ABSTRACT
Periodicals, including newspapers, emerged from the mid-seventeenth century onwards to serve the needs of booksellers as advertising media for their wares. One of the more successful radical periodicals was the Monthly Magazine, founded by the Leicester republican, Sir Richard Phillips in 1796, edited by the Unitarian physician, John Aikin, and, from 1800, printed by Davis, Wilks and Taylor. Aikin’s idea for a periodical devoted to the progress of the arts (i.e. technology) and science had come from France where, as early as 1771, François Rozier, observing the way scientific communication was passing from the reading of books by individuals to the giving of papers to scientific society members, had hit upon the idea of publishing for profit a journal devoted entirely to science. One estimate suggests that 64 per cent of all nineteenth-century scientific periodicals were commercially published rather than issued as the official journals of learned societies.
