Evening Star Newspaper, October 11, 1931, Page 74

E2 # R e fragment of the original prose of Plato, or a verse ot Euripides, if they were discovered miraculously preserved and intact—and have hastily changed the mental subject before they went mad. We know that the old poets of Rome had their publishers. Scribes copied their works. Their various publics bought, paying a proper price. These writings, made and enduring for centuries before the coming of Christ—where are they now? No one knows. All vanished in the collapse of that ancient civilization lik2 dust that passes over the desert in a storm. Our civilizati- 2 knows one specimen of Latin writing dated A. D. 53, nothing earlier. ‘This materialistic age takes better care of its records. It would nesd a world-wide cataclysm to engulf all the collections of the civilized world. For centuries England has been the great storehouse, but since the war treasures have poured westward across the Atlantic in such volume that if American clvilization were to perish today the bulk of the world’s store of rare bocks and original manuscripts would be lost forever. In their tiers of upholstered seats, or on hard chairs around the baize-covered table, in the marts of a dozen capitals, sit the book-hunters, winking, nodding, occasionally murmuring a figure as the auctioneers chant. Behind these men and beyond the maris where they assem- ble to chatfer looms the enormous and newly rich land of mass production and millionaires: America, the tireless ard aggressive collector of the post-war age. At every big sale now, whoever buys, the cream of the books, rare manuscripts and literary relics is invariably destined for a home in the New World. T’HE dominance of the American buyer for the private collection, the museum and the Ybrary mayv be gauged by the typical instence of a recent Sotheby’s szle, at which American purchases accounted for $88,000 of the $104,000 paid for part of the books from an old Buck- inghamshire library. In the last decade it is estimated that nearly $100,0600,000 has been spent on American account on books from the incxhaustible mine of the Old World, most of the purchases being made in England. The treasure trove of the little island is only partly due to the fact that literature has flour- ished there fcr so many centuries. The chief explanation is that for over a hundred years England played the cellecting role which America plays today. Fron the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nine- teenth century Europe was in flux. Thrones were falling. Great nobles were fleeing their ancestral castles. Rich men were being ruined or caught short and forced to scll their ac- cumulated possessions. Libraries and art col- lections were being dispersed and sold. England, inviolate behind her barriers of the sea, had grown vastly rich over this whole period. Her aristocracy, her merchant princes, her nabobs fresh from the loot of India, her new industria: lcaders were gorged with surplus cash. They bought, outbidding everybody. America is now taking her share, with something over, from British native literature by way of interest. But although the American collection al- ready probably surpasses all others, England will always be a great library, for she has a matchless treasure of books, manuscripts and records tightly cemented in the great libraries ot the British Museum, of old university col- leges, in the patent office and the public rec- ords office (where they preserve the original Domesday Book, and where a professor re- cently turned up several Shakespeares which the librarians did not know they had) in Ed- inburgh, in the lbraries at the several seats of the old princes of the church at Canterbury, Peterborough, Lambeth and in the entailed libraries of old families who have preserved in the muniment rooms of their ancestral abodes records dating back sometimes to the Con- queror. Outside of these inviolable preserves there . are still thousands of valuable volumes tucked away in dusty corners and old chests and attics in England, unknown to their owners. These buried treasures are continually coming to light, either accidentally or by deliberate search on the part of the hard-up owners, and the Amer- ican collector is continually profiting by such finds. In a collection in the United States, for in- stance, there now lies a rare 10-page pamphlet entitled “New England’s Trials.” The date is 1620. Two copies were known and coveted by the great collectors of Americana. But they were inaccessible. One was in the Bodleian and the other in the British Museum. Whence, abruptly, came this third copy? It had lain for three centuries among a collection of old tracts in a small English library before some one by chance turned it over and recognized its worth, It came into the auction room, and, ex- changed for $12,000 of American money, passed from obscurity to the light of day in a place accessible to scholars and students. 15 R 10 VG ~rpeepe . e i o | HE “Venus and Adonis” which now reposes in the Huntington Library was discovered by a similar chance. A bookseller of London was on a visit to Lamport Hall, the ancestral home of the Ishams. Booksellers and book- dealers are among the most inquisitive of mor- tals. This one, nosing about, came upon an old lumber room which apparently nobody had entered for long years. Over stacks of wood and discarded furniture dust had settled thickly. Cobwebs dimmed the pale light coming through one small, grimy window. Mice ran boldly about the floor. One may be sure that these signs of neglect and decay only spurred the curiosity of the bookman. He poked among the dusty piles to see if there were any old books or papers about, and discovered a stack of volumes, dirt- grimed, many chewed by mice. For a long time he turned them over without finding anything of particular importance. But suddenly his ey2 was arrested by a volume of peculiar size and shape. He seized it. A “Venus and Adonis” of Shakespeare! It was an unknown fourth edi tion of 1599, printed for “William Leake, dwell- ing in Paule’s Churchyard at the signe of the Greyhound.” The find, and the record price paid by Hunt- ington made a good newspaper story at the time. Everybody heard about it, including two young men who were ®hooting with the bow THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, OCTOBER H, 1931, The Wanderer By Charles E. Scotton Y desk is one of those high, old-fashioned affairs, and I sit, during the daylight hours, upon a stool and write in a ledger. The narrow window before me is covered with an eternal film of dust and it looks out upon tall and gloomy buildings. But, away over in one corner of the window, there is a tiny patch of blue, and sometimes I see a handful of cloud pass by, with the sun tinting it a glorious purple, or I see a bird, high and free, winging away with a song in his heart.™ Late in the afternoon, when the shadows are gaheflng behind my desk, I de- part upon wondrous journeys and my bit of travel over the world to far places, and once, even, I was shi: lue becomes a crystal globe. I ; cked, and 1 remember those glistening hours when I lay on my back on the heaving deck of a little sailboat and watched the trade winds billow the canvas above my head. I visit Nippon when Spring bursts the cherry blossoms into an undulat- ing wave of deckhands of a freighter. songs of Nile boatmen. pink. Down on the Bund of Shanghai I run semi-amok with the I see the Taj Mahal by moonlilght, and I sing the : I am snowbound for days in Vlad svostok, under mil- lions of stars, and I dance on the white sand of a South Sea Island beach. I can tell you of a thrilling little wine shop on a side street in Marseille, or of a wonderful cavern where the blue waters of the Mediterranean toss their white caps on the rocks. And there is that in a little stone house in the Vale o, irl who always dresses in blue and lives Kashmir. At evening, just as the sun lingers in a break of the mountain range, I hear the call of the muezzin; camels clum and frying their way down a narrow road. An odor of spices and salt water ] sh in a crooked, dim-lit lane of Limehouse; an Autumn day and evening on the canals of Venice, and the song of a gondolier, So it is that I em a great traveler and adventurer, and as the shadows grow and about me, I hear the gentle tinkle of temple bells. v 4= w— p— and arrow one day soon after, on the lawn of an old country house at Shrewsbury. They had put up as a target an old book they had picked up in the lumber room where the old yew bow was kept. It fell down, and going to set it up again, one of the young men glanced idly ac the open page and saw there the magic word “Venus.” Instantly he recollected the “Venus and Adonis,” about which he had read in the paper. He examined the book. Sure anough, it was another copy! The New York collector of Shakespeareana, H. C. Foiger, paid $50,000, for it. These prices sound tremendous, yet they are always rising. In 1899 a Scotsman bought four Shakespeare folios for $8,500. Six years later he sold them to the Rhode Island collector, Perry, for $30,000. Joseph Widener now has them, and they are worth, maybe, $150,000. In 1825 Thomas Grenville paid the record pricq of 125 guineas for a Shakespeare “First Folio,” now in the British Museum. The last time the British Museum went into the market for a Shakespeare “First Folio"—the two it already possessed lacked the portrait of the poet by Droeshout in the first state, without which no first folio is considered absolutely perfect—it had to bid as high as $67,500. That was nine years ago. It would be folly to suppose that the era of great finds in these fields is over, although every time a find is made and the news gets into the paper in tens of thousands of old houses a mighty poking and prying among old books and in lumber garrets and ancient chests ensues. ISCOVERIES are sometimes made in the D auction room itself under thé noses of the experts. In London one day they put up a Paine’s “Dailey Meditations,” printed “at Cam- bridge by Marmaduke Johnson in 1688.” Every one took it for granted that Cambridge meant Cambridge, England—every one, that is, except Rosenbach, who chanced to be present and who suddenly recollected that it was Marmaduke Johnson who printed at Cambridge, Mass., the first Bibles issued for the Redskins. A glance at the volume itself confirmed his suspicion. The book went to him for $250, and he was twitted on the high price he had paid. But faces fell when he revealed his discovery, and the auc- tioneer kicked himself when the bidder told him he would have gone up to $50,000 to secure that rarity of Americana. Spa2in and Italy are, without doubt, mines in which many rich nuggets still lie hid. There are lost Foligno Dantes of 1422, lest Bucher Molieres of 1734, lost Cervantes, lost letters of Columbus and other conquistadors, which may still repose snugly in some old monastery or castle. A Columbus relic is the dream of the Amer- lcana collector. From the New World the ex- plorer wrote several letters—to Ferdinand and Isabella, to the royal treasurer, to his friend Lius de Cantangel—which ought to be about some place. The original letter to de Cantangel, written when he got home and describing his great disccvery, has never been found. This letter was printed and many copies were dis- tributed to spread the news and to satisfy the international demand for it. Where are all these printed copies? Only one of the first printing has ever been found. There was a second printing but again only one copy of this has turned up. The first editicn copy is now preserved in the Lenox Founda- tion section of the New York Public Library. ‘The other is in the great Ambrosia Library in Milan, which at the time of the copy’s discovery had as its librarian a priest who was also an astute scholar and book lover, and who se- cured it. Book collectors may think that that achievement zlone warranted the subsequent elevation of the librarian to the papal chair at the Vatican, which he now cccupies. Only one private collection can boast a Cer- vantes letter. Nobody has a Shakespeare let- ter. If you can dig up one anywhere, you could ask anything up to half \a millicn for it without being clapped in a madhouse. It may sound as impossible as a flight to the moon, but this world of the book chasers is like a vir- gin forest which at any mement may display some new and fantastic orchid round a turn in the trail, nestling coyly behind the foliage of a high tree. One of the rarest copies of Poe's works was rescued by a piano tuner from a bundle of papers on its way to the pulp mill. He sold it for $3,800. Values are strangely elusive. There must have been much heartburning when the originzl “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” manu- script fetched $77.000, or $25,000 more than the price realized next day by the manuscript diary of John Ward, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon from 1629 to 1681, which contains such references to Shakespeare as “Hee spent att the rate of £1,000 & year, as I have heard,” and “Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted.” T that now famous sale of Satheby's a copy of the suppressed first edition of “Alice,” presented to that Mrs. Craik who wrote “John Halifax, Gentleman,” went for $25,000, and Alice’s own copy of the book, one of the second edition of 1866, inscribed by the author, realized $7,500. That was enough to start the landslide. Sotheby's was deluged with “Alices” and copies of every other book that Dodgson ever wrote, either under his own name or his pen name of Lewis Carrcll. Down went the market with a bang. A month later an uninscribed copy of the 1866 second edition of “Alice” went for a mere $480, and another copy of the same edi- tion, inscribed to one Florence Bickerteth by It’s a New Spanish Custom PAIN has solved the problem of farm unem- ployment and farm waste in & manner which is effective if a little rough on a farmer who might wish to drift along content with keeping a jump ahead of the Spanish equivalent of the sheriff, The government has decreed that all farms must be kept in production in order that un- favorable import conditions shall not continue to exist and in order that $obs may be pro- vided for unemployed. Under the new rules, according to Walter Bauer, an expert of the Foreign Agricultural Service of the Department of Agriculture, the mayor of each locality, with the assistance of the rural police, constitutes a committee to de= termine if any farms are not operated as the season, crop and good farming practice demand. When conditions are found which are be- leved to be below the standards to which good Spanish farms are accustomed a State agri- cultural expert is appointed to lay down a proe gram for the farm., This program must be car- ried out, and if non-co-operation is encountered the local committee is empowered to hire laber to carry on the work, the operator of the farm being presented with a bill for services which he is required to pay. The unusual, if not unique, provision is added to the law that the operator of a farm found laggard may, if he has the ability and the desire, be appointed as the State expert to lay down the program for the very farm which under his direction has run afoul of the law. If he has been lax in his activities he may be the man to build a fire under himself to start things hopping around his farm. He has ’ the right, if he is named as his own state ex- pert, to demand that he end his laziness and get to work, and as an added spur he can order himse¥ to get busy within two days or face the threat of hiring outside labor to do his work, for which he will bill himself. This provision of the law no doubt will turn the tables on the inner self of many a farmer who loves to bask in the warm sunshine or lie in the cool shade on a hillside while his farm work piles up unheeded. Many a conscience which has gone down slowly to defeat before the inertia of a dreamy soul probably will gain the upper hand with the fearsome cloak of the governmental commission to make “that lazy farmer bring his farm to a full harvest.” The possibilities under the law are infinite, but their main intent is to bring to a minimum the amount of farm products imported into Bpain. In particular wheat and corn are to be fostered, for the import balance in these two crops is great. < ‘The provisfons of the law only go to the ex- tent of covering land now in production and have no authority over virgin land. Where an intention to abandon sowing and leave present farmed acres idle is found, compulsory sowing may be invoked if it is found that any unem- ployment would result. One factor only is left to the control of the farmer without any outside meddling and that Is the distribution of his crops. He may main- tain any percentage of various crops that now exist and may not be forced to cut one crop and increase another. It is an interesting experiment and will bear watching to see what governmental control will do to crops and crop prices. the author, for $10 less. About a hundred other Alice and Dodgson items went for a song. Many people think that age notches up the value of a book. An error. Age is apt to be a factor of Httle account when books emerge from the dusty shelves into the cold hard light of the open market where collectors, with a standard of values all their own, narrowly appraise them. Suppose you found, tucked away in some dark corner, a copy of the “Bug” Bible, printed in 1549, or, still better, a Barker's black-letter Bible of 1653, containing the error of “Judas™ for “Jesus” in Matthew xxvi? What a find{ Must be worth a fortune. You send it to the auction room and wait breathlessly, dreaming meantime of all you are going to buy and do when that treasure is exchanged, after a sem- sational fight between excited collectors and dealers, for far more than its weight in gold. And what comes back to you? For the “Bug” Bible a trifie of $75, for the Barker Bible $265 (the error Las increased its normal worth). ‘These were the prices realized on the last occasion that the aforesaid items were offered. Old, quaint, curious—but the collectors don’t want them. There are too many about. . For centuries after printing started in 1450, Bibles and books of common prayer were about the only books that were printed in abundance. So many Breeches Bibles have survived that nobody wants one ncw. Thousands of people, who either are not in- terested in or cannot afford the big game, go in for the first editions of the last century. One can understand the attraction on seeing a portion of the collection of first editions from the library of Edmund Goose, the great British critic of the Victerian and Edwardian eras, sell at auction for $30,000, which would be two or three hundred times their original cost. There is no end to the vagaries and the luck of first-edition game. A. A. Milne is a modern. He published a limited signed edition of “When We Were Very Ycung,w priced at less than $10. The price of copies has been steadily advancing until today the collector would have to pay around $40¢ for one. One year you could buy a first edition of H. M. Tomlinson's first book, “Sca and the Jungle” for $5; the next year the price had jumped to $151 at auction. The criginal price in 1912 was $1.50. Dean Swift's “Gulliver's Travels,” published at a very modest price, is worth perhaps $3,000 now. But it has been only 40 years since Kip- ling’s “Letters of Marque”’ was published at about half a dollar; the last time one came on the market it fetched $9.000. Fifteen thoue sand copies of “Letters of Marque” were printe ed, but all except two or three were destroyed. Hence the big price. HE skill in the gaxe is to spot the winners and get their first editions while they are still unwanted and therefcre cheap. The $1.50 edition of Galsworthy's “Man of Property” now fetches around $10, and Norman Douglas’ “Soutn Wind,” only about 14 years old, around $25. But these figures pzale beside the $2,100 paid for a 1913 copy of “Chance” inscribed on the flyleaf “Caroline and Arthur Marwood— affectionately, from J. Conrad. 1913.” Bernard Shaw always roars ridicule when anything of his fetches a fantastic price in the auction room, loudly urging 2ll wise persons who "have his first editions and such to take advantage of prices while the market is high, Postcards and typewritten letters bearing mere= ly the famous “G. B. S.” initials have been sold at auction for as high as $6 apiece, and $200 has been paid for a little unpublished poem he wrote for the Englich actress, Ellen Terry. ‘The boom in Shaw has bren sudden. A few vears ago Gilbert Faber, one of the London experts, went to Shaw and asked what he wanted for a selection of his manuscripts and first editions. Shaw said he had no idea of their price, but Faber insisted. *“All right, I'll take $25,000 for the lot,” said Shaw. “That is an excellent start for a Dutch auction,” retorted Faber. “I will now offer you $100 for them.” The bargain eventually closed at $150. The big boom in modern first editions and manuscripts started soon after, and inside three years the worth of that lot had soared from $150 to nearly $10.000. Galsworthy and Kipling are probably the two steadiest big markets among living write ers. Not long ago three first-edition copies of the former's books brought nearly $1.000. That is an astonishing price when you recollect that he has been writing for only 30 vears, and that there must be over 1,000 of each of those first editions about in the world. People seem to hang on to their Galsworthys. But Galsworthy, by his suppressions and ine scriptions, by interference with the make-up of his books, by reluctance to inscribe and giva away first editions of early books. or by tardie ness in acquiring recognition has given the collectors tough chases and made them pay through the nose. He offers a striking cese in point with the 1923 edition of his collected short stories, published under the title “Cape tures.” The publishers issued this with a list of books by other authors c¢n the reverse of the first end paper. Galsworthy objecting, the page -was torn out of the first issue, and this particular edition, which is very rare, is valued at $1,000 a copy. Then there was the “Silver Spoon” incident in 1926. Galsworthy objected to the dust cover bcok jacket, with the title in silver and green on the front, along with & silver spoon. It was withdrawn, but not before a few had got out. A first edition in this firs§ suppressed wrapper is worth around $150. It is the same with Kipling. First-edition copies are not so scarce as one might surmise from surveying the amazing prices they fetch, But they are tightly held. Let one come into the market and the fight to get it maKes the price, Even a letter of his has fetched nearly $500, and there was-a time when tradesmen held his checks for small amounts, framed them, and sold them at a big profit. = Long ago, when he was in America, Kipling sent back to his old school at Westward Ho & copy of the 1886 first edition of his “Depart« mental Ditties.” He inscribed it: “The Come mon Room, U. S. College, with the compliments of the author,” and added some notes explana= tory of various Hindu words and phrases which evidently were puzzling to his old masters back at school. The idea of a shrewd dealer of the worth of that book was $3,900, and he went as high as that to get it at auction.