The building up of the British museum collection of incunabula.

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Small edition of perhaps 20 - 30 copies. Printed wrappers, small 4to, 23 cm, pp. Uncommon separate printing: from 1894 twenty copies of any paper printed in the Transactions were presented to the writer, and presumably a few more were run off. A paper read before the Bibliographical society, 20 October 1924. Reprinted from the Library. 22 cm. Fourth ser., vol. 5, no. 3, Dec. 1924, p. [193]-214 "Transactions of the Bibliographical society. Second ser., vol. V. From the text: "The British Museum collection of some 11,500 books printed in the fifteenth century is far from being the largest in existence, though it is one of the largest. Munich is credited in Minerva with having 16,000, and at Paris the combined resources of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Biblio thèque de l'Arsenal, and the Ste Geneviève and Mazarin collec tion must considerably exceed even that large total. But the proportion of duplicates both at Paris and at Munich is very large, and the possession by the British Museum of at least 9,850 different editions puts it very well in the front rank. I will own, however, to a frustrated ambition to be able to say, before I left, that the Museum had ten thousand different editions or issues. It would have been quite easy to fulfil this ambition by picking up Strasburg, Cologne, or Venice books of the last decade of the fifteenth century at small prices ; but with the ideal of ten thousand different editions as a pleasant round-number at which to close the collection (which has now been receiving special attention for fully thirty years), there has grown up a more discriminating desire to select these final acquisitions so as to fill real gaps." Scarce - no copy on JISC Discover. Wrappers slightly browned, Good. N° de ref. del artículo ABE-51486

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