Lintott engaged not to print any quartos except for Pope, but he printed the quarto pages on small folio, and sold each volume for half-a-guinea. These being cut down by some dishonest traders, were sold as subscription copies.
Lintott was defrauded of his profit by the sale of a duodecimo edition, printed in Holland, which obliged him to print an edition in a similar form. Of Lintott’s first duodecimo edition 2500 copies were quickly sold off. Five thousand further copies were at once printed.
Some of Hearne’s antiquarian works were subscribed at ten shillings and sixpence per volume for small paper, and one guinea for large paper.
It seems to have been the practice for the subscriber to a book to pay down half the purchase-money on sending in his name, and the other half on publication.
Another expedient for the rapid sale of books was their issue in numbers. Smollett’s “History of England” was published in sixpenny numbers, and had an immediate sale of 20,000 copies. This immense success is said to have been due to an artifice practised by the publisher. He sent down a packet of prospectuses carriage free (with half-a-crown enclosed) to every parish clerk in the kingdom, to be distributed by him through the pews of the church. This being generally carried out, a valuable advertisement was obtained, which resulted in an extensive demand for the work.
Books are published at an equal price, according to size, whether they are good or bad, but they find their level in the catalogues of the second-hand booksellers. The bad soon become waste-paper, or are marked down to very low prices, while the good books increase in price till they come in some cases to be marked more than the original published price.
Sometimes when books are printed in limited numbers the public will give more than the published price even before publication; thus the large paper edition of the “Life of the Queen,” by Mr. R. R. Holmes, was subscribed at £8, and the right of receiving a copy when ready is said to have been sold for from £20 to £25.
Publishers occasionally reduce the price of a book after publication, but this is seldom a successful operation. The selling-off of remainders has been the means of distributing books to the public at a low rate, and it will often be found that some of the scarcest and highest priced books in the present day are those which have been sold-off. These were good books, which sold too slowly, but which went off quickly when the price was low. When the stock is exhausted, and more are required, the price naturally goes up.
A most remarkable instance of this increase in price of a sold-off book is that of Edward Fitzgerald’s wonderful version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, the first edition of which was published by Quaritch in 1859. Though the number printed was few, nobody bought, and eight years afterwards the publisher, in disgust, threw the whole remainder into a box outside his door, and marked all these one penny each. It is said that Dante Rossetti found them there, and soon the remainder was exhausted. Now this penny book is worth six guineas.[37]