Book Collector
Jones is remembered more as a book-collector than as a journalist. Over his lifetime he amassed four significant book collections. His first collection of about 600 first editions of modern authors was started with the purchase of a first edition of Robert Browning's Inn Album. It has been described as one of the early first-edition collections, and was eventually sold.
His second collection of about 2,000 volumes of early English poetry and drama was notable in that it sold at auction in New York in 1918-19 for about $400,000. (The New York Times claimed this number was $391,854.)
His third collection was of Elizabethan items. It was sold in 1923 for $137,865.
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Famous quotes containing the words book and/or collector:
“Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.”
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“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
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