sets of copies bound purposely with a title-page in which the author's name in full is not given, but only his initials. Still Simmons is not satisfied; still the sale lags. Can it be that the three booksellers that have been acting for Simmons are not doing their duty by the book? Something of this kind seems to be implied by the issue, in 1668, of what was perhaps the fifth binding of copies, with a title-page showing that one of the three has no farther concern with the book, and that two others, one of them in the West end, are now agents instead. By this time Simmons seems to have given up the idea that Milton's name did harm; for he not only restores it in full, but openly conjoins his own with it by first announcing himself as the printer. The slight variation in the same year to a sixth title-page with different ornamentation seems to imply nothing more than Simmons's readiness to set up a new title-page whenever he bound a new set of copies; but one sees more in the final changes of title-page in 1669, when Simmons gets rid of all his former agents, and makes his neighbour, Helder in Little Britain, the sole agent for the book thenceforward. Of course, one trade reason for the willingness of Simmons to set up new title-pages was that the book might continue to look like one of the current year. Paradise Lost saw the light in 1667; but there are yet persons who, on the faith of copies of the first edition dated 1668 or 1669, suppose the original publication to have been in one or other of these years.
That Simmons was in some anxiety, for a while, about the sale of the book appears from another circumstance, appertaining more particularly to that issue of copies in 1668 which bore what I have numbered as the fifth form of title-page. Then, more evidently than at any other time in the eighteen months after the first publication, Simmons seems to have tried to "push" the sale. He changed the agents, increased their number, and distributed them more through the town; and he put his own name to the book, while restoring Milton's in full. But he did more. He had heard by that time that it was an objection to the book that people could not tell from the title-page what it was about. The name Paradise Lost conveyed
