The English provincial book trade has been the subject of serious historical study for rather more than a century. In 1879, W. H. Allnutt, an Assistant at the Bodleian, read a paper on ‘Printers and printing in the provincial towns of England and Wales’ to the first annual meeting of the Library Association, held at Oxford. Album's pioneering work was an account of the introduction of printing into provincial towns, and over the next eighty years was followed by numerous local studies, most of them by librarians or by those amateur historians who have contributed so much to our knowledge of the minutiae of the history of provincial England. Many of these studies are excellent, soundly based as they are on documents in record offices and private archives, and on the study of provincially printed books to be found in the local collections of our public libraries. Printing, especially book printing, has inevitably attracted the greatest attention; it is more exciting than bookselling, and its products can be seen and handled on library shelves. In 1959, Paul Morgan summarised the achievements of his predecessors in a lecture on ‘English provincial printing’ delivered in Birmingham. In 1977, appropriately in Oxford and addressing the Rare Books Group of the Library Association, Morgan showed that histories or directories of the trade had been published for eighteen of the thirty-nine English counties; work is now in progress on similar studies of at least nine others.

Despite all this effort, however, surprisingly little is known of the provincial book trade as an economic entity.