A genius for letters: Booksellers and bookselling from the 16th to the 20th century (Publishing pathways)

By the mid-eighteenth century bookselling was established as the key factor in the book business. On the one hand, booksellers were at the center of the interlocking range of associated activities involved in the manufacture and distribution of a multi-form product. On the other hand, they helped to shape the consumption of print in the market, responding to and guiding the taste of readers as customers. Printers, binders, authors, and readers never achieved the corporate force and solidarity of the booksellers who, in England, early on dominated the London Stationers' Company. It was as `publishers' in its increasingly specialist sense of the marketing and distribution of texts, that this commercial sector acquired its authority in the long term. As the owners of valuable copyrights the leading London booksellers laid the foundation of a commercial interest which was never seriously challenged. The contributors to this volume unravel some of the complexities of the trade organized by business people working at different times and different places but all pursuing what might be called the logic of the market place through the sale of books. Topics include booksellers and bookbinders by Anthony Hobson; Italian bookselling in the eighteenth century by Luigi Balsamo; booksellers and bookshops in late seventeenth-century London by Giles Mandlebrote; and circulating libraries, booksellers and book clubs 1870-1966 by Simon Eliot. 188 pages. printed paper over boards.. 8vo..