Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/187

CONSTABLE, CADELL, AND BLACK. 153 may be said to be absolutely new," and this will pro- bably apply with the same force to the ninth edition, which is to be commenced next year. Long before this date Mr. Adam Black was assisted in his business by his sons. He retired from the house in 1865, and now laden with honours in public, and successes in business, life, he may fairly claim to be the Nestor of publishers. He must have seen many changes in the literary world, and marked many vicissitudes in the " realms of print ;" but the changes as far as they operated for him were for the better, and vicissitudes seem invariably to have kept outside his charmed circle. In the year 1861, a very valuable work the " Col- lected Writings of the late Thomas de Quincey " came into the hands of Messrs. Black ; but, as the public are almost entirely indebted to the laborious care and patient perseverance of another publisher, Mr. James Hogg, then of Edinburgh, for the production of this collection, which then consisted of fourteen volumes, we have thought it better that this account should form a kind of supplement to our present chapter. For a period of about forty years De Quincey had been an extensive contributor to periodical literature, and it is scarcely surprising that, during such a length of time, the sources even where many of his contribu- tions originally appeared had been forgotten, and that the very existence of a few had altogether escaped the author's recollection. Various attempts had been made to induce De Quincey to draw together and revise a selection from the more important, of his scattered writings, but from his varying state of health and, consequent on this, his inveterate habit of pro- crastination, the work was always postponed ; and 10