Part 2

I have cited this obscure book-seller whom no biographer will ever celebrate――Passard, the Brutus, the Cassius, the last of the _bouquinistes_. Now I move on. The present-day keeper of a book-stall on the bridges, the _quais_, the boulevards――poor, anomalous, battered creature, who picks up only half a living from his unwanted stock――is a mere shadow of the _bouquiniste_; for the _bouquiniste_ is dead. It is a great social catastrophe, his disappearance, but one of the inevitable consequences of progress. A harmless and innocent by-product of the superabundance of good literature, he could not, in the nature of things, survive its decline. In that age of ignorance from which we have now had the good fortune to emerge, the publisher was, in general, a man capable of appreciating the books he published; he printed them on good solid paper, supple and resonant, and, when they were sufficiently important, had them bound in sound moisture-proof leather, well-glued and stoutly sewn. If by chance the volume found its way to the second-hand book-stall, that did not spell its ruin. Whether of sheep-skin, calf, or parchment, the binding――blanched and hardened in the sun; moistened, stretched, and softened by passing showers――still afforded lasting protection to the visions of the philosopher or the dreams of the poet. The progressive publisher of today knows that the fame of his books, after the brief baptism of advertising, will vanish in three days along with the _feuilleton_. He puts a yellow or green paper jacket over his ink-spotted pages, and abandons the whole absorbent rag to the mercy of the elements. A month later, the wretched volume is lying on the stall-keeper’s shelves, a prey to a brisk morning rain. It drinks in the moisture, loses its shape, becomes mottled here and there with brown spots, gradually reverting to the pulp from which it came; with little more preparation it is ready to be stamped into cardboard. Such is the life-cycle of the book in _our_ progressive times!

The _bouquiniste_ of other days, presiding over his noble and venerable volumes, has nothing in common with the pitiable vendor of damp paper who offers for sale the mildewed rags which are the remains of the new books. The _bouquiniste_, I tell you, is no more――and as for the brochures which have replaced his _bouquins_, they will have faded from memory in twenty years. I should know, since I am responsible for some thirty of them.

And do me the favor of telling me, if you can, what will be left of these books of mine in twenty years?

Paris, 1840 or 1841

CH. NODIER

_No book is completed until_ Error _has crept in & affixed his sly Imprimatur_

NOTES

[1] Mathurin Cordier, ca. 1480–1564, French educator and austere author of numerous works for children of a moralizing nature. Calvin was among his pupils in Paris.

[2] Jan van Pauteren, ca. 1460–1524, Flemish writer whose latin grammar, however popular in its own day, was widely attacked in later times for its obscurity.

[3] Louis van der Aa, called Louis de Bruges, Seigneur de la Gruthuyse, ca. 1425–1492, a learned nobleman of Flanders who, commissioning some of the finest manuscripts which have come down to us, set an example for Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

[4] Anne of Austria, 1602–66, daughter of Philip III of Spain, wife of Louis XIII of France, a great book collector.

[5] Paul Girardot de Préfond, eighteenth-century French collector, whose fine books are now scattered in many libraries.

[6] François Maynard, 1582–1646, a French author, who, having vainly sought favor, loudly lamented his fate from the scene of his retirement in Toulouse.

[7] Urbain Chevreau, seventeenth-century French writer of some reputation in his own time, and a very discriminating bibliophile.

[8] Antoine-Marie-Henri Boulard, 1754–1825, avid collector who lived in Paris.

[9] The Bollandists are Belgian Jesuits who published the voluminous and weighty _Acta Sanctorum_ legends of saints, arranged according to the days of the calendar.

[10] Paris, 1613 or 1623, an adaptation in verse from the _Historia Ethiopica_ of Heliodorus.

[11] Two scenes of Cyrano used by Molière in the _Fourberies de Scapin_, Paris, 1671.

[12] Antoine-Aléxandre Barbier, 1765–1825, bibliophile, and author of a _Dictionnaire des Anonymes_.

[13] Antoine Bauzonnet, Paris bookbinder of the mid-nineteenth century.

_750 Copies printed by the Crimson Printing Company_

_Reproductions by the Meriden Gravure Company_

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_), superscripts by an initial caret and the superscripted characters surrounded by braces (I^{er}).

――Obvious punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.