Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea, volume 1) by Rebecca Thorne

[james_davis_nicoll]

An underappreciated bodyguard casts her current career aside in favour of romance and small-town entrepreneurship, thus earning the incandescent fury of her absolute monarch ex-boss.

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea  (Tomes & Tea, volume 1) by Rebecca Thorne 

Comments

[oursin]

It might actually make more sense to set up a circulating library?

[ba_munronoe]

Books normally kept chained to the shelves to make sure nobody walks off with them.

[jsburbidge]

That's sort of my thought. There were certainly bookstores before the late 19th Century - Hello, St. Paul's Churchyard - but the financial and social model when they are printed via formes set with movable type is emphatically not that of the modern-day bookstore where many middle-income buyers come in regularly to browse and pick up a new read. That's why Jane Austen's heroines use circulating libraries. (But Mr. Bennett, a gentleman with a respectable income and less popular tastes, buys his books ... probably from booksellers in London.)

Not having read the reviewed book, I am only guessing that it assumes a very mid-20th century model for the bookstore at a social level. Victoria Goddard's Greenwing and Dart series certainly does, in an otherwise Regency world, and it sets my teeth on edge.

[oursin]

Yes, people buying books depended a) on changes in paper and print technology in the C19th and b) a new marketing model of cheap reprints (not new books) for railway travellers initiated by WH Smith, sold alongside newspapers and periodicals on station bookstalls.

[jsburbidge]

Whence the (almost unreadable) British Railway Shakespeare, set in something like two-point type...

[(Anonymous)]

Two-point type. Okay ... now I've gone blind ...

-Awesome Aud

[(Anonymous)]

... and the typesetter went blind too ....

[roseembolism]

It occurs to me that book selling in the 18th century style would be interesting, given that they would be luxury products. Things like negotiating with fussy customers, meeting with other booksellers in fact coffee shops to set prices, racing to estate sales and defunct private libraries to acquire trigger of books- in order to destroy them to maintain high prices....

In fact, translating James Lackington and "The Temple of the Muses (the predecessor to modern bookstores(, who scandalized his letters by offering *gasp* fixed prices for books would make for a fine cozy fantasy. Pity this book isn't it.