THE BOOK-HUNTER etc BY JOHN HILL BURTON With Additional Notes BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE NEW YORK SHELDON AND COMPANY 335 Broadway 1863 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by SHELDON AND COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: PREFATORY NOTE TO THIS EDITION. ROM the beginning books have been reckoned almost among the necessaries of life by the people of this country. Of later years they have become objects of taste and luxury, and of collection for the purpose of special study. This disposition to possess books other than standard works of reference and the miscellaneous literature of the day is increasing rapidly among us; and the desire is very generally accompanied, at least in a certain degree, by the means for its gratification. To all those who have this taste, and to many who have it not, the following desultory dissertation on books, book-collecting, and book-collectors, cannot fail to be welcome for its always interesting, often serviceable, and sometimes amusing, information. Its influence upon those whose brains are touched with bibliomania cannot fail to be good; for it deals firmly, though gently, with their cherished folly, b and leads them away from that petty dilettanteism into which a love of rare and beautiful books is apt to fall, toward a manly and sensible indulgence of their inclination. The true book-lover will delight in the outside as well as the inside of his treasures; and he is more than mortal, if he does not glory a little in their accumulation, "for to have meny is a plesaunt thynge;" but he has passed a perilous line whose books have become to him other than the means and signs of culture, or the loved companions of his solitude. Against that danger there is in the following pages many a wholesome warning. It must be confessed, however, that there is much in this book which, though good in itself, is very wide of its main purpose. Not to speak of previous pages, the connection of the chapters upon John Spalding and Robert Wodrow with a dissertation upon bibliomania is of the slenderest; while the thread which served as the author's clue in passing to the curious and interesting accounts of the Early Northern Saints and the Early British Church Architecture is to my eye quite invisible. The "etc." of the title-page must be accepted in its widest meaning. "The Book-Hunter and other things is certainly a title broad enough to shelter any and all of the topics that have been treated under it; for in fact it stops only just short of de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. The author, conscious of this, half apologizes for making the book so large and so discursive; and if he had reason, how much more have I, who have added to its length and But as he had coneven to its discursiveness ! cerned himself not a little with the social and literary condition of this country, and had almost always led his reader to false conclusions, it was thought that in an edition intended for the United States these should be corrected. The doing of this naturally led to the doing of a little more ; the occupation beguiled hours of suffering when more serious and exacting duties could not be attended to; and the result may perhaps be deemed not entirely superfluous, except by that sort of men who would regard it as the greatest glory of the compilers of the Justinian Pandects that they reduced three millions of lines in the works of their predecessors to one hundred and fifty thousand. An excellent work, truly; and they who did it, public benefactors, and worthy of all the praise which their record of the feat silently solicited and artfully won. Yet in the interests of us all there must be some limit to the spare diet of words upon which some folk would have literature exist; |