. Childs
said there was no use in being a printer without plenty of capital, and
so that idea was renounced.

But to return to Mr. John Childs. About the year 1826, in association
with the late Joseph Ogle Robinson, he projected and commenced the
publication of a series of books known in the trade as the 'Imperial
Edition of Standard Authors,' which for many years maintained an
extensive sale, and certainly then met an admitted literary want,
furnishing the student and critical reader, in a cheap and handsome form,
with dictionaries, histories, commentaries, biographies, and
miscellaneous literature of acknowledged value and importance, such as
Burke's works, Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' Howe's works, the writings of
Lord Bacon--books which are still in the market, and which, if I may
speak from a pretty wide acquaintance with students' libraries fifty
years ago, were in great demand at that time. The disadvantage of such a
series is that the books are too big to put in the pocket or to hold in
the hand. But I do not know that that is a great disadvantage to a real
student who takes up a book to master its contents, and not merely to
pass away his time. To study properly a man must be in his study. In
that particular apartment he is bound to have a table, and if you place a
book on a table to read, it matters little the size of the page, or the
number of columns each page contains. Mr. Childs set the fashion of
reprinting standard authors on a good-sized page, with a couple of
columns on each page. That fashion was followed by Mr. W. Smith--a Fleet
Street publisher, than whom a better man never lived--and by Messrs.
Chambers; but now it seems quite to have passed away. On the failure of
Mr. Robinson, Mr. Childs' valuable reprints were placed in the hands of
Westley and Davis, and subsequently with Ball, Arnold, and Co.; and
latterly, I think, the late Mr. H. G. Bohn reissued them at intervals.
As to his part publications, when Mr. Childs had given up pushing them,
he disposed of them all to Mr. Virtue, of Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, who
then secured almost a monopoly of the part-number trade, and thus made a
large fortune. 'I love books that come out in numbers,' says Lord
Montford in 'Endymion,' 'as there is a little suspense, and you cannot
deprive yourself of all interest by glancing at the last part of the last
volume.' And so I suppose in the same way there will always be a
part-number trade, though the re