Chapter IX: The Collector’s Best Bet 264 (3)

Now Wee-hicle was a coachman of local renown. His thin, emaciated, Don Quixotic figure had always attracted my attention. Wee-hicle knew more individuals of prominence in Philadelphia than did the mayor himself. Further, Wee-hicle had vision. To be carried home in the early hours by Wee-hicle boded good. In this way he had sponsored the early careers of more youths who later became distinguished citizens than any Harvard professor. This night he drove to the curb and recognized me. At the same time the footsteps in the darkness quickened and an anxious voice shouted, “Cabby!” Now I wanted to go home with Wee-hicle myself. With a rude bound, I reached the cab door before the person behind me.

“Which way are you going?” he asked me as he came close to the cab. His voice was clear and friendly, nor was the dark too thick to hide the kindliness of his expression. With that forced reciprocal politeness which often overtakes one in the heat of anger or disappointment, I battled with a desire to grab the book and run off into the darkness.

“I can take you anywhere you care to go,” I answered. He heard the vindictive note in my voice, as I meant him to. He looked at me uneasily. Perhaps he feared I had been drinking.

“I feel like having a bite,” he began. “I’d like to go to McGowan’s. Perhaps you will join me.” Without waiting for a reply, he leaned forward and called out our destination to Wee-hicle.

Those were the days when McGowan’s was an all-night meeting place where convivial souls gathered to eat, drink, and to be quietly merry. It was famous for its terrapin; in fact, it was at that time one of the great restaurants of America. Situated at the corner of Fifteenth and Sansom streets, it had an entrance on either side. When we arrived I told Wee-hicle to wait.

After ordering supper my host picked up the Gabrielle d’Estrées volume and exhibited it in a most tantalizing manner.

“You paid a very high price for that little missal,” I ventured.

He looked up, surprised. “How do you know?”

“I was there--at the auction.” At that moment the waiter brought two long-stemmed glasses filled with a golden-brown liquid. It was bitter and warming. “I was the underbidder,” I said.

“You bid me up?” The waiter replaced our glasses with others. We drank silently. “So you wanted this book? Well, well! You love books?” I nodded. His face seemed to soften. “And what would you have given for it?” He handed the volume across the table to me and my fingers trembled.

“All that I have in the world,” I said dramatically. “Fifty-seven dollars.” The waiter came forward with our supper. It was a beautiful repast worthy of the skill of Dennis McGowan himself.

As we ate I listened to my new friend through an ever-thickening haze. He told me of his interest in books and manuscripts. He was not a collector exactly, he explained, but a man who bought intermittently as the desire came upon him.

“And now,” said he, “since you wanted this book so badly, will you accept it as a proof of our newly made friendship?” He leaned across the table and I grasped his hand. He insisted upon my accepting the volume as a gift! Then we talked of books and bookmen until far into the night. We walked home in the early morning air.

The next day at noon, as I crossed the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, I was aware of a familiar figure who waved and attracted great attention with a coach whip. It was Wee-hicle.

“Say, young Rosenbach,” he holloed, “what do you mean, keepin’ me waitin’ all night on Sansom Street?” He came toward me on a run, accusingly. “Sneakin’ out on Fifteenth Street, you and your friend! I want my money! I waited outside all night long. Twenty-five dollars, night rates!” To quiet his shouting, I motioned him to follow me to my room. I had forgotten him completely. Had the preceding night been a dream or a nightmare? Surely it was neither, for there on my bookshelf was the missal in its old gilt binding--the book which had been forced so generously upon me. I paid Wee-hicle gladly and figured his services cheap at the price. As to the gentleman who presented me with the volume, it was Joseph M. Fox. He later became my partner in the book business.

The auction business is an old, old game. Herodotus, somewhere in his writings, describes the auctions which took place once a year in all Babylonian villages. In those days, before the advent of the bachelor girl, despairing parents hopefully offered their surplus maidens in the auction mart, where they disposed of them in marriage to the highest bidders. Then there were the auctions which followed military victories. The Romans solved the problem of dividing captives and other spoils of war in this popular manner.

But the first book auctions, as far as records show, began in the latter part of the seventeenth century in Holland. The enterprising Dutchman who originated the idea of selling literary works by competitive bid, whether he was a book lover or interested only in cold commercial hope of gain, should have his memory appreciatively marked by periods of celebration down the years. Can’t you imagine every true book lover bowing to the name of this fellow who brought a new and sharp-edged enjoyment into the book game?

Of all the branches of the sport connected with book collecting, that of attending book auctions is the greatest, the most stirring. I presume some patient mathematician knows the number of facets of the Koh-i-nur diamond, but no one will ever be able to count the emotional reflections which take place during a book auction in the hearts and minds of men and women who are enamored of books. The book auction is an adventure. Other adventures may lose their glamour if you repeat them, but each experience at a sale of books brings a delightful thrill never to be duplicated.

Other experiences in your life may have been exciting, and you will always shrink from repeating them, in the fear, perhaps, that they may lose some one quality. But the book auction, which includes the sale of literary manuscripts and letters, continues to offer those very elements which first fascinated you. Don’t be surprised when you find yourself one of the habitual adventurers. Unsympathetic, misunderstanding friends may accuse you of being a book-auction fiend, but you will listen indulgently and let it go at that.

Most of the great books of the world have found their way to the auction room at one time or another. Bibliophiles of renown have sat restlessly out front bidding against one another. It is these, rare books and the buyers of them, who have given to the auction its illustrious background. Nearly every collector enters the auction field to enjoy its seductive pleasures some time during the period of his fever.

When you first go to an auction you firmly believe that prices are at their highest. The complaint of high prices is as old as the auction game itself. The morning after every sale you read the same old story in your newspaper, of the “crazy,” “mad,” and “exorbitant” prices which were paid. Present prices always seem high. If you keep a record of them you will find, in ten years’ time, that these prices are extremely low. As a matter of fact, prices will never be lower than they are to-day. Certain items may fluctuate, but in general the great classics of all literature can be revalued upward every ten years. Very often you may have the feeling that you paid too much for some book--in other words, you were stung; and it may be so. But the beauty of it all is that an auction holds fair play for all sides. Even the experienced buyer is liable to get stung. You are in good company. And joy of joys, the auctioneer, your arch enemy, sometimes gets charmingly stung himself! For who can say when some bargain will drop unexpectedly into the collector’s maw?

I remember a case in point. It was during the third part of the Hoe sale in April 1912. In the catalogue a celebrated autograph play by Lope de Vega was listed. Entitled _Carlos V_, it had been written in Toledo and was dated November 20, 1604. Now manuscript plays by this famous Spanish writer are extremely desirable. Although the greatest book dealers and collectors of England, France, Italy, and Germany were present that night, they either slighted or forgot its value. I purchased it on my first bid, $125.

A collector in Philadelphia had given me a bid of $7500 on it! He was even then sitting at his telephone impatiently waiting to hear if I had secured it for him. The above story is at the expense of a New York house. My next will be on a British concern, in order to balance honors.

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.”

The name Dibdin has come to be almost synonymous with “bibliomaniac.” Although Pennypacker, twenty-five years ago, said that the true bibliomaniac was a rarissimo,--nearly as scarce as the dodo,--a new generation of Dibdin men is springing up. There are young men to-day who find it as difficult to pass an old bookstore or a junk shop as did those in years gone by; young fellows who will travel miles to enrich their knowledge of books. I’m afraid it’s the old-timer, though, who lives among his books, sleeps among them, surrounded by folios, quartos, books of every size, who thrives in an atmosphere that is musty, who frowns upon cleanliness as a vice. Of course, such peculiarities are hardly necessary or desirable, but such men have lived. The modern Dibdin takes a course in bibliography at college and attends all book sales. He marks down prices, learns the various methods experienced bidders use, thus supplementing his college training with all that he learns in the auction room.

Many years ago I knew a young married man who lived in Orange. He was auction mad. One New York sale we both attended continued for twelve evenings. On the twelfth his bride appeared with him and he introduced her to the other maniacs. In those days it was quite unusual for a woman to appear at a book auction.

“Why did you bring Mrs. Blank to-night?” I inquired.

“Oh,” said he, “it came to the point where I just had to prove there were such things as book auctions!”

Although the following tale has nothing to do with book auctions, I am reminded of it because it has distinctly to do with wives. And wives, there is no doubt about it, have their niche in the book world, if only for the influence they have upon their book-mad consorts.

A small man with a shy, walruslike look came to see me one day in Philadelphia. His meek appearance was in marked contrast to the determined manner with which he greeted me. He introduced himself as a piano tuner from Harrisburg.

“I have here, doctor,” he said, pulling out of an inner pocket a blue envelope, “something which will interest you. I found it in a secondhand-furniture store among a bundle of papers on its way to the pulp mill. I rescued it.” He opened the envelope and drew out a pamphlet in brown paper wrappers. It was Poe’s _Prose Romances. No. I. Containing The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, published in Philadelphia in 1843. There are only three or four copies known to exist.

“What do you want for it?” I asked him.

“Three thousand eight hundred,” he said quite calmly. Naturally I was surprised that a man who made his living tinkering with refractory pianos should know the value of this work. In answer to further questions, he told me that he spent all his evenings and some of his days browsing in secondhand stores, in the hope of making a book find.

“And now my dream’s come true. I’m always picking up old books. It makes my wife wild. She always nags me. Wasting time and throwing away good cash, she calls it!”

I had to have this book. While I wrote out the check I asked him why he wanted this peculiar sum, and what he would do with it. He answered without hesitation.

“The first thing I’ll do,” he said, “is to hand over $800 of it to the missus and let her go to Europe, like she’s always wanted to do. I told her I’d fix her one day! I guess she won’t nag me any more!”

I recall the crowd present at the sale of the collection of that great editor of Keats, J. Buxton Forman, in 1920. Students, collectors, poets, seers, bookmen were there. Suddenly the auctioneer announced that the next item was a love letter of Keats to Fanny Brawne. Whereupon my friend Kit Morley was inspired and wrote this exquisite sonnet, which he dedicated to me:--

IN AN AUCTION ROOM

Letter of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, Anderson Galleries, March 15, 1920

TO DR. A. S. W. ROSENBACH

“_How about this lot?_” said the auctioneer;
“_One hundred, may I say, just for a start?_”
Between the plum-red curtains, drawn apart,
A written sheet was held.... And strange to hear--
(Dealer, would I were steadfast as thou art),
The cold quick bids. (_Against you in the rear!_)
The crimson salon, in a glow more clear,
Burned bloodlike purple as the poet’s heart.

Song that outgrew the singer! Bitter Love
That broke the proud hot heart it held in thrall,
Poor script, where still those tragic passions move--
_Eight hundred bid: fair warning: the last call:_
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
_Sold for eight hundred dollars--Doctor R.!_

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

IV

SOME LITERARY FORGERIES

“I cast my bread upon the waters, and it came back to me after many days!”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked the tall white-haired man who sat opposite me in his luxurious library. The room was an enormous one, and thousands of fine books lined the walls from floor to ceiling. My friend seemed in a confidential mood, and I expected to hear something startling. This Gothic room, with its early Spanish religious sculptures, had the very atmosphere of a confessional. My companion had had a somewhat weird career, and as I watched him through the heavy smoke of our cigars I recalled many strange stories of his youth. Once he had been a lawyer’s clerk, but now he was a director in many banks, with financial interests all over the world. The variegated stages by which he had risen to such eminence, not only in business but as a collector of pictures and books, were not always clear to the friends of his later years.

He told me that he had been so poor as a boy he had often known hunger; that, as a scrivener in the lawyer’s office, he had eked out a most pitiable existence copying deeds and other legal documents. In 1885 he happened to read in the newspapers of famous auction sales of autographs in London, and of the first arrival in this country of representatives of the English book houses. For instance, Bernard Quaritch was holding his first exhibition in New York at the Hotel Astor. General Brayton Ives, Robert Hoe, and other great collectors of the glaring ‘80’s were beginning to form their libraries. My friend was fascinated, and as he had no capital to invest in great rarities himself, he thought he would make a few. He determined to try his hand at imitation.

Just about that period there was an awakened interest in the ill-fated Major André, who had suffered death as a British informer. In his grimy boarding house on Grand Street my friend practiced imitating André’s handwriting. He finally manufactured a splendid letter in which Major André wrote to General Washington requesting that he be shot as a soldier and not hanged as a spy. As he described his youthful fabrication his mouth lighted with a smile of pleasure, and he confessed that he had been very proud of this forgery; it had been a work of art! He finally actually sold this pseudo-André letter for $650! Those were the days when unpedigreed rarities were more easily disposed of, as there were not so many autograph sharks around as there are to-day.

Thirty years elapsed. My friend had grown in riches and in reputation. Now he was a noted collector; forgotten were the peccadillos of his youth. In 1915, during the Great War, he noticed the advertisement of a sale in London containing an André letter. He cabled an unlimited bid, as was now his custom. The letter was bought for him for £280. A few weeks later, upon opening the package which he received from the custom house, the inclosed autograph letter looked familiar to him. A closer scrutiny revealed the fact that he had bought back, at three times what he had received for it, his own fabrication!

Several years ago I had the remarkable good fortune to secure for my own library a letter written by Cervantes. It is the only one known in a private collection to-day. Other letters of his--and they are few--may be seen only in the Spanish National Library at Madrid. Cervantes’s autographs are so rare that the British Museum possesses no example of the handwriting of the author of _Don Quixote_, nor is there one in the library of the Hispanic Society in New York City, founded by that great collector, Mr. Archer M. Huntington. From this you may realize to some extent the desirability and scarcity of a letter of Cervantes. Written on two pages, and dated February 4, 1593, it is extremely legible, in a bold Castilian hand, and contains his signature in full: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, with a fanciful twirling flourish becoming to a great Spanish author. Many an expert eye has passed upon it gloatingly in years gone by, for it has been in the celebrated collections, first of Benjamin Fillon, in Paris, and later of Alfred Morrison, of London.

Some time after acquiring this celebrated autograph I was startled one day in New York, when an agent from a well-known English autograph house telephoned me and said he had a wonderful letter of Cervantes. He asked £3000 for it, which was certainly not too high, when you stop to consider that Cervantes’s place in literature is second only to that of Shakespeare. If a Shakespeare letter were found to-day many collectors would not consider $500,000 too much to pay for it. What, then, is a Cervantes letter worth? While I sat mulling over these mathematical problems, the doorbell rang and the dealer came in. His manner was important, almost condescending. His precious letter was inclosed in a fine morocco case, elaborately tooled. He removed it from its costly trappings, and after a moment of suspense, which was really most effective, he handed the letter to me. I could scarcely believe my eyes. I looked for the date--February 4, 1593. It was an excellently forged copy of the one in my possession.

“Where in the devil did you get this?”

His face turned the color of a carnation and his swanky manner of assurance wilted away.

“Just what do you mean?” he asked me slowly. I motioned him to follow, and took him into my book vault, where I laid his clever forgery next to mine the original. For a moment I thought he would crumple up and fall to the floor. I have never seen anyone so completely nonplussed. He had really believed his Cervantes letter to be the original, and had come in all good faith to sell it to me. I proved to him how some forger, after securing the sheets of old paper, had, through a process of photo-engraving, cleverly produced the letter which he had so exultingly shown to me.

The beautiful thing about the book business is that you must be constantly on your guard. It makes the game exciting to know that there are beings who, like vultures, would pick your bones if you but gave them the chance. Thank heaven for them. The chase is more exhilarating on their account.

The atmosphere of Wall Street is that of a Quaker meetinghouse beside it.

Forgeries have been in existence as long as the collecting game itself. During the Renaissance forgers were very active in every field of creative art. Not only did they make imitations of great Greek and Latin classics, which were just beginning their popular vogue in Europe, but they very cleverly copied old medals, and fabricated old gems too. Of course, the collector himself is in a sense morally responsible for the forger. The collector’s overdeveloped sense of acquisitiveness leads him to pay extravagant prices for his favorites; he will search out and buy every available pen scratch of some great writer.

A poor wretch in an attic reads in the newspapers that a capitalist has just paid $2000 for an autograph letter of Robert Burns. He then begins to “discover” other letters and documents by the same author. This is the launching of a career that is usually full of excitement and gives full scope to the imagination. The forger is a picturesque figure until he, too, is discovered and publicly condemned. This class of men--I know of no women forgers--is responsible for the literary detective. There is real sport in tracking these fabrications. An ability to tell the original from the false, the genuine from the spurious, sometimes under the most trying circumstances, has developed almost into a fine art.

There are men who make literary detecting their profession. Their eyes are so well trained that they are seldom wrong when pronouncing judgment. They are as fully aware of the thousand and one tricks of the professional forger’s game as they are alert to the peculiarities of each author’s handwriting.

These experts could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. When you stop to consider that there are men even now in dark holes in London, in obscure garrets in Paris, in flats in Harlem, and in apartments in Atlantic City, making their livelihood forging autographs, it puts you pleasantly on your guard. These fellows are very often unsuccessful authors with a certain amount of erudition, broken-down booksellers, or other bits of riffraff from the literary world. I once knew a genial old college professor who turned from unlucrative teaching to make an honest penny, as he termed it, by forging.

My uncle Moses always told with a chuckle of his experience with an Englishman by the name of Robert Spring. He called at my uncle’s shop in Commerce Street one day in the 60’s and said he had an old document signed by Washington. In fact, it was a military pass issued to some Revolutionary worthy, permitting him to go through the lines. My uncle naturally pricked up his ears at the mention of his favorite character, General Washington, and immediately asked to see this interesting relic. The Englishman then held it up dramatically, and when Uncle Moses read it he felt like embracing his visitor. For, lo and behold, the pass was made out in the name of one of my uncle’s own ancestors!

It had every earmark of age, was written on old paper in faded ink, the creases were almost worn through, and the edges were frayed. To his covetous eyes the pass seemed much more desirable on account of its connection with his forbears. He asked the Englishman what he wanted for it and how it had come into his possession. He glibly explained he had found it in an old-fashioned hair trunk in the attic of a house in old Philadelphia. He wanted fifteen dollars for this pass--a large sum in those days, when one could buy a full autograph letter of Washington for that much money. Uncle Moses rose to this thin story as a trout strikes at a fly.

Some years later Ferdinand J. Dreer, of Philadelphia, a connoisseur, came to see him. Among other things, my uncle showed him the faded pass. Mr. Dreer looked at it for a moment, and then, according to Uncle Moses, turned to him and in that cheerfully disgusted tone which one collector uses to a brother who has made a foolish deal, said:--

“Mr. Polock, you, of all men, should know better! This thing is an arrant forgery, and worth less than nothing.”

It later appeared that Robert Spring was the first great forger of American documents. He had written many such military passes, all of them with spurious signatures of General Washington. But he was always foxy enough to look up the name of some ancestor of the man on whom he planned to prey. Uncle Moses, nevertheless, remained stoical, and said this outlay of fifteen dollars was one of the most profitable investments he had ever made. It placed him on his guard as nothing had before; was, in fact, an investment that would in time be worth thousands of dollars to him.

Spring’s career as a forger lasted a surprisingly long time. He reached a point where he made no effort to conceal from his Philadelphia customers the almost made-to-order character of these documents of his. He salved their feelings by saying he would never think of offering them anything that was not genuine. Of course, he was an excellent penman. Washington was his favorite model, perhaps because he had greatest success in copying his handwriting. He sold most of his productions to persons who lived abroad, who were not regular collectors. He assumed various names when he wrote to members of the English nobility, representing himself sometimes as a widow in want, or as the needy daughter of Stonewall Jackson, thus feeding most lucratively upon the kind-heartedness of wealthy people thousands of miles away. He was arrested several times, but finally reformed. Before dying he grew to be a most proper and meticulously honest dealer in books and engravings, and, I suppose, rests comfortably now in the bookmen’s heaven.

I have collected letters and documents of Washington almost from the beginning of my career. To-day I own an interesting, authentic collection of more than two hundred, written between the years 1755 and 1799. He was a prolific correspondent. His handwriting is always legible; the writing of a sensitive, clear-thinking person whose nerves were under excellent control. Many of these letters are the charming messages which any leisured gentleman of that period might write. Others are on military matters of the utmost importance. Another series deals entirely with agriculture, and shows how well the masterly general could play the gentleman farmer.

The years which have passed since his death have seen the world flooded with Washington autographs. But it took a measure of daring and a fanatical spirit of patriotism to forge letters of his while he was still alive and fulfilling with vigor the now historical duties of his military career. It was in May or June of 1777 that a book appeared in London purporting to contain certain letters of Washington written in 1776 to friends and relatives of his in Virginia. These letters paint him as a man whose motives were questionable. The false lines in this book relate his pretended thoughts and feelings about the Revolution in which he was then engaged. They make him say he is tired of it all; that he wishes for peace at any price with the mother country. They reveal him as a military scapegrace with the soul, but not the courage, of a traitor! Despite the publisher’s preface explaining his possession of these intimate documents, it was soon proved that the letters were deliberate forgeries. Nevertheless, they were of grave importance at the time, for they served as a powerful propaganda against Washington, and therefore the colonies, and made a strong appeal to the ignorant and easily biased mind.

Forgers must have, above all, a keen sense of chronology. This is the first great requisite after their natural skill in imitating handwriting. For instance, they cannot refer to the discovery of America in a letter supposed to have been written before that event took place, or date a letter of Dickens, 1872, two years after his death, and expect to get away with it. Both these slips, strange to say, have occurred. In fact, forgers frequently make similar crude errors, alluding to incidents that hadn’t happened at the time the letter was dated.