Nearly a quarter century after his groundbreaking first book, Judging New Wealth, James Raven remains firmly in the first rank of historians of authorship, reading, and publishing in pre-Victorian Britain. His multivolume study, The English Novel 1770–1829 (2002, cowritten with Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling), is indispensable for scholars researching the deep history of the genre, and his 2007 tome The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 will undoubtedly remain a standard work among book historians for years to come.

On the heels of such expansive, near-encyclopedic studies of the British book trade, Raven's two most recent books exchange breadth for depth. In fact, implicit in both of these studies is the sense that the field of publishing history might benefit from fewer grand narratives about the revolutionary powers of print and more time in the archives making sure we have the underlying details correct. Case in point, the first of these titles, Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England, is less a comprehensive history of “the publishing business” than a relatively narrow study of business publishing. Specifically, this is primarily a book about “jobbing,” or the “mundane but critical” (180) commissions that kept eighteenth-century presses and printers occupied between contracts to publish the likes of Swift, Hume, and Gibbon. Orders from local businesses included everything from ornate trade cards to plain bookkeeping ledgers, from forgery-proof banknotes to tickets to the town's theater. Long overlooked by book historians “as an embarrassing and vague sideline, largely unrelated to the more glamorous printing, publishing and selling of books” (5), such ephemera not only sustained the rapidly proliferating printing shops of eighteenth-century England but laid the groundwork for the age's commercial revolution.

The great irony of this burgeoning commercial publishing world, Raven points out, is that it continued to expand “despite a virtual technological standstill in the design of the common printing press.” In fact, he muses, “William Caxton would have been at home in the printing house of The Times in 1800” (33). That said, those few significant advances that did arrive in the eighteenth century—chief among them elaborate engraving, intaglio printing, and new typefaces—enabled publishers to establish a steady trade in such items as paper currency, lottery tickets, and billposters. Because of their ephemeral nature, of course, few such items survive; and those looking for examples will unfortunately need to look elsewhere, as this book features no images. All told, though, this is the sort of meticulously researched, impressively learned, and consistently insightful book we have come to expect from Raven. Not only does it offer original contributions to the histories of publishing and commerce, but it usefully reminds us that, while in eighteenth-century England “almost no life was untouched by print,” the story of “print culture” is as much one of bills, signs, and forms as it is of books, magazines, and newspapers (257–58).

Raven's other new book from 2014, Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800, is, if anything, an even more specialized survey. Originating in Raven's 2010 Panizzi lectures at the British Library, this study turns away from the who's, what's, and how's of publishing history to focus squarely on the where of England's book trade. Specifically, Raven sets out to map the “commercial topography” of London's publishing scene, exhaustively studying old maps, title pages, illustrations, and, most importantly, land-taxation returns to determine where in London booksellers tended to cluster, how frequently they changed their premises, and what a particular address said about a publisher's market niche. While the obsessive tracking of corporate relocations and the square footage of particular storefronts can in places make for less than riveting reading, there is consistent pleasure in watching a top-rate researcher at work. In fact, Bookscape functions as a master class of sorts on how to do deep, exhaustive research in the narrowest corners of book history. And whenever the narrative verges on obscurantism, Raven is careful to stop and explain what is at stake. At one point, for instance, he pauses to ask, “What does it matter whether Rivington was at no. 58, 62 or 64 or who exactly succeeded whom and when? The principal reason is the site, the place of trade, its size, prestige, history, neighbours and neighbourhood, and the practical, commercial and social effects of space” (45).

Overall, Bookscape might best be approached as a reference book. Those interested in tracking the movements of a particular London publisher between the Restoration and 1800 are likely to find masses of useful data in this book's expansive tables, lists, and appendices. And historians of modern cities in general and London in particular might learn much from Raven's detailed narratives of how the book business grew up around Saint Paul's, relocated a mile northward to Little Britain after the Great Fire of 1666, gradually returned to Paternoster Row and Saint Paul's Churchyard in the early eighteenth century, and eventually expanded outward to Fleet Street, the Strand, Finsbury Square, and beyond. Given the ravages of the Fire and the Blitz, almost nothing of the great bookselling streets and shops remains, but Raven works tirelessly to recreate the sights, sounds, textures, and even smells of Aldersgate, Cornhill, and, particularly, Paternoster Row. Much of the work here is done through a host of well-reproduced historical maps, prints, portraits, and advertisements, and Raven adds to the mix dozens of charts, tables, graphs, and maps of his own. In fact, in terms of illustration, no two books could stand in greater contradistinction than the two under review here. While Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England will likely strike most as the more engaging read, it is hard to imagine any scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England not profiting from or enjoying a half-hour's stroll through the image and map galleries Raven and the British Library generously offer in Bookscape.