BOOK-TRADE OP LEIPSIG. 



welcomed as a work of such intrinsic 

 worth ought to be welcomed. From 

 its sale the author's finances were 

 improved and his fame established. 

 Dr. Johnson mentions, that he has 

 heard Dodsley (by whom it was 

 published) say, that when the copy 

 was offered him, the price demanded 

 for it, which was a hundred and 

 twenty pounds, being such as he 

 was not inclined to give precipi- 

 tately, he carried the work to Pope, 

 who having looked into it, advised 

 him not to make a niggardly offer, 

 for " this was no every day writer." 

 (Hutchinson's Biog. Medica.) 



BOOK AUCTIONS. 



The first book-auction in England, 

 of which there is any record, was in 

 1676, when the library of Dr. Sear- 

 nan was brought to the hammer. 

 Prefixed to the catalogue there is 

 an address to the reader, saying, 

 "Though it has been unusual in 

 England to make sale of books by 

 auction, yet it hath been practised 

 in other countries to advantage." 

 For general purposes this mode of 

 sale was scarcely known till 1700. 

 (Jenoway's Notes.) 



BOOK TRADE OF LEIPSIG. 



As Frankfort monopolizes the 

 trade in wine, so Leipsig monopo- 

 lizes the trade in books. It is here 

 that every German author (and in 

 no country are authors so numer- 

 ous) wishes to produce the children 

 of his brain, and that, too, only dur- 

 ing the Easter fair. He will submit 

 to any degree of exertion that his 

 work may be ready for publication 

 by that important season, when the 

 whole brotherhood is in labour, 

 from the Khine to the Vistula. If 

 the auspicious moment pass away, 

 he willingly bears his burden twelve 

 months longer, till the next advent of 

 the bibliopolical Luci ua. This perio- 

 dical littering at Leipsig does not at 

 all arise, as is sometimes supposed, 

 from all or most of the books being 



printed there ; Leipsig has only its 

 own proportion of printers and pub- 

 lishers. It arises from the manner 

 in which this branch of trade is 

 carried on in Germany. Every 

 bookseller of any eminence, through- 

 out the confederation, has an agent 

 or commissioner in Leipsig, to whom 

 he applies for whatever books he 

 may want, whether published there 

 or elsewhere. The whole book trade 

 of Germany thus centres in Leipsig. 

 Wherever books may be printed, it 

 is there they must be bought ; it is 

 there that the trade is supplied. 



Before the end of the sixteenth 

 century the book-fair was estab- 

 lished. It prospered so rapidly 

 that, in 1600, the Easter catalogue, 

 which has been annually printed 

 ever since, was printed for the first 

 time. It now presents every year, 

 in a thick octavo volume, a collec- 

 tion of new books and new editions 

 to which there is no parallel in 

 Europe. At the fair all the bre- 

 thren of the trade flock' together in 

 Leipsig, not only from every part 

 of Germany, but from every Euro- 

 pean country where German books 

 are sold, to settle accounts and exa- 

 mine the harvest of the year. The 

 number always amounts to several 

 hundreds, and they have built an 

 exchange for themselves. 



Yet a German publisher has less 

 chance of making great profits, and 

 a German author has fewer pros- 

 pects of turning his manuscript to 

 good account, than the same classes 

 of persons in any other country that 

 knows the value of intellectual la- 

 bour. Each state of the confedera- 

 tion has its own law of copyright, 

 and an author is secured against 

 piracy only in the state where he 

 prints. If the book be worth any- 

 thing it is immediately reprinted in 

 some neighbouring state, and as the 

 pirate pays nothing for the copy- 

 right, he can obviously afford to 

 undersell the original publisher. 

 Such a system almost annihilates 



