THE FIRE --- _Frontispiece_,

PIRATES THROWING LIBRARY OVER-BOARD ---------- page 19

FRIARS AND THEIR ASS-LOAD -------------------- 35

BRUSHING CLOTHES IN A COLLEGE LIBRARY -------- 45

BOOKWORMS ------------------------------------ 73

RATS DESTROYING BOOKS ------------------------ 99

HOUSEHOLD FLY-DAMAGE ------------------------- 102

BOYS RAMPANT IN LIBRARY ---------------------- 141

THE ENEMIES OF BOOKS.

CHAPTER I. FIRE.

THERE are many of the forces of Nature which tend to injure Books; but
among them all not one has been half so destructive as Fire. It would
be tedious to write out a bare list only of the numerous libraries and
bibliographical treasures which, in one way or another, have been
seized by the Fire-king as his own. Chance conflagrations, fanatic
incendiarism, judicial bonfires, and even household stoves have, time
after time, thinned the treasures as well as the rubbish of past ages,
until, probably, not one thousandth part of the books that have been are
still extant. This destruction cannot, however, be reckoned as all loss;
for had not the "cleansing fires" removed mountains of rubbish from our
midst, strong destructive measures would have become a necessity from
sheer want of space in which to store so many volumes.

Before the invention of Printing, books were comparatively scarce; and,
knowing as we do, how very difficult it is, even after the steam-press
has been working for half a century, to make a collection of half a
million books, we are forced to receive with great incredulity the
accounts in old writers of the wonderful extent of ancient libraries.

The historian Gibbon, very incredulous in many things, accepts without
questioning the fables told upon this subject. No doubt the libraries
of MSS. collected generation after generation by the Egyptian Ptolemies
became, in the course of time, the most extensive ever then known;
and were famous throughout the world for the costliness of their
ornamentation, and importance of their untold contents. Two of these
were at Alexandria, the larger of which was in the quarter called
Bruchium. These volumes, like all manuscripts of those early ages, were
written on sheets of parchment, having a wooden roller at each end
so that the reader needed only to unroll a portion at a time. During
Caesar's Alexandrian War, B.C. 48, the larger collection was consumed
by fire and again burnt by the Saracens in A.D. 640