[5] Said to have been purchased for Lord Amherst.
Foundations of bibliography--Commencement of advertising books through catalogues and lists at end of other publications--Classes of literature principally in demand--Origin of sales by public competition--A book-lottery in 1661--The book-auction in London makes a beginning--The practice extends to the provinces and Scotland (1680-95)--First sale-catalogue where Caxtons were separately lotted (1682)--Catalogue of a private library appended to a posthumous publication (1704)--Mystery surrounding the sources whence the Harleian Library was supplied with its early English rarities--An explanation--Indebtedness of the Heber Collection to private purchasers on a large scale--Vast additions to our knowledge since Heber's time--The modern auction-marts--Penny and other biddings at auctions--An average auction-room--Watching the Ashburnham sale--The collector behind the scenes--Key to certain prices--The Frost and the Boom--Difficulty of gauging quotations without practical experience--The _Court of Appeal_--The Duke of Wellington pays £105 for a shilling pamphlet--A few more words about the Frere sale in illustration of the Boom and something else--The Rig.
THE earliest method of communication between holders and vendors of books and probable buyers of them related to the issue of new works, or, at most, to such as were not out of date. Maunsell's celebrated folio, of which he was not apparently encouraged to proceed with more than certain sections, and which did not comprise the subjects most interesting to us, came out in 1595 in two parts, and was, notwithstanding its imperfect fulfilment, the most comprehensive enterprise of the kind in our language down to comparatively recent times. These matters usually took the form of notices, accompanying a published volume, of others already in print or in preparation by the same firm. No possessor or observer of old English books can fail to have met with such advertisements; but, as we have said, they limit themselves, as a rule, to current literature and the ventures of the immediate stationer or printer. To some copies of Marmion's _Antiquary_, 1641, we find attached a slip containing an announcement by Thomas Dring of old plays on sale by him at the White Lion in Chancery Lane, and inserted posterior to the issue of this particular drama, which does not bear Dring's name; and we all know the list of dramatic performances appended to _Tom Tyler and his Wife_, 1661, and probably emanating from Kirkman the bookseller, where we discern items belonging to an earlier period--of some of which we know nothing further. This catalogue, the material for which Kirkman had personally brought together by the expenditure of considerable time and labour, was re-issued in 1671, and from about that time Clavell and other members of the trade circulated periodical accounts of all the novelties of the season, but almost entirely in those classes which seem to have then appealed to the public: Law, Science, and Divinity--just the sections with which Maunsell in 1595 began and ended.