A Companion to the History of the Book (44 page)

The London booksellers were always capable of acting together when their oligopoly was threatened. They did so several times during the eighteenth century. They took action against Scottish printers and booksellers who illegally reprinted London books and sold them in the north of England and the Midlands. They tried – with rather less success because they were on less certain legal ground – to do the same against the Irish booksellers. They worked together for new legislation – to limit the import of English-language books, for example – and supported each other in what was sometimes long, complex, and expensive litigation in the courts of both England and Scotland. The mutual dependence of the London booksellers was perhaps best exemplified in the operation of the so-called “share-book” system. Rights in copies were regularly bought and sold at closed auctions which could be attended only by certain members of the trade. There was an understanding that rights bought at such sales (known as “trade sales”) would only be sold through the same channel; hence the rights remained within the inner circles of the trade, although occasional newcomers were admitted, thus increasing the pool of capital among the participants. From the early decades of the eighteenth century onward, it became increasingly common for copy-owners to sell shares (from as much as a half, to as little as one sixty-fourth) in a copy, thus creating complex jointly owned copyrights. These are reflected in the long imprints to be found in many London books of the period. The consequence of the share-book system was that all those who participated in it had an interest in defending it, and in defending the interpretation of the 1710 Act which guaranteed the value of their investments.

There was greater competition in the trade, but it was between the London booksellers themselves, rather than between them and others. It was only in the last quarter of the century that the London booksellers’ attempt to protect their traditional stranglehold on the trade began to fail. They lost a critical case in the House of Lords in 1774 which effectively opened the way to unlimited reprinting and sale of books whose copyright was in public domain. Booksellers in the north and the Midlands – the areas of greatest economic growth in these early decades of industrialization – could legally obtain books from Scottish and Irish suppliers if these were cheaper than their London rivals. Law and economics interacted, and did so in the environment of rapidly developing industrial capitalism.

The protection of the law, however, would have had little point if the London booksellers had not been able to operate efficiently at a national level. The economic mechanisms for the maintenance of London’s domination of the trade revolved around the distribution system. We know little of this in the early seventeenth century. The upper and middle classes bought their books in London, or from London booksellers directly or through their agents. There were bookshops in the major provincial towns, and books were sold at markets and fairs. The chapmen and peddlers who took goods into the most remote parts of the country also included a few books among their other wares. It was the development of the networks of agents built up by the provincial newspaper producers that transformed the distribution system of the English book trade. By the middle of the century, most towns of any size had a printer and a weekly newspaper. Circulating areas actually contracted geographically, but print-runs and sales, and hence the networks of local agents, increased significantly. Where detailed investigation has been possible, as in Wiltshire and the surrounding areas of south-west England, it is clear that these networks were a critical channel for book distribution (Ferdinand 1997). Books were advertised in the newspapers and could be ordered through their agents. They transmitted the orders to the London booksellers, either directly or through the newspaper proprietor. Thus the provincial newspaper proprietors became the linchpins of a national book-distribution system. They had the contacts in the London trade (for stocking their own shops, as well as for supplies of essential items, such as paper and ink), they had relatively easy access to transportation (since they were typically based in major towns), and – critically – they had lines of credit with the London book trade and had developed means of payment which could overcome or circumvent the obstacles presented by a still primitive system of banking and credit transfer.

The consequence of these developments was that by the second half of the eighteenth century it was possible, without too much difficulty, to obtain a copy of almost any book anywhere in England, and in much of the rest of the British Isles. To facilitate this activity, the London trade also began to develop a supporting infrastructure. Various attempts had been made to produce regular lists of newly published books dating back to the Term Catalogues first published in 1668. The lists published in
The Gentleman’s Magazine
were perhaps the first that were both authoritative and widely available. Before the end of the century, there were various attempts to produce a regular listing of new titles for the benefit of the trade rather than the public. A
Complete Catalogue of Modern Books,
first published in 1773, marks the beginning of a more or less continuous series. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was not difficult for a provincial bookseller or reader to keep up with what was being published. Moreover, these various lists also indicated to the provincial booksellers how each title could be obtained. Specialist book wholesaling is a phenomenon of the last quarter of the eighteenth century; until that time, the bookseller was typically his own distributor, although there is evidence that consortia of booksellers worked together to make the system more effective. In 1785, there appeared the first of many directories intended to help both London and provincial booksellers to identify each other and to know how to communicate. This guide,
The London and Country Printers, Booksellers and Stationers Vade Mecum
by John Pendred, was as important for the Londoners, who could identify their primary provincial customers, as it was for the provincials, who could find out how to contact (and pay) the Londoners (Pollard 1955).

All the evidence taken cumulatively suggests that an effective system for book distribution was operational by about 1750 (Pollard 1978). Of course, it was far from perfect. The physical transport of books was problematic; they had (and have) a comparatively unfavorable ratio of weight to value, so that any form of transport for which the charges are based on the former, will disadvantage books. Books seem to have cost more in the provinces than in London as a result. However, the transport infrastructure was changing for the better. Indeed, it could hardly move in any other direction. The main roads were improved and maintained properly in the eighteenth century for the first time since the Romans left in 410. Before the end of the seventeenth century, the rivers were being partly canalized to make them more suitable for transport; artificial waterways began to be dug from the 1760s onward. Although the real revolution came in the nineteenth century with the building of the railways, by 1800 inland transport in Britain was easier than it had ever been, and provision was far more widespread. On the major roads there were regular coach services, carriers with carts and wagons, and – most important of all – state-controlled postal services which were both a cause and a consequence of the improvement of the roads. The book trade was a beneficiary of all of these developments; it was, in terms of the economy in general, a minor player, but for the trade itself the improvements in transport were another mechanism for securing the effectiveness of the distribution system.

The cultural dimension of the London oligopoly is less tangible but no less important. London was the center of English – and increasingly of British – literary life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, the book trade had its place in asserting and ensuring that dominance. The decline of royal and aristocratic patronage effectively left the book trade as the paymasters of the authors. In turn, the trade had to satisfy the wishes of its customers. Because the trade was in London, authors also had to be in London, or to go there to make their names and their fortunes. The mid-eighteenth-century writer Henry Fielding (1707–54) illustrated the process perfectly in one of his novels: the story
oí Joseph Andrews
(1742) turns on one of the characters – Parson Adams, a country clergyman – going to London to try to find a bookseller to publish his (almost certainly unsaleable) book. Printed culture was very largely a metropolitan culture, underpinned by the legal and economic power of the London book trade. It was not until the industrial towns of the north and the Midlands began to develop their own distinctive cultural lives in the nineteenth century – including powerful and influential newspapers quite unlike the anodyne imitations of the London press which typified the eighteenth century – that this was to change. Even then, the London book trade was so well entrenched that it was to remain at the heart of British publishing for another two centuries. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, its position is still substantially intact.

Buyers and Readers: The End and the Beginning

The book trade was sustained by demand. Demand came from readers. Without readers there can be no book trade. The pattern which evolved in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, and which remains essentially intact even now, was that the producers – the booksellers (in the eighteenth-century sense) – dealt with intermediaries who were part of the same trade rather than with the general public. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these intermediaries were retail booksellers. In London, where it had been customary for booksellers to be retailers as well as publishers, specialization in retailing developed during the century. This development was as much social as it was economic. By the end of the century, the fashionable areas of London were no longer in the City where the trade was traditionally based, but to the west and the north, in rapidly developing Piccadilly, St. James’s, and Islington. The retailers moved with their market, and developed their own distinctive branch of the trade. A simultaneous development, largely aimed at the opposite end of the socio-economic scale, was of selling books at low prices in great quantities, and the evolution of the practice of remaindering. The pioneer was James Lackington (1746–1815) whose Temple of the Muses was probably the largest bookshop in the world at the end of the eighteenth century. The link between public and publisher was finally broken. In the provinces it had never existed. Provincial books buyers bought through their local bookseller; the larger shops in the larger towns had a stock of books – typically an eclectic mixture of new and secondhand, dominated by Bibles, prayer-books, and school books – but could also order books for their customers. The would-be reader in Cumberland or Cornwall could read a review or epitome in
The Gentleman’s Magazine
and then order the book through the same chain of supply that had brought the magazine in first place.

The price of books was always, of course, an issue for readers. Lackington’s success demonstrated that by the end of the eighteenth century there was a market for cheap books. Retail book prices were remarkably stable from the late seventeenth century until the 1780s. Large books (folios and quartos to use contemporary trade terminology) were about 10s or a little more, octavos (perhaps the most typical format in the mid-eighteenth century) about 5s, and the smallest books even less. The smallest pamphlets sold for 6d, as did some tracts and chapbooks. Prices rose fairly steeply toward the end of the period (Altick 1957: 51). A three-volume novel typically sold at about 9s in the 1790s, but this had gone up to about 12s within a decade (St. Clair 2004: 203). This reflected broader trends in prices of goods and commodities in the period (Mitchell 1988: 719–20). Prices, however, need to be set in the context of wages and the cost of living. The latter was stable for much of the eighteenth century; indexing 1700 at 100, the cost of living fell slightly, reaching a low point of 81 in 1732, but after the middle of the century there was a steady increase to 109 in 1762, 130 in 1771, 140 in 1792, and 153 in 1796. In this context, the prices of books roughly reflect the general economic trends of the period, although in real terms they were probably marginally cheaper by the end of the century than they had been at the beginning, and there were far more cheap editions, partly as a consequence of the greater competition introduced into the trade from the mid-1770s onward.

But could people afford to buy books, however cheap they were? Even at the end of the eighteenth century, a female domestic servant could be earning as little as £4 a year, although her accommodation, food, and clothing were typically provided (Berg 2004: 377–8). A laborer (male) earned an average of £19 in 1710 and £25 in 1797. Among the most likely customers for books, a schoolteacher earned an average of £16 in 1710, and £43 in 1797. Both clerks and skilled men in the printing trade itself were better paid than this (£44 and £43 respectively in 1710; £135 and £66 in 1797). A clergyman’s average income was £100 in 1710 and £238 in 1797, although these averages (and no doubt others) conceal very large variations between individuals (Mitchell 1988: 153).

Buying books, however, was not the only way to obtain them. In 1661, the London bookseller Francis Kirkman opened the capital’s first circulating library, in which customers could borrow books for a limited period of time for a fee. A small circulating library became a profitable sideline for many booksellers throughout the country during the eighteenth century. For some, it was far more than that. In London, in the major provincial cities, and in the pleasure resorts, the circulating library brought the book trade into the developing leisure industry. Especially in the resort towns, the temporary residents needed amusements when not taking the waters or going to the assembly rooms or paying and returning “calls.” The literature of the time – Sheridan’s plays, Austen’s novels – perfectly captures the life and the place of the circulating library in it. By the 1780s, circulating libraries had become an important part of the book-trade economy. The publishers of novels (and by this time we can use the word “publisher” in the modern sense) were particular beneficiaries. The Noble brothers in the 1780s, William Lane in the 1790s, and some others even less well remembered, built successful businesses on commissioning and publishing scores of novels designed specifically for sale to the libraries. Lane’s Minerva Press, for example, specialized in Gothic fiction for the library market. These were never intended as literary masterworks; they were unashamed leisure reading, and had themes which are still familiar in that market: romance, horror, glamorized history, and the like.