Bookselling and Publishing

Bookselling and publishing address the main points of the economy of the printed book.  This bibliography lists some books that cover these two topics.

 Howard-Hill, T.H.  The British Book Trade 1475-1890: A Bibliography.  London, England: The British Library, 2009.  Howard-Hill provides a history of the British book trade and the books published between 1475 and 1800.  The Bibliography has 24,567 entries which he had been compiling since 1963.

Mumby, Frank A.  The Romance of Bookselling: A History fromthe Earliest Times to the Twentieth century.  Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Reprint Corporation, 1967.  Mumby addresses the history of bookselling in England by tracing its roots to ancient Rome anf through the Dark ages up to the twentieth century.  He describes his book as a simple outline and a beginning for other researches to dig deeper into the subject.

Mumby, Frank Arthur and Ian Norrie.  Publishingand Bookselling.  London, Enland: Jonathon Cape LMT.  1974.  Mumby, who wrote the first part of this book that addresses publishing and bookselling before 1870, examines bookselling from its origins in the ancient world through its evolution as a result of printing by introducing the key factors of the trade during each time period.  Mumby also addresses the historical factors that influenced both publishing and bookselling.

Mann, Alastair F.  TheScottish Book Trade: 1500-1720.  East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 2000.  Mann responds to previous authors’ oversight of Scottish publishers by compiling the history of those overlooked publishers.  Mann looks at each stage of the book trade, namely booksellers, bookbinders, stationers and printers.

Pettegree, Andrew.  The Book in the Renaissance.  New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010.  Pettegrew explores the origin of books through the invention of print and the development of a trade market for books in Europe.  He looks at the book’s influence at school, news religion, libraries and medicine.

Wiles, R.M.  Serial Publication in England Before1750.  Cambridge, England: The Cambridge University Press. 1957.  Wiles examines the book trade that resulted from a new way of publishing and vending books in England.  Publishers found that those who were not previously interested in books would buy them in short, inexpensive installments.

I decided that I wanted to find all the books for this bibliography in the library because once you find one book on the topic, there are likely to more books on the same topic in the same area.  My problem was finding the first book.  I went through almost every topic on the list of topics for this unit using keywords to try and find the right book.  I kept finding books related to the topic, but not in the same time period, or books addressing other issues, anyway, it just took a while to find the publishing section and from there I just  thumbed trough lots of books to find the right time period and books containing the right emphasis on the subject.  I found that most authors addressed both bookselling and publishing, so I included both in this bibliography.  Most of the books I found were about England, mostly because I could actually read them.  There were other books in German, French, Russian, and probably some other languages I don't recognize, but as I am unable to read those languages, I could not tell what they were actually about.  

It was interesting to see the different writing styles of the authors and what drew them to the research of the topic.  Most started their research as a response to the lack of research that had previously been done on the topic.