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 just
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....
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....
A stiff-necked youth, lounging sluggishly in his study ... distributes
innumerable straws in various places, with the ends in sight, that he
may recall by the mark what his memory cannot retain.... 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 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....
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 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.--R. DE BURY. _Philobiblon._