Seeking Robinson Crusoe by Tim Severin
Author:Tim Severin [Severin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447207184
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Chapter Four
PAINTED MAN
E. Crusoe spends the night in a tree.
IF A FOREST IS THE BEST PLACE to hide a leaf, a library is the easiest place to mislay a book, and the worst place to try to find it again. As a result the ‘lost list’ tantalized Defoe experts for a quarter of a century.
The ‘lost list’ was a catalogue. The only clue to its existence was an advertisement which appeared in the London press six months after Defoe’s death in 1731. A London bookseller, Olive Payne, placed the advertisement to announce that he would be selling off Defoe’s personal collection of books. In his advertisement Olive Payne informed the public that they could pick up a free copy of his auction catalogue at any one of eight booksellers’ shops prior to the auction and see exactly what was in the ‘curious Collection of Books’ going on sale.
The first scholer to spot the advertisement in the course of his research on Defoe and realize that it could hold the clue to Defoe’s own literary taste was his mid-Victorian biographer, William Lee. He reasoned that if a copy of the catalogue could be found, it would reveal which books Defoe had read – books that might have influenced his own writing. But had a copy of Payne’s catalogue survived? If so, where was it? The literary sleuths hunted diligently. But they found nothing. William Lee reported sadly that he ‘had searched in vain for the Catalogue, and fear that a copy does not exist’.
Twenty-six years later, in 1895, later another Defoe scholar, George Aitken, observed in the learned journal Athenaeum how ‘Others have echoed Mr. Lee’s regret at the loss of the Catalogue’. With a scholar’s reproving tone Aitken scolded those experts who, not finding the list, ‘indulged in speculations, based upon Defoe’s own works, respecting the books he must have read’.
Then George Aitken dropped his bombshell. ‘The missing Catalogue’, he announced, ‘has . . . been lying all these years in the British Museum.’ The catalogue would have been found much earlier, he observed tartly, if ‘there had been a cross-reference under “Defoe” to “Catalogues” ’.
Aitken’s treasure trove has fifty-three pages. At the start of his catalogue Olive Payne states that he is offering the books of ‘the ingenious Daniel De Foe, Gent., lately deceased’. The auctioneer promises that the books ‘will begin to be sold very cheap (the lowest price marked in each book)’. The sale is to begin on Monday 15 November 1731 ‘and to continue daily until all are sold.’ With typical auctioneer’s puff, Payne adds: ‘N.B. The books are in very good condition, mostly well bound, gilt and lettered’.
The discovery of the catalogue raised a new problem for the scholars. Olive Payne had sold off two private libraries at the same time. One book collection had belonged to Daniel Defoe, the other to ‘the Reverend and Learned Philip Farewell, D.D., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge’. Unfortunately Payne had not bothered to note on his list which books had belonged to which of his two deceased clients.
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