ABSTRACT
The energy is palpable (Figure 1.1). Two children-one with a woman who appears to be his mother-approach from opposite directions. They move towards the front door of Tabart’s Juvenile Library at 157 New Bond Street at the center of the frame. Benjamin Tabart (1767-1833) was the Tabart on the sign, the “Ben” of my chapter title, and the Ben whose bookshop provides entry into my book on the children’s book business. Ben’s house was his
“juvenile library,” a children’s bookshop, rather than a lending librarythough they existed in the period. The “library” in the shop’s name took its cue from the implicitly fashionable French term for bookseller, “libraire.” Although Ben’s house was a children’s bookshop where books addressed to children were sold, it was also a publishing house where books were created. “House,” as Asa Briggs explains in A History of Longmans,1 “was an old description for a publisher, but one that was not exclusive to publishing: the House of Commons and the House of Lords place the words within a constitutional context as did the House of Hanover” (A. Briggs 4). By the nineteenth century, “[h]ouse,” as Briggs explains, also applied to the “fashion business,” as in “the House of Worth” (A. Briggs 5), or the House of Chanel.
