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

Collecting Gothics was the perfection of collecting. Like Trollope 'firsts' up to 1922, they were both rare and unwanted. And they had an extra quality which Trollope could not claim. Being the works of a generation of writers and not one writer only, they were potentially far more numerous and, representing a fashion in novel-writing and not a single characteristic authorship, they tended to turn up (when they did turn up) in groups. This meant that my collection increased in spasms, which were the more exciting for the blank periods in between. I have already mentioned some of the windfalls which good fortune brought me the small starting windfall from Bumpus, the important windfall from Syston Park, the melancholy but tremendous windfall from Arthur Hutchinson. There were others, some of which dropped in my path as I toured the book-shops of the United Kingdom, while others came my way thanks to information from friendly booksellers, who tipped me off when they heard of small lots in the possession of any of their confrères. One of these was, in fact, the very last of my Gothic 'buys ' a dozen or more titles from the library of Harriet Mellon, the actress who had a fortune from Coutts the banker and became Duchess of St Albans. They were in unusually sumptuous bindings which, with their silk or coloured end-papers, agreeably suggested the pleasure the good lady always took in squandering her millions. That, I suppose, was about 1937; and a twelve-month later, except for a few duplicates, I parted with the whole collection. I did this for more than one reason. From the first I had intended to use my Gothics as material for some kind of a book, and up to a point (though not very discernibly) I did so, for they were the basis of a considerable element in the opening volume of Bulwer: a Panorama (later entitled Bulwer and his Wife). Several of Bulwer Lytton's early novels are the direct projections of Gothic Romance (after it had undergone strengthening and improving treatment at the sometimes didactic hands of Scott, Maturin and the Porter sisters), and link the Gothic period proper with the debased horror-fiction of the mid-nineteenth century. But I never tackled outright the task of criticism or bibliography of Gothic Romance per se because, long before I got round to it, other people were on the job. More than one critical examination of the period of Gothic taste in fiction, poetry, architecture and decoration ap peared during the late nineteen-twenties and early nineteen-thirties, and when three or four years before it actually appeared in 1989 Miss Dorothy Blakey started on her great bibliography of the Minerva Press, it became obvious that not enough in either department remained undone to justify my keeping Gothic Romance as an item on a future writing programme, or as an exorbitant competitor for urgently needed shelf-room. For although I had continued throughout the early thirties to collect the now infrequent Gothics which came my way, I had as long ago as 1927 started another line, and by the middle thirties several more, and the pressure on space was becoming intolerable.

My second reason for disposing of the Gothic collection was partly that I was restless, partly that I felt as though a hitherto unspoilt holiday resort had been found out. A point had been reached when there was not enough doing to keep my mania busy, and further, the subject was becoming 'smart'. During the late nineteen-twenties it had become increasingly difficult to find fresh titles in Gothic Romance, and when they occurred they were much more highly priced than had been usual. Competition had unmistakably begun; and it was noticeable that the 'Old Novel' section in catalogues (previously more or less of a rag-bag and none too frequent at that) became not only fairly general, but also emphatic as to type and often important in content. To put it frankly, my growing disinclination (except in outstanding cases) to buy on a rising and publicised market arose from a queer sense that obscure Gothic Romances should be hunted out and not bought from write-ups; also that they ought not to cost much above the average price which I had been accustomed to pay. Illogical, I admit; but there it was. I wonder whether other collectors are conscious of a similar feeling of frustration when, after some years of more or less solitary pursuit of a particular quarry, that quarry becomes suddenly more expensive and, instead of lurking in obscure shelves and basements, is thrust on their attention by ingenious cataloguing.
I hope this does not read like a complaint, or as implying that at their enhanced prices the books were over-charged. They were always genuinely scarce, and only absence of demand had kept them cheap. Now buyers (notably certain American libraries) were multiplying, and of course prices rose. No doubt I had myself done something to create a more general interest in this particular class of book, and so raised the market against myself. But that was not all of it. I am convinced that taste in book-collecting obeys some influences far bigger than a few individual collectors can exercise. The era of poetry and old plays (that during which the Ashley Library was formed) was giving place to an era of fiction. Novels from the early eighteenth century to the end of the Victorian period were due to become the prevailing taste, and I was lucky in being a little ahead of their coming, and so earning the early bird's reward. It is quite possible that the wastage of old novels which took place during the war of 1914-18 hastened the swing of the pendulum in favour of fiction. In 1917 and 1918 thousands of novels in two to five volumes were sold for pulp. Prices of paper and strawboard rose to famine height, and second-hand booksellers all over the country gladly turned into cash forgotten fictions which no one would buy. There used to be a bookshop in Barnsley (the West Riding town from which both my parents came) whose stock of three-deckers was regularly exposed outside and stretched a dozen feet across a wide pavement. In those days I passed them by, caring nothing for such things. The whole lot were sold for pulp between 1914 and 1918, and I sometimes wonder wistfully what may not have been among them. Is it not possible that this wholesale destruction threw a shadow of coming scarcity over collector-land and gave to some collectors a second sense of what was destined soon to disappear?