“YOU care nothing,” says Hogg in one of his abusive letters, “for anything that does not come under the beard of Geordie Buchanan.” And there is some truth in the reproach from the beginning of the Magazine, especially from the famous seventh number, in which Mr Blackwood began fully to control and govern it. His attention had been so concentrated on the new organ, that other matters attracted him in a minor degree, and his personal list of new publications was not large. I say his personal list, for through his correspondents he had—according to the custom of the time, which made almost every new book the property of two or three publishing firms in partnership—a hand in most things that were going on. The lists advertised, first on the brown cover of the Magazine, later as business grew in the more decorous pages sewn in with it, are amazingly characteristic of this habit of the period. On one side of the page are, for example, “Books published for Messrs Cadell & Davies and William Blackwood,” while on the other the inscription stands, “Books published for William Blackwood and Messrs Cadell & Davies.” John Murray and William Blackwood, William Blackwood and John Murray, are similarly interchanged; and many other names come in, even that of a local bookseller in Newcastle, part of whose venture the Edinburgh publisher had taken upon him.