Prices of Books

The last sale in the seventeenth century to be recorded is that of John Lloyd, Bishop of St. Davids, sold in 1699 by John Bullord at Tom’s Coffee-House.

When auctions were first started conditions of sale were formulated, and with the exception of a little elaboration, they remain pretty much what they were at first; but there were certain peculiarities which are worthy of mention.

The catalogues were not at first divided into day’s sales, but as many lots as possible were sold in the time fixed for the sale. The hours were usually from nine to twelve, and from two to six. Sometimes the sales only took place in the evening. In 1681 we learn that an average sale of 544 lots in a day was considered satisfactory. In the Conditions of Sale printed in the Catalogue of Seaman’s library we read—

“That the Auction will begin the 31st of October at the Deceased D

house in Warwick Court in Warwick Lane punctually at nine Of the Clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, and this to continue daily until all the books be sold.”

The early hour was found a disadvantage, and books often sold for low prices at the beginning of sales, so that Cooper was forced to make a rule that the sale should not be commenced unless there were twenty present. At this time biddings of a penny were common.

Two great evils came to light on the first institution of auctions; one was due to the buyers, and the other to the auctioneers. It was found that in cases where the buyer thought he had given more for a book than was wise, he often forgot to pay and fetch away the books. Millington refers specially to this in 1681—

“I question not but the well disposed, and the Learned will give us such incouragement in the Sale by Bidding in some measure to the value of the Books so exposed, as may further incourage and keep on foot such a commendable and serviceable a way of sale (as this of Auction is) to the great purposes of promoting Learning and Knowledge. Which, when I consider, I cannot but wonder that so many persons have appeared at our auctions, and buy with a great freedom to the injury of others (that are truly conscientious to pay for, and fetch away the Books so bought); yet in most auctions have hitherto neglected to fetch away and pay for their own. To the end therefore that they may know, we will not be damaged after so great expences, as inevitably attends the management of an auction; we do intend to prosecute them according to the law if forthwith they do not send for their books, or give us some reasonable satisfaction. To prevent any abuses for the future that may happen to other gentlemen who suffer by this unhandsome practice (of having Books bought out of their hands by persons that never will, or perhaps never designed to fetch them away), we shall, at a convenient time, for the further satisfaction of gentlemen, give an account of their names, and desire their absence if any of them happen to be present.”[40 - Millington’s preface to catalogue of libraries of Lawson, Fawkes, Stockden, and Brooks, 30th May 1681.]

The other evil was the attempt of the booksellers to get rid of some of their old stock by introducing it into the sales of collectors’ libraries. This trick has already been alluded to.

The frequenters of auctions seem to have been very jealous of being bid against by any one interested in the sale. This jealousy found voice in the complaints of Wanley and others at Bridges’ sale in 1726.

The lots were not numbered throughout in the catalogues, but the octavos, quartos, and folios were each numbered separately, the number of each section running on from the previous day’s sale. This is very confusing, as when you look at the end for the purpose of finding the total number of the lots, you only find the number of folios in the sale. Millington found that it was not advisable to bid for books, in case it might be supposed that he was running them up in price, and Mr. Pollard believes that he adopted a plan of getting men to bid for him.

In corroboration of this view Mr. Pollard refers to a copy of the catalogue of the libraries of Button, Owen, and Hoel, 7th November 1681, in the British Museum which belonged to Millington. It has two receipts by persons whose names are among the bidders for money received from Millington for various books. “At first sight this seems a reversal of what we should expect, but after the first few sales the auctioneers had renounced the right of making bids themselves, lest they should be accused of running up prices, and Millington had obviously employed these friends to bid for him.”[41 - Bibliographica, vol. ii. p. 115.]

Another evil connected with auctions comes from knocks out, which are thoroughly dishonest, and in fact, criminal, being, as they are, a form of conspiracy, but the agreements of two persons not to bid against one another are not necessarily to be condemned. Mr. Henry Stevens was very urgent against any kind of agreement, and in his reminiscences amusingly describes his frustration of a knock-out; and it has been said that when the Duke of Roxburghe and Lord Spencer made an agreement, they were parties to a knock-out; but this view is founded on a fallacy, viz., that whatever price a book fetches at public auction is the proper price. We know, however, that this is not correct; for instance, the Valdarfer Boccaccio fetched its huge price at the Roxburghe sale because two great book-buyers with long purses bid against one another. When one of these buyers died and the book was again in the market, seven years after the first sale, the survivor obtained the book at a smaller price. Hence who is to say whether £2260 or £918 is the actual value of the book!

CHAPTER VI

AUCTION SALES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The sales of the last quarter of the seventeenth century are of the greatest interest in the history of the subject, but they are not of any great value as guides to present prices, for circumstances and tastes have greatly changed. The sales were largely those of the working libraries of theologians, and the books which their owners found of use in their studies sold well, while books in other classes which have now taken their place in public esteem fetched prices which seem to us very small. Among the number of sales noticed in the last chapter, two only stand out as the libraries of true collectors in the modern acceptation of the term, that is, of those who collect for love of the books rather than from an appreciation of their utility. Much the same conditions ruled during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, although the library of Charles Bernard, serjeant-surgeon to Queen Anne and brother of Dr. Francis Bernard, previously referred to, was sold in March 1711 at the Black Boy Coffee-House in Ave Maria Lane, and the sale of the vast collection of Thomas Rawlinson commenced in 1721. Then followed the sale of John Bridges’ library in February 1726, but the middle of the century was passed when the great sale of Dr. Richard Mead occurred. This (1754-55), when compared with Askew’s sale in 1775, may be said to mark an era in bibliography. These two great physicians were friends with similar tastes. We are, therefore, able to gauge the considerable growth of the taste for book-collecting during the few years that parted these two sales. Askew bought many books at Mead’s sale, and when the same volumes came to be sold at his own sale they realised twice and thrice the prices he had given. We shall see in the register of the sales after Askew’s day how the prices gradually advanced, until we arrive at the culmination of the bibliomaniacal spirit in the Roxburghe sale of 1812.

We will now enumerate some of the principal sales which took place during the eighteenth century, which led up to the long list of sales which have formed so marked a feature of the nineteenth century.

Charles Bernard’s library, sold in 1711, was said by Oldys to contain “the fairest and best editions of the classics.” Swift, in his “Journal to Stella” (19th March) wrote, “I went to-day to see poor Charles Bernard’s books, and I itch to lay out nine or ten pounds for some fine editions of fine authors”; and on the 29th he adds, “I walked to-day into the city and went to see the auction of poor Charles Bernard’s books. They were in the middle of the Physic books, so I bought none; and they are so dear, I believe I shall buy none.”

The sale of the library of Thomas Britton, the well-known small-coal man of Clerkenwell, in January 1715, deserves mention on account of the worthiness of its owner. The books were sold by auction at St. Paul’s Coffee-House by Thomas Ballard, and the sale catalogue consists of forty closely-printed pages in quarto. There were 664 lots in octavo, 274 in quarto, and 102 in folio, besides 50 pamphlets and 23 manuscripts. This was the second library Britton had collected, for some years before his death he sold the first one by auction.

Thomas Rawlinson (1681-1725) was one of the most insatiable of book collectors, and he left the largest library that had been collected up to his time. His chambers were so filled that his bed had to be moved into a passage, and he took London House, in Aldersgate Street, to accommodate his ever-increasing library. Oldys says of him—

“If his purse had been much wider he had a passion beyond it, and would have been driven to part with what he was so fond of, such a pitch of curiosity or dotage he was arrived at upon a different edition, a fairer copy, a larger paper than twenty of the same sort he might be already possessed of. In short, his covetousness after those books he had not increased with the multiplication of those he had, and as he lived so he died in his bundles, piles, and bulwarks of paper, in dust and cobwebs, at London House.”[42 - “Memoir of William Oldys,” 1862, p. 101.]

He did, in fact, commence the sale of his library before his death, and the first part was sold in December 1721. The catalogue of the whole library occupied sixteen parts, the last being sold in 1734. A complete set of these catalogues is very rare, and the lists of them in the various bibliographical works are mostly incomplete. There is, however, a set in the Bodleian Library. The books in the first five parts sold for £2409, and the manuscripts alone took sixteen days of March 1734 to sell, and went cheap. Hearne writes in his Diary (9th November 1734)—

“The MSS. in Dr. Rawlinson’s last auction of his brother Thomas’s books went extraordinary cheap, and those that bought had great penny worths. The Doctor purchas’d many himself, at which here and there one were disgusted, tho’ all the company supported the Doctor in it, that as a creditor he had a right equal to any other. My friend Mr. Tom Brome, that honest gentleman of Ewithington in Herefordshire in a letter to the Doctor, says that he cannot but wonder at the low rates of most of the MSS., and adds ‘had I been in place I should have been tempted to have laid out a pretty deal of money, without thinking myself at all touched with bibliomania.’”[43 - Reliquiæ Hearnianæ, 1869, vol. iii. p. 159.]

On 10th November Hearne further writes—

“Dr. Rawlinson by the sale of his brother’s books hath not rais’d near the money expected. For it seems they have ill answer’d, however good books; the MSS. worse, and what the prints will do is as yet undetermin’d.”[44 - Ibid., p. 160.]

It is worthy of mention here that Dr. Rawlinson purchased Hearne’s Diaries for a hundred guineas from the widow and executrix of Dr. William Bedford, to whom they had been given by Hearne,[45 - Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 490.] and he bequeathed them with other property to the University of Oxford. The auctioneers who dispersed Thomas Rawlinson’s large collections were Charles Davis and Thomas Ballard.

The sale of the valuable library of John Bridges at his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn by Mr. Cock, in February 1726, was an event of much literary interest. The number of lots was 4313, occupying twenty-seven days, and the total proceeds of the sale were £4001. This is therefore worthy of note as the first sale at which the prices averaged nearly one pound per lot.

There was much dissatisfaction among the buyers at the high prices, and a conspiracy to “bull” the market was suspected.

Humphry Wanley expressed his opinion strongly on this point—

“Feb. 9, 1725-6.—Went to Mr. Bridges’s chambers, but could not see the three fine MSS. again, the Doctor his brother having locked them up. He openly bid for his own books, merely to enhance their price, and the auction proves to be, what I thought it would become, very knavish.”

“Feb. 11, 1725-6.—Yesterday at five I met Mr. Noel and tarried long with him; we settled then the whole affair touching his bidding for my Lord [Oxford] at the roguish auction of Mr. Bridges’s books. The Reverend Doctor one of the brothers hath already displayed himself so remarkably as to be both hated and despised, and a combination among the booksellers will soon be against him and his brother-in-law, a lawyer. These are men of the keenest avarice, and their very looks (according to what I am told) dart out harping-irons. I have ordered Mr. Noel to drop every article in my Lord’s commissions when they shall be hoisted up to too high a price. Yet I desired that my Lord may have the Russian Bible, which I know full well to be a very rare and a very good book.”[46 - Wanley’s “Diary,” Lansdowne MS., 808, quoted Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. i. pp. 91-92.]

The frontispiece to the sale catalogue exhibited an oak felled, and persons bearing away the branches, signifying that when the oak is cut down every man gets wood. Nichols, referring to the motto, Δρυὸς πεσούσης πᾶς ἀνὴρ ξυλεύεται, speaks of it as “an affecting memento to the collectors of great libraries, who cannot or do not leave them to some public accessible repository.”[47 - Ibid., vol. ii. p. 106.]

Besides the sale catalogue, there was a catalogue raisonné of Bridges’s library, a large paper of which, bound in old blue morocco, and ruled with red lines, Dr. Gosset bought for Dibdin for four shillings, and the latter styles it a happy day when he received it.

In 1731 was sold, at St. Paul’s Coffee-House, the extensive library of Anthony Collins, the famous freethinker and author, and a friend of Locke. His books were sold in two divisions. Part 1 of the catalogue contained 3451 lots, and part 2, 3442.

The sale of Dr. Thomas Pellet’s library in 1744 is of especial interest as the first undertaken by Samuel Baker, the founder of the house of Sotheby.

In 1746 two sales of note took place, those of Sir Christopher Wren and Michael Maittaire, the scholar and bibliographer. The following advertisement of the former is from the Daily Advertiser of 26th October 1748—

“To be sold by auction, by Messrs. Cock and Langford, in y

Great Piazza, Covent Garden, this and y

following evening, the curious and entire libraries of y

ingenious architect Sir Christopher Wren, Knt., and Christopher Wren, Esq., his son, late of Hampton Court; both deceased. Consisting of great variety of Books of Architecture, Antiquities, Histories, etc., in Greek, Latin, French, and English; together with some few lots of Prints. The said books may be viewed at Mr. Cock’s in y

Great Piazza aforesaid, till y

time of sale, which will begin each evening at 5 o’clock precisely. Catalogues of which may be had gratis at y

place of sale aforesaid.”

Maittaire’s library was sold in two parts, in November 1748 and January 1749, by Mr. Cock, and occupied forty-five evenings in the selling. For some reason or other the books appear to have been sacrificed, and they realised little more than £700. One reason was, that they were not very presentable in appearance. The auctioneer writes in the “advertisement” to the catalogue—

“Tho’ the books in their present condition make not the most ostentatious appearance, yet like the late worthy possessor of them, however plain their outside may be, they contain within an invaluable treasure of ingenuity and learning. In fine, this is (after fifty years’ diligent search and labour in collecting) the entire library of Mr. Maittaire, whose judgement in the choice of books as it ever was confessed, so are they undoubtedly far beyond whatever I can attempt to say in their praise. In exhibiting them thus to the public, I comply with the will of my deceased friend, and in printing the catalogue from his own copy, just as he left it (tho’ by so doing it is more voluminous), I had an opportunity not only of doing the justice I owe to his memory, but also of gratifying the curious.”

According to a very interesting account of the sale in Beloe’s “Anecdotes” (vol. v. pp. 389-452), it appears that if “the curious” attended the sale, they did not do much to raise the prices. Beloe writes, “The library of Michael Maittaire was of incalculable value, from its great variety, from the number of early printed books which it contained, from the extraordinary collection of Greek and Latin tracts by the famous French printers of the sixteenth century, from the most uncommon books in criticism which it exhibited, and lastly, from the high reputation of its possessor.” And, in conclusion, he says, “Such a collection was never before exhibited for public sale, and perhaps never will again.”

A striking instance of the absurdly low prices obtained for the books is that of Homeri Batrachomyomachia (Venet. per Leonicum Cretensem, 1486, 4to), which sold for sixteen shillings. In this copy a subsequent possessor wrote the following note—

“This book is so extremely rare that I never saw any other copy of it except that of Mons. de Boze, who told me he gave 650 livres for it. Mr. Smith, our consul at Venice, wrote me word that he had purchased a copy, but that it was imperfect. Lord Oxford offered Mr. Maittaire fifty guineas for this identical copy.”

Askew’s copy, supposed to be the same as this, fetched at his sale fourteen guineas.

Martialis, apud Vindelinum Spirensem—sine anno—which is described as “one of the rarest of rare books,” only brought four shillings and sixpence. The editio princeps of Plautus (Venet. per Joh. de Colonia et Vindelinum Spirensem, 1472, folio) was sold for sixteen shillings, while the Pinelli copy fetched £36. These are no exceptions to the rule, for Beloe mentions a large number of rare books which only fetched a shilling or two shillings each.