Books and Bookmen

MADAME, it is no modish thing, The bookman’s tribute that I bring; A talk of antiquaries grey, Dust unto dust this many a day, Gossip of texts and bindings old, Of faded type, a...

Equally fine is the ‘Cæsar’ of 1635, which, with the ‘Virgil’ of 1636 and the ‘Imitation’ without date, M. Willems thinks the most successful works of the Elzevirs, “one of the...

And so the registers run on. Sometimes they tell of the death of a glutton, sometimes of a _Grace wyfe_ (grosse femme). Now the bell tolls for the decease of a duke, now of a “d...

The next bogie, so limp and washed-out as he seems, with his white, drooping, dripping arms and hands, reminds us of that horrid French species of apparition, “la lavandière de...

It is amusing to remember that the great and erudite Rabelais was taken in by some pseudo-classical fragments. The joker of jokes was hoaxed. He published, says Mr. Besant, “a c...

So universal and ardent has the love of magnificent books been in France, that it would be possible to write a kind of bibliomaniac history of that country. All her rulers, king...

The natural sympathy of collectors “to middle fortune born” is not with the rich men whose sport in book-hunting resembles the _battue_. We side with the poor hunters of the wil...

The stranger stretched out his arm, which swiftly elongated itself till the hand disappeared from view round the corner. In a moment the hand returned with the catalogue. The pa...

Doubtless Racine had the book bound before he presented it. “People are discontented,” writes his son Louis, “if you offer them a book in a simple marbled paper cover.” I could...