- About Bookbinding -

The true University of these days, says a great scholar of our century, Thomas Carlyle, is a collection of books, and all education is to teach us how to read. If there were any volume, out of the multitude of books about books 'that have been written, which could illuminate the pathway of the unskilled reader, so as to guide him into all knowledge by the shortest road, what a boon that book would be! When we survey the vast and rapidly growing product of the modern press,-when we see these hosts of poets without imagination, historians without accuracy, critics without discernment, and novelists without invention or style, in short, the whole prolific brood of writers who do not know how to write,-we are tempted to echo the sentiment of Wordsworth:The intellectual power, through words and things, Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way. The most that anyone can hope to do for others is to suggest to them a clue which, however feeble, has helped to guide his uncertain footsteps through the labyrinthian maze of folly and wisdom which we call literature. The knowledge acquired by a Librarian, while it may be very wide and very varied, runs much risk of being as superficial as it is diversified. There is a very prevalent, but very erroneous notion which conceives of a librarian as a kind of animated encyclopaedia, who, if you tap him in any direction, from A to Z, will straightway pour forth a flood of knowledge upon any subject in history, science, or literature. This popular ideal, however fine in theory, has to undergo what commercial men call a heavy discount when reduced to practice. 'The librarian is a constant and busy worker in far other fields than exploring the contents of books. His day is filled with cataloguing, arranging and classifying them, searching catalogues, selecting new books, correspondence, directing assistants, keeping library records, adjusting accounts, etc., in the midst of which he is constantly at the call of the public for books and information. What time has he, wearied by the day's multifarious and exacting labors, for any thorough study of books? So, when anyone begins an inquiry with, ''You know everything; can you tell me,-I say: Stop a moment; omniscience is not a human quality; I really know very few things, and am not quite sure of some of them.There are many men, and women, too, in almost every community, whose range of knowledge is more extended than that of most librarians. The idea, then, that because one lives perpetually among books, he absorbs all the learning that they contain, must be abandoned as a popular delusion. To know a little upon many subjects is quite compatible with not knowing much about anyone. Beware of the man of one book, is an ancient proverb, pregnant with meaning. The man of one book, if it is wisely chosen, and if he knows it all, can sometimes confound a whole assembly of scholars. An American poet once declared to me that all leisure time is lost that is not spent in reading Shakespeare. And we remember Emerson's panegyric upon Plato's writings, borrowing from the Caliph Omar his famous (but apocryphal) sentence against all books but the Koran: Burn all the libraries, for their value is in this book. So Sheffield, duke of Buckingham: Read Homer once, and you can read no more, For all books else appear so tame, so poor, Verse will seem prose, but still persist to read, And Homer will be all the books you need. Of course I am far from designing to say anything against the widest study, which great libraries exist to supply and to encourage; and all utterances of a half truth, like the maxim I have quoted, are exaggerations. But the saying points a moral-and that is, the supreme importance of thoroughness in all that we undertake. The poetical wiseacre who endowed the world with the maxim, A little learning is a dangerous thing, does not appear to have reflected upon the logical sequence of the dictum, namely: that if a little learning upon any subject is dangerous, then less must be still more dangerous.

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