History of bookselling
Aristotle possessed a somewhat extensive library, and Plato is recorded to have paid the large sum of one hundred minae for three small treatises of Philolaus the Pythagorean.
When the Alexandrian library was founded about 300 BC, various expedients were used for the purpose of procuring books, and this appears to have stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica: Scholars and students spent many hours in these bookshop schools reading, examining, and studying available books or purchasing favourite selections for their private libraries.
Book dealers traveled to famous bookstores in search of rare manuscripts for purchase and resale to collectors and scholars and thus contributed to the spread of learning.
[7] The Société typographique de Neuchâtel sales representative, Jean-François Favarger, made several tours of France and Switzerland, selling books and negotiating deals with booksellers in 1775-1776.
[8] In 1810 Napoleon created a system by which, a would-be bookseller had to apply for a license (brevet), and supply four references testifying to his morality, and four confirmations of his professional ability to perform the job.
[9] The spread of Christianity naturally created a great demand for copies of the Gospels, other sacred books, and later on for missals and other devotional volumes for both church and private use.
It was, therefore, enacted that no bookseller except two sworn stationers or their deputies, should sell any book being either his own property or that of another, exceeding half a mark in value, under a pain of imprisonment, or, if the offence was repeated, of forfeiting his trade within the university.
[13] The religious dissensions of the Reformation in 16th-century continental Europe and the English Reformation in England under Henry VIII and Edward VI fostered a great demand for books; but in England governments of both the Tudor and Stuart dynasties feared a free press and made various efforts to control the distribution of printed materials.
In the following reigns the Star Chamber exercised a rather effectual censorship; but, in spite of all precautions, such was the demand for books of a polemical nature, that entrepreneurs and subversives printed many abroad and surreptitiously introduced them into England.
[1] In the course of the 16th and 17th centuries the Low Countries for a time became the chief centre of the bookselling world, and many of the finest folios and quartos in our libraries bear the names of Jansen, Blauw or Plantin, with the imprint of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Leiden or Antwerp, while the Elzevirs produced - besides other works - their charming little pocket classics.
[1] Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603) interfered little with books except when they emanated from Roman Catholics, or touched upon her royal prerogatives; and towards the end of her reign, and during that of her successor, James (r. 1603–1625), bookselling flourished.
Paternoster Row, London, was for over a hundred years the centre of this industry, where retail booksellers, busily engaged in obtaining the books ordered by the book-buying public.
The society a few years afterwards widened its field of operations so as to include the whole of the United Kingdom, and it became "The Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland.
The Spanish settlements drew away from the old country much of its enterprise and best talent, and the presses of Mexico and other cities teemed with publications mostly of a religious character, but many others, especially linguistic and historical, were also published.
Books chiefly for scholars and libraries were imported from Europe; but after the War of 1812 printing-presses multiplied rapidly, and with the spread of newspapers and education there also arose a demand for books, and publishers set to work to secure the advantages offered by the wide field of English literature, the whole of which they had the liberty of reaping free of all cost beyond that of production.
In consequence of the Civil War, the high price of labour, and the restrictive duties laid on in order to protect native industry, coupled with the frequent dealings with England, a great change took place, and American publishers and booksellers, while there was still no international copyright, made liberal offers for early sheets of new publications.
