In those times also there was a class of thieves who shamefully mutilated books by cutting away the margins and endpapers to use the materials for letters, a kind of sacrilege, he well says, which should be prohibited by the threat of anathema. As a preventative of some of these evils he puts out that no student should go to his books after meals without washing his hands. No grease-stained fingers should unfasten the clasps, or turn the leaves of a book; no crying child should be let admire the capital letters lest he soil the parchment, for a child instantly touches what he sees. And, finally, let the clerk, he advises, take care also that the smutty scullion reeking from his stewpots does not touch the lily leaves of books, all unwashed.
Many bookmen might I reckon up who have used books scurvily, tearing their leaves open with a finger or blunt instrument instead of using a paperknife of ivory or bone. James Thompson, the poet of The Seasons, did not scruple to attempt this delicate operation with his candle-snu fers. To introduce Wordsworth into one’s library,Southey tells De Quincey, is like letting a bear into a tulip garden; he had no mercy on his own or other people’s books, and once at tea-time De Quincey observed him take up a butter-knife to open the pages of a volume of Burke: he tore his way into the heart of the volume with this knife, that left its greasy honours behind it on every page. De Quincey was not shocked at this proceeding, he was surprised only that Wordsworth should have been so precipitate in his vandalism, as a more appropriate book-knife could easily have been discovered; he was even inclined to extenuate the act because the book was a common one. Had the book been an old black-letter book, having a value from its rarity, he would have been disturbed in an indescribable degree; but simply, he is quick to add, lest perchance he be convicted of bibliophily, with reference to the utter impossibilityof reproducing that mode of value. As for the Burke, he himself had bought the book, with many others, at the sale of Sir Cecil Wray’s library, for about two-thirds of the selling price. He only mentions the case to illustrate the excess of Wordsworth’s outrages on books, which made him, in Southey’s eyes, a mere monster; for Southey’s library was his estate; and this difference of habits would alone have su ficed to alienate him from Wordsworth.
Others, as Richard de Bury observes, use books as receptacles for papers and other objects, thus straining their covers beyond bearing point. A clumsy offender was Selden, who would buy his spectacles by the gross, using them to mark the place in a book where he happened to leave off reading. It was quite a common thing, soon after his library came to the Bodleian, for spectacles to drop out of the books as they were taken incautiously from the shelves. It has been my custom, Medwell, the American Grangeriser, ingeniously confesses, for over forty years to insert articles, from magazines and newspapers, pertinent to the subjects,in my books; many of them are so full as nearly to burst their covers,and some I have been obliged to have rebound to save them; and like damage is done by botanists, who look upon a book as nothing more than a press for plants and flowers: a vestibule to the herbarium.
When Dr. Johnson was engaged upon his edition of Shakespeare, David Garrick refused to lend him copies of the old plays in his collection, knowing that he treated books with a roughness ill-suited to their constitution, and he thought that he had gone quite far enough by asking Johnson to come to his library. The great man took his revenge by saying nothing of Garrick in his Preface. That Dr. Johnson was rough on books I have sufficiently noticed, but I cannot ignore another piece of evidence from his Life of Young, where after commending the keenness bestowed by the poet upon the perusal of books, he proceeds to describe Young’s crude method of marking pages, with evident approval: When any passage pleased him, he appears to have folded down the leaf, so that many of the books, which the Doctor had seen, are by these notes of approbation so swelled beyondtheir real bulk, that they will not shut.
Several learned men have not scrupled to treat books as though they were newspapers by tearing or cutting out extracts to save themselves the trouble of copying them. I have already noticed Edward FitzGerald’s habit of pollarding literature by cutting out of his books the sections which gave him no pleasure and binding up only those which were to his taste, and in order to show that such habits are not unusual among scholarly men, I shall cite a few further instances. Charles Darwin had no respect for books, but merely consideredthem as tools to be worked with; when they fell to pieces with rough use he held them together with metal clips; he would cut a heavy book in half to make it more convenient to hold, and he would tear out, for the sake of saving room, all the pages of pamphlets except the one that interested him. Dr. Hughlings Jackson, founder of the science of neurology, had the same bad habit: he had no compunction about tearing out any portion which interested him, and would frequentlysend to a friend a few leaves torn out of a book dealing with any subject in which he knew the friend to be interested. His library was thus a collection of mutilated volumes. On purchasing a novel at a railway bookstall, which he often did, his first act was to rip off the covers, then to tear the book in two, putting one half in one pocket and the other in the other. On one such occasion the clerk at the stall stared at the performance of this sacrilegious act with such obvious amazement that Jackson, observing him, remarked: You think I am mad, my boy, but it’s the people who don’t do this who are really mad. But no more fantastic desecration is recorded than that of Shelley, who had a passion for making and sailing paper boats. He could not resist the temptation to pursue these nautical adventures whenever he came to a pond, and any paper which came to his hand was requisitioned for this miniature shipbuilding. If he had stopped at letters and newspapers, or even those banknotes which are said to have augmented his curious purpose, he would not have figured in my black-list, but when all other raw material of the craft failed, he did not shrink from turning to one of the portable volumes which were the companions of his rambles. He applied their fly-leaves as our ancestor Noah applied Gopher wood; but, Hogg explains, learning was so sacred in his eyes that he never trespassed further on the integrity of the copy.
Scholars do not hesitate to mix books with eating apparatus. I have sometimes heard of an Iliad in a nutshell, says Swift, but it has been my fortune to have much oftener seen a nutshell in an Iliad. Madan recalls Dean Burgon’s study table in Oriel with forgotten tea-cupsat various elevations, on jutting promontories of the alpine “massif” of books, once stately and fragrant, show the results of unfair usage, and that in his various movings from one place to another more than one has been foully injured by a great nail driven into a packing-case. In such misfortunes he felt no regret, for so long as a volume held together he was not troubled by its outward show.
How readers of the commoner kind will wet their fingers to expedite the turning of pages is well known. But this naughty habit is not confined to rude fellows of the baser sort, for not so long ago a learned vandal was observed in the University Library at Cambridge in the act of wetting his forefinger for this same purpose. He was nicely rebuked by Jenkinson, the librarian, who silently caught his hand and laid it on the table. Well may Madan disapprove of giving scholars permission to rove freely round the shelves of Bodley’s Library. The great men of literature, he says, are often the very persons who could be least trusted in those rich store-rooms; and he goes on to recount their depredation, as pulling books out by the top of their backs, fingering them, turning leaves by the application of moisture, and holding them open on a table by putting other volumes on them; finally, they seldom know how or where to put a volume back, as he well remembers upon a sight of the Douce Romm MSS, after a visit from Robinson Ellis or the Malone room after Swinburne had been allowed to sample it. We have societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and other animals, observes Walter Jerrold, why have we no society for the prevention of cruelty to books? A favourable answer might have been more necessary in olden times, but even in our day there are not wanting those ingrates who misuse books and treat them with neglect, for I find so experienced a witness as Dr. Hag
-berg Wright holding up the ancients as examples to some readers of our time. In bygone times readers, he says, were counted by tens, but they loved the books they read, and handled them with reverence and care. Nowadays readers have deteriorated; they do not love their books as their ancestors loved them. Too often, he says, they handle them as bricks and buy them as furniture; they even mutilate them, and if, as he believes, book-lovers always remain lovers of books though some of them have degenerated into bibliomaniacs, many of them are rough wooers, if we may judge by the treatment of books in our lending libraries. One such library mentioned by Alexander Smith was no better than a Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels and romances;each book had been in the wars, and the tears of three generationshad fallen upon their dusty pages.
In conclusion I must set out a few words on the perils of bookbinding, for although these dangers may be avoided by careful attention, the binder is still often a biblioclast by accident, stupidity, or ignorance. In my chapter of first editions I have said something about “condition,” and how modern collectors demand their specimens in “mint state,” so here will do no more than commend a fashion which is both scientific and protective. Had it always prevailed, mutilated copies of rare books would not have been so common. Even so recently as the year 1881 Andrew Lang was not a fully convinced opponent of cut margins, for although he knew that once the binder begins to clip he is unable to resist the seductive joy, and cuts the paper to the quick, even into the printed matter, he was only almost tempted to say that margins should always be left untouched. There is now no doubt. Margins should never be cut. All books should appear intonsis capillis, with locks unshorn, as Motteley the old dealer used to say, an Elzevir in its paper wrapper may be worth more than the same tome in morocco, stamped with Longepierre’s fleece of gold. No collector of our time would commit such an error as to rebind a fair copy, still less allow his binder to cut the margins of any book. The biblioclastic bookbinder is, however, still a menace, and Blades is so incensed against him that he is encouraged by memories of how Dante in his Inferno deals out to the lost souls tortures suited with dramatic fitness to the past crimes of the victims, to imagine that had he to execute judgment on the criminal binders of certain precious volumes he has seen, where the untouched maiden sheets entrusted to their care have, by barbarous treatment, lost dignity, beauty and value, he would collect the paper shavings so ruthlessly shorn o f, and roast the perpetratorof the outrage over their slow combustion. He justifies this drastic punishment on the ground that, however much the plea of ignorance may have been justified in the past, there is no such excuse in these times, when the historical and antiquarian value of old books is freely acknowledged, Quarter should not be given.
On Reading and Collecting
BY HERBERT FAULKNER WEST
This essay is from West’s The Mind on the Wing, his 1947 sequel to the landmark book Modern Book Collecting for the Impecunious Amateur. West was a professor of comparative literature at Dartmouth and a promoter of nature writing. This essay is an excellent summary of the ins and outs of collecting and caring for books.
I hope the report recently announced by the National Opinion Research Center of Denver, in which 41 percent of those questioned said they preferred reading to all other forms of recreation, is true. I happen to prefer it also, and I write these chapters primarily for fellow readers and collectors who buy books not for speculation but because they want to read them. The fact that a book you buy may rise in value is fine, but it should be secondary to the fact that you have bought it because you want to read it and have it on your own shelves.
Many strange and interesting characters who have the urge to collect are known to all booksellers. Many of them usually know nothing of literature, but the urge to collect (the acquisitive instinct we share with squirrels) is irresistible. One bookseller friend of mine told me some of his clients are taxi drivers and letter carriers, and one, a house painter, has a good library but has never read a book.
Collectors who are simply speculators hurt the book market and make things difficult for the honest collector, and, as one bookseller told me recently, they tempt booksellers to evil deeds. John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, 1944, a much overrated book, through speculators rose to $20 or $25 for the first edition, but it wasn’t long before it dropped to where it belonged in the first place—at about its published price. The moral here is not to be stampeded by ballyhoo but calmly and critically to judge the book for yourself.
The collecting instinct is deeply rooted in all men, women, and children. I read not long ago of one Sergeant Spann who collected 3,000 war souvenirs in less than two years overseas. He had sent home, so the article stated, copies of Mein Kampf, Bibles in four languages, German weapons, clocks, beer steins, pipes, and even a couple of wedding rings. Spann started, so the Associated Press dispatch stated, collecting cigar bands when he was two years old, then turned to match folders, chewing-gum wrappers, marbles, and snakeskins. I have a lot of sympathy for Sergeant Spann, as I have for collectors of Aspidistra lurida, bottlecaps, upholstered carpet tacks, dust wrappers, trade cards, dog collars, stuffed birds, stuffed shirts, whisky bottles, Heinz labels, preserved chutney, theater programs, bus tickets, comic valentines, pressed ferns, birds’ eggs, old nails, horseshoes, locks of hair, prints and etchings, snuffboxes, Sandwich glass, nasturtium seeds, empty cartridge cases, beds Washington slept in, cigarette cases, diamonds, champagne corks, copies of the National Geographic, stocks and bonds, human skulls, knives, Philippine bolos, ichneumons (the Egyptian mongoose), meerkats (suricates), Krugeriana, playing cards, and photographs of Hollywood dream boys and girls. Still, all in all, I prefer books to all of these, and even to beautiful postage stamps.
The sale in 1946 of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt stamp collection proved the vitality of philately. Jacob Blanck in the February 23, 1946, issue of Publishers Weekly sounded a rather plaintive note. “To become a book collector requires,” he asserted, “a degree of lettering greater than that possessed by the average schoolboy,” who collects stamps. “Now this, we must admit,” he goes on to say, “may sound somewhat ludicrous to the comparative few who think only in terms of First Folios (Shakespeare’s invariably), Fanshawe, Tamerlane, or the bibelot issued by Eugene Field back in his Denver days. But the fact is that book collecting need not be, and is not, necessarily so expensive as the deluxe purveyors would wittingly, or otherwise, have the public believe. Unfortunately the stories of the small and sometimes remarkably fine specialized collections that cost but the fraction of an inscribed Moby-Dick never reach the headlines.”
A decade ago I wrote a book showing reasonably conclusively that the impecunious amateur can, without going into bankruptcy or losing his wife’s affection, build up a fine library of modern first editions. I know quite a few men of modest means who have made author collections, so complete and so fine that they were worthy of presentation to great libraries, of such writers as Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, T. F. Powys, Roy Campbell, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Aldous Huxley, H. L. Mencken, C. M. Doughty, H. M. Tomlinson, Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Edward Garnett, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Norman Douglas, Henry Williamson, Michael Fairless, W. H. Hudson, Howard Fast, and many others.
Book collecting can be the most rewarding of interests for the collector who reads the books he collects, and who buys only the books he wants to read. I was once moved by a Chinese student some years before the war who actually cut down on his meals so that he could buy a new fine edition of Shelley (Scribner’s) and certain Nonesuch Press books that he loved and desired in a beautiful format. Of that particular year he is the only student I can vividly recall.
Reading develops the critical faculty and what Pascal called esprit de finesse (good taste and judgment) more rapidly than any other interest I can think of, and these are qualities that we do not have in America in any overwhelming abundance. Travel, one hears, broadens the mind, but I’ve known people who have been aro
und the world who returned as empty-headed as when they left, though they did bring back a few souvenirs made in Birmingham. It is not long before the persistent reader may differentiate between the quality of one writer as compared with another. From Kipling to Chaucer is quite a gap, but it is one that, in time, may be bridged by any intelligent reader.
The number of friends one makes through book collecting may also be prodigious, and such friendships are among the most rewarding I have. Not only does the constant reader feel a kinship with a favorite author, living or long dead, but also one makes friends with booksellers, generally a fine lot, with critics, writers, and fellow book collectors. I have corresponded for years on the friendliest of terms with men I have never seen who shared with me their interests in certain authors together with their knowledge of books and collecting. The late Paul Lemperly of Cleveland, Ohio, I never saw, but for years his letters to me were so charming and so full of his genuine and enthusiastic love for books, and packed so full of unusual bibliographic lore, that after his death I deposited his letters in the Dartmouth College Library.
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