PRESERVATION: A DECADE OF PROGRESS

Abstract

In his remarkable essay “On books and the housing of them” Gladstone was apprehensive of developments which have since become major problems of library administration. He observed that “already the increase of books is passing into geometrical progression” and he predicted that it was “in truth difficult to assign dimensions for the libraries of the future”. He proposed in somewhat pointed terms a Victorian version of Boston Spa. From the evergrowing mass of books, items would have to be selected for “interment”, “burial”. “Undoubtedly the idea of book‐cemeteries such as I have supposed is formidable. It should be kept within the limits of the dire necessity … But it will have to be faced, and faced perhaps oftener than might be supposed. And the artist needed for the constructions it requires will not be so much a librarian as a warehouseman ”. He speaks of “boundless' demand for books, of their processing and of their housing. Of special interest in this essay are his comments on preservation. “If we wish to give to the block [of the text] a lease of life equal to that of the pages, the first condition is that it should be bound. So at least one would have said half a century ago. But, while books are in most instances cheaper, binding, from causes which I do not understand, is dearer, at least in England, than it was in my early years. So that few can afford it. We have, however, the tolerable and very useful expedient of cloth binding (now in some danger, I fear, of losing its modesty through flaring ornamentation) to console us”.