The Development of the International Book Trade, 1870-1895: Tangled Networks (review)

Reviewed by: The Development of the International Book Trade, 1870-1895: Tangled Networks Ronald Tetreault Alison Rukavina . The Development of the International Book Trade, 1870-1895: Tangled Networks. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 182 pp. $80.00. One manifestation of a rising interest in material culture is the rapid development of the field of book history. Where traditional bibliography elevated the book as a timeless object to be described, enumerated, or collected, its historicization tends to focus attention on the ways these books circulated and the systems of institutional control to which they were subjected. A history of books is not just an account of successive editions, then, but an investigation into the economic, legal, and socio-political circumstances under which they were produced. One important outcome of such a "sociology of bibliography," to use D. F. McKenzie's phrase, is the kind of close and careful examination Alison Rukavina undertakes into how this social space of cultural production has been negotiated and contested. Rukavina's The Development of the International Book Trade concentrates on the relations between London publishers and the Australian book trade at a time when the British Empire is reaching its peak, but the larger implications of these business relationships are never far from [End Page 152] her mind. The result is a book that is as daring in its theoretical reflections as it is firmly rooted in painstaking archival research. In the first place, the fundamental conception of her project challenges the limits of previous studies. Book history has until recently been grounded on a national model. Important multi-volume studies such as the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain or the History of the Book in Canada reflect this emphasis on the circulation of books within a single country. However, the value of taking a wider view that crosses national boundaries is made evident by Rukavina's work. The relations she traces among colonial book markets, London publishing houses, and ambitious entrepreneurs who served as indispensable go-betweens points toward the vitality of transnational exchange at the end of the nineteenth century, a trade that foreshadows the growth of a globalized economy in the twentieth century. Rukavina gives economic history a human face, however, by concentrating on a handful of key "book trade agents" whose criss-crossed interrelationships give concrete expression to abstractions about international development. Scottish-born George Robertson, for one, emigrated to Australia in the early 1850s. Having been apprenticed to a bookseller in Dublin where he spent his early youth, he set up a bookstore in Melbourne where he sought to satisfy both the needs of a rapidly growing reading public and the larger Imperial imperative of British identity by disseminating products of the home culture. In 1857, Robertson established a London branch of his firm (initially headed by his brother) in order to secure the sources of the latest books and to improve the reliability of long-distance shipments. Robertson's business improved immeasurably when, in 1870, he appointed the resourceful Edward Petherick to head his London operation. Born near Bristol, the son of a stationer, Petherick was barely six years old when the family emigrated to Australia and set up as booksellers. At the age of fifteen, in 1862, he went to work in Robertson's Melbourne establishment. His young assistant proved such an asset to the firm that in 1870 Robertson appointed him to head the London office. Petherick assiduously promoted Robertson's growing distribution and wholesale network for British books in Australia and New Zealand and formed strong business relationships with major publishers like Macmillan, Longman, and Bentley. He also took charge of finances and communications and explored the potential of new transportation routes. When Robertson decided to wind down his activities in 1887 due to advancing age, Petherick started his own firm, the Colonial Booksellers' Agency, in London, with the backing of several big London publishers with whom he had done business. Not content merely to distribute books on behalf [End Page 153] others, he bought up their stereotype plates and began to reprint books for colonial markets under his own name. Besides Robertson's old clients in the Australian colonies, Petherick now...

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