BRITISH BOOK TRADE INDEX (BBTI) and THE ENGLISH PROVINCIAL BOOK TRADE BEFORE 1850

BBTI - The BRITISH BOOK TRADE INDEX (BBTI) aims to include brief biographical and trade details of all those who worked in the English and Welsh book trades up to 1851. (The National Library of Scotland maintains a separate Scottish Book Trade Index.) BBTI includes not only printers, publishers and booksellers but also other related trades, such as stationers, papermakers, engravers, auctioneers, ink-makers and sellers of medicines, so that the book trade can be studied in the context of allied trades. BBTI is, however, an index to other sources of information, and is not a biographical dictionary.

BBTI was founded in 1983 by Professor Peter Isaac at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne with financial assistance from the Sir James Knott Charitable Trust, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. Professor Isaac died in June 2002, shortly after seeing the project established at the University of Birmingham, where the then Arts and Humanities Research Board’s Research Enhancement Scheme funded a project to make BBTI freely accessible online. The funded project, directed by Maureen Bell with the assistance of John Hinks as Research Fellow, ended in 2005.

THE ENGLISH PROVINCIAL BOOK TRADE BEFORE 1850 -
A checklist of secondary sources by John Feather
(Oxford Bibliographical Society, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1981)
with later additions by Paul Morgan