Author: Frank A. Mumby
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Published: 2018-03-21
Total Pages: 588
ISBN-13: 9780365150114
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Excerpt from The Romance of Book Selling: A History From the Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century My reason for offering this work is that no one else has attempted to write an adequate history of English bookselling and publishing. Wherever I looked for information on the subject I was faced with regrets that so little had been done to explore this evaded field of research. "No great trade has an obscurer history," says Mr. Birrell in one of his "Selected Essays." "It seems to lie choked in mountains of dust which it would be suicidal to disturb. Men have lived from time to time of literary skill - Dr. Johnson was one of them - who had knowledge, extensive and peculiar, of the traditions and practices of 'the trade, ' as it is proudly styled by its votaries; but nobody has ever thought it worth his while to make record of his knowledge, which perished with him, and is now irrecoverably lost." And I met the familiar saying of Carlyle - that "ten ordinary histories of kings and courtiers were well exchanged against the tenth part of one good History of Booksellers" - so many times that I was ashamed at last to face it again until I had done something to remove the reproach which seemed to lie hidden in his words, since I had myself undertaken a series of "Histories of Kings and Courtiers." Curwen's "History of Booksellers," issued in 1873 and long since out of print, is not, strictly speaking, a history at all, consisting mainly of a collection of articles on the leading publishers and booksellers of his day. Much material lies scattered through Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century," and Charles Knight has made abundant use of this in his "Shadows of the Old Booksellers," a work which, though pleasantly written, is not always trustworthy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
