The price of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, two volumes folio, was in 1755 four guineas in sheets, and £4, 15s. in boards.
Folios are so completely out of fashion now, except for gorgeously illustrated books, or for facsimiles of books and documents, that it is scarcely worth while to carry the inquiry to a later period.
QUARTOS
The small quarto volumes of the seventeenth century were by no means high priced, and we learn that three shillings bought Milton’s “Paradise Lost” when first published. The price of the early editions of the separate plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, which now are so much sought after, was sixpence. This we learn from the address prefixed to the early issue of “Troilus and Cressida,” 1609, published before that play was acted—
“Amongst all these is none more witty than this; and had I time, I would comment upon it, though I know it needs not—for so much as will make you think your