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Updated: May 29, 2025
This talk was like the improvisation of a musician who is profoundly learned, but has in him a vein of poetry too. The talk and the music strongly appeal to robust minds, and at the same time do not repel the sentimentalist. It is not to be supposed that the Bibliotaph pleased every one with whom he came in contact. There were people whom his intellectual potency affected in a disagreeable way.
'You see that his antipathy has not prevented his writing a stanza in my copy of his most notable volume. 'And this? 'I have at divers times contributed the sum of five dollars to divers Fresh Air funds. The Bibliotaph could not be convinced that his sin of autograph collecting was not venial.
A young woman whom he admired, being brought up among brothers, had received the nickname, half affectionately and half patronizingly bestowed, of 'the Kid. Among her holiday gifts for a certain year was a book from the Bibliotaph, a copy of Old-Fashioned Roses, with this dedication: 'To a Kid, had Abraham possessed which, Isaac had been the burnt-offering.
John Bagford died an unrepentant sinner, lamenting with one of his later breaths that he could not live long enough to get hold of a genuine Caxton and rip the initial page out of that. The bibliotaph buries books; not literally, but sometimes with as much effect as if he had put his books underground. There are several varieties of him.
But in hunting rare books the time will be sure to come when a man may well cry, 'I had rather than forty dollars I had my list of first editions with me! The Bibliotaph carried much accurate information in his head, but he never traveled without a thesaurus in his valise. It was a small volume containing printed lists of the first editions of rare books.
'This incident, said the Bibliotaph, 'gave me a vivid sense of the possibility of determining a man's profession by a cursory examination of his cuticle. Lowell's conviction about N. P. Willis was well-founded: namely, that if it had been proper to do so, Willis could have worn his own plain bare skin in a way to suggest that it was a representative Broadway tailor's best work.
He had been describing a visit which he had made in the hero-worshiping days of boyhood to Chappaqua; how friendly and good-natured the great farmer-editor was; how he called the Bibliotaph 'Bub, and invited him to stay to dinner; how he stayed and talked politics with his host; how they went out to the barn afterwards to look at the stock; what Greeley said to him and what he said to Greeley, it was a perfect bit of word-sketching, spontaneous, realistic, homely, unpretentious, irresistibly comic because of the quaintness of the dialogue as reported, and because of the mental image which we formed of this large-headed, round-bellied, precocious youth, who at the age of sixteen was able for three consecutive hours to keep the conversational shuttlecock in the air with no less a person than Horace Greeley.
Poets wrote humorous verse, and artists who justly held their time as too precious to permit of their working for love decorated the pages of the Bibliotaph's scrap-books. One does not abuse the word 'unique' when he applies it to these striking volumes. The Bibliotaph did not always follow contemporary judgment in his selection of men to be so canonized.
Words which have been used to describe a famous man of this century I will venture to apply in part to the Bibliotaph. 'He was a kind of gigantic and Olympian school-boy, ... loving-hearted, bountiful, wholesome and sterling to the heart's core.
The Bibliotaph declared that had he rendered an itemized bill for services in this matter, the largest item would have been for Turkish baths. Here was a case in which the collector paid well for the privilege of having a signed copy of a well-loved author's novel. He begrudged no portion of his time or expenditure.
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