Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: XI. If only
As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb’s “ragged veterans.” Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall; many of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately in fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands. But so often have I removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library at each change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have I given to its well-being at normal times (for in all practical matters I am idle and inept), that even the comeliest of my books show the results of unfair usage. More than one has been foully injured by a great nail driven into a packing-case -- this but the extreme instance of the wrongs they have undergone. Now that I have leisure and peace of mind, I find myself growing more carefull -- an illustration of the great truth that virtue is made easy by circumstances. But I confess that, so long as a volume hold together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.
I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years -- never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize...
... Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessaries of life. Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller’s window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I could not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine...
... I sold my first edition of Gibbon for even less than it cost me; it went with a great many other fine books in folio and quarto, which I could not drag about with me in my constant removals; the man who bought them spoke of them as “tomb-stones.” Why has Gibbon no market value? Often has my heart ached with regret for those quartos. The joy of reading the Decline and Fall in that fine type! The page was appropriate to the dignity of the subject; the mere sight of it turned one’s mind...
Alpha.
My library dominates my small apartment and, while I’ve always preferred to buy books in modest paperback editions (because I am cheap and because who knows in advance if a book is going to be special) I now own a large number of volumes in hardback editions. But I doubt that any are of the quality Gissing is describing here. At best my volumes are covered in cloth and I believe he is talking about leather. My books that have a noticeable scent are the ones I’ve dragged along for decades and have fallen victim to mildew. The smell of printing ink is heaven to me, but I’ve never noticed that smell from the page of a book I’ve purchased.
My edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (The Heritage Press with illustrations by Piranesi) happens to be one of the finest books in my collection. But the important thing for me is that this edition includes the footnotes on the outside of each page rather than in the back -- Gibbon tends to save his dry humor for the footnotes, which are particularly scathing when it comes to the Catholic Church.
I’ve read that you can open Gibbon at random and find a perfect English sentence. I’ve never tested that before but his prose style is at least as lovely as Jane Austen’s. (Why is the more recent Mr. Gissing’s prose so strange by comparison? Was this a Victorian fashion?) Here’s a random sentence from the first of my three volumes:
The Asiatic pomp, which had been adopted by the pride of Diocletian, assumed an air of softness and effeminacy in the person of Constantine.
That’s rather a short one so let’s try another, this time about Julian:
The unanimous evidence of his contemporaries is confirmed by the public and private declarations of the emperor himself; and his various writings express the uniform tenor of his religious sentiments, which policy would have prompted him to dissemble rather than to affect.
But here is my favorite quote from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Recently I was reading a library copy of Ram Dass’s Still Here. The book itself was interesting but not exceptional (his almost pathetic reliance on his guru seems to say more about Ram Dass’s perpetual need for solace than for the value of his guru’s teachings), but this particular edition was an absolute joy to read because of the typeface, the color of the ink and the overall design. But what pleased me about the typeface was that it was obviously a digital production. Every letter was perfect which you will never find with actual type. I somehow doubt Ryecroft/Gissing would have approved.
In the purer ages of the [Roman] commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain.
Last year I couldn’t leave Powell’s Books in Portland without the Everyman’s Library edition of The Magic Mountain. It’s a new translation and my old, paperback edition is getting quite ragged -- I told myself. But the truth is that the printed pages in that edition just looked lovely and I couldn’t resist. This turned out to be a wise decision as John E. Woods is kind enough to translate both the German and the French into English, something the previous translator failed to do, and a crucial passage in the book is in French.
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