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.

These two trends, the one of taste the other of technique, were soon to meet in Frederick Locker (afterwards Locker-Lampson), whose Rowfant Library, while not by any means the most important, was possibly the most revolutionary in its influence upon following generations that the whole century produced. For Locker formed in two small book-cases such a gathering of first editions of English imaginative literature that the mere catalogue of it (printed in 1886) produced the effect of a stately and pic turesque procession. Some of the book-hoards of previous generations could have spared the equivalent of the Locker collection without seeming noticeably the poorer, but the compactness and unity of this small collection, in which every book appears to have been bought for a special reason and to form an integral part of the whole, gave it an artistic individuality which was a pleasant triumph for its owner, and excited so much interest among American admirers of Mr Locker's poetry that it may be said to have set a fashion.

This was indeed the 'cabinet collection' par excellence, for Locker's field embraced English literature from Chaucer to Swinbume. It set others thinking besides American admirers of London Lyrics, as we shall see in the next chapter.
It also marked, though it did not perhaps initiate, the emergence of a factor which bulks so large in modern bibliophily that the layman may be excused for equating, as he is apt to do, the part with the whole: viz, the overriding importance attached to chronological priority first edition, first issue, etc. as a criterion of the interest of a book. This now preponderant factor is actually of quite modern development, for the average nineteenth-century collector was as much interested in the finest-looking or the best-edited edition as in the first. And some good judges, who regard this exclusive elevation of the first edition as a very parochial limitation on the health and growth of bibliophily, believe also that it will be transitory. Whether this proves to be the case or not, we need to remember that chronological priority is only one of many criteria in book-collecting. But it has been an increasingly dominant one during the past seventy-five years, so that its influence is of necessity taken for granted in the pages which follow.