ABSTRACT
Early in 1744 the bookseller Richard Chandler, aged about thirty-one and on the verge of bankruptcy, blew out his brains. The following year his business partner Caesar Ward, aged thirty-five, went bankrupt and was forced to sell his printing house in Coney Street, York. Chandler probably only compounded the affront when he offered Richardson the opportunity to complete Kelly's work and publish it under his own name. T. S. Ashton, in his Economic History of England in the eighteenth century, comes up with different figures, based on notices in The London Gazette and the Gentleman's Magazine. The imprint to a Masonic volume in 1738 places Ward and Chandler amongst that brotherhood, and in 1739 they capitalized on the celebrity of Dick Turpin to print and publish at least five editions of an account of his trial and execution at York, probably one of their most successful ventures.
