During the nineteenth century, the German book market experienced phenomenal growth, driven by German publishers’ dynamic entrepreneurial attitude towards developing and distributing books. Embracing aggressive marketing on a large scale, they developed an increasing sense of what their markets wanted. Based almost entirely upon primary sources including over seventy years of trade newspapers, this is an in depth study of how and why this market developed—decades before there was any written theory about marketing. This uniquely well-researched study provides an in-depth account of how markets were developed in very sophisticated ways long before there was a formal discipline of marketing.