A Martyr to Bibliography

A Martyr to Bibliography by Olphar Hamst

Joseph-Marie Quérard, born at Rennes on 25 December 1797 into a poor family, rose from an eleven-year-old book-trade apprentice to become France's foremost bibliographer, entirely self-taught after leaving school at the same age. Entering the book trade in 1807, he worked as an agent in his native village, then in Paris from 1812, and later for a Viennese book firm, where exposure to German scholarly rigor convinced him that bibliography was his true vocation. After five years of labor, he left Vienna for Paris in 1825 to publish his life's project, forgoing secure prospects abroad. The essay traces Quérard's major works chronologically: his first publication, the *Bibliographie Moderne de la France* (1826), which he expanded into his masterwork *La France Littéraire* (1827–39, ten volumes), an alphabetical bibliographical dictionary of French authors and their works, later supplemented by an eleventh volume on pseudonymous and anonymous writers. Other productions include short-lived periodicals (*Le Bibliologue*, *Revue Bibliographique*, *Le Bibliothécaire*, *Le Moniteur de la Librairie*, and finally *Le Quérard*, founded in 1855 to relieve his poverty); a Voltaire bibliography; *La Littérature Française Contemporaine*, of which he was fraudulently stripped by his publisher Daguin, leading to a ruinous arbitration, lawsuit, and even three months' imprisonment at Clichy; and his most celebrated and controversial work, *Les Supercheries Littéraires Dévoilées* (1845–53, five volumes), an exposé of literary frauds, pseudonyms, and plagiarisms that scandalized and fascinated Parisian literary society, containing a notoriously savage 170-page article against Alexandre Dumas. Throughout, the biography emphasizes Quérard's perpetual poverty and the world's ingratitude toward him despite his prodigious industry. Repeated petitions for a librarianship—including one signed by sixty-six Paris booksellers and five Academicians in 1842—were rebuffed by ministers Villemain and Salvandy with cold bureaucratic contempt; even a recommendation from Panizzi for a post at the British Museum was refused because Quérard was French. His rival J.-C. Brunet received the Legion of Honor for the comparatively lesser *Manuel du Libraire*, prompting Quérard's bitter pamphlet-letter of protest. Only late in life, after a subscription organized by Hector Bossange and the Didot brothers (endorsed internationally, notably by three British Museum librarians, yet snubbed by the Bibliothèque Impériale itself) partially relieved his debts, did he finally receive a decoration—too late to bring him security. Quérard died in December 1865, still laboring over corrections to a planned second edition of the *Supercheries* and dreaming of an unrealized *Encyclopédie du Bibliothécaire*. The work closes with tributes from Gustave Brunet, J. Assézat, and Paul Lacroix, mourning a man who "was born a bibliographer, lived, and died a bibliographer," devoted wholly to truth and books yet denied the institutional recognition and financial security his labor deserved—hence the title's characterization of him as "A Martyr to Bibliography." A closing glossary of technical bibliographical terms for pseudonym types (anagram, allonym, cryptonym, etc.), compiled after Pierquin de Gembloux, supplements the biographical narrative.

By Olphar Hamst · First published 1867 · Genre: Biography, Bibliography, Literary History · 17,581 words

First lines

Joseph-Marie Quérard, was born at Rennes, (Ille-et-Vilaine,) the 25th December 1797, of parents whose sole fortune consisted of their honesty and three children to boot. The name "Quérard," known only in the above village and its environs, is nevertheless that of a once distinguished though now extinct family, one branch of which, it would appear, Quérard humourously remarks, was reduced to poverty. Condemned from his birth to labor, Quérard, having arrived at a reasoning age, desired rather to make a name for himself, than attempt to trace one through his ancestors. From earliest infancy, he was sent to a school in his native village, and at the age of eleven he was removed, having doubtless in the eyes of his parents finished his education. He was thus deprived of the benefit of a classical education; but fortunately, a little later, his travels necessitated the acquisition of several foreign languages, which in the profession he created for himself were infinitely more useful to him than a knowledge of the classics would have been, which are learned with so much difficulty and time, and so easily forgotten.

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bibliography · book collecting · rare books · literary satire · Victorian literature · nineteenth-century literature · bibliophilia · scholarly obsession · book trade · antiquarian books · literary history · humor

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