4                                  Kenneth A. J^ohf

and produced a seventeenth-century quarto edition priced at $20.
This is a modest cost by today's standards; however, a young grad¬
uate student in 1939 would doubtless have thought the price a bit
steep. Jack hesitated, probably felt a moment of apprehension,
and then made the purchase. Without realizing it at the time, he
had become a collector. Book-collecting was a pa,ssion that would
consume his energies and talents until his untimely death in 1966.

The more than ninety shelves of volumes in shining leather
bindings and near-perfect dust jackets span more than four cen¬
turies of English literature. The earliest in date is the 1545 edition,
the third collected edition, of The Workes of Geffray Chaucer,
printed in London by Robert Toy. The most recent are the novel¬
ists, poets, and playwrights that Jack was reading in the 1960's—
Tennessee \\alliams, AMlliam Carlos Williams, Ivy Compton-
Burnett, and Robert Frost, to select only a few out of the hun¬
dreds that lined his shelves.

The volumes collected do not necessarily form a representative
history of English literature, for Jack's tastes were individual and
mercurial. He revered Anthony Trollope, but merely tolerated
Charles Dickens. He admired the poems of T. S. Eliot, but would
not allow those of Ezra Pound on his shelves. As a further perusal
of the volumes in his Library will show, he had a collector's bias
for original boards, pristine bindings, distinguished provenance,
and inscriptions by the authors, preferably from one famous au¬
thor to another more famous author. "To attract a collector,"
A. W. Pollard has written, "a book must appeal to his eye, his
mind, or his imagination." In the case of Jack Samuels, all three
qualities had relevance to the continued growth of his Library.
His special loves were the drama of the Restoration, the literature
of the eighteenth century, the Victorian three-decker novels with
particular emphasis on Trollope, Australian fiction, and the first
editions of contemporary writers, including E. M. Forster, Robert
Frost, John Galsworthy, Baron Corvo, Lytton Strachey, \^irginia
Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw.