In preparing a second edition of The Care of Books I have made no important alterations or additions. As a general rule I have contented myself with a revision of the text; but in some places, as for instance in the account of the library at Titchfield Priory, I have made a longer quotation from the authority laid under contribution. I have also added eight new illustrations.

I should be indeed hard to please if I were not gratified by the kind and cordial tone of the numerous criticisms which have been written on my essay, both by Englishmen and by foreigners. On three questions, however, raised in more than one article, I wish to say a few words. I have been found fault with (1) because many celebrated libraries are passed over by me in silence; (2) because I have not selected illustrations of desks and other library-appliances from printed books as well as from MSS.; and (3) because, though I state on my title-page that the period covered by my essay extends to the end of the eighteenth century, my last illustration represents Dean Boys, who died in 1625.

To the first count in this indictment I reply that I have intentionally cited those libraries only which contribute some new fact to the tale of the gradual development of book-preservation.