London Book Trades

London Book Trades 2 – a biographical and documentary resource of information from c. 1470 to c. 1830

What's New

The Bibliographical Society is pleased to present this new website building upon Michael Turner's original database. David Macfarlane led the initiative to re-engineer the system, developing a new presentation of the underlying data and adding significant new enhancements. These include:

• all information for an individual is now on a single page instead of being split across multiple separate pages
• the page title now includes the person's name, as well as birth/death dates, or a best estimate of their lifespan based upon the underlying data
• a career floruit has been calculated for each person based upon any extant underlying data and is displayed with confidence grades
• a graphical timeline of floruit is provided for each person where calculable
• a new chronological index has been created based upon the floruit along with updated Indexes by Name, LBT/Number, and McKenzie Reference Number
• alternate spelling functionality has been introduced to help search the data for individuals who have variant names or spelling explicitly flagged as such in the underlying data
• calendar pages now contain all court activities for each day and are more easily accessible
• calendar pages now show all tradespeople active in that year based upon their calculated floruits, separately showing those in the printing-related trades and those in other trades

This 1521 woodcut shows the operation of a common press. It is the pressmark of Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535). While he printed some books by English authors, he printed exclusively in Paris and therefore he appears only indirectly in this website.

• a name disambiguation page and related functionality has been introduced to help navigate the data for individuals with the same names
• family relationships in the underlying data have been analysed extensively so in addition to parents and children they now show grandparents, aunts/uncles, and cousins and their occupations
• relationship disambiguation and confidence scores have been calculated for each family relationship based upon the underlying data
• address pages have been created, along with a graphical representation of occupancy at the same address over time
• additional badges are provided to show at-a-glance profile characteristics and distinguishing features such as having more than one occupation or being part of a "printing dynasty' of at least 3 generations
• category pages have been created for persons who held an office in the Stationers' Company
• an occupation cross reference table has been created to group the many recorded occupations into higher level functional categories
• floruits are displayed for each apprentice
• links to external references have been provided (e.g. VIAF, Wikipedia, ODNB) where they have been confidently matched

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 considering additional enhancements, including integration with other repositories such as the ESTC, and plan to address any significant data quality issues as part of a future project. In the meantime if you would like to provide any feedback, especially on how you are using the website, please send email to LBT at BibSoc'.