The practice, we have already referred to, of booksellers fraternising pleasantly together for the purpose of bringing out expensive editions at a lessened risk, led to many famous associations, the earliest of which, the “Congers,” will be dealt with hereafter in connection with the history of families still represented in the trade, but the “Chapter Coffee House” is too important to be passed over altogether. There is an amusing account of the Chapter Coffee House in the first number of the _Connoisseur_. It “is frequented by those encouragers of learning, the booksellers.... Their criticisms are somewhat singular. When they say a good book, they do not mean to praise the style or sentiment, but the quick and extensive sale of it.... A few nights ago I saw one of these gentlemen take up a sermon, and after seeming to peruse it for some time, with great attention, he declared it was ‘very good English.’ The reader will judge whether I was most surprised or diverted, when I discovered that he was not commending the purity or elegance of the diction, but the beauty of the type, which, it seems, is known among the printers by that appellation.... The character of the bookseller is generally formed on the writers in his service. Thus one is a politician or a deist; another affects humour, or aims at turns of wit or repartee; while a third perhaps is grave, moral, and sententious.” In this Coffee House the associated booksellers met to talk over their plans, and many a germ of most valuable projects was originated here; the books so published coming in time to be called “Chapter Books.” Among the chief members of the association were John Rivington, John Murray, and Thomas Longman, James Dodson, Alderman Cadell, Tom Davies, Robert Baldwin (whose name, if not family, figured in bookselling annals for a century and a half), Peter Elmsley, and Joseph Johnson. Johnson was Cowper’s publisher; the first volumes of the poems fell dead, and he begged the author to think nothing further of the loss, which they had agreed to share. In gratitude Cowper sent him the _Task_ as a present; it was a wonderful success, and altogether Johnson is said to have made £10,000 out of Cowper’s poems. He assisted in the publication of the _Homer_ without any compensation at all. The most important “Chapter books” were Johnson’s _English Poets_, including his _Lives of the English Poets_, for which latter he received two hundred guineas, and a present of another hundred, and, on their re-publication in a separate edition, a fourth hundred. “Sir,” observed the Doctor to a friend, “I have always said the booksellers were a generous set of men. Nor in the present instance have I reason to complain. The fact is, not that they paid me too little, but that I have written too much.”