The Book-Hunter
injunctions as to the proper treatment of the manuscripts which were
read in his day, and the signal contrast offered by the practice both of
the clergy and laity to his decorous precepts:--
"We not only set before ourselves a service to God in preparing volumes
of new books, but we exercise the duties of a holy piety, if we first
handle so as not to injure them, then return them to their proper places
and commend them to undefiling custody, that they may rejoice in their
purity while held in the hand, and repose in security when laid up in
their repositories. Truly, next to the vestments and vessels dedicated
to the body of the Lord, holy books deserve to be most decorously
handled by the clergy, upon which injury is inflicted as often as they
presume to touch them with a dirty hand. Wherefore, we hold it expedient
to exhort students upon various negligencies which can always be
avoided, but which are wonderfully injurious to books.
"In the first place, then, let there be a mature decorum in opening and
closing of volumes, that they may neither be unclasped with precipitous
haste, nor thrown aside after inspection without being duly closed; for
it is necessary that a book should be much more carefully preserved than
a shoe. But school folks are in general perversely educated, and, if not
restrained by the rule of their superiors, are puffed up with infinite
absurdities; they act with petulance, swell with presumption, judge of
everything with certainty, and are unexperienced in anything.
"You will perhaps see a stiff-necked youth, lounging sluggishly in his
study, while the frost pinches him in winter time, oppressed with cold,
his watery nose drops, nor does he take the trouble to wipe it with his
handkerchief till it has moistened the book beneath it with its vile
dew. For such a one I would substitute a cobbler's apron in the place of
his book. He has a nail like a giant's, perfumed with stinking filth,
with which he points out the place of any pleasant subject. He
distributes innumerable straws in various places, with the ends in
sight, that he may recall by the mark what his memory cannot retain.
These straws, which the stomach of the book never digests, and which
nobody takes out, at first distend the book from its accustomed closure,
and, being carelessly left to oblivion, at last become putrid. He is not
ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to transfer his
empty cup from side to side upon it; and because he has not his alms-bag
at hand, he leaves the rest of the fragments in his books. He never
ceases to chatter with eternal garrulity to his companions; and while he
adduces a multitude of reasons void of physical meaning, he waters the
book, spread out upon his lap, with the sputtering of his saliva. What
is worse, he next reclines with his elbows on the book, and by a short
study invites a long nap; and by way of repairing the wrinkles, he
twists back the margins of the leaves, to the no small detriment of the
volume. He goes out in the rain, and now flowers make their appearance
upon our soil. Then the scholar we are describing, the neglecter rather
than the inspector of books, stuffs his volume with firstling violets,
roses, and quadrifoils. He will next apply his wet hands, oozing with
sweat, to turning over the volumes, then beat the white parchment all
over with his dusty gloves, or hunt over the page, line by line, with
his forefinger covered with dirty leather. Then, as the flea bites, the
holy book is thrown aside, which, however, is scarcely closed in a
month, and is so swelled with the dust that has fallen into it, that it
will not yield to the efforts of the closer.
"But impudent boys are to be specially restrained from meddling with
books, who, when they are learning to draw the forms of letters, if
copies of the most beautiful books are allowed them, begin to become
incongruous annotators, and wherever they perceive the broadest margin
about the text, they furnish it with a monstrous alphabet, or their
unchastened pen immediately presumes to draw any other frivolous thing
whatever that occurs to their imagination. There the Latinist, there the
sophist, there every sort of unlearned scribe tries the goodness of his
pen, which we have frequently seen to have been most injurious to the
fairest volumes, both as to utility and price. There are also certain
thieves who enormously dismember books by cutting off the side margins
for letter-paper (leaving only the letters or text), or the fly-leaves
put in for the preservation of the book, which they take away for
various uses and abuses, which sort of sacrilege ought to be prohibited
under a threat of anathema.
"But it is altogether befitting the decency of a scholar that washing
should without fail precede reading, as often as he returns from his
meals to study, before his fingers, besmeared with grease, loosen a
clasp or turn over the leaf of a book. Let not a crying child admire the
drawings in the capital letters, lest he pollute the parchment with his
wet fingers, for he instantly touches whatever he sees.
"Furthermore, laymen, to whom it matters not whether they look at a book
turned wrong side upwards or spread before them in its natural order,
are altogether unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk also
take order that the dirty scullion, stinking from the pots, do not touch
the leaves of books unwashed; but he who enters without spot shall give
his services to the precious volumes.
"The cleanliness of delicate hands, as if scabs and postules could not
be clerical characteristics, might also be most important, as well to
books as to scholars, who, as often as they perceive defects in books,
should attend to them instantly, for nothing enlarges more quickly than
a rent, as a fracture neglected at the time will afterwards be repaired
with increased trouble."--Philobiblion, p. 101.]
I have recourse to our old friend Monkbarns again for a brilliant
description of the prowler among the book-stalls, in the performance of
the function assigned to him in the dispensation of things,--renewing my
already recorded protest against the legitimacy of the commercial part
of the transaction:--
"'Snuffy Davie bought the game of Chess, 1474, the first book ever
printed in England, from a stall in Holland, for about two groschen, or
twopence of our money. He sold it to Osborne for twenty pounds, and as
many books as came to twenty pounds more. Osborne resold this inimitable
windfall to Dr Askew for sixty guineas. At Dr Askew's sale,' continued
the old gentleman, kindling as he spoke, 'this inestimable treasure
blazed forth in its full value, and was purchased by royalty itself for
one hundred and seventy pounds! Could a copy now occur, Lord only
knows,' he ejaculated, with a deep sigh and lifted-up hands,--'Lord only
knows what would be its ransom!--and yet it was originally secured, by
skill and research, for the easy equivalent of twopence sterling. Happy,
thrice happy, Snuffy Davie!--and blessed were the times when thy
industry could be so rewarded!'"
In such manner is it that books are saved from annihilation, and that
their preservers become the feeders of the great collections in which,
after their value is established, they find refuge; and herein it is
that the class to whom our attention is at present devoted perform an
inestimable service to literature. It is, as you will observe, the
general ambition of the class to find value where there seems to be
none, and this develops a certain skill and subtlety, enabling the
operator, in the midst of a heap of rubbish, to put his finger on those
things which have in them the latent capacity to become valuable and
curious. The adept will at once intuitively separate from its friends
the book that either is or will become curious. There must be something
more than mere rarity to give it this value, although high authorities
speak of the paucity of copies as being everything. David Clement, the
illustrious French bibliographer, who seems to have anticipated the
positive philosophy by an attempt to make bibliography, as the Germans
have named it, one of the exact sciences, lays it down with authority,
that "a book which it is difficult to find in the country where it is
sought ought to be called simply _rare_; a book which it is difficult to
find in any country may be called _very rare_; a book of which there are
only fifty or sixty copies existing, or which appears so seldom as if
there never had been more at any time than that number of copies, ranks
as _extremely rare_; and when the whole number of copies does not exceed
ten, this constitutes _excessive rarity_, or rarity in the highest
degree." This has been received as a settled doctrine in bibliography;
but it is utter pedantry. Books may be rare enough in the real or
objective sense of the term, but if they are not so in the nominal or
subjective sense, by being sought after, their rarity goes for nothing.
A volume may be unique--may stand quite alone in the world--but whether
it is so, or one of a numerous family, is never known, for no one has
ever desired to possess it, and no one ever will.
But it is a curious phenomenon in the old-book trade, that rarities do
not always remain rare; volumes seeming to multiply through some
cryptogamic process, when we know perfectly that no additional copies
are printed and thrown off. The fact is, that the rumour of scarcity,
and value, and of a hunt after them, draws them from their
hiding-places. If we may judge from the esteem in which they were once
held, the Elzevirs must have been great rarities in this country; but
they are now plentiful enough--the heavy prices in the British market
having no doubt sucked them out of dingy repositories in Germany and
Holland--so that, even in this department of commerce the law of supply
and demand is not entirely abrogated. He who dashes at all the books
called rare, or even very rare, by Clement and his brethren, will be apt
to suffer the keen disappointment of finding that there are many who
participate with him in the possession of the same treasures. In fact,
let a book but make its appearance in that author's Bibliotheque
Curieuse, Historique, et Critique, ou Catalogue Raisonne des Livres
difficiles a trouver; or in Graesses's Tresor des Livres Rares et
Precieux; or in the Dictionnaire Bibliographique des Livres Rares,
published by Caileau--or let it be mentioned as a rarity in Eibert's
Allgemeines Bibliographisches Lexicon, or in Debure, Clement, Osmont, or
the Repertorium Bibliographicum,--such proclamation is immediate notice
to many fortunate possessors who were no more aware of the value of
their dingy-looking volumes than Monsieur Jourdain knew himself to be in
the habitual daily practice of talking prose.
So are we brought again back to the conclusion that the true book-hunter
must not be a follower of any abstract external rules, but must have an
inward sense and literary taste. It is not absolutely that a book is
rare, or that it is run after, that must commend it to him, but
something in the book itself. Hence the relics which he snatches from
ruin will have some innate merits to recommend them. They will not be of
that unhappy kind which nobody has desired to possess for their own
sake, and nobody ever will. Something there will be of original genius,
or if not that, yet of curious, odd, out-of-the-way information, or of
quaintness of imagination, or of characteristics pervading some class
of men, whether a literary or a polemical,--something, in short, which
people desirous of information will some day or other be anxious to
read,--such are the volumes which it is desirable to save from
annihilation, that they may find their place at last in some of the