Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac

Citation

Simpson, M. (2006), "Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac", Library Review, Vol. 55 No. 3, pp. 223-224. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530610656028

Peter Isaac was by profession an engineer, but he also had, from an early age, a passion for the history of printing and the book trade in England. Having retired as head of the Department of Civil Engineering at Newcastle University in 1981, he devoted himself to studying aspects of the book: writing books and articles, and stimulating others to do the same. This was done not least through his involvement, from the start, in the annual British Book Trade Seminars, now the Annual Conference on the History of the British Book Trade. The volume under review is the proceedings of the nineteenth seminar, held at Worcester in July 2001, and sixth to be published in the Print Networks series. The publication was to be a festschrift for the indefatigable Isaac, but before its appearance he died suddenly, in June 2002. He was 81, but looked and acted like a very much younger man. He no doubt enjoyed the 2001 seminar greatly; he would have been delighted with this book.

There are eighteen essays in this book, following an affectionate memoir by his fellow organiser of Seminars and editor of their proceedings, Barry McKay, and an introduction by Maureen Bell, outlining the themes of the book. The volume ends with a bibliography of Isaac’s book trade publications (not his contributions to engineering), and an index. The chronological span is very wide, from English incunabular sammelbande to the mid‐nineteenth century. The geographical span is also wide: outside England, there are chapters about Wales (Thomas Gee senior, printer in Denbigh), Scotland (Oliver and Boyd’s Edinburgh Cabinet Library), the United States (Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century and the shabby treatment of his sponsor, Edinburgh’s Charles Elliot) and Australia (Baker’s Juvenile Circulating Library in Sydney in the 1840s). Within England, there are essays examining book matters in Whitehaven, the Lake Counties, Yorkshire, Manchester, Leicester, Norwich, London, Kent and the Isle of Wight.

The volume illuminates aspects of the book trade in its widest sense. There are essays about libraries and collecting (for example, the sale of the collection formed by the Methodist Adam Clarke, 1762–1832); others are on children’s literature. Some chapters concentrate on printing in one area (for example, Otley in Yorkshire or Tonbridge in Kent); others are devoted to one figure (for example, the early eighteenth century Edmund Harrold of Manchester or London’s Septimus Prowett); one essay concentrates on a single work, the Book of Common Prayer. John Feather’s stimulating essay, on the other hand, takes a very broad canvas, “The history of the English provincial book trade: a research agenda”, while Diana Dixon gives a valuable survey of the disparate sources available for studying English provincial newspapers.

There is something here for everyone interested in aspects of the history of the book in Britain. The essays, well footnoted, provide a wealth of material of lasting value and importance, which will encourage further study on a very wide front. Isaac’s infectious enthusiasm will thus continue to stimulate study of the British book trade for years to come.