xcess in this
bibliographical luxuriousness which refuses to partake with other vulgar
mortals in the common harvest of the public press, but must itself
minister to its own tastes and demands. The owner of such an
establishment is subject to no extraneous caprices about breadth of
margins, size of type, quarto or folio, leaded or unleaded lines; he
dictates his own terms; he is master of the situation, as the French
say; and is the true autocrat of literature. There have been several
renowned private presses: Walpole's, at Strawberry Hill; Mr Johnes's, at
Hafod; Allan's, at the Grange; and the Lee Priory Press. None of these,
however, went so distinctly into the groove afterwards followed by the
book clubs as Sir Alexander Boswell's Auchinleck Press. In the
Bibliographical Decameron is a brief history, by Sir Alexander himself,
of the rise and progress of his press. He tells us how he had resolved
to print Knox's Disputation: "For this purpose I was constrained to
purchase two small fonts of black-letter, and to have punches cut for
eighteen or twenty double letters and contractions. I was thus enlisted
and articled into the service, and being infected with the _type_ fever,
the fits have periodically returned. In the year 1815, having viewed a
portable press invented by Mr John Ruthven, an ingenious printer in
Edinburgh, I purchased one, and commenced compositor. At this period, my
brother having it in contemplation to present Bamfield to the Roxburghe
Club, and not aware of the poverty and insignificance of my
establishment, expressed a wish that his tract should issue from the
Auchinleck Press. I determined to gratify him, and the portable press
being too small for general purposes, I exchanged it for one of Mr
Ruthven's full-sized ones; and having increased my stock to _eight_
small fonts, roman and italic, with the necessary appurtenances, I
placed the whole in a cottage, built originally for another purpose,
very pleasantly situated on the bank of a rivulet, and, although
concealed from view by the surrounding wood, not a quarter of a mile
from my house."[74]

[Footnote 74: Bibliographical Decameron, vol. ii. p. 454.]

To show the kind of man who co-operated with Scott in such frivolities,
let me say a word or two more about Sir Alexander. He was the son,
observe, of Johnson's Jamie Boswell, but he was about as like his father
as an eagle might be to a peacock. To use a common colloquial phrase, he
was a man of