa.s.sing notice and perusal.
The sole method of arriving at this information is to take the publication home. Even where shelf-room and funds are forthcoming, there is slight danger of any large percentage of recent literature being added to the stores of a judicious householder. To read, perhaps only to skim, and return, will be the general rule.
It is inexpedient to lend oneself too exclusively to a period or a school; for even where one has to study for a purpose a particular cla.s.s of authors, or a particular subject or group of subjects, the local inst.i.tution is at hand to help one; and the cheap reproductions of the writings of the earlier centuries, erring, as they do, on the side of indulgence, place it in the power of individuals of modest means to have at their elbows a representative a.s.semblage, not necessarily a c.u.mbrous one, of the literature from Chaucer to the present day, so that they may form a comparative estimate of the intellectual activity and wealth of successive ages, while, at the same time, the Greek and Latin authors are procurable in a collective shape, if they desire to compare notes and satisfy themselves on the obligations of the moderns to the ancients.