Byromania: A Reflection on Collecting Byron Books

Young people of today seem to be growing up with technology whereas I grew up with books and think I was very fortunate to have done so. I read voraciously from my earliest days; I had a grandfather who had collected books (unfortunately not the poet Byron) and I spent many happy days in his small library. Rather like Byron’s comments recalling his days at Harrow School, ‘The truth is that I read eating—read in bed—read when no one else read—and had read all sorts of reading since I was five years old’.¹ It was not only that I enjoyed reading books, but I loved the tactility and the aroma of grandfather’s leather-bound antiquarian volumes, so perhaps I became a ‘bibliomaniac’ at that time.

I developed an urge to collect and happily in my younger days, second hand bookshops were much more common than today, particularly antiquarian book shops. As a young man in my late teens on visiting London in the Charing Cross Road area, I could visit at least ten established antiquarian book dealers. Most have now disappeared. I am often asked why I collect, as I collect things other than books, for instance eighteenth-century Derby porcelain. I think the answer has to be because I can’t help it! The genus collecteana has done much for the world: many of our great museum collections were donated by collectors. I have not collected to make money and agree with what one famous collector said: ‘think nothing about values; still less about fashion; buy what you love, pay the price that things are worth to you and to you alone.’ As it happens, particularly with Byron first editions, many I bought years ago now have amazing values. In addition to my books, I have collected material relating to the poet: pictures, prints, busts, even a lock of his hair!²

Susan Pearce wrote an erudite work published in 1995 entitled On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. Pearce records that the accumulation of material is a standard human preoccupation here, as elsewhere, and our relationship to this world’s goods is one of the major themes of European nineteenth-century fiction in general as it was of nineteenth-century society. For example, Balzac’s Cousin Pons and, in the twentieth century, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz. Utz was the owner of a spectacular collection of Meissen porcelain and obsessive about it, spending hours in museums looking at porcelain: ‘“What” Utz’s mother asked the family physician, “is this mania of Caspar’s for porcelain?”. “A perversion,” he answered’.³ I have never considered my collecting porcelain to be a perversion! I prefer a definition written by Walter Benjamin in the Arcades Project (1927–40) when he said, ‘perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against its dispersion’.⁴

The one thing I hate contemplating is getting rid of any of my books, I feel comforted by them, I enjoy looking at them, I even enjoy smelling them and certainly reading them. Why should a first edition first issue of a volume of Byron’s poems be any different to a twenty-first-century copy of the same work? It is a difficult question to answer. The fact is that it is extremely enjoyable to read Byron’s poetry in a book printed at the genesis of the work.

When I was young, collecting birds’ eggs—something that is illegal today—there was the thrill of the search and the discovery of the find. Similarly, having sought a book for a long time, and pursued many avenues that ended with disappointment, to find that book is a great thrill. Let me give you an example. A great rarity in the Byron canon is a first edition 1813 of a satirical poem by Byron entitled Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn, by Horace Hornem Esq, printed by S. Godnell, London for Sherwood Neely & Jones, Paternoster Row...