For years, I have gotten into the habit of going through the catalogs sent to me, from time to time, by booksellers of old books. They were distributed in paper format for a long time, at more or less regular intervals. Now, in the digital age, these smugglers find themselves partly suffocated under the flood of illusions promised by new developments and communications at every wind.
I don’t like these second-hand books any less than before. As guardians of ancient knowledge, without worrying about the effects of the latest fashion, they pay attention to books as much as to old papers, geographical maps, manuscripts, photographs. The descriptions of their lots alone very often constitute a key that opens the doors to unsuspected worlds.
Take the most recent catalog from bookseller Roger Auger. He presents old photographs there. Mr. Auger has decided to sell images that he has patiently collected, left and right, over many years spent hunting everywhere.
My eye stops on a description of glass plates. These are negatives. Glass on which lies a thin film of silver salts in which the light has frozen a fragment of eternity. These images from the 19th centurye century are the work of the Livernois. In Quebec, for a century, this family of photographers was the mirror of an entire world. Of the people they photographed on these plaques, in Sunday clothes, we only know the names. Perrault, Thériault, Blais, Charbonneau, Beaulieu, Ferland… There is something moving there. Such old photos express not the past, but the youth of a society.
The person who owned these negatives before Mr. Auger assured him that in Sillery, students at Collège Jésus-Marie used these old glass plates, during their art classes, to mix colors. How many precious photographs have been smeared, scratched, lost forever, disregarding what they bear witness to? It is not without reason that our photographic archives are rather meager, even if photography has been practiced in this half-country since 1840.
A few weeks ago, the bookseller François Côté announced, in one of his beautiful thematic catalogs, a copy of a book with a strange title: Dissertations on the apparitions of angels, demons & spirits and on the ghosts and vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia & Silesia. A small work in-12, the equivalent of a pocket book, bound in full period leather, decorated with iron, with its gilding, its ribbing. The book was, for more than two centuries, in one of the libraries of the Church which, among us, long served as a state library. Such a book reminds us that our consciences have been haunted by specters of all kinds, from Draculas to Seven-Hour figures. These specters fed on our fears, without us knowing how to counter them, other than by repressing them in the psyche of beliefs, while the reality of a world of exploited people continued to eat us to the blood. .
The sometimes poetic descriptions of the works offered by second-hand booksellers’ catalogs do not say everything about their content. A book is not just about its cover, its title, the paper used, the way it was printed and then bound. Shit in a silk stocking, it showed. And it still shows. Not just in books either.
In Montreal, the bookbinder Robert Jourdain told me how wealthy people, the nouveau riche, had him make fake bindings to decorate their office, their living room. He found himself making fake bookcases for them padded with the leather of the books. “At least give me real books to bind,” Mr. Jourdain told them. “Any one!” In the end, it will be the same price. » They were only interested in creating the illusion. So the binder delivered them blanks. The bindings were arranged in the colors of their decor. By the time they decide to change it.
What are books still used for, those of yesterday and today?
After the crushing of the uprisings of 1837-1838 in Canada, an emissary from the British Empire, Lord Durham, affirmed that this society, without literature and without history, was doomed to disappear. This people, he judged, was not yet a people. It found itself condemned to suffocate on the sidelines of universal history. It was therefore doing it a service to sweep it away as quickly as possible to allow itself to further exploit the territory. The historian François-Xavier Garneau pointed out that there were good reasons to rebel against such butchery of humanity. The books existed, he said in substance. They ensured, at least for an essentially European society, the confirmation of an innate right to live over time. The birth of a literature constituted a salutary national safe conduct.
Isn’t there something truly despairing, when we think about it, to see today the omnipotent Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon treating journalists with sovereign disdain, reducing them to a status, openly inferior in his mind? , novelists or essayists? As if literature, in a society dedicated to referring to it to give itself the right to exist, was equivalent to simple entertainment without consequences, just good enough to exonerate a government from responding to questions that are nevertheless legitimate and serious.
To glorify a bad national novel, this government of shopkeepers prefers to create false books, beautiful empty shells supposed to free us from the weight of history. When they want us to believe that people as competent as Alexandre Shields of the Duty and Thomas Gerbet of Radio-Canada are worthy of contempt, without anyone vigorously protesting, there is indeed something rotten which, unfortunately, reigns in this half-country.