Sales ledgers from Gumpert's bookshop in Gothenburg (1870–1900)

This dataset contains digitized sales ledgers from Gumpert's bookshop in Gothenburg, one of the most prominent bookshops in Sweden during the nineteenth century. Like most major bookshops at the time, Gumpert’s bookshop primarily sold books on credit, and consequently, the bookshop had to keep a record detailing all the returning customers’ purchases. In most cases each customer was assigned a page in the sales ledgers and the purchases were listed in chronological order. The customers’ name, profession or title, and residence location were scribbled on top of the page. The Gumpert ledgers are comprised of 48 volumes, one volume per year from 1870 to 1917, each containing between 900 and 1,200 pages. They record nearly a million purchases. The present dataset contains material from 1870–1900 and consists of photographs of the original documents (in .jpg format) as well as transcriptions of a 10 % sample of the ledgers from 1879–1890 (in .txt /.pdf /.xlsx format), listing in all over 18,000 purchases. The dataset was created in association with the Scandinavian Moment in World Literature project and formed an important empirical source for my doctoral dissertation «Modern Reading: Swedish Book Consumption during the late nineteenth century» and my article Hansen, H. (2017). Buying and Borrowing Books: Book Consumption In Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden (pp 121-154). Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada, 54(1-2). https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v54i1-2.25614.