The attractiveness bestowed by Age cannot be treated quite so summarily, because although the same line of argument can be followed, it has to be helped out by an explanation arising from a particular case. No collector would value a dull sermon printed in 1800 any higher than a dull sermon printed in 1900, and if we go back two centuries instead of one, in the case of a book printed in London its value is none the greater for the extra hundred years. If, however, the sermon chanced to have been printed in 1700 in some provincial town, its age would distinctly be an element of value. Down to 1693 printing was only permitted in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and (after the outbreak of the Civil War[2]) at York. When the restraining Act was dropped in 1693 printing made its way, not very rapidly, into one provincial town after another. Hence a dull sermon with a provincial imprint may be dear to the heart of some local antiquary as the first-fruit of the press in his neighbourhood. If we go back another sixty years from 1700 we reach another typographic zone, as we may call it, within which some slight interest attaches to all examples of English printing, for the end of the year 1640 is the limit of the special catalogues of early books published by the British Museum, the Cambridge University Library, and the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The first and last of these have indexes of printers; in the second the primary arrangement is typographical. Thus all books which are old enough to have been printed before the end of 1640 are thereby invested with some slight interest solely as products of English presses. When we get back to before 1600 we are in the period covered by the different editions of the _Typographical Antiquities_ of Joseph Ames. When we go back another hundred years we are within the fifteenth century; printing has been introduced into England for less than twenty-five years, and the smallest fragment of a book from one of the early presses at work at Westminster, Oxford, St. Albans, or the City of London, is esteemed as of interest and importance. Thus if we go far enough back Age does add to the interest of a book, but only by bringing it under another influence, that the interest of an English fifteenth century book is due to its importance in the history of printing and not to its antiquity being easily demonstrated by the fact that a contemporary unadorned manuscript of the same work will probably have only a fraction of the value of the printed edition. There are, of course, other cases in which age may be said to have some secondary influence, as in the case of books dealing with social customs, ballads and the like. But here it is still more evident that the social or literary interest is the primary consideration, and that this cannot be created, though it is greatly enhanced, by Age.