Bookman

“ Surely every book-collector is in his heart of hearts a specialist. Have you ever taken into your hands some choice gem of your collection without wishing that there were others in your library of the same genus? Is there not some one volume among your books that demands your first consideration when new shelving is put up, when your books are re-arranged; the volume to which you would fly first of all if a fire broke out in your sanctum? Brother bookman, I can almost hear you turn in your chair at the awful prospect of having to make choice between your beloved tomes! ”

“ The Bookman makes appeal to every one who is interested in current literature. It is not a dry-as-dust magazine for specialists. Every line and every picture it contains is of peculiar interest to the great and ever increasing public that delights in books. ”

“ The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is apropos. ”

“ Remember also that although one may judge the propensities of a collector from the titles of his volumes and his character from their contents, yet there is nothing which indicates his habits so surely as the external appearance of his books. Whenever our book-hunter enters the library of a fellow-bookman he can gauge at once the depths of his feelings towards books, let alone the extent of his bibliographical knowledge.
Surely no man is such a giant among his fellows that he may allow the life-works of the greatest geniuses of this world to be spurned underfoot? ”

“ The bookman is indeed perpetually engaged in his form of spring cleaning, which is rearranging his books, and is always hoping to square the circle, in both collecting the books of one department together, and also having his books in equal sizes. ”

“ The bookman, in fact, is a quite illogical and irresponsible being, who dare not claim that he searches for accurate information in his books as for fine gold, and he has been known to say that that department of books of various kinds which come under the head of “what’s what,” and “why’s why,” and “where’s where,” are not literature. ”

“ All that may be expected is that at some distant day the simplicity and effectiveness of some plan of the sort will begin to commend itself to clubwomen. If, then, some lover of the older literature will point out the fact that, back in 1915, the gloomy era when fighting hordes were spreading blood and carnage over the fair face of Europe, an obscure and humble librarian, in the pages of The Bookman, pointed out the way to sanity, I shall be well content. ”

“ Fundamentally The Bookman Foundation is being established to stimulate the study of American literature 368 and its development; more immediately, and as the direct means to that end, the purpose of the Foundation will be to afford a vehicle for the best constructive criticism, spoken and written, on the beginnings and development of our literature. ”

“ There are very few people writing verse today who have the power to charm us and enchant us and carry us away with them as Benét can. He has found the horse with wings.”
The Bookman Anthology of Verse (1922) , edited by John Farrar, editor of The Bookman, is an altogether extraordinary anthology to be made up from the poets contributing to a single magazine in eighteen consecutive months. ”

“ During the hours of the day when he is visiting patients, who tell their symptoms at intolerable length, or dictating letters about corn, or composing sermons, which will not always run, the bookman is thinking of the quiet hour which will lengthen into one hundred and eighty minutes, when he shall have his reward, the kindliest for which a man can work or hope to get. He will spend the time in the good company of people who will not quarrel with him, nor will he quarrel with them. ”

“ It will not only afford novel-readers food for discussion during the coming season, but it will eventually fill a recognised place in English fiction.’
THE MARKET-PLACE
By HAROLD FREDERIC
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Times.—‘Harold Frederic stood head and shoulders above the ordinary run of novelists. The Market-Place seizes the imagination and holds the reader’s interest, and it is suggestive and stimulating to thought.’
The Bookman.—‘Incomparably the best novel of the year. It is a ruthless exposure, a merciless satire. Both as satire and romance it is splendid reading. ”

“ Alas! that there should be men to whom books are merely so much paper and cloth. ‘A book,’ you tell them, ‘is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose, to a life beyond.’ And their answer is a smile. But this is no time for repining. The great army of book-lovers swells with each passing year. From all sides come recruits, often from the most unexpected quarters, from mill and factory, mean street and slum. Yes; ’tis a great day for books, and soon Everyman will have his library, in fact as well as in name. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It is now, however, my function to describe a more subtle, but no less powerful influence which the book-hunter exercises in the preservation and promulgation of literature, through the mere exercise of that instinct or passion which makes him what he is here called. What has been said above must have suggested—if it was not seen before—how great a pull it gives to any public library, that it has had an early start; and how hard it is, with any amount of wealth and energy, to make up for lost time, and raise a later institution to the level of its senior. ”

“ WHAT are the books that tempt? Are they the old, familiar volumes, old friends in old clothes—well-worn editions of the classics? Or are they those same old friends decked in rich and fanciful bindings? I am acquainted with a book-lover who confesses that he has no taste for the fanciful modern reprint. You may show him Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Hunt, or Jefferies, or Stevenson in the richest of binding, and tempt him not. He is not, he declares, to be caught that way. As well might the reader go arrayed in frills and furbelows to a masculine friend and expect to be received with decorum. ”

“ Of the term now used, the best explanation I can give is this, that in the selection of books—other questions, such as rarity or condition, being set aside or equally balanced—a general preference is to be given to those which are the most witless, preposterous, and in every literary sense valueless—which are, in short, rubbish. What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the title of "The Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort in the choice of a Library." ”

“ On the other hand, English book-collectors have always been cosmopolitan in their tastes, and without leaving England it is possible to study to some effect, in public or private libraries, the finest books of almost any foreign country. It is small wonder, therefore, that our bookmen, when they have been minded to write on their hobbies, have sought beauty and stateliness of work where they could most readily find them, and that the labourers in the bookfield of our own country are not numerous. ”

“ Then as if to show the world that one profession was too small to hold the boundless qualities of my genius, I startled the English reading public with a novel, the depth and power of which stirred the soul of the most blasé of novel-readers, and the presses of my publisher were taxed to the utmost to supply the demand for my work ”

“ But there is something more important than persiflage and gossip—there is the new novel to choose from the circulating library. For in the country the bookstall man is also the librarian and adviser; he not only sells papers but he controls the reading of the neighbourhood. ”

“ Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the sixth time, some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if any one should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy for a brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity of some fantastic critic. ”

“ Strange! Aforetime, a book was burnt now and again in the market-place by the common hangman. Was he, I wondered, paid by the hour? I had always supposed the thing quite easy for him—a bright little, brisk little conflagration, and so home. Perhaps other books were less resistant than this one? I began to feel that the critics were more right than they knew. Here was a book that had indeed an intense vitality, and an immense vitality. It was a book that would live—do what one might. ”

“ Faulkener is in his three-pair-of-stairs confined workshop by five in the morning winter and summer, and oftentimes labours 'till twelve at night. Severer toil, with more uniform good humour and civility in the midst of all his embarrassments, were never perhaps witnessed in a brother of the ancient and respectable craft of Book-binding!
Lis. I entreat you not to inflame my imagination by200 such tantalizing pictures! You know this must ever be a fiction: the most successful bibliomaniac never attained to such human happiness. ”

“ Of a truth, the foes of the book-lover are not few. One of the most insidious, because he cometh at first in friendly, helpful guise, is the bookbinder. Not in that he bindeth books—for the fair binding is the final crown and flower of painful achievement—but because he bindeth not: because the weary weeks lapse by and turn to months, and the months to years, and still the binder bindeth not: and the heart grows sick with hope deferred. ”

“ They are not instinct with the spirit of the times. One might say that these stories represent the novel in its theatrical mood. It is the novel masquerading. Just as a respectable bookkeeper likes to go into private theatricals, wear a wig with curls, a slouch hat with ostrich feathers, a sword and ruffles, and play a part to tear a cat in, so does the novel like to do the same. The day after the performance the whole artificial equipment drops away and disappears. The bookkeeper becomes a bookkeeper once more and a natural man. The hour before the footlights has done him no harm. ”

“ Little did those barefooted priests know what an opponent to their Romish rites they were fostering into life; their [301] love of learning and passion for books, drove all fear away; and the splendor of the new power so dazzled their eyes that they could not clearly see the nature of the refulgent light just bursting through the gloom of ages.
After the invention of the printing art, bibliomania took some mighty strides; and many choice collectors, full of ardor in the pursuit, became renowned for the vast book stores they amassed together. ”

“ It is vastly better for the librarian to select a few persons, either on his staff or outside of it, on whom he can rely to give him information, after reading a book, on specific points regarding which he may{23} require it. Especially in considering current fiction should the reader be able to distinguish between mere outspokenness, such as we find in the Bible or Shakespeare, and immoral or degrading tendency. ”

“ To have the resource and not to feel the ennui, to enjoy your bottle in the present, and your book in the indefinite future, is a delightful condition of human existence. There is no place, in which a man can move or sit, in which the outside of a book can be otherwise than an innocent and becoming spectacle.—T. L. Peacock. Crotchet Castle.
BOOKS YOU MAY HOLD IN YOUR HAND
Johnson used to say that no man read long together with a folio on his table. 'Books,' said he, 'that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.'—J. Boswell. Life of Johnson. ”

“ The fact is that the book-hunter, if he be genuine, and have his heart in his pursuit, is also a reader and a scholar. Though he may be more or less peculiar, and even eccentric, in his style of reading, there is a necessary intellectual thread of connection running through the objects of his search which predicates some acquaintance with the contents of the accumulating volumes. ”

“ Before proceeding to a description of the various manipulations required in gilding a book, it will be necessary to direct the attention of the young workman again to what has been advanced relative to care and attention in previous parts of this work, and follow up the remarks there made with others on the taste necessary to be displayed in this most important part of the art of bookbinding. ”

“ Of this class of workman it may be said quite as aptly as of the poet, that he is born, not made. The usual testimonies to qualification—steadiness, sobriety, civility, intelligence, &c.—may all be up to the mark that will constitute a first-rate book-keeper in the mercantile sense of the term, while they are united in a very dreary and hopeless keeper of books. ”

“ My books are everything to me; and you know what book borrowers are. My friends are welcome to tap my literary resources, but it must be through me as medium. When a seeker after knowledge calls upon me I select from my library the appropriate volume and read or recite to him such passages as appear to me most applicable to his case. ”