Excerpt from Bertram Dobell: Bookseller and Man of Letters

Shall we take another type of bookseller and subject him to a kindly scrutiny? Saving your patience, there could hardly be a better instance than a man who, in dealing with second-hand wares, has struck an original line of his own. In this Latin Quarter of ours - the one spot where Murger's Colin with his book-burst pockets would have been thoroughly at home - Mr. Bertram Dobell has more claims than seniority to be considered representative. He has done more to widen our acquaintance of poets and playwrights in the Elizabethan and jacobean eras than perhaps any other living man. To him we owe Traherne and Strode, fine singers both, who had survived in manuscript only, and might have gone unlaurelled down to dusty death but for his discernment. Out Of the files of the Old London Magazine he has rescued and identified many unknown pieces from the pen of Lamb; and he has recovered more than one Old English play which looks like giving its author a place alongside Webster and Dekker. Of late, scouring through fresh piles of unprinted manuscripts, he came across two manuscript versions of Sidney's 'arcadia -each differing from each, and both from the final version we so freely discuss and rarely read.

One or two things of moment relating to the origin of that fine romance have come to light through his happy agency; and we may say the same with regard to the difficult and narrow field Of Shakespearean biography. As for minor gleanings in this and similar fields, they are many and valuable, and are to find their way soon into another published volume. All this is a signal achievement for a man who spent a youth of grinding poverty and scanty education. He was nearly thirty when he broke away from a soulless occupation, and set out with a ten pound note to learn the arduous and difficult trade of a dealer in books. In the conversations I have had with him at sundry times he confesses to something over sixty years of age, and an unbroken habit of reading from five to six hours a day. This is the secret of it all - complete absorption in the one pursuit, the love of books, first for their own sake, and secondly as a medium for honest dealing with one's fellow-men. On their own merits, as George Colman said, modest men are dumb. The one thing on which Mr. Dobell prides himself is that he was of some service during life to that melancholy and distracted soul, 'b. V.' Thomson; and if only for the part he played in sustaining and encouraging him, long before his means enabled him to publish Thomson's poems, all who know 'the City of Dreadful Night, ' and the circumstances of the author's life, will hold Mr. Dobell in grateful remembrance. As he says himself, 'the thing that galled me when I was young was to be chained to a thankless and sordid trade where I could never call my brain my own; and if I have had an ambition gratified in life, it was to feel that I had justified my life by doing some good to other men, and, above all else, to that fine, sad singer.' It is an eloquent vindication of a life of hard work.

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