- About Bookbinding -

Cardinal Mezzofanti both wrote and spoke thirty languages, and was quite familiar with more than a hundred. He said that if he once heard the meaning of a word in any language, he never forgot it. Yet he was of the opinion, that although he had twenty words for one idea, it was better to have twenty ideas for one word; which is no doubt true, so far as real intellectual culture is concerned. Lord Macaulay, who had a phenomenal memory, said that if all the copies of Milton's Paradise Lost were to be destroyed, he could reproduce the book complete, from memory. In early life he was a great admirer of Walter Scott's poetry, and especially the "Lay of the Last Minstrel", and could repeat the whole of that long poem, more than six hundred lines, from memory. And at the age of fifty-seven he records -"I walked in the portico, and learned by heart the noble fourth act of the Merchant of Venice. There are four hundred lines. I made myself perfect master of the whole in two hours." It was said of him that every incident he heard of, and every page he read, "assumed in his mind a concrete spectral form." But the memory for names and words has been sometimes called the lowest form of memory. Persons of defective or impaired intellect frequently have strong and retentive verbal memories. Mrs. Somerville records the case of an idiot who could repeat a whole sermon verbatim, after once hearing it, but who was stupid and ignorant as to every thing else. And there are many instances in the books to the same effect. Another kind of memory may be called, for want of a better name, the local memory. A person who has this strongly developed, if he once goes to a place, whether a room, or a street in a city, or a road in any part of the country, knows the way again, and can find it by instinct ever after. In the same way anyone gifted with this almost unerring sense of locality, can find any book on any shelf in any part of a library where he has once been. He knows, in like manner, on which side of the page he saw any given passage in a book, which impressed him at the time, although he may never have had the volume in his hand more than once. He may not remember the number of the page, but he is sure of his recollection that it was the left or the right hand one, as the case may be, and this knowledge will abridge his labor and time in finding it again by just one half. This local memory is invaluable to a librarian or an assistant in shortening the labor of finding things. If you have a good local memory, you can, in no long time, come to dispense with the catalogue and its shelf-marks or classification marks, almost entirely, in finding your books. Although this special gift of memory - the sense of locality - is unquestionably a lower faculty of the mind than some others named, and although there are illiterate persons who can readily find and produce any books in a library which have often passed through their hands, yet it is a faculty by no means to) be despised. It is one of the labor-saving, time-saving gifts, which should be welcomed by every librarian. The time saved from searching the catalogues for location-marks of the outside of books, will enable him to make many a research "in their inside. This faculty, of course, is indefinitely strengthened and improved by use-and the same is true of the other branches of the sense which we call memory. The oftener you have been to any place, the better you know the way. The more frequently you have found and produced a given book from its proper receptacle, the easier and the quicker will be your finding it again. Another faculty or phase of memory is found in the ability to call up the impression made by any object once seen by the eye, so as to reproduce it accurately in speech or writing. This may be termed the intuitive memory. There are many applications or illustrations of this faculty. Thus, for example, you see a book on some shelf in your library. You take in its size, its binding, both the material and the color, and its title as lettered on the back. All this you absorb with one glance of the eye. You remember it by the principle of association-that is, you associate with that particular book, in connection with its title, a certain dimension, color, and style of binding. Now, when you have occasion to look up that special volume again, you not only go, aided by your memory of locality, to the very section and shelf of the library where it belongs, but you take with you instinctively, your memory or mental image of the book's appearance.

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