ABSTRACT
In Nineteenth century, on the 1st of November, 1848, that William Henry Smith II opened a bookstore at Euston station, the London terminus for the London North-West railway which itself had opened a little over a decade previously. The mail coach system had begun to distribute newspapers in the 1780s and continued unchallenged until the 1830s but the service was slow, with coaches averaging seven to eight miles per hour in summer and only five miles in winter, compared to 40 miles per hour for trains by the mid-century. The impact of railways on print distribution has long been recognised: as Hayes summarises it, “the development of passenger railways combined with the widespread availability of inexpensively-produced books significantly influenced what people read, how they obtained what they read, and, indeed, how they read. The digital duopoly of Google and Facebook has been a defining factor in shaping the media landscape since 2010.
