The English Bookman’s Library represents a body of late-Victorian book-historical writing that is invested in reproducing and displaying the holdings of national institutional libraries as both collectibles and as models for the contemporary fine press movement. The short series, which also included H. R. Plomer’s A Short History of English Printing (1900), and W. Y. Fletcher’s English Book Collectors (1902), emphasized a historical trajectory that culminated in the work of presses such as William Morris’ Kelmscott Press, best known for producing elaborate editions inspired by illuminated manuscripts. As series editor Alfred W. Pollard writes in his “General Introduction”, this is a “new series of books about books, exclusively English in its aims”, and seeks to fill in the gaps of book history at a time when, as he “boldly” says, “the book-work turned out . . . by the five or six leading printers of England and Scotland seems to [Pollard], in both technical qualities and the excellence of taste, the finest in the world”. In other words, the series is intended to shore up this claim of primacy in modern fine press printing.