The Library

by Stuart Kells

  Reverend Dr Gosset was unusually short in stature: the editor of the New Monthly Magazine called him ‘squat’, and the Earl of Marchmont noticed an uncanny resemblance to Alexander Pope. When he preached, he did so standing on two hassocks. Apart from auction catalogues, his library was rich in Greek and Latin classics. He possessed and expressed opinions on many matters bibliographical, social and political, and he was well informed about book-world facts and gossip; he allegedly knew, for example, all the secret, ten-letter codes that London’s booksellers used to write acquisition prices in their stock—codes like kingalfred (Quaritch), bethankful (Henry George Bohn) and mygodhelps (Francis Edwards).

  (In these codes, each non-recurring letter corresponded to a numeral. The word-key was usually told only to the bookseller’s staff. The Edinburgh firm R. & J. Balding—so named because the co-owners were losing or had lost their hair—used the code-word ‘motherfuck’. One former co-owner, Spike Hughes, wrote of the day when another co-owner, John Price, had to explain the code to the firm’s pleasant but proper secretary: ‘We retreated and left him to it!! She said nothing about it to any of us afterwards and we never asked him how it went.’)

  At the 1785 Christies sale of Samuel Johnson’s banged, dusted and buffeted library, Gosset bid alongside Horace Walpole, buying Walpole’s 1759 Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, a French Bible (printed in Amsterdam in 1678), a selection of recent editions of classical works and William Hutton’s History of Birmingham—a book rendered unforgettable by Edmond Malone’s anecdote of a visit to Johnson’s home in March 1783.

  I found him in his arm-chair by the fireside, before which a few apples were laid. He was reading. I asked him what book he had got. He said the History of Birmingham. Local histories, I observed, were generally dull. ‘It is true, sir; but this has a peculiar merit with me; for I passed some of my early years and married my wife there.’ I supposed the apples were preparing as medicine. ‘Why no, sir; I believe they are only there because I want something to do. These are some of the solitary expedients to which we are driven by sickness. I have been confined this week past, and here you find me roasting apples, and reading the History of Birmingham.’

  When Gosset was laid up on his own sickbed, the mere sight of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible on vellum was enough to restore him miraculously to health. At least that’s what Thomas Frognall Dibdin said in his 1809 book Bibliomania, in which he portrayed Gosset in the guise of the book-loving Lepidus. Dibdin’s narrator leaps from a chaise and hurries upstairs ‘into the auction room’.

  The clock had struck twelve, and in half an hour the sale was to begin…You observe, my friends, said I, softly, yonder active and keen-visaged gentleman? ’Tis LEPIDUS. Like Magliabechi, content with frugal fare and frugal clothing and preferring the riches of a library to those of house-furniture, he is insatiable in his biblio-maniacal appetites.

  Gosset, like Dibdin, was a self-appointed arbiter of bibliographical taste. A respected, even loved, figure in the book trade, he would be honoured with fond tributes on the occasion of his death in 1812. Stephen Weston composed a poem, ‘The Tears of the Booksellers’, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and a Latin tribute, which appeared in the fourth edition of William Bowyer’s Critical Conjectures on the New Testament. The auctioneers Leigh and Sotheby sold Gosset’s library in 5740 lots over twenty-three days between 7 June and 2 July 1813, realising a total of £3141 7s. 6d.

  Though the Bodleian bought well, Richard Heber was the principal purchaser at the Gosset sale. The books were sentimentally important for the man who’d been Gosset’s protégé since childhood.

  Richard Heber was born in 1774, the son of Reginald Heber, a wealthy rector and landowner. Richard’s mother died soon after his birth. During his first years, perhaps as a result of that loss, a virulent strain of bibliomania took hold. According to Holbrook Jackson, the boy was ‘normal’ until he saw a copy of Henry Peacham’s 1638 Valley of Varietie,

  which he showed to Bindley, who described it as rather a curious book. Why this incident should have set Heber on his terrible career is not known, but sure it is that, from that hour, the love of books blinded him to everything else.

  At the age of eight, Richard prepared a detailed bibliographical catalogue. By the age of ten, he was chasing books with exceptional vigour, making fine distinctions about editions and bindings and formats. By twelve, his father was complaining about young Richard ‘running up unreasonable bills with Joliffe, the bookseller’. Heber’s quarry was diverse. Greek and Latin classics. Cook’s voyages. The output of the master printers. Multivolume editions of Shakespeare and Johnson.

  Heber’s associates noticed in the boy an ‘unnatural gravity’. At book auctions he would sit beside Gosset, taking it all in, while the reverend gave his real-time commentary on the proceedings. Under Gosset’s mentorship, Heber was a keen bidder at the Pinelli sale of 1789, an event that ‘caused high excitement among the literati of the Capital’.

  Richard’s father was worried. He wrote a stern letter to his son. ‘Of multiplying books, my dear Richard, there is neither end nor use. The Cacoethes of collecting books draws men into ruinous extravagances. It is an itch which grows by indulgence and should be nipt in the bud.’ If Richard promised not to bring his father ‘any more Bookseller’s bills of which you know I have too much reason to complain, I will indulge you in laying out five Guineas at the sale you mention, but not a shilling more’. The bills, though, continued to arrive. Reginald was forced to forbid booksellers from sending their goods without explicit approval from him or his agents. Why, he asked, could not his son be satisfied with visits to Westminster and other libraries where he could read the classics ‘and about every other Book you can have any real occasion for’? If Richard was to keep buying books, he would have to do so in secret and without his father’s blessing.

  Richard’s secrecy was imperfect. After receiving, indirectly, another bill, Reginald complained in 1791 of Richard’s ‘prohibited Extravagance’. By the age of twenty-one, Richard was widely recognised as a formidable bookman. In 1804 he inherited the Yorkshire and Shropshire estates of his long-suffering father. Naturally, he used his new wealth to build a great library—one uniquely strong in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama—and a reputation as the most ardent, most dogged bibliophile.

  Seymour de Ricci, William Roberts and Thomas Frognall Dibdin all left portraits of Heber the mature collector. He was ‘a bibliomaniac, if ever there was one’; ‘a bibliomaniac in the more unpleasant sense of the word; no confirmed drunkard, no incurable opium-eater, had less self-control’; ‘the great and strong passion of his life was to amass such a library as no individual before him had ever amassed’. Holbrook Jackson wrote of how books were Heber’s infatuation. To see a book was to desire it, and to desire it was to possess it.

  Using his knowledge, learning, accomplishments and riches, Heber made his life a mortal quest to assemble the perfect library. His definition of perfection had much to do with breadth: his collection was ‘omnigenous’ and he bought books ‘by all methods, in all places, at all times’. The definition was also about repetition. ‘No gentleman,’ he remarked, ‘can be without three copies of a book, one for show, one for use, and one for borrowers.’ Extending to more than 100,000 books (30,000 of which he acquired in a single purchase), Heber’s library filled eight houses. After visiting one of them, Dibdin wrote that he had never seen ‘rooms, cupboards, passages and corridors, so choked, so suffocated, with books’. The piles of volumes extended ‘up to the very ceiling…while the floor was strewn with them’. Unusually for a bibliophile, Heber disliked large paper copies—because they took up too much space, space that other books could occupy.

  Heber was a driving force behind the celebrated bibliophile society, the Roxburghe Club, which he co-founded in 1812 during the famous auction of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library. Heber came to exemplify the obsessive, psychologically damaged book collector. Yet he endured with grace
and wisdom a series of personal scandals, in one of which he was publicly accused of an improper private relationship with a young man, Charles Henry Hartshorne.

  In Heber’s pleasant dotage there would be much reading and book-talk. With his ‘cronies’ Drury, Haslewood, Wilbraham and the Boswells, he—much attached to the ‘lower school of the old Latin Poets’ such as Lucan, Claudian and Silius Italicus—would ‘moot Greek metres’, ‘fight over derivatives and etymons’, ‘quote long passages’ of Johnson’s biography, and ‘ring changes on “Robin Hood Garlands”’. In October 1833, Heber died among his books, at Pimlico, in the room in which he’d been born. His will, hidden on a bookshelf, was not found for three months. The sale of Bibliotheca Heberiana took even longer, extending over 216 days in London, Paris and Ghent, and marking the end of the peak period of British bibliomania.

  Prior to these dispersals, while still searching for Heber’s will, his executors found and destroyed certain volumes with pornographic and homosexual content, among them the Earl of Rochester’s scandalous farce, Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery. Though it was written in the 1670s (and first circulated in manuscript in 1676 or thereabouts), the book first appeared in a printed version in 1684 (with an Antwerp imprint). On that edition the author of the slim volume was identified as ‘the E. of R.’ The book was received with words such as these: ‘intolerable foulness’, ‘a pariah amongst books’, ‘diabolical humour’, ‘indecent burlesque’, ‘outrageously ribald’. Nearly every book in the edition was destroyed, but Robert Harley preserved the text in a manuscript copy, and at least two printed copies survived into the nineteenth century—one of them the copy destroyed by Heber’s executors. Though Rochester’s contemporaries decried the book (and though there are doubts about the work’s attribution to the earl), it did find an audience. The play was supposedly performed, once, before the court of Charles II. At least three French editions were produced in the eighteenth century.

  Apart from Sodom, Heber’s executors also destroyed ‘one or two other obscene books’. The executors’ definition of ‘obscene’ was idiosyncratic, and their purge incomplete. A curious book of verse, for example, got through. Dating from 1680, within a few months of Rochester’s death, Poems on several Occasions by the Right Honourable the E. of R. purported to have been published in ‘Antwerpen’ but was actually issued in London. Also appearing over Rochester’s name was a racy adaptation, ‘in poor taste’, of the tragedy Valentinian, originally written by the Shakespeare collaborators Beaumont and Fletcher. The full title of the revised work was Valentinian: a Tragedy. As ’tis Alter’d by the late Earl of Rochester and Acted at the Theatre Royal. Together with a Preface concerning the Author and his Writings. By one of his friends. The ‘friend’ was Robert Wolseley. Poems on several Occasions and the sauced-up Valentinian both escaped Heber’s executors; they appeared, alongside other Rochester titles, in the 1834 auction sales of Bibliotheca Heberiana.

  Posthumous printings of Sodom attracted prosecutions for obscenity. (Joseph Streater and Benjamin Crayle were fined for attempting to publish Sodom in 1689.) One of the few surviving printed copies—an edition probably dating from early in the eighteenth century and entitled Sodom, or the Gentleman Instructed, A Comedy—came to light recently after it was released from ‘a private European collection’. Sotheby’s estimated that the octavo volume would achieve between £25,000 and £35,000; in fact it realised £45,600 inclusive of premium. The catalogue described it as the rarest piece of early English pornography on record. John Vincent in the Independent called it the last surviving copy of ‘quintessential’ English porn.

  Alexander Pushkin’s library, too, seems to have been purged of clandestine and pornographic literature after his death. According to Andrew Kahn, the major part of Pushkin’s library that now survives contains ‘virtually no erotic literature of any kind’, though the library was rich in meditations on love, including Baculard d’Arnaud’s Épreuves du sentiment, and ‘sensational anthologies of anecdotal histories alongside medical works on masturbation’. Pushkin is known to have read Diderot, Laclos, the younger Crébillon, and the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, which Pushkin regarded as one of the best works of depraved French fantasy; the poet admitted he’d become aroused while reading it ‘and had to put it down’.

  The executors’ destruction of Sodom echoed another act that took place less than a decade earlier, and that has been described as the greatest literary crime in history: the burning of the personal memoirs of the poet and libertine Lord Byron. Soon after Byron’s death in 1824, three men disposed of the manuscript: the publisher John Murray; the poet Thomas Moore and Byron’s long-time companion, John Cam Hobhouse. Along with lawyers representing Byron’s married half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and his widow, Anne Isabella, these men decided the manuscript would ruin Byron’s reputation, it was that scandalous. In Murray’s drawing room they tore up the pages and threw them into the fire.

  There was much to cover up, including evidence of Byron’s relationship with Augusta. (Harriet Beecher Stowe claimed Byron had fathered Augusta’s daughter, Medora, a claim backed by Lord and Lady Byron’s own letters.) Peter Cochran has recently argued that, apart from ‘protecting’ Byron’s reputation, the three men had other, less noble, motivations. Hobhouse was embarking on a political career. Murray was worried that a rival publisher might secure the right to issue the memoirs. And both Murray and Hobhouse grappled with feelings of betrayal and a desire for revenge. Moore, for his part, seems to have been bamboozled into playing along; Corin Throsby pictured him ‘overwhelmed by what he called the “hoity toity proceeding”—complicated issues of copyright and payment, and Hobhouse’s self-righteous bullying’.

  Another episode of post-mortem executorial awkwardness had a happier ending.

  Redmond Barry made Melbourne, Australia, his home from 1839. Like most of his fellow settlers, he tried to create in the New World the values and institutions of the Old. His greatest achievements were connected with his prominent roles in the founding of the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne Public Library—two institutions that helped make Melbourne one of the greatest cities of the nineteenth century. The foundation stones for both institutions were laid on 3 July 1854. Barry was chancellor of the university and chairman of the library’s trustees until his death.

  Strongly influenced by the international public library movement, Barry believed in making knowledge available for the benefit of all. Before the library was built, he threw open his own private library to sundry visitors. When the new library opened, he ensured its management would adhere to liberal principles. Foreign visitors marvelled at the conspicuous lack of admission restrictions. Barry’s ethos extended to his involvement in the library’s operations. Happy to dust shelves and to fill in for the porter, he even stayed late into the night to help staff fill bookshelves after a late delivery.

  He helped make the library’s regulations, which forbade the mutilation or marking of books. His own library, however, was another matter. Barry marked and annotated his books extensively. Many of those volumes are now held in institutional collections. Forty-four are in the library of St Mary’s College at the University of Melbourne. The books feature vehement underlining and are heavily annotated in Barry’s hand with textual comments, cross references and quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible. The annotations typically show Barry disagreeing with the author’s views. Though Barry made some of the notes in pencil, most are in emphatic ink.

  Barry was appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court of Victoria in January 1852. Presiding over the trial of the bushranger Ned Kelly, he sentenced Kelly to death. Barry himself died in 1880, twelve days after the outlaw’s execution.

  The Melbourne Public Library became one of the world’s great civic libraries and is known today as the State Library of Victoria. Early in the twentieth century, John Monash engineered the dome of the library’s Domed Reading Room, emulating those of the Pantheon and the British Museum. Monash would soon
become a key Allied general in World War I. At the time of its construction, the Melbourne dome was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world. The Pantheon dome, the greatest concrete structure in antiquity, is still the largest unreinforced one. The British Museum dome is not concrete at all; it consists of cast iron and papier-mâché.

  Though the State Library of Victoria is indubitably a solid institution, some of its foundational documents are highly curious. The library has kept Redmond Barry’s personal journals—Barry called them his day books—which chronicle with striking candour his ‘flagrantly nonconforming sexual behaviour’. He diligently and matter-of-factly recorded his affairs and trysts and assignations with prostitutes and mistresses and married women.

  September 22. Sunday. church. Mrs S 4 times… September 25. Mrs S 3 times… October 8 went to Parramatta with Mrs S. Mrs S 10 times.

  In her Barry biography, Ann Galbally likened these notes to the scoreboard in a game of cricket. Notwithstanding their surprising content, they are of unarguable value. Had they been burned, their loss would have obscured Barry’s character—and falsified his legacy.