CCI Newsletter, No. 21, March 1998

Blades' The Enemies of Books*

Among the "enemies" that William Blades' eccentric rantings The Enemies of Books singles out for criticism, along with fire, water, and vermin, are bookbinders. He accuses these "biblioclasts" of desecrating books by trimming margins, and suggests collecting the shavings and "roast[ing] the perpetrator of the outrage over their slow combustion"! He is equally dismissive of one binder who had the temerity to soak off the cover of a unique 15th-century Indulgence "the result being that when dry it was so distorted as to be useless. That man soon after passed to another world, where we may hope his works have not followed him, and that his merits as a good citizen and an honest man counterbalanced his demerits as a binder." But when it comes to restoration he has nothing but praise: "...nothing is more astonishing to the uninitiated than the transformation they [the books] undergo in the hands of a skilful restorer." It is Blades' description of the washing process that deserves some comment here:

"When all the sections are loose, the separate sheets are placed singly in a bath of cold water and allowed to remain there until all the dirt has soaked out. If not sufficiently purified, a little hydrochloric or oxalic acid, or caustic potash may be put in the water, according as the stains are from grease or from ink. Here is where an unpractised binder will probably injure a book for life. If the chemicals are too strong, or the sheets remain too long in the bath, or are not thoroughly cleansed from the bleach before they are re-sized, the certain seeds of decay are planted in the paper, and although for a time the leaves may look bright to the eye, and even crackle under the hand like the soundest paper, yet in the course of a few years the enemy will appear, the fibre will decay, and the existence of the books will terminate in a state of white tinder." Blades' implication that washing will remove dirt is not totally correct—washing paper without first removing the surface dirt results in driving the dirt further into the interstices and fibres of the paper. Thus he muddies the waters by confusing surface cleaning to remove dirt, with washing to remove impurities, and with bleaching to remove stains. In this context "washing" can be taken to mean discoloration caused by residual impurities in the paper, such as acidity. He appears to show some understanding of the problems caused by insufficient washing and the subsequent breakdown of the cellulose fibres, but we know today that the use of these chemicals is highly questionable. Used well into the first half of this century to bleach paper, they are now recognized to be severely deleterious to paper and it is very probable that their very use, regardless of the extent of washing, would have induced further deterioration.

*Blades, William. The Enemies of Books, 3rd edition. London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill (1881).