EXHIBITION
" EIVrERED at Stationers' Hall." The words have not been seen in a new book since 1911, when the Copyright Act finally removed from the Stationers' Company the ancient privilege by which entry in the Company's register conferred copyright on a printer or publisher (not that all books appeared in the register, entry being reserved to members of the Company). For the first time in 400 years, the Company has now put some of its treasures into a small but rewarding exhibition which will be on view in the panelled " Stock Room " of Stationers' Hall until August 31st. Chief among the treasures are the registers themselves, in which visitors can see such moving entries as those of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the First Folio Shakespeare, Milton's Paradise Lost and Dr. Johnson's dic- tionary. There would be more to show if the Company had not lost its original hall and all its possessions—except the registers, which the clerk probably had with him at his house in Clerkenwell —during the Great Fire. The present hall, dating from 1668, has now been restored after the bomb damage it received in 1940; to the visitor who approaches it across one of the waste stretches near St. Paul's, its near-miraculous survival- may suggest that providence had decided that the Company had suffered enough.
The exhibition includes many rare books, broadsides and almanacs, and some fine Restoration plate. A hitherto unrecorded
specimen-sheet of Thomas Caslon's " Large Letters " (he was Master of the Company in 1782) stands out boldly beside Joseph Highmore's portrait, equally sound and solid, of Samuel Richardson (Master of the Company in 1754). There is much here, including .a collection of early newspapers, which will have a special sentimental interest
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