There is, however, another edition of “Robinson Crusoe” which, for rarity, puts all first editions in the shade. So immediate was the success of this wonderful romance that it was issued in a newspaper, very much as popular novels are now run. It was published in the “Original London Post,” or “Heathcot’s Intelligence,” numbers from 125 to 289, October 7, 1719, to October 19, 1720. This was publication in parts with a vengeance. Of the entire series of 165 leaves, only one is in facsimile. I see that I have not yet said that I own this copy. There is a copy in the British Museum, but I am told that it is very imperfect, and I know of no other.

• Chapman’s Homer, 1616, £15;
• Chaucer’s Works, 1542, £15 10;
• “Robinson Crusoe,” 1719-20, £75;
• Goldsmith’s “Vicar,” 1766, £65;
• Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” 1770, £25;
• Herrick’s “Hesperides,” 1648, £38;
• Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” 1667, £90.

But why continue? The point of it all is his comment: “If the beginner is alarmed by these prices, let him remember that such are paid only for well-known and highly prized rarities”; and remember, too, that this is the comment of an astute collector upon the prices of only twenty years ago.

Most of the books then sold realized the highest prices ever known. Many of the London dealers were represented,—Quaritch, Maggs, and several others came in person,—and the sale will long be remembered in the annals of the trade.

After the above explanation it is hardly necessary to say that “Book Auction Records,” published by Karslake in London, has no value whatever as a guide to prices, in comparison with “American Book Prices Current,” to the compilation of which the late Luther S. Livingston devoted so much of his time—time which we now know should have been spent in doing original work in bibliography.

NO books have appreciated more in value than presentation or association volumes, and the reason is not far to seek. Of any given copy there can hardly be a duplicate. For the most part presentation copies are first editions—plus. Frequently there is a note or a comment which sheds biographical light on the author. In the slightest inscription there is the record of a friendship by means of which we get back of the book to the writer. And speaking of association books, every one will remember the story that General Wolfe, in an open boat on the St. Lawrence as he was being rowed down the stream to a point just below Quebec, recited the lines from Gray’s “Elegy,”—

I have before me a copy of Stevenson’s “Inland Voyage.” Pamphlets aside, which, by reason of their manner of publication, are now rare, it may be said to be the author’s first book. It has an inscription, “My dear Cummy: If you had not taken so much trouble with me all the years of my childhood, this little book would never have been written. Many a long night you sat up with me when I was ill; I wish I could hope by way of return to amuse a single evening for you with my little book! But whatever you may think of it, I know you will continue to think kindly of the Author.” I thought, when I gave four hundred dollars for it, that I was paying a fabulous price; but as I have since been offered twice that sum, Rosenbach evidently let me have a bargain. He tells me that it is good business sometimes to sell a book for less than it is worth. He regards it as bait. He angles for you very skilfully, does Rosy, and lands you—me—every time.

Robert Louis Stevenson
his copy of
A Child’s Garden Of
Verses
and if it is [in] the hands of any one
else, explain it who can!
but not by the gift of
Robert Louis Stevenson

That Stevenson afterward changed his mind and gave it to “E. F. Russell, with hearty good will,” is shown by another inscription. This copy was purchased at the sale for the British Red Cross in London, shortly after the outbreak of the war. It may be some time before it is worth what I paid for it, or the price may look cheap to-morrow—who shall say?

But for one collector who expresses a mild interest in Trollope, there are a thousand who regard the brave invalid, who, little more than twenty years ago, passed away on that lonely Samoan island in the Pacific, as one of the greatest of the moderns, as certain of immortality as Charles Lamb. They may be right. His little toy books and leaflets, those which

and elsewhere, are simply invaluable. The author and the printer were one and the same—R. L. S., assisted, or perhaps hindered, by S. L. O., Mrs. Stevenson’s son, then a lad. Of these Stevensons, “Penny Whistles” is the rarest. But two copies are known. One is in a private collection in England; the other was bought at the Borden sale in 1913 by Mrs. Widener, for twenty-five hundred dollars, in order to complete, as far as might be, the Stevenson collection now in the Widener Memorial Library. It was a privately printed forerunner of “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” published several years later.

In recent years there have been published a number of bibliographies without which no collector can be expected to keep house. We are indebted to the Grolier Club for some of the best of these. Its members have the books and are most generous in exhibiting them, and it must indeed be a churlish scholar who cannot freely secure access to the collections of its members.

Aside from the three volumes entitled “Contributions to English Bibliography,” published and sold by the Club, the handbooks of the exhibitions held from time to time are much sought, for the wealth of information they contain. The Club’s librarian, Miss Ruth S. Granniss, working in coöperation with the members, is largely responsible for the skill and intelligence with which these little catalogues are compiled. The time and amount of painstaking research which enter into the making of them is simply enormous. Indeed, no one quite understands the many questions which arise to vex the bibliographer unless they have attempted to make for themselves even the simplest form of catalogue. Over the door of the room in which they work should be inscribed the text, “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Some blunders are redeemed by the laughter they arouse. Here is a famous one:—

But for the most part the lot of the bibliographer, as Dr. Johnson said of the dictionary-maker, is to be exposed to censure without hope of praise.

The advice given by “Punch” to those about to marry—“Don’t”—seems, then, to be the best advice to a man who is tempted to buy by the hope of making a profit out of his books; but I observe that this short and ugly word deters very few from following their inclinations in the matter of marriage, and this advice may fall, as advice usually falls, on deaf ears. Only when a man is safely ensconced in six feet of earth, with several tons of enlauding granite upon his chest, is he in a position to give advice with any certainty, and then he is silent; but it will nevertheless be understood that I do not recommend the purchase of rare books as an investment, and this in spite of the fact that many collectors have made handsome profits out of the books they have sold. While a man may do much worse with his money than buy rare books, he cannot be certain that he can dispose of them at a profit, nor is it necessary that he should do so. He should be satisfied to eat his cake and have it; books selected with any judgment will almost certainly afford this satisfaction, and of what other hobby can this be said with the same assurance?

It may as well be admitted that we do not buy expensive books to read. We may say that it is a delight to us to look upon the very page on which appeared for the first time such a sonnet as “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” or to read that bit of realism unsurpassed, where Robinson Crusoe one day, about noon, discovered the print of a man’s naked foot upon the sand; but when we sit down with a copy of Keats, we do not ask for a first edition; much less when we want to live over again the joys of our childhood, do we pick up a copy of Defoe which would be a find at a thousand dollars. But first editions of Keats’s Poems, 1817, in boards, with the paper label if possible, and a Defoe unwashed, in a sound old calf binding, are good things to have. They are indeed a joy forever, and will never pass into nothingness. I cannot see why the possession of fine books is more reprehensible than the possession of valuable property of any other sort.

There is another class of collector with whom I am not in keen sympathy, and that is the men who specialize in the first published volumes of some given group of authors. These works are usually of relatively little merit, but they are scarce and expensive: scarce, because published in small editions and at first neglected; expensive, because they are desired to complete sets of first editions. Anthony Trollope’s first two novels have a greater money value than all the rest of his books put together—but they are hard to read. In like manner, a sensational novel, “Desperate Remedies,” by Hardy, his first venture in fiction, is worth perhaps as much as fifty copies of his “Woodlanders,” one of the best novels of the last half century. George Gissing, when he was walking our streets penniless and in rags, could never have supposed that a few years later his first novel, “Workers in the Dawn,” would sell for one hundred and fifty dollars, but it has done so. I have a friend who has just paid this price.

Nor do I think it necessary to have every scrap, every waif and stray, of any author, however much I may esteem him. My collection of Johnson is fairly complete, but I have no copy of Father Lobo’s “Abyssinia.” It was an early piece of hack-work, a translation from the French, for which Johnson received five pounds. It is not scarce; one would hardly want to read it. It was the recollection of this book, doubtless, that suggested the “Prince of Abissinia” to Johnson years later, when he wanted to write “fiction,” as the dear old ladies in “Cranford” called “Rasselas”; but it has never seemed necessary to my happiness to have a copy of “Lobo.” On the other hand I have “stocked” “Rasselas” pretty considerably, and could supply any reasonable demand. Such are the vagaries of collectors.

No paper dealing with the prices of books would be complete without the remark that condition is everything. Any rare book is immensely more valuable if in very fine condition. Imagine for a moment a book worth, say, six hundred dollars in good condition,—for example, the “Vicar of Wakefield,”—and then imagine—if you can—a copy of this same book in boards uncut. Would twenty-five hundred dollars be too high a price for such a copy? I think not.

Another point to be remembered is that the price of a book depends, not only on its scarcity, but also on the universality of the demand for it. And once again I may take the “Vicar” as an example of what I mean. The “Vicar” is not a scarce book. For from six to eight hundred dollars, dependent upon condition, one could, I think, lay his hands on as many as ten copies in as many weeks. It is what the trade call a bread-and-butter book—a staple. There is always a demand for it and always a supply at a price; but try to get a copy of Fanny Burney’s “Evelina,” and you may have to wait a year or more for it. It was the first book of an unknown young lady; the first edition was very small, it was printed on poor paper, proved to be immensely popular, and was immediately worn out in the reading; but there is no persistent demand for it as there is for the “Vicar,” and it costs only half as much.

ON a cold, raw day in December, 1882, there was laid to rest in Brompton Cemetery, in London, an old lady,—an actress,—whose name, Frances Maria Kelly, meant little to the generation of theatre-goers, then busy with the rising reputation of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. She was a very old lady when she died—ninety-two, to be exact; she had outlived her fame and her friends, and few followed her to her grave.

I have said that the day was cold and raw. I do not know certainly that it was so; I was not there; but for my sins I have passed many Decembers in London, and take the right, in Charles Lamb’s phrase, to damn the weather at a venture.

Nothing is more evanescent than the reputation of an actor. Every age lingers lovingly over the greatness of the actors of its own youth; thus it was that the theatre-goer of the eighteen-eighties only yawned when told of the grace of Miss Kelly’s Ophelia, of the charm of her Lydia Languish, or of her bewitchingness in “breeches parts.” To some she was the old actress for whom the government was being solicited to do something; a few thought of her as the old maiden lady who was obsessed with the idea that Charles Lamb had once made her an offer of marriage.

It was well known that, half a century before, Lamb had been one of her greatest admirers. Every reader of his dramatic criticisms and his letters knew that; they knew, too, that in one of his daintiest essays, perhaps the most exquisite essay in the language, “Dream Children, A Reverie,” Lamb, speaking apparently more autobiographically than usual even for him, says:—

“‘We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.’”

I am quoting, not from the printed text, but from the original manuscript, which is my most cherished literary possession; and this lovely peroration, if such it may be called, is the only part of the essay which has been much interlineated or recast. It appears to have occasioned Lamb considerable difficulty; there was obviously some searching for the right word; a part of it, indeed, was entirely rewritten.

There the matter rested. Fanny Kelly was by way of being forgotten; all the facts of Lamb’s life were known, apparently, and he had lain in a curiously neglected grave in Edmonton Churchyard for seventy years. Innumerable sketches and lives and memorials of him, “final” and otherwise, had been written and read. His letters—not complete, perhaps, but volumes of them—had been published and read by the constantly increasing number of his admirers, and no one suspected that Lamb had had a serious love-affair—the world accepting without reserve the statement of one of his biographers that “Lamb at the bidding of duty remained single, wedding himself to the sad fortunes of his sister.”

Then, quite unexpectedly, in 1903, John Hollingshead, the former manager of the Gaiety Theatre, discovered and published two letters of Charles Lamb written on the same day, July 20, 1819. One, a long letter in Lamb’s most serious vein, in which he formally offers his hand, and in a way his sister’s, to Miss Kelly, and the other a whimsical, elfish letter, in which he tries to disguise the fact that in her refusal of him he has received a hard blow.

In the Works of Lamb, published in 1818, he had addressed to Miss Kelly a sonnet:—