In 1890 Macmillan published The Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. While the book was itself an important contribution to the ‘dismal science’, it also carried a key significance for publishing and bookselling in the UK for the following 100 years. It was the first ‘net’ book, that is, to be sold at a price predetermined by the publisher that all booksellers would agree not to discount. Macmillan was initially the only publisher to pursue this method of creating a level of predictability and stability within the book market. As others joined, the system became a cooperative movement rather than a multilateral contract signed at the one date. At a meeting in January 1895, held at Stationers’ Hall in London, the booksellers came together to form the Booksellers Association of Great Britain and Ireland (the BA). One of the first resolutions put before the new organisation asked for approval of the net system of publishing and selling books: it was passed unanimously. A further meeting in October 1895 at Anderton’s Hotel in London led to the formation of the Publishers’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland (the PA). Trade body could now speak unto trade body; acronym unto acronym. Eventually, a refined version of the Macmillan initiative set out by the PA was agreed by the BA on Friday 24 February 1899. This was the Net Book Agreement (NBA) that held sway for most of the working lives of the interviewees represented in this book. The NBA was celebrated at a dinner in May 1901, presided over by Frederick Macmillan; the attendance of 300–400 members of the trade – publishers, booksellers and indeed authors – demonstrated the consensual nature of the scheme now applying throughout the UK.
Not that there had always been the need for two trade bodies or an agreement between them. It was not until the nineteenth century that the distinction between booksellers and publishers was by and large complete. (The combination of printers and publishers was to persist into the twentieth century.) It had only been in the fifty years or so before 1890 that, instead of printing and publishing the books that they sold in their shops, booksellers largely bought their stock directly from the publishers. This of course had created a conflict: publishers wanted to sell their books at the highest price possible; booksellers wanted to buy cheaply and sell to make a profit. Throughout the nineteenth century, booksellers encountered serious problems in keeping their profit margins high enough to be viable. At an early stage, booksellers realised that their survival lay in convincing the publishers to give them favourable terms and discounts in order to secure both their profits and cashflow. The solution was obvious to the booksellers: the publisher would fix a retail price, allowing the books to be sold to the bookseller at a discount. The problem was to convince publishers that it would work. A first attempt was made in 1829 when publishers and booksellers drew up the Bookselling Regulations, which sought to fix trade and retail prices for books. However, these regulations were not universally accepted and the agreement, forerunner of the NBA, broke down in the late 1830s. This was the era of ‘free trade’, when the general political mood was against price fixing of any sort. It was difficult for booksellers to find champions of their idea for a fixed retail price for books, both within the trade and outwith it. Booksellers continued to struggle in a very competitive marketplace, while publishers found it difficult to find outlets for their stock as more and more bookselling businesses failed. Writers suffered too. They had earlier banded together as the Society of Authors in 1883, driven by the need to protect their rights and optimise their incomes. Their representative Walter Besant had been involved in the discussions with the PA and BA and saw the NBA as a means of providing stability for authors as well as those more directly involved in the book trade. Little wonder that the NBA had been approved by all parties.
The twentieth century began then with the prospect of security and growth in bookselling; it was to end, as will be seen, in uncertainty and consolidation. There were some hiccups on the way: the so-called ‘book war’ of 1906–8 resulted from the establishment of a net price-discounting book club by The Times in 1905 (a Glasgow Herald book club founded in 1907 lasted only a year); the successful marketing of the sixpenny paperback by Penguin from 1935 seemed initially to challenge financial stability because of the relatively small margins on the sale of each individual title, until booksellers realised that the ‘Tesco principle’ of volume sales and low retail (net) prices could result in as healthy a profit as limited sales of high-priced hardbacks; and there were government-derived challenges to the general application of Retail Price Maintenance (RPM; the generic term for schemes such as the NBA) in the period after the Second World War. These challenges originated in a sense that the interests of the individual consumer were not being served by such price fixing, although the argument of the ‘greater good of the greater number’ – that is, of a general social benefit being produced – underpinned the survival of RPM for both books and medicines. Publishers and booksellers cared for the intellectual and imaginative health of the whole nation.
The NBA did, it must be admitted, create a complacency within the book trade that is at times represented in these interviews. While various retailing revolutions transformed the rest of the high street, the cosy (for the bookseller) and intimidating (for many readers) bookshop resisted change until the last third of the twentieth century. Indeed, the dissolution of the voluntary agreement that was the NBA in 1995 (by the publishers rather than the booksellers) further accelerated a period of very rapid change within bookselling that shattered any remnants of complacency. A sense of regret and bewilderment at the speed and nature of such change is also represented in these interviews.
Bookselling had been a genteel vocation: entry was often as a result of accident or birth. Professional training was through a period of apprenticeship – partly abroad, where possible, in the major continental book centres of Paris or (pre-1939) Leipzig. Experience was gained in various departments and of the diverse functions of the trade before a position in management opened up. This relatively insular formation contributed no doubt to the general conservatism of the trade through the perpetuation of familiar practices from generation to generation. Bookshops could not be easily distinguished from libraries; both were cathedrals of books with dim, daunting interiors that only the most confident, knowledgeable of local ritual and observances, dared enter. There was little direct competition, and consequently the service to customers could be quite casual. Books not in stock could take weeks, if not months, to arrive as the result of a distribution system seemingly designed by Heath Robinson. (I write from experience of the offhand treatment of customers by staff of a monopolistic bookshop in a middling-sized town in the 1970s.) The sentimentalised image of the bookseller as a guide and mentor to good reading that still pops up in a film such as You’ve Got Mail (1998), by contrast with the efficient but soulless chain retailer, does not necessarily reflect the reality of the historical situation of the early twentieth century. It is to the credit of the generation of booksellers represented in this book that they began to initiate in the 1960s, once they gained management positions, long-overdue change.
That evolutionary change, working within independent booksellers, building up small localised chains, emerged from a context of increased disposable income and leisure time, both being intensively competed for by other media and activities. More particularly, it also emerged from the rapid expansion of higher education in the UK during the 1960s, both in the number of students going on to tertiary study and in the number of new institutions being created to cater for them. Dynamic companies like John Smith and James Thin began, for example, to computerise their stock and ordering systems, a difficult task given the non-standardised, diverse nature of the goods being sold compared to other forms of retailing. The key to many of their reforms was improving the level of service and choice offered to the customer. Those customers could be drawn into environments that were better lit, more colourful, more welcoming. As can be read in the accounts of John Smith, bookshops began to host events from musical recitals to authors’ readings and signing sessions, converting the curious into regular customers. This was unprecedented – Dickens did not tour bookshops, only theatres and concert halls. (Not that there were not diehards who felt that a sacred product like the book needed a reverential and meditative ambience – but that, at least until the 1980s, was what libraries continued to provide.) The reform-minded bookshops offered from the 1960s a wider stock, more efficient ordering systems, helpful staff and unhurried surroundings that encouraged the customer to browse without feeling intimidated.
And yet, like the efforts of the Duma in pre-revolutionary Russia, these reforms seem at one and the same time correct and necessary in the light of prior practice and failure to adapt, but narrow and inadequate in the light of the social and commercial changes that ultimately swept away many of the independents, including the small chains. This is the miracle of retrospective vision. At the time, few would have anticipated the end of what Edward Shils called the ‘bourgeois era’ through Thatcherism’s enthusiasm for the market, and mass participation in the market, followed by New Labour’s continuing emphasis on access and participation in a broader-based civil society. These may be most easily seen in the transformation of public libraries, which moved away from books (and the bourgeoisie and aspirant working class) to provide a variety of products in surroundings, which included soft furnishings and conversation, that resembled bookshops. But it affected bookshops as well. The larger chain bookshops like Waterstone’s or Borders that emerged from the 1990s onwards sold a lifestyle as much as they sold books, offering the sofas, coffee and unpressured leisure reflected in a TV series like Friends. The small independents and small chains that had initiated reforms now saw them taken up by these larger chains on a scale, with a degree of capitalisation and commercial clout, that they could not emulate. Some disappeared; others, such as John Smith and James Thin, were taken over by larger companies. The statistics are unavailable for Scotland, but Laura J. Miller, in her excellent Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (University of Chicago Press, 2006), provides comparable figures for the USA. In 1991 independents accounted for about one third of all adult books sold there, but by 1997 their share had fallen to less than a fifth. The Scottish evidence for this revolution is found on the high streets of its large conurbations and in the pages of this book.
It was also seen on the shelves of the bookshops. Where the 1960s reformers had moved towards offering customers greater choice and had supported local publishers, the chains returned to a more restricted range of titles, held in greater numbers, to give the market what it wanted. A system of central buying was, and is, practised by some of these retail chains, whereby orders are placed by a central purchasing manager generally located at head office. This has the effect of homogenising title buying, which mitigates against small publishers who produce only a handful of titles a year and against titles which may seem to have a Scottish appeal only. The rationale behind such a system is that less time is taken up seeing the representatives of each publisher and that the discount structures are simplified. There is anecdotal evidence, at least, to suggest that titles published in Scotland do not fare well under central buying schemes, as they come from small publishers and/or are not viewed as appropriate for a UK market. The chains argue, in their defence, that the dedicated Scottish sections of their bookshops make up for this. Those independent retailers that remain do buy smaller quantities than wholesalers and the chains, and the discounts given to them are generally lower, but their continuing presence, particularly outside the major cities, can make a difference to small publishers whose print runs are limited and whose market is distinctively Scottish. In some cases, titles may be available only through the independents, as their potential is deemed too small for either the wholesalers or chains. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the control of most Scottish retail outlets was located outside Scotland, a development seen by those within the Scottish publishing industry, as well as those concerned for the choices available to Scottish readers, as being undesirable. These vital links in the supply chain are geographically distant from the Scottish market and hold no particular remit to promote books from Scotland or to service the Scottish, as distinct from the British, reader.
There matters might have remained from that point onwards, and the close of the careers recorded in this book, but for two factors: online bookselling and the entry of the large supermarkets. By 2000, the world wide web had become an established resource for retail selling and purchasing of all sorts. It had also become a powerful tool for promoting goods of all sorts. This situation was partly due to the success of Amazon, launched as an online bookshop in 1995 with a user-friendly interface and the use of ‘intelligent agents’ to replace the bookshop assistant and with a range of ‘stock’ far outstripping any constrained by a physical building. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1999 for the manner in which he had transformed online shopping. The nature of the web means that its outreach is global (although the books still have to be dispatched) and titles can be browsed online by those living in even the remotest communities in Scotland who may never have had access to a bookshop. The advent of internet bookselling has also given to publishers a more level playing field in which to sell their books. In 2005, the then Scottish Publishers’ Association launched BooksfromScotland.com, an internet site that features and sells over 13,000 Scottish-interest titles.
The phenomenal online sales and massive discounting, in particular by Amazon, of titles such as the Harry Potter series weakened the chains and provided a role model for supermarkets such as Tesco. The latter realised the principle of its founder, noted above, in slashing the prices of a narrow range of titles, especially those boosted by external factors such as selection by television book clubs, and selling them in large volumes. Buying books, or at least choosing from a limited number of titles, has become for many part of the weekly shopping trip. Books remain a significant source of cultural capital as well as, for the moment, the chief medium for learning and teaching. Independent booksellers have survived, albeit in smaller numbers and in a radically altered trading environment. The principles of economics, or at least the operation of an unregulated market, ended the world of bookselling captured in the interviews in this book.
Alistair McCleery
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