make complaint to
the archbishop of Canterbury, and to certain other persons named, who
shall thereupon examine into his complaint, and if well founded reduce
the price; and any bookseller charging more than the price so fixed
shall be fined L5 for every copy sold. Apparently this enactment
remained a dead letter.

For later times it is necessary to make a gradual distinction between
_booksellers_, whose trade consists in selling books, either by retail
or wholesale, and _publishers_, whose business involves the production
of the books from the author's manuscripts, and who are the
intermediaries between author and bookseller, just as the booksellers
(in the restricted sense) are intermediaries between the author and
publisher and the public. The article on PUBLISHING (q.v.) deals more
particularly with this second class, who, though originally booksellers,
gradually took a higher rank in the book-trade, and whose influence
upon the history of literature has often been very great. The
convenience of this distinction is not impaired by the fact either that
a publisher is also a wholesale bookseller, or that a still more recent
development in publishing (as in the instance of the direct sale in
1902, by the London _Times_, of the supplementary volumes to the 9th
edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, which were also "published"
by _The Times_) started a reaction to some extent in the way of
amalgamating the two functions. The scheme of _The Times_ Book Club
(started in 1905) was, again, a combination of a subscription library
with the business of bookselling (see NEWSPAPERS); and it brought the
organization of a newspaper, with all its means of achieving publicity,
into the work of pushing the sale of books, in a way which practically
introduced a new factor into the bookselling business.

During the 19th century it remains the fact that the distinction between
publisher and bookseller--literary promoter and shopkeeper--became
fundamental. The booksellers, as such, were engaged either in wholesale
bookselling, or in the retail, the old or second-hand, and the
periodical trades.

Coming between the publisher and the retail bookseller is the
important distributing agency of the _wholesale bookseller_. It is to
him that the retailer looks for his miscellaneous supplies, as it is
simply impossible for him to stock one-half of the books published. In
Paternoster Row, London, which has for over a hundred years