Some of them, indeed, vanished in his own
life-time. The old association of booksellers, with its accompaniment of
trade-books, dwindled with the growth of the spirit of competition and
the greater facility of communication, so that, long before his death,
the co-operation between the booksellers of London and Edinburgh was no
more than a memory. Another institution which had his warm support was
the Sale dinner, but this too has all but succumbed, of recent years, to
the existing tendency for new and more rapid methods of conducting
business. The object of the Sale dinner was to induce the great
distributing houses and the retail booksellers to speculate, and buy an
increased supply of books on special terms. Speculation has now almost
ceased in consequence of the enormous number of books published, which
makes it difficult for a bookseller to keep a large stock of any single
work, and renders the life of a new book so precarious that the demand
for it may at any moment come to a sudden stop.
The country booksellers--a class in which Murray was always deeply
interested--are dying out.
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