One of the gamest buyers I know of was the late John A. Rice of Chicago.  As a competitor at the great auction sales he was invincible; and why?  Because, having determined to buy a book, he put no limit to the amount of his bid.  His instructions to his agent were in these words:  ``I must have those books, no matter what they cost.’’

An English collector found in Rice’s library a set of rare volumes he had been searching for for years.

``How did you happen to get them?’’ he asked. ``You bought them at the Spencer sale and against my bid.  Do you know, I told my buyer to bid a thousand pounds for them, if necessary!’’

``That was where I had the advantage of you,’’ said Rice, quietly. ``I specified no limit; I simply told my man to buy the books.’’

The spirit of the collector cropped out early in Rice.  I remember to have heard him tell how one time, when he was a young man, he was shuffling over a lot of tracts in a bin in front of a Boston bookstall.  His eye suddenly fell upon a little pamphlet entitled ``The Cow-Chace.’’ He picked it up and read it.  It was a poem founded upon the defeat of Generals Wayne, Irving, and Proctor.  The last stanza ran in this wise: 

    And now I’ve closed my epic strain,
    I tremble as I show it,
    Lest this same warrior-drover, Wayne,
    Should ever catch the poet.

Rice noticed that the pamphlet bore the imprint of James Rivington, New York, 1780.  It occurred to him that some time this modest tract of eighteen pages might be valuable; at any rate, he paid the fifteen cents demanded for it, and at the same time he purchased for ten cents another pamphlet entitled ``The American Tories, a Satire.’’

Twenty years later, having learned the value of these exceedingly rare tracts, Mr. Rice sent them to London and had them bound in Francis Bedford’s best style—­``crimson crushed levant morocco, finished to a Grolier pattern.’’ Bedford’s charges amounted to seventy-five dollars, which with the original cost of the pamphlets represented an expenditure of seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents upon Mr. Rice’s part.  At the sale of the Rice library in 1870, however, this curious, rare, and beautiful little book brought the extraordinary sum of seven hundred and fifty dollars!

The Rice library contained about five thousand volumes, and it realized at auction sale somewhat more than seventy-two thousand dollars.  Rice has often told me that for a long time he could not make up his mind to part with his books; yet his health was so poor that he found it imperative to retire from business, and to devote a long period of time to travel; these were the considerations that induced him finally to part with his treasures. ``I have never regretted having sold them,’’ he said. ``Two years after the sale the Chicago fire came along.  Had I retained those books, every one of them would have been lost.’’