MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE National Book League, in conjunction with The Observer, are holding in their delightful little gallery at 7 Albemarle Street an exhibition of book-plates. They were so kind as to invite me to the opening ceremony and I was privileged in being able to address to the assembled company a few ill-chosen words. The house occupied by the National Book League was known 150 years ago as Grillion's Hotel. So far from being a temple of tact, it was the site, on the afternoon of April 21st, 1814, of one of the largest and most devastating bricks ever dropped. It was in the hall of Grillion's Hotel that the Prince Regent came to congratulate Louis XVIII on his restoration. Louis le Desire, being exhausted by his morning's drive up from Hartwell, having found it a strain to respond to the plaudits of the gentlemen from White's Club who had ridden out to meet him on his entry to London, was not at his worldly and ingenious best. Carried away by the exhilaration of the moment, he replied to the Prince Regent with the following unfortunate words. "It is to the counsels of Your Royal Highness, to this glorious country, and to the steadfastness of its inhabitants, that I attribute, after the will of Providence, the re-establishment of my House upon the throne of its ancestors." That sort of remark might well have passed unresented on the morrow of the battle of Waterloo; but it was not liable to please the subjects of the French monarch, who were at that moment experiencing a Cossack invasion; and it was obnoxious to those other potentates who, on the Beresina, and at Leipzig, had earned immortal renown by the defeat of Napoleon. Alexander I, who regarded himself as the only liberator of Europe, was so enraged by this gratuitous tribute to the Prince Regent and the people of England that he decided there and then that the Bourbons were no good. Bernadotte, he felt, would make a better King for the French. Thereafter followed a series of dissensions and disillusions, ending in the dank despair of Taganrog. This should have warned me that one should be exceedingly careful what one says in Grillion's Hotel. * * * * I spoke with what I hoped would be regarded as disarming frankness. My audience were not disarmed. I observed, as I developed my argument, that the assembled designers of book-plates, printers of book-plates, users of book-plates, and collectors of book-plates, were displeased rather than pleased by what I said. I gather from the catalogue that most people who use or collect book-plates reside at Clapham; I felt as I pursued my frank discourse that I was faced with the angry eyes of the whole Clapham Sect. It was fortunate that the acoustics of the gallery at 7 Albemarle Street are less excellent than those of the hall outside: at least two-thirds of my audience did not hear what I said. But the remaining third were, I fear, hurt by my attack upon those who used, and still more those who collected, these horrible adhesive emblems. They felt, I suppose, that I was treating a solemn inaugural occasion with unwarranted flippancy; they felt that I in my ignorance was ridiculing a craft or a hobby that had meant much to them all their lives: they felt that it might be all very well to make a gay little speech at such a function, but that, after all, there was such a thing as good taste. They felt sad, offended, ruffled; they trooped out into the hall seeking comfort; I crept away into the night feeling that, like Louis le Desire, I had dropped a brick. . - * * * * I dislike book-plates for several reasons. In the first place, they remind me of philatelists and bibliophils. The former derive aesthetic pleasure from small oblongs or squares of paper with gum on their backs; the difference between philatelists and the people who reside in Clapham and use book-plates is that the latter prefer their treasured objects unlicked by someone else. The bibliophil is liable to treat books as possessions, rather than as household goods to be used for the everyday purposes of life, like towels, tobacco pouches and boots and shoes. Books ought to be banged about and carried about and scribbled over. The bibliophil treats them as sacred possessions, to be crooned over as if they were coins of the fourth century B.C. To me such atti- tudes are repugnant, and I said so. In the second place, those who use book-plates have for the last 60 years been inclined to indulge in what Sir Francis Meynell, in his introduction to the catalogue of this exhibition, has well called "art-nouveau mediaevalism." "There will," he rightly observes, "be high- breasted maidens and higher breasted tulips; ' gothic ' lettering; and a pompous phraseology." Even worse are those book- plates that contain winsome puns or jokes; those that suggest spring and merriment; those that depict sundials and garden baskets bursting with roses; and those that pronounce anathemas against those studious people who borrow the books of their friends and are too studious to return them. I do not care even for the type of book-plate that provides the owner with an exterior or interior view of his own house. Thus in this exhibition there is a book-plate designed by Mr. Edmund New for Mr. Alan Coltart, lovingly depicting a window-seat in Oxford. There is the lattice, half open to the summer scents and sounds; there are the towers dreaming away in the June sunshine; there the two books cast all careless upon the cushion; there a huge terrestial globe, suggesting travel. What does Mr. Cohan do with this magazine-drawing ?
*- That is what I want to know. Does he gum the picture into all his books, including Penguins, or does he reserve the object for such books as he considers good and grand ? Does he ever get a little tired of that eternal view of the Sheldonian and the two books so carelessly discarded upon the cushion ? If I possessed a book-plate which I stuck into my books, I should after a fortnight or so be annoyed by its repetitive qualities; even so, I am assured, do those who have succumbed to the Tahitian practice of tattooing their bodies become irritated almost to madness by the Japanese pheasant that sprawls across their backbone and their ribs. In the third place, I dislike book-plates since they harbour the collectors of book- plates, and since these may be tempted to destroy fly-leaves, and even bindings, and even books, in their impatience to detach from its place the book-plate that somebody else has owned and licked. I observe from the catalogue that Mr. Crouch, who was the man who discovered that most book-plate- users came from Clapham, possessed in his collection as many as 60,000 book-plates. Some of these, surely, must have been wrenched from the places where they had originally been stuck. Much as I approve of defacing books. I hold strongly to the principle that this defacement is only legitimate when exercised upon one's own books and for the purpose of study and future reference. I suspect the collectors of book-plates of being indifferent to this sacred principle. All of which I said in the hall of Grillion's: and it wasn't liked.
Armorial book-plates are, I agree, magnificent; but they can only be employed by very armorial people, in folios, in palatial libraries. Other people have to search for symbols. In Mr. Mark Severin's volume on book-plates, which I have studied with interest, there are many bright suggestions as to such symbols. It seems that, if for many years you have been happily married, you should celebrate that privilege by sticking into your books a square of gummed paper bearing the sem- blance of two carp. These inedible fish are, so Mr. Severin assures us, regarded by the Japanese as symbols of conjugal felicity. Alternatively, a book-plate, so Mr. Severin asserts,. is a wonderful vehicle for erotic symbols, as well as for designs depicting alpine flora, nudes, Aztec deities, elves, sun-dials, and owls. My own experience is that it is all far quicker and cheaper to write one's name on the fly-leaf of the book together with the date of purchase. One can also, as I do, possess a rubber stamp.
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