Books and Bookmen
Books and Bookmen
Book Excerpt
ice. When a man is
first smitten with the pleasant fever of book-collecting, it is for
Elzevirs that he searches. At first he thinks himself in amazing
luck. In Booksellers' Row and in Castle Street he "picks up," for a
shilling or two, Elzevirs, real or supposed. To the beginner, any
book with a sphere on the title-page is an Elzevir. For the
beginner's instruction, two copies of spheres are printed here. The
second is a sphere, an ill-cut, ill-drawn sphere, which is not
Elzevirian at all. The mark was used in the seventeenth century by
many other booksellers and printers. The first, on the other hand,
is a true Elzevirian sphere, from a play of Moliere's, printed in
1675. Observe the comparatively neat drawing of the first sphere,
and be not led away after spurious imitations.
Beware, too, of the vulgar error of fancying that little duodecimos with the mark of the fox and the bee's nest, and the motto "Quaerendo," come from the press of the Elzevirs. The mark is that of Abraham Wolfgang, which
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