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| A Rough and Ready Copy of Burton's THE BOOK-HUNTER (1863) |
Books
are tough. Raging fire or lengthy submersion
in water can do them in, but otherwise they often survive hard use, neglect,
inquisitive children, pets, lack of climate control, insects, and with a little
luck, many natural disasters. These
rough and ready reading copies are found almost everywhere. But they are rarely encountered on the
shelves of fastidious collectors or in special collections libraries. Unless you collect association copies, then
you must take a book’s condition as it comes.
This thought struck me as I held a book with a Titanic connection. The book is Luther Livingston’s First Editions of George Meredith. . . Offered for Sale by Dodd & Livingston, New York [1912]. It is inscribed to English book collector Clement K. Shorter. Tipped-in is an excellent autograph letter from Livingston to Shorter, discussing, among other things, an upcoming visit by fellow bibliophile Harry Widener to Shorter. Widener is the famous young American collector who perished on the Titanic along with his father, only a few days after seeing Shorter. His mother survived and built the Widener Library at Harvard in his honor. She then placed her twenty-seven-year-old son’s already impressive book collection within. Bookseller and bibliographer Luther Livingston was close to Harry Widener. He was selected as the first librarian of the Widener Library, but he died tragically of a rare bone disease before he could assume the post. His ongoing illness is also mentioned in the letter to Shorter. So, there is a lot to unpack with this association copy and the appeal to me was irresistible, condition be damned.
Bookseller Howard Mather of Wykeham Books knows my interests and offered it to me. His condition description was accurate, but I hoped it might be better than advertised. Nope. The book literally looks as if it had gone down on the Titanic and later swept ashore. I passed this feedback onto Mather giving him a good laugh. Perhaps Shorter was reading it in the bathtub and let it slip. Maybe it was fire-hosed during the London Blitz of World War II. Whatever the case, it is thoroughly dried out now, a little wavy, somewhat crinkly, certainly stained, but a survivor. A relic.
This thought struck me as I held a book with a Titanic connection. The book is Luther Livingston’s First Editions of George Meredith. . . Offered for Sale by Dodd & Livingston, New York [1912]. It is inscribed to English book collector Clement K. Shorter. Tipped-in is an excellent autograph letter from Livingston to Shorter, discussing, among other things, an upcoming visit by fellow bibliophile Harry Widener to Shorter. Widener is the famous young American collector who perished on the Titanic along with his father, only a few days after seeing Shorter. His mother survived and built the Widener Library at Harvard in his honor. She then placed her twenty-seven-year-old son’s already impressive book collection within. Bookseller and bibliographer Luther Livingston was close to Harry Widener. He was selected as the first librarian of the Widener Library, but he died tragically of a rare bone disease before he could assume the post. His ongoing illness is also mentioned in the letter to Shorter. So, there is a lot to unpack with this association copy and the appeal to me was irresistible, condition be damned.
Bookseller Howard Mather of Wykeham Books knows my interests and offered it to me. His condition description was accurate, but I hoped it might be better than advertised. Nope. The book literally looks as if it had gone down on the Titanic and later swept ashore. I passed this feedback onto Mather giving him a good laugh. Perhaps Shorter was reading it in the bathtub and let it slip. Maybe it was fire-hosed during the London Blitz of World War II. Whatever the case, it is thoroughly dried out now, a little wavy, somewhat crinkly, certainly stained, but a survivor. A relic.
