This lot only fetched seven shillings and sixpence.
The number of sales seem now to have increased annually, but it was some years before a library that could rank with Richard Smith’s was sold. In April 1683 the books of Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester, were sold (twenty-two years after his death) “by Samuel Carr, at his house of the King’s Head in St. Paul’s Churchyard.” About this time auction sales took place in various parts of the country, and Edward Millington was largely employed as a peripatetic auctioneer. In September 1684 he sold books at Stourbridge Fair (Bibliotheca Sturbitchiana). In 1686 two sales occurred at Trumpington (Obadiah Sedgwick in March, and William Whitwood in May) and two at Cambridge (Dr. Edmond Castell in June, and Rev. J. Chamberlaine, of St. John’s College, at Stourbridge Fair, in September). When we forget the change that has taken place in the value of money, and express our surprise that rare books should only realise a few shillings, we should note that the cost of the hire of thirteen carts for conveying Dr. Castell’s books from Emmanuel College to the sign of the Eagle and Child, where they were sold, was only three shillings.38 In 1685 and 1686 occurred the famous sales of the stock of Richard Davis, the Oxford bookseller, which was satirised in the Auctio Davisiana, noticed in an earlier chapter.
In 1682 William Cooper published a list of book-sales up to that date, and again a fuller list in 1687, which contained a note of seventy-four sales in the ten years 1676-86. The following note is printed on the back of page 33 of Catalogus Librorum Bibliothecæ viri cujusdam Literati, 14th February 1686-87—
“To gratifie those Gentlemen whose curiosities may lead them to make perfect their Collection, I have caused to be printed the names of those persons whose libraries have been sold by auction, and the series of the time when” [1676-1686].