High atop London's Ludgate Hill sits an architectural masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of London:
For a religious site (the current cathedral is believed to be the fourth such erected on this site since 604 CE), St. Paul's may actually be more famous, at least to book collectors, for the secular activities that have been conducted in its vicinity for well over five centuries. As William Roberts observed in The Book Hunter in London (1895),
[t]he bookselling and book-hunting annals of the district which starts with St. Paul's, and terminates at Charing Cross, might occupy a goodly-sized volume.... The chief interest of St. Paul's Churchyard as a book locality centres itself in the publishing rather than the second-hand bookselling phase. One of our earliest printer-publishers, Julian Notary, was 'dwellynge in powles chyrche yarde besyde ye weste dore by my lordes palyes' in 1515, his shop sign being the Three Kings. At the sign of the White Greyhound, in St. Paul's Churchyard, the first editions of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Rape of Lucrece' were published by John Harrison; at the Fleur de Luce and the Crown appeared the first edition of the 'Merry Wives of Windsor'; at the Green Dragon the first edition of the 'Merchant of Venice'; at the Fox the first edition of 'Richard II.'; whilst the first editions of 'Richard III.,' 'Troilus and Cressida,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and 'Lear' all bear Churchyard imprints. Not only were there very many booksellers' shops around the Yard, but at the latter part of the sixteenth century bookstalls started up, first at the west, and subsequently at the other doors of the cathedral....
This publishing history is recorded on the many title pages that were issued for publishers and booksellers operating in or near St. Paul's Churchyard, such as the title page for this ca. 1736 edition of Herman Moll's Atlas Minor (via the David Rumsey Map Collection)...
...the even earlier (1724) title page for John Nott's The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary, Or, The Accomplish’d Housewives Companion...
...and numerous later title pages, such as those depicted below:
Interestingly enough, the importance of these secular activities is recognized in the latest history of the cathedral itself, St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004 (awarded the 2004 William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History). As James Raven notes in his excellent article for this book, "St. Paul's Precinct and the Book Trade to c. 1800,"
[f]rom at least the early fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the precinct of St. Paul's was synonymous with the book trade. Long before the introduction of printing [in Britain] in the final third of the fifteenth century, the different yards and building ranges adjoining the cathedral -- and at times the cathedral cloisters and nave -- had housed suppliers of vellum, paper, writing materials and books. As manuscript production and exchange tracked the varied evolution of cathedral and monastic centres across Britain, the streets around St. Paul's became a particular focus for scriveners, limners and stationers, and with their book traditions well established, continued in the age of print as the premier site of book publishing in Britain. By 1800 St. Paul's Churchyard -- together with Paternoster Row to the immediate north -- comprised one of the greatest publishing centres in Europe. From here, booksellers despatched books, magazines and other print to the country towns of England but also to the colonies in North America, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Australia and the Far East. Fire and 
constant rebuilding [most notably the Great Fire of 1666] transformed the physical appearance of the shops and stalls of the precinct, but the rituals of the book trade, many based on proud traditions and on memories of defiance and martyrdom, continued to be played out in the vicinity of the cathedral. No history of St. Paul's is complete without an account of the publishing and bookselling cocoon that was the churchyard and row....
The numerous fires that have plagued St. Paul's Churchyard over the centuries have left us with few reliable records of how this area may actually have looked at different times in its history. Notwithstanding which, a few notable attempts have been made to ferret out such information for very specific periods (see title above right).
We suspect that the image below, an early 20th century depiction of the 16th century cathedral and its surrounding area (now known as Old St. Paul's), is rather fanciful, given that surviving descriptions of the area over the centuries suggest a far darker, more cramped and more chaotic jumble of publishers, booksellers and associated activities....
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