- ホーム
- > 洋書
- > 英文書
- > Biography / Autobiography
Full Description
John Bell (1745-1831) was an English publisher. The Dictionary of National Biography has Charles Knight calling Bell a 'mischievous spirit, the very Puck of booksellers'. His 109-volume, literature-for-the-masses Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, which rivalled Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), was published from 1777 to 1783. Each volume cost just six shillings, at a time when similar volumes usually cost many times that. The drawings and illustrations with which Bell adorned his publications influenced later publishers, as did his abandonment of the long S. Most notable, perhaps, was Bell's joint-stock organisation of his publishing company, which defied 'the trade' - at the time, forty dominant publishing companies - in order to establish a monopoly on the best publications. In addition to the immense Poets of Great Britain, Bell also published similar volumes on Shakespeare and the British Theatre, as well as the Sunday newspaper Bell's Weekly Messenger and other periodicals.
Contents
Preface; 1. John Bell, bookseller and partner in The Morning Post; 2. The British Letter Foundry, 1788-1789; 3. John Bell and The Oracle, 1789-1793; 4. Bell's Weekly Messenger; 5. La Belle Assemblée; 5. Bell's Constitutional Classics; 6. Retirement and death; Appendices; Index.
