Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/60

 Wedmore and Mr. Alfred Whitman have written. See the prints they speak of, and in addition handle everything you possibly can that has ever issued from an engraver's hand. If the spirit of print collecting is in your blood you will by this means light a fire that will never go out as long as you live. The enthusiasm of youth will absorb you, and the love you bear for the engraver and his work will never die.

What to Collect.—This becomes at once a personal matter governed first by the reader's taste—even a beginner has his own especial predilections—and by what he intends to spend on his hobby. Mezzotints are the most costly, and wood engravings of the sixties are the most inexpensive. Between these two extremes lie all the other classes of engraving. In the chapters following, an effort is made to keep the prints discussed within the reach of a man of limited means. It may come as a surprise to many wealthy collectors who place themselves in the hand of printsellers who naturally talk of nothing but "states," to know that lithographs and wood engravings with print on the other side of the page have not been deemed unworthy to find a place on the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the exhibitions of Lithographs in 1898-9 and Modern Illustration in 1901. Superb collectors will sneer at this. But the writer at the outset desires to state that this little volume does not aspire to treat of anything other than the "lower slopes." That is the keynote. It might even be desirable to give a detailed list of what not to collect in order