 | |  |
William Edwards's Auctions 1749-1760
Of Richard Edwards (?1691-1767), little is known other than that he was a schoolmaster and stationer. His son William (1722-1808) apparently started the family tradition of being simultaneously bookseller, bookbinder, and publisher.
He was remarkable, early in life, for his great attention, industry, and application to his business, which were bookbinding and bookselling; in both of which he excelled almost every one of that branch, and particularly in the latter he has been noted the world around. . . .[4]
[He was] a character of considerable eminence in his profession, and . . . The Catalogues which he occasionally published were astonishingly rich in scarce and valuable books; of which the ornamental bindings were peculiarly elegant.[5]
He seems to have started selling books by auction about the same time (1749) as he commenced publishing. There are advertisements in the newspapers for seven sales by Edwards (sometimes William Edwards) in Halifax from 1749 through 1760; the first of these was in conjunction with the Halifax bookseller Nathanial Binns, and the rest were by Edwards alone. No surviving catalogue has been traced, so little can be learnt of these sales. In particular, it is difficult to gauge how extensive they were, for at least two sales of books (those of 1749 and 1759) began on a specified date and continued "every Evening till they were Sold". Only one collector is named in the advertisements, and the contents are described merely as "Choice and valuable Books" or as "Books on Divinity, History, Law, Physick, Antiquities, Voyages, Travels, and Miscellanies", a common country gentleman's range of interests. The sales did not take place in Edwards's shop or in a regular auction room but at The Old Cock Inn in Halifax.
Edwards does not seem to have acted as agent for the vendors, taking a percentage of the prices at which the works were sold, as an ordinary auctioneer might do. Instead, he seems to have sold his own books at auction, presumably as a way of realizing cash on them more quickly than he could in his shop. At any rate, at his auction of 1760 he sold "part of several libraries lately purchased", indicating that they had already been paid for, presumably by the auctioneer. The sales are infrequent, not quite one a year from 1754 through 1760, mostly in the autumn, and it is likely that they served primarily as a priming-device for William Edwards's secondhand
The William Edwards auctions thus far recorded cover only 1749-1760;[6] apparently when he became firmly established as a bookseller he discontinued the practice. So far as I have ascertained, William Edwards never issued a catalogue of the stock of his shop. For that matter, neither did his son Richard. It was only his most successful sons James and Thomas who published catalogues of their book-stock. James did so almost as soon as he had established himself in London.
| | |