books of all classes are gathered together as they are every day in the week, at the houses of the few London auctioneers who make a speciality of this description of property. The fact is, however, the reverse, for BOOK-PRICES CURRENT does not profess to contain complete and perfect reports of every sale that takes place, but merely a selection which has to be made in such a way as to afford the greatest amount of the most useful information within a reasonable compass. The difficulty is not so much what to put in as what to leave out, having regard to the matter contained in previous volumes, the number of times the same book has been sold before during the season, and, above all, the difference in the prices realised. For example, were a book to sell on twenty different occasions during the year at about the same price more or less each time, there would obviously be no necessity to give a complete record of the whole, whereas were the prices utterly dissimilar, it might be, especially if the book were of a description to appeal to a wide circle of readers, and at the same time had a reputation for constantly shifting its ground in the matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. Then, again, the temporary and, for the time being, essential value of any book whatever may be, and often is, very seriously affected by considerations of binding and condition, to say nothing of special circumstances which are constantly arising to add to its importance, and these points, too, have to be carefully analyzed.

From December, 1895, to November, 1896, which is the span of this, the tenth volume of BOOK-PRICES CURRENT, more than 47,000 lots of books have been disposed of. We report 6,594, or, roughly speaking, one out of every seven lots, the remaining six being, for one reason or another, passed by. I do not believe, however, that anything really important has been omitted, or that this volume is in the least behind any of those which have preceded it, in utility and the varied nature of its contents.

I now give the statistics, to which reference has been made, in a tabulated form, omitting shillings and pence in the money column:

December, 1892, to November, 1893 No. of Lots, 49,671

Amount realised, £66,470

1893 1894 " 1895 ""

1894 1895 1896

33 51,108

£72,472

£71,229

33 47,268

£80,111

This shows an approximate average of £1 6s. 7d. per lot in 1893, £1 8s. 5d. in 1894, £1 11s. 4d. in 1895, and this year £1 13s. Iod.; according to which the quality of the books sold must either be appreciably rising, or people must be willing to pay more for them than they have ever done before. I believe that during the past

four years both these causes have been at work to elevate the market, and that not only have a large number of exceptional volumes been brought to the hammer during the period in question, but that buyers are now paying more for books, of one kind or another, than they have done for many years past.

To revert to the proposition that it would not be altogether satisfactory to strike an average on the results of a few sales by auction, I need only instance this present year (1896), when the figures work out, accurately enough for our purpose, at £1 13s. 10d. per lot of books sold. As contrasted with £1 6s. 7d. in 1893, this is a very considerable increase indeed, and one which at first sight would seem to point to some extraordinary enthusiasm running riot, as it has done at intervals ever since persons starved to purchase "right" Elzevirs, with their wrong paginations and passages in red, or went mad in the school of Aldus. Such, however, is not the case, for as a matter of fact, the auction-rooms were anything but unusually brisk from the first day of January till the middle of August, when they closed altogether, according to custom. Only in November and December did prices commence to rule high, and nothing was disposed of during those months that could have appreciably raised the average on an enormous mass of more than 47,000 lots of books sold during the year. The reason of the increase is, not that prices were in the aggregate much higher, but that a few very extraordinary and extremely valuable books contributed so lavishly to the grand total that it was raised to the extent of several thousand pounds above its proportionate, and therefore normal, level. One imperfect copy of the first edition of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," printed by Caxton about the year 1478, sold for £1,020 (see post, 2084), and another for £1,880 (see post, 4541), making altogether £2,900 for two folios, and raising the average on the whole year's sales by as much as Is. 2d. Then there are other very valuable books to be met with, chiefly in a miscellaneous sale held by Messrs. Sotheby on June 18th and five subsequent days, when some 1,600 volumes realised more than £8,500, among them the "Canterbury Tales," which sold for £1,880, as above mentioned.

Yet, although the increase on the average of previous years can thus, to some extent, be accounted for, I am of opinion that books of a certain kind are selling rather better than they have done for some time past. Books are a luxury, and the first thing the ordinary man does in times of stress is to curtail his expenses by ceasing to buy them. Food he must have and houserent he must pay, or take the consequences in either case, but

"quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore," which are precisely those which are the most difficult to meet with, and excite the greatest competition, he is generally content to wait for till his circumstances improve. The state of trade has of late improved, and that is the reason why more money has been paid for books during each succeeding year from 1893 onward, or, if it is not, then I frankly confess that I do not know the reason, and cannot form a conjecture.

Since this time two years ago there are several classes of books which have certainly fallen on evil days. In the first place, the manufactured "limited editions" of contemporary authors, usually poets and essayists, have absolutely vanished. Not one of these books has kept its ground on its merits, no matter to what degree of "uniquity" it might have originally aspired. The reasons for this are clear enough, and one of them will suffice. These books were got out to take the place of others which were becoming so very expensive as to be practically out of the reach of all book-collectors but a very few. Dickens, Thackeray, Ainsworth, and many other novelists, and the school which numbered Pierce Egan and William Combe among its greater lights, were attracting scores of authors, some of them as celebrated, perhaps, as they, others certainly much less so, but all alike “very scarce by reason of special circumstances which had consigned the greater number of copies of the first editions of their works to the dustbin or the flames, or had relegated them to the hands of those who, like Charles Lamb, thought that a book was primarily intended for use and not ornament, and had treated their possessions accordingly. So, too, many of these authors were introduced by Cruikshank, “Phiz," Rowlandson, Alken, and other talented artists, who dressed them up in fine garments and sent them out to compete and jostle for popular favour with the rest. Books of this sort rose almost daily in price. "Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom," went for £10 at least, or, if on large paper, for as much again or more, provided only that it were clean and in the original boards, which was indeed seldom the case. Very likely it would sell for that now under similar circumstances, for although very many books of this once popular kind have fallen woefully in the market during the past year, exceptional copies still hold their own, and will probably continue to do so. The majority-the general ruck--which are fairly good in their way, but not good enough to satisfy the requirements of punctilious collectors-are, as I have said, to be got for much less than

was once the case, and this was a fatal blow to the "limited edition," which had henceforth no reason for its existence, and consequently languished and died. It was the outcome of a popular craze that has since lost most of its energy, and which many believe to be moribund.

There is a fashion in books as in everything else, but there are some books which are altogether outside the pale of a fleeting fancy, and will never be dependent upon popular favour for a bare existence. These are the old and time-worn classics of our own and other countries, past and present, which famous printers sent forth from presses that creak in their primitive way no more, but which did their work so well that comparison with some of our modern productions were odious in the extreme; literature, in all its branches, from the hands of masters living or dead; books of travel which opened up continents we have since inherited, or "come by" in the ordinary course of events; books which describe the first gropings in the dark after great secrets, now as open as the day; works of artistic or antiquarian interest of acknowledged position; books of history compiled from documents and other sources of information now either lost to us for ever or which could not be traced without extreme labour-all these classes of books and many others may be thought even more of in the days to come than they are now, but can never by any possibility be esteemed less. This present volume of BoOK-PRICES CURRENT is, like the nine that have preceded it, full of such books as these, and that is why I think such a record of their existence and temporary resting-place is distinctly worth preserving now and hereafter.

Subscribers to BOOK-PRICES CURRENT from its commencement, as well as all who have occasion to consult its pages from time to time, will notice that improvements are continually being made in minor details, the object throughout having been to make the work as practical and easy of reference as possible. It has been recognised from the first that the raison d'être of any work of the kind must necessarily consist in its adaptability to meet sudden requirements, and that if it fail in that, it would have but a precarious existence, liable to be suddenly terminated by any other book of the same kind, which, even though an obvious imitation, and perhaps not equal to it in many respects, had still this merit of easy access in its favour. This year the improvements are particularly noticeable. A Subject Index has been added, and the General Index has been considerably enlarged and more generally displayed, with the object of distinguishing at a glance one edition

of the same book from another. Many of the entries have been commented upon either bibliographically or by way of collation, and these are distinguished in the General Index by means of an asterisk placed over the corresponding numbers of what is to all intents and purposes a current catalogue of the prices realised at auction for important books old and new. We have here, then, virtually three indices which will, I do not doubt, add very materially to the utility of the work.

I shall be not merely glad, but grateful, for any suggestions that any of our subscribers can give me for still further improving a book which from the first has received such a flattering measure of support.

London.

J. H. SLATER.