Time was when the collector contented him-self with a signature on a card; but that, I am told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letter addressed to him personally--"on any subject you please," as an immature scribe lately sug-gested to an acquaintance of mine. The in-genuous youth purposed to flourish a letter in the faces of his less fortunate competitors, in order to show them that he was on familiar terms with the celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred motive is the spur to many a collector. The stratagems he employs to compass his end are inexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note to inquire in what year you first published your beautiful poem entitled "A Psalm of Life." If you are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him that you are not the author of that poem, which he must have confused with your "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"--and there you are. Another expedient is to ask if your father's middle name was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has probably been dead many years, and as perhaps he was not a public man in his day, you are naturally touched that any one should have in-terest in him after this long flight of time. In the innocence of your heart you reply by the next mail that your father's middle name was not Hierophilus, but Epaminondas--and there you are again. It is humiliating to be caught swinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch of one's genealogical tree.
Some morning you find beside your plate at breakfast an imposing parchment with a great gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. This document--I am relating an actual occurrence --announces with a flourish that you have unan-imously been elected an honorary member of The Kalamazoo International Literary Associa-tion. Possibly the honor does not take away your respiration; but you are bound by courtesy to make an acknowledgment, and you express your insincere thanks to the obliging secretary of a literary organization which does not exist anywhere on earth.
A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of the correspondent who advises you that he is replenishing his library and desires a detailed list of your works, with the respective dates of their first issue, price, style of binding, etc. A
bibliophile, you say to yourself. These inter-rogations should of course have been addressed to your publisher; but they are addressed to you, with the stereotyped "thanks in advance."
The natural inference is that the correspondent, who writes in a brisk commercial vein, wishes to fill out his collection of your books, or, pos-sibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full crushed Levant. Eight or ten months later this individual, having forgotten (or hoping you will not remember) that he has already de-manded a chronological list of your writings, forwards another application couched in the self-same words. The length of time it takes him to "replenish" his library (with your books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot control your emotions sufficiently to pen a reply. From a purely literary point of view this gentleman cares nothing whatever for your holograph; from a mercantile point of view he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate specimens, which he disposes of to dealers in such frail merchandise.
The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in preparing a critical and biographical sketch of you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, some slight hitherto unnoted event in your life--a signed photograph and a copy of your book-plate are here in order--is also a character which periodically appears upon the scene. In this little Comedy of Deceptions there are as many players as men have fancies.
A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to transfer this leaf from the book of his experi-ence: "Not long ago the postman brought me a letter of a rather touching kind. The unknown writer, lately a widow, and plainly a woman of refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in the loss of her little girl. My correspondent asked me to copy for her ten or a dozen lines from a poem which I had written years before on the death of a child. The request was so shrinkingly put, with such an appealing air of doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately transcribed the entire poem, a matter of a hun-dred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am unable to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt or wholly amused when, two months afterward, I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neat price attached to it, in a second-hand book-shop."
Perhaps the most distressing feature of the whole business is the very poor health which seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No other class of persons in the community shows so large a percentage of confirmed invalids.
There certainly is some mysterious connection between incipient spinal trouble and the col-lecting of autographs. Which superinduces the other is a question for pathology. It is a fact that one out of every eight applicants for a specimen of penmanship bases his or her claim upon the possession of some vertebral disability which leaves him or her incapable of doing anything but write to authors for their auto-graph. Why this particular diversion should be the sole resource remains undisclosed. But so it appears to be, and the appeal to one's sympa-thy is most direct and persuasive. Personally, however, I have my suspicions, suspicions that are shared by several men of letters, who have come to regard this plea of invalidism, in the majority of cases, as simply the variation of a very old and familiar tune. I firmly believe that the health of autograph hunters, as a class, is excellent.
