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OTHER PEOPLE'S BOOKS: ASSOCIATION COPIES AND
ANOTHER PLEASURE OF COLLECTING·

The collecting impulse traces a broad path through humanity. Our concern, however, is only with its manifestation as an obsession with books. Others may build deeply loved collections of Elvis memorabilia, or school lunch boxes, or Barbie dolls. Ours, we like to think, is a higher calling. Indeed, the pleasures of bibliophilia are both numerous and great — according to The Rowfant Club formulation it is books "in their various capacities to please the mind of man" that captivate us. The pages of The Caxtonian have been truly graced recently by essays from our member Eden Martin, taking us on a bibliographic tour of the works of Whitman and Poe, compliments of his own collections, and illustrated with images of some of his books. Among the highlights of Mr. Martin's collections are some "association" copies, books whose prior owners include individuals of interest to readers — or collectors — for their connection to the author or in their own right.
"Association" copies are themselves a broad sub-species of bibliophilia, one distinctly different from collecting fine bindings, or focusing on typography or paper-making, or books-about-books (incestuous passion, that one). In the ordinary course I would guess that few collectors begin with the notion of building a collection of association copies. More often, I suppose, it happens as it happened to me. First I found a subject, a group of writers, and collecting "their" books — the ones they had written — led me to collecting "their" books the ones they owned.
My own collection is small in quantity — early and rare editions of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi and their circle. After nearly thirty years of collecting, little I covet now becomes available, and often what does is one-of-a-kind, and I find myself in competition, out of my league, with, say, Harvard, or a fellow Johnsonian named, not coincidentally, Rothschild. My hunger unabated I have necessarily expanded my focus by reducing it, and now I assiduously read the catalogues of dealers and auction houses and wait for tips and calls searching for association copies of books — most of which I already have — from the Johnson circle.
It is stimulating, in more ways than one — for example it stimulates me to keep working to better support my habit. But it is also stimulating physically and intellectually. For example, in 1751 when Samuel Johnson was compiling — really creating — his monumental Dictionary of the English Language a man he actually did not much admire — James Harris — published Hermes: or, a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar. Johnson observed that the dedication to that book, "though but fourteen lines long . . . [had] six grammatical faults in it." While Johnson admitted Harris was "a sound sullen scholar," he also felt he was "a prig and a bad prig. I looked into his book, and thought he did not understand his own system." Yes, Johnson "looked into his book," even as he was working on his own great book, the Dictionary. The very copy of Hermes that Johnson "looked into" is mine now. You may imagine, perhaps better than I can describe, the physical sensation of sitting in my library, surrounded by various editions of Johnson's Dictionary, and holding in my hands the very volume Johnson himself consulted while drafting the famous "Preface" to those dictionaries, and his introductory articles about English Grammar and Etymology. Having Johnson's Hermes also stimulates my own search through his balanced and elegant Johnsonian sentences for traces — hints — of the same thoughts, perhaps originally expressed in the more straight-forward prose of Harris. Stimulation indeed, of many of the senses — including, of course, the sense of smell, attuned to the scent of 250 year old paper and leather.
There is an undeniable pleasure in owning a 1651 first edition of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, or, The Matter, Form and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. Hobbes, of course, was regarded by Johnson as morally dangerous, and rather than include Hobbes' own words in the 114,000 quotations in the Dictionary, he quoted extensively from John Bramhall, surely a lesser thinker and writer than Hobbes, referring to Bramhall's frequent refutations of Hobbes. Johnson even quotes Richard Bentley, a lesser writer than even Bramhall, to illustrate the definition of "scribble":
If a man should affirm, that an ape casually meeting with pen, ink and paper, and falling to scribble, did happen to write exactly the Leviathan of Hobbes, would an atheist believe such a story? And yet he can easily digest things as incredible as that.
What a complex pleasure it is then to have in my library, as I do, Johnson's own copy of that very despised Leviathan.
Perhaps the appeal of association copies can be better expressed by spending a little more time with a few others. Let us begin with a book by Thomas Goodwin, entitled The Returne of Prayers: a treatise wherein this case [How to discerne Gods answers to our prayers] is briefly resolved. A copy of the fifth edition, published in 1638 in London, 141 years later, in 1779, came into the possession of James Boswell, in Edinburgh. We know this because it is signed and dated in his distinctive hand on the free front fly-leaf. To understand what this book — a frequent resident of Boswell's pockets — suggests about Boswell perhaps we need a slight refresher course in who he was.
Of course he was the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, but he was much more than that. A complex and contradictory life is sometimes best illuminated by small insights, such as the ones provided by Boswell's devotion to an old book offering reassurance of the efficacy of prayer and its constant availability both as a source of solace and of hope for a better life, not only in the hereafter, but in this world. James Boswell was born in 1740, scion of an ancient and noble Scots line, whose family had held the estates of Auchinleck, in Ayrshire, since the fourteenth century. His father, Alexander, was a distinguished jurist who sat on the highest civil and criminal courts of Scotland. Boswell himself was a lawyer, and an author, long before 1791, when his famous Life of Samuel Johnson was published. In fact his first book, an account of his travels to Corsica, made him famous in 1768 when he was only twenty-eight; published to great success, it was translated almost immediately into five languages. He was, even by the lofty standards of the time, highly educated, a master of many languages and famous as a wit, a social butterfly, a skillful advocate, a politician and also as an intemperate drunk, a debauched profligate, and an ambitious man always at work defeating his own ambitions.
Among his most consistently pursued, and consistently undermined, ambitions, was to be pious. A staunch Scots Presbyterian, he flirted with Roman Catholicism in his youth, then attended Protestant church services regularly in England and Scotland, where he was often moved to tears. He repented his sins deeply, but frequently, because he was in fact better at remorse than he was at reform. Boswell was torn by his own need for salvation, and by profound self-knowledge that led him to fear it would, in the end, be denied him. The late Prof. Pottle of Yale — known as "Boswellianissimus" — explains his dilemma — and his appeal to us — this way.
There is nothing painful in the autobiography either of a saint or of a complacent libertine. John Wesley's Journal is not painful, nor does one suffer as he reads the Memoirs of Casanova. We can stand apart from such men and judge their lives as we would works of pure fiction. But Boswell's Journal is painful to read, because, while we are laughing with him and at him, the scales fall from our eyes and we come suddenly to see that he is ourselves. He is the articulate honest expression of that state of being which nearly all of us experience: of piety that seldom issues in righteousness; of primordial indecencies mocking our boast of civilization; of ambitions misdirected beyond our strength; of warring motives which can never be reconciled; of childish dreams carried over into mature life. Like him we do our best work half-heartedly while we pursue phantoms; we spend our lives in turmoil and heartache, lacking the power to shape our destinies.
Reading Boswell's journals and his recitations of his hopes for his children, his desires to excel, to be faithful to his beloved wife, interspersed with his accounts of whoring and drunkenness, it is clear how this little book was a source of comfort. It was, no doubt, a physical as well as spiritual bridge that allowed him to cross quickly back from the depths of his worst self, to the peaks of his better hours. Reading it we can consider one source of his continually renewed optimism, his eternal hope and his belief that it is never too late to become better. The object itself, always within his literal grasp in his pocket, was, we can believe, a physical comfort to this tormented man.
Now, for the solution of a bibliographic mystery of 215 years standing, we turn to another book of Boswell's, this time one he wrote, his 1785 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. In 1773 Boswell and Johnson had undertaken a strenuous trip to the western islands of Scotland. Both kept journals, and Johnson turned his immediately into a book, published in 1775. Boswell, always intending to write Johnson's biography, published his only after Johnson's death in 1784, as a preview of what was already promised to the public, realizing that it would take him years to complete the larger work. Boswell's Journal was a great success — it captured Johnson's wit and powers of observation, as well as Boswell's, and it reflected the wide range of their conversations, many of which, you might guess, were about books and people they both knew.
Among the people much on Johnson's mind during this journey to the wilds of Hebrides, where English was often only a second language and crude huts or the outdoors frequent lodgings, were Henry and Hester Thrale. Henry was a wealthy brewer and member of Parliament, and he and his wife Hester had "adopted" the Widower Johnson in 1764. They gave him his own room in their country seat at Streatham, and Johnson spent many days and nights there, almost a member of the family. The Thrales nurtured him, and he revered them. Henry Thrale was an educated man, although not a scholar, with considerable social and intellectual polish, and great financial resources. Hester was a remarkable woman, also well-educated — although never in school. She was a social lion, a woman whose salon was enlarged and made famous by the frequent presence of Johnson. She nursed him when he was ill, and he confided his hopes and fears, as well as his opinions, to her.
This was an era when the Blue Stockings held sway over London society. They were, as you probably know, a remarkable group of women, mostly wealthy and aristocratic, who were also writers, or close to the world of literature and the arts. At their evenings card-playing was forbidden, and good conversation the featured entertainment. The most famous people in London frequented their rooms, including politicians as important as Edmund Burke, artists as renowned as Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great actor David Garrick, and others of similar reputation. The bluest of the Blue Stockings was Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, of ancient lineage, great wealth, and social position. She was also the author, in 1768, of a famous essay on Shakespeare. More of that in a minute. Hester Thrale and Mrs. Montagu were friends, but rivals. Famous for their conversation, others would come to Mrs. Montagu's evenings just to hear them talk to each other; it was no secret though that Johnson's devotion was one of Hester Thrale's few advantages over Mrs. Montagu.
So it went, until 1781, when Henry Thrale died. The Thrale marriage had been an arranged one, and largely happy, but one with more respect than love on both sides. Hester had given birth to twelve children in eighteen years, only five of whom survived their father's death. These five daughters were tutored in music by an Italian singer and composer, Gabriel Piozzi, who had become a fixture in the Thrale household. More than that, he had fallen in love with Hester, and she with him. It was impossible, unthinkable. An Italian Catholic music master could not aspire to such a match. More to the point, no one of the widow Thrale's status could possibly so degrade herself. Her friends, especially the novelist Fanny Burney, were horrified. Her daughters, especially the oldest, the accomplished but cold Queeny, were scandalized; and all refused to consent. It was a nightmare for her, as the gossip columns speculated about whether she would marry Dr. Johnson, a father-figure some thirty-two years her senior, and he, unable to imagine she would remarry at all but instead continuing to believe she would devote herself to his increasingly needy care, made demands she could not meet. Finally she bowed to the pressures and sent Piozzi away, back to Italy. She then sank into a depression so deep that, on her doctor's advice, and with her daughters' grudging consent, Piozzi was summoned, and they were quietly married in 1784, to the horror of virtually all who knew them. It marked the end — and a bitter one — of her relationship with Johnson.
Public humiliation and ridicule drove the newlyweds to a lengthy honeymoon in Italy and Europe. Dr. Johnson, feeling abandoned and betrayed, died a few months after the event. The Blue Stockings never mentioned her name except, perhaps, in ridicule or contempt. And then, in 1785 Boswell published his Journal of the great Hebrides 1773 adventure. He was a careful reporter. His Journal recited, verbatim, many of his conversations with Johnson during their time on the road. He was proud of his skills as an author, and immediately after the trip, he had shown the manuscript to Johnson and others, including Mrs. Thrale, who had returned it with compliments. Now, twelve years later in 1785, seeing it through the press with editorial advice from his friends, Boswell was careful about what would reach the public. The original manuscript of his Journal reported the following exchange one evening on the Isle of Sky:
Boswell:     I spoke of Mrs. Montagu's very high
          praises of Garrick.
Johnson:     Sir, it is fit she should say so much, and
          I should say nothing. Reynolds is fond of
          her book, and I wonder at it; for neither I,
          nor Beauclerk, nor Mrs. Thrale, could get
          through it.
It was this manuscript that Mrs. Thrale herself had returned to Boswell with praise after reading it, some twelve years earlier. Now, however, she had fallen from grace, and was in virtual exile in Europe. Let Boswell describe what happened next:
I had no motive whatever to invent it . . . I said . . . "Why should I set two women to pull one another caps?" Besides had Mrs. Thrale been still in the state she formerly was, I might have been less scrupulous; but now she is under a cloud and may probably desire to have the protection of Mrs. Montagu should she venture to return to England, it might hurt her.
So Boswell crossed out Mrs. Thrale's name in the manuscript before he sent it to the printer — an act of kindness, although he had been as cruel about her remarriage as anyone, and knew she was a potential rival as a biographer. In conversation with his friends and literary advisors Edmond Malone and John Courtenay however, Boswell had second thoughts. Again, Boswell:
Mr. Courtenay, however, insisted that as Dr. Johnson had done Mrs. Thrale the honor to quote her as an authority on taste and to class her with himself and Beauclerk, I had no right to deprive her of such a distinction. . . . I . . . ordered her name to be reinstated.
Indeed the evidence shows this to be true. The deletion of Mrs. Thrale's name can clearly be seen in the surviving manuscript originally sent to the printer, and its insertion in the first proof from the printer, in Boswell's hand, is equally clear. The book was then published, the first edition of the first state, with a print run of about 1500 copies, proclaiming to the world that Mrs. Thrale could not even finish Mrs. Montagu's book. The Blue Stockings, especially Mrs. Montagu, were livid. Mrs. Thrale, who indeed intended ultimately to return to England, was horrified. Her war with Boswell, which later became highly public, had begun. That, however, is another story. This is a bibliographic one.
This story stems from Boswell's explanation of the publishing history of his Journal in a letter he wrote to Malone, and later in a published reply to a published effort by Mrs. Thrale to regain Mrs. Montagu's good graces, although, having seen the original manuscript in 1773, she could not in 1785 exactly deny Johnson's report of her difficulty. First, to Malone in 1786, Boswell described his original uncertainty about including the reference to Mrs. Thrale and his initial decision:
Upon these considerations I struck it [Mrs. Thrale's name] out, and some hundreds of the first edition were actually thrown off without it. Sir Joshua Reynolds' copy has it not.
Then, in the published response to Mrs. Thrale, he wrote:
When my Journal was passing through the press, it occurred to me, that a peculiar delicacy was necessary to be observed in reporting the opinion of one literary lady concerning the performance of another; and I had such scruples on that head, that in the proof sheet I struck out the name of Mrs. Thrale from the paragraph in question, and two or three hundred copies of my book were actually published without it; of these Sir Joshua Reynolds' copy happened to be one, but while the sheet was working off, a friend for whose opinion I have great respect, suggested that I had no right to deprive Mrs. Thrale of the high honor which Dr. Johnson had done her, by stating her opinion along with that of Mr. Beauclerk, as coinciding with, and, as it were, sanctioning his own. That observation appeared to me so weighty and conclusive, that I hastened to the printing house, and as a piece of justice, restored Mrs. Thrale to that place from which a too scrupulous delicacy had excluded her.
There is one problem with all of this. As the great Prof. Pottle and R. W. Chapman, the great Johnsonian, have observed, no copy of the first edition has ever been seen without Mrs. Thrale's name. Two other respected scholars wrote in 1972 in the periodical The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, that they had advertised widely in bookish papers and journals, but had been unsuccessful in turning up a single copy without the reference to Mrs. Thrale. If indeed "hundreds," or even only "two or three hundred" sheets had been printed that way, out of an edition of 1500, at least one should have survived. The authors speculated that Boswell just didn't really know what the state of the printing process was when he hurried to the printer to put Mrs. Thrale back, and that in fact sheet U6 had not yet been run without her name, and never was except for the first proof. As for the Reynolds' copy, they speculated that perhaps a stray uncorrected proof had been picked up and hurriedly bound in the early copy prepared specifically for Reynolds' review. Alas, they concluded, "Reynolds' copy is not known to be extant," and so the mystery must remain unsolved.
In 1999 Stephen Weissman of Ximenes Rare Books, in Gloucestershire, England, called me. He had just been offered Sir Joshua Reynolds' copy of Boswell's Journal. Would I be interested in having it? Would I? And so the mystery is solved. The book is here, inscribed in Reynolds' hand as "From the Author," and signed by Reynolds with his marginal notes. Sheet U6 gives us the answer, and makes the Bibliographical Society authors look prescient. Holding the solution to this mystery in my hands is satisfying indeed. Think what satisfaction there is in having this particular association copy, even beyond the pleasure of reading a copy of Boswell's own book, given to his dear friend, the great Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Perhaps the pleasure association copies provide comes simply from the way they lead us deeper into the general subject that was the original focus of our collecting impulse, along paths we would not otherwise have known to explore. A good example of this is the story of another book, to be told, perhaps, in another Caxtonian.