_Literary Executor of the late
Henry Stevens of Vermont.
39, Great Russell Street,
_ London, W.C.
_ 10th February, 1900._

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
THOMAS HARIOT

AND HIS

ASSOCIATES

COLLECTORS OF RARE English books always speak reverently and even
mysteriously of the 'quarto Hariot' as they do of the 'first folio.' It
is given to but few of them ever to touch or to see it, for not more
than seven copies are at present known to exist. Even four of these are
locked up in public libraries, whence they are never likely to pass into
private hands.

One copy is in the Grenville Library; another is in the Bodleian; a
third slumbers in the University of Leyden; a fourth is in the Lenox
Library; a fifth in Lord Taunton's; a sixth in the late Henry Huth's;
and a seventh produced £300 in 1883 in the Drake sale.

The little quarto volume of Hariot's Virginia is as important as it is
rare, and as beautiful as it is important. Few English books of its
time, 1588, surpass it either in typographic execution or literary
merit. It was not probably thrown into the usual channels of commerce,
as it bears the imprint of a privately-printed book, without the name or