Bookbinding in the higher styles is now done fairly well in England, though, in the opinion of many, the workmanship is not equal to that of the French artists of three hundred years ago.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] See Guigard, Armorial du Bibliophile, vol. i. p. 248.
[13] Mr. Quaritch, the bookseller, has in preparation a Dictionary of English Book Collectors, somewhat after the scheme of M. Guigard's book.
CHAPTER XI.
BOOKS TO BUY.
ONE of the most difficult branches of bibliography is that which treats of the books to choose and those to avoid, with reference mainly to their pecuniary value. Few collectors, who are not specialists, care very much for the utility of their libraries; in many cases, indeed, it is not a question of utility at all, but of extent, though I apprehend that no one would wish to crowd his shelves with rubbish merely for the sake of filling them. As an immense proportion of the books which have been published during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries clearly come under that category, the collector has much to avoid, and stands in need of considerable experience to enable him to make a selection.
Naudé, the apologist for "great men suspected of magic," whose patron, by the way, was Cardinal Mazarin, had a method of purchasing which, if not unique, was at any rate uncommon. His favourite plan was to buy up entire libraries, and sort them at his leisure; or when these were not available in the bulk, he would, as Rossi relates, enter a shop with a yard measure in his hand, and buy his books by the ell. Wherever he went, paper and print became scarce: "the stalls he encountered were like the towns through which Attila had swept with ruin in his train". Richard Heber, the bibliotaph, too, had collections of miscellaneous books at Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, and other continental towns, to say nothing of London, where the aristocracy among his treasures were deposited. The books were sold by auction after his death; the sale occupied 202 days, and flooded the market with rubbish—a worthy termination to a life of sweeping and gigantic purchases, made in the hope of acquiring single grains of wheat among his tons of worthless chaff.