THORPP, William (bookseller, Chester) – His engraved trade card [printed on paper], 1664, 133 x 85cm, the iconography including three coats-of-arms, and a hand pointing to an elaborately-tooled bible with clasps, the initials WT beside it, the wording below: ‘Printed for William Thorpp Book seller in the City of Chester, & are to be sould by him there at his shop at the hand & Bible neere the high Crosse & at the Stationers Armes in the Watergate Street, where also Books both new & old are to be bound and sold’.

THORPP, William (bookseller, Chester) – His engraved trade card [printed on paper], 1664, 133 x 85cm, the iconography including three coats-of-arms, and a hand pointing to an elaborately-tooled bible with clasps, the initials WT beside it, the wording below: ‘Printed for William Thorpp Book seller in the City of Chester, & are to be sould by him there at his shop at the hand & Bible neere the high Crosse & at the Stationers Armes in the Watergate Street, where also Books both new & old are to be bound and sold’.

AN EXCEPTIONALLY RARE SURVIVAL and valuable evidence of the book trade's representation in the north west of England. With a population of 7,164 in 1664, Chester was then roughly as big as Shrewsbury and Manchester, the largest town for some sixty miles around.