On the Care of Books.
The two things most neglected in houses are the trimming of lamps and the care of the books. The condition of many libraries in large country houses is most lamentable. In such neglect are they that it would take months, and in some cases years, working day and night, to restore them to a healthy condition. For, poor things! they are really so neglected, that their covers become like the limbs of rheumatic people. If you touch them they seem to shriek and cry with pain. They are either parched for lack of a proper atmosphere, or else they are sticking together with the damp or thickly covered with dust.[8] There is nothing else in a house like this, and why are these things so? It is because there are so few people who understand the care of books. I once read the following in a daily paper, and thought I recognised in it a familiar hand, that of Mr. Andrew Lang:—
'The foes of books are careless people—first of all. They tear pages open with their thumbs, or cut them with sharp knives which damage the margins. It is so difficult to keep paper knives, and ivory paper knives are the favourite pasture of some scholars, who bite the edges till the weapon resembles a dissipated saw. To avoid this temptation some employ mediæval daggers, or skene dhus, but the edges spoil a book. Cigarette ashes are very bad for books, so is butter, also marmalade. Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth are said to have been very careless with their books. Dr. Johnson used to clean his from dust by knocking them together, as Mr. Leighton says housemaids do. Scott was very careful; he had a number of wooden dummies made, and, when a volume was borrowed, he put the dummy in its place on the shelf, inscribing it with the name of the borrower. He also defended his shelves with locked brazen wires. "Tutus clausus ero" ("I shall be safe if shut up"), his anagram, was his motto, under a portcullis. Borrowers, of course, are nearly the worst enemies of books, always careless, and very apt to lose one volume out of a set. Housemaids are seldom bibliophiles. Their favourite plan is to dust the books in the owner's absence, and then rearrange them on fancy principles, mostly upside down. One volume of Grote will be put among French novels, another in the centre of a collection on sports, a third in the midst of modern histories, while others are "upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady's chamber." The diversity of sizes, from folio to duodecimo, makes books very difficult to arrange where room is scanty. Modern shelves in most private houses allow no room for folios, which have to lie, like fallen warriors, on their sides.'
All that is very true, particularly about housemaids. Indeed, I have rarely found any woman who cared sufficiently for her books to really fondly tend them.
The principal enemy which books have is Damp. This means ruination, more perhaps to the paper than to the binding, though both suffer. A fungus growth comes on the leather, and inside there come stains and 'fox' marks. Damp is caused (1) through lack of fires or warmth; (2) through too many sides of a room being exposed to the elements without having the walls battened; (3) the thaw following a frost, proper means for warmth not being adopted during the frost. The only remedy for damp is the trying process of opening each volume and suspending it open, after wiping with a dry cloth each page affected. The next worst enemies are gas and heat.
Gas alone, provided the books are not placed high up, will not be nearly so destructive as it is generally supposed; but all atmospheres heated too highly are destructive. Mr. Poole, a very experienced American librarian, has reported as follows, and, I think, very rightly:—
'The burning of many gas lights doubtless has a tendency to increase the evil by increasing the heat. Yet the deterioration of bindings goes on in the libraries where gas is never used. This fact shows that the chief injury arises from heat, and not merely from the sulphurous residuum of gas combustion.'
Mr. Poole made an experiment in the upper gallery of a library, and found that—
'While the temperature of the floor was 65° Fahr., that of the upper gallery was found to be 142°. Such a temperature dries up the oil of the leather, and burns out its life. Books cannot live where men cannot live.' Similarly, Mr. Blades wrote in his little manual:
'The surest way to preserve your books is to treat them as you would your own children, who are sure to sicken if confined in an atmosphere which is impure, too hot, too cold, too damp, or too dry. It is just the same with the progeny of literature.'