still
continued under the title of Pickering and Chatto, of 66, Haymarket, who
continue to use the Aldine device employed both by William Pickering and
his son. There is no Pickering in the present firm.

[Illustration: _James Toovey's Shop, Piccadilly._]

[Illustration: _Bernard Quaritch, the Napoleon of Booksellers._]

Of all second-hand booksellers, living or dead, Bernard Quaritch is
generally conceded to be the king. Mr. Quaritch was born in 1819 at
Worbis, Prussia, and after serving an apprenticeship to a bookseller
came over to England in 1842, and obtained employment at H. G. Bohn's,
with whom he remained (exclusive of two years in Paris) until 1847. He
left Bohn's in April of that year, with the observation: 'Mr. Bohn, you
are the first bookseller in England, but I mean to be the first
bookseller in Europe.' Quaritch started with only his savings as
capital, and his first catalogue was nothing more than a broadside, with
the titles of about 400 books, the average price of which ranged from
1s. 6d. to 2s. His first big move was made in 1858, when the Bishop of
Cashel's library was sold, when he purchased a copy of the Mazarin Bible
for L595. In the same year appeared his first large catalogue of books,
which comprised nearly 5,000 articles; two years later his catalogue had
increased from 182 to 408 pages, and included close on 7,000 articles;
in 1868 his complete catalogue consisted of 1,080 pages, and 15,000
articles; in 1880 it had extended to 2,395 pages, describing 28,000
books; but seven years later his General Catalogue consisted of 4,500
pages, containing 40,000 articles. As a purchaser, Mr. Quaritch puts the
whilom considered gigantic purchases of Thomas Thorpe entirely into the
shade. In July, 1873, he purchased the non-scientific part of the Royal
Society's Norfolk Library; a few weeks later at the Perkins sale he
bought books and manuscripts to the extent of L11,000; at the sale of
Sir W. Tite's books in 1874 the Quaritch purchases amounted to L9,500;
at the two Didot sales in 1878 and 1879 his purchases exceeded L11,000
in value; at the Beckford sale in 1882 a little more than half of the
total (L86,000) was secured by Mr. Quaritch; at the Sunderland sale,
1881-83, Mr. Quaritch's bill came to over L33,000; at all the other
great sales of the past twenty years the largest buyer has invariably
been 'B. Q.' In an announcement 'To Book Lovers in all Parts of the
World,' the Napoleon of bibliophiles m