Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/500

458 458 PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS man printer to earn wherewithal! to exist on in the Dublin printing offices. In 1753 we find Samuel Richardson publishing a pamphlet " The History of Sir Charles Grandison before Publication by certain Booksellers in Dublin." It appears that sheets had been stolen from Richardson's warehouse, and that three Irish booksellers each produced cheap editions of nearly half the entire novel, before a single volume had appeared in England. There was no legal remedy; but "what," asks the Gray's Inn Journal indignantly, "what then should be said of Exshaw, Wilson, and Saun- ders, booksellers in Dublin, and perpetrators of this vile act of piracy ? They should be expelled from the Republic of Letters as literary Goths and Vandals, who are ready to invade the property of every man of genius." With the Act of Union, however, the Dublin booksellers were made amenable to Eng- lish law, and a dolorous cry arose that their trade was ruined, and that the " vested right " they had inherited, to prey upon the Saxon, had been abolished by the cruel conquerors. From this moment, of course, Irish bookselling was obliged to take a higher tone. In a few years the Dublin Review and the Dublin University Magazine vindicated the intellectual powers of the natives, and for a long time were widely circulated in Ireland, and were then mainly indebted to the enterprise of Irish authors and book- sellers. When the Commission of National Education was appointed in Ireland," Mr. Thorn was selected as a publisher, and, through their pecuniary aid, was enabled to bring out a series of " Irish National School Books," that for cheapness and excellence are probably still unrivalled. These led, as we have previously seen, to petitions from the English pub-