The Bookseller digitised by The British Newspaper Archive

The archive of The Bookseller was digitised earlier this month by The British Newspaper Archive. As one of the oldest magazines in the UK, the title’s digitised issues mark the publication of books by authors including George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, among many others.

Run by Findmypast and the British Library, the archive has added over 400,000 new pages from The Bookseller’s past issues. The pages released feature historic material, including a profile of Margaret Atwood and a review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as a chart on the sales of Zadie Smith’s debut White Teeth (Penguin).

Founded on the 1st January 1858 by publisher Joseph Whitaker, the publication was initially marketed as a “Handbook of British and Foreign Literature”. A blog post featured on the archive’s website explains that the newly founded title had incorporated Bent’s Literary Advertiser, which dates back to 1802.

The monthly magazine for booksellers, publishers and book-buyers included “a complete list of all the works issued in the UK, and the chief works published abroad”.

Other sections covered new bookshops that emerged across the country, as well as the ones that closed over time. The “Publications of the Month” in the magazine were categorised according to subject, with biographical, historical, fictional and poetic publications among the various featured sections.

In the late 1800s, the publication featured previews of books like The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Moreover, in 1865, the release of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll is marked in the publication, which printed John Tenniel’s original illustrations and spotlighted the book as one of the “Illustrated Books of the Season”.

Two of Whitaker’s children succeeded him as editors, and George Herbert Whitaker made the magazine a weekly publication in 1909. This was disrupted by the First World War, but the weekly schedule resumed in the late 1920s.

Around this time, in 1928, another difficult period led to the Publishers Association (PA) and the Booksellers Association (BA) taking over editorial control and changing the publication’s title to Publisher and Bookseller. This remained the publication’s title until 1933, when Edmond Seagrave took over the editorship for four decades, succeeded by his personal assistant Philothea Thompson in 1971. This was the decade when The Bookseller became the first UK publication to begin publishing weekly bestseller charts, and also the time when the “Oddest Title of the Year” was launched.

The publication underwent big changes after author Louis Baum took over as editor in 1980, and a decade later the magazine was being published in colour. At the turn of the century, it continued to feature publishing and bookselling news, pre-publications book reviews, author interviews and comment pieces from authors including like Kate Mosse and Anthony Horowitz.

The magazine was bought by the Stage Media Limited in 2020.