Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/336

296 THE RIVINGTONS, THE PARKERS, AND JAMES N IS BET: RELIGIOUS LITERATURE. TVT OT only is the Rivington family the oldest still existing in bookselling annals, but even in itself it succeeded, a century and a half ago, to a business already remarkable for antiquity. In 1711, on the death of Richard Chiswell, styled by Dunton " the Metropolitan of booksellers," his premises and his trade passed into the hands of Charles Rivington, and the sign of the "Bible and the Crown" was then first erected over the doorway of the house in Paternoster Row ; and from that time to this the " Bible and the Crown" might have been fairly ^stamped upon the cover of nearly every book issued from the establish- ment, as a seal and token of its contents. Charles Rivington was born at Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, towards the close of the seventeenth cen- tury, and from a very early age he evinced such a taste for religious books that his friends determined to send him to London, that he might become a theo- logical bookseller. Having served his apprenticeship