Selections from Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting
First published by the Cambridge University Press, 1948, and reissued by the Private Libraries Association, London, 1970.
Selection made by Edward Maggs.
© The Provosts of Eton College, reproduced with their kind permission.

From the days when George Thomason collected and preserved, as they came out, every ephemeral pamphlet and tract of the Civil War period in England to the bequest to Princeton of the Parrish collection of Victorian fiction, the gift of Arthur William Young's library to Cambridge, or the depositing in the British Museum of the late Mr Barry Ono's collection of 'penny dreadfuls', the history of book-collecting is a record of service by book-collectors a service performed sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously to the republic of letters. The book-collector is in fact one of the assault troops in literature's and history's battle against the inequity of oblivion. 'The pulping-mill', wrote W. Carew Hazlitt, 'has been as busy as the Press all these centuries on which we look back. It has neither eyes nor ears, nor has it compassion; it unrelentingly grinds and consumes all that comes in its way; age after age it has reduced to dust what the men of the time refuse in the presence of something newer, and, as they hold, better.' From Archbishop Parker and Robert Cotton to our own time, collectors, whether the professionals in the institutional libraries or the amateurs who are our present concern, have been preservers of books and essential contributors to the progress of scholarship.

 Their technique has been well described by a now old-fashioned but still respectable authority, John Hill Burton [The BookHunter (1862), p.200] . . . 'It is', he says, 'the general ambition of the class to find value where there seems to be none, and this develops a certain skill and subtlety, enabling the operator, in the midst of a heap of rubbish, to put his finger on those things which have in them the latent capacity to become valuable and curious. The adept will at once intuitively separate from its friends the book that either is or will become curious. And there must be something more than mere rarity to give it this value.' Note the words 'or will become curious'; for it was then and is still one of the collector's most significant functions to anticipate the scholar and the historian, to find some interest where none was recognised before, to rescue books from obscurity, to pioneer a subject or an author by seeking out and assembling the raw material for study, in whatever its printed form. It is a very easy matter nowadays to find a First Folio or a first edition of Johnson's Dictionary and a man needs neither imagination nor persistence to possess himself of a copy of either: all he needs is a cheque-book. Similarly it was very easy to stand an egg on end after Columbus showed how it was done. But as Mr Sadleir put it [Michael Sadleir, 'Decentralisation or Deadlock', in The Colophon, no. 3 (New York, 1930)], rather more pithily than Burton: 'In nature the bird who gets up earliest catches the most worms, but in book-collecting the prizes fall to birds who know worms when they see them.'