Advertisements for Books in London Newspapers, 1760-1785

Advertisements for Books in London Newspapers, 1760-1785 JAMES TIERNEY The present essay is meant as successor to a paper that I delivered at the Book Trade Conference at London University in 1994, a paper that was later printed among the conference proceedings in a volume entitled A Genius for Letters. ' The earlier paper drew upon years of reading book advertisements printed in mid-eighteenth-century English newspapers while working in the North Reading Room of the British Library during the 1970s and early 1980s—those wonderful days when one actually got to thumb through the original papers, not crank through microfilms. The long period of eye-straining but delightful research was a necessary undertaking while I was preparing an edition of the correspondence of the mid-eighteenthcentury London bookseller Robert Dodsley.2 (In the eighteenth-century book trade, a "bookseller" was the equivalent of a modern publisher; a "publisher ," although some held copyrights, largely acted as a distributor or seller for booksellers' products or engaged in the publication of pamphlets.) Since Dodsley's correspondence was, by the nature of his business, full of references to newly published works—both to his own publications and to those of others—this plentiful fund of newspaper advertisements proved invaluable for many editorial purposes. Without them undoubtedly I would not have identified many of the authors and works referred to only obscurely in the text of the correspondence, nor would I have been able to assign dates to many undated letters. I needed only to discover the relevant 153 154 / TIERNEY announcement among the plethora of advertisements in such newspapers as the Daily Advertiser, the General Advertiser, the General Evening Post, and the London Evening Post, and immediately the mystery was solved and a footnote could be added to the letter for the benefit of future users of the edition. It was the most basic kind of literary detective work but entirely gratifying because it worked. When I came to write the earlier paper, I was aglow with the advantages that newspaper advertisements afforded my work on Dodsley's correspondence , and I proceeded to elaborate on the specific values that newspaper advertisements offered students of book history—how advertisements are mines of information about books and the book trade itself. For instance, I explained how book advertisements frequently supply bibliographical data pertinent to individual publications—the size of a book, the quality of its paper, whether it carries illustrations and by whom, the edition number, its cost, and whether or not it is being offered by subscription—all of which, of course, are particularly significant in the case of books no longer extant. In addition, I called attention to the fact that book advertisements furnish the names of booksellers and (sometimes) printers, their shop locations, products, and services—many of whom are not recorded in existing biographical dictionaries and directories—as well as the business collaborations among these tradesmen. What's more, I noted that book trade advertisements and notices frequently reveal valuable data on persons, products, and services in such ancillary fields as bookbinding, papermaking, inkmaking , and engraving, as well as information relevant to book auctions, the opening of new book shops, the publication of periodicals, even feuds among members of the trade. All of this led me to the sweeping conclusion that the consulting of contemporary newspaper advertisements was a necessary component of any effort to produce the definitive history of the book in eighteenth-century England. I was pleased to be able to make this statement, for it was the cumulative wisdom of many years of patiently inspecting thousands of newspaper advertisements. Yet at the same time I made that statement, something I had discovered late in my research for that paper was nagging at me, something I hadn't detected years earlier when working on Dodsley's correspondence. As already mentioned, my work with newspaper advertisements to that point had been largely confined to the period of Dodsley's publishing career, or from 1735 to 1764. During this period newspapers and newspaper advertising had been growing by leaps and bounds. For instance, just prior to Dodsley's appearance on the London publishing scene—in the 1720s and early 1730s...