Lord Spencer bid a thousand guineas, to which the marquis of Blandford added his customary advance of ten. “You might have heard a pin drop,” Dibdin reported. “All eyes were turned—all breathing well nigh stopped,” and from that point the contest was between Lord Spencer and Blandford. “ ‘Two thousand pounds are offered by the Marquis,’ ” Evans declared, and Lord Spencer paused for fifteen seconds before upping the figure by £250. Blandford added another ten, which abruptly ended the contest. “The echo of that fallen hammer was heard in the libraries of Rome, of Milan, and St. Mark,” Dibdin concluded. “Boccaccio himself startled from his slumber of five hundred years.”
The price paid for the Valdarfer Boccaccio stood as the largest sum paid for a printed book until 1884, when J. Pierpont Morgan bought a 1459 Mainz Psalter for $24,750. Lord Spencer was gracious in defeat, perhaps because he had an idea that time was on his side. Within seven years, the marquis of Blandford was forced to sell his library, and the book once again was on the market. This time competition was tepid, and Spencer added the Boccaccio to his Althorp Library for £918.15s.
The Roxburghe sale was the watershed event in what Dibdin proclaimed to be “the grand era of Bibliomania,” but book passion remained intense for many decades, as the response to another auction twenty-eight years later demonstrates. In the summer of 1840, prominent collectors and booksellers on both sides of the English Channel began receiving in the mail a fourteen-page catalogue that announced the forthcoming dispersal of a private library gathered over four decades by a certain Jean-Nepomucene-Auguste Pichaud, a reclusive Belgian nobleman further identified as Count Fortsas. Though only fifty-two items were listed, intense interest was aroused by virtue of the accompanying claim that the collector “admitted upon his shelves only works unknown to bibliographers and cataloguists”—works that were known nowhere else. “It was his invariable rule, a rule from which he never departed,” a preface to the catalogue explained.
With such a system, it is easy to conceive that the collection formed by him—although during forty years he devoted considerable sums to it—could not be very numerous. But what it will be difficult to believe is, that he pitilessly expelled from his shelves books for which he had paid their weight in gold—volumes which would have been the pride of the most fastidious amateurs—as soon as he learned that a work, up to that time unknown, had been noticed in any catalogue.
The preface described what had happened when Count Fortsas learned from a bibliography that a number of the items he thought were unique actually existed elsewhere. “It made him lose at once the third of his cherished library. After that he seemed disgusted with books and with life; he did not make a single further acquisition,” resulting in a “severe blow for our bibliomaniac” that “contributed to hastening his end.” Count Fortsas was said to have died at the age of sixty-nine on September 1, 1839, at the Château de Fortsas, the place of his birth, near the remote Belgian village of Binche in Hainaut.
Accordingly, the fifty-two remaining items were to be sold on August 10, 1840, to the highest bidders. Payment would be in cash, with a 10 percent premium added to the hammer price. Under no circumstances could books be returned after the auction; those unable to attend were invited to “send their bids with every confidence to M Em. Hoyois, Printer and Bookseller, rue de Nimy, at Mons, and he will deal with them. A deposit is required from persons with whom he has not previously done business. Letters must be stamped.” Count Fortsas had inventoried his library in a “pell-mell” fashion, and it was further decided that items would be listed in the same haphazard manner he had utilized, and without following any systematic bibliographical system: “For a collection so small, a classification would have been, in fact, a useless matter. The interruption in the series of numbers is caused by the works from time to time expelled from his shelves.” As a final tease, excerpts from the count’s own notes for each item were appended to each description.
We know now that this was the clever prank of Renier Chalons of Brussels, the impish president of the Société des Bibliophiles Belges, so we can smile at many of the items listed and described in the catalogue. At the time, however, the announcement was received with utmost seriousness. The genius of the scheme lay in the tantalizing catalogue entries. None of these books existed, but they were described in a way that made them irresistible. Supporting information, moreover, was authentic and painstakingly documented. There was a plausibility to everything. Perhaps it was a hoax, but what if it were authentic? Decisions had to be made, and many collectors and curators decided it was better to be safe than sorry.
The details of what followed were gathered by William Blades, an authority on printing history and the author of a splendid rumination on the fragility of literary artifacts, The Enemies of Books. His lively essay, “Count de Fortsas’s Library,” and his invaluable translation of the catalogue, were published in the April 1863 issue of a short-lived New York periodical, The Philobiblon, with additional material furnished in the November 1863 issue. Blades was fifteen years old when the hoax was perpetrated and was therefore able to gather information while many of the principals were still alive.
As the sale approached, commissions authorizing purchases were sent off to Belgium. A gentleman of Lille was interested in a pamphlet purportedly relating to the Belgian Revolution of 1814–1815 and printed in an edition of two thousand copies, but “entirely suppressed” prior to release. “A friend saved this copy for me,” Count Fortsas had written in his notes. “I consider it unique.” When the princesse de Ligne read a description of Lot 48, she immediately decided she had to acquire the book, purportedly bound in “green chagrin, with a lock of silver gilt.” The supposed author, her grandfather, was known to have kept company with many influential women. His “memoir” was cryptically titled My Campaigns in the Low Countries, with the List, Day by Day, of the Fortresses That I Have Lifted to the White Arm, and was additionally described as having been “Printed by Me Alone, for Me Alone, in One Sole Copy, and for a Reason.” The princess did not want this embarrassment to fall into indiscreet hands, as the letter to her agent made clear: “Buy, I conjure you, at any price the foolishness of that scamp, my grandfather.”
The baron de Reiffenberg, director of the Royal Library of Brussels, was authorized to buy several items at the sale. M. F. M. Crozet of Paris sent commissions for two lots; the Belgian minister submitted orders for nine items, and stressed that his commission was without limit. Octave Delepierre, a bibliographer well known in England, wrote Hoyois with commissions for five books and imposed no limitations on price. One of the five, Number 47, had this identification: “Philosophical Disputation, in Which the Anonymous Author Attempts to Show That Man before Sin Did Not Have Sex. Cologne, 1607.4to.”
Certainly one of the most curious titles was Number 43, “The Aftermaths of Pleasure or the Discomfiture of the Great King in the Low Countries. At Ponent (Holland), 1686, 12mo.” (A 12mo, twelvemo, or duodecimo is a book, approximately 5 by 7½ inches, where each leaf is one twelfth of a whole sheet.) It was further described by the count as a “libel of disgusting cynicism on the occasion of the fistula of Louis XIV. One of the plates represents the ‘royal behind’ under the form of a sun surrounded with rays with the famous motto: Nec pluribus impar.”
As the auction drew near, dealers and collectors quietly began to converge on the town of Binche, a number of them meeting unexpectedly in the same coach. The Roxburghe Club sent a representative from London. On August 9, 1840, the day before the sale was scheduled to go forward, the Brussels newspapers carried a short notice; the Count Fortsas library would not be sold after all. In a last-minute move, the citizens of Binche reportedly had bought the collection en bloc, and would deposit it in the public library as a memorial to the town’s native son. A quick look around the tiny town disclosed that no such repository existed, and further inquiries revealed there was neither a Château Fortsas nor a Count Fortsas.
Fifteen years later, Renier Chalons ac
knowledged his hand in the prank when he enjoined the production of a facsimile by the man who had printed the catalogue for him, M Hoyois, arguing that further embarrassment should be avoided. Hoyois lost the case but went ahead and published a transcript of the court proceedings, along with related facts still in his possession, including letters and absentee bids that he had received from prospective buyers. The disagreement ended what had been a close friendship between the two men, and was the only sour note in an otherwise ingenious hoax.
In England, meanwhile, Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), the forty-eight- year-old illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer, was not quite halfway into his own frenzied quest to preserve every scrap of paper and vellum fragment he could locate. “I wish to have one copy of every book in the world,” the antiquary and collector wrote toward the end of his life, and it was not an idle wish. Though he had inherited a sizable estate, virtually every shilling was spent to acquire manuscripts. The life and obsessions of Sir Thomas Phillipps were richly documented in a five-volume study prepared by his biographer, A. N. L. Munby, later abridged into a single volume by Nicolas Barker (see General Bibliography). Both works contend that Sir Thomas was the greatest collector of manuscripts the world has ever known, and the first true collector of the modern era.
The preface to an early catalogue Phillipps wrote in longhand outlined his sense of purpose, and is perhaps the most significant explanation of his lifelong quest: “In amassing my collection, I commenced with purchasing everything that lay within my reach, to which I was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts.” Beacause at first he lacked the skill to “judge unerringly” which items were worth saving and which were not, Phillipps made the simple decision to take no chances: “I had not the ability to select, nor the resolution to let anything escape because it was of trifling value.” His passion for manuscripts “arose from witnessing the unceasing destruction of them” by “goldbeaters,” crass salvagers who extracted precious metals that had been inlaid centuries earlier on vellum by medieval illuminators—and also, of course, from the manuscripts’ uniqueness.
Sir Thomas coined a word to distinguish his passion for vellum from the more common kind of bibliomania then being celebrated by Dibdin, an acquaintance who repeatedly sought permission to visit the Phillipps estate at Thirlestaine House, Cheltenham.
As I advanced, the ardour of the pursuit increased until at last I became a perfect vello-maniac, and I gave any price that was asked. Nor do I regret it, for my object was not only to secure good manuscripts for myself but also to raise the public estimation of them, so that their value might be more generally known, and consequently more manuscripts preserved. For nothing tends to the preservation of anything so much as making it bear a high price.
Sir Thomas admitted to having models that he tried to emulate. “The examples I always kept in view were Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Robert Harley. They had the advantage of me in living a century or two before, and although their collections were so immense, that some thought there was nothing to be gleaned after them, yet I foresaw that there must be vast treasures upon the Continent in consequence of the dispersion of Monastic libraries by the French Revolution.” Because this preface was never published during Phillipps’s lifetime, its date of composition can only be estimated. Munby placed it around 1828, when the collector was thirty-six years old, though Seymour de Ricci put it at 1837, when the first catalogue of the collection was printed privately; it contained 23,837 entries. In either case, the “vello-maniac” was still a relatively young man with many years ahead of him.
Munby conceded that Phillipps was “vain, selfish, dogmatic, obstinate, litigious and bigoted,” but added that “some of his unparalleled success as a collector can be ascribed” to these nasty traits. “To amass so many and so valuable manuscripts that great scholars were forced to visit his library was the ambition of a vain man, though to say that is not to minimize his veneration for scholarship and his solicitude for the preservation of records.” For all Phillipps’s faults, Munby concluded that “his achievement must be judged as heroic in conception and execution.”
Phillipps proposed turning his collection over to the British government, and exchanged letters to that effect with Benjamin Disraeli, then chancellor of the exchequer. Because Phillipps demanded what amounted to total control, nothing proceeded beyond the discussion stage. “Altho’ I greatly sympathize with your intentions,” Disraeli wrote, “I cannot hold out any prospect of my being able to induce Parliament to cooperate with you in the plan as, at present, proposed.” When Phillipps died in 1872, he was confused, bitter, and unable to secure the future of his treasures in a way that would keep them together. Instead, he drafted an impossible will that assured their ultimate sale. Among his stipulations were that the books should remain forever in Thirlestaine House, that no bookseller or stranger should ever be allowed to rearrange them, and that no Roman Catholic should ever be admitted into the library. He also decreed that one of his daughters, Henrietta, and her husband, James Orchard Halliwell, should never be allowed among the collections either; he had opposed their marriage and suspected Halliwell of manuscript theft. Moreover, the funds he allowed for maintenance and upkeep were totally inadequate for the task. The man “pleased no one in life,” the Reverend John Fenwick, a favored son-in-law, observed, “and I expect he has managed to displease everybody in death as well.”
The collection Sir Thomas Phillipps left was so enormous that a full century of inventories, private sales, and auctions was necessary to sort it out. The bad news, for the British Museum at least, was that the man did not have it in him to give his collection to the nation outright; the nation’s error was its failure to make a reasonable offer. But collectors serve civilization in many ways. The irreplaceable material Phillipps rescued can be found today in institutions all over the world where they serve scholarship. This was not his intention, but it is his legacy. Once the Court of Chancery declared in 1885 that his will was too restrictive, dispersal was possible.
Like Samuel Pepys before him, Phillipps was served honorably in death by a relative, in this case a grandson, Thomas FitzRoy Fenwick, who spent the better part of fifty years supervising the sale of the collection. In 1887, the Royal Library in Berlin acquired for £14,000 621 manuscripts that Phillipps had acquired at the 1824 sale in The Hague of superior material gathered over two generations by Gerard Meerman (1722–1771), author of Origines Typographicae, and his son, Jean Meerman (1753–1815). A number of papers pertinent to Welsh history went to Cardiff, important Belgian manuscripts were sold to the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels, Dutch material was bought by the Provincial Archives in Utrecht, and other documents were acquired for archival collections at Metz, Bordeaux, and Paris. During the early 1900s, exceptional items began crossing the Atlantic to the United States, where they entered collections then being assembled by J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry E. Huntington.
When Seymour de Ricci gave a series of lectures at Cambridge University on “English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts” in 1929, he noted that six decades after the brooding collector’s death, thirty thousand items still remained in crates and boxes in Thirlestaine House. What soon became known as the “residue” of the Phillipps collection would be sold in 1946 for £100,000 to two third-generation London booksellers, the brothers Philip and Lionel Robinson. Though the deal would ultimately be judged an unqualified bargain, the Robinsons took a tremendous risk because 90 percent of the library was unlisted and unexamined at the time of the purchase. The brothers bought largely on faith in the value of the holdings, but to protect themselves against possible disaster, they privately gave Harvard University an opportunity to buy the collection for £110,000. William A. Jackson, Harvard’s Houghton librarian, made a noble effort to raise the money, but during a crucial moment in the negotiations he had to depart on a State Department mission to South America and could not be consulted. In his absence, and with no information on wh
at the contents were other than assurances that they had to be splendid, Harvard officials sadly cabled regrets. Repeating an error made several decades earlier, the British Library turned down a similar offer.
Within a few months, the Robinsons were thanking their lucky stars that their entreaties had been declined. A sale of thirty-four manuscripts at Sotheby’s on July 1, 1946, realized £55,190. Among the newly discovered treasures sold that day was a fourteenth-century volume of Provençal songs decorated with miniature portraits, bought by Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia for £7,500. Maggs Brothers of London paid £6,200 for a 1480 Aesop’s Fables illuminated in Italy with 135 exquisite miniatures (it is now in the collection of the New York Public Library). Three months later, the Robinsons made back another £19,740 off their investment with the sale of 165 lots of autograph letters and historical papers, including a collection of Colonial material of special interest to the state of Georgia. Items bought by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, and Yale University brought in another £35,875.
The Robinsons continued selling material through 1956, when they retired from active business but retained ownership of the “residue.” When A. N. L. Munby published the fifth and concluding volume of his Phillipps Studies four years later, “many thousands of manuscripts and documents” still remained to be examined. “The formation and dispersal of the collection has so far covered nearly a century and a half,” he wrote, “over a third of the period during which private libraries have been formed in England.”
But the saga of Sir Thomas Phillipps went on. In 1964, Lew David Feldman of New York offered the Robinsons $10 million for what remained, sight unseen, on behalf of the University of Texas. Before a deal could be signed, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he would place his papers on the Austin campus of the University of Texas, and money earmarked for the Phillipps collection was used instead to build the LBJ Library. A few months later a bin filled with wastepaper was found to contain William Caxton’s manuscript translation of the first part of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the document thought lost for more than four hundred years and now reunited with the second part at the Pepys Library at Magdalene College in Cambridge. In 1977, all the remaining Phillipps manuscripts were purchased by Hans P. Kraus, a New York bookseller. Many sales had been consummated during the previous ninety years, yet the collection still included two thousand volumes of material. “I am confident that many discoveries will reward my venture,” Kraus wrote in his 1979 autobiography.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 16
