BOOKS UNDER THE HAMMER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 219, 3 September 1943, Page 4

BOOKS UNDER THE HAMMER

HEN a farmer intends to buy a horse he turns his back on it. He may even turn his back on the auctioneer, and give ventriloquial bids from nowhere. The book-buyer is open and eager. He watches his rivals, and he gives the most appealing looks at the uplifted hammer, even shouting out a bid after the blow has fallen. He is an innocent. Or perhaps he is just highly excitable. -Perhaps print is more disturbing than blood and bone, dust-jackets than canvas covers. Whatever the explanation is, you never see farmers at a horse sale throwing caution to the winds and giving twice as much for a horse as it is worth. But you see book-buyers doing that at a book sale. If you had attended a certain auction sale in Wellington the other week you would have seen buyers giving as much as five times the published price of a book, not because it was rare or a collectors’ piece, but because excitement and full pockets carried them away. I did it myself. I gave two guineas for a two-volume Don Quixote that almost

certainly came to Wellington as a "remainder" at 15 shillings. I went to 65 shillings for a work published at 55, but was saved by others who were more ridiculous still-including a lawyer, whose winning (?) bid was four-pounds-five. It is not merely the making of books to which there is._no end-it is the folly of the fanatics who buy them. %* * * TILL, it was good fun while it lasted, and that was for two days. And I am not forgetting the week of furtive visits in advance, when the collection was "on view." Day after day from one to four-thirty the hard-headed and the soft-headed found it necessary to return with their catalogues, to undo this bundle and look again at that, and revise their prices upwards. I am sure the limits went up each day or the final scramble would have ended on a lower level; but I may be wrong; I may not be allowing enough for book-buyers’ madness and the auctioneer’s magnetic eye. z Anyhow this is what happened. A dictionary that can be bought in the shops for 21/- was pushed up to 52/6. A seven-volume set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, pocket-size, with small print and cheap binding, published at 2/- a volume, brought 72/6. A single volume of the Canterbury Tales, published in America at 1% dollars, began at a pound and soared (I think), to two pounds. A two-volume edition of Mallory’s Le Mort d’Arthur, worth a guinea to an ordinary buyer and two at most to a collector, brought 85/-. An Arthur Rackham Rip Van Winkle realised 42/6. * * * NOTHER interesting fact was the taste, or -presumed taste, of the present-day reading public. If prices indicated preferences, the most popular author in New Zealand to-day is H. G. Wells, who brought £14, It is true that the buyer of Wells got 28 volumes for his money, all in first-class order; but the buyer of Scott got 50 volumes for £4/15/- without any trouble at all, and the buyer of Mrs. Henry Wood 33 for 40/-. Of the foreign authors Tolstoy was in best demand (21 volumes for £11), with Turgenieff a bad second (17 volumes for £3/10/-). One of the most

surprising items was a 21-volume set of Hazlitt, which brought £12/10/-. How any editor can expand Hazlitt into 21 large volumes is beyond the comprehension of the -ignorant, but the competition for all that diligence proved that it was appreciated some-where-perhaps by one of the University librarians, who were present in force. And it was interesting to see four pounds still available for Borrow, fourfive for Disraeli, four-ten for Mark Twain, and eight-five for Thomas Hardy. But why was there such a slump in Meredith, whose 17 volumes with difficulty brought two-pounds-five? # * * ORNOGRAPHY — or what many people still believe to be pornography, and buy for no other purposewas in rather weak demand, perhaps because prurience is a symptom of peace and repression. In any. case Burton’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights brought only £8/10/-, footnotes and all. Rabelais went for £2/5/-, Boccaccio for £2/15/- Balzac (without the Contes Drolatiques) soared to £10/10/-, while the Heptameron in five volumes went for 32/6, and Suetonius\ (I think) for less. Ey * 7 POLITICS were in good demand, but not by comparison with letters and art.. Bismarck, for . example, brought 25/- (one volume), Asquith 35/- (two volumes) and Randolph Churchill 24/-. On the other hand, four volumes of Walter Page and Lord Frederic Hamilton brought only 12/- between them, while a three-volume set of Brougham’s Lives of Statesmen went for 4/-- one of the very few bargains of the whole sale. Of Theology I hardly dare to speak, A Bible in fqur volumes brought 35/-; one in 17 volumes 42/6; another in 25 volumes brought only 20/-; and one in three volumes dropped to 11/-. But there is, of course, a tradition against costliness in this field. An Imitation of Christ, very attractively produced, realised £2/10/-. Cardinal Newman’s Correspondence brought 17/-, a single volume Concordance 67/6, two copies (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) of the Pilgrim’s Progress 30/-, but Stanley’s History of the Jews went for 8/-, Dean Farrar’s Life of Christ for 5/-, and a volume on Higher Criticism (with four others) for 4/-. The only two bundles, however, that brought one bid only-three shillings-were Shots at Satan (with four others) and Heaven Our Home (with five). But there may have been good theological reasons for that. * * % HE "others" provided an _ exciting uncertainty-especially as no books were handed over during, the sale, and some of us waited for two days before we knew what brand of pig we had bought in our pokes. My own luck surprised me. I bougltt a bundle of nine books, only one of which I wanted in advance, but there was only one I did not want when I took. delivery. These were among the "others": Memoirs of Count Grammont (two volumes of scandal from the Court of Charles II.), Gesta Romanorum (a fat volume of moral tales compiled in the 14th century with a good deal more adventure in them than morality), A Perplexed Philosopher (Henry George wrestling with Herbert Spencer’s references to the land question), Little Arthur’s History of England (a hundred years old, but revised and, carried forward to the accession of our present King), and this choice morsel for a last bite-The Letter-Writer’s Vade Mecum (how to write a begging letter, how to write a letter of condolence, how to address a lady of quality, how to avoid grammatical pitfalls, and so on-all in the very best style of 1832). I don’t knowswhat luck others had, but since I had to fight twice for this bundle, someone else having claimed my winning bid, I suspect that someone else knew better than I did what it contained. And I think I know, too, -why Job wished that his adversary had written a book, -Biblion.