Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/104

76 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. classics broadcast among the people. He was the first to discard the long s. He was soon rivalled by Cook and Harrison, and all three were distinguished, not only by publishing in little pocket volumes, ex- quisitely printed, and embellished by the best artists for the many, what had before been produced in folios and quartos for the few, but as the inventors of the " number trade," by which even expensive works were sold in small weekly portions to those to whom litera- ture had hitherto been an unknown luxury. Such were the Lives of CJirist, TJie Histories of England Foxes Book of Afartyrs, Family Bibles with Notes, and The Works of Flavins JosepJius. Many of these " number books," though of no great literary merit, exhibited every possible attraction on their copious title-pages, and were announced with the then novel terms of " beautiful," "elegant," "superb," and "mag- nificent." But the pioneer to whom the cheap book-buying public is most indebted was Alexander Donaldson, who, though an Edinburgh man, fought out his chief battles among his London brethren. Donaldson's contemporaries in Edinburgh in the middle of the eighteenth century were Bell, Ellis, and Creech, the only bookseller worth recording before that date being Alexander Ramsay, the poet. Donaldson having struck out the idea of publishing cheap reprints of popular works, extended his business by starting a bookshop in the Strand, London a step that brought him into collision with the London publishers and authors, for Johnson calls him " a fellow who takes advantage of the state of the law to injure his brethren . . . and supposing he did reduce the price of books is no better than Robin Hood who robbed