"MISSAL ILLUMINATIONS.


FIFTY DIFFERENT CAPITAL LETTERS _on_ VELLUM; _all in rich Gold
and Colours. Many 3 inches square: the floral decorations
are of great beauty, ranging from the XIIth to XVth century.
Mounted on stout card-board_. IN NICE PRESERVATION, L6 6_s_.


These beautiful letters have been cut from precious
MSS., and as specimens of early art are extremely
valuable, many of them being worth 15_s_. each."


Mr. Proeme 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. Another is a volume of coarse or quaint titles,
which certainly answer the end of showing how idiotic and conceited
some authors have been. Here you find Dr. Sib's "Bowels opened
in Divers Sermons," 1650, cheek by jowl with the discourse attributed
falsely to Huntington, the Calvinist, "Die and be damned,"
with many others too coarse to be quoted. The odd titles adopted
for his poems by Taylor, the water-poet, enliven several pages,