Sidor som bilder
PDF
ePub

perhaps for the purpose, and some merchantable printed catalogues, general and special, for which we are thankful, but they mostly fall far short of Bibliography. Indeed it is a fact that no painstaking earnest collector of rare and precious books can find anywhere reliable collations and descriptions of one-half of them, but he is compelled often to take them on trust.

The contents of some of our excellent public and private libraries are each separately scheduled in print or manuscript sufficiently well no doubt to be used on the premises in face of the books described, but our learned and indefatigable librarians presiding over the best dozen of our libraries each catalogue their books as carefully and elaborately as if they existed nowhere else, and sometimes probably, notwithstanding the celebrated ninetyone rules, in as many ways as there are copies. While some books are thus catalogued over and over again, very many are overlooked and altogether neglected. This is inevitable, but no improvement can be expected so long as there is no standard, no acknowledged general system worthy the name, no co-operation or common interest in Universal Bibliography.

Now if these twelve Cæsars over books would each thoroughly bibliographize separate rare and valuable books and exchange results, instead of all half doing the same work in a dozen different styles, we might eventually have our literary history and bibliography in a fit state to transmit satisfactorily to posterity, instead of continuing the present muddle which is manifestly growing muddlier every year as the harvest of the press accumulates. It is doubtless as much as each staff can accomplish to keep up with the growth of its own library without regarding others. As there is little hope of any one library ever even approaching completeness, there is no apparent progress whatever made towards that universal and harmonious catalogue raisonné which we have been so long and so devoutly praying for. We are not

moving so fast in this matter as the world around us, and are therefore lagging, a circumstance not creditable to the Great or Greater Briton.

The good old fashioned idea and practice of printed catalogues of large and rapidly increasing libraries in this country are we are sorry to say well nigh abandoned as impracticable, while in America the importance and necessity of them are recognized and at present acted upon; but it is not unlikely that the curators of the Congress Library at Washington and of the Public Library at Boston may somewhat modify their notions and practice in this respect, when their collections are increased from somewhat under 200,000 to 800,000 or a million volumes, like the library of the British Museum, or the National Library of Paris. It is well known that the difficulties of producing a printed catalogue of a large and rapidly growing library vastly increase in proportion to its size. It is hardly therefore to be expected that a single institution, national, public or private, should take upon itself the burden of universal bibliography, or the right of scribing rules and general principles for others. The staff of the British Museum library for instance may not dictate to that of Bodley or Paris, and as no one of them is afflicted with affluent misery, or has sufficient money, men or authority to lead off independently, they, like many lesser lights, are compelled to shine under their own bushels. Of consequence the manuscript catalogue of each library, however excellent it may be, is of little use except to the owners, and it must, like our unlicensed beer be taken on the premises. It affords the student outside the library no adequate means of studying the bibliography of his subject at home, nor can he compare the books of one library with those of another.

pre

This isolation and waste of vain repetition, it is believed, is wholly unnecessary. One good portrait by a Titian is better than a dozen by inferior or less skilled artists. The best can be multiplied easier than new ones made.

So a good portrait of a book is good for all time, and replicas may be readily supplied to any extent. It would indeed be difficult to supply portraits, or descriptive titles and collations of all books at once, but a well digested plan, expansive as an indiarubber band, it is believed, might be devised which in a few years would supply our public and private libraries with titles as fast as they are required, and at the same time educate a bibliographical staff, that would eventually post up the ledger of our literature to date, and keep it up. There is now nothing as we have said approaching a complete bibliographical record of the books of the English language, that is, of Great Britain, America, India and Australia. Germany and France are a little better off, but not much. Other bookprinting nations are we believe behind even England.

So far nothing has been said of trash or natural selection in our works, the bugbear of half the critics. It is natural that every man should select such books as he fancies, but it is only fair that he should leave the same right to others. We all know that in books, what is trash to one person is nuggets to another, and that the tastes of mankind in this respect are as varied as in every thing else. Our notion is that every book, big and little, that is published, like every child that is born, should be registered, without inquiry into its merits or character. We are no Malthusian either in population or books. Who shall pronounce on the progeny of a mother or an author, and declare that this or that should not have been? tainly not the registrar, or the cataloguer. A human soul that is once in existence, or a book that is once in print and published, you cannot well put out of existence. You may kill it, or cut it up in a review, but it exists nevertheless, and should be provided for. If villainous, watch and impound it. Ask a hundred men who read as they run, to each exclude a hundred of the worthless volumes from a library of ten thousand, and the chances are that no single book would receive five

Cer

black balls. You have a perfect right to turn up your nose at my poems and pronounce them trash, while I may if I please indulge in the like luxury of calling your sermons stuff and nonsense; yet we are individual critics, and our opinions go exactly for what they are worth, while our books perhaps rival in the rapidity of sale the Proverbial Philosophy, proverbially vitupperated annually at twelve and sixpence per column by the professed critic who has it in hand. Not every one is robust enough to relish Bacon or indulge pleasantly or profitably in the Novum Organum, for his mind may be better adapted to enjoy Peter Wilkins or Mother Goose's Melodies. Indeed it is amazing, looking up and down our streets and markets, to see how light is the mental pabulum that best nourishes some minds, and what dry and hard meat others require. The lighter a balloon the higher it will rise, even so sometimes the thinner the matter of a book the higher it goes in the estimation of some of our neighbours, whose tastes and opinions are to be respected. No man or person ever wrote a book, probably, so weak and wishywashy but that some mental stomach might be found just strong enough to thrive upon it. We therefore, in view of the general fitness of things, vote for the cataloguing of every book printed as it turns up, leaving the selection to the selectors. There is no fear of being papered up if we arrange, sort and systematise our stores.

Who does much, of him much is expected, is an old rule in international affairs by which England may fairly be called upon to give to the world the first instalment of a Universal Printed Catalogue, made on true bibliographical principles, with full titles and collations, not alone of English printed books, but of all the books in all languages existing in our public and private libraries, or likely to be in them. What we want is a full, clear, plain, practical, exact, precise, concise and comprehensive title, collation and description, that is to say a real portrait and intellectual photograph of every one of the books in our libraries,

true and expressive like the faces of our friends, and as readily distinguishable and recognizable. They should be so well executed as to become at once standard by the universal law of superiority and value, and to pass current like our coins. These titles should be procurable at small cost, and be so good as to be adopted as a matter of course by all our public and private libraries, as fast as their present back stock of titles can be adapted or disposed of. Made in this way lovers of books would probably make photographic albums of their favorites in the manner they now do of their friends and companions. This brings us then to our long-cherished hope of

A CENTRAL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BUREAU,

public or private, where librarians, collectors, and amateurs may buy these authorized descriptive titles of books as they buy postage stamps, money orders or telegrams, at a tithe the cost of making them, and at the same time infinitely superior in quality. Such a bureau, under government protection, it is believed, might from the beginning be made self-supporting or even remunerative, like the Post Office. It would soon become a great educator of the educated and an inestimable boon to the historian, or the literary or scientific researcher, by enabling him at once to find, ready at his hands cut and dried, the materials of his subject. It not unfrequently happens that students exhaust their energies in mastering the materials of their subjects, before they put pens to paper. Not every historian has the pluck, persistence and toughness of Gibbon. A well-stocked and methodical Bibliographical Bureau would have relieved that historian of three-fourths of the fag and worry of his twenty years mousing for materials. A student now visits the library of the British Museum, and dives into its voluminous, manuscript alphabetical catalogues pretty much as the pearl fisher plunges into the sea. Sometimes he brings up a pearl and is rewarded, but oftener he brings

« FöregåendeFortsätt »