ere in the special collections to which the generous
taste and liberal scholarship of its founder devoted his best gifts of
intellectual ability and ample resources of fortune. It represents the
favorite studies of a lifetime consecrated after due offices of religion
and charity to the choicest pursuits of literature and art. It would be
difficult to estimate the value or importance of these marvellous
treasures, whose exhibition hitherto only in part has challenged the
admiration of all scholars and given a new impulse to those studies for
which they furnish an apparatus before unseen in America.... The
countless myriads of volumes produced in the past four centuries of
printing with movable types have left in all the libraries of all the
nations comparatively few monuments, or even memorials, of so many
eager, patient, or weary generations of men whose works have followed
them when they have rested from their labors. The Lenox Library was
established for the public exhibition and scholarly use of some of the
most rare and precious of such monuments and memorials of the
typographic art and the historic past as have escaped the wreck and been
preserved to this day. That exhibition and use must be governed by
regulations which will insure to the fullest extent the security and
preservation of the treasures intrusted to our care, in the enforcement
of which the trustees anticipate the sympathy and co-operation of all
scholars and men of letters, through whose use and labors alone the
public at large must chiefly derive real and permanent benefit from this
and all similar institutions." The "regulations" adopted by the trustees
for the preservation of their treasures do not seem unreasonable.
Admission is by ticket, which may be procured of the librarian by
addressing him by mail. We have space for but the briefest possible
glimpses at these treasures. The chief rarities in typography are found
in the north and south libraries on the first floor. In "first editions"
it would be difficult to say whether the library prides itself most on
its Bibles, its Miltoniana, or its Shakesperiana. In Bibles the whole
art of printing with movable types is fully portrayed, the series
beginning with the "Mazarin," or Gutenberg, Bible, the first book ever
printed with movable types. There are Bibles in all languages. There is
the first complete edition of the New Testament in Greek ever published,
its title-page dated Basle, 1516. In a glass