Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/467

425 CHARLES EDWARD MUD IE. 425 ing that when once.he was started he would be second to none. In the year 1840, he opened a little shop in Upper King Street, Bloomsbury, and he carried on precisely the same trade as his father did in Cheyne Walk. By degrees, however, he neglected the newspaper and general stationery business, and devoted himself more exclusively to the circulating library, which he in- creased at such a rapid rate that the father became alarmed at the speculative spirit of his son. In 1842, Mr. Mudie commenced his system of lending out one exchangeable volume to subscribers at the rate of a guinea per annum ; and as he made the addition of every new work, immediately upon its publication, a feature in his establishment, he produced an entire revolution in the circulating library movement, and was rewarded by a rapidly increasing number of sub- scribers. Nor did he at this early period confine his dealings solely to circulating the books of other pub- lishers. He was himself in some instances a publisher, and from his establishment issued the first English edition of James R. Lowell's "Poems," and Mr. George Dawson's first " Orations." In 1852 the library had grown too large for the house in Upper King Street, and he removed his business to two houses which form part of his present establishment the penultimate house in New Oxford Street, and the penultimate house in Museum Street ; and though the corner house intervened, the two were connected by a passage. Gradually, as the business grew, the houses on either side were absorbed. In 1860 the large hall was opened, and inaugurated by a festive gathering of literary men and publishers ; and the entire block of building, as it stands at present, 27