Libraries and the Book Trade: The Formation of Collections from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (review)

This volume is the result of the twenty-first annual conference on the history of the book trade, organized by Birkbeck College, University of London on 4 and 5 December 1999. The focus of the eight papers that Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote gathered in this volume is twofold: libraries and the book trade, on the one hand, and the formation and growth of collections from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, on the other. The scholars who have contributed to this rich selection have succeeded in providing diversified accounts of the relationship of libraries to the book trade in Europe (mainly in England). Each section addresses specific aspects of this vast subject, as the titles indicate:

E. S. Leedham-Green, "Booksellers and the Libraries in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge"

R. J. Roberts, "The Latin Stock (1616-1627) and Its Library Contacts"

K. A. Manley, "Booksellers, Peruke-Makers, and Rabbit-Merchants: The Growth of Circulating Libraries in the Eighteenth Century"

Simon Eliot, "'Mr. Greenhill, whom you cannot get rid of': Copyright, Legal Deposit and the Stationers' Company in the Nineteenth Century"

Donald Kerr, "Sir George Grey and the English Antiquarian Book Trade"

Leslie A. Morris, "William Augustus White of Brooklyn (1843-1927) and the Dispersal of His Elizabethan Library"

Conor Fahy, "Collecting an Aldine: Castiglione's Libro Del Cortegiano (1528) through the Centuries"

Esther Potter, "Bookbinding for Libraries"

In a review with space limitations, it is impossible to do justice to all the contributions. I particularly enjoyed K. A. Manley's lively account of a peculiar aspect of the history of circulating libraries. Indeed, who would have known (at least it was new to me) that in the eighteenth century, the circulating library was run by booksellers (albeit not exclusively) whose gifts extended sometimes to hairdressing! Since the purpose of these libraries was to serve the needs of the public, from the regular reader to the scholar, the librarian was first of all a businessman, and the first circulating libraries were indeed commercial ones. These new types of libraries had a major impact in making books more widely available in England. Leslie Morris's essay shows the complex partnership among collectors, institutional libraries, and the book trade. She plunges the reader into the protracted negotiations between William Augustus White's booksellers and Harvard College Library. Conor Fahy's essay describes the author Castiglione's relationship with Italian and French booksellers in encouraging and promoting new publications. Fahy also examines a pattern that began in the late nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth: the exodus of English and Italian collections to America.

Readers of Libraries & Culture will surely peruse this volume with avidity. To anyone remotely interested in the book trade, this travel through time in Libraries and the Book Trade will make you want more.