The London printers William Bowyer, father and son, entered the year 1731 with justifiable confidence. The elder Bowyer had been in business since 1699, his skill and integrity securing valuable customers. Chief among these were the London booksellers, the wholesaling and retailing entrepreneurs who together virtually monopolized the British book trade. A closer sense of the resultant rhythms of work may be gained by surveying the year's work as a whole. There were twenty-five pay periods for the year, each ending on a Saturday. Seventeen covered the previous two weeks' work, the others either one or three weeks. The twenty-five works underline the printer's dependence on the London booksellers, especially when it is also noted that Bowyer had been given the printing of only part of seven works. Parliamentary work was thus all the more sought after, for it eventually yielded Bowyer (and his competitor Richardson) something like double the profit.

The House of Longman, founded in 1724, which survived for 270 years, through seven generations, might well have come to an early end in 1755 with the death of its founder, Thomas Longman (1699-1755). The word 'conger', describing the group participating in the sale, was familiar to both Thomas I and Thomas II, although its meaning changed over the course of the eighteenth century, as did the words 'publisher' and 'publishing'. The history of serial publications, particularly in the eighteenth century, could never be completely separated from the history of books. Thomas I and his nephew preferred building up a substantial home trade, wholesaling books as well as retailing them, and developing a foreign trade to making bold innovations and diversifying their business, as some other booksellers, notably the Newberys, chose to do. The expanding Longman home trade rested on a network of contacts, some of them expressed in imprints that were not always consistently framed.