This chapter focuses on the more standard types of binding and the more ephemeral protection offered to text blocks within the book trade. Within the decade of the 1760s, a number of significant changes took place that took the trade in two different directions. At the lower level, the introduction of both case binding and the use of linen canvas as a covering material set precedents not fully realized until the end of the period. At the upper level, there was a distinct movement towards greater precision of work in both forwarding and finishing, a development that was recognized by the master binder James Fraser in 1781. This decade saw also the reintroduction at the upper levels of the trade of sewing on recessed supports. The sewing structures of books bound in boards used either raised or recessed supports.

By the early nineteenth century, booksellers and printers had set up business in many of the smaller towns, and Scotland had printing, publishing and paper industries operating on a British scale. This enlarged trade can be viewed against a broader social and economic context. By the mid-1830s, the Scottish trade was complaining about the intense competition that had led to the frequent undercutting of the full retail prices. Yet the controversy was not remotely new. The Edinburgh Booksellers' Society had confronted the problem in 1796 and found one of their number, George Mudie, guilty of a practice 'highly detrimental to the interest of the fair trader'. Mudie gave in, but the problem nevertheless slowly grew. The Edinburgh trade recognized that a unified approach was necessary, and that the active support of London publishers and wholesalers was needed to control underselling. The principles of free trade were about to envelop the British book trade.

The story of the British book trade between 1830 and 1914 is one of increased internationalisation. Domestic trade, its structure and organisation, as well as its products and customers, would be complete without a serious consideration of the larger global implications of the period. In the mid-nineteenth century the British book trade was transformed from a cottage trade into a mass manufacturing industry. The home markets of Scotland, Wales and Ireland had been implicated in the English book trade well before the nineteenth century, most notably through bookselling and joint ventures that had linked booksellers and printers in Edinburgh, Dublin and elsewhere with their counterparts in London. By the middle of the nineteenth century a number of British publishers were coming to specialise in titles for readers on the move. One of the consequences of the opening up of the Middle East, Africa and South-East Asia was an increased desire for armchair adventures emphasising the exoticism of strange lands.

The year 1891 saw a Factory and Workshops Act raise the minimum working age to 11, and an Assisted Education Act that abolished fees for elementary education. The journals, rather like the publishers and booksellers they served, struggled to reconcile their cultural and commercial roles, and defended one position when they could not hold the other. In 1891 members of the British book trade made some progress in their attempts to protect their property and livelihoods. By 1891 booksellers were enjoying a greater degree of protection for their livelihoods than they had enjoyed since Lord Campbell's committee ended the policy of fixed retail prices in 1852. In 1891 a reviewer in the Bookseller highlighted the predictability of the three volume novel That affair: There is nothing especially remarkable in Mrs. Cudlip's new novel. Booksellers would frequently have made more profit from selling writing paper, envelopes, diaries, scrapbooks, stamp albums, personalised printed stationery and fancy goods than from books.

This chapter discusses the study of reading in the early nineteenth century Anglophone world, The reading nation in the Romantic period that has been the subject of many reviews, seminars, interrogations, blogs and personal communications. The titles of works, variations on 'history of the British book trade', often disavow any ambition to discuss the consumer interest. The chapter approaches the conceive of texts, books, reading and consequences not only as a chronological parade of book producers but as a complex literary system within a wider cultural system. An analysis of the historic book industry seen this way sets out to retrieve the changing governing structures within which books were produced in the form that they were and not in others, including state textual controls, the legal framework, and business practices. In order to understand the economic relationships between prices, production and timing of access, we need to retrieve the intellectual property regime within which book publishing occurred.