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A collection of title pages by the Plantin Press (17th/18th C.)
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<p>[QUOTE="2manycats, post: 9542005, member: 13761"]A lovely group. I suggest a possible alternative origin: title page collecting was an execrable hobby in the Victorian era and earlier, much to the bane of future bibliophiles, so maybe these are part of one such collection, though the one double you have does argue for printer's scraps.</p><p><br /></p><p>See Blades' "Enemies of Books": p. 118: "it is a serious matter when Nature produces such a wicked old biblioclast as John Bagford, one of the founders of the Society of Antiquaries, who, in the beginning of the last century, went about the country, from library to library, tearing away title pages from rare books of all sizes. These he sorted out into nationalities and towns, and so, with a lot of hand-bills, manuscript notes, and miscellaneous collections of all kinds, formed over a hundred folio volumes, now preserved in the British Museum. That they are of service as materials in compiling a general history of printing cannot be denied, but the destruction of many rare books was the result, and more than counter-balanced any benefit bibliographers will ever receive from them."</p><p><br /></p><p>P. 120: "Mr. Proëme is a man well known to the London dealers in old books. He is wealthy, and cares not what he spends to carry out his bibliographical craze, which is the collection of title pages. These he ruthlessly extracts, frequently leaving the decapitated carcase of the books, for which he cares not, behind him. Unlike the destroyer Bagford, he has no useful object in view, but simply follows a senseless kind of classification. For instance: One set of volumes contains nothing but copper-plate engraved titles, and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios of the seventeenth century if they cross his path."[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="2manycats, post: 9542005, member: 13761"]A lovely group. I suggest a possible alternative origin: title page collecting was an execrable hobby in the Victorian era and earlier, much to the bane of future bibliophiles, so maybe these are part of one such collection, though the one double you have does argue for printer's scraps. See Blades' "Enemies of Books": p. 118: "it is a serious matter when Nature produces such a wicked old biblioclast as John Bagford, one of the founders of the Society of Antiquaries, who, in the beginning of the last century, went about the country, from library to library, tearing away title pages from rare books of all sizes. These he sorted out into nationalities and towns, and so, with a lot of hand-bills, manuscript notes, and miscellaneous collections of all kinds, formed over a hundred folio volumes, now preserved in the British Museum. That they are of service as materials in compiling a general history of printing cannot be denied, but the destruction of many rare books was the result, and more than counter-balanced any benefit bibliographers will ever receive from them." P. 120: "Mr. Proëme is a man well known to the London dealers in old books. He is wealthy, and cares not what he spends to carry out his bibliographical craze, which is the collection of title pages. These he ruthlessly extracts, frequently leaving the decapitated carcase of the books, for which he cares not, behind him. Unlike the destroyer Bagford, he has no useful object in view, but simply follows a senseless kind of classification. For instance: One set of volumes contains nothing but copper-plate engraved titles, and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios of the seventeenth century if they cross his path."[/QUOTE]
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