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Updated: May 29, 2025
It is not, for instance, in the decorous quartos of Roughhead, but in the hoary blackletter folios, looking older than they are for blackletter adhered to the Statutes after it had been cast off by other literature that one will find such specimens of ancestral legislation as the following:
Around the walls stood several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with rows of gigantic folios, and black-letter quartos, and the upper with little parchment-covered duodecimos. Over the central bookcase was a bronze bust of Hippocrates, with which, according to some authorities, Dr. Heidegger was accustomed to hold consultations, in all difficult cases of his practice.
"Not more closely than I have observed you," said Marcus. "I have often wondered what stout old quartos you were reading. To tell you the truth, I inferred, from the dimensions of the books and your white cravat, that you were a clergyman."
They might be classified by the different sizes of books they affect as folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos but this would be neither an expressive nor a dignified classification. In enumerating the various orders to which Fitzpatrick Smart did not belong, I have mentioned many of the species, but a great many more might be added.
Ben Jonson's Underwoods with his own corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell's Poems, with autograph notes; manuscript volumes of letters, containing almost every famous name known to English literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the vast collection which filled the muniment room upstairs; books which had belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole; the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the quartos everything that the heart of the English collector could most desire was there.
It was natural that literature should reflect the tendency of the time; and the dumpy little quartos of controversy and piety which still crowd our older libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small beside that of the Bible.
But we regarded books, not pounds; and valued codices more than florins, and preferred paltry pamphlets to pampered palfreys. On tedious embassies and in perilous times, we carried about with us that fondness for books which many waters could not extinguish." And what books they were in those old days! What tall folios! What stout quartos!
But when one reads of twice that sum paid for the Swift, of £1300 for the thirteen quartos of the Somers Papers, and so forth, the feeling is not that the sums paid were at all too much for the work done, but that the publishers must have been very lucky men if they ever saw their money again.
This astonishing man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poet, a profound political speculator, a philosophic student of literature through all its chambers and recesses, was also a circumnavigator on the most pathless waters of scholasticism and metaphysics. Coleridge, Law's English version of Jacob a set of huge quartos.
This astonishing man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poet, a profound political speculator, a philosophic student of literature through all its chambers and recesses, was also a circumnavigator on the most pathless waters of scholasticism and metaphysics. Coleridge, Law's English version of Jacob a set of huge quartos.
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