The collector of books is a type which we would do well to define, since everything points to his disappearance in the very near future. The printed book has existed at the most for some four hundred years, yet books are already accumulating in some countries in a manner that threatens the very equilibrium of the globe. Civilization has reached the most unexpected of its ages, the age of paper. Now that everyone writes books, no one shows any particular eagerness to buy them. Besides, our young authors are well on the way to building up whole libraries for themselves out of their own works. They need only be left to their own devices.
If we were to subdivide the species book collector into its various classes, the top-most rank in the whole subtle and capricious family should without doubt be given to the bibliophile.
The bibliophile is a man endowed with a certain amount of intelligence and taste, who derives pleasure from works of genius, imagination, and feeling. He enjoys his mute conversations with great minds—unilateral conversations which can be begun at will, dropped without discourtesy, and resumed without insistence; and, from this love of the absent author whose words have been made known to him through the device of writing, he comes insensibly to love the material symbol in which those words are clothed. His feeling for the book is like the love of one friend for another’s portrait, or of the lover for the portrait of his mistress; and, like the lover, he wants the loved object to look its best. He would not be happy to leave the precious volume that has so enthralled him clad in the drab habiliments of poverty, when it is in his power to clothe it luxuriously in watered silk and morocco. His library, like the gown of a favorite, is resplendent with gold lace; and his books, by their outward look alone, are worthy—as Virgil would have said—of the regard of consuls.
Alexander was a bibliophile. When victory put into his hands the rich coffers of Darius, he was able to fill them with the rarest treasures of Persia. The works of Homer were among the spoils.
Bibliophiles today are vanishing along with kings. In the past, the kings themselves were bibliophiles, and it is to their enlightened munificence that we owe the copying of so many manuscripts of inestimable value. Alcuin was the Gruthuyse[3] of Charlemagne, just as Gruthuyse was the Alcuin of the Dukes of Burgundy. The salamanders of François Ier will become as widely known through his beautiful books as through his architectural monuments. His son, Henri II, entrusted the secret of his love cipher to the magnificent bindings in his library, just as he did to the sumptuous decoration of his palaces. The volumes once owned by Anne d’Autriche[4] still delight the connoisseur by their chaste and noble elegance.
Great lords and statesmen echoed the taste of their sovereigns, and there were as many rich libraries as there were families with shields and escutcheons. Almost down to our own day, the houses of Guise, d’Urfé, de Thou, Richelieu, Mazarin, Bignon, Molé, Pasquier, Séguier, Colbert, Lamoignon, d’Estrées, d’Aumont, de la Vallière, rivalled one another in their treasures of learned and serviceable books. I have named but a few of these noble bibliophiles, quite at random, in order to spare myself the tedious task of naming them all. To compile future additions to this list will be a less embarrassing task to those who come after us!
Even more remarkable—finance itself once showed a love for books. How it has since changed! King François Ier’s treasurer, Grolier, alone, did more for the progress of typography and binding than will ever be accomplished by all our paltry medals and our grudging literary budgets. A mere dealer in wood, M. Girardot de Préfond[5], bolstered his slightly insecure claim to nobility by using his money in the same worthy fashion, thus earning at least the immortality of the bibliographies and catalogues. Our bankers of today show no signs of envying him.
Alas, the bibliophile is no longer to be found in the upper classes of our progressive society (I ask your pardon for the adjective, but it will have to stand, by your leave, along with the verb to progress); the bibliophile of the present day is the scholar, the man of letters, the artist, the small independent proprietor or the man of moderate fortune, who finds in dealing with books some relief from the boredom and insipidity of dealing with other men, and who is, to some extent, consoled for the deceptive nature of the other affections by a taste which, though perhaps misplaced, is at least innocent. But such a man will never amass important collections; it is, alas, the exception if his acquisitions are still there to meet his dying gaze or to be left as a modest legacy to his children. I know one bibliophile of this sort (and could tell you his name if I chose) who has spent fifty years of his hardworking life in building up a library, and in selling his library in order to live. There is a bibliophile for you, and I warn you that he is one of the last of the species. Today, it is love of money that prevails; books no longer offer the slightest interest.
The opposite of the bibliophile is the bibliophobe. Our great gentlemen of the political and banking worlds, our great statesmen, our great men of letters, are for the most part bibliophobes. For this imposing aristocracy which our happy advances in civilization have brought to the fore, education and human enlightenment in general date at the most from Voltaire. In their eyes, Voltaire is a myth which sums up the discovery of letters by Trismegistus and the invention of printing by Gutenberg. Since everything is to be found in Voltaire, the bibliophobe would have no more hesitation than Omar in burning the library of Alexandria. Not that the bibliophobe reads Voltaire! He takes pains not to read him; but he is grateful to have Voltaire to turn to as a specious pretext for his disdain for books. For the bibliophobe, anything that is no longer “current” is already waste paper; he lets nothing accumulate on his neglected shelves but moistening sheets and spotting pages—until such time as he unloads the whole mass of damp rags,—sterile tribute from some famished muse or other,—into the hands of the passing rubbish-collector, who pays less for them than their value by weight. The bibliophobe, in other words, accepts the homage of a book and then sells it. It goes without saying that he does not read it, and never pays for it.