Louise Kemeny

Bibliomania

: A rage for collecting and possessing books. (OED)

: An obsessive–compulsive disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. (Wikipedia)

Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) was nothing if not a bibliomaniac. “He was quite bonkers, I mean he was completely barking,” Mr Horne* tells me. We are sitting in the bookcase-lined living room of the central London residence from which Mr Horne runs his antiquarian book dealing business. And he’s right; Phillipps referred to himself as “a complete Vello-maniac” (as the manuscripts tended to be on vellum). By the time he died he had amassed the largest ever private collection of over 60,000 manuscripts. In doing so he ‘endeavoured,’ as his father-in-law accused him, “to ruin the future prospects of your younger children, by the most ridiculous expenditure of your property perhaps of any Man living!!!!!!’[1]

Yet this obsessive – and destructive – collecting, however barking, has preserved myriad important artefacts, and Phillipps’s motive for doing so is rarely given the attention it warrants.

A French manuscript chronicle of the ancient world, late 15th century, illustrated vellum; one of Mr Horne's finest artefacts.

I ask Mr Horne where, in his opinion, the human compulsion to collect and preserve comes from. “I think there is especially a compulsion to do so at times when old things are being lost or destroyed. Phillips was so horrified by the losses of medieval manuscripts that were occasioned by Napoleon’s armies sacking monasteries around Europe, that he decided to save every manuscript he could … he was completely impassioned by the idea of saving them.”

In fact, Phillips did not begin rescuing manuscripts until he was in his thirties, by which time he was already a hardened bibiomaniac. Bibliomaniacal behaviour was so manifest in Phillipps by the age of twenty that his father wrote angrily to him at university: ‘…I highly disapprove of your going to an auction when you have no money to pay for what you buy … therefore draw in, and if you are wise spend somewhat less than your Income instead of three or four times as much … you will be sorry you have squandered away your property so foolishly…’ [2]

Thus, Thomas Phillipps senior, ‘apprehensive of his son’s continuing extravagance, left the estate in trust, giving his heir access to only the income’. Combined with the honour of baronet secured for Phillipps by his father-in-law in 1821, this provided him with the very decent income of £6,000 p.a. Despite this, he had bought enough within a year to put himself into a debt from which he never emerged. Ironically, his serious spending began in 1822 when he moved to the Continent, being ‘obliged to economize’.

But Europe in the 1820s was a dangerous place for a bibliomaniac; the book-buying climate post-Napoleonic Wars ‘had no previous parallels, and have never been equalled again’.[3] Due to the ‘dispersal and … the destruction of many libraries … it has been computed that [at the time of the Revolution] in the private libraries of France, a nation which led the world in bibliophily, there were thirteen million volumes, ten million of which were destroyed or had changed hands within five years’.[4] This is where Mr Horne’s account takes precedence; undoubtedly the prospect of the destruction of so many manuscripts sent Phillipps into a frenzy.

“And he bought them by what we would now call the container-load,” says Mr Horne. “When he died there were hundreds of cases unopened, of manuscripts … the sales from his libraries took place annually for over a century.”

The last sale of Phillipps’s remaining collected stocks were to the New York dealers H. P. Kraus in 1977, over a century after his death. A. N. L. Munby believes that ‘the lifetime of Sir Thomas Phillipps exactly spans the critical period [of] change [...] When he was born, the collecting of books and manuscripts was the occupation of the dilettanti … When Phillipps died … book-collecting had become a professional business.’[5]

I ask Mr Horne if he’s ever bought a book in which he has no personal interest but which he knows will sell well.

“Yes. That’s the difference between being in business and being a collector. As a collector you can allow your personal tastes to dictate … But I’m fairly spoilt really because I deal in the period that I enjoy … You can get dealers who are just making extensions to their collection. I think it’s very wrong, I think for a start you shouldn’t deal and collect in the same field.”

Why?

“I think you end up actually doing both badly … If you’re collecting in the same field that you deal in, you have a tendency to want to collect the nicest things. In that case you’re actually collecting against the interests of your customers … they undoubtedly would like to buy the nicest things. And the two aren’t really compatible. So I think you have to be quite strict.”

When I ask Mr Horne how the recession has affected his business he tells me “a very interesting – if slightly worrying – story about that. There’s a German auctioneer, who had only just started in the business at the time of the 1929 crash … he said in 1930 the German business was unaffected, in 1929 it had been unaffected, in 1931 there was no German book business. There was a lead-in period of two years. In the preceding years, people had been spending the money that they’d actually earned in the two years before that, when everything had been fine.”

Given the implications this has for the current climate I queried as to how he had survived recessions in the past. “Yes… but this one’s probably worse … This year we’ve done three international fairs so far – one in California, one in Milan and one in New York – and historically New York has been much the biggest for us. In California we did much the same as we often do, not very exciting, but pretty good, ditto Milan, New York… we probably did between 10-20% of the business we’d done in the preceding year.”

At this point I’m interested to ask if the internet – and the increasing availability of manuscript facsimiles online – has impacted this recession in a different way from the last, from his perspective. “I think if anything the long term effect is beneficial because it actually stimulates an interest in what is a rather obscure market, where the entry level now is quite high. If facsimiles have helped to introduce people to manuscripts then I think they’re doing a very good job … if [the antiquarian book trade] becomes too rarefied, and too exclusive, then it dies.”

By this point it has probably emerged that Mr Horne is an antiquarian book trader of international stature with little competition in his specific period of interest. He was given “a very nice sixteenth century book in Latin” by a family friend as a boy, which bit him with the book bug. When he grew up there were four antiquarian book shops within a bus ride of his home. “Sadly”, he says, this “is now more or less impossible”.

I ask him why he thinks this is the case and the response is depressingly familiar. “The real answer is costs. Their rents and business rates. Their businesses are simply not profitable enough, and if you compare the profit margin on a sweater that costs 50p to make in China which is then being sold for £50 on the high streets, and bookseller who if he’s going to get net more than 50% thinks he’s doing very well…”

The antiquarian book trade certainly seems like a very small world now. Where I grew up, in Chiswick, there is one antiquarian bookshop, on the high road. Fosters’ Bookshop is probably what the remembered shops of Mr Horne’s childhood were like: ‘the oldest shop on Chiswick High Road’,[6] books line every wall of the narrow, low-ceilinged space, with jenga-like formations of vintage Folio Society volumes towering on the desk, obscuring Mr Foster from view when you first walk in.

I phone Fosters’ in search of a nice edition of the 1936 classic children’s book Ferdinand the Bull, by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson.[7] Although it is now out of print it continued to be extremely popular into the 1960s so I’m hopeful about finding a later, cheaper edition. Unusually, Mr Foster says, he doesn’t have it in stock, and advises that I try Marchpane[8] (Rare Children’s and Illustrated Books). Marchpane, as it turns out, has a mint-condition, 1938 edition which, at £60, is a little too dear for me. They advise that I try Nigel Williams (Rare Books), who also specializes in children’s books. When I call Nigel Williams I am disappointed; they do not have it either. “Have you tried Marchpane?” Yes. “It’s a bit further afield, but have you tried Fosters?” Yes. “Right. Sorry…” In the end, I’m ashamed to say, I buy an unused, later edition from Amazon, for £7.10.

When I go to interview Stephen Foster, he confirms for me just how small the antiquarian book trading world is. If a book is stolen, there is a good chance that the thief will be caught if they try to sell it on the market: “they will gravitate towards the specialists in that field” who are, based on my experience so far, likely to know each other. It would be difficult to actually profit from such a theft; should he come across a book from the right period, Mr Foster believes he might even be able to recognize the handwriting of the last trader to mark it up and therefore probably the trader from which it was stolen.

‘Established in 1968, our family-run business has just passed to a second generation of booksellers’, Fosters’ website proudly proclaims. Stephen Foster, unlike Mr Horne, did not go to university. “If you’d asked me when I was seven, what I wanted to be, I’d have said a bookseller … it’s what I’d always wanted to do”. He started working in the family business at eighteen, effectively managing the shop for the next five years, before setting up by himself. His first shop was in Wandsworth, after which he took over the Bell Street shop, which he has now run for twenty years, taking over the Chiswick shop when his parents retired three years ago; his weeks now divided between Chiswick and Bell Street, his father “still pops in occasionally, tells me what I’m doing wrong!”

I ask him how the trade has changed since he’s been in business. “The change in the way books are sold over the last ten, fifteen years, as in with more internet sales… we don’t run internet sales from this shop at all. Predominantly that’s run from the bell street shop because it’s a little bit more central, its quite handy if people see something on the internet, that it’s ten minutes from the British Library, from Oxford Street – people can come in and look at what they’ve seen [online].’ Typing this up in the Rare Books reading room of the British Library I can certainly see his point.

Has the internet helped in that respect? “It’s not necessarily improved our business, all that’s happened is we’ve followed the customers … we used to sell lots of books to people that walked through the door, but as those customers have looked on the internet we’ve followed them to the internet. We’re [not] selling that many more books, what’s happened is fewer people come in the shop and we send out more parcels. So it’s just a different distribution. It’s more time consuming because the internet is quite time consuming. We don’t sit and do the crossword in the morning drinking coffee, which is actually what I probably did do twenty years ago!”

Mr. Foster

When I enquire about the difference between the two shops, it proves a complex distinction for Mr Foster to define. “[At Bell Street] we’ve got a lot of art books which we’re relatively well known for, more academic books, we keep some of our very antiquarian things there … But the thing about the Chiswick shop is it’s still very much a high-street shop, people still shop locally here. I’ve got people who come in this shop … with their children and they were being brought in by their parents, because they’ve always lived in the area.” This is certainly the case, I myself am one of these locals and it transpires during the course of our conversation that I even went to the same local comprehensive school as Mr Foster. I tell him that in April I came in and bought a perfect, hard-backed, signed, first edition of Iain M. Banks’s Excession for my boyfriend (for a very reasonable £15).

“Exactly. Those sorts of things we sell here, nicely bound volumes, poetry, children’s illustrated books, first editions, things that people like to collect, so it’s a range here. This shop I always feel… having been in my own shop for nearly twenty years, when I came and started working in here again, it felt like going back twenty years. Because actually it felt like the way we used to run shops.”

“We do other things as well, we do a bit of furnishing work with interior decorators, for film companies… it means that there are a number of little pigeon-holes for me to think about when I’m buying which gives you a broader range. Fingers in lots of pies is probably the way forward.” I ask him if he thinks this kind of adaptability has helped his businesses to flourish. “If you have a shop which is just doing walk-in trade, you will have suffered from the internet – there’s no two ways about it. Those customers that you had coming in have drifted off but you’ve not replaced it with any other form of income. It depends what sort of business you are. I’m a general bookseller, I mean literally we do everything from Penguin paperbacks through to seventeenth century medical books. In some ways I think if you are very specialist you’re maybe less affected because you have a very particular knowledge in a very particular area. You have your academic customers, your collectors who are buying from you… I suspect you could be very specialist and not worry about the internet too much.”

He is right on the money. Mr Horne said himself that the “long term effect is beneficial”, and indeed his manuscripts and early printed books are bought by “a mixture of private collectors, academic libraries, public institutions, and other dealers … they’re international, so England would only be a small part of a market.”

Whilst Mr Foster does trade overseas – he is currently in discussions with a client in Baghdad and has in the past sent books to aid workers in Afghanistan – the majority of his clientele is English and London-based. Mr Horne diagnosed the dying breed of high-street antiquarian bookshop with inflated rent and business rates whilst Mr Foster’s family-owned high-street shop avoids the issues that would normally affect it in an affluent area such as Chiswick. I believe, however, that the real secret to Mr Foster’s success is his breadth of interest and his ability to evolve in an increasingly tough climate; he may feel that he spends half his week working in a time warp but constantly switching between two very different shops keeps him on his feet and alive to the changing market.

I ask Mr Foster how one goes about valuing a book. “There’s an important distinction: rarity means that there are very few of them, scarcity means that there are fewer copies than the market desires. There are lots of rare books, but the scarce books are the ones worth the money. A good example is Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Notoriously it’s got a candy pink, Brighton Rock-coloured dust jacket, but underneath it’s got a cherry red cloth. So as the jacket got chipped this red glared through the pink and looked hideous, so people took the jackets off. Consequently, a nice copy of Brighton Rock in a jacket is a ridiculously scarce thing. They hardly ever turn up, and it’s worth tens of thousands of pounds, whilst you can buy a nice first edition without a jacket for a few hundred quid.”

When I ask Mr Horne this question, he answers “With difficulty. To a great extent it’s a matter of experience. Most relatively important books are not rare. There will be plenty of copies, and the copies will be sold from time to time. And so you’d know from being in the business for a long time what sort of prices copies go for, so that gives you a range. And then after that it’s a question of judgement in relation to the individual copy. A copy in its original binding would be worth more than one that’s in a modern binding, generally. A copy that’s particularly large and handsome, that hasn’t been cropped and trimmed, will be better commercially than one that’s been cut down to the mean text block size. One that’s got an interesting early association, interesting annotations, interesting ownership or provenance, is probably going to go ahead of one that is naked and just sort of a bare text. Now, that’s a question of fashion.”

I have asked both dealers what they believe is so special about a first edition. Mr Horne is “a bit cynical about first editions, to be perfectly honest … I think in many cases they’re actually rather overrated. But I understand the appeal where it’s the first appearance in print of something that either is universally important or important to you. Because even if the second appearance is more beautiful, more correct textually, which it often is – somebody’s noticed all the printer’s errors, it’s maybe even revised by the author so it conforms to what he actually had in mind – it’s still not the first time that this book has appeared. I think if it’s a book that makes a great impact when it first appears, then there is a logic to saying ‘I really want the first’. If it’s a book which doesn’t, then actually it’s slightly silly. It’s sort of stamp collecting. There’s a work of Galileo’s, for example, that was printed first in Italian, and it was not much read in Italy, it wasn’t read at all outside it, and nobody apart from a few professionals in the field took much interest in it. Then later on the same year the Latin edition came out which was disseminated very widely, had a huge impact, got Galileo into trouble with the church and the inquisition, famously, and was the work that everyone was talking about, and the work that had the lasting effect. So actually the first, there, was relatively inconsequential and it was the first edition in Latin that actually had the effect”.

Mr Foster also acknowledges the potential for the “stamp collecting” aspect, though he emphasises the personal significance of a first edition for the individual – like the signed, first edition Excession – particularly as a bookseller who works in the gift trade.

I noted with interest that despite all hardship, this year’s Antiquarian Book Fair at London Olympia saw a new record for a 20^th-century first edition. A signed, unopened copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses – which had a huge impact and was banned in the UK for over a decade – was sold by dealer Pom Harrington for £275,000. Of this Mr Foster says that “something truly marvellous will always attract a premium.”

When I inquire as to what the most “truly marvellous” artefact is that he has ever acquired he responds, “It’s not always about value… I had – I’ve kept it actually. (I bought it and tried to sell it and nobody wanted it and I don’t care now.) It’s a vellucent binding – a painted vellum binding – and it’s beautiful. It’s by one of the ladies who worked for Cedric Chivers – he had half a dozen women artists working for him, including Jessie M. King. It’s the Book of Job, illustrated with lovely angels with trumpets… it’s a beautiful binding. The killing thing about it is the inscription inside. It’s someone writing to say ‘I give this book back to you, it was given to me by your father, who fell during the First World War’. They’ve obviously had this painted and then given it to their godson – or whoever it was – it’s lovely.”

I ask Mr Horne what is, or has been, the most interesting artefact that has come into his possession. “Interesting…?” Interesting, inspiring, beautiful, valuable, it’s up to him. “Terribly difficult. It’s ever such a long time, isn’t it? I suppose there’s one at the moment which is the first edition, or first edition in Latin more accurately, of the letter that Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella telling them about his new discoveries across the oceans. It’s a lovely late sixteenth century Roman binding, which was very appropriate – and it’s a complete fake. It’s a deliberate nineteenth century fake. Designed to be sold to the American billionaires of the late nineteenth century who were collecting anything that related to America.” When I ask how this affected the sale he replies, “I haven’t sold it at all, I’ve kept it.” Although he continues to explain that he has only recently managed to “finally settle” the origins of this fake first edition, I do find it intriguing that neither dealer has yet “managed to sell” his treasure.

The cover of the faux, 15th century, Latin first edition of Christopher Columbus's letter to Ferdinand and Isabella.

...and the watermarks that helped to give it away.

It is hard to discern whether they have not yet found the right clients for their marvellous books, or whether they are both subconsciously retaining them. Either way it could well be a symptom of bibliomania.

If one takes into account the period of strange flux in which Thomas Phillipps was buying books and manuscripts, he was not only indulging an irrational, irresponsible excess; he was clearly also safeguarding against the future, conscious that ‘much of what he gathered was at risk of destruction. He bid high in the rooms and forced the market upwards against himself, but he recognized that higher prices would encourage preservation.’ Famously, Phillipps himself had tried to rescue records from the flames when the Palace of Westminster burnt down in 1834. When Mr Foster and I talk about Phillipps, he tells me “an old customer of mine was a psychiatrist, who once said to me ‘you do realise that Bibliomania is a condition – a very mild one, but it’s still a condition!’”

[1] Excerpt from a letter dated 9/4/1833, A. N. L. Munby, Portrait of an Obsession: The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the world’s greatest book collector (London: Constable, 1967), p.13-14. All further references will be to this edition, contained within the main body of the text.

[2] Excerpt from a letter dated 26/6/1812, Munby, Portrait of an Obsession, p. 5.

[3] Munby, Portrait of an obsession, p. 15.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, p. xvi.

[6] http://www.fostersbookshop.co.uk/

[7] Watch the fantastic 1938 Disney animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGTVRbpAuRo

[8] http://www.marchpane.com/