Pebbles From Gissing Pond

I

I AM not a bibliographer; not even, in any exact sense, a bibliophile. I have a certain suspicion of those who are oversedulous of paper, bindings, types, and margins. Like any man in his senses, I prefer well-made, workmanlike books, legible, portable, durable. Yet sometimes I echo Tennyson’s line from In Memoriam: ‘So careful of the type? But no!’ For what concerns me is the immediate impact of a book upon the mind. Anything in the way of rich ornament, excessive bulk, eccentric typography, or slovenly editing impedes the true purpose. And a first edition, especially one too prized for casual use, does not necessarily bring us any closer to the heart and mind of the writer. An autograph scrawled in polite complaisance is an escape, not a communication. What then? So tender of the author’s mood? It is his tenth or hundredth printing, rather than his first, that brings him strength. Perhaps in the genial enthusiasms of editioneering there has sometimes been trop de zèle. Perhaps it is not untimely to say a few words about collecting the contents of books rather than their physical adjuncts.

In the 158th Totler (April 13, 1710) you may read Addison’s gay scherzo on Tom Folio, the ’broker in learning, employed to get together good editions and stock the libraries of great men ’: —

There is not a catalogue printed that doth not come to him wet from the press. He is a universal scholar, so far as the title page of all authors. He has a greater esteem for Aldus and Elzevir, than for Virgil and Horace. He thinks he gives you an account of an author, when he tells you the subject he treats of, the name of the editor, and the year in which it was printed. Or, if you draw him into further particulars, he cries up the goodness of the paper, extols the diligence of the corrector, and is transported with the beauty of the letter. This he looks upon to be sound learning, and substantial criticism.

You will hardly have missed Addison’s sly pun on Tom Folio and tomfoolery. He knew that books exist primarily to be read, and to carry their noble ecstasies and anxieties to the mind. Virgil and Horace are more important than Aldus and Elzevir. Chaucer, Montaigne, Melville, remain of greater circumstance than the most talented of their typothetæ. The text itself concerns us more than the mise en page.

To soliloquize in so enormous a field of allusion has its dangers. It is like driving a car from Long Island into New York City over the miracle of the great Queensborough Bridge. On either side, glittering in diagonal light, are the bristling spires and terraced minarets of Manhattan, foreshortened, from that despicable vantage, into strange rhomboids of dazzle and shade. But the driver dare only divine them on the outer fringe of his retina. He must keep his car in line in that roaring stream of traffic. So our only hope here can be to keep the steering wheel steady and follow the narrow little track we have marked for ourselves.

II

Of the technique of bibliography I know very little. It is a hobby for specialists, and has a symbolic notation of its own almost as intricate as algebra. It is full of fascinating dissensions and curious quibbles. It has a historic and mountainous literature. You can get some notion of its technical severities in a little book like Iolo Williams’s The Elements of Book Collecting, which I esteem specially for its lively outburst against the naïveté often shown in the matter of bookplates. You may pursue it more informally in John T. Winterich’s Primer of Book Collecting, which gives an accurate case history of a beginning collector. It would be almost too trite, except that new amateurs are born every day, to mention the most famous modern title in this field. November 1918 was doubly a division of epochs. The wars of Europe entered a new phase, and the book was published which begot a whole new generation of devotees. When that generation speaks of its ABC, it always means Mr. Newton’s delightful Amenities of Booh Collecting.

Bibliography, like mathematics, has two great branches: pure and applied. Pure bibliography, the exact science of describing and identifying books, requires in the student almost as complicated technical equipment as that of the medico-legal detective Dr. Thorndyke. Printers’ and binders’ casualties, which distress the author or reader, are the meat and drink of the scientific bibliographer. There is even a dissecting-room phase; the completely conscientious collator, to be certain of the history of the volume in question, may have to dismember it altogether in order to examine it signature by signature. This is the perfect analogy of the operation which is a brilliant clinical success, but the patient expires.

Pure bibliography, with its absorbing oddities of variant copies, cancels, watermarks, dust wrappers, advertisement insertions, misnumbered signatures, issues, impressions, Anglo-American priorities, I leave humbly on one side. My amateurish inquest I call applied bibliography, and avail myself of it only so far as it helps me to reproduce my author’s mood. I am in low standing among rigorous collectors because I care little for ‘mint state.’ Unopened copies such as please the moguls are small joy to me. A book that has never been read has never been born. I like my copy to show signs of life and use. Literature is a form of companionship, and surely we do not love our friend less because he has a wrinkle in his coat or a crack in his shoe.

Also from active experience in the world of editing and publishing I know something (no one can know all) of the queer anomalies and accidents of the press and the bindery. I take many bibliographers’ cherished ’points’ with a sprinkle of salt, for I know how printed sheets get held, mislaid, shuffled about. First-printed does not necessarily mean first-bound, for in a small press-run the sheets that come latest from the press go earliest to the folding machines. Many sheets of an authentic first printing may not get bound until long afterward, and in a case of quite different material. If a book seems to be selling well, a second printing may be ordered almost immediately — before publication, even. When these copies come from the bindery they are piled on top of what remains at that time of the original stock. Orders as they arrive are naturally filled from the top of the pile. Perhaps presently a third printing is deposited on top of the second. I know of at least one book which is usually listed at a modest premium by edition dealers, but there are several hundred copies of the first issue still in the publisher’s stockroom, available — oh, how available! — at the published price.

Stark error may intervene to complicate the problem. A few years ago there was a book which seemed to be going briskly; the Christmas season approached, and the sales department wished to be sure there was enough stock on hand. They called for a count. There were 15,000 copies in the bins, but by a slip of the pencil the stock clerk reported 1500. This threw a spasm of alarm into the upstairs office. Fifteen thousand more copies were ordered printed and bound, and rushed through. By the time the error was discovered there were 30,000 copies in the stockroom; and just about then a phenomenon took place that no author can ever understand and which sometimes happens with mysterious suddenness. The sale of that book stopped. In spite of ingenious efforts, in which reprint publishers and tobacconists and eminent druggists like Mr. Liggett have borne their share, there are still some thousands of survivors of that fatal error in decimals. That is why, when about one hundred people buy that book at Christmas time, as every year about one hundred people do, they are surprised to note the date 1927 at the foot of the title-page.

There are occasions also when perhaps the numbering machine used for counting off limited editions is too faithful to its art. I remember the loud cry of anguish uttered by a conscientious bookseller when I called to his attention a de luxe volume he had on sale. It said something like this: ‘This edition is limited to 950 copies of which this is number 2388.’ Nor can the bookseller always be counted on to be without guile. I have a copy of Kenneth Grahame’s Pagan Papers dated 1898 in which the page facing title speaks of itself as second edition; the copyright page is imprinted third edition; yet a renowned Oxford bookseller inscribed the front cover as first edition, scarce, and sold it as such to a confiding beginner. The genuine first, of which I also have a copy, was dated 1894,

III

The most cautious bibliographers are those who have had intimate printing-house experience. The serious student of these matters will acquaint himself with the Bibliographia series (‘Studies in Book History and Book Structure’), a witenagemot presided over by Mr. Michael Sadleir, himself publisher, novelist, and critic. He has been probably the luckiest of all bibliographers, for his expert book on a great novelist, simply entitled Trollope, was undoubtedly bought by a certain number of customers who saw the title listed and thought it a novel of the demimonde. I remember that when there was a front-page scandal going on among New York ecclesiastics an alert bookseller down town managed to dispose of a long-lingering copy of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life just by putting it in the window.

In the Bibliographia series one volume is by Mr. R. W. Chapman of the Oxford University Press, whom I like to think of as the ideal modern bibliographer: a printer, an editor, a scholar, an acute explorer among byways of ink, and a writer of exceptional grace. If you want to feel the full pulse of bibliophile blood, see Mr. Chapman’s little book of essays, The Portrait of a Scholar (1920). Those beautiful studies, written in dugouts in Macedonia during the war, have more depth and sweetness of feeling than most of us could compass in the quiet of an easy sanctum. Apparently Mr. Chapman has a special skill in doing his writing in surprising places. Once I had a long letter from him written at the Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh, where he had taken refuge to compile his index of Jane Austen’s letters. He dated it ‘12:9:26,’ which by our customary American notation would mean December 9, 1926. But British usage on this point is unvaryingly logical: first the day, then the month, then the year. So Mr. Chapman’s letter was not written on December 9, but on 12th September. I have seen autograph cataloguers go wrong by not realizing this difference in usage. One of the first requirements of the bibliographer in our language is a shrewd observation of Anglo-American divergences.

For instance, in A. P. Herbert’s fine mystery story, The House by the River,he speaks of a character who was so insignificant that his death would be announced only on the front pages of the newspapers. To understand this you need to be familiar with the makeup of British journalism. An excellent English detective story failed of success over here because it hinged upon a feature of English railroading entirely unknown in America — a ‘slip carriage.’ Similarly I have seen British visitors darkly puzzled by a statement on a Long Island Railroad time-table about Daylight Saving. ‘During the balance of the year, trains will operate on Eastern Standard Time.’ ‘What do they mean by the balance of the year?’ said my Englishman. ‘Is it the equinox?’

If you make bibliography your hobby, you are choosing not a bed of roses but a field of battle. There is nowhere more militant difference of opinion than that of rival authorities on ‘issues’ and ‘states.’ Collectors are by nature crotchety, sentimental, and humorous (in the Elizabethan sense), or they would n’t be collectors. Furthermore, the will to believe is exceptionally strong in respect of one’s own cherished copy. And the complex is inflamed by the frolicsome irresponsibility of many booksellers’ catalogues, which often list fallacious ‘points’ on very inadequate scrutiny of the problem. The London Times Literary Supplement not long ago very justly reproached

those booksellers who, observing some slight variant between two volumes — the date, perhaps, of an advertisement — leap to the conclusion that it is of important ‘issue significance,’ and, without the justification of real evidence or real reasoning, lend to their inference the oracular authority of a printed catalogue; the mistake is repeated in other catalogues or even in apparently expert bibliographies, and once the ball is set rolling there is no stopping it.

The happy credulity of some collectors has never been more genially described than by Eugene Field in his Love-Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. This is his diagnosis of the disease ‘ catalogitis ’:

Every human being has 2 sets of bowels — physical and intellectual. The brain is the intellectual bowels. Catalogitis is a stoppage in the fanlike structure of the 4th layer of brain so the ideas are no longer cooled and the continuity of thought is interrupted. It is caused by a germ which grows in the cheap paper used by booksellers for catalogue purposes.

Even more than most of us the bibliographer has to refrain from leaping into the cathedral chair of dogmatism. There are some disputes, such as the colored-paper issues of Leaves of Grass or how many copies of Alice in Wonderland were dated 1865, that are unlikely ever to be settled. Sometimes there is no such thing as certainty. In the words of the philosophic London charwoman quoted by Professor Mackail, ‘There ynt no ’appiness in this world; we just got to be ’appy withaht it.’ What standing, for instance, would the prenatal copies prepared for the Book Clubs have among collectors? These are usually galley proofs cut to page size, bound up and sent to the committees of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and so forth, for consideration. Like trial balloons I have set quite a number of these adrift through the Union Square Book Shop or Mendoza’s on Ann Street, to puzzle connoisseurs and see what might happen.

IV

Peculiarly interesting is the task of the enthusiast who has set himself the job of compiling the bibliography of a living writer. We must assume that he esteems the work of his author, yet he has a natural desire to see his bibliography complete. A friend of mine, engaged upon such a catalogue, was appalled to learn that to round out his collection he must buy the whole set of the latest edition of the Encyclopœdia Britannica, his subject having chanced to contribute an article to it. The author himself begins to feel an embarrassment in knowing that everything he publishes makes his bibliographer’s task more complicated. He begins to suspect that, like Goldsmith’s lovely woman who stooped to be conquered, there is only one thing he can do to help: —

When authors find themselves collected
And learn, alas, that men collate
Their books for errors unsuspected
Or copies in a pristine state;

Also, since authors are human beings and sometimes have a sense of mischief, they may enjoy playing tag with collectors. This has been suggested by William McFee in his vigorous preface to James T. Babb’s bibliography. I knew when I first met Mr. Babb that he had the lion-hearted spirit required in a true bibliographer. It was a bitterly cold night just before Christmas; I had been giving a talk at the admirable Hampshire Bookshop, which is one of the not least valuable assets of Smith College. At the back of a roomful of young women I was startled to see two determined-looking gentlemen. These were Mr. Babb and a friend, who had driven all the way from New Haven to get some information about Messrs. McFee and Tomlinson, who were the subjects of their collecting zeal. After the meeting they seized the lecturer, thrust him into their well-ventilated vehicle, and said they would drive him, through the cold New England night, all the way back to Springfield, provided he would discuss some moot points of bibliography. The curtains were put down against the gale, and in that sinister journey Mr. Babb’s bibliography of McFee, lately published, was really born. The meeting ended with coffee and Western sandwiches in a lunch wagon in Springfield, which averted a gathering rheum; it was followed by a generous parcel of medicament which arrived by express bearing only the dispatch identification ‘Samuel Weller, New Haven, Conn.’ It may be mere coincidence, but I have never yet met a book collector who was a Prohibitionist.

The old problem of the Wars of English and American Succession is specially interesting in the case of an author like Mr. McFee. They tell us that up to the time when he became an American citizen his English firsts were presumably more desirable; since then, the American firsts. But that canon will not settle all problems. The usual sentimental reason given for the esteem of a first edition is that the collector likes to have the book in the format in which it was first seen by the author. Well, take the case of Stevenson; a book such as The Wrong Box, published practically simultaneously in London and New York. Surely it was the Scribner edition which reached him first, in Samoa? I consider my Scribner first, which cost me only a few cents at Leary’s in Philadelphia, quite as intimate an association as the Longmans, Green edition could be. There is a lot of absurd nonsense fostered about Anglo-American priorities. I believe it is true that the English first of Huckleberry Finn antedates the American, and the other day I saw the English edition listed by a London bookseller at £40. But who on earth, unless the copy itself has special associations, would want an English first of Huck?

My interest in bibliography (if any) is toward its more human emanations. There are occasional books that effuse or emanate what Walt used to call eidolons — phantoms or electrons of personality. I remember Andre Maurois’s anecdote of Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet, whose extraordinary Journal of My Other Self is one of the most fascinating duplicities of our time. I may remember it imperfectly, but the gist of the story was that a shy misogynist was perturbed one autumn to find himself greeted and followed on the streets by Viennese ladies who clustered about him without the slightest provocation on his part. Terrified, he found them sitting beside him at pavement cafés and offering him drink; beckoning him into crepuscular taxicabs. To prevent his nervous collapse an inquiry was held by his friends; it appeared that he was wearing an old overcoat that had once belonged to the emotional Rilke. So even the exuviæ of a great poet may ejaculate vibrations of their own.

I pass to another phase of our subject, only asking leave at this point to jot down two axioms. First, the most valuable first editions are those that never knew they were first editions. And second, the autograph most worth having is the one that was never intended as such.

V

I never thought of myself as a collector — except that I once hired a room in an office building to collect my thoughts — until quite lately. During a shelf cleaning among my books I found a cardboard box in which for several years, obeying some subconscious instinct, I had hidden small odds and ends that seemed too precious to throw away. I found there so curious an assortment of relics that I was startled. Evidently I was more of a jackdaw than I had realized. There were ticket stubs of many colors from an old theatre in Hoboken. There was a piece of copper wire, a silvertopped cork, a white quartz Indian arrowhead, sea shells from a Long Island beach, a mass of unidentifiable keys, buckles from broken wrist-watch straps, and a number of foreign coins. There were buttons, an eraser, old dog-license tags, and a fragment of stained glass from Chartres Cathedral. Every piece of this diverse rubbish, had we space to consider it, might be the theme of a story; added together, they would compile into an autobiography. As I contemplated them, in the rueful mood of an executor for several of my dead selves, it struck me that some of these trifles, poor to alien view but full of meaning to me, might be what Stevenson called moral emblems. They might even symbolize the various modes of feeling that impel us to treasure books.

The copper wire was from an old telephone booth, now dismantled, which served for many years in a college dormitory as the sole outlet of romance. That wire, which seems in its somewhat tarnished color to show signs of atomic fatigue, had been used by many generations of Haverford boys calling up Bryn Mawr. How many naïve young electrolyses had passed through that soft metal! I said to myself that the copper wire might symbolize literature as Communication.

The silver cork, from a set of four little glass phials one of which got broken, — a gift from a Bourbon connoisseur, — suddenly revealed itself as a symbol of literature as Intoxication or Ecstasy; also as Narcotic or Sedative.

The Indian arrowhead was picked up on the front lawn of a Long Island home one blazing summer when, on account of drouth, the roots of the grass lay bare and one tended the turf more closely than usual. It had lain there, I suppose, since the red men of Paumanok were pushed off by the first Dutch commuters. It was still razorsharp; it reminded me that books, too, are sometimes piercing missiles. This was literature as Penetration.

The scrap of stained glass, one of the bits of old mediæval blue that were broken when those noble windows were buried for safety during the war, was given me by the curator of Chartres himself. He sleeps alone with a dog in that cathedral at night. Sometimes I wonder what that blue west window may be like at full moon. Perhaps this fragment of color, dull until you hold it against the sky, suggests literature as a form of translucence. If we remember our Shelley, we are bound to be reminded of the complete white light of being reaching us through the colored panes of human emotion. This typifies the Mystic function of literature.

And in the cardboard box there was one more very humble item, so commonplace that I almost scruple to mention it: a minute corkscrew such as is supplied with the bottles of a certain much-advertised disinfectant. This suggests the antitoxic properties of our art — literature as Purification.

Obviously this schedule of symbols is haphazard and fanciful. I was about to say ‘merely’ fanciful; but what else is the privilege of letters but to let the fancy roam? I felt that these trivial emblems were chosen for me by some instinct wiser than myself. And at the bottom of that box of souvenirs were still two other small objects, two pebbles. One was from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. When my friend Captain David Bone, master of the Anchor liner Transylvania, comes on soundings, approaching the Newfoundland Banks, the lead, which has a pocket of tallow at the base, brings up from the sea floor sand and shells and small brown pebbles. He was collecting the best of these pebbles with the idea of making a deep-sea necklace for his daughter. He gave me one of them and it amused me to keep it beside a little white stone I had found at the bottom of Gissing Pond, which is only a small pool in suburban Long Island, but which a dog called Mr. Gissing once mistook for the ocean itself. As I look at those two trophies, the pebble from Gissing Pond is more impressive than the other. It is often so in the soundings of literature. You cannot always tell at first glance which specimen comes from the greater depths. In our reveries we may bring up both kinds of pebbles — some from deep oceans (remember that out of the mere hearsay of a coral island Shakespeare edified his Tempest), some from shallow suburban ponds.

VI

I was pleased, the very day I was writing down these notes, to observe the New York Times remarking that ‘the real beauty of a book as an entity is obscured in the mad hunt for bibliographical quiddities.’ I commend, as pastime for the collector of ideas, tracing back the spiritual genealogy of the books we love. I mean their genealogies in our own minds: when we first heard of them, first saw them, first owned them. Some are always tinctured for us by the special circumstances in which we first met them. We hear a great deal about ‘association copies,’ by which the experts always mean sentimental kaleidoscopes of the author. But we readers have associations, too; they are our own, and no one can dictate them to us.

By what long-delayed and queerly twisted approaches we have met the books that mean most! I cannot forget that it was in a Russian bookshop on the East Side of New York that I first met one of the greatest of American testimonies, Walt Whitman’s prose. Not schools nor colleges nor the more fashionable bookstores of the Western avenues had brought home to my business and bosom the fact that Walt had written a whole volume of prose, perhaps just as important as his poems, and which, as Mr. Canby has said, we neglect at our peril. Walt has been admitted to the Hall of Fame, but that settles none of the problems he raises both for critic and for citizen. The familiar arguments are still urged against him. I was amused to see a letter in the Philadelphia Public Ledger last spring in which a sturdy Philadelphian reproached the canonization. ’Residents of this city,’ he wrote, ‘remember Whitman simply as a picturesque, lovable loafer who used to be seen on Market Street frequently with a market basket on his arm and sans necktie. He was a poser, as his life’s story will show; shirked his responsibility wherever possible, and the only thing that was commendable in his entire career was his work as a nurse during the Civil War.’ Philadelphia, a great textile city, naturally resented Walt’s not buying neckties, just as his generous hosts in Germantown did not relish his habit of dallying in the bathroom to sing. Yes, he made bathroom topics lyrical — which is naturally hard to forgive for those who are waiting to get in.

It was from a provincial bookseller in England that I first heard of Alexander Smith’s Dreamthorp, sweetest and most sedative of books. Yet I think it was fifteen years before I actually saw a copy: it was Mr. John C. Eckel, eminent collector in Philadelphia, who gave me a first edition (1863). Alexander Smith was born in 1830 at Kilmarnock in Scotland, a town that has a memorable sound in booklovers’ ears. His father was a designer of patterns for Paisley shawls; is it too fanciful to see a similar warm color and fine weave in the son’s prose? Alexander Smith was one of the first of those moderns who have made the grim city of Glasgow famous in the arts. But he seceded to her rival and became secretary of Edinburgh University. The career of university executives is an exhausting one; we are told that he died ‘of overwork and anxiety’ just past his thirty-sixth birthday. These memoranda would be justified if they did nothing more than introduce a few new readers to Dreamthorp.

These unasked confessions have the more candor because it chances that this winter, for the first time in several years, I find myself living in town, divided from my books, except fifteen or so needed as iron ration. Perhaps it is a queer sense of relief. Those loaded shelves had become a spiritual menace; they overhung my life. But, making a Gonzalo’s choice, I was startled at their endlessly interlacing roots of association. Once I read that the reason why sowing wild oats became a phrase of reproach was because the wild oat, an unimpressive plant itself, has tough tendrils that stretch thirty feet horizontally underground and can never be wholly eradicated. These books I love are my wild oats. Every one ejaculates whole nerve systems of human relationship.

I spoke, for instance, of the old bookseller in Suffolk who introduced me to Dreamthorp; more accurately, he introduced me to Mosher’s Bibelots, where I first read of the book. That fine old gentleman (I have described him in Shandygaff) had known Edward FitzGerald, and remembered FitzGerald and Tennyson walking down the Woodbridge street together. He had known Bernard Barton, the Quaker banker to whom Charles Lamb wrote his famous letters. He had even known a soldier who stood guard over Napoleon at St. Helena. Again, a few years ago I used to see in Riverside Park an old gentleman who remembered Washington Irving. In our own Long Island village there was until lately a bookseller who lamented that the copy of Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman gave William Cullen Bryant disappeared for a dollar at a parish rummage sale. There is in that same village a Russian furniture dealer who grew up as a boy on Count Tolstoy’s estate. He says the peasants did not think of Tolstoy as a philanthropist because he gave away his property, but just as a madman. Look where you may along a bookshelf, those wild-oat roots stretch in every direction. Shakespeare himself is only ten begats away.

VII

Since we have spoken of Gissing Pond, it is only mannerly to explain that name a little further. It was in Mosher’s catalogues that I first heard of Gissing, but it was one of the staff of Brentano’s bookstore, dead many years now, who started me reading him. I remember the blank look that went round the editorial circle of a large publishing house, about 1916, when I urged that it might be worth while to put some of George Gissing’s novels back in print. True, it would have been a losing venture; yet among critics and collectors there has been in these fifteen years a remarkable revival of interest in his sombre talent. It became a habit with me never to visit a secondhand bookstore without looking for something by Gissing.

I like to think that there may even have been some hereditary influence at work. My grandfather was at one time a director of the firm of Chapman and Hall, Dickens’s publishers. The literary adviser of the company was George Meredith. In an old scrapbook kept by my grandfather is a letter from Meredith asking him to read the MS. of one of Hardy’s early novels. Meredith turned down a number of books that afterward became famous: East Lynne, The Heavenly Twins, Erewhon, and novels by Ouida and Mrs. Lynn Linton and Bernard Shaw. I feel a sort of perverted thrill in knowing that a novel written by an uncle of mine was declined by Meredith. But among the writers to whom he gave their first substantial encouragement were Hardy and Gissing. Since he and my grandfather used to exchange notes on such matters, I like to believe that the latter may have read some Gissing in MS.

At any rate, my own enthusiasm grew steadily. It chanced that on the day that a copy of By the Ionian Sea reached me our furnace man brought us a puppy in his pocket. The dog was christened Gissing. He was a dog with many theological overtones, and became the hero of a little fable which was begun for the amusement of some children but changed itself into something rather different. When that story was made public I realized that it was outrageous to call its caninehuman hero Mr. Gissing, and the little ocean of his adventures Gissing Pond. (Queerly enough, its name in local tradition is Black Ink.) Yet he would take no other name. I have often thought apologetically about this, for many readers have supposed there was some covert satire intended.

Gissing is one of the very few authors for whom I have deliberately gone to the dealers in rarity and bought first editions. My first of The Odd Women (three volumes, Lawrence and Bullen, 1893) cost me $15.¹ The first of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Constable, 1903) is one of the modern books most worth coveting. It was Gissing’s last completed work (Veranilda was unfinished at his death). Ryecroft was the book in which, after years of bitterness and struggle, happier conditions of life allowed some of his natural sweetness to emerge. It is n’t an expensive book, considering its unique appeal; I saw it listed at £5 in one of Elkin Mathews’s catalogues last summer. At the bar of a New York speak-easy, where talk had suddenly grown warm and confiding among the group of chance-met casuals, I heard a woman, not herself bookish in habit, speak of

Ryecroft with passionate enthusiasm. She had forgotten both title and author, but the flavor of the book had remained vital in her memory. Presently we identified it from what she said, and she cried, ’Ryecroft! That’s it! How I could have loved that man! ’ He needed it. He was a sadly observant student of women, but those who read his stories attentively divine that he had benefited little by the supreme energies liberated in happy relations with the other half of humanity.

Those curious about Gissing can read much between the lines in the veiled biography of him — how accurate it is I have no idea — by his friend Morley Roberts. It is called The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912), and interestingly precedes some later fashions in pseudobiography. The most personal association copy of Ryecroft is the one Gissing gave Roberts at St. Jean de Luz in the Pyrenees shortly before his death. It was the first copy he inscribed, and I believe it is adrift somewhere in this country. When Gissing was thirty he wrote to his younger sister, Ellen Gissing, apropos of the reviews of Demos: —

I have got at last something of a standing.... I think of very little but art, pure and simple, and all my work is profoundly pessimistic as far as mood goes. Never mind; if I live another ten years, there shall not be many contemporary novelists ahead of me; for I am only beginning my work. . . . Scott and Thackeray did not begin till they were forty.

He did live those ten years; he died at forty-six, on December 28, 1903. In recent years St. Jean de Luz has become quite a favorite resort for American tourists; often cheerful travelers tell me of its plage, its casino, its lively little shops and villas, but I have never met anyone who remembered its association with the novelist of New Grub Street.