Judge Methuen tells me that one of
the most pleasing delusions he has experienced in
his long and active career as a bibliomaniac is that
which is born of the catalogue habit. Presuming
that there are among my readers many laymen, for
I preach salvation to the heathen, I will
explain for their information that the catalogue habit,
so called, is a practice to which the confirmed lover
of books is likely to become addicted. It is
a custom of many publishers and dealers to publish
and to disseminate at certain periods lists of their
wares, in the hope of thereby enticing readers to
buy those wares.
By what means these crafty tradesmen
secure the names of their prospective victims I cannot
say, but this I know full well that there
seems not to be a book-lover on the face of the earth,
I care not how remote or how secret his habitation
may be, that these dealers do not presently find him
out and overwhelm him with their delightful temptations.
I have been told that among booksellers
there exists a secret league which provides for the
interchange of confidences; so that when a new customer
enters a shop in the Fulham road or in Oxford street
or along the quays of Paris, or it matters not where
(so long as the object of his inquiry be a book),
within the space of a month that man’s name and
place of residence are reported to and entered in the
address list of every other bookseller in Christendom,
and forthwith and forever after the catalogues and
price-lists and bulletins of publishers and dealers
in every part of the world are pelted at him through
the unerring processes of the mails.
Judge Methuen has been a victim (a
pleasant victim) to the catalogue habit for the last
forty years, and he has declared that if all the catalogues
sent to and read by him in that space of time were
gathered together in a heap they would make a pile
bigger than Pike’s Peak, and a thousandfold
more interesting. I myself have been a famous
reader of catalogues, and I can testify that the habit
has possessed me of remarkable delusions, the most
conspicuous of which is that which produces within
me the conviction that a book is as good as mine as
soon as I have met with its title in a catalogue, and
set an X over against it in pencil.
I recall that on one occasion I was
discussing with Judge Methuen and Dr. O’Rell
the attempted escapes of Charles I. from Carisbrooke
Castle; a point of difference having arisen, I said:
“Gentlemen, I will refer to Hillier’s
‘Narrative,’ and I doubt not that my argument
will be sustained by that authority.”
It was vastly easier, however, to
cite Hillier than it was to find him. For three
days I searched in my library, and tumbled my books
about in that confusion which results from undue eagerness;
’t was all in vain; neither hide nor hair of
the desired volume could I discover. It finally
occurred to me that I must have lent the book to somebody,
and then again I felt sure that it had been stolen.
No tidings of the missing volume came
to me, and I had almost forgotten the incident when
one evening (it was fully two years after my discussion
with my cronies) I came upon, in one of the drawers
of my oak chest, a Sotheran catalogue of May, 1871.
By the merest chance I opened it, and as luck would
have it, I opened it at the very page upon which appeared
this item:
“Hillier (G.) ’Narrative
of the Attempted Escapes of Charles the First from
Carisbrooke Castle’; cr. 8vo, 1852, cloth,
3/6.”
Against this item appeared a cross
in my chirography, and I saw at a glance that this
was my long-lost Hillier! I had meant to buy it,
and had marked it for purchase; but with the determination
and that pencilled cross the transaction had ended.
Yet, having resolved to buy it had served me almost
as effectively as though I had actually bought it;
I thought aye, I could have sworn I
had bought it, simply because I meant to
buy it.
“The experience is not unique,”
said Judge Methuen, when I narrated it to him at our
next meeting. “Speaking for myself, I can
say that it is a confirmed habit with me to mark certain
items in catalogues which I read, and then to go my
way in the pleasing conviction that they are actually
mine.”
“I meet with cases of this character
continually,” said Dr. O’Rell. “The
hallucination is one that is recognized as a specific
one by pathologists; its cure is quickest effected
by means of hypnotism. Within the last year a
lady of beauty and refinement came to me in serious
distress. She confided to me amid a copious effusion
of tears that her husband was upon the verge of insanity.
Her testimony was to the effect that the unfortunate
man believed himself to be possessed of a large library,
the fact being that the number of his books was limited
to three hundred or thereabouts.
“Upon inquiry I learned that
N. M. (for so I will call the victim of this delusion)
made a practice of reading and of marking booksellers’
catalogues; further investigation developed that N.
M.’s great-uncle on his mother’s side
had invented a flying-machine that would not fly,
and that a half-brother of his was the author of a
pamphlet entitled ‘16 to 1; or the Poor Man’s
Vade-Mecum.’
“‘Madam,’ said I,
’it is clear to me that your husband is afflicted
with catalogitis.’
“At this the poor woman went
into hysterics, bewailing that she should have lived
to see the object of her affection the victim of a
malady so grievous as to require a Greek name.
When she became calmer I explained to her that the
malady was by no means fatal, and that it yielded
readily to treatment.”
“What, in plain terms,”
asked Judge Methuen, “is catalogitis?”
“I will explain briefly,”
answered the doctor. “You must know first
that every perfect human being is provided with two
sets of bowels; he has physical bowels and intellectual
bowels, the brain being the latter. Hippocrates
(since whose time the science of medicine has not
advanced even the two stadia, five parasangs of Xenophon) Hippocrates,
I say, discovered that the brain is subject to those
very same diseases to which the other and inferior
bowels are liable.
“Galen confirmed this discovery
and he records a case (Lib. xi., wherein there
were exhibited in the intellectual bowels symptoms
similar to those we find in appendicitis. The
brain is wrought into certain convolutions, just as
the alimentary canal is; the fourth layer, so called,
contains elongated groups of small cells or nuclei,
radiating at right angles to its plane, which groups
present a distinctly fanlike structure. Catalogitis
is a stoppage of this fourth layer, whereby the functions
of the fanlike structure are suffered no longer to
cool the brain, and whereby also continuity of thought
is interrupted, just as continuity of digestion is
prevented by stoppage of the vermiform appendix.
“The learned Professor Biersteintrinken,”
continued Dr. O’Rell, “has advanced in
his scholarly work on ‘Raderinderkopf’
the interesting theory that catalogitis is produced
by the presence in the brain of a germ which has its
origin in the cheap paper used by booksellers for
catalogue purposes, and this theory seems to have the
approval of M. Marie-Tonsard, the most famous of authorities
on inebriety, in his celebrated classic entitled ‘Un
Trait sur Jacques-Jacques.’”
“Did you effect a cure in the case of N. M.?”
I asked.
“With the greatest of ease,”
answered the doctor. “By means of hypnotism
I purged his intellectuals of their hallucination,
relieving them of their perception of objects which
have no reality and ridding them of sensations which
have no corresponding external cause. The patient
made a rapid recovery, and, although three months have
elapsed since his discharge, he has had no return
of the disease.”
As a class booksellers do not encourage
the reading of other booksellers’ catalogues;
this is, presumably, because they do not care to encourage
buyers to buy of other sellers. My bookseller,
who in all virtues of head and heart excels all other
booksellers I ever met with, makes a scrupulous practice
of destroying the catalogues that come to his shop,
lest some stray copy may fall into the hands of a mousing
book-lover and divert his attention to other hunting-grounds.
It is indeed remarkable to what excess the catalogue
habit will carry its victim; the author of “Will
Shakespeare, a Comedy,” has frequently confessed
to me that it mattered not to him whether a catalogue
was twenty years old so long as it was
a catalogue of books he found the keenest delight
in its perusal; I have often heard Mr. Hamlin, the
theatre manager, say that he preferred old catalogues
to new, for the reason that the bargains to be met
with in old catalogues expired long ago under the
statute of limitations.
Judge Methuen, who is a married man
and has therefore had an excellent opportunity to
study the sex, tells me that the wives of bibliomaniacs
regard catalogues as the most mischievous temptations
that can be thrown in the way of their husbands.
I once committed the imprudence of mentioning the
subject in Mrs. Methuen’s presence: that
estimable lady gave it as her opinion that there were
plenty of ways of spending money foolishly without
having recourse to a book-catalogue for suggestion.
I wonder whether Captivity would have had this opinion,
had Providence ordained that we should walk together
the quiet pathway of New England life; would Yseult
always have retained the exuberance and sweetness
of her youth, had she and I realized what might have
been? Would Fanchonette always have sympathized
with the whims and vagaries of the restless yet loyal
soul that hung enraptured on her singing in the Quartier
Latin so long ago that the memory of that song is
like the memory of a ghostly echo now?
Away with such reflections!
Bring in the candles, good servitor, and range them
at my bed’s head; sweet avocation awaits me,
for here I have a goodly parcel of catalogues with
which to commune. They are messages from Methuen,
Sotheran, Libbie, Irvine, Hutt, Davey, Baer, Crawford,
Bangs, McClurg, Matthews, Francis, Bouton, Scribner,
Benjamin, and a score of other friends in every part
of Christendom; they deserve and they shall have my
respectful nay, my enthusiastic attention.
Once more I shall seem to be in the old familiar
shops where treasures abound and where patient delving
bringeth rich rewards. Egad, what a spendthrift
I shall be this night; pence, shillings, thalers,
marks, francs, dollars, sovereigns they
are the same to me!
Then, after I have comprehended all
the treasures within reach, how sweet shall be my
dreams of shelves overflowing with the wealth of which
my fancy has possessed me!
Then shall my library be devote
To the magic of
Niddy-Noddy,
Including the volumes which Nobody wrote
And the works
of Everybody.