On Books and The Housing of Them | Page 2

United States jointly. In this matter there rests upon
these two Powers no small responsibility. They, with their vast range of
inhabited territory, and their unity of tongue, are masters of the world,
which will have to do as they do. When the Britains and America are
fused into one book market; when it is recognized that letters, which as
to their material and their aim are a high-soaring profession, as to their
mere remuneration are a trade; when artificial fetters are relaxed, and
printers, publishers, and authors obtain the reward which well-regulated
commerce would afford them, then let floors beware lest they crack,
and walls lest they bulge and burst, from the weight of books they will
have to carry and to confine.
It is plain, for one thing, that under the new state of things specialism,
in the future, must more and more abound. But specialism means
subdivision of labor; and with subdivision labor ought to be more
completely, more exactly, performed. Let us bow our heads to the
inevitable; the day of encyclopaedic learning has gone by. It may
perhaps be said that that sun set with Leibnitz. But as little learning is
only dangerous when it forgets that it is little, so specialism is only
dangerous when it forgets that it is special. When it encroaches on its
betters, when it claims exceptional certainty or honor, it is impertinent,
and should be rebuked; but it has its own honor in its own province,
and is, in any case, to be preferred to pretentious and flaunting
sciolism.
A vast, even a bewildering prospect is before us, for evil or for good;
but for good, unless it be our own fault, far more than for evil. Books
require no eulogy from me; none could be permitted me, when they
already draw their testimonials from Cicero[4] and Macaulay.[5] But
books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of
communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They
are the allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at
enmity with the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher
compartments of our threefold life. In a room well filled with them, no
one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the
individual, they are first and foremost among the compages, the bonds

and rivets of the race, onward from that time when they were first
written on the tablets of Babylonia and Assyria, the rocks of Asia
minor, and the monuments of Egypt, down to the diamond editions of
Mr. Pickering and Mr. Frowde.[6]
It is in truth difficult to assign dimensions for the libraries of the future.
And it is also a little touching to look back upon those of the past. As
the history of bodies cannot, in the long run, be separated from the
history of souls, I make no apology for saying a few words on the
libraries which once were, but which have passed away.
The time may be approaching when we shall be able to estimate the
quantity of book knowledge stored in the repositories of those empires
which we call prehistoric. For the present, no clear estimate even of the
great Alexandrian Libraries has been brought within the circle of
popular knowledge; but it seems pretty clear that the books they
contained were reckoned, at least in the aggregate, by hundreds of
thousands.[7] The form of the book, however, has gone through many
variations; and we moderns have a great advantage in the shape which
the exterior has now taken. It speaks to us symbolically by the title on
its back, as the roll of parchment could hardly do. It is established that
in Roman times the bad institution of slavery ministered to a system
under which books were multiplied by simultaneous copying in a room
where a single person read aloud in the hearing of many the volume to
be reproduced, and that so produced they were relatively cheap. Had
they not been so, they would hardly have been, as Horace represents
them, among the habitual spoils of the grocer.[8] It is sad, and is
suggestive of many inquiries, that this abundance was followed, at least
in the West, by a famine of more than a thousand years. And it is hard,
even after all allowances, to conceive that of all the many manuscripts
of Homer which Italy must have possessed we do not know that a
single parchment or papyrus was ever read by a single individual, even
in a convent, or even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas Acquinas,
the first of them unquestionably master of all the knowledge that was
within the compass of his age. There were, however,