REBINDING

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SOLANDER SLIP-CASE

In Chapter Thirteen of his Essai, Bonnardot remarks:

“When one sees upon the table in a public shop, a rare book roughly sewn, ignobly deteriorated and, especially, badly cut down, either too much or unevenly, one may believe that it has passed, at some period, through the hands of a provincial bookbinder or of one of our Parisian binders of the lower order, who consider it proper to wrap up a typographical monument of the Louis XII period in a way to strike off about nineteen-twentieths of its value.

“I know of no species of vandals worse, more primitive or more irresponsible than these botchers. But one can see how they are sometimes impelled, in spite of a natural taste, to commit these ravages. After considerable discussion, a person may offer them about 75 centimes ($0.15), more or less, for a piece of work which, if done with care, should well be worth eight or ten times that amount. The natural and inevitable punishment caused by this penny-pinching, is the almost total depreciation of a book placed in the care of an easy-going bibliophile who, with a light heart condemns his old friend to a binding limited in price to 75 centimes.

“The provincial bookbinder whose work, with its dirty, warped boards, simpers under a covering of sheep still hairy and spotted with patches of ink, is in much the same class as a cheap glazer and gilder to whom an amateur iconophile might naively send for restoration a rare Albert Durer; and both these similar to an architect who, with blind decision, would be sent to mutilate the flanks of some majestic cathedral. This redoubtable trio, born enemies of souvenirs engraved in stone or upon paper, botch and destroy, although perhaps without malice, at least three-fourths of anything on which they operate. May these tardy remarks still save something from the ruins!

“The most irremediable of the crimes which can be committed in rebinding a small, old book, is the trimming of margins. The simple matter of a centime’s economy in the size of the boards, may direct the trimming of some charming gothic quarto up to the very text. One may thrice exclaim with joy when the text itself has not been cropped. Those who partly realize, or divine by instinct, that margins are good for something, sometimes take pains to preserve them, but trim them with an inequality so shocking that the victim has only escaped Charybdis in order to fall upon Scylla. Undoubtedly, the greatest merit of a rare book is to have untrimmed margins or, at least, margins trimmed only slightly and evenly. But to obtain evenness, it is not proper to cut huge slices in order to square the edges; such zeal for symmetry easily might result in cutting into the text. The best method for squaring a book which was unevenly cut when previously bound, is to refold and equalize each sheet before any further trimming is done; a long and detailed operation for which one pays, not in centimes but in francs.”