Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/124

92 2 THE L ONGMAN FA MIL V. some years he was the chief contributor to Longman's Animal Review started in 1802, the same year as the Edinburgh Review. About this time Longman first went to Scotland, paid a visit to Walter Scott, and purchased the copyright of the Minstrelsy then publishing ; and in the following year Rees crossed the borders, and returned with an arrangement to publish the Lay of the Last Minstrel on the half- profit system, Constable having, however, a very small share in it. Scott's moiety of profits was 169 6s. , and success being then ensured, Longman'offered 500 for the copyright, which was at once accepted. They afterwards added 100, "handsomely given to supply the loss of a fine horse which broke down suddenly while the author was riding with one of the worthy publishers" (Owen Rees). Already in the first few years of the century we find the house connected with Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Scott, but it was by no means entirely to poetry that Longman and Rees trusted. In 1799 they purchased the copyright of Lindley Murray's English Grammar, one of the most profitable school books ever issued from the press for many years the annual sale of the Abridgment in England alone was from 48,000 to 50,000 copies. Chambers' Cyclopcedia was entirely re-written, re-cast, and re-christened, and again, under the management of Abraham Rees, after whom it was named, came out in quarto form in parts, but at a total cost of ;85. The ablest scientific and technical writers of the day were retained, and among them we find the names of Humphry Davy, John Abernethy, Sharon Turner, John Flaxman, and Henry Brougham. For the first twenty years of this century Rees' New Cyclopcedia filled the place that the En-