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Sulla took the city soon afterwards, and carried the books to Rome, and here more damage was done by the careless editing of Tyrannion, who made a trade of copying 'Aristotle's books' for the libraries that were rising on all sides at Rome. The Romans learned to be book-collectors in gathering the spoils of war.
For the use of book-collectors, I may go on to say that any one who is offered a copy of the edition of The History of Selborne of 1789, should be careful to see that not merely the plates I have mentioned are in their places, but that the engraved sub-title, with a print of the seal of Selborne Priory, occurs opposite the blank leaf which answers to page 306.
But, since we have become a nation of book-collectors, and since there exists, as Mr. Coleridge describes it, "a reading public," this principle of honour is altered. Wealthy and even noble authors are proud to receive the largest tribute to their genius, because this tribute is the certain evidence of the number who pay it.
Robert Elsmere says, "Miracles do not happen" at least, to book-collectors. "Murray sighs o'er Pope and Swift, and many a treasure more," said Cowper, when Lord Mansfield's house was burned, and we have all had experience of the sorrows of Murray.
Clarke in his Repertorium Bibliographicum observed that the penny at that time seems to have been more than the equivalent of our pound sterling in the purchase of black-letter rarities. Jean Grolier, the prince of book-collectors, was born at Lyons in 1479. His family had come originally from Verona, but had long been naturalised in France.
This furnishes another evidence of the low estate of bibliography in England, where, in a nation full of rich book-collectors and owners of fine libraries, almost no buyers are found for the most extensive bibliography ever published, a national work, furnishing so copious and useful a key to the literature of the world in every department of human knowledge.
Before leaving the subject of the libraries in the two great capitals, we ought to bestow a word or two upon those splendidly endowed institutions by which a few Florentine book-collectors have kept up the literary fame of their city, without pretending to emulate the splendour of the Médici, or the wealth of the Vatican, or the curious antiquities of St. Mark. We desire especially to say something in remembrance of the 'Riccardiana' which, from its foundation in the sixteenth century, has been famous for the value of its historical manuscripts. Among these are the journals of Fr
We have still to notice one or two of Grolier's contemporaries, who may be classed as great book-collectors of an old-fashioned type. But their function was not so much to collect books as rare and curious objects as to undertake the duty of saving the records of past history from destruction.
For example, there was one Thomas Blinton. He was a man who wickedly adorned his volumes with morocco bindings, while his wife 'sighed in vain for some old point d'Alençon lace. He was a man who was capable of bidding fifteen pounds for a Foppens edition of the essays of Montaigne, though fifteen pounds happened to be 'exactly the amount which he owed his plumber and gas-fitter, a worthy man with a large family. From this fictitious Thomas Blinton all the way back to Richard Heber, who was very real, and who piled up books as other men heap together vulgar riches, book-collectors have been a picturesque folk.
As I have said, however, the raison d'etre of the club, and the feature upon which its fame chiefly rests, is its collection of rare books, and of these by far the most interesting are its own publications. Even its catalogues are works of art, published in numbered editions, and sought by libraries and book-collectors.
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