Provincial Book (?) Trade in the Carpathian Basin, or What Was Being Sold in a Small-Town Bookshop in 1899?
Provincial Book (?) Trade in the Carpathian Basin, or What Was Being Sold in a Small-Town Bookshop in 1899?

Summary/Abstract: One of the most serious professional conflicts in the Hungarian book trade at the end of the 19th century was the conflict of interests between provincial booksellers and the big publishing houses of the capital. The rules of the Hungarian Booksellers' Association contained strict regulations on the discounts that could be applied, and if a bookshop deviated from them, it faced immediate internal investigation and, in the last resort, expulsion. By contrast, large publishing companies were not bound by the discount convention, if they distributed their products through colportage (door-to-door salesmen). In addition, the mass of instalment series and the cheap dumping of modern antiquarian bookshops drew the remaining customers away from the country bookshops. The owners of these smaller shops, struggling to survive, protested regularly (and in increasingly exasperated tones), but there was no institutional solution to the complaints of the rural bookseller. Provincial bookshops were therefore forced to increase their profits by expanding their product range, and in addition to books, they had to stock a wide range of other articles to ensure the income they needed to survive. This highly eclectic range of artifacts is illustrated by a cheerful poetic advertisement published in 1899 in the Hungarian booksellers' journal. We don't know who the humorous shopkeeper was or where the bookshop was, but this unique source sheds some light on what an anonymous bookseller in a nameless small town in the Carpathian Basin was making a living from at the end of the 19th century. Not books...

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