My Rare Book by Frederick Wedmore — Read

I wish I could say it was my diligence that discovered it, and that I hunted it out of some fifth-rate bookstall of Goswell Street or of the New Road -- ‘all this lot at 6d. apiece. ' But no, it has no romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given perhaps, eighty years ago, by friend to friend, or lover to sweetheart, in days when our great-grandmothers were beautiful and our great-grandfathers devoted, it got to be neglected, it got to be sold -- somebody ceased to care for it, or somebody wanted the few shillings it then would bring -- somehow it tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen bookbuyer rescued it, and took it to a binder of note, and then it was arrayed in seemly dress, and safer for the future. Afterwards -- but not for very long, I think -- it was a rich man's possession: one thing, and quite a little thing, in a great library of English classics, from Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and Tennyson. Then it came to be sold, along with most or all of its important companions, and so I got it, in prosaic fashion. I bought it under the hammer at Sotheby's -- or rather, Mr. F. S. Ellis bought it there on my behalf -- on the 3rd of March, in this present year of grace. And now it takes up its position on insignificant shelves, by the side of the Rogers with the Turner illustrations; by the side of a few things -- but the collector knows them not.

This is how it figures in the auctioneer's catalogue: ‘Wordsworth (W.) Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, _green morocco extra g.e. by Riviere_, 1798. ' The ‘g.e. ' means nothing more mysterious than ‘gilt edges. ' The morocco is of a rich and sunny green -- the ‘good' green of modern artistic speech, which rightly enough, I suppose, endows colour and line with moral qualities. I am thankful to the rich man for having saved me both money and trouble, in binding, completely to my taste, it happens, my rare book.