FINE BOOKS

First Edition: xv + 332 pages, engraved frontispiece, 39 plates, original red cloth - back slightly faded, titled and decorated in gilt on the upper cover and spine, top edge gilt, other edges uncut, a very good copy.

Fine Books is significant because it was one of the earliest and most influential twentieth-century books to explain why books are collected as physical objects rather than merely read as texts. Written by the distinguished bibliographer Alfred W. Pollard (1859–1944), Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum and one of the founders of modern analytical bibliography, it helped define the principles of rare-book collecting for a new generation.

Before Pollard, most works on book collecting were either practical manuals or auction records. Fine Books attempted something more ambitious: to explain what makes a book "fine" from the perspectives of literature, printing, illustration, typography, paper, binding, provenance and condition.

The book appeared during the height of the Arts and Crafts and Private Press movements, when collectors were beginning to appreciate books as works of craftsmanship.