Those who collect and those who sell books are not too far apart in
temperament. Every good dealer is, at heart, as covetous as any collector
and as eager to make the next discovery. Conversely, there are few
collectors who do not rejoice in a bargain. "It is nought, it is nought,
saith the buyer; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth" was the
apt cover motto of Dr. Rosenbach's catalogs. Bookseller and collector
alike are united by enthusiasm and mutual dependency. For these reasons,
book collecting, sometimes represented as a solitary activity, is anything
but that. 

Neither is it far removed from the mainstream of our cultural life.
Collections, private and public, feed scholarship. They are part and
parcel of our need to know our world and to know ourselves. Book
collecting has been portrayed as the pursuit of a wealthy elite. Wealth
may ease the task of acquisition, as it can simplify many things in life,
yet collections of real significance may be formed on a pittance. Zeal,
knowledge and hard work count for as much as monetary advantage in this
sphere. What does the collector receive as recompense? The thrill of the
chase, aesthetic pleasure, the fulfillment of creating a whole that is far
more than the sum of its parts--these are some of the many satisfactions
that make book collecting an enduring pursuit.

I am predisposed to believe that the quality of an age, both intellectual
and material, may be mirrored by its collectors and their collections, for
these reflect the esteem in which books are held in the culture at large.
A society humane in its aspirations values both books and learning. As a
first example of how a collection may accurately reflect the undercurrents
of the times in which it is formed an obvious candidate is that of Jean
Grolier.

Grolier, whose life encompassed and epitomized the high Renaissance, was a
scion of a Lyonnaise merchant family that claimed Italian roots. His
father, Etienne, was treasurer to the court of the Duc D'Orleans and later
to the French army in Milan. Jean's was clearly a gilded career from its
outset. The imaginative portrait in the Grolier Club of the young
princeling bedecked in silks and brocades is probably not too far from the
truth. Educated in humanist ideals he adopted wholeheartedly the
Petrachian concept of the court library and he had all the means to make
his collection great. 
   
A survey of surviving volumes from his library was published in 1971 by
the Grolier Club. Although the author, Gabriel Austin, refers to this as a
preliminary catalogue, it is an exacting and comprehensive treatise that
identifies over five hundred separate works owned by Grolier. Because of
this and as a consequence of over one hundred years of Grolier
scholarship, it is a supportable claim that we know Jean Grolier's library
better than that of any other private collector of the sixteenth century. 

The sheer size of Grolier's collection--some three thousand volumes are
believed to have been in the library at the Hotel de Lyon, Grolier's
residence after his return from Italy--would have been a near
impossibility for one man to amass in a lifetime in the pre-printing era.
Petrarch's library (at least one volume from which Grolier owned) is
believed to have numbered some two or three hundred volumes, all of
course, manuscripts. The printing press (and Grolier's indefatigable
energy) made it possible for him to own multiple copies of the same work,
sometimes even four or five copies of the same edition. Io Grolierii
[Lugdunensis] et Amicorum is written in, or stamped on, many of his books,
and it must be remembered that Grolier was not only a collector,
inveterate reader and scholar but a supporter of the new learning and a
classicist of no mean achievement.

This is reflected in his choice of works, which (if what has survived is
taken as a fair sampling of the collection as a whole) exhibit a clear
bias towards humane and classical studies. The tiny proportion of
theological texts is surprising for a library of this period. In
percentage terms, by my calculations, under 10 percent of the surviving
works are religious, primarily Church fathers and the works of humanist
figures such as Erasmus. Of course, such a secular style, harbinger as it
is of social change in the coming century, was supportable at this time
only among the very elite of European society, of which stratum Grolier
was a nonpareil example. 

That Grolier was a courtier is reflected by the eleven copies of
Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano among his surviving books. That he
was a reader and scholar is displayed by the extraordinary range of Latin
and Greek works he consumed and the prolific annotations surviving in some
of these. That he was a true collector is proven not only in the size and
scope of his holdings but the delight he clearly possessed in seeing his
favorite works in the finest possible dress. He owned an inordinate number
of Aldines on vellum, purchased, one assumes, directly from the printer.
He had his books bound at the finest ateliers in Italy and France (as a
corpus, of course, Grolier's bindings are unequalled). I feel that Jean
Grolier was the first collector of books in a modern sense, a man who
enjoyed amassing, who delighted not only in the miracle of text but in the
tactile and aesthetic delights of its adornment. 

If Grolier represents the collecting impulse at its most enlightened, Sir
Thomas Phillipps represents a darker aspect. The social landscape of early
Nineteenth century England seems, anecdotally at least, to have been
littered with gentlemen of good birth intent on squandering their
birthright on drinking, gaming and rowdiness. The tragicomic archetype is
Squire Mytton, remembered for igniting his nightdress to cure the hiccups,
among other exploits. Sir Thomas was profligate in his own way; where
others drank themselves to debtor's prison, his addiction was the
collecting of books which was nearly as injurious to his considerable
fortune as the worldly excesses of some of his contemporaries. 

Phillipps, born illegitimately in 1792, was the only son of a successful
manufacturer. Perhaps these faintly cloudy origins explain his later
obsession with genealogy. His father had purchased an estate and house,
Middle Hill, which still stands. Young Phillipps had a conventional
education--that is Rugby School and University College, Oxford--and by the
time he left school he was already established as a collector of genealogy
and topography. 

His father died in 1818 and in short order Phillipps acquired a wife and a
baronetcy. Already Phillipps was starting to purchase on a large scale.
While he was wealthy enough, with an income of some 6000 pounds a year at
the first, his houses demanded a serious outlay and his estate was
entailed. The pattern of debt that was to afflict him all his life emerged
as he began rancorous correspondence with his creditors.

In order to escape from the importunities of these and to reduce his
living costs he moved briefly to Berne.  Ironically, it was this move that
precipitated the most extreme form of his collecting mania. Vast
quantities of manuscript material were available in Europe, much of it at
risk of destruction. Phillipps set to work with great gusto to buy what he
could. He spent heavily at the great Meerman sale on some of the finest
manuscripts offered during the entire century, yet his nets were spread
wide enough to buy material by the pound from binders and other artisans.
For lack of care the libraries of some of the great religious houses had
been plundered and scattered. Manuscript leaves were in use as binders'
waste, shoe linings and even wrapping paper. In this holocaust of books it
is little wonder that Phillipps was obsessed with a sense of mission and
it is thanks to his efforts that many remarkable manuscripts escaped
destruction. 

Back at Middle Hill, Phillipps' acquisitions continued apace. One marvels
at the patience of the booksellers who dealt with his foibles. Irregular
payment (if payment was tendered at all), the return of material years
after it had been sent and constant irascible correspondence was the lot
of Phillipps' merchants.  Admittedly, fault was on both sides, as
ethicality was not the strong suit of the London trade of the time. 
Phillipps berated his booksellers with such epithets (occasionally well
deserved) as þrogue,þ þrascal, þscoundrelþ and countless accusations of
mere impudence. For all this, Phillipps was, between the mid 1820's and
the 1850's, the single greatest buyer and most dealers accommodated him. A
fair case can be made that his enthusiasms shaped the market for
manuscript material, which was chaotic at the outset of his collecting but
was an organized business by the end of his career. 

Phillipps' house was now brimful with books, most housed in the special
dropfront cases that he designed.  Frederic Madden's account of a visit in
1844 gives a vivid picture of the eccentric baronet in his lair, not to
mention the privations to which his family and visitors were subject.
Finally, in 1867, he purchased Thirlestaine House, a far more spacious
residence, although this move was clearly not entirely satisfactory;  Lady
Phillipps complained that she was "booked out of one wing and ratted out
of the other." The library then numbered some 100,000 volumes and the
septuagenarian Phillipps continued to add to it. Towards the end of his
life, he attempted unsuccessfully to find a home for the library, on which
he had spent around a quarter of a million pounds (today, just one of the
better manuscripts in the collection would fetch many times that amount).
Upon his death in 1872 the house and library were left to his youngest
daughter Katharine in a will remarkable for its restrictive codicils which
seemed designed to cause contention even after his death. 

What Sir Thomas had spent a lifetime amassing took several lifetimes to
evaluate and distribute. Indeed, the final chapter has still to be written
as H.P. Kraus, purchasers of the last residue of the collection, continue
to offer Phillipps material, though all the great manuscripts have long
since been sold. In the process, extraordinary discoveries have been made
which would have delighted the baronet. Walter Ralegh and Robert Herrick's
commonplace books, the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses perhaps
rendered by Caxton, these and many others would probably not have survived
were it not for his omnivorous purchasing. 

Phillipps was clearly impetuous, quarrelsome, vindictive, arbitrary and
insensitive to the needs of his family and others. Yet he could be
generous, especially in giving access to his collection and it is a
testament to his good qualities that his children, though subject to
various privations and his arbitrary temperament, remained affectionately
disposed towards him. A straightforward account of his life makes him
sound like an ogre but, reading between the lines, he was a decent if
exasperating man, in the grip of an overwhelming passion. He also was a
mirror of his times, in his obsession no more driven than many of his
contemporaries. As he was carving out his little empire among his books
his country was creating its own greater Empire and many of the nuances of
that larger drama are reflected in his life. 

Robert Hoe III (1839-1909) seems comparatively colorless next to the
intense shadings of Phillipps although his achievements in business and
collecting testify to a redoubtable strength of will. His grandfather had
been apprenticed to a carpenter in Leicestershire in England before
emigrating to the United States, where, after arriving penniless and
nearly dying of fever, he had become the most successful manufacturer of
printing presses up to that time. The same drive seems to have been
present in the grandson, who joined the family firm at the age of 17. He
was described as follows: 

      "Mr Hoe had a rough and unpleasing exterior and an overbearing
manner, but back of that and back of the restless, energetic businessman
there was the true collector, the true bibliophile, and we may be certain
that the happiest hours of his long and busy life were those spent among
his books.þ"  He was, in short, that quintessential American personality,
the captain of industry, and he planned his collecting with the same
tactical enthusiasm he brought to his business. He was an active buyer
from his teens and was one of the founders of the Grolier Club. He
purchased several substantial collections, including those of Charles H.
Kalbfleisch, Almon W. Griswold and Abby E. Pope. He held a loose
confederacy with several Grolier Club worthies including Beverly Chew and
William Loring Andrews, with whom he often sent joint bids to London. 

As a collector his interests ranged from Americana to Elizabethan
literature; from Caxton to Trautz- Bauzonnet bindings; from Grolier to
Gower. He had a passion for fine condition, which proved both admirable
(the only perfect copy of Caxton's edition of Le Morte D'Arthur) and
faintly ridiculous (as witness his penchant for stripping off perfectly
serviceable eighteenth century calf and replacing it with bindings by
Michel, Lortic, David and the like). This last practice earned him, with
justice, a good deal of criticism but proved to be a good investment at
the time of the sale of his books. 

From 1903 on a series of library catalogs was published, sixteen in all by
the time of his death. These list over 140,000 titles bound into
21,000-odd volumes, an extraordinary group by any accounting. There is
genuine vision in this collection, not simply an amassing of high spots,
though of these there were plenty, from a Gutenberg Bible on down. There
is a rich gathering of emblemata, a remarkable group of bookbindings and
superb English incunabula. It is a very European collection in everything
but its vast size and scope. After all, Robert Hoe was, in a sense, buying
Europe. American industry and finance were the most effective in the world
and there was a hunger for cultural trappings to match the material. Those
America could not yet supply. Hoe was the first American collector to
storm the ramparts, a process that Morgan and others were to repeat in
years to come. 

The sale of Hoe's books began in 1911 under the aegis of the Anderson
Auction Gallery. It was the first book auction held in the US to draw full
international attention. The results were remarkable. Hoe's Gutenberg
Bible on vellum made $50,000, the highest price that had been paid for a
printed book to that date. The buyer was a new force on the marketplace,
Henry Huntington, who was represented by George D. Smith. The underbidder
was Joseph Widener, representing his son. The Hoe books supplied many
treasures to these two that are now incorporated in the great libraries
named after them. There was a great struggle in the ninth session of the
sale for the Wynkyn de Worde Heylas, Knight of the Swanne on vellum, which
made $21,000. To put these numbers in perspective, the buying power of the
dollar in 1911 was approximately 16 times what it is today, based on
composite price indices. The total of the first part of the sale, nine
sessions in all, was a hair short of a million dollars, of which
Huntington had paid about half. 

Hoe's sale ran to three more parts and ultimately grossed almost two
million dollars, with one exception (the Britwell Court sales) a record
amount to that date. It marked the ascendancy of the American collector.
The London and European book trade was effectively locked out and the
frustrations of would-be bidders can only be imagined. American economic
clout had triumphedþand would continue to triumphþfor almost two decades
to come. At the end of this period, American libraries both public and
private had moved from the position of poor cousins of their counterparts
overseas to real rivals. To an extent, this was Hoe's doing. His sale had
created the necessary interest and a momentum which would continue to the
Depression. 

The portrait of John Quinn by Augustus John is an eloquent testimonial to
his character. Quinn's face is aquiline, patrician, the expression that of
a man of perception and serious intent. He was a collector whose taste
proved a true bellwether, the first American modern. Unlike his
predecessor, Hoe, his preoccupations were rooted solidly in this century.
A wealthy New York lawyer, he was collecting Seurat, Matisse, Derain,
Rousseau and others well before the Armory Show of 1912, to which he
loaned many major works. He was the first American admirer of Brancusi. He
frequently represented artists and writers, often without compensation
when he was interested in the principles involved. He was a champion
against suppression and censorship. One newspaper article of the time
provides an apt summation of his activities. 
      
      "He is perhaps as near to a Maecenas as any man living today; a
Maecenas who has made his own money and intends to use it in his own way.
He is no bestower of haphazard favors, but a shrewd figure capable of
impressive generosities, equally capable of severe judgements and fearless
in his tastes and in his defense of them." 

As a collector of books, he was as original in his taste as in his art
collecting. He sold his books in 1924, a few months before his unexpected
and untimely death at the age of 54. The sale was conducted by Anderson
Galleries, which had sold the Hoe collection. It was the first
comprehensive collection of modern literature issued this century and one
that is still largely unexcelled.

Quinn collected most of the authors we now consider part of the twentieth
century canon. Joyce is represented by the original manuscript for Ulysses
(sold for $1975) as well as the manuscript for Exiles, among others.
Joseph Conrad is present to an extraordinary, almost embarrassing degree.
Quinn purchased the manuscripts to almost all his major works, from
Almayer's Folly to The Warriors's Soul, from Conrad and his wife. Only one
seems to have escaped him: that for Karain Conrad's wife retained. When
she eventually relented, it was sent by sea-mail on the Titanic.

Pound is present; Eliot is present; W.B. Yeats, his family and friends are
richly present, including a fine presentation of his first book Mosada.
Hemingway is not to be found, nor is F. Scott Fitzgerald (both a little
too late on the scene for Quinn to appreciate), but the rich texture of
the catalogs comes from the host of lesser authors. Despite the abundant
high-spots, many of the books were clearly an expression of Quinn's taste
for comprehensive reading. 

In the auction, many books made quite paltry sums but it is not the dollar
totals of the sale that make it important. Quinn legitimized the
collecting of modern literature and largely defined the field. The Quinn
catalog is still useful as a bibliographical tool, thanks to the long runs
of minor yet intriguing Irish and English writers of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and the fine author biographies that preface
each section. In the end, the collection fetched a quarter of a million
dollars over five sessions, a remarkable total for a library that was so
individualistic and idiosyncratic. 

There is common ground between these four great collectors. In every case
something is reflected in their collections of the circumstances in which
they lived. Grolier's parallels the growth of the humanist perspective in
Italy and France, Phillipps' the ravenous appetite for antiquarian
scholarship in nineteenth century England. Hoe's collecting was part and
parcel of America's economic coming-of-age and in Quinn's we see the
growing appreciation of European modernism. Book collecting does not exist
as a thing apart, isolated, but like all cultural activity is an extension
not only of the collector but of the age.