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

It was, I suppose, some time in 1928 that at a dinner of the Omar Khayyam Club I made the acquaintance of Arthur Hutchinson. He was nearly twenty years my senior and had been editor of the popular and successful Windsor Magazine since before the turn of the century. He was a bald, large-faced, solid-built but terrifically energetic and always bustling man, with a more tireless capacity for talk than anyone I ever met. Nothing could stop Hutchinson talking; and the luncheons to which, in his hospitable way, he would continually invite both friends and strangers, would persist until late in the afternoon, unless the guests were adamant in returning to work or keeping another engagement. He was kindness personified, and only needed to know that in some way he could help a friend to set about doing so. But the process involved torrents of words, long telephone harangues, and pages covered with his fierce black handwriting, and often left the person helped though duly grateful more exhausted than his helper.

Hutchinson's hobby was the collecting of fiction from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteen-hundreds - not necessarily fiction in first edition or fiction in original state, but just fiction, with a very strange but quite definite predilection for fiction by women authors. It was a devouring hobby; and, as he spent a large part of his life striding about London, he practised it off and on every day. He was terrified of leaving a parcel in a taxi, so regularly strapped or tied his purchases to his wrist. He sometimes came to see me with a whole cluster of parcels dangling and bumping on his arm. It must have been a very uncomfortable system, but it fulfilled its purpose. He was the kind of collector conventionally called 'omnivorous', his lust for fiction being uncontrolled either by selective design or problems of space. There were also certain non-fiction lines which he worked no less energetically notably the publications of the Daniel Press, the works of Oscar Wilde, and books dealing with various towns in which he had a special interest. That he was not hampered by the difficulty of housing his purchases was due to his curious way of living. He had a bedroom in a hotel off the Strand, and in that room were always two packing cases supplied by a big furniture repository. As each parcel of books was delivered, he packed it in a case, often not removing the outer wrapping. When the cases were full, he telephoned to the repository, who collected the full cases and left two empty ones in their place. He was always talking of taking a house in the country and spending a happy retirement sorting and arranging his books. But quite suddenly, on the evening of Friday, August 26, 1927, he died in his room. He had invited a number of people to a tea-party on the following afternoon at a large west-end hotel (these Saturday tea-parties were one of his regular pleasures) and not until they had waited an hour for their host and then telephoned to his address, did they learn what had happened.

During my four years' acquaintanceship with Hutchinson we had grown intimate as only persons can whose hobbies are identical. We exchanged lists of desiderata; we made up check-lists of works by specified authors from the advertisement leaves at the end of volumes; we had a common enthusiasm for Robert Bage, and planned to republish his cynical and strangely modern novels with a biographical introduction and critical comments. Hardly a day passed without our either meeting or telephoning or writing, and whenever I could play truant from my office, we would visit those booksellers who dealt in our particular quarry. I was, therefore, not altogether surprised though highly complimented, for after all I was only a recent friend compared with many others to find that in his will he had appointed me one of two 'library-executors' to dispose of his books to the best advantage of two nephews, who were his nearest relatives and of whom he was very fond. But I had no idea, until we came to tackle the job, what a tremendous (and in some ways a macabre) task had been laid upon me. I say 'upon me' designedly, for my fellow-executor was compelled by ill-health to throw in his hand almost immediately, and shortly afterwards died. It was only in the very early stages that we worked together, and even then owing to his other commitments my colleague was unable to spare more than a very occasional hour. For the handling of Hutchinson's library very occasional hours were to prove worse than useless. I shall never forget the first sight of that astonishing collection. After sending our credentials to the repository and fixing a time for a preliminary view, we asked for certain sample cases to be unpacked in readiness for our visit. Having arrived at the huge building, we were conducted to a sort of mezzanine floor low-ceilinged and in complete darkness. There were, we were told, one hundred and forty packing cases of books, of which a random dozen or fifteen had been unpacked. We were given torches and left to investigate.

The rays of light flickered across the vast floor on which spines upward were ranged row after row of books. It looked as though an over-floor of books had been laid down, with the narrowest passages here and there through which we crept, flashing the torches on to title after title, and feeling every moment more appalled at the prospect of having to sort these thousands of volumes and prepare them for sale. For they were completely unclassified and desperately miscellaneous; quite half were still parcelled and would have to be undone and distributed before even a start could be made. Out in the daylight my colleague and I stared at one another in despair. What in the world were we to do? What indeed? The repository naturally charged storage on this bulk of books, as well as rent for the cases in which they were packed. To allow these expenses to run indefinitely would hardly fulfil an executor's duty toward the estate he was directed to benefit. On the other hand, to invite a bookseller to make an offer for the library would involve giving him a chance to examine it, and this he could only do in situ and after the entire collection had been spread out. Such an arrangement, even if the repository were able to spare the necessary space, would still further increase the cost to the estate, for examination would be an affair of weeks, for which and properly the bookseller would recoup himself by an adjustment of the price offered. Equally subject to preliminary inspection would be an offer of the library to a firm of auctioneers, and the result would at best be a choice of special items and the rest left behind. We knew enough of Hutchinson's tastes and methods to be sure that only a small minority of the books were up to the level of individual cataloguing; and no auctioneer could afford to take delivery of a vast mass of miscellaneous material and sort it through, without the certainty of finding more money-bringers than were here available.

Eventually, after consultation with the executor proper of Hutchinson's will, it was decided that I be allowed to make an offer for the whole collection and take responsibility for its disposal. This arrangement was highly speculative, because, although I had a general idea of the nature of the library, I had only seen a fraction of it and that under difficult conditions. Further, no one could estimate the length of time needed to go through and classify all the hundred and forty cases, and during the period of classification the books must be stored somewhere and at the buyer's expense. On the other hand, being nearly as great an old-novel maniac as Hutchinson (perhaps at that time the only other one in the country), I could reckon on finding more books in the collection which I wanted for myself than could any other single buyer, and must regard the acquisition of these as equivalent to monetary return. As matters turned out, the arrangement proved scrupulously fair to both parties. Leaving entirely out of account the time and labour spent in sorting, I got back by sale of unwanted or duplicate material almost exactly what I paid the estate for them. The incidental costs, when set against the books I kept, represented fairly enough the price I should have had to pay for those books, had I been able to find them elsewhere.