‘Business sticks to me, sirs’: The Bill-Sticker and Public Print in the Nineteenth Century

Twenty-First Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade

Lecture by Dennis Duncan, Associate Professor, University College London

“He is a literary man … and he caters for the major part of the population almost the only literature that they ever peruse. He is a publisher to boot, whose varied and voluminous works … are read by all the world” (“The Billsticker,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 20 Aug 1853). This lecture will look at the figure of the billsticker — the urban publisher par excellence — pinning and pasting advertisements on the walls, posts, and hoardings of the city. In literature, his forms have ranged from As You Like It’s sweet, lovelorn Orlando, posting his terrible poetry on the trees of Arden, to Blazes Boylan in Ulysses, cuckolding our hero Bloom and sticking his bill where it doesn’t belong. The reality was of a skilled but semi-vagabond trade drifting towards greater professionalization in the form of trade associations and advertising agencies. This paper observes the billstickers’ sly resistance to continual attempts —both local and municipal —to regulate them, and the way that these behaviors were often viewed with a wry or indulgent tolerance.

Dennis Duncan is a writer and Associate Professor in English at University College London. His books include Book Parts (with Adam Smyth, Oxford University Press, 2019), and Index, A History of the (W. W. Norton, 2022). The latter was a New York Times bestseller and was listed as one of the Books of the Year in the New York Times, TIME magazine, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times. It has been translated into nine languages. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. His current research concerns ephemera and the history of collecting. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

The registration form will post here approximately one month in advance of the program. This event is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in-person at the Clark Library. Seating is limited. Walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.

The lecture will be livestreamed and the recording will be available to watch on the Center’s YouTube channel for one year following the event. Registration is not required to watch the livestream.

Image: Change of Amusements. Leeds, [England]: Dewhirst, 1818. Clark Library Annex 3; Artwork, Box 91, folder 4.