The term bouquiniste is one of those words of double meaning which unfortunately abound in all languages. It is applied both to the amateur in search of old books and to the poor open-air merchant who sells them. In times past the dealer in second-hand books lacked neither a certain standing nor prospects for the future. He was occasionally known to make his way up from a modest side-walk stall, or a chilly push-cart to the dignity of a real shop measuring all of six meters square. A case in point was that of Passard, recollections of whom may still linger in the Rue du Coq. And who could forget Passard, with his close-cropped hair, his short trumpet-shaped queue, and his ill-matched eyes—the large eye tawny and prominent, the small eye blue and deep-set—which a whim of Nature had given him to bring his physical appearance into line with the eccentric originality of his character? When Passard, the right corner of his mouth raised in a slight sardonic twitch, was in the mood for talking; when his little blue eye began to sparkle with a malicious gleam which never appeared in the large, lifeless eye; then you might expect to see unrolled before you the whole chronicle of literary and political scandal of forty eventful years. Passard, who had once peddled his way from the Passage des Capucines to the Louvre and from the Louvre to the Institut, his portable book-shelf under his arm, had seen, known, and despised everything from his exalted station as bouquiniste!
I have cited this obscure book-seller whom no biographer will ever celebrate—Passard, the Brutus, the Cassius, the last of the bouquinistes. Now I move on. The present-day keeper of a book-stall on the bridges, the quais, the boulevards—poor, anomalous, battered creature, who picks up only half a living from his unwanted stock—is a mere shadow of the bouquiniste; for the bouquiniste is dead. It is a great social catastrophe, his disappearance, but one of the inevitable consequences of progress. A harmless and innocent by-product of the superabundance of good literature, he could not, in the nature of things, survive its decline. In that age of ignorance from which we have now had the good fortune to emerge, the publisher was, in general, a man capable of appreciating the books he published; he printed them on good solid paper, supple and resonant, and, when they were sufficiently important, had them bound in sound moisture-proof leather, well-glued and stoutly sewn. If by chance the volume found its way to the second-hand book-stall, that did not spell its ruin. Whether of sheep-skin, calf, or parchment, the binding—blanched and hardened in the sun; moistened, stretched, and softened by passing showers—still afforded lasting protection to the visions of the philosopher or the dreams of the poet. The progressive publisher of today knows that the fame of his books, after the brief baptism of advertising, will vanish in three days along with the feuilleton. He puts a yellow or green paper jacket over his ink-spotted pages, and abandons the whole absorbent rag to the mercy of the elements. A month later, the wretched volume is lying on the stall-keeper’s shelves, a prey to a brisk morning rain. It drinks in the moisture, loses its shape, becomes mottled here and there with brown spots, gradually reverting to the pulp from which it came; with little more preparation it is ready to be stamped into cardboard. Such is the life-cycle of the book in our progressive times!
The bouquiniste of other days, presiding over his noble and venerable volumes, has nothing in common with the pitiable vendor of damp paper who offers for sale the mildewed rags which are the remains of the new books. The bouquiniste, I tell you, is no more—and as for the brochures which have replaced his bouquins, they will have faded from memory in twenty years. I should know, since I am responsible for some thirty of them.
And do me the favor of telling me, if you can, what will be left of these books of mine in twenty years?
Paris, 1840 or 1841
Ch. Nodier
No book is completed until Error has crept in & affixed his sly Imprimatur
NOTES
[1] Mathurin Cordier, ca. 1480–1564, French educator and austere author of numerous works for children of a moralizing nature. Calvin was among his pupils in Paris.