Note 50 — Chapter XIII · BIBLIOGRAPHY—EARLY DECADES OF PAUL’S WORK

In connection with this a curious fraud may be noted here. At the sale of Dr. Laing’s library there was disposed of a number of odd lots of pamphlets and papers, and amongst these a quantity of undamaged sheets of the Ballads and Poems of Dunbar. Whoever bought these was determined to make a profit out of them, for an Edinburgh “book-hunter” discovered one day in a second-hand bookseller’s shop a nicely bound gilt-top quarto volume, bearing the title “Ancient Poetry of Scotland. Edinburgh, 1508,” and having the device of Andro Myllar on it. Facing the title was “Imprinted Glasgow, 1800. Limited to 50 copies, 10 on thick paper, 1 on vellum.” The book looked tempting, and was bought; but, to the bibliophile’s disappointment, it proved most fragmentary, as it contained only a limited portion of the sheets of the Ballantyne reprint several times repeated, irrespective of consecutiveness, throughout the book, and many of the pages bore traces of the accident which befell the original work.