One of the features of books is their tendency to describe their own history: as the bibliographer and literary critic D.F. McKenzie wrote, ‘every book tells a story quite apart from that recounted by its text’. Henry Dugdale Sykes’s Sidelights on Shakespeare
Ah, the colophon. Thanks for those De Wordean examples. I enjoyed them almost as much as the colophons in the middle(!) of Inscription, Issues 1&2. Here are some other examples for fun: http://books-on-books.com/2019/04/23/the-colophon-and-the-left-over-i/
Enjoyable as always, I'm looking forward to sharing your blog with colleagues of mine this summer during a rare book seminar. Many thanks