By Anthony Esolen

My wife likes well-made and handsome objects for the house, so whenever I look for gifts to give her, I go to antique stores, or to stores selling unwanted objects from estate sales. Even if it's only a box for trinkets, I make sure it's joined with dovetails and not with cheap little nails that work loose. Bakelite, for old kitchen utensils, is better than plastic; it's a little heavier, and it acquires a mellow toning over the years. We have landscape paintings in oil pastels, framed behind that sort of old-style glass that makes it seem as if a window were opened into a world beyond.

I might say the same thing about books and their covers. For I do judge books that way. You must, when you come upon a lot of shelves and you don't have all day to scan the books one by one. I judge by the garish covers that began to prevail in the 1960's, sometimes for good books but far more often for garbage – think of the latest slapdash book ghost-written for the latest forgettable politician.

Old books aren't like that. That doesn't mean they were all good. It does mean, from my experience, that they at least were not stupid. Even the old Doubleday Image series of Catholic classics, once the 1970s come along, suffers a collapse in quality, made evident by a cheap and banal flashiness in the covers. It is like what happened to dimes and quarters after 1964, in the change from silver to the zinc-copper sandwich. Silver has a milky-white and sober sheen, and a silver coin rings when you spin it on a table. Zinc has a flat gray glare. It does not ring. It clanks.

For the sake of art, the revision of the Mass after Vatican II could not have come at a worse time. By now, many people have come to value what came before the great flattening, whether in music or art or architecture, or even in humble household utensils and the look of your backyard garden. But in those days? I am reminded of the satire on high modern nonsense in the comedy, The Odd Couple. Felix gets rid of Oscar's old homely furniture and replaces it with minimalism and absurdity. One of the pieces is a chair shaped like an open palm, with a thumb for the armrest and four fingers for the back.

I can spend all afternoon in a room with old books, not because they are old, but because most of them will be real books. I can take my time. They do not drum noise into my head. I cannot spend more than a couple of minutes in a room full of books with those glaring covers, whose contents will usually be just as garish, cheap, and loud.

I can sit at a piano for an hour and play old hymns, their lyrics written by people for whom the tradition of English poetry was ever present, a formative and continuing influence in their lives. I cannot do so with hymns whose poetry is cheap, clumsy, and sometimes stupidly heretical. "Abide with Me," composed by Henry Lyte a few days before he died, indeed abides with me, and if I am conscious during my own last hours, I hope to pray in his words, "Hold thou thy Cross before my closing eyes." It is a better line than any written for any Catholic hymn in the last sixty years.

What puts me in mind of this? Christmas does; not the feast, but the translation of the prologue of John, the Gospel reading for the Mass during the day. I often pray that prologue at night, as the old translators have nobly rendered it, building up to that grand and mysterious revelation: "But to as many as did receive him, he gave power to become children of God, who believed in his name: who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."

Do I understand those words? That depends on what we mean by understanding. They are not meant to be understood as if they were a medical report, nor can I fix their meaning in a single interpretation. Such is the case with all great poetry. I can go where Shakespeare directs my mind and heart when he says that Love "bears it out even t...