For bacon .... 1 half-pennyFor liquor ... 1 shillingHe was, moreover, dirty and ill-conditioned, and the only thing that saved him from utter ruin even in his youth was the painful necessity of having to work for a very long time in order to earn what any binder of the present day would look upon as a trifle. Nevertheless, Payne was, when he applied himself, a most conscientious artist, and, although the owner of some costly manuscript or volume would certainly have been horrified to find it lying in a corner of his garret, waiting its turn in company with an old shoe or two, and the remains of the food which Payne had been consuming a week or two before, yet he might be sure that he would get his treasure back in the end, not the worse for its company, but bound in a style that could not be equalled anywhere but in Paris, and not even there at the same small cost.Some of Payne's bindings—for he had his moods—are beautiful, classical, and surprisingly artistic, and, notwithstanding his failing, it is clear that he worked hard on occasion. In fact, it is the opinion of many authorities that no English-born binder has ever succeeded, from that day to this, in approaching the genius of Payne. Walther, Staggemeier, and Kalthoeber, though they worked in London, were all Germans. Lewis may or may not have equalled his predecessor, and the same remark applies to Rivière and Bedford, whose names, however, are too contemporary to invite comparison. Besides, the question is one of individual preference, after all, and any binder, however excellent, may have to yield the palm to another in some specific matters of detail.The glamour of a binding, indeed, vanishes when criticism steps forward. The indescribable something, which is at the same time everything, falls to pieces the instant dissecting implements are produced, and the effect is gone on the instant. The whole work of art must be regarded, and no single part of it, and we may then dream, if we like, of all the strange things that happened when it was ushered into the world. It is a pity that antique and historic bindings are so extremely difficult to procure. No one but a millionaire could hope to stock his shelves with a representative assortment of bindings of different epochs and schools, and even he might spend his whole life in searching for them.There is something in a binding which fascinates, and yet hurls back the inspired sneer of Robbie Burns with interest:'Through and through the inspired leaves,Ye maggots, make your windings;But, oh! respect his lordship's taste,And spare his golden bindings.'Yes! some bindings are of greater interest, from every possible point of view, than the leaves they protect, and but for their kindly care other leaves which exist among our choicest possessions might have been utterly destroyed. Many a book has been saved from death by the glamour of its cover, and will yet be saved.CHAPTER X.THE HAMMER AND THE END.The past ten years have witnessed rather more than 600 high-class sales of books by auction in London alone, and the vast majority of the collections dispersed to the winds during that period of time were not fifty, nor forty, and, at a venture, not thirty years old. Nay! it would be tolerably safe to go still further, and to say that the life of a library is, as a rule, less than half that of a man. Though it may consist of the products of antiquity, it has but a short period of existence before it as a whole; and as book is added to book, and manuscript to manuscript, and the sum total of volumes of either kind continues to increase, so, too, it is all but certain that the closing scene of its dissolution draws nearer and nearer to the end.Generally speaking, the larger and more important a collection, the shorter its life. There are exceptions, but they only prove the rule, which may fairly be described as universal. Books are a valuable species of personal property, and next-of-kin often prove unsympathetic and unsentimental in the custody of them; besides, books cannot be divided so satisfactorily as coin, and the first and almost necessary step is to turn them into money when an estate has to be distributed among many. This is the reason why there are so few great collections in the hands of private individuals, and why they are in jeopardy every day and hour.In this respect, then, the life of a book is even less than that of a man—an analogy which in no wise minimizes the value of existence to either. A good deal of enjoyment can be crowded into a compass of thirty years, and much information may be obtained in that period if only it be sought for aright. To askcui bono?is a beggarly interrogatory which might with equal force be thrust before all life's actions, and I would not have it supposed that in my opinion it is a proper or even a satisfactory question to put where books are concerned. I only deplore the fact that to accumulate is usually to scatter the seeds of a short-lived enjoyment which dies in October. Hence it is that lovers of books have been known to cheat time and the hour, and to gratify their own inclinations as fully as possible, taking steps to secure their treasures from the hammer and the end, and have with these objects established national libraries of the very utmost importance—libraries which may certainly be destroyed in some great conflagration or by the rush of shot and shell, but can never be dispersed for the sake of the money they would produce, and will practically, therefore, remain intact for many centuries.This, it would seem, is really the only effectual way of preserving the good and permanent things of this life for the benefit of those who come after us, for the hammer, though it never destroys directly, does so indirectly, if it be a fact that the whole is greater in every quality, save number, than the parts which compose it. Here is an instance of the contrary plan of hedging round our possessions with stipulations and directions designed for their preservation. Among the great failures of book-men let this be chronicled.The mind travels back some five or six years to one of the high-priests of a fast-decaying cult. He lodged at a farm-house which, being in the direct path of advancing streets, has perhaps by this time been pulled down. At the time of which I speak it stood in an ocean of mud, not far from the highroad—a relic in the midst of surroundings so painfully new that few strangers who wandered that way failed to pause at the wicket-gate, and gaze on the thatched roof and warped windows that time had doomed. Once or twice a year, seldom oftener—for book-men of the type of the one who held sway there hate to be disturbed—I used to claim admission to the one moderately large room that the house possessed. Its walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and a number of movable cases mapped out the surface into narrow alleys. Some thousands of volumes, all bound alike, and consisting chiefly of historical works in English and Latin, must have been here stored. There were many rare books, and all were good of their kind, and most had been well read. The ways of their owner, the lifelong occupant of this crumbling cottage, were peculiar. He would get up at ten in the morning to the minute, and after breakfast take a walk in the fields, or perhaps to the city, returning at five precisely, winter and summer alike. He was so accurate in his movements that people used to set their watches by him, the new clock being generally out of gear. At half-past five he drank tea out of an enormous basin, and smoked a clay pipe, which it was his pleasure to light with a burning coal or at the chimney of his lamp. Matches he detested, on account of the sulphur, which, he said, fouled the tobacco and made it unbearable. At seven the business of the day commenced, and was continued till two, and sometimes three, in the morning—the business of reading hard without cessation, except to take a pull at the basin or to fill and light the pipe. Very pleasant were the winter evenings, when the wind howled round the gables of the house, as it often did, and the night was as black as pitch. This had gone on for thirty years without much, if any, variation, until one day the bookworm was found dead at his post, surrounded by the only real friends he had in the world, for the safety of which he had provided as follows:By his will, made some twelve months previously, he directed that the whole of his property of every description, books excepted, should be turned into money and divided between two persons named in equal shares. The books he bequeathed to another worm, who lived a mile or two away, and who used occasionally to drop in to compare notes, subject, however, to the express condition that they should neither be sold nor otherwise parted with, and be kept in the same state in which they then were. For their further preservation he directed that the legatee should have the use of the books for his life only, and that after his death they should become the absolute property of a third person, at that time comparatively young in years, a good scholar, and a man of money. One would certainly have thought that these precautions would have sufficed to preserve this library intact for a very considerable length of time; but, as events turned out, it was carted off within a month and sold piecemeal by auction to the highest bidders.In the first place, it seems, the owner for life had looked over the books, and not finding them sufficiently representative of the particular branch of study to which he devoted himself, went to the reversioner and proposed a joint sale. The latter demurred, not, indeed, to the general principle, but to the suggested division of the proceeds. He said that a life interest in the hands of a man of fifty was worth less than a prospective inheritance of the whole by one much younger, and in this he was right. An actuary very quickly calculated the shares, and then came the hammer and the end.There are hundreds and thousands of such cases, but not many bookworms of the type I have mentioned. They are fast dying out, for they belong to a very old school, which has no part or lot in these go-ahead days. It would be pitiable to hear a graybeard say farewell to a class of boys, and to see him totter to the door, which, as Epictetus says, is always open; and still more pitiable would it be if we could enter into his thoughts and regrets. Fortunately, we are as yet spared the pain of such partings as these, for our school is new—brand new—and what few old-time book-men are left feel out of place therein. Rather do they regard us in the light of merry roisterers growing wise by painful stages, whose presence is not as yet mellowed by experience, nor sanctified by the touch of time.And so there are two schools of book-men, one closed to all but the very few, the other open to all who choose to enter, and in each there is a table laden with delights. But at the head of each alike sits the skeleton of Egyptian orgies, veiled, perhaps, after the manner of later and more effeminate times, but still there. It is the same skeleton that startled the Epicurean in the heyday of his pleasures, and threatened him ere the banquet was half over. So also it menaces us, for it clutches a hammer, and we know that it will very shortly proclaimTHE END.Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London.*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKTHE ROMANCE OF BOOK-COLLECTING***
For bacon .... 1 half-pennyFor liquor ... 1 shilling
He was, moreover, dirty and ill-conditioned, and the only thing that saved him from utter ruin even in his youth was the painful necessity of having to work for a very long time in order to earn what any binder of the present day would look upon as a trifle. Nevertheless, Payne was, when he applied himself, a most conscientious artist, and, although the owner of some costly manuscript or volume would certainly have been horrified to find it lying in a corner of his garret, waiting its turn in company with an old shoe or two, and the remains of the food which Payne had been consuming a week or two before, yet he might be sure that he would get his treasure back in the end, not the worse for its company, but bound in a style that could not be equalled anywhere but in Paris, and not even there at the same small cost.
Some of Payne's bindings—for he had his moods—are beautiful, classical, and surprisingly artistic, and, notwithstanding his failing, it is clear that he worked hard on occasion. In fact, it is the opinion of many authorities that no English-born binder has ever succeeded, from that day to this, in approaching the genius of Payne. Walther, Staggemeier, and Kalthoeber, though they worked in London, were all Germans. Lewis may or may not have equalled his predecessor, and the same remark applies to Rivière and Bedford, whose names, however, are too contemporary to invite comparison. Besides, the question is one of individual preference, after all, and any binder, however excellent, may have to yield the palm to another in some specific matters of detail.
The glamour of a binding, indeed, vanishes when criticism steps forward. The indescribable something, which is at the same time everything, falls to pieces the instant dissecting implements are produced, and the effect is gone on the instant. The whole work of art must be regarded, and no single part of it, and we may then dream, if we like, of all the strange things that happened when it was ushered into the world. It is a pity that antique and historic bindings are so extremely difficult to procure. No one but a millionaire could hope to stock his shelves with a representative assortment of bindings of different epochs and schools, and even he might spend his whole life in searching for them.
There is something in a binding which fascinates, and yet hurls back the inspired sneer of Robbie Burns with interest:
'Through and through the inspired leaves,Ye maggots, make your windings;But, oh! respect his lordship's taste,And spare his golden bindings.'
'Through and through the inspired leaves,Ye maggots, make your windings;But, oh! respect his lordship's taste,And spare his golden bindings.'
'Through and through the inspired leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings;
Ye maggots, make your windings;
But, oh! respect his lordship's taste,
And spare his golden bindings.'
And spare his golden bindings.'
Yes! some bindings are of greater interest, from every possible point of view, than the leaves they protect, and but for their kindly care other leaves which exist among our choicest possessions might have been utterly destroyed. Many a book has been saved from death by the glamour of its cover, and will yet be saved.
CHAPTER X.
THE HAMMER AND THE END.
The past ten years have witnessed rather more than 600 high-class sales of books by auction in London alone, and the vast majority of the collections dispersed to the winds during that period of time were not fifty, nor forty, and, at a venture, not thirty years old. Nay! it would be tolerably safe to go still further, and to say that the life of a library is, as a rule, less than half that of a man. Though it may consist of the products of antiquity, it has but a short period of existence before it as a whole; and as book is added to book, and manuscript to manuscript, and the sum total of volumes of either kind continues to increase, so, too, it is all but certain that the closing scene of its dissolution draws nearer and nearer to the end.
Generally speaking, the larger and more important a collection, the shorter its life. There are exceptions, but they only prove the rule, which may fairly be described as universal. Books are a valuable species of personal property, and next-of-kin often prove unsympathetic and unsentimental in the custody of them; besides, books cannot be divided so satisfactorily as coin, and the first and almost necessary step is to turn them into money when an estate has to be distributed among many. This is the reason why there are so few great collections in the hands of private individuals, and why they are in jeopardy every day and hour.
In this respect, then, the life of a book is even less than that of a man—an analogy which in no wise minimizes the value of existence to either. A good deal of enjoyment can be crowded into a compass of thirty years, and much information may be obtained in that period if only it be sought for aright. To askcui bono?is a beggarly interrogatory which might with equal force be thrust before all life's actions, and I would not have it supposed that in my opinion it is a proper or even a satisfactory question to put where books are concerned. I only deplore the fact that to accumulate is usually to scatter the seeds of a short-lived enjoyment which dies in October. Hence it is that lovers of books have been known to cheat time and the hour, and to gratify their own inclinations as fully as possible, taking steps to secure their treasures from the hammer and the end, and have with these objects established national libraries of the very utmost importance—libraries which may certainly be destroyed in some great conflagration or by the rush of shot and shell, but can never be dispersed for the sake of the money they would produce, and will practically, therefore, remain intact for many centuries.
This, it would seem, is really the only effectual way of preserving the good and permanent things of this life for the benefit of those who come after us, for the hammer, though it never destroys directly, does so indirectly, if it be a fact that the whole is greater in every quality, save number, than the parts which compose it. Here is an instance of the contrary plan of hedging round our possessions with stipulations and directions designed for their preservation. Among the great failures of book-men let this be chronicled.
The mind travels back some five or six years to one of the high-priests of a fast-decaying cult. He lodged at a farm-house which, being in the direct path of advancing streets, has perhaps by this time been pulled down. At the time of which I speak it stood in an ocean of mud, not far from the highroad—a relic in the midst of surroundings so painfully new that few strangers who wandered that way failed to pause at the wicket-gate, and gaze on the thatched roof and warped windows that time had doomed. Once or twice a year, seldom oftener—for book-men of the type of the one who held sway there hate to be disturbed—I used to claim admission to the one moderately large room that the house possessed. Its walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and a number of movable cases mapped out the surface into narrow alleys. Some thousands of volumes, all bound alike, and consisting chiefly of historical works in English and Latin, must have been here stored. There were many rare books, and all were good of their kind, and most had been well read. The ways of their owner, the lifelong occupant of this crumbling cottage, were peculiar. He would get up at ten in the morning to the minute, and after breakfast take a walk in the fields, or perhaps to the city, returning at five precisely, winter and summer alike. He was so accurate in his movements that people used to set their watches by him, the new clock being generally out of gear. At half-past five he drank tea out of an enormous basin, and smoked a clay pipe, which it was his pleasure to light with a burning coal or at the chimney of his lamp. Matches he detested, on account of the sulphur, which, he said, fouled the tobacco and made it unbearable. At seven the business of the day commenced, and was continued till two, and sometimes three, in the morning—the business of reading hard without cessation, except to take a pull at the basin or to fill and light the pipe. Very pleasant were the winter evenings, when the wind howled round the gables of the house, as it often did, and the night was as black as pitch. This had gone on for thirty years without much, if any, variation, until one day the bookworm was found dead at his post, surrounded by the only real friends he had in the world, for the safety of which he had provided as follows:
By his will, made some twelve months previously, he directed that the whole of his property of every description, books excepted, should be turned into money and divided between two persons named in equal shares. The books he bequeathed to another worm, who lived a mile or two away, and who used occasionally to drop in to compare notes, subject, however, to the express condition that they should neither be sold nor otherwise parted with, and be kept in the same state in which they then were. For their further preservation he directed that the legatee should have the use of the books for his life only, and that after his death they should become the absolute property of a third person, at that time comparatively young in years, a good scholar, and a man of money. One would certainly have thought that these precautions would have sufficed to preserve this library intact for a very considerable length of time; but, as events turned out, it was carted off within a month and sold piecemeal by auction to the highest bidders.
In the first place, it seems, the owner for life had looked over the books, and not finding them sufficiently representative of the particular branch of study to which he devoted himself, went to the reversioner and proposed a joint sale. The latter demurred, not, indeed, to the general principle, but to the suggested division of the proceeds. He said that a life interest in the hands of a man of fifty was worth less than a prospective inheritance of the whole by one much younger, and in this he was right. An actuary very quickly calculated the shares, and then came the hammer and the end.
There are hundreds and thousands of such cases, but not many bookworms of the type I have mentioned. They are fast dying out, for they belong to a very old school, which has no part or lot in these go-ahead days. It would be pitiable to hear a graybeard say farewell to a class of boys, and to see him totter to the door, which, as Epictetus says, is always open; and still more pitiable would it be if we could enter into his thoughts and regrets. Fortunately, we are as yet spared the pain of such partings as these, for our school is new—brand new—and what few old-time book-men are left feel out of place therein. Rather do they regard us in the light of merry roisterers growing wise by painful stages, whose presence is not as yet mellowed by experience, nor sanctified by the touch of time.
And so there are two schools of book-men, one closed to all but the very few, the other open to all who choose to enter, and in each there is a table laden with delights. But at the head of each alike sits the skeleton of Egyptian orgies, veiled, perhaps, after the manner of later and more effeminate times, but still there. It is the same skeleton that startled the Epicurean in the heyday of his pleasures, and threatened him ere the banquet was half over. So also it menaces us, for it clutches a hammer, and we know that it will very shortly proclaim
THE END.
Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London.
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKTHE ROMANCE OF BOOK-COLLECTING***