Approved plans are set to turn the former Tourist Information building on Museum Street into a Topping & Company bookstore. Set to be “the country’s largest independent bookshop”, it’s quite a coup for the city.
It adds to York’s reputation as a ‘Bookshop Town’ and softens recent closures of much-loved retailers such as Fossgate Books, Ken Spelman Books, and Borders.
But York’s history of bookshops and printing is much older, varied, and traces of it are still present.
By the sixteenth century there was a close connection between publishing and selling of books in York. The first printing press in the city was established by Frederick Freez, a Dutchman, in 1496 – only two decades after the technology was first brought to England.
Besides London, York was one of only three places in the country allowed to operate a printing press. But the newfangled machines upset the scribe’s guild in the city, as it challenged the traditional role of handwritten texts that dates to the eighth-century scholar, Alcuin of York.
Publishing and selling of books were closely connected with religious texts and the Church. It helps explain why the Stonegate and Minster Gates area of the city – literally at the gates of the Precinct of the Minster – was the centre of York’s printing and bookselling by the sixteenth century and continued to be for several centuries. Minster Gates was even known for a long time as “Bookbinders Alley”.
Above a shopfront on the corner of Minster Gates and High Petergate, there’s a figure of Minerva, the classical goddess of wisdom, propped up on a stack of books, tome in hand. It was created in 1801 as an advertisement for John Wolstenholme who had a bookshop here.
It was the English Civil War and King Charles I’s choice of York as his northern centre of power that bolstered and diversified the city’s publishing and bookselling prowess. St. William’s College began publishing and dispersing royalist propaganda in 1642. The master printer of such tracts was Stephen Bulkley, who self-stylised himself as “Printer to the King’s Majesty”. A telling title of one of his publications is The King on his throne: or A discourse maintaining the dignity of a king, the duty of a subject, and the unlawfulnesse of rebellion.
Thereafter came the heyday for publishing and bookselling in York. The bookshops were lively social spaces where literary and enlightened ideas were discussed.
Of the publications of this era were the first historical accounts of York, and in later centuries historic maps and heritage guides for York were printed here. Such publications were instrumental in establishing York as a heritage city and becoming a major tourist attraction in the modern age.
One celebrated bookseller of the era is John Hinxman. He published the first ever copies of Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy in 1759 from his bookshop at No.35 Stonegate. (This event is marked today by the world’s first stained-glass blue plaque.)
No.35 Stonegate had been a bookshop and publishing house since 1682, and in 1718 was where York’s first newspaper, The York Mercury, was published. A carved golden bible sign hangs above the entrance. It is known as the “Sign of the Bible” – the name of the first bookshop.
There’s a carved figure next door, part of the shopfront of No.33. It’s a little red devil and signifies the building’s historic use as a printer. Why a red devil? It’s suggested that because operators of printing presses always had inky black figures, they were associated with the dark arts!
More recently, the trade of rare and vintage books in the city helped establish the York National Book Fair in 1974. It’s grown into the largest rare, antiquarian & out-of-print book fair in the UK and Europe.
The history of York’s bookshops also features a terrorist attack. A bomb exploded in September 1989 at the Penguin bookshop in the city. The device was one of five sent to bookshops in the UK after Penguin’s publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988, which had led to a global protest. The bomb in York shattered windows but nobody was injured nor ever charged.
On a happier note – we now have the York Centre for Print’s “Thin-Ice Press”. Housed in the beautiful St Anthony’s Garden on Peasholme Green, it ensures that the historic skill of traditional book making in York is carried forward.
By Duncan Marks
August 2025