Of nineteen volumes dealing with the James gang, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse James,” by Robertus Love (New York, 1925) seems the most thorough and unbiased biography. An important and scarce James item is “The Trial of Frank James for Murder,” by George Miller, Jr., privately printed in Missouri in 1898. It gives in detail information not to be found elsewhere. The list could go on indefinitely, for the period of the gunmen extended from the Civil War to the middle 90’s, and the literature on the subject is limitless. Much of it, of course, is lurid, sensational material, written solely for entertainment and with no claim to historical accuracy. But there are also many more pretentious works: good, bad and indifferent. Many otherwise excellent biographies of Western gunmen are marred by the fact that the author’s treatment is colored by his admiration or contempt for his subject. But, perhaps, that is a failing of biographers in general.
Everything relative to
North Carolina Literature
Old books, letters, pamphlets and newspapers bought and sold.
S. W. WORTHINGTON
Wilson North Carolina
INCUNABULA
In a recent article in the New York TIMES, Philip Brooks, noted rare book commentator, remarked that there is nothing particularly mysterious about incunabula. A polysyllabic Latin word with an impressive sound, it means simply cradle books, or books published during the infancy of printing. They occupy only a short span in the history of books, no more than about fifty years, from the middle to the end of the fifteenth century. To many collectors they are the true aristocrats, not only for their antiquity, but often for their artistic beauty. For nearly 500 years printers have been trying but none have been able to approach the typographical perfection of the Gutenberg Bible, which was finished around 1455. Even the paper of these ancients is of superior quality that they will outlive most books issued today.
Mr. Brooks further declared that while a common objection to collecting incunabula is that they are incomprehensible, being printed in dead languages that nobody reads nowadays, it is nevertheless a fact that before the end of the century, books were being published freely in the vernacular, and Caxton and his successors were making valuable contributions to English literature in their native tongue.
Since the middle of the seventeenth century, when the output of the fifteenth century first began to attract notice as collectible objects, they have been subject to such intensive scrutiny that they are now the most thoroughly bibliographed books in the world. From Panzer (1793-1803) and Hain (1826-1834), who described 16,300 titles, the scientific study evolved through the brilliant work of Bradshaw and Proctor until its culmination in the British Museum catalogue.
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