ge country
houses is most lamentable. In such neglect are they that it would take
months, and in some cases years, working day and night, to restore them
to a healthy condition. For, poor things! they are really so neglected,
that their covers become like the limbs of rheumatic people. If you
touch them they seem to shriek and cry with pain. They are either
parched for lack of a proper atmosphere, or else they are sticking
together with the damp or thickly covered with dust.[8] There is nothing
else in a house like this, and why are these things so? It is because
there are so few people who understand the care of books. I once read
the following in a daily paper, and thought I recognised in it a
familiar hand, that of Mr. Andrew Lang:--

'The foes of books are careless people--first of all. They tear pages
open with their thumbs, or cut them with sharp knives which damage the
margins. It is so difficult to keep paper knives, and ivory paper knives
are the favourite pasture of some scholars, who bite the edges till the
weapon resembles a dissipated saw. To avoid this temptation some employ
mediaeval daggers, or skene dhus, but the edges spoil a book. Cigarette
ashes are very bad for books, so is butter, also marmalade. Dr. Johnson
and Wordsworth are said to have been very careless with their books. Dr.
Johnson used to clean his from dust by knocking them together, as Mr.
Leighton says housemaids do. Scott was very careful; he had a number of
wooden dummies made, and, when a volume was borrowed, he put the dummy
in its place on the shelf, inscribing it with the name of the borrower.
He also defended his shelves with locked brazen wires. "Tutus clausus
ero" ("I shall be safe if shut up"), his anagram, was his motto, under
a portcullis. Borrowers, of course, are nearly the worst enemies of
books, always careless, and very apt to lose one volume out of a set.
Housemaids are seldom bibliophiles. Their favourite plan is to dust the
books in the owner's absence, and then rearrange them on fancy
principles, mostly upside down. One volume of _Grote_ will be put among
French novels, another in the centre of a collection on sports, a third
in the midst of modern histories, while others are "upstairs and
downstairs, and in my lady's chamber." The diversity of sizes, from
folio to duodecimo, makes books very difficult to arrange where room is
scanty. Modern shelves in most private houses allow no room for folios,
which have to lie, l