WHannah Allen, born Hannah Howse and later Hannah Chapman, was an English bookseller and printer whose trade focussed on religious treatises and colonial affairs in America. Our knowledge of Allen's activities comes mainly from documents dated between 1646 and 1651.
WArthur Probsthain is an independent bookstore based in London, specialising in antique Asian and African books.
WThomas Astley was a bookseller and publisher in London in the 18th century. He ran his business from Saint Paul's Churchyard and Paternoster Row. He belonged to the Company of Stationers. He published the celebrated Voyages and Travels which described localities in Africa and Asia, compiling information from travel books by John Atkins, Jean Barbot, Willem Bosman, Theodor de Bry, Francis Moore, Jean-Baptiste Labat, Godefroi Loyer, Thomas Phillips, William Smith, and Nicolas Villaut de Bellefond. It included engravings by G. Child and Nathaniel Parr. Astley intended his Voyages to improve upon the previous travel collections of Samuel Purchas, John Harris, and Awnsham & John Churchill. It was read by patrons of Hookham's Circulating Library, Boosey's circulating library, London Institution, Royal Institution, Salem Athenaeum, and Cape Town public library. Astley's Voyages was translated into German (Schwabe, Allgemeine Historie der Reisen, Leipzig) and French (Prévost, Histoire des voyages, Paris).
WJohn Bagford was an English antiquarian, writer, bibliographer, ballad-collector, bookseller, and biblioclast.
WSimon Beattie is a British antiquarian bookseller, literary translator and music composer. He was the first British bookseller to be featured in Fine Books Magazine's series Bright Young Things; when he became a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association in 2011, the Association's Newsletter described him as 'a dealer to watch'.
WGeorge Bedborough Higgs was an English bookseller, journalist and writer who advocated for a number of causes, including sex reform, freethought, secularism, animal rights, vegetarianism, and free love. He was the secretary of the Legitimation League and editor of the League's publication The Adult: A Journal for the Advancement of freedom in Sexual Relationships. Bedborough was convicted for obscenity in 1898, after being caught selling a book on homosexuality; the case of Regina v. Bedborough, has also been referred to as the Bedborough case or Bedborough trial.
WJohn Bell (1745–1831) was an English publisher. Originally a bookseller and printer, he also innovated in typography, being responsible for an influential font that omitted the long s. He was also noted for drawing the reading public to "the best literature" by commissioning attractive art work to accompany the printed work.
WRobert Benson Bowman was a Newcastle bookseller and entrepreneur. As well as publishing a range of popular books, Bowman was a business partner of the ironmaster Lowthian Bell and an amateur botanist.
WThomas Cadell (1742–1802), often referred to as Thomas Cadell the elder, was a successful 18th-century English bookseller who published works by some of the most famous writers of the 18th century.
WEdward Chapman was a British publisher who, with William Hall founded Chapman & Hall, publishers for Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, Eadweard Muybridge and Evelyn Waugh among others.
WFrederic Chapman was a publisher of the Victorian era who became a partner in Chapman & Hall, who published the works of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.
WRobert Clavell, was a bookseller of London. He was born in Steeple, Dorset, of a branch of an old Dorsetshire family, being baptised there on 18 September 1632.
WRobert Dodsley was an English bookseller, poet, playwright, and miscellaneous writer.
WRobert Harding Evans (1778–1857) was an English bookseller and auctioneer.
WChristina Agnes Lilian Foyle was an English bookseller and owner of Foyles bookshop.
WRalph Griffiths was an English journal editor and publisher of Welsh extraction. In 1749, he founded London's first successful literary magazine, the Monthly Review (1749–1845), and remained its editor until his death in 1803.
WThomas Guy was a British bookseller, investor, member of Parliament, and the founder of Guy's Hospital, London.
WJohn Hatchard (1769–1849) was an English publisher and bookseller, in Piccadilly, London. The Hatchards bookshop there is still in business.
WRichard Head was an Irish author, playwright and bookseller. He became famous with his satirical novel The English Rogue (1665) – one of the earliest novels in English that found a continental translation.
WWilliam Hone was an English writer, satirist and bookseller. His victorious court battle against government censorship in 1817 marked a turning point in the fight for British press freedom.
WWilliam Hutton was an English poet and historian. Originally from Derby, he moved to Birmingham and became the first significant historian of the city, publishing his History of Birmingham in 1781.
WJoseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues. Johnson is best known for publishing the works of radical thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, Erasmus Darwin and Joel Barlow, feminist economist Priscilla Wakefield, as well as religious dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Gilbert Wakefield, and George Walker.
WSamuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
WFrancis Kirkman appears in many roles in the English literary world of the second half of the seventeenth century, as a publisher, bookseller, librarian, author and bibliographer. In each he is an enthusiast for popular literature and a popularising businessman, described by one modern editor as "hovering on the borderline of roguery".
WJames Lackington was a bookseller who is credited with revolutionizing the British book trade. A shoemaker's son trained as a cobbler, he showed early initiative by selling pies and cakes in the street when aged 10 and teaching himself to read. In August 1773, Lackington arrived in London with two shillings and sixpence, and would eventually become a wealthy man. He is best known for refusing credit at his shop which allowed him to reduce the price of books throughout his store. He printed catalogues of his stock; according to Lackington's biography, the first edition contained 12,000 titles. He bought whole libraries and published writers' manuscripts. He also saved remaindered books from destruction and resold them at bargain prices, firmly believing that books were the key to knowledge, reason and happiness and that everyone, no matter their economic background, social class or gender, had the right to access books at cheap prices.
WJohn Limbird (1796?-1883) was an English stationer, bookseller and publisher, characterised by an obituarist as "the father of our periodical writing".
WSampson Low was a bookseller and publisher in London in the 19th century.
WJohn Major was an English publisher and bookseller, responsible for many books including illustrated editions of The Compleat Angler.
WJohn Miles was an English businessman who was master of the Stationers Company and a director of the New River Company. He was a major landowner in Friern Barnet and Whetstone in north London in the second half of the nineteenth century and was instrumental in the development of those areas.
WChristopher Robin Milne was an English author and bookseller and the only child of author A. A. Milne. As a child, he was the basis of the character Christopher Robin in his father's Winnie-the-Pooh stories and in two books of poems.
WCharles Edward Mudie , English publisher and founder of Mudie's Lending Library and Mudie's Subscription Library, was the son of a second-hand bookseller and newsagent. Mudie's efficient distribution system and vast supply of texts revolutionized the circulating library movement, while his "select" library influenced Victorian middle-class values and the structure of the three-volume novel. He was also the first publisher of James Russell Lowell's poems in England, and of Emerson's Man Thinking.
WEadweard Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first name Eadweard as the original Anglo-Saxon form of Edward, and the surname Muybridge, believing it to be similarly archaic.
WGeorge Nicol was a bookseller and publisher in 18th-century London. In 1781, he became bookseller to George III, a position he held until 1820. In 1785, he published an improved edition of James Cook's third voyage. In 1786, he became involved with John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and bore responsibility for the letterpress. He and the others in the project wanted to create a type that would be both utilitarian and beautiful.
WEric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.
WJohn Henry Parker was an English archaeologist and writer on architecture and publisher.
WThomas Pavier was a London publisher and bookseller of the early seventeenth century. His complex involvement in the publication of early editions of some of Shakespeare's plays, as well as plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, has left him with a "dubious reputation."
WThomas Payne (c.1718–1799) was an important bookseller and publisher in 18th-century London.
WGeorge Philip (1800–1882) was a cartographer, map publisher and founder of the publishing house George Philip & Son Ltd.
WSamuel Jackson Pratt was a prolific English poet, dramatist and novelist, writing under the pseudonym of "Courtney Melmoth" as well as under his own name. He authored around 40 publications between 1770 and 1810, some of which are still published today, and is probably best remembered as the author of Emma Corbett: or the Miseries of Civil War, (1780) and the poem Sympathy (1788). Although his reputation was tainted by scandal during his lifetime, he is today recognised as an early campaigner for animal welfare and the first English writer to treat the American Revolution as a legitimate subject for literature.
WBernard Alexander Christian Quaritch was a German-born British bookseller and collector.
WThomas 'Clio' Rickman (1760–1834) was an English Quaker publisher of political pamphlets.
WGeorge Riebau was a bookseller and bookbinder in Blandford Street, London to whom Michael Faraday was apprenticed in 1805 at the age of fourteen.
WJohn Snare was a bookseller and publisher from Reading, England, whose life was dominated by the discovery at a country house auction in 1845 of a hitherto lost Diego Velázquez painting, which Snare identified as a young Charles Stuart. It was supposed that the portrait was painted in 1623 during Charles' eight-month visit to Spain where the future monarch failed in his attempt to secure the hand of the Spanish Habsburg princess Maria Anna. A protracted court case in Scotland with trustees from the estate of the Earl of Fife arose over the ownership of the work and this eventually brought Snare to financial ruin. Following the trial, Snare emigrated to New York City. After Snare's death, the Velázquez passed to Snare's son, and went on display briefly in 1885 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting has not been seen again since. No images of the work survive, only Snare's written descriptions of the painting.
WTiranti is an art supply retailer, bookstore, and former publisher based in Thatcham, Berkshire, England, Tiranti supplies sculptors' tools and equipment, and supplies materials for carving, mouldmaking, modelling, restoration and casting. It also sells art books and media. The firm dates back to 1895 when it was founded by Giovanni (John) Tiranti. In the twentieth century it was a noted art book publisher as Alec Tiranti, specialising in sculpture and furniture.
WNicholas Trübner, born Nikolaus Trübner, was a German-English publisher, bookseller and linguist.
WEdward Truelove (1809–1899) was an English radical publisher and freethinker.
WWilliam Yarrell was an English zoologist, prolific writer, bookseller and naturalist admired by his contemporaries for his precise scientific work.