to some extent fanciful. It would be difficult, for
instance, to justify the high prices paid by collectors of the days of
George III. for the first printed editions of the Greek and Latin
classics. With few exceptions these are of no value as texts, and there
are no possible associations by which they can be linked with the
personality of their authors. It may be doubted whether any one now
collects them save as specimens of printing, though no class of books
which has once been prized ever sinks back into absolute obscurity. On
the other hand the prestige of the first editions of English and French
literary masterpieces has immensely increased. A first folio Shakespeare
(1623) was in 1906 sold separately for L3000, and the MacGeorge copies
of the first four folios (1623, 1632, 1663-1664 and 1685) fetched
collectively the high price of L10,000. The quarto editions of
Shakespeare plays have appreciated even more, several of these little
books, once sold at 6d. apiece, having fetched over L1000, while the
unknown and unique copy of the 1594 edition of _Titus Andronicus_,
discovered in Sweden, speedily passed to an American collector for
L2000. Information as to early editions of famous English books will be
found in Lowndes' _Bibliographer's Manual_, in Hazlitt's _Handbook to
the Popular Poetical and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain from the
Invention of Printing to the Restoration_ (1867) and his subsequent
_Collections and Notes_ (1876-1903), and as to more recent books in
Slater's _Early Editions, a bibliographical survey of the works of some
popular modern authors_ (1894), while French classics have found an
excellent chronicler in Jules Le Petit (_Bibliographie des principales
editions originales d'ecrivains francais du XV^e au XVIII^e siecle_,
1888).

In most cases there is a marked falling off in the interest with which
early editions other than the first are regarded, and consequently in
the prices paid for them, though important changes in the text give to
the edition in which they first occur some shadow of the prestige
attaching to an original issue. One of the recognized byways of
book-collecting, however, used to be the collection of as many editions
as possible of the same work. When this result in the acquisition of
numerous late editions of no value for the text its only usefulness
would appear to be the index it may offer to the author's popularity.
But in translations of the Bible, in liturgical wor