I began collecting when I was six – and not in a casual way either: Rather, it was a bit obsessive and over the intervening 67 years nothing much has changed. My collecting was however severely curtailed by my lack of disposable income until about 15 years ago.
As a child I collected the cards that came with boxes of breakfast cereals as well as stamps and, a little later, coins. One positive spin-off was that I learnt something about other countries and about our history. In the mid 1980s I began collecting books about Australian history. I soon realised that to be a successful collector you needed to build the specialised knowledge that goes with it in regard to what books are rare, what authors are worth collecting and what is a fair price for them.
The problem with this is that, like Oscar Wilde, I can resist anything except temptation – and so when confronted with a few 1st editions of C J Denis and Mary Gilmore at a cheap price, I soon broadened my area of collecting to include Australian literature. This was long before the internet and so my collecting was restricted to second hand bookshops in Newcastle, where I live, with the occasional foray to bookshops in Sydney where I found the prices were about double what they were where I lived!
This seemed to work well until one day in 1992 I ventured into the upstairs room of Cooks Hill Books and found a full set of The Yellow Book just begging for a good home (13 vols with the first four containing art work by Aubrey Beardsley as well as poetry and essays by most of the English Decadents).
There were also copies of The Savoy and related ephemera. I couldn’t really afford them but I totally agree with the sentiments expressed by Susan Sontag when she wrote: “To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else’s collection rather than your own.” (1) So, what was I supposed to do? Later I became familiar with that talented reprobate, Leonard Smithers who, during the 1890s, published some beautiful books by authors that W B Yeats referred to as “the tragic generation”. Few lived to be old, and fewer still lived to find much happiness yet their contribution to English literature is not insignificant.
During this time I also discovered William Nicholson who was the more talented half of the Beggarstaff Brothers. He produced many striking posters and art books during the 1890s when Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Cheret, Alphonse Mucha, Maxfield Parrish and many others were turning poster design into an art form that attracted much admiration – and inevitably many collectors including myself.
About 15 years ago I inherited money from my father. He had relatively little education, while I have a degree in Economics and one in History. It is therefore somewhat ironic that he was much better than I was in making money. To collect rare books you need money. This was in a period when the A$ was close to parity with the US$ and also healthy against the UK pound. And so I was soon bidding at rare book auctions held in London and New York. I had fun while the good times lasted, buying early editions of the works of Edmund Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney, Geoffrey Chaucer, Ben Jonson, John Donne as well as an early edition of Euclid’s Geometry translated into English with a preface by John Dee who, as you may know was an alchemist and advisor at the Court of Elizabeth I, along with the large 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles.
But postage costs, the GST on imported books and the poor exchange rate put a stop to buying overseas. (The A$, I’m pleased to report, is currently doing somewhat better than the currency of Zimbabwe though a bit weak compared to anything else!)
During the last decade I’ve focused on early Australian books, such as almanacs and directories, along with some more modern art books from private presses. I’ve also become more interested in the issue of provenance – and not just previous owners but also the early Australian printers, book binders, publishers and book sellers as well as authors. When I write about some of these lesser known, or in some cases totally unknown people, for Biblionews I feel that I’m giving them a little bit of immortality. And for me its important that the contribution of these people is not totally forgotten. In handling their books, and even reading the occasional one, I experience a connection with them across the many decades since they were alive. In the words of the theme song of The Detectorists sometimes “I’m with the ghosts of the men who can never sing again.” Like the main characters in that television series, I’m also looking for rare artifacts from the past – and in doing so, like them, I’m a time traveler to days and places long gone.
1. Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. p 25.