Old Picture Books, With Other Essays on Bookish Subjects

Just as you had completed a valuable monograph on that enterprising French publisher Antoine Vèrard, you were whirled away to India to organise a great library at Calcutta. I have seen it stated in the newspapers, on high authority, that your Imperial Library is to be a second British Museum, but I am afraid that, even when fully developed by your energy and skill, it will contain no Vèrards. I hope, however, that when you come over on furlough you will resume the pleasant studies we used to pursue together, and that you may even be induced to read another paper before the learned Society of which you were once my fellow secretary. To keep alive your interest in old books is thus a reasonable pretext for dedicating to you these bookish essays. My real hope is that as they stand on your book-shelf they may remind you of the original British Museum and of the many friends you left behind here after your seventeen years' work amid our Bloomsbury fogs.