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 544 Book Publishers and Publishing ducts. In fact, they may be said to have been anywhere from two to two and one half times more costly. The constant tendency towards less bulky volumes seems to have received its first impetus from the fact that at an early date books were charged for at circulating libraries according to size; but of course weight in the hand and improvement in paper and type _have had most to do with it. During these opening decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia had been retaining her position as our foremost publishing centre. Two encyclopaedias in twenty-one and in forty-seven volumes, one of them representing an investment of $500,000, had been completed there by 1824, works that would have probably overtaxed the publishing facilities of any other of our printing centres. Philadelphia has to her credit, too, the first American edition of Shakespeare and the first American anthology,' though one had been projected previ- ously at New York. The final word was said as to the reality of her supremacy when Barlow, a New England man, published there, in 1807, his Columbiad, "in all respects the finest speci- men of book making ever produced [up to that time] by an American press." Though Carey and Hart were ten years after their foundation in 1 829 regarded as the leading publishers of belles-lettres in America, their place in this respect was soon to be taken by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. And while Philadelphia holds to the present day supremacy in the pub- lication of medical literature, the foundation of her primacy running back well into the eighteenth century, the rising great- ness of New York began somewhere about 1820 to relegate her, as a whole, to second place. Perhaps the dominant reason for this change was the fact that during the period of bitterly intense rivalry to secure the latest European success for reprinting, the port of New York won a publishing victory over that of Philadelphia. One does not, however, have any too comfortable a feeling in asserting that primacy ever did belong to New York until the sixties. Phila- delphia declined slowly; and up to the Civil War it, conserva- » Beauties of Poetry, British and American (i 791 ). Nineteen American writers are represented. The first of a proposed series of volumes of American Poems Selected and Original, printed at Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1793, is usually given as our earliest anthology.