At an early period of his life Mr. Bohn married a daughter of the senior partner in the firm of Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., an alliance that doubtless strengthened his business connections. His trade sales were for many years among the most important in London, lasting for three or four days, and were conducted after the manner of the good old school of booksellers--now, alas! almost extinct--with the pleasing accompaniments of singing and supper. Though Mr. Bohn, a few years since, transferred his “Libraries” and his premises in York Street to Messrs. Bell and Daldy, he has not yet entirely severed his connection with the bookselling world, though as the “father of the trade” he has long since earned the right to leisure and retirement--a right acknowledged not alone in England, for in June, 1869, the _New York Round Table_ devoted an interesting article to Mr. Bohn’s retirement from the publishing world, and observed that many of his articles in “Lowndes” were unsurpassed in bibliography, especially those on Shakespeare and Junius. “Indeed,” adds the writer, “if we may believe report, such has been the unceasing devotion of Mr. Bohn to work that for years he has subjected himself to a weekly examination by his surgeon to warn him of the first symptoms of the collapse that such an unintermitted strain upon his mind might be supposed to produce.”
THREE VOLUME NOVELS AND LIGHT LITERATURE.
Round Henry Colburn clusters a body of writers, lighter and gayer, and consequently more ephemeral than any we have yet noticed--men and women, too, for the matter of that, who purchased immediate success too often with a disregard of future reputation.
As a lad, Henry Colburn was placed in the establishment of William Earle, bookseller, of Albemarle Street, and after this preliminary training obtained the situation of assistant to a Mr. Morgan, the principal of a large circulating library in Conduit Street. Here he had, of course, ample opportunity of gauging the reading taste of the general public, and it is probably from this early connection with the library-subscribing world that he determined henceforth to devote himself almost exclusively to the production of the light novelties which he saw were so eagerly and so incessantly demanded. In 1816 he succeeded to the proprietorship of the library, and conducted the business with great spirit and success until, removing to New Burlington Street, he resigned the Conduit Street Library to the hands of Messrs. Saunders and Ottley, who, until their recent dissolution, were famous, not only for their circulating library, but for the tender care they bestowed upon the works of suckling poets and poetasters.