Enemies of Books

CHAPTER II.

WATER.

Heer Hudde's library lost at sea.--Pinelli's library captured
by Corsairs.-MSS. destroyed by Afohammed 11-Books damaged by rain.-
Woffenbuttel.- Vapour andMould. -Brown stains.--Dr. Dibdin.-Hot
water .pipes.-Asbestos fire.-Glass doors to bookcases.

CHAPTER III.

GAS AND HEAT.

Effects of Gas on leather.--Necessitates re-binding.--Bookbinders.--Electric
light.--British Museum.-Treatment of books.- Legend of Friars and their books.

CHAPTER IV.

DUST AND NEGLECT.

Books should have gilt tops.-Old libraries were neglected.--
Instance of a College library.- Clothes brushed in it.-Abuses
in French libraries.-Derome's account of them.--Boccaccio's story
of library at the Convent of Mount Cassin.

CHAPTER V.

IGNORANCE AND BIGOTRY.

Destruction of Books at the Reformation.- Mazarin library.--
Caxton used to light the fire.--Library at French Protestant Church,
St. Martin's-le- Grand.- Books stolen.- Story of books from
Thonock Hall.-Boke of St. Albans.--Recollet Monks of Antwerp.

--Shakespearian "find."--Black-letter books used in
W.C.-Gesta Romanorum.--Lansdowne collection.--Warburton.--Tradesman and rare
book.-Parish Register.-Story of Bigotry by M. Muller.--Clergymen destroy
books.-Patent Office sell books for waste.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BOOKWORM.

Doraston.-Not so destructive as of yore.--Worm won't eat
parchment.-Pierre Petit's .poem.--Hooke's account and image.-Its
natural history neglected.- Various sorts-Attempts to breed
Bookworms.- Greek worm.--Havoc made by worms.--Bodleian and
Dr. Bandinel.--"Dermestes."--Worm won't eat modern paper.--
America comparatively free.--Worm-hole at Philadelphia.

CHAPTER VII.

OTHER VERMIN.

Black-beetle in American libraries. germanica.--Bug Bible.
-.Lepisma.--Codfish.-Skeletons of Rats in Abbey library,
Westminster.-Niptus hololeucos.--Tomicus Typographicus.-House
flies injure books.

CHAPTER VIII.

BOOKBINDERS.

A good binding gives pleasure.--Deadly effects of the "plough"
as used by binders.-Not confined to bye-gone times.
-Instances of injury.-De Rome, a good binder but a great

cropper.--Books "hacked."--Bad lettering.
-Treasures in book-covers.--Books washed, sized, and mended.--"Cases"
often Preferable to re-binding.

CHAPTER IX.

COLLECTORS.

Bagford the biblioclast.--Illustrations torn from MSS.-Title-pages torn
from books.--. Rubens, his engraved titles.--Colophons torn out of books.--
Lincoln Cathedral--Dr. Dibdin's Nosegay.--Theurdanck. -Fragments of MSS.-Some
libraries almost useless.--Pepysian.--Teylerian.- Sir Thomas Phillipps.

CHAPTER X.

SERVANTS AND CHILDREN.

Library invaded for the purpose of dusting.--Spring clean.
---Dust to be got rid of.--Ways of doing so.-Carefulness praised.--
Bad nature of certain books--Metal clasps and rivets.--
How to dust.- Children often injure books.--Examples.--Story of
boys in a country library

POSTSCRIPTUM.

Anecdote of book-sale in Derbyshire.

CONCLUSION.

The care that should be taken of books.--Enjoyment derived from them.




ILLUSTRATIONS.

SERVANT USING A "CAXTON" TO LIGHT THE FIRE-----_Frontispiece_,

PIRATES THROWING LIBRARY OVER-BOARD--------- page 19

FRIARS AND THEIR ASS-LOAD-----35

BRUSHING CLOTHES IN A COLLEGE LIBRARY--------45

BOOKWORMS-----73

RATS DESTROYING BOOKS 99

HOUSEHOLD FLY-DAMAGE 102

BOYS RAMPANT IN LIBRARY 141



THE ENEMIES OF BOOKS.

CHAPTER I.

FIRE.

THERE are many of the forces of Nature which tend to injure Books;
but among them all not one has been half so destructive
as Fire. It would be tedious to write out a bare list only
of the numerous libraries and bibliographical treasures which,
in one way or another, have been seized by the Fire-king as his own.
Chance conflagrations, fanatic incendiarism, judicial bonfires,
and even household stoves have, time after time, thinned the treasures
as well as the rubbish of past ages, until, probably, not one
thousandth part of the books that have been are still extant.
This destruction cannot, however, be reckoned as all loss;
for had not the "cleansing fires" removed mountains of rubbish from
our midst, strong destructive measures would have become a necessity
from sheer want of space in which to store so many volumes.

Before the invention of Printing, books were comparatively scarce;
and, knowing as we do, how very difficult it is, even after
the steam-press has been working for half a century, to make
a collection of half a million books, we are forced to receive
with great incredulity the accounts in old writers of the wonderful
extent of ancient libraries.

The historian Gibbon, very incredulous in many things,
accepts without questioning the fables told upon this subject.
No doubt the libraries of MSS. collected generation after generation
by the Egyptian Ptolemies became, in the course of time, the most extensive
ever then known; and were famous throughout the world for the costliness
of their ornamentation, and importance of their untold contents.
Two of these were at Alexandria, the larger of which was in the quarter
called Bruchium. These volumes, like all manuscripts of those early ages,
were written on sheets of parchment, having a wooden roller at each
end so that the reader needed only to unroll a portion at a time.
During Caesar's Alexandrian War, B.C. 48, the larger collection
was consumed by fire and again burnt by the Saracens in A.D. 640.
An immense loss was inflicted upon mankind thereby; but when we are
told of 700,000, or even 500,000 of such volumes being destroyed we
instinctively feel that such numbers must be a great exaggeration.
Equally incredulous must we be when we read of half a million volumes
being burnt at Carthage some centuries later, and other similar accounts.

Among the earliest records of the wholesale destruction of Books
is that narrated by St. Luke, when, after the preaching of Paul,
many of the Ephesians "which used curious arts brought their
books together, and burned them before all men: and they
counted the price of them, and found it 50,000 pieces of silver"
(Acts xix, 19). Doubtless these books of idolatrous divination
and alchemy, of enchantments and witchcraft, were righteously
destroyed by those to whom they had been and might again be
spiritually injurious; and doubtless had they escaped the fire then,
not one of them would have survived to the present time, no MS.
of that age being now extant. Nevertheless, I must confess
to a certain amount of mental disquietude and uneasiness when I
think of books worth 50,000 denarii--or, speaking roughly,
say L18,750,[1] of our modern money being made into bonfires.
What curious illustrations of early heathenism, of Devil worship,
of Serpent worship, of Sun worship, and other archaic forms
of religion; of early astrological and chemical lore,
derived from the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks;
what abundance of superstitious observances and what is now termed
"Folklore"; what riches, too, for the philological student,
did those many books contain, and how famous would the library
now be that could boast of possessing but a few of them.


[1] The received opinion is that the "pieces of silver" here mentioned
were Roman denarii, which were the silver pieces then commonly used
in Ephesus. If now we weigh a denarius against modern silver,
it is exactly equal to ninepence, and fifty thousand times ninepence
gives L1,875. It is always a difficult matter to arrive at a just
estimate of the relative value of the same coin in different ages;
but reckoning that money then had at least ten times the purchasing
value of money now, we arrive at what was probably about the value
of the magical books burnt, viz.: L18,750.

The ruins of Ephesus bear unimpeachable evidence that the City
was very extensive and had magnificent buildings. It was one
of the free cities, governing itself. Its trade in shrines and
idols was very extensive, being spread through all known lands.
There the magical arts were remarkably prevalent, and notwithstanding
the numerous converts made by the early Christians, the 'Efesia grammata>, or little scrolls upon which magic sentences
were written, formed an extensive trade up to the fourth century.
These "writings" were used for divination, as a protection
against the "evil eye," and generally as charms against all evil.
They were carried about the person, so that probably thousands
of them were thrown into the flames by St. Paul's hearers when his
glowing words convinced them of their superstition.

Imagine an open space near the grand Temple of Diana, with fine
buildings around. Slightly raised above the crowd, the Apostle,
preaching with great power and persuasion concerning superstition,
holds in thrall the assembled multitude. On the outskirts
of the crowd are numerous bonfires, upon which Jew and Gentile
are throwing into the flames bundle upon bundle of scrolls,
while an Asiarch with his peace-officers looks on with the
conventional stolidity of policemen in all ages and all nations.
It must have been an impressive scene, and many a worse subject
has been chosen for the walls of the Royal Academy.

Books in those early times, whether orthodox or heterodox,
appear to have had a precarious existence. The heathens
at each fresh outbreak of persecution burnt all the Christian
writings they could find, and the Christians, when they got
the upper hand, retaliated with interest upon the pagan literature.
The Mohammedan reason for destroying books--"If they contain what is
in the Koran they are superfluous, and if they contain anything
opposed to it they are immoral," seems, indeed, _mutatis mutandis_,
to have been the general rule for all such devastators.

The Invention of Printing made the entire destruction of any author's
works much more difficult, so quickly and so extensively did books
spread through all lands. On the other hand, as books multiplied,
so did destruction go hand in hand with production, and soon
were printed books doomed to suffer in the same penal fires,
that up to then had been fed on MSS. only.

At Cremona, in 1569, 12,000 books printed in Hebrew were publicly
burnt as heretical, simply on account of their language;
and Cardinal Ximenes, at the capture of Granada, treated 5,000
copies of the Koran in the same way.

At the time of the Reformation in England a great destruction
of books took place. The antiquarian Bale, writing in 1587,
thus speaks of the shameful fate of the Monastic libraries:--


"A greate nombre of them whyche purchased those superstycyouse mansyons
(_Monasteries_) reserved of those librarye bookes some to serve
their jakes, some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, and some to rubbe
theyr bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sope sellers,
and some they sent over see to yeS booke bynders, not in small nombre,
but at tymes whole shyppes full, to yeS, wonderynge of foren nacyons.
Yea yeS. Universytees of thys realme are not alle clere in thys
detestable fact. But cursed is that bellye whyche seketh to be
fedde with suche ungodlye gaynes, and so depelye shameth hys
natural conterye. I knowe a merchant manne, whych shall at thys
tyme be namelesse, that boughte yeS contentes of two noble
lybraryes for forty shyllynges pryce : a shame it is to be spoken.
Thys stuffe hathe heoccupyed in yeS stede of greye paper, by yeS,
space of more than these ten yeares, and yet he bathe store ynoughe
for as manye years to come. A prodygyous example is thys, and to be
abhorred of all men whyche love theyr nacyon as they shoulde do.
The monkes kepte them undre dust, yeS, ydle-headed prestes regarded
them not, theyr latter owners have most shamefully abused them,
and yeS covetouse merchantes have solde them away into foren
nacyons for moneye."

How the imagination recoils at the idea of Caxton's translation of
the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or perhaps his "Lyf of therle of Oxenforde,"
together with many another book from our first presses, not a fragment
of which do we now possess, being used for baking "pyes."

At the Great Fire of London in 1666, the number of books burnt was enormous.
Not only in private houses and Corporate and Church libraries were priceless
collections reduced to cinders, but an immense stock of books removed from
Paternoster Row by the Stationers for safety was burnt to ashes in the vaults
of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Coming nearer to our own day, how thankful we ought to be for
the preservation of the Cotton Library. Great was the consternation
in the literary world of 1731 when they heard of the fire at
Ashburnham House, Westminster, where, at that time, the Cotton MSS.
were deposited. By great exertions the fire was conquered, but not
before many MSS. had been quite destroyed and many others injured.
Much skill was shown in the partial restoration of these books,
charred almost beyond recognition; they were carefully separated
leaf by leaf, soaked in a chemical solution, and then pressed
flat between sheets of transparent paper. A curious heap
of scorched leaves, previous to any treatment, and looking like
a monster wasps' nest, may be seen in a glass case in the MS.
department of the British Museum, showing the condition to which
many other volumes had been reduced.

Just a hundred years ago the mob, in the "Birmingham Riots,"
burnt the valuable library of Dr. Priestley, and in the "Gordon Riots"
were burnt the literary and other collections of Lord Mansfield,
the celebrated judge, he who had the courage first to decide that the Slave
who reached the English shore was thenceforward a free man. The loss
of the latter library drew from the poet Cowper two short and weak poems.
The poet first deplores the destruction of the valuable printed books,
and then the irretrievable loss to history by the burning of his Lordship's
many personal manuscripts and contemporary documents.

"Their pages mangled, burnt and torn,
The loss was his alone;
But ages yet to come shall mourn
The burning of his own."


The second poem commences with the following doggerel:--

"When Wit and Genius meet their doom
In all-devouring Flame,
They tell us of the Fate of Rome
And bid us fear the same."


The much finer and more extensive library of Dr. Priestley was left
unnoticed and unlamented by the orthodox poet, who probably felt
a complacent satisfaction at the destruction of heterodox books,
the owner being an Unitarian Minister.

The magnificent library of Strasbourg was burnt by the shells
of the German Army in 1870. Then disappeared for ever,
together with other unique documents, the original records of