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Itinerant salesmen, also called pedlars, street hawkers, hucksters and ballad singers are considered to be the most important distributors of popular printed matter in Europe between 1600 and 1850. A general assumption is that the pedlar travelling from town to countryside was strongly distinct from the role of the established booksellers in the towns, selling books to the educated and affluent buyer. The commercial position of the urban pedlars, however, is very often underestimated. In this book, therefore, the itinerant book trade is studied in an English and Dutch, urban context, leading to a new perspective on the role of the pedlars as an intermediary between the established booksellers and an extensive, socially diverse reading public.
Price: $212.00
Pages: 288
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Library of the Written Word
Publication Date:
18 October 2013
ISBN: 9789004252844
Format: Other
“This is a commendably ambitious project. Not content to investigate the history of Dutch pedlars of printed matter across more than two centuries, Jeroen Salman provides a thorough comparison with itinerant sellers in England, while maintaining a clear view of the wider European context. In the process he assembles a wealth of new information about Dutch and English pedlars, hawkers, ballad-singers, and news-vendors gleaned from a vast range of sources. While London and Amsterdam are central to the study, the author uses records from Utrecht, Leiden, and Exeter to furnish detailed case studies of the situation in provincial towns. […] Jeroen Salman is to be congratulated not only for identifying those aspects of the trade in cheap print in both countries hitherto largely ignored but also for demonstrating what can be done by exploiting to the full an immense variety of documentary, textual and visual resources.”
Maureen Bell, Newark. In: The Library, 7.16.3 (September 2015), pp. 346-349.
Maureen Bell, Newark. In: The Library, 7.16.3 (September 2015), pp. 346-349.
Jeroen Salman, Ph.D. (1997) is Assistant Professor Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. He has published on early modern popular culture, literature and book history, including the volume New Perspectives in book history. Contributions from the Low Countries (Walburg Pers, 2006).