The binding of books and the matter of spirit.

One day in the late 1890s, the young Winston Churchill visited an office of the Conservative party to inquire about a possible career in politics. When he was informed by the official that if he didn't raise a significant sum of money, his opportunities would be seriously diminished, Churchill was discouraged (or at least as discouraged as it is possible to imagine him). But when he was about to leave the office, he saw something that would change his life. Years later, he would describe this seemingly small event as follows: "My eye lighted upon a large book on his table on the cover of which was a white label bearing the inscription 'SPEAKERS WANTED.' I gazed upon this with wonder. Fancy that! Speakers were wanted and here was a bulky book of applications! Now I had always wanted to make a speech; but I had never on any occasion great or small been invited or indeed allowed to do so."

This was a magic moment for the young Winston, an opening into a future giddy with promise, excitement, and adventure. For him, the label bearing the words Speakers Wanted had the evocative power of that sign Alice encountered in Wonderland. Like "Drink Me," "Speakers Wanted" hinted at both an eventuation and transformation suggestive of some mysterious though triumphant future - a future, one might fancy in retrospect, waiting to be found inside the book's covers.

Our custom of gift-wrapping presents reflects such a notion, and is therefore, and in its way, mysterious. You can bring a naked bottle of wine to a dinner party or simply hand over an unwrapped book as a birthday gift without risking too great an impropriety; and yet, the gesture leaves us with a sense of compromise and incompleteness. Part of a gift is missing if it is not wrapped, and that something is ceremonious and symbolic. An unwrapped present is somewhat like an unbound book . . . or perhaps one that is bound, but lacks a label - a label, perhaps, with the words Speakers Wanted.

Ceremonies and symbols are in themselves mysterious because they are instruments of distance, meant for probing realities otherwise unknowable. No matter how attractive and desirable it may otherwise be, an unwrapped gift is incomplete, for it lacks momentary promise. Breaking into a box knowing that it contains something unknown is essential to the ceremony. The present you have received exists in time, in the present, and whatever use or desirability it will have for you as a future possession will be forever threaded through that brief moment of anticipation when you were forced to open the package in order to discover its inner truth.

Though evanescent, this moment of expectation is real and inescapable. In spite of his glorious career as an orator, Churchill could never have quite recaptured the specific thrill of promise implicit in that first instant of discovery. No matter how fine or expensive or touchingly personal the gift within, it cannot in the nature of things be possessed of the same charm as the moment of its anticipation. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." And so it is with gifts, some of whose promissory grace inevitably vanishes in the light of actuality.

By now, we have come a long way from the common-sense view that mysteries are confined to those unseen presences concealed by the packages that contain them. Exteriors have their own mysteries, as well - even though they are by definition visible. And along with their containing innerness, they partake of their own uniquenesses, as if there were another spatial dimension that cannot be measured. In addition to signifying depth, surfaces have their own sort of depth - let us say, lateral rather than vertical.

But what is a lateral depth? How can depth be measured sideways and forward rather than down? In this sense, would two acres of land be twice as deep as one? What sort of nonsense is that? And yet, surfaces are never more than partially visible, which means that when we focus upon this part, the remainder is as surely lost to sight as the dreamlike interior of the eeriest grotto. Its retrievability is no more than a promise, like that of the secret gift within a package. So in this sense, two acres really are twice as deep as one.

Obsessed with the inscrutable depth of a canvas surface, painters understand such a truth instinctively.

Now, the long loop of my preamble brings us naturally back to the subject of book bindings, whose ostensible object is to package and protect the leaves of a text. Since they provide a tempting surface for decoration, that temptation has naturally proved irresistible. Over a millennium after those first bindings were designed to embrace and preserve the leaves of a book, the first dust jackets - covers conceived to cover the covers - passed through the same phased development of austere plainness to decorative excess, somewhat in the manner of all new inventions, imitating that original evolutionary invention of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Translations everywhere.

As for bindings, the temptation they provide for embellishment was felt so early in their history that by the fifth century A.D., St. Jerome cried out to the wealthy collectors of his day: "Your books are covered with precious stones, and Christ dies naked before the door of his temple!" Jerome's cry has been muted by the centuries, and its echoes are no longer haunted by so dour a theology, but the sentiment lives on. Essentially, its premise is that books are instruments, therefore means to an end; and to convert means into ends and lavish excessive care upon them is not only foolish, it is wrong. And to the extent that decadence can be defined as a loss of the object, decadent.

Most of us draw a line between wholesomeness and decadence, but we draw it differently, and in different places. (We also lean toward a different terminology, for in a decadent age, the word wholesome is a cultural embarrassment.) Seventeenth-century American books were an almost exclusively New England product, therefore bound puritanically in plain leather - the gold-tooled binding of Increase Mather's 1679 A Call from Heaven an exception. At the other end of the spectrum are the Kelmscott productions of William Morris, whose pages and bindings are cicatriced with as baroque an excess of design as has ever embellished or mutilated a surface.

But it is an anecdote about Morris's disciple, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, that conveys the right proportion. When a lady bibliophile complained to him that the six pounds he'd charged for a binding with very little gold tooling seemed exorbitant, he is said to have answered, "Madam, I charge as much for my restraint as for my elaboration."

Tacitus' De Vita et Moribus Julii Agricolae was the first book printed by the Doves Press, and it was designed by Cobden-Sanderson. Bound in plain vellum, the book is an exquisite expression of the restraint he spoke of. It is also a just example of the high standard of excellence maintained by the Doves Press, whose productions were characterized, in the words of Douglas C. McMurtrie, "by a majestic simplicity of design, meticulous type-setting, flawless presswork on the finest of papers and workmanlike binding." The result, as manifest in this edition of Tacitus, is perhaps too austere for some tastes, but not for mine.

Cobden-Sanderson's range of accomplishment was broad, however, and some of his bindings, like that of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, are splendidly ornate, risking excess ornament very much as his Doves Press bindings tend to risk too little. Many of his contemporaries liked to refer to Cobden-Sanderson's "genius"; and the term is perhaps justified when one considers his philosophical grasp of, not just bookmaking, as it is narrowly considered, but the symbolic role of the book as both cultural instrument and aesthetic object.

"The ideal book," he wrote in his book of that title, "is a composite thing, made up of many parts, and may be made beautiful by the beauty of each of its parts . . . in subordination to the whole which collectively they constitute. . . . On the other hand each contributory part may usurp the functions of the rest and of the whole, and growing beautiful beyond all bounds ruin for its own the common cause."

Such wisdom is hardly limited to books; it applies to the components of all art as well as to the collaborative human effort required by such diverse entities as baseball teams, committees, and corporations - not to mention democracy itself. Like so many of our values, the grace of that internal harmony and elegant concinnity praised by Cobden-Sanderson is felt most acutely in its absence and neglect. Individuals who sacrifice the common good for their own personal aggrandizement are like those "parts" the great bookman spoke of - a lavish binding wasted upon leaves of pulp paper, for example; or a thick rag paper marred by cheap and clumsy typesetting, utilizing a crudely designed font.

The sacrifice of a public good for personal glorification is always painful, whether in the hot-dog behavior of a sports star or the finagling of an ambitious politico . . . bringing to mind those fractious lines of Dryden, which seem especially pertinent to the gang-warfare of contemporary politics (you may of course supply the names of your own representatives here, as at the voting booth): "In friendship false, implacable in hate, / Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."

It is a paradox that when we speak of a book's "matter," we are speaking of that which is not matter at all, but noumenon, gestalt, transcendent form, idea - that which is implicit in, and conveyed by, the sequence of the words in the text. Thus it is precisely the "matter" of Isaac Walton's The Compleat Angler that remains unaltered behind all its changing materials, with their variations of print, paper, and binding in the more than three hundred editions of its publishing history. The matter is the order of the words, not their material representations in print. As those literate barbarians who don't collect books like to proclaim: it's the matter that matters, not the edition.

This matter they speak of is the book's "mind," not its matter at all. It is the essence, the ghost in the book's body. It is the secret, inner life, which we know exists but don't know exactly how it exists, or what it is, or - as I am finding out at this very moment - how, precisely, to describe it. This inner life of the book is very much like our own inner life, which is the ultimate mystery of innerness. We know this about ourselves, and yet keep trying to ignore it in the name of clarity and scientific integrity.

Still, scholars in the humanities love a mystery; that is why so many of them read and collect mystective novels. It is axiomatic for them that, in spite of their exasperating inaccessibility to formulation, mysteries are intrinsic to whatever is meant by "reality." It is precisely in their combining the immeasurably enigmatic and the inescapably authentic that certain questions fascinate and beguile the mind. And yet, if they were entirely mysterious and beyond measure, how could anything at all be known about them?

There is only one way - through their outer dress, their envelopes, their bodies. We assume a vital though mysterious connection between inner and outer realities, and indeed have no other way of knowing them, for they are transactionals, each requiring the other for its status as validity or truth. In this way, and to this extent, we know books by their bindings; if we didn't, whenever we opened a book we would have no idea what text would be waiting to surprise us.

What if it were otherwise? What if all the books in a library had their bindings removed and were then recased at random, so that Gone with the Wind would be found in the binding for a second-year algebra text, and Nabokov's Pnin would be bound in the 1941 Blue Jacket's Manual? Then, truly, you could not judge a book by its cover. But until such mad transformations occur, and within obvious limitations, we can assume otherwise.

Looked at closely, the outer coverings of things always partake of their plenary significance. In one of his journals, the prudish Hawthorne observed that clothing has become as natural for us as our bodies, and an essential part of our human nature. That this is still true is perversely implicit in the popularity of such magazines as Playboy and Penthouse. Without clothing, we are as incomplete as an unbound book. Many years ago, a wealthy collector had all of his acquisitions handsomely rebound, saying that he liked his friends to be well-dressed.

Exteriors, being phenomenal, are not only essential to the world of things as we know them, they are intrinsically mysterious. In saying that containers "contain" mysteries, we usually mean that they enclose that which is entirely separate, and both literally and figuratively hidden. And yet, those surfaces are cryptic in themselves, quite apart from what they conceal and protect. Thus, the binding of a book is the outer, physical form of three sorts of mystery: the visible text, that text's invisible "meaning," and the binding itself as a physical entity.

But the tension between inner and outer meanings is not limited to this primary, spatial mode; it applies to the basic structure of the metaphor, in which the vehicle, or literal meaning, is external, and the tenor, or intended meaning, is figurative and interior. In this, it is like the matter of a book, when that matter refers to its "message" or "meaning." Much of the point and effort of literary study is focused upon the exegesis of latent, textual meanings . . . mining texts for occult implications and the bright gold of allusion.

In past centuries allegorical and metaphorical ways of thinking were of great, even obsessive, interest, occasionally extending upwards into heights of pure madness, especially in the rarified atmosphere of religious controversy, where there is little oxygen. With the advancement of science, biblical interpretations became increasingly metaphorical in their forced retreat from literal meaning, so that the 969 years Methuselah was said to have lived turned out to be not years after all, but some lesser interval of time.

The belief that overt facts conceal mysterious essences was an old one, and it found its way into strange places. The ancient story of Jason and the Golden Fleece was especially hospitable to allegorical interpretation. Scholars since antiquity occupied themselves with the euhemeristic passion to seek out some kind of historical, factual basis for the events celebrated in The Argonautica.

This habitude, combined with a passion for parables, inspired some extraordinary interpretations. There were those that equated the Golden Fleece with rain and fertility. Others intrepreted the Argonauts' quest as a solar myth, the ram being associated with Zeus, whose image was the sun. Furthermore, the Argonauts voyaged into the unknown East to bring back a golden (i.e., shining) object. To others, the Golden Fleece was a symbol of human purity. In still another view, the ram was a variation upon the Lamb of God, or Christ.

Last but not least, and most germane to our present purpose, was a theory advanced by an obscure tenth century scholar named Suidas, that the Golden Fleece was not simply the resplendent hide of a great ram, but the sheepskin binding of a book on alchemy. The form of this intriguing notion exemplifies its purport. As the cover of a book both conceals and represents its text and the matter therein, so does the literal meaning of the Golden Fleece function figuratively, concealing and representing the arcane formula for the transmutation of metals into higher forms. Q. E. D.

Who was this Suidas who propounded such an astonishing interpretation, one that retrojects alchemical lore into a far more distant past than can be documented elsewhere? I have found little information about him; he is known chiefly for his Suda Lexicon - evidently not much of a lexicon at all, in the modern sense of the word, but a sort of notional encyclopedia filled with folklore, superstitions, and various curious notions, including the above-mentioned theory.

So far as I can tell, the Suda Lexicon has never been translated from its original Greek into English. After considerable effort, I was able to procure a copy through the interlibrary loan system of the university where I teach. Immediately upon opening the book, however, I saw that the Greek was a briarpatch, with only the most exiguous notes in German and Latin - in themselves of limited usefulness to me, but sometimes I can make out the sense of a passage in the intersection of my smattering of all three languages.

But here there was no help, so I walked around the briarpatch, telling myself that it was something I could translate if my life depended upon it; then immediately comforting myself with the realization that my life didn't depend upon it. So I returned the book forthwith and lapsed into the repose of my previously undisturbed ignorance.

You pay a price for everything, of course; and the price I am paying for my laziness is an unscratchable itch. What were Suidas' reasons for thinking that the Golden Fleece was actually the binding of a book about transmuting baser elements into gold? What could they have been? On the surface (in a manner of speaking), the idea seems absurd. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the text that conveys the fullest version of the story, the sheepskin is said to be large enough to hang over Jason's shoulder and reach the ground. A ram that size? More like an elephant folio.

But, of course, not even a mythical ram could be truly elephantine; and that wasn't the sort of hook referred to, anyway. The reference would have been to a papyrus roll, and its "binding" would have been a sort of leather pouch, called a diphthera. Suidas evidently believed that the leather was parchment, or sheepskin; and that the text contained the long-sought alchemist's formula.

Since the fleece was said to be golden, transmutation was probably the book's primary focus, although arriving at a formula for transmuting baser metals into gold was only part of the alchemists' quest. According to Paracelsus, the "Double Tincture" had to do with curing diseases as well as transmuting metals into a higher form - gold being the highest. As for Suidas himself: the tenth century in which he lived was a time when the influx of Arabic learning into Europe was very great, and much of that learning was in the form of astrological and alchemical lore - the word alchemy itself being from the Arabic, meaning "the art of transformation," and by a tortuous historical linguistic route the origin of our word "chemistry."

Recently I bought a very obscure alchemical treatise - a 16mo bound in quarter leather and marbled boards, with gilt title on red leather. The title page is in itself an abstract of the book (as is typical of the period), and reads as follows:

THE GOLDEN ASS WELL MANAGED AND MYDAS Restored to Reason

Or a new Chymical Light appearing as a day Star of Comfort to all under Oppression or Calamities, as well Illiterate, as Learned, Male as Female; to ease their Burdens and provide for their Families.

WHEREIN

The Golden Fleece is Demonstrated to the blind world, and that good Gold may be found as well in Cold as Hot Regions (though better in hot) within and without through the universal Globe of the Earth, and be profitably extracted: So that in all places where any Sand, Stones, Gravel, or Flints are, you cannot so much as place your footing, but you may find both Gold, and the true matter of the Philosopher's Stone. And is a Work of Women and play of Children.

Written at Amsterdam, 1669, by John Rodolf Glauber, The bright Sun of our Age, and Lover of Mankind, like a true Elias riding on this Golden Ass, in a Fiery Chariot.

And Translated out of Latin into English, in briefer Notes, 1670 by W. C. Esq. True Lover of Art and Nature, and well wisher to all men, especially to the poor distressed Houshold of Faith; The true Catholick Church, and body of Christ, Dispersed through many Forms of Religions, through the whole World, as the perfect Israelites.

Note here a typical seventeenth-century version of a dust-jacket puff, touched with the philo-semitism of the time, and praising the author and translator as virtual saints. Indeed, we are meant to understand that these were two benevolent men, and whoever might possess their book and apply its nostrums for transmuting sand and gravel and such into gold is blessed. Literally construed, that blessing might have a greater authority than first appears, and touch upon the supernatural, for Glauber died in 1668 - in which case, if the biographical note of The Golden Ass, Well Managed is to be believed, he wrote it in Amsterdam a year after he'd died.

The title's reference is of course to the old story of King Midas, who was asked to judge a musical contest, and declared Pan the winner over Apollo. Insulted, Apollo changed his ears into those of an ass - the dream of many a poet when stung by a bad review. Later, of course, Midas was granted his wish that all he touched would turn to gold - a classic moral showing how little we know what's good for us. But, as the title page announces, through Glauber's "new Chymical Light," Midas has finally been restored to reason.

Glauber has a modest place in the history of science. A contemporary of Newton, he was one of those transitional figures - half-alchemist, half-chemist - who participated in standing old notions on their heads, thus making way for the scientific revolution. He was said to have developed an early method for manufacturing acids and salts, but was considered a charlatan because of his secret concoction, Sal Mirabile, a cathartic. While open channels of communication are essential to science, they are death to humbugs.

One of the interesting features of The Golden Ass is that many of the prescriptions for transmuting baser metals into gold are not about transmutation at all; they are about the discovery of gold in various ores and its refinement therefrom. In spite of his liberal references to Paracelsus, Glauber is as intent upon showing how gold is identified and extracted as upon how it is manufactured from humbler stones and ores. In many passages an innocent reader can't be sure which process is being described: transmutation or discovery. Glauber's uncertain poise between these quite different processes reflects his transitional character as half-alchemist and half-chemist.

This ambiguity, however, is not all there is; it is compounded with a spiritual one. Glauber tells us so. "But now," he writes, "the philosophers seek not corporeal gold, but spiritual." And here, finally, another loop is closed, and we return to the basic theme of a material envelope covering a spiritual truth. So it is that the vehicle, or literal meaning, of a metaphor carries its tenor, or figurative meaning; and a reference to golden fleece conceals a formula for transcending nature; and the material binding of a book conceals its inner physical matter in the form of printed pages . . . which in turn contain its intellectual or spiritual matter, what we mean when we say we have read the same book in different editions.

One of the most interesting and eloquent statements upon the aesthetics of book bindings can be found in the ninth edition (one of the two "scholars' editions") of The Encyclopaedia Brittanica, as follows: "At the time when books were rarities, being either manuscripts produced by patient secluded labour or the productions of the printing-press during the infancy of typography, they were naturally very highly prized; and as much labour and expense were bestowed upon the protection and embellishment of a cherished folio as would suffice at the present day for the building of a house. The wooden cover of a book, with its metal hinges, bosses, guards, and clasps, seems, in all but dimensions, fit for a church door."

Like all those examples previously given, houses and church doors are containers of mystery, and worthy of our respect in themselves, for the profound depths of their surfaces as well as for those more obvious depths they conceal and contain. And there is one perspective in which it is as just and comprehensible for bibliophiles to rejoice in the care lavished upon the exteriors of their possessions as it is for others to take pleasure in a finely made house or the elegantly carved door of a church.

We can't read all our books all the time, but daily we can contemplate their spines lining the shelves of our libraries. These are what collectors look at, and they look at them differently, according to their individual aesthetics, needs, and temperaments. Some look upon them as big-game hunters look upon their trophies - both sorts of trophies often featuring the tanned and treated hides of animals; others look upon their books as mirrors of what they are or would like to be.

These collectors are sentimentalists, of course; but what would life be Without sentiment - even the sort that extends to that extremity stigmatized as "sentimentality"? Too many wise and accomplished people have had their years enriched by such possessions, along with the memory of how they were acquired, for anyone to dismiss their passions as trivial or irrelevant.

All true. And yet, in closing, it must be pointed out that surfaces without interiors are nothing but a mockery. It is ultimately the magic within that justifies the magic without. It is the printed text that validates the beautiful workmanship of bindings and renders it meaningful. Whatever is alive is admirable and mysterious, and however life is defined, it is interior - it exists somewhere inside - a truth that all surfaces proclaim, celebrate, and serve.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge understood this, but in understanding it, lost his good sense and went too far, and suffered a Coleridgean fit. In 1802 he told his wife: "I love warm rooms, comfortable fires, & food, books, natural scenery, music & c." So far, you will say, so good. But then the great man's good sense tilted and he staggered into incoherence, saying: "...but I do not care what binding the Books have, whether they are dusty or clean - & I dislike...all the ordinary symbols & appendages of artificial superiority - or what is called Gentility."

It's a pity he could not have achieved a sensible balance between inner and outer validities, so obviously legitimate in themselves and so easily reconciled. It's a pity he had to set these values at each other's throat, like pit bulls or fighting cocks, rather than working their contrarieties together to achieve a dialectic fusion and synthesis. Interiors and exteriors are transactionals, after all; and it is fitting that they should be joined. Since books are designed to be read, it is only reasonable that some of us care that the eye is pleased.

Still, the principle bears repetition: to lavish care upon the bindings of books with an utter disregard of their content is not only an intellectual sin, it is foolishness. There have been a few such pathetic members in the long and honorable tradition of bibliophilism, and they are as deserving of our pity as of Robert Burns's satiric scorn in his little poem, "The Bookworms": "Through and through the inspired leaves, / Ye maggots, make your windings; / But, oh!, respect his lordship's tastes, / And spare his golden bindings!"

And that golden feminine rhyme may serve as the back cover of my little essay, fitting to close it with a thud . . . along with my own brief expression of personal thanks that, while this small and pleasant quatrain was written by Robert Burns, it was not done in the Scottish dialect.

Jack Matthews has published numerous story collections, novels, essays, poetry, and plays. His most recent is Booking Pleasures, a collection of essays many of which first appeared in the pages of the Antioch Review. He teaches at Ohio University in Athens.