the addition of an _authentic_ portrait to a biography
certainly lends an added interest, whilst the addition of a map is often
of the greatest assistance to the reader. But that books should be
mutilated, torn apart, and stuffed with play-bills, lottery-tickets, and
the like, no sane book-lover will admit.

There are some books that seem to ask for illustration. Who has handled
the three folio volumes which comprise the first edition of Clarendon's
'History of the Rebellion' without feeling that by rights they should
contain fine mezzotint portraits of the chief actors in that great drama?
But they must be mezzotints, mark you--mere line engravings would be out
of place among those bank-note paper leaves with their handsome
great-primer type. This question of seemliness, too, must be considered
carefully ere we add a single plate to any volume. Not every engraving,
however beautiful in design and impression, is at once suitable to every
book that treats of the subject it depicts. That the illustrations be
contemporary with the text goes without saying. No one would be so
foolish as to insert modern 'half-tone' illustrations in a
seventeenth-century book.

That heading 'Extra-illustrated,' so dear to certain booksellers, must
send a shudder through many of the discerning readers of their
catalogues. Books that are extra-illustrated should be avoided by the
collector on principle. There is something foolishly egotistical in
seeking (by those who have no knowledge of book-production) to 'improve'
the work of other men whose business is the making of books. There can be
no necessity for it; the author is quite sure to have added the
illustrations that are requisite for the volume. It is only books that
were published without illustrations that we are justified in attempting
to embellish. Illustrations in a book are invariably a question of the
author's and publisher's tastes; the cost of their production is not
usually an all-important item: it is the setting up of the type, the
paper, and the binding that count--not the illustrations.

It was the fashion in the early decades of the last century to issue
volumes of engravings suitable for illustrating the works of contemporary
writers, such as Byron and Scott: and these illustrations can be used
when you have your editions rebound. There is no particular merit about
the greater part of them, but they depict incidents described in the
text, so at least they are apposite.