Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/442

402 402 THOMAS NELSON. his refusal to work on Sundays. Lord Melville, how- ever, who had often seen him in the dockyard, en- quired the cause of his absence, and on learning the fact of his dismissal, severely rebuked the officials, and shortly afterwards advanced him to a higher post. In the latter years of Nelson's residence inLondon,he was engaged in obtaining orders for the Stratford Edition of " Henry's Bible," a work issued in shilling parts, to be bound up in six large folio volumes, which was held in high repute, and attained a large circulation. Nelson secured the names of a great number of sub- scribers, chiefly in the northern district of London. After having thus received the necessary business training, and acquired the necessary commercial ex- perience, Nelson determined to make a start upon his own account, and left London for Edinburgh. Here at first he rented a small apartment, which he occupied as a book-warehouse, stocked chiefly with second- hand books, and from this little establishment he issued the " Scots Worthies," and one or two other works, in monthly parts. In a few years afterwards he removed to the well-known small shop at the corner of the West Bow. Here he commenced his cheap issues in 241110., of such works as Baxter's " Saints' Rest," Booth's " Reign of Grace," " Mac Ewan on the Types," and some of Willison's works. Indeed, we have been told, epigrammatically, that Nelson, in this little corner shop of the West Bow, commencing with a humble reprint of " The Vicar of Wakefield/' arrived in time at the more ponderous honour of " Josephus." In his early publishing career, he and Peter Brown, another bookseller engaged in the same line of business in Edinburgh, were of considerable service to each other, for though they were not in