Abstract
IN few instances that a political economist could hold up as an example is the function of the merchant in the processes of supply and demand so clearly and simply displayed as in that of Mr. Bernard Quaritch, the wealthy merchant in the book trade. He is especially a merchantman seeking goodly pearls, whose great qualification must be that he knows the exact demand for, and the exact scarcity of, what is to be bought and sold. His catalogue does not aim at completeness as did the one which we noticed lately. Scarcely more than one-tenth of the titles carefully entered in Mr. Friedlander's lists are to be found here; but these make a collection, and a very large one, of books brought together by “natural” selection with the same good results in this case of intelligent working, as in the more automatic world around us. Many eminent men in various branches of science have first selected books bearing upon their own subject?, and then, on the dispersion of such libraries, Mr. Quaritch selects those works which have a higher value through their own superior merit, or the often doubtful though highly-prized recommendation of rarity. Accordingly Mr. Quaritch's catalogue is considerably like the sum total of British legislation. Each item of it was the supply of an existing want according to the best light of the time of its production. While circumstances, however, have changed and fresh laws have been devised to meet the changed circumstances, old laws have remained upon the statute book, and the existing code contains at the same time both inconsistent repetitions and grave deficiencies, and lacks both symmetry and completeness. While the catalogue of Mr. Friedlander shows the German love of both these good qualities and the scientific tastes of the compiler, that of Mr. Quariteh does not profess to be complete in any sense; it is a list of an immense stock of books brought together, as their former possessors ceased to require them, by a shrewd man of business who knew fheir market value. Hence in examining these bound up volumes which contain the many rich prizes of scientific literature constituting Part II. and Part III. of a new “General Catalogue,” one is not surprised to find that a book like Agassiz's “Nomenclator Zoologicus” is to be found in four different places in one of them; that five copies of Owen's “Odontography” are offered, and a variety of copies of many others.
Bernard Quaritch's General Catalogue.
Part II. Natural History and Science. Part III. Periodicals, Journals, and Transactions. (London: 1881–83.)
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A Scientific Catalogue . Nature 29, 212 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/029212a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/029212a0