Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/27

Rh books were manufactured, to sell them to the general public. For long, many of the booksellers had printing offices; they all, of course, kept shops, at which not only printed books but stationery was retailed; book-binders were not unfrequent among them; and, to very recent times, they were the chief proprietors of newspapers, a branch of the trade that appears, from some modern instances, to be again falling in their direction.

In England the printing press found a sure asylum, but at first the books printed were very few in number and the issue of each book small. The works produced by Caxton consisted almost entirely of translations. "Divers famous clerks and learned men," says one of the early printers, "translated and made many noble works into our English tongue. Whereby there was much more plenty and abundance of English used than there was in times past." Wynkyn de Worde followed closely in his master's footsteps; but soon a new source of employment for the press was discovered, and De Worde turned his attention to the production of Accidences, Lucidaries, Orchards of Words, Promptuaries for Little Children, and the like. With the Reformation came of course a great demand for Bibles, and, between the years 1526 and 1600, so great was the rush for this new supply of hitherto forbidden knowledge that we have no less than three hundred and twenty-six editions, or parts of editions, of the English Bible.

In the "Typographical Antiquities" of Ames and Herbert are recorded the names of three hundred and fifty printers in England and Scotland, who flourished between 1474 and 1600. Though these "printers" were also booksellers, their history belongs more