bibliophily is on the increase. it is a constatation which i make with regret; for the bibliophile’s point of view is, to me at least, unsympathetic and his standard of values unsound. among the french, bibliophily would seem to have become a kind of mania, and, what is more, a highly organized and thoroughly exploited mania. whenever i get a new french book i turn at once—for in what disgusts and irritates one there is always a certain odious fascination—to the fly-leaf. one had always been accustomed to finding there a brief description of the “vingt exemplaires sur papier hollande van gelder”; nobody objected to the modest old dutchman whose paper gave to the author’s presentation copies so handsome an appearance. but van gelder is now a back number. in this third decade of the twentieth century he has become altogether too simple and unsophisticated. on the fly-leaf of a dernière nouveauté i find the following incantation, printed in block capitals and occupying at least twenty lines:
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il a été tiré de cet ouvrage, après impositions spéciales, 133 exemplaires in-4. tellière sur papier-vergé pur-fil lafuma-navarre, au filigrane de la nouvelle revue fran?aise, dont 18 exemplaires hors commerce, marqués de a à r, 100 exemplaires réservés aux bibliophiles de la nouvelle revue fran?aise, numérotés de i à c, 15 exemplaires numérotés de ci à cxv; 1040 exemplaires sur papier vélin pur-fil lafuma-navarre, dont dix exemplaires hors commerce marqués de a à j, 800 exemplaires réservés aux amis de l’edition originale, numérotés de 1 à 800, 30 exemplaires d’auteur, hors commerce, numérotés de 801 à 830 et 200 exemplaires numérotés de 831 à 1030, ce tirage constituant proprement et authentiquement l’edition originale.
if i were one of the hundred bibliophiles of the nouvelle revue fran?aise or even one of the eight hundred friends of the original edition, i should suggest, with the utmost politeness, that the publishers might deserve better of their fellow-beings if they spent less pains on numbering the first edition and more on seeing that it was properly produced. personally, i am the friend of any edition which is reasonably well printed and bound, reasonably correct in the text and reasonably clean. the consciousness that i possess a numbered copy of an edition printed on lafuma-navarre paper, duly watermarked with the publisher’s initials, does not make up for the fact that the book is full of gross printer’s errors and that a whole sheet of sixteen 64pages has wandered, during the process of binding, from one end of the volume to the other—occurrences which are quite unnecessarily frequent in the history of french book production.
with the increased attention paid to bibliophilous niceties, has come a great increase in price. limited éditions de luxe have become absurdly common in france, and there are dozens of small publishing concerns which produce almost nothing else. authors like monsieur andré salmon and monsieur max jacob scarcely ever appear at less than twenty francs a volume. even with the exchange this is a formidable price; and yet the french bibliophiles, for whom twenty francs are really twenty francs, appear to have an insatiable appetite for these small and beautiful editions. the war has established a new economic law: the poorer one becomes the more one can afford to spend on luxuries.
the ordinary english publisher has never gone in for van gelder, lafuma-navarre and numbered editions. reticent about figures, he leaves the book collector to estimate the first edition’s future rarity by guesswork. he creates no artificial scarcity values. the collector of contemporary english first editions is wholly a speculator; he never knows what time may have in store.
65in the picture trade for years past nobody has pretended that there was any particular relation between the price of a picture and its value as a work of art. a magnificent el greco is bought for about a tenth of the sum paid for a romney that would be condemned by any self-respecting hanging-committee. we are so well used to this sort of thing in picture dealing that we have almost ceased to comment on it. but in the book trade the tendency to create huge artificial values is of a later growth. the spectacle of a single book being bought for fifteen thousand pounds is still sufficiently novel to arouse indignation. moreover, the book collector who pays vast sums for his treasures has even less excuse than has the collector of pictures. the value of an old book is wholly a scarcity value. from a picture one may get a genuine ?sthetic pleasure; in buying a picture one buys the unique right to feel that pleasure. but nobody can pretend that venus and adonis is more delightful when it is read in a fifteen thousand pound unique copy than when it is read in a volume that has cost a shilling. on the whole, the printing and general appearance of the shilling book is likely to be the better of the two. the purchaser of the fabulously expensive old book is satisfying only his possessive 66instinct. the buyer of a picture may also have a genuine feeling for beauty.
the triumph and the reductio ad absurdum of bibliophily were witnessed not long ago at sotheby’s, when the late mr. smith of new york bought eighty thousand pounds’ worth of books in something under two hours at the britwell court sale. the war, it is said, created forty thousand new millionaires in america; the new york bookseller can have had no lack of potential clients. he bought a thousand guinea volume as an ordinary human being might buy something off the sixpenny shelf in a second-hand shop. i have seldom witnessed a spectacle which inspired in me an intenser blast of moral indignation. moral indignation, of course, is always to be mistrusted as, wholly or in part, the disguised manifestation of some ignoble passion. in this case the basic cause of my indignation was clearly envy. but there was, i flatter myself, a superstructure of disinterested moral feeling. to debase a book into an expensive object of luxury is as surely, in miltonic language, “to kill the image of god, as it were in the eye” as to burn it. and when one thinks how those eighty thousand pounds might have been spent.... ah, well!
