THERE are few more attractive phases in the history of book-hunting in London than that of localities. Up to nearly the end of the last century, these localities were for the most part, and for close on 350 years, confined to within a narrow area. With the rapid expansion of London north, east, south, and west, the 'trade' has not only expanded, but its representatives have sprung up in every district, whilst many of the older ones have forsaken the limits of the City, and pitched their tents in Greater London. For centuries bookselling and publishing flourished side by side in St. Paul's Churchyard, Fleet Street, and their immediate neighbourhoods.
[Illustration: _St. Paul's Churchyard, 1606. From the Crace Collection._]
Of all the old bookselling localities close to the heart of London, none were more famous than Little Britain and Moorfields. Three years before the Great Fire of London--in 1663--Sorbière, in his 'Journey to England,' made the following observation: 'I am not to forget the vast number of booksellers' shops I have observed in London: for besides those who are set up here and there in the City, they have their particular quarters, such as St. Paul's Churchyard and Little Britain, where there is twice as many as in the Rue Saint Jacque in Paris, and who have each of them two or three warehouses.' The bookselling zenith of Little Britain was attained in the seventeenth century; it may almost be said to have commenced with the reign of Charles I., and to have begun a sort of retrogression with the Hanoverian succession. But there were printers and booksellers here at the latter part of the sixteenth century. From a newspaper published in this district in 1664, we learn that no less than 464 pamphlets were published here during four years. It was a sort of seventeenth-century combination of the Paternoster Row and Fleet Street of the present day. It is the place where, according to a widely circulated statement, first made in Richardson's 'Remarks on Paradise Lost,' 1734, an Earl of Dorset accidentally discovered, when on a book-hunt in 1667, a work hitherto unknown to him, entitled 'Paradise Lost.' He is said to have bought a copy, and the bookseller begged him to recommend it to his friends, as the copies lay on his hand like so much wastepaper. The noble Earl showed his copy to Dryden, who is reported to have exclaimed: 'This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too.' Though this anecdote may be apocryphal, certain it is the poem is in a way connected with the neighbourhood, inasmuch as Simmons' shop was in Aldersgate Street. In addition to this fact, Richardson also tells us that Milton lodged for some time in Little Britain with Millington, the famous book-auctioneer, who had then quitted the rostrum and followed the more peaceful vocation of a dealer in old books.