FAMOUS BOOKSELLER

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19125, 21 September 1936, Page 9

FAMOUS BOOKSELLER

HIS LAST WISH “TELL NO ONE WHEN I DIE” LONDON, Aug. 8. I thank you, Spencer, courteous chap. For many a volume quaint and neat. Which would not have been mine, perhap, Had 1 not known New Oxford street. So wrote Robert. Louis Stevenson in 1885, after a visit to the bookshop of Walter Spencer. (It was a cold, wet day, and the bookseller himself has recorded that the great man drank brandy and water as a. precaution against a chill.) Now Mr. Spencer has died, at the age of'73. His death took place last week, but his last wish was that it should have no publicity, not even an announcement in lire newspapers. Yesterday the London bookselling community received formal postcards telling them that Walter Spencer was dead and already buried. He had been 53 years in the trade. For at least 51 his headquarters had been the little shop in New Oxford street that R u L. Stevenson rhymed. It is still there, stti.ll chock-a-block* with old coloured prints, books., early broadsheets. GREAT GHOSTS It is full, too, of ghosts, Swinburne, Meredith, Gladstone, Pater, Jeffries, Gissing, Tennyson, Henry Irving,.Thomas ■ Hardy—all were frequent visitors. Mr. Spenoev was an expert, on Dickens. He had the world’s finest Dickens museum. In it is a lock of the novelist's hair, the clothes he wore when he had his fatal seizure, pipes, cheques, the medicine chest he took on his first tour of America Mr. Spencer paid fabulous prices for rare books and manuscripts. Iri 1926 lie gave £ISOO lor the original manuscript of Thomas Hardy’s “A Pair of Blue fiXes.” He was probably one of the six richest booksellers, in. the world. For many years he lived in a house immediately opposite his shop. But he never walked from one to the other. Morning and evening a taxicab collected and delivered him. His one fear was of traffic.

For the last year or two he had not been seen in the auction rooms. Any contemplated purchase was, always submitted to him either at his home in the Isle of Wight or at Broadstairs, where he died.