Libraries and Booksellers in the Long Eighteenth Century

This special issue of Library and Information History examines the diverse relationships between libraries, booksellers, and communities on both sides of the Atlantic. It was inspired by a Bibliographical Society of America-sponsored panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2014 annual meeting in Williamsburg, VA. I initially proposed the topic of libraries and booksellers because the study of libraries and booksellers is essential for understanding the circulation and management of information in the long eighteenth century. Indeed, the interconnectedness of commerce, community, and the library in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world has received increased scholarly attention in the years since the publication of James Raven’s London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (2002).¹ When I first arranged the panel, I had envisioned topics like private collections, university libraries, subscription libraries, and the book trade, and was pleasantly surprised when even more distinctive abstracts were submitted. The papers on the panel were stimulating and insightful, including the essays on Moreau de Saint-Méry and the New York Society Library published here, along with a third essay on the London printer Tace Sowle-Raylton that was an excellent later addition.

The essays in this volume focus on two key people in the bookselling trade, as well as an important social institution. The central figures under discussion in Louisiane Ferlier’s and Sara E. Johnson’s essays — Tace Sowle-Raylton (1666–1749) and Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819) — span the long eighteenth century and were both marked as different within their respective communities. Jennifer Furlong’s focus on the acquisition of books in the New York Society Library analyses the links between library shareholders, the library as an emerging and self-defining institution, and the shaping of library collections.

Ferlier analyses the connections between Sowle-Raylton and the Quaker library in London during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In so doing, Ferlier demonstrates Quakers’ larger ties to the eighteenth-century book trade. Sowle-Raylton, as a woman printer-bookseller, worked with an expanding Quaker book trade that she helped to improve and modernize. The Quaker library, Ferlier shows, evidences the increased professionalization of Quaker publishing in London under Sowle-Raylton’s influence. Johnson’s essay on Moreau de Saint Méry describes someone whose identity as a bookseller was only one of his many roles in colonial Pennsylvania. Moreau was an exile living in Philadelphia during the French and Haitian revolutions; his networks in early Pennsylvania reveal a vibrant Francophone community with his bookshop serving as an essential part of that community. Furlong’s work on the New York Society Library explores the relationship between library and bookseller, but from the perspective of library acquisitions rather than from the bookseller’s perspective. Her study of the relationships between commerce, share ownership, donation, and collection formation reveals the complexity of library growth and development in eighteenth-century New York. Overall, the three essays expand scholarly discussion about booksellers, book acquisition, and their ties to library history and information history in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Today, libraries and booksellers are both central to knowledge work and incalculably diffuse. A bookseller may be virtual, one of an endless list of a search engine’s third-party sellers, geographically dispersed yet yoked together thanks to the formal unity of the search engine’s font. Booksellers may also exist in a form more or less recognizable from an eighteenth-century perspective: a person owns a shop that sells books, with tastes responding to the needs of a particular community. Libraries, too, both resemble their eighteenth-century counterparts and seem unfamiliar at the same time. Early images of libraries that show a circulation desk and walls of shelves have their twenty-first-century descendants, but the synthesis of library resources and information technology available today is uniquely innovative. Today, the relationship between information, consumer, and distribution is a complex and often political one; the following essays reveal similar connections among libraries and booksellers in the eighteenth century.

Notes

1. J. Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002).