When I was eighteen, in my second year at Aberystwyth, the small honours class in English (six of us) assembled once a week for a two-hour session of Beowulf with Professor Gwyn Jones, in his round room in one of the towers of the High Victorian, Gothic-inspired old college building on the seafront. We sat about a heavy table, prescribed copies of the Anglo-Saxon text (Wyatt-Chambers) before us, hoping for once to be overlooked. But no one ever was. The time would come when you would be asked to translate. As I must have mentioned before, Gwyn Jones looked and was formidable: to have failed to prepare for this trial was unthinkable. Your own part in the performance over, however, you could afford to glance around, take in the ambiance. Apart from the stout, panelled door and leaded window, the room was lined with shelves, and the shelves with books more or less from floor to ceiling. And as I observed over time, they were mostly leather-bound and glowed with the patina of age. We might have been back in the 1860s. Anyway, that is where my interest in old books began.

I have recently acquired a copy of The Grammar of Ornament. The third edition, it was published in 1868 by Bernard Quaritch, who was born near Göttingen in Germany in 1819. With some experience in the book trade behind him, he came to London in 1842 and in due course founded his own business, primarily as an antiquarian bookseller, though occasionally, as above, also as publisher, ...