The earliest book auction sale recorded took place at Warwick Court, Warwick Lane, in 1676, and in the following ten years only seventy-three auction sales of books are recorded as having been held. These auctions usually began at nine in the morning, and biddings might advance at a penny per time. The sales, however, differed from the sales of a later period. Formerly at the sales I attended the lots of books fell to the highest bidder, but although an auctioneer was usually present, he could only sell by a scale according to numbers, which was arranged by the publisher for whom the auctioneer acted. These delightful old catalogues are a continual source of inspiration to all booksellers, even if it is only the author or title of a book in which he is interested. It is, however, the sale catalogues of the eighteenth and the greater part of the nineteenth century which interest me most. It was a period which may be called the Golden Age of bookselling. The sale catalogues of this later time unfortunately came to an end in 1890, with that of Richard Bentley & Son, whose business was afterwards taken over by Messrs. Macmillan & Co. At the end of this catalogue, dated October 21, 1890, there was reprinted from "The Bookseller" an article on "Trade Sale Dinners," to which I contributed some of the information, and I am indebted to the courteous head of Messrs. Whitaker & Co. for allowing me to reproduce it in this chapter. It is as follows: "The very ancient institution, peculiar to booksellers, of dining together on the occasion of a trade sale, is almost extinct and is, we very much regret to think, likely to become entirely so in the near future. "The fashion of dining together on the occasion of a sale is a very old one. An interesting collection of sale catalogues in the possession of Mr. William Reader contains specimens dating back to 1704. They consist of the catalogues sent in the ordinary course of business to Osborne and his successor, the first of the Longmans. It is evident from these catalogues that sale dinners were a well-established custom of the trade as long ago as the beginning of the eighteenth century; and, as it must have required considerable time for the practice to have developed into a custom, their first beginnings may possibly have been as far back as 'the spacious times of great Elizabeth,' when bookselling first took shape as a regular trade.