Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/373

333 BUTTERWORTH AND CHURCHILL: TECHNICAL LITERATURE. TN treating of "technical literature," we shall encounter many works which were rightly de- scribed by Charles Lamb as "books which are not books ; " and the present chapter will be interesting rather as containing biographical notices of men who thoroughly deserved, and thoroughly achieved, success, than for any bibliographical anecdotes we can lay before the reader. The value of technical literature, in a publishing point of view, had been correctly estimated in the very earliest times of bookselling annals, and Richard Tottell (or Tothill), an original member of the Sta- tioners' Company, and eventually their chairman, had in Edward the Sixth's reign, and subsequently in Queen Elizabeth's, succeeded in obtaining a patent for law-books ; and when, through the petition of the Stationers' Company, he was compelled to forego some of the works which he had thus monopolised, he warily " kept his law-books to himself, and yielded ' Dr. Wilson upon_Usurie/ and ' The Sonnets of th' Earle of