The fact that during nearly a century the family circle was so large, facilitated not a little the carrying out of a general scheme of a federation of book-selling agencies, whose special purpose it was to make known to the reading public of Europe, and to find an outlet for the productions of the Elzevir Presses. The first Louis was able, notwithstanding his active labours in Leyden, to pass a considerable portion of each year on the trade routes of Germany and France. His youngest son, Bonaventure, had, before his twenty-third year, sojourned in all the more important of the cities of Italy, and the nephews and grandchildren appear to have, so to speak, parcelled out Europe between them, carrying on literary campaigns from Naples in the South, to Copenhagen in the North. These “campaigns” had for their purpose not only the distribution of the Elzevir publications, but the collection from literary centres throughout Europe of “copy,” “texts,” and literary suggestions, to utilise for future publishing undertakings. The travelling Elzevirs were also, of course, in a position to secure to advantage the supplies required for their retail concerns in Leyden, Amsterdam, and The Hague. Willems finds records of large purchases of books made by the Elzevirs in Italy between 1606 and 1652. In 1622, there are references showing the existence in Venice of a depot for the sale of the Elzevir publications, and it appears that this depot was within a stone’s throw of the site of the establishment of Aldus, closed nearly half a century earlier. It was the Aldine classics that served as a model or at least as a suggestion for the more beautiful and more accurate sixteenmo editions of Elzevir. There was also an agency in Florence which, in the seventeenth century, was more nearly than Venice the literary centre of Italy. Even at this time, 1675-1700, there was no organised system of transportation between Holland and Italy that could be depended upon for regular shipments of books. There is a reference in the Elzevir correspondence in 1675, and again in 1679, to the forwarding of bales of books through the kindness of travellers, in the former instance through Charles Dati,[135] and in the latter through the Abbé Brassetti. _De exemplaren von Virgilius sign door schipper Jan Willis op Livorno versonden ende geaddresseert aen Abbate Brassetti, soo dat met twyffele ofte sullen wel te recht koomen._[136] With England the Elzevirs had important relations, not only in the matter of buying and selling books, but in connection with the publication of a considerable number of books by English authors. Some of these publications were undertaken either for the account of the authors or of English publishers, who desired to secure the advantage of the Elzevir typography, which could not at that time be equalled by the work of any printers in England. It was the England of Charles II., of Pepys, Evelyn, Dryden, and Baxter, of which we are speaking.