John Bell (publisher)

John Bell (1745–1831) was an English publisher. The Dictionary of National Biography has Charles Knight calling Bell a "mischievous spirit, the very Puck (Shakespeare) of booksellers." His 109-volume, literature-for-the-masses Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, which rivaled Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), was published from 1777 to 1783. Each volume cost just six shillings, at a time when similar volumes usually cost multiple times that. The drawings and illustrations with which Bell adorned his publications influenced later publishers, as did his abandonment of the long s. Most notable, perhaps, was Bell's joint-stock organization of his publishing company, which defied "the trade" – forty dominant publishing companies – in order to establish a monopoly on the best publications. In addition to the immense Poets of Great Britain, Bell also published similar volumes on Shakespeare and The British Theatre, as well as the Sunday newspaper Bell's Weekly Messenger, women's magazine La Belle Assemblée, and other periodicals. He died in Fulham in 1831.

He was the uncle of Edward Bell.