Louis Elzevier, a refugee from Louvain, set up as a bookseller in Leiden in 1583; his sons and grandsons, Bonaventure and Abraham above all, made the firm the foremost printing house in Europe between 1620 and 1650, with a branch in Amsterdam run by Louis III and Daniel. The Elzeviers printed Latin classics, the "petites républiques" in 24mo, and French authors of the Grand Siècle "suivant la copie imprimée à Paris" — a formula covering counterfeits of Parisian editions, often the first collected editions in small format of Molière, Corneille or Pascal. Their devices, the Sphere, the Solitary (Non solus), the Minerva, and their typefaces created a style, to the point that "elzevir" also came to denote, in the 19th century, a typeface.
The elzevir was an object of bibliophilic passion in the 19th century: Charles Nodier, followed by collectors who measured margins to the millimetre, drove up the prices of volumes that had to be gathered into complete sets. Bibliographers answered the call: Alphonse Willems in 1880, Berghman, and then Édouard Rahir in 1896, established the list of authentic editions, their dates, their print runs and their counterfeits. For the bookseller, an elzevir is described by its reference to Willems, by its height in millimetres, by its binding — contemporary vellum or signed 19th-century morocco — and by its condition; the "first Elzevirian edition" of a French text is a catalogue selling point.
Any small 17th-century Dutch volume is wrongly called an elzevir: the Janssons, Blaeus, Wolfgangs or Hacks printed in the same manner, and many volumes bearing the Sphere device are in fact counterfeits produced in Brussels or Amsterdam by others. The "elzevirs" of 19th-century collections (Jouaust, the Petite Bibliothèque elzévirienne) are not genuine ones.
