Part 6
At the sale of the Britwell Court Library in London in 1923, I noticed a little book lying sandwiched between Paice’s _Fortune’s Lottery, or How a Ship of Bristoll Called the Angel Gabriel Fought Against the Spanish_, and Pallinganius’s _The Zodyacke of Lyfe_. It was Philip Paine’s _Dailey Meditations, or Quotidian Preparations for and Consideration of Death and Eternity_, printed at Cambridge by Marmaduke Johnson in 1668. As it was passed around the room all my bookman friends looked at it and shook their heads. Of value, they thought, comparatively slight. Only a dull theological work. As I reread the lengthy title something back in my brain made me concentrate more carefully upon it. Somewhere those printed words struck a vaguely familiar chord in my memory. All during the sale I kept turning forward to that page in my catalogue where it was listed. Suddenly I knew! Marmaduke Johnson it was who printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first Holy Scriptures issued for the North American Indians--the Eliot Indian Bible.
The little book was put up for sale and I asked leave to examine it again for a moment before bidding. I knew at once it was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not England. This made it tremendously rare, because it was the only known copy, hitherto unrecognized, of the first volume of verse printed in North America. Those present took it for granted from the catalogue description that the little work was printed in Cambridge, England, and as such, was certainly worth less than the price at which it was soon knocked down to me, fifty-one pounds. After the sale several people, including a great Americana expert and the auctioneer, met me and rather twitted me for paying $250 for a stupid old religious tract worth but a few shillings. They were amazed that I had shown such a lapse of judgment.
When I informed them what the book really was, the auctioneer sadly asked, “Doctor, what would you really have given for it?”
When I said £8000 or £9000--between $40,000 and $50,000--he was not any too happy. During the following year, when the little tract by Baxter in the Indian dialect appeared for sale, they catalogued it Cambridge, Massachusetts! Thus listed, it sold for $34,000, as I have mentioned before.
You see, we are always reading of record prices and it is very rare to hear of the valuable things that slip through unobserved. It is these latter that give book auctions their zest. And the auction houses, if they only knew it, benefit also by the chance bargain, for it is this very thing that attracts the public.
On the other hand, the most experienced buyer never knows when he will have to pay a really high price. It is the average, after all, that counts. Yet here is a phenomenon which has always seemed peculiar to me. When times are bad and prices in Wall Street are tumbling, when Steel sells far below its worth and the oils go begging, rare volumes continue to command an ever-increasing price. In 1907, the year of the panic, books sold for record sums at auctions, while so-called standard securities dipped sharply in a helpless market. Two years later, when national finances were again wobbly, when the bears were having a picnic with the lambs, old books went for higher prices than ever before.
In the Henry W. Poor sale, held in New York in this same year, record prices were established, despite the prediction of the wiseacres, who said that prices must go down. It is for this reason that some of the most discerning men in Wall Street purchase rare books as an investment. I know many a captain of industry who quietly hides away in the secrecy of his strong box rare little volumes, such as Shakespeare quartos, small pamphlets by Shelley, and even first editions of Joseph Conrad. These rich men realize--and rightly, too--that such treasures will always sell at a premium, even though the market is tumbling and Wall Street is in a panic. Owners of precious books always find they do not have to wait for the chance buyer. Their volumes can be sent to the auction mart at any time, where they will realize, as a rule, their full value.
America has had two really great auctioneers: Stan V. Henkels, of beloved memory, and the late Thomas E. Kirby. The latter in many respects exerted the greatest influence of any person in the auction world of this country. He was the founder of the American Art Association, and his opinions on objects of art were accepted as gospel by the most meticulous collectors, including the late P. A. B. Widener, William A. Clark, and Henry C. Frick. He was really brilliant on the block, and his remarks were frequently the wittiest imaginable. I remember as a youth going to his auctions and being fascinated by his repartee and the rapidity with which he sold.
Stan V. Henkels was the only auctioneer who catalogued every work himself and cried his own sales too. His humor was irresistible, and the audience would often break out in guffaws of laughter at his many bright sallies.
In 1902 I attended a sale at Henkels’s where the price of a certain volume caused the book world to hum for months afterward. I was late, and entered the room as the bidding began on a little book which was placed in full view of the audience. I asked one of the employés for its number in the catalogue and found that it was _The Dying Words of Ockanickon, an Indian King_, and was published in London in 1682. It did not seem to be a volume of much importance. I was acquainted somewhat with its history. The highest price it had ever brought was $52.50, at the Barlow sale in 1890. I leaned forward to whisper to a friend in the row ahead of me and he said $200 would be an enormous price for it.
Suddenly the air seemed charged with electricity, and I looked about to see who was bidding. On one side of the room sat a man I knew, A. J. Bowden, who represented George H. Richmond and Company, of New York. On the other I saw Mr. Robert Dodd, of Dodd, Mead and Company. Both were experienced auction bidders, with the set expression of the mouth and the feverish, alert look. I did not know at the time that both had received instructions to buy this particular work at any price. Each had that most dangerous weapon of the auction game, the unlimited bid.
From sixty dollars the price rapidly jumped. Stan V. Henkels, colorful, suave, provocative, naïve, and humorous, kept egging them on. Up and up the price went, until it reached the $900 mark. Then a murmur of consternation swept the room, followed by a hush. Robert Dodd broke the silence with a $100 raise. Bowden followed with another $100 and Dodd added $100 more. When Bowden finally shouted, “Thirteen hundred dollars,” Dodd smiled.
“Fourteen hundred,” he said sweetly.
Just at this moment poor old Bowden exhibited his first sign of weakness. He stopped bidding in hundreds and raised the bid twenty-five.
Dodd saw his chance and brought up his battalion with a crash. Little _Ockanickon_ was wrested from Bowden at the freak price of $1450. When Richmond read in the paper next morning the price at which he had so nearly bought _Ockanickon_, he fell out of bed!
Speaking of freak prices, think of my surprise when I went to an auction one day last year and saw with amused amazement a little volume of book mysteries I once wrote. I felt self-conscious, uncomfortable, and pleased, all rolled into one, when the bids on _The Unpublishable Memoirs_ jumped up, and it finally sold for sixteen dollars. The joke is that this volume is still obtainable at its published price of $2.50.
The enormous and ever increasing attendance at auction sales in the established city auction rooms is caused by the hope that sometime a real bargain will come your way. This is the lure, the real bait. It has an appeal all its own. But for the young enthusiast it is often a costly and dangerous game. It is wiser to begin your bidding under the guidance of an experienced agent. There are several collectors and owners of great private libraries in this country whose names are entirely unknown in the auction room. They may enter the salesroom incognito, to enjoy watching their agent at battle with others, but they are careful not to run any risks themselves through careless, inexperienced bidding. One of the greatest book collectors in the world, Mr. Henry E. Huntington, never bid. In all the years during which he was buying he never entered the lists to joust for himself.
In the forty years I have been bidding I have found a new thrill in every sale. From my earliest years at Henkels’s auctions to the most recent sales in London, Paris, and New York, I have repeatedly known a fine exhilaration. I sniff the air like an old war horse at the smell of powder. How often have I felt my pulses race, my temperature rise with the rising bids! But as I grow older I find I have to fight that deadliest of maladies--conservatism. This is one thing in the world that the collector should pray to be delivered from. Of course it is awfully difficult to pay $500 to-day for a book that in your youth you could have picked up for only twenty, or to buy a book for $1000 which two years ago passed through your fingers for one third as much.
The late George D. Smith, a spectacular figure in the auction mart for more than twenty years, was the only man I ever knew entirely immune from conservatism. I can remember him at the Hoe sale in 1911-12. There he was constantly bidding against the sharpest and most astute members of both the European and the American book trade. How cool and collected he was in the very midst of battle! The comments of his competitors remained unnoticed by him when he paid what were then considered extravagant prices for books and manuscripts. And his judgment was right. To-day these same items can’t be bought for two or three times the sums he paid. When he purchased, toward the end of the sale, a Gutenberg Bible for $50,000, everyone said he had gone quite mad. They did not realize that the same remarks were made sixty-five years earlier, when, in 1847, James Lenox had given £500--about $2500--for it. This copy is now in the New York Public Library. In my opinion the Gutenberg Bible was then worth every dollar of the $50,000 which G. D. S. paid for it. Ten years from now it will be cheap at $250,000.
There have been many notable auctions during the past twenty years, but I shall never forget my first one in England, in 1907. A dear friend of mine, and a most intelligent collector of exquisite taste, Mr. William C. Van Antwerp, of San Francisco, had gathered together a small but delectable library, which he decided to sell at Sotheby’s in March of that year. I crossed on the Oceanic with Alfred Quaritch, who occupied a commanding position in the book world.
I was but one of the small fry, out of college only a few years. Quaritch and I had been drawn to each other by the magnet of books. On the way over we talked of the sale, and I dwelt with especial emphasis on the fine first folio of Shakespeare in Van’s collection. In a way, I was sounding out Quaritch, for I knew instinctively that it would be useless to bid against this giant of the auction room if he wanted the folio himself. I grew very nervous as we sat in the smoking room one evening when we were about five days out. I decided I had hemmed and hawed long enough. Finally I worked up courage to ask him to execute a bid for me on the folio.
He seemed surprised, and did not answer for some moments. Then he asked me, “How much do you intend to bid? I warn you, if it’s too low I’ll buy it myself.”
I answered weakly, “Five thousand pounds.”
He opened his eyes wide. “That _is_ a bid,” he said, “and I’ll get it for you.”
Then came the day of the auction in London. I remember sitting next to Quaritch, witnessing the battle of wits and bids at Sotheby’s. I was shaking like the proverbial aspen leaf, to a degree that I have never done since. The bidding on the folio opened at £500. After what seemed an interminable length of time, it was knocked down to Quaritch for £3600. I was so completely overcome with joy that I had to walk around the block for air and refreshment to buck me up. This was a handsome copy, bound in morocco by Bedford, a celebrated craftsman of the 70’s.
I recall, too, Harry Elkins Widener’s pleasure when this folio passed finally into his possession. I think of all the books of his fine collection, he valued this one the most. Years later, when we paid £8600--a little under $43,000--at the Baroness Burdett-Coutts’s sale, the record price for a Shakespeare folio, I received my brother Philip’s cable, advising me of our luck, without a tremor.
Fifteen years had rolled by; much water had run under the bridge. Poor Quaritch, my dearest friend in the book business, had passed away, only forty-two years old when he died. His death was a great loss to the world of rare books.
The price of a first folio indicates the trend of values in the English market, just as the Boucher Molière, 1734, shows the state of the French market, while the Dante printed in Foligno, 1472, tells the tale of the Italian market. These books are always rising in value, and it is the rapidity of their change in price that shows which way the wind is blowing. To-day, when the condition of a book is everything and collectors pay more attention to it than to anything else, fine first folios of Shakespeare are judged by these three points: First, the copy must have its full number of leaves, each page perfect, without facsimile. Second, the binding. It is, of course, more desirable in the original binding, or, next, rebound in the eighteenth century, or, lastly, in a good modern binding. In years to come the original binding will be the chief of all desiderata. Third, the folio must be of adequate size, about thirteen by eight and a quarter inches. A quarter of an inch one way or another can spell tragedy to the fanatical collector. If you are lucky enough to find a first folio having all three of these qualities, the gods are with you. I have been fortunate to procure such an one, the celebrated copy from Sir George Holford’s library. It is perfect in every detail. It is exceptional in having the blank leaves, known in no other copy; its original old calf binding is without a single blemish.
This is the finest first folio known to exist. It is the cornerstone of a collection of Shakespeare’s works which I have been gathering for many years. I remember the excitement when we exhibited in our Philadelphia show window the four folios, each in its original binding, the _Poems_, in a similar binding, and forty-one of the early quarto plays. The passionate interest shown by the man in the street indicated his never-flagging enthusiasm for anything pertaining to the greatest writer the world has known.
In 1905, Mr. Bernard Buchanan MacGeorge, of Glasgow, sold four Shakespeare folios in their original binding to Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island. He doubtless believed he was using his cunning Scotch wisdom to a high degree when he steadfastly held out for £10,000. At this price he figured he was doing himself a neat turn, because he had paid only £1700 for them six years before. But if he had been a bit cannier, a little more patient, he would have received two or three times the sum Mr. Perry paid him. When the balance of the MacGeorge Library was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in July 1924, all the bibliophiles in bookdom would have torn one another to bits to get the Shakespeare folios at the old price. But I was lucky enough to procure them when I purchased _en bloc_ the Perry Library, and to-day they are in the library of Mr. Joseph Widener, at Lynnewood Hall, near Philadelphia.
Thank goodness, they are at least near home, where I can look at them to my heart’s content.
The history of the Shakespeare folios is an interesting one. Shakespeare’s genius was so overwhelming that even the least of the nitwits of his day appreciated him. His greatest contemporaries were the most eager to preserve his works. Immediately after his death in 1616 steps were taken to issue a complete edition of his plays. His manuscripts were probably collected, but, alas, not saved, and scholars of the time, many of whom had known him well, labored to procure a perfect text.
Three years passed. Then, in 1619, the English public was surprised to see issued a single volume containing nine plays. No one knows how many copies composed this edition, but it is a strange circumstance that but one copy is in existence to-day. I once owned it, but it finally passed to Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, who added it to his remarkable collection of Shakespeareana. This one surviving copy is in its original binding. It has an index, too, in the quaint old handwriting of its first owner, Edward Gwynne, who proudly stamped his name in gilt on the outside cover. Even though I should not care to be dubbed a prophet in my own country, I do not hesitate to say that this book would bring at least $200,000 if it were sold on the block to-day.
This 1619 volume was but a makeshift, playing for its sale upon the magic name of Shakespeare. John Heminge and Henry Condell, both true and tried friends of the great Bard, and fellow actors, mentioned in his will, undertook to give the world a complete and correct edition of his plays. William Jaggard and his son Isaac were responsible for the printing, a laborious task when you consider that the volume consisted of one thousand double-column pages. Thus, the great first folio was finally issued in 1623, in a plain calf binding. It contained a portrait of William Shakespeare, with a leaf of verses on the opposite page by his famous contemporary, Ben Jonson. These are among the finest lines ever written concerning Shakespeare, and perhaps the greatest from Jonson’s pen. The original price of the first folio was five dollars a copy.
One pound in 1623! And yet in the years between 1700 and 1750 it had only advanced to ten, which reminds me of a good story. In 1790 the copy belonging to John Watson Reed was offered for sale. That astute collector, the Duke of Roxburghe, wanted it and commissioned an agent to buy it for him. The bidding started at five pounds and rose to the enormous sum of twenty guineas! Everyone was astounded. The duke’s agent grew faint-hearted and passed a slip of paper to him suggesting that His Grace retire from the contest. The duke replied with these memorable and appropriate words:--
Lay on, Macduff; And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
The folio finally fell to the duke for thirty-five pounds. How often, when I feel myself weakening at a sale, do I think of the old duke’s quotation from _Macbeth_. It should be the motto of every auction bidder.
The Duke of Roxburghe’s library was sold at Sotheby’s in 1812, and it included the first folio. It brought an advance of almost three hundred per cent, being purchased by the Duke of Devonshire for £100. It can be seen now in the Henry E. Huntington Library. The sale of this collection more than one hundred and fifteen years ago provided a sensation which is still talked about, and was not equaled until the auction of the Gutenberg Bible a year ago last February. As Thomas Frognall Dibdin said, it reverberated around the world. The Valdarfer Boccaccio was the high light in the Roxburghe sale. This notorious volume was the only perfect copy of the first edition of the _Decameron_. I have always thought that his flowery description of the bidding which took place in that “grand æra of Bibliomania,” as he was so pleased to term it, applies exactly to the tactics used in the modern auction room. Dibdin wrote as follows:--
The room was crowded to excess; and a sudden darkness which came across gave rather an additional interest to the scene. At length the moment of sale arrived. Mr. Evans prefaced the putting up of the article by an appropriate oration, in which he expatiated upon its excessive rarity, and concluded by informing the company of the regret and even “anguish of heart” expressed by Mr. Van Praet that such a treasure was not at that time to be found in the imperial collection at Paris. However, it should seem Bonaparte’s agent was present. Silence followed the address of Mr. Evans. 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 that 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.
“A thousand guineas” were bid by Earl Spencer--to which the Marquis added “ten.” You might have heard a pin drop. All eyes were turned, all breathing well nigh stopped ... every sword was put home within its scabbard, and not a piece of steel was seen to move or to glitter save that which each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand. See, see! They parry, they lunge, they hit; yet their strength is undiminished, and no thought of yielding is entertained by either.... “Two thousand pounds are offered by the Marquis.” ...
Then it was that Earl Spencer, as a prudent general, began to think of an useless effusion of blood and expenditure of ammunition--seeing that his adversary was as resolute and “fresh” as at the onset. For a quarter of a minute he paused; when my Lord Althorp advanced one step forward, as if to supply his father with another spear for the purpose of renewing the contest. His countenance was marked by a fixed determination to gain the prize--if prudence, in its most commanding form, and with a frown of unusual intensity of expression, had not bade him desist. The father and son for a few seconds converse apart; and the biddings are resumed.
“Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds,” said Lord Spencer. The spectators are now absolutely electrified. The Marquis quietly adds his usual “ten” ... and there is an END OF THE CONTEST! Mr. Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a due pause--and indeed, as if by something præternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended “in midair.” However, at length down dropt the hammer ... and, as Lisardo has not merely poetically expressed himself, “the echo” of the sound of that fallen hammer “was heard in the libraries of Rome, of Milan, and St. Mark.”