History of the Project

Origination

The London Book Trades (LBT) has passed through many forms over the past decades.

Initially, a simple database was created to accommodate work done by the late Michael L.Turner (MLT, 1935-2017) on members of the Stationers' Company active during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Stationers' Company is one of the Livery Companies (or Guilds) of the City of London. The one which historically was responsible for the control of the book trade and to which members of the trade (printers, booksellers, publishers, bookbinders, paper-merchants and the like) normally, but not exculsively, belonged. It obtained a Royal Charter of incorporation in 1557, though it had been in existence as a Fellowship or Brotherhood for some 159 years before that date.

The work was in many ways a continuation of the previously published work of the late Prof.D.F.McKenzie (DFM, 1931-1999) on the details of those who had been apprenticed through the Stationers' Company from 1605 to 1800. DFM was eager that his materials should be entered into the database and, with the agreement of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, this was done, thereby spreading the coverage from 1830 back to 1605. MLT then created provisional entries for apprentices from 1556 to 1604 based on a survey of Arber's Transcript. At about this time Prof.J.A.Lavin submitted to the Oxford Bibliographical Society a more fully worked list covering this earlier period based on the model of McKenzie's volumes. He subsequently agreed that his work could be included in the database.

Oxford

Meanwhile in 1989 The Leverhulme Trust made a major grant to four History of the Book projects (including this one) to enable each of them to appoint a post-doctoral Research Fellow for a period of two years. The LBT Project appointed Dr.Christine Ferdinand, later Fellow Librarian of Magdalen College, Oxford. Significant progress was made in the following two years on developing and enriching the database under the direction of MLT.

Since that time additional work was been carried on by MLT and a start was made on enlarging the content by including those who were active in the book trades but not members of the Stationers' Company. Another major addition has been the inclusion of details of some two to three thousand bookbinders employed in London during the early decades of the nineteenth-century, collected specifically for the project by Esther Potter from the Jaffray Manuscripts in the British Library. There are now something over thirty thousand individuals listed.

Wiki Version 1

In December 2006, through the good offices of The Bibliographical Society, arrangements were made to safeguard the database by depositing it with the School of Advanced Studies (University London) on their SAS-SPACE E-repository. After further discusssions an agreement was made in March 2009 between The Bibliographical Society and The Oxford Bibliographical Society to jointly publish the material through London University (Institute of English Studies) on a web-site specially created by the University of London Computer Center (ULCC). The project then passed under the aegis of the Bodleian Library.

For many years the late Prof.Michael Treadwell worked on the members of the London trade (particularly printers) and created a rich and immaculate collection of notes. After his death these were scanned. We are extremely grateful to his family and to his former Department of English Literature at Trent University for permission to access these notes through the website. Many others have helped over the years and without the continuous support of the Stationers' Company itself, and the good offices of The Bodleian Library little would have been achieved.

Need to Rebuild

When Oxford University closed the web host that was running LBT at the end of 2024, The Bibliographical Society obtained the system files from Oxford and proceeded to analyse how the site had been built over time. Separately, a copy of MLT's original database was obtained. The results of an extensive review was to determine that the 2008 version of Michael Turner's database (in MS Access format) was still usable because of the structures built into the relational database and the normalisation employed in populating it. Additionally, the edits that had been made in the Wiki after the ULCC conversion of the database were identifiable in the history records of the wiki and could be extracted.

Wiki Version 2.0

Given the choice between standing up the ULCC version of the data in the wiki or rebuilding from scratch, the Bibliographical Society decided to preserve the centrality of the database and create a transformation script that would pull the data out of the database and construct the pages of a wiki automatically. The Web Group of The Society preferred to reimplement the database using current sustainable technologies. David Macfarlane led this effort and was able to build a successful replacement for the LBT wiki site by early 2026. Details of the process is available in Data Conversion Notes.

The intent is to maintain the data in the database (now in MySQL) and regenerate the wiki pages as and when necessary.

While there are still (at time of writing in early 2026) some portions of the database that do not yet appear in the wiki - such as English Stock, charter signatories, and Livery Companies other than the Stationers' Company - sufficient data are included to make this version publicly available.

Plans

Release 2.1

• Controlled editability (download/edit/upload csv files)
• Additional data extracted from database

Release 2.2

• List of books printed by each printer (from ESTC)
• Links to Wikipedia, VIAF, etc

Release 2.3

• Final analysis and extraction of more obscure data from Michael Turner’s database

If you have research to add to this database or are interested on working on the London Book Trades website, contact us at "LBT at BibSoc".