ABSTRACT
The technical innovations which revolutionised printing and began to have a significant impact on publishing in the last three decades of the twentieth century had wider consequences, and were themselves only a small part of a process of economic and social change. Historically, British publishing had been structured around one-person or family businesses often passed down from generation to generation until the succession failed. This pattern essentially subsisted for four hundred years from the middle of the sixteenth century. The whole organisation of the British book trade was built around a fragmented publishing industry consisting of a large number of firms, many of them very small and few of them very large. The retail trade, which was the essential outlet for the publishers’ products, was even more fragmented. Since the final separation of bookselling and publishing at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the typical British bookselling firm had been a family business with a single shop. Despite the growth of W H Smith as a national retailer in the middle decades of the twentieth century, bookselling, even more than publishing, essentially consisted almost entirely of small businesses.
