eous utterance of his joyous nature, and their production he
regarded in the light of a recreation amid the more serious affairs of
life. He had an ambition, which the results of his labour fully
justified, to be regarded as an authority on Typography. I can remember
his amusement, and perhaps annoyance, when he had gone down to a
Yorkshire town to deliver a lecture on some typographical subject, to
find that the walls and hoardings of the town were decorated with
posters, announcing the lecture as by "Talbot B. Reed, author of 'A Dog
with a Bad Name!'"

But all scholars and book-lovers will regard this work of his on "The
History of the Old English Letter Foundries" as being of supreme value.
In it, as he himself says, he tells the story of the fifteenth century
heroes of the punch and matrix and mould, who made English printing an
art ere yet the tyranny of an age of machinery was established.
Whatever Talbot Reed's pen touched it adorned, and in the light of his
mind what seemed dry and dusty corners of literary history became alive
with living human interest.

Besides this great work, he edited the book left unfinished by his
friend Mr Blades, entitled "The Pentateuch of Printing," to which he
added a biographical memoir of Mr Blades.

All that related to the craft of printing was profoundly interesting to
Reed, whether viewed from the practical, or the historic, or the
artistic side. His types were to him no mere articles of commerce, they
were objects of beauty; to him the craft possessed the fascination of
having a great history, and the legitimate pride of having played a
great part in the world.

Reed delivered more than one admirable public lecture on subjects
related to the art of printing. One he delivered at the Society of
Arts, on "Fashions in Printing" (for which he received one of the
Society's silver medals), and another on "Baskerville," the interesting
type-founder and printer of Birmingham in the last century, to whom a
chapter of "The History" is devoted.

Only two years before his death Reed was one of a small band of book-
lovers who founded the Bibliographical Society, a body which aims at
making easier, by the organising of literature, the labours of literary
men, librarians, and students generally. From its start he undertook,
in the midst of many pressing personal duties, the arduous task of
honorary secretaryship of the young society--an office which he regarded
as one of great ho