Shelf Life E-Book

Michael Robb

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 445

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A very enjoyable history and survey of the present and the future.' - James Daunt, Managing Director of Waterstones; CEO of Barnes & Noble Embark on a captivating journey through the ages with Shelf Life, a meticulously crafted exploration of bookselling and publishing that spans two millennia. This engaging narrative unveils the resilience and innovation of key figures who have shaped the literary landscape, from the pioneering days of William Caxton to the contemporary influence of Jeff Bezos. As the narrative navigates the ever-evolving terrain of book retail, it delves into the seismic changes of the past forty years and reflects on the current state of the industry, as well as offering insights into the challenges and future opportunities that lie ahead for publishing and bookselling in the twenty-first century. A must-read for anyone passionate about books, bookshops and the enduring legacy of the written word.

Leseprobe

For my parents, Joyce and Peter Robb,for introducing me to books.

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Michael Robb, 2025

The right of Michael Robb to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 837 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

Introduction: On Books and Bookshops

PART ONE: Remembrance of Things Past

1   William Caxton the Pioneer: Early Episodes in the History of Bookselling

2   Wynkyn de Worde and the Development of the Publishing Business

3   James Lackington’s Temple of the Muses: Bookselling in the Age of the Enlightenment

4   Charles Edward Mudie and W.H. Smith: Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century

5   Allen Lane and the Paperback Revolution: The Quest for a Wider Book Market in the Twentieth Century

6   Bookselling in the Twentieth Century

PART TWO: The Way We Live Now

7   Tim Waterstone and the Bookselling and Publishing Transformation of the 1980s

Interlude: The Closing of a Bookshop

8   Selling Books in the New Millennium

9   Changes to the Wider Book Industry

10 Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon

11 The Digital, Audio and Self-Publishing Explosion

12 How the Book Trade Fought Back

PART THREE: The Shape of Things to Come

13 The Road Ahead for Bookselling

14 The Road Ahead for Publishing

15 Two Big Issues for the Book Trade

Epilogue: The Last Word

Useful Information

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Introduction

On Books and Bookshops

Robbs Bookshop in Chelmsford, Essex, 1984. (Author’s collection)

Discovering Books

Like many compulsive readers, I had often dreamed of opening a bookshop. I consider myself very lucky that my parents were booklovers, who read to my brothers and me regularly, sharing the Just William novels that my Dad had enjoyed as a child and a whole host of Enid Blyton volumes that my Mum had loved. Through doing this, they instilled in my brothers and me not just a love of books but an understanding of the delights to be discovered within their pages.

We all have our own memories of discovering books and each of us will have treasured titles from childhood that are uniquely significant to us – books that helped form our personal reading pathway. My parents took us to the library and the two local bookshops: a branch of W.H. Smith and an independent, Clarkes, which was really a stationery and art materials shop with books upstairs. I remember that within the latter there was a separate room for children’s books, which had a table and chairs in the centre but was dominated by a big bookcase of Puffin books. I still fondly remember the wonderful feeling of being in that room, surrounded by shelves of interesting-looking books and often being left alone to browse at my leisure.

The first book I remember owning, one bought from Clarkes specifically for me and not just one I shared with my two older brothers, was Ginger’s Adventures, a Ladybird story in simple verse about a dog called Ginger. Originally published in 1940, it was illustrated by Angusine Jeanne MacGregor, who illustrated many of the early Ladybirds. Memory can be unreliable at such a distance, but I recall reading this edition repeatedly as well as sometimes just looking through the pages at the illustrations.

This is my earliest memory of a direct relationship with a book, when I was probably around 5 or 6 years old. Already, though, I revelled in the ownership of the book and felt a strong attachment to the physical object itself, this treasured possession. From that point onwards, I grew to love books dearly. I also became increasingly obsessed with bookshops. I associated them with something magical, an Aladdin’s Cave of riches, and always got excited when a bookshop visit was being planned. The door into a bookshop is the entrance into multiple other worlds and experiences.

As I grew older, I discovered more wonderful books from browsing in bookshops. For a while, I was entranced by the C.S. Lewis Narnia books with their iconic Pauline Baynes illustrations. I loved the experience of being lost in this fantastical other world and read all seven books at least twice. I still possess those original Puffin paperbacks to this day. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and in particular its beginning, epitomises a very simple truth about reading. As Cathy Rentzenbrink says in Dear Reader, ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not only a cracking story in its own right, but also represents the way every book offers an invitation to open a door and find a way to another world’. Lucy opens the door of a wardrobe, steps inside and finds herself walking from the normal world she knows into the magical world of Narnia, brushing through the snow-covered trees until she comes to the clearing with the lamppost.

The opening of that wardrobe door is, to me, a metaphor for opening the pages of a book. We read books for many reasons, but the most obvious is to be transported to other experiences. It doesn’t have to be another world, such as Narnia, but all novels talk to us of experiences different to our own – what life was like for people who lived in earlier centuries or who live in other countries, or who go through experiences we have not.

Another thing that always appealed to me about the Narnia series was that, although the child protagonists entered Narnia and became involved in all sorts of adventures, when they returned to the real world no time had elapsed at all. To me, that seems to sum up the power of a good book – something we can lose ourselves in, detaching ourselves from the world around us, forgetting time and place, entranced only by the book and its alternative reality.

I formed the habit of looking for the next thing to read as soon as one book was finished, always wanting to have a ‘book on the go’. In her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel summed this up perfectly: ‘I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.’ This habit started in earnest during those early years, moving from Enid Blyton to C.S. Lewis to Roald Dahl and many others, and then on towards more grown-up fare.

As a teenager, I trawled the bookshops to feed my science fiction obsession, seeking more books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Michael Moorcock and Asimov. And then, when I hit 16, I discovered George Orwell and bought a succession of the black Penguin paperbacks from Clarkes. Because the shop interestingly arranged books by publisher rather than author, I came to recognise the omnipresence of the Penguin logo. I had an assumption that if Penguin published it, a book came with a certain authority, and this in turn led me to the discovery of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and Graham Greene. Other booklovers will have similar experiences of how they discovered books, each of us building our own reading pathway.

And of course, I discovered the personal magic of reading books. While a book is ultimately the work of the author, every reader also brings their own unique interpretation. As you read, your imagination creates pictures in your head, visualising the author’s words, producing a completely personal experience. The author’s voice is there, but it needs your input as reader to make the writing live. In an interview for Marxism Today, Angela Carter said, ‘Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel … all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.’

Every reader’s experience of a particular book is unique to them. For example, my experience of reading Great Expectations is, in many ways, similar to yours. We will have Pip, Joe Gargery, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and the rest in common, along with the descriptions of places and events within the novel. But when I read Dickens’ words, they conjure something unique in my imagination, my personal visualisation from Dickens’ text. When you read the same words, it will be your imagination creating a separate unique experience. You will visualise the places, characters, scenes and conversations in your own fashion.

Wherever we went on holiday around Britain, we invariably ended up in a bookshop. These were mainly independent bookshops, and I grew to love the differences in what they stocked. I understood that the book selection and the way the volumes were displayed reflected the personalities of the booksellers. I appreciated the random and sometimes chaotic nature of this and benefitted from multiple serendipitous book discoveries. Still today, I prefer a small independent bookshop to a large, well-stocked chain store, drawn to the more personal curation of titles that the best independents offer.

At some point during my childhood, our family conceived a pipe dream of one day opening our own bookshop. For a long time, though, it was really nothing more than just a dream, a running family joke, something we really didn’t expect would ever happen, the sort of thing I imagine many book-loving families talked about. But the joke persisted, going on for years and becoming part of our family myth. ‘One day, when we open our bookshop ….’ It was very much my personal dream too and, on numerous bookshop visits, I imagined how much fun it would be to work in such a place.

This fascination with books and bookshops finally paid off when, many years later, on a beautiful sunny Friday in early February 1984, my father and I opened our own bookshop. There was a wonderful buzz of excitement as we handed out glasses of wine to welcome our new customers. Friends and family dressed in T-shirts emblazoned with our logo were walking around the town handing out balloons and leaflets, touting for business. After months of planning, the dream had now become a reality, based on our belief that Chelmsford deserved its own independent bookshop.

The customers coming through the door seemed to agree. Time and again, we heard something along the lines of ‘At last, the town has its own proper bookshop!’ Never mind that our shop was quite small and our range was quite limited, but almost from that first weekend the town and its book buyers took us into their hearts. We had plenty to do to build our reputation, to earn customers’ trust and let people know we existed, but it was a strong start.

After all the preparations, it was incredibly gratifying to see those first customers coming into our shop, smiles upon their faces, gleefully browsing among our shelves. It was hard not to smile in return as they started bringing their chosen books to the till and we rang up their purchases. That connection between customer and bookseller was truly magical, something I had hoped for and was now finally experiencing, recommending favourite titles to them and receiving recommendations in return. I delighted in this, the pure pleasure of bookselling, sharing a love for books with our customers.

Very quickly these customers also started moulding the shop to their needs and requirements, as they asked for things we didn’t have in stock or where we held only a small selection. I soon noticed that our original vision of the shop was being daily changed by the customers. A bookshop certainly needs a vision of what sort of shop it will be, but the bookseller also has to take into account the customers’ wishes and be prepared to be flexible. The bookseller and customers together, like a writer and their readers, give the shop its identity.

In this way, our bookshop started to develop a separate character of its own. It became almost like a living thing, grown from our original vision. We had created a public space, legally owned by us but in reality belonging to the whole town. It was gratifying to see the customers acting as if they were a part of the operation and having a stake in the business.

From that very small beginning the business grew, and over the next few years we became an established part of the town and part of our customers’ lives. We sold thousands and thousands of books, built up a strong customer base, held regular events and created a wonderful space for people to discover and enjoy books. We ran a huge schools operation, supplying books to almost all primary and secondary schools within a 10-mile radius, as well as to the local further education college, the polytechnic, Essex County Council and many other businesses.

We were joining a lengthy tradition of bookselling in Britain that stretched back centuries. Our bookshop was very similar to hundreds of other independent bookshops around the country, many family-run like our own, all a much-loved part of their local communities.

The Changes

What we didn’t realise at that time was that this very traditional world of British bookselling that we had just joined was about to experience a massive transformation. That transformation would ultimately kill off our bookshop, although not for another sixteen years. It would also revolutionise the way that books were bought and sold in Britain. In common with most retail sectors, the book trade had been constantly evolving and changing for centuries, but the next four decades would arguably see greater change than ever before and we would be caught in the middle of this tidal wave of revolution and development.

There were several major drivers of this change and upheaval, beginning with the huge growth of chain booksellers in the 1980s and 1990s, part of a national growth in retail chains and shopping malls across the UK. The new bookshop chains transformed British high streets into book utopias with fantastic large, new shops bursting with a much wider and more attractive stock range, creating a bigger market for publishers’ books.

However, this rapid development of chain bookshops, while giving a massive shot in the arm to the book trade, inevitably led to the closure of hundreds of long-established independent bookshops that could not compete. This caused huge ructions throughout the trade, upending the accepted way of doing things and dramatically altering the nature of the UK book business.

During the same period, publishing, like so many industries, has had to completely change the way it works. Post-war publishing was predominantly enacted by family-run companies led by besuited white men, using production techniques little changed from the Victorian era. New computer technology, advances in printing techniques and more efficient distribution methods, many driven by more modern companies from Europe and beyond, forced massive change on the industry. Much of this has been realised in centralisation and the creation of larger publishing conglomerates, with huge media corporations swallowing up those smaller British businesses. These are better placed to face the challenges of a modern global market, but arguably lost some of the individuality and charm in the process. Alongside this, the industry has seen a huge overhaul in personnel, with more women taking over the reins of power and companies becoming more diverse to better reflect the modern world.

Then, the abolition of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) in 1997 meant the end of fixed pricing for books and the introduction of heavy discounting on best-selling titles. This resulted in supermarkets and other non-book retailers becoming more involved in bookselling and selling the top titles at very low prices, reducing margins for writers and publishers and, significantly, taking the bulk of these key bread-and-butter sales away from bookshops. It also made things easier for Amazon to establish itself and grow its business quickly when it entered the fray.

That dramatic growth in online selling and shoppers’ general move away from physical retailers to the internet delivered another massive blow to the book trade. Amazon entered the UK market in the late 1990s, discounting heavily, delivering to the customer’s door and leaving hundreds of competitor bookshops floundering in its wake. The abolition of the NBA provided the basis on which it could thrive.

The subsequent growth of digital publishing and the introduction of the e-book in the new century then seemed to threaten the very existence of books and bookshops, with many sales switching to Kindle and other devices. The prospect remains that the future of the book might well be in a digital format and physical books could disappear and, with them, physical bookshops.

Added to this is the recent massive growth in audiobook sales, another rival format to the printed book and a market mainly in the hands of Amazon through its company Audible, removing even more market share from bookshops. And, finally, the growth and rapid development of self-publishing online also threatens the businesses of traditional publishers and booksellers.

Each of these developments on their own would have resulted in dramatic change to the book trade. But, taken together, these changes occurring in rapid succession have resulted in the bookselling and publishing landscape today being almost unrecognisable from what it was four decades ago when I first started out as a bookseller. It is a fascinating story and yet it has still to reach its conclusion.

It is difficult to predict what else lies in store for booksellers and publishers in the coming decades, although the pandemic has in some ways added to retailers’ difficulties, helping to speed up the changes in shopping habits and the move to online retail. Conversely, the pandemic did also stimulate a renewed regard for independent businesses, with lockdowns encouraging people to shop locally. Many businesses responded by offering home delivery or kerbside collections and had to improve their websites to offer postal deliveries. The pandemic demonstrated the resilience and ingenuity of independent bookshops, and the public responded favourably. The residual effect of this has continued even after Covid receded, with recent years seeing record growth of new independent bookshops in the UK with fifty-four new shops opening in 2021, forty-five in 2022 and fifty-one in 2023.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If we take a step back to look at the trade from a historical perspective, we see that previous crises in the book trade have been faced and dealt with by the passion and ingenuity of booksellers and publishers. Encouragingly, in the third decade of the new century, we see signs of a brilliant new generation bringing new ideas and new thinking to regenerate the book trade in light of these recent changes. A wave of new independent booksellers has been matched by vibrant growth in the independent publishing sector, bringing much-needed diversity and a fresh perspective to the trade.

As well as recounting the rich history of the book trade, this book will examine these wider changes to bookselling and publishing in recent decades and then ponder where it will go from here in the decades hence. In scrutinising the longer history of the book trade in Britain, we shall discover that there have indeed been peaks and troughs in the trade’s fortunes on many previous occasions. During those centuries, booksellers and publishers have proved themselves to be resilient and adept at reacting to change.

I also want to look at the more existential idea of bookselling and publishing in the coming decades. Will we even read books in the future? Increasingly as a society, we access information digitally, through our phones and laptops, often in bite-sized chunks, selecting just the portion we want to read. There is no guarantee that we will always want to read long-form fiction or non-fiction in the future as a ‘book’, either physical or digital. Already, the digital revolution has meant that print reference books, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, textbooks, maps and guides have experienced declining sales, as the digital equivalent is easier to use, more accessible and constantly updated. The concept of the ‘book’ itself, the basis of the entire book trade, could be under threat and in the future could prove to be an irrelevance.

With the huge rise in self-publishing online in the past two decades, will we even need publishers in the future? Is this an old-fashioned model not fit for purpose in the modern era? Perhaps, as online publishing becomes even more ubiquitous and readers find easier ways to access content, the traditional route of a publisher or gatekeeper will be redundant?

And will we still need authors? We now have AI that can generate content and write articles, essays and stories. Will the human voice be redundant? Most pertinent to this narrative, will the physical book and, in turn, the physical bookshop, survive?

The history of bookselling and publishing demonstrates that new developments can take a long time to bed in, in some cases over decades or even centuries. When the codex format (essentially, the current book format that we know so well) was invented 2,000 years ago, it took centuries before people stopped producing the more cumbersome and less user-friendly scrolls, the predecessor format. And when printing was developed in Europe in the fifteenth century, again it was centuries before people stopped producing handwritten and hand-illustrated manuscripts.

On that evidence, it seems possible or even probable that the digital book will eventually replace the print version. At the moment, the print and digital versions exist side by side, along with audiobooks, as different options for how we consume books. But will the digital version ultimately win out, as more of our lives are determined by the digital medium? While this development wouldn’t lead to fewer books being read, what would it mean for the future of our bricks-and-mortar bookshops?

We don’t know the answers to any of these questions right now. But forty years ago, at what was a pivotal moment for the book trade in the early 1980s, we could barely envisage multiple huge bookshop chains across the land, while online bookselling and digital publishing were the stuff of science fiction. In similar fashion, from our present-day perspective, we cannot really envisage where the trade will be another forty years from now. One could ask, though, whether we are in danger of sleepwalking towards losing our physical books and bookshops in the decades ahead of us.

On the flipside, it is worth recognising in this discussion how much readers have valued the physical book throughout its several thousand-year history, whether as scroll, codex, manuscript, print, hardback or paperback. Likewise, readers have always revered bookshops, treating them, as I always have, as magical places where they can source more books to feed their addiction to the printed word. And we should emphasise the enthusiasm of publishers and booksellers for creating and promulgating books. Their excitement and enthusiasm have driven the popularity of books for hundreds of years.

There are around 84,000 people involved in the book trade in Britain today and there have been millions of others throughout its history, all bringing their own enthusiasm and ideas to the business. These professionals share a passion for books, an understanding of the power that books contain, and a recognition of what books can offer, alongside a desire to bring books to the widest possible audience, a theme we will see repeated throughout this book. The books we read exist because of them.

The history of the book trade is packed with fascinating personalities and their stories, and in this narrative we will endeavour to find out more about many of the personnel who have driven innovation and change across the centuries. We will discover the stories of booksellers and publishers from the early days of print, such as William Caxton and Wykin de Worde, innovative booksellers like John Hatchard, James Lackington and W.H. Smith, pioneering publishers such as John Murray, Allen Lane and Paul Hamlyn, as well as many others who transformed the book trade over the past few centuries, among them Charles Edward Mudie, William and Christina Foyle, Tim Waterstone, Terry Maher and Jeff Bezos. Over many centuries, the book trade has become a well-founded edifice, constructed upon the work of these great characters, their strengths underpinning the trade’s success.

I will return to the story of our family bookshop and its demise later in this narrative. After the closure of our bookshop, I transferred to the publishing side of the business, where I have worked now for over two decades. Throughout these turbulent times, I have been very much working at the coalface, experiencing the changes first hand and being involved in adapting to them. Like many others, I have been caught up in the rollercoaster ride that the book trade has experienced in these decades, watching booksellers’ and publishers’ fortunes rise and fall.

I am someone who has always loved books and bookshops and cares deeply about the book trade, but I consider myself first and foremost a reader. As a reader, I am keen to explore whether physical books and bricks-and-mortar bookshops will still exist in another forty years. And, if we think their future is threatened, what can we do to ensure their survival?

This book aims to weave a path through these tempestuous waters and assess where the trade has washed up today and what stormy weather still awaits it in the years ahead. While I’m sure this book will be of interest to those working in bookselling and publishing, it is very much written for all readers and booklovers who care about the future of both books and bookshops.

The book is divided into three parts, each quite different in tone. Part One (The Past) recounts the history of bookselling and publishing over the past 2,000 years. The story is told through a series of smaller stories or vignettes, creating an overarching narrative that builds a picture of the trade’s progression over the centuries.

Part Two (The Present) covers the last four decades of recent history, detailing the massive changes that the trade has undergone during this time. This period also covers my career in the book trade, so inevitably there is more personal reflection in this section.

Part Three (The Future) looks in detail at the state of the book trade today and examines where it might be heading in the years ahead. Again, this contains some personal reflection, along with a variety of other viewpoints to discuss the future of bookselling and publishing in Britain.

The history of the book trade is a huge subject and one that could fill a book many times the length of this one. So, this book is not a definitive, complete history but rather it is my personal version of that history.

PART ONE

Remembrance of Things Past

1

William Caxton the Pioneer: Early Episodes in the History of Bookselling

William Caxton showing a specimen of his printing to King Edward IV; painting by Daniel Maclise. (Alamy)

The Codex

When did bookselling in Britain begin? If we wanted a neat and tidy narrative, we could say that the history of British bookselling began in 1476 when William Caxton set up the first printing press in England. But books had been created and sold long before that, with handwritten manuscripts dating back centuries and scrolls dating back thousands of years. So, to be completely thorough, we need to go right back to the ancient world when books were produced in the form of scrolls, to be unrolled and read either vertically or horizontally, sometimes in concertina fashion, more often just on a continuous roll. As different cultures had developed writing, knowledge and stories had been increasingly written down, inscribed on a variety of materials – whatever was at hand, including wood, stone, clay, tree bark, animal hide, papyrus, parchment and eventually on paper.

Once humans had learned to reproduce knowledge and stories as text, these ideas could be preserved for future generations. Those who created and sold scrolls, the early publishers and booksellers, would have recognised the importance of the texts they were reproducing, whether they consisted of factual knowledge, ideas or stories. They would probably have been lovers of the written word themselves and have possessed a desire, which was common to most people engaged in the book trade, to share this knowledge or retell these great stories. Humans have always wanted to know more and seem always – from the earliest times round the campfire – to have wanted to tell stories as a way of trying to understand the world and the lives they were living.

The scroll contained text written by hand by scribes, and in many cultures those scribes were slaves. Scrolls, made of papyrus, were still the dominant book format in Ancient Roman times, carried in handy scroll cases. The Romans had inherited the idea from the Greeks, who themselves had inherited it from the Egyptians or even earlier cultures. Scrolls could be up to 16m long and weren’t easy to read, requiring two hands and very careful unwinding. Books of this fashion probably date back about 5,000 years, but we cannot be entirely certain.

The time of the Roman Empire also saw, around the first century CE, the very important development of the codex, in which folded leaves or pages of parchment were stacked and then pasted or sewn together at one end – an early version of the modern book. The word ‘codex’ derives from the Latin word ‘caudex’, meaning ‘trunk of a tree’ or ‘block of wood’.

The codex became a much easier way to read a work of literature and enabled the inclusion of page numbers, indices and tables of contents. It was a handier, compact format that could hold more content in less space, with writing on both sides, unlike scrolls. The codex offered the ability to easily go back to pages that had been read earlier, all of which made the book much more user-friendly.

There is research to suggest that the development of the codex was a natural transition from the use of the writing tablet, which had been common in Rome and across the Roman Empire for centuries. The writing tablet was generally two or more flat pieces of wood bound together by cords through pierced holes, either in modern book format or a concertina. These were used for writing messages, official letters, school exercises and for note taking. The tablet was sometimes coated in wax but, equally, users simply wrote in chalk or ink directly onto the wood. Notes taken for larger works could then be transcribed onto scrolls.

At the time of its introduction, the codex book format represented the most significant development in book publishing until the later invention of the printing press. It still took a few centuries for all booksellers and readers to adapt, but the scroll was gradually replaced by the codex.

Most scrolls were created using papyrus, made from the papyrus plant that grew in the wetlands of the Nile Delta. The codex was generally made from parchment, although both formats utilised both materials to some extent. Parchment, once made, was a longer lasting and more lightweight material, one of the best writing materials ever created. But parchment was made from animal skin and was much more difficult to produce, involving a complex simultaneous procedure of stretching and drying. It took centuries to perfect this technique and lead to the more widespread use of parchment. Consequently, the move from papyrus to parchment was slow and papyrus was still being used in Egypt up to the twelfth century CE. Paper only came to prominence as the material for creating books over 1,000 years later, with the dawn of printing.

Most early Christian Bibles adopted the new codex format, and the rapid spread of Christianity was aided by the Bible being available in this handy way. The introduction of the codex has also been said to be responsible for the fixed order of the books of the Bible, which was much more flexible before its introduction. A standard scroll would probably hold just one of the books of the Bible, while the codex format could contain several books. The word ‘bible’ derives, in fact, from the plural of the Greek word ‘biblio’, meaning book, therefore ‘books’. Until recent times, many of the key developments in book-trade history were driven by those wanting to distribute religious texts, most notably the Bible.

In the following centuries, the means of binding pages at one edge were refined and perfected to create a better product. Still today, pages are either glued or stitched together, albeit by more sophisticated methods. But here essentially was the birth of the book as we know it – a format that has remained relatively unchanged for two millennia and the basis of the huge book trade that thrives today in the twenty-first century.

I spoke of my affection for the physical object of the book earlier and, in my opinion, this basic format has yet to be bettered. The recent introduction of the digital book has not replaced the codex format, rather it has widened the different versions of a book available to the reading public. Books today can be read in print format (as hardback or paperback), digital e-book or audiobook – but the lead category by far is still that original paper format. It needs no power or batteries, its mechanisms don’t get ruined if you drop it in the bath or get sand in its pages, it is portable, collectable and lovable. It will take something quite amazing to beat this perfect invention. Stephen King called books ‘a uniquely portable magic’ and, despite all the technical innovations on offer, that description still holds.

Atticus: Bookseller of Ancient Rome

Bookselling as a profession is as old as books. There is evidence of purveyors of books in Ancient Greek times, as well as during the days of the Roman Empire, but there would have been booksellers before this time too. The bookseller used scribes to make a copy of a book to order, often for a wealthy customer building a library. Both Aristotle and Plato acquired libraries in this way.

In Ancient Rome, there was a busy bookselling and publishing industry, with several booksellers setting up shops and reproducing texts by modern authors of the time as well as classic texts. These would have included books by Martial, Ovid, Virgil and Propertius.

A bookseller would advertise the texts for sale on a list outside his shop and, once a purchase was agreed, a copy would be made by the transcribers working for them, performing a sort of ‘print-on-demand’ business of the ancient world. In the twenty-first century, many books are printed on demand, although often today the end customer is unaware of this. As a result of improvements in printing processes and digital technology, some books (particularly more academic or specialist titles, but also a lot of online self-published books) are often printed in very low numbers or printed individually when a customer orders it. Most of these can be printed in a matter of minutes, thus saving the publisher committing to a print run until they actually have a firm order, which is almost a reversion to the Roman method of 2,000 years ago.

Titus Pomponius Atticus was a bookseller and publisher who lived in Rome from around 100–32 BC. He was famous for his friendship and correspondence with Cicero. Atticus seemingly was something of an entrepreneur, introducing new production techniques. He kept several slaves, who all copied the same text at the same time from one person’s dictation, creating papyrus scroll books – an early form of mass ­production in publishing. This was less print on demand, but more a new development – a move towards speculative publishing, producing several copies of a book that he hoped would sell, rather than having firm pre-orders first. As well as publishing works by his friend Cicero, he also published famous works by many Greek writers, including Plato.

Atticus’ success bred imitators utilising similar methods, including Tryphon and Dorus, who were all part of a bustling early publishing and bookselling industry. Other booksellers at this time distributed different parts of the text to different slaves, so that each inscriber was copying out the same text over and over. These methods were the early and more laborious precursors of the printing press.

In civilised Rome, literacy was quite widespread but restricted to wealthier citizens. And this was true throughout the Roman Empire, including in Britain, benefitting from the strong literary culture at the heart of the empire, and it seems that there were booksellers in Roman Britain, too. There is no way now of knowing for certain, but these were probably the earliest booksellers in Britain – the first evidence of the British book trade and the early beginnings of our story.

Copies of works by the likes of the poet Martial were distributed and sold throughout the Roman Empire, carried by those serving in the army to the outer reaches, including Gaul and Britain. Martial, who was most famous for his books of Epigrams, refers to several of his works being published in the handy new codex format: ‘You who long for my little books to be with you everywhere and want to have companions for a long journey, buy these ones which parchment confines within small pages. Give your scroll-cases to the great authors, one hand can hold me.’

The codex could be said to be the paperback of its day: it was so much easier to take to read on a journey. It is fascinating to consider that reading, for some at least, was available in this fashion in Britain at such an early date.

The introduction of the new codex, a pivotal moment in book-trade history, can indeed be compared to the upheaval and furore created when Allen Lane introduced the cheap Penguin paperback editions in the 1930s or when e-books were first developed early in the twenty-first century. Change is often viewed initially with suspicion before it becomes absorbed into the mainstream.

The Middle Ages

Although Britain was undoubtedly more disorganised, less efficiently run and less civilised after the Romans’ departure, booksellers in Britain continued to supply literature to the select few, predominantly to religious communities and the wealthy. Most of the population were not literate and would have had very little need for such things. Book production in the early Middle Ages was mainly conducted by a monastic monopoly, with monks creating beautiful tomes, mostly of religious or educational texts, with distribution to a very limited number of people, often for use within the monastery itself.

The Middle Ages were not, however, a cultural desert. Hundreds of beautiful and significant books were created at this time, including such works as The Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. These manuscripts required a great deal of skill from the scribes and illustrators who produced them and were also beautiful works of art. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is, in fact, a collection of several books that were separately created, but together they provide future generations with a record of Anglo-Saxon rule, demonstrating how important books have become over the centuries.

It was also during this time that we see the strong beginnings of an English literary tradition. The fourteenth century witnessed the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman. But of most significance were the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, a diplomat and royal official who went on to write some of the most influential poetic works of English literature.

Chaucer was well travelled and grew to love French poetry after journeying across the Channel. But it was his trips to Genoa and Florence that introduced him to Italian poetry, specifically Boccaccio, which had the most influence on him. Chaucer’s most important early work, Troilus and Criseyde, often referred to by critics as the first modern novel, owes a great deal to Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. The Canterbury Tales, which he wrote in retirement, echoes the storytelling structure of the Italian poet’s Decameron, but has a construction and style of its own.

Chaucer was one of the first poets to write in the emerging English language, setting a precedent for those who followed. His works would probably have been read or recited initially to a courtly audience, and only after his death did they become available as books. However, particularly following the introduction of print, Chaucer quickly became an established part of the English literary canon, to be followed by Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, Austen, et al.

The foundation of the universities also created a growing demand for instructional texts for education, such as law books. Oxford University dates from as early as 1096, and Cambridge from 1209. In addition, the universities built extensive libraries, which created further demand for relevant texts. These works, copied out by hand, were known as ‘manuscripts’, which means ‘written by hand’ in Latin.

Universities also needed to provide reliable textbooks for their students, so they began to license ‘stationarii’ (stationers), an early form of bookshop. Each stationer was licensed to create master copies of textbooks. These master copies were then broken down into ‘peciae’, which were essentially four-page excerpts from the manuscript that the student would borrow and then make their own copy of, for a small fee. This has some similarities to how universities today, in the digital age, pay a subscription or rental fee to publishers for the use of their texts, which enables the university to supply relevant excerpts to individual students for a subscription fee. This reduces the cost to students and removes the necessity for them to each own and carry around weighty tomes, when they might only need to study a certain chapter or section of the relevant book. Like many things in this narrative, publishing has come full circle and found contemporary solutions to age-old problems.

After the Norman invasion, the country gradually became more civilised, and various book producers (including scriveners, limners and binders) began operating in London, already gathering in an early publishing community around St Paul’s Churchyard. As demand for other types of secular texts grew, the stationarii were no longer just supplying educational texts to students. More English noblemen were becoming book collectors, imitating their counterparts in France and elsewhere in Europe and driving this demand for more books. The Company of Stationers (taking its name from the stationarii) was incorporated in 1404, with its headquarters at Station Hall.

These developments reflected an ongoing growth in the number of bookshops in the early fifteenth century, supplying secular manuscripts to their customers and importing from the continent. A skeleton book trade existed before the age of print, ready for growth when print was introduced and in a good position to exploit its potential.

William Caxton and the Introduction of the Printing Press

Mass printing of texts had first been developed in China, Korea and Japan as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries, mainly through woodcut printing. In Europe, it wasn’t until the 1450s that Johannes Gutenberg developed the first printing press in Mainz, Germany.

There had been several difficulties in developing printing in Europe. Printers in the Far East had used carved wood blocks to print but their alphabets were composed mainly of symbols and images and wood blocks were perfect for this. However, wood was not good enough to achieve decent legibility with the letters of the European alphabet. These had to be small enough to fit many words in a line but big enough to be read clearly; the letters had to be moved around repeatedly and then reused after frequent inking. Only metal would give the required definition and reliability.

Gutenberg was trained as a goldsmith, so he already understood the techniques required to forge small objects from metal and this helped him develop the movable type as a solution. To make a success of printing, Gutenberg not only had to create the moulded type itself, he also had to develop a workable printing press and then source a good enough ink to achieve the required results.

Once he had eventually developed a viable printing process using movable metal type, many other printers set up in the same area, using his methods. Many of these worked for Gutenberg first before setting up on their own and, in those early years, book printing was mainly associated with Germans. As well as those in Mainz, Johan Mentelin had a print workshop in Strasburg, Berthold Ruppel in Basle, Heinrich Kepfer in Nuremberg and Ulrich Zell in Cologne, among others. Gradually, printing spread across mainland Europe, with printers established in Venice and Paris by 1470.

As a result of Gutenberg’s breakthrough, books would gradually become available to a wider audience. Gutenberg’s most famous work was the first printed version of the Bible, and its availability to a wider audience was of huge significance. The initial buyers of printed books were still the aristocracy or the ecclesiastical market, but the new process eventually opened the door to the mass distribution of different types of books and pamphlets. In addition to Bibles, psalters, books of indulgences and other religious material, printers also started to publish grammars, almanacks and educational texts.

William Caxton was the first person to introduce a printing press into England and, as the first known English printer and retailer of books, he has been called ‘the father of English bookselling’. Caxton was born in Kent sometime between 1415 and 1424, although there is no definitive confirmation of his place of birth. That hasn’t stopped some claiming that he was born in Tenterden and, indeed, the town still has a pub called the Print House, which boasts a Caxton Lounge.

William was originally apprenticed to Robert Large, a mercer dealing in silks, importing and exporting from the Low Countries. Caxton’s parents would have had to be relatively well off to be able to place him in such an apprenticeship.

Caxton seems to have done well in this profession and, after Large’s death in 1441, he set up in business for himself and lived in fashionable Bruges, where he became a successful and influential merchant, diplomat and writer. Bruges was a major business and cultural centre, and Caxton would have been exposed to many wider influences there, including literature and the arts. He may well have started trading in books during these years, alongside his mercers’ business, and have developed a passion for books himself. He spent time in Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent, areas that had many workshops producing highly sought-after manuscripts.

Caxton’s success as a mercer is significant. He had learned how to raise capital to finance projects, he understood the import and export business between England and mainland Europe and he recognised the importance of connections with influential men. Caxton came to printing as a businessman, not as an artisan, and this experience would enable him to start a professional publishing and bookselling business in England. Many of the early printers across Europe went bankrupt but Caxton’s experience stood him in good stead. Eventually, he would run down the rest of his business and concentrate solely on being a merchant of books.

In 1471 Caxton began translating the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, heroic tales inspired by Homer, which would become the first book ever printed in the English language. He began this translation with a view to printing it, so he had already decided that he wanted to be a printer, supported by his early patron, Margaret of Burgundy.

Caxton travelled to Cologne in 1471 with the specific aim of learning about printing, Cologne being the nearest city with a printing press. For the next couple of years, he learned the essentials of printing and the various processes involved, and at this time he took Wynkyn de Worde into his employ as his assistant. De Worde would work with Caxton for the rest of Caxton’s life. During his time in Cologne, Caxton also acquired a printing press and the necessary metal type, probably from the printer Johan Veldener, from whom he had learned about printing.

Caxton set up this press in Bruges and printed the first copies of the History of Troy there in 1473. He then returned to England and set up his printing press in Westminster in 1476. Among the works he subsequently printed was The Canterbury Tales, not only the first printed edition of this work but the first book to be printed in England. Caxton also printed Aesop’s Fables, various histories and chivalric romances and, in 1484, Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. He printed over 100 titles, mostly in English, and a large number of these were translated by him.

Although Caxton was the first to set up business as a printer in England, printed books were already flooding into the English market from mainland Europe. Most of these, however, were in Latin or French, so printing books in English was exploiting a gap in the market – an inspired part of his business plan, and probably his main reason for moving his business to England.

To make the business as cost-effective as possible, Caxton printed a variety of works, including smaller pamphlets alongside larger works. He also imported and distributed books from the Continent, both printed books and manuscripts, using his existing knowledge of this market.

Although his business was based in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, he did not specialise in religious works, but instead sold predominantly secular works to the many important businessmen, courtiers and merchants who frequented Westminster. Caxton had swapped silks for books but remained a businessman working to turn a profit. Printing was not a hobby adopted for retirement; this was hard work. To facilitate and grow the business, he employed assistants and apprentices, including the aforementioned Wynkyn de Worde, who managed the print workshop.

Initially, like manuscripts before them, the first printed books were aimed at the wealthy and were often printed to order in small quantities. But the invention of the printing press would eventually lead to cheaper books and make them available to a wider market. This, in turn, created more demand and underpinned the growth of the book trade as others followed Caxton’s example in the ensuing decades.

The Caxton printing press, following the Gutenberg model, used movable metal type arranged on a wooden plate, called the lower platen. The type (the letters) was always arranged in the same order in trays, so that the typesetter could easily access it. Capital letters were kept in the top tray, or case – hence ‘upper case’ and ‘lower case’. The type was arranged on the plate in the order of the text, but back to front and upside down to create the page. Ink was applied to the type by use of a leather inking ball or ‘dabber’, a sheet of paper placed onto it and an upper platen was brought down to press the plate and paper together, imprinting type onto the page. The platen would then be removed, the printed sheet taken out and hung to dry, while the next sheet of paper was inserted and the press cranked into place again.

The print shop was not spacious and would have been very loud and busy. This was a slow and laborious printing method, but it was quicker than books being copied out by hand. It was also easier to read, as the type was uniform and multiple copies could be made repeatedly. Up to 250 sheets could be produced in an hour by the speediest printers, although most did not achieve that number. A new plate would be introduced when the next page was to be printed.

Early printers had no model to follow except manuscripts, so the first printed books looked very like manuscripts, including the design of a page and the type itself, which initially imitated the calligraphic style of handwritten manuscripts. Caxton printed his books in folio; that is, one sheet of paper folded once to provide four sides of printed text. For binding, sheets were gathered into bundles of different sizes. Caxton favoured the ‘quaternion’, whereby four folded sheets were bundled together to form sixteen pages of text. So, the outer sheet of the four would hold pages 1, 2, 15 and 16 of the book, the next 3, 4, 13 and 14 and so on. The quaternion would then be bound to the next bundle of four and so on.

Setting up as a printer was an expensive business and a much bigger initial outlay than producing manuscripts. The printer had to invest in the printing press itself, the metal movable type, ink and supplies of paper, and staff to handle all these different elements of the process. Printing multiple copies was also more of a gamble than just creating one handwritten copy. If the printer printed too many copies, any profits would be wiped out. Equally, once printed books became the norm, if a print book proved a success and the initial print run was sold out, it was a lengthy and laborious task to reprint, as each page would have to be typeset anew to print once more.