6 - Distribution

Summary

‘The wagon, the canal barge, the merchant vessel, the post office and the railroad may have influenced the history of literature more than one would suspect.’ This chapter looks at the ways in which books, newspapers and periodicals reached the reader during the period 1830–1914. As one member of the book trade noted, by ‘making communication and carriage far cheaper and more rapid’ changes in ‘our railway and post-office systems’ were having a profound effect upon the ways in which books were published, distributed and sold during the 1850s. The development of the railway system, which was serving most of the great cities by the 1840s, was very important to the enlargement of the market for print and I look in some detail at those major wholesalers such as W. H. Smith & Son and John Menzies who exploited its potential both as a mode of distribution and as a venue for the sale of texts in the form of railway bookstalls. Several of the journalists who visited Smith’s warehouse in the Strand during the 1860s and 1870s compared it to a factory. This metaphor seems apt for a period in which texts began to be produced on an industrial scale, but this chapter is also concerned with those other cultural middlemen, such as travelling salesmen, bookstall clerks, booksellers’ assistants and newsboys, whose hard labour helped to shape this new phase in the communication circuit just as much as the new technologies of print and communication.