British Book Trade Index: development and progress

Abstract

Readers of Library Review well know the importance of books and, hence, of the book trade. But, just as many libraries now also handle records, CDs, xeroxes, etc., so the "book trade" has always been much wider than is immediately obvious from these two words. Indeed, we are still engaged in defining the boundaries of our catch-all definition. Because of this catholicity it must be recognized that the book trade antedates Gutenberg's development of printing from movable types in the middle of the fifteenth century -there were scribes, parchminers, illuminators, rubricators and even papermakers before then.In the last few decades of the nineteenth century a number of local bibliographers -often librarians stimulated by the development of ratesupported libraries -produced substantial bibliographies of works about their own localities. Generally, these provided information about local printers and publishers only incidentally. Such listings continued until the outbreak of the Second World War restricted time and materials.In the North east of England we were unusually fortunate in our book-trade historians: C.C. Burman (for Alnwick), Richard Welford (for Newcastle and Gateshead) and J.L. Hilson (for Berwick). All three concentrated on works produced in their "town" and on the producers. These were ideal quarries for our work.For more than a century individual scholars have studied provincial printers -and, sometimes, publishers. Their published work is widely scattered, but I suspect that much is still unpublished. In 1981 Professor John Feather put us provincial book-trade dabblers in his debt with his Oxford Bibliographical Society Occasional Publication 16, The English Provincial Book Trade before 1850: A Checklist of Secondary Sources, which greatly needs bringing up to date as the pace of this provincial work builds up. In addition, in the last 30 years several groups have been set up to study the trade in their areas.The study of the English book trade had traditionally concentrated on London and the University towns of Oxford and Cambridge. The classical work of Duff, and Plomer and his colleagues, was extended to bookbinders by Howe and Ramsden -the latter also listing bookbinders outside the metropolis. English papermakers and paper mills up to 1800 were dealt with by Shorter in his magisterial work. But generally the provinces and the other countries of the British Isles were ignored, either as unimportant or too difficult to study, or both.In the 1960s and 1970s displaced Londoners like myself, and others with proper local pride, developed a network among ourselves, which was brought to

Digital Humanities and Electronic Resources in the Long Eighteenth Century

“…26 26 ‘The British Book Trade Index’, <http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/>; see Peter Isaac, ‘British Book Trade Index: Development and Progress" , Library Review , (), 17–23.…”