The aim of this project has been to reconstruct as fully as possible the contents of Thomas Hardy’s library at Max Gate, his Dorchester home, at the time of his death in January 1928. In so doing it seeks to provide an accessible resource for scholars and general readers interested in the specific books that Hardy owned, in the overall character of his library, and in the somewhat melancholy story of that library’s dispersal.

INTRODUCTION

Included in the listings that follow are the authors, titles, and other available details of books that Hardy is known to have had accessible on his own shelves for reading and consultation. Such volumes can and do make a very substantial contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Hardy’s reading and thinking, especially since many of them contain annotations and other markings in his hand. At the same time it is necessary to keep in mind that he also borrowed books from Mudie’s and other circulating libraries (e.g., The Times Book Club), and that he spent much time in libraries both locally (e.g., the Dorset County Museum) and in London (e.g., at the Athenaeum Club and the British Museum). Valuable indications of Hardy’s reading in books he didn’t own can be obtained from his Literary Notebooks, as edited by Lennart J. Björk.

Copies of Hardy’s own works have been omitted from the present reconstruction on the assumption that he would as a matter of course have had available to him copies of the books he had published and the items he had contributed directly to periodicals. This policy has proved difficult to observe with absolute consistency, but the working principle has been to exclude the books written or edited by Hardy and the magazine issues in which his writings were first printed--i.e, directly at his instigation. Included, on the other hand, are those works (mostly anthologies) that reprinted selected stories, poems, etc., in accordance with the judgment of someone other than Hardy himself--and that may on occasion have served to draw his attention to the writings of other authors. Volumes added to the library during the interval between Hardy’s death and the death of his second wife, Florence Hardy, in 1937 have also been omitted.

The reconstruction is called ‘attempted’ because it is, and will inevitably remain, incomplete. No listing of Hardy’s books has survived from his lifetime and many volumes that he owned at various times were evidently given away (e.g., to his siblings or to local hospitals) or otherwise disposed of without any record of them having been made. Nor was any comprehensive listing of the Max Gate library undertaken while his widow remained alive or during the interval between her death in October 1937 and the sale of the bulk of that library by the London auction house of Hodgson & Co. on 26 May 1938 (referred to here, and generally, as the ‘Max Gate sale’). It is also incomplete in the sense that many of the books dispersed as a result of that sale have not been tracked to their current locations--or eventual fates--and therefore cannot be described on the basis of first-hand examinations of the actual copies. That many of the most important of Hardy’s books have nevertheless been preserved and made accessible to scholars is thanks very largely to the astuteness and devotion of such collectors as Richard Purdy and Frederick B. Adams--both of whom made numerous purchases at the original Max Gate sale--and to Florence Hardy’s including in her will the clause that led to the creation of a richly representative ‘Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection’ in the Dorset County Museum. The listings here thus fall unavoidably into two broad categories: items located and directly describable, and items unlocated and describable only on the basis of uncheckable information gleaned from auctioneers’ and booksellers’ catalogues. It is a difference always to be kept in mind when evaluating the information provided in the individual entries.

Many books from the Max Gate shelves have been inspected at first hand, including all those in the Dorset County Museum, the British Library, the Eton College Library, the Beinecke Library of Yale University, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, the Fales Library of New York University, the Colby College Library, the Princeton University Library, the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, and in numerous private collections. For these, and for the relatively few whose details have been kindly supplied by their present institutional or individual owners, it has been possible to provide a full bibliographical description (author, title, place of publication, publisher, and date), specify the presence of any signatures, inscriptions, or bookplates, and offer some indication of the extent to which the volume appears to have been marked or annotated by Hardy himself. For unlocated items, on the other hand, it must again be stressed, the descriptions remain unavoidably dependent upon the varying fullness and accuracy of the catalogue entries cited.

Items are listed in a simple alphabetical sequence based on author, title (when no author is known), and a small number of group headings--specifically ‘Bible’, ‘Hymnal’, ‘Map’, and ‘Psalter’. Multiple items associated with a specific author or heading are ordered alphabetically by title.

The crucial distinction between located and unlocated copies is most immediately registered in the ‘location’ record that appears, within square brackets and flush to the right-hand margin, at the end of each entry. When the actual copy of a Max Gate volume has not been tracked down, the ‘location’ record will identify the most recent reference to the book that I have found in a catalogue issued either by a bookseller (e.g., Maggs Bros. 664/10; i.e., item no. 10 in catalogue number 664 issued by Maggs Bros., the London booksellers) or by an auction house (e.g., Sotheby’s 17 Nov. 1958/28; i.e., lot 28 in Sotheby’s catalogue of the sale held on 17 November 1958). In a few instances the ‘location’ record for an untraced title will name the printed source (e.g., Collected Letters, iv. 272) in which Hardy’s ownership of that particular volume is effectively documented.

When, however, the description of a volume has been based on an inspection of the actual copy, the ‘location’ record will simply display the name of the institution (e.g., Dorset County Museum, abbreviated as ‘DCM’) or the private collection (e.g., C. J. P. Beatty) in which it resided at the time of its being examined. When such a volume (e.g., from the now dispersed Frederick B. Adams collection) has subsequently come onto the market, the name of the collection in which it was originally inspected will be included in the ‘location’ record together with an identification of the bookseller or auction house subsequently involved (e.g., R. A. Gekoski 29/278; seen at Adams).

Each entry begins with a bibliographical description that in the case of unlocated items is limited to the information available from the catalogue or catalogues in which the volume is known to have appeared. Supplementary publication details (e.g., as to ‘editions’ and ‘issues’) derived from such catalogues are not analysed or endorsed but simply reported within parentheses immediately following the main bibliographical description. Square brackets may also be used at this same point for the discussion of more substantive issues, such as a catalogue’s citation of a questionable publication date or the absence of the title-page from an inspected volume. Then, on a new line, appears whatever information is available as to the presence of bookplates, signatures, or presentation inscriptions in that particular volume; brief details of any Hardyan annotations or markings seen or reported; and a listing, within parentheses, of the scholarly studies in which the volume is discussed and the successive book trade catalogues, dating back to the Max Gate sale, in which further references to the volume can be found. Additional information of various kinds is sometimes supplied below the main entry in slightly reduced type.

The fear of creating bibliographical ‘ghosts’ has effectively discouraged speculative elaboration of the often meagre descriptions available for volumes not examined at first hand. When, however, titles and editions have been confidently identified, the forms of reference to individual authors are sometimes standardised, details accumulated from more than one bookseller’s or auctioneer’s catalogue, and responses offered to obvious errors and lacunae. Given the impossibility of checking the catalogue descriptions of unseen items, this list accepts and faithfully reproduces the references in such catalogues to signatures, inscriptions, markings, and bookplates--including booksellers’ blanket assertions as to the presence of ‘Max Gate’ bookplates in all of the items listed in a specified section of a particular catalogue or in the catalogue as a whole. Because of the inadequacies of the original Hodgson catalogue of the 1938 sale (see HISTORY), it has been invoked (as ‘MG Sale’) only when it mentions an actual title, even though it is sometimes possible to trace individual volumes to lot descriptions in which their titles are not specifically mentioned--all British Library (‘BL’) items, for example, having derived from the three undiscriminated ‘parcels’ that comprised the single lot numbered 287.

For a full discussion of the somewhat vexed topic of ‘Max Gate’ bookplates reference should be made to the BOOKPLATES section of this Introduction. For most purposes, however, it may be enough to know that they are found in a large majority of the surviving volumes that once sat on Hardy’s shelves, that they exist in several different though for the most part closely similar versions, and that none of them were inserted during Hardy’s lifetime. Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (‘SCC’), in his capacity as one of Hardy’s literary executors, had red and black bookplates printed by Cambridge University Press shortly after Hardy’s death and during visits to Max Gate he personally inserted red plates into a good many volumes he deemed to be of particular importance. Other ‘Max Gate’ plates, however, were printed in considerable numbers, and often to very similar designs, immediately following the Hodgson sale in 1938 and inserted, without controls or supervision of any kind, by booksellers intent on recording the provenance of what they had purchased at the sale.

Hardy himself did not have any bookplates printed or inserted--the crudely printed ‘Thomas Hardy’ labels found in one or two early volumes could well have been his father’s--and the earliest and most significant of the Max Gate labels were those inserted by Sydney Cockerell immediately after Hardy’s death. These, as Cockerell later explained in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement of 17 September 1938, were printed by the Cambridge University Press in two colours, ‘red for books containing Hardy’s signature or notes in his handwriting, black for the other selected books’, and his own contribution was to paste red labels into as many signed or annotated volumes ‘as I could find’, leaving the black labels ‘to be inserted by Mrs. Hardy or an assistant’--an arrangement, so he claimed, that was ‘not fully carried out’.

The presence in the Dorset County Museum of occasional volumes bearing black ‘Cockerell’ plates (identified as ‘SCC’ plates in the listings that follow) strongly suggests either that Cockerell did not in fact confine himself entirely to the red labels or that Florence Hardy did make some attempts--however fitful and inexperienced--to follow his instructions in respect of the black labels. However, Cockerell’s letter in The Times Literary Supplement also complained that some of the same bookplates, both red and black, were being handed out at the Hodgson sale, and John Hodgson himself later acknowledged, in a private letter to Cockerell, that his firm had received from Max Gate, along with the books themselves, a box containing several dozen labels, a few of them red, most of them black. Many were badly damaged by damp, he reported, but he had himself pasted black labels in some books that seemed of particular interest and passed on other labels, still loose, to three or four of the booksellers--including the Ulysses Bookshop (of New York, as distinct from the later London bookshop of that name) and the Export Book Company--who had purchased items at the sale. To this distribution can doubtless be attributed the stained, soiled, and poorly inserted ‘Cockerell’ labels, both red and black, that are occasionally encountered--but here denied any ‘SCC’ designation.

After the sale most of the booksellers who had made large purchases sought to record the otherwise unsignalled provenance of the volumes they had acquired by printing and inserting ‘Max Gate’ bookplates of their own. Those originating, for example, with Maggs Bros. and Bertram Rota matched very closely (though not precisely) the plates inserted by Cockerell; those issued by Heffer’s of Cambridge had a quite distinctive decorative surround; while those inserted in volumes listed in the Export Book Company’s catalogue (it is not known what use, if any, the firm made of its ‘Cockerell’ plates) were much larger than the others and incorporated a photograph of Hardy himself. The many volumes catalogued by the San Francisco bookseller William P. Wreden carried Bertram Rota plates, having been purchased at the Hodgson sales by Rota and then sold on. A large and somewhat romantically illustrated bookplate used by Florence Dugdale prior to her marriage is found in a very few volumes and a few of the Maggs bookplates, bearing the standard statement ‘From the Library of Thomas Hardy, O. M., Max Gate’, were altered by hand to read ‘From the Library of Mrs. Hardy, Max Gate’.

Because the Hardy bookplates come in so many different forms, and with such different histories, no single one among them can be said to constitute ‘The Max Gate bookplate’ or ‘Thomas Hardy’s Max Gate bookplate’, terms commonly invoked in auctioneers’ and booksellers’ catalogues over the years. ‘Cockerell’ bookplates clearly have claims to be considered the most ‘authentic’, but because of the scattering of such plates at the time of the Hodgson sale only those confidently believed to have been inserted by Cockerell himself are specifically identified in the listings that follow. The ‘pictorial’ bookplates, incorporating a photograph of Hardy, that originated with the Export Book Company, are similarly identified, simply because they are so different from the others and could easily be mistaken for amateurish assertions of private ownership.

Although no attempt is made to differentiate among the other plates (including damaged or inexpertly inserted ‘Cockerell’ plates), registration of their presence--as established by actual inspection or asserted in the various catalogues consulted--can nonetheless play a significant role in determining whether or not a particular volume is in fact the copy of that title that Thomas Hardy owned. However, the presence or absence of a ‘Max Gate’ bookplate is not in itself an absolute determinant of a Max Gate provenance. Such bookplates, after all, are absent from many of the most important and interesting of Hardy’s books. They are not to be found, for example, in the volumes presented by Florence Hardy to her husband’s friends or in many of those deposited by her executors in the Dorset County Museum. They must also have been absent from most of the books secured by private bidders or their agents at the Hodgson sale itself or promptly sold on by purchasing booksellers who had not yet prepared their own post-sale catalogues.

Elkin Mathews was one of the few booksellers who chose not to insert bookplates into their purchases at the Hodgson sale but to identify such items in their catalogues (e.g., Elkin Mathews’s catalogue 77) as ‘From the Library of Thomas Hardy’--in Mathews’s case an entirely credible claim that has been duly registered in the entries for the individual volumes. In the catalogue no. 111 issued in the winter of 1938 by the firm of Horace G. Commin--in effect by Alan G. Thomas--it is similarly asserted that all the Hardy items included are ‘from the library at Max Gate’, and that terminology has again been invoked for Commin volumes not specifically identified as bearing Max Gate bookplates. Also to be noted is that, prior to the publication of Commin catalogue 111, Alan Thomas sent typed or handwritten lists of selected Max Gate items to particular collectors and institutions: there are two examples in the Beinecke Library and one in the Dorset County Museum, all carrying the Commin letterhead and dated in June or July 1938. Because such lists are unnumbered, and largely (though not completely) overlapping as to their contents, the single designation ‘Commin 1938 list’ is used when describing volumes that appear in one or more of the 1938 lists but do not reappear in Commin catalogue 111.

For further information about the history of the library, see HISTORY below.

Although Hardy seems to have thought of himself as ‘collecting’ books from an early age, very little is in fact known of the stages and processes by which he accumulated the volumes which, by the time of his death, had spread from the shelves of his study into many of the other rooms of Max Gate. A few letters to booksellers survive, but all that seems clear overall is that he bought on impulse rather than systematically and that most of the acquisitions during his hugely famous final decades came in the form of volumes presented--and often inscribed--by friends, acquaintances, aspiring writers, and unknown admirers.

Immediately after Hardy’s death his books and papers were subjected to the critical scrutiny of Sydney Cockerell, notable bibliophile and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, whom Hardy had appointed, jointly with Florence Hardy, as his literary executor. Cockerell had Max Gate bookplates made and inserted a good many of them himself (see BOOKPLATES above). At the same time he recommended to Florence Hardy the removal of many volumes that ‘though not rubbish, did not deserve a place in Hardy’s study’. Cockerell’s relations with his co-executor were already strained, however, and since all contact between them was soon broken off it is unclear to what extent, if at all, she acted upon his directive. She does, however, appear to have given some books to Hardy’s surviving sister, Kate, and to have made occasional donations of books to the local hospital, of which she was an active patron. She certainly followed the instruction in Hardy’s will that selected volumes from his library should be presented to some of his closest friends. Even so, once the initial turning-out of cupboards and destruction of old proofs and other loose papers had been completed, Hardy’s study--as perhaps distinct from other rooms at Max Gate--seems to have remained little disturbed until Florence Hardy’s own death in the early autumn of 1937.

Although Florence Hardy specified in her own will that Max Gate and its contents should be sold, she at the same time directed that some of the more important books from Hardy’s library should be deposited and displayed (together with some major manuscripts) in the Dorset County Museum. Her solicitor and executor, Irene Cooper Willis, duly selected some 475 volumes for the Museum, together with most of Hardy’s copies of his own works, and these were subsequently itemised by the Museum’s curator, initially for insurance purposes. Florence Hardy’s sisters seem to have taken a few books following her death, others may have been sent off to charities or to the local dump, but all that can be said for certain is that after the books for auction and for the Museum had been removed, little more than ‘sundry books’ remained for inclusion in lots 184 and 185 of the sale of the Max Gate contents by the Dorchester auctioneers, Hy. Duke & Sons, on 16 February 1938.

A survey of the library’s contents for purposes of probate had meanwhile (November 1937) been undertaken on Cooper Willis’s instructions by the London auction house of Hodgson & Co. (the firm’s surviving records are now in the British Library). John Hodgson and his wife--subsequently, as Lady Dalrymple-Champneys, a distinguished bibliographer in her own right--found books throughout the house, including the living-room, the dining-room, the upstairs corridor, and the attics up under the roof, but their survey focussed primarily on Hardy’s study and on such highlights as inscribed copies by currently fashionable authors (e.g., J. M. Barrie and John Galsworthy) and did not attempt anything approaching a comprehensive listing. Their first entry for the upstairs corridor, for example, read ‘Miscellaneous Books in 27 shelves’, estimated value fifteen pounds, the second ‘Philpotts (Eden) The Judge’s Chair, 1914, and First Editions, Presentation Copies to Mrs Hardy or Thomas Hardy, 12 vols.’, estimated value two pounds.

Unfortunately, much the same limitations characterised Hodgson & Co.’s published catalogue for the 26 May 1938 auction--generally referred to as the ‘Max Gate sale’--at which ‘The Library of Thomas Hardy, O.M.’ was so largely dispersed. It is true that in the catalogue of that sale most of the Eden Phillpotts volumes were duly separated out into individual lots, but more typical of the catalogue as a whole were those lots in which brief descriptions of two or three identified titles were followed by references to varying numbers of unspecified ‘others’. Towards the end of the sale are to be found such crowded lots as no. 265: ‘Kaye-Smith (S.) Sussex Gorse (back soiled), First Edition, 1916, and others by Arnold Bennett, Kipling, H. G. Wells, etc. 30 vols.’ Some additional volumes not included in the original auction were listed in another Hodgson sale four weeks later, on 8 July 1938, most of them in lots that were at once very large and very minimally described.

A further problem with the catalogue and, indeed, the sale arose from Hodgson’s failure to distinguish Hardy’s books from those that properly belonged to his widow and had in some instances arrived at Max Gate after Hardy’s death. The bidders at the sale--most of them booksellers--would, of course, have had the opportunity to inspect the lots at first hand, but the catalogue’s abbreviated entries have radically compromised its longer-term value as a record of what the Max Gate library in fact contained.

Of greater usefulness to the present ‘reconstruction’ have been the individuated and generally more informative catalogues brought out in 1938 or 1939 by the dealers and booksellers (Maggs Bros., Bertram Rota, Heffer’s, etc.) who had purchased largely at one or both of the sales and by other booksellers on both sides of the Atlantic who had acquired Max Gate volumes from one or other of those original purchasers: Bertram Rota, in particular, sold on a large consignment to the new Californian house of William P. Wreden, and a few volumes here included are named only in a list (‘Rota/Wreden list’) prepared by Rota in advance of that transaction. Variable in their accuracy and specificity though such catalogues may be, they remain indispensable to any attempt to arrive at a comprehensive sense of the books Hardy owned.

Particularly useful in filling out the record are the shrewd purchases made at the principal Hodgson sale by a small number of known collectors, notably Richard Little Purdy, whose books are now in the Beinecke Library, and Frederick Baldwin Adams, whose Max Gate volumes were included in the 6-7 November 2001 Sotheby auction of his Hardy collection and sold to a variety of bidders, both private and institutional, at consistently high prices. Max Gate books were also bought early on by the Colby College library, mostly from the post-sale catalogues; the British Library eventually obtained, by gift, the numerous Baedekers and other travel books contained in the three ‘parcels’ sold to a ‘Private’ bidder for £1.10.0 at the Max Gate Sale; and much more recently the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, already a significant repository of Max Gate titles, acquired a large number of Max Gate volumes that had remained on William P. Wreden’s shelves ever since Wreden had purchased them from Rota in 1938. At the present time the largest known holdings of Max Gate items are in the Dorset County Museum, the Beinecke Library of Yale University, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, with other significant gatherings in the Eton College library, the British Library, the Colby College library, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and the Fales Library at New York University. Some important Max Gate volumes remain in private collections on both sides of the Atlantic, though nowhere in numbers comparable to the holdings of the former Purdy and Adams collections.

David Holmes, manuscripts dealer and devoted Hardyan, embarked upon a reconstruction of Hardy’s library quite independently of myself and at roughly the same time. I originally yielded the field upon the discovery of this duplication, only for David to discover a year or two later that serious pursuit of the project was incompatible with the demands of his business. At that time he turned over to me all the considerable results of his own researches, and I have been able to draw extensively--and gratefully--on his findings as well as on his continuing support and assistance. But for the design and content of this final reconstruction I alone am responsible.

All corrections, additions, criticisms, and comments should be addressed to Debra Dearlove at David Mason Books, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The compilation of the present list would have been impossible without the generous and sustained support for this and related projects received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I have also depended during the project’s too long gestation upon friends, colleagues, assistants, collectors, booksellers, and librarians too numerous to list, and to all of them I offer my heartfelt thanks. A few people deserve particular mention: David Holmes, to whom I have already paid tribute; the late Richard Little Purdy, whose scholarship and collection were both sources of inspiration; the late Frederick B. Adams, a great collector and Hardyan and, together with his wife, Marie-Louise Adams, a fount of splendid hospitality; Michael Meredith, librarian of Eton College, unfailingly enthusiastic about the project and actively contributory to it; Barbara Rosenbaum, who valuably listed many of the Max Gate books in the Hardy section of her English Literary Manuscripts volume; and Jeremy Steele, whose exemplary study of the Greek and Latin items in Hardy’s library was an early and continuing source of encouragement. Among the others to whom my gratitude is great and gladly given I must particularly name Roger Peers, Richard de Peyer, Judith Stinton, and Lilian Swindall at the Dorset County Museum; Marjorie Wynne and Vincent Giroud at the Beinecke Library; Elizabeth James at the British Library; Nancy S. Reinhardt and Patricia Burdick at Colby; Cathy Henderson at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas; and such indefatigably helpful friends and colleagues as Claudius Beatty, Pamela Dalziel, James Gibson, Bill and Vera Jesty, Trevor Johnson, W. J. Keith, Richard Landon, Peter Lennon, W. W. Morgan, Stephen Pastore, and Keith Wilson. I owe a special debt to the generous co-operation and indulgence of the private collectors named in the catalogue itself, to my former research assistants, especially Ian Dennis, Ian Singer, and Mary Newberry, and to Sandra Alston for her expert aid in adapting to electronic distribution material originally intended for print. Indispensable above all has been the patience, wisdom, expertise, and active assistance of my wife, Jane Millgate, herself the constructor of an elegant electronic catalogue devoted to the letters of Sir Walter Scott.

Michael Millgate
University Professor Emeritus
University of Toronto

Most of the abbreviations employed in the descriptions of individual works are assumed to be either self-explanatory or in standard bibliographical use: ‘pres. ins.’, for example, signifies ‘presentation inscription’ (always to Hardy unless otherwise noted) and ‘f.f.e.p.’ indicates ‘front free end-paper’. Page references to Hardy’s prose works are always to the Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1912-14), unless otherwise noted.

Listed below are abbreviations used for names, titles, and locations.