P. 117. Howell's New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets.—The Huth fragment seems as if it would complete the unique, but imperfect, Capell copy.
P. 119. A Hundred Merry Tales.—Besides the Huth mutilated copy and the Göttingen complete one (of 1526) there is a fragment at the Birthplace Museum, Stratford. I saw it there, but did not note to what impression it belonged.
P. 122. Four Sons of Aymon, 1504.—A fine copy is offered at 15s. in a catalogue about 1760. Of the Famous history of the vertuous and godly woman Judith, 1565, all that is so far discoverable is that it is a translation in English metre by Edward Jenynges. A title-page, preserved among Ames's collections at the British Museum, is copied by me in Bibl. Coll., 1903, pp. 210-11.
P. 125. Destruction of Books.—Untold numbers of volumes have also been sacrificed to the accumulation of material on special lines. Tons of the Annual Register, Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries, and the like, have been lost, if it be a loss, in this way. A few pages, maybe, are all that survive of a book, and when the library of the specialist is sold, the rest shares the same fate at the hands of an unsympathetic purchaser.
P. 126. Unique copies.—The play of Orestes, 1567, came to light at Plymouth about forty years ago with an equally unique issue of one of Drayton's pieces. Of such things the present writer has met in the course of a lengthened career with treasures which would make a small library, and has beheld no duplicates.
P. 128. Fragments.—The Fragment has within the last twenty or thirty years come into surprising evidence, and in my latest instalment of Bibliographical Notes, 1903, I have been enabled to supply numerous deficiencies in existing records even of modern date from a variety of sources not ostensibly connected with Bagford, Fenn, or any other culprit of this type, shewing that the process of disappearance was in universal operation, and that mere chance arrested it here and there just in the nick of time.
P. 128. Capital Books.—It is perhaps not unfair to add that although Milton's Poems, 1645, is not a rare book, it is eminently so in an irreproachable state, to say nothing of such a copy as the Bodleian one presented by the poet himself, which one of the earlier officials, a Dr. Hudson, thought might be thrown away without detriment to the library.
P. 171. Early Prices of Binding.—The books or pamphlets issued at one penny, that is, a silver penny of the day, were usually stitched or sewn.
The edition of the Book of Common Prayer, 1552, was sold, bound in parchment, at 3s. 4d., and in leather, paper boards, or clasps, at 4s. But in the next impression, it being in contemplation to suppress certain matter, the price was to be reduced in proportion.
P. 183. There has been recently added to Cohen's work a companion one on the French illustrated literature of the nineteenth century.
