Podianus could hardly be expected to emulate the magnanimity of Bishop Ancina, considering that if he had often had to give scudi for his books, he would have been reduced to the necessity of stealing them. He was rich, however, in a thrifty wife, to whom her husband's goings-on were an enigma and an abomination. Finding that remonstrances availed nothing, whenever money for housekeeping was absolutely necessary, she would lay hold of a book, and pledge it with the butcher or baker or candlestick-maker, when Podianus would be necessitated to redeem it somehow. He himself rarely dined and did not always sleep at home, being sure of free quarters from other bibliophiles, who hoped that he would one day bequeath them his library. At length he was persuaded to make a donation of it in his lifetime, on condition that the books should remain in his possession until his death. Either oblivious of this, or wishing to secure other patrons, he made another prospective donation of the books to the fathers of a certain monastery, who inscribed the record of his benefaction upon a marble tablet, to be put up in their chapel after his death. When this event took place, they swooped down upon the prize, only to find a still more recent beneficiary in possession. In their mortification they effaced the laudatory inscription from the tablet, only leaving the initial letters D. O. M., which were commonly interpreted, Daturis Opes Majores—to those who shall leave us a more substantial legacy. Nicius mentions one more mighty book-hunter, Cardinal Peranda, of whom, however, beyond the fact that he was enthusiastic and indefatigable in the pursuit, we learn nothing bibliographically memorable but his misadventure with a pet monkey, which, having got hold of the cotton stopper of the ink-bottle (for so I must render _gossypium_ according to my present lights) saturated with ink, must needs employ it upon the most precious book in his whole library. An enemy of books this which has escaped the attention of Mr. Blades. I will conclude with an anecdote not strictly bibliographic or bibliopolic, but not unconnected with the special objects of our Association, inasmuch as it proves the use in Italy, early in the seventeenth century, of a minor invention serviceable to bookmen—blotting-paper. It is the story of Muzio Oddi, mathematician and engineer, who, though debarred from pen and ink, solaced his imprisonment at Pesaro by the composition of mathematical treatises, written on sheets of blotting-paper, at first by charcoal cut to a point, afterwards, having given more stability to his paper by pressing several sheets together, by a reed-pen dipped in ink made from charcoal and water, and kept in a walnut shell. Sir Edward Thompson has shown from an old record that blotting-paper was known in England in the middle of the fifteenth century; yet sand was in more common use to a comparatively recent date. It is a remarkable circumstance that sand