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

The third incident which during these years affected my bibliomania will seem (and admittedly is) of much smaller stature than the tremendous exhumation of the Bellew Library. But it was very important to me, in that it launched me on my (to the time of writing) latest new large-scale operation in nineteenth-century fiction. For that reason namely that its influence on my collecting activity became effective later than that of the Bellew Library I have given the latter priority, although chronologically it does not merit it. One day in the autumn of 1928 a bookseller, who then occupied a charming shop in St Martin's Lane (now, alas, abandoned), told me he had a queer lot of miscellaneous stuff in the basement which I might like to look over. I was conducted to two small and poorly lighted rooms (not the usual basement, which was one of my regular haunts) the floors of which were piled and littered with wrappered magazines, with small books of all kinds and with hundreds of yellow-backs. It was the collection of an old gentleman named Molineux, an insatiable collector recently dead, who had bought books for decades and always wrapped his purchases carefully and put them away. A lovelier lot of obscure fictional oddments I never hope to see again. There were pictorial board issues, Parlour and Railway Library books, the Annuals of Routledge and Tinsley, the Christmas Numbers of Belgravia and London Society, and all manner of other ephemera.

I was, of course, conscious of the yellow-back as a feature of Victorian publishing; but the word suggested a rather dispiriting and almost illegible crown 8vo reprint of Ouida or James Payn or Walter Besant, with a spine (where present) of conventional design and tail-ends of cheap canvas fluffing through worn patches in the glazed paper boards. The Molineux yellow-backs, on the other hand, were mainly of small format, with admirably designed front covers and spines, and in new condition. Similarly, the Parlour Library volumes and those belonging to other Series, as well as the wrappered Annuals from about 1860 onwards, were unsoiled and untorn. It seemed a case for buying in bulk, and instituting a small-scale Hutchinson sort-out. The bookseller was quite agreeable (with the market as it then was, the labour of arranging and cataloguing would have been quite uneconomic, for the material apart from its condition was mostly of the kind at that time suited to outside shelves or boxes where, if it sold at all, it would sell at from threepence to two-shillings a go). He quoted me a flat price per volume, and in a few days' time I had entered into the Molineux inheritance.
Since then my yellow-back and board-series collections were considerably enlarged. During the nineteen-thirties I received welcome reinforcements from the collection of the late John Browne of Croydon (who bought his books from Mann Nephews, Cornhill, as loyally as Frances Price bought hers from Seacome or from Harding of Chester and took as good care of them) and a few from that of the excellent Mary Rumfitt, who went in for 'Series' and (most admirable habit) always dated her signature. Latest accretion of all (it could not for obvious reasons find a place in this catalogue) was the extensive file of yellow-back covers in proof many in several states which belonged to the famous firm of Edmund Evans. Evans printed by far the largest proportion of pictorial board covers produced between the early fifties to the mid-nineties, and their file is very comprehensive.

Nevertheless the original Molineux contribution to my Yellow-back collection (see Section II) remained the foundation of the whole. Nearly all the Detection yellow-backs were part of it, as also the elegant little Marryats and other naval novels, the pictorial examples of the Railway Library, and the bulk of the small format reprints of the fifties and early sixties, copies of which nowadays are hardly ever seen. To one small group of yellow-backs nothing (so far as I recall) accrued from any one of the three respected book-buyers above mentioned. Mary Rumfitt would certainly have disapproved; John Browne might well have hesitated before the raised eyebrows of Mann Nephews; but that J. R. Molineux (to whom they would strongly have appealed) passed them by implies that their extreme scarcity goes farther back than the last twenty years. Because this group (though very incomplete in first issue and unequal as to condition in any shape) acts as a link between my fiction library and a non-fiction collection to which I have already referred and to which I am especially attached, I would take leave to mention it.