Bibliophilia

“ To the real collector there is no more delightful reading than the literature which deals with the subject he has made his own; and the more ample and specialised it be, the greater will be his delight.
What bibliophile has not read, and read again, such delightful works as Burton's 'Book Hunter,' Blades' 'Enemies of Books' and 'Life and Typography of William Caxton,' 'The Library' and 'Books and Bookmen' by Andrew Lang, Harrison's 'Choice of Books' and 'Among my Books,' Clark's 'Care of Books,' Edwards' 'Libraries and Founders of Libraries,' and many others of equal charm? ”

“ There are relics of the age before circulating libraries, there are fragments of the lettered store of some scholarly great-grandfather, and these, with a few odd numbers of magazines, a few primers and manuals, some sermons and novels, make up the ordinary library of an English household. But the amateur, whom we have in our thoughts, can never be satisfied with these commonplace supplies. He has a taste for books more or less rare, and for books neatly bound; in short, for books, in the fabrication of which art has not been absent. ”

“ A single glance at our own great books will illustrate this—books which are constantly reprinted, without which no library can be tolerated—which are still, generation after generation, the objects of the national worship, and are popularly supposed to afford a universal and unfailing standard of excellence in the various departments of literature. These books, although pored over as a task and a study by the few, are rarely opened and never read by the many: they are known the least by those who reverence them most. ”

“ I feel sure that the benefit to the people of a reference and lending library of carefully selected books, is undisputed by all who are interested in the mental, moral, and social advancement of our city. The books in such a library should be as general and as fascinating as possible. I would have this library a representative one, with a grand foundation of solid, standard fact literature, with a choice, clear-minded, finely-imaginative superstructure of light reading, and avoid the vulgar, the sensuously sensational, the garbage of the modern press. ”

“ The encouragement of the Study of Bibliography, in its legitimate sense, and towards its true object, may be numbered among the most efficacious cures for this destructive malady. To place competent Librarians over the several departments of a large public Library; or to submit a library, on a more confined scale, to one diligent, enthusiastic, well-informed, and well-bred Bibliographer or Librarian (of which in this metropolis we have so many examples) , is doing a vast deal towards directing the channels of literature to flow in their proper courses. ”

“ The Bibliomania, or the collecting an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity, has, since libraries have existed, infected weak minds, who imagine that they themselves acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves. Their motley libraries have been called the madhouses of the human mind; and again, the tomb of books, when the possessor will not communicate them, and coffins them up in the cases of his library—and as it was facetiously observed, these collections are not without a Lock on the Human Understanding.—I. d'Israeli. Curiosities of Literature: The Bibliomania. ”

“ In the past librarians have hesitated to discard any book which has once been placed on the shelves. They have believed that all printed matter has value and that a book which belongs to the library is sacred and must on [Pg 132] no account be destroyed. It is difficult to defend such an attitude. If we admit for the time being that the librarian never makes mistakes in acquiring books, still it is sure to happen that many books will outlive their usefulness, except as a part of the history or bibliography of the subject. ”

“ We rejoice to see well-printed books for the Library appear at half the old prices; and to know that there is some chance of the eyes of a generation not prematurely perishing under the inflictions of a typography inferior to the ordinary newspaper. Free Libraries would create a large and certain demand for such works. With the majority, the fame of our great writers is little more than the scrolls upon their tombs. Let our glorious Literature no longer be, for the People,
"The Monument of banish'd Minds."
THE END. ”

“ The preservation of literature through public libraries has been and will ever be one of the most signal benefits which civilization has brought to mankind. When we consider the multitude of books which have perished from the earth, from the want of a preserving hand, a lively sense of regret comes over us that so few libraries have been charged with the duty of acquiring and keeping every publication that comes from the press. Yet we owe an immeasurable debt to the wisdom and far-sightedness of those who, centuries ago, provided by this means for the perpetuity of literature. ”

“ Rare things and precious, as manuscripts were before the invention of typography, are well preserved, but when the printing press was invented and paper books were multiplied in the earth; when libraries increased and readers were many, then familiarity bred contempt; books were packed in out-of-the-way places and neglected, and the oft-quoted, though seldom seen, bookworm became an acknowledged tenant of the library, and the mortal enemy of the bibliophile. ”

“ Yet printed books must almost always make the greater part of a collection, and it may be well to give some rules as to the features that distinguish the productions of the early press. But no amount of “rules” is worth six months’ practical experience in bibliography. That experience the amateur, if he is wise, will obtain in a public library, like the British Museum or the Bodleian. Nowhere else is he likely to see much of the earliest of printed books, which very seldom come into the market. ”

“ By far the largest number of American libraries were limited to a few thousand volumes, often a few hundreds only, and these were chiefly made up of common or elementary works on arts, sciences and general literature. Writers were compelled to consult works at second hand, and could seldom get access to scarce and valuable originals; and the difficulties of making original inquiries into archæology, antiquities, philology, and other more abstruse, or less popular topics, increased at every step, and were in fact insurmountable to men of ordinary means. ”

“ Or, Benjamin Franklin, as he founded the first circulating library? Andrew Carnegie, ridiculed when announcing his intention to use his wealth in providing buildings for public libraries, lived to see himself acknowledged a benefactor of mankind.
Next to providing books is the necessity of providing good books and of printing them according to the laws of art and good taste. Continual association develops a taste for the things associated with. If the majority of books are poorly composed or poorly printed, they will unconsciously be taken as standards of book style by the reading public. ”

“ Side by side with printing, it strives after that perfection which shall ensure the perpetuity of human thought. Thus a book, clothed in morocco, is not a mere piece of mechanism, but a vehicle in which the intellectual life of writers no longer on earth is transmitted from age to age. And it is the art of book-binding which renders libraries possible. What the author, the printer, and the binder create, the library takes charge of and preserves. ”

“ But the present narrative, while it embraces a wider range, is, at the same time, independent throughout of all that have preceded it, being largely compiled from sources available only to those who are familiar with the stores of the Library and habituated to their use, as well as from private accounts and papers, for access to which, as for other kind assistance, the writer is indebted to the Librarian. Yet it is only as an attempt that the volume asks to be received and judged; for a work of this kind cannot at once attain completeness. ”

“ After all, and especially so far as imaginative literature is concerned—and these remarks apply almost exclusively to that—it is no part of the work of the library to revive what public opinion, the soundest ultimate guide, has permitted to perish; more especially as booksellers charge exaggerated prices for out-of-print novels, whatever their merit may be. In the case of some of the older books which form landmarks in literary history, it is absolutely necessary to have well-edited modern reprints for the benefit of the students who are being formed in every school in the kingdom. ”

“ It is true enough that one may form, not only a library, but a remarkably extensive one, of books [173] of reference and study; but this does not quite answer to the idea of a bibliophile—in fact, it is little more than the digestion into book-form of a mass of learning and useful information. Again, if, without embracing such classes of volumes, we limit ourselves to those which, as we express the matter above, are positively important, we of course find on our shelves all the capital authors, ancient and modern ”

“ To collect books indiscriminately tends to develop the dread bibliomania. To specialise in a particular class of books should be the object of every collector; but to adhere so rigidly to that one class of literature as to exclude from our library the great books of the world, is to deprive ourselves [59] of all the advantages which a library can offer. 'There are some books, as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, and Scott, which every man should read who has the opportunity ”

“ Fuller remarks, “that it is a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning by getting a great library;” and the supposition is equally erroneous, that a large collection necessarily implies a good one. The truth is, were we to discard all the works of a mere temporary interest, and of solemn trifling, that incumber the fields of literature, the magnitude of numerous vast libraries would suddenly shrink into most diminutive dimensions, for the number of good original authors is comparatively few; study therefore quality rather than quantity in the selection of your books. ”

“ Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still with us—the man without a tinge of letters, who buys up old manuscripts 'because they are stained and gnawed, and who goes, for proof of valued antiquity, to the testimony of the book-worms.' And the rich Bibliophile now, as in your satire, clothes his volumes in purple morocco and gay dorures, while their contents are sealed to him. ”

“ Let us admit freely, that fiction as a branch of literature, is today important, not merely as a means of relaxation and amusement but of inspiration and instruction. Whether or not that admission implies that a public library ought to provide an undue quantity of it is a question of logic, and to be logical when sentiment will more effectively carry your point is today fatal in the discussion of more weighty matters than the one we are now considering. There is, indeed, a form of printed matter even more frequently used than the novel for relaxation and amusement. ”

“ We should not flatter ourselves that the enjoyment of the delights of bibliomania was reserved to one time and generation; a greater than any of us lived many centuries ago, and went his bibliomaniacal way, gathering together treasures from every quarter, and diffusing every where a veneration and love for books. ”

“ They have made everyone a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print, and diffuse itself over the whole intellectual world. The consequences are alarming. The stream of literature has swollen into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea. A few centuries since, five or six hundred manuscripts constituted a great library ”

“ It has become the fashion for a certain section of librarians, a few public men and a considerable number of newspapers, to lament in doleful accents the popularity and preponderance of fiction reading in all kinds of lending libraries. But surely Fiction, as the most hardy and flourishing form of literary endeavour, which has been built up by the contributions of some of the greatest minds of all nations, cannot be denied its rightful place because certain narrow-minded persons think it fashionable to denounce the whole policy of public libraries? ”

“ We are, however, indebted to the patriotic endeavours of our grocers and trunkmakers, alchemists of literature! they annihilate the gross bodies without injuring the finer spirits. We are still more indebted to that neglected race, the bibliographers!
The science of books, for so bibliography is sometimes dignified, may deserve the gratitude of a public, who are yet insensible of the useful zeal of those book-practitioners, the nature of whose labours is yet so imperfectly comprehended. ”

“ Civilization has reached the most unexpected of its ages, the age of paper. Now that everyone writes books, no one shows any particular eagerness to buy them. Besides, our young authors are well on [8] the way to building up whole libraries for themselves out of their own works. They need only be left to their own devices.
If we were to subdivide the species book collector into its various classes, the top-most rank in the whole subtle and capricious family should without doubt be given to the bibliophile. ”