- About Bookbinding -

The rage for first editions of very modern books reached what might be called
high-water mark some time since, and has been on the decline. Shelley's "Queen
Mab," 1st ed. 1813, was sold at London for £22.10, and his "Refutation of
Deism," 1814, was sold at £33, at a London sale in 1887. In New York, many
first editions of Shelley's poems brought the following enormous prices in 1897.
Shelley's Adonais, 1st ed. Pisa, Italy, 1821, $335.
Alastor, London, 1816, $130.
The Cenci, Italy, 1819, $65.
Rellas, London, 1822, $13.
But these were purely adventitious prices, as was clearly shown in the sale at
the same auction rooms, a year or two earlier, of the following.
     Shelley’s Adonais, 1st ed. Pisa, 1821, $19.
Alastor, London, 1816, $32.
The Cenci, Italy, 1819, $21.
HelIas, London, 1822, $2.
     The sales occasionally made at auction of certain books at extraordinary
prices, prove nothing whatever as to the real market value, for these reasons:
(1) The auctioneer often has an unlimited bid, and the price is carried up to an
inordinate height. (2) Two or more bidders present, infatuated by the idea of
extreme rarity, bid against one another until all but one succumb, when the
price has reached a figure which it is a mild use of terms to call absurd. (3)
Descriptions in sale catalogues, though often entirely unfounded, characterising
a book as "excessively rare;" "only - copies known," "very scarce," "never before
offered at our sales," etc., may carry the bidding on a book up to an unheard-of
price.
The appeal always lies to the years against the hours; and many a poor book-
mad enthusiast has had to rue his too easy credulity in giving an extravagant
sum for books which he discovers later that he could have bought for as many
shillings as he has paid dollars. Not that the rarissimi of early printed books can
ever be purchased for a trifle; but it should ever be remembered that even at
the sales where a few - a very few - bring the enormous prices that are bruited
abroad, the mass of the books offered are knocked down at very moderate
figures, or are even sacrificed at rates very far below their cost. The possessor
of one of the books so advertised as sold at some auction for a hundred dollars
or upwards, if he expects to realise a tithe of the figure quoted, will speedily find
himself in the vocative.
While there are almost priceless rarities not to be found in the market by any
buyer, let the book collector be consoled by the knowledge that good books, in
good editions, were never so easy to come by as now. A fine library can be
gathered by anyone with very moderate means, supplemented by a fair amount
of sagacity and common sense. The buyer with a carefully digested list of books
wanted will find that to buy them wisely takes more time and less money than
he had anticipated. The time is required to acquaint himself with the many
competing editions, with their respective merits and demerits. This involves a
comparison of type, paper, and binding, as well as the comparative prices of
various dealers for the same books. No one who is himself gifted with good
perceptions and good taste, should trust to other hands the selection of his
library. His enjoyment of it will be proportioned to the extent to which it is his
own creation. The passion for nobly written books, handsomely printed, and
clothed in a fitting garb, when it has once dawned, is not to be defrauded of its
satisfaction by hiring a commission merchant to appease it. What we do for
ourselves, in the acquirement of any knowledge, is apt to be well done: what is
done for us by others is of little value.
We have heard of some uninformed parvenus, grown suddenly rich, who have
first ordered a magnificent library room fitted with rose-wood, marble and gilded
trappings, and then ordered it to be filled with splendidly bound volumes at so
much per volume. And it is an authentic fact, that a bookseller to the Czar of
Russia one Klostermann, actually sold books at fifty to one hundred roubles by
the yard, according to the binding. The force of folly could no farther go, to
debase the aims and degrade the intellect of man.
In the chapter upon rare books, the reader will find instances in great variety of
the causes that contribute to the scarcity and enhancement of prices of certain
books, without at all affecting their intrinsic value, which may be of the smallest.

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