The Most Famous Book Auction Never to Be Held

Last week, for the first time, I obtained some books for my collection at a book auction. Up until now, I’ve always either bought my books retail or received them as generous gifts. Buying at auction -- even just attending an auction -- was quite a different experience: sometimes frustrating, sometimes heart-racing, always eye-opening. Before going, I picked up some practical tips (always sit in the back) as well as some buying tips (it’s easier to outbid a dealer than a collector, since the dealer will almost always drop out while the lot is still under retail value). Nearly 300 lots went in about two hours; I ended up with one lot of two books, but it was well worth it.

Rather than write about those books this week, however, the experience got me thinking about another, much more infamous book auction: the Fortsas Auction of 1840. The Fortsas Auction was famous because of the literal uniqueness of every item in its catalog; it was infamous because the event never took place. It is known to most book historians as The Fortsas Bibliohoax.

Here’s a succinct account of the story from the “Hoax Archive” at the Museum of Hoaxes:

Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, was a man with a singular passion. He collected books of which only one copy was known to exist [his fake silhouette is shown here]. If he ever discovered that one of the volumes in his library had a duplicate anywhere in the world, he would immediately dispose of it. So when he died on September 1, 1839 he possessed only fifty-two books, but each of them was absolutely unique.

His heir, not sharing the old man's passion for book collecting, arranged for an auction to sell off the library, and so a catalog of this small but highly unusual collection was mailed to bibliophiles throughout Europe [title page shown below]. The auction, the collectors were told, was to be held in the offices of Mâitre Mourlon, notary, 9 rue de l'Église, in Binche, Belgium on August 10, 1840.

When Europe's librarians and intellectuals received the catalog, they could scarcely believe their eyes. The books would have been valuable even if duplicate copies had existed, but the fact that each one was unique made them priceless. The catalog contained detailed descriptions of the books, as well as numerous comments. A typical comment read:

A manuscript note attributes this work to Pere Felix Grebard, private secretary to the noted Huet, bishop of Avranches. This Pere Grebard is likewise the author of a very rare tragedy, 'La mort de Henry le grand,' which I have had in my collection, but of which I rid myself, having learned that Mons. J. Ketele of Audenarde had another copy of it.

On August 9, the day before the auction, the collectors descended on Binche like a pack of vultures. The Belgian government even sent an official representative, believing that the collection was so valuable that it should be bought in its entirety and kept in the country.

But only disappointment greeted the hopeful buyers. Try as they might, they could not locate any street named "rue de l'Église" in the town of Binche.

Their spirits sunk even lower when they read an announcement in the newspaper informing them that the town of Binche had decided to purchase the entire collection for its public library.

Disheartened, some of the collectors returned home, but others stayed, curious to view the unique books in their new home. But although they searched and searched, they couldn't find the library anywhere. Only then did it gradually dawn on them. There was no Binche public library. There was no Comte de Fortsas. The entire auction and list of unique books had been an enormous, elaborately designed hoax.

The man behind the hoax was a local antiquarian named Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon (1802-1889). The planning that had gone into the deception was incredible. He had carefully researched the interests of all the major bibliophiles in Europe in order to ensure that they would make the long and fruitless trek to Binche. And he had done all this merely for the sake of a practical joke.

The hoax proved not to be a total loss for its victims. The catalog they had received itself became a highly coveted collector's item. Within a few decades it had more than quadrupled in price.

There was such demand for the catalog, that the printer of the original catalog, M. Hoyois, decided to publish a few more copies of it. However, Chalon forbade him from doing so, leading to a legal battle between the two men. This dispute is described in The Bibliographer: A Journal of Book-Lore (June, 1884):

In 1855, M. Hoyois issued a prospectus for a reimpression of the Fortsas Catalogue, with the orders and correspondence of various bibliophiles with regard to the supposed sale, and a facsimile of a letter from the Count de Fortsas. M. Chalons forbade this re-impression, and a division arose between the friends. M. Chalons took legal measures to prevent M. Hoyois from reprinting the Catalogue, and also influenced the Societe des Bibliophiles Belges to refuse their subscription to the book.

The University of Delaware Library also has a brief account of the hoax that includes a short bibliography of works related to it. In August 2008, to celebrate the anniversary, Boston book-collector and librarian Jeremy Dibbell, at PhiloBiblios, marked the occasion by writing a blog post about the event and setting up a LibraryThing shelf of the Comte’s precious books. If they don’t exist in reality, I suppose, they can at least be seen in virtual reality.

Which brings us to this week’s book. This is a copy of the limited edition, 1986 revised and newly annotated version of bibliography, historian, and Sherlock Holmesian Walter Klinefelter’s The Fortsas Bibliohoax, of which only 378 copies were printed. The book was originally published by the Carteret Book Club of Newark in 1941 as a limited run of 128 copies, printed by the Press of the Woolly Whale. A reprint of 200 copies followed in 1942. The 1986 edition includes an unusually comprehensive colophon that provides a great deal of information about the book’s production: it was printed by Ward Schori of Evanston, Ilinois using artisan Rudolph Ruzicka’s Fairfield font (manufactured by Boston Linotype Composition, also of Evanston) on acid-free Brockway Text paper and bound by John LaRiviere of Chicago (whom Schori often used). Schori was a noted printer and journalist who specialized in highly-collectible miniature books from the early 1960s up until his death in 1995.

The book is bound in brown boards with a buckram spine bearing brown printed titling; in the lower outside corner of the front board there is a gilt imprint of the Fortsas family crest, which also appears on the title page (a mule treading on an open book over the motto “Secte des Agathopedes”, or “Sect of Saint Agathopus” -- Agathopus was a fourth century Thessalonican martyr who was drowned in the sea as a punishment for refusing to surrender his theological books to Roman authorities). It was published without a dust-jacket. The paper is a rich, soft stock with ragged fore-edges on every other page. It is in octavo format; the pagination runs 1-87 and begins with the usual preliminaries (a dark brown fly conjugate with the front pastedown and bearing a map of Belgium and description of Binche at the time of the Fortsas Auction; a blank; frontispiece illustration of the Comte de Fortsas in his bathrobe, reading a book in his library; title page with copyright information on the verso; and half-title). At the back is the colophon, a blank, and the same style of fly-conjugate-to-pastedown as at the front.

The contents provide, in a combination of reference work and historical narrative, most of the information a reader would need for a complete picture of the infamous prank. These include an account of the auction (copiously footnoted with enriching contextual and explanatory material), an annotated reprint of the auction catalog, and a concluding annotated bibliography of works (in a variety of languages) related to the event. Particularly fascinating, of course, is the reprint of the catalog and the accompanying annotation -- it offers a glimpse into the peculiar, particular, and often times ridiculously esoteric topics of interest, obsession, and even scandal for European book-collectors in the mid-nineteenth century. The bibliography of relevant works was prepared by Weber Devore. Klinefelter’s research on the auction was assisted by printer-publisher Gary Hantke and poet-printer Emerson Wulling. The frontispiece illustration of the Comte was done by Roberta Goforth and first appeared on the cover of the poetry chapbook Stepladder (Galesburg: Knox College, 1953).

In his book, Klinefelter details the mania that gripped a number of the more celebrated buyers who descended on Binche for the auction; he also shows how their deep sense of competitiveness was a product of both their keen desire, but also their high connoisseurship. It was a testament to the orchestrators of the bibliohoax that they were able to dupe so many extremely intelligent bibliophiles with their catalog. As I looked around the bidders at the auction I attended this week, I couldn’t help but wonder how such a prank would go over today.

The Nonesuch Edition of "The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester" (and England's first pornographer...)

April is National Poetry Month (which I guess means that the other eleven months are all National Prose Months?) and so I’ve chosen this week’s book to celebrate that fact.

The full title is Collected Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The collection was edited by John Hayward and published by The Nonesuch Press of 16 Great James Street, London, in 1926, in a print-run of 1,050 copies. It was printed by William Brendon and Son, Ltd., of Plymouth, England. Each copy is hand-numbered, with numbers 1 through 75 issued on “English hand-made paper” and numbers 76 through 1,050 on “antique paper”; my copy is number 376 and is, indeed, printed on thick “antique” paper with rough-cut edges (some of the gatherings and leaves in my copy are still uncut along the top, mostly toward the end of the book in the textual notes and explanatory notes...one doesn’t read Rochester, I suppose, for the textual notes...). The book is fairly scarce and is assessed at approximately $150 to $250.

The 232 leaves each measure 19.5cm x 25.5cm and are bound into gatherings of eight leaves apiece (oddly, the other copies I've found listed for sale online describe the book's format as quarto; it seems to me more accurately described as octavo royal); the initial gatherings (leaves 1-27) were evidently printed separately because their signatures ([#], [a1]-[a8], b[1]-c*[5]-[d2]) differ from the rest of the book’s (B-[2D5]). Each page has seven vertical chain-lines spaced at approximately 3cm, with no evident watermark. The binding is dark gray hardboard in three-quarter gray paper with a pasted paper label on the spine (all of which was the customary appearance--or “branding”, to use modern PR jargon--of Nonesuch books). My copy has a bookplate pasted inside the front cover indicating previous ownership by “James McDonald”; above the name is a standing raven, beneath which runs a ribbon containing the family’s motto: “Nec tempore nec fato” (“Neither by time nor fate”). The only previous readership evidence I have been able to identify is a tiny penciled check-mark in the inner margin of the penultimate line of p. xi of the introduction (on the subject of “Mrs. Barry’s” duodecimo editions of Rochester’s letters, published in 1714 and 1732).

At the front of the book there is a blank flyleaf, a half-title, the full-title page (with the numbering information on the verso), a dedication (to F. L. Lucas), and the table of contents. Following these preliminaries are some introductory pages on the book and the Earl of Rochester’s work (signed by Hayward “San Vigilio. Garda, 1925”). First is a “Prefatory Note” from the editor, in which Hayward explains the significance and scope of his work: “The Earl of Rochester’s work has never been edited.... This edition is nothing more than the largest collection of his poems and letters that has yet appeared in print.” Hayward also dismisses those moralists whose offense at Rochester’s highly obscene works kept them from being reprinted for so long. Apparently the 1920s, with its flappers and rum-runners, was better able to appreciate the subtlety of Rochester’s style of humor than the puritanical Victorians had been. Nonetheless, Hayward is not so crass as to allow all of Rochester’s vulgarity to be reproduced for the unsuspecting reader; particularly inexcusable language has been delicately censored out with the judicious use of hyphens (see, for example, the short verse "To All Curious Criticks and Admirers of Metre", shown here).

For those of you unfamiliar with “England’s first pornographer” (as Richard Norton puts it), or if you have not yet seen Johnny Depp’s somewhat fanciful take on the Earl’s life in The Libertine, John Wilmot (1647-1680; shown here crowning his pet monkey as poet laureate) can best be described as a satirist and a bawdy poet. He was also known for his voracious sexual appetite and indignant disregard for anyone who suggested he remain quiet about it (legends about Wilmot were so pervasive that characters based on him appeared on the English stage for over a century following his death). Though a member of the nobility and part of King Charles II’s personal circle, Wilmot was equally at home amongst the whores, pimps, thieves, and actors of London; his poetry, long repudiated as vulgar and gross by readers unable to see past the surface-layer of his debauchery and unorthodox lifestyle, actually brims with bitingly honest subtext that captures in plain, unflattering terms both the latent socio-political energies of the early Restoration and hypocritical public mores of its ruling elite. For more critical and in-depth information on the Earl and his work, I refer you to the honors thesis of Ealasaid Haas, which she completed at Occidental College (California) in 2001.

Following the single page prefatory note (paginated ix) there is a section on “The Text” of the works (xi-xviii), a general “Introduction” on the poet (xix-l), and finally a single-page “Chronological Table” of the key dates in the Earl’s life (including such choice episodes as “Attempt to elope with Miss Malet...May 28th, 1665”, “Banished for Satire on the King...1673” [his second of three such banishments], “Tavern brawl at Epsom...June, 1676”, and “Sets up as a Mountebank...1676”).

Though Hayward claims that his edition is “in no sense...definitive”, its comprehensiveness and the inclusion of copious amounts of well-researched scholarly material makes this both a beautiful book (as most Nonesuch Press books are) but also a valuable one for any person interested in reading and learning about the Earl of Rochester. It is as thorough, if not more, than many cheap modern editions now available on the market. It contains 152 pages of the Earl’s poetry, a transcription of the broadside used to advertise his services when he disguised himself as “Alexander Bendo” (the “mountebank” mentioned above), The Tragedy of Valentinian, a scene from Sir Howard’s Play, and 51 pages of his personal letters. The book concludes with three appendices: poems attributed to but not certainly by the Earl, a court masque, and a series of letters written by his mother describing the illness that eventually ended his life and his famed deathbed repentance and conversion. These appendices are followed by a section of textual notes (329-351) and explanatory notes (355-404). The last four pages provide an index to the poems listed alphabetically by their first lines.

A few remarks on Nonesuch Press would be in order. Nonesuch was one of a number of small, independent publishing shops that opened up in London in the decade following World War I. Founded by Sir Francis Meynell, his wife Vera Mendel, and author David Garnett in 1923 it released approximately  8-18 titles per year up until 1935. During the years of World War II its output dropped dramatically to approximately 1-5 titles per year. In the 1940s and 1950s the Press went through a period of transitional owners (including a time under the control of George Macy, founder of the Limited Editions Club) until it was eventually closed in 1968. Recently modern presses such as Duckworth and, in 2005, Barnes and Noble have reissued Nonesuch editions. Unsurprisingly, these editions are fairly cheap and unremarkable; original Nonesuch volumes, on the other hand, are prized collectibles and can often fetch up to $2,000.

The Press specialized in English literature (though in its last years it expanded its market to include high-end children’s literature) and its signature style was single-color boarded hardcovers with text printed on heavy (often hand-made) paper, usually sold uncut. Unlike many of its competitors, Nonesuch employed a small Albion hand-press (like the one shown here) for the set up and design its books; these designs were then given to a machine-press printer (such as, in the case of my book, William Brendon of Plymouth) for production. This system allowed Nonesuch to mass-produce (and competitively price) titles that have the look and feel of high-end, handmade volumes. According to Meynell, in a 1936 retrospective bibliography on the first 100 volumes issued by the Press, this system demonstrated that “mechanical means could be made to serve fine ends.” In this sentiment, Meynell belongs to that generation of craft businessmen who between the wars seized on revolutions in industry and technology to economize products to a large market but who refused to relinquish those aspects of the pre-industry crafts age that consumers were thought to value as markers of personalization and quality.

It would be irresponsible of me to feature a collection of the Earl of Rochester’s works and not offer a sample from his work. Thus, to conclude, here is his “To the Postboy”, in which Rochester conflates the simple business of asking for directions (to Hell, no less) with a kind of perverse self-praise (the language is mostly accessible for modern readers, though the word “swive” is no longer in regular use). If you like what you read here (or if you are merely disturbingly fascinated by it), more of his works can be found at the Luminarium. Also, below this is an image taken of his rather raunchy "A Song. To Cloris.", in which Rochester riffs with ribaldry on a traditional pastoral poetic theme.

Rochester: Son of a whore, God damn you! Can you tell

A peerless peer the readiest way to Hell?

I've outswilled Bacchus, sworn of my own make

Oaths would fright Furies, and make Pluto quake;

I've swived more whores more ways than Sodom's walls

E'er knew, or the College of Rome's Cardinals.

Witness heroic scars -- Look here, ne'er go! -- 

Cerecloths and ulcers from the top to toe!

Frightened at my own mischiefs, I have fled

And bravely left my life's defender dead;

Broke houses to break chastity, and dyed

That floor with murder which my lust denied.

Pox on't, why do I speak of these poor things?

I have blasphemed my God, and libeled kings!

The readiest way to hell -- Come, quick!

Boy:                          N'er stir:

The readiest way, my Lord, 's by Rochester.

"You freakish homunculus": Henry Arthur Jones's "Saints and Sinners"

Oscar Wilde once observed that there are three rules to being a successful playwright: “The first rule is not to write like Henry Arthur Jones; the second and third rules are the same.” The unfortunate target of Wilde’s biting remark, Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) was the author of numerous late nineteenth-century English dramas, including The Dancing Girl, The Middleman, Judah, and Wealth.

This book is a vellum-bound first edition of Jones’s five-act play Saints and Sinners, A New and Original Drama of

Modern English Middle-Class Life. This is a first edition of the play, published by Macmillan and Company, London and New York, in August 1891, and printed by R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh. The vellum is in great shape and all four original leather ties are intact; in fact, many of the pages in the volume are still uncut (when books are printed from full-size sheets of paper, the sheets are folded to create the proper page sizes and must be cut--usually along the top edge--to be separated; most modern books come machine-cut from the printer, but some classy volumes still call for the reader to own his or her own page-cutter). The pages are of handmade paper, bearing a maker’s watermark that seems to be a highly ornamental set of initials (“J & C”?). Only 100 copies of this extremely rare first edition were printed. To add to the rarity of this particular copy, it is signed by the author on the recto of the second (blank) leaf: 

Dear Mr Woodruff, 

faithfully yours

/ Henry Arthur Jones

I haven’t been able to get an estimated value for this item because no other dealers online seem to be selling a comparable copy; most other sellers listing a “first edition” of this play are actually selling the second issue of the first edition (the true first edition was the limited editions series of 100 on handmade paper and bound in vellum).

The book begins with four unnumbered leafs, a leaf with the half-title on the recto and a printer’s ornament on the verso, followed by the title page leaf with the limited edition statement on the verso. The author’s preface (dated “London, 14th April 1891) follows for 11 leaves, then a leaf with the character list and the names of the original performers of each role on the recto and scene breakdown on verso (and the claim that the play runs precisely 2 hours and 38 minutes on the stage). Above the character list is a statement regarding performance provenance: “Produced first at the Theatre Royal, Margate, on Monday 22nd September 1884; and at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, on 25th September 1884, filling the bill nightly until Easter 1885.” Why the long delay between the premiere and publication (7 years!) is beyond me; if you are interested in more details about the performance run, the website dedicated to Victorian actress Elizabeth J. Phillips has a thorough page documenting the production. 

All of this preliminary material is in gathering A. The body of the play itself covers gatherings B through the first part of I; each of the five acts has an appropriate subtitle. The remainder of gathering I through K contains an appendix titled “Religion and the Stage”, an essay by Jones that first appeared in the January 1885 issue of The Nineteenth Century review and that took the occasion of his play’s lengthy run (it was up for a remarkable 200 nights; despite its lukewarm reception by critics its scandalous depiction of middle-class religion in a small English town no doubt attracted curious audience members) to descant on the merits of permitting theatrical productions that examine “religious questions”. In the essay, Jones lambasts the phenomenon of theatrical censorship, from Shakespeare’s day to the present, reserving particular ire for puritanical arbiters of taste such as the late Thomas Bowdler (whose editions of Shakespeare’s plays eviscerated from the texts anything potentially bawdy, scandalous, or inappropriate to be read aloud in the presence of women and children gives us today the phrase “to bowdlerize”).

There are no markings of readers in my copy, but some owner (perhaps “Mr. Woodruff”) has cut some of the pages open. The pattern of these opened pages may suggest what parts the reader bothered to look at and what he decided to skip over: the half-title, title page, preface, and first four leaves of Act I are opened; the rest of the play remains uncut until Act V, which is entirely opened (did Mr. Woodruff find the first scene tedious but, suspecting Jones would perhaps ask him what he thought of the play, skip to the end to find out how it was resolved?). The first two and last three leaves of the appendix are also opened, but the middle eight are uncut (again, just reading the top and tail of the work?).

About Jones (shown below in a press photograph, c. 1880), Martha Bellinger, in her 1927 A Short History of the Drama, observed: 

Like Pinero, Mr. Jones learned his technique from the French. In 1884 he adapted Ibsen's Doll's House for the English public under the title Breaking a Butterfly. It would be a bold person today who would offer any "adaptation" whatever of Ibsen, and with such a title! At the time, however, adaptations were in order, and Ibsen was then only another European playwright, not a theatrical prophet. Mr. Jones continued his work with domestic comedy and social pieces, including The Masqueraders and The Bauble Shop. In 1896 he wrote Michael and His Angel, generally considered his strongest drama. It is a study of small-town people, concerned with the expiation of guilt. It is both sentimental and romantic, with the solemn attitude towards sexual irregularity which generally characterized the Victorian writer. Mr. Jones, however, has shown a kind of evangelistic spirit in regard to the stage: a perception of its possible nobility and truth, and a desire to contribute to its ethical and moral value. 

And from Alice Fort and Herbert Kates’s 1935 Minute History of the Drama:

The circumstances surrounding the early life of Henry Arthur Jones would generally be considered anything but favorable to a successful dramatic career. He was the son of a Buckinghamshire farmer. What education he received was brief and acquired in a local grammar school. At 13 he went "into business" and was a commercial traveller until he was 30. The people among whom he was raised believed that drama was the invention of the devil and that those who went to the theater were bound straight for perdition. If Jones became a dramatist it was because the urge within him was so strong he couldn't help it. His first play was written when he was 16, two years before he ever saw the inside of a theater. His first produced play, Only Round the Corner, was staged in 1878. The melodrama, The Silver King, written in collaboration with Henry Herman and produced in 1882, assured his position as a dramatist. 

Henry Arthur Jones belongs to that period sometimes referred to as the "Victorian Transition." It was the period when drama was trying to free itself from its inherited superficialities and to become a part of contemporary life. In 1884, Jones made an attempt at serious drama in his Saints and Sinners. It was hooted by the first-night audience and condemned by the press. Discouraged, Jones returned to melodrama. 

In 1896, when London had become to a certain extent "Ibsen-conscious," Jones made another attempt at serious drama with Michael and His Lost Angel. Again he was hooted by the audience and condemned by the critics. It was too forward looking for that generation and not sufficiently plain spoken for the next, as a later attempt at a revival proved. In the opinion of Jones himself and of some of his commentators it deserves to be rated as his best effort. The following year, however, he returned to the polite, superficial comedy with The Liars, following it in 1900 with Mrs. Dane's Defense. The Lie had its premiere in New York in 1914 and did not reach the London stage until 1923. There even so capable an actress as Sybil Thorndike could not save it from vitriolic comment from the pen of the renowned English dramatic critic, James Agate. 

Henry Arthur Jones made a start with the new dramatic movement. He was never able, however, to shake off the influence of that early Victorian period when his work began, nor to achieve a real success with the newer trend of dramatic thought.

Finally, Barrett Clark’s entry on Jones in the 1915 British and American Drama of Today relates:

To Henry Arthur Jones, more than to any other single force, [was] due that Renaissance and "uplift" -- let the term be accepted in its best sense -- of the English drama [of his day]. Jones carried on the tradition of Congreve and Sheridan in high comedy. His best work, with the exception of Michael and His Lost Angel, consists of comedies of manners. The Liars, The Case of Rebellious Susan, and Dolly Reforming Herself, satires on contemporary society, are among the finest character plays of the day. Jones's work is characterized by close observation of the foibles of the upper classes and the aristocracy of England; a keen sense of humor -- as opposed to the cleverness and wit of Wilde and Pinero -- which brings him much closer to the English Restoration dramatists than any other of his day; and a keen sense of dramatic construction. Jones [wrote] many comedies, but his melodramas -- especially The Silver King and The Middleman -- and his tragic play, Michael and His Lost Angel -- must be taken into account in any estimate of the dramatist's total output.

In addition to being a dramatist, Jones wrote (somewhat heatedly) on political topics, particularly “from the right” in response to H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. One such work was My Dear Wells: a Manual for Haters of England (1921), a collection of open letters to Wells originally published in the New York Times. Wells repeatedly declined to respond to Jones, writing to the Times: "I do not believe that Mr. Jones has ever read a line that I have written. But he goes on unquenchably, a sort of endless hooting. I would as soon argue with some tiresome, remote and inattentive foghorn"; and later, in 1926, in the preface to Mr Belloc Objects: "For years I have failed to respond to Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, who long ago invented a set of opinions for me and invited me to defend them with an enviable persistence and vigour."

Another sample of Jones’s political (sort of...) writing is his epic response to Shaw's manifesto in opposition to the First World War, Common Sense About the War: "The hag Sedition was your mother, and Perversity begot you. Mischief was your midwife and Misrule your nurse, and Unreason brought you up at her feet - no other ancestry and rearing had you, you freakish homunculus, germinated outside of lawful procreation."