Concerning Bibliomania

FROM the days of papyrus to the nineteenth century, when of the making of books there is no end, bibliomania has affected mankind in more or less intensified form. Ineffectually has it been diagnosed and treated by bibliographs of all ages. Peignot defines it as “ a passion for possessing books ; not so much to be instructed by them as to gratify the eye by looking on them. He who is affected by this mania knows books only by their titles and dates, and is rather seduced by the exterior than the interior.”

The symptoms of so virulent a disease are not to be mistaken. They can be instantly known, says Dibdin, by a passion for (1) large paper copies; (2) uncut copies ; (3) illustrated copies ; (4) unique copies ; (5) copies printed upon vellum ; (6) first editions ; (7) true editions ; (8) a general desire for the black letter. I would add to these a passion for (9) editions printed at private presses ; (10) editions privately bound.

A characteristic of the disease is that it succumbs to no known remedies. All applications, external as well as internal, seem but to increase its fervency; neither does poverty allay it, once the craze is on. Many a one so afflicted has gone starving to bed, transported by the possession of an incunabulum for which he has expended his last sou. No condition, no age, is exempt, no climate. It rages among royalty as among the commoner herd of humanity.

French book - collectors, and notably the mesdames de France, have displayed peculiar and luxurious tastes in binding. We are told that of the daughters of Louis XV., Adélaïde affected red morocco ; Sophie, citron ; and Victoire, olive. Catharine de’ Medici was so great a connoisseur of finely bound books that authors and booksellers tried to distinguish themselves in bindings made expressly for her. Such was their success that it was deemed expedient, upon her death, to strip the books of their ornate and costly dress, lest they should fall a prey to her creditors. Marie Antoinette had a library of upwards of five thousand volumes in the Petit Trianon ; and Madame de Pompadour, whose conduct was not in every respect above criticism, must surely be commended for her love of books, as she was the possessor of three thousand volumes. Her bookbinder was no less a personage than the celebrated Anton Michel Padeloup. Madame de Maintenon, too, had rare and exquisite taste in books and bindings ; and enrolled among book-lovers are to be found the names of Marguerite d’Angoulême, Margaret of Valois, Diana of Poitiers, as well as the Duchesse de Montpensier, “ La Grande Mademoiselle,” the Marquise de Montespan, and the Duchesse du Berry. To them we owe some of the finest examples of the bookbinder’s art. The idiosyncrasies of their dispositions we can almost forgive by reason of that taste which to-day makes glad the heart of the book-fancier.

Nor do these names close the list of bibliophilists. Charles the Bald was a lover of books and learning. A Bible was illuminated expressly for his private use, and his love of learning often carried him to royal extremes. The story goes that one “ Johannes Erigena, surnamed Scotus, a man renowned for learning, sitting at table, in respect of his learning, with Charles the Bauld, Emperor and King of France, behaved himselfe as a slovenly scholler, nothing courtly ; whereupon the Emperor asked him merrily, Quid interest Scotum et Sotum ? [What is there between a Scot and a Sot ?] He merrily, but yet malapertly answered, Mensa [The table] ; as though the Emperor were the Sot, and he the Scot.”

Of English book-lovers the name is legion. Dibdin tells us that Richard de Bury, tutor to Edward III., and afterward Bishop of Durham, was the first affected. However this may be, certain it is that he owned more books than all the other bishops of England. Dean Colet and Erasmus abetted the mania, and Sir Thomas More was not exempt. Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey were given over to bibliophilism; and Henry VII. and James I., both booklovers, even attempted literary production on their own account.

Pepys, despite his feminine frailties, was a collector of rare books ; and sundry kicks disposed gratuitously among his servants, his flirtatious deportment at church when full of years his maltreatment of the partner of his joys and sorrows, all these are of little moment in comparison with that worthy love of “ an old book, a rare book, a grave, innocent book.”

His Grace the Duke of Roxburghe conceived a passion for first editions. It has been related with all due authenticity that at a certain sale a first edition of Shakespeare was offered. The duke’s friends were deputed to bid it in, while he viewed the contest at a distance. Twenty guineas and more had been offered, when a slip was handed his Grace asking if his friends should continue bidding. The duke wrote in reply : —

It is needless to say that the duke became the happy possessor of the folio.

Undoubtedly, it is to the bookbinder of the past that we owe in a very large degree the extension of the mania. Such exquisite workmen as Grolier, Maioli, Le Gascon, Derôme, and Padeloup worked for all time; and how amazed, not to say dumfounded, would these worthies be to behold the methods we employ to supply the ever increasing demand for books ! Nowadays we preserve a book of American manufacture, not for the beauty of its binding, not for the tooling on this one or that, not for the rare quality of the morocco, but, perchance, because it is a first edition of Hawthorne or of Poe’s Tamerlane, or, what is more than probable, because undue use would soon end in its destruction, such is the ephemeral nature of our art of to-day. The signs, however, are propitious ; and when once we have recovered from extreme youth, with its hurry and bluster and unsophistication, then shall our versatility be turned toward the arts, of which not the least is the art of binding.

The peculiar ideas in bookbinding are many and curious. The Golden Ass of Apuleius was once bound in ass’s skin ; a collection of pamphlets respecting one Mary Tufts, reputed to have been confined of rabbits, was sent forth to the world in rabbit skin ; Tuberville on Hunting was bound by Whittaker in deer skin ; Fox’s historical works met the gaze of humanity in fox skin, and Bacon’s works in hog skin.

On May 15, 1874, there was sold in Paris, by auction, a part of the library of M. Lucien de Rosuy, father of the eminent Japanese scholar. Some of the books, we are told, were bound in cat skin colored garnet and buff; others in the skins of the crocodile, royal tiger, rattlesnake, seal, otter, white hear, and Canadian black wolf. I confess to little, if any, sympathy for the taste of M. Lucien de Rosuy, authority in binding though he may have been. How much more healthful and normal that of him who has written concerning his simple wants: —

In addition to the many evils we lay at the door of the French Revolution is the morbid practice of binding in human skin. What must have been the feelings of that lady whose lover, a Russian poet, is said to have presented her with a volume of his sonnets bound in his own skin, taken from an amputated leg ! More desirable by far, from a moral point of view, as a salutary warning to the young and to evil doers generally, was the practice in vogue in the less enlightened past of flaying criminals to obtain materials for binding contemporary legal documents. This recalls an edition of The Newgate Calendar, being the memoirs of the most notorious characters convicted of outrages on the laws of England since the eighteenth century, the binding of which was ornamented in gold with designs suggestive of the contents ; to wit, dark lanterns, masks, pistols, handcuffs, shackles, and other reminders of crime. A public library in Bury St. Edmunds contains a full account of the execution of a murderer, in an octavo volume bound in the murderer’s own skin by a surgeon of the town.

A more elegant, and certainly a less gruesome habiliment for a book was a piece of the waistcoat of Charles I., in which a volume was bound relating to the dwarf Jeffrey Hudson. A copy of the New Year’s Gift was appareled in a like manner. With this the supply must have been exhausted, since we read of no further use being made of the garment.

To the bibliognostic the following lines from Pope’s Dunciad are eloquent with meaning : —

“ There Caxton sleeps with Wynkyn at his side,
One clasped in wood, and one in strong cowhide.”

Another fancy that obtained at an early date was the insertion of jewels into the bindings of books. St. Jerome is said to have exclaimed, “Your books are covered with precious stones, and Christ died naked before his temple ! ”

By a law of March 24, 1583, Henry III. of France forbids the bourgeois to wear precious stones in their dress, but such is the graciousness of his Majesty he allows their books of devotion to be adorned with diamonds, not exceeding four, while the nobility are allowed five, and the princes are not limited as to number. It was the same monarch who, when he instituted the order of Penitents, invented a binding consisting of the cheerful device of death’s - heads, cross-bones, tears, crosses, and other instruments of the Passion, on black morocco, relieved, however, by the inscription “ Spes mea Deus.”

Carlyle, it is said, had no love for books per se, and Darwin was not deterred by any sentimental notions of sacrilege from cutting an unwieldy volume in two for easier manipulation. Not so Petrarch, who would suffer the loss of a leg rather than submit to such torture an edition of the Epistles of Cicero, transcribed by himself, and bound so massively as to be constantly falling upon that unfortunate member. But Carlyle was too “ sairously ” bent upon the reformation of humanity, and Darwin too much absorbed in the origin of that humanity, to have time for the indulgence of a fancy so pertinacious as bibliophilism. If a portion of the Iliad was found in the hands of a mummy, think you it was more precious in the eyes of Carlyle, the lover of great men, — Carlyle, who styles the immortal Johnson the withered pontiff of Encyclopædism ? To him books were of intrinsic worth only for the soul and thought that were in them. The value of Boswell’s Letters was not enhanced in Temple’s eyes because they were discovered in a shop at Boulogne in use for wrapping-paper ; nor of Sterne’s Diary in that it was found in a plate - warmer. He was an admirer of Luther’s Table Talk, not because it was unearthed from an old foundation, wrapped in strong linen cloth, waxed within and without, in which condition it had lain since its suppression. And so he writes : “ In books lies the soul of the whole past; the articulate audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been, — it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.” And again : “ Is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a book ? ” And as such the Sage of Chelsea reverenced it; not for any atmosphere of antiquity that proceeded from it.

But let me not seem to discourage the bibliomaniac’s profession ; this were the part of no true bibliophile. Rather do I say. Love a book ! — in any way, whether its age, or dress, or thought appeals to you, love it with all the ardor of your soul.