I got this from Avva, and I confess that while I was reading it (in Russian), I assumed it was a rant from relatively recent times — say, my grandfather’s day. Imagine my surprise when I got to the end and discovered it was from the 14th century! Thus I made the acquaintance of Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, online here in an English translation by Ernest Chester Thomas (and here in Latin); here’s the passage (from ch. XVII) quoted by Avva:
You may happen to see some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his studies, and when the winter’s frost is sharp, his nose running from the nipping cold drips down, nor does he think of wiping it with his pocket-handkerchief until he has bedewed the book before him with the ugly moisture. Would that he had before him no book, but a cobbler’s apron! His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as black as jet, with which he marks any passage that pleases him. He distributes a multitude of straws, which he inserts to stick out in different places, so that the halm may remind him of what his memory cannot retain. These straws, because the book has no stomach to digest them, and no one takes them out, first distend the book from its wonted closing, and at length, being carelessly abandoned to oblivion, go to decay. He does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open book, or carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no wallet at hand he drops into books the fragments that are left. Continually chattering, he is never weary of disputing with his companions, and while he alleges a crowd of senseless arguments, he wets the book lying half open in his lap with sputtering showers. Aye, and then hastily folding his arms he leans forward on the book, and by a brief spell of study invites a prolonged nap; and then, by way of mending the wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the leaves, to the no small injury of the book. Now the rain is over and gone, and the flowers have appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking of, a neglecter rather than an inspecter of books, will stuff his volume with violets, and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil. Then he will use his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt line by line through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the effort to close it.
But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the shapes of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of the most beautiful books.
Again, there is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut away the margins from the sides to use as material for letters, leaving only the text, or employ the leaves from the ends, inserted for the protection of the book, for various uses and abuses—a kind of sacrilege which should be prohibited by the threat of anathema.
I join him in his anathema!
“…and wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. ”
I’m particularly grateful to such medieval commenters (who write observations in precious Old Irish in volumes that contain a text that we have in numerous copies).
This brought back memories of my first year at university, when I was once horrified to discover that my friends had decided to use my 19th century Liddell and Scott and a large and valuable book on Oceanic art as the stumps for corridor cricket. I feel this would not have happened had they been classicists and not mathmos.
then, by way of mending the wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the leaves
I had no idea vellum could be wrinkled or dog-eared, especially casually.
Well, vellum [or other parchment] can stand bending & re-bending better than paper – that’s why manuscripts once assessed as valueless get dismembered & repurposed as music portfolios, spines for other bindings, &c.; but it is, I would say, equally as difficult to un-dog-ear as paper – even beautiful, 100% cotton paper. But there were papermills in Europe in the XIIII C.
& I have to say, I looooove marginal notations, doodles & such, because they give such an immediate feeling of connexion with earlier page turners. I can think of some instances where it appears later amateurs, or even unauthorized children(?) took to retracing the outlines of delicately drawn miniatures or initials, or even to colouring them in. Not such a happy connexion. Ugh.
Thank-you, Mr Hat, for I had not encountered this text before, either.
Catanea: You will enjoy this TLS review (by Tom Johnson) of Orietta Da Rold’s Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions (archived), as will anybody else with an interest in the history of paper and parchment. A sample:
It’s pretty depressingly familiar, except for some of the the physical materials, but I think I might warm to any modern reader who left violets and primroses behind.
a goose and a pomegranate
The Shrimp And The Anemone.
My books are mine, so I see no need to excuse writing notes in them. How better to recover, in context, what I thought worth thinking 20 years ago when I read the book ? A Zettelkasten requires too much unremunerated effort.
I also wipe my hands on my pants. Posterity can complain all it wants, for all I care.
I don’t mind the notes, which get more and more valuable as the centuries pass; I was joining in the curse on the “class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut away the margins from the sides to use as material for letters, leaving only the text” — I used to have a near-incunabulum (from just a few years after the cutoff point of 1500) that had been so mutilated, with just a few letters left of what might have been fascinating marginal annotations. Anathema maranatha!
I don’t mind the notes, which get more and more valuable as the centuries pass
I didn’t know that ! I should put my notes on the futures market. I can see “learnèd musings” up on the board right next to “lard”.
I don’t mind the notes, which get more and more valuable as the centuries pass
Kurt Tucholsky begs to differ.
That’s specifically about library books.
Well, in a sense that is what the books the Irish monks wrote in were – books in common use by a community, in this case of monks and scholars
As Peter Panter preaches a.a.O: Mit den eigenen Büchern also beginne man, was man mag.