Am falschen Ort? German Printers and Booksellers in 18th Century London

In this paper, I am going to address issues of location in the international book-trade, and specifically the problems experienced by Germanspeaking printers and booksellers in London during the mid-eighteenth century. Three periods of sustained activity can be recognised here: a preliminary “Pietist” phase, from ca. 1705 to 1722; the period from 1749 to the mid-i780s during which a number of specialist German printers and booksellers focussing inter alia on the German-speaking community emerge; and the period from the early 1790s to ca. 1802 associated with a number of new specialist German booksellers seeking to profit from a sudden interest in German literature. All of the printers and booksellers based their activities to the west of the City of London and close to centres of immigrant settlement or “cosmopolitan” activity. None of them attempted to encroach on the core activities of the native trade which remained determined to exclude outsiders from the printing and publishing of the most profitable, “mainstream” titles. Germans were necessarily specialists, restricting their activities to fields neglected by the native English and Scots. Their specialisation is defined by language, by format or genre. And almost all the German book-trade initiatives were relatively short lived, typically ending with the printer or bookseller selling his stock and “going into another way of business.”