College Rhymes

Before the web, book collecting was a very physical hobby and searching through hundreds of second hand books on hundreds of shelves was the basic mode of grazing. Scanning spines for titles, the perusal was in itself exciting, holding in one’s mind the hope of a rare find. With the advent of the web and search engines, the search could easily become a quick daily event for new arrivals. In this way I found one day a set of the rare Oxford periodical College Rhymes, containing all of Lewis Carroll’s fourteen contributions and all in original cloth. The last three volumes (without Carroll contributions) were not present but eleven out of fourteen volumes wasn’t bad. He had been editor of the magazine from July 1862 to March 1863. I have never seen a set since which tends to affirm the price (£1,400). When a bookseller lists an item that hasn't cropped up for sale for decades, he has to pitch it without any previous comparatitive figures. There was a partial set sold in the 1950s. The seller was Jeffrey Stern of York, once a Lewis Carroll collector himself, whose collection is now at Seitoku Gakuin College in Tokyo.