A Victorian Amazon.com: Edward Petherick and His Colonial Booksellers’ Agency

In the late nineteenth century, a central figure in the international book trade was Australian Edward Petherick, who positioned himself as an important middleman for publishers wanting to expedite the sale of their books overseas. The article surveys the history of Petherick’s Colonial Booksellers’ Agency, which specialized in distributing, advertising, and publishing books for colonial and foreign markets, and illustrates the shift in the last two decades of the nineteenth century from British publishers eagerly cooperating with their overseas counterparts to British, colonial, and foreign firms directly competing for access to the international market in English-language books.