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Grolier Club Publications part 4

The most important publication of the club, even more important than the "Knickerbocker," is the "Philobiblon" of Richard de Bury. The good Bishop of Durham holds perhaps the foremost place among all British book lovers, just as Grolier holds the foremost place among all French book lovers; and it was most fit and appropriate that a company of American book lovers named for the Frenchman should choose for reverent reproduction the masterpiece of the Englishman.

The task was honorable but laborious; and it was undertaken not lightly or in a spirit of levity, but with courage, determination, and forethought. The mechanical execution was confided to Mr. De Vinne, than whom no one was worthier. The literary labor was undertaken by Professor Andrew Fleming West of Princeton, who had already lectured before the club upon the book he was to edit. Professor West shrunk not from the toil of a dutiful comparison of manuscripts and early editions that a proper text might be established; and this proper text, most devoutly amended and revised, the club sent forth as the first volume. In the second was contained Professor West's sturdy and precise rendering of the original Latin into our later English. These two volumes, long delayed by the ardent and arduous labors of the editor, were followed by a third volume in which was to be found an introduction, an account of the author, and such notes as were needful for the elucidation of the work.

The edition was limited to two hundred and ninety seven copies on paper and three on vellum, one of which latter is properly reserved for the library of the club. The volumes are clad in pure vellum covers, stamped with the gold seal of the good bishop, while within there is a novel lining paper, rich in colour and congruent in design. The form is a small quarto, with a page six inches wide and a little less than eight inches long. The paper, a so called" white antique," is American handmade by the Brown Company, and Mr. De Vinne regards it as whiter, clearer, and better than any English, Dutch, or Italian printing paper.

The typography is not merely decent and seemly; it is as exact and as beautiful as the utmost skill and loving care could make it. The type of the first volume, which contains the Latin text, is a pica black letter; the second volume, which contains the English translation, being set in modern Roman (not old style) small pica. The black letter types were got out of the vaults of Sir Charles Reed's Sons for Mr. De Vinne by Mr. Talbot Baines Reed, and they are drives of punches believed to have been cut in France in the first half of the sixteenth century. There are rubricated initials, of a full bodied vermilion not often seen nowadays. There are head pieces and tail pieces, some of them, and the more ingenious, having been devised by Mr. G. W. Edwards. There is a page of fair proportion (as we have seen), and there is a type rightly adjusted thereto; and there is the very perfection of press work, alike impeccable in impression and in register. Herein indeed we see the final superiority of the best modern printing by improved machines when guided by a fine artistic sense; such registry as this would be absolutely accidental, not to say impossible, on the hand-presses of the early printers.

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