n-twentieths of
its value.

"I know of no species of vandals worse, more primitive or more
irresponsible than these botchers. But one can see how they are sometimes
impelled, in spite of a natural taste, to commit these ravages. After
considerable discussion, a person may offer them about 75 centimes
($0.15), more or less, for a piece of work which, if done with care,
should well be worth eight or ten times that amount. The natural and
inevitable punishment caused by this penny-pinching, is the almost total
depreciation of a book placed in the care of an easy-going bibliophile
who, with a light heart condemns his old friend to a binding limited in
price to 75 centimes.

"The provincial bookbinder whose work, with its dirty, warped boards,
simpers under a covering of sheep still hairy and spotted with patches of
ink, is in much the same class as a cheap glazer and gilder to whom an
amateur iconophile might naively send for restoration a rare Albert Durer;
and both these similar to an architect who, with blind decision, would be
sent to mutilate the flanks of some majestic cathedral. This redoubtable
trio, born enemies of souvenirs engraved in stone or upon paper, botch and
destroy, although perhaps without malice, at least three-fourths of
anything on which they operate. May these tardy remarks still save
something from the ruins!

"The most irremediable of the crimes which can be committed in rebinding a
small, old book, is the trimming of margins. The simple matter of a
centime's economy in the size of the boards, may direct the trimming of
some charming gothic quarto up to the very text. One may thrice exclaim
with joy when the text itself has not been cropped. Those who partly
realize, or divine by instinct, that margins are good for something,
sometimes take pains to preserve them, but trim them with an inequality so
shocking that the victim has only escaped Charybdis in order to fall upon
Scylla. Undoubtedly, the greatest merit of a rare book is to have
untrimmed margins or, at least, margins trimmed only slightly and evenly.
But to obtain evenness, it is not proper to cut huge slices in order to
square the edges; such zeal for symmetry easily might result in cutting
into the text. The best method for squaring a book which was unevenly cut
when previously bound, is to refold and equalize each sheet before any
further trimming is done; a long and detailed operation for which one
pays, not in centimes but in franc