Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 by James Raven (review)

This is one of the latest volumes published by James Raven, who has become a sort of standard-bearer for the cause of book history, particularly of the eighteenth century. In this work, neatly encapsulated under the term ‘Bookscape’, Raven has extended the content of his Panizzi lectures of 2010 to develop ideas about the relation of space and function in the metropolitan book trade. The theoretical justification for the cross-referencing of booksellers and printers with their physical environment is clear enough and does not necessarily benefit from the elaborate analysis of chapter one, in which some of the more obscure usages of space as a cultural signifier are given an airing. Throughout the work there does seem to be some tension between the pragmatic, ground-level material provided by the land tax assessments, and the attempt to flesh out the implications of the information in relation to a more general chronology of the trade. The organisation of information both by collection and dispersal at street level was being undertaken by a range of individuals and institutions who laid down tracks through the urban landscape across the eighteenth century. Much of this was commercial in character, some was sponsored by the institutions of local and national government. Within this latter category fell the rambling excursions of the parish-based rating assessors who annually wove their way through the built-up parishes of central London noting down the values, rentals, and tax-paying capacity of the people living and working in the vast and expanding network of individual properties. Some of these were inhabited by members of the book trades and this study has also grown out of the project ‘Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London’, now based at the London Metropolitan Archive. Through this book Raven offers a guide to the wonderfully dense and informative house-by-house tax record, suggesting how the information can be used to reconstruct key areas in the organization and structure of the print industry in London.

The two main focal points for his investigation are, as might be expected, the network of streets centred on Paternoster Row in the heart of the City, and those crammed into the area around Little Britain, an alternative focus for the book trades just outside the eastern boundary and adjacent to Smithfield Market. The tax records provide a gripping view of the trade packed into the narrow streets of London, and the best parts of this book, which it must be said is not always a very easy read, reveal all kinds of otherwise invisible characteristics of the trading community. The stability of some premises as very long-running centres of bookselling and printing are set against the locations which in contrast reveal an almost manic turnover of occupancy. Neighbourhoods can be explored in detail and some of the hidden structures of continuity, association and competition be brought into view. The text of this work is embedded in a substantial apparatus of maps, tables, graphs and contemporary illustrations which display some of the characteristics of eighteenth-century London. The numbering is hard to follow and the sequences are erratic. Even so, the visible representation of the material in such varied form is of considerable use and an essential element of Raven’s descriptive reconstructions.

The clearly source-based elements of Raven’s book are its strength. Its weakness lies in the ambitious attempt to construct a general analysis of the history and character of the London trade before 1800 based on the platform of the tax records. As he points out at various moments in the text, book history has to be put together from a mass of variable detail, and however seductive the presence of the continuous sequence of tax assessments may be they need above all to be contextualized. One major problem of the analysis arises from the fact that the mapping...