Compared with a number of its continental neighbours, Britain departed the First World War era of austerity with its overseas book trade largely unscathed, and a steady influx of eminent private libraries entering the market gave the antiquarian sector a significant boost. London booksellers maintained close collaborations with their American peers: in the 1920s they anticipated an annual appearance from visiting Americans who would purchase for stock.
After the worst of the inflation subsided, German antiquarians also exerted considerable influence on the European book market, joining the long-established Dutch dealers. Germany boasted the oldest booksellers’ association in the world, the Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler, founded in 1825. Yet Britain could still claim a leadership role in shaping the trade in rare books, evidenced by the founding of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association in 1906.
The foundation of British book dealing through the twentieth century was laid in 1900 with the Net Book Agreement, which prohibited booksellers from discounting new volumes. France had similar conventions and other European nations would adopt comparable rules over the century. The NBA allowed discounts only for schoolbooks and a modest concession for libraries (5 percent). The strict enforcement of the NBA ushered in a new era of costly cloth-bound editions, reanimating the middle-class circulating libraries. Mudie’s closed in 1937, leaving W.H. Smith and the Boots Booklovers’ Library—launched by Jesse Boot to draw people into his pharmacy network—as the era’s enduring successes. To satisfy discerning readers, circulating libraries needed to refresh their stock frequently, so they acted as both sellers and major purchasers of books. Much of this surplus stock found its way into the two-penny libraries, often sold by the sackful: thus the complex ecosystem of bookselling discovered fresh ways to monetise unsold stock.
Gollancz could with justification claim that he had given rise to Britain’s most vigorous political organisation, though with the outbreak of war in 1939, the whole enterprise collapsed.
In 1905 The Times challenged the NBA with a discount book club, but the attempt failed at great cost in the courts. It would be the 1930s before book clubs reappeared, thanks to Victor Gollancz, another trailblazing entrepreneur who, like Haldeman-Julius, embraced socialist ideals. Gollancz, a publisher since 1927, knew the trade intimately, and instead of competing with booksellers, he integrated them into his endeavour, the Left Book Club. Members could have their selections delivered to the bookshop nearest to them, for which the booksellers would be paid. They were under no obligation to stock Gollancz’s radical texts, which might have unsettled more conservative customers.
Gollancz had timed his move well. Italy’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia demonstrated the impotence of the League of Nations, and the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 became a rallying point for the British left. There was no better moment for a movement aimed at resisting fascism, averting war, and alleviating poverty at home. Subscriptions surged—20,000 in the first year and 39,000 by March 1937. Nor was Gollancz ever short of quality books to distribute: the club’s principal 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, drawn from lengthy interviews with Mao Zedong. Like other clubs, Gollancz expanded its offerings to include supplementary and educational texts, all optional. For those unable to read a book every month, he introduced B- and C-class memberships. Every chosen book was reviewed in Left News, mailed monthly to all members.
Thus far the pattern followed a familiar arc, but what set the Left Book Club apart was its emphasis on activism. From the outset Gollancz urged members to form study circles and to participate in rallies, the first held at the Albert Hall in February 1937. The authors of the month’s pick were encouraged to undertake lecture tours. Then arrived the Left Book Club Theatre Guild, a summer school, and Christian groups—an important social outlet given the varied views on pacifism and cooperation within the left, and Gollancz’s prized Popular Front. Between 1936 and 1939 the club published fifteen books about the Soviet Union, even as the Labour Party opposed sharing a platform with communists to the point of threatening members with expulsion if they had joined the Left Book Club.
Gollancz could rightly claim to have fostered Britain’s most dynamic political organisation, though the 1939 declaration of war destabilised it all. After peaking at 57,000 members earlier in the year, membership fell to 17,000 by 1942 and to 7,000 when Gollancz dissolved the Left Book Club in 1948. A viable alternative had emerged in the Reader’s Union, a less ideological and less exhausting option founded in 1937. In its first twenty-one years it issued 417 titles and sold seven to eight million copies, with a substantial international footprint thanks to an arrangement with Robertson and Mullens in Melbourne. The Left Book Club also cultivated subscribers and discussion groups in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, while Left News was banned in India. Left-wing reading circles also blossomed across Europe, as well as in Egypt, Jerusalem, and Kingston, Jamaica.
The second major innovation in bookselling during this era was the establishment of Penguin Books by Allen Lane in 1935. The debate about who truly invented the paperback is moot, having witnessed several earlier waves of paperback publishing in the nineteenth century, and looking back further to the French Bibliothèque Bleue and the unbound pamphlets of the seventeenth century, not to mention Haldeman-Julius and his Little Blue Books in the twentieth. Lane’s aim, however, differed from prior paperback ventures that primarily targeted readers of periodicals and dime novels. He sought to offer modern fiction, previously available in hardback, at a far lower paperback price of 7s 6d. A major obstacle remained: obtaining the rights from fellow London publishers for these recent titles. For a moment it seemed the paperback revolution would stall, as publishers refused to participate. But Jonathan Cape defied expectations, convinced Lane would fail, and decided to take a share of the potential profits. Before long Lane had secured ten titles and the presses began turning again.
Booksellers, however, were not eager to stock these slim paperbacks that Lane was promoting across the country. Booksellers worried that such delicate editions would suffer from handling, and they did not want their established clientele to migrate to significantly cheaper volumes: you could buy fifteen Penguins for the price of a single new hardback. In the end, it was Woolworths’ buyer who saved the day, spurred by his wife, by purchasing 60,000 copies of the initial ten titles. Penguin’s fortunes never looked back: the imprint soon expanded into non-fiction (Pelican) and commissioned original works. The turbulence and risks of the pre-war era were captured in a sequence of Penguin Specials, authored for Penguin and sold in large numbers. Lane’s enterprising spirit paid rich dividends: the sale of Penguin Specials before the war helped secure a generous supply of paper for wartime use, and during the conflict Penguins became a ubiquitous sight on both home fronts and battlefronts alike.
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William and Gilbert Foyle were initially destined for careers within the British civil service. When they failed the entry exam, they chose instead to sell off their textbooks. Three decades later they stood as owners of one of the world’s greatest bookshops, housing five million volumes across thirty miles of shelving. By 1912, the shop had become an all-encompassing emporium—selling second-hand, new, and antiquarian books from its famed address at 121 Charing Cross Road, extending in the 1920s to gramophone records. Foyle’s Educational supplied textbooks and prizes to schools, while the library department offered a similar service to public libraries. Foyle’s Welsh Press opened in 1927, followed in 1934 by a chain of 3,000 two-penny libraries with branches in India, Australia, South Africa, Palestine and Egypt, all supplied by Foyle’s. In 1937, Foyles launched the Right Book Club, a rather modest counterweight to Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club. The education department provided entertainers for parties, and there existed a handicraft shop and travel bureau. All of this, not to mention the famous literary lunches introduced by Christina Foyle in 1930 and which remained a staple of the literary calendar for eight decades. Foyles stood as London’s most fashionable bookshop, serving royalty, screen stars, and, through their vast mail-order operation, customers throughout the British Empire.
With books as their foundation stone, all of these enterprises could extend their influence into nearly every aspect of information culture.
Th is was the era 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 rival the breadth offered by Foyles, yet the sheer scale of these enterprises allowed them to spread their wings and create a network of branch bookshops, a pattern also followed by Foyles. Both Blackwell’s and Heffers maintained respected antiquarian divisions and went on to become publishers. Heffers established dedicated children’s and paperback shops, Blackwell’s operated separate music and art outlets. Heffers supplied libraries and launched reading clubs, Blackwell’s undertook the difficult task of sending books to POWs during World War II. When wartime evacuations moved schools, colleges, and government departments away from London, Dillons (founded in 1936) followed London’s educational institutions to new sites with smaller satellite outlets.
With a foundation built on books, these firms extended their reach into almost every facet of information culture. The same applied to the many sizable provincial bookshops. In most towns there was a dominant bookseller: 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 concerns typically operated a flagship store, second-hand and antiquarian branches, and additional outlets near colleges or medical facilities. They secured lucrative municipal contracts with local authorities and education departments to bolster profits. Although the major houses sought to expand, there was an informal code preventing encroachment on another firm’s territory. The result was a restrained expansion that differed markedly from the later chain-store model that took hold in the 1990s.
These were precisely the types of enterprises with abundant space and large display windows that could capitalise on the visual revolution of the inter-war years, marked by the advent of the illustrated dust jacket. Of course, the dust jacket did not spring from the twentieth century alone. Beforehand, the practice involved paper wrappers used to protect the boards or leather bindings, with the expectation that buyers would discard them at the point of purchase. The search for the earliest printed wrappers pushes the dusty origins of the dust jacket back through the 1890s. The Bodleian Library in Oxford holds the earliest known example, a book titled Friendship’s Offering, published in 1830. Yet there was little sense among publishers and booksellers that the jacket offered a vehicle to promote content or authors. The predecessors were the embossed covers of the late nineteenth century and the illustrated paper covers, sometimes pasted on boards, of the yellow-backs and dime novels.
The path toward today’s dust jackets, with their carefully devised covers and inner flaps that hint at the text and introduce the author, began only in the 1920s, when publishers began to invest in striking, evocative artwork. This created another new function in the bookselling world—the book jacket artist—and drew some of the era’s most esteemed artists into Britain, including Edward Ardizzone, Graham Sutherland, and John Piper. Virginia Woolf enlisted her sister, Vanessa Bell, to craft her dust jackets and remained loyal to her despite booksellers’ grumbles that they were dull and barely conveyed the work’s essence. Yet the jackets did confer a distinctive look, unique to Woolf’s oeuvre. The inter-war jackets often reflected a publisher’s particular style and the lead artist’s signature. In today’s consumer-driven market, the most crucial aim of the dust jacket is to align a book with a reader’s mood, whether it be the gentle, pastoral hues of a travelogue or domestic romance, or the somber tones of a 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.
