One of the most modern of book-thoroughfares deserves a brief reference here. Charing Cross Road has for some years been a popular and successful resort of booksellers and book-hunters. It is within convenient reach of both the Strand and Holborn, and is only two or three minutes' walk from Piccadilly Circus. The books offered for sale here are, for the most part, priced at exceedingly moderate rates. Mr. Bertram Dobell may be regarded as the chief of the trade here, possessing, as he does, two large shops well filled with books of all descriptions. Mr. Dobell's catalogues are very carefully compiled, and possess a literary flavour by no means common; his lists of privately-printed books form a most valuable contribution to the bibliography of the subject. Mr. John Lawler, for many years chief cataloguer at Puttick's, and more recently at Sotheby's, had a shop in Charing Cross Road, which he has just given up; and Mr. A. E. Cooper, who makes a speciality of first editions of modern authors and curious and out-of-the-way books, both French and English.
[176:A] Sewell, Cornhill, and Becket and De Hondt, Strand, were among the last to use these curious trade signs.
[192:A] The identical book with which Johnson knocked down Osborne, 'Biblia Græca Septuaginta,' folio, 1594, Frankfort, was at Cambridge in February, 1812, in the possession of J. Thorpe, bookseller, who afterwards catalogued it.
[192:B] Timbs, writing in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ in 1868, identified the house at which Tonson probably lived, and this house was in Timbs's time a bookseller's. Gray's Inn Lane has become so thoroughly renovated and improved that it is no longer possible to point to any particular spot where any celebrity lived.
[201:A] 'One day [writes Lytton] three persons were standing before an old bookstall in a passage leading from Oxford Street into Tottenham Court Road. Two were gentlemen; the third, of the class and appearance of those who more habitually halt at old bookstalls.
'"Look," said one of the gentlemen to the other; "I have discovered here what I have searched for in vain the last ten years--the Horace of 1580, the Horace of the Forty Commentators--a perfect treasury of learning, and marked only fourteen shillings!"