Studio: international art (2.1894)

The Two Paynes,

by Austin Dobson

A foot-note to this reference—one of those pro-
fuse annotations which, it is shrewdly suspected,
furnished the real pretext of the poem—describes

Payne as a " Trypho Emeritus." He is also de-
clared to have been " one of the best and honestest
men living," " to whom, as a bookseller, learning
is under considerable obligations."

Not the least of these obligations is his protec-
tion and encouragement of his exceedingly eccen-
tric and even disreputable namesake, Roger Payne

" king's chester." in the collection of
mr. d, w. currie

the bookbinder. This is the more laudable because,
in spite of appearances to the contrary, they were
not in any way related. Payne the bookbinder was
born in 1739 on the confines of Windsor Forest.
Having chosen his calling early, he was first em-
ployed by Joseph Pote, the well-known bookseller
of Eton. He subsequently drifted to Osborne
of Gray's Inn, that "rough, imperative tradesman "
whom Johnson, for his intolerable insolence,
knocked down with a folio. Payne himself was
not of a particularly conciliatory disposition, and
the ill-assorted pair soon parted company. Then
Roger Payne came under the influence of Thomas
Payne, who ultimately, somewhere between 1766
and 1770, set him up in business near Leicester
1S6

Square. It is, indeed, to Thomas that booksellers
owe the existence of Roger. For, in addition to
other peculiarities, both inherited and acquired,
poor Roger Payne had an inordinate attachment

to ale. This kept him all his lifetime in miserable
poverty and squalor, although, strangely enough,
it does not, for many years at least, appear to have
impaired his wonderful skill as a craftsman. He
seems to have had no other vices but this of " barley-
broth," which to him—like " orses and dogs " to
the squint-eyed gentleman in David Coppe7-field,
who robbed poor David of his coveted box-seat on
the Canterbury coach—was "wittlesand drink—
lodging, wife, and children—reading, writing, and
'rithmetic—snuff, tobacker, and sleep." Once,
according to the younger Payne (Tom Payne's
son), Roger's day's diary contained but the two
Falstaffian items—" Bacon, 1 halfpenny ; liquor,
1 shilling." When he could get ale he would not
work; when he worked he grew lyrical at the
prospect of it, and broke into strange bursts of
dislocated doggerel in his bills. Here—collected
by Dibdin from oral tradition—is one verse of two
with which he sent home Sir Edward Barry " On
the Wines of the Ancients " (1775):

" Homer, the bard, who sung in highest strains,
The festive gift, a goblet for his pains ;
Falernian gave Horace, Virgil, fire,
And Barley Wine my British Muse inspire.
Barley Wine first from Egypt's learned shore,
And this the gift to me from Calvert's store."

With this deplorable infirmity, it may perhaps
be guessed that Roger Payne never had any ex-
tensive establishment such as that in Duke Street,
Piccadilly, of his successor, Charles Lewis, or the
palatial premises now occupied in Shaftesbury
Avenue by another distinguished bibliopegist, Mr.
Joseph W. Zaehnsdorf. Indeed, for the greater part
of his career he worked alone in a bare and
miserable garret, combining in himself all the Seven
Stages of Bookbinding. He not only made his own
tools, but—and this undoubtedly gave to his work
the inestimable impress of one intelligence—he was
his own puller, collater, sewer, forwarder, head-
bander, coverer and finisher. Late in life he took
for assistant one Richard Wier, who was also a
votary of " barley-broth," and whose wife was a
famous book-repairer and restorer, of whom Dibdin
gives a portrait. Wier and his master, according
to report, often quarrelled in as well as out of their
cups, from which encounters Payne, who was the
weaker and older man, generally came off badly.
With the march of years he grew shakier and
shabbier and less skilful, and was finally main-