THE MERCANTILE LIBRARY
There is a legend of an old booklover who was pasturing among his folios one evening by candle light. Perhaps he sat (as Charles Lamb used to) with a tumbler of mild grog at his elbow. Perhaps he was in that curious hypnotic trance induced by utter silence, long reading and insufficient air. In the musty fragrance of his library the tapers cast their mellow gush of gold about him, burning up the oxygen from under his very nose. At any rate, in a shadowy alcove something stirred. A bookworm peeped out from a tall vellum binding. It flapped its wings and crew with a clear lively note. Startled, the aged bibliophile looked up and just glimpsed the vanishing flutter of its wings. It was only a glimpse, but it was enough. He ran to his shelves, his ancient heart pounding like an anvil chorus. The old promise had come true. For if any man shall live to see a bookworm, all the volumes on his shelves immediately turn to first editions, signed by the author. But the joyous spasm was too much for the poor scholar. The next morning he was found lying palsied at the foot of his bookcase. The fact that at least two fingers of grog remained in his glass, undrunk, led his fellow booklovers to suspect that something strange had happened. As he lay dying he told the story of his vision. He was the only man who ever saw a bookworm.
But if a bookworm should ever flap its wings and crow in Philadelphia, certainly the place where it would do so would be the Mercantile Library. I imagine that when Mr. Hedley, the delightful librarian, shuts up at night, turns off the green-shaded lamps and rings the bell to thrust out the last lingering reader from the long dark tables, he treads hopefully through those enchanted alcoves. The thick sweet savor of old calf and the dainty bouquet of honest rag paper, the subtle exhalation of rows and rows of books (sweeter to the nostril of the bibliosoph than any mountain air that ever rustled in green treetops), is just the medium in which the fabled bookworm would crow like chanticleer. It is fifty years this month since the Mercantile Library moved into the old market building on Tenth street, and while fifty years is a mere wink of the eyelash to any bookworm, still it is long enough for a few eggs to hatch. For that matter, some of the library's books have been in its possession nigh a hundred years, for it will celebrate its centennial in 1922.
The Mercantile is everything that a library ought to be. It has the still and reverent solemnity that a true home of learning ought to have, combined with an undercurrent of genial fellowship. It is not only a library but a club. Through the glass panels at the back one may see the chess players at their meditative rites, and the last inner fane where smoking is permitted and the votaries puff well-blackened briars and brood round the boards of combat in immortal silence. The quaint old stained windows at the western end of the long hall look down on the magazine tables where one may be reading the Cosmopolitan and the next the Hibbert Journal. From these colored panes Franklin, Milton, Beethoven and Clovio gaze approvingly. They are surmounted by four symbolic figures, representing (I suppose) their respective arts of Science, Poetry, Music and Art. Of Clovio the miniaturist one does not often hear, and I may as well be honest and admit I had to look him up in the encyclopedia.
To the heart of the booklover the Mercantile speaks with a magical appeal. One wishes there were a little cloister attached to it where the true saints of the bookworld might be buried. It seems hard that those who have so long trodden the alcoves of peace should be interred elsewhere. To many devout souls libraries are the greatest churches of humanity. Even the casual dropper-in realizes that the Mercantile is more than a mere gathering of books. It is a guild, a sort of monastery. The members have secret raptures and side-long glances whereby they recognize one another. As they walk down the long entrance passage they are purged of the world and the world's passions. As they pass through the little swinging gates that shut out the mere visitor, as they bury themselves in shadowy corners and aisles pungent with book-perfume, they have the grateful bearing of those secure in a strong fortress where the devil cannot penetrate. For my own part, I have only one test of a good library, which I always employ when I get anywhere near a card catalogue. There is a certain work, in three volumes, famous chiefly because Robert Louis Stevenson took the second volume with him on his immortal Travels With a Donkey. It is called Pastors of the Desert, by Peyrat, a history of the Huguenots. If you will turn again to R. L. S.'s chapter called A Camp in the Dark you will see that he says:
I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat's Pastors of the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping bag.
I am happy to assert that the Mercantile has a set of these volumes, and therefore one may pronounce it an A-l library.
Of course the Mercantile has many more orthodox treasures than Peyrat, though its function is not to collect incunabula or rare editions, but to keep its members supplied with the standard things, and the important books and periodicals of the day. Mr. Hedley was gracious enough to take me into the locked section of the gallery, where there are alcoves teeming with old volumes and rich in the dust that is so delightful to the lover of these things. He showed me, for instance, a first edition of the Authorized or King James Bible, imprinted at London by Robert Barker in 1611. Inside the front cover some one has written in pencil "Charge £5." I am no expert on these matters, but I wonder if many a collector would not pay a hundred times as much for it nowadays? On another shelf I saw a beautiful edition of Eusebius's Chronicles, printed at Venice in 1483, the paper as fresh and the rubrication as bright as when it was new. Opening it at random, I found the following note, which seemed quaintly topical:
Anno salutis 811, Anno mundi 6010, Locustes gregatim ex Affrica volantes Italiam infestant.
(Year of grace 811, Year of the earth 6010. The locusts flying in swarms from Africa, infest Italy.)
In this book some former owner has written, with the honorable candor of the true booklover:
De isto pretioso volumino animadvertere libet, quod non est "edition premiere" sicut opus Deburii falso ostendit.
W. H. Black, 4 Feb., 1831.
(Concerning this precious volume it is permitted to remark that it is not the first edition, as the work of Deburius falsely maintains.)
Ignoble Deburius, shame upon him !
Mr. Hedley also showed me the famous Atlas Major of John Blaeu, the Dutch publisher, issued (in Spanish) in Amsterdam in 1662, eleven huge tomes in white vellum, stamped in gold. These marvelous large-scale maps, magnificently colored by hand, with every town marked by a tiny dot of gleaming gold, set the lover of fine work in a tingle of amazement. Lucky indeed the bibliophile who finds his way to that sacred corner. One would not blame any bookworm for crowing with a shrill cry of exultation if he were hatched in that treasury. There was not time to find out whether John Blaeu's atlas contained plates of American geography, but I hope to go again and study these fascinating volumes more at leisure, by Mr. Hedley's kindness.
Perhaps the most curious feature of the Mercantile is the huge vaulted cellar which underlies the length of the whole building. Constructed originally for storage of market produce, before the days of modern refrigeration, it is now a dark and mysterious crypt extending under the adjoining streets, where the rumble of wheels sound overhead. The library's stamping press, used to incise the covers of books, gives one of the chambers a medieval monkish air, and the equally medieval spelling of the janitor in some memoranda of his own posted upon a door do not detract from the fascinating spell. With a flashlight Mr. Hedley showed me the great extent of these underground corridors, and I imagined that if so friendly a librarian should ever hold a grudge against an author it would be an admirable place to lure him and leave him lost in the dark. He would never find his way out and his copyrights would expire long before his bones would be found. Joan Gutenberg, the library cat, dwells in that solemn maze of heavy brick arches, and she finds it depressing that the only literature stored down there is the overplus of old government documents.