LITMIR.BIZ

PAPER-KNIFE PLEASURES.

       Table of Contents

      ‘With the odd sixpence in his hand,

       And greed in his gray eyes;’

      having, moreover, in his mind’s eye as he walked

      ‘Vistas of dusty libraries

       Prolonged eternally.’

      Mr. Andrew Lang, too, has sung to us of the man who ‘book-hunts while the loungers fly,’ who ‘book-hunts though December freeze,’ for whom

      ‘Each tract that flutters in the breeze

       Is charged with hopes and fears,’

      while

      ‘In mouldy novels fancy sees

       Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.’

      There are periodicals which cater solely for old-book adorers; and while on the one hand your enthusiast will publish his ‘Pleasures’ and ‘Diversions,’ on the other a contemporary will devote a volume to the subjects which attract and interest ‘the Book Fancier.’

      Meanwhile, is there nothing to be said of, or by, the admirer of new books—the man or woman who rejoices in the pleasant act of turning over new leaves? At a time when volumes are issuing by the dozen from the publishers’ counters, shall not something be chronicled of the happiness which lies in the contemplation, the perusal, of the literary product which comes hot from the press? For, to begin with, the new books have at least this great advantage over the old—that they are clean. It is not everybody who can wax dithyrambic over the ‘dusty’ and the ‘mouldy.’ It is possible for a volume to be too ‘second-hand.’ Your devotee, to be sure, thinks fondly of the many hands, dead and gone, through which his ‘find’ has passed; he loves to imagine that it may have been held between the fingers of some person or persons of distinction; he is in the seventh heaven of exaltation if he can be quite certain it has had that honour. But suppose this factitious charm is really wanting? Suppose a volume is dirty, and ignobly so? Must one necessarily delight in dogs’ ears, bask in the shadow of beer-stains, and ‘chortle’ at the sign of cheese-marks? Surely it is one of the merits of new leaves that they come direct from the printer and the binder, though they, alas! may have left occasional impressions of an inky thumb.

      It might possibly be argued that a new volume is, if anything, ‘too bright and good’—too beautiful and too resplendent—for ‘base uses.’ There is undoubtedly an amari aliquid about them. They certainly do seem to say that we ‘may look but must not touch.’ Talk about the awe with which your book-hunter gazes upon an ancient or infrequent

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