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Updated: September 16, 2025
The sale-room of an old and famous firm of book auctioneers in London is, of course, a great meeting-place for collectors, librarians, dealers: not only when an auction is in progress, but perhaps even more notably when books that are coming on for sale are upon view.
"Remain at my side, collectors, we will cover the rear. Forward, now! go up the mountain." And while those went upward, Mohammed remained at the foot of the mountain. On either side the collectors, and in front of him all the fishermen of Praousta, more than fifty men, with threatening looks and burning eyes.
With a view to diminish these as much as possible, the instructions from the Secretary of the Treasury now laid before you were transmitted to the collectors of the several ports.
Now this fountain at Nimes has yielded, and yields still, an almost inexhaustible supply of Roman and Gaulish and Gallo-Greek coins that have been thus thrown in as oblations to the nymphs in remote times; and these coins are now in the museums of Nimes and Paris, and in those of private collectors. The same custom still remains, but instead of coins, pins are now cast into springs.
The portfolio contained letters whose very signatures would have driven the first of modern autograph collectors distracted with joy whose meanest scrap would make a scrap-book the envy of the world.
All that gathering of insignificant, grave and pretentious young men, who, while they crowded, made their progress in the ranks of the sub-prefects, councillors of prefectures, picking up nominations under the feet of the influential guests as they would cigar stumps, disgusted him; men of twenty years, born, as it were, with white cravats, pretentious and pensive, creatures of office and not of work, haunting the Chambers and the antechambers, mere collectors of ideas, repeaters of serious commonplaces, salon democrats who would not offer their ungloved hand to a workman on the street; staff-majors ambitious of honors and not of devotion, whom he felt crowding around him, with smiles on their lips and applications in their pockets.
In the preamble to this rescript it is expressly declared, that no blame shall attach to the collectors of the customs, for not informing the merchant of the amount of the custom duties while the goods are in transit; but if the merchant wishes to enter them, the officer is not to lead him into error.
Now that the cottages have been ransacked by dealers and collectors, the treasures have not only been absorbed by wealthy townspeople, but are finding their way with those of impoverished landowners and occupiers to the millionaire mansions on the other side of the Atlantic.
From Palfrey's "History of New England." By permission of, and by arrangement with, the authorized publishers, Houghton, Miffin Co. Copyright, 1873. Cotton Mather, son of Increase Mather, the president of Harvard College. This work was entitled "Wonders of the Invisible World." It is now much sought after by collectors of Americana.
Imagine telling the news of the world for the last quarter of a century to an intelligent and once well-educated man who has known nothing of what has happened in all that time except what he might learn from ignorant natives, who had obtained their knowledge second hand from Spanish tax collectors only a trifle less ignorant than themselves.
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