Only Collect

Michael Sadleir

PASSAGES FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF A BIBLIOMANIAC

The introduction to XIX Century Fiction, A Bibliographical Record.
London, Constable. 1951.
© Richard Sadleir, reproduced with kind permission

Early enthusiasms

To write any sort of an account of the formation of my collection of Nineteenth Century Fiction would be impossible without a continual use of the first person singular, and without reference to phases of my individual bibliolatry which, though intense and absorbing in their day, are now things of the past and are not reflected in this catalogue. I will not, therefore, apologise either for egotism or apparent irrelevance, seeing that both are implicit in the job which, to please myself, I have undertaken.

I began collecting books at the age of eighteen. As an undergraduate my favourites were contemporary 'firsts' poets, prose writers and novelists; but I soon extended operations into French literature of the schools which styled themselves Symboliste and Décadent. I think I must from

I will not apologise either for egotism or apparent irrelevance, seeing that both are implicit in the job which, to please myself, I have undertaken.

the very beginning have had a penchant for group-collecting, that is to say, for seeking out the first editions of authors who belong to one movement, and adding to them the manifestoes, pamphlets and ephemeral periodicals which, in larger or smaller numbers, are produced by every movement. In any event, I now recognise in this Symboliste phase of my collecting the same impulse which later turned me to the pursuit, in non-fiction, of nineteenth-century Londoniana, of books on coloured paper, of certain obscure nineteenth-century private press issues (Lee Priory, Great Totham), of the literature of publishing; in fiction, of Gothic Romance, of Silver Fork novels, of yellow-backs and, of course, first and other editions of the cloth period in one to four volumes.

I no longer possess my main collection of Gothic Romances (and of such as I still have, only very few e.g. by Porter and Maturin qualify for inclusion in this Catalogue); but the gathering of that collection had its impulse so far back in my book-hunting career that I must advance-mention it at this early stage and return to it later and at greater length.

My youthful enthusiasm for the Symbolist movement in French literature inevitably included the great inspirers of that movement Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Now both these poets the latter under the influence of the former were profound admirers of Edgar Allan Poe, and made transla tions of writings by Poe, which themselves have become classics. As a collector of Symbolisme, my ambition would naturally have urged me to collect the works of the American master; but he, in first edition, was far beyond my financial reach, and I had to content myself with reprints as respectable as possible. Nevertheless, through reading Poe, I found myself exploring into the past in search of the work of Charles Brockden Brown; and from Brown to the English, German and French romances of the 'Terror' school became (when the time was ripe) a step both easy and natural.

This, however, was not yet. I was ready for a new adventure; but among Victorian, not pre-Victorian, allurements.