Many volumes have I thus mutilated, and I hope that
in the sale-rooms of a sentimental posterity they may fetch higher
prices than their duly uncut duplicates. So long as my thumb tatters
merely the margin, I am quite equanimous. If I were reading a First
Folio Shakespeare by my fireside, and if the matchbox were ever so
little beyond my reach, I vow I would light my cigarette with a spill
made from the margin of whatever page I were reading. I am neat,
scrupulously neat, in regard to the things I care about; but a book,
as a book, is not one of these things.
Of course, a book may happen to be in itself a beautiful object. Such
a book I treat tenderly, as one would a flower. And such a book is, in
its brown-papered boards, whereon gleam little gilt italics and a
little gilt butterfly, Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies. It
happens to be also a book which I have read again and again--a book
that has often travelled with me. Yet its cover is as fresh as when
first, some twelve years since, it came into my possession. A flower
freshly plucked, one would say--a brown-and-yellow flower, with a
little gilt butterfly fluttering over it. And its inner petals, its
delicately proportioned pages, are as white and undishevelled as
though they never had been opened.
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