letter man, or a tall copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man,
or an early-English dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or
a pasquinader, or an old brown calf man, or a Grangerite, {1} or a
tawny moroccoite, or a gilt topper, or a marbled insider, or an
editio princeps man." These nicknames briefly dispose into
categories a good many species of collectors. But there are plenty
of others. You may be a historical-bindings man, and hunt for books
that were bound by the great artists of the past and belonged to
illustrious collectors. Or you may be a Jametist, and try to gather
up the volumes on which Jamet, the friend of Louis Racine, scribbled
his cynical "Marginalia." Or you may covet the earliest editions of
modern poets--Shelley, Keats, or Tennyson, or even Ebenezer Jones.
Or the object of your desires may be the books of the French
romanticists, who flourished so freely in 1830. Or, being a person
of large fortune and landed estate, you may collect country
histories. Again, your heart may be set on the books illustrated by
Eisen, Cochin, and Gravelot, or Stothard and Blake, in the last
century. Or you may be so old-fashioned as to care for Aldine
classics, and for the books of the Giunta press. In fact, as many
as are the species of rare and beautiful books, so many are the
species of collectors. There is one sort of men, modest but not
unwise in their generations, who buy up the pretty books published
in very limited editions by French booksellers, like MM. Lemerre and
Jouaust. Already their reprints of Rochefoucauld's first edition,
of Beaumarchais, of La Fontaine, of the lyrics attributed to
Moliere, and other volumes, are exhausted, and fetch high prices in
the market. By a singular caprice, the little volumes of Mr.
Thackeray's miscellaneous writings, in yellow paper wrappers (when
they are first editions), have become objects of desire, and their
old modest price is increased twenty fold. It is not always easy to