Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/125

93 THE L ONGMAN FA MIL Y. 93 cyclopedia Britannica "a Scots rival in little esteem'W was afterwards to occupy. In 1803, we find the trade catalogue has extended so much in bulk and character that it is divided into no less than twenty-two classes, Among their books we note Paley's Natural Theology (ten editions published in seven years), Sharon Turner's Anglo- Saxon History, Pinkerton's ^Geography, Cowper's Ho- mer, and Gifford's Juvenal. About this time too, they engaged very extensively in the old book trade, a branch of the business dis- carded about the year 1840. In a catalogue of the year 1811 we find some very curious books. Here are the celebrated Roxburgh Ballads, now in the British Museum ; a Pennant's London, marked .300 ; a Granger's Biographical Dictionary, ?$o ; Pilkington's Dictionary of Painters, 420 ; two volumes of Cromwelliana, ^250 ; an extraordinary assemblage of Caxtons, Wynkyn de Wordes, and other early printed books, one supposed to date from 1446 ; a unique assemblage of Garrickiana, and many other articles of a matchless character.* Longman was himself indefatigable in business, for fifty years unremittingly he came from and returned to Hampstead on horseback ; but as the rious branches of the trade clearly prove, the superinten- dence of so vast a business was altogether beyond the power of any single man ; and perhaps nothing tended more to raise the firm to the eminent position it soon attained than the plan of introducing fresh blood from time to time ; the new members being often chosen on account of the zeal and talent they had displayed as servants of the house. In 1804
 * Bookseller, June, 1865.