[Illustration: KUSTER'S RECEIPT FOR A PORTION OF HIS FEE] Dͬ Bentley had told me you would write to some booksellers in Hollͩ. Since we refused Mͬ Mortier's offers it might perhaps be of service but I think we could not pitch on a fitter person for disposing of a good quantity of Suidas beyond sea. Bentley's financial negotiations with the Dutch booksellers were apparently not successful, since copies of the _Lexicon_ were disposed of to foreign booksellers by the method of exchange: Feby 1ᵗʰ 1705/6. Agreed then also yͭ foreign booksellers be treated with for an exchange of an hundred[93] Suidas's, for a number of bookes wͨͪ shall be esteem'd of equal value, & yͭ Catalogues of proper bookes wᵗʰ their respective prises, be procur'd from them to be approv'd of by yͤ University. The succession of troubles encountered by the university both in the production and distribution of this book illustrates the difficulties of the Curators in attempting to grapple with the details of stock-keeping and accountancy. By 1732 "part of yͤ impression was in yͤ University warehouse and yͤ rest was got into Mͬ Innys's[94] hands in London, but in such manner, yͭ neither had a perfect book." After some two or three years of negotiation for the mutual purchase of sheets at ½_d_ a piece, the university, having bought the whole of Innys's stock for £400, acquired 410 complete sets of the work and appointed a Syndicate to dispose of them. The Syndics, however, found remaindering difficult: It were well (says the writer of a memorandum of 1749) if we could get some one to take them all off our hands at almost any rate. I have tried Knapton and Whiston in vain. They durst not venture on the whole: but advise to advertize them at 30ˢ a Book, and let yͤ Booksellers have them at 25ˢ.... I have hopes yͭ Vailliant may take them all at 25ˢ a book, especially if he be allowed time for payment of the money, & yͤ University would take some of it in books, which we really want for yͤ Rustat Library[95]. Eventually, in 1752, 75 sets were disposed of to T. Merrill (a Cambridge bookseller) at one guinea each and the rest seem to have been exchanged[96]. So ended the most ambitious of the early publishing enterprises of the university. Amongst the other books printed during this period, editions of the classics are prominent. The titles of these will be found in Appendix II and Davies's editions of Cicero, Barnes's Anacreon (1705) and Homer (1711), Taylor's Lysias (1740) may be specially noted. The edition of the _Medea_ and _Phoenissae_ of Euripides by W. Piers (1703) contains, in its preface, an interesting tribute to the renovation of Cambridge typography: Si _Typorum elegantiam_ mireris, gratias merito ingentes habeto _Illustrissimo Principi_ Carolo _Duci_ Somersetensium _munificentissimo nostrae Academiae Cancellario_, cui Cordi est _nostrum_ imo _suum_ denuò revixisse _Typographéum_.