Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/24

16 I've seen a mighty throng Of printed books and long, To draw to studious ways The poor men of our days; By which new-fangled practice, We soon shall see the fact is, Our streets will swarm with scholars Without clean shirts or collars, With Bibles, books, and codices As cheap as tape for bodices."

In spite of this feeling against the popularization of learning and the spread of education—a feeling not quite dead yet, if we may trust the evidence of a few good old Tory speakers on the evil effects (forgery, larceny, and all possible violation of the ten commandments) of popular education a feeling perhaps subsiding, for a country gentleman of the old school told us recently that he "would wish every working" man to read the Bible—the Bible only—and that with difficulty" a progressive sign the world was too well aware of the good to be gathered from the furtherance of these novelties to willingly let them die, and though the battle was from the first a hard one, it has been, from first to last, a winning battle.

It will be essential throughout this chapter, and indeed throughout the whole work, to bear in mind that it was not till quite modern times that a separate class was formed to buy copyrights, to employ printers, and to sell the books wholesale, to which their names were affixed on the title pages—to be in fact, in the modern acceptation of the word, Publishers. There was no such class among the old booksellers; but they had to do everything for themselves, to construct the types, presses, and other essentials for printing, to bind the sheets when printed, and finally, when the