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.

Mr Muir has said flatly that 'the foundation of all collecting is not logical but sentimental. No self-respecting collector of books needs a reason for collecting. He collects because he likes books.' A. W. Pollard, however, laid it down2 that 'in the modern private collection, as in the modern museum, the need for a central idea must be fully recognised. Neither the collector nor the curator can be content to keep a mere curiosity-shop. It is the collector's business to illustrate his central idea by his choice of examples, by the care with which he describes them and the skill with which they are arranged. In all these matters many amateurs rival, if they do not outstrip, the professional curators and librarians. But that they [certain vagaries of taste] are not peculiar to an age which some think Alexandrine, is shown by John Hill Burton's description [Op. Cit., pp 17 - 19] of a collector of a hundred years ago.
'Let us now summon [he says] the shade of another departed victim Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq. He too, through a long life, had been a vigilant and enthusiastic collector . . . He had a principle of selection peculiar and separate from all others', as was his own individuality from other men's. You could not classify his library according to any of the accepted nomenclatures peculiar to the initiated. He was not a black-letter man, or a tall-copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man, or an early-English-dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a pasquinader, or an old-brown-calf man, or a Grangerite, or a tawny-moroccoite, or a gilt-topper, a marbled-insider, or an editio princeps man; neither did he come under any of the more vulgar classifications of an antiquarian, or a belles-lettres, or a classical collector. There was no way of defining his peculiar walk save by own name-it was the Fitzpatrick Smart walk. In fact, it wound itself in infinite windings through isolated spots of literary scenery, if we may so speak, in which he took a personal interest. There were historical events, bits of family history, chiefly of a tragic or a scandalous kind, efforts of art or of literary genius on which, through some intellectual law, his mind and memory loved to dwell; and it was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or costly as it could be.'

Burton's list of recognised types to which his collector did not belong is a useful reminder that specialisation is almost as old as book-collecting. But he is chiefly concerned to illustrate individuality of taste. This essential in the book-collector's make-up has, indeed, been recommended and enjoined in almost every manual for collectors ever written, and it is extolled among the obiter dicta of many other authorities. 'The essence of book-collecting', as Mr Sadleir once put it, 'is to want something because you yourself want it, and not because it is the kind of thing which seems in great demand.'

A.J.A. Symons expressed the same idea in his comments ['A Book-Collector's Apology', in The Book-Collector's Quarterly, no. 1 (930), p. 54] on two well-known 'blue-prints' for collectors. 'Mr Seymour de Ricci,' he wrote, 'who is a man of knowledge, published a Book-Collector's Guidegiving brief notes on the "two or three thousand British and American books which fashion has decided are the most desirable for the up-to-date collector". Could there be a more pointed, though unconscious, criticism of what is called, with appropriate ugliness, "high-spot" collecting? What is an "up-to-date" collector? As well talk of an "up-to-date" giraffe.' And again, apropos another list, which also has been mentioned in an earlier chapter: 'Were Mr Newton to show me in person his hundred selected novels, no doubt they would interest me, as reflecting the peculiarities of his mind and taste; but if any other person shows me Mr Newton's hundred novels, I shall ask him why he has not made his own choice.'