Excerpt from The Romance of Book-Collecting Extraordinary proceedings that took place at the sale of the books of Richard Davis, an ancient bookseller of Oxford, who had fallen into the clutches of the bailiffs. The auctioneer commences with a dirge said, or perhaps sung, over the miser able Davis O the vanity of human wishes O the changeableness of fate and its settled unkind ness to us, ' etc. Each book is extolled at length, and there are pages of lamentation and woe as Hobbes of Malmesbury, his Leviathan, a very large and famous beast, ' is knocked down, by mis take, for the miserable sum of five pieces of silver. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.