In eighteenth-century London, few streets were more closely associated with the world of books than Paternoster Row. Running close to St Paul’s Cathedral, this relatively short street became one of the principal centres of the British book trade, crowded with booksellers, publishers, stationers and associated businesses. By the end of the century, it had become a place through which an extraordinary quantity of printed material passed on its way to readers in London, the provinces and beyond.
Paternoster Row had not always been a book-trade district. Its name itself recalled an earlier commercial landscape, traditionally associated with sellers of paternosters, or rosaries. During the early eighteenth century, however, the book trade increasingly shifted towards the area around St Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row. Older centres of bookselling, including Little Britain, lost some of their importance as London’s commercial geography changed.
The Row was particularly well suited to the expanding trade in printed books. Its position in the City placed it close to printers, paper merchants, warehouses and transport networks, while St Paul’s remained a major landmark and meeting point. The concentration of related businesses also brought obvious advantages. A bookseller could negotiate with printers, publishers and fellow traders within a comparatively small area, while customers and visiting provincial booksellers knew exactly where to look for new publications.
It is important, however, not to imagine the eighteenth-century book trade in terms of the sharply separated professions familiar today. The distinction between “publisher” and “bookseller” was often blurred. A bookseller might finance the production of a book, acquire rights to it, arrange printing, advertise it and sell it from his shop. Several booksellers might also collaborate in the publication of a single work, sharing both the financial risks and the potential profits. The names of these partners could then appear together on a title page.
Paternoster Row was therefore a centre of business as much as of literature. Books were commodities requiring capital, storage, advertising and distribution. The growing importance of magazines, periodicals and serial publications during the eighteenth century further transformed the trade. These forms of print depended upon regular production and reliable distribution, encouraging booksellers to develop larger and more organised commercial operations.
Among the figures associated with the Row were Richard Baldwin, who maintained a bookshop there for many decades, and John Cooke and John Coote, both important publishers during the later eighteenth century. Cooke, in particular, produced hundreds of publications and expanded into neighbouring premises, an indication of the scale of business that successful publishing could require. By the 1790s, numerous publisher-booksellers occupied the street, confirming its position as a central node in London's increasingly sophisticated print economy.
The importance of Paternoster Row also extended far beyond the capital. London booksellers supplied provincial retailers and participated in networks that distributed printed material across Britain. The Row thus helped connect authors, printers and publishers with readers who might never visit London themselves. Its businesses formed part of a larger communications system in which books, newspapers, magazines and other printed works moved between the capital and the rest of the country.
This commercial concentration mattered culturally as well as economically. The eighteenth century saw dramatic growth in the production and circulation of printed material, including novels, religious works, political pamphlets, educational texts and periodicals. The development of copyright law, notably following the Statute of Anne in 1710, also formed part of the changing legal and commercial environment in which booksellers operated. The Stationers’ Company remained an important institution within this world, although the book trade itself was becoming increasingly complex and diverse.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Paternoster Row had become more than simply a street containing bookshops. It was a recognisable symbol of the British book trade: a dense commercial community in which literary culture and business were inseparable. Books that later generations would remember primarily as works of imagination, scholarship or political argument began their public lives as products requiring investment, production and distribution. Paternoster Row was one of the places where those processes came together.
Its later history would bring further expansion and transformation, but the foundations of its reputation were firmly established in the eighteenth century. In the shadow of St Paul’s, the Row helped turn London into the dominant centre of the English-speaking book trade, and demonstrated that the history of literature is also, inevitably, a history of commerce.
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