[1][3] The Broad Street branches, which include speciality music and art/poster shops, remained the only ones until expansion in the early 1990s, when at peak after taking over Heffers in Cambridge in 1999[5] and James Thin in Scotland in 2002,[6] the company had more than 70 outlets.

[6] Its library supply chain serves an international market, but parts were sold off in 2009, with the North American arm of Blackwell Book Services and the Australian business James Bennett sold to Baker & Taylor for their academic arm YBP Library Services.

[9][needs update] In February 2022, the UK book chain Waterstones, itself under the umbrella of Elliott Management Corporation, bought Blackwell's.

The company was founded in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Blackwell, son of the first city librarian, who having finished his education at 13, was apprenticed to a local bookseller for a shilling a week.

A religious family, the Blackwells had also become involved with the Temperance Society due to Benjamin's father being teetotal, and as a protest against the government making money from the excise duty on alcohol.

The first Blackwell publication, Mensæ Secundæ: verses written in Balliol College by Henry Beeching, was printed in 1897.

[4] To promote universal access to literature, Blackwell's pioneered a series of cheaper books, from a one-volume Shakespeare to "3-and-6 novels".

After rescuing the Shakespeare Head Press, he commissioned belles-lettres, including well-known classics such as the Pilgrim's Progress, the works of the Brontës and a complete version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.