ABSTRACT
Many late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century booksellers appeared problematic and unsettling figures to those attempting to classify them. All booksellers were traders, but some prospered as the manufacturers and purveyors of hallowed literature, the guardians of particular religious observance and political belief, and the conduits of intellectual debate. Many booksellers deserved praise as literary contributors in their own right. In the first half of the eighteenth century, several book merchants, including Bernard Lintot, Thomas Guy, and the Knaptons, ranked among the most distinguished citizens of their day.
