the four folios, L600, an offer which was
accepted, and it may be doubted whether such a set could now be
purchased for L6,000. Mr. Lenox was for over ten years desirous of
obtaining a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalter,' printed by Stephen Daye
at Cambridge, New England, 1640, the first book printed in what is now
the United States, and had given Mr. Stevens a commission of L100 for
it. After searching far and wide, the long-lost 'Benjamin' was
discovered in a lot at the sale of Pickering's stock at Sotheby's in
1855. 'A cold-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing towards the
table behind Mr. Lilly, I quietly bid, in a perfectly neutral tone,
"Sixpence"; and so the bids went on, increasing by sixpences, until half
a crown was reached and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up
this very volume, he turned to me and remarked, "This looks a rare
edition, Mr. Stevens; don't you think so? I do not remember having seen
it before," and raised the bid to 5s. I replied that I had little doubt
of its rarity, though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms, and at
the same time gave Mr. Wilkinson a sixpenny nod. Thenceforward a
"spirited competition" arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until finally
the lot was knocked down to Stevens for 19s.' The volume had cost the
late Mr. Pickering 3s. It became Mr. Lenox's property for L80.
Twenty-three years later another copy was bought by Mr. Cornelius
Vanderbilt for 1,200 dollars.

In a letter to Justin Windsor, the late J. Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps
gave some very curious and interesting information respecting
book-collecting in the earlier half of the present century. 'About the
year 1836,' he wrote, 'when I first began hunting for old books at the
various stalls in our famous London city, black-letter ones and rare
prints were "plenty as blackberries," and I have often found such things
in unlikely places and amidst a mass of commonplace rubbish, exposed for
sale in boxes labelled, "These books and pamphlets 6d. or 1s. each,"
outside an old bookseller's window, where another notice informed the
passer-by that "Libraries were purchased or books bought;" and thus
plainly showed how such now indeed rarities came into the possession of
an ignorant bibliopole. It was not, however, till about 1840 that I
turned my attention to the more special work of collecting Shakespeare
quartos, in which, I may say, I have been very successful. It was at one
of George Chalmers' sales that I fi