VIII: BIBLIOPHILY

 Bibliophily is on the increase. It is a constatation which I make with regret; for the bibliophile’s point of view is, to me at least, unsympathetic and his standard of values unsound. Among the French, bibliophily would seem to have become a kind of mania¹, and, what is more, a highly organized and thoroughly² exploited mania. Whenever I get a new French book I turn at once—for in what disgusts and irritates one there is always a certain odious³ fascination—to the fly-leaf. One had always been accustomed to finding there a brief description of the “vingt exemplaires sur papier hollande Van Gelder”; nobody objected to the modest old Dutchman whose paper gave to the author’s presentation copies so handsome an appearance. But Van Gelder is now a back number. In this third decade of the twentieth century he has become altogether too simple and unsophisticated. On the fly-leaf of a dernière nouveauté I find the following incantation, printed in block capitals and occupying at least twenty lines:

63

Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage, après impositions spéciales, 133 exemplaires in-4. Tellière sur papier-vergé pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, au filigrane de la Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise, dont 18 exemplaires hors commerce, marqués de A à R, 100 exemplaires réservés aux Bibliophiles de la Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise, numérotés de I à C, 15 exemplaires numérotés de CI à CXV; 1040 exemplaires sur papier vélin pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, dont dix exemplaires hors commerce marqués de a à j, 800 exemplaires réservés aux amis de l’Edition originale, numérotés de 1 à 800, 30 exemplaires d’auteur, hors commerce, numérotés de 801 à 830 et 200 exemplaires numérotés de 831 à 1030, ce tirage constituant proprement et authentiquement l’Edition originale.

If I were one of the hundred Bibliophiles of the Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise or even one of the eight hundred Friends of the Original Edition, I should suggest, with the utmost politeness, that the publishers might deserve better of their fellow-beings if they spent less pains on numbering the first edition and more on seeing that it was properly produced. Personally, I am the friend of any edition which is reasonably well printed and bound, reasonably correct in the text and reasonably clean. The consciousness that I possess a numbered copy of an edition printed on Lafuma-Navarre paper, duly watermarked with the publisher’s initials, does not make up for the fact that the book is full of gross printer’s errors and that a whole sheet of sixteen 64pages has wandered, during the process of binding⁴, from one end of the volume to the other—occurrences which are quite unnecessarily frequent in the history of French book production.

With the increased attention paid to bibliophilous niceties, has come a great increase in price. Limited éditions de luxe have become absurdly common in France, and there are dozens of small publishing concerns which produce almost nothing else. Authors like Monsieur André Salmon⁵ and Monsieur Max Jacob scarcely ever appear at less than twenty francs a volume. Even with the exchange this is a formidable price; and yet the French bibliophiles, for whom twenty francs are really twenty francs, appear to have an insatiable appetite for these small and beautiful editions. The War has established a new economic law: the poorer one becomes the more one can afford to spend on luxuries.

The ordinary English publisher has never gone in for Van Gelder, Lafuma-Navarre and numbered editions. Reticent⁶ about figures, he leaves the book collector to estimate the first edition’s future rarity by guesswork. He creates no artificial scarcity⁷ values. The collector of contemporary English first editions is wholly a speculator; he never knows what time may have in store.

65In the picture trade for years past nobody has pretended that there was any particular relation between the price of a picture and its value as a work of art. A magnificent El Greco is bought for about a tenth of the sum paid for a Romney that would be condemned⁸ by any self-respecting hanging-committee. We are so well used to this sort of thing in picture dealing⁹ that we have almost ceased to comment on it. But in the book trade the tendency to create huge artificial values is of a later growth. The spectacle of a single book being bought for fifteen thousand pounds is still sufficiently¹⁰ novel to arouse indignation. Moreover, the book collector who pays vast sums for his treasures has even less excuse than has the collector of pictures. The value of an old book is wholly a scarcity value. From a picture one may get a genuine ?sthetic pleasure; in buying a picture one buys the unique right to feel that pleasure. But nobody can pretend that Venus and Adonis is more delightful¹¹ when it is read in a fifteen thousand pound unique copy than when it is read in a volume that has cost a shilling. On the whole, the printing and general appearance of the shilling book is likely to be the better of the two. The purchaser of the fabulously¹² expensive old book is satisfying only his possessive 66instinct. The buyer of a picture may also have a genuine feeling for beauty.

The triumph and the reductio ad absurdum of bibliophily were witnessed not long ago at Sotheby’s, when the late Mr. Smith of New York bought eighty thousand pounds’ worth of books in something under two hours at the Britwell Court sale. The War, it is said, created forty thousand new millionaires in America; the New York bookseller can have had no lack of potential clients. He bought a thousand guinea volume as an ordinary human being might buy something off the sixpenny shelf in a second-hand¹³ shop. I have seldom witnessed a spectacle which inspired in me an intenser blast of moral indignation. Moral indignation, of course, is always to be mistrusted as, wholly or in part, the disguised manifestation¹⁴ of some ignoble¹⁵ passion. In this case the basic cause of my indignation was clearly envy. But there was, I flatter myself, a superstructure of disinterested¹⁶ moral feeling. To debase a book into an expensive object of luxury is as surely, in Miltonic language, “to kill the image of God, as it were in the eye” as to burn it. And when one thinks how those eighty thousand pounds might have been spent.... Ah, well!

1 mania   

n.疯狂；躁狂症，狂热，癖好

参考例句：

• Football mania is sweeping the country.足球热正风靡全国。
• Collecting small items can easily become a mania.收藏零星物品往往容易变成一种癖好。

2 thoroughly   

adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地

参考例句：

• The soil must be thoroughly turned over before planting.一定要先把土地深翻一遍再下种。
• The soldiers have been thoroughly instructed in the care of their weapons.士兵们都系统地接受过保护武器的训练。

3 odious   

adj.可憎的，讨厌的

参考例句：

• The judge described the crime as odious.法官称这一罪行令人发指。
• His character could best be described as odious.他的人格用可憎来形容最贴切。

4 binding   

有约束力的，有效的，应遵守的

参考例句：

• The contract was not signed and has no binding force. 合同没有签署因而没有约束力。
• Both sides have agreed that the arbitration will be binding. 双方都赞同仲裁具有约束力。

5 salmon   

n.鲑，大马哈鱼，橙红色的

参考例句：

• We saw a salmon jumping in the waterfall there.我们看见一条大马哈鱼在那边瀑布中跳跃。
• Do you have any fresh salmon in at the moment?现在有新鲜大马哈鱼卖吗？

6 reticent   

adj.沉默寡言的；言不如意的

参考例句：

• He was reticent about his opinion.他有保留意见。
• He was extremely reticent about his personal life.他对自己的个人生活讳莫如深。

7 scarcity   

n.缺乏，不足，萧条

参考例句：

• The scarcity of skilled workers is worrying the government.熟练工人的缺乏困扰着政府。
• The scarcity of fruit was caused by the drought.水果供不应求是由于干旱造成的。

8 condemned   

adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• He condemned the hypocrisy of those politicians who do one thing and say another. 他谴责了那些说一套做一套的政客的虚伪。
• The policy has been condemned as a regressive step. 这项政策被认为是一种倒退而受到谴责。

9 dealing   

n.经商方法，待人态度

参考例句：

• This store has an excellent reputation for fair dealing.该商店因买卖公道而享有极高的声誉。
• His fair dealing earned our confidence.他的诚实的行为获得我们的信任。

10 sufficiently   

adv.足够地，充分地

参考例句：

• It turned out he had not insured the house sufficiently.原来他没有给房屋投足保险。
• The new policy was sufficiently elastic to accommodate both views.新政策充分灵活地适用两种观点。

11 delightful   

adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的

参考例句：

• We had a delightful time by the seashore last Sunday.上星期天我们在海滨玩得真痛快。
• Peter played a delightful melody on his flute.彼得用笛子吹奏了一支欢快的曲子。

12 fabulously   

难以置信地，惊人地

参考例句：

• The couple are said to be fabulously wealthy. 据说这对夫妇家财万贯。
• I should say this shirt matches your trousers fabulously. 我得说这衬衫同你的裤子非常相配。

13 second-hand   

adj.用过的，旧的，二手的

参考例句：

• I got this book by chance at a second-hand bookshop.我赶巧在一家旧书店里买到这本书。
• They will put all these second-hand goods up for sale.他们将把这些旧货全部公开出售。

14 manifestation   

n.表现形式；表明；现象

参考例句：

• Her smile is a manifestation of joy.她的微笑是她快乐的表现。
• What we call mass is only another manifestation of energy.我们称之为质量的东西只是能量的另一种表现形态。

15 ignoble   

adj.不光彩的，卑鄙的；可耻的

参考例句：

• There's something cowardly and ignoble about such an attitude.这种态度有点怯懦可鄙。
• Some very great men have come from ignoble families.有些伟人出身低微。

16 disinterested   

adj.不关心的，不感兴趣的

参考例句：

• He is impartial and disinterested.他公正无私。
• He's always on the make,I have never known him do a disinterested action.他这个人一贯都是唯利是图，我从来不知道他有什么无私的行动。