Most of us are aware of a book Gray's Anatomy. It is a book on the Anatomy of the Human Body. A textbook written by Henry Gray and illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter, published in 1858. A Bible for all to be doctors.
But whoever has heard of the anatomy of a book. A book like a human has an anatomy. I have heard my father; Nirmal Chandra Kumar, the antiquarian talking to Radha Prasad Gupta, the famous bibliophile and describing the anatomy of books. A book has a head, back, calf, toe and more. Most importantly it has a spine. Its skin be rubbed or a little foxed. I love the description. The way that they resonate so beautiful and relate to humans—the head of the spine, the foot of the spine, the spine.
The anatomy of a book is best described in one of the antiquarian book world’s favorite prints: a caricature of a bedraggled, elderly bibliophile standing in a muddle of books, as if he has risen from them. His hair is slightly mussed, eyes obscured behind spectacles, and he wears a suit with a pocket square. Titled Anatomy of an Antiquarian Bookseller, the poster’s provenance makes it something that dealers of rare tomes especially appreciate: only fifty lithographs of the design, by the artist Ronald Searle, were produced, as a commission for the centenary of a Scottish book-trading firm in 1970. Searle labelled the portrait with terms drawn from the vernacular of book-dealing that apply equally to the settling and slumping of a body, which, once in fine condition, is now merely fair: dog-eared; mottled calf; joints badly worn; spine cracked.
In D. W. Young’s lighthearted, lexical short film, A Body of Language, a bookdealer shows off the obscure and fanciful language of the book world, particularly the bodily lingo, is the focus of the above film, and the two dozen or so booksellers interviewed on camera describe with relish their favorite terms. “Dentelles,” the term tells us, as he ever so gently traces a finger down a frilly gilt border, is the name for the golden edging on the inside of a cover; the word is drawn from the French dentelle, which means “lace,” and which itself comes from the Middle French for “little tooth.”
It was fascinating to hear my father and Satul kaku (R P Gupta), discuss the health of books after diagonising like a doctor, because the demonstration of extreme competence and precision is powerfully appealing: there is a name for every part and every production method, and particularly for every malady. The specialized language is all in the service of diagnosis and correction. When a book has been read too much or loved too roughly, it’s “thumb-soiled” (deliciously icky-sounding). If the spine tilts just a bit to the side, it’s “slightly cocked.” A little juvenile, don’t you think ? When paper is browning from age or moisture, it’s “foxed.” Some things sound bad but are not so: “stab holes” might show that a book has been bound from side-stitched installments that were published separately. And that “mottled calf” from the poster isn’t a sign of decay—it’s only the name for a method of using dribbles of acid to make young leather look more interesting.
Accordingly, and comfortingly, the language of cures for booky ills is also expansive. The film tells us about wormholes in the binding, showing spines chawed to dust by pests, but it also reassures us about the existence of “remboîtage”: the procedure for swapping covers if you have one volume with marvellous innards but a ragged cover, and another that is gorgeously packaged but drab inside. I also learned that books can be chipped, creased, tired, and disbound, they can also be re-cased, pressed, re-hinged, and guarded. If only healing the cockled or faded body were so easy.
If “all professions are conspiracies against the laity” as George Bernard Shaw said, then sometimes the rest of us want to be in the congregation, guided by someone who can offer us the language to describe our parts. The professionals, positively glowing with their expertise, reassure us that someone has already seen and recognized the details, and has a word for the state of things and how they are likely to change over time.
What’s more, living with books has its own merits. A book, a bit soiled does not need to be a “rare survival”, an astonishingly well-preserved and scarce piece.
The appeal of the anatomy of books comes from the dictionary of imperfections, and because the cataloguing of exacting terms has its own kind of delight.
Image : My father, Satul Kaku and the famous poster : Ronald Searle, Anatomy of an Antiquarian Bookseller