Mr. Proeme is a man well known to the London dealers in old books. He is wealthy, and cares not what he spends to carry out his bibliographical craze, which is the collection of title pages. These he ruthlessly extracts, frequently leaving the decapitated carcase of the books, for which he cares not, behind him. Unlike the destroyer Bagford, he has no useful object in view, but simply follows a senseless kind of classification. For instance: One set of volumes contains nothing but copper-plate engraved titles, and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios of the seventeenth century if they cross his path. Another is a volume of coarse or quaint titles, which certainly answer the end of showing how idiotic and conceited some authors have been. Here you find Dr. Sib's "Bowels opened in Divers Sermons," 1650, cheek by jowl with the discourse attributed falsely to Huntington, the Calvinist, "Die and be damned," with many others too coarse to be quoted. The odd titles adopted for his poems by Taylor, the water-poet, enliven several pages, and make one's mouth water for the books themselves. A third volume includes only such titles as have the printer's device. If you shut your eyes to the injury done by such collectors, you may, to a certain extent, enjoy the collection, for there is great beauty in some titles; but such a pursuit is neither useful nor meritorious. By and by the end comes, and then dispersion follows collection, and the volumes, which probably Cost L200 each in their formation, will be knocked down to a dealer for L10, finally gravitating into the South Kensington Library, or some public museum, as a bibliographical curiosity. The following has just been sold (July, 1880) by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, in the Dunn-Gardinier collection, lot 1592:-- "TITLEPAGES AND FRONTISPIECES. _A Collection of upwards of_ 800 ENGRAVED TITLES AND FRONTISPIECES, ENGLISH AND FOREIGN (_some very fine and curious) taken from old books and neatly mounted on cartridge paper in 3 vol, half morocco gilt. imp. folio_." The only collection of title-pages which has afforded me unalloyed pleasure is a handsome folio, published by the directors of the Plantin Museum, Antwerp, in 1877, just after the purchase of that wonderful typographical storehouse. It is called "Titels en Portretten gesneden naar P. P. Rubens voor de Plantijnsche Drukkerij," and it contains thirty-five grand title pages, reprinted from the original seventeenth century plates, designed by Rubens himself between the years 1612 and 1640, for various publications which issued from the celebrated Plantin Printing Office. In the same Museum are preserved in Rubens' own handwriting his charge for each design, duly receipted at foot.