15 - The English provincial book trade: evidence from the British book trade index

Summary

During the past twenty years, an increasing amount of scholarly attention has been focused on the spread of the book trade in the English provinces and the character of that trade as it developed from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Local historians and historians of the book alike have focused on the specific details of the book trade and its personnel in particular towns and cities; the first monograph on the provincial trade in England was published by John Feather in 1985. The series of annual British Book Trade Seminars initiated by the late Peter Isaac has encouraged a particular research focus on the provincial trade, and his accumulation of data from willing contributors to the British book trade index began, in the 1980s, a process which continues with the recent incarnation of an augmented BBTI on the Web.

BBTI’s evidence for the systematic study of the provincial book trade is now beginning to be explored, though the collection and entry of data is still in progress and the database will continue to grow, at a slower rate, after the funded project ends; in a sense, it can never be complete. Nonetheless, the growth of BBTI to its current size of approximately 120,000 records, representing those who worked in the book trade and its allied trades in England and Wales from the earliest times to 1851, provides a data set which, while in some respects inconsistent and incomplete, is at least large enough to enable some useful statistical analysis. While necessarily hedged with caveats, findings from searches of the database are reliable enough both to suggest broad historical trends in the development of the provincial trade and to indicate areas deserving further investigation at a more detailed level.