It were well (says the writer of a memorandum of 1749) if we could get some one to take them all off our hands at almost any rate. I have tried Knapton and Whiston in vain. They durst not venture on the whole: but advise to advertize them at 30s a Book, and let ye Booksellers have them at 25s....
I have hopes yt Vailliant may take them all at 25s a book, especially if he be allowed time for payment of the money, & ye University would take some of it in books, which we really want for ye Rustat Library[95].
Eventually, in 1752, 75 sets were disposed of to T. Merrill (a Cambridge bookseller) at one guinea each and the rest seem to have been exchanged[96]. So ended the most ambitious of the early publishing enterprises of the university.
Amongst the other books printed during this period, editions of the classics are prominent. The titles of these will be found in Appendix II and Davies's editions of Cicero, Barnes's Anacreon (1705) and Homer (1711), Taylor's Lysias (1740) may be specially noted. The edition of the Medea and Phoenissae of Euripides by W. Piers (1703) contains, in its preface, an interesting tribute to the renovation of Cambridge typography:
Si Typorum elegantiam mireris, gratias merito ingentes habeto Illustrissimo Principi Carolo Duci Somersetensium munificentissimo nostrae Academiae Cancellario, cui Cordi est nostrum imo suum denuò revixisse Typographéum.
Mathematics is represented primarily by the second edition of Newton's Principia (1713), by Le Clerc's Physica (1700 etc.), by Robert Green's Principles of Natural Philosophy (1712—an anti-Newtonian treatise) and by the Praelectiones (1707 and 1710) and other works of W. Whiston; biography by Knight's Life of Erasmus (1726); Oriental studies by Ockley's Introductio ad Linguas Orientales (1706) and Lyons's Hebrew Grammar (1735).
A work of more general interest is the first edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Christian Morals, published from the ms of the Author by John Jeffery and printed by Crownfield in 1716.