DEALERS IN BOOKS, as with most other commodities, have operated from a variety of locations, ranging from large, well-stocked emporia to the smallest, ramshackle or temporary premises. Books have also been bought and sold at fairs and markets and by itinerant traders, alongside clothes, food and other products. Nowadays, most of the printed material sold in markets is confined to boxes of shiny paperbacks or piles of dog-eared magazines on stalls selling miscellaneous bric-a-brac, although in Cambridge and one or two other towns occasional regular bookstalls are still to be found. It is a far cry from the heyday of the fairs of Frankfurt or Leipzig, which formed part of the infrastructure of the pan-European distribution of new and secondhand books, central to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wholesale and retail book trade. By the early eighteenth century the international marketing of new books was increasingly done by other means, though antiquarian and secondhand books continued to be sold at the long-established fairs. In England town markets, controlled by a variety of grants and licenses, helped to accommodate the buyers and sellers of books, but it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that there were regular assemblies of provincial and metropolitan booksellers in specialist antiquarian book fairs.

The present volume is based on papers given at the 27th annual conference on book trade history, sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association and held, in 2005, at the Society of Antiquaries. It explores some of the ways in which the open-air book trade contributed to the cultural life of Europe. The contributors show how the early 'Latin' trade in learned books flourished at the urban fairs, while cheap popular books were spread through the countryside by peddlers and hawkers. At the same time, small books and broadside ballads were also distributed within urban areas by street traders, balladeers and the so-called 'walking stationers', who operated from makeshift stalls and barrows.

While the fairs and markets established a clear line of commercial activity outside the formal boundaries of the shop, much open-air trading took place in the streets and public spaces. The itinerant members of the trade, visible mainly through prosecutions and punishment, kept the wheels of commerce turning at a popular level through their ubiquitous buying and selling and by acting as a pool of casual labor. The overlapping activities of street trader, hawker and peddler formed part of a complex economic system across Europe which has yet to be brought clearly into view.

John Flood gives a lively account of the Frankfurt Fair, making use of a wide range of sources to provide a clear view of the rise and fall of a great commercial enterprise. Although there were other rival fairs, most notably - especially for the German book trade - the important Leipzig fair held twice a year, Frankfurt was ideally situated at the junction of trade routes, with waterway access via the Rhine and the Main for the bulk transport of books and other heavy merchandise. At its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Frankfurt fair had become a hive of international bookselling, with permanent shops lining the streets which surrounded the stalls of the central fair. Each year, in spring and autumn, booksellers, printers and bookbinders from allover Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, England and the Baltic converged on Frankfurt to buy and sell learned books and to arrange credit in an age when there were few easy or safe ways of settling accounts at a distance. The Frankfurt fair also provided crucial encouragement and competitive stimulus to booksellers such as Georg Willer, who began the practice of issuing catalogues of the latest publications sold there. But the Thirty Years' War cast a long shadow and by 1749 the Frankfurt fair had petered out, only to be revived as an international publishers' fair 200 years later in 1949.

Clive Griffin describes the role of the itinerant book trade in Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of the traveling booksellers, printers and bookbinders were immigrants, many of them from France or Flanders. They covered a wide area of the peninsula, selling mainly imported books and commodities, and they also sometimes traveled with printing presses. Their books were often only a sideline: as foreigners, they had to be prepared to turn a hand to anything to earn a precarious or even perilous living, and they ran the risk of being denounced to the Inquisition as purveyors of heretical or subversive material. Inquisition records provide the primary source material for the sometimes heart-rending stories of the dangers faced by these unfortunate individuals.

By contrast with these small-time dealers in popular literature and ballads, Ian Maclean's case study of the international Latin trade is concerned with the chaotic affairs of the once prominent and prosperous Symphorien Beraud, a bookseller who was murdered in the streets of Lyon in 1585. Beraud left a tangle, in France, Italy and Spain, of unsettled finances and warehouses crammed with books, some decaying, whose value it was almost impossible to assess. Maclean weaves his way through a mass of confused evidence, offering a detailed commentary on the inventory drawn up in 1591 of the stock of Beraud's former associate, Etienne Michel. The legal documents associated with this case provide a unique insight into the trade in learned books in southern Europe in the late sixteenth century.

The other papers in the volume deal with the itinerant and street trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jeroen Salman describes the early stages of a large-scale research project to quantify the role played by peddlers in the distribution network for printed materials in the Netherlands between 1600 and 1850. The Netherlands at this period were much more urbanized than Britain and Salman's particular focus is on a neglected figure, the urban peddler. Consequently his picture of the itinerant book trade is very different from that provided by the late John Morris for Scotland, where hawkers and peddlers traversed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century highlands and lowlands. Morris has brought together much valuable information about these obscure traders, some of whom left evocative memoirs of their hard lives, trudging hundreds of miles in all winds and weathers, carrying heavy packs of books and other goods, and sleeping rough in barns or under hedges. David Stoker's study of distribution networks for books and newspapers in rural Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire sets the itinerant book trade in the broader context of the development, in the early eighteenth century, of established local bookshops, the rise of the newspaper press in Notwich, Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds, and the introduction of book auctions. He describes the network of hawkers, usually accompanied by a horse or cart, and peddlers, who carried their wares on their back, together with the regional markets and fairs at which books were sold, most notably the celebrated Stourbridge Fair held annually near Cambridge.

In his account of the street trade in the poorer areas and open spaces of London from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Michael Harris draws on evidence from Old Bailey trials and from Henry Mayhew's monumental London Labor and the London Poor - rich but often overlooked sources for book trade history. As well as investigating the character and organization of the London street trade, he also introduces us to the distinctive and colorful cast of eccentric traders who flitted through the London streets.

Robin Myers
Michael Harris
Giles Mandelbrote

London
December 2006