ation in Religion, or a Revolution in Politics, there is an undercurrent of influence from the one to the other, which is to be traced in the varying fortunes of individual works;-in their popularity, at one time, and their oblivion at another;-in the splendid rewards and the severe punishments which have attended their production; in the singular way by which one book is sometimes supplanted by another, or is raised to the pinnacle of fame, by the very means which were used to decry and degrade it. Here, however, and now, I have but to indicate the several classes of causes, if I may so speak, by which the prices of books have been ordinarily affected, and which necessarily have their place amongst the questions that will claim consideration in the selection and establishment of Libraries. They may (for the purpose in hand) be grouped under two heads: 1, Rarity; 2, Condition. BOOK I. Chapter VI. D. Clement's Classification of Causes of Rarity in books. In his Bibliothèque curieuse, historique et critique, ou Catalogue raisonné de livres difficiles à trouver, David Rarity in Books. Clement has gone very minutely into both the causes and the degrees of Rarity in books. That work is now a century old, and (although it extends to nine goodly quartos,) is incomplete; but no subsequent writer has treated the subject so elaborately, or has based his opinious about it on so large an induction of facts and comparison of authorities. According to Clement, there are two sorts of rarity in books: the one absolute, the other conditional or contingent. There are rare editions of very common books. There are books of almost common occurrence in public Libraries, which are BOOK I. Chapter VI. Purchases. rarely seen in the market. A book or an edition of which but very few copies exist he calls necessarily rare;' one which is only with difficulty to be met with, -however many copies may be extant;-he calls 'contingently rare. Under the first head he classes: (1) Books of which few copies were printed; (2) Books which have been suppressed; (3) Books which have been almost entirely destroyed by casual fire, or other accident; (4) Books of which a large portion of the impression has been 'wasted'-usually for want of success when published; (5) Volumes of which the printing was never completed; (6) Copies on large paper or on vellum. Under the second head he enumerates: (1) Books on subjects which interest only a particular class of students; (2) Books in languages which are little known; (3) Heretical, licentious, and libellous books; (4) First editions of a classic author from MSS; (5) First productions of the printing press in a particular town; (6) The productions of the celebrated printers of the sixteenth century; (7) Books in the vernacular language of an author who printed them in a foreign country; (8) Books privately printed; (9) Works the various parts of which have been published under different titles, in different sizes, or in various places. The degrees of rarity he estimates thus: (1) Every book which is no longer current in the trade and requires some pains in the search for it, is 'of infrequent occurrence' (peu commun); (2) If there are but few copies in the country in which we live, and those not easily met with, it is 'rare;' (3) If the copies are so dis persed that there are but few of them, even in the neighbouring countries, so that there is increased difficulty to procure them, it is 'very rare;' (4) If the number of copies be but 50 or 60, and those scattered; or if the work be so far lost as not to make its appearance more frequently than it would, were but 60 copies of it in existence, it is 'extremely rare;' (5) And, finally, every work of which there are not ten copies in the world is 'excessively rare' (de la dernière rareté.). One qualification, it is evident, must here be tacitly understood, although it is not explicitly stated,—namely, that the books to which this scale shall be applied for any practical purpose must be books which, on some ground or other, are sought for. There are few, even amongst "bibliomaniacs," for whom scarcity, quite irrespectively of every other quality, will suffice, however decisive it may be (cæteris paribus) in determining prices. BOOK I. Chapter VI. tremely small impression. Books, the excessive rarity of which arises from a of Books of exvery small impression, are usually (there are, of course, striking exceptions) such as relate to the genealogy or the possessions of eminent families, or such as have been the amusements of opulent leisure-not always, it must be confessed, of a discreet or dignified kind. There are, (to take an example from the first named category,) few English books of greater rarity than Lord "It would be an abuse of terms to ascribe 'rarity' to many books of no interest-of which it might with truth be said that the readers are still rarer than the copies-and which nobody cares to know. For a book to deserve this epithet, bibliographically speaking, it is, we think, necessary that in addition to its well-attested scarcity, it should be more or less sought for (plus ou moins recherché), and be consequently more or less valuable."-Brunet, ut supra, pref. xiv. BOOK I. Chapter VI. Purchases. Of Suppressed Books. 2 1 Peterborough's work, entitled, "Succinct genealogies .... by Robert Halstead," of which the impression is stated to have been limited to 24 copies, and a copy of which has been sold for £74. Again, of the works of Mme. de Montesson, printed under the title of Euvres anonymes, extending to eight volumes, (large octavo), twelve copies only were worked off for presents. This collection has been termed, by a distinguished bibliographer, "une des plus grandes et des plus précieuses raretés de la littérature Française." Of the class last-named-that in which wealth has been misemployed-it will be enough to name a single instance, the Tableau des mœurs du temps, dans les différens âges de la vie, a book which is entitled to the epithet "excessively rare," in the highest possible degree, since one copy only appears to have been printed of it, that being undoubtedly one too many. Sometimes, in the case of works extending over many volumes, the number of complete copies printed is less than that of the separate impressions of certain volumes; as, for example, is the case with Taylor's translation of Plato (probably the only translation of that philosopher, in his entirety, which is extant in any modern language as the work of a single translator), of the whole ten volumes of which but 50 copies were printed. The same remark holds good of the Euvres anonymes mentioned above. Of the books which owe their rarity to suppression, some are amongst the very best, and some amongst the very worst, that have given employment to the press. 1 Sale of Sir M. M. Sykes (1824), Pt. 1373. 2 Van de Weyer, in Philobiblon Memoirs (1854), 85. Even in England the list would include several translations of the Bible; many works of great value on British history; and some of the best productions of our earlier theologians. In many cases, a foreign press, and a transfer of the unfinished work from one press to another, are found in combination with the fact of suppression, but have sometimes tended to lessen rather than to enhance the rarity of the persecuted book. In others, the rigour of suppression has been directed against some portion of the work, and has made almost every copy of it an imperfect one; as, for example, was the case with Tindale's Pentateuch printed by Luther's printer, Hans Luft, "at Malborow, in the Land of Hesse," in 1530. By Act of Parliament' (twelve years later) it was directed that all the marginal notes should be cut off. Mr. Grenville's copy, now in the British Museum, is believed to be the only perfect copy in existence. ' Of the first edition of Hall's Union of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancaster and York, not one complete copy appears to have survived; and probably of the first edition of Fabyan's well-known Chronicle but one, so successfully was that work suppressed by Wolsey." 1 It is not surprising that when vigorous efforts have been made to suppress books, almost in the infancy of printing, their success has sometimes been so complete as to throw doubt on the alleged existence of such books. This, for example, has been the case with the famous Liber Conformitatum of the Franciscans, three 1 Mr. Grenville's MS. note, as quoted in Bibliotheca Grenvilliana, i, 78. BOOK I. Chapter VI. Purchases. |