OF SHOWING DUE PROPRIETY IN THE CUSTODY OF BOOKS
We are not only rendering service to God in preparing volumes of new
books, but also exercising an office of sacred piety when we treat
books carefully, and again when we restore them to their proper places
and commend them to inviolable custody; that they may rejoice in purity
while we have them in our hands, and rest securely when they are put
back in their repositories. And surely next to the vestments and
vessels dedicated to the Lord's body, holy books deserve to be rightly
treated by the clergy, to which great injury is done so often as they
are touched by unclean hands. Wherefore we deem it expedient to warn
our students of various negligences, which might always be easily
avoided and do wonderful harm to books.
And in the first place as to the opening and closing of books, let
there be due moderation, that they be not unclasped in precipitate
haste, nor when we have finished our inspection be put away without
being duly closed. For it behoves us to guard a book much more
carefully than a boot.
But the race of scholars is commonly badly brought up, and unless they
are bridled in by the rules of their elders they indulge in infinite
puerilities. They behave with petulance, and are puffed up with
presumption, judging of everything as if they were certain, though they
are altogether inexperienced.
You may happen to see some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his
studies, and when the winter's frost is sharp, his nose running from
the nipping cold drips down, nor does he think of wiping it with his
pocket-handkerchief until he has bedewed the book before him with the
ugly moisture. Would that he had before him no book, but a cobbler's
apron! His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as black as jet, with
which he marks any passage that pleases him. He distributes a
multitude of straws, which he inserts to stick out in different places,
so that the halm may remind him of what his memory cannot retain.
These straws, because the book has no stomach to digest them, and no
one takes them out, first distend the book from its wonted closing, and
at length, being carelessly abandoned to oblivion, go to decay. He
does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open book, or carelessly
to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no wallet at
hand he drops into books the fragments that are left. Continually
chattering, he is never weary of disputing with his companions, and
while he alleges a crowd of senseless arguments, he wets the book lying
half open in his lap with sputtering showers. Aye, and then hastily
folding his arms he leans forward on the book, and by a brief spell of
study invites a prolonged nap; and then, by way of mending the
wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the leaves, to the no small
injury of the book. Now the rain is over and gone, and the flowers
have appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking of, a
neglecter rather than an inspecter of books, will stuff his volume with
violets, and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil. Then he will use
his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will
thump the white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust, and
with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt line by line
through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book
is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so
full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the
effort to close it.
But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those
shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the shapes
of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy
commentators, and wherever they find an extra margin about the text,
furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes
their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. There the Latinist
and sophister and every unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen,
a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and
value of the most beautiful books.
Again, there is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut
away the margins from the sides to use as material for letters, leaving
only the text, or employ the leaves from the ends, inserted for the
protection of the book, for various uses and abuses--a kind of
sacrilege which should be prohibited by the threat of anathema.
Again, it is part of the decency of scholars that whenever they return
from meals to their study, washing should invariably precede reading,
and that no grease-stained finger should unfasten the clasps, or turn
the leaves of a book. Nor let a crying child admire the pictures in
the capital letters, lest he soil the parchment with wet fingers; for a
child instantly touches whatever he sees. Moreover, the laity, who
look at a book turned upside down just as if it were open in the right
way, are utterly unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk
take care also that the smutty scullion reeking from his stewpots does
not touch the lily leaves of books, all unwashed, but he who walketh
without blemish shall minister to the precious volumes. And, again,
the cleanliness of decent hands would be of great benefit to books as
well as scholars, if it were not that the itch and pimples are
characteristic of the clergy.
Whenever defects are noticed in books, they should be promptly
repaired, since nothing spreads more quickly than a tear and a rent
which is neglected at the time will have to be repaired afterwards with
usury.
Moses, the gentlest of men, teaches us to make bookcases most neatly,
wherein they may be protected from any injury: Take, he says, this book
of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the
Lord your God. O fitting place and appropriate for a library, which
was made of imperishable shittim-wood, and was all covered within and
without with gold! But the Saviour also has warned us by His example
against all unbecoming carelessness in the handling of books, as we
read in S. Luke. For when He had read the scriptural prophecy of
Himself in the book that was delivered to Him, He did not give it again
to the minister, until He had closed it with his own most sacred hands.
By which students are most clearly taught that in the care of books the
merest trifles ought not to be neglected.