By the beginning of the sixteenth century, St. Paul’s Churchyard was the chief centre of the book trade, not only for London, but for the whole country.
Parts of the cathedral and its surrounding areas had been used as markets since the fourteenth century. By 1597, St. Paul’s was used not only as a church - it had become the bookshop of London.
Booksellers on Paternoster Row became a source of competition in the latter half of the century, eventually winning the prominent position in London bookselling, but St. Paul’s maintained its supremacy well into the seventeenth century.
The bookshops were populated largely by foreign booksellers in the sixteenth century. England did not have its own printing press until the 1490s, and in 1484 Richard III had passed an Act of exemption to foreign printers, encouraging them to bring their trade to London. The central settling point for these booksellers was St. Paul’s Churchyard.
The Rev. Dr. Croby, in his ’Life of George IV.,’ tells us that Queen Charlotte was in the habit of paying visits, in company with some lady-in-waiting, to Holywell Street and Ludgate Hill, ’where second-hand books were exposed for sale during the last half of the eighteenth century.’
