Chapter 7

The natural sympathy of collectors “to middle fortune born” is not with the rich men whose sport in book-hunting resembles the _battue_. We side with the poor hunters of the wild game, who hang over the fourpenny stalls on the _quais_, and dive into the dusty boxes after literary pearls. These devoted men rise betimes, and hurry to the stalls before the common tide of passengers goes by. Early morning is the best moment in this, as in other sports. At half past seven, in summer, the _bouquiniste_, the dealer in cheap volumes at second-hand, arrays the books which he purchased over night, the stray possessions of ruined families, the outcasts of libraries. The old-fashioned bookseller knew little of the value of his wares; it was his object to turn a small certain profit on his expenditure. It is reckoned that an energetic, business-like old bookseller will turn over 150,000 volumes in a year. In this vast number there must be pickings for the humble collector who cannot afford to encounter the children of Israel at Sotheby’s or at the Hôtel Drouot.

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 champêtre_; 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 wherewithal 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 (_si mentem mortalia tangunt_) that they are now so highly valued that the price of a copy would have kept the author alive and happy for a month.

[Picture: Binding with the arms of Madame de Pompadour]

_OLD FRENCH TITLE-PAGES_.

NOTHING can be plainer, as a rule, than a modern English title-page. Its only beauty (if beauty it possesses) consists in the arrangement and ‘massing’ of lines of type in various sizes. We have returned almost to the primitive simplicity of the oldest printed books, which had no title-pages, properly speaking, at all, or merely gave, with extreme brevity, the name of the work, without printer’s mark, or date, or place. These were reserved for the colophon, if it was thought desirable to mention them at all. Thus, in the black-letter example of Guido de Columna’s ‘History of Troy,’ written about 1283, and printed at Strasburg in 1489, the title-page is blank, except for the words,

Hystoria Troiana Guidonis,

standing alone at the top of the leaf. The colophon contains all the rest of the information, ‘happily completed in the City of Strasburg, in the year of Grace Mcccclxxxix, about the Feast of St. Urban.’ The printer and publisher give no name at all.

This early simplicity is succeeded, in French books, from, say, 1510, and afterwards, by the insertion either of the printer’s trademark, or, in black-letter books, of a rough woodcut, illustrative of the nature of the volume. The woodcuts have occasionally a rude kind of grace, with a touch of the classical taste of the early Renaissance surviving in extreme decay.

An excellent example is the title-page of ‘Les Demandes d’amours, avec les responses joyeuses,’ published by Jacques Moderne, at Lyon, 1540. There is a certain Pagan breadth and joyousness in the figure of Amor, and the man in the hood resembles traditional portraits of Dante.

[Picture: Les demandes tamours auec les refpôfesioyeufes. Demáde refponfe]

There is more humour, and a good deal of skill, in the title-page of a book on late marriages and their discomforts, ‘Les dictz et complainctes de trop Tard marié’ (Jacques Moderne, Lyon, 1540), where we see the elderly and comfortable couple sitting gravely under their own fig-tree.

[Picture: Les dictz et complainctes]

Jacques Moderne was a printer curious in these quaint devices, and used them in most of his books: for example, in ‘How Satan and the God Bacchus accuse the Publicans that spoil the wine,’ Bacchus and Satan (exactly like each other, as Sir Wilfrid Lawson will not be surprised to hear) are encouraging dishonest tavern-keepers to stew in their own juice in a caldron over a huge fire. From the same popular publisher came a little tract on various modes of sport, if the name of sport can be applied to the netting of fish and birds. The work is styled ‘Livret nouveau auquel sont contenuz xxv receptes de prendre poissons et oiseaulx avec les mains.’ A countryman clad in a goat’s skin with the head and horns drawn over his head as a hood, is dragging ashore a net full of fishes. There is no more characteristic frontispiece of this black-letter sort than the woodcut representing a gallows with three men hanging on it, which illustrates Villon’s ‘Ballade des Pendus,’ and is reproduced in Mr. John Payne’s ‘Poems of Master Francis Villon of Paris’ (London, 1878). {119a}

Earlier in date than these vignettes of Jacques Moderne, but much more artistic and refined in design, are some frontispieces of small octavos printed _en lettres rondes_, about 1530. In these rubricated letters are used with brilliant effect. One of the best is the title-page of Galliot du Pré’s edition of ‘Le Rommant de la Rose’ (Paris, 1529). {119b} Galliot du Pré’s artist, however, surpassed even the charming device of the Lover plucking the Rose, in his title-page, of the same date, for the small octavo edition of Alain Chartier’s poems, which we reproduce here.

[Picture: Les Oevvres feu maiftre Alain chartier en fon viuant Secretaire du feu roy Charles les feptiefme du non...]

The arrangement of letters, and the use of red, make a charming frame, as it were, to the drawing of the mediæval ship, with the Motto VOGUE LA GALEE.

Title-pages like these, with designs appropriate to the character of the text, were superseded presently by the fashion of badges, devices, and mottoes. As courtiers and ladies had their private badges, not hereditary, like crests, but personal—the crescent of Diane, the salamander of Francis I., the skulls and cross-bones of Henri III., the _marguerites_ of Marguerite, with mottoes like the _Le Banny de liesse_, _Le traverseur des voies périlleuses_, _Tout par Soulas_, and the like, so printers and authors had their emblems, and their private literary slogans. These they changed, accordinging to fancy, or the vicissitudes of their lives. Clément Marot’s motto was _La Mort n’y Mord_. It is indicated by the letters L. M. N. M. in the curious title of an edition of Marot’s works published at Lyons by Jean de Tournes in 1579. The portrait represents the poet when the tide of years had borne him far from his youth, far from _L’Adolescence Clémentine_.

[Picture: Le Pastissier François, MDCLV, title page]

[Picture: Le Pastissier Francois, 1655, showing a kitchen scene]

The unfortunate Etienne Dolet, perhaps the only publisher who was ever burned, used an ominous device, a trunk of a tree, with the axe struck into it. In publishing ‘Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses, très illustre Royne de Navarre,’ Jean de Tournes employed a pretty allegorical device. Love, with the bandage thrust back from his eyes, and with the bow and arrows in his hand, has flown up to the sun, which he seems to touch; like Prometheus in the myth when he stole the fire, a shower of flowers and flames falls around him. Groueleau, of Paris, had for motto _Nul ne s’y frotte_, with the thistle for badge. These are beautifully combined in the title-page of his version of Apuleius, ‘L’Amour de Cupido et de Psyche’ (Paris, 1557). There is probably no better date for frontispieces, both for ingenuity of device and for elegance of arrangement of title, than the years between 1530 and 1560. By 1562, when the first edition of the famous Fifth Book of Rabelais was published, the printers appear to have thought devices wasted on popular books, and the title of the Master’s posthumous chapters is printed quite simply.

[Picture: Gargantva]

In 1532–35 there was a more adventurous taste—witness the title of ‘Gargantua.’ This beautiful title decorates the first known edition, with a date of the First Book of Rabelais. It was sold, most appropriately, _devant nostre Dame de Confort_. Why should so glorious a relic of the Master have been carried out of England, at the Sunderland sale? All the early titles of François Juste’s Lyons editions of Rabelais are on this model. By 1542 he dropped the framework of architectural design. By 1565 Richard Breton, in Paris, was printing Rabelais with a frontispiece of a classical dame holding a heart to the sun, a figure which is almost in the taste of Stothard, or Flaxman.

The taste for vignettes, engraved on copper, not on wood, was revived under the Elzevirs. Their pretty little title-pages are not so well known but that we offer examples. In the essay on the Elzevirs in this volume will be found a copy of the vignette of the ‘Imitatio Christi,’ and of ‘Le Pastissier François’ a reproduction is given here (pp. 114, 115). The artists they employed had plenty of fancy, not backed by very profound skill in design.

In the same _genre_ as the big-wigged classicism of the Elzevir vignettes, in an age when Louis XIV. and Molière (in tragedy) wore laurel wreaths over vast perruques, are the early frontispieces of Molière’s own collected works. Probably the most interesting of all French title-pages are those drawn by Chauveau for the two volumes ‘Les Oeuvres de M. de Molière,’ published in 1666 by Guillaume de Luynes. The first shows Molière in two characters, as Mascarille, and as Sganarelle, in ‘Le Cocu Imaginaire.’ Contrast the full-blown jollity of the _fourbum imperator_, in his hat, and feather, and wig, and vast _canons_, and tremendous shoe-tie, with the lean melancholy of jealous Sganarelle. These are two notable aspects of the genius of the great comedian. The apes below are the supporters of his scutcheon.

The second volume shows the Muse of Comedy crowning Mlle. de Molière (Armande Béjart) in the dress of Agnès, while her husband is in the costume, apparently, of Tartuffe, or of Sganarelle in ‘L’Ecole des Femmes.’ ‘Tartuffe’ had not yet been licensed for a public stage. The interest of the portraits and costumes makes these title-pages precious, they are historical documents rather than mere curiosities.

These title-pages of Molière are the highwater mark of French taste in this branch of decoration. In the old quarto first editions of Corneille’s early plays, such as ‘Le Cid’ (Paris 1637), the printers used lax and sprawling combinations of flowers and fruit. These, a little better executed, were the staple of Ribou, de Luynes, Quinet, and the other Parisian booksellers who, one after another, failed to satisfy Molière as publishers.

[Picture: Les Oeuvres de Mr Moliere]

The basket of fruits on the title-page of ‘Iphigénie,’ par M. Racine (Barbin, Paris, 1675), is almost, but not quite, identical with the similar ornament of De Visé’s ‘La Cocue Imaginaire’ (Ribou, Paris 1662). Many of Molière’s plays appearing first, separately, in small octavo, were adorned with frontispieces, illustrative of some scene in the comedy. Thus, in the ‘Misanthrope’ (Rihou 1667) we see Alceste, green ribbons and all, discoursing with Philinte, or perhaps listening to the famous sonnet of Oronte; it is not easy to be quite certain, but the expression of Alceste’s face looks rather as if he were being baited with a sonnet. From the close of the seventeenth century onwards, the taste for title-pages declined, except when Moreau or Gravelot drew vignettes on copper, with abundance of cupids and nymphs. These were designed for very luxurious and expensive books; for others, men contented themselves with a bald simplicity, which has prevailed till our own time. In recent years the employment of publishers’ devices has been less unusual and more agreeable. Thus Poulet Malassis had his _armes parlantes_, a chicken very uncomfortably perched on a rail. In England we have the cipher and bees of Messrs. Macmillan, the Trees of Life and Knowledge of Messrs. Kegan Paul and Trench, the Ship, which was the sign of Messrs. Longman’s early place of business, and doubtless other symbols, all capable of being quaintly treated in a title-page.

_A BOOKMAN’S PURGATORY_.

THOMAS BLINTON was a book-hunter. He had always been a book-hunter, ever since, at an extremely early age, he had awakened to the errors of his ways as a collector of stamps and monograms. In book-hunting he saw no harm; nay, he would contrast its joys, in a rather pharisaical style, with the pleasures of shooting and fishing. He constantly declined to believe that the devil came for that renowned amateur of black letter, G. Steevens. Dibdin himself, who tells the story (with obvious anxiety and alarm), pretends to refuse credit to the ghastly narrative. “His language,” says Dibdin, in his account of the book-hunter’s end, “was, too frequently, the language of imprecation.” This is rather good, as if Dibdin thought a gentleman might swear pretty often, but not “_too_ frequently.” “Although I am not disposed to admit,” Dibdin goes on, “the _whole_ of the testimony of the good woman who watched by Steevens’s bedside, although my prejudices (as they may be called) will not allow me to believe that the windows shook, and that strange noises and deep groans were heard at midnight in his room, yet no creature of common sense (and this woman possessed the quality in an eminent degree) could mistake oaths for prayers;” and so forth. In short, Dibdin clearly holds that the windows did shake “without a blast,” like the banners in Branxholme Hall when somebody came for the Goblin Page.

But Thomas Blinton would hear of none of these things. He said that his taste made him take exercise; that he walked from the City to West Kensington every day, to beat the covers of the book-stalls, while other men travelled in the expensive cab or the unwholesome Metropolitan Railway. We are all apt to hold favourable views of our own amusements, and, for my own part, I believe that trout and salmon are incapable of feeling pain. But the flimsiness of Blinton’s theories must be apparent to every unbiassed moralist. His “harmless taste” really involved most of the deadly sins, or at all events a fair working majority of them. He coveted his neighbours’ books. When he got the chance he bought books in a cheap market and sold them in a dear market, thereby degrading literature to the level of trade. He took advantage of the ignorance of uneducated persons who kept book-stalls. He was envious, and grudged the good fortune of others, while he rejoiced in their failures. He turned a deaf ear to the appeals of poverty. He was luxurious, and laid out more money than he should have done on his selfish pleasures, often adorning a volume with a morocco binding when Mrs. Blinton sighed in vain for some old _point d’Alençon_ lace. Greedy, proud, envious, stingy, extravagant, and sharp in his dealings, Blinton was guilty of most of the sins which the Church recognises as “deadly.”

On the very day before that of which the affecting history is now to be told, Blinton had been running the usual round of crime. He had (as far as intentions went) defrauded a bookseller in Holywell Street by purchasing from him, for the sum of two shillings, what he took to be a very rare Elzevir. It is true that when he got home and consulted ‘Willems,’ he found that he had got hold of the wrong copy, in which the figures denoting the numbers of pages are printed right, and which is therefore worth exactly “nuppence” to the collector. But the intention is the thing, and Blinton’s intention was distinctly fraudulent. When he discovered his error, then “his language,” as Dibdin says, “was that of imprecation.” Worse (if possible) than this, Blinton had gone to a sale, begun to bid for ‘Les Essais de Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne’ (Foppens, MDCLIX.), and, carried away by excitement, had “plunged” to the extent of £15, which was precisely the amount of money he owed his plumber and gasfitter, a worthy man with a large family. Then, meeting a friend (if the book-hunter has friends), or rather an accomplice in lawless enterprise, Blinton had remarked the glee on the other’s face. The poor man had purchased a little old Olaus Magnus, with woodcuts, representing were-wolves, fire-drakes, and other fearful wild-fowl, and was happy in his bargain. But Blinton, with fiendish joy, pointed out to him that the index was imperfect, and left him sorrowing.

Deeds more foul have yet to be told. Thomas Blinton had discovered a new sin, so to speak, in the collecting way. Aristophanes says of one of his favourite blackguards, “Not only is he a villain, but he has invented an original villainy.” Blinton was like this. He maintained that every man who came to notoriety had, at some period, published a volume of poems which he had afterwards repented of and withdrawn. It was Blinton’s hideous pleasure to collect stray copies of these unhappy volumes, these ‘Péchés de Jeunesse,’ which, always and invariably, bear a gushing inscription from the author to a friend. He had all Lord John Manners’s poems, and even Mr. Ruskin’s. He had the ‘Ode to Despair’ of Smith (now a comic writer), and the ‘Love Lyrics’ of Brown, who is now a permanent under-secretary, than which nothing can be less gay nor more permanent. He had the amatory songs which a dignitary of the Church published and withdrew from circulation. Blinton was wont to say he expected to come across ‘Triolets of a Tribune,’ by Mr. John Bright, and ‘Original Hymns for Infant Minds,’ by Mr. Henry Labouchere, if he only hunted long enough.

On the day of which I speak he had secured a volume of love-poems which the author had done his best to destroy, and he had gone to his club and read all the funniest passages aloud to friends of the author, who was on the club committee. Ah, was this a kind action? In short, Blinton had filled up the cup of his iniquities, and nobody will be surprised to hear that he met the appropriate punishment of his offence. Blinton had passed, on the whole, a happy day, notwithstanding the error about the Elzevir. He dined well at his club, went home, slept well, and started next morning for his office in the City, walking, as usual, and intending to pursue the pleasures of the chase at all the book-stalls. At the very first, in the Brompton Road, he saw a man turning over the rubbish in the cheap box. Blinton stared at him, fancied he knew him, thought he didn’t, and then became a prey to the glittering eye of the other. The Stranger, who wore the conventional cloak and slouched soft hat of Strangers, was apparently an accomplished mesmerist, or thought-reader, or adept, or esoteric Buddhist. He resembled Mr. Isaacs, Zanoni (in the novel of that name), Mendoza (in ‘Codlingsby’), the soul-less man in ‘A Strange Story,’ Mr. Home, Mr. Irving Bishop, a Buddhist adept in the astral body, and most other mysterious characters of history and fiction. Before his Awful Will, Blinton’s mere modern obstinacy shrank back like a child abashed. The Stranger glided to him and whispered, “Buy these.”

“These” were a complete set of Auerbach’s novels, in English, which, I need not say, Blinton would never have dreamt of purchasing had he been left to his own devices.

“Buy these!” repeated the Adept, or whatever he was, in a cruel whisper. Paying the sum demanded, and trailing his vast load of German romance, poor Blinton followed the fiend.

They reached a stall where, amongst much trash, Glatigny’s ‘Jour de l’An d’un Vagabond’ was exposed.

“Look,” said Blinton, “there is a book I have wanted some time. Glatignys are getting rather scarce, and it is an amusing trifle.”

“Nay, buy _that_,” said the implacable Stranger, pointing with a hooked forefinger at Alison’s ‘History of Europe’ in an indefinite number of volumes. Blinton shuddered.

“What, buy _that_, and why? In heaven’s name, what could I do with it?”

“Buy it,” repeated the persecutor, “and _that_” (indicating the ‘Ilios’ of Dr. Schliemann, a bulky work), “and _these_” (pointing to all Mr. Theodore Alois Buckley’s translations of the Classics), “and _these_” (glancing at the collected writings of the late Mr. Hain Friswell, and at a ‘Life,’ in more than one volume, of Mr. Gladstone).

The miserable Blinton paid, and trudged along carrying the bargains under his arm. Now one book fell out, now another dropped by the way. Sometimes a portion of Alison came ponderously to earth; sometimes the ‘Gentle Life’ sunk resignedly to the ground. The Adept kept picking them up again, and packing them under the arms of the weary Blinton.

The victim now attempted to put on an air of geniality, and tried to enter into conversation with his tormentor.

“He _does_ know about books,” thought Blinton, “and he must have a weak spot somewhere.”

So the wretched amateur made play in his best conversational style. He talked of bindings, of Maioli, of Grolier, of De Thou, of Derome, of Clovis Eve, of Roger Payne, of Trautz, and eke of Bauzonnet. He discoursed of first editions, of black letter, and even of illustrations and vignettes. He approached the topic of Bibles, but here his tyrant, with a fierce yet timid glance, interrupted him.

“Buy those!” he hissed through his teeth.

“Those” were the complete publications of the Folk Lore Society.

Blinton did not care for folk lore (very bad men never do), but he had to act as he was told.

Then, without pause or remorse, he was charged to acquire the ‘Ethics’ of Aristotle, in the agreeable versions of Williams and Chase. Next he secured ‘Strathmore,’ ‘Chandos,’ ‘Under Two Flags,’ and ‘Two Little Wooden Shoes,’ and several dozens more of Ouida’s novels. The next stall was entirely filled with school-books, old geographies, Livys, Delectuses, Arnold’s ‘Greek Exercises,’ Ollendorffs, and what not.

“Buy them all,” hissed the fiend. He seized whole boxes and piled them on Blinton’s head.

He tied up Ouida’s novels, in two parcels, with string, and fastened each to one of the buttons above the tails of Blinton’s coat.

“You are tired?” asked the tormentor. “Never mind, these books will soon be off your hands.”

So speaking, the Stranger, with amazing speed, hurried Blinton back through Holywell Street, along the Strand, and up to Piccadilly, stopping at last at the door of Blinton’s famous and very expensive binder.

The binder opened his eyes, as well he might, at the vision of Blinton’s treasures. Then the miserable Blinton found himself, as it were automatically and without any exercise of his will, speaking thus:—

“Here are some things I have picked up,—extremely rare,—and you will oblige me by binding them in your best manner, regardless of expense. Morocco, of course; crushed levant morocco, _doublé_, every book of them, _petits fers_, my crest and coat of arms, plenty of gilding. Spare no cost. Don’t keep me waiting, as you generally do;” for indeed book-binders are the most dilatory of the human species.

Before the astonished binder could ask the most necessary questions, Blinton’s tormentor had hurried that amateur out of the room.

“Come on to the sale,” he cried.

“What sale?” said Blinton.

“Why, the Beckford sale; it is the thirteenth day, a lucky day.”

“But I have forgotten my catalogue.”

“Where is it?”

“In the third shelf from the top, on the right-hand side of the ebony book-case at home.”