Once again, unable to find any newer fiction that interested me, I’m reading another Sir Walter Scott. It’s The Fortunes of Nigel, and I believe this will be the eighth or ninth Walter Scott that I’ve read. Though Scott’s works are available at Gutenberg and can be read on Kindles, I like having nice old editions of 19th Century classics. I bought this copy of Nigel on eBay from a seller in the United Kingdom.
The book was not expensive, but I was immediately impressed by the quality of the binding and, in particular, the quality of the paper. Though the paper is 111 years old, it is bright white and has hardly yellowed at all (though the heavier paper used for the illustrations has yellowed somewhat). The paper is remarkably thin and opaque. There is no brittleness. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what kind of paper this almost certainly is. The clue is the name Henry Frowde on the title page, over the Oxford University Press imprint.
Henry Frowde, it seems, was not a scholar, but he was a genius at printing and binding. He must have been a bit of a religious fanatic, because he printed a lot of Bibles. One of his innovations was the use of Oxford India paper, which was made from bleached rags and hemp. It was often used for Bibles, and as you’ll see in the Wikipedia article, Encylopedia Britannica used it for their 1911 edition.
So now that’s another item for my next visit to the U.K. — visiting some bookstores that sell old books. I’m guessing that there are several of those in Edinburgh. I am not particularly interested in rare books, nor would I be able to afford them. But I am very interested in beautiful books that are beautifully printed on good paper and beautifully bound. There are many cheaply printed old editions of 19th Century classics. It’s nice to see that the Oxford press adhered to a higher standard.
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