As to the morality of book-plate collecting, I suppose something ought to be said here. There is but one objection to it, but that is, undoubtedly, a serious one: taking a book-plate out of a book means the possible disfigurement and injury of the volume from which it is taken; yet, for the purpose of study and comparison, the removal is a distinct advantage. To confess this seems, at first sight, to bring collecting at all under a sweeping condemnation; and such, indeed, would be the case, were it not for the fact that damage to, or even the actual destruction of, very many books is really a matter of no consequence whatever. Book-plates are found quite as often in the worthless literary productions of our ancestors as in the worthy; and it is puerile to cavil over the removal of a book-plate from a binding which holds together material by the destruction of which the world would certainly not be the poorer. So much for the book-plates in valueless books. As regards those in valuable or interesting ones, it is certainly unwise to remove them at all. This is a golden rule which cannot be too forcibly impressed upon collectors and booksellers. The case does not occur very often; and when it does, the book itself, with the book-plate in it, can be easily fetched and placed beside the 'collection' when needed for comparison. It may happen that the book-plate in this valuable book is interesting from the fact that it belonged to some man of note, or that it is unique; if so, we have only a further reason against taking it out of the volume. The value of a very early book-plate, when preserved in the volume in which it is discovered, is lessened almost to a vanishing point if separated from that volume. Pasted into a book as a mark of ownership, it is an undoubted book-plate; whereas, if taken out and fastened into a collection of book-plates, it at once loses the proof of its original use, so essential to its value and so material to the student of book-plates. On the other hand, as I have said, there is no harm in removing, from some uninteresting and valueless volume, the book-plate of a famous man. Everybody knows that Bishop Burnet or David Garrick had plenty of what they themselves regarded as 'rubbish' in their libraries; so that Burnet's book-plate in an actually valueless volume does not prove that the Bishop's shrewd eye ever scanned its pages, or that his episcopal hand ever held it. Besides, I know as a fact that it is a not uncommon trick for the possessor of the book-plate of some famous man to affix that book-plate in a worthless volume, and then offer the whole for sale at a price much higher than would be asked or obtained for the book-plate itself, though the value of the book may be _nil_!