Charles Whittingham the younger was a genuine artist in printing. He loved books to begin with, and thought no pains too great to bestow upon their production. Born at Mitcham, on October 30th, 1795, he was apprenticed to his uncle in 1810. In 1824 he was taken into partnership, but this lasted only four years, and he then set up for himself at 21 Took's Court, Chancery Lane. A near neighbour of his at that time was the publisher William Pickering, who since 1820 had been putting in the hands of the public some excellently printed and dainty volumes. It is stated in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ that the series known as the _Diamond Classics_ was printed for Pickering at the Chiswick Press. But this was not the case. He had no dealings whatever with the Whittinghams or the Chiswick Press before his introduction to Charles Whittingham the younger in 1829. The _Diamond Classics_, which he began to issue while he was living in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1822, were printed by C. Corrall of Charing Cross, and the _Oxford English Classics_, in large octavo, chiefly by Talboys and Wheeler of Oxford, while most of his other work, amongst it the first eleven volumes of the works of Bacon, was done by Thomas White, who is first found at Bear Alley, and subsequently at Johnson Court and Crane Court in Fleet Street. [Illustration: FIG. 35.--Old-faced Type.] Few of these early books of Pickering's had any kind of decoration beyond a device on the title-page. Simplicity, combined with what was best in type and paper, seem to have been the publisher's chief aim at that time; but in some of the _Diamond Classics_ will be found the small and artistic border-pieces which he afterwards used frequently.