LORD BIRKENHEAD'S BOOKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20810, 28 February 1931, Page 8 (Supplement)

LORD BIRKENHEAD'S BOOKS.

SALE OF THE LIBRARY. The sale of the " major portion of the library of the late Earl of Birkenhead " took place in London recertly. An English writer thus describes trie sale, ■which •was held at Lord Birkenhead's old house in Grosvenor Gardens: — " The lights go up and the experts arrive and take their places. There is badinage between some: others, very serious men in spectacles, who know the temporary value of eveiything to a shilling, and that there is little permanent value to anything, sit quietly and whatever they buy, will not utter a hundred words in the afternoon. The library fills; there is a fair sprinkling of women, who import a human element. "The bidding begins with volumes of judgments by Lord Birkenhead; miraculously fine and logical judgments, as I have always heard. The first bid of 5s comes with difficulty, though, and prices in shillings rule. But an appeal for the final of them, as ' The last judgment,' nets a pound. " Eight volumes of speeches work up to fifteen shillings in the end, through feminine intervention. 'These speeches filled the House of Commons once. Then comes a, long succession of books, many classics, poets, Jane Austen, Bacon, Balzac, Burns, Byron. There are thirteen Bacons; the Chancellor remembered his predecessor. The books go moderately well. A Bacon, sumptuously bound for presentation to a Duke of Chandos, fetches 40 guineas. A series of 100 volumes of British poets, which poets was not stated, but with ' emblematically -tooled backs, gilt edges, in red straight-grain morocco,' reaches 38 guineas. A first edition of Johnson makes thirty; but no word is said of Lord Birkenhead's fondness for Johnson."