The British Book Trade: An Oral History (review)

The British Book Trade: An Oral History is a collection of interviews drawn from the oral history project Book Trade Lives, which is part of the British Library Sound Archive's more comprehensive project National Life Stories. Expertly edited by project interviewer Sue Bradley, the book is organized thematically, with each of its nineteen chapters focusing on a particular aspect of the book business between the 1920s and 2006. Topical extracts from the oral histories of more than eighty book trade insiders provide a detailed and finely nuanced account of nearly a century of British bookselling and publishing. Of obvious interest to students of book history, The British Book Trade is such a pleasure to read that its appeal should extend well beyond an audience of specialists.

One reason this is such an engaging volume is that it features a diverse cast of characters, many of them gifted storytellers whose distinctive voices combine to create a rich historical context. Included here are the recollections of editors, secretaries, publisher's readers, and sales agents alongside interviews with such major figures as Andre Deutsch and Max Reinhardt of Bodley Head. Throughout the book, descriptions of everyday business in a wide variety of bookshops are intermingled with accounts of larger scale developments in the book industry, both in Britain and around the world. In this way, the editor provides readers with a comprehensive guide to the requisite skills of the book trade as well as insight into the strong bonds of friendship and professionalism that have usually existed among its members. Told from such a range of perspectives, the life stories that comprise The British Book Trade are vivid, moving, often very funny, and almost kaleidoscopic in their cumulative effect. This is an image Bradley herself employs in the book's introduction, stating that her editorial work with these stories "felt like handling a kaleidoscope" (xvii) as she assembled this 300-page book from 1,600 h of interviews archived in Book Trade Lives.

Bradley admits that the process of weaving together snippets of interviews to create the content of the book felt at times "like severing life-connecting threads" (xvii). However, she notes that the primary reason for turning portions of the interviews into a book was to develop a wider audience for the Book Trade Lives recordings, and she emphasizes that readers may locate these interviews intact at the British Library (see http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/sound/ohist/ohnls/nlsbook/book.html). In her informative introductory discussion of possible approaches to editing such a large body of oral history recordings, Bradley explains that chief among her reasons for choosing a thematic arrangement was to demonstrate what oral testimony might bring to a written history of the book trade. She certainly succeeds in this, though some readers will no doubt wish to know more about her methodology, especially the details of her collaboration with interviewees. In this regard, there are valuable insights to be gained, not only from Bradley's introduction but also from her italicized interview questions inserted at various points in the text and from commentary on the interview process included in the final chapter. It remains, however, that the purpose of The British Book Trade is clearly more to tell stories than to provide methodological information.

Bradley organizes the testimonies to chart important developments in British bookselling and publishing, and she introduces these developments in a subtle and very effective way by the chapter titles, which are quotations taken from the interviews. For example, one interviewee's question "Has anyone mentioned Elizabeth Weiler?" becomes the title of a chapter on the role of women booksellers—the fiercely intellectual Weiler herself as well as distinguished women such as Christina Foyle, longtime chair of her family's prestigious book firm, and Gerti Kvergic, proprietor of The Economist Bookshop. Another interviewee's expression, "the opening of the sluice," provides the title for a chapter...