A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New

The seduction of the printed word has always required entrepreneurs. This vivid Victorian portrait traces the merchants of literature from ancient Rome's manuscript copyists to the Victorian publishing houses that still bear their names. Curwen, a journalist who edited the Times of India, approaches his subject through "biographies" of firms rather than dry chronology, giving flesh to names like Longmans, Butterworths, and W.H. Smith. He illuminates the fractious world of early copyright wars, where Alexander Donaldson grew rich selling cheap reprints while other publishers chased him through the courts. The book reveals bookselling not as a quiet profession but as a battlefield of commerce and passion, where fortunes were made and lost on the tastes of readers. For anyone who has ever wondered how literature reached them, this is the origin story.