Mr. Quaritch has outdone all previous booksellers by the grandeur of his catalogues. They have grown in size and importance, until the last General Catalogue, in seven volumes and nine supplements, a large paper copy of which is in the Reading-room of the British Museum, throws all other catalogues into the shade. The volumes containing the various classes into which the catalogue is divided each form a most valuable bibliography and a grand record of the present prices of books. This is not a history of booksellers, and therefore more need not be said of them here than that a body of men to whom book collectors are greatly indebted may well be proud of numbering in their ranks those already named, as well as the Pickerings, the Lillys, the Boones, the Ellises, and the Bains, upon whose exploits we have not space to enlarge. AUCTIONEERS William Cooper, a bookseller in a good way of business at the sign of the Pelican in Little Britain, was the first to introduce into England the practice of selling books by auction, when in 1676 he sold Dr. Seaman’s library, and for some years he was the chief auctioneer in London. His first catalogue--the first sale catalogue in England--is exhibited in the Kings’ Library at the British Museum. In 1680 Edward Millington, a better known man and a bookseller of standing, took to auctioneering, and he and Cooper together divided the chief business in this department. Other booksellers, such as Moses Pitt, Zachary Bourne, Nathaniel Ranew, Richard Chiswell, and John Dunsmore, Robert Scott, &c., sold books by auction, and Oldys styles Marmaduke Foster, who made the catalogue of Thomason’s Civil War Tracts in twelve folio manuscript volumes, an auctioneer. It is, however, of the two foremost men, Cooper and Millington, that we want to know more, and fortunately a wit of Christ Church, Oxford, George Smalridge, afterwards Dean of Christ Church and Bishop of Bristol, was struck by the humours connected with the sale in 1686 of the stock of a bankrupt Oxford bookseller--Richard Davis, the publisher of several of the Hon. Robert Boyle’s works. Smalridge wrote a skit on the proceedings, under the title of “Auctio Davisiana Oxonii habita per Gulielmum Cooper, Edoar. Millingtonum, Bibliop. Lond. ... Londini: Prostant venales apud Jacobum Tonson, 1689.” This was reprinted in _Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta_, vol. i. 1691.[11]