A Biographical Dictionary of those Engaged in the Book Trade in Kent 1750-1900

摘要

E. Gordon duff, in his 1911 sandars lectures, spoke of 'the cloud of obscurity' hanging over the history of the provincial book trade in England, and this would largely remain so for the next sixty years. It was only during the 1970s that systematic efforts began to be made to record members of the trade in various important provincial centres, and it was the mid-1980s before the first attempts were made at analysing the impact of the provincial trade as a whole. The coming of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) at this time provided a boost to such efforts as both provincial imprints and metropolitan imprints listing provincial distributors began to be recorded in significant numbers. The work under review originated with the compiler's appointment as a member of the ESTC team in 1977. Over the ensuing thirty-five years he assembled an impressive database with details of more than 4500 employers and employees engaged in the book and related trades during the century and a half in question. The entries range in size from a brief two-line reference to about 750 words.