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

In conclusion, a few words in explanation of certain peculiarities of the collection catalogued in this volume. It presents certain obvious gaps, and also certain unexpected amplitudes. Some comment is due on both these phenomena.
Like Archdeacon Wrangham I have always been more interested in hunting 'difficult' and unusual books than in the acquisition of famous and therefore expensive ones. Wrangham quotes with approval these sentences from the library catalogue of a fellow bibliophile, and applies them to his own collection:
This collection is by no means to be considered as an Essay towards a perfect Library. Here are few publications of great price; but it is believed that not many private collections contain a greater number of really curious and scarce books.
I would venture to make the same claim on behalf of the books here described, naturally using the final words in a modern sense and as is compatible with a Library of Fiction. A preference for the rare but unsought was, of course, virtually forced on me (as on the Archdeacon) by limitations of finance; indeed only in very recent years have I been justified in paying other than really modest prices, even for books I badly wanted. But I must insist that it was from the first and has remained an ingrained characteristic of my collecting mania. When I started in earnest on nineteenth-century fiction in first edition, there were a few novelists already keenly sought for by important collectors of the day (e.g. Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Borrow, the Brontes, George Eliot, Meredith, Gissing, Stevenson and Hardy) and therefore at the same time charted. The first editions of these writers, if available, were easily located. Booksellers knew they had them, and kept them on a first-edition shelf, often behind glass. Even in cases when I could have afforded to pay the prices, I should have had little satisfaction in acquiring such easy game. In consequence, these authors (and two or three others of their class) were regarded as outside my territory. Admittedly, during more recent years, I was lucky enough to obtain satisfactory specimens of several of these once-avoided novelists; but not of all of them. I never attempted to collect Scott, Borrow or Stevenson. Of Thackeray (modestly enough) I desired nothing except a really fine Vanity Fair and a really fine Esmond both in cloth, for the bound Esmond in the collection is there for the sake of its charming appearance and connection with Delane. I freely recognise that the absence (or virtual absence) of certain giants in nineteenth-century fiction destroys any pretension to completeness which this book might be so rash as to make. Fortunately, however, their failure to appear does not seriously affect my catalogue's reference value, for all have been bibliographised already, so that other books exist to which, for better or for worse, the curious may turn.

At the other end of the scale from the missing great are a few ostensibly over-distended small. Why, it may be asked, such lavish provision of Lady Georgiana Chatterton, B. L. Farjeon, Charles Gibbon, Katherine S. Macquoid, Hawley Smart? I can only reply that I am weakly susceptible to runs of 'family' copies or to longish presentation series of novels once belonging to some friend of the author. Such runs, when they turn up, are usually in fine condition and those with presentation inscriptions sometimes throw an amusing light on the character of the writer. On behalf of three of the novelists above-mentioned I would further plead a definite intrinsic interest. Lady Georgiana Chatterton ranks with the so-similarly-named Lady Georgiana Fullerton as a Catholic authoress with a devoted and well-merited following of her own; Farjeon, Australian by origin, was one of the most popular writers of sensation fiction of his day, whatever degree of oblivion may now have overtaken him; while Hawley Smart can surely claim his share of whatsoever respect be considered due, on the one hand to dashing writers of the G. A. Lawrence and Whyte-Melville order, on the other to the spirited and inexhaustible turf-lore of Nat Gould. Had I been lucky enough to strike Lawrence or Whyte-Melville in presentation-series, they would appear in this catalogue. Nat Gould (who did to some extent come my way in a highly desirable form) is debarred from inclusion, because he published no story in two or three volumes. A paragraph is due in explanation of the virtual absence of Part-Issues, which will strike every knowledgeable student of this catalogue. Except in a few very special cases, I have not collected Parts. They are a nuisance to preserve and impossible to read without damage, while few things are more dismal to look at than a shelf of cloth or morocco boxes. Consequently only my brightest of star-authors Le Fanu, Marryat, Frances Trollope (and one or two more whose Part-issues are publishing curiosities) offer their Part- as well as their Volume-issues; the rest are in boards or cloth, and not necessarily the more easily obtained for being so.
Further inconsistencies will doubtless strike the reader and user of these pages. Some must be charged to the luck or ill-luck of the chase; others to a personal preference for one author over another.