Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/33

Rh librarian at Oxford, and so great was his zeal for obtaining books that he persuaded the Company of Stationers in London to give him a copy of every book that was printed, and this voluntary offering was rendered compulsory by the celebrated Licensing Act of 1663, which prohibited the publication of any book unless licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, and entered in the Stationers' Registers, and which fixed the number of copies to be presented gratis at three. In the reign of William and Mary the liberty of the press was restored, but in the new Act the door was unfortunately thrown open to infractions of literary property by clandestine editions of books, and in the following reign the property of copyright was secured for fourteen years, though the perpetuity of copyright was still vulgarly believed in, and, by the better class of booksellers, still respected. The number of compulsory presentation copies was gradually increased to eleven, forming a very heavy tax upon expensive books, and was only in our own times reduced to five. At present the registration of books 'at Stationers' Hall is quite independent of the presentations, which are still compulsory. The fee for the registration or assignment of a copyright is five shillings.

By the end of the last century all the privileges and monopolies of the Company had been shredded away till they had nothing left but the right to publish a common Latin primer and almanacs. In 1775 J. Carnan, an enterprizing tradesman, questioning the legality of the latter monopoly, published an