An Aldine House title page

[Illustration by R. W. A. Rouse. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. (London: Aldine House, 1898.]

From a page about Everyman’s Library: “Aldine House, the offices of J. M. Dent and Sons, was located on Bedford Street in the Covent Garden district of London,” named of course after the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, founder of the Aldine Press.

Aldine has another meaning for me, as a joking adjective that described my great friend Aldo Carrasco. Yes, we knew about Aldus Manutius. We were Renaissance humanists, all the way.

[Gray’s poem is here. As for Robert William Arthur Rouse, one auction page gives his dates as 1867–1951. Another describes him as flourishing between 1882 and 1929. The image is from the British Library’s Flickr pages.]