The founders and rules of the British Empire took the fame of Oxford to the far corners of the earth. Many of them were, of course, educated at Oxford; they ate Oxford marmalade for breakfast; in the twilight of Empire a few of them even relaxed in Oxford bags. Yet the name o£ Oxford is known to millions throughout the world not because of trousers, or marmalade, or even scholarship, but because they have received their education from books supplied by Oxford booksellers. Oxford, a city which had a well-established book trade; the makers of medieval books - the scribes, limners, illuminators, and binders - and their sellers clustered around St Mary's and in Catte Street, near the Schools which stood on the site now occupied by the Bodleian. Their customers were the men of the University, but the invention of printing wrought a revolution in the availability of books and in the ability to read them. It was not, however, the printers themselves, but the booksellers, who were the key figures in the dissemination of this vast new literature. The learned booksellers of Oxford were soon adapting themselves to new ways. John Dorne had a shop near St Mary's in the 1520s from which he sold a great variety of books: the old learning was represented by Peter Lombard, and the new by Erasmus; but amongst the learned folios Dorne also stocked school textbooks, ballads, sheet almanacs, and the astrological prognostications which our ancestors loved. Each year he had a stall at St. Frideswide’s Fair and at Austin Fair which provided valuable additional income. Dorne, and, no doubt, his contemporaries about whom little or nothing is known, had begun to bridge the gap between town and gown, supplying the needs and tastes of both. Outside the city there were no printers but there were books and men who sold them. As early as 1604 we know of a stationer in Charlbury. Stationers normally had a few ballads and Bibles on their shelves and from them country bookshops developed. By 1800, all the major towns in Oxfordshire had a tradesman who was, at least in name a bookseller. Most of them are shadowy. Only accidental survivals, like the little Holloway cache rescued by Johnson, or the much larger Cheney archives, can add flesh to the bare bones of names and dates. We can, however, argue by analogy with similar survivals elsewhere in England. Such analogies suggest that there were few towns of any size in which there was not a bookshop able to supply the needs of the locality. In Oxfordshire, as elsewhere the book trade was essentially distributive, and the similarity between the trade in Oxfordshire and that elsewhere emphasises the point that Oxford itself is not only not the whole story but is rather a deviation from it. The learned men of Oxford made the city a major centre of learned publishing; but beyond the walls the county pursued a quiet and uneventful existence in which the book trade was one of many which catered to its modest needs.
After Parker's Bookshop, also in Broad street, closed in the 1970s, Thornton's Bookshop (locally known as Thornton's) became the oldest university bookshop in Oxford, England.[1] [2] It was founded in 1835 by Joseph Thornton (1808–1891) in Magdalen Street.[3] From 1870, the bookshop was located at 11 Broad Street (opposite Balliol College), continued as a family business by five generations of the Thornton family[4] and from 1983 by the Meeuws family, but closed at the end of 2002. The shop premises on Broad Street were frequently used for television adaptations like Brideshead Revisited, and the last Inspector Morse episode, The Remorseful Day.[5]
The best description of the history of the bookshop Joseph Thornton & Son is that of the first 100 years which Frederick Thornton wrote for “The Bookseller” in 1935. Centenary of the firm of J. Thornton & Son, Booksellers 11. Broad Street, OxfordIt may be of interest to citizens of Oxford and members of the University to learn that the above firm has been in existence fox one hundred years. It was founded i n September 1835 by Joseph Thornton, the son of the Rev. John Thornton of Billericay, Essex, the author of some twenty-seven books, most of them theological. Joseph Thornton started business in a small shop, subsequently Pacey's, in Magdalen Street as a second-hand bookseller. There exists an early statement of accounts which shows that he began with a cash capital of £260, a modest sum even for those days. In 1840 he married and moved to 51, High Street where his seven children were born. The elder of his two sons, John Henry, used to tell how as a boy he had sat on the steps of the shop in vacation time and had watched the coaches drawing up at the Angel Inn, or rattling over the old cobblestones on their way to and from London. He could also recall evenings spent with his brother and sisters clambering up the ladders and scampering round the scaffolding of the University Museum, then in process of being built.In 1853 Joseph Thornton removed his business to 18, Magdalen Street, on the site of the present Randolph Hotel. Ten years later it was moved again to 10, Broad Street, and finally in 1870 to No. 11, next door.John Henry (1845 – 1924) entered the business in 1860, became a partner in 1873 and sole owner in 1891 on the death of his father. Under him the business was considerably developed. He introduced new books (his father having adhered strictly to the second-hand trade) initiated the circulation of catalogues which have been a feature of the firm’s activities ever since. For some years, like his father, he lived over the shop, but by 1906, having ceased in 1890 to use the premises as his home, he had taken the whole of the upper portion of the building into the business.Frederick Stanbury, the elder son of John Henry, entered the business in 1892, became a partner in 1902, and on the death of his father in 1924, became sole owner. During this partnership of father and son, the business was further extended, and methods of cataloguing and accountancy were modernized. In 1914 the upper portion of No. 12, Broad Street was added to the business premises.In 1922, John Stanbury, the only son of Frederick Stanbury, entered the business, and two years later was taken into partnership. During his connection with the firm the quality of the stock has been much improved and a varied selection of foreign books has been introduced. Frederick Thornton wrote to the Oxford Times, Spring 1935 Throughout the 100 years of its existence the clientele of the business has consisted mainly of the members and alumni of the University of Oxford and of other educational institutions in the British Isles and in all parts of the world. Indeed, not a day goes by without some consignment of books being sent abroad.In its earlier days the business dealt chiefly with Theological and Classical works, but during the past thirty years most branches of general bookselling have been developed, including early editions of standard English authors, learned periodicals, Oriental and Semitic literature, finely printed books, works on anthropology, travel and early voyages.'Many of the firsts present customers date from the l870’s, and some from the 1860’s. Important libraries have been purchased, among them the library of the late Canon Dalton, sometime tutor to H.M.King George. The catalogue of this library "greatly interested the King", and he purchased some volumes from it.The firm frequently receives requests to trace rare books, or to report books dealing with abstruse subjects, in fact, recently an oriental student entered the shop and asked if a work could be recommended in which instructions were given as to how to make a women love him - here was a plunge into the lore of the middle ages.
In 1983, nearly bankrupt, the bookshop merged with another Oxford bookshop, Holdan Books, owned by Willem A and Scharlie Meeuws and continued to trade for another 20 years when it moved first to Boars Hill near Oxford and finally to Faringdon where it stopped trading in 2023.