Α1 HORN-BOOKS AND BATTLEDORES BY CHARLES WELSH "Q. When is a Book not a Book? A. When it's a Horn-Book." T the Whitmore sale in Boston last month, Professor Kittredge of Harvard paid $4.75 for a piece of cardboard printed on one side and folded, measuring about five by eight inches. A similar piece cost him $3.50. Neither of them, I believe, was a hundred years old. These pieces of cardboard were two Battledores, originally published, probably, to sell at one penny plain and two pence colored. In less than a century their respective values had increased two hundred and twentyeight fold and one hundred and sixtyeight fold. This beats Sir Walter Scott's "farthing chap books worth their weight in gold!" And these are by no means early specimens. Battledores were printed by Dean and Sons, of London, as late as 1840, and nearly as late as that by Darton. Some twelve years ago Mrs. G. Linnaeus Banks, the novelist, who was then about seventy years old, In the collection of the books published by John Newbery which I made some years ago and which is now owned by Mr. D. C. Heath, the Boston publisher, are some rare early Copyright, 1902, by THE LITERARY COLLECTOR CO. All rights reserved. specimens with the imprint of their inventor, Collins of Salisbury, and backed with the famous "floweryand-gilt-pattern Dutch paper." Perfect specimens of "battledores" are, I believe, rarer than perfect specimens of horn-books, although the latter antedate the battledores by centuries. Certainly horn-books have been far more often described and illustrated than battledores, and I have seen more examples of the former than of the latter. We But age and durability should precede youth and flimsiness. will therefore apply ourselves first to a consideration of the horn-book, the history of which goes very far back into the past, and may be said to be earlier than that of the printed book itself; for the earliest form of all would appear to have been a leaden casting on which the letters of the alphabet were in relief. According to Chambers' Book of Days, two matrices cut in stone, which which were obviously intended for casting these leaden plates, were formerly in the possession of the Musgrave family of Edenhall. But to come to the horn-book as it is more generally known. It was really not a book at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It was simply a printed fly leaf pasted on wood, covered with horn, and secured all round with a narrow band of copper which was fastened down with small tacks. The wooden back was elongated to furnish a handle, through a hole in which a string was |