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A Theory of Book-prices
By Alfred W. Pollard
Reeds lang waren wij van plan in Folium eens fundamentele en aan iedereen, die in het boek belangstelt, zich steeds weer opdringende vraagstukken te bespreken. Wat maakt een boek begeerlijk en wat maakt een boek duur; welke factoren bepalen de prijs van een boek?
Onlangs kwamen wij in THE BOOK-LOVER'S MAGAZINE, Vol VI, 1907, een opstel van Alfred W. Pollard tegen, waarin zulke vragen op zo afdoende, beminnelijke en nog heden actuele wijze worden beantwoord, dat wij ertoe besloten - nu dit dubbelnummer ons voldoende ruimte geeft - dit opstel aan onze lezers mede te delen.
One of the least pleasant incidents of a librarian's daily life is the necessity thrust upon him of disabusing worthy people as to the value of their possessions. Occasionally the tale is the other way about, and the little book which has been brought for examination, rather to learn what it is than in the hope of its having any selling value, turns out to be worth many pounds. But for one pleasant chance of this kind there are at least ten of the other, and the disappointment is sometimes grievous to witness. The worst cases of all, because the most excusable, are in connection with facsimiles. It is quite easy for a facsimile of a letter by Burns, or even of a book by Caxton, to lose, sometimes accidentally, sometimes by malice, the accompanying leaves which explicitly state its modern origin. In this condition it is found in an old box or drawer with other belongings of some elder relative, now dead, and the finder, in ignorance of the very existence of facsimiles, the more he examines it is the more convinced that he has lighted on a real treasure, and will speedily be in possession of much ready cash.
As I have said already, the disappointment of these innocently deceived people seems to me not unreasonable. It is much harder to sympathise with those who, for weeks after a first edition of some English classic has sold for a price high enough to attract the paragraphists, bring for inspection tattered copies or fragments of copies, of editions published any time within fifty years of the first, and magnanimously offer to sell them for half the
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price fetched by the copy at Sotheby's. What irritates one with these good people is their obvious belief that all book-collectors are fools, and their equally obvious anxiety to make a profit out of this folly by selling for a high price something which they themselves would not buy for their own use or enjoyment for half a crown. Readers of this magazine do not need to be told that it is only by accident, and not often by that, that a book-collector is a fool. The mere fact that the keenest collectors of our own day are American men of business, who can afford to pay high prices because they find it so easy to earn large fortunes, should by itself suffice to convince any one that, despite the silly word Bibliomania, popularised by Dr. Dibdin, book-collecting and folly do not often go together. Yet it would be quite easy for any newspaper reader to point to instances of very large sums being given for shabby, imperfect copies of not very readable old books, and the problem is thus sufficiently complicated to make an attempt to analyse it perhaps not altogether unacceptable.
If any one who has not intimately considered the question were to be asked as to what are the two chief elements of value in the books which fetch the high prices, he would certainly be tempted to place Rarity and Age in the front rank. It is quite easy, however, to see that a book may be both rare and old without being sought after by collectors. A Latin oration printed without decoration at Venice or Paris in 1505 might be hawked from bookshop to bookshop without tempting a dealer to buy it at any price at all, and if he bought the book for a couple of shillings, and put it in his catalogue at half a sovereign, he would be making no unconscionable bargain, as the book might remain on his hands for years. To be four hundred years old will save a book from the fourpenny box, because it is to the advantage of dealers to keep up the dignity, even the fictitious dignity, of old books. But as regards actual saleability, unless it have accidental value as a specimen of printing, book illustration or binding, the unreadable book of 1505 is no better off than its unreadable successor of our own day. The only thing which can help it is the passion for ‘completeness’, which private collectors are rapidly giving up, but to which many librarians still cling. In 1505 the number of separate books printed either at Venice or at Paris would probably be about a hundred, and for this period, when the output of the press was so small, there is a sporting instinct among librarians which makes them desire mere numbers, even when there is little likelihood of the new acquisition proving useful to students of literature, of the history of print- | |
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ing, or of anything else.
This sporting instinct is not wholly bad. There is something to be said for the theory that in an English national library one copy of every English book, and in a French national library one copy of every French book, is worth preserving, and if another library chooses to form a subsidiary collection in case of the first being accidentally destroyed, the possibility of such a mishap cannot be denied.
But the number of libraries which will acquire books as so many counters in a game is very limited, and the private collectors who are inclined to follow them now hardly exist. It is this fact which enables us to measure the primary value of rarity at the present time. In every country there are two, three, or four public libraries which are willing to buy, at a reasonable price, any books which would appear in their national bibliographies. If the owner of a book can ascertain that in one or more of these libraries there is no copy of it, there is a probable purchaser for the book, and it therefore possesses a probable value. If the great libraries, which set before them a national ideal, are already supplied, the only probable purchaser is the very raw collector, who has handled so few old books that he is ready to make himself believe that he is interested in anything with an early date. Putting aside these raw hands and the great national libraries, what does it matter to any one if only one copy, or ten or fifty, of a dull book has escaped the wastepaper man? Speaking for myself, if I had a hundred unique books offered to me, on condition that I should treat them as heirlooms, unless I could make them illustrate something in the history of literature, or the bookish arts, or that still more fertile source of interest, human nature, I would not take them as a gift.
The truth as to these two reputed elements of value would seem to be that Rarity has little or no primary value, is worth little or nothing by itself, but has, as we shall see, an overwhelming importance as a secondary quality in enhancing a primary value which arises in some other way. As to Age, on which ignorant owners set such store, though it may seem sometimes to have an independent influence, this can always be better resolved into something else, usually, in so far as it operates, into typographical interest and rarity.
The simple truth (which would be obvious were it not for preconceptions of ‘bibliomania’) surely is that to possess any value a book must have, to start with, a real discernible and explainable element of interest. The interest may be of the humblest kind. Scoffers delight to assert that it usually lies in the number of the misprints, because misprints are often quoted as a ready means of
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distinguishing one early edition from another. As a matter of fact, an Elizabethan book guaranteed to have misprints on every page would be of considerable use to students of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as helping them to gauge the possibilities of one form of error in Elizabethan texts. So, too, in another connection, misprints might possibly throw some light on the technical methods of the early printers, and thus interest students of the history of printing. But though even the familiar gibe of the enemy may thus be turned into a solid reason for valuing a book, there is no need to seek such recondite sources of attraction. The edition or copy which appeals to our sense of beauty or our imagination more powerfully than any other will aways be the most valued, and it would be difficult to find a book esteemed by collectors which does not possess this appealing power in one or other of its forms. The material elemens of book-building - paper, type, ink, presswork, and the arrangement of the page - may all be either good or bad, and when they are all good there is an aesthetic satisfaction in surveying and possessing the resultant whole which may well open purse-strings.
The material differences between one copy and another appeal to the same sense. However beautiful a book may have been when it left the printer's hands, its possessors have it in their power to spoil it by losing leaves, cropping margins, dirtying the pages, or putting it into ugly or unsuitable covers. The paramount importance of ‘condition’ is one of the points which it is hardest tot drive into the head of the uninitiated, and yet, except in the case of books of great literary interest which it is impossible to obtain in a better state, there is nothing on which wise collectors more rigorously insists. Not being the fools which outsiders choose to consider them, they naturally do not wish to buy books unless in a state in which it is a pleasure to handle them; and the raw collector who sets himself to pick up shabby and imperfect copies of famous books is making the worst possible investment. Such copies are the rightful prey of the scholars and students who want them for reasons quite different from those which influence a collector, and if the latter interferes with these students' copies, no one need pity him when he burns his fingers.
While it is possible to summarise very briefly these aesthetic considerations, the qualities in books which appeal to the imagination form a much larger and more difficult subject. It is surely reasonable to wish to possess any great masterpiece of literature, or important historical document, in the form in which it was first launched on the world, so as to know how it looked when the author and his friends saw and handled it. To possess an
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original copy of a book or document which has made a great stir in the world's history is an equally reasonable ambition, and accounts for the high prices paid for interesting proclamations, for the first English translations of the Bible, for the first editions of the Book of Common Prayer, or for such a document as Luther's Ninety-five Theses. Lastly, though few books can possess the personal human interest of the best autograph letters, inscriptions in them may give them something of this charm also; and sometimes the mere mark of having belonged to some famous owner, such as Mary Queen of Scots, will make them eagerly sought for.
Perhaps a special class by themselves should be reserved for books illustrating the history of printing. The discovery of the art of printing with movable types produced such far-reaching effects that there is nothing strange in the zeal with which every step in the invention and in the diffusion of the art all over the world has been studied. But the study has now been carried to such a pitch that all books printed in the fifteenth century have been invested with a special value, even though they have no beauty to recommend them, no literary interest, and no obvious importance in the history of printing. The number of registered ‘fifteeners’ being now about twenty-five thousand, to possess as large a proportion as possible of this total has become an object of ambition to the great European libraries, while local libraries naturally collect the earliest specimens of printing in the towns in which they are placed. The books of particular presses (as at one time Aldines and Elzeviers), the first books printed in different towns, books with interesting notes by their printers, early illustrated books (even when the illustrations are not beautiful)-all these form subdivisions in which different collectors of ‘fifteeners’ engage.
The existence in large numbers of books which give no indication of when, where, or by whom they were printed opens up, to those who enjoy such quests, endless fields of investigations, and the hunt of late years has been pursued with extraordinary seriousness and success. Unfortunately the booksellers also are now joining in the sport, and find excuses for doubling prices in reasons so recondite that fifteen years ago they would hardly have been understood. But the game is too difficult and requires too much learning ever to become popular, or to appeal to the richest class or collectors, who have not the time to devote to it, so that it is unlikely that the present high prices will continue, save in the case of a few books, such as the ‘Gutenberg’ Bible, of which all the literary world has heard.
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With this last sentence we come in sight of our fully developed theory of book prices. Let it be granted that some books are preserved and bought rather because they are akin to the true desideranda than because they are desirable themselves, it yet remains true that it is only by appealing to our sense of beauty or our imagination that a book can command a high price. How high a price it may command will depend on the number of people who are, or wish to be thought, able to appreciate its qualities; on the extent of the wealth of these possible purchasers; and on the number of copies of the book which can be brought into the market.
The decline in the value of the first editions of the Greek and Latin classics has synchronised with the disuse of classical quotations in parliamentary rhetoric. The great rise of prices a hundred years ago was brought about by the incursion into the book-lover's hunting-grounds of a handful of rich peers. When the peers grew tired of the hobby prices fell, amid the tearful laments of Dr. Dibdin, and most of these lordly collections have since passed to other hands. The rise of prices which is still (though disturbed by variations in the money market) afflicting the humble booklover has been brought about by the incursion of a similar handful of American millionaires, who bid against each other, as the dukes did a century ago, with a sporting spirit. Were it not for the commendable American habit of transferring their treasures to public libraries and universities, we might confidently look for a reaction in a few years similar to that which Dibdin deplored. As it is, prediction, even such an easy prediction as that fashion will change, is more than a little risky.
My own belief is that as long as American social conditions permit enormous fortunes to be so quickly made, the prices of the English classics, which they especially affect, are likely to rise, and to rise very rapidly, until the best books are cleared out of the market. This is practically what happened with those most in favour a century ago. All the great English collectors collected the same books, so that of the first book printed at Venice, of which only one hundred copies were issued, the British Museum, by the munificence of four several benefactors, possesses four examples. As most of the copies extant were already in older public libraries, one of the books to boast about was thus practically withdrawn from competition, to the discouragement of new collectors. A Gutenberg Bible and a fine First Folio Shakespeare are now the prizes most valued by Americans. There are five Gutenberg Bibles at present in New York, and I do not know how many First Folios. If these come into the market when their owners die, the
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game may go on. If they are all left to public institutions the supply cannot be kept up, and when copies of the most fashionable books are unattainable private collecting may cease to attract. How near we are to this point it is difficult to guess. In lecturing last autumn I remarked that, so far from £ 1750 being an astonishing price for a first Folio to fetch, it was only extreme commonness that kept it so cheap; when public institutions had absorbed a few more of the good copies, a really fine example might be expected to fetch £ 10,000. As I write this article the prediction has already come very near fulfilment by the sale of the MacGeorge set of the four Folios for this precise sum, of which the 1623 edition must be reckoned as accounting for considerably more than half. Since the publication of Mr. Sidney Lee's census of copies of the First Folio, it has become evident that while there are plenty of made-up copies in private hands, the number of fine ones is already approaching exhaustion, and thus we are already within the zone of famine prices.
When we turn from the Shakespeare Folio to the Quartos, which are ten or twenty times as rare, we find in the prices paid within the last eighteen months for the second part of Henry IV., for Titus Andronicus, and recently for Richard III., that the famine zone has here also been reached. Thus we have Rarity, on which we cast scorn as a primary element of value, returning as a secondary constituent with irresistible force. Because they are not rare, fine books like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Nuremberg Chronicle still fetch comparatively small prices, which have only crept up gradually in response to the general rise. Even Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, which is almost as necessary a book to a modern collector as a First Folio, only commands about £ 120 (which indeed is double what the author was paid for it), because the supply of good copies of it is almost equal to the demand. The disappearance of a dozen copies of any one of these books would send up the prices of the survivors with a rush. Fortunately the tendency of the competition and publicity of the salerooms tends not to decrease but to increase the number of known copies of a fine book. The paragraphs as to some record price fetched at auction, while they fill owners of reprints and facsimiles with unwarrantable hopes, at the same time cause a ransacking of old bookcases, boxes and cupboards, which brings to light buried treasures unquestionably genuine. In this way even the millionaire has his uses, though the effect of his advent on bookbuyers of moderate means has been most disheartening, and this not only in the case of the private collector, but of many public libraries as well.
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