The office was readily accepted, and this same Queer gentleman was the person fixed upon to become the purchaser of the copy-right of this inestimable treasure. A meeting was appointed, the circumstances explained, the copy produced, was cast off, and agreed to be comprised in an octavo volume. Then succeeded the anxious moment of expectation of the reply to be given to, “How much will you advance for the copy-right?”
The author had doubtless heard of the large sums given per volume to Gibbon, Robertson, Blair, Beattie, and other writers of that calibre; and though perhaps neither his pride nor his ambition carried his expectations quite so far as to suppose that he should be placed on a parallel with these illustrious names, yet his disappointment (and disappointment is always in proportion to the hopes indulged) cannot easily be described, when, in a dry, grave, and inflexible, tone, he heard the words “Twenty pounds and six copies.”
Thus was the flattering hope of authorship nipped in the bud; the labour of many successive months, in a moment rendered unavailing, and the fond dreams of fame and emolument made to vanish as by the wand of a sorcerer.
There are sundry other booksellers upon our list; for example, the Splendid Bookseller, the Cunning Bookseller, the Black Letter Bookseller, the Comical Bookseller, the Dirty Bookseller, the Fine Bookseller, the Unfortunate Bookseller, &c. &c.
The Splendid Bookseller, by patient and persevering frugality, with high connections, which seemed entailed upon his house, was enabled to retire to tranquillity and independence, long before the decline of life, or infirmities of age, rendered it necessary to do so. He was highly respectable, but could drive a hard bargain with a poor author, as well as any of his fraternity.
The Cunning Bookseller lived within a hundred miles of the preceding personage, but in pursuit of the main chance, would condescend to do, what his neighbour would have disdained. He would attend in person at the little auctions in the metropolis and its environs, where effects were distrained for rent or taxes, but among which, by chance, some less common books had found their way. In making a bargain with an author, he was dry and cold, and hard and sharp, as flint. He had also another way of getting on. If he saw those who frequented his shop, and whose means he knew to be less abundant, express any earnestness of curiosity about either his own publications, or books newly imported or published, he would, with great apparent civility, encourage them to become purchasers, by observing, that he should not be in a hurry to call for payment. But alas! the poor wights hardly had time to peruse their new acquisitions, before this sharp-faced dealer and chapman would call for a settlement, and either urge the having a bill at short date given him, or would provoke the pride of the poor scholar to part with other books, dear perhaps as the apple of his eye, to cancel the debt and get rid of his importunity.
By such modes of conduct, and by extraordinary success in various publications, and in one more particularly, he accumulated very large property, and retired. After his retirement, however, the “auri sacra fames” still continued to agitate him, nor had he entirely got the better of this infirmity, when death called upon him finally to settle all his accounts at once.
The Black Letter Bookseller was also somewhat of a singular character in his way, and in his day. He was a perfect master of his business, and of that part of it more immediately which related to the earlier productions of the English press. He was, moreover, acute, active, and obliging.
It was in his time that old English books, of a particular description both in prose and verse, were, from some cause or other, principally perhaps as they were of use in the illustration of Shakespeare, beginning to assume a new dignity and importance, and to increase in value at the rate of five hundred per cent. Tracts which for a long preceding interval, produced no more than eighteen-pence, now began to sell for more than as many shillings. This rage often extended to the whimsical titles, which it was the fashion of our forefathers to prefix to their publications; and it may perhaps be said truly of most of them, that in this, and this only, their principal value consisted. It must be allowed, that ingenuity must frequently have been put to the full stretch, to have devised such appellations as the following.