Loth PREFACE T is a common delusion-from which publishers and booksellers are not exempt-that the problems we are called upon to solve and the circumstances in which we are placed are peculiar to our own land and generation. A close study of conditions in foreign countries reveals the fact that most of the difficulties connected with our craft with which we are confronted in England have already exercised or are beginning to trouble our colleagues abroad. In the same way, in reading Knight's account of the Bookseller-publishers of old times, we are struck even more by the similarities than by the differences. It is true we are told comparatively little of the actual conduct of their businesses, owing, no doubt, to the author's regrettable view that it would "have too much of a commercial character to be generally interesting," but we are told enough to realize that although our predecessors were spared the appalling complications of the present age, they were not without many of the major difficulties that beset publishers to-day. If we do not often encounter authors so gracious in their recognition of their publishers' services as William Cowper, we are happily not visited by irate clients, sword in hand, and kept "trembling behind the counter" like Jacob Robinson, until the " ysms of the author's anger" has passed! Similarly, parox |