This volume brings together extensive recollections of authors, publishers, auctioneers and booksellers from 1779 to 1853, based on the author's personal acquaintance with the prominent writers, artists and book publishers of the period. The book is in three sections, each one concentrating on a given area of London and the literary scene centred upon it. They are Paternoster Row, Fleet Street and The Strand. Attention is paid to different forms of publication, such as the early magazines, in which books were published by instalments, and to key personalities. There is also detailed background to some of the most important publishing houses, such as Longman, and works which were considered pivotal to their success, such as 'Rees' Cyclopaedia' and the 'Annual Review'. Engagingly written from a personal perspective, this book will be of value to historians of literature and publishing, and others interested in London's literary past.

The antiquarian and topographer John Britton (1771 1857) is best remembered for his multi-volume series of The Beauties of England and Wales. A self-taught author and scholar, he was attracted by the work of John Aubrey (1626 97), who was born in the same Wiltshire village as him, and had very similar interests as an antiquarian and biographer, famous for his Brief Lives and for his surveys of and writings on Avebury and Stonehenge. Britton's research on Aubrey's life induced him to write a fresh account, using surviving manuscripts as well as printed sources, which would clear up the contradictions and errors of earlier versions. This 1845 book is a fascinating portrait of a sickly child who ended up a pauper because of family debts and lawsuits, but was a diligent and intelligent scholar, scientist and occultist, and a close friend of Thomas Hobbes and Robert Hooke."

This two-volume work which was first published in 1825-8 presents London's most important buildings at a time of rapid urban transformation. Aiming to project a vision of London as a dynamic city of integrated courtly and commercial power, the 70 entries span a historical range from the medieval (Westminster Hall) to the early nineteenth century (Soane's Museum) and a diversity of building types from palaces and churches to banks, theatres, prisons and bridges. Edited by John Britton, a leading topographical authority of the period, and Auguste Charles Pugin, an Anglo-French architectural draughtsman, the volumes contain 146 engravings of the selected buildings, correctly scaled from different perspectives and including interior scenes as well as external plans. This was a landmark publication in its time and remains a vivid portrait of the London's built environment immediately before the advent of the railway. This new edition includes an extended introduction by Stephen Daniels, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Geography, University of Nottingham.