Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON. 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 |