James Lackington

James Lackington (31 August 1746 in Wellington, Somerset – 22 November 1815 in Budleigh Salterton, Devon) was a bookseller who is credited with revolutionizing the British book trade. He is best known for refusing credit at his London bookshop which allowed him to reduce the price of books throughout his store. He built the largest bookstore in the United Kingdom, with an inventory of over 500,000 volumes.

The son of a shoemaker, and one of 11 children, Lackington was apprenticed to a cobbler at an early age. He showed initiative by also selling pies and cakes in the street when aged 10. Lackington had no formal education so in order to teach himself to read, he and his friends would often scour flea markets for cheap editions of plays, and classical literature.

In August 1773, Lackington moved to London with his first wife, Nancy. Upon arrival, he spent their last half crown on a book of poems. Later, in his memoirs, he explained: "for had I bought a dinner, we should have eaten it to morrow, and the pleasure would have been soon over, but should we live fifty years longer, we shall have the Night Thoughts to feast upon." In 1774, Lackington had saved enough money to be able to rent his own shop, and he began selling both shoes and books together. He bought whole libraries and published writers' manuscripts. He also saved remaindered books from destruction and resold them at bargain prices, firmly believing that books were the key to knowledge, reason and happiness and that everyone, no matter their economic background, social class or gender, had the right to access books at cheap prices. By 1794, Lackington had amassed a large enough inventory to move into a massive shop on Finsbury Square with his business partner Robert Allen. Lackington named the store "Temple of the Muses" and was said to have been large enough "that a mail coach and four were driven round the counters at its opening". Above the entrance of the store, he placed a plaque which read: "Cheapest Bookstore in the World." The bookstore was the largest in the United Kingdom, and boasted an inventory of over 500,000 volumes, with annual sales of 100,000 books.

Lackington wrote two autobiographies: Memoirs of the First Forty Five Years of the Life of James Lackington (1791) which was published in multiple editions and The Confessions of James Lackington (1804), to which Letters, on the bad consequences of having daughters educated at Boarding Schools was later appended. The front matter in variant editions of Lackington's Memoirs has been analyzed by Corrina Readioff who observed, "Of particular interest in Lackington’s programme of literary self construction is his persistent and enthusiastic use of quotations from the works of other writers as prefatory paratext.

Lackington considered himself to have been blessed with two happy marriages, the first to Nancy, who died of fever, then Dorcas. In 1798, Lackington retired to his estate in Gloucestershire and became a part time Methodist preacher and philanthropist to the Wesleyan cause.

Lackington's Magazine, a Canadian speculative fiction quarterly that keeps content accessible to anyone with an internet connection, is named in honor of James Lackington. Every cover image features a nod to a book hoard and Lackington's era, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.