THE BOOK SURPLUS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 1, 3 January 1939, Page 18

THE BOOK SURPLUS

PROBLEM IN PERSPECTIVE

Sir William Bragg's plea for a book purge was dealt with ten years ago in an essay addressed to members of Congregation at Oxford by one of the most distinguished of Bodley librarians, Falconer Madan, says the "Many Chester Guardian," though, as he had then relinquished the librarianship, he appeared, he said, as one of those superannuated officials who, "if still visible in his old haunts, is often a sad sight and a great nuisance. His case is analagous to that of the widow of tlie late rector who remains in the par^ ish." In carrying out the purge, who is to decide whether books are eitheil dead or trash? Obviously, "the great men of literature or scholarship." Yet they, Madan declared, were often not fit to touch books at all, and he certainly couldn't trust them in the storerooms of the Bodleian. "They pull books out by the top of the back, they turn over the leaves by the application of moisture, they hold them open on a table by putting other volumes j on them. SWINBURNE'S METHODS. "I have known the state of the Malone Room when Swinburne was allowed to 'sample' it. I have seen Deaa Budgon's study table in Oriel, and noticed the forgotten tea-cups at various elevations on jutting promontories of the alpine massif of books." With books everywhere, Madan had his own suggestion for their disencumbrance. "Let the next generation make a holocaust of the books. The next generation will never do so." It was said some Victorian novels were | ripe for destruction. "Only the British Museum and the Bodleian can ex-) hibit these sixty or seventy thousand volumes intact. If we could not, and the surviving set were destroyed in the next aerial war, literary critics and historians would be, or ought to be, in despair. I doubt if a week has passed in the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary without recourse to that collection." With books, as with everything else, "Time puts them in their proper perspective and steadies our views." j