As wine and oil are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe
understanding and many civil virtues be imported into our minds from
foreign writings.—MILTON.
It is pleasant to take down one of the magicians of the shelf, to
annihilate my neighbor and his evening parties, and to wander off
through quiet country lanes into some sleepy hollow of the
past.—CORNHILL MAGAZINE, RAMBLES AMONG BOOKS.
IT was held by Disraeli that literature is in no wise injured by the
bibliophile, since though the worthless may be preserved, the good is
necessarily protected, he no doubt having in mind the death of the
collector and subsequent sale of his library. For though the bibliophile
may stint his family and hoard his golden leaves and tooling, at least
he abhors dog’s-ears and keeps his treasures clean. La Bruyère, who gave
us the delightful maxim, “We only write in order to be heard, but in
writing we should only let beautiful things be heard,” referred to these
accumulations as “tanneries,” condemning fine bindings, one of the few
false dogmas uttered by the sprightly, entertaining author of Les
Caractères. Fine bindings not only preserve but beautify fine books; and
to the sentiment of La Bruyère I prefer that of Jules Janin: “_Il faut à
l’homme sage et studieux un tome honorable et digne de sa louange._”
(“The wise and studious man should have a volume worthy of his praise.”)
In Edouard Rouveyre’s instructive and beautifully-printed manual on
bibliography, the question of bindings is summed up in a sentence, fine
bindings naturally referring to books that are worthy of beautiful and
permanent coverings: “Binding is to typography what this is to the other
arts; the one transmits to posterity the works of the scholar, the other
preserves the typographical production for him.... The binding of the
amateur,” he continues, “should be rich without ostentation, solid
without heaviness, always in harmony with the work that it adorns, of
great finish in its workmanship, of exact execution in the smallest
details, with neat lines, and a strongly conceived design.”[17]
Footnote 17:
Connaissances Nécessaires à un Bibliophile, par Edouard Rouveyre,
Troisième Edition. Paris, Ed. Rouveyre et G. Blond, 1883, 2 vols.
“The binding of a book,” the Right Honorable W. E. Gladstone succinctly
observes, “is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The
paper, type, and ink are the body in which its soul is domiciled. And
these three, soul, body, and habiliment, are a triad which ought to be
adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense.” Nor
should the book-lover neglect to carry out the rules relative to binding
laid down by Octave Uzanne in his Caprices d’un Bibliophile: “A book
should be bound according to its spirit, according to the epoch in which
it was published, according to the value you attach to it and the use
you expect to make of it; it should announce itself by its exterior, by
the gay, striking, lively, dull, somber, or variegated tone of its
accoutrement.”
With regard to the book-cases themselves, their height should depend
upon that of the ceilings, and on the number of one’s volumes. For
classification and reference, it is more convenient to have numerous
small cases of similar or nearly similar size and the same general style
of construction than a few large cases in which everything is engulfed.
With small or medium-sized receptacles, each one may contain volumes
relating to certain departments or different languages, as the case may
be; by this means a volume and its kindred may be readily found. Thus
one, or a portion of one, may be devoted to bibliography, another to the
philosophers, another to poetical works, another to foreign literature,
another to reference works, another to books relating to nature, art,
etc.
The style and color of the bindings, also, may subserve a similar
purpose; as, for instance, the poets in yellow or orange, books on
nature in olive, the philosophers in blue, the French classics in red,
etc. Unless methodically arranged, even with a very small library, a
volume is often difficult to turn to when desired for immediate
consultation, requiring tedious search, especially if the volumes are
arranged upon the shelves with respect to size and outward symmetry.
This may be avoided by the use of small book-cases and a defined style
of binding. I refer to the general style of binding; variety in bindings
is always pleasing, and very many books one procures already bound and
wishes to retain in the original covers. Books, moreover, which are in
constant or frequent use should not be placed in too tender colors.
Volumes become virtually lost and inaccessible in the vast walnut
sarcophagi in which they are frequently entombed, and lose the
attractive look they possess when more compactly enshrined. Above all
things, the book-case should be artistic, artistically plain, except for
the richness of the carving. Black walnut I should banish, unless
employed exclusively for somber old folios, to accentuate their
antiquity. Neither the library nor the study should appear morose or
exhale an atmosphere of gloom.
In a room ten and a half to eleven feet high, five feet is a desirable
height for the book-cases. Besides the drawers at the base, this will
afford space for four rows of books, to include octavos, duodecimos, and
smaller volumes. In some of the cases three shelves may be placed—the
shelves, of course, should be shifting—to include folios, large quartos,
and octavos. Where the ceilings are twelve feet high, six feet is a
better proportion, this height affording five or four shelves, according
to the size of the volumes. By leaving the top of the book-case twelve
to thirteen inches wide, ample space will be allowed for additional
small books, porcelains, and _bric-à-brac_. It must be borne in mind
that tall book-cases, in addition to the inaccessibility of the volumes
on the upper shelves, leave little if any space for pictures on the
walls above them; and that, though books assuredly furnish and lend an
air of refinement to an apartment, they still require the relief and
complement of other decorative objects.
The cultured business man who may have the taste but lacks the time for
extensive reading, the average man or woman who reads for recreation,
may derive more benefit from a small library comprised of the best books
carefully chosen than from the average large library. “_Quid prosunt
innumerabiles libri quorum dominus vix totâ vitâ suâ indices perlegit?_”
(“Of what use is an innumerable quantity of volumes whose owner may
scarcely read the titles during his lifetime?”) Seneca justly reasoned.
It is not so much the dinner of innumerable courses as a few dishes well
prepared. Except to those who read quickly and assimilate readily, the
large library is apt to consist for the most part of “uncut edges” in
the layman’s sense of the term.
A good library is rarely suddenly formed. Moreover, if it could be, it
were not half as satisfactory as a library added to by degrees, the
growth and gradual increase of years. Again, some of the works that were
considered a rare treat half a century since are no longer a treat
to-day. They have become old-fashioned in the same sense as a garment.
The critical eighteenth-century essay in its entirety, the old style
metaphysical airing of some pet hobby, or didactic wool-drawing now seem
rather ponderous productions. At present one does not even care to read
all of the joint productions of Addison and Steele (particularly the
latter’s essays), an averment that would have placed one under a ban
twenty years ago. Yet even in Johnson’s day the Rambler was more
extolled than perused, the publisher complaining that the encouragement
as to sale was not in proportion to the raptures expressed by those who
read it.
With the increasing pyramids of books, selection must become
proportionately more and more restricted. Equally is this the case with
poetry. Many of the ancient bards still figure in the editions of the
English poets—only to sun their gilded backs on the library shelves and
seldom have their pages turned. It were absurd to assert that the
Spectator and numerous other productions of a former day will ever
become closed volumes. Curiosity, and their fame also, would always
cause them to be read by futurity did not their merit preclude the
possibility of their ever sinking into oblivion. It is very probable,
however, that at no distant day many of the immortals will exist in
abridged editions. Some authors, like Montaigne, on the other hand, can
never be cut down; their redundancies and embroideries are their charm.
To our forefathers time was more lenient than it is to us. Somehow the
days and the nights were longer, and the old-time reader appeared to
find more leisure and a brighter oil with which to pursue his literary
browsings and point his antitheses. “There is a certain want of ease
about the old writers,” Alexander Smith remarks (and I recall no one who
has expressed it so musically before), “which has an irresistible charm.
The language flows like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion,
eddy, and sweet recoil—the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring
and dimple to the surface and breaking the whole into babbling music.”
“When I looked into one of these old volumes,” Thoreau
characteristically says, “it affected me like looking into an
inaccessible swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of
the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were
making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain
fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a _humus_ for new
literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bull-frogs and the
hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I
had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”
In this age of hurry and concentration who has the time to wade through
the hundred volumes of Voltaire? It is even a task to go through his
anthology, Élite de Poésies Fugitives, in the pretty little two-volume
Cazin edition, there are so many more shells than pearls. But one’s time
is well repaid after all, if only for the sake of finding and holding
one such exquisite bit of airy verse as M. Bernard’s Le Hameau. Is it
original, or a translation? The German poet Gottfried Bürger’s Das
Doerfchen and this are one and the same, except that the latter is
somewhat condensed, though equally beautiful. Following M. Bernard’s
idyl is a panegyric in verse by Voltaire addressed to M. Berger, “who
sent him the preceding stanzas,” Voltaire’s tribute beginning:
De ton Bernard
J’aime l’esprit.
C’est la peinture
De la nature.
Bernard, Berger, and Bürger; or Bürger, Berger, and Bernard would at
first sight seem to be in a tangle. But in rendering to Cæsar the things
that are Cæsar’s,
I praise my dear
Sweet village here,
undoubtedly should be returned to the German poet.
In the case of nearly every prolific author some few volumes represent
his finest thought. I grant every one has or should have a favorite
author, one who stands to him on a higher pedestal than all others,—an
author whom he reveres and loves, and who must be read in every line
that was the emanation of his brain. But for one to read every page of
Thackeray, Bulwer, Goethe, Dumas, and the host of celebrated romancists,
poets, essayists, and philosophers, delightful and instructive though
they be, is a simple impossibility.
To return to the change in literary taste, and to instance a marked
example, consider Wilson, or Christopher North. “Fusty Christopher,”
Tennyson termed this pompous _arbiter elegantiarum_. The tables have
been turned since the editor of Blackwood reviled the poet-laureate, and
the animus of the criticism on Tennyson might now be applied to its
stultified author. What magazine of the present could be induced to
publish North’s rhapsodies? An installment would seriously damage The
Atlantic, Scribner’s, or even Maga itself. How tiresome his ceaseless
alliteration, his deluge of adjectives, his stream of similes, his
invective, his bathos!
Many portions of the Noctes, it is true, are marvels of imagination and
erudition, and some of his angling conceits are worthy of Norman
MacLeod. Others, especially his selections as collected and published by
himself under the title of The Recreations, are crusted over with algæ
of self-conceit. It is the peacock who consciously struts. Pepys’s
reiterated “I” and quaint egotism are never tiresome; Wilson’s pompous
first person plural becomes a weariness. They used to give us Baxter’s
Saints’ Rest to parse, in the olden school days, and I could not help
but think that if the saints had such a horrible time, how fortunate it
was we lived in a more advanced period. No doubt the schoolmaster might
have given us worse books to parse; and, unquestionably, we should be
duly grateful that The Recreations were not included. From the _a
priori_ to the _a posteriori_ would have been so much harder sailing!
Has not even the long-spun panorama of The Seasons lost something of its
charm? Or, rather, should it not be read in an old edition?
Good editions of good books, though they may often be expensive, can not
be too highly commended. One can turn to a page in inviting letterpress
so much easier than to a page of an unattractive volume. The fine shades
of meaning stand out more clearly, and the thought is revealed more
intelligibly when clothed in fitting typographical garb. Often it
becomes a positive labor to follow many a pleasing author in the small
or worn types and poor paper with which the publisher mercilessly
thrusts him into the world. The reader has virtually to work his passage
through the pages and take frequent rests by the way.
Poor illustrating is even worse. Who may appreciate the beauties of The
Talking Oak in the edition where Olivia is portrayed in the act of
kissing a giant bole whose girth scarcely equals her own? One must ever
afterward associate an oak with a fat Olivia. Apparently the artist
never read Sir Thomas Wyatt:
A face that should content me wondrous well
Should not be fair, but lovely to behold,
or William Browne:
What best I lov’de was beauty of the mind,
And that lodgd in a Temple truely faire.
How dreadful, too, are many of the works illustrated by Cruikshank and
Crowquill, which some profess to set such store by because they are held
at such a premium by the book dealers!
Nearly as reprehensible as poor illustrating is pilloring the
unfortunate author in the stocks of some atrocious color that must
develop a cataract if gazed at long and fixedly. “I have been well-nigh
ruined by the binder!” exclaimed one of the bright writers and
literarians of the day; and before attempting to read one of his most
entertaining volumes I stripped it of its frightful garb and clothed it
in becoming attire. Otherwise one might not follow the ideas, the
glaring blue and hideous figure of the original cover asserted
themselves so strongly.
One should always endeavor to procure a good edition to start with; it
is inconvenient to change editions. You come to associate certain
favorite passages of a well-conned author with their place upon certain
pages, so that you may instantly turn to them. The passages look strange
to you in strange types, and you almost require to be introduced anew.
With a change of page the mere thought itself remains the same, only it
seems to have altered its expression. Let those who will, prate about a
thought being a thought wherever it may exist. Some thoughts there are
so airy and delicate they require to be read by one’s self—they lose a
portion of their fragrance if repeated or obtained second hand. They
should be savored by the eye and heard only by the inner ear. “The dark
line” of the sun-dial “stealing imperceptibly on—for sweet plants and
flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings
by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by”—is more sharply defined
upon the page of The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, the page where I
first saw it, than it can ever appear to me upon any other page. Again,
many flowers one enjoys most upon the uncut stalk. They may not be
plucked and retain the full aroma they distill amid their natural
surroundings. So that a quoted sentence from want of connection often
loses much of the charm it presents upon the author’s page. And yet, on
the other hand, quotation, when judiciously employed, not unfrequently
places the author quoted in his most favorable light, while forming
equally a pleasing complement to the page of the writer himself.
Montaigne’s _fleurons_ of citation, woven from his scholastic and
inexhaustible loom, what were the Essays without them?—limpid brooks and
springs ever pouring their sparkling waters into the meandering,
smooth-flowing river of the text. Merely by the change of type,
quotation relieves the monotony of the page, while, with great writers,
apt citation lends added emphasis and beauty to the thought, just as the
art of damascening enriches a fine blade.
Good editions are everything in reading. Even the fragrant mint of Lamb
possesses a heightened pungency to me when gathered along the cool,
broad margins of a London imprint. Not only the mind through the
personality or charm of the thought expressed, and the ear through the
harmony and lucidness of the style with which it is uttered; but equally
the eye, in the outward garb with which the thought is clothed, should
be gratified in reading a beautiful book. The printer it is who
contributes the finishing touches and heightens the reflective surface.
Elia’s buoyant, playful graces have, perhaps, received their most
exquisite and appropriate setting in the two little volumes of the
Temple Library, printed by the Chiswick press, the smaller being
preferable to the large-paper edition.
It is pleasant to have some authors both in an early and a late edition.
If I desire the notes, the full-page illustrations, and an amplified
text, I choose the edition of The Complete Angler illustrated by
Stothard and Inskipp and annotated by Sir Harris Nicholas. If I wish to
get still nearer Walton—to hear more plainly his birds contending with
the echo, to pluck his culverkees and ladysmocks, to smell his
primroses, and admire the very “shape and enameled color of the trout it
joyed him so to look upon,” I read him in the old spelling and old font
of the fac-simile reprint of the first edition. Moreover, for the sake
of making comparisons, it is often desirable to have an early as well as
a late edition of a favorite author. So subtle, indeed, are the niceties
of reading they may scarcely be defined. How delightful the mere cutting
of the edges of the book one longs to read, and the occasional dip into
the pages as you turn the leaves!
Of a few favorite authors it is desirable to possess two copies, one in
an inexpensive form to take when traveling. A trunk-maker is yet to
appear who will contrive an apartment that will enable one to pack books
so they may receive no possible injury—the one thing Addison’s
Trunk-maker of the Upper Gallery neglected. Besides, apart from the
friction in its receptacle, a valuable book is liable to other injuries,
or loss while traveling. The traveling volume should be small, securely
bound, light in the hand, and not too bulky for the pocket.
But an old book of all books for true delight! The pleasure of reading
Chaucer or Spenser is doubled by the types and the associations of the
past. The foxed and faded pages are like the rust on antique bronzes,
the lichens on an old wall.
In the preface to Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books reference is made
to this fascination which is conferred by an ancient font upon an
ancient page. “There is,” remarks the author, “a delicate flavor of
antiquity and a certain quaint charm in the old print of the books from
which many of the dedications have been drawn that seems to depart when
the same sentences are printed in modern type, and we are apt sometimes
to wonder what it was that we originally admired. The bouquet has fled
while we were in the act of removing the cork from the bottle.” Present,
too, with the charm of the olden page itself is the thought of who may
have first turned the pages when the book you are reading was in its
fresh and spotless leaf, and whose hand it was that traced the
annotations which embroider its margins.
To revert in parentheses to the sun-dial, Mrs. Gatty’s monograph,
recently republished and extended,[18] contains thousands of mottoes and
references to the clock of nature taken from numerous languages, but
none equal to Lamb’s apostrophe. So far as references to the passage of
time are concerned, there can be none more expressive than Ronsard’s
lines:
Footnote 18:
The Book of Sun-Dials. Collected by Mrs. Alfred Gatty. New and
enlarged edition. London: George Bell and Sons, 1889. Pp. viii, 502.
Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame!
Las! le temps non: mais _nous_ nous en allons.[19]
Footnote 19:
Time goes, you say? Ah, no!
Alas, Time stays, _we_ go!
(Austin Dobson’s translation.)
Singularly, the beautiful sonnet in which these lines occur was one
which had been cast aside by Ronsard from the later editions of his
works, and was only reprinted in Buon’s edition of 1609. Still more
singular it seems that the “Prince of Poets” should have remained
comparatively unappreciated for two centuries until reintroduced by St.
Beuve. Am I mistaken in thinking there is a pronounced resemblance
between this sonnet and Shakespeare’s “When I do count the clock that
tells the time”?