There are certain things, the Autocrat informs us, that are "good for
nothing until they have been kept a long while; and some are good for
nothing until they have been long kept and _used_. Of the first, wine is
the illustrious and immortal example. Of those which must be kept and
used I will name three--meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems." May we
present another representative of the class which gathers value with the
"process of the suns," one as immortal and historic as wine and even
richer in associations--the parchment book cover? In this case it
matters not whether the object meets with use or neglect. So long as it
is not actually worn to pieces on the one hand, nor destroyed by mold on
the other, the parchment binding will keep on converting time into gold,
until after a few hundred years it reaches a tint far surpassing in
beauty the richest umber of a meerschaum, and approached only by the
kindred hue of antique ivory.
Here is a table full of old parchment-bound books, ranging from a tiny
twenty-fourmo, which will stay neither open nor shut, to thin, limp
folios that are instantly correspondent to either command. Those that
are bound with boards have taken on a drumhead quality of smoothness and
tension, especially the fat quartos and small octavos, while the larger
volumes that received a flexible binding resemble nothing in surface so
much as the wrinkled diploma on yonder wall, with its cabalistic
signature now to be written no more, Carolus-Guil. Eliot; but all agree
in a tint over which artists rave, the color that gold would take if it
were capable of stain. But there is no stain here, or rather all stains
are taken up and converted into beauty. Dust, dirt, smudges, all are
here, and each is made to contribute a new element of charm. Is the
resultant more beautiful than the spotless original? Compare it with the
pearly tint of the diploma, or turn up the folded edge of one of those
flexible bindings and note the chalky white of the parchment's protected
under-surface. The same three hundred years that have made over Europe
and made English America have, as it were, filled in the rhythmic pauses
between their giant heart-beats by ripening Dr. Holmes's wine and
touching with Midas caress these parchment bindings!
It is surely a crime to keep such beauty of tint and tone hidden away in
drawers or all but hidden on crowded shelves. Let them be displayed in
open cases where all may enjoy them. But let us go softly; these
century-mellowed parchments are too precious to be displayed to
unappreciative, perhaps scornful, eyes. Put them away in their
hiding-places until some gentle reader of these lines shall ask for
them; then we will bring them forth and persuade ourselves that we can
detect a new increment of beauty added by the brief time since last we
looked on them. I once heard an address on a librarian's duty to his
successors. I will suggest a service not there mentioned: to choose
every year the best contemporary books that he can find worthily printed
on time-proof papers and have them bound in parchment; then let him
place them on his shelves to gather gold from the touch of the mellowing
years through the centuries to come and win him grateful memory such as
we bestow upon the unknown hands that wrought for these volumes the
garments of their present and still increasing beauty.