Financial Calamity and Insolvency 1854–56

The satisfaction Whitaker may have experienced from launching his new business did not last long. In October 1853, the family suffered a calamitous misfortune when his wife, Ann, died from a stroke after the birth of their fourth child, Marian.Footnote ⁴⁴ Whitaker was suddenly left alone to support three children plus a newborn baby. It was the beginning of a period of great difficulty. Although many of the books he published that year were short, several were more than 140 pages long, suggesting a commitment of considerable sums to printers and binders. Mid-way through 1854, and with only two new titles published, he became insolvent. His debts outweighed the sums owed to him, and he was unable to pay his creditors. No records remain to explain exactly what caused the insolvency, but his son George later offered a clue to what may have been a contributing factor: too many of the clergymen for whom Whitaker provided sermon writing and publishing services failed to pay him on time, or even at all:

His predicament was common. It was said of the previous generation, ‘the cast of official bankrupts often reads … like a who’s who of the lost eighteenth-century London book trades’.Footnote ⁴⁶ John Stockdale repeatedly found himself in debtors’ gaol thanks to poor publishing decisions, entering five different gaols from 1819 to 1840.Footnote ⁴⁷ Bookselling was a precarious business, and even large and well-established firms could find themselves in financial disarray.

The difference between insolvent and bankrupt debtors was a question of scale. An insolvent was a person for whom the delicate balance between debt and credit had temporarily failed, while the bankrupt was usually a substantial merchant or manufacturer who owed large sums of money to creditors with little hope of ever being able to repay them, or who had even attempted to evade them. As an insolvent, Whitaker’s debt was modest but still devastating to him and his already grieving family.

Between 1854 and 1856, Whitaker’s name appeared repeatedly as an insolvent debtor in the pages of The London Gazette, the official journal of record, although it is not clear whether he suffered several lapses into insolvency or whether a single event was played out over two years. On 14 July 1854, an indenture notice stated that he had ‘conveyed and assigned all his estate and effects’ to two assignees: Joseph Bennett, a wholesale stationer, and a bookbinder called Thomas Chubb.Footnote ⁴⁸ The men were entitled to collect any sums owed to Whitaker until the debts were cleared, and they were given two months to execute the agreement. The notice did not record the precise sums owed, but Whitaker later testified that £30 would clear his debts, the equivalent of approximately £30,000 today.Footnote ⁴⁹ The size of the sum owed, and that it was owed to suppliers of publishing services indicated the fragility of his business.

The insolvency process was a means for an honest trader to honour commitments to creditors. The maintenance of a reputation and good standing amongst peers was assured by the quick repayment of debts.Footnote ⁵⁰ In an effort to keep his good name, Whitaker wrote to his debtors to instruct them to pay directly to his creditors the sums that were owed to him:

He also tried to raise funds from other assets to clear the debt. The copyright of Whitaker’s Clergyman’s Diary was transferred to the Stationers Company, and The Educational Register and Family Almanack was returned to John Henry Parker.Footnote ⁵² To make matters worse, Whitaker’s father, Thomas, died in October 1854, leaving everything to his second wife, Susan, and nothing to his children.Footnote ⁵³ Whitaker could not depend on his family for assistance.

Undaunted, he soon started another business at 310 Strand. Having given up the Pall Mall premises, perhaps as part of the settlement of his insolvency, he moved back to the Strand, and by January 1855 was publishing a new periodical called The Artist.Footnote ⁵⁴ A departure from the primarily religious publications of his earlier attempts, this move indicated a broadening of his publishing interests. In addition, on 19 May 1855, less than two years after Ann’s death, he re-married, this time in an Anglican church wedding at St Giles, Camberwell.Footnote ⁵⁵ Elizabeth Brown was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a silversmith who now had four motherless children to care for. That her father was a silversmith like Whitaker’s own, and that he and his new bride had both been living at the same address in Peckham at the time of their marriage, suggests a family connection, and possibly that she had been engaged to look after the children after Ann’s death.

Domestic life had calmed, but Whitaker was still in financial trouble. The sum he owed was small but, at over £20, it was enough to land him in debtor’s gaol.Footnote ⁵⁶ He turned to the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) for assistance. Founded in 1790 ‘to relieve authors in distress’, the RLF had helped some very well-known writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Love Peacock.Footnote ⁵⁷ In order to be eligible for RLF funds, the applicant had to be a bona fide author of published works. In support of his claim, Whitaker offered the four annual volumes of each of two titles he had initiated at Parkers, The Educational Register and The Clergyman’s Diary.Footnote ⁵⁸ He confirmed that the reason for his application was ‘failure in business in 1854’ and he maintained that his income was ‘very trifling’, consisting of ‘occasional contributions to a country newspaper [unnamed] on which I expect to obtain a permanent engagement in a few months’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nonetheless, he was turned down on the grounds that the authorship of the two titles was ‘not sufficient to establish a claim on the fund’.Footnote ⁶⁰ His books were categorised as compilations rather than authored works, even though they agreed that the works ‘could not have been got up without much mental toil and author’s craft’.Footnote ⁶¹ Approximately 17 per cent of applications to the RLF were rejected for a variety of reasons, and in this case, Whitaker was just not enough of an ‘author’ to qualify.Footnote ⁶² He would have to go to the Surrey gaol.

Built in 1798, the common gaol had a capacity for 400 inmates, many of whom were insolvent debtors like himself.Footnote ⁶³ Debtors remained in gaol until their debts were repaid, sometimes for many years. The fortunate would be visited by family and friends, who could bring food, wine, and other items for their comfort. Men lived and slept in the same large room, and there was no privacy: ‘The unfortunate soldier, barrister, or merchant, is compelled to eat, herd, and sleep with the lowest vagabond of his sex’.Footnote ⁶⁴

In January 1856, Whitaker was called to appear in the Court of Insolvent Debtors. Now described as a ‘newspaper reporter’, he appeared at the Court in Lincoln’s Inn, presenting himself ‘on his own petition’ in order to vest ‘in the Provisional Assignee [his] Estate and Effects’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Like other insolvents, he had to place all his assets at the disposal of his creditors, apart from a few basic items for himself and his family, and commit to repaying the balance of all sums.Footnote ⁶⁶ A month later, he was called again to appear in court to be discharged unless any creditor appeared in court to oppose the decision.Footnote ⁶⁷ Whitaker did not appear in the London Gazette again after this entry, so his financial woes appeared to have been finally resolved almost two years after they began. As his debts were resolved, rehabilitation could begin.

Thanks to Whitaker’s good standing in the trade and his now-cleared financial record, he was quickly re-hired by his former employer, J. H. Parker, who had recently acquired the venerable general interest magazine The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review. First published in 1731 by Edward Cave, it was a miscellany of writing sourced from a wide variety of publications on mainly historical and antiquarian topics, overseen by the pseudonymous editor ‘Sylvanus Urban’, a persona created to appeal to a broad readership from both town and country.Footnote ⁶⁸ The magazine had two features that would be significant for Whitaker’s future career: a section of book reviews and a correspondence column for letters to the editor. He prepared his responses by compiling notebooks full of statistical information, newspaper cuttings, and extracts from government-issued ‘Blue Books’ so he would not be ‘caught napping’ by an unexpected question.Footnote ⁶⁹ These notebooks would later become central to his plan for a new kind of almanack.

The book review section was used by the book trade and book-buyers looking for information about new books, but procuring the bibliographic details could be frustratingly difficult. Whitaker knew from his bookselling experience how important it was for booksellers to see publishers’ announcements and knew that they lay in a variety of sources, such as publishers’ catalogues, wholesalers’ lists, trade and auction sales catalogues as well as advertisements and reviews in the literary press and in national newspapers like The Times. He also knew that for small or provincial booksellers, it was expensive and difficult to access these multiple publications. Even the trade advertisers, Bent’s Literary Monthly Advertiser and The Publishers’ Circular, carried notices and advertisements primarily from the larger London publishers, with only a few entries from Edinburgh and smaller publishing centres. As Whitaker wanted to provide a wide range of titles in his columns, he was compelled to contact publishers directly, thereby broadening his own professional networks and developing relationships with a wide range of publishers all over the country. This expanded collection of trade contacts would be key to the success of his next venture, a new trade journal. He was now in direct contact with a large group of the very people who were most likely to become his contributors and subscribers, as well as the all-important advertisers.

Advertising was essential for bookselling, and printed books were amongst the first commodities to be marketed through advertising. The Bodleian Library has a copy of a poster advertisement for Pye’s of Salisbury, published by William Caxton in 1476, identifying the title of the work and where it might be acquired.Footnote ⁷⁰ By the nineteenth century, advertising was publishers’ primary marketing tool. Publishers supplied the name of the author, title, format and size of the edition, type of binding, as well as the retail price. All these details contributed to the marketing effort and helped both booksellers and customers to identify the desired edition. The title and author conveyed the subject and credentials of the author of the work, while the format and binding signalled the likely market. The larger the size of the book and the more luxurious the binding, the higher the price was likely to be. Folios and quartos were usually priced higher than octavos and duodecimos.

The advertisements also played an important role in publicising the publication date of an edition. This action publicly established the start of the period of copyright protection for the work and allowed the publisher to assert their ownership of the copyright. However, although advertising was important, it was not cheap. The abolition of the 1/6 tax on advertisements in 1853 reduced the cost of advertising, but it remained a considerable expense for publishers, especially for the titles that needed to be advertised in several publications and over several years, such as schoolbooks, textbooks, and manuals. Richard Bentley and Messrs. Colburn and Co were rumoured to spend £5,000 annually on advertising, with Longmans paying even more.Footnote ⁷¹ Publisher John Chapman calculated that a publisher should expect to spend at least 25 per cent of the production costs for a new book on advertising.Footnote ⁷² He underlined the trade’s reliance on the practice:

Other countries were not so reliant on advertising. The German book trade developed a centralised system organised by its trade association, der Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, to circulate information about new books via a network of agents and through its journal, das Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandels. This was a regular publication with printed lists and summaries of new books, along with some business news.Footnote ⁷⁴ Using this information, booksellers could sample new books ‘à condition’ and return them for a full refund if necessary.Footnote ⁷⁵ Similar practices applied in France and America. As booksellers were regularly notified about new books and could sample the texts for themselves, there was less need for extensive advertising.

There was no such system in England, but from 1802 William Bent produced a monthly publication, A List of New Publications, to provide booksellers with a trade list of new books. To attract subscribers and advertisers, Bent sent free copies to ‘all Booksellers in Town and Country’ for the first two years and made them available ‘at most of the Coffeehouses in London and Westminster’, locations frequented by businessmen and traders.Footnote ⁷⁶ A charge of a penny was levied in January 1804, rising to 6d in May 1805, when the title changed to The Monthly Literary Advertiser. In 1829, the title was changed again to Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser (hereafter collectively referred to as Bent’s).

Bent’s provided a little editorial information on the back page in some issues under the heading ‘Literary Intelligence’. Most of the items were brief notices of forthcoming titles, but these snippets of literary news could also be surprisingly international. Although book production was concentrated in London, the market for these books extended nationally and internationally, and the London publishers needed to understand the nature of their overseas markets and to communicate with foreign booksellers. For instance, the December 1805 issue printed, amongst other foreign stories, an account of the setting up of an association in Natchez, Mississippi, for the dissemination of knowledge; a brief piece about how science was being taught in Turkey; and an item about how the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin had admitted into its membership a Mr. Wagener, who had devised a way to print geographical charts from moveable type that was superior to engravings.Footnote ⁷⁷ This information was not meant to be esoteric. It broadened and enriched the booksellers’ knowledge of the wider world of books, enhancing their status as high-class tradesmen and helping them to impress their customers.

By the late 1830s, Bent’s main advertisers, the publishers and wholesaling booksellers, had become dissatisfied with the service it provided, and a committee of the principal London houses which was led by William Longman (1813–77) and included established firms such as John Murray, John Rivington, and Robert Seeley, launched a new trade publication called The Publishers’ Circular. The form and arrangement of the new publication were devised by Longman, and it was initially to be published by his firm until the committee agreed that the appearance of impartiality was important and appointed publisher Sampson Low as editor.Footnote ⁷⁸ The publishers’ committee emphasised that the new journal was not the ‘speculation of an individual’ like Bent’s, but was instead a collective initiative backed by some of the most powerful booksellers and publishers in London.Footnote ⁷⁹ Although it was not marketed as an official publication, the committee planned to act as a de facto authority or representative body, for instance by proposing that their new publication collect information for a central repository of bibliographic details and sale prices. Publishers were encouraged to submit ‘one Advertisement of every New Work and New Edition which they publish’ to be collected in a similar manner as in the German trade – a reference to the Börsenverein.Footnote ⁸⁰

The Börsenverein was formed in 1825 to circulate information about new books and to regulate the production, distribution, and sale of books across the German states. In addition, the association lobbied for legislative changes to benefit the bookselling trade, acted as a clearing house for settling accounts, and later added other services for members, such as the provision of training and professional counsel.Footnote ⁸¹ Publishers sent details of their new and forthcoming titles to be included in the Annual Catalogue, and from 1834 the Börsenblatt was published several times a week to circulate news, reviews, and other details of new books. This service was invaluable, and the committee of The Publishers’ Circular perhaps hoped that they could play a similar role for the British book trade. However, there was too much friction and too little alignment of mutual interests between the older, established publishers and many of the newer retail booksellers for this to be achievable. Until the 1870s, The Publishers’ Circular remained primarily a publishers’ advertiser with limited news, commentary, or analysis of trade matters.

The first issue of The Publishers’ Circular appeared in October 1837 with fourteen pages of advertisements for books, periodicals, and engravings and a two-page classified index to the advertised books. Later a small editorial section appeared with a little news and ‘literary intelligence’, mainly notices or announcements of notable forthcoming books. The back pages offered a selection of small advertisements for businesses for sale, situations vacant, and books wanted, giving readers the opportunity to exchange information, hire staff, and offer other services related to their trade.

Claims were made in the early years that The Publishers’ Circular was ‘the first and only catalogue of the works published in Great Britain approaching completeness’.Footnote ⁸² By the late 1850s, however, this claim was hard to justify and, as Whitaker was to discover when editing The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Publishers’ Circular did not reflect the expansion and diversity of book production as many of the regional publishers and small London ones did not advertise with them. Nonetheless, these lists were the most comprehensive then available.Footnote ⁸³

As trade news was not a priority, even topics of great significance received only minimal coverage. In what would have been considered an important development at the time, the abandonment of the booksellers’ regulations and the dissolution of the committee, merited only a brief paragraph in June 1852.Footnote ⁸⁴ Sampson Low was not only the editor of the journal but also the Secretary of the committee, with a key role in the enforcement of the now abandoned regulations, so he would have been fully aware of the significance of the action. Publishers’ views on the matter were aired in a series of letters in The Times and in John Chapman’s Westminster Review, but not in the book trade’s own journal.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Publishers’ Circular was a showcase for circulating publishers’ advertisements and news of forthcoming titles, it was not a forum for discussion or debate until the final decade of the century.

One of the reasons for the greater emphasis on advertising rather than journalism was its economic model. As editor, Sampson Low was not paid directly by the committee but instead accepted a ‘fair remuneration’ for his work by retaining the income from the advertisements.Footnote ⁸⁶ This created a financial incentive to fill the paper with advertising rather than incurring the expense of writing news stories or reviews of new books. Low was an insider, a publisher with a general list, and, as noted earlier, the Secretary of the committee that enforced the booksellers’ regulations until 1852. He worked to maintain order within the trade, in part by circulating retail prices and bibliographic details in The Publishers’ Circular to ensure all booksellers knew the prices and publication dates for the books they sold.Footnote ⁸⁷ Given his position as a publisher, he had no incentive to do anything that would disrupt the dominance of the leading London houses.

Whitaker emerged from his period of insolvency in 1856, just as competition between booksellers was intensifying. Without any regulations to restrict them, booksellers could apply whatever customer discounts they regarded as necessary to make a sale. His experience as an insolvent and as an editor at The Gentleman’s Magazine made him realise that booksellers were not well served by the existing trade publications and that they needed more help, particularly accurate and timely access to sales information about new books. A retrospective account of the early years of The Bookseller underlined the difficulty of finding this information:

He further noted that it was ‘practically impossible to find the exact title or publisher of many books then issued unless by a house of the front rank’.Footnote ⁸⁹ If an experienced bookman based in central London like Whitaker had difficulty tracking down these details, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone less experienced, well-connected, or well-placed.

He was also aware that booksellers they needed not only more information about new books but also more guidance and institutional support. Decades of experience as a bookseller had equipped him with a deep personal knowledge of the difficulties faced by colleagues and of the issues that affected the smooth running of their businesses. Reminiscing in the fiftieth issue of The Bookseller in 1866, he reminded readers of his original reasoning. His journal would function not only as an advertiser but also as an independent information service, circulating valuable business intelligence for the benefit of the bookselling trade as a whole:

This new plan required a new approach and a new location, so Whitaker prepared to restart his business yet again.

Editorial Policy

It is not clear how many journalists wrote for The Bookseller other than Whitaker himself, but as editor, he set the tone and the contents reflected his priorities. Impartiality was key: The Bookseller had to appeal to publishers and booksellers alike as publishers’ advertisements contributed to its financial stability, and it was important to demonstrate editorial impartiality and even-handedness. Many readers would have known that The Publishers’ Circular was owned by a consortium of many of the same leading publishers who had controlled the defunct association. By contrast, The Bookseller was free to represent the interests of a broader constituency:

At heart, he was both an institutionalist and a moderniser, with a high regard for regulation and longstanding trade conventions, but he held an unsentimental conviction that some of the trade’s business practices needed reform. His sympathy was aligned with the booksellers rather than the publishers, and he was not above apportioning blame for unfair business practices and pointing the finger at publishers. He was particularly exercised about underselling and routinely referred to it as a problem, as ‘evil’, ‘ruinous’, or ‘a vexed subject’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Some of the larger publishers were suspected of fostering the ‘spirit of underselling’ for their ‘own immediate interests’, but he also despaired at booksellers’ inability to resist the urge to offer lavish discounts to their customers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

One of Whitaker’s most persistent concerns was the lack of consensus about how to resolve many of the contentious issues that affected both sides, such as prices and copyright protection. He was a firm believer in the need for collaboration and consensus and thought that this was most likely to be achieved by a trade association:

Without a trade association to arbitrate commercial conflicts and agree on regulations, he worried that unresolved conflicts would damage the reputation and profitability of the trade. Whitaker could not have known it then, but there would be neither sufficient esprit de corps nor any uniform plan for organising the book trade until the 1890s.

One of the reasons for this lack of consensus was what he perceived as booksellers’ lack of confidence in their own expertise and an ignorance of established trade conventions. Many newer booksellers had little or no training in bibliography and were unaware of the range of new books appearing each year. This lack of knowledge left them vulnerable to exploitation by both publishers and customers alike. There were reports of ‘scores of instances’ where customers had felt emboldened enough to haggle over prices in ‘a manner they would feel ashamed to do with their butcher or tailor’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ An example was given of a thirty-shilling book on sale only a few days after publication at a price that returned the bookseller only one shilling above the trade price.Footnote ¹¹¹ For Whitaker, bookselling was a skilled occupation, ‘rather like a profession than a trade’, and required a deep knowledge of literary and bibliographic history.Footnote ¹¹² If booksellers were better informed, especially about ‘the present ruinous system’ [of underselling], they could resist the temptation to cheapen their stock.Footnote ¹¹³ He repeatedly tried to convince his readers to develop a sense of pride in their work and to appreciate their superior status as retailers of books: ‘Cannot booksellers generally be made to feel that their profession is of a little higher order than that of snuff or tobacco dealers?’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Of course, the suggested remedy was regular study of The Bookseller to improve booksellers’ knowledge of the range of books available and help them understand the emerging market for cheap books, including the new kinds of readers at the lower ends of the social scale. Perhaps prompted by Wilkie Collins’ recent essay in Household Words on the vast potential readership hidden amongst the ‘Unknown Public’, readers were advised to familiarise themselves with the popular lower-priced books by travelling to the poorer parts of London and the outskirts of towns and studying the shopwindows of booksellers who catered to people who read cheap literature.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Another of Whitaker’s concerns was market dominance. The balance of power within the book trade was held by the publishers, who acquired the copyright in many contractual arrangements and controlled the supply of books. This created the potential for misuses of market power and the exploitation of unfair advantage. While having no power himself to change these dynamics, Whitaker could highlight the risks for booksellers and try to mitigate the most blatant examples, such as too great a concentration of power in one company. For instance, the move by wholesalers Simpkin Marshall to larger premises in Stationers’ Hall Court prompted warnings that this expansion meant they would now ‘monopolise all the London trade’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ While not a publisher but rather a circulating library, Mudie’s Select Library was also a source of anxiety because of the volume of books it acquired. Founded in 1842 in the Bloomsbury area of London by George Mudie, the library grew quickly to become a dominant force with several provincial branches and a large list of overseas subscribers in Germany, Russia, India, China, and the Middle East.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This rapid growth and the enormous numbers of books required for the library – between 1853 and 1862 nearly 960,000 copies were added – gave Mudie a very strong hand when negotiating with publishers.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Described by Whitaker as ‘an eyesore to many booksellers’ for having a ‘monopoly of public patronage’, he feared that its enormous influence had become ‘an abuse of power’ perpetrated by its management.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The library was also accused of bias and of acting improperly with the ‘arbitrary rejection’ of respectable books because Mr. Mudie disagreed with their contents.Footnote ¹²⁰ Whitaker was not generally hostile to Mudie, but he did plead with him ‘to exercise your great powers with some judgement and to remember that even kings are but mortal’.Footnote ¹²¹

Whitaker was right to be wary of monopoly power, as exemplified by a story that neither The Bookseller nor The Publishers’ Circular reported due to the extreme secrecy with which the matter was treated. In order to stave off bankruptcy, Mudie’s, the largest bulk buyer for many publishers, had to be re-formed in 1864 as a limited company and offer half of its shares to publishers, including Murray, Blackwood, and Bentley.Footnote ¹²² As David Finkelstein recounts, had the rest of the book trade realised the perilous state of Mudie’s finances, many publishers would have been ruined at an already depressed time for the book trade.Footnote ¹²³ It was not reported whether Whitaker and Sampson Low were aware of the threat, but Whitaker’s views on behalf of retailers can be surmised from the letter printed in The Bookseller from ‘MJM’ after the announcement of the limited company:

Although Mudie’s was too important to publishers to fail, retail booksellers were less sympathetic, as their own livelihoods were threatened by the library’s custom of selling off retired copies at very low prices. The incident also underlines the delicate diplomatic balance Whitaker had to maintain on matters of financial consequence for the trade. He observed the ordinary day-to-day struggles of the book trade from a different point of view than those presented in The Publishers’ Circular, and, although he sympathised with the concerns of booksellers, the good will and financial stability of publishers were essential for the commercial welfare of the book trade as a whole.

Whitaker was a diligent editor and remained acutely attuned and responsive to the needs of his readers. He also worked hard, claiming that ‘we editors not infrequently work 18 out of the 24 hours’, and attributed the success of The Bookseller to ‘the hearty manner’ in which he worked.Footnote ¹²⁵ Many of the obituaries later confirmed his dedication to his work.Footnote ¹²⁶ His single-minded commitment to The Bookseller and to his readers was such that he published no other titles for the next ten years:

From the outset, The Bookseller was designed to be useful: to become a monthly reference guide that would furnish readers with the help they needed to find the advantages for their businesses in the increasingly competitive commercial environment.

The Organisation of The Bookseller

Whitaker stated his aims clearly in the first issue:

The journal opened with a list of participating advertisers under the heading, ‘with complete lists of the works recently issued by … ’, along with the page numbers for the accompanying adverts to assist with searching. The three-column parade of publishing houses spoke volumes about the value of the journal to publishers. Many of the leading houses were regularly listed, including most of the owners of The Publishers’ Circular and its editor, Sampson Low. The numbers fluctuated from month to month but consistently included the majority of firms from across the country. The advertising section was the largest in each issue and regularly took up 75 per cent of the journal, rising to 95 per cent for the all-important Christmas issues. This list represented advertising income and was an important contribution to Whitaker’s financial stability. For the first year, the advertising fees were set lower than the two rivals’ publications but were soon raised to the same levels once he felt confident enough in his new publication.

The editorial section was usually between four and twelve pages long and constituted a compendium of statistics, news, and commentary drawn from official sources and from sources amongst his professional networks. Much of this specialist market knowledge was unlikely to have been recorded anywhere else and forms a rich and under-used primary source for historians.Footnote ¹²⁹ The first item was a gazette of recent bankruptcies and insolvencies, mergers, and announcements of new firms sourced from The London Gazette, the official government journal of record. This was followed by a list of new businesses, recent partnerships, mergers, and dissolutions – a roll-call of businesses and partnerships as they formed and dissolved in real time. Details of businesses sold by auction and the prices realised, and changes of address, were also included along with information on any dividends due to creditors. This parade of dissolutions and new partnerships indicated the distribution of the book trade across the country and hinted at both the dynamism and precariousness of bookselling. It would have been difficult for ordinary booksellers to gather these details themselves, as trade directories such as Kelly’s and Kent’s were organised by city and county, making it difficult to get a national overview.

The accuracy of the information was vital. People with legal or financial responsibilities for a business could be identified, and assessments of their propriety and financial credibility could be made by any potential investors or partners. In case there was any doubt about the salience of this information, Whitaker cited a report of a lawsuit whose outcome relied on the evidence of the date of the change of name and ownership of a firm that had been printed in The Bookseller. He reminded them that this seemingly trivial information was ‘of the utmost value’, and that ‘the fact of the change in the name of the firm having been notified in The Bookseller had considerable weight in deciding the issue’.Footnote ¹³⁰

The next section was headed ‘Trade Changes and Gossip’, and to Whitaker’s readership, this gossip was meaningful. While some may dismiss gossip as rumour or tittle-tattle, sociologists and business historians value the exchange and circulation of this information as an egalitarian act and as being of great value to a business community.Footnote ¹³¹ In a commercial context, exposure to a variety of viewpoints helped to build trust and foster understanding, reduce risks and costs, and encouraged the development of a common trade language, opening the community up to new ideas and fresh perspectives in ways that were good for business.Footnote ¹³²

Exchanging and sharing gossip spread trade knowledge beyond just those with privileged and vested interests. Mark Granovetter’s theory of ‘weak ties’ suggests that access to information from beyond an individual trader’s own personal or professional networks has significant advantages for a trading community.Footnote ¹³³ There were benefits for readers from hearing a range of opinions and Whitaker encouraged booksellers and publishers and even lowly assistants to contribute and represent their grievances and suggestions in a national forum. By presenting the journal as a forum where ‘the feelings and opinions of the trade’ could be represented, The Bookseller would be more than just a means of communicating information; it would be a virtual public square that connected bookselling colleagues dispersed across the country.Footnote ¹³⁴

Whitaker also understood that this gossip played an important part in the construction of the book trade’s collective history by capturing what were later seen as decisive or seminal moments:

To deepen his readers’ knowledge of their trade and encourage them to feel part of a proud tradition, he published death notices, obituaries, and house histories of booksellers and publishers of note. These forms of historical and institutional gossip helped to establish an acceptable, if idealised, version of a collective history – a storied past that explained, legitimised, and reinforced the current value system.Footnote ¹³⁶ With a knowledge of their trade’s history, readers could understand the issues and subtexts of the news stories and learn to use trade jargon and colloquialisms. By reading The Bookseller, they could acquire some of the insider knowledge necessary to be fully participating members of their trade and pass as part of the cognoscenti. The recording, organising, and disseminating of a respectable version of the past helped The Bookseller become a reservoir of trade folklore, the record of a common heritage. These details contributed stories and viewpoints to the collective consciousness and, in effect, became the first draft of an institutional history, albeit an incomplete and sometimes contradictory one.

It is this editorial section that perhaps holds the greatest interest for book historians as a historical source and displays Whitaker’s attempts at making the book trade into a more self-aware, self-defensive, collective-minded body of traders. The types of information he collected, refined, and presented there can be divided into four main categories: highlighting business opportunities; providing guidance on trade customs and conventions; monitoring for threats to the trading ecosystem; and fostering a trade identity and sense of community.

Highlighting Opportunities: Statistics and Innovation

Whitaker was a longtime enthusiast and collector of official data, statistics, and factual information. From his early years as a bookseller, he scoured newspapers, Board of Trade publications, and government ‘Blue Books’, and preserved his findings in a series of commonplace books to which he later referred to answer readers’ questions at The Gentleman’s Magazine and again for Whitaker’s Almanack.Footnote ¹³⁷ In The Bookseller, he produced statistical data primarily about book production but also information of wider commercial interest. For instance, in the first year of publication, examples of this factual data included: the value of books imported into America (May); the population of Irish towns and the number of booksellers there, the value of paper duty received in the quarter to March 1858, and a list of literary pensions for the year (August); figures for Russian book production and a table of newspaper stamps issued in 1857 (September); figures for books sold at Bentley’s trade sale and proceeds of sales of annuals in 1829 (November); and stamps issued to Parisian journals (December).Footnote ¹³⁸ The provision of statistics about book production, the fluctuations of business cycles, the relative health of foreign trade, and the growth or decline of certain kinds of demand contributed to an understanding of the state of the trade. It was hoped that they would also be able to recognise business opportunities and calculate any associated risks. What practical use booksellers made of the information is hard to know, but its inclusion in The Bookseller gave readers the opportunity of seeing the same information and developing a shared understanding of their business world.

One type of statistical information that booksellers sorely needed was credible sales figures for new books, but these were very hard to find. Publishers were notorious for exaggerating sales figures and Whitaker knew to treat them with care, even musing to his readers that the figures claimed publicly for some titles must ‘somewhat astonish their printers’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Until the computerisation of wholesalers’ inventories in the 1970s, there was no reliable way to collect this data for books, but a hundred years earlier, Whitaker did try to do the next best thing by providing circulation figures for newspapers and periodicals based on the newspaper and paper taxes.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ These were useful for booksellers’ assessment of the market, and in 1864 he published a column that included detailed analysis of sales figures with explanatory comments about the impact of the recent abolition of the tax on paper in 1861. Over time, and with regular attention to this information, readers could plot the growth, or otherwise, of individual titles and note emerging or declining trends.

While sales figures of books remained elusive, Whitaker realised that he could track the growth in the production of new titles, and from the early 1860s, he published lists of new titles published over the previous year. The original idea had come from The Spectator after a writer there had ‘taken the pain to wade through’ The Bookseller to ‘extract some returns of the publishing trade in this country’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Readers who were ‘curious about these matters’ were encouraged to read the rest of The Spectator issue and preserve it for future reference. Appreciating the value of this information, Whitaker compiled the information himself from 1863.

The lists were not truly definitive, as it was hard to convince smaller and provincial publishers to submit the required information. Even thirty years later, it was reported that these publishers continued to be under-represented, with a ‘considerable number’ escaping notice every year.Footnote ¹⁴² Despite their deficiencies, the lists offered readers the chance to understand and appreciate emerging trends. In another attempt to empower his readers and encourage them to see themselves as a cohesive group of traders with some common values, Whitaker printed the findings of the national census. Extracts from the 1861 census were discussed alongside a similar selection from ten years earlier to show the changes within the book trade.Footnote ¹⁴³ In the article, headed ‘literary census’, Whitaker showed how some roles had expanded while others declined. The figures showed a slight reduction in the number of publishers and booksellers in 1861 but a sharper drop in the numbers of copperplate printers, engravers, and typefounders. This was contrasted by the rise in the number of lithographic printers and reflected the on-going shift to the newer technology. Similarly, the reduction in the number of typefounders was due to the development of stereo- and electroplates that required fewer workers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The reduction in the numbers of paper manufacturers and merchants was linked to the depression in the paper trade that preceded the abolition of the paper tax in 1861, a trend previously noted in The Bookseller:

On the other hand, the steep rise in waste-paper dealers and a smaller one in rag gatherers and dealers, alongside the decrease in numbers of paper manufacturers and merchants, indicated the shortage of rags in the mid century. From these statistics, booksellers could better understand the market in which they operated as well as some of the transformations taking place within it.

Readers were kept up-to-date not only with new books but also with any novel and useful technological innovations and business practices. From 1861, there was a dedicated column headed ‘Inventions and Innovations During the Month’ that listed details of new patents sourced from the recently reformed Patent Office.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Items listed included stationery with minor enhancements such as ‘improved envelopes’ or ‘improved pens and pen-holders’, but also more substantial innovations such as new patents for embossing and stamping presses, and machines for stitching and folding paper.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Many of these innovations were undertaken by ‘shop floor inventors’, small-scale and undercapitalised single traders such as a Mr Lay of King William Street near Covent Garden, who improved the process of photographic printing by devising a method of fixing and toning positive prints without immersing them in water.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

As an illustration of this interest in innovation, Whitaker reported on the 1862 International Exhibition, the successor of the Great Exhibition of 1851, in exhaustive detail in a thirty-two page report published over five issues from April to August.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Much of the reporting listed just the names and addresses of exhibitors plus a brief description of their products, but some of the more interesting products were reviewed in detail. Whitaker believed that some of the prototypes and emerging technologies on display would have ‘an enormous influence upon the manufacture of books during the next ten years’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ However, his overall view of the sections that concerned the book trade was one of disappointment. The representation of advances in paper manufacture was ‘unmistakably deficient’, and letterpress printing had ‘nothing new’ to offer, although lithography and colour printing were ‘fairly represented’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Nonetheless, despite the mixed reviews, readers were able to see the vast array of technology being developed in their field, as well as a handy list of potential suppliers for reference.

Two topics of great concern were, unsurprisingly, paper and ink. The reduction in advertising duty in 1853 had contributed to an acute shortage of rags, the raw material of papermaking. Demands from the stationery trade for new consumer items such as wallpaper, wrapping paper, and paper-based toys exacerbated the problem. Demand increased again after the abolition of the paper tax in 1861, as paper no longer needed to be cut into individual sheets in order to calculate the tax payable and could be used from a more cost-effective option: a continuous web.Footnote ¹⁵² This increased demand led to experimentation with novel raw materials such as esparto grass in the 1850s and later wood pulp in the 1880s.Footnote ¹⁵³ Whitaker covered the paper trade and advances in paper making with reports of a paper-producing insect called the sustillo, a form of caterpillar from India that could weave a piece of paper a yard-and-a-quarter long, which was ‘so perfect in its texture and consistency’ that it was ideal for writing.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

British printing ink, another essential material, was not highly regarded by Whitaker. Letterpress printing suffered from poor materials, with some impressions having a ‘grey and speckled appearance’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Both typefounders and printers denied the problem was their fault. The culprit was deemed to be the ink and the use of inferior manufacturing materials, such as lamp-black.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ French printers used the superior spirit black, with the result that ‘much of the best French printing is better than the best of ours’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The problem seemed to be a lack of innovation. Only four patents for inks were granted by 1850, but improvements were underway, and by the 1880s the number had increased to nearly a hundred, immeasurably widening the possibilities for colour printing.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Whitaker also blamed low-quality ink for limiting the potential of lithographic printing, which promised cheaper printing for illustrations, as existing inks were not suitable for the new lithographic printers.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ However, a letter in The Bookseller from an anonymous journeyman printer hinted that the problem with ink was a matter of culture rather than innovation; the problem lay less with inferior quality but rather with the system of bribes and back-handers that prevailed in pressrooms as part of the practice of paying ‘chapel dues’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

One of the more intriguing inventions reported was something very much ahead of its time. The microphotoscope was a portable invention described in a letter to the journal headed ‘Books Superseded’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ It was designed to be worn as a pair of spectacles that magnified a series of tiny slides carrying photographic images of a text. The slides slotted into the top of the glasses so the wearer could read a speech or a sermon. The letter boasted that the invention would sweep away the need for a gentleman’s library and enable him to carry all his books in a waistcoat pocket. Mark Zuckerberg and his ‘Meta Glasses’ are only 140 years late.

Guidance on Customs and Conventions

The Victorian book trade operated under a collection of uncodified conventions and longstanding practices that had evolved over time and were passed down through personal networks in response to changing regulations, legislation, and economic circumstances. One of the results of the abolition of the booksellers’ regulations in 1852 was that there was no longer a mechanism to oversee trade activities or to ensure compliance with business norms. Any disputes between traders had to be settled privately, if at all. Misunderstandings and even outright illegality could occur as one trader, whether intentionally or unintentionally, infringed on the rights of another, risking costly legal action, lost sales, and reputational damage. Whitaker was keen to preserve both the stability and reputation of the book trade and worried that its economic performance would suffer if conventions were flouted through ignorance or opportunism.

His readers wrote to him about their unhappiness over the potential for unfair competition from new recruits who did not understand the conventions and used deep underselling as a sales technique. One country correspondent protested that the trade had abandoned its respectability by allowing ‘any broken-down tradesman, village-schoolmaster, or hairdresser who chooses to call himself a bookseller’ to enter the trade.Footnote ¹⁶² Not only were the businesses of what he called the ‘legitimate booksellers’ in the country trade being ‘frittered away’ by competition from these new traders who were willing to give away 2d in the shilling as discounts, but their ‘credit and respectability’ was also under threat.Footnote ¹⁶³

Part of the problem was the number of these new traders. Newer entrants to the trade had different aims and strategies compared to the older generations of booksellers, who were worried that the propriety of the trade might be compromised. Whitaker differentiated between booksellers who were really ‘sellers’ of books and those who merely reacted to customer orders, between bona fide booksellers and merchants who also sold books as a sideline.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Those he considered proper booksellers were later defined as follows:

Complaints were also made about publishers who supplied books to religious societies on the same terms as agreed with those who were ‘really’ booksellers.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ With few or no overheads and a captive audience in the form of a congregation, these arrangements by-passed local booksellers. Although reluctant to criticise the societies for what were seen as their positive roles in promoting ‘religious truth’, Whitaker commented that some of them used their privileged position as a pretext to deny sales to local booksellers by acquiring books and stationery at trade prices and then re-selling them to local school groups and congregations.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Addressing the delicate question robustly by invoking the eighth commandment, ‘thou shall not steal’, a number of unnamed religious societies were accused of ‘robbing honest tradesmen’ by pursuing ‘such practices as would and could only end in disgrace and bankruptcy if amenable to the ordinary business code’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

The Bookseller published explanations and clarifications of some conventions that were not always well-understood, such as the remaindering of overprinted titles and the return of unsold books. Remaindering was the common practice of publishers selling off excess copies of an edition at low prices. Warehousing slow-moving stock was expensive, and publishers could dispose of excess copies to booksellers as ‘remainder’ items with large trade allowances that were then retailed at very low prices. When carried out carefully, it was generally understood that remaindering should not harm the sales of new books as long as all copies of a remaindered title, not just a portion of them, were sold together. The root of the problem was the lack of consensus about how long after publication publishers had to wait before remaindering their extra copies. Whitaker’s view was that a minimum of two years was required for ‘the higher class books’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

There was also some confusion about the terms under which unsold copies could be returned by a bookseller. ‘Sale or return’ was the convention that allowed booksellers to return books they had bought speculatively, on the condition that they could be returned for a full refund if unsold. It was not a common practice in Britain, in contrast to the German and American book trades of the time, but it did happen.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Publishers did not want to accept returned stock, and booksellers did not want unsaleable stock taking up precious space. One correspondent suggested that copies could be returned with the carriage costs unpaid.Footnote ¹⁷¹ There was a view that publishers would benefit should booksellers be willing to display books speculatively, but even in the 1880s, The Bookseller doubted that, other than in certain ‘isolated and special cases’, the practice would be anything other than disastrous for both publisher and bookseller.Footnote ¹⁷² The former would never know whether they were trading at a loss, and the expertise of the latter would be redundant:

Although ‘sale or return’ did not become widespread in England until the twentieth century, publishers did permit returned copies of unsold stock under certain circumstances; for instance, should the condition of the book be faulty, or when a new edition appeared before all the old copies a bookseller had in stock had been sold off.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Whitaker advised in these instances that the publisher was always responsible for imperfect copies, and it was ‘the custom of the trade to take back all copies of the old edition’ once a new edition was announced.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Much of Whitaker’s guidance was intended to reduce conflict between parties and to try to limit additional costs to booksellers, but some of the queries also revealed small but time-consuming frustrations. Bookshops were often small and cramped, with little counter space, so the arrival of unfolded newspapers and periodicals was unwelcome.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Opening with the adage ‘time is money’, a series of letters aimed at ‘London newspaper proprietors’ asked that newspapers arrive ready-folded.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The correspondent added that he received 450 copies to fold each week.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Another letter, published two months later explained that there were only 150 folding machines in London, many fewer than in Scotland, America, and Germany, but more would be available soon.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In the meantime booksellers should use ‘their best efforts’ to promote pre-folded newspapers and periodicals and refuse any unfolded ones: it was hoped that ‘an appeal that touches the pockets of newspaper proprietors will soon be met with a response’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Other topics were not necessarily concerned with financial risk but were intended to help booksellers understand how differences in national characters affected their book-buying choices, such as whether new books should be sold with uncut or unopened pages.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Machines could cut and trim the pages of the books before binding, and American readers were thought to be too impatient for ‘all such needless hinderances’ to cut open the pages themselves.Footnote ¹⁸² On the other hand, English book buyers preferred the pages unopened and considered the act of releasing the pages themselves an act of respect for the book-making process.Footnote ¹⁸³ The practical implications of the trend towards pre-cut pages in the export trade became clear a few years later when an Australian bookseller, described as a ‘utilitarian’ rather than a ‘bibliomaniac’, explained why he wanted books with uncut pages for his market.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Amongst the reasons were the guarantee that uncut pages proved the book was new as advertised, that re-binding would be easier due to the large page size, and that time-wasters could not read the book in the shop.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

Back home, the issue remained live as the market for books broadened. While bibliophiles might enjoy the ritual of using a paper knife on a well-produced new book, those in other situations, such as libraries and educational settings, required cut edges. The reopening of the question prompted a wistful reminder of the need for an official trade forum where such matters could be discussed: ‘If we had a publisher’s club or society, where publishers could meet and freely exchange ideas from time to time, some uniformity of plan might be agreed upon.’Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In the meantime, and with few signs of a trade association being formed, Whitaker continued to provide what guidance he could.

Monitoring for Threats

Much of the news and gossip in The Bookseller was sourced from its own subscribers and advertisers, which made Whitaker a de facto, if unofficial, watchdog for the book trade. From his editorial vantage point, he could observe and scrutinise the activities of his colleagues and warn of signs of threat. This was an attempt to transfer some power to booksellers by arming them with information and boosting their self-confidence as knowledgeable traders. Whitaker understood the structural forces and imbalances within the trade that put booksellers at a disadvantage and tried to create a fair and even playing field for all. It was undeniable that publishers held the balance of power by controlling the supply of books and setting the retail price, and this created the potential for misuse of that market power. Without any power to actually change these dynamics, Whitaker could at least highlight some of the risks.

Readers from across the trade were encouraged to use The Bookseller as a forum for debate by contributing information, opinions, and letters to the journal, and to share their experiences and concerns with trade colleagues.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ This was an opportunity for readers to participate in trade discourse and consider themselves part of a trading community. Contributions were selected for publication based on the criteria of their usefulness, in Whitaker’s view, to ‘the vendors of books’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ The airing of grievances and exchanges of views was encouraged in the hope that a resolution might be reached. Some of the topics may have seemed trivial, such as the warning of a ‘literary hoax’ in November 1858, where ‘some wag’ tricked many of the country newspapers into printing an advertisement for a non-existent new book called Literary Pyrotechnics.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Grievances may never be resolved, but the exposure and discussion of the issues presented opportunities to consider the value and ramifications of certain practices and to appreciate different points of view.

Reports of individual acts of outright criminality were rare. One example was the swindler in Manchester who attempted to defraud London booksellers by placing orders for books that were never paid for.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ His actions were camouflaged by the long credit periods booksellers agreed upon with their customers. The police were powerless, as the unsuspecting booksellers had willingly forwarded the books with an invoice, so the unpaid bill was considered an ‘ordinary debt’ rather than a crime.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Booksellers with meagre profits were vulnerable to this sort of attack, so warnings of renewed attempts were issued in September 1859, August 1861, and April 1862.Footnote ¹⁹² Other examples include notices of the fraudsters in Paternoster Row who posed as publishers’ travellers to steal remittances, and of the even more brazen thieves who managed to steal collectors’ bags from a cupboard at Simpkin Marshall.Footnote ¹⁹³ At one point, the problem was so pervasive that warnings of ‘loose characters’ operating in the Row prompted Whitaker to offer a five-pound reward for ‘information as will enable the police to detect and convict any of the guilty parties’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Reports of the capture of fraudsters were not common, but the rare successes were celebrated; the eventual capture of the Manchester swindler was reported in 1864.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

The ‘Lady Scott Swindle’ was more sophisticated.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Following the story over several months, Whitaker reported that a pamphlet had been produced ‘for the purpose of exposing the tricks, contrivances, dodges, and other ingenious devices’ used by a fraudster with a string of false names including ‘James Hitchman’, ‘Miss Alexander’, the ‘Viscount de Montgomery’, and ‘Hamilton and Co’.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ This individual had made a comfortable living by ‘laying traps for advertisers and others’, sending begging letters, obtaining credit with tradesmen and posing as an advertising agent. Suspicion was soon aroused about a new business in Stationers’ Hall Court called Hamilton and Co.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ The assumption was that this was a new venture by the established firm of Hamilton, Adams, and Co., but few people were seen visiting the building other than the postman.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Further investigation found an advertisement on the back door for beautifying potions sold by a Miss Alexander.

Having been alerted to the potential threat in The Bookseller, several country booksellers reported that a Lady Scott had ordered many copies of one of Hamilton and Co’s titles, a book of poems and essays by a Vernon de Montgomery.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Fearing they would never be paid for the books, they raised their concerns with The Bookseller, which ‘immediately warned the chief wholesale houses of the intended fraud’.Footnote ²⁰¹ Undeterred, the fraudster changed tack and wrote directly to a reader in Shropshire, asking for a loan of £100 in the name of V. de Montgomery.Footnote ²⁰² Clearly not a reader of The Bookseller himself, the swindler did not realise that his aliases were now public knowledge and that booksellers and publishers were using their trade journal to protect themselves and stymie his efforts.

Some of the reported threats came from within the book trade itself and could be considered instances of chicanery rather than crimes. For instance, some publishers used ‘puffs’ to sell their books – the thinly disguised promotional pieces offered as independent opinions. Whitaker considered puffing a ‘mala fide practice’ and denounced publishers who used them.Footnote ²⁰³ The practice was blamed, perhaps unfairly, on American publishers and British publishers who imported American books, and readers were reminded that the respectable ‘great houses’ did not indulge in such behaviour.Footnote ²⁰⁴ The Bookseller policy for the Notices column stated that they were to be strictly impartial:

For Whitaker, this was a matter of professional integrity as well as one of fairness and honesty. He disapproved of publishers attempting to access ‘free’ advertising and threatening the authority of his journal. But despite his criticisms of puffing and other unfair practices, many of them persisted. Finding solutions to these problems and standardising business conventions required greater consensus and cooperation than was possible without a trade association.

Fostering Trade Identity and Cooperation

Whitaker was convinced that the bookselling trade needed a stronger sense of identity and consensus to address some of the seemingly intractable issues that dogged the trade, particularly underselling and copyright infringement. Booksellers and publishers had to act together in their collective best interests to regulate prices and agree on business conventions. However, there was no appetite for going back to the old days pre-1852, when the leading houses dominated the London association. Whitaker made several attempts to encourage his readers to form associations both nationally and locally, but none emerged. There were still too many conflicts of interest between the various parts of the book trade. In the meantime, he continued to encourage a greater understanding between them by addressing matters of the welfare of book workers and philanthropy to support those who fell on hard times.

Throughout this period, there was one institution that did represent all parts of the book trade in London: the Booksellers’ Provident Institution (BPI). Founded in 1837 by Thomas Longman and other leading firms, with an initial fund of £10,000, the aim of the BPI was

For an annual subscription of two guineas or a one-off payment of twenty guineas for a Life Membership, eligible members could request temporary and permanent financial assistance for themselves and their families should their businesses fail. Whitaker supported their efforts enthusiastically and recommended that all eligible booksellers join up. Reports of the BPI’s activities and the Annual Report featured in The Bookseller, and lists of assistance paid out were published to demonstrate the generous benefits of membership.

Other philanthropic efforts included individual fundraising on behalf of widows and orphans of deceased booksellers and a trade-wide effort on behalf of the Paris Booksellers’ Relief Fund for ‘distressed brethren’ in Paris who had been involved in the 1871 siege of the city.Footnote ²⁰⁷ The grand total of £2,000 was raised from more than 156 booksellers all over the country. However, despite the occasional instances of willingness to work together for the common good, it would take several more decades and greater financial pressure before there was sufficient momentum to formalise cooperation within the book trade.

A New Kind of Trade Journal

Despite some initial setbacks and disappointments, Whitaker was happy with the overall success of The Bookseller. Just two years after the first issue, he congratulated his readers and himself for the improvements he saw in the trade. He claimed that, thanks to his efforts, there was ‘no longer the apathy and ignorance of literature’.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Although there was still room for improvement, booksellers were now ‘thoroughly well-informed of all professional matters, as well as interested in them’.Footnote ²⁰⁹ His confidence had been boosted by letters of appreciation and praise from the local press. A bookseller from Peterhead in Scotland thanked Whitaker for including so much information that was useful for the country bookseller.Footnote ²¹⁰ Another reader wrote:

The City Press, the local newspaper of the City of London, saw the emergence of these journals as ‘a sign of the expansion of trade’ and acknowledged their importance:

The Bookseller was hailed as the archetype of the new class of journals, standing ‘at the head of the list’ and considered a great improvement on the existing publications.Footnote ²¹³

Following Whitaker’s model, these new journals offered more than just lists of products and prices, they also offered access to impartial commentary and analysis of the relevant commercial sector and impartial assessments of new products.Footnote ²¹⁴ Whitaker later claimed to have innovated many of the characteristic features of the new trade journals: ‘no trade organ has exhibited any praiseworthy feature which was not indicated in our very first number’.Footnote ²¹⁵ Precisely what these features were was not specified, but he vigorously defended his claim as the prototype:

There was no definition of this ‘essential distinction’, but the shift in emphasis from providing a showcase for publishers’ new works to addressing the needs of the booksellers set The Bookseller apart from both Bent’s and The Publishers’ Circular. By the 1880s, Joseph Hatton’s history of journalism identified one of the main reasons for the ‘marvellous success’ of Victorian trade journals as the symbiotic relationship between the journalism they offered and the extensive advertising, and because there was ‘nothing redundant in their contents’.Footnote ²¹⁷ This specialist content was of great value to the intended readership:

Trade journals soon reached every commercial sector, from The Baker’s Record and The Hatter’s Gazette to The Draper and The Hairdresser’s Chronicle. In the last decade of the century, the Victorian trade journal was acknowledged as the ‘organ of communication between manufacturers and dealers and their customers’.Footnote ²¹⁹ These publications preserve a wealth of commercial information and business intelligence that traders and merchants used in their daily business lives and are invaluable historical resources.

The journalism in The Bookseller does not tell the whole or definitive story of the book trade in the mid- and late-Victorian period, but it does provide a record of the central concerns of the time and reveal some of the attempts to resolve them. It is a living history, with all the imperfections, shifts in emphasis, and dead ends implied by such a description. The information collected and preserved within the journal’s pages contained a diverse collection of consistent and contradictory opinions and advice, correct and incorrect interpretations of factual events, inaccurate and accurate sets of figures and statistics, and even bibliographic details of books that never reached the printers. The reporting was responsive to the needs of its readers and to the shifts in the larger social and political economies, which makes it hard to draw a consistent narrative about attitudes to the changing times. It is the combination of these elements that makes The Bookseller such a valuable resource for historians trying to understand the experiences of ordinary booksellers. The extent to which Whitaker’s journalistic efforts contributed to the economic fortunes of individuals or the trade as a whole is impossible to calculate, but The Bookseller did document the slow reconfiguring of trade practices and demonstrated how difficult it was to accomplish even the most urgent and accepted reforms without the organisational mechanisms with which to carry them out. The information collected, organised, and disseminated in The Bookseller over four decades formed the foundations of a bureaucratic and organisational infrastructure that underpinned the book trade as it slowly evolved into a recognisably modern industry in the last decades of the century.

Whitaker’s Almanack: ‘The Most Complete, the Cheapest, and the Best Almanack Ever Published in England’

The pressures of supporting a large and still-growing family added to existing tensions within Whitaker’s marriage to Elizabeth. He needed new sources of income and turned to one of the oldest publishing genres of all, the almanack. He had already published several almanacks during his early years with John Henry Parker, including Whitaker’s Penny Almanack (1852) and Whitaker’s Almanack for Clergymen (1852). The new title was more ambitious. Whitaker’s Almanack was planned as a commonplace book of miscellaneous information he had collected to answer readers’ queries when he was editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine. He was fully aware of the competition, as The Bookseller carried advertisements and previews of new almanack titles every autumn, ranging from single-page sheets, neat volumes to fit into pockets, and larger editions for a gentleman’s library, all offered at prices to suit every budget. Trading on his reputation as a trusted figure in the book trade, he had no embarrassment about using his position as the editor of what was considered by some as the main trade journal to sell his own book. He boasted unashamedly that it would be ‘the most complete, the cheapest, and the best almanack every published in England’.Footnote ²²²

Advertisements appeared in The Bookseller throughout 1868, extolling the virtues of the new almanack, and prospectuses were sent to local agents around the country, promising that there would be ‘a very large demand’ for it.Footnote ²²³ Booksellers believed him and reserved multiple copies, so that the whole edition was fully ‘subscribed’ by the time it went on sale in December 1868. The first printing of 40,000 copies was quickly sold out, and a reprint was ordered; by March 1869, the entire edition was gone, setting the book up with ‘a good name and a good market for succeeding years’.Footnote ²²⁴ The strong sales for the first edition enabled Whitaker to repay his printers and binders and find the financial relief he sought.Footnote ²²⁵

Whitaker’s timing was good. Britain was now not only the workshop of the world but also its ‘warehouse, banking hall, shipping agency, and insurance office’.Footnote ²²⁶ The country and its empire generated about a quarter of all world trade.Footnote ²²⁷ It was not a coincidence that the new almanack was launched just after the passing of the 1867 Second Reform Act, which enfranchised nearly one million urban male voters – about 35 per cent of men over twenty-one years old. This group had benefitted from the expansion of the Victorian economy, and with prosperity came political influence. Whitaker would provide these men with access to the information they needed to become informed members of the body politic, including an overview of the British system of government, facts and statistics about the economy, and the names and ranks of senior members of the government, the judiciary, the military, and educational and religious institutions. He had seen the potential of a new market for a carefully priced and well-sourced compendium of useful information for a growing section of society that he understood well: the petit-bourgeoise. A preface for the 1877 edition identified this readership specifically: ‘The Publisher will feel obliged by booksellers giving their attention to the circulation of this almanack amongst manufacturers, farmers, tradesmen, and the lower middle class generally’.Footnote ²²⁸ In other words, men like himself.

Whitaker’s Almanack was an immediate success. Just ten years later, it was chosen to be included in the base of Cleopatra’s Needle on the embankment of the river Thames as a representative of Victorian social and cultural life, along with, among other things, a portrait of the Queen, a set of British coins, a map of London, and a selection of newspapers of the day. ‘Whitakers’, as it came to be known, had become a symbol of the quintessentially Victorian desire for classification and order, alongside Bradshaws, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), and A New English Dictionary (first published in 1884 and later renamed The Oxford English Dictionary).

Of all his publications, the almanack was Whitaker’s favourite. It symbolised the importance he placed on the organisation, systemisation, and dissemination of high-quality information packaged in an affordable and accessible format for the ordinary reader. For his efforts, in 1875, he was elected to the Society of Antiquaries, an organisation founded in 1751 for ‘the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries’.Footnote ²²⁹

Despite this personal success, Whitaker’s family life was again in trouble as relations with his wife deteriorated. In 1869, he petitioned for a judicial separation from Elizabeth after fourteen years of marriage, accusing her of ‘violent, insulting, and indecent language’ and acts of violence against the adult daughters from his first marriage.Footnote ²³⁰ He also accused her of attacking him physically. However, the petition did not result in separation, and even though four more children were born over the next six years, unhappiness remained. In 1877, Elizabeth petitioned for the restitution of conjugal rights but, despite the difficulties between them, they remained married until Whitaker’s death.

In 1875, he retired from The Bookseller and handed the editorial reins to his eldest son, Joseph Vernon, devoting himself to producing the almanack from his extensive library in Enfield. To ensure its continuation after his death, he created a deed of settlement with £10,000 deposited into a trust, separating its copyright and accounts from the rest of the family business and from his personal estate.Footnote ²³¹ There was no mention in his will of The Bookseller, the firm’s other titles, or the fate of the firm as a whole, and his sons had to borrow money to maintain the rest of the publishing list, including The Bookseller, after his death.Footnote ²³² But the almanack was not his last attempt at organising information.

The Reference Catalogue of Current Literature: ‘The Fattest Octavo Ever Published’

Just before Whitaker stepped away from The Bookseller, he came across a simple solution to a growing problem: how could booksellers keep up with the ever-increasing number of new titles produced each year?Footnote ²³³ Many publishers produced catalogues of their current lists, but not all booksellers received them. The catalogues were printed in a variety of formats, were not always regularly updated, and, in any case were easily lost. Trade catalogues, such as Sampson Low’s The English Catalogue, were useful cumulative lists of new books but retrospective in nature. They did not record any post-publication changes in prices that might have been made in the meantime. A comprehensive collection of all books in print and available for sale, which could be updated and circulated to all booksellers, would be invaluable.

Frederick Leypoldt, editor of the American trade journal Publishers’ Weekly, faced the same problem and had responded with the first The Uniform Trade List Annual in 1873. He asked American publishers to print their latest catalogues in a uniform, standardised format, arranged them in alphabetical order, and bound them together in one volume. Whitaker quickly saw the potential for the British trade and embarked on his own edition. In July 1874, he published The Reference Catalogue of Current Literature, a single volume of 3,200 pages with an index listing 50,000 of the titles. It was, among other things, a triumph of the binder’s skill and was bound with a special strong binding so the book would open freely. It weighed 7lb, measured six inches across the spine, and contained 148 publishers’ catalogues and advertisements representing the majority of British publishers. It was declared by its publisher as ‘the fattest octavo volume ever published’.Footnote ²³⁴

Where Leypoldt allowed publishers to list the trade prices of their books in their catalogues, rather than the retail prices, Whitaker instructed publishers to supply their catalogues with retail prices only.Footnote ²³⁵ The reasoning was that booksellers could then share the catalogue with their customers:

The trade prices agreed upon between the publisher and the bookseller were commercially sensitive and it was considered inappropriate and unprofessional for customers to see them.Footnote ²³⁷

The most consequential elements of the publication were the index Whitaker devised to highlight the most important titles. Initially something of an afterthought, the index would later become one of the most important features of his catalogue. With 3,200 pages of new books, he realised that booksellers needed ‘a ready guide’ to help search for the one they wanted from among the thousands of others in the catalogue:

The index listed, alphabetically, the short title for each book along with the name of the publisher and the page number in the publisher’s catalogue where the long title and other sales information were printed. For maximum effectiveness, the most important titles were listed several times: by title, by author name, and by subject heading. Books on the same subject and with similar titles, but produced by different publishers, were listed together, clearly marked with the corresponding page number of the publisher’s catalogue.

Booksellers now had their own personal copy of the largest collection of current bibliographic and sales information that had ever been available to the English book trades. Inside, the layout of the catalogues was simple and utilitarian, and designed to be easily navigable. Titles were usually arranged alphabetically by title, by author, or by series, with some titles appearing in several categories. Publishers with larger lists, such as Cassell, Petter and Galpin & Co. also listed books under broad subject categories such as ‘Illustrated Works’, ‘Children’s Books’, ‘Educational Works’, and ‘Serial Publications’.Footnote ²³⁹ W. and R. Chambers included an index to assist booksellers hunting for titles in categories such as ‘Arithmetical Text Books’, ‘English Grammars’, and ‘School Registers’.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Others included mixed categories such as lists of books suitable as school prizes, gifts, or birthday books.Footnote ²⁴¹

The price of the huge volume was kept deliberately low to ensure a wide distribution and to acknowledge the contributing publishers’ considerable financial contribution for printing their catalogues. The London trade paid 2/6 per volume with an additional 3d for carriage costs to the country trade. To protect Whitaker’s own investment the entire edition of four thousand copies was pre-ordered and pre-paid before publication. Once published, multiple copies were ordered by booksellers of all sizes, not just by ‘a few large wholesale dealers but [by] more than a thousand booksellers in all parts of the world’.Footnote ²⁴²

In addition to surveying publishers’ offerings of new books booksellers could now engage in market research and advise customers of the most suitable titles for their needs. Sampson Low’s retrospective The English Catalogue was not optimised for the requirements of modern booksellers. Although a particular title could be searched and its price noted, booksellers could not easily judge between similar types of books from different publishers, nor compare the value for money or suitability of rival dictionaries, grammars and copy books, sermons and tracts, or the attractiveness of school prize books and travel guides. Subscribers to The Reference Catalogue had physical and visual evidence of this literary and bibliographical cornucopia sitting on their shop counter.

Any bookseller with the space to collect and store all eight editions published between 1874 and 1898 could not have failed to notice the rapidly increasing volume of book production over these years. A comparison of the spines of the successive volumes demonstrates the expansion of the catalogue as it swelled from six inches wide in 1874 to a whole foot long twenty years later, partly thanks to the index, which itself ran to 576 pages. Figure 2 demonstrates the widening volumes:

Figure 2

The Reference Catalogue 1874, 1894, and 1898

An example that illustrates this growth is Ward, Lock and Tyler’s catalogue which was 64 pages long in 1875 but had over 200 pages in 1894, including a 28-page index of its own. The 1898 edition had an index of 100,000 titles, and the finished version was so large that it had to be split into two volumes.

Not all publishers were persuaded of The Reference Catalogue’s usefulness and some never contributed their lists, such as Scottish publishers Oliver and Boyd and legal specialists Sweet and Maxwell. Nonetheless, and despite their limitations as historical sources, the eight editions have preserved valuable information about the Victorian book trade and the range of books available for sale. Book historians such as Simon Eliot and William St Clair have raised concerns over the likely under-counting of published titles in the Victorian period, especially for cheap books. These low-priced books were less likely to have been preserved in libraries and institutions and were therefore not enumerated in union catalogues or surveys such as the Nineteenth Century Short-Title Catalogue, but large numbers of them are listed in The Reference Catalogue.Footnote ²⁴³ Tabulating the titles in each of the publishers’ catalogues would be a huge undertaking but would be an invaluable exercise and offer historians a far greater understanding of the reading choices available to Victorian readers.

The catalogue continued to grow into the twentieth century, and by 1932, three volumes and two feet of shelving were required to accommodate them.Footnote ²⁴⁴ Whitaker’s heirs, now trading as J. Whitaker & Sons and known as ‘Whitakers’, decided to stop binding the individual catalogues and instead expanded the index alone, transforming it into the most comprehensive listing of English-language books in print in the world. Further changes were made over the years. After 1961, it was called British Books in Print, and in 1978 the records were transferred to microfiche and published monthly.Footnote ²⁴⁵ From 1988, the publication was renamed Whitaker’s Books in Print.

The firm’s role as the self-appointed guardian of book trade bibliography led to their involvement in several key developments. Whitakers acted as the distribution agents for the British National Bibliography and assisted the efforts to create a bibliographic service designed for libraries in 1950.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Of perhaps even greater significance to the current book trade, Whitakers also played a key role in the development of the international numbering system (ISBN) in the 1960s. As computerisation spread, albeit unevenly, to the book trade’s warehouses, the need for standardised identifiers across the global book and library trades became urgent. The old methods of identifying individual editions were no longer adequate; computers demanded machine-readable standardised systems using numbers rather than letters and words. According to David Whitaker, British publishers did not immediately appreciate the need for books to have a unique identifying number until W. H. Smith began to computerise their warehouse in 1965.Footnote ²⁴⁷ On behalf of Whitakers, the Council of British National Bibliography, and the Publishers Association, David Whitaker wrote the rule book for the Standard Book Numbering Agency in 1967.Footnote ²⁴⁸ Together with Daniel Melcher, the inheritor of Frederick Leypoldt’s business in America now called R. R. Bowker, the two publishers of book trade news and sales data became the official agencies for ISBNs in their respective countries in 1969.Footnote ²⁴⁹ Although still not digitised itself, traces of Whitaker’s catalogue remain at the heart of the most important information systems that underpin the operations of the national and international book trade. Its DNA lives on in the services now administered by the global data service company Nielsen Book UK, such as BookData, a database of published works and, in effect, the latest iteration of The Reference Catalogue.Footnote ²⁵⁰

Whitaker and the Organisation of the Trade

There had been no trade body to oversee book prices and control discounting since 1852 when the existing regulations were abolished and the committee that oversaw them was dissolved. This also meant that there was no central authority to act as a mediator for disputes between traders, regulate working conditions, or represent the interests of the book trade as a whole. Whitaker repeatedly implored his readers to consider forming a trade association, but the spirit of the times favoured free trade, and many booksellers preferred the freedom to set their own prices and discount freely. Nonetheless his views were clear: underselling was ‘the greatest evil of the day’, a pervasive problem that created ‘an insane competition’ that benefitted no-one.Footnote ²⁵¹ While both publishers and booksellers were blamed, it was the publishers’ self-interest that he particularly condemned: ‘This spirit of underselling is said to be fostered by some of the larger publishers, who are charged with caring for nothing but their own immediate interests.’Footnote ²⁵² Booksellers did not escape criticism and were accused of being complicit in their own destruction: ‘booksellers have been so insane as to run the prices down in a manner totally uncalled for’.Footnote ²⁵³ It was a problem they had created for themselves as a response to increasing competition, and it was for them to resolve it. For there to be any hope of improvement, Whitaker urged his readers to ‘make themselves acquainted with the pernicious results of the system’ promising that The Bookseller would be ‘instrumental in bringing about a better state of things’.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Its pages would be committed to the collective effort of finding a resolution:

Underselling was frequently discussed in the letter pages and in occasional editorials in The Publishers’ Circular in the 1860s and 1870s, but there was little agreement about where the responsibility for reform lay. Correspondents variously blamed booksellers, wholesalers, and publishers.Footnote ²⁵⁶ Publishers themselves did not accept responsibility: ‘A Publisher’ wrote to The Bookseller stating his surprise at his colleagues’ lack of interest in the issue, complaining that ‘the London publishers and wholesale houses appear to take so little interest in this important subject’.Footnote ²⁵⁷ The Publishers’ Circular doubted that a solution was even possible and that it was ‘beyond the power of any combination of the trade’.Footnote ²⁵⁸ For Whitaker, however, such resignation and passivity were unacceptable and the topic was raised and debated throughout his editorship of The Bookseller. Letters were published, arguments were ventilated, and meetings to discuss the possibilities for cooperation were proposed, but, despite intensifying competition, there was little actual progress until almost the end of the century when a group of London booksellers formed the London Booksellers’ Society (LBS).

By the 1890s even the publishers were beginning to be concerned. They were particularly worried about the viability of higher class booksellers on whom they relied to stock a wide range of books in a variety of formats and bindings. Not only did they have to compete with undersellers but now there was new competition from cooperative societies like the Army and Navy Stores and from department stores such as Harrods. These retailers bought in bulk and received preferential terms from publishers which enabled them to offer discounts of 3d or even 4d in the shilling to undercut smaller booksellers. Publishers themselves were also under pressure from authors, with support from 1884 from the Society of Authors, demanding a fairer return from their copyrights and from rises in the costs of production and distribution. Pressure was growing and the book trade had to change and address new commercial imperatives.

In March 1890, The Bookseller published a letter that marked the beginning of a new phase of cooperation between booksellers and publishers. Publisher Frederick Macmillan’s letter, printed under the heading ‘A Remedy for Underselling’, proposed two new pricing and discounting strategies: ‘subject’ books would be sold at whatever discount the bookseller decided as usual but ‘nett’ books would be sold at the price fixed by the publisher.Footnote ²⁵⁹ Booksellers would also be offered a reasonable trade allowance to ensure a modest profit per copy sold. The scheme would not be compulsory and booksellers who wanted to sell with discounts could continue to do so. The trade’s reaction was initially mixed, but Macmillan forged ahead and tested his idea, fittingly, with a new book by the eminent economist Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics. It was priced at 12/6 rather than the more usual 16s for a book of this kind.

A few months later, a ‘private and informal’ meeting of a dozen booksellers was convened in to discuss forming a London Booksellers’ Society (LBS) with Whitaker’s son Joseph Vernon, now editor of The Bookseller, nominated as one of the council members.Footnote ²⁶⁰ The chief purpose of the new society went beyond just pricing policies. It would also:

More specific objectives included standardising trading terms, establishing a mechanism to resolve grievances that might arise between parties, and providing the opportunity for ‘social intercourse’ among members.Footnote ²⁶² Although these may not have been couched in the same words, the concerns of the LBS broadly reflected those championed by Whitaker Senior in The Bookseller since 1858. Perhaps at last noting some improvement in trade relations, The Bookseller reported that there was ‘a growing inclination on the part of the trade to enter into closer bonds of relationship one with another than has hitherto been customary’.Footnote ²⁶³ Finally, there was enough common cause for the book trade to start to act together in its own interests. But despite the positive signs, progress remained slow, and it was another half-decade before significant reforms were agreed.

In the summer of 1894, publishers came under pressure from W. H. Smith and Mudie’s, both influential bulk buyers, to delay the publication of cheap reprint editions of novels that first appeared in the three-volume format for up to a year.Footnote ²⁶⁴ Two months previously, the LBS had submitted a ‘memorial to publishers’ signed by a thousand booksellers, claiming that they could not make a profit from the ‘better class’ of books on current terms.Footnote ²⁶⁵ The Bookseller commented that few booksellers were interested in three-volume novels unless they also operated a library themselves, and the LBS declared themselves to be ‘unanimously in favour of such novels being published at once in a six-shilling form’.Footnote ²⁶⁶ The publishers of higher-priced books suddenly found common cause with booksellers, prompting a leader in The Publishers’ Circular that mused whether it was time for publishers to follow the examples of authors and booksellers and ‘combine to protect their interests’.Footnote ²⁶⁷

The formation of a national booksellers’ association, the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland (ABGBI) in 1895, increased the pressure further. In January 1896, the Publishers Association (PA) was formed with C. J. Longman as President and John Murray as Vice-President. Support from the most powerful publishers was essential for any trade-wide initiative, and it was an important indicator of the gravity of the moment that the committee of the PA was formed of the leading publishers, including Longmans, Green & Co., William Blackwood and Sons, Smith, Elder & Co., and John Murray. Illustrating the grip the leading houses continued to have over the trade and the entrenched nature of its structures, this new committee included many of the same houses that had controlled the previous association, which was dissolved in 1852, with only one of the newer houses, William Heinemann (1863–1920), invited on to the committee.Footnote ²⁶⁸

Finally, after a break of more than four decades, both sides of the book trade were now ready to cooperate to protect their mutual interests and accept regulation for the common good. After four years of negotiation, the PA, acknowledging that they had to act ‘in the interests of the booksellers’, drew up terms for a scheme that was satisfactory to the ABGBI.Footnote ²⁶⁹ The Net Book Agreement (NBA), described by Frederick Macmillan as the ‘Magna Charta [sic] of the book trade’, came into operation on 1 January 1900. It remained in force until 1995. Whitaker had managed to sustain a dogged belief in cooperation and the need for a trade association through nearly four decades, despite the lack of interest from his colleagues.

Later, observers from the younger generation offered their analysis for the reluctance to cooperate. Heinemann suggested that, in contrast to the German states, the historically highly centralised nature of the British trade, with its twin centres of production in London and Edinburgh meant that there was less need for a separate trade body.Footnote ²⁷⁰ He also identified the highly competitive nature of the British trade as another factor and feared that this tendency might threaten its very survival:

In a memoir published in 1923, Joseph Shaylor (1844–1932), a bookseller and former managing director of wholesalers Simpkin Marshall, noted other factors such as the over-production of books, their low prices, and the inclusion of ‘outside firms’, presumably referring to drapers, grocers, and latterly department stores, in selling books.Footnote ²⁷² W. G. Corp, chronicler of the ABGBI, suggested that a combination of the ‘highly individualistic tendency of the age’ and the pusillanimity of the publishers of the day prevented the necessary cooperation.Footnote ²⁷³ If the strengths of the book trade were its enterprise, diversity, and openness to new entrants, it was these very characteristics that had also made it resistant to accepting anything that restricted their entrepreneurial impulses.

Retirement

Although supposedly retired in 1875, Whitaker remained active after relinquishing editorial responsibility for The Bookseller. He was now fifty-five years old and had recently been elected as a Fellow to the Society of Antiquaries. He was also still fully engaged with his own business and in the wider book trade. Three of his daughters had married publishers, and, in addition to Joseph Vernon, several of his younger sons would join in the family firm. His youngest child, Leonard, born in 1875, was the last of fifteen children and the one whose own offspring would eventually pilot the family’s publishing interests up to the eve of the new millennium in 1999.Footnote ²⁷⁴

Retirement was busy. In addition to producing the annual editions of Whitaker’s Almanack, the veteran publisher remained faithful to his motivating mission to produce books with a practical use. He returned to the devotional manuals and commentaries authored by friends that he had published in the 1850s, but now, responding to what he hoped would be a more receptive market, offered his titles in a wider selection of formats. One such title, The Daily Round: Meditation, Praise and Prayer Adapted to the Course of the Christian Year, was advertised as available in ten different editions. They ranged in price from a pocket-sized volume bound in cloth for three shillings to a larger octavo printed in large type and marketed as ‘a most acceptable present to Aged Persons’ bound in Morocco leather and retailing at eighteen shillings.Footnote ²⁷⁵

Eventually even the indefatigable Whitaker succumbed to ill-health, which was exacerbated by a broken heart. In February 1895, his eldest son, Joseph Vernon, had died aged fifty, and the ailing publisher, now aged seventy-five, followed a few months later on 15 May. The funeral was to be simple, ‘plain decent and inexpensive and without mutes feathers scarves flowers or gloves’.Footnote ²⁷⁶ At his request the funeral procession started at the offices of The Bookseller in Warwick Lane, a poignant reminder of the centrality of the book trade to his life.Footnote ²⁷⁷ The procession headed to Norwood in south London, where he was buried beside his son. His estate was valued at £16,934 0s 9d.Footnote ²⁷⁸ After the family, generous legacies and gifts were provided for in his will for close friends, professional associates, and colleagues. His chief cashier and business partner, Charles William Speight, received £100; Reverend Thomas Benson Pollock, the long-time Whitaker author of The Daily Round, received twenty guineas; Whitaker’s four assistants were gifted ten guineas each, and all the clerks, porters, and other office assistants who had been with the company for more than three years were also given £5 each. There were small gifts of ten guineas to his mother-in-law and other family friends.Footnote ²⁷⁹ All the female domestic servants in the household were given £5 over and above their wages.Footnote ²⁸⁰

News of his death was greeted with sadness and respect for his publishing achievements. Many of the newspaper obituaries focused on the success of Whitaker’s Almanack, but the literary and trade press acknowledged the significance of his work. The Athenaeum told its readers that:

The Book and News Trades Gazette described The Bookseller as ‘The Times of bookselling journals’, a recognition of the journal’s continued pre-eminence.Footnote ²⁸² The obituary also mentioned Whitaker’s ‘magnificent’ library, noting that ‘he was never more delighted than when showing his treasures to friends who shared his own intense love of books’.Footnote ²⁸³ However, Whitaker himself knew all too well that a love of books, however intense, was not enough for successful bookselling. At the very least it also required a thorough understanding of the unpredictable market for books and access to the latest bibliographic information.