Mapping the location of printers, booksellers and allied businesses deepens our understanding of the commercial and cultural orientation of the book trade between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, the business of publishing and bookselling, characterized by increasing diversity and a steady expansion of production, was closely allied to the transformation of London during this period. With some important exceptions, seventeenth-century London printers continued to congregate in two broad areas of activity, one outside the City focused on Smithfield, and the other stretching broadly southwards from the cathedral to Paul's Wharf and London Bridge. Both old and new London venues sustained the advance of the eighteenth-century book trade. Several ancient sites had supported book-traders, some under the same distinctive trade sign, for generations stretching back before the Civil War, but recent research also reveals the recurrent reuse of many print and book shops by different trades.

The term 'publishing', used to denote a discrete and stable commercial practice, dates from the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The years of Romanticism saw the English book trade change from a craft to something that might plausibly be called an industry. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the British book trade had enjoyed a long period of stability. A considerable proportion of the increase in publishing is accounted for by the expansion of commercial novel publishing. Publishing had always been concentrated in London, indeed, it was virtually a metropolitan monopoly until the mid-eighteenth century. As some firms concentrated on publishing, so others saw new opportunities in the old enterprises of retailing and wholesaling. At the end of the eighteenth century the law, practices and constitution of the book trade had already changed profoundly, and its market had expanded enormously. Printing was undergoing its own industrial revolution.