f Addison, Pope, Walpole, and their contemporaries, and the
stately octavo editions of the same writers; and finally of the myriad
_infra_ that have swarmed from the press during the last century. But,
when we walk through a library that offers a representative collection
of books from the invention of printing to the present, we realize that
the bigness of the folios and quartos has deceived us as to their
relative number, all forms of literature being considered.

The parent of our present book form, the Roman codex, split from an
actual block of wood, had a surface hardly as large as the cover of a
Little Classic. The vellum Books of Hours were dainty volumes. Even in
the period between Gutenberg and Aldus, books of moderate size were not
uncommon, and continuously, from the days of the great Venetian
popularizer of literature to the present, the small books have far
outnumbered their heavy-armed allies. Common sense, indeed, would tell
us that this must be so, even if it had not inspired Dr. Johnson, its
eighteenth century exponent, to declare: "Books that you may carry to
the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all."

Our account properly begins with Aldus. From 1494, the date of his first
productions, until 1501 he printed his books in folio and quarto. But in
the first year of the new century he began to use his famous cursive
type, now called italic. The fineness of the new type, as has been
suggested, called for a smaller size of book, which was also favored by
considerations of economy and convenience; and so Aldus made up his
sheets in a form which the fold compels us to call octavo, but which
to-day would be called sixteenmo. Says Horatio F. Brown, in his "The
Venetian Printing Press": "The public welcomed the new type and size.
The College granted Aldus a monopoly for ten years for all books printed
in this manner. The price of books was lowered at once. Didot calculates
that an octavo of Aldus cost, on an average, two francs and a half,
whereas a folio probably cost about twenty francs. These two innovations
on type and on format constituted a veritable revolution in the printing
press and in the book trade, which now began to reach a far more
extensive market than it had ever touched before. With this wide
diffusion of books came the popularization of knowledge at which Aldus
aimed. Scholarship began to lose its exclusive and aristocratic
character when the classics were placed