If, as has been asserted, he is the best author who gives the reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time, surely the olive crown should be awarded the composers of the compilations, the digests, and the anthologies, often the fruit of decades spent in poring over manuscripts and print. Little do we consider the pains they have cost. What an amount of rummaging through faded manuscripts, what ransacking of musty folios and plodding through by-ways of the past has it not required to produce Bullen’s smiling volumes from the song-books, masques, and pageants of the Elizabethan Age, and his other rarer anthologies, Speculum Amantis and Musa Proterva. The works themselves of very many of the authors quoted would be a veritable labor to wade through, with few fragrant flowers of poesy to perfume the way. All this the compiler spares us, and with catholic taste gathers a blossom here and a blossom there from the vast fields of little-known song. Equally does Mr. Bullen deserve the thanks of every lover of lyric poetry for his collection of Campion’s works, and the Chiswick press the tribute of all admirers of beautiful printing for the frame in which Campion’s “golden cadence” has been set.
By reading Hazlitt’s Gleanings in Old Garden Literature I am saved the fatigue of perusing countless uninteresting tomes on the subject. He has extracted the honey for me from innumerable flowers. Yet my Parkinson, my Gerarde, my Evelyn, my Bacon I must read between the lines myself; it is to the dull books he has been the bee for me. To gather the sweets is often a difficult and always a laborious task. Not these plodding compilers, the class who are referred to in the wise old precept, the source of which I have never been able to trace: “Those who do not practice what they preach resemble those sign-posts in the country which point out the weary way to the traveler without taking the trouble of traversing it themselves.”
Without doubt, among the most beloved of books are those written for pure love of the beautiful, distinct from literary ambition or posthumous fame, especially when to this is added a sympathetic, lucid, and unconscious style, such as we love to linger over in The Complete Angler or White’s Selborne. Walton himself has epitomized this charm in a line introductory to his angling idyl: “I wish the reader also to take notice that in the writing of it I have made myself a recreation of a recreation.”
Johnson has said books that you may carry to the fire and hold readily in your hand are the most useful, after all. Before Johnson, and long before printing was dreamed of, an old Greek proverb held that a great book was a great evil, and Martial wrote:
Buy books that but one hand engage,
In parchment bound, with tiny page.
Assuredly, the little book is a delight. It is a joy in the hand when well bound, and may serve to take the place of fire-arms in a public conveyance where one otherwise might find himself at the mercy of an uncongenial or too loquacious passenger. But the life of the library were dull were it confined to the 18 and 24 mos. Let each book and each subject have its appropriate setting, and let there be variety of sizes. The majesty of the shelves were fled without the thick quarto and tall old folio.
Apart from De Bury, Dibdin, Disraeli, Burton, Didot, Janin, the bibliophile Jacob, and other universally known bibliographical writers, there are innumerable pleasant books on books. Of such, in addition to those previously alluded to, may be specified Lang’s Books and Bookmen and The Library; The Pleasures of a Bookworm and The Diversions of a Bookworm, by J. Rogers Rees, delightfully written volumes attractively printed by Elliott Stock; Alexander Ireland’s Book-Lover’s Enchiridion; Saunder’s The Story of Some Famous Books; Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books, and How to form a Library, the latter three volumes likewise daintily printed by Elliott Stock in the series of The Book-Lovers’ Library.
In A Club Corner, by A. P. Russell, a volume previously mentioned, is largely devoted to books and authors. A store-house of literary and bibliographical information exists between the covers of Library Notes, and Characteristics, by the same author. Books and how to use Them is the title of an instructive and entertaining small duodecimo by J. C. Van Dyke, librarian of the Sage Library, New Brunswick, N. J., a writer deep versed in books, but not shallow in himself. Brander Mathews’s Ballads of Books, or Lang’s recast of this volume, is a most excellently chosen collection of poems relating to books. Every one will read with pleasure Percy Fitzgerald’s The Book Fancier, or the Romance of Book-Collecting, a work replete with curious information. The French scholar has a host of kindred works to choose from, all written de cœur; for in France the passion for books, book-collecting, fine letterpress, and fine bindings exists to a greater degree than anywhere else. It was a Frenchman, the famed bouquineur Nodier, who worried through life without a copy of Virgil “because he could not succeed in finding the ideal Virgil of his dreams.”
What instructive, sparkling volumes are these: L’Enfer du Bibliophile, Mes Livres, Connaissances Nécessaires à un Bibliophile, Derome’s Le Luxe des Livres and the two beautifully-printed and entertaining volumes, Causeries d’un Ami des Livres, Le Petit’s L’Art d’Aimer les Livres, Peignot’s Manuel du Bibliophile, Octave Uzanne’s Caprices d’un Bibliophile, Mouravit’s Petite Bibliothèque d’Amateur, Jacob’s Les Amateurs de Vieux Livres, and how many more!