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The book is not to be found in his sale catalogue; he had Lyly's plays in quarto, seven of them each marked 'rare, and he had two copies of a well-known book called Euphues Golden Legacie, written by Thomas Nash. The Perkins Sale catalogue shows neither of Lyly's novels. List after list of the spoils of mighty book-hunters has only a blank where the Anatomy of Wit ought to be.
More congenial, however, in my recollection, is that remote and dingy hall where rough Carfrae, like Thor, flourished his thundering hammer. There it was that one first marked, with a sort of sympathetic awe, the strange and varied influence of their peculiar maladies on the book-hunters of the last generation.
These incidental divisions are too numerous and complex for a proper classification of book-hunters, and I am inclined to go back to the idea that their most effective and comprehensive division is into the private prowler and the auction-haunter. The difference between these is something like, in the sporting world, that between the stalker and the hunter proper.
In a classification of book-hunters, the aspirants after large-paper copies deserve special notice, were it only for the purpose of guarding against a common fallacy which confounds them with the lovers of tall copies.
Here then I pause, turning over the leaves of one volume, reading the title of another, studying the personal appearance of a third, and weighing the merits of their authors against the contents of my purse. And when I say "personal appearance," I say it advisedly; for book-hunters, are skilled Lavaters in their way, and books, like men, attract or repel at first sight.
Thus the heart of man has answered, and will answer Lucretius, the noblest Roman poet, and the least beloved, who sought, at last, by his own hand, they say, the doom that Virgil waited for in the season appointed. To Philip Dodsworth, Esq., New York. Dear Dodsworth, Let me congratulate you on having joined the army of book-hunters.
Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over, to know if it could be really so. So it really was. His book had disappeared from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet the ground and never germinate disappear. At last it had got a certain value as a curiosity for book-hunters.
One of the Bibliotaph's fellow book-hunters owned a chair said to have been given by Sir Edwin Landseer to Sir Walter Scott. The chair was interesting to behold, but the Bibliotaph after attempting to sit in it immediately got up and declared that it was not a genuine relic: 'Sir Edwin had reason to be grateful to rather than indignant at Sir Walter Scott.
The good Bishop, known to all book-hunters as the author of the Philobiblon, died in 1345, but his collection remained intact, subject to rules he had himself laid down, until the dissolution of the monasteries, when Durham College, which was attached to a religious house, was put up for sale, and its library, like so much else of good learning at this sad period, was dispersed and for the most part destroyed.
He used to rejoice at the blow that fell on the arrogant magnificence of Alexandria. 'Our idle book-hunters, he said, 'know about nothing but titles and bindings: their chests of cedar and ivory, and the book-cases that fill the bath-room, are nothing but fashionable furniture, and have nothing to do with learning. Lucian was quite as severe on the book-hunters of the age of the Antonines.
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