Keywords
Citation
Bengtson, J. (2010), "Books for Sale: The Advertising and Promotion of Print since the Fifteenth Century", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 8, pp. 637-638. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011073164
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This is the twenty‐ninth volume of the “Publishing pathways” series, which has become an established and key resource for studies in the history of the book, publishing, the book trade and libraries. Each of the volumes in the series is comprised of a series of original essays by scholars and practitioners. The eight essays in Books for Sale: The Advertising and Promotion of Print Since the Fifteenth Century were first presented in 2008 in London at the annual Book Trade History conference put on by the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association and they explore innovative and creative approaches to the marketing of books over the past five centuries. What is striking is the importance that those in the book trade placed on advertising and promoting their wares from the very beginning of the hand‐press era in the fifteenth century, a focus of attention that is now carried forward into the digital world. As such, taken as a whole, this well illustrated and indexed volume clearly elucidates examples of the varied and essential interplay between the text as a physical commodity and the text as a product of intellectual endeavour.
Many non‐specialists in the history of early printing will be surprised to learn that tens of thousands of editions were produced in the second half of the fifteenth century alone. Nevertheless, scant evidence of book advertising survives from this period, though, as Lotte Helinga argues, printers were actively experimenting with marketing methods. She also provides a useful handlist of some of the extant advertisements that hopefully can be built upon in the coming years. Moving into the latter part of the sixteenth century, the sale of promotion of printer Christopher Plantin's eighth‐volume Biblia Regia (1568‐1572) was an altogether more sophisticated affair, with targeted approaches to varying types of potential customers. Michael Harris's article expands on the complex relationships between commercial networks across trades at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The approach examines not merely the advertising of printed materials but the use and growth of printed advertising in commercial activity in general. Such is the theme of the following essay by Phillippa Plock who reveals how printers produced advertising that could be of some beauty. Thanks to the collecting habits of Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839‐98), Waddesdon Manor near Aylesbury contains a remarkable collection of more than 700 seventeenth and eighteenth century Continental, primarily Parisian, trade cards and labels, many ornately decorated.
With the book trade rapidly expanding in Ireland in the early nineteenth century, Charles Benson traces the various tactics used to promote books both within Ireland and further afield, such as the purchasing of advertising space in English newspapers. By mid‐century sophisticated and effective marketing strategies had been developed. Few more effective devices than the book jacket have been invented by the book trade. Alan Powers explores the importance of the jacket, particularly in branding authors and imprints within the competitive mass market of the second half of the twentieth century. The evolution of literary prizes over the past century, or so, are also explored in the volume's penultimate essay, as mechanisms to enhance the marketing of specific authors.
A volume such as this would not be complete without addressing the opportunities and challenges that the internet poses to the book trade. Established and proven paradigms of production, marketing, promotion and sales are disintegrating as the digital world expands. Udo Göllmann, of AbeBooks Europe, provides a brief but excellent survey of the rapidly evolving and new marketplace within which the book trade must now operate.