The Confessions of a Collector by William Carew Hazlitt

Arcane anecdotes for book and coin experts 

As someone with an interest in book history and rare book libraries, I sometimes enjoy reading books about book collectors and their collections. This led me to William Carew Hazlitt’s book The Confessions of a Collector, published in 1897. Hazlitt (1834 -1913) came from a long line of men of letters. His grandfather William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was a famous essayist and literary critic. William Carew Hazlitt’s published writings are mostly on literary history and bibliography. He was also a collector of books, coins, china, postage stamps, paintings, and furniture. The Confessions of a Collector is a memoir about his collecting activities in these various areas.

Hazlitt was an expert on early English literature (pre-1700) and wrote a muli-volume bibliography of printed books from that era. To support his scholarly endeavors, he worked as a personal librarian to wealthy book collector Henry Huth. While purchasing books on Huth’s behalf, thousands of rare volumes passed through Hazlitt’s hands. Unfortunately, the reader learns very little about those books from Hazlitt’s memoir. The text is basically a catalog of London book dealers and anecdotes about Hazlitt’s dealings with each of them. Hazlitt assumes a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader. He expects one to have read all the books he’s written, read all the books he’s read, and met all the dealers he mentions. The intended audience for the book seems to have been his closest colleagues in the London collecting community. Although he mentions famous early printers like William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde, Hazlitt never discusses the exceptional qualities of the books they produced, other than their monetary value. In fact, he never expresses any sort of affection whatsoever for the books in which he’s dealing. The point of each anecdote is simply that Hazlitt bought such-and-such a book for five pounds and sold it later for fifteen. Of course, a century later, all the information on prices and the relative rarity of volumes will be obsolete to today’s bargain hunters, so Hazlitt’s tales of book collecting will likely only be of interest to museum curators or rare book librarians.

After nine chapters on books, there is one chapter on collecting china and one chapter on postage stamps and paintings. The remaining five chapters are on coin collecting. This latter section of the book is far more informative than Hazlitt’s thoughts on book collecting. On the topic of coins, Hazlitt does a better job of communicating his enthusiasm for numismatics (coin collecting) and his appreciation for the art form. I am not a coin collector, but Hazlitt certainly did pique my interest on the subject. He describes his decision-making process when examining and purchasing rare coins, which might actually prove valuable advice to a reader who is starting a collection of European coins. One wishes Hazlitt had approached the subject of books in the same helpful manner, instead of merely rattling off an assortment of random deal-making anecdotes.

Other than the division of topics into chapters as described above, there is little organization to the information that Hazlitt provides here. He simply meanders on each subject, often repeating the same points. If you were an avid collector of books and coins in the late 19th century, this memoir might have replicated the experience of a fireside chat in Hazlitt’s study (and perhaps not an entirely pleasant one, since he does come across as a bit of a blowhard). These days, however, only expert collectors, those privy to the most arcane knowledge in their areas of interst, are likely to find much use for The Confessions of a Collector.
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