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

One day in the autumn of 1922 I was in Bumpus' bookshop at 850 Oxford Street. There were at least two upstairs floors of second-hand books in that original shop (this was before the old Marylebone Court House was taken in, and of course long before the move to Messrs Bumpus' present premises), and poking about on the uppermost floor of all I came across a little run of books in three-quarter morocco with the book-plate of Samuel Whitbread, the wealthy brewer and enlightened Foxite politician, who quarrelled with Sheridan over the rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre and died by his own hand in 1815. There were, I think, five titles all novels in about sixteen volumes; and I remember clearly that one was Regina Roche's The Children of the Abbey, another Horrid Mysteries, another The Carpenter's Daughter of Dereham Down, and another Duncan and Peggy by Mrs Helme. I carried them home. Though I hardly realised it, I was in the toils of a new entanglement. My Gothic collection had started. It was not long before the lust for Gothic Romance took complete possession of me. Some instinct for which I can only be thankful told me not to stray into 'Sensibility', 'Pastoral' or 'Epistolary' novels of the period 1770 1820, but to stick to Gothic novels and Tales of Terror.

Of course in the case of several prolific authors (whom it was a natural ambition to complete) sensibility, pastoral and even improving fictions were intermingled with Gothics and had to be secured; but in the main I kept to my restricted field, and so obeyed with tolerable accuracy the influences which (from Baudelaire to Poe and Brockden Brown, through Northanger Abbey and the 'Tenor' elements in Dickens to a generalised passion for old novels as things for their own sake desirable) had guided me to my new and absorbing interest. I soon discovered that Gothic Romance as a collecting subject perfectly illustrated a truth about book-collecting which is not everywhere realised. In itself it was an untrodden and an uncharted field; but among Gothic Romancers were a few writers famous either as individuals or on other grounds. In consequence, among the Gothic titles which I ought logically to acquire were certain items already of great celebrity and therefore sought after by collectors. These titles were expensive; but paradoxically they were comparatively easy to find. The genuinely difficult ones were those no one had bothered to want. It is worth remarking that a collector will often have this same experience that the high spots in his subject, though costly, do not test his assiduity or his skill as a collector; the real snags are hidden among the crowd of titles hitherto despised and rejected. Actually, as in time I came to understand, to have stumbled on 'firsts' of The Children of the Abbey and Horrid Mysteries at the very outset of my career as a collector of Gothics was as phenomenal a piece of beginner's luck as can be imagined. Never since have I set eyes on a 'first' of Mrs Roche's best-known novel, and on only two 'firsts' of Horrid Mysteries; and although it was regrettable that Samuel Whitbread's binders had destroyed half-titles, I soon knew enough of the difficulties of my subject to treasure with gratitude what they had left behind. It follows from what has just been said that my next lot of acquisitions were mainly 'high spots'. I bought Mrs Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian; I bought Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Lewis' The Monk (both the London and Waterford editions) and his Tales of Wonder and Sophia Lee's Recess. If I had had the money, I could without difficulty have bought Shelley's Zastrozzi and St Irvyne. But the supply of well-known (and therefore available) titles which were within my reach soon ran out, and I might have suffered a considerable check, but for my second piece of good luck within a few months.

In the spring of 1928 Sothebys held a sale of the final portion of the famous library from Syston Park. At the end of the sale or of one session were several bundles of old novels. There were forty or fifty volumes in each bundle, and the cataloguers had naturally wasted neither time nor-space on detailed description. With some inward trepidation I went to Sothebys myself, and at about half-past four in the afternoon bought all but (I think) two of the bundles, at prices which reflected the fatigue, the satiation or the indifference of the trade. When I got the books home and sorted them up, I found that my Gothic collection had ceased to be an aspiration and had become a reality. No title of, at that date, current market importance was in the bundles; but there were a few which have since become bill-toppers (the first novels of Mrs Radcliffe and Jane Porter The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and Thaddeus of Warsaw were among them) as well as a large number of genuine minor Gothics of the kind most difficult to locate. Further, the majority showed an admirable taste on the part of Sir John Thorold or his binders, and virtually all had their half-titles and their incidental advertisements. From the date of the Syston Park sale until approximately 1930 the pursuit of 'Gothics' was my main book-collecting preoccupation. But before anthologising the events of those few years, I would like to describe a friendship which contributed largely to the building-up of the collection, and pay a tribute to a man whose peculiar quality as a bibliomaniac and his abundant generosity alike to fellow-collectors and to aspiring authors have not been celebrated as they deserved.