1 DECEMBER 1928, Page 21

A good bookselling business which has been conducted for two

centuries in the same premises surely deserves a record. We may heartily commend, both for its subject and for its literary merit the imposing quarto on The. Oldest London Bookshop, by ?4r. George Smith and Mr. Frank Benger (Ellis, 10s. ed.). Mr. Ellis's business, at 29 New Bond Street, was founded in 1728 by John Brindley, who had been a book- binder in Little Britain and who had the good sense to follow

the well-to-do Londoners westward to " The King's Arms 'Y in what was then an unfinished street on the very fringe of the town. Brindley published for Pope and developed a sound bookselling business. James Robson succeeded him and lived till 1806. After an interval came the Boones who acted for the British Museum, and from the last of them the business was purchased in 1872 by the late Frederick Ellis,, a most accomplished man who was an intimate friend of William Morris and who made his shop a literary meeting- ground for all the eminent Victorians. Frederick Ellis was succeeded by his nephew, and he in turn by the present owners, Messrs. Holdsworth and Smith. An appendix con- tains a series of extracts from the correspondence of James Robson, bearing on the literary history of the age of Johnson.