Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade

Long before bookshops settled behind plate glass, books travelled by cart, stall and barrow. These essays follow them out into the open air, from the great Frankfurt book fairs of the sixteenth century to the secondhand barrows of London's Farringdon Road in the twentieth, asking what fairs and markets meant for the way books reached their readers.

Leading book historians range across Britain and Europe and across several centuries, tracing how books, ideas and the people who carried them moved through streets and public spaces. It is a scholarly collection, best suited to anyone interested in the history of the book trade, in collecting, or in the long, sociable business of buying books from someone standing outdoors.