“I’ve seen a mighty throng Of printed books and long, To draw to studious ways The poor men of our days; By which new-fangled practice, We soon shall see the fact is, Our streets will swarm with scholars Without clean shirts or collars, With Bibles, books, and codices As cheap as tape for bodices.” In spite of this feeling against the popularization of learning and the spread of education--a feeling not quite dead yet, if we may trust the evidence of a few good old Tory speakers on the evil effects (forgery, larceny, and all possible violation of the ten commandments) of popular education--a feeling perhaps subsiding, for a country gentleman of the old school told us recently that he “would wish every working man to read the Bible--the Bible only--and _that_ with difficulty”--a progressive sign--the world was too well aware of the good to be gathered from the furtherance of these novelties to willingly let them die, and though the battle was from the first a hard one, it has been, from first to last, a winning battle. [Illustration: Richard Pynson. Died about 1530.] [Illustration: Monogram used by Richard Pynson.] It will be essential throughout this chapter, and indeed throughout the whole work, to bear in mind that it was not till quite modern times that a separate class was formed to buy copyrights, to employ printers, and to sell the books wholesale, to which their names were affixed on the title-pages--to be in fact, in the modern acceptation of the word, Publishers. There was no such class among the old booksellers; but they had to do everything for themselves, to construct the types, presses, and other essentials for printing, to bind the sheets when printed, and finally, when the books were manufactured, to sell them to the general public. For long, many of the booksellers had printing offices; they all, of course, kept shops, at which not only printed books but stationery was retailed; bookbinders were not unfrequent among them; and, to very recent times, they were the chief proprietors of newspapers, a branch of the trade that appears, from some modern instances, to be again falling in their direction.