The shock in the family circle can be imagined. It was the beginning of many sorrows. Two years later, in 1881, Sir Charles Reed died; and in 1883 the family was again plunged into grief by the sad death of Talbot's eldest brother ("my 'father confessor' in all times of trouble," Talbot used to say of him), the Reverend Charles Edward Reed, who was accidentally killed by a fall over a precipice while he was on a walking expedition in Switzerland. Lady Reed, it may be here said, died in June 1891. While most people will think that Talbot Reed's boys' books are his best bequest to literature, he considered them of less importance in the work of his life than his book entitled "A History of the Old English Letter Foundries; with Notes Historical and Bibliographical on the Rise and Progress of English Typography" (Elliot Stock, 1887), the preparation of which cost him ten years of research and labour. His boys' books were the spontaneous utterance of his joyous nature, and their production he regarded in the light of a recreation amid the more serious affairs of life. He had an ambition, which the results of his labour fully justified, to be regarded as an authority on Typography. I can remember his amusement, and perhaps annoyance, when he had gone down to a Yorkshire town to deliver a lecture on some typographical subject, to find that the walls and hoardings of the town were decorated with posters, announcing the lecture as by "Talbot B. Reed, author of 'A Dog with a Bad Name!'" But all scholars and book-lovers will regard this work of his on "The History of the Old English Letter Foundries" as being of supreme value. In it, as he himself says, he tells the story of the fifteenth century heroes of the punch and matrix and mould, who made English printing an art ere yet the tyranny of an age of machinery was established. Whatever Talbot Reed's pen touched it adorned, and in the light of his mind what seemed dry and dusty corners of literary history became alive with living human interest. Besides this great work, he edited the book left unfinished by his friend Mr Blades, entitled "The Pentateuch of Printing," to which he added a biographical memoir of Mr Blades. All that related to the craft of printing was profoundly interesting to Reed, whether viewed from the practical, or the historic, or the artistic side. His types were to him no mere articles of commerce, they were objects of beauty; to him the craft possessed the fascination of having a great history, and the legitimate pride of having played a great part in the world. Reed delivered more than one admirable public lecture on subjects related to the art of printing. One he delivered at the Society of Arts, on "Fashions in Printing" (for which he received one of the Society's silver medals), and another on "Baskerville," the interesting type-founder and printer of Birmingham in the last century, to whom a chapter of "The History" is devoted.