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Fine Books By: Alfred W. Pollard (1859-1944) |
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BY
ALFRED W. POLLARD
[Illustration: The Connoisseur's Library] NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
LONDON: METHUEN & CO. LTD.
1912
TO
SIR EDWARD MAUNDE THOMPSON, G.C.B.
DIRECTOR AND PRINCIPAL LIBRARIAN OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
1888 1909
PREFACE
If the mere taking of trouble ensured good work, this contribution to
the Connoisseur's Library should be entitled to the modest praise of
being "superior to the rest" of its author's book makings, since it has
been ten years on the stocks and much of it has been written two or
three times over, either because the writer's own information had
increased or to take account of the successful researches of others. Yet
in the end defeat in one main point has to be acknowledged. The book was
begun with a confident determination to cover the whole ground, from the
beginnings of printing and printed book illustration down to our own
day, and in the case of printing the survey has been carried through,
however sketchily. But the corresponding survey of book illustration
ends, with rather obvious marks of compression and fatigue, about 1780,
leaving the story of a hundred and thirty years of very interesting
picture work untold. Pioneering is always so exciting that recognition
of the impossibility of carrying out the full plan of the book within
the limits either of the present volume or of the author's working life
was not made without sincere regret. The subject, however, of the
abandoned chapter was not only very large, but very miscellaneous, and
the survey for it would have had to include at least three other
countries (France, Germany, and the United States) besides our own. To
one section, moreover, that of illustrations in colour, a separate
volume of this series has already been devoted. The author would,
therefore, fain console himself with the hope that in one or more other
volumes a competent account may be given by some other hand of the
wood engravings, etchings, steel engravings, and lithographs, with which
books have been decorated since 1780. The poorness of paper and print
with which these modern illustrated books have too often been
handicapped has caused collectors to take little interest in them it
even suggested the unworthy excuse for the failure to write the missing
chapter that these are not really Fine Books , but only books with fine
pictures in them, and so are outside our subject. But both students and
collectors have their duties as well as their delights, and in view of
the high artistic value of quite a large proportion of these modern
illustrations, the preservation of clean and uncropped copies of the
books in which they occur and the tribute of careful cataloguing and
description are certainly their due. While the desired completeness has not been attained the ground here
covered is still very wide, and for the book as a whole no more can be
claimed than that it is a compilation from the best sources a list of
these will be found in the Bibliography controlled by some personal
knowledge, the amount of which naturally varies very much from chapter
to chapter. The obligations incurred in writing it have thus been great,
and a sad number of these are to fellow workers and friends Proctor,
John Macfarlane, W. H. Allnutt, Konrad Burger, Dr. Lippmann, Anatole
Claudin, and the Prince d'Essling who have died while the book has been
in progress. Among those still happily alive acknowledgment must
specially be made to Sir Sidney Colvin for help received from his
masterly introduction to the great monograph on Early Engravers and
Engraving in England published by the Trustees of the British Museum;
to Mr. A. M. Hind for use made of the list of engravers and their works
in the same book; to Mr. Campbell Dodgson for dippings into the wealth
of information in his Catalogue of German and Flemish Woodcuts in the
Print Room of the British Museum (Vols. I and II); to Mr. Gordon Duff
for help derived from his three series of Sandars Lectures on English
Printing, and to Mr... Continue reading book >>
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