Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is the retail and distribution end of the publishing process.
Virago is a British publisher of women's writing and books on feminist topics. Started and run by women in the 1970s and bolstered by the success of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), Virago has been credited as one of several British feminist presses that helped address inequitable gender dynamics in publishing. Unlike alternative, anti-capitalist publishing projects and zines coming out of feminist collectives and socialist circles, Virago branded itself as a commercial alternative to the male-dominated publishing industry and sought to compete with mainstream international presses.
Spare Rib was a second-wave feminist magazine, founded in 1972 in the United Kingdom, that emerged from the counter culture of the late 1960s as a consequence of meetings involving, among others, Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe. Spare Rib is now recognised as an iconic magazine, which shaped debate about feminism in the UK, and as such it was digitised by the British Library in 2015. The magazine contained new writing and creative contributions that challenged stereotypes and supported collective solutions. It was published between 1972 and 1993. The title derives from the Biblical reference to Eve, the first woman, created from Adam's rib.
Borders (UK) Ltd., also known as Borders & Books etc., was established as a Borders Group subsidiary in 1998, and in 2007 became independent of the US parent company. At its peak after separation from the US parent, it traded from its 41 Borders and 28 BOOKS etc. shops with over one million square feet of retail space, taking around 8% of the retail bookselling market. In 2008 and 2009 the store numbers were reduced before the collapse of the chain. They also operated one single branch in Ireland, but closed this early in 2009. On 26 November 2009 it was announced that Borders (UK) had gone into administration. All stores closed on 24 December 2009.
Charles Landry is an author and international adviser on the future of cities best known for popularising the Creative City concept. His book The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators became a movement to rethink the planning, development and management of cities.
The Bookseller is a British magazine reporting news on the publishing industry. Philip Jones is editor-in-chief of the weekly print edition of the magazine and the website. The magazine is home to the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, a humorous award given annually to the book with the oddest title. The award is organised by The Bookseller's diarist, Horace Bent, and had been administered in recent years by the former deputy editor, Joel Rickett, and former charts editor, Philip Stone. We Love This Book is its quarterly sister consumer website and email newsletter.
The Good Book Company (TGBC) is an evangelical Christian publisher, located in Epsom, Surrey, England. They are structured as a large unquoted, private company, limited by share capital. Their practices include publishing, mission outreach and training. The Publisher was declared runner up in the Christian Publisher of the Year Award by the Trade Body for Christian Publishing and Retailing in the UK.
The Silver Moon Bookshop was a feminist bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London founded in 1984 by Jane Cholmeley, Sue Butterworth, and Jane Anger. They established Silver Moon Bookshop to share intersectional feminist rhetoric with a larger community of readers and encourage open discussion of women’s issues. The shop served both as a safe space for women to participate in literary events and a resource center to learn about local feminist initiatives. The owners of Silver Moon Bookshop eventually expanded into the publishing field through establishing Silver Moon Books, as well as creating the store newsletter Silver Moon Quarterly.
Lionel Leventhal is a British publisher of books on military history and related topics, whose eponymous company was established in 1967.
The book trade in the United Kingdom has its roots as far back as the 14th century, however the emergence of internet booksellers such as Amazon partnered with the introduction of the e-Book has drastically altered the scope of the industry. Book retailers such as the Borders Group have failed to adjust to these changes, thus there has been a steep decline in the number of operating traditional and independent bookshops. However, still heavily influential on the trade globally, British publishers such as Penguin Books and Pearson remain dominant players within the industry and continue to publish titles globally.
James Robert Tyrrell was an Australian bookseller, art dealer, publisher and author. He enjoyed a career of seven decades in the booktrade and was esteemed in his era as the "doyen of Sydney booksellers". He wrote a standard history of early bookselling in Australia entitled Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney.
Albert Henry Spencer, often referred to as A. H. Spencer, was an Australian bookseller. He was a specialist in antiquarian bookselling and Australiana and established the Hill of Content bookshop in Melbourne, one of that city's "finest bookshops". He has been called "one of the last links with an heroic age of Australian bookselling and collecting".
Feminist businesses are companies established by activists involved in the feminist movement. Examples include feminist bookstores, feminist credit unions, feminist presses, feminist mail-order catalogs, and feminist restaurants. These businesses flourished as part of the second and third-waves of feminism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Feminist entrepreneurs established organizations such as the Feminist Economic Alliance to advance their cause. Feminist entrepreneurs sought three primary goals: to disseminate their ideology through their businesses, to create public spaces for women and feminists, and to create jobs for women so that they did not have to depend on men financially. While they still exist today, the number of some feminist businesses, particularly women's bookstores, has declined precipitously since 2000.
Desmond Zwemmer was a British publisher and bookseller. For many years he ran the publishing firm A. Zwemmer Ltd. which published award-winning "books about specialised areas of the arts". He also worked with the London-based arts bookshop, A. Zwemmer, which has been variously praised by Sir Kenneth Clark who called it a "source of refreshment", by Henry Moore and by Alfred H. Barr Jr.
The selling of books dates back to ancient times. The founding of libraries in c.300 BC stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers. In Rome, toward the end of the republic, it became the fashion to have a library, and Roman booksellers carried on a flourishing trade.
Anton Zwemmer (1892–1979) was a Dutch-born British bookseller, book distributor, art dealer, publisher and collector who founded Zwemmer's Bookshop and the Zwemmer Gallery in London. He was a "friend and patron of many leading artists", from Picasso to Henry Moore and Wyndham Lewis, and he played "an important role in spreading knowledge and appreciation of modern art" in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s.
Deighton, Bell, & Company was a British firm of booksellers and publishers located in Cambridge, England. It enjoyed a long and close association with the University of Cambridge. In 1978 it celebrated two centuries in the book business and, along with two other booksellers Heffers and Bowes & Bowes, the firm contributed to "making Cambridge a prestigious centre of bookselling".
The Bookplace was a radical community bookshop at 13 Peckham High Street, Peckham, south east London which was open 1977–1996.
Housmans is a bookshop in London, England, and is one of the longest-running radical bookshops in the United Kingdom. The shop was founded by a collective of pacifists in 1945 and has been based in Kings Cross, since 1959. Various grassroots organisations have operated from its address, including the Gay Liberation Front, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and London Greenpeace. Housmans shares its building with its sister organisation Peace News.
Robert W. Orr is a bookseller based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Orr is best known as the co-founder of the Lavender Menace Bookshop, alongside Sigrid Nielsen.
