Unlike some of its continental neighbors, Britain emerged from First World War austerity with its overseas book market largely intact, and a steady stream of distinguished private libraries coming onto the market gave the antiquarian trade a considerable boost. London dealers worked closely with their American counterparts: during the 1920s they would expect to see them in London once a year, buying for stock.
Once the great inflation had passed, German antiquarians also played an influential role in the European book market, along with the well-established Dutch traders. Germany also boasted the oldest booksellers’ association in the world, the Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler, founded in 1825. Britain, though, could claim primacy in the organization of the rare book trade, with the establishment of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association in 1906.
The basis of British book trading through the twentieth century was laid down in 1900, with the establishment of the Net Book Agreement, forbidding booksellers to sell new books at discounted prices. Similar arrangements were in place in France and would be adopted elsewhere in Europe during the course of the century. The Net Book Agreement allowed discounts only for schoolbooks and a modest consideration for public libraries (5 percent). The rigid enforcement of the NBA introduced another era of expensive hardbacks, giving a new lease of life to the middle-class circulating libraries. Mudie’s closed its doors in 1937, leaving W.H. Smith and the most successful of all, the Boots Booklovers’ Library, established by Jesse Boot to increase footfall in his chain of pharmacies. To satisfy their demanding customers, circulating libraries had to renew their stock very regularly, so they were sellers as well as major buyers of books. Much of this weeded stock made its way to the two-penny libraries, often sold by the sack-load: thus the complex ecology of bookselling found new ways to monetize surplus stock.
Gollancz could with justice claim that he had created the most active political organization in Britain, though with the declaration of war in 1939, it all came crashing down.
In 1905 The Times newspaper had challenged the NBA with a cut price book club, but lost, expensively, in the courts. It would be the 1930s before book clubs returned, thanks to Victor Gollancz, another pioneering entrepreneur and like Haldeman-Julius a committed socialist. Gollancz, a publisher since 1927, knew the industry well, and rather than compete with the booksellers, he co-opted them into his project, the Left Book Club. Members would have their books delivered to the bookshop closest to their homes, for which the booksellers would receive a fee. They were under no obligation otherwise to stock Gollancz’s radical texts, which might have shocked their more conservative customers.
Gollancz had chosen his moment well. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 had demonstrated the impotence of the League of Nations, and the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 was a touchstone cause for the British left. There never was a better moment for a movement aimed at resisting fascism, preventing war and eliminating poverty at home. Members flooded in, 20,000 in the first year and 39,000 by March 1937. Nor was Gollancz ever short of quality books to send them. The club’s main selections included Arthur Koestler’s Spanish Testament, Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism, George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China, based on long interviews with Mao Zedong. Like other clubs, Gollancz expanded its service to additional, supplementary and educational texts, all optional. For those who could not read a book each month, he also introduced B- and C-class memberships. All the books chosen were reviewed in Left News, sent monthly to all members.
So far this follows a familiar pattern, but what distinguishes the Left Book Club was its emphasis on activism. From the beginning Gollancz encouraged members to band together into study groups and to attend rallies, the first at the Albert Hall in February 1937. The authors of the chosen book of the month were encouraged to go on lecture tours. Then came the Left Book Club Theatre Guild, a summer school and Christian groups, an important form of socializing given that club members had divergent views on both pacifism and cooperation across the left, Gollancz’s much-desired Popular Front. Between 1936 and 1939, the club issued fifteen books on the Soviet Union, though the Labour Party was so opposed to sharing a platform with communists that it threatened party members who had joined the Left Book Club with expulsion.
Gollancz could with justice claim that he had created the most active political organization in Britain, though with the declaration of war in 1939, it all came crashing down. Aft er a peak of 57,000 members earlier in the year, by 1942 membership was down to 17,000 and 7,000 when Gollancz wound up the Left Book Club in 1948. By now there was a serious alternative, the Reader’s Union, a less ideological and less exhausting alternative to the Left Book Club, founded in 1937. In its first twenty-one years it published 417 books and sold between seven and eight million copies, including a considerable number abroad, thanks to an arrangement with Robertson and Mullens of Melbourne. The Left Book Club also had its subscribers and discussion groups in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, though Left News was banned in India. Left book groups also sprang up in many parts of Europe, not to forget Egypt, Jerusalem and Kingston, Jamaica.
The other major bookselling innovation of the era was the foundation of Penguin Books by Allen Lane in 1935. We know better than to talk here of the invention of the paperback, having seen successive waves of paperback publishing in the nineteenth century, and can reach further back to the French Bibliothèque Bleue and the unbound pamphlets of the seventeenth century, not to forget, in the twentieth century, Haldeman-Julius and his Little Blue Books. What Allen Lane had in mind, though, was a departure from earlier paperback ventures that had been aimed largely at the readers of story magazines and dime novels. Lane was intending to offer contemporary fiction of the sort published in hardback for 7s 6d at a much lower paperback price. There was one substantial problem: to do so he would need the cooperation of the other London publishers who owned the copyrights of these recent publications. It seemed for a moment that the paperback revolution would never get off the drawing board, as publisher after publisher refused. But then Jonathan Cape broke ranks, certain that Lane would fail, and calculating he might as well take some money while it was still available. Soon Lane had his first ten titles and could set the presses turning.
Bookshop owners were also none too keen to stock the neat little paperbacks with which Lane toured the country. Booksellers feared, not without cause, that the fragile paperbacks would be damaged by browsing, and had no interest in their existing customer base trading down to very much cheaper books: you could get fifteen Penguins priced at sixpence for the cost of one new hardback novel. In the event, it was Woolworths’ buyer who saved the day, encouraged by his wife, by ordering 60,000 copies of the first ten titles. Penguin never looked back: indeed it soon branched out into non-fiction (Pelicans) and commissioning original titles. The turbulence and dangers of these pre-war years were chronicled in a series of Penguin Specials, all written for Penguin and selling hugely. Here Lane’s entrepreneurial spirit was richly rewarded. The sale of the Penguin Specials in the pre-war period guaranteed a generous paper ration during the war (calculated as a percentage of usage between September 1938 and August 1939) and during the war Penguins became a ubiquitous presence on the home front and the front line.
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William and Gilbert Foyle were originally destined for a career in the British civil service. When they failed the entrance examination, they decided to sell off their textbooks. Thirty years later, they were the proprietors of one of the greatest bookshops in the world, with five million volumes on thirty miles of shelves. By 1912, this was an everything shop, selling second-hand, new and antiquarian books from its iconic location at 121 Charing Cross Road, and extending in the 1920s to gramophone records. Foyles Educational supplied textbooks and prizes to schools, and the library department provided a similar service for public libraries. Foyles Welsh Press was founded in 1927, followed in 1934 by a chain of 3,000 two-penny libraries, with outlets in India, Australia, South Africa, Palestine and Egypt, all supplied with stock from Foyles. In 1937, Foyles started the Right Book Club, a rather feeble counterweight to Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club. The education department provided entertainers for parties, and there was a handicraft shop and travel bureau. All this, not to mention the famous literary lunches initiated by Christina Foyle in 1930 and a fixture in the literary calendar for eighty years. Foyles was London’s most fashionable bookshop, selling to royalty, film stars and, through their enormous mail-order department, customers throughout the British Empire.
With books as their foundation stone, all of these businesses could spread their influence into almost every element of information culture.
Th is was the age of the marquee label: Hatchards (founded 1797) sharing the London market with Foyles, Blackwell’s in Oxford (1879), Heffers in Cambridge (1876). None could quite equal the manic variety of Foyles, but the sheer size of these businesses allowed them all to spread their wings, establishing a network of branch bookshops, as did Foyles. Both Blackwell’s and Heffers had an admired antiquarian wing, and both became publishers. Heffers had bespoke children’s and paperback shops, Blackwell’s separate music and art shops. Heffers supplied libraries and established reading clubs, Blackwell’s undertook the difficult and laborious task of sending books to POWs during the Second World War. When the war required evacuation of schools, colleges and government departments from London, Dillons (founded in 1936) followed London colleges into their new locations with small satellite shops.
With books as their foundation stone, all of these businesses could spread their influence into almost every element of information culture. The same went for the large bookshops in many provincial towns. Most provincial towns had a dominant seller: George’s of Bristol (established 1847), Hudson’s of Birmingham (1899), Sherratt and Hughes of Manchester (1896), Wheaton’s of Exeter (1780) and in Scotland, James Thin of Edinburgh (1848) and John Smith’s of Glasgow (1751). These businesses tended to follow a common model, with a large retail main shop, second-hand and antiquarian outlets and branches near colleges or hospitals. Lucrative contracts with local authority libraries and educational administrations helped bolster the bottom line. Although the major sellers were keen to spread their wings, there was a gentleman’s agreement not to step on each other’s turf. None of the shops opened by the major booksellers overlapped geographically. In this respect this limited expansion differed fundamentally from the chain stores that flourished from the 1990s.
These were precisely the sort of businesses with their copious space and large display windows that could take full advantage of the aesthetic revolution that occurred in these inter-war years, with the introduction of the illustrated dust jacket. Of course, just as with the paperback, the dust jacket was not an invention of the twentieth century. A paper wrapper had been used to protect the embossed front or leather binding of books for some decades, with the expectation that the buyer would discard it on purchase. The search for the earliest such printed wrappers has marched the origins of the dust jacket steadily backwards from the 1890s. As of now, the gold medal goes to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, for a book named Friendship’s Offering, published in 1830. But there was no sense that publishers and booksellers saw the dust jacket as an opportunity to promote the content or author. Here the progenitors are the embossed covers of the late nineteenth century, and the illustrated paper covers, sometimes glued to boards, of the yellow-backs and dime novels.
The journey towards the dust jacket of today, with its artfully designed covers along with the inside flaps, sketching the essence of the text and introducing the author, began only in the 1920s, when publishers started to invest in striking, evocative artwork. This created yet another new role in the bookselling industry, the book jacket artist, and this new opportunity enrolled some of the most respected artists of the day, including, in Britain, Edward Ardizzone, Graham Sutherland and John Piper. Virginia Woolf relied on her sister, Vanessa Bell, to design her dust jackets, and stuck with her despite grumbling from booksellers who found them dull and only marginally evocative of the text. But they did give the books a distinctive look, unique to Woolf ’s work. The inter-war jackets often adopted a style unique to the publisher and their lead artist. In today’s commercial age of plenty, the most important task of the dust jacket is to match a book to your mood, from the pastoral watercolor tones of the travel narrative or cosy domestic romance, to the dark hues of the murder mystery.
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Excerpted from The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century by Andrew Pettegree. Copyright © 2026 by Andrew Pettegree. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.