the book collector
albeit still imperfectly, in the modern age) nor was it even a matter of perception until well into the period considered as the number of printed sales records and other bibliographical resources built up. It was, and in many ways still is, more a matter of merit or admiration, in the ‘O Rare Ben Jonson’ sense. McKitterick is interested in establishing what criteria made a particular book worthy of distinction from the common mass and therefore made it worthy of preservation, of competition for possession, and of bibliographical record. What it was, indeed, that made it valuable, not only financially but also historically. It was, as he notes, ‘no sudden discovery. It was a prolonged a V air, proceeding at di V erent speeds in di V erent subjects and di V erent lit- eratures, and it was expressed in several di V erent ways.’ In order to achieve this manageable corpus, entire categories of books, mostly but not exclusively in more popular genres such as lighter literature, personal piety, domestic economy and technical manuals that were genuinely rare were excluded from the corpus of acceptable books. Exclusion could be ruthless; as McKitterick notes, in 1805 La Serna Santander suggested that of the 15,000 editions he calculated had been printed in Europe in the fifteenth century, ‘it would be di Y- cult to find 1,500 worth the attention of the curious, and justifying a special place in libraries’. In what sometimes seems like a litany of bibliographical saints McKitterick clearly has a number of special heroes. One of the first was Lamoignon’s librarian Adrien Baillet whose encyclopedic com- pilation of Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs (9 volumes, 1685–6) is ‘of especial interest in understanding the emerging priorities that were to a V ect taste for future generations. In particular, and besides the considerable range of his reading in di V erent subjects, he gathered a conspectus of printers who could be regarded as exemplifying the best of the past, sometimes thanks to the accuracy of their editions, sometimes because of the appearance of their books, sometimes (ideally) thanks to both.’ Thus attention was drawn to the work of the better early printers such as Aldus, the Estiennes, and the Elzeviers who have retained their high position among collectors (except and only recently for the last) to today. This increasing appreciation of typography led in part,
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