United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The accurate Peignot, after accepting of this classification with high admiration of its simplicity and exhaustiveness, is seized in his supplementary volume with a misgiving in the matter of the bibliotaphe, explaining that it ought to be translated as a grave of books, and that the proper technical expression for the performer referred to by Rive, is bibliothapt.
The French have, as usual, dignified the process which restores diseased books to health and condition by an appropriate technical name it is Bibliuguiancie; and under that title it will be found fitly and appropriately discussed in the Dictionnaire de Bibliologie of Peignot, who specially mentions two practitioners of this kind as having conferred lustre on their profession by their skill and success Vialard and Heudier.
Both writers are dishonest in the statements they make and the passages they quote from their adversaries, and both are grotesque and profane. Peignot, not being influenced by polemical rancour, is no doubt honest in his quotations, and tells you that the persons who preached the passages quoted by him uttered them in all religious sincerity.
Among these I would chiefly be inclined to affect the company of Peignot, whose wild and wayward course of reading provides for you something like to a ramble over the mountains with an Alpine hunter, the only kind of guide to whom the thorough pedestrian wanderer should give up his freedom.
Among the valuable bibliographical works of Peignot, is a dictionary of books which have been condemned to the flames, suppressed, or censured. We do not require to go far through his alphabet to see how futile the burnings and condemnations have been in their effect on the giants of literature.
The reason seems chiefly to have been Dolet's unsparing exposure of the immoralities of monks and priests, and of the plan of the Sorbonne to put down the art of printing in France. In Peignot is preserved a long list of the names of the works to the publication of which he lent his aid.
Peignot has noticed the chief books stigmatised by authority in all these various ways; but though undoubtedly this wider view is more philosophical, the view is quite comprehensive enough which confines itself to the consideration of books that were condemned to be burnt.
Peignot attributes it to a sermon preached by the Italian pulpit orator Savonarola, on the 8th of February 1497, against indecorous books, in consequence of which the inhabitants of Florence made a bonfire of their Boccaccios, an explanation which every one who pleases is at liberty to believe.
Peignot tells us that it is of rare occurrence among his countrymen, and yet, as we have seen, he thought it necessary to correct the technical term applied to this kind of practitioner, by calling him a Bibliothapte when he conceals books a Bibliolyte when he destroys them.
Peignot discusses, by the way, with his usual scientific precision, as a department in Bibliography, "Titres de livres qui ont induit en erreur des Bibliothecaires et des Libraires peu instruits."
Word Of The Day