Old And Rare Books An Elementary Lecture

Excerpt from Old and Rare Books: An Elementary Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution of South Wales, Swansea, on March 2nd, 1885 I Fear that I have chosen for my lecture a subject which can be but of comparatively little interest to the majority of you, and have consulted therein rather my own tastes and inclinations than those of my audience. For it is a fact that people in general take little account of old books - save, perhaps, for their convertibility into waste-paper. Nor is this little failing at all to be wondered at; as our greatest poet has said, "The world is still deceived with ornament;" and old books have, as a rule, little that is attractive about them externally; their covers are usually dull and forbidding; their backs are apt to be broken; they have a way of being short of the final pages; they are printed in crabbed and obscure characters; the foot-notes are often strangely hieroglyphical; - they have, in short, all that air of fustiness and old fogeyism that comes alike, with age, to books and men. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Official organ of the book trade of the United Kingdom.

Vols. for 1871-76, 1913-14 include an extra number, The Christmas bookseller, separately paged and not included in the consecutive numbering of the regular series.