London Book Trades

The London Book Trades V2.0 – a biographical and documentary resource

Presented by The Bibliographical Society with the support of the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library and the Oxford Bibliographical Society.

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The London Book Trades project was built from a database designed to contain biographical information on printers, booksellers, bookbinders, stationers, and those in associated trades who worked in and around London from the introduction of printing into England until about the year 1830. There are currently entries for something over thirty-two thousand individuals, about two thirds of whom have been derived from the archives of the Stationers' Company.

For the Stationers' Company, the City Livery Company principally concerned with these matters, we are attempting to be comprehensive - including all its members, whether they subsequently worked in the book trade or not - in London or not; and all the apprentices bound at the Hall, even if there is no subsequent record of their freedom. Individuals whom we know to have been made free of the Stationers' Company are indicated by the category Stationers Company. The Company have supported the project in its early phases.

Welcome

This is Version 2.0 (Spring, 2026) of this presentation of the London Book Trades data. See details in the History of the Project and other content in the page category for Front Matter.

If you are familiar with any previous version of the London Book Trades before version 2.0 in the spring of 2026, you will note several differences. All information for each person is available on one page; there are more links among people, to/from Addresses, and to/from the Calendar of events. Each person's name is in the title of their page, so searching by name gives you a more recognisable list of pages to choose from. If you want to search by LBT number (for example, if you know the LBT number of the person you want to study), put that number in the Search field in the top right corner; use all leading zeros in the five digits (eg, "03236"). Pages where the search term appears in the title are shown before matches that appear elsewhere on the page.

Further details can be found in the History of the Project, the Technology Rationale, the Data Conversion Notes, and other pages of the Front Matter.

We are not at this time accepting edits or additions. However, if you'd like to comment on this website or tell us how you use it, please contact: "London Book Trades at the Bibliographical Society"

What's New

Browsing LBT V2, you will notice a number of new features compared with the previous version of this database:

• all information for a person is on a single page for that person (instead of being split across separate pages)
• the page title includes the person's name (and birth/death dates, if known) to make recognising search results easier
• graphical timeline of floruit for each person
• extensive use of calendar pages to group court activities for each day and show printers and other tradespeople active in that year
• address pages for all identified addresses, including graphical representation of occupancy by date
• indexes, by name, LBT number, floruit, and McKenzie reference
• relationship disambiguation calculations with confidence factors
• relationships shown for each person includes grandparents, aunts/uncles, and cousins
• floruit calculations with confidence grades
• external references (ODNB, Wikipedia, etc) where matched, with confidence