With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers, to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune to find a copy of the extremely scarce _Lyric Poems_ of Philip Ayres (1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early printed books. * * * * * Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite. _Barnabee's Journall_, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced at £48, and _Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture_, 1640, at £25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of Dekker's _Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London_ (1631), at £14. A copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page, is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's _History of the Civil Wars_, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio _Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I._, printed by J. Hughs and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's _Carmen Deo Nostro_ in the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of Herbert's _Temple_, and a first edition of _Hesperides, or the works, both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq._, £140. * * * * * It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the others early issues, is offered for £37 10_s._ On the other hand, a first edition of _Friendship's Garland_ can be bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10_s._ 6_d._, and a first edition of Buchanan's _Book of Orm_ for half-a-crown.