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.

The dissemination history of music is shaped by a fundamental difference in comparison with the regular book trade, its authors and readers. Accurate quantification of the output of printed music during our period is impossible at present owing to inadequate bibliographical control, but one can be sure that whatever the level of supply, copies could be purchased only by persons with sufficient funds. Imprints, newspaper advertisements and publishers' catalogues were used by Humphries and Smith to augment the work of previous scholars and produce the standard list of music printers, publishers and engravers. The unique contribution of dissemination history lies in explaining what happens at the intersection of individuals, the copies of texts and the environments in which those copies are made and used. Understanding the complexities of these intersections requires gathering data not only on texts and those who issued them, but also on the individual buyers and users of those texts.