Books and Bookmen [27]
elsewhere in Europe. In England publishers are men of business; in
France they aspire to be artists. In England people borrow what
they read from the libraries, and take what gaudy cloth-binding
chance chooses to send them. In France people buy books, and bind
them to their heart's desire with quaint and dainty devices on the
morocco covers. Books are lifelong friends in that country; in
England they are the guests of a week or of a fortnight. The
greatest French writers have been collectors of curious editions;
they have devoted whole treatises to the love of books. The
literature and history of France are full of anecdotes of the good
and bad fortunes of bibliophiles, of their bargains, discoveries,
disappointments. There lies before us at this moment a small
library of books about books,--the 'Bibliophile Francais,' in seven
large volumes, 'Les Sonnets d'un Bibliophile,' 'La Bibliomanie en
1878,' 'La Bibliotheque d'un Bibliophile' (1885) and a dozen other
works of Janin, Nodier, Beraldi, Pieters, Didot, great collectors
who have written for the instruction of beginners and the pleasure
of every one who takes delight in printed paper.
The passion for books, like other forms of desire, has its changes
of fashion. It is not always easy to justify the caprices of taste.
The presence or absence of half an inch of paper in the "uncut"
margin of a book makes a difference of value that ranges from five
shillings to a hundred pounds. Some books are run after because
they are beautifully bound; some are competed for with equal
eagerness because they never have been bound at all. The
uninitiated often make absurd mistakes about these distinctions.
Some time ago the Daily Telegraph reproached a collector because his
books were "uncut," whence, argued the journalist, it was clear that
he had never read them. "Uncut," of course, only means that the
margins have not been curtailed by the binders' plough. It is a
point of sentiment to like books just as they left the hands of the
old printers,--of Estienne, Aldus, or Louis Elzevir.
It is because the passion for books is a sentimental passion that
people who have not felt it always fail to understand it. Sentiment
is not an easy thing to explain. Englishmen especially find it
impossible to understand tastes and emotions that are not their
own,--the wrongs of Ireland, (till quite recently) the aspirations
of Eastern Roumelia, the demands of Greece. If we are to understand
the book-hunter, we must never forget that to him books are, in the
first place, RELICS. He likes to think that the great writers whom
he admires handled just such pages and saw such an arrangement of
type as he now beholds. Moliere, for example, corrected the proofs
for this edition of the 'Precieuses Ridicules,' when he first
discovered "what a labour it is to publish a book, and how GREEN
(NEUF) an author is the first time they print him." Or it may be
that Campanella turned over, with hands unstrung, and still broken
by the torture, these leaves that contain his passionate sonnets.
Here again is the copy of Theocritus from which some pretty page may
have read aloud to charm the pagan and pontifical leisure of Leo X.
This Gargantua is the counterpart of that which the martyred Dolet
printed for (or pirated from, alas!) Maitre Francois Rabelais. This
woeful ballade, with the woodcut of three thieves hanging from one
gallows, came near being the "Last Dying Speech and Confession of
Francois Villon." This shabby copy of 'The Eve of St. Agnes' is
precisely like that which Shelley doubled up and thrust into his
pocket when the prow of the piratical felucca crashed into the
timbers of the Don Juan. Some rare books have these associations,
and they bring you nearer to the authors than do the modern
reprints. Bibliophiles will tell you that it is the early READINGS
they care for,--the author's first fancies, and those more hurried
expressions which he afterwards corrected. These READINGS have
their literary value, especially in the masterpieces