There is something in a binding which fascinates, and yet hurls back the inspired sneer of Robbie Burns with interest:
'Through and through the inspired leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings;
But, oh! respect his lordship's taste,
And spare his golden bindings.'
Yes! some bindings are of greater interest, from every possible point of view, than the leaves they protect, and but for their kindly care other leaves which exist among our choicest possessions might have been utterly destroyed. Many a book has been saved from death by the glamour of its cover, and will yet be saved.
CHAPTER X.
THE HAMMER AND THE END.
The past ten years have witnessed rather more than 600 high-class sales of books by auction in London alone, and the vast majority of the collections dispersed to the winds during that period of time were not fifty, nor forty, and, at a venture, not thirty years old. Nay! it would be tolerably safe to go still further, and to say that the life of a library is, as a rule, less than half that of a man. Though it may consist of the products of antiquity, it has but a short period of existence before it as a whole; and as book is added to book, and manuscript to manuscript, and the sum total of volumes of either kind continues to increase, so, too, it is all but certain that the closing scene of its dissolution draws nearer and nearer to the end.
Generally speaking, the larger and more important a collection, the shorter its life. There are exceptions, but they only prove the rule, which may fairly be described as universal. Books are a valuable species of personal property, and next-of-kin often prove unsympathetic and unsentimental in the custody of them; besides, books cannot be divided so satisfactorily as coin, and the first and almost necessary step is to turn them into money when an estate has to be distributed among many. This is the reason why there are so few great collections in the hands of private individuals, and why they are in jeopardy every day and hour.
In this respect, then, the life of a book is even less than that of a man—an analogy which in no wise minimizes the value of existence to either. A good deal of enjoyment can be crowded into a compass of thirty years, and much information may be obtained in that period if only it be sought for aright. To ask cui bono? is a beggarly interrogatory which might with equal force be thrust before all life's actions, and I would not have it supposed that in my opinion it is a proper or even a satisfactory question to put where books are concerned. I only deplore the fact that to accumulate is usually to scatter the seeds of a short-lived enjoyment which dies in October. Hence it is that lovers of books have been known to cheat time and the hour, and to gratify their own inclinations as fully as possible, taking steps to secure their treasures from the hammer and the end, and have with these objects established national libraries of the very utmost importance—libraries which may certainly be destroyed in some great conflagration or by the rush of shot and shell, but can never be dispersed for the sake of the money they would produce, and will practically, therefore, remain intact for many centuries.
This, it would seem, is really the only effectual way of preserving the good and permanent things of this life for the benefit of those who come after us, for the hammer, though it never destroys directly, does so indirectly, if it be a fact that the whole is greater in every quality, save number, than the parts which compose it. Here is an instance of the contrary plan of hedging round our possessions with stipulations and directions designed for their preservation. Among the great failures of book-men let this be chronicled.
The mind travels back some five or six years to one of the high-priests of a fast-decaying cult. He lodged at a farm-house which, being in the direct path of advancing streets, has perhaps by this time been pulled down. At the time of which I speak it stood in an ocean of mud, not far from the highroad—a relic in the midst of surroundings so painfully new that few strangers who wandered that way failed to pause at the wicket-gate, and gaze on the thatched roof and warped windows that time had doomed. Once or twice a year, seldom oftener—for book-men of the type of the one who held sway there hate to be disturbed—I used to claim admission to the one moderately large room that the house possessed. Its walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and a number of movable cases mapped out the surface into narrow alleys. Some thousands of volumes, all bound alike, and consisting chiefly of historical works in English and Latin, must have been here stored. There were many rare books, and all were good of their kind, and most had been well read. The ways of their owner, the lifelong occupant of this crumbling cottage, were peculiar. He would get up at ten in the morning to the minute, and after breakfast take a walk in the fields, or perhaps to the city, returning at five precisely, winter and summer alike. He was so accurate in his movements that people used to set their watches by him, the new clock being generally out of gear. At half-past five he drank tea out of an enormous basin, and smoked a clay pipe, which it was his pleasure to light with a burning coal or at the chimney of his lamp. Matches he detested, on account of the sulphur, which, he said, fouled the tobacco and made it unbearable. At seven the business of the day commenced, and was continued till two, and sometimes three, in the morning—the business of reading hard without cessation, except to take a pull at the basin or to fill and light the pipe. Very pleasant were the winter evenings, when the wind howled round the gables of the house, as it often did, and the night was as black as pitch. This had gone on for thirty years without much, if any, variation, until one day the bookworm was found dead at his post, surrounded by the only real friends he had in the world, for the safety of which he had provided as follows: