Part 15

For some years Farringdon Road has enjoyed the distinction of being the best locality in London for bookstalling. Its stalls are far more numerous, and the quality of the books here exposed for sale is of a much higher class, than those which are to be met with in other places. There are between thirty and forty bookstalls or barrows here, and the place has what we may describe as a bibliopolic history, which goes back for a period of twenty years. The first person to start in the bookselling line was a coster of the name of Roberts, who died somewhat suddenly either in December of 1894 or early in January of the present year. Roberts appears to have been a fairly successful man at the trade, and had a fairly good knowledge of cheap books. The _doyen_ of the Farringdon Road bibliopoles is named Dabbs--a very intelligent man, who started first in the hot-chestnut line. Mr. Dabbs has generally a fairly good stock of books, which varies between one and two thousand volumes, a selection of which are daily displayed on four or five barrows, and varying from two a penny ('You must take two') up to higher-priced volumes. Curiously enough, he finds that theological books pay the best, and it is of this class that his stock chiefly consists. Just as book-hunters have many 'finds' to gloat over, so perhaps booksellers have to bewail the many rarities which they have let slip through their fingers. It would be more than could be expected of human nature, as it is at present constituted, to expect booksellers to make a clean or even qualified confession in this respect. Our friend Dabbs, however, is not of this hypersensitive type, and he relates, with a certain amount of grim humour, that his greatest lost opportunity was the selling of a book for 1s. 6d. which a few days afterwards was sold in Paris for £50. He consoles himself with the reflection that at all events _he_ made a fair profit out of this book. If we could all be as philosophical as this intelligent book-barrow-keeper, doubtless the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune would impress fewer wrinkles on our brows, and help us to think kindly of the friends who put us 'up' to good things in the way of gold-mines and generously left us to pay the piper.

However picturesque may be the calling of the bookstall-keeper to the person who experiences a fiendish delight in getting a 6d. book out of him for 5-1/2d., the calling is on the whole a very hard one. Exposed to all weathers, these men have a veritable struggle for existence. Their actual profits rarely exceed 30s. or £2 weekly. They vary greatly, of course, according to weather, and a wet Saturday makes a very material difference to their takings. Many weeks throughout the year these takings do not average more than 8s. or 10s. We have made inquiries among most of the bookstall-keepers in the Metropolis, and the above facts can be depended upon. When these men happen upon a rare book, they nearly invariably sell it to one of the better-class booksellers. By this means they make an immediate profit and effect a ready sale. There is beyond this a numerous class of what may be described as 'book-ghouls,' or men who make it a business to haunt the cheap bookstalls and bag the better-class or more saleable books and hawk them around to the shops, and so make a few shillings on which to support a precarious existence, in which beer and tobacco are the sole delights. We once met a man who did a roaring trade of this description, chiefly with the British Museum. He took notes of every book that struck him as being curious or out of the way, and those which he discovered to be absent from the Museum he would at once purchase. He was great in the matter of editions, such as Pope, Junius, Coleridge, and so forth. The Museum is naturally lacking in hundreds of editions of English authors; but as these editions, almost without exception, possess no literary value, their presence (or absence) was not a matter of importance. For some months the 'collector' referred to inundated the Museum with these unimportant editions. Our friend discovered that the Museum authorities, ignoring the prices which he placed on his wares, would only have them at their own figures--which showed a curious similarity to those at which the vendor had obtained them--and this, coupled with the fact that they refused to purchase many of the items offered at any price, led him to the conclusion that he was serving his country at too cheap a rate. It is scarcely necessary to add that he is now following a vocation which, if less agreeable, is certainly more profitable to himself. Occasionally one of these professional bookstallers blossoms into a shopkeeper in some court or alley off Holborn; but more generally they are too far gone in drink and dilapidation to get out of the rut.

One of the most curious characters who ever owned a bookstall was Henry Lemoine, the son of a French Huguenot. He was born in 1756, and for many years kept a stall in Bishopsgate Churchyard. He wrote many books, and did much hack-work for various publishers, chiefly in the way of translations from the French. He gave up shopkeeping in 1795, and became a pedestrian bookseller or colporteur of pamphlets. In 1807 he again set up a small stand of books in Parliament Street, and died in April, 1812. He might have achieved success, and become a respectable member of society, but his great failing was an all-consuming thirst.

Writing over forty years ago in 'London Labour and the London Poor,' 1851, Henry Mayhew remarked: 'There has been a change, and in some respects a considerable change, in the character or class of books sold at the street stalls, within the last forty or fifty years, as I have ascertained from the most experienced men in the trade. Now sermons, or rather the works of the old divines, are rarely seen at these stalls, or if seen, rarely purchased. Black-letter editions are very unfrequent at street bookstalls, and it is twenty times more difficult, I am assured, for street-sellers to pick up anything really rare and curious, than it was in the early part of the century. One reason assigned for this change by an intelligent street-seller was, that black-letter or any ancient works were almost all purchased by the second-hand booksellers, who have shops and issue catalogues, as they have a prompt sale for them whenever they pick them up at book-auctions or elsewhere.' As we have already pointed out, the same rule which obtained forty years ago applies with equal force to-day, and in the chief instances in which we have met with books well known to be rare, on bookstalls, their condition has been so bad as to render them valueless, except, perhaps, for the purpose of helping to complete imperfect copies.

At one time the bookstall-keepers had fairly good opportunities of making a haul of a few rare books--that was when they were called in to clear out offices and old houses. As the world has grown wiser in respect to books as well as other things, executors, legatees, and so forth, have acquired unreasonable views as to the value of old books, and everything in the shape of a volume is sent to the regular book-auctioneers. When it is remembered that practically all the books which now occur on the various bookstalls of the Metropolis are purchased under the hammer at Hodgson's, the chances of obtaining anything rare are reduced to a minimum. These books are the refuse of the various bookshops, after, perhaps, having passed from one shop to another for several years without finding a purchaser outside the trade. At Hodgson's, of course, these books find their level, after repeated appearances; they are here sold, not quite by the cartload, but certainly in lots sufficiently large to fill a moderate sized wheelbarrow. The tastes of the bookbuying public are so infinite that there would seem to be a sale, at some time or another, for every species of printed matter; but the habitual haunter of the bookstalls meets with the same water-soaked dog-eared volumes month after month, and year after year, so that he is forced to the conclusion that the right purchaser has not yet come along. These volumes appeal to the bookbuyer with a piteousness which is scarcely less than positively human. In the words of George Peele, written over three centuries ago, these books seem to say,

'Buy, read and judge, The price do not grudge; It will give thee more pleasure Than twice as much treasure;'

but no one seems to take the hint. Samuel Foote, in 'The Author,' makes Vamp say: 'Books are like women, Master Cape; to strike they must be well dressed; fine feathers make fine birds: a good paper, an elegant type, a handsome motto, and a catching title, has drove many a dull treatise through three editions.' These adventitious aids may still possess a potent influence in selling a new book even to-day, but they have little effect on the sale of the books which gravitate towards the book-barrow.

The bookstall-keeper, it is true, has no rent to pay, except for the hire of his barrow, which amounts to one shilling per week each. Even this small charge is a considerable item where a man hires two or three barrows and does scarcely any trade. Then he has to pay someone to look after his goods during his absence. Further than this, the barrow-man has to pay cash down before he removes his purchase from the sale-room. On the other hand he gives no credit. The bookseller who enjoys the luxury of a shop, gets credit from the auctioneer, and gives credit to his customers. He has to put as large a margin of profit as possible on his books, and an average of sixpence each has to be added to the original cost of every item catalogued. The bookstall-man is, naturally, handicapped in many ways, and if he finds the sweepings of his more aristocratic _confrères'_ shops a long time on his hands, he, at all events, makes as large a profit with much fewer liabilities.

We have referred to Hodgson's as the centre from which nearly all the bookstalls are supplied. Occasionally, however, the barrow-man buys at Sotheby's, and frequently so at Puttick and Simpson's. Sometimes the more adventurous spirits attend auctions in private houses in the suburbs, and occasionally those held a few miles out of town. These expeditions are more often than not 'arranged,' and usually resolve themselves into 'knock-outs.' It is a by no means unknown contingency for two or three men to purchase, against all comers, the entire lot of books at figures which invariably put the auctioneer into an exceedingly good humour; neither is it an unknown event for these men to decamp without the books, and also without leaving their addresses or deposit! Such tricks, however, are not the work of the tradesmen who have a _locus standi_, but of the better class of book-jackals, who, failing to get the books for next to nothing, outbid everyone else, and leave the auctioneer to get out of the dilemma as he best can.

For many years the weekly cattle-market at Islington has been a happy hunting-ground of the bookstall-keeper. Books are among the hundred and one articles which are brought from every conceivable source, and many very good things have doubtless been picked up here. But it is always the early prowler who gets the rarities--the man who gets there at eight or nine o'clock in the morning. There is very little but absolute rubbish left for the post-prandial visitor. A few inveterate book-hunters have journeyed thither at various times and in a spasmodic manner, but the hope of anything worth having has usually turned out to be a vain one: they have always been anticipated.

Between the more ambitious shop and the nondescript bookstall, there is a class or species of bookseller who deserves a niche in this place. We refer to men like Purcell, in Red Lion Passage, Red Lion Square, Holborn, who are almost as much printsellers as booksellers. They make one book by destroying many others. Grangerizing is the proper name of this practice; but as the Rev. Mr. Granger has been productive of more curses than a dozen John Bagfords--an evil genius of the same type--the process is now termed extra-illustrating. However much one may denounce the whole system, it is impossible, whatever a particular book-hunter's idiosyncrasy may be, not to feel interested in some of the collections which these enterprising and ruthless biblioclasts manage to get together. Mr. Purcell is an adept at this game, of which, doubtless, Mr. F. Harvey, of St. James's Street, is one of the most clever, as he is certainly the most eminent of professors. Mr. Purcell's collection of prints, engravings, press-cuttings, and so forth, cover an extraordinarily wide field. In fifty cases out of a hundred, booksellers who make grangerizing a speciality find it pays far better to break up an illustrated book than to sell it intact. When they purchase a book, it is obviously their own property, to preserve or destroy, as they find most agreeable. Personally, we regard the system as in many ways a pernicious one, but it is one upon which a vast amount of cant has been wasted.

But bookshops and stalls are obviously not the only places at which bargains in books are likely to be secured, as the following anecdote would seem to prove: 'A writer and reader well versed in the works of the minor English writers recently entered a newspaper-shop at the East End and purchased a pennyworth of snuff. When he got home he found that the titillating substance was wrapped in a leaf of Sir Thomas Elyot's black-letter book, "The Castell of Helth." The next day the purchaser went in hot haste to the shop and made a bid for the remainder of the volume. "You are too late, sir," spoke the shopkeeper. "After you had gone last night, a liter_airy_ gent as lives round the corner gave me two bob for the book. There was only one leaf torn out, which you got. The book was picked up at a stall for a penny by my son." The purchaser of the pennyworth at once produced the leaf, with instructions for it to be handed to his forestaller in the purchase of the volume, together with his name and address; and next day he received a courteous note of thanks from the "liter_airy_ gent" aforesaid.' Nothing is so uncertain as one's luck in book-hunting, but, without entirely discrediting the foregoing story, we can only say that it is an old friend with a new face. We have heard the same thing before. Not so very long ago, a certain bookseller thought he had at last got a prize; it was one of the rarest Shakespeare quartos, and worth close on £100. He had purchased it among a lot of other dirty pamphlets. He looked the matter up, and everything seemed to point to the fact that his copy was genuine in every respect--a most uncommon stroke of luck indeed. The precious quarto was in due course sent to Puttick's, and the modest reserve of £70 was placed upon it. The quarto was genuine in every respect, but it was a _facsimile_!

It may be taken for granted that genuine Shakespeare quartos do not occur on bookstalls, and even a rare Americana tract only occurs in the wildest dreams of the book-hunter. Nevertheless, 'finds' of more or less interest continue to be made by keen book-hunters. Dr. Garnett tells how a tradesman at Oswestry had in his possession books to which he attached no importance, but which, a lady informed him, must be very rare. They were submitted to the authorities of the British Museum, who gave a high price for them. One was Sir Anthony Sherley's 'Wits New Dyall,' published in 1604, of which only one other copy is known to be in existence. As a rule, offers of rare books come from booksellers, who do not always say how they become possessed of them. Among the private people who offer books to the Museum for sale are a large proportion who think that a book must necessarily be rare because it is a hundred years old or more. Before the great catalogue was made, finds were occasionally made in the Museum itself, and even now a volume will occasionally be found which has special interest and value on account of its binding. In other cases a book will be found to be in a binding made up of leaves of some rare work far more valuable than the book itself.

SOME BOOK-HUNTING LOCALITIES.

LITTLE BRITAIN AND MOORFIELDS.

THERE are few more attractive phases in the history of book-hunting in London than that of localities. Up to nearly the end of the last century, these localities were for the most part, and for close on 350 years, confined to within a narrow area. With the rapid expansion of London north, east, south, and west, the 'trade' has not only expanded, but its representatives have sprung up in every district, whilst many of the older ones have forsaken the limits of the City, and pitched their tents in Greater London. For centuries bookselling and publishing flourished side by side in St. Paul's Churchyard, Fleet Street, and their immediate neighbourhoods.

Of all the old bookselling localities close to the heart of London, none were more famous than Little Britain and Moorfields. Three years before the Great Fire of London--in 1663--Sorbière, in his 'Journey to England,' made the following observation: 'I am not to forget the vast number of booksellers' shops I have observed in London: for besides those who are set up here and there in the City, they have their particular quarters, such as St. Paul's Churchyard and Little Britain, where there is twice as many as in the Rue Saint Jacque in Paris, and who have each of them two or three warehouses.' The bookselling zenith of Little Britain was attained in the seventeenth century; it may almost be said to have commenced with the reign of Charles I., and to have begun a sort of retrogression with the Hanoverian succession. But there were printers and booksellers here at the latter part of the sixteenth century. From a newspaper published in this district in 1664, we learn that no less than 464 pamphlets were published here during four years. It was a sort of seventeenth-century combination of the Paternoster Row and Fleet Street of the present day. It is the place where, according to a widely circulated statement, first made in Richardson's 'Remarks on Paradise Lost,' 1734, an Earl of Dorset accidentally discovered, when on a book-hunt in 1667, a work hitherto unknown to him, entitled 'Paradise Lost.' He is said to have bought a copy, and the bookseller begged him to recommend it to his friends, as the copies lay on his hand like so much wastepaper. The noble Earl showed his copy to Dryden, who is reported to have exclaimed: 'This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too.' Though this anecdote may be apocryphal, certain it is the poem is in a way connected with the neighbourhood, inasmuch as Simmons' shop was in Aldersgate Street. In addition to this fact, Richardson also tells us that Milton lodged for some time in Little Britain with Millington, the famous book-auctioneer, who had then quitted the rostrum and followed the more peaceful vocation of a dealer in old books.

Roger North, in his 'Life of the Right Hon. Francis North,' has an oft-quoted reference to Little Britain. From this interesting account we learn that during the latter part of the seventeenth century it was a plentiful and perpetual emporium of learned authors, and that men went thither as to a market. The trade of the place was, in consequence, an important one, the shops being large, and much resorted to by literary personages, wits, men-about-town, and fashionable notabilities generally. The booksellers then were men of intellect. But referring, by way of contrast, to the place during the earlier half of the eighteenth century, he laments that 'this emporium is vanished, and the trade contracted into the hands of two or three persons, who, to make good their monopoly, ransack, not only their neighbours of the trade that are scattered about the town, but all over England, ay, and beyond sea, too, and send abroad their circulators, and in this manner get into their hands all that is valuable. The rest of the trade are content to take their refuse, with which, and the fresh scum of the press, they furnish one side of the shop, which serves for the sign of a bookseller, rather than a real one; but instead of selling, deal as factors, and procure what the country divines and gentry send for; of whom each hath his book-factor, and, when wanting anything, writes to his bookseller and pays his bill. And it is wretched to consider what pickpocket work, with the help of the press, these demi-booksellers make. They crack their brains to find out selling subjects, and keep hirelings in garrets, at hard meat, to write and correct by the groat; and so puff up an octavo to a sufficient thickness; and there is six shillings current for an hour and half's reading, and perhaps never to be read or looked upon after. One that would go higher, must take his fortune at blank walls, and corners of streets, or repair to the sign of Bateman, King, and one or two more, where are best choice, and better pennyworths. I might touch other abuses, as bad paper, incorrect printing, and false advertising; and all of which and worse are to be expected, if a careful author is not at the heels of them.'

We get an interesting glimpse of a meeting of two book-lovers in this locality from Izaak Walton. In his 'Life of Bishop Sanderson,' Walton writes that about the time Sanderson was printing this excellent preface ('before his last twenty Sermons,' 1655), 'I met him accidentally in London, in sad-coloured clothes, and, God knows, far from costly. The place of our meeting was near to Little Britain, where he had been to buy a book, which he then had in his hand.'

The house of Bateman is worthy of an important chapter in the bookselling annals of Little Britain, and the best-known member (Christopher) of the family is described in the usual sugared style of John Dunton: 'There are few booksellers in England (if any) that understand books better than Mr. Bateman, nor does his diligence and industry come short of his knowledge. He is a man of great reputation and honesty.' Nichols states that Bateman would allow no person to look into books in his shop, and when asked a reason for this extraordinary rule, he answered: 'I suppose you may be a physician or an author, and want some recipe or quotation; and, if you buy it, I will engage it to be perfect before you leave me, but not after, as I have suffered by leaves being torn out, and the books returned, to my very great loss and prejudice.' Bateman's shop was a favourite resort of Swift, who several times speaks of it in his 'Journal to Stella:' 'I went to Bateman's, the bookseller, and laid out eight and forty shillings for books. I bought three little volumes of Lucian, in French, for our Stella, and so, and so' (January 6, 1710-11); and again: 'I was at Bateman's, to see a fine old library he has bought, and my fingers itched as yours would do at a china-shop' (July 9, 1711).