e great printers, then a delightful hobby will be yours; for
the field is narrow, and your collecting must take the form of a personal
inspection of each volume purchased. It will be book-hunting with a
vengeance; the booksellers' catalogues (which rarely give the printers)
will be of little use to you except as regards certain specimens with
which you are acquainted, and each volume that you acquire will have been
unearthed by your own hands. It is a subject which has been chosen so
frequently by specialists that there are bibliographies of almost all the
well-known printers, most of them, it were needless to add, in French.
For a list of them, you must consult the work of Bigmore and Wyman, as
well as that of Mr. W. P. Courtney.

There is a chance here, also, for the public librarian. How many of the
public libraries in this country possess a collection of books
illustrating the history and progress of printing in their particular
towns? Most provincial public libraries now possess collections of books
relating to the history and topography of their localities; and it should
not be difficult to form similar collections of locally-printed books. It
would be an interesting hobby for the private collector too, and such a
collection would be of the greatest interest and value from the
bibliographical standpoint. Similarly it would not be difficult to form a
small collection of books printed by, say, the French or German or
Italian printers before 1500, or the Paris or Venetian printers up to
1600. There is a considerable field for the collector here.

[Sidenote: Ballads and Broadsides.]

11. Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Ballads: a curious byway of
book-collecting this, for the knowledge to be gleaned from these
_curiosa_ is not probably of great value. Nor can a great deal be said in
favour of their utility. Perhaps, however, the first two would be classed
more properly with No. 22--Facetiae and Curiosa, leaving Ballads only
under this heading. The Earl of Crawford and Balcarres' 'Bibliotheca
Lindesiana: a Catalogue of a Collection of English Ballads of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, printed for the most part in Black
Letter' was printed privately in small quarto in 1890. It is undoubtedly
the finest collection of this kind in the world. Ritson's 'Ancient Songs
and Ballads' was revised by Hazlitt in 1877. Then there are such volumes
as Payne Collier's 'Illustrations of English Popular Literature,'
published in