Andrew Lang

Books and Bookmen Andrew Lang

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..