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.
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. 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