Fine Books

the abundance of educated slave-labour books were very cheap, almost as cheap as they are now, and book-collectors could busy themselves about refinements not unlike those in which their s

logues of them were often classified so as to show what books had been acquired in all the different departments of human knowledge. Even in the sixteenth century, when these literary ideals were dominant, we find some examples of another kind. In Jean Grolier, for instance, we find the book-lover playing the part, too seldom assumed, of the discriminating patron of contemporary printing and bookbinding. Instead of collecting more old books than he could find time to read, Grolier bought the best of his own day, but of these sometimes as many as four or five copies of the same work that he might have no difficulty in finding one for a friend; and whateve

aid the better. Parker was soon followed by Sir Robert Cotton, whose success in gathering books and documents illustrating English history was so great that his library was sequestered and very nearly altogether taken from him, on the plea that it contained state papers which no subject had a right to possess. Owing to the carelessness and brutality of the previous generation, Cotton's opportunities were as great as his zeal in making use of them, and at the cost of his fortune he laid the foundations of a national library. Humbler men imitated him without being able to secure the same permanence for their collections, more especially Humphrey Dyson, a notary, who seems to have acquired early printed books and proclamations, with the same zeal which Cotton devoted to

in his own house and allow students to read in it was worthy of Aristotle's μεγαλ?ψυχο?, the man who does everything on a scale that befits his dignity. But in proportion as public collections of books and facilities for obtaining access to them are increased, the preservation of a library on a large scale i

rsity Library at Cambridge by George I. Thus even when a collector was not inspired by, or could not afford to indulge, public motives, respect for his memory or desire to benefit an institution often brought his books to a safe haven. But more often the munificence was personal and direct. For some cause not quite easy to see the flow of benefactions to English libraries has dwindled sadly of late years,1 so that journalists with short memories write of gifts and bequests to American libraries as if they were unprecedented. Even of late years, however, the foundation of the John Rylands Library, Chancellor Christie's gifts and bequest to the Victoria University, the Sandars legacy to the University Library, Cambridge, and Mr. Alfred Huth's bequest to the British Museum of any fifty books it might choose to select

oks which were useful to him as a student of Elizabethan literature, more especially of Shakespeare, and bequeathed them to the Bodleian, while Capell left his similar collection to Trinity College, Cambridge. The library of Natural History books brought together by Sir Joseph Banks and bequeathed by him to the British Museum is another example of well-defined collecting, though of a different sort. Among men who were not themselves specialists the vogue lay in the direction of first editions of the Greek and Latin classics and of a few Italian and English authors of special merit, together with books illustrating the history of printing down to about the year 1480 or 1485. The early classics seem to have been the indispensable element in any collection of the first rank, and they appear with monotonous regularity in the libraries of

hem. Yet it can hardly be denied that to collect various kinds of books from an antiquarian, ?sthetic, or any other well-defined point of view, not directly literary, is an independent pursuit in its own right, just as to collect old or beautiful china or silver is an independent pursuit, whether or no the china or silver be used for eating or drinking from. It will be said, of course, that on this view books are no better than china (or postage stamps), and there are indeed some strange instances of men who have fallen below their possibilities and have collected books, and not without success, despite a most amazing indifference to their contents. This reduces the joy they can get from their hobby to the bare pleasure of collecting for the sake of collecting, an ignoble delight in indulging acquisitiveness, redeemed to some extent by the

extant copies of the First Folio Shakespeare, a comparatively common book, but of supreme interest for its associations, is a striking example of the zeal with which every discoverable copy of a valuable book is now hunted down. Those whose business it is to gather such information can tell in the case of dozens of books of much less importance exactly how many copies have been discovered and in whose possession they remain. But in the case of a book of little interest the most that can be said is that it is "undescribed," and i

logue might help to piece out a genealogy, or that it might count as another unit in statistics (a poor reason), or justify its purchase in some other haphazard way. But considerations of this kind, such as they are, cannot affect private collectors. A really dull book is merely a nuisance, and whether

o centuries instead of one, in the case of a book printed in London its value is none the greater for the extra hundred years. If, however, the sermon chanced to have been printed in 1700 in some provincial town, its age would distinctly be an element of value. Down to 1693 printing was only permitted in London, Oxford, Cambrid

The first and last of these have indexes of printers; in the second the primary arrangement is typographical. Thus all books which are old enough to have been printed before the end of 1640 are thereby invested with some slight interest solely as products of English presses. When we get back to before 1600 we are in the period covered by the different editions of th

ing easily demonstrated by the fact that a contemporary unadorned manuscript of the same work will probably have only a fraction of the value of the printed edition. There are, of course, other cases in which age may be said to have some secondary influ

Rarity, we come back to our original question as to what are the quali

y beautiful unity. No doubt as to this students run some risk of losing their sense of proportion. I myself am conscious, for instance, that I have looked at so many fifteenth century woodcuts, as compared with other works of art, that I distinctly overrate them. Mr. Robert Proctor, who knew more about fifteenth century books than any other man has ever known, or is ever likely to know, once said to me in all seriousness, that he did not think he had ever seen an ugly one. Allowing, however, fo

aser at a small price. The collector should leave it severely alone, partly because such "working copies" are the rightful perquisite of poor scholars, partly because, as he presumably buys books for his pleasure, he defeats his own object if, except in the case of the very rarest, he buys copies at which he cannot look without regretting that their headlines are cut off or the paper rotten through bad cleaning. Mr. Frede

hich it was carried from one country and city to another, and on the methods and lives of the early printers, is of interest, and in its degree and measure, of importance. Moreover, just as foxes are hunted because they show such good sport, so these early books are collected because the study of them combines in a singular degree the charms of scientific and historical discovery, with all sorts of literary, social, and human side-interests. The claim which Henry Bradshaw put forward that antiquarian bibliography must be studied scientifically has been perverted by the unwise

which thus become the sole means of differentiating them. As helps the bibliographer has, in the first place, such a classification of the two or three thousand fifteenth century types as he is able to carry in his head. This, in proportion to its completeness, enables him to narrow down the field to be investigated. Some small typographical peculiarity, the way in which the illuminator or rubricator has filled the blank spaces, the note which by good fortune he may have appended in this or some other known copy saying when he finished his work, similar notes by early purchasers which occasionally give the date of their bargain, these and other p

hey helped forward the classical renaissance, all over Europe the medieval books which were still read were seized on for the press, so that in the books printed between 1470 and 1490 we are presented with a conspectus or summary of medieval literature. Caxton printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and prose renderings of the old romances. The Italian presses were busy with Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The enormous size of the great Speculum or Encyclop?dia of Vincent de Bea

of the early seventies (and there is one still earlier example), did not become common till about 1490, and even twenty years later we find many books still without them. The information which we now expect to find on a titlepage was given in a paragraph, mostly at the end of the book, to which bibliographers have agreed to give the name "colophon," from κολοφ?ν, the Greek for a "finishing stroke." As we have already noted, in many books no information of this kind is given, but when printers, or their proof readers or editors, took the trouble to write a colophon at all, they had no reason to confine themselves to the sever

f, this was printed as a token of the master's pride in his work and his desire that it might be recognized as his, and many printers' marks are very decorative and even beautiful. Comparativ

outlines are often less graceful than those of their French and Italian competitors, had a special gift for characterization, and the quality of their work is much more uniform, perhaps because even before the invention of printing with movable types they were an organized craft. But in almost all fifteenth century cuts there is a certain naive simplicity which captivates those who allow themselves to study it, until they are apt, as the present writer has confessed is probably true of himself, to rate it too highly. As is the case with the more ambitious artists in oils of the same periods, wherever there was any demand for book-illustrators a local school with strongly marked characteristics at once appears. The work of the Augsburg cutters can be told at a glance from that executed at Strassburg, and the styles

this period Italy was slightly ahead; from 1530 to about 1570 France was far in advance of the rest of Europe; after 1570 there was a higher technical level in the Low Countries than elsewhere, and Plantin and the Elzevirs gained individual reputations. But there was very little good taste even in the Low Countries, and from a typographical standpoint the seventeenth century is a Sahara with hardly any oases. From this wilderness the eighteenth century, under the guidance of France and England, timidly felt its way back to a kind of trim neatness, but the positive experiments of Baskerville and the Didots, and in Italy of Bodoni, were not

style having been lost and no printer being able to do justice to the finer work on which designers insisted. But copper engravings throve in Germany and the Low Countries, and when the fashion of engraved frontispieces and titles took root in England in the last years of the

er a century, great technical skill and, at least in the "sixties," very fine design being marred by the poverty and often the tawdriness of its typographical set

e photogravure, and the colour processes now being rapidly perfected threaten to reduce all black and white illustrations to unimportance. In so far, however, as the new processes necessitate the use of heavily loaded papers as a condition of their being even tolerably well printed, the least antiquarian of collectors may be forgiven for neglecting the books illustrated by them. Some of them can only be preserved by every plate being backed wit

e of this series restricts the subject of the present volume to books which are prized either for their typographical beauty, their place in the

elp to found new libraries, not

also set up temporarily at Newcastle-on-T