Chapter 8

The binding of a book is its most conspicuous feature, the part which forms its introduction to the public and by which too often it is judged and valued; yet the binding is not an integral portion of the volume. It may be changed many times without essentially changing the book; but if the printed pages are changed, even for others identical to the eye, the book becomes another copy. The binding is, therefore, a part of a book's environment, though the most intimate part, like our own clothing, to which, indeed, it bears a curious resemblance in its purpose and its perversions.

Human clothing is for protection and adornment. That of a book involves two other demands mutually so contradictory that bookbinding has always offered a most attractive challenge to the skill of the handicraftsman. The first demand is that the book when closed shall form a well-squared and virtually solid block, like the rectangle of wood from which its first predecessors were split, and shall be able to stand alone, unsupported. The second demand is that this same object, when open, shall lie flat at any point and display all its leaves in turn as fully, and far more conveniently, than if they had never been fastened together. Whatever may be true of other clothing, it is eminently true of a book's that the part which really counts is the part which is never seen. Only the ornamental portion of a book's covering is exposed. The portions which protect the book and render it at once firm and flexible are out of sight and unheeded by the ordinary reader. Hence the existence of so much bookbinding that is apparently good and essentially bad, and hence the perpetual timeliness of attempts like that of the present chapter, to point out what binding is and should be. The processes in bookbinding by which its different ends of utility and ornament are achieved are known under the two heads of Forwarding and Finishing.

Forwarding includes many processes, literally "all but the finishing." It is to forwarding that a book owes its shapeliness, its firmness, its flexibility, and its durability. Forwarding takes the unfolded and unarranged sheets as delivered by the printer and transforms them into a book complete in all but its outermost covering of cloth or leather. The first process is to fold the sheets and reduce their strange medley of page numbers to an orderly succession. This is assuming that there is a whole edition to be bound. If it consists of a thousand copies, then there will be a certain number of piles of folded sheets, each containing a thousand copies of the same pages printed in groups, let us say, of sixteen each. These groups of pages are called sections or signatures. They are now rearranged, or gathered, into a thousand piles, each containing the signatures that belong to one book. The edition is thus separated into its thousand books, which the collator goes over to see that each is perfect. Let us follow the fortunes of a single one. It is not much of a book to look at, being rather a puffy heap of paper, but pressing, rolling, or beating soon reduces it to normal dimensions, and it is then carried forward to the important process of sewing. This is the very heart of the whole work. If the book is badly sewed, it will be badly bound, though a thousand dollars were to be spent upon the decoration of its covering. There is only one best method of sewing, and that is around raised cords, in the way followed by the earliest binders. There are modern machine methods that are very good, but they are only cheap substitutes for the best. The cords must be of good, long-fibered hemp, and the thread of the best quality and the right size drawn to the right degree of tension without missing a sheet. After the sewing the end papers are put in place, the back is glued and rounded, and the mill boards are fitted. Into these last the ends of the cords are laced and hammered. The book is then pressed to set its shape, being left in the press for some days or even weeks. After it is taken out, if the edges are to be treated, they are trimmed and then gilded, marbled, sprinkled, or otherwise decorated. The head band--for which many French binders substitute a fold in the leather--is now added. It was formerly twisted as the book was sewn, but at present is too often bought ready-made and simply glued on. The book is now forwarded.

The business of the finisher is to cover and protect the work already done on the book, but in such a way as not to interfere with the strength and flexibility that have been gained, and, finally, to add such decoration as may be artistically demanded or within the means of the purchaser. If leather is employed, it must be carefully shaved to give an easily opening hinge, yet not enough to weaken it unnecessarily. This is a most important process and one that must be left largely to the good faith of the binder. If he is unworthy of confidence, his mistakes may long escape notice, but, though buried, they are doomed to an inglorious resurrection, albeit he may count on a sufficient lapse of time to protect himself.

The next and last process of finishing is that of the decorator, whose work passes out of the sphere of handicraft into that of art. His problem is no easy one; it is to take a surface of great beauty in itself, as of calf or morocco, and so treat it as to increase its beauty. Too often, after he has done his utmost, the surface is less attractive to the eye than it was at the beginning. He, therefore, has a task quite different from that of the painter or sculptor, whose materials are not at the outset attractive. This condition is so strongly felt that many booklovers leave their bindings untooled, preferring the rich sensuous beauty and depth of color in a choice piece of leather to any effect of gilding or inlaying. This initial beauty of the undecorated book does not, however, form an impossible challenge, as witness the work of the Eves, Le Gascon, and the binders of such famous collectors as Grolier and de Thou.

It may be well to consider more particularly what the problem of the book decorator is. Though perfectly obvious to the eye and clearly illustrated by the work of the masters, it has been sometimes lost sight of by recent binders. It is, in a word, flat decoration. In the first place he has a surface to work upon that is large enough to allow strength of treatment, yet small enough to admit delicacy; then, whatever in beautiful effects of setting, relief, harmony, and contrast can be brought about by blind tooling, gilding, and inlaying, or by rubbing the surface as in crushed levant, or variegating it as in "tree" or marbled calf, all this he can command. He has control of an infinite variety of forms in tooling; he has only to use them with taste and skill. There is practically no limit to the amount of work that he can put into the binding of a single book, provided that every additional stroke is an additional beauty. He may sow the leather with minute ornament like Mearne, or set it off with a few significant lines like Aldus or Roger Payne; all depends upon the treatment. If he is a master, the end will crown the work; if not, then he should have stopped with simple lettering and have left the demands of beauty to be satisfied by the undecorated leather. Above all, let every decorator stick to flat ornament. The moment that he ventures into the third dimension, or perspective, that moment he invades the province of the draftsman or painter. One does not care to walk over a rug or carpet that displays a scene in perspective, neither does one wish to gaze into a landscape wrought upon the cover of a book, only to have the illusion of depth dispelled upon opening the volume. Embossing is, to be sure, a literal not a pictorial invasion of the third dimension, but its intrusion into that dimension is very slight and involves no cheating of the eye. It has now practically gone out of use, as has the heavy medieval ornamentation of studs or jewels. In cloth covers, which are confessedly edition work and machine made, the rules of ornament need not be so sharply enforced. Here embossing still flourishes to some extent. But the decorative problem is essentially the same in cloth as in leather binding, and the best design will be one that triumphs within the conditions, not outside them. The machines and the division of labor have made sad havoc with binding as a craft. The men in America, at least, who are masters of every process and of all the skill and cunning of the early binders are few, and their thinning ranks are not being filled. Will bookbinding, in spite of a high economic demand, share the fate that has overtaken engraving, or shall we have a renascence of this fascinating handicraft and delightful art, to take its name from the present era?

PARCHMENT BINDINGS

There are certain things, the Autocrat informs us, that are "good for nothing until they have been kept a long while; and some are good for nothing until they have been long kept and _used_. Of the first, wine is the illustrious and immortal example. Of those which must be kept and used I will name three--meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems." May we present another representative of the class which gathers value with the "process of the suns," one as immortal and historic as wine and even richer in associations--the parchment book cover? In this case it matters not whether the object meets with use or neglect. So long as it is not actually worn to pieces on the one hand, nor destroyed by mold on the other, the parchment binding will keep on converting time into gold, until after a few hundred years it reaches a tint far surpassing in beauty the richest umber of a meerschaum, and approached only by the kindred hue of antique ivory.

Here is a table full of old parchment-bound books, ranging from a tiny twenty-fourmo, which will stay neither open nor shut, to thin, limp folios that are instantly correspondent to either command. Those that are bound with boards have taken on a drumhead quality of smoothness and tension, especially the fat quartos and small octavos, while the larger volumes that received a flexible binding resemble nothing in surface so much as the wrinkled diploma on yonder wall, with its cabalistic signature now to be written no more, Carolus-Guil. Eliot; but all agree in a tint over which artists rave, the color that gold would take if it were capable of stain. But there is no stain here, or rather all stains are taken up and converted into beauty. Dust, dirt, smudges, all are here, and each is made to contribute a new element of charm. Is the resultant more beautiful than the spotless original? Compare it with the pearly tint of the diploma, or turn up the folded edge of one of those flexible bindings and note the chalky white of the parchment's protected under-surface. The same three hundred years that have made over Europe and made English America have, as it were, filled in the rhythmic pauses between their giant heart-beats by ripening Dr. Holmes's wine and touching with Midas caress these parchment bindings!

It is surely a crime to keep such beauty of tint and tone hidden away in drawers or all but hidden on crowded shelves. Let them be displayed in open cases where all may enjoy them. But let us go softly; these century-mellowed parchments are too precious to be displayed to unappreciative, perhaps scornful, eyes. Put them away in their hiding-places until some gentle reader of these lines shall ask for them; then we will bring them forth and persuade ourselves that we can detect a new increment of beauty added by the brief time since last we looked on them. I once heard an address on a librarian's duty to his successors. I will suggest a service not there mentioned: to choose every year the best contemporary books that he can find worthily printed on time-proof papers and have them bound in parchment; then let him place them on his shelves to gather gold from the touch of the mellowing years through the centuries to come and win him grateful memory such as we bestow upon the unknown hands that wrought for these volumes the garments of their present and still increasing beauty.

LEST WE FORGET THE FEW GREAT BOOKS

One result of the stir that has been made in library matters during the last two generations, and especially during the latter, is the enormous increase in the size of our libraries. In 1875 the public libraries of the United States contained a little less than 11,500,000 volumes. In the five years from 1908 to 1913 the libraries of 5,000 volumes and over added nearly 20,000,000 volumes, making a total of over 75,000,000 volumes, an increase of 35.7 per cent. In 1875 there were 3682 libraries of more than 300 volumes each; in 1913 there were 8302 libraries of over 1000 volumes each. In 1875 there were only nine libraries containing 100,000 volumes or over. These were the Library of Congress, 300,000; Boston Public Library, 300,000; New York Mercantile Library, 160,000; Harvard College Library, 154,000; Astor Library, 152,000; Philadelphia Mercantile Library, 126,000; House of Representatives Library, 125,000; Boston Athenaeum, 105,000; Library Company of Philadelphia, 104,000. In 1913 there were in this class 82 libraries, or over nine times as many, including 14 libraries of 300,000 to 2,000,000 volumes, a class which did not exist in 1875.

Meanwhile the individual book remains just what it always was, the utterance of one mind addressed to another mind, and the individual reader has no more hours in the day nor days in his life; he has no more eyes nor hands nor--we reluctantly confess--brains than he had in 1875. But, fast as our libraries grow, not even their growth fully represents the avalanche of books that is every year poured upon the reader's devoted head by the presses of the world. To take only the four countries in whose literature we are most interested we find their annual book publication, for the latest normal year, 1913, to be as follows: Germany, 35,078 volumes; France, 11,460; England, 12,379; America, 12,230. But Japan, Russia, and Italy are each credited with issuing more books annually than either England or the United States, and the total annual book publication of the world is estimated to reach the enormous figure of more than 130,000 volumes. In view of this prodigious literary output, what progress can the reader hope to make in "keeping up with the new books"? De Quincey figured that a man might possibly, in a long lifetime devoted to nothing else, read 20,000 volumes. The estimate is easy. Suppose we start with one book a day--surely a large supposition--and count a man's reading years from 20 to 80, 60 years in all; 60 times 365 is 21,900. This estimate makes no allowance for Sundays, holidays, or sickness. Yet, small as it is--for there are private libraries containing 20,000 volumes--it is manifestly too large. But whatever the sum total may be, whether 20,000 or 2,000, let us see, if I may use the expression, what a one must read before he can allow himself to read what he really wants to.

First of all we must read the books that form the intellectual tools of our trade, and there is no profession and hardly a handicraft that does not possess its literature. For instance, there are more than ten periodicals in the German language alone devoted exclusively to such a narrow field as beekeeping. Such periodicals and such books we do not call literature, any more than we do the labors of the man or woman who supplies the text for Butterick's patterns. But they are printed matter, and the reading of them takes up time that we might have spent upon "books that are books."

But besides this bread and butter reading there is another sort that we must admit into our lives if we are to be citizens of the world we live in, contemporaries of our own age, men among the men of our time, and that is reading for general information. The time has long since gone by, to be sure, when any man could, like Lord Bacon, take all knowledge for his province--we can hardly take a bird's-eye view of all knowledge to-day. No amount of reading will ever produce another Scaliger, learned in every subject. To be well informed, even in these days of the banyan-like growth of the tree of knowledge, is to be a miracle of erudition. Most of mankind must be content with the modest aim which Dr. Holmes set for the poet, to know enough not to make too many blunders. In carrying out this humble purpose, that of merely touching elbows with the thronging multitude of facts of interest to the civilized man, we have a task great enough to occupy the time of any reader, even if he made it his vocation; and with most of us it must be only a minor avocation. The very books about the books in this boundless field, the compends of the compends, the reviews of the reviews, form in themselves a library great enough to stagger human weakness. Besides all this--in a sense a part of it, yet a miscellaneous and irrational part--come the newspapers, with their daily distraction. This is after all our world, and we cannot live in it and be absolute nonconformists. So we must submit to the newspaper, though it makes a heavy addition to our daily load of reading for information. But there is still another kind of necessary reading that I wish to mention before we come to that which ranks chief in importance.

The woman who takes out of the public or subscription library a novel a day is only suffering from the perversion of an appetite that in its normal state is beneficial. It is possible that her husband does not read enough for amusement, that his horizon is narrowed, his sympathies stunted by the lack of that very influence which, in excess, unfits his wife for the realities and duties of everyday existence. It came as a surprise to many to learn from Tennyson's "Life" that the author of "In Memoriam" was a great novel reader. But clearly in his case the novel produced no weakening of the mental fiber. President Garfield advised the student to mingle with his heavier reading a judicious proportion of fiction. The novel may rank in the highest department of literature and may render the inestimable service of broadening and quickening our sympathies. In this case it belongs to the class of the best books. But I have introduced it here as the most prominent representative of what we may call the literature of recreation. There is a further representative of this class that is peculiarly well fitted to bring refreshment and cheer to the weary and dispirited, and that is humor, which is often also the soundest philosophy.

If the reader does not at the outset make provision in his daily reading for the best books, the days and the months will go by, and the unopened volumes will look down upon him from his shelves in dumb reproof of his neglect and reminder of his loss. In truth it is all a matter of the balance of gain. What we rate highest we shall find room for. If we cannot have our spiritual food and satisfy all our other wants, perhaps we shall find that some of our other wants can do with less satisfaction. That we should neglect the material side of life for the spiritual I do not say. But for our encouragement let me quote another estimate of what may be accomplished by persistent reading, and my authority shall be the late Professor William Mathews, the essayist, an author whose graceful style bears lightly as a flower a weight of learning that would appall, if it did not so delight us. Says Dr. Mathews:

Did you ever think of the sum total of knowledge that may be accumulated in a decade, or score of years, or a lifetime by reading only 10 pages a day? He who has read but that small amount daily, omitting Sundays, has read in a year 3130 pages, which is equal to six volumes of 521 pages each, enough to enable one to master a science. In five years he will have read 15,650 pages, equivalent to 30 large volumes, or to 60 of the average size. Now, we do not hesitate to say that 30 volumes of 521 pages each of history, biography, science, and literature, well chosen, well read, and well digested, will be worth to nine persons out of ten more than the average collegiate education is to the majority of graduates.

Our case for knowing the best books is, therefore, not hopeless. What we need for the achievement is not genius, but only a moderate amount of forethought and persistence. But who is there that has not tasted the joy of discovering a great book that seemed written for himself alone? If there is such a man, he is to be pitied--unless, indeed, he is to be congratulated on the unimagined pleasure in store for him. Discovery is not too strong a word for the feeling of the reader when he lights upon such a world-opening volume. He feels that no one else ever could have had the same appreciation of it, ever really discovered it, that he is

the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.

Keats, in his glorious sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," has given the finest of all expressions to this sense of literary discovery.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne: Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher in the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

To describe such accessions of spiritual vision we turn instinctively to the narratives of Holy Writ, to Pisgah and its revelation of the Promised Land, to the ladder at Bethel with its angels ascending and descending, and to the lonely seer on Patmos with his vision of a new heaven and a new earth.

But, questions a listener, do books ever really affect people like this? Most assuredly! We have only to turn to biography for the record, if we do not find living witnesses among our friends. It was said of Neander that "Plato is his idol--his constant watchword. He sits day and night over him; and there are few who have so thoroughly and in such purity imbibed his wisdom."

The elder Professor Torrey, of the University of Vermont, found his inspiration, as many another has done, in Dante. In his youth he preferred the Inferno; in his middle life he rose to the calm heights of the Purgatorio; and he used to say with a smile that perhaps the time would come when he should be fitted to appreciate the Paradiso. Highly interesting is John Ruskin's tribute to Sir Walter Scott:

It is one of the griefs of my old age that I know Scott by heart, but still, if I take up a volume of him, it is not laid down again for the next hour.

Beside this we may place Goethe's testimony, also written in old age:

We read many, too many, poor things, thus losing our time and gaining nothing. We should only read what we can admire, as I did in my youth, and as I now do with Sir Walter Scott. I have now begun "Rob Roy," and I shall read all his romances in succession. All is great--material, import, characters, execution; and then what infinite diligence in the preparatory studies! what truth of detail in the composition! Here we see what English history is; what an inheritance to a poet able to make use of it. Walter Scott is a great genius; he has not his equal; and we need not wonder at the extraordinary effect he has produced on the reading world. He gives me much to think of; and I discover in him a wholly new art with laws of its own.