Cooper was not satisfied with the catalogue, which had been made by one considered by him to be incompetent, and of whom he writes thus—
“This Catalogue was taken by Phil Briggs, and not by W. Cooper, but afterwards in parts methodized by him. Wherefore he craves your excuse for the mistakes that have hapned; and desires that the Saddle may be laid upon the right horse.”
The sale of Benjamin Worsley’s library (May 1678) is interesting, as being the first auction in which a fair representation of old English literature occurs, in addition to the ordinary theological works. Chaucer (1602) fetched £1, 3s. 6d.; Ben Jonson’s Works (1640), £1, 13s. 6d.; Shakespeare, second folio, 16s., and third folio, £1, 8s. 6d. The auctioneers were John Dunsmore and Richard Chiswell, and the sale took place over against the Hen and Chickens, in Paternoster Row. The sixth sale consisted of the libraries of John Godolphin and Owen Philips, and took place in November 1678, when a Caxton—“Geffrey Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiæ in English”—fetched five shillings. We thus see that in two years there were only six sales. After this time they became more frequent, and in this same month of November 1678 an attempt was made at rigging a sale; the booksellers were so well satisfied with the prices obtained, that they thought it would be a good stroke of business to lift some of their old stock under the cover of a good name. Moses Pitt adopted this expedient, and issued a catalogue of books described as including “the library of a worthy and learned person deceased, with a considerable number of the choice books of most sciences, some of which have been bought out of the best libraries abroad, particularly out of the late famous and learned Gilbert Voetius’s.”