Of the Street-sale of Pocket-books and Diaries.
The sale of pocket-books, in the streets, is not, I was told by several persons, “a living for a man now-a-days.” Ten years ago it was common to find men in the streets offering “half-crown pocket-books” for 1s., and holding them open so as to display the engravings, if there were any. The street-sale usually takes place in March, when the demand for the regular trade has ceased, and the publishers dispose of their unsold stock. The trade is now, I am assured, only about a tenth of its former extent. The reason assigned for the decline is that almanacks, diaries, &c., are so cheap that people look upon 1s. as an enormous price, even for a “beautiful morocco-bound pocket-book,” as the street-seller proclaims it. The binding is roan (a dressed sheep-skin, morocco being a goat-skin), an imitation of morocco, but the pocket-books are really those which in the October preceding have been published in the regular way of trade. Some few of them may, however, have been damaged, and these are bought by the street-people as a “job lot,” and at a lower price than that paid in the regular way; which is 4s. 6d. to 5s. 6d. the dozen, thirteen to the dozen. The “job lot” is sometimes bought for 2s. 6d. a dozen, and sold at 6d. each, or as low as 4d.,—for street-sellers generally bewail their having often to come down to “fourpenny-bits, as they’re going so much now.” One man told me that he was four days last March in selling a dozen pocket-books, though the weather was not unfavourable, and that his profit was 5s. Engravings of the “fashions,” the same man told me, were “no go now.” Even poorly-dressed women (but they might, he thought, be dress-makers) had said to him the last time he displayed a pocket-book with fashions—“They’re out now.” The principal supplier of pocket-books, &c., to the street-trade is in Bride-lane, Fleet-street. Commercial diaries are bought and sold at the same rate as pocket-books; but the sale becomes smaller and smaller.
I am informed that “last season” there were twenty men, all street-traders in “paper,” or “anything that was up,” at other times, selling pocket-books and diaries. For this trade Leicester-square is a favourite place. Calculating, from the best data I can command, that each of those men took 15s. weekly for a month (half of it their profit), we find 60l. expended in the streets in this purchase. Ledgers are sometimes sold in the streets; but as the sale is more a hawker’s than a regular street-seller’s, an account of the traffic is not required by my present subject.