Books - What's the Point?

My brain has a lot of time to think this morning, because I am folding and pricking and pressing a batch of 25 new books. Once you've got that set up your mind has a lot of time to wander. And of course I am thinking about books. It's what I do.

Lately I've been attending classes on How To Start A Small Business, and of course they want to know what I think is worthwhile about bookbinding. I can see they don't think anything is, and it's my job to convince them otherwise. So I've been thinking about my relationship with books a lot, and so my next couple of posts are going to be about value.

Bookbinding does a couple of things - it preserves and repairs books, and keeps them free from harm for a longer time. Fine binding also turns the book into a luxury object - something most people will make an effort to preserve.

For me, books are not only the words on the page. Old books are little pieces of history. They are stories that are not told elsewhere - the book itself is the story.

I just reached out a plucked a piece of the early 18th century off my bookshelf.

It is a small volume - about 4" x 6" - bound in sprinkled calf, and rebacked but I'm not sure when. Whoever did the reback tried to mimic the original style but couldn't resist adding double gold lines that probably wouldn't have decorated the original boards. Those lines are sort of worn off but that could easily be faked and I can see the rebacking binder made an effort to make the lines and the new spine look early, but the details aren't quite right.

Inside, I see the pastedowns are original. If the reback had been an early one they would have cut the flyleaf back to a stub and folded it over onto the inside board, which is a kind of mutilation that is frowned upon nowadays. Whoever did the reback added a separate strip of paper, toned to go with the original. So they're not hiding the reback but they're trying to make it look natural, which means the reback was, again, later rather than earlier. See? I've just looked at the thing and already it has a story.

Now, the book itself. The title on the spine is "Mottoes Etc." because back in those days the label wasn't the Official Real Title of the book, but just enough words for the owner to differentiate it from the other books he owned. The actual title: "The Mottoes of the Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians, Translated into English" is given on the title page, along with one of my favourite parts of any old book - the printer's note:

For "Mottoes Etc." was printed in London for Richard Wellington, at the Dolphin and Crown without Temple-Bar. And lastly, it was printed in M.DCC.XXXVII. That is 1737, and I am interested to note that they divided up the date into millennium, hundred-years, and less-than-a-hundred-years using periods. I file that information away in my trivia collection, and go back to contemplating Richard Wellington and whether he had a good time at the Dolphin and Crown without Temple-Bar (early typography is fun, too) and wondering whether the D&C was a pub. It sure sounds like a pub, and I often do business out of the local coffee-shop, why shouldn't Richard Wellington have worked out of a pub? Or maybe it's just that the Dolphin and the Crown were the signs he used on his own storefront. Or maybe the D&C was also a rooming house and that's where he lived.

Then I turn to the preface, which kindly tells me why the book was written, and I find another story. "Many of my Fair [ie, female] Readers, as well as very gay and well-received Persons of the other Sex, are extremely perplex'd at the Latin Sentences at the Head of my Speculations; I do not know whether I ought not to indulge them with Translations of each of them."

So here's another little footnote to history. I knew the newspapers in the title - The Guardian, the Tatler, and the Spectator - were re-published in several editions and no doubt you can find them on the Internet - but how many have heard this story? That there were so many people asking what the Latin phrases in those newspapers meant that they wound up being published in their own book? We don't often see Latin in books any more, but when we do we assume that way back when books were printed in Latin people were so well-educated they could read those books. Not women, of course, but apparently a lot of "well-received" men, too, couldn't figure them out - or at least not well enough to be sure of the meaning. Interesting social history side note.

Whenever I pick up my little book I can find out something. Turning randomly, I can read Latin (because who can ever get enough Latin, right?) like "Quid de quoque viro, & cui dicas, saepe caveto" which I am told means "Take heed of whom you speak, and what it is, Take heed to whom" Very true and useful, I'm sure, but more just fun for me to read.

Plus, in 18th-century style, this book is stiff with ornaments. Those are decorative stamps used in printing to fill in odd pages ends or mark the beginning or ends of chapters or divisions. A story and Latin and a lot of pictures! All in one little volume.

Of course I love it. Of course I want to take care of it. I am glad somebody thought enough of this book to save it from the ravages of time. I think a lot of it myself. And that is why bookbinding will continue.

Back to the Future

I see today there are lots of posts on lots of blogs, all from people who went to BEA (BookExpo America) last week and are now buzzing about digital books and How They're Taking Over And We Can't Stop It, and How It's The End of Books.

OK, so I'll say it here. Just a small comment, but I'll say it.

Think of people buying books. It's a money-making opportunity. So you write a book, and you go find a printer and get it printed up, and then you go to some place where people will hear your voice, and you try to sell it. Or maybe you know how to do the printing yourself, so you go out and find books to print and you print them and then you go to some place where people will hear your voice, and you try to sell them.

Everybody's their own entrepreneur. One person can write a book and sell it - and thousands more will try it and fail but that's not the point. The point is that the industry - and the money - is in the hands of the little guy.

Does that sound like the current state of digital publishing?

That's odd, because it's a description of the state of book publishing 350 years ago. Back then, your book was printed by cold type on a handpress, either by you or by some guy who lived down the alley, and you might be hawking your book on the village green, but you had the power to publish your own books, and to price and sell them. Over time, little publishers arose and became big publishers, and a giant industry arose around the process of printing and publishing - one in which the writer and the printer were fairly small cogs in the process. Publishers made money through volume, and volume arose through cheap printing which came via machine-made paper and then huge offset printers and dozens of other money-saving advances, and with each one the amount of capital expense needed to publish a book rose until the little guy pretty much couldn't handle it.

Now, thanks to digital publishing, we're right back where we were in the 17th century. Anybody can publish a book, but they're hawking them on the Internet rather than on the street.

I'm not saying digipub isn't a bad thing for some people. There's a loss of professionalism and a loss of knowledge and lots of books that won't get through to as many people because they don't find out about them when the bookstores aren't there to put them on their shelves. I'm not saying the industry isn't changing - I'm just saying I don't think it'll be the end, and I don't think it's necessarily a disaster.

Last week I had an interview in which I tried to explain being a bookbinder. Knowing that in the average population most people don't really understand bookbinding, I took along four books I had bound - a full goat, an historical full calf, a buckram and one bound in velvet. I slapped them into the interviewer's hand and bid her hold them and turn the pages. She wanted to keep on holding them. Once I figure out how to get more people to experience well-bound books again, I think people will be clamouring to have their books rebound.

Social History and Librarians

Internet research - I loves it.

Yesterday's post didn't show all of the book's cover, but you could see a comparatively new piece of tape on the bottom panel of the spine, which carried, handwritten in white, the library call numbers of the book when it was at the University of Waterloo (Ontario), whose card sleeve adorns the inside front pastedown. But they got it from somebody else - I know because on the front cover there is a ticket, about 3" x 3":

I love the peek into past lives I get from reading old advertising, tickets, trade mail, and so on. I can't tell, of course, whether this book was bound specifically for Brotherhead's Library in Philadelphia, or acquired by them sometime after the binding, which could not have been earlier than 1853. I might suspect that the rather grand binding meant it wasn't originally bound for the library, because they would have known the ticket would cover it up. But maybe originally the library didn't use tickets - this may have been the original library book, and the ticket was pasted on decades later.

Just a bit of trivia:

A quick trip to Google brought up Trubner's American and Oriental Literary Record for August 1869, which include a letter from Mr. W. Brotherhead himself. Stung by a previous reference to Brotherhead's library in New York containing a mere 3,000 volumes, he listed the (much larger) number of volumes contained in each one of their major libraries - including the Philadelphia one, with 20,000 volumes, and listing their lending policy, which is the same as on the ticket we have here.

It interests me that on the ticket they spell out a policy for dealing with multi-volume novels (all in the same title count as one) because it shows that the "three volume novel" of fifty years before were still normal to find in a library collection. And I'm sure a lover of business, economics, or social history would make a lot out of the various fees involved - such as, that if you expect to have more than 165 book-days per year you might as well take out the whole year's subscription, and if you have to leave the price of the book as a deposit at the library to take the book out, then the really poor people were essentially barred.

The point of this post? Well, nothing really, except I thought the ticket was a historical artefact worth noting. 

You find all sorts of these things in old books. One time I took the spine off a mid-19th century Bible and discovered the mull reinforcing the spine was a piece of cloth from a woman's dress. It was lovely - a pale green flowered lawn - and I realized that if your wife discarded just one dress you had enough mull for dozens of thick Bibles, as dresses back then used a lot of fabric. Another time the spine of a 17th-century book had been reinforced with paper left over from printing a play. I only got a few lines, but it does make me wonder what's inside other books whose spines haven't fallen away.