Publishers' Booklists in Late Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

In the middle of the seventeenth century London publishers began to include lists of other publications in books. Between 1646 and 1665 the number of publishers engaging in this practice grew from thirty-six to sixty-six. A close study of the booklists of two publishers, Thomas Parkhurst and Brabazon Aylmer, shows that these lists were plainly designed to bring very specific groups of readers and potential buyers into their shops. Lists of publishers’ advertisements on the spare pages of books distributed by other publishers support the idea that these lists helped to postulate and even to construct communities of readers of a rather specific bias, taste, and religious propensity.