Circulation figures for Royal Society journals c1900-2010

This spreadsheet contains our best data on the actual   circulation (including sales, but also, where known, non-commercial   distribution, e.g. to fellows, and as gifts/exchanges to learned   institutions)                 

From 1955 (when the RS set up its own sales/marketing team) until 1989, the circulation figures were published each year in the Society's   YearBook (or, Annual Report, 1980-89). Prior to that, circulation information   is only rarely available (as far as we have found so far). After 1990, the   Society stopped making its sales/circulation figures public (look at the   graph in the second tab, and you'll guess why), but they do survive in internal reports.

Tab2 focuses on the Philosophical Transactions and the Proceedings: the earliest data are from 1863, but the series is mostly post-1900. This data was the basis for Figure 3 in my 2022 article 'From philanthropy to business' https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0021

Tab3  focuses on the so-called 'other publications': the Year Book, Biographical   Memoirs, and Notes & Records (data starts 1955) 

Tab4 includes a snapshot of circulation c.1935. This is the most   detailed pre-1955 information. It comes from a document prepared by RS staff   in late 1935, to provide information to printers interested in tendering for   the RS printing contract. A copy of 'Sales and Distribution of Royal Society Periodicals' survives in the   archive of Cambridge University Press, held at Cambridge UL, Pr578