JAMES RAVEN, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade.

Abstract

WHEN the Critical Review began in 1756 Tobias Smollett attempted to make a distinction between the new journal's noble, disinterested aim to revive ‘the true Spirit of Criticism’ and the ‘sordid views of Avarice’ characteristic of the Critical's predecessor the Monthly Review. The distinction was spurious, of course, and the Critical was focused on profit and on selling literary opinions no less and no more than the Monthly, but it sounded good. One thing of which this book reminds us repeatedly from its title onwards is that book publishing and the associated trades are businesses and have always been so, notwithstanding innumerable attempts to pretend to the contrary. In the introduction to this valuable and absorbing book, Raven comments, ‘To their creators and suppliers, books and print variously brought fortune, fame, poverty, bankruptcy, insanity and martyrdom’ (p. 3). This brief remark points to the principal reason for this book's being a highly enjoyable read as well as a gathering of a vast amount of factual information: it is a lively book about a huge variety of people connected to the business of books. In only 500 pages (really 400, since the index and especially the wonderfully detailed notes occupy more than 100) it covers with apparent ease the immense subject of changes and developments in the trade from about 1450 to 1850. The main focus is on the period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.