A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  For fifty years, Robert Hoe assembled one of the world’s finest private libraries. Like Richard de Bury five centuries earlier, Hoe combined motivation and means with opportunity and taste. His grandfather, who moved to New York from England in 1803, developed the first steam-driven rotary presses to be used in the United States. Robert Hoe III—who directed R. Hoe & Co. through its most dominant years in the printing equipment industry—amused himself by collecting what he felt was the ultimate expression of the family trade. In 1896, the assistant librarian of the Astor Library in New York, O. A. Bierstadt, compiled an overview that celebrated Hoe’s achievement. “Without counting each and every book and pamphlet, it may be roughly estimated to comprise about fifteen thousand volumes,” he wrote.

  Of early manuscripts upon vellum and paper there is an unusually large number. [The collection’s] chief characteristic is its many-sidedness, and it is as cosmopolitan as the metropolis of America, where it has been coming to maturity during thirty years or more. Unlike many others, this library is not dwarfed to a single specialty, as if its creator were a bibliophilistic mole, burrowing so long through one small section of the world of literature that he is blind to everything else. It is a carefully chosen collection of a large portion of the world’s literary masterpieces, in the best editions and the finest possible condition and state of preservation.

  Of equal merit was that no single element obscured the whole collection. “It is not a solo upon one bibliographical string or instrument, but it is a complete and harmonious symphony of books—a library so nearly perfect as to make it a heaven upon earth to the bibliophile.”

  Certainly any institution would have been overjoyed at the prospect of adding this “heaven upon earth” to its treasure room, but Hoe had made clear that he would have nothing to do with bequests. His will was quite emphatic on the point: “I specifically authorize my Executors to sell at auction either in this country or in Europe all my furniture, personal property, works of art and library, especially authorizing them as to my books to take expert advice and sell the same either in London, Paris or New York as they shall deem most advantageous to my estate.” Shortly after Hoe’s death came the announcement that his books would be offered in a series of sales mounted periodically over nineteen months, starting in April 1911. In an introduction to the seven-volume auction catalogue, Beverly Chew, a fellow New York bibliophile, described a visit his friend once made to an unnamed European library in which everything was “covered with dust, with leaves stained and bindings broken and in every way proclaiming the effects of indifference and neglect.” Disgusted by the sight, Hoe came home convinced that only “those who love books should have them in their custody.”

  Though Robert Hoe was greatly esteemed in book circles, his passing meant little more to the world at large than that of any other businessman who had prospered during America’s Gilded Age. The death a year earlier of Brooklyn bicarbonate of soda manufacturer E. Dwight Church was attended with little fanfare as well, and when his exceptional library was sold privately just a few weeks before the Hoe sale opened, the news coverage was not overly revealing. In fact, the identity of the man who actually bought the Church library, Henry E. Huntington of California, was not immediately disclosed, and probably was concealed deliberately. The flamboyant Wall Street bookseller George D. Smith told the press that he alone had bought the books, that he was “hopeful” of selling them “en bloc to the United States government,” and that if those efforts failed, he intended to “break up the collection and dispose of it to private collectors.” In fact, Smith intended to do nothing of the sort—a signed bill of sale in the Huntington Library archives demonstrates quite conclusively that Huntington had bought the books from the Church estate—but some high-stakes gamesmanship was going on, and the likely reason for it was the forthcoming Hoe sale, which had electrified the book world.

  Hoe had been the founding president of the Grolier Club, the oldest and most prestigious society of book collectors in the United States. Though his fortune was not nearly equal to that of J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), it was considerable nonetheless and certainly sufficient to satisfy his taste for rare books. As John Hill Burton had pointed out fifty years earlier, Americans had been using their new wealth to buy up great English libraries and bring them to the United States, but like every other commodity the world has ever known, the source was not inexhaustible. In what may well have been a modest nod of thanks to the mother country, the first journalist J. Pierpont Morgan allowed to see his New York library was not an American, but an unnamed “special correspondent” for The Times of London, who wrote an exultant account of his exclusive tour of the “marble palace” in midtown Manhattan. “I have entered the most carefully guarded treasure-house in the world, and nothing in it has been hidden from me,” the correspondent reported in the December 4, 1908, issue of the newspaper. “Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan is probably the greatest collector of things splendid and beautiful and rare who has ever lived. There is no one with whom we can compare him except, perhaps, Lorenzo de Medici, and he surpasses even that Prince in the catholicity of his taste.”

  As he proceeded through “bronze gates into a lofty hall of rarest marble,” the correspondent found himself “frightened by the task” of having to give “even the roughest description of some of the things I saw.” Everywhere he turned, there was a mind-boggling treasure to behold. He asked the identity of a “gorgeous jeweled volume,” and learned it was the Ashburnham Bible, an outstanding example of early British handicraft which Morgan had paid £10,000 to secure several years earlier. Passing by incunabula “that not even the British Museum can match,” he paused at William Blake’s original drawings for the Book of Job, Phiz’s illustrations for The Pickwick Papers, and the holograph manuscripts for Endymion, A Christmas Carol, Vanity Fair, and Ivanhoe. He spotted Shelley’s private notebook, and then he glanced over handwritten documents and letters of Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Robert Burns, and Charles Lamb.

  “Is it Bibles that attract you?” he asked. “There are thirty shelves of them—two Gutenbergs … one on paper, the other on vellum; the Hebrew Bible of 1482; all of the English Bibles from the Coverdale onwards; Bibles owned by celebrated personages, such as Colbert’s, in thirty-two volumes, with the statesman’s arms on the covers; Mme. De Maintenon’s, Sir Walter Scott’s; Bibles in Icelandic and other strange tongues; a set of the Gospels in ten volumes, exquisitely bound for Padeloup.” Going to the other side of “Mr. Morgan’s own Library Room,” he described a similar panoply of Elizabethan and Jacobean first editions. “Practically everything is here—Shakespeare folios and quartos, Milton, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Drayton, Sir Thomas Browne, Marvell, Waller, Buton, hundreds of others.” And “all the famous printers” were there as well, twenty-one shelves alone filled with Aldines, another seven with Elzeviers. “Are you interested in Caxtons and Wynkyn de Wordes? Here are two score of them, including several that are unique.”

  The breathtaking tour proceeded with other discoveries. “Everything one takes from the shelves is precious, everything is the finest specimen of its kind that could be obtained.” When the visitor thought he had seen all there was to see, he was brought into yet another room where “the richest jewels in this marble casket” repose, including the only known manuscript fragment to survive of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. “This room is not only burglar-proof and fire-proof; it is actually a safe, or the latest pattern and with all the improvements. One enters by a thick steel door fitted with a combination lock, and the walls of the room are of steel, while a steel shutter protects the window at night.”

  Though the Englishman admitted “nothing but admiration” for Morgan and professed great esteem for “his generosity, his love for precious things, his enterprise in discovering them,” he also had to accept the reality that “these heirlooms of England will never go back, and I repeat they should never have come here in the first place.” Still, in one instance he acknowledged begrudging respec
t for the entrepreneur’s legendary knack for outmaneuvering his competitors. “The story of how Mr. Morgan obtained the Byron volumes reads like some record of the Humanists. He found that there were no Byron manuscripts in England, but heard a vague rumour that there were some in Greece. Forthwith he sent an agent there with carte blanche to buy, whatever the price. The result is half a score of volumes containing the manuscripts of ‘Don Juan,’ ‘Werner,’ ‘Manfred,’ ‘Marino Faliero,’ and other works.” As he completed his examination, the correspondent shook his head in disbelief, and what began as a triumphant visit to a “bookman’s paradise” concluded on a somber note. “I do not believe that any one in England knows how many things that ought never to have left the country are contained in these few cubic yards of space in New York,” he wrote. “I do not know whether it was wonder or sorrow that I felt the more.” Today, Morgan’s “bookman’s paradise” at 29 East Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue, is open to visitors and available to scholars from all over the world. It is one of the great pilgrimages any bibliophile can make. A ten-minute walk away, at 11 East Thirty-third Street, the nine-room brownstone once occupied by Robert Hoe and his family is gone, demolished years ago to make way for an office building. It was here in 1884 that Hoe gathered with eight other New York collectors to form the Grolier Club, and here that he kept his great book collection until he died in 1909. The announcement that his library would be sold generated tremendous interest on both sides of the Atlantic, with European dealers reversing what had become their accustomed role of selling to Americans, not buying from them. The most prominent booksellers in the international market came to New York for the sale. Making the trip from England were Alfred Quaritch and Ernest Maggs; Madame Théophile Bélin came over from Paris; Dr. Ludwig Baer arrived from Frankfurt, Germany.

  On April 13, 1911, eleven days before the opening session, the New York Times reported that “the book that is arousing the keenest speculation among collectors and dealers as to the price it will bring is the Gutenberg Bible, printed on vellum.” Until then, the most anyone had ever paid for a printed book was the $24,750 J. Pierpont Morgan had paid Bernard Quaritch, London’s leading antiquarian bookseller and Alfred’s father, in 1884 for the Mainz Psalter, printed in 1459, and far more scarce than the forty-two-line Bible. The next day the New York Times published another feature as a huge Sunday spread, this one under the bold headline “How Americans Get Private Libraries Worth Fortunes.”

  The article was occasioned by the upcoming Hoe sale, yet it had very little to say about Robert Hoe. Instead, for the first time public attention was focused on the E. Dwight Church library, which had been sold a few weeks earlier for $1.3 million but had attracted no attention because the sale had been finalized entirely behind closed doors. Much of the article illuminated high spots in the Church collection, including a Bay Psalm Book and the “only copy that has come to light” of the first collection of laws printed in America, The Book of the General Lawess and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts, 1648. Church also had acquired the unique manuscript copy of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography that had been brought to France in 1791 by William Temple Franklin and returned to the United States in 1867 by the U.S. Minister to France, John Bigelow. “All of these precious volumes,” the Times article noted, “are now stored in safe deposit vaults pending decision as to where the collection’s new home is to be—or homes, rather, for there is little likelihood that it will remain intact.”

  The article allowed that while Henry E. Huntington’s name finally had been “given out” as the new owner of the Church library, a number of “book experts” had confided that the putative $1.3 million purchase price “was probably footed by a group of rich men who came to an agreement rather than compete with each other. Of this group of bibliophiles, it is said, each will keep that part of the collection which he particularly covets, whereupon the remainder will be put on the open market.” Thus, on the very eve of the Hoe sale, a coterie of New York “book experts” had dismissed Henry E. Huntington as a serious player. Any suggestion that he alone had paid $1.3 million for the Church collection was deemed patently absurd, and the man whose name had been “given out” as buyer of the Church library was assumed to be nothing more than a front man for a consortium of wealthy collectors.

  That perception began to change dramatically at 2:30 P.M. on Monday, April 24, 1911, however, when Robert Hoe’s books finally went on the block in the Anderson Auction Company’s gallery at Madison Avenue and Fortieth Street, just a few minutes away from the dead collector’s townhouse. Attracting the most attention in the opening session was a copy of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, printed in 1470 by John of Speier, “richly illuminated in gold by a contemporary Venetian artist,” and one of only eight copies known on vellum. The dealer George D. Smith opened at $1,000 and matched Belle da Costa Greene bid for bid until the prize was his at $2,700. Miss Greene, it was pointed out in press accounts, was representing J. Pierpont Morgan, her employer; Smith was identified only as an independent dealer.

  For the second round, which began that evening at 8:15, all four hundred reserved seats in the second floor gallery were filled with the world’s most important book people. A scrapbook of old news clippings kept by the Grolier Club preserves to this day a stub for seat 107H. The action moved along indifferently until a “remarkably fine copy” of the 1486 Book of Saint Albans came up in Lot 252. It too was knocked down to Smith, who prevailed over Quaritch with an offer of $12,000. Seventeen lots after that came the climactic moment of the evening, the contest to see who would win what was identified in the catalogue as Biblia Sacra Latina, the forty-two line “editio princeps of the Bible,” printed on vellum at Mainz in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg and Johann Fust between 1450 and 1455 and bound in two folio volumes with contemporary oak boards and pigskin. “The remarkable nature and importance of this superlatively great book are such that a discursive comment would be unnecessary,” the catalogue stated, though a “few salient features” were offered anyway, not least of which was one point put forth in bold capital letters:

  IT IS THEREFORE PROBABLE THAT NO OTHER OPPORTUNITY WILL EVER OCCUR TO OBTAIN A VELLUM COPY OF THIS MONUMENTAL WORK, THE FIRST IMPORTANT BOOK PRINTED FROM MOVABLE TYPE.

  After the two volumes had been placed on a center table, Sidney Hodgson, the distinguished British auctioneer brought over by Anderson Galleries to conduct the Hoe sale, addressed the anxious gathering: “What am I bid for this?”

  Someone in the back of the room provoked a ripple of skittish laughter with an offer of $100. George D. Smith quickly bid $10,000, a firm statement of intent that left no further room for frivolous pretenders. Alfred Quaritch smartly raised that to $15,000, at which point the “bidding became brisker,” with advances arriving so quickly “it was impossible to say where they came from.” At $30,000, Quaritch abandoned whatever hope he had of bringing back to England the book his father had sold to Robert Hoe seventeen years earlier; his withdrawal prompted a wave of patriotic applause from the Americans. Thereafter the match was between Joseph E. Widener of Philadelphia and George D. Smith, the Wall Street dealer who “book experts” and dumbfounded onlookers alike finally realized “was acting as a representative of a wealthy customer.”

  Widener, said to be bidding for his nephew Harry Elkins Widener, answered each of Smith’s bids with a thousand-dollar advance of his own. When they reached $50,000 he shook his head. “This is the last chance you will have to purchase this book,” Hodgson declared in final warning. “Do I hear any advance?” With no other bids forthcoming, and with the gallery in an uproar, the Gutenberg Bible was hammered down to George D. Smith. Presently shouts came from throughout the room: “Who is the buyer? Who is the buyer?” Hodgson glanced at Smith, who nodded his approval; the auctioneer then announced the new owner to be Henry E. Huntington, and as the ovation continued, a stately man with a bushy mustache in the front row stood to acknowledge the cheers. With flash, aplomb, and high
drama, the Californian had confirmed his intention to form one of the finest libraries in the world.

  The next day sales continued at the same torrid pace, with prices going “to the vanishing point,” according to the New York Herald. Figures for “both ancient and modern tomes” were so high that even the “European experts” in attendance were “astonished.” George D. Smith and Belle da Costa Greene dueled gamely once again, this time for the right to claim William Blake’s Milton, “the original edition of the rarest of all Blake’s productions”; only two other copies are recorded, one in the British Museum, the other in the Lenox Library. Though Miss Greene was reported “bent upon getting the treasure,” she “gave up the struggle when Mr. Smith called out $9,000.” In its continuing coverage, the New York Tribune noted that third-day results brought the running total to just under $300,000 and that “George D. Smith made a large majority of the purchases,” while “his leading patron,” Henry E. Huntington, “sat beside him.” Smith was not capturing all the high spots, however. Alfred Quaritch of London waged a lively duel with Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia for the A. Firmin-Didot copy of Cleriadus et Melladice, a French romance printed in Paris in 1495 and the only known copy on vellum. Rosenbach was an up-and-coming bookseller whose name would soon become synonymous with twentieth-century collecting. Quaritch prevailed with an $8,000 bid, though Rosenbach secured a fine copy of the 1598 London edition of George Chapman’s translation of Homer for $3,000.

  By the end of the first week, there were grumblings about the “absurdly high” prices being paid and the “prevailing bibliomania” in evidence. “In bidding against Mr. Smith the rest of us are practically attacking a brick wall,” Walter M. Hill, a Chicago bookseller, said. “I had no less than three hundred items which are for the Newberry Library of Chicago, but not one could I obtain.” Exasperated by having to go well in excess of what she had planned to spend, Théophile Bélin quipped to reporters, “Your prices are as tall as your buildings.”