A SPECTATOR AND EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'A joy. Each chapter instantly became my favourite' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas 'Wonderful' Lucy Mangan 'The right book has a neverendingness, and so does the right bookshop.' This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scrawl in their margins or just curl up with them in bed. Taking us on a journey through comfort reads, street book stalls, mythical libraries, itinerant pedlars, radical pamphleteers, extraordinary bookshop customers and fanatical collectors, Canterbury bookseller Martin Latham uncovers the curious history of our book obsession - and his own. Part cultural history, part literary love letter and part reluctant memoir, this is the tale of one bookseller and many, many books. 'If ferreting through bookshops is your idea of heaven, you'll get the same pleasure from this treasure trove of a book' Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express

Vols. for 1871-76, 1913-14 include an extra number, The Christmas bookseller, separately paged and not included in the consecutive numbering of the regular series.

Official organ of the book trade of the United Kingdom.

This study breaks new ground surveying the origins of the Gothic chapbook, its publishers and authors, in order to establish conclusively the impact these pamphlets had on the development of the Gothic genre. Considered the illegitimate offspring of the Gothic novel, the lowly chapbook flooded the market in the late eighteenth century, creating a separate and distinct secondary market for tales of terror. The trade was driven by a handful of individuals who were booksellers and dealers, circulating library proprietors, stationers, and small publishers – what they produced were more than four hundred chapbooks, bluebooks and shilling shockers containing Gothic tales from magazines, redactions of popular novels, extractions of entire inset tales, and original tales of terror. This book responds to the urgent and pressing need to contextualise the Gothic chapbook in ascertaining a more concise and comprehensive view of the entire Gothic genre.