Prices of Books / An Inquiry into the Changes in the Price of Books which have occurred in England at different Periods

by Henry B. Wheatley

QUARTOS

The small quarto volumes of the seventeenth century were by no means high priced, and we learn that three shillings bought Milton’s “Paradise Lost” when first published. The price of the early editions of the separate plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, which now are so much sought after, was sixpence. This we learn from the address prefixed to the early issue of “Troilus and Cressida,” 1609, published before that play was acted—

“Amongst all these is none more witty than this; and had I time, I would comment upon it, though I know it needs not—for so much as will make you think your testern well bestowed,—but for so much worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it.”

The poets had a profitable time when their poems, handsomely printed in quarto volumes, were priced so high as two guineas. Sir Walter Scott made great sums by these editions which sold in large numbers, but no other poet was so fortunate as he was. Moore did well with his poems, and in his Diary (Dec. 23, 1818) he records an amusing instance of the practical appreciation of an admirer. He writes—

“The young Bristol lady who enclosed me £3 after reading ‘Lalla Rookh’ had very laudable ideas on the subject; and if every reader of ‘Lalla Rookh’ had done the same, I need never have written again.”

Wordsworth’s “Excursion” was published in 1814, in a two guinea quarto volume, but it took six years to exhaust an edition of five hundred copies. Such are the inequalities in the rate of the remuneration of authors.

Rees’s “Cyclopædia,” which was published between 1802 and 1820 (in forty-five volumes and six volumes of plates), cost in all £85. The “Encyclopædia Britannica,” which has superseded it, is published at the small price of twenty-eight shillings per volume.

In the early part of this century, when it was the fashion to print standard works in quarto, they were very high priced, thus the first edition of “Pepys’s Diary” was published in two volumes for six guineas. Now the quarto is almost as much out of date as the folio, and is confined to illustrated books.