The Library | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1881 Macmillan and Co. edition.

THE LIBRARY

Contents:
PREFATORY NOTE AN APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK-HUNTER
THE LIBRARY THE BOOKS OF THE COLLECTOR
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

Books, books again, and books once more! These are our theme, which
some miscall Mere madness, setting little store By copies either short
or tall. But you, O slaves of shelf and stall! We rather write for you that
hold Patched folios dear, and prize "the small, Rare volume, black with
tarnished gold." A. D.

PREFATORY NOTE

The pages in this volume on illuminated and other MSS. (with the
exception of some anecdotes about Bussy Rabutin and Julie de
Rambouillet) have been contributed by the Rev. W. J. Loftie, who has
also written on early printed books (pp. 94-95). The pages on the
Biblioklept (pp. 46-56) are reprinted, with the Editor's kind permission,
from the Saturday Review; and a few remarks on the moral lessons of
bookstalls are taken from an essay in the same journal.
Mr. Ingram Bywater, Fellow of Exeter College, and lately sub-
Librarian of the Bodleian, has very kindly read through the proofs of
chapters I., II., and III., and suggested some alterations.
Thanks are also due to Mr. T. R. Buchanan, Fellow of All Souls
College, for two plates from his "Book-bindings in All Souls Library"
(printed for private circulation), which he has been good enough to lend
me. The plates are beautifully drawn and coloured by Dr. J. J. Wild.
Messrs. George Bell & Sons, Messrs. Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., and
Messrs. Chatto & Windus, must be thanked for the use of some of the
woodcuts which illustrate the concluding chapter. A. L.

AN APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK-HUNTER

"All men," says Dr. Dibdin, "like to be their own librarians." A writer
on the library has no business to lay down the law as to the books that
even the most inexperienced amateurs should try to collect. There are
books which no lover of literature can afford to be without; classics,
ancient and modern, on which the world has pronounced its verdict.
These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are
the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer,
Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and
Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,--these
every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or
in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we go
beyond it, the tastes of men begin to differ very widely. An assortment
of broadsheet ballads and scrap-books, bought in boyhood, was the
nucleus of Scott's library, rich in the works of poets and magicians, of
alchemists, and anecdotists. A childish liking for coloured prints of
stage characters, may be the germ of a theatrical collection like those