house" of Cotta and Co. to carry into full effect the idea that their own
editions should alone be published, thereby adding other millions to the
very many of which they already are the owners!

At this moment a letter from Mr. Bayard Taylor advises us that German
circulating libraries impede the sale of books; that the circulation of
even highly popular works is limited within 20,000; and that, as a
necessary consequence, German authors are not paid so well as of right
they should be.[1] This, however, is precisely the state of things that,
as we are now assured, should be brought about in this country, prices
being raised, and readers being driven to the circulating library by
reason of the deficiency of the means required for forming the private
one. It is the one that _would_ be brought about should our authors,
unhappily for themselves, succeed in obtaining what is now demanded.

[Footnote 1: New York _Tribune_, Nov. 29]

The day has passed, in this country, for the recognition of either
perpetuity or universality of literary _rights_. The wealthy Carolinian,
anxious that books might be high in price, and knowing well that monopoly
privileges were opposed to freedom, gladly cooperated with Eastern authors
and publishers, anti-slavery as they professed to be. The enfranchised
black, on the contrary, desires that books may be cheap, and to that end
he and his representatives will be found in all the future co-operating
with the people of the Centre and the West in maintaining the doctrine
that literary _privileges_ exist in virtue of grants from the people who
own the materials out of which books are made; that those privileges have
been perhaps already too far extended; that there exists not even a shadow
of reason for any further extension; and that to grant what now is asked
would be a positive wrong to the many millions of consumers, as well as an