Further light is thrown on this subject by certain answers to questions recently received from forty superintendents in the United States. These answers show that in two only of forty cities where text-books are furnished is any systematic attention given to the care of text-books. In two cities there is an official curator of books who looks after the covering, repairing, and rebinding of them.
The custom in public schools seems to be to purchase text-books, to keep them in use with a minimum of repairs until they are too tattered and soiled to be thought respectable even by the most careless teacher, and then throw them away. This practice is probably wasteful and extravagant; at least it seems to be so in the light of the experience in libraries in the same matter.
[CHAPTER XIII]
Leather: General Notes
The names given to different kinds of leather come sometimes from the character of its surface, that is, from the “grain,” or roughness or corrugation it has; sometimes from the animal it once covered; sometimes from the method of tanning; sometimes from the fact that it is part of a skin which has been split; sometimes from the place or country where it is made or where the animal it once covered lived, and sometimes from a combination of two or more of these.
The subject of the leathers used in bookbinding is a very difficult one. Tanners, dealers and binders, dictionaries, encyclopædias and books on tanning disagree with one another as to the proper terms to use in speaking of different kinds of leather. Imitations are many, and very successful. In the list below I have tried to follow the usage of binders; but I am sure no expert would accept it throughout as correct.
With this variety in definition goes a corresponding variety in character in leather of the same name. Different skins tanned in the same way, apparently, and called by the same name by dealers and binders, will wear, some well, some not so well. The only quite definite assertion which can be made is, that of modern leathers, few save the best morocco and pigskin will keep their strength for any length of time in an American library, and morocco and pigskin usually for not much over 20 years.
As the remarks which follow indicate, English leather makers have recently procured leathers guaranteed to be dressed on the lines recommended by the Society of Arts Report. See also the revised report, and the little volume, with samples, called Leather for Libraries by Hulme, Parker and others.
Leathers made from the skins of animals of the same kind, the goat for example, though made by the same process, vary somewhat with the animals’ sex, age when killed, the food on which they lived, the climate in which they matured, and their manner of life, and, if females, with the fact that they have or have not had young. Also, the leather made from the skin of one part of the body differs materially from that made from the skin of another part.