Regency Hot Spots: Bookseller Shops and the Subscription Library

For most of the subjects of Reg Roms (gentlewomen and men), reading was a popular pastime to occupy days full of leisure. In Town, there would have been many opportunities for gentlewomen and men to get their hands on good reading material including newspapers, periodicals, and books.

The most popularly name dropped book shop in Reg Roms is Hatchards, who has operated (now owned by Waterstones) in London since 1791 (https://www.hatchards.co.uk/history/) but it is by no stretch of the imagination the only venue for procuring literature, non fiction and reference books. Below I have compiled two excerpts from popular London guidebooks from 1803 and 1820 which list booksellers, popular coffeehouses, circulating and public subscription libraries.

Hatchards was opened by an enterprising young John Hatchard who had been plying his wares at the literary coffee houses of London for years. By the Regency era, literary coffeehouses were beginning to be replaced as political debate havens by the gentleman clubs (England, Literary and Social, from a German Point of View, 1875) doubtless lending booksellers an oppportunity to flourish. From the evidence below, it seemed coffeehouses were becoming more casual places of interaction, to catch up on the broadsheets and have a bite to eat.

A circulating library or subscription library were like libraries, except borrowers paid a fee for books. Public libraries would not become a major force until the early 20th century, so circulating libraries/subscription libraries delivered the supply of hot of the presses fiction, newspapers, magazines, catalogues and scientific studies the increasingly literate population (yet not wealthy enough to afford to purchase) was hungry for (http://news.lib.uchicago.edu/blog/2011/05/05/circulating-libraries/).

The terms of subscription below offers some wonderful insights into how the rent-a-book system worked.

A catalogue of Hookham’s circulating library, 1829