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Updated: June 13, 2025
And the question, where in an extensive collection, a book-hunter admitted to freely range over all the shelves, and a stranger to the minute classification of books, has misplaced the missing volumes, is an insoluble problem, except by hunting over or handling the entire library.
As inveterate book-hunter, I confess to a great fancy to lay hands on his Dorando: A Spanish Tale, a shilling book published in Edinburgh during the progress of the once famous Douglas case, and ordered to be suppressed as contempt of court after it had been through three editions.
James." He addressed Mr. James, but he was looking at the shelves as he spoke, and, with the habit of a book-hunter, taking down the volumes, looking at the title-pages and replacing them; under his arm he carried a single volume in old leather binding. Mr.
If, after he has taken his last survey of his treasures, and spent his last hour in that quiet library, where he has ever found his chief solace against the wear and worry of the world, the book-hunter has been removed to his final place of rest, and it is then discovered that the circumstances of the family require his treasures to be dispersed, if then the result should take the unexpected shape that his pursuit has not been so ruinously costly after all nay, that his expenditure has actually fructified it is well.
It is now, however, my function to describe a more subtle, but no less powerful influence which the book-hunter exercises in the preservation and promulgation of literature, through the mere exercise of that instinct or passion which makes him what he is here called.
And what a delight in the pursuit of the rarities which the eager book-hunter follows with the scent of a beagle!
There is a letter upon this subject by Henri Estienne the printer, in which the high reputation of De Thou's library is contrasted with Lucian's just invective against the illiterate book-hunter: 'The satirist would have honoured a man like you, so learned and so generous in your library: you choose your books with taste, and proportion the cost of binding to the price of the volume; and Lucian, I am sure, would have praised your carefulness in these respects.
Part of the secret lay in this idea: to be a good book-hunter one must not be too dainty; one must not be afraid of soiling one's hands. He who observes the clouds shall not reap, and he who thinks of his cuffs is likely to lose many a bookish treasure. Our Bibliotaph generally parted company with his cuffs when he began hunting for books.
All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed, upon the owner's death probably, as of no value, to the stalls they had returned; and there I found this portion of them just before my old haunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make room for the improvements between Westminster and Oxford Road.
The old Duke of Roxburghe wisely sank his rank and his wealth, and wandered industriously and zealously from shop to stall over the world, just as he wandered over the moor, stalking the deer. One element in the excitement of the poorer book-hunter he must have lacked the feeling of committing something of extravagance the consciousness of parting with that which will be missed.
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