Page:On the Difficulty of Correct Description of Books - De Morgan (1902).djvu/25

 emiae Historia,' by J. B. du Hamel, of which the second (16) and enlarged edition is Paris, 1701, quarto.

The time at which the confusion between publication and printing is most injurious is that at which the printed book was not the exclusive medium, and the manuscript had not altogether disappeared; a period which includes at least a century after the invention of printing. For so long, at least, did writers who had no particular pretension to be antiquaries, cite manuscripts and printed books indiscriminately; and very often without distinction of character: so that subsequent writers, who thought only of printed books, have taken as printed all they could find cited as published. In this way we have the two unprinted works of Werner, as already mentioned, incorporated by Weidler with the printed ones.

We have noticed, as an introduction, and by way of amusement, the manner in which the French experts, as they are called, made the bibliographer forge a title at the beginning of an old book, by way of altering the edition, forgetting the description at the end. Those who have experience in books, even of a very moderate extent, know that they must always look at the end; because publishers of a former day did sometimes change the venue: not indeed by stamping in the names of convent libraries, but by printing special title-pages. We have before us a folio which, according to the title-page, is Candalla's Euclid, Paris, 1602. Though a tolerably good copy, and in old morocco, with guilt leaves, it was picked up on a mean stall in the open air, at a very low price. The fact is, that in its descent, it did not meet with any real expert, who looked at the end, where it appears that it is the Lyons edition of 1578, and that the Parisian title-page is a substitute. It is the only edition of Candalla that contains all the three books which he added. We have not called such a proceeding a trick or a forgery, because it was often some—