3. Irregularity and rudeness of type is a "note" of the primitive
printing press, which very early disappeared. Nothing in the
history of printing is so remarkable as the beauty of almost its
first efforts. Other notes are -

4. The absence of figures at the top of the pages, and of
signatures at the foot. The thickness and solidity of the paper,
the absence of the printer's name, of the date, and of the name of
the town where the press stood, and the abundance of crabbed
abbreviations, are all marks, more or less trustworthy, of the
antiquity of books. It must not be supposed that all books
published, let us say before 1500, are rare, or deserve the notice
of the collector. More than 18,000 works, it has been calculated,
left the press before the end of the fifteenth century. All of
these cannot possibly be of interest, and many of them that are
"rare," are rare precisely because they are uninteresting. They
have not been preserved because they were thought not worth
preserving. This is a great cause of rarity; but we must not
hastily conclude that because a book found no favour in its own age,
therefore it has no claim on our attention. A London bookseller
tells me that he bought the "remainder" of Keats's "Endymion" for
fourpence a copy! The first edition of "Endymion" is now rare and
valued. In trying to mend the binding of an old "Odyssey" lately, I
extracted from the vellum covers parts of two copies of a very
scarce and curious French dictionary of slang, "Le Jargon, ou
Langage de l'Argot Reforme." This treatise may have been valueless,
almost, when it appeared, but now it is serviceable to the
philologist, and to all who care to try to interpret the slang
ballades of the poet Villon. An old pamphlet, an old satire, may
hold the key to some historical problem, or throw light on the past