about 55,000, and the insurance,
which was assessed by referees at the amount of $42,000, would nearly
have replaced the books by new ones. Many of the volumes had to be
rebound as the damage by wetting the glue and paste which are such
important elements in binding securely, led to the falling apart of the
covers.

There are multitudes of books restored by some one of the processes which
have been ingeniously contrived to make an old book as good as new, or an
imperfect volume perfect. The art of reproducing in facsimile, by mere
manual dexterity with the pen, letters, words, and whole pages, has been
carried to a high degree of perfection, notably in London. A celebrated
book restorer named Harris, gained a great reputation among book lovers
and librarians by his consummate skill in the reproduction of the text
of black-letter rarities and early-printed books of every kind. To such
perfection did he carry the art of imitating an original that in many
cases one could not distinguish the original from the imitation, and even
experts have announced a Harris facsimile in a Shakespeare folio to be
the printed original. The art has even been extended to engravings, with
such success that the famous Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare, which
illustrates the title-page of the first folio of 1623, has been
multiplied in pen-made facsimile, so as to deceive the most careful
scrutiny.

This nice and difficult art is not widely pursued in this country, though
there are some experts among New York and Philadelphia book-binders, who
practice it. The British Museum Library has a corps of workers engaged in
the restoration both of books and of manuscripts (as well as engravings)
who are men of the highest training and skill.

The process is necessarily quite expensive, because of the time required
and of the small number of competing artists in this field. It is chiefly
confined to the restoration of imperfect copies of early printed and rare
books, which are so frequently found in imperfect condition, often
wanting title-pages or the final leaves, or parts of pages in any part of
the volume.

So costly, indeed, is this skilful hand-restoration of imperfect books,
that it has been a great boon to the collectors of libraries and rare
works, to see the arts of photography so developed in recent years, as to
reproduce with almost exact fidelity printed matter of any kind from the
pages of books. The cost of such facsimiles of course