“I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious, all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of traditions shown,
And all that History, much that Fiction weaves.”
So sang Charles Lamb; and Southey says of these two delightful works:—“The ‘Every-Day Book’ and ‘Table Book’ will be a fortune a hundred years hence, but they have failed to make Hone’s fortunes.” However, Tegg gave him five hundred pounds to compile the “Year Book,” which proved much less successful than the others.
Hone had been a bookseller in the Strand, where he probably acquired his miscellaneous stock of quaint knowledge about old English customs, and all that appertained to a race fast dying out. After the famous trial, in which his “Parodies” were charged as being “blasphemy,” he immediately stopped the sale of them; and, though at that time in urgent need of money, he resolutely refused tempting offers for copies. “The story of my three-days’ trial at Guildhall,” he writes, “may be dug out from the journals of the period; the history of my mind, my heart, my scepticism, and my atheism remain to be written.” It is said that he was first awakened to a better way of thinking, in the following manner:—One day, walking in the country, he saw a little girl standing at a doorway, and stopped to ask her for a drink of milk; and, observing a book in her hand, he inquired what it was. She said it was a Bible; and, in reply to some depreciatory remark of his, added, in her simple wonder—“I thought everybody loved their Bible, sir!”
By this time Tegg was thriving;—he bought his first great-coat, and the first silk pelisse for his wife, and was able to make a rule of paying in cash, which he found an immense advantage. The book auctions, continued nightly at 111, Cheapside, formed the immediate stepping-stone to his wealth. He visited all the trade sales, and bought up the “remainders,” i.e., surplus copies of works in which the original publishers had no faith;—“I was,” he writes, “the broom that swept the booksellers’ warehouses.” At one of the dinners preceding these trade sales, he heard Alderman Cadell give the then famous toast—“The Bookseller’s four B’s”—Burns, Blair, Buchan, and Blackstone. In the auctioneer’s rostrum he was very lively and amusing, and the room became well known all over London. At one of the last sales, a gentleman who purchased a book asked if “he ever left off selling for a single night?” Fifteen years before, on his road to the dock to embark for Calcutta, he found Tegg busy, and as busy still on his return. “If ever man was devoted to his profession, I am that man,” says Tegg; and again—“I feel that my moral courage is sufficient to carry out anything I resolve to accomplish.”
Now that his own publications were proving very lucrative, Tegg resolved to abandon the auctioneering portion of the business, and confine himself to the more legitimate trade; and, at his last sale, he took upwards of eighty pounds. The purchase and sale of remainders, however, still formed a very important branch of his traffic.
About this time he took another journey to Scotland, and had an interview with Sir Walter Scott, who had, he says, “nothing in his manner or conversation to impress a visitor with his greatness.” Immediately on his return he made his final remove to the Mansion House, Cheapside—once the residence of the Lord Mayor—and the annual current of sales rose in the proportion of from eighteen to twenty-two. Now a popular as well as a wealthy man, he was elected a Common Councillor of the Ward of Cheap, took a country house at Norwood, with a beautiful garden attached—“though I scarcely knew a rose from a rhododendron”—and set up a carriage.
It was, of course, from the Mansion House that his well-known publications were dated. In 1825, the year after the purchase of the “Table Book,” he published the “London Encyclopædia;” it was a time of great financial difficulty (as we have, indeed, seen in almost all our lives of contemporary publishers); his bills were dishonoured to the extent of twenty thousand pounds; and the work was began solely to give employment to those who had been faithful in more prosperous years. The public, however, supported the undertaking, and Tegg was rewarded for his courage.
The time of the panic, in 1826, was a season of severe trial, in domestic as well as pecuniary matters; and Tegg, though he maintained that few men were ever insolvent through mere misfortune, began to fear that despondency would deprive him of his reason. And now it was that he appreciated more than ever the brave qualities of his wife, who roused and manned him again to the struggle; till, in the end, he became a gainer rather than a loser by the crisis, for the best books were then sold as almost worthless; and at Hurst and Robinson’s sale he purchased the most popular of Scott’s novels at fourpence a volume.
Among his other great “remainder” bargains we may mention the purchase of the remainder and copyright of “Murray’s Family Library” in 1834. He bought 100,000 volumes at one shilling, and reissued them at more than double the price. His greatest triumph of all was, however, the acquisition of “Valpy’s Delphin Classics,” in one hundred and sixty-two large octavo volumes, the stock amounting to nearly fifty thousand copies, the whole of which were sold off in two years.
To return to his own publications, we find that, up to the close of 1840, he had issued four thousand works on his own account, and “not more than twenty were failures.”