question, for instance, that engravings or designs by artists such as Holbein and Dürer and the Little Masters of Germany, by Charles Eisen, Hubert François Bourguignon, dit Gravelot, D. N. Chodowiecki or Simon Gribelin; by W. Marshall, W. Faithorne, David Loggan, Sir Robert Strange, Francesco Piranesi; by Hogarth, Cipriani, Bartolozzi, John Keyse Sherwin, William Henshaw, Hewitt or Bewick and his imitators; or, to come to modern times, that the occasional examples traced to the handicraft of Thomas Stothard, Thackeray, Millais, Maclise, Bell Scott, T. G. Jackson, Walter Crane, Caldecott, Stacy Marks, Edwin Abbey, Kate Greenaway, Gordon Browne, Herbert Railton, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Parsons, D. Y. Cameron, Paul Avril—are worth collecting.
Until the advent of the new taste the devising of book-plates was almost invariably left to the routine skill of the heraldic stationer. Of late years the composition of personal book-tokens has become recognized as a minor branch of a higher art, and there has come into fashion an entirely new class of designs which, for all their wonderful variety, bear as unmistakable a character as that of the most definite styles of bygone days. Broadly speaking, it may be said that the purely heraldic element tends to become subsidiary and the allegorical or symbolic to assert itself more strongly. Among modern English artists who have more specially paid attention to the devising of book-plates, and have produced admirable designs, may be mentioned C. W. Sherborn, G. W. Eve, Robert Anning Bell, J. D. Batten, Erat Harrison, J. Forbes Nixon, Charles Ricketts, John Vinycomb, John Leighton and Warrington Hogg. The development in various directions of process work, by facilitating and cheapening the reproduction of beautiful and elaborate designs, has no doubt helped much to popularize the book-plate—a thing which in older days was almost invariably restricted to ancestral libraries or to collections otherwise important. Thus the great majority of modern plates are reproduced by process. There are, however, a few artists left who devote to book-plates their skill with the graver. Some of the work they produce challenges comparison with the finest productions of bygone engravers. Of these the best-known are C. W. Sherborn (see Plate) and G. W. Eve in England, and in America J. W. Spenceley of Boston, Mass., K. W. F. Hopson of New Haven, Conn., and E. D. French of New York City (see Plate).
Authorities.—The curious in the matter of book-plate composition will find it treated in the various volumes of the Ex-libris Series (London). See also A. Poulet-Malassis, Les Ex-libris français (1875); Hon. J. Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley), A Guide to the Study of Book-plates (1880); Sir A. W. Franks, Notes on Book-plates, 1574–1800 (private, 1887); Friedrich Warnecke, Die deutschen Bücherzeichen (1890); Henri Bouchot, Les Ex-libris et les marques de possession du livre (1891); Egerton Castle, English Book-plates (1892); Walter Hamilton, French Book-plates (1892), Dated Book-plates (1895); H. W. Fincham, Artists and Engravers of British and American Book-plates (1897); German Book-plates, by Count K. E. zu Leiningen-Westerburg, translated by G. R. Denis (1901). (E. Ca.)
BOOK-SCORPION, or False Scorpion, minute arachnids superficially resembling tailless scorpions and belonging to the order Pseudoscorpiones of the class Arachnida. Occurring in all temperate and tropical countries, book-scorpions live for the most part under stones, beneath the bark of trees or in vegetable detritus. A few species, however, like the common British forms Chelifer cancroides and Chiridium museorum, frequent human dwellings and are found in books, old chests, furniture, &c.; others like Ganypus littoralis and allied species may be found under stones or pieces of coral between tide-marks; while others, which are for the most part blind, live permanently in dark caves. Their food consists of minute insects or mites. It is possibly for the purpose of feeding on parasitic mites that book-scorpions lodge themselves beneath the wing-cases of large tropical beetles; and the same explanation, in default of a better, may be extended to their well-known and oft-recorded habit of seizing hold of the legs of horse-flies or other two-winged insects. For safety during hibernation and moulting, book-scorpions spin a small spherical cocoon. They are oviparous; and the eggs after being laid are carried about by the mother, attached to the lower surface of her body, the young remaining with their parent until they have acquired their definite form and are able to shift for themselves.
(R. I. P.)
BOOKSELLING. The trade in books is of a very ancient date. The early poets and orators recited their effusions in public to induce their hearers to possess written copies of their poems or orations. Frequently they were taken down viva voce, and transcripts sold to such as were wealthy enough to purchase. In the book of Jeremiah the prophet is represented as dictating to Baruch the scribe, who, when questioned, described the mode in which his book was written. These scribes were, in fact, the earliest booksellers, and supplied copies as they were demanded. Aristotle, we are told, possessed a somewhat extensive library; and Plato is recorded to have paid the large sum of one hundred minae for three small treatises of Philolaus the Pythagorean. When the Alexandrian library was founded about 300 B.C., various expedients were resorted to for the purpose of procuring books, and this appears to have stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers, who were termed βιβλὶων κάπηλοι. In Rome, towards the end of the republic, it became the fashion to have a library as part of the household furniture; and the booksellers, librarii (Cic. D. Leg. iii. 20) or bibliopolae (Martial iv. 71, xiii. 3), carried on a flourishing trade. Their shops (taberna librarii, Cicero, Phil. ii. 9) were chiefly in the Argiletum, and in the Vicus Sandalarius. On the door, or on the side posts, was a list of the books on sale; and Martial (i. 118), who mentions this also, says that a copy of his First Book of Epigrams might be purchased for five denarii. In the time of Augustus the great booksellers were the Sosii. According to Justinian (ii. 1. 33), a law was passed securing to the scribes the property in the materials used; and in this may, perhaps, be traced the first germ of the modern law of copyright.
The spread of Christianity naturally created a great demand for copies of the Gospels and other sacred books, and later on for missals and other devotional volumes for church and private use. Benedict Biscop, the founder of the abbey at Wearmouth in England, brought home with him from France (671) a whole cargo of books, part of which he had “bought,” but from whom is not mentioned. Passing by the intermediate ages we find that previous to the Reformation, the text writers or stationers (stacyoneres), who sold copies of the books then in use—the ABC, the Paternoster, Creed, Ave Maria and other MS. copies of prayers, in the neighbourhood of St Paul’s, London,—were, in 1403, formed into a gild. Some of these “stacyoneres” had stalls or stations built against the very walls of the cathedral itself, in the same manner as they are still to be found in some of the older continental cities. In Henry Anstey’s Munimenta Academica, published under the direction of the master of the rolls, we catch a glimpse of the “sworn” university bookseller or stationer, John More of Oxford, who apparently first supplied pupils with their books, and then acted the part of a pawnbroker. Anstey says (p. 77), “The fact is that they (the students) mostly could not afford to buy books, and had they been able, would not have found the advantage so considerable as might be supposed, the instruction given being almost wholly oral. The chief source of supplying books was by purchase from the university sworn stationers, who had to a great extent a monopoly. Of such books there were plainly very large numbers constantly changing hands.” Besides the sworn stationers there were many booksellers in Oxford who were not sworn; for one of the statutes, passed in the year 1373, expressly recites that, in consequence of their presence, “books of great value are sold and carried away from Oxford, the owners of them are cheated, and the sworn stationers are deprived of their lawful business.” It was, therefore, enacted that no bookseller except two sworn stationers or their deputies, should sell any book being either his own property or that of another, exceeding half a mark in value, under a pain of imprisonment, or, if the offence was repeated, of abjuring his trade within the university.
“The trade in bookselling seems,” says Hallam, “to have been established at Paris and Bologna in the 12th century; the lawyers and universities called it into life. It is very improbable that it existed in what we properly call the dark ages. Peter of
