To watch carefully and studiously a big sale such as that of the Ashburnham library, of which two out of three portions are now scattered, is a bibliographical, if not a commercial, education in little. We attended in person throughout, and observed with interest and profit the curious working, unappreciable to those not practically versed in books, and acquainted with the result only through paragraphs in the newspapers. A spectator with some preparatory training could see how and why certain lots fetched such and such abnormal figures; and a leading agency in this direction was the unfortunate employment--unfortunate for himself, not for the owner or the auctioneer--by a leading buyer of an agent who had to win his purchases from men stronger than himself. Thus the Caxton's _Jason_, instead of bringing perhaps £1000, ran up to more than twice that sum, while, if it was re-sold under different conditions, it might not even reach the lower amount. Still more striking were the offers for such things as the first English edition of More's _Utopia_ (£51), a volume which has repeatedly sold for a couple of guineas; while, on the other hand, a handsomely bound copy of Bourrienne's _Memoires_ in ten volumes went for 11s., and other ordinary works in proportion.
The names in the booksellers' ledgers and in the auctioneers' catalogues as buyers of old or scarce literature are not by any means necessarily always the names of collectors. They are often those of middlemen, through whose hands a volume passes before it reaches its ultimate destination--passes in many cases from one of these channels to another. This is, of course, another mode of saying that the number of actual book-holders on their own permanent account is comparatively limited, and so it is. A call on the part of two or three persons for a particular class of work or subject immediately puts the whole trade on its mettle; everything directly or indirectly connected with the new topic is bought up or competed for with extraordinary and abrupt eagerness; the entire fraternity is bent on supplying the latest demand; and prices rise with proportionate rapidity to an extravagant height. The market consists of a couple or trio of individuals, who might be insensible to the excitement which they have occasioned if it were not for the offers from all sides which pour in upon them from day to day; and in a season or so it is all over; quotations are as before; and the running is on something different. Books of Emblems, Catholic Literature, Gardening and Agriculture, Occult Sciences, Early Poetry, Old Plays, Americana, Bewick, Cruikshank, the modern novelists, have all had their day. But the cry and the want are largely artificial. The customers are few; the caterers are many. Such a criticism applies only to the rarer and costlier _desiderata_.