same edition, same date, same
nearly everything--for fifty shillings. Of course it is no such
matter; yet the bait is often swallowed, and the poor (or possibly
rich) fish caught.

The relatively cheap literature of the present day has been thought to
be a revival rather than an invention. We meet with tracts published
in the reign of Elizabeth with the express notation of the price of
issue, namely, one penny. The _Book of Common Prayer_, 1549, was to be
sold at 2s. 2d. unbound, and 4s. in paste or boards. The ordinary
amount charged for a tract extending to thirty or forty pages, and for
a quarto play, was 4d. or a groat. The first folio Shakespeare, 1623,
cost the original purchaser 20s.; Percival's _Spanish Dictionary_,
1599, appears to have come out at 12s. There are lists of
advertisements attached to publications of the later Stuart era
showing that a large variety of popular productions brought the
printer or stationer twopence or a penny. A curious little edition of
_Coffee-House Jests_, 1760, bears the imprint:--

"Drogheda. Printed for the sake of a Penny:
Sold in Waterford, Cork, and Kilkenny."

But throughout these statistics, which are capable, of course, of
infinite augmentation, we have to keep before us the difference in the
value of money, and the purchasing power of the same amount in other
and more practical directions; and it follows that the printed matter
offered to-day for threepence or sixpence had no real parallel in
former times, and that the absolutely cheap book is a product of
modern facilities for manufacture.

The published price not unfrequently presents itself at the foot of
the title on books of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth
centuries. The simplicity of some individuals who are ranked among
occasional or casual buyers was illustrated many years since by a man
going into a shop in Fleet Street and putting down eighteenpence in
payment of Hubert's _Edward II._, 1721, in the window. The bookseller
explained to him that his price was 5s. "But," insisted the customer,
"look at the title-page; it was published at 1s. 6d." "Then you had
better go to the publisher," observed the other, replacing the volume.

Book-collecting seems scarcely to concern very closely those who
regard the pursuit from a severely practical point of view, or in the
aspect of absolute intrinsic importance. It is true enough that one
may form, not only a library, but a remarkably extensive o