Alfred William Pollard

Books in the House Alfred William Pollard

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1907 Excerpt: ... FOUR CENTURIES OF BOOK PRICES Not many people have heard of Robert Copland. Nevertheless, he has two claims to remembrance. He was the first native Englishman after Caxton's death who had the pluck to take up the gentle craft of printing, which had been exclusively in the hands of foreigners for over fifteen years. Secondly, being a small poet, he penned, albeit dramatically, the immortal line, 'A penny, I trow, is enough on books,' which embodies frankly and simply the attitude of the man in the street to literature. Since Copland's day other writers have groped after such a remark, but their heart has failed them, and they have softened and spoilt it. Copland was not only the first in the field, but he put the unspoilt nut into a very neat nutshell. Like many other excellent lines, Copland's 'A penny, I trow, is enough on books' may have been caught up, and botched a little, from an actual 'vox populi,' as Mr Anstey uses the phrase. Copland assigns it to a passing visitor to his stall, who was fingering the new books on it. For a groat, so he was told, he could be well supplied, but the price was too high for him, and Copland, unable to effect a sale, seems to have made his profit out of his visitor by obtaining from him the copy of a tract on 'The Seven Sorrows that Women have when their Husbands be Dead,' and putting their conversation into verse as a prologue to it. It is unfortunate that almost all the information we have about the original prices of early English books concerns what the serious writers of the day were pleased to call' trifellys,' or else the dismal school-books in which it is not easy to take much interest. From fragments of the day-book of John Dome, or Thome, a foreign book-seller in Oxford, we know a good deal about the prices pai...