Then he will use his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the
volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered
with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used
leather will hunt line by line through the page; then at the
sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside, and is
hardly shut for another month, until it is so full of the dust
that has found its way within, that it resists the effort to
close it.

But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those
shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the
shapes of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity,
become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra
margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if
any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins
to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every
unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we
have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of the
most beautiful books.

Again, there is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books,
who cut away the margins from the sides to use as material for
letters, leaving only the text, or employ the leaves from the
ends, inserted for the protection of the book, for various uses
and abuses-- a kind of sacrilege which should be prohibited by
the threat of anathema.

Again, it is part of the decency of scholars that whenever they
return from meals to their study, washing should invariably
precede reading, and that no grease-stained finger should