For a long time past the trades of bookselling and book-publishing have been carried on apart.  This has doubtless rid booksellers of all the unpopularity which formerly belonged to them in their other capacity.  This unpopularity is now heaped as a whole upon the publishers, who certainly need not dread the doom awaiting those of whom the world speaks well.

A tendency of the two trades to grow together again is perhaps noticeable.  For my part, I wish they would.  Some publishers are already booksellers, but the books they sell are usually only new books.  Now it is obvious that the true bookseller sells books both old and new.  Some booksellers are occasional publishers.  May each usurp—­or, rather, reassume—­the business of the other, whilst retaining his own!

The world, it must be admitted, owes a great deal of whatever information it possesses about the professions, trades, and occupations practised and carried on in its midst to those who have failed in them.  Prosperous men talk ‘shop,’ but seldom write it.  The book that tells us most about booksellers and bookselling in bygone days is the work of a crack-brained fellow who published and sold in the reigns of Queen Anne and George I., and died in 1733 in great poverty and obscurity.  I refer to John Dunton, whose Life and Errors in the edition in two volumes edited by J.B.  Nichols, and published in 1818, is a common book enough in the second-hand shops, and one which may be safely recommended to everyone, except, indeed, to the unfortunate man or woman who is not an adept in the art, craft, or mystery of skipping.

The book will strangely remind the reader of Amory’s Life of John Buncle—­those queer volumes to which many a reader has been sent by Hazlitt’s intoxicating description of them in his Round Table, and a few perhaps by a shy allusion contained in one of the essays of Elia.  The real John Dunton has not the boundless spirits of the fictitious John Buncle; but in their religious fervour, their passion for flirtation, their tireless egotism, and their love of character-sketching, they greatly resemble one another.

It is this last characteristic that imparts real value to Dunton’s book, and makes it, despite its verbiage and tortuosity, throb with human interest.  For example, he gives us a short sketch of no less than 135 then living London booksellers in this style:  ’Mr. Newton is full of kindness and good-nature.  He is affable and courteous in trade, and is none of those men of forty whose religion is yet to chuse, for his mind (like his looks) is serious and grave; and his neighbours tell me his understanding does not improve too fast for his practice, for he is not religious by start or sally, but is well fixed in the faith and practice of a Church of England man—­and has a handsome wife into the bargain.’