The Universal British Directory 1793 1798

In contrast to today's music industry, whose principal products are recorded songs sold to customers round the world, the music trade in Georgian England was based upon London firms that published and sold printed music and manufactured and sold instruments on which this music could be played. The destruction of business records and other primary sources has hampered investigation of this trade, but recent research into legal proceedings, apprenticeship registers, surviving correspondence and other archived documentation has enabled aspects of its workings to be reconstructed. The first part of the book deals with Longman & Broderip, arguably the foremost English music seller in the late eighteenth century, and the firm's two successors - Broderip & Wilkinson and Muzio Clementi's variously styled partnerships - who carried on after Longman & Broderip's assets were divided in 1798. The next part shows how a rival music seller, John Bland, and his successors, used textual and thematic catalogues to advertise their publications. This is followed by a comprehensive review of the development of musical copyright in this period, a report of efforts by a leading inventor, Charles 3rd Earl Stanhope, to transform the ways in which music was printed and recorded, and a study of Georg Jacob Vollweiler's endeavour to introduce music lithography into England. The book should appeal not only to music historians but also to readers interested in English business history, publishing history and legal history between 1714 and 1830.

Nikolaus Pevsner described Berwick-upon-Tweed as 'one of the most exciting towns in England' [Nikolaus Pevsner, Buildings of England: Northumberland (1957), 88] - a place where an absorbing historical tale can still be read in the dense fabric of its old streets and buildings. It attracts not only day-trippers and holidaymakers but also new residents who have learnt to appreciate the spirit of the place. But outsiders all too easily confine their attention to the space within the impressive Elizabethan ramparts, while local people are sometimes unaware or dismissive of the wider significance of the very things that they know so intimately. Berwick deserves to be known better, and to be celebrated not just as a vivid reminder of what many other towns were once like, but more especially as something unique and distinctive, shaped by a peculiar combination of historical and geographical circumstances. This distinctiveness is acutely apparent as one passes between Berwick and the contrasting, but historically intertwined, settlements of Tweedmouth and Spittal. This book presents something of the wealth of historic interest encapsulated in Berwick, Tweedmouth and Spittal, and explains how these places came to assume such varied and distinctive forms. Above all, it urges that a town anxious for stability and prosperity in the future must know where it has come from as well as where it is going.