[77:A] Hazlitt was a good deal of a book-borrower. In his 'Conversations with Northcote' he speaks of having been obliged to pay five shillings for the loan of 'Woodstock' at a regular bookseller's shop, as he could not procure it at the circulating libraries.
IT is perhaps to be regretted that the late Adam Smith did not make an inquiry into the subject of Books and their Prices. The result, if not as exhaustive as the 'Wealth of Nations,' would have been quite as important a contribution to the science of social economy. In a general way, books are subject, like other merchandise, to the laws of supply and demand. But, as with other luxuries, the demand fluctuates according to fashion rather than from any real, tangible want. The want, for example, of the edition of Chaucer printed by Caxton, or of the Boccaccio by Valdarfer, is an arbitrary rather than a literary one, for the text of neither is without faults, or at all definitive. To take quite another class of books as an illustration: the demand for first editions of Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, and others, is perhaps greater than the supply; but we do not read these first editions any more than the Caxton Chaucer or the Valdarfer Boccaccio; we can get all the good we want out of the fiftieth edition. We do not, however, feel called upon to anticipate the labours and inquiries of the future Adam Smith; it must suffice us to indicate some of the more interesting prices and fashions in book-fancies which have prevailed during the last two centuries or so in London.
The sale of books by auction dates, in this country at all events, from the year 1676, when William Cooper, a bookseller of considerable learning, who lived at the sign of the Pelican, in Little Britain, introduced a custom which had for many years been practised on the Continent. The full title of this interesting catalogue is in Latin--a language long employed by subsequent book-auctioneers--and runs as follows:
CATALOGUS | VARIORUM ET INSIGNIUM | LIBRORUM | INSTRUCTISSIMÆ BIBLIOTHECA | CLARISSIMI DOCTISSIMIQ VIRI--LAZARI SEAMAN, S. T. D. | QUORUM AUCTIO HABEBITUR LONDINI | IN ÆDIBUS DEFUNCTI IN AREA ET VICULO | WARWICENSI. OCTOBRIS ULTIMO | CURA GULIELMI COOPER BIBLIOPOLÆ | LONDINI.