Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/433

393 THOMAS TEGG. 393 ever insolvent through mere misfortune, began to fear that despondency would deprive him of his reason. And now it was that he appreciated more than ever the brave qualities of his wife, who roused and manned him again to the struggle ; till, in the end, he became a gainer rather than a loser by the crisis, for the best books were then sold as almost worthless; and at Hurst and Robinson's sale he purchased the most popular of Scott's novels at fourpence a volume. Among his other great " remainder " bargains we may mention the purchase of the remainder and copyright of " Murray's Family Library" in 1834. He bought 1 00,000 volumes at one shilling, and re- issued them at more than double the price. His greatest triumph of all was, however, the acquisition of "Valpy's Delphin Classics," in one hundred and sixty-two large octavo volumes, the stock amounting to nearly fifty thousand copies, the whole of which were sold off in two years. To return to his own publications, we find that, up to the close of 1840, he had issued four thousand works on his own account, and " not more than twenty were failures. " Tegg's reputation as a bookseller chiefly rests upon his cheap reprints and abridgments of popular works ; and, in connection with these, his name is mentioned in Mr. Carlyle's famous petition on the Copyright Bill. Though we have failed to ascertain to what general or particular works Mr. Carlyle refers, the petition is of such curious interest to all concerned in the writing and selling of books, that we do not hesitate to quote it in extenso*: 1839, and afterwards republished. 25
 * This "Petition" was first printed in the Examiner, 7th April,