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other a large and comprehensive collection. Among the latter was 

 Richard Heber, who possessed a collection whose numbers could not 

 be expressed in less than six figures, holding that one needed three 

 copies of every book, one for use, one for show, and another to lend 

 his friends. Finally the struggle among all these persons always is to 

 get something that no one else has acquired, which is then called 

 unique, or to procure a more sumptuous copy than his neighbor's. 



The mania for book cellecting is by no means a modern disease, but 

 has existed ever since there were books to gather, and has infected 

 many of the wisest and most potent names in history. Euripides is 

 ridiculed by Aristophanes in " The Frogs" for collecting books. Of 

 the Roman emperor Gordian, who flourished (or rather did not flour- 

 ish, because he was slain after a reign of thirty-six days) in the third 

 century, Gibbon says, " twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a 

 library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his in- 

 clinations, and from the productions which he left behind him it 

 appears that the former, as well as the latter, were designed for use 

 rather than for ostentation." This combination of uxorious and 

 literary tastes seems to have existed in another monarch of a later 

 period — Henry VIII, the seeming disproportion of whose expenditure 

 of £10,800 for jewels in three years, during which he spent but £100 

 for books and binding, is explained by the fact that he was indebted 

 for the contents of his libraries to the plunder of monasteries. Cicero, 

 who possessed a superb library, especially rich in Greek, at his villa in 

 Tusculum, thus describes his favorite property: "Books to quicken 

 the intelligence of youth, delight age, decorate prosperity, shelter and 

 solace us in adversity, bring enjoyment at home, befriend us out of 

 doors, pass the night with us, travel with us, go into the country 

 with us." 



Petrarch, who collected books not simply for his own gratification, 

 but aspired to become the founder of a permanent library at Venice, 

 gave his books to the Church of St. Mark, but the greater part of them 

 perished through neglect, and only a small part remains, which may 

 now be seen. Boccaccio, anticipating an early death, offered his 

 library to Petrarch, his dear friend, on his own terms, to insure its 

 preservation, and the poet promised to care for the collection in case 

 he survived Boccaccio, but the latter, outliving Petrarch, bequeathed 

 his books to the Augustinians of Florence, and some of them are still 

 shown to visitors in the Laurentinian library. From Boccaccio's own 

 account of his collection, we must believe his books quite inappropriate 

 for a monastic library, and the good monks probably instituted an 

 auto da// for most of them, like that which befell the knightly ro- 



