The Poetics of Literary Commerce: Popular and Patrician Bookselling and the Rise of Publishing, 1700-1825

As England shifted from an oral/manuscript to a print-based culture between the late 1600s and early 1800s, bookselling occupied an increasingly central position in literary affairs, and the system of signs and symbols long embedded in the mode of book production--the venerable "poetry" of formats, typography, title pages, shop signs, trademarks, handbills, author-bookseller relations, publication notices--became an increasingly important concern in the bookseller's affairs. In the early 1700s, two notable trade "styles" arose: the patrician idiom of status-conscious booksellers, which reflected the literary experience of socio-cultural elites, and the popular idiom of the trade's rogues and rascals, which aligned itself with the cultural interests of unlettered as well as lettered readers, and which often derided the elite version of books and reading. The print economy of the middle and later 1700s continued to sustain these trade approaches, but as demand expanded--bringing the "establishment" booksellers into ever keener competition with the rogues--commercial and rhetorical strategies altered. Increasingly, while patrician booksellers accommodated popular business tactics to serve the print needs of an emerging nation of readers, the popular reprinters and entrepreneurs of the day embraced patrician stylistic practices to project an ethical concern for the cultural needs of those readers. Between 1790 and 1825, the commercial and symbolic field abruptly altered as a numerous community of small-scale book shops gave place to a handful of large-scale publishing house. Although the publishers of the early 1800s were the heirs of patrician bookselling, their highly specialized, intensely capitalized form of literary commerce was not congenial to the old poetic styles. Moreover, the signs and symbols of a bygone era had lost their public resonance A nation of readers--that is, a nation of print adepts--no longer found meaning in the traditional poetry of bookselling.