Collins concentrated instead on four of the ten papers, originally delivered at the ‘Under the Hammer’ conference in London in November 2000, but even so, his discussion of Nigel Ramsay’s paper on ‘English Book Collectors and the Salerooms in the Eighteenth Century’ occasioned, in a subsequent letter to the editor, the displeasure and wrath of Arthur Freeman, whose own ‘The Jazz Age Library of Jerome Kern’ is another of the papers reprinted in Under the Hammer.
John Collins also “slowed to a trot” for Paul Needham’s ‘William Morris’ “Ancient Books” at Sale’; T.A. Birrell’s ‘Books and Buyers in Seventeenth-Century English Auction Sales’; Giles Mandelbrote’s ‘The Organization of Book Auctions in Late-Seventeenth Century London’ and ‘The Sale of Richard Heber’s Library’ by Arnold Hunt, who is working on a full scale book on the subject, but for no better reason than the fact that I was reading the book whilst enjoying an Easter family holiday break in the charming Zeeland town of Zeirikzee, I have focussed on Otto S. Lankhorst’s fascinating paper on ‘Dutch Book Auctions in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’.
The publishers claim that the scholarly contributors have provided in Under the Hammer, a book that is “insightful and full of fascinating detail” and though I may be simply learning what others already knew, this was certainly the case for me where the Lankhorst paper was concerned.
Book auctions seem to have had their origins in the Low Countries and though the earliest surviving
catalogue is dated 1599, it has been suggested that auctions were already common in Louvain in the early 16th century. Between 1599 and 1800, as many as 27,500 sale catalogues may have been issued, but what made the Dutch Republic
pre-eminent in this field?
Lankhorst offers four reasons. First, the unusually high Dutch literacy rate and resulting demand for books and second, the limited availability and poor holdings of public and indeed university libraries. Auctions provided scholars and students a chance to buy out-of-stock material or simply buy at a lower price, and Leiden university stipulated that small auctions should be held only when there were no lectures, and larger auctions only during vacations.
The fact that the Dutch were not so attached as other nations to family possessions, especially libraries, is cited as another reason for the numbers of auctions, but the principal reason is the sheer number of books produced by the very large
number of booksellers and printers in the Dutch Republic.
From the early 17th century booksellers would sell their stock though auctions, adding books to private libraries, or even setting up entirely spurious auctions.
Catalogues titled Bibliotheca anonymiana or Bibliotheca selectissima should be viewed with some suspicion.
Otto Lankhorst naturally goes into much more detail on these and many other matters, such as the
manner in which the sales were catalogued and conducted, or the collection, preservation and
publication of old sale catalogues in institutional collections, and, as with most of the other papers, he provides extensive references to guide those who wish to go further into the subject. All in all, Under the Hammer is an absorbing read.
Joseph Crawhall – a talent for art and eccentricity
In a much longer review that appeared in a recent issue of The Bookdealer, John Collins of Maggs Bros warned that it is “always difficult reviewing a collection of essays; each really needs its own review, so one has to steel one’s heart, and gallop through”.
