The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed rapid expansion in the number of private schools. Many of these schools offered a new modern curriculum incorporating mercantile topics and modern languages and increasingly including scientific subjects. This paper argues that in responding to these developments booksellers, in combination with authors, began for the first time to shape a scientific schoolbook market.

The paper begins by examining how, from mid-century, booksellers began increasingly to distinguish schoolbooks from other didactic scientific publications. I consider advertisements and reviews, as well as the content of the books, to demonstrate how books “for the use of schools” became increasingly differentiated from public lecture companion texts and works of polite science for use in the home. In particular I argue that claims to pedagogic expertise, made by both publishers and authors, contributed to these processes by creating new styles of presentation as well shifts in subject coverage. While the process of generic differentiation continued into the nineteenth century, a number of schoolbook booksellers were well placed by the 1790s to exploit the explosion in schooling that took place in the early nineteenth century.

In the second half of the paper, I outline trends in scientific schoolbook production in the eighteenth century, including periods of growth, shifts in the locations of publication and the rise and fall of leading individuals in the schoolbook business. I describe how a small, metropolitan writing, printing and bookselling milieu was gradually supplanted by a larger, mixed provincial and metropolitan marketplace from the 1750s. This diverse marketplace itself was again transformed as a rapid increase in production in the 1790s led to the eventual dominance of the schoolbook market by a small number of booksellers. I conclude by arguing that these changes in the scientific schoolbook market, particularly when placed alongside similar trends in medical publishing, scientific publishing for university students and educational publishing more widely, enable us to identify leading scientific publishers who through their dominance had the power to shape the curriculum.