in their time—John the father, and Henry and James the two sons; but Henry Bohn made the greatest name. His famous Guinea Catalogue (“the guinea pig”) was long a marvel, at least in respect to thickness, till Mr. Quaritch decided to far outrival it, and make it appear slim by the side of his huge volumes. Henry Bohn was a remarkable man, and the cultivator of many tastes. In later life he neglected second-hand bookselling for publishing and the selling of remainders. He has already been mentioned as one of the chief of those who have supplied the public with sound cheap literature. Bohn was fond of exhibiting his importance, and when at a book-sale he would, catalogue in hand, inspect the lots far ahead, and occasionally look up and arrest the course of the sale by inquiring of the auctioneer what was the number of the lot then selling.
Mr. Quaritch has outdone all previous booksellers by the grandeur of his catalogues. They have grown in size and importance, until the last General Catalogue, in seven volumes and nine supplements, a large paper copy of which is in the Reading-room of the British Museum, throws all other catalogues into the shade. The volumes containing the various classes into which the catalogue is divided each form a most valuable bibliography and a grand record of the present prices of books.
This is not a history of booksellers, and therefore more need not be said of them here than that a body of men to whom book collectors are greatly indebted may well be proud of numbering in their ranks those already named, as well as the Pickerings, the Lillys, the Boones, the Ellises, and the Bains, upon whose exploits we have not space to enlarge.
AUCTIONEERS
William Cooper, a bookseller in a good way of business at the sign of the Pelican in Little Britain, was the first to introduce into England the practice of selling books by auction, when in 1676 he sold Dr. Seaman’s library, and for some years he was the chief auctioneer in London. His first catalogue—the first sale catalogue in England—is exhibited in the Kings’ Library at the British Museum.
In 1680 Edward Millington, a better known man and a bookseller of standing, took to auctioneering, and he and Cooper together divided the chief business in this department. Other booksellers, such as Moses Pitt, Zachary Bourne, Nathaniel Ranew, Richard Chiswell, and John Dunsmore, Robert Scott, &c., sold books by auction, and Oldys styles Marmaduke Foster, who made the catalogue of Thomason’s Civil War Tracts in twelve folio manuscript volumes, an auctioneer. It is, however, of the two foremost men, Cooper and Millington, that we want to know more, and fortunately a wit of Christ Church, Oxford, George Smalridge, afterwards Dean of Christ Church and Bishop of Bristol, was struck by the humours connected with the sale in 1686 of the stock of a bankrupt Oxford bookseller—Richard Davis, the publisher of several of the Hon. Robert Boyle’s works. Smalridge wrote a skit on the proceedings, under the title of “Auctio Davisiana Oxonii habita per Gulielmum Cooper, Edoar. Millingtonum, Bibliop. Lond. … Londini: Prostant venales apud Jacobum Tonson, 1689.” This was reprinted in Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta, vol. i. 1691.11
The sale, according to Anthony à Wood, took place “in a large stone fabric opposite St. Michael’s Church, in Oxon., near the north gate of the city, called Bocardo” (a prison in the Middle Ages), and apparently it attracted a great deal of attention on account of the novelty of the mode of sale. Smalridge fastened on the salient points, and he has thus given us information respecting the conduct of a sale in the seventeenth century which we should not otherwise have possessed. The persons of the little drama are six Christ Church men—Arthur Kaye, Walter Bacon, Ed. Stradling, George Dixon, Christopher Codrington, and William Woodward—and in the pride of their learning they make sad fun of the pomposity and ignorance of the poor auctioneers. We must, however, remember that this is a satire and a caricature. Cooper is described as “a man of wonderful and notable gravity,” with a monstrous paunch; and Millington as having a Stentor’s lungs and consummate impudence, a very windbag, whose hollow bellows blow lies.
Woodward took the part of Cooper, and Codrington that of Millington, but when these characters were first pressed upon them, the latter urged that “if a book is bad, I cannot pile encomiums on it, and prefer Wither to Virgil, or Merlin to the Sibyls.” We are told that bids of one penny were taken, and that when the third blow of the hammer has been struck the sale was irrevocable. The auctioneers seem to have offended the ears of the Oxonians by saying “Nepŏtis” and “Stephāni.” At the end of the day Woodward is made to say, “I have spoken, I the great Cooper, whose house is in Little Britain.” Codrington recites a long rhodomontade ending thus: “I check myself and put a curb on the runaway muses. But this mallet, the badge of my profession, I affix as a dedicatory offering to this post—To Oxford and the Arts Millington consecrates these arms.” Dunton draws a favourable portrait of Millington in his “Life and Errors.” He says he “commenced and continued auctions upon the authority of Herodotus, who commends that way of sale for the disposal of the most exquisite and finest beauties to their amorosos; and further informs the world that the sum so raised was laid out for the portions of those to whom nature had been less kind: so that he’ll never be forgotten while his name is Ned, or he, a man of remarkable elocution, wit, sense, and modesty—characters so eminently his, that he would be known by them among a thousand. Millington (from the time he sold Dr. Annesly’s library) expressed a particular friendship to me. He was originally a bookseller, which he left off, being better cut out for an auctioneer. He had a quick wit, and a wonderful fluency of speech. There was usually as much comedy in his ‘once, twice, thrice,’ as can be met with in a modern play. ‘Where,’ said Millington, ‘is your generous flame for learning? Who but a sot or a blockhead would have money in his pocket and starve his brains?’ Though I suppose he had but a round of jests, Dr. Cave once bidding too leisurely for a book, says Millington, ‘Is this your “Primitive Christianity?”’ alluding to a book the honest doctor had published under that title. He died in Cambridge, and I hear they bestowed an elegy on his memory, and design to raise a monument to his ashes.” Thomas Hearne does not give him so good a character. He writes under date 13th September 1723: “Though the late Mr. Millington of London, bookseller, was certainly the best auctioneer in the world, being a man of great wit and fluency of speech, and a thorough master of his trade; though, at the same time, very impudent and saucy, yet he could not at the end of the auction, be brought to give an account to the persons who employed him, so that by that means, he allowed what he pleased and no more, and kept a great number of books that were not sold to himself. Whence arose that vast stock of books, though most of them but ordinary, that he had when he dyed, and which, after his death, were sold by auction.”12
“An Elegy upon the Lamented Death of Mr. Edward Millington, the famous Auctioneer,” alluded to by Dunton, is printed in the “Works of Mr. Thomas Brown,” ed. 1744, iv. p. 320, but the Rev. C. H. Hartshorne quotes it in his “Book Rarities of Cambridge,” 1829, p. 450, from Bagford’s Collection, British Museum, Harleian MSS., No. 5947. It reads as follows:—
“Mourn! mourn! you booksellers, for cruel death
Has robb’d the famous auctioneer of breath:
He’s gone,—he’s gone,—all the great loss deplore;
Great Millington—alas! he is no more:
No more will he now at your service stand
Behind the desk, with mallet in his hand:
No more the value of your books set forth,
And sell ’em by his art for twice the worth.
Methinks I see him still, with smiling look,
Amidst the crowd, and in his hand a book:
Then in a fine, facetious, pleasing way
The author’s genius and his wit display.
O all you scribbling tribe, come, mourn his death,
Whose wit hath given your dying fame new birth.
When your neglected works did mouldering lie
Upon the shelves, and none your books would buy,
How
An annotated translation of
