The Book-Hunter
intrusive readers or unceremonious investigators, and their repute for
solid learning has given them a claim to attention and careful
preservation. It has sometimes happened to me, as it probably has to
many another inquisitive person, to penetrate to the heart of one of
these solid volumes and find it closed in this wise:--As the binder of a
book is himself bound to cut off as little as possible of its white
margin, it may take place, if any of the leaves are inaccurately folded,
that their edges are not cut, and that, as to such leaves, the book is
in the uncut condition so often denounced by impatient readers. So have
I sometimes had to open with a paper-cutter the pages which had shut up
for two hundred years that knowledge which the ponderous volume, like
any solemn holder-forth whom no one listens to, pretended to be
distributing abroad from its place of dignity on the shelf. Sometimes,
also, there will drop out of a heavy folio a little slip of
orange-yellow paper covered with some cabalistic-looking characters,
which a careful study discovers to be a hint, conveyed in high or low
Dutch, that the dealer from whom the volume was purchased, about the
time of some crisis in the Thirty Years' War, would be rather gratified
than otherwise should the purchaser be pleased to remit to him the price
of it.
Though quartos and folios are dwindling away, like many other
conventional distinctions of rank, yet are authors of the present day
not entirely divested of the opportunity of taking their place on the
shelf like these old dignitaries. It would be as absurd, of course, to
appear in folio as to step abroad in the small-clothes and queue of our
great-grandfathers' day, and even quarto is reserved for science and
some departments of the law. But then, on the other hand, octavos are
growing as large as some of the folios of the seventeenth century, and a
solid roomy-looking book is still practicable. Whoever desires to
achieve a sure, though it may be but a humble, niche in the temple of
fame, let him write a few solid volumes with respectably sounding
titles, and matter that will rather repel the reader than court him to
such familiarity as may beget contempt. Such books are to the frequenter
of a library like country gentlemen's seats to travellers, something to
know the name and ownership of in passing. The stage-coachman of old
used to proclaim each in succession--the guide-book tells them now. So
do literary guide-books in the shape of library-catalogues and
bibliographies, tell of these steady and respectable mansions of
literature. No one speaks ill of them, or even proclaims his ignorance
of their nature, and your "man who knows everything" will profess some
familiarity with them, the more readily that the verity of his
pretensions is not likely to be tested. A man's name may have resounded
for a time through all the newspapers as the gainer of a great victory
or the speaker of marvellous speeches--he may have been the most
brilliant wit of some distinguished social circle--the head of a great
profession--even a leading statesman; yet his memory has utterly
evaporated with the departure of his own generation. Had he but written
one or two of these solid books, now, his name would have been
perpetuated in catalogues and bibliographical dictionaries; nay,
biographies and encyclopaedias would contain their titles, and perhaps
the day of the author's birth and death. Let those who desire posthumous
fame, counting recollection as equivalent to fame, think of this.
It is with no desire to further the annihilation or decay of the stout
and long-lived class of books of which I have been speaking, that I now
draw attention to the book-hunter's services in the preservation of some
that are of a more fragile nature, and are liable to droop and decay. We
can see the process going on around us, just as we see other things
travelling towards extinction. Look, for instance, at school-books, how
rapidly and obviously they go to ruin. True, there are plenty of them,
but save of those preserved in the privileged libraries, or of some that
may be tossed aside among lumber in which they happen to remain until
they become curiosities, what chance is there of any of them being in
existence a century hence? Collectors know well the extreme rarity and
value of ancient school-books. Nor is their value by any means fanciful.
The dominie will tell us that they are old-fashioned, and the pedagogue
who keeps a school, "and ca's it a acaudemy," will sneer at them as
"obsolete and incompatible with the enlightened adjuncts of modern
tuition;" but if we are to consider that the condition of the human
intellect at any particular juncture is worth studying, it is certainly
of importance to know on what food its infancy is fed. And so of
children's play-books as well as their work-books; these are as
ephemeral as their other toys. Retaining dear recollections of some that
were the favourites, and desiring to awaken from them old recollections
of careless boyhood, or perhaps to try whether your own children inherit
the paternal susceptibility to their beauties, you make application to
the bookseller--but, behold, they have disappeared from existence as
entirely as the rabbits you fed, and the terrier that followed you with
his cheery clattering bark. Neither name nor description--not the
announcement of the benevolent publishers, "Darton, Harvey, and
Darton"--can recover the faintest traces of their vestiges.[61] Old
cookery-books, almanacs, books of prognostication, directories for
agricultural operations, guides to handicrafts, and other works of a
practical nature, are infinitely valuable when they refer to remote
times, and also infinitely rare.
[Footnote 61: I question if Toy Literature, as it may be called, has
received the consideration it deserves, when one remembers how great an
influence it must have on the formation of the infant mind. I am not
prepared to argue that it should be put under regulation--perhaps it is
best that it should be left to the wild luxuriance of nature--but its
characteristics and influence are surely worthy of studious observation.
It happened to me once to observe in the library of an eminent divine a
large heap of that class of works which used to be known as "penny
bookies." My reverend friend explained, in relation to them, that they
were intended to counteract some pernicious influences at work--that he
had made the important and painful discovery that the influence of this
class of literature had been noticed and employed by the enemies of the
Church. In confirmation of this view, he showed me some passages, of
which I remember the following:--
"B was a Bishop who loved his repose,
C was a Curate who had a red nose,"
D was a Dean, but how characterised I forget. I did not think, however,
that the proposed antidote, in which the mysteries of religion and the
specialties of a zealous class in the English Church were mixed up with
childish prattle, was much more decorous or appropriate than what it was
intended to counteract.]
But of course the most interesting of all are the relics of pure
literature, of poems and plays. Whence have arisen all the anxious
searches and disappointments, and the bitter contests, and the rare
triumphs, about the early editions of Shakespeare, separately or
collectively, save from this, that they passed from one impatient hand
to another, and were subjected to an unceasing greedy perusal, until
they were at last used up and put out of existence? True it was to be
with him--
"So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."
But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like some
ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a
long age digging and searching for some fragment of intellectual
treasure.
One book, and that the most read of all, was hedged by a sort of
divinity which protected it, so far as that was practicable, from the
dilapidating effects of use. The Bible seems to have been ever touched
with reverent gentleness, and, when the sordid effects of long handling
had become inevitably conspicuous, to have been generally removed out of
sight, and, as it were, decently interred. Hence it is that, of the old
editions of the Bible, the copies are so comparatively numerous and in
such fine preservation. Look at those two folios from the types of
Guttenburg and Fust, running so far back into the earliest stage of the
art of printing, that of them is told the legend of a combination with
the devil, which enabled one man to write so many copies identically the
same. See how clean and spotless is the paper, and how black, glossy,
and distinct the type, telling us how little progress printing has made
since the days of its inventors, in anything save the greater rapidity
with which, in consequence of the progress of machinery, it can now be
executed.
The reason of the extreme rarity of the books printed by the early
English printers is that, being very amusing, they were used up,
thumbed out of existence. Such were Caxton's Book of the Ordre of
Chyualry; his Knyght of the Toure; the Myrour of the World; and the
Golden Legende; Cocke Lorell's Bote, by De Worde; his Kalender of
Shepeherdes, and suchlike. If any one feels an interest in the process
of exhaustion, by which such treasures were reduced to rarity, he may
easily witness it in the _debris_ of a circulating library; and perhaps
he will find the phenomenon in still more distinct operation at any
book-stall where lie heaps of school-books, odd volumes of novels, and a
choice of Watts's Hymns and Pilgrim's Progresses. Here, too, it is
possible that the enlightened onlooker may catch sight of the
book-hunter plying his vocation, much after the manner in which, in some
ill-regulated town, he may have beheld the _chiffonniers_, at early
dawn, rummaging among the cinder heaps for ejected treasures. A ragged
morsel is perhaps carefully severed from the heap, wrapped in paper to
keep its leaves together, and deposited in the purchaser's pocket. You
would probably find it difficult to recognise the fragment, if you
should see it in the brilliancy of its resuscitation. A skilled and
cautious workman has applied a bituminous solvent to its ragged edges,
and literally incorporated, by a sort of paper-making process, each
mouldering page into a broad leaf of fine strong paper, in which the
print, according to a simile used for such occasions, seems like a
small rivulet in a wide meadow of margin. This is termed inlaying, and
is a very lofty department in the art of binding. Then there is,
besides, the grandeur of russia or morocco, with gilding, and tooling,
and marbling, and perhaps a ribbon marker, dangling out with a
decoration at its end--all tending, like stars, and garters, and
official robes, to stamp the outer insignia of importance on the book,
and to warn all the world to respect it, and save it from the risks to
which the common herd of literature is liable. The French have, as
usual, dignified the process which restores diseased books to health and
condition by an appropriate technical name--it is Bibliuguiancie; and
under that title it will be found fitly and appropriately discussed in
the Dictionnaire de Bibliologie of Peignot, who specially mentions two
practitioners of this kind as having conferred lustre on their
profession by their skill and success--Vialard and Heudier.[62]
[Footnote 62: There is something exceedingly curious, not only in its
bearing on the matter of the text, but as a record of some peculiar
manners and habits of the fourteenth century, in Richard of Bury's