Transcribed from the 1912 James Nisbet & Co. edition byDavid Price,
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
BY
IAN MACLAREN
London
JAMES NISBET & CO. LIMITED
22 BERNERS STREET, W.
1912
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
They cannot be separated any morethan sheep and a shepherd, but I am minded to speak of thebookman rather than of his books, and so it will be best at theoutset to define the tribe.
It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has manybooks, for he may be a book huckster or his books may be thosewithout which a gentleman’s library is not complete. And in the present imperfect arrangement of life one may be abookman and yet have very few books, since he has not thewherewithal to purchase them. It is the foolishness of hiskind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and hisfastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-halfpennyedition. The bookman, like the poet, and a good many otherpeople, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains anillustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookmanwhich I think is apropos. As he was to preside at a lectureI was delivering he had in his courtesy invited me to dinner,which was excellent, and as he proposed to take the rôlethat night of a man who had been successful in business, but yetallowed himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, hedesired to create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with acertain imposing air that we should visit what he called“my library.” Across the magnificence of thehall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind ofwalk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed hisincome, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following inthe rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an oceanliner. “There,” he said, with his thumbs in thearmholes of his waistcoat, “what do you think ofthat?” And that was without question a very largeand ornate and costly mahogany bookcase with glass doors. Before I saw the doors I had no doubt about my host, but theywere a seal upon my faith, for although a bookman is obliged tohave one bit of glass in his garden for certain rare plants fromRussia and Morocco, to say nothing of the gold and white vellumlily upon which the air must not be allowed to blow, especiallywhen charged with gas and rich in dust, yet he hates thisconservatory, just as much as he loves its contents. Hiscontentment is to have the flowers laid out in open beds, wherehe can pluck a blossom at will. As often as one sees thebooks behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked,then he knows that the owner is not their lover, who keeps trystwith them in the evening hours when the work of the day is done,but their jailer, who has bought them in the market-place forgold, and holds them in this foreign place by force. It hasseemed to me as if certain old friends looked out from theirprison with appealing glance, and one has been tempted to breakthe glass and let, for instance, Elia go free. It would belike the emancipation of a slave. Elia was not, good luckfor him, within this particular prison, and I was brought backfrom every temptation to break the laws of property by mychairman, who was still pursuing his catechism. “What,” was question two, “do you think I paidfor that?” It was a hopeless catechism, for Ihad never possessed anything like that, a