Recently published in strong Buckram, price £1 75. 6d. BOOK PRICES VOLUME I. CURRENT, Being a Record of the Prices at which Books have been sold at Auction during 1887, with the Titles and Descriptions of the Books in full, the Catalogue Numbers, and the Names of the Purchasers. This volume has been very gladly welcomed by collectors, booksellers, and book buyers as being a most useful record of prices, and a book for permanent reference as to the value of works sold at auction. The very copious Index which accompanies the volume adds very considerably to its value. VERY FEW COPIES OF this firsT VOLUME ARE LEFT, AND WHEN THE STOCK ON HAND IS EXHAUSTED IT WILL NOT BE REPRINTED. Opinions of the Press. It will furnish a record of great use and interest to the bibliophile.”— Notes and Queries. "The practical utility of such a record will be best appreciated by those who have been accustomed to consult such guides as Lowndes and Brunet with a feeling that their information, though in great part obsolete, is at least much better than no information at all."-Daily News. "It will be serviceable to those who buy and to those who sell books; especially, we should imagine, to the latter. Also, it will enable owners to know the market value of their possessions, which is often, in these days of the first-edition craze, a great deal higher than the uninitiated would imagine."-Pall Mall Gazette. "Like other of Mr. Stock's publications, it is beautifully printed."— Printer and Stationer. "Such a publication has long been a desideratum needed by booksellers, librarians, and bibliophiles." --Trübner's Literary Record. "Mr. Elliot Stock has done many things to make his name revered by the plodding bibliophile, but nothing will give him a warmer corner in the collector's heart than the publication of Book-Prices Current. . . Literary Opinion. "To booksellers this will be invaluable. But for book-lovers, and those who delight to read catalogues and such-like records of book-history, it will, if we mistake not, prove to be a source of unfailing interest."Antiquary. Book-Prices Current: A RECORD OF THE PRICES AT WHICH BOOKS HAVE BEEN SOLD AT AUCTION, FROM DECEMBER, 1887, TO NOVEMBER, 1888. Lib, Sci. 37229 PREFACE. IT is only from a careful comparison of the prices realised at auction that the value of a given book can be estimated with any degree of certainty. The auction-room is a market in which everything falls at last to its level; and it is there also that popular fancy and the decrees of fashion acquire a degree of solidity which may be looked for in vain elsewhere. The second volume of Book-Prices Current is an improvement on the first, in that the power of comparison is largely augmented, and the facilities for reducing any given volume to its normal pecuniary value considerably increased. As condition and binding control the market to a great extent, special care has been taken to give the fullest particulars compatible with reasonable brevity, so that those whose business or pleasure it is to consult the records of the prices at which books have been sold at auction may have it in their power to discriminate between intrinsic and extrinsic value, and to judge accordingly. It would be an invidious task to inquire into the reasons which regulate the rise and fall in the value of books, especially as those reasons are in a measure based upon arbitrary causes, and derive their authority more from accidental circumstances than from any settled rule. There are undoubtedly certain well-known axioms which no prudent purchaser can afford to disregard; but the primary cause regulating the value of a given book, at any specified time, is as impossible to analyse as is the caprice of the collector who buys it. Why, for example, should the great editions of the Fathers sell at the present day for no more than they did in 1676, the date of the first English sale of books by auction; and why should the Editio Princeps of Homer in Greek (Florence, 1488) now realise close on £150, when two hundred years ago a perfect copy was knocked down for nine shillings? It is not because the present generation love Homer rather than Augustine or Chrysostom, nor solely on account of the relative scarcity of the volumes, for other books, which are exceedingly rare in the sense of not often being met with, are nevertheless of no value whatever. Possibly the reason is traditional, and the modern collector, spurred by the writings of Dibdin and Hazlitt, sees with their eyes and admires what they approve. At the sale of Dr. Lazarus Seaman, which took place in Warwick Lane exactly 213 years ago, extraordinary prices were realised for some of the books quoted in the present volume. Eliot's Indian Bible, with the rare dedication to Charles II, inserted only in the twenty copies sent to England, brought nineteen shillings; at the sale of the Wimpole Library in June last, £580 was not considered too high a price to give (post, No. 6250); Cotton's "Way of the |