of manners and customs. Still, of the earliest printed books,
collectors prefer such rare and beautiful ones as the oldest printed
Bibles: German, English,--as Taverner's and the Bishop's,--or
Hebrew and Greek, or the first editions of the ancient classics,
which may contain the readings of MSS. now lost or destroyed.
Talking of early Bibles, let us admire the luck and prudence of a
certain Mr. Sandford. He always longed for the first Hebrew Bible,
but would offer no fancy price, being convinced that the book would
one day fall in his way. His foreboding was fulfilled, and he
picked up his treasure for ten shillings in a shop in the Strand.
The taste for incunabula, or very early printed books, slumbered in
the latter half of the sixteenth, and all the seventeenth century.
It revived with the third jubilee of printing in 1740, and since
then has refined itself, and only craves books very early, very
important, or works from the press of Caxton, the St. Albans
Schoolmaster, or other famous old artists. Enough has been said to
show the beginner, always enthusiastic, that all old books are not
precious. For further information, the "Biography and Typography of
William Caxton," by Mr. Blades (Trubner, London, 1877), may be
consulted with profit.

Following the categories into which M. Brunet classifies desirable
books in his invaluable manual, we now come to books printed on
vellum, and on peculiar papers. At the origin of printing, examples
of many books, probably presentation copies, were printed on vellum.
There is a vellum copy of the celebrated Florentine first edition of
Homer; but it is truly sad to think that the twin volumes, Iliad and
Odyssey, have been separated, and pine in distant libraries. Early
printed books on vellum often have beautifully illuminated capitals.
Dibdin mentions in "Bibliomania" (London, 1811), p. 90, that a M.