Stationers’ Hall, near Paternoster Row.
(From an Etching by R. Cole. 1750.)
But the pioneer to whom the cheap book-buying public is most indebted was Alexander Donaldson, who, though an Edinburgh man, fought out his chief battles among his London brethren. Donaldson’s contemporaries in Edinburgh in the middle of the eighteenth century were Bell, Ellis, and Creech, the only bookseller worth recording before that date being Alexander Ramsay, the poet. Donaldson having struck out the idea of publishing cheap reprints of popular works, extended his business by starting a bookshop in the Strand, London—a step that brought him into collision with the London publishers—and authors, for Johnson calls him “a fellow who takes advantage of the state of the law to injure his brethren ... and supposing he did reduce the price of books is no better than Robin Hood who robbed the rich in order to give to the poor.” In 1771, Donaldson reprinted Thomson’s Seasons, and an action at law was brought against him by certain booksellers. He proved that the work in question had first been printed in 1729, that its author died in 1748, and that the copyright consequently expired in 1757; and the Lords decided in his favour, thereby settling finally the vulgar and traditional theory that copyright was the interminable possession of the purchaser. To follow this interesting question for a moment. In Anne’s reign it was decided that copyright was to last for fourteen years, with an additional term of fourteen years, provided that the author was alive at the expiry of the first. In 1773–4, following upon Donaldson’s prosecution, a bill to render copyright perpetual passed through the Commons, but was thrown out in the Lords, and in 1814 the term of fourteen years and a conditional fourteen was extended to a definite and invariable period of twenty-eight years. Finally in 1842, the present law was passed, by which the term was prolonged to forty-two years, but the copyright was not to expire in any case before seven years after the author’s death.
Donaldson left a very large fortune, which was greatly augmented by his son, who bequeathed the total amount, a quarter of a million, to found an educational hospital for poor children in Edinburgh, under the title of “Donaldson’s Hospital.”
During the period under review the localities affected by the bookselling and publishing trade had greatly changed and altered. The stalls of the “Chap. Book” venders had disappeared from London Bridge and the Exchange, and even Little Britain had been entirely vacated. Little Britain, from the time of the first Charles to Mary and William, was as famous for books as Paternoster Row afterwards became. But, even in 1731, a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine says, “The race of booksellers in Little Britain is now almost extinct; honest Ballard, well known for his curious divinity catalogues (he was said to have been the first to print a catalogue), being then the only genuine representative ... it was, in the middle of the last century, a plentiful and learned emporium of learned authors, and men went thither as to a market. This drew to the place a mighty trade, the rather because the shops were spacious and the learned gladly resorted to them, where they seldom failed to meet with agreeable conversations.” The son of this Ballard died in 1796, and was by far the best of the Little Britain booksellers. When the “trade” deserted Little Britain, about the reign of Queen Anne, they took up their abode in Paternoster Row, then principally in the hands of mercers, haberdashers, and lace-men—a periodical in 1705 mentioning even the “semptresses of Paternoster Row;” for the old manuscript venders, who had christened the whole neighbourhood, had died out centuries before. It now became the headquarters of publishers and more especially of old booksellers, but with the introduction of magazines and “copy” books, that latter portion of the trade migrated elsewhere, and the street assumed its present appearance of wholesale warehouses, and general and periodical publishing houses. It was not long indeed before the tide of fashion carried many of the eminent firms westward, and the movement in that direction is still apparent.
THE LONGMAN FAMILY.
CLASSICAL AND EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE.
The family of Longman can trace a publishing pedigree back to a date anterior to that of any other house still represented amongst us—the Rivingtons only excepted. As in the previous chapter, we shall select one member—necessarily that one to whom most public interest is attached—as the typical representative of the firm, touching lightly, however, upon all. And, in accordance with the scheme of the present volume, our remarks will primarily be devoted to a narrative of their business connections with that branch of literature—classical and educational works—with which the name of Longman is more immediately associated.