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He who has a passion for old editions of the classics in vellum bindings Stephenses or Aldines will not be put off with a copy of Robinson Crusoe or the Ready Reckoner, bound to match and range with the contents of his shelves.
The splendid Aldines, on vellum, fell into the hands of an ignorant notary with a new room to furnish: and he thought fit to strip off all the bindings, that had been a marvel of Italian art, and to replace them with the gaudy coverings that were more suited to his bourgeois desires. M. de Lincy remarks that Grolier's books were strangely neglected through a great part of the eighteenth century.
Slates and primers became suddenly odious to a person aware of the existence of Aldines and Elzevirs, and bitten with the passion, then just let loose on the book-buying world, for first editions of the famous books of the century. Whenever that sum in the savings bank should have reached a certain height, he would become a second-hand bookseller with a stall.
I love them as I never can the moderns; they are my most intimate friends, my heart's own darlings. And how I love to lavish money on them, to see them adorned in every way! How I love to heap them up, Aldines, and Elzevirs, and Baskervilles, and Biponts, in all their grace and majesty. This was what filled that London box.
Among them are some splendid manuscripts from the library of Mathias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and a vast collection of choice Aldines bound in the costliest manner. No less than 1,200 volumes of the sixteenth century are here, amongst these several specimens of topography printed in Franche-Comte.
The type of both is small, and, though distinct, especially the Thucydides, not at all what we should call elegant. In fact, elegant Greek type is a very late invention. There is, I believe, no claim to textual criticism in these early Aldines; the publishers printed from such manuscripts as they could get.
First, I show you a pair of Aldines, and, what is better, a pair editionum principum, the first Sophocles and the first Thucydides. Both have the proper attestation at the end that they come from the Aldi in Venice in the year 1502, the Thucydides in May, and the Sophocles in August; hence the former has not the Aldine anchor at the extreme end.
All lovers of rare books are admirers of what they call Aldines and Elzevirs that is, books printed at the press of Aldo Manuzio and his family at Venice in the sixteenth century, and by the Elzevir family in Holland in the seventeenth century. We speak of a Bradshaw and a Baedeker to describe the best-known of all railway guides and guide-books.
That one who sees the universe move round him understandingly, and fathoms in some degree the wonder and the beauty of the eternal laws, must be a pleasanter object to his Creator than any other who, merely employing pleasure, makes a fetich of his luxuries, his Aldines and Elzevirs, and, dying, goes into the unknown world no wiser concerning the ends and aims of this one than when he entered it.
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