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Updated: July 16, 2025
To make a long story as short as may be, I should say that Allen and I had been acquainted when we were undergraduates; that, when fellows of our respective colleges, our acquaintance had become intimate; that we had once shared a little bit of fishing on the Test; and that we were both book-collectors.
Public libraries can never satisfy the longings of book-collectors any more than can the private libraries of other people. Whoever really cared a snap of his fingers for the contents of another man's library, unless he is known to be dying? It is a humorous spectacle to watch one book-collector exhibiting his stores to another.
D'Israeli deplored the carelessness which led the 'literary antiquary' to entrust his discoveries and reminiscences to the fly-leaves of notebooks, to 'parchment budgets, and paper-bags of extracts. He expressed especial disappointment at the loss of the manuscript on London Libraries, with its anecdotes of book-collectors and remarks on booksellers and the first publishers of catalogues.
In undertaking to write these few chapters on the lives of the book-collectors, we feel that we must move between lines that seem somewhat narrow, having regard to the possible range of the subject.
The memory of many great book-collectors has been preserved in the libraries established from ancient times in several of the Italian cities.
He has secured my willing attention, and is not likely to be disappointed of a considerable audience. We live in vocal times, when small birds make melody on every bough. The old book-collectors were a taciturn race the Bindleys, the Sykeses, the Hebers. They made their vast collections in silence; their own tastes, fancies, predilections, they concealed.
Guillaume Postel and his friends found time to discuss the merits of the authors before the Flood. But even in writing the briefest account of the great book-collectors, we are compelled to go back to somewhat remote times, and to say at least a few words about the ancient book-stories from the far East, from Greece and Rome, from Egypt and Pontus and Asia.
Strange to say, the conversation of this most omnivorous of book-collectors was less of books than of men. True, he was deeply versed in bibliographical details and dangerously accurate in his talk about them, but, after all, the personality back of the book was the supremely interesting thing.
We find, however, that in 1645 or 1646, when he had published no fewer than eleven pamphlets in all, and when moreover his English and Latin Poems had been issued by Moseley, he must have taken some pains to secure that copies of the entire set of his writings, as then extant, should be in the hands of eminent book-collectors and scholars. James's, London.
The little cloth-and-gold volume, so valued by book-collectors to-day, contained the frog story and twenty-six other sketches, some of which are still preserved in Mark Twain's collected works. Most of them were not Mark Twain's best literature, but they were fresh and readable and suited the taste of that period.
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