Bookshops in London [ Cities / Trade ]
… eighteenth-century booksellers were key agents in the strengthening of a public sphere in Britain, but their social status and their retailing activities in the City prevented them from being admitted in ‘good company’. Their shops, … promotion of sociability sits rather uneasily alongside that other great preoccupation of urban culture, the pursuit of status. Whereas one sought to unify society, the other encouraged fragmentation. The two motives cannot be easily … keeper, distancing folios from casual modes of selection based on browsing and, in turn, giving them a certain "elite" status’. ‘Buying into Classes: The Practice of Book Selection in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Studies …
Books | Commerce | Reading
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