Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/451

411 indigenous to Edinburgh, or, at all events, does not obtain in London. The advantage of cheap labour, which includes, of course, cheap paper, are here so great, especially in the issue of large editions, as to more than counteract the drawback in the shape of transit cost to, and agents' commission in, London. We have already entered into the history of several of these leading Edinburgh houses, and as our space is growing scanty, we can scarcely now do more than mention the firm of Oliver and Boyd; and though, from their long standing and importance, the career of the house would afford material for an interesting chapter, we must hope to have an opportunity of recurring to the subject at a not very distant time. Formerly Oliver and Boyd enjoyed a very large share of the Scotch country business, and occupied indeed much the same position in the northern, as is held by Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., in the southern, capital. Of later years, however, their attention has been more exclusively fixed upon the publication of educational works, and among the writers whose books have been issued by them, the names of Spalding, Reid, Morell, White, and McCulloch, are known to every schoolboy. "The Edinburgh Academy Class-Books" have also attained a very wide circulation far beyond the walls of the Edinburgh Academy; and "Oliver and Boyd's Catechisms," published at the low price of ninepence each, are used in nearly all elementary classes where science, in any form, is taught. As a book of reference for students of every grade, of a larger growth, Oliver and Boyd's Edinburgh Almanac is, perhaps, unrivalled for the fulness and yet conciseness of every branch of official information, at all essential to the inhabitants of Scotland.

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