Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/118

88 88 THE L ONGMAN FA MIL Y. West adds, " I was in the habit of going to Mr. Longman's almost daily from the years 1785 to 1787 or 1788, for various books for country orders, being what, is termed in all wholesale booksellers' shops ' a collector.' Mr. Norton Longman had been caused by his father wisely to go through this same wholesome routine of his profession ; and I am informed that the present Mr. L. (Thomas Norton Longman), although at the very head of the book trade, has pursued a similar course with his sons." Longman and this brings us to the subject had married a sister of Harris, the patentee, and long the manager of Covent Garden Theatre. By her he had three sons, and of these Thomas Norton Longman, born in 1771, about 1792 began to take his father's place in the publishing establishment ; and about this time Thomas Brown entered the office as an ap- prentice. In 1794, Mr. Owen Rees was admitted a member, and the firm's title was altered to " Longman and Co. ;" and at this time, too, the younger Evans, " rating," we are told, " only as third wholesale book- seller in England," became bankrupt, and the whole of his picked stock was transferred to 39, Paternoster- row. The stock was further increased by a legacy from the elder Evans to Brown's father in 1803. This elder Evans, as the publisher of the Morning Chronicle, had incurred the displeasure of Goldsmith, who, mind- ful of Johnson's former valour, "went to the shop," says Nichols, " cane in hand, and fell upon him in a most unmerciful manner. This Mr. Evans resented in a truly pugilistic method, and in a few moments the author of the Vicar of Wakefield was disarmed and stretched on the floor, to the no small diversion of the bystanders."