“The amateur is born,” Derome goes on to say in Le Luxe des Livres; “he holds the Muses captive. If books could speak they would pronounce him a hard jailer. The bibliophiles ruin themselves in their calling, neglecting their duties to their families. Such are not men of letters, they are bibliotaphes. They bury their books, they do not possess them.... The luxury of bindings is extended to profusion. It is the fête of red morocco and tawny calf.” La Rousse thus defines the term bibliotaphe: “From the Greek biblion, book; taphô, I inter, I hide. 1. He who lends his books to no one, who buries them, inters them in his library. 2. A reserved portion of a library where precious works or works that one does not wish to communicate are locked up.” Nodier made still another discrimination, that of the bibliophobe whom he thus describes: “The bibliophobe would see nothing out of the way in burning libraries. He sells the copies that are dedicated to him, and does not return the service.”
Between the bibliophile and the bibliomane Nodier draws this distinction: “The bibliophile chooses his books, the bibliomane entombs them; the bibliophile appreciates, the other weighs; the bibliophile has a magnifying glass, the other a fathom measure.” But the close consanguinity which exists between the book-lover and the book-collector; the narrow strip dividing terra firma from the dangerous marsh ever lighted by ignes-fatui that lure the pursuer on and on, is well defined by Burton in the introduction to The Book Hunter, where, referring to the class for whom the volume was written, he finds it difficult to say whether he should give them a good name or a bad, whether he should characterize them by a predicate eulogistic or a predicate dyslogistic.
We all know of the man who paid a fabulous sum for a copy of a very rare work, only to consign it to the flames on receiving it, in order that his own copy might have no duplicate. This is an exceptional form of the bibliolythist, or book-burner. Among this class are included authors ashamed of their first writings, authors who have changed their political or religious views, or who have eulogized a friend who has become a bitter enemy. There exists another form of the bibliolythist which Fitzgerald has omitted from his Romance of Book-Collecting—the “burking” of a work by one who has been assailed. I know of a standing offer from a gentleman of three dollars apiece for every copy that booksellers send him of a certain volume which retails for a fifth of the price. The work contains a reflection on one of his ancestors, and as soon as the volumes are received they are burned. But the book-burner is by no means a modern institution, Nero and Caliph Omar still remaining the greatest of bibliolythists.
I would suggest as another desirable term to add to the lexicon of the bibliopholist the term bibliodæmon, or book-fiend—a designation expressive of something more than the ordinary significance of “book-borrower,” innocent enough, no doubt, in some of his milder forms, but exasperating to the last degree in his most depraved phases. The borrowing of a reference book or a volume, a chapter or a page of which may touch upon a subject that one desires to consult merely for the time being, is a matter apart. So also is the exchange of books between friends, or the borrowing of a work not readily procurable, the recipient on his part standing ready to return the courtesy, and forthwith restoring the volume unsullied.
Promptness in returning and scrupulous care of a volume are the tests which distinguish the comparatively harmless form of the borrower from the aggravated and exasperating one. The miserly practice of borrowing books, books from which the well-to-do borrower seeks to derive pleasure or benefit without returning a just equivalent, simply to shirk the trifling cost of the volume he covets, deserves the severest stricture. Such are library dead-heads and defaulters to publishers and authors. It is this form of the bibliodæmon who retains desumed copies for an indefinite period, trusting the loan may be forgotten; and who, deaf to all ordinary appeals and reminders, only relinquishes the volume—frequently maltreated—when virtually wrested from him at his home. The celebrated French bibliophile Pixérécourt had inserted on the frontal of his library-case these pertinent lines:
Tel est le triste sort de tout livre prêté:
Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est gâté.
Each book that’s loaned the same sad fate o’ertakes—
’Tis either lost or sent back with the shakes.
There really exists no reason why books should be loaned—there are always the public libraries in which the borrower may ply his trade.