Prices of Books

John of Trittenheim, Abbot of Spanheim, who is known in literature as Trithemius, said some hard things against printing in an essay, De Laude Scriptorum Manualium, thus—

“A work written on parchment could be preserved for a thousand years, while it is probable that no volume printed on paper will last for more than two centuries. Many important works have not been printed, and the copies required of these must be prepared by scribes. The scribe who ceases to perform his work because of the invention of printing can be no true lover of books, in that, regarding only the present, he gives no due thought to the intellectual cultivation of his successors. The printer has no care for the beauty and the artistic form of books, while with the scribe this is a labour of love.”

When, however, Trithemius found it necessary to exhort his own monks, he was not able to speak very favourably of their love of books—

“There is, in my opinion, no manual labour more becoming a monk than the writing of ecclesiastical books, and preparing what is needful for others who write them, for this holy labour will generally admit of being interrupted by prayer and of watching for the food of the soul no less than of the body. Need, also, urges us to labour diligently in writing books, if we desire to have at hand the means of usefully employing ourselves in spiritual studies. For you see that all the library of this monastery, which formerly was fine and large, has been so dissipated, sold, and made away with by the disorderly monks before us, that when I came I found but fourteen volumes.”20

Others were wiser than to oppose the new art, and many scribes, recognising the inevitable destruction of their trade, became printers. Caxton’s master, Colard Mansion, was an extensive writer of manuscripts before he took to the business of printing at Bruges. Much has been written upon famous collections of manuscripts, and upon the individual works which compose them, but it is not often that these come to public auction, so that the particulars of prices are comparatively meagre. The grand collections of the British Museum and the Bodleian21 are preserved in safety for the use of the learned, and we only know that they are of the greatest value. What they would fetch if sold now can only be guessed, and it would be merely frivolous to inquire. Three of the grandest collections in the Museum—the old Royal Library, the Cotton, which was only saved from slow destruction by the establishment of the British Museum, to which it was transferred, and the Harley, which the nation obtained for £10,000—must now be of untold value.

The purchase by the British Museum of the library of Dr. Charles Burney greatly added to the completeness of the collections of Greek Classics. Among the manuscripts is the wonderful Iliad of Homer on vellum, formerly belonging to Mr. Towneley, which, although it cannot be dated further back than the beginning of the fourteenth century, is supposed to be of the earliest date of the MSS. of the Iliad known to scholars. A committee appointed to consider the purchase of the library stated in their report: “With respect to the value of the manuscripts, the Homer is rated by the different witnesses at from £600 to £800, and one of them supposed it might even reach so high a price as £1000;22 the Greek rhetoricians are estimated at from £340 to £500; the larger copy of the Greek Gospels at £200; the geography of Ptolemy at £65; and the copy of Plautus at £50. One witness estimates the whole of the ancient manuscripts at upwards of £2500, and an eminent bookseller at £3000.” “The books with manuscript notes, together with Dr. Burney’s Variorum Compilation, including the Fragmenta Scenica Græca, are estimated by one at £1000, and by another as high as £1340.” It must be remembered that this was written in 1818, and these prices may be multiplied considerably at the present day.

Even those large private collections which have been in the market of late years have mostly been sold in bulk, so that little light has been thrown upon the current value of fine manuscripts.

One of the best sources of information respecting present prices is to be found in Mr. Quaritch’s admirable catalogues of his collections of literary treasures.

When the treasures of Hamilton Palace were dispersed by public auction, the priceless collection of manuscripts was sold by private contract to the German Government. The amount paid has never been officially announced, but it is believed to have reached the sum of £75,000. Some of these manuscripts were not required at Berlin, and they were sold in May 1889 by Messrs. Sotheby for £15,189.

The gem of the collection was the fifteenth-century manuscript of Dante’s Divina Commedia, illustrated with upwards of eighty drawings, attributed to Sandro Botticelli. Of it a writer in the Times said, “This priceless volume may, without exaggeration, be described as the most valuable manuscript in existence, from its artistic interest, for it stands alone as an example of a literary work of the first order illustrated by an artist of the highest rank.”

It is impossible here even to register some of the many beautiful works that made the manuscripts of the Duke of Hamilton so famous. Great dissatisfaction was felt by the British public when it was found that these treasures were to be transported to Berlin. Before the final decision was made, Mr. Ruskin, in a “General statement explaining the nature and purposes of St. George’s Guild,” wrote—

“I hear that the library of Hamilton Palace is to be sold some time this spring. That library contains a collection of manuscripts which the late Duke permitted me to examine at leisure, now some thirty years ago. It contains many manuscripts for which I have no hope of contending successfully, even if I wished to do so, against the British Museum or the libraries of Paris and Vienna. But it contains also a very large number of manuscripts, among which I could assuredly choose some for which the partly exhausted general demand might be not extravagantly outbid, and I think the English public ought to have confidence enough in my knowledge of art and history to trust me with a considerable sum for this purpose.”

Mr. Quaritch, who entered into Mr. Ruskin’s plans, circulated this pamphlet, and asked for contributions to be sent to him, which he would forward to Mr. Ruskin. Had the Government of this country been of the same mind with Mr. Ruskin, these manuscripts would not have been lost to the country.

The sale of the Hamilton manuscripts to a foreign Government naturally caused those who were interested in these matters to feel great anxiety lest the Earl of Ashburnham’s manuscripts, which it was known the owner wished to sell, should also be sent abroad. This collection consisted of upwards of three thousand manuscripts in about four thousand volumes, and were made up of purchases from the Duke of Buckingham (Stowe) and M. Libri; and of an Appendix consisting of separate manuscripts purchased from time to time by the late Lord Ashburnham.

(1) The Stowe collection grew out of the library of MSS. formed by Thomas Astle, the palæographer, and Keeper of the Records in the Tower. Astle directed by his will that his collection should be offered to the Marquis of Buckingham on certain specified terms, one of which was the payment of the sum of £500. This amount was not of course any measure of their value, and the bequest was made in gratitude to the Grenville family for favours which Astle had received from them. A room was built at Stowe by Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Soane to receive the collection, in which were charters, registers, wardrobe accounts, inventories, correspondence, and many items of the greatest historical value. O’Conor’s Irish MSS. and the State Papers of Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in the reign of Charles II., afterwards found a home at Stowe. In April 1849 the Marquis of Chandos wrote to Sir Robert Peel, stating that he had recently had offers from private parties for the Stowe manuscripts, and offering them to the British Museum. Sir Frederick Madden valued the collection at £8300, but he was only authorised to treat with Lord Chandos for the Irish manuscripts separately, and to seek for further information respecting other portions of the collection. In the meantime, however, the whole number were sold to Lord Ashburnham for £8000.

(2) Libri collection. In June 1846 the Trustees of the British Museum applied for Treasury sanction to the expenditure of £9000 in the purchase of the Libri manuscripts, but this was refused. In September following renewed application was made for £6600 for the collection, less the Napoleon papers valued at £1000. The Treasury allowed £6000 with commission to agents, but the negotiation failed, and Lord Ashburnham obtained the MSS. for £8000.

(3) Barrois collection, chiefly consisting of French romances and poems, was offered to the British Museum in 1848 for £6000. It was examined by the Keeper of the Manuscripts, who recommended the purchase, but apparently no application was made to the Treasury, and the collection was soon afterwards sold to Lord Ashburnham for the same amount.

(4) Appendix of MSS. collected separately by Bertram, fourth Earl of Ashburnham, among which were some splendid illuminated manuscripts.

With respect to some of these manuscripts a difficulty had arisen, owing to M. Léopold Delisle’s claim that a large number of the manuscripts in the Libri collection had been stolen from libraries in France by Libri while holding the office of Inspector-General of Libraries. M. Delisle also alleged that at least sixty of the Barrois manuscripts were stolen from the Paris National Library. In November 1879 Lord Ashburnham offered to treat for the sale of his library of printed books and manuscripts with the Museum alone, or jointly with the French Government, naming £160,000 as the price for the whole, and stated that he had received an offer to that amount “from another quarter.” The Trustees then asked whether Lord Ashburnham would treat for the manuscripts alone, and his answer in January 1880 was that he had ascertained that the offer he had received of £160,000 for the whole library from a private individual was intended for private speculation, and that the collection was worth a great deal more. This amount, which comes to about £500 for each manuscript, seems to be very large, but competent authorities have agreed to the valuation. At any rate, the Treasury was not prepared to buy the whole at such a price, and the Principal Librarian treated for the Stowe collection alone, the price of which Lord Ashburnham fixed at £30000.23 In the end these were purchased for the nation.

For many years the late Sir Thomas Phillipps was an omnivorous collector of manuscripts, and his collections were vast. They are gradually being sold by auction. Several portions have passed under the hammer of Messrs. Sotheby, and others are still to follow.

A very fine collection of illuminated manuscripts was gathered in a very short period by William Morris. It is fortunate that a collection made by one who knew so well what to buy is not to be dispersed or taken out of the kingdom. As long as it remains intact it will be a worthy monument of an enthusiastic lover of art who, while teaching the present age, was not forgetful of the history of the earlier workers in the same spirit.

We cannot register prices of such priceless manuscripts as the Gospels of St. Cuthbert, for two centuries at Lindisfarne, and now among the Cottonian MSS. in the British Museum, or the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin—both of the seventh century; but some few books of great interest which have been sold by auction may be mentioned here. The chief of these is the splendid manuscript of the Bible in the British Museum, said to have been presented by Alcuin to Charlemagne. The vicissitudes of this book are very remarkable. It was confiscated during the French Revolution, and eventually came into the possession of M. Speyr Passavant of Basle, who unavailingly offered it for a large sum to the chief libraries of Europe. It was offered to the Trustees of the British Museum, first for £12,000, then for £8000, and lastly for £6500. The unfounded claims of the proprietor, who appears to have been very much of a charlatan, appear to have damaged the repute of the MS., and it remained on his hands. On 27th April 1836 the volume was put up to auction at Evans’s rooms, and was described in six pages of a catalogue in which it was the chief lot. It was catalogued as the Emperor Charlemagne’s Bible—a manuscript on vellum by Alcuin, completed A.D. 800, presented to Charlemagne A.D. 801 at the ceremony of his coronation, and mentioned in his will. The date is not undisputed, and it is supposed by some to be of about forty years later. The statement that this Bible is mentioned in the Emperor’s will is absolutely denied. The price registered in Evans’s sale catalogue is £1500, and the purchaser is given as Scordet, but the book was really bought in, and it is said that few of the biddings for it were genuine. After this failure fresh overtures were made to the British Museum, and in the end it was bought for that library for £750, which must be considered a small price for so splendid and interesting a book. There was some correspondence on this Bible in the Gentleman’s Magazine, in which Sir Frederick Madden took part. These letters are reprinted in Gomme’s Gentleman’s Magazine Library (“Literary Curiosities,” 1888, pp. 234-64). Another historical manuscript of particular beauty which has been several times sold by auction, and now safely reposes at the British Museum, is the famous so-called Bedford Missal (really Book of Hours), written and illuminated for John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France under Henry VI., to whom he presented the book in the year 1430. It passed into the hands of Henry II. of France, and long subsequently into those of Lady Worsley (widow of Sir Robert Worsley), from whom it was purchased by the Earl of Oxford, who bequeathed it to his daughter, the Duchess of Portland. At the latter’s sale in 1786 it was bought by James Edwards the bookseller for £213, 3s. At Edwards’s sale in 1815 it was bought for £687, 15s. by the Marquis of Blandford, who afterwards sold it to Mr. Broadley. At Broadley’s sale in 1833 Sir John Tobin bought it for £1100. Sir John’s son sold it to the bookseller from whom the British Museum purchased it in 1852.

Two instances of most interesting manuscripts sold at very inadequate prices may here be recorded. One of the most distinguished among the Ashburnham manuscripts was one known as the Albani Missal. It is a manuscript of offices, and was executed apparently for Alemanno Salviati, gonfalonier of Florence and brother-in-law of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and given by him to one of his relatives of the house of Baroncelli. This beautiful volume contains five full-page miniatures, each the work of a master. The first is by the hand of Amico Aspertini, of Bologna, the pupil of Francia; the next is attributed to Lorenzo di Credi; the third and fourth of high excellence, though unassigned; and the fifth by Perugino, signed “Petrus Perusinus pinxit.” For this artistic treasure Mr. James Dennistoun gave £20 in Rome in the year 1838. When he had purchased it he found that opposition to its leaving Italy would be made on the part of the Roman authorities, so he had it unbound and divided, and got it sent to England privately a few pages at a time. He afterwards sold it to Lord Ashburnham for £700. These facts were printed in the Times in 1883 by a cousin of Mr. Dennistoun.

Mr. Madan gives in his “Books in Manuscript,” 1893, a very interesting account of a bargain obtained by the Bodleian Library, which account is here reproduced in a somewhat condensed form. “Six years ago [1887] a little octavo volume, in worn brown binding, stood on the shelves of a small parish library in Suffolk, but was turned out and offered at the end of a sale at Sotheby’s, presumably as being unreadable to country folk.” It was described in the catalogue as “Latin Gospels of the Fourteenth Century, with English Illuminations.” For the sum of £6 it passed into the Bodleian Library, and came to be catalogued as an ordinary accession. It was noticed that the writing was of the eleventh century, and that the illuminations were valuable specimens of old English work of the same century, comprising figures of the four evangelists, of the Byzantine type, which was common in the west of Europe; the drapery, however, colouring, and accessories were purely English. The book itself was seen to be not the complete Gospels, but such portions as were used in the service of the Mass at different times of the year. On a fly-leaf was found a Latin poem, describing how the book had dropped in the water and was brought up by a soldier, who plunged in after it. Surprise was expressed that the book was uninjured, save a slight contraction of two of the leaves, and to this expression was added, “May the king and pious queen be saved for ever, whose book was but now saved from the waves!” Curiosity was felt as to the identity of this king and queen, when the difficulty was solved by a reference to Forbes-Leith’s “Life of St. Margaret of Scotland,” where this passage occurs: “She had a book of the Gospels beautifully adorned with gold and precious stones, and ornamented with the figures of the four evangelists painted and gilt.... She had always felt a particular attachment for this book, more so than for any of the others which she usually read.” Then follows a story almost identical with the one given above, which proves that the identical book is now preserved in the Bodleian Library.

It is not often that bargains such as these can be obtained, but in spite of a great rise in price large numbers of manuscripts are still purchaseable on reasonable terms. The late Mr. J. H. Middleton was particularly urgent in pointing this out, and his words may appropriately close this chapter—

“On the whole, a fine manuscript may be regarded as about the cheapest work of art of bygone days that can now be purchased by an appreciative collector. Many of the finest and most perfectly preserved manuscripts which now come into the market are actually sold for smaller sums than they would have cost when they were new, in spite of the great additional value and interest which they have gained from their antiquity and comparative rarity. For example, a beautiful and perfectly preserved historical Anglo-Norman Vulgate of the thirteenth century, with its full number of eighty-two pictured initials, written on between six and seven hundred leaves of finest uterine vellum, can now commonly be purchased for from £30 to £40. This hardly represents the original value of the vellum on which the manuscript is written.

“Manuscripts of a simpler character, however beautifully written, if they are merely decorated with blue and red initials, commonly sell for considerably less than the original cost of their vellum.

“A collector with some real knowledge and appreciation of what is artistically fine can perhaps lay out his money to greater advantage in the purchase of manuscripts than by buying works of art of any other class, either mediæval or modern.”24

CHAPTER IV

PUBLISHED PRICES

It was impossible for the scribe (however low his pay might be reduced) to compete with the printing-press, and we have good authority for saying that printed books could be obtained in the fifteenth century for one-fifth of what would have been the cost of the same books in manuscript. Mr. Putnam, in his interesting work on the history of bookselling, quotes from Bishop John of Aleria, who, writing to Pope Paul II. in 1467, said that it was possible to purchase in Rome for 20 gulden in gold works which a few years earlier would have cost not less than 100 gulden. Other books selling for 4 gulden would previously have cost 20. Mr. Putnam also quotes Madden, to the effect that in 1470 a copy of the forty-eight line Bible, printed on parchment, could be bought in Paris for 2000 francs, while the cost of the same text a few years earlier in manuscript would have been 10,000 francs.

It is rather curious to find that the present custom of fixing a published price is comparatively modern, and that the system for which some of our present retail booksellers yearn—that is, of buying from the publishers in bulk and retailing at their own price—was formerly in common use. In the old catalogues of English books no prices are affixed to the various entries, and the custom of printing the prices of books was not general until the end of the seventeenth century. But after all the booksellers’ latitude was not very great, for the law stepped in to limit the price of books.

We might naturally have supposed that the invention of printing would have made a complete break in the mode of selling books, but this was not so. Continuity was preserved, and the company to which the London trade belongs is not called after the printers, but after the older order of stationers. In a “Note of the State of the Company of Printers, Bookesellers, and Bookebynders comprehended under the name of Stacioners,” dated 1582, we are told that “in the tyme of King Henry the Eighte, there were but fewe Printers, and those of good credit and competent wealth, at whiche tyme and before there was an other sort of men that were writers, lymners of Bookes and diverse thinges for the Church and other uses, called Stacioners, which have, and partly to this daye do use to buy their bookes in grosse of the saide Printers, bynde them up, and sell them in their shops, whereby they well mayntayned their families.”25

It seems probable that the English booksellers before the introduction of printing experienced little interference in their business from foreign scribes, and therefore the bringing in of printed books from abroad was distasteful to them. What they particularly objected to was the importation of these books bound instead of in sheets.

By “an Act touching the Marchauntes of Italy” (1 Ric. III. cap. 9) aliens were prohibited from importing certain goods into this country, but this Act was not to “extend to Importers of Books, or to any writer, limner, binder, or printer.”

In Henry VIII.’s reign this importation was found intolerable, and “an Act for Printers and Binders of Bokes” was passed (25 Hen. VIII. cap. 15). It is stated in the preamble when the provision in the Act of Richard III. was made there were few books and few printers in England, but that at this time large numbers of printed books were brought into the country—

Whereas, a great number of the King’s subjects within this realm having “given themselves diligently to learn and exercise the said craft of Printing, that at this day there be within this realm a great number cunning and expert in the said science or craft of printing, as able to exercise the said craft in all points as any stranger, in any other realm or country, and furthermore where there be a great number of the King’s subjects within this realm which [live] by the craft and mystery of binding of books, … well expert in the same,” yet “all this notwithstanding, there are divers persons that bring from [beyond] the sea great plenty of printed books—not only in the Latin tongue, but also in our maternal English tongue—some bound in boards, some in leather, and some in parchment, and them sell by retail, whereby many of the King’s subjects, being binders of books, and having none other faculty wherewith to get their living, be destitute of work, and like to be undone, except some reformation herein be had.”

Then follow some provisions respecting the sale of books at too high a price—

“And after the same enhancing and increasing of the said prices of the said books and binding shall be so found by the said twelve men or otherwise by the examination of the said lord chancellor, lord treasurer, and justices, or two of them; that then the same lord chancellor, lord treasurer, and justices, or two of them at the least from time to time shall have a power and authority to reform and redress such enhancing of the prices of printed books by their discretions, and to limit prices as well of the books as for the binding of them; and over that the offender or offenders thereof being convict by the examination of the same lord chancellor, lord treasurer, and justices, or two of them or otherwise, shall lose and forfeit for every book by them sold whereof the price shall be enhanced for the book or binding thereof, three shillings four pence.”