ABSTRACT
Walter T. Spencer Mr Thomas Hardy has visited London so rarely during the past twenty years that the chances of his making his way into a bookshop are infinitesimal. But he has been a customer of mine, nonetheless. Twenty years ago he was searching for Latin Vulgates with, as he put it in a letter to me, ‘the type fairly clear for eyes not so strong as they were’.1 It chanced that I was busy at the time, gathering together for a collection in America, copies of the work (first editions) of the chief living authors, for a presentation library on behalf of a good cause, and I was asked if I could get the authors themselves to sign their own volumes. I had been successful in fifty or sixty cases, but I remember that there were two authors who sent a refusal, though neither of them would have been pleased had they known that their two minds shared a single thought: they were Miss Marie Corelli and the late Henry James.
