PISANUS FRAXI
109
assisted by
Sir
James Emerson Tennet, and Mr. George Witt." Wright
was
also an antiquary; he took his degree at Cambridge in 1834, and
was
one of the founders of the Camden Society, and of the British
Archeological Society. His essay seems to have been written at about the
time of Hotten's reprinting, and since it exists at exactly the same stage
of intellectual development as Knight's work, which preceded it by some
eighty years, it strikes one as being less justified.
Hotten's issue of this printing was in 125 copies only, Ashbee
specifies, "of which 6 on large paper, price, to subscribers (only),
small paper
£4.
lOs, large paper £10. lOs; Roxburg binding."
If
this
notation is correct we get an idea of the part of the market at which
Hotten was aiming: it was very small and very rich. There is, how–
ever, some ambiguity in that parenthetical "only": it may mean that
this
volume was sold only by subscription, or even by subscription
in
advance, Hotten circularizing his customers and raising enough
money to pay for the printing beforehand, as certain European print–
ing houses do today; or it may possibly mean, since the specification
is
written by Ashbee, that this was the price paid only by those who
subscribed, and that a customer walking in off the street might get
it at a knocked-down figure, or that Hotten would sell it for whatever
he could get-a practice common enough in bookselling of this kind.
Hotten did write a circular for this issue, which Ashbee happily re–
produces, and it gives us a chance of examining that great man's
prose. "This is a very extraordinary volume," its simple eloquence
runs, "upon a subject that is now attracting the almost universal
attention of the learned and curious in Europe." One of the distinc–
tive attributes of publishers of pornography, we shall often see, is
their peculiar sense of time. There follows a short ramble through
the subject of the volume, and the circular closes with this para–
graph: "As
only one hundred and twenty-five
copies have been pri–
vately printed, and the great libraries of Europe have absorbed many
of these, the volume will soon become one of the RAREST OF
MODERN BOOKS.
Five
or
six
copies, it is understood, have been
printed on LARGE PAPER." This
is
of course the usual come-on,
and
in the bit about the great libraries of Europe contains the fami–
liar, pleasant fantasy of megalomania. I say fantasy of megalomania
because it is hard to imagine anyone believing this nonsense--not
Hotten or his customers. But it is all part of the ritual, as is the last
sentence, which serves to thicken the atmosphere of the arcane. In it
Hotten is acting as a front or agent for himself, and by this slight
removal of himself from the scene of the crime seems to imply that
the real pornographer
is
the printer's boy.
