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 founders of the new presses at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1580s were native Englishmen: Thomas Thomas and Joseph Barnes. The advent of Archbishop Laud at Oxford was therefore important in an institutional way. The Laudian press was to be funded from money received from students on entering the university, and on taking their degrees - the same fund that was to pay for building and maintaining the Schools quadrangle. The distinction between university and private enterprise had been defined in a material way when in 1619 the University of Oxford accepted the Greek type presented by Sir Henry Savile. Between 1655 and the 1690s, only two men were active printers in Cambridge: John Field and John Hayes. For the latter part of the seventeenth century, the name of John Fell, Dean of Christ Church, has become synonymous with learned printing at Oxford. The two university presses faced the challenges posed by the London printers.