Royal Exchange — Equiano’s bookseller

Equiano’s ‘Interesting Narrative’ (1789) was sold by subscription through Taylor and Co. at the South Arch of the Royal Exchange — one of the City booksellers that put the foundational text of British abolitionism into readers’ hands. When Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African in 1789, he did so by subscription — a self-published model in which buyers committed up front and lent their names to the front matter as endorsement.

Among the booksellers handling distribution was Taylor and Co. at the South Arch of the Royal Exchange. The arcaded courtyard of the Exchange was a long-established centre of City commerce — the heart of insurance, shipping and merchant trade — and Equiano’s choice of seller put his book directly in the path of the merchants and underwriters whose wealth was bound up in the trade he was arguing against.

The present Royal Exchange building is the third on this site (the previous building burned in 1838); the 18th-century building Equiano knew was destroyed in the Great Fire of the Royal Exchange in 1838. The arched colonnades and the Cornhill / Threadneedle Street junction remain the same civic stage.

People

• Olaudah Equiano

Themes

• Abolition
• Literature
• Trade & commerce

Place

• City of London
• Georgian

Sources

• Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. London, 1789 — full text on Project Gutenberg. — https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15399/15399-h/15399-h.htm
• Equiano’s World — editions and distribution — https://equianosworld.org/publications.php
• Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. University of Georgia Press, 2005.