The history of Norman Colbeck's career as a collector is inextricably linked to his career as a bookseller, since he embarked on the latter to support the former. He has charted in his preface to A Bookman's Catalogue: The Norman Colbeck Collection of Nineteenth-Century and Edwardian Poetry and Belles-Lettres in the Special Collections of the University of British Columbia (1987) the course of the early stages of his collecting, while still a clerk with the Orient company: from the acquisition of his first serious purchase--its title obscured by time--of a book "marked 'scarce 21/'" ("the price of several midday luncheons in the A. B. C. teashop in Walbrook, by the side of the Mansion House"), to his aspiration to be known as a collector of books from the earlier centuries, to his evolution under the aegis and influence of A. J. A. Symons into a "19th-century man." He also...