PISANUS FRAXI
17
"nothing has been done, and the task is now almost hopeless." Never–
theless, Ashbee has been able to discover the names of some modern
authors, and has traced the operations of the booksellers, a pursuit,
he remarks, "equally interesting, but quite as difficult." Another dif–
ficulty has to do with the extraordinary range, diffusion, and quan–
tity of works which fall into this category, and one of Ashbee's pur–
poses in the
Index
is "to show through what widely spread ramifica–
tions erotic literature extends, and what a vast field has to
be
tra–
versed. The field indeed, even in this restricted portion of bibliogra–
phy, is so extended, and the books so numerous, that I have no hope
of ever exhausting my subject." Furthermore, most of the books of
this class are printed "either privately or surreptitiously, in small
issues, for special classes of readers or collectors," and from the first
must be thought of as scarce or uncommon. And they tend rapidly
to become scarcer: "They do not usually find their way into public
libraries . . . but are for the most part possessed by amateurs, at
whose death they are not unfrequently burned; and they are always
liable to destruction at the hands of the law. Their scarcity then ...
is very much in proportion to their age; and as society is constantly,
so to say, at war with them, the natural course is for them to die out
altogether." In the light of these remarks one can more fully under–
stand that blackmailing provision in Ashbee's bequest to the British
Museum. Rather than permit his cherished collection of obscenities
to be dispersed or destroyed, the old bibliophile, with appropriate
Quixotry, would have allowed his entire library to go under: with–
out institutional custodianship, it would very likely have been broken
up and sold at auction. Ideals, it seems, can find expression even
in
such a morass as this.
In composing the
Index
Ashbee had to contend with certain
problems of method. He at first planned to classify his material by
subjects but soon found this impracticable, "the titles of this kind of
books being so specially deceptive." Consequently he adopted
in
the
Index
a strictly alphabetical arrangement, a decision which post–
poned rather than solved his bibliographical difficulties (and
in
any
event the entire contents of the volume are recapitulated in the final
alphabetical index). By the time he was ready with
his
second
volume, however, Ashbee's sense of his project had both strengthened
and refined, and the
Centuria
and the
Catena
are arranged accord–
ing to subject. This arrangement is in itself of interest since it casts
