Henry B. Wheatley (1838–1917)

Mr Wheatley’s book was probably aimed at Victorian gentlemen scholars sequestered in their libraries caressing their first editions. Nevertheless this is a fascinating introduction, if a little antiquated, to book history. The great buyers are of course important and interesting; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Marquess of Blandford and Earl Spencer. Bibliotheca splendissima as Sotheby’s described the library of Prince Talleyrand. Female collectors - the Duchesse de Berri and Miss Richardson Currer (books sold for £5,984 in 1862) for example - are glimpsed at the margins and are all the more intriguing for that. Mrs Corbett of Barlaston Hall sold her Caxton Canterbury Tales in 1896 for £1,000. If she had a Caxton what else did she have on her bookshelves?

Wheatley is excellent on the ebbs and flows of bibliomania and that those books ‘which had been sleeping unmolested upon a book-seller’s shelf ... will now start up from its slumber, and walk abroad in a new atmosphere and be noticed and ‘made much of’.’ At one point early editions of Shakespeare sold for about the same as works by Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Then he began to outstretch them and Wheatley charts the steady rise in prices and competition for the rarities. Jane Austen first editions are not mentioned and the only female author noted here is Charlotte Bronte - a first edition of Jane Eyre selling for seventeen guineas in 1897. Here is a history of bookselling, the drama of auctions, the skulduggery of sellers, the desperation of collectors in their pursuit of first editions and all contained within the genteel covers of this charming erudite book.… (mer)