Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800. The Panizzi Lectures 2010 by James Raven (review)

For many years Mr. Raven has been encouraging us to explore the printing and publishing of books in England in commercial rather than literary or intellectual terms, notably in his Judging New Wealth (1992) and The Business of Books (2007); he has produced the first full bibliography of popular fiction in the later eighteenth century in volume 1 of The English Novel 1770–1829 (2000), and written on the export trade to America, notably in London Booksellers and American Customers (2002). In 1999 he set up a funded project, Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London: with the assistance of Nigel Hall and others this made possible the analysis of the London land-tax records that formed the basis of his Panizzi lectures at the British Library, “London Booksites: Places of Printing and Publication before 1800.” This material has been further developed with a modified title in Bookscape (a term coined by the author in 1997 and not yet in the OED).

Mr. Raven attempts to place himself within a theoretical discourse, “the spatial turn,” but this is emphatically not a book about theory, or literature, or indeed, as he emphasizes, about books: his aim is “to provide a more detailed picture of the transformation in the London book trades of the eighteenth century,” by setting out where and by whom books were produced. He emphasizes the importance of “historical and non-imaginative evidence,” not literary representations. Wanting to get beyond imprints on title pages, which sometimes conceal crucial information, he points out how ESTC makes searches difficult by not including all the booksellers, addresses, and trade signs listed on imprints. His sources include surviving printing ledgers and account books, trade directories and cards, eighteenth-century representations and early twentieth-century photographs of streets and premises, but he scrupulously points out the limitations of all of these. His key sources, which have made this such an invaluable work for anyone interested in the London book trades in the eighteenth century, are the annual land-tax rate books, which identify the occupier and the rental values at the time of the assessment. The difficulties of extracting this information, given the ways in which it was recorded, were formidable, but with the help of maps and tables, and building in part on the work of Ian Maxted, Mr. Raven has recovered the location of book-trade sites, their size, and their neighbors, how long they were in one place, how often they moved and where to, and how the character of whole districts changed. Of the physical buildings in what was the center of London bookselling almost nothing apart from Wren’s cathedral remains: after the Great Fire of 1666 the rapid rebuilding retained the original footprint, but after the German bombing of 1941 and the prolonged postwar rebuilding of the area around St. Paul’s much of the street plan was lost, and only the street names and the restored Stationers’ Hall can remind us of the character of the district before 1800.

There is much to learn from his meticulous scholarship. Successions to businesses and movement between sites are recurrent themes. Many premises carried on trade for long periods with a succession of booksellers. It was common for booksellers to move premises; contrary to modern belief, they did not own the freeholds, but leaseholds allowed for considerable modifications and extensions of the premises. We should try to distinguish between printers, bookseller-printers, booksellers, and nonprinting publishers, though it is not always easy to do so, partly because imprints do not make it clear; we should not assume that printers lost status during this period. Premises might pass from one kind of book trade to another, and members of different branches might work side by side. Many booksellers leased several premises in different streets for various purposes, such as printing or storage. Street numbers were not especially important, and...