Record of Bibliography and Library Literature. 29 them, however, are interesting as showing the tendency of modern taste, and we can only admire the perseverance of Mr. Castle, or of Mr. Gleeson White (the editor of the Ex-Libris Series, of which this volume forms part), in getting together so large and representative a collection. As regards Mr. Castle's letterpress, his preface speaks of the whole work as having been re-modelled ; a phrase rather stronger than the amount of alteration we have been able to discover seems to us to warrant. In the interval between the two editions, Mr. W. J. Hardy's work on book-plates, in the series of Books about Books, has appeared ; and Mr. Castle here makes some slight use of it, with many courteous acknowledgments. With the aid of Mr. Fincham he has also greatly enlarged his Bibliographical Appendix, so that it now includes " every published account of a literary allusion to English book-plates that might prove of interest to the ex- librist? Altogether this enlarged edition of his book is very handsome and fascinating ; and we cannot doubt but that it will be as successful as its predecessors, which speedily went out of print. Printers' Marks : a Chapter in the History of Typography. By W. Roberts, editor of "The Bookworm." London: George Bell &> Sons, 1893, 8vo. pp. xv. 261. Price 75. 6d. nett. Like other volumes in the pretty Ex-Libris Series, to which it belongs, Mr. Roberts' book is avowedly "popular" in its intention, and does not emulate the exhaustive research which we applauded in our notice of Dr. Kristeller's Die Italienische Buchdrucker und Verlegerzeichen a short time ago. His book, however, is both entertaining and instructive, and, having regard to the limits which its inclusion in the series necessarily imposed on it, a more systematic method of treatment was, perhaps, impossible. Mr. Roberts would, indeed, have been in a better position for attempting this if he had adopted a more natural sequence in his chapters than the patriotic, but rather unscientific order England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Spain. The German printers carried their marks with them into almost every country into which they helped to introduce the art of printing. The influence of the marks used by the Italian printers is very observable in many French examples ; and the French marks, again, greatly influenced those both of England and Spain. Mr. Roberts partly atones for his mistaken arrangement by an introductory chapter in which he endeavours to give a general survey of his subject, but his deviation from the scientific order in working out his subject in the different countries has left his own views less clear than they might be, and his introduction suffers accordingly. In justice, indeed, to Mr. Roberts, we are bound to point out that his first few pages offer by no means a fair specimen either of his powers or of this book as a whole. Thus, on page i, we have the unwary statement that " in the earlier stages of its history, at all events," the mark " was merely an attempt to prevent the inevitable pirate from reaping where he had not sown," a theory for which we believe there is no evidence whatever, except its apparent reasonableness to our modern conceptions. Unless we are greatly mistaken, until nearly the end of the fifteenth century there was no copyright either in letter-press, illustrations or devices. One printer copied from another, as one scribe had copied from another scribe, and the conception of piracy only grew up gradually. When we come to the granting of privilegia, we reach something approaching the modern law of copyright, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
