le garret. The last firm of second-hand
booksellers of note who thrived in Paternoster Row was that of William
Baynes and Son; and the last of the race is still remembered by the
older generation of book-collectors, with his old-time appearance in
frills and gaiters. In 1826 Baynes published one of the most remarkable
catalogues (254 pages) of books printed in the fifteenth century which
has ever appeared. It is full of extremely valuable bibliographical
information. For many years John Wheldon, the natural history
bookseller, had a shop, chiefly for the sale of back numbers of
periodicals, at 4, Paternoster Row (as well as in Great Queen Street),
and this little shop subsequently passed into the tenancy of Jesse
Salisbury, who was there until six or seven years ago. The Chapter
Coffee-house, where so many important publishing schemes have been
mooted and carried out, still lingers in the Row, but modernized out of
all recognition.

The chief interest of St. Paul's Churchyard as a book locality centres
itself in the publishing rather than the second-hand bookselling phase.
One of our earliest printer-publishers, Julian Notary, was 'dwellynge in
powles chyrche yarde besyde ye weste dore by my lordes palyes' in 1515,
his shop sign being the Three Kings. At the sign of the White Greyhound,
in St. Paul's Churchyard, the first editions of Shakespeare's 'Venus and
Adonis' and 'Rape of Lucrece' were published by John Harrison; at the
Fleur de Luce and the Crown appeared the first edition of the 'Merry
Wives of Windsor'; at the Green Dragon the first edition of the
'Merchant of Venice'; at the Fox the first edition of 'Richard II.';
whilst the first editions of 'Richard III.,' 'Troilus and Cressida,'
'Titus Andronicus,' and 'Lear' all bear Churchyard imprints.

Not only were there very many booksellers' shops around the Yard, but at
the latter part of the sixteenth century bookstalls started up, first at
the west, and subsequently at the other doors of the cathedral. From a
letter addressed by Sir Clement Edmonds, March 28, 1620, to the Lord
Mayor, we gather that two houses were erected at the west gate of St.
Paul's without the sanction of the authorities, and these were ordered
to be removed, as were also certain 'sheds or shops that were being
erected near the same place.' A chief portion of the stock of these
shops and stalls would naturally be devotional books of various
descriptions. That these books were not always to b