Price I IS. od., bound in red art-linen, top edges gilt NOTE BY THE EDITOR: This volume, originally issued under the title of Sale Records, has long been out of print, and is in much demand to enable complete sets of the publication to be formed. It will now be reprinted, and will be ready for delivery to subscribers at the earliest possible date in 1907. The editorship was not formerly in my own hands, and in my opinion, rightly or wrongly, the method of compilation was not of a character to merit the commendation of those to whom accuracy and means of immediate reference are desiderata. This refers especially to the old and out-of-date system of numbering the entries; cumbrous and fatiguing; and to the need for an Index, tiresome at the best, and an absolute nuisance when that index is untrustworthy. These drawbacks will be entirely absent from the new edition, as the opportunity will be taken to compile the volume upon the same plan as the present volume, viz., in one alphabet, without an index, and with a sufficiency of cross-references. In revising the volume special care will be taken to avoid headings wherever possible, and the only correct plan will be adopted of placing the works under the names of their respective authors. By this means, together with the fact that the whole of the copies of any particular work which occurred for sale in 1903-4 will appear on one page, the saving of time in referring will be enormous, while the possibilities of comparison of states and prices will be of no less value to the searcher. It is true that the same material will be found in the earlier edition, but if the axiom is true that in business Time is money the cost of this new edition will be profitable expenditure, even for the original subscribers. The frontispiece to the new edition will be a view of the house in which John Keats resided at Hampstead, and it will also contain plates of the mulberry-tree (still in full vigour), under which he wrote the Ode to a Nightingale, and of the bust to his memory, erected by Americans in Hampstead Church, in 1894. It is possible also that views of other buildings of literary interest, in or near Hampstead, may be included, as it is hoped that Book-Auction Records may be of sufficient value to merit permanent preservation. |