The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction 9781119115168, 1119115167, 9780470654934

Table of contents :
Content: Editor's Note viiA Note on Money viiiList of Illustrations xIntroduction 1Part I The Middle Ages and the Renaissance 91 Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066 112 From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066-1530 483 Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530-1640 81Part II The Interregnum and the Long Eighteenth Century 1354 Politics and Periodicals, 1641-1695 1375 Partisan Strife and the World of Print, 1695-1740 1776 Managing the Flood of Print, 1740-1780 205Part III From the Nineteenth Century to the Modern Age 2277 Consolidating Change, 1780-1820 2298 The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820-1870 2519 The Age of Mass Production, 1870-1920 317Part IV The Twentieth and Twenty?First Centuries 33910 Minority Culture and Popular Print, 1920-1940 34111 The Age of the Mass?Market Paperback, 1940-1970 37112 Big Business and Digital Technology, 1970-2018 413References 461Index 506

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The Book in Britain

The Book in Britain A Historical Introduction

Edited by Zachary Lesser

Written by Daniel Allington David A. Brewer Stephen Colclough Siân Echard Zachary Lesser

This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley and Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Zachary Lesser to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data applied for Hardback ISBN: 9780470654934 Cover image: Items from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Photograph by Chris Lippa. Cover design: Wiley Set in 10/12pt Warnock by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents Editor’s Note  vii A Note on Money  viii List of Illustrations  x Introduction  1 Part I 

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance  9

1 Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066  11 2 From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530  48 3 Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640  81 Part II 

The Interregnum and the Long Eighteenth Century  135

4 Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695  137 5 Partisan Strife and the World of Print, 1695–1740  177 6 Managing the Flood of Print, 1740–1780  205 Part III 

From the Nineteenth Century to the Modern Age  227

7 Consolidating Change, 1780–1820  229 8 The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870  251 9 The Age of Mass Production, 1870–1920  317

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Part IV 

The Twentieth and Twenty‐First Centuries  339

10 Minority Culture and Popular Print, 1920–1940  341 11 The Age of the Mass‐Market Paperback, 1940–1970  371 12 Big Business and Digital Technology, 1970–2018  413 References  461 Index  506

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Editor’s Note In planning this book, I hoped to do something different from other introductions to the field of book history. There were already several excellent anthologies of classic essays and collections of new topical essays. What there was not yet, it seemed to me, was a clear, up‐to‐date narrative of the long history of the book in Britain. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for one scholar to tell that story in any real detail. The goal of The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction was to combine the benefits of a multiply authored volume – the expertise in each historical period that no single author could have – with the coherence and readability of a monograph. Although we have not sought to eliminate the distinctiveness of each author’s approach, we have worked collaboratively throughout the planning, writing, and revising stages in order to create that narrative coherence. Our plan was for each of us to edit the entire manuscript and revise based on those suggestions. Sadly, Stephen Colclough died suddenly in 2015. While he had already written his chapters, he was not able to revise as the other authors were. We therefore lightly edited his chapters to enhance their connections to the rest of the volume. These interventions were minor, with the exception of a few more substantial passages on the abolitionist use of print (which I wrote) and on lithography and hot‐metal composing machines (which Daniel wrote). We have largely let Stephen’s excellent work stand as is, making only occasional revisions based on our reading of the entire manuscript, which Stephen was tragically unable to see. — Zachary Lesser

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­A Note on Money Until February 15, 1971 (known as Decimal Day), English currency was based on a non‐decimal system of pounds (£), shillings (s), and pence (d, from the Latin denarius). There were 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound. A penny therefore equaled 1/240 of a pound, as opposed to 1/100 of a pound after decimalization. Whenever ­monetary figures are mentioned in the pre‐decimal period, we have not converted their value into decimal currency. Over the centuries covered here, the value of money – what it could purchase – changed drastically. It is hard to compare these values across time, but one good way to do so is by reference to average wages. (The other main way is to compare the purchasing power of money over time, since core expenses like food, clothing, and shelter changed in price relative to earnings at different rates over time.) We need to bear in mind, however, that in earlier periods wages did not represent the full compensation a worker received, as employment could include meals and sometimes lodging, and not all people worked in the cash economy. The website MeasuringWorth.com offers reliable estimates of average annual earnings in the United Kingdom over the past several centuries, taking account of the various kinds of in‐kind compensation some workers received. We use their data as a rough guide to the historical value of money. Around 1600, a journeyman might earn between £3 and £8 per year, depending on his trade, plus food and drink. The average annual total compensation for workers of £8 15s equates to between 6d and 7d per day. While a ballad could be had for a penny, one of Shakespeare’s plays printed in quarto was usually 6d, the equivalent of a day’s wage, which would have made it a substantial purchase. Longer bound volumes sold for considerably more: the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) retailed for around £1, and Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) around £2 10s. Both were obviously well out of reach for the typical worker. In 1700, the same journeyman might earn £12 annually, or about 9d per day. A chapbook containing a brief tale in one or one‐and‐a‐half sheets of paper cost 2d, not s­ omething to be purchased unthinkingly but affordable if considered important. Meanwhile, the 1719 first edition of Robinson Crusoe cost 5s, or about a week’s ­earnings: this publication was not aimed at most working people. In 1800, a worker’s annual earnings were now, on average, around £23 10s. Some cheap reprinted novels cost 6d, or about 5% of weekly compensation – certainly within reach, although not all of this compensation was in cash and hence available for use in buying a book. New novels of the time often appeared in three‐volume sets at 3s or 4s per volume, a much more considerable expenditure of an entire week’s earnings or more. The rise of lending libraries suggests that plenty of readers were not purchasers.

­A Note on Mone

By 1900, the annual earnings for a typical worker had risen to £68. A new novel by Thomas Hardy might retail for 6s, or a bit less than a quarter of weekly earnings, but plenty of cheaper editions could be found, including reprints of classics for a penny. Compare that to today. In 2016, the average annual earnings in the United Kingdom was £26 200. A new paperback bestseller can be had from Amazon or at W.H. Smith for £5 or £6, less than 2% of weekly pay (before taxes). Certainly books have gotten cheaper over time relative to average earnings. But these very long‐term trends mask more local rises and falls in the standard of living of British men and women and in the relative prices of books, both new and old. They are intended simply to give readers a broad overview of the value of money at different moments in the history of the book in Britain.

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­List of Illustrations Cover Items from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Photograph by Chris Lippa. Figure 1.1

An eleventh‐century copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis ­anglorum, in Latin, with Caedmon’s Hymn added in Old English in the bottom margin.  12 Figure 1.2 England in the ninth century.  17 Figure 1.3 Ezra in his study, from the Codex Amiatinus.  21 Figure 1.4 A portrait of the scribe, from the twelfth‐century Eadwine Psalter.  25 Figure 1.5 The Seax of Beagnoþ, a tenth‐century knife inscribed in runic letters.  30 Figure 1.6 The Ruthwell Cross, showing one of the sections with part of The Dream of the Rood carved in runes.  31 Figure 1.7 A runic alphabet in the ninth‐century St. Dunstan’s Classbook.  32 Figure 1.8 The opening of the Gospel of Matthew in the Book of Kells, starting with the words “Liber generationis.”  39 Figure 1.9 The Chi‐Rho (the monogram for Christ) page from the Lindisfarne Gospels.  40 Figure 1.10 A page from the St. Chad Gospels, including legal memoranda written in Old Welsh.  41 Figure 1.11 A page from the Eadwine Psalter, showing three versions of the Psalm in parallel columns, with interlinear translations in Anglo Norman and Old English.  46 Figure 2.1 Historiated initial from the Carrow Psalter, showing two episodes from the story of Jonah.  50 Figure 2.2 Agricultural figures in the bottom margin of a page from the Luttrell Psalter.  55 Figure 2.3 The annunciation to the shepherds, in the Holkham Bible, an illustrated Bible with captions in Anglo‐Norman French and Middle English.  58 Figure 2.4 The printer’s device of Richard Grafton, showing a grafted tree ­growing out of a barrel (tun).  69 Figure 2.5 A page from William Caxton’s 1476 printing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, showing the beginning of The Merchant’s Tale.  71

­List of Illustration

Figure 2.6 Figure 2.7 Figure 2.8 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6 Figure 3.7 Figure 3.8 Figure 3.9 Figure 3.10 Figure 3.11 Figure 3.12 Figure 3.13 Figure 3.14 Figure 3.15 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 5.1

Woodcut illustrating the opening of Book II of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498.  73 An illustration of a print shop c. 1600 showing compositors picking type from cases; a forme being inked; a pressman working the press; and sheets being gathered up and set out to dry.  75 Type being arranged on a composing stick, illustrated in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick exercises: or, the doctrine of handy‐works. Applied to the art of printing (1683).  76 Title page of William Thynne’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1550.  82 Title page of Thomas Speght’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1598.  88 Title page of an almanac printed in London in 1565.  91 Frances Wolfreston’s copy of the 1655 edition of Othello: “a sad one.”  94 The opening of Book I of The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser.  97 The martyrdom of William Tyndale, in a 1570 copy of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.  99 Examples of black letter, Roman, italic, and Anglo‐Saxon typefaces.  107 The engraving of Stonehenge, from the 1610 edition of William Camden’s Britannia.  109 Surrey, one of the engraved county maps in the 1610 edition of William Camden’s Britannia.  110 Title page of the Matthew Bible, 1537.  115 Title page of the Coverdale Bible, 1535, showing Henry VIII handing a copy to a bishop.  116 Title page of the Great Bible, 1539, with the king in the center.  117 Title page of the King James Bible, 1611.  120 Opening of the First Folio of the works of Shakespeare, showing the engraving by Martin Droeshout, and the address to the reader by Ben Jonson.  122 Psalm 123 from the Bay Psalm Book.  131 A graph of the changing annual number of surviving titles, excluding periodicals, from 1600 to 1799.  138 An unremarkable‐looking, but politically incendiary petition to King Charles I.  141 The frontispiece to Eikon Basilike.  145 The title page of Eikonoklastes attempts to counter and overwhelm the title page of Eikon Basilike.  146 The spades in the Popish Plot playing cards.  155 The entirety of an early issue of the first newspaper in English.  159 The sophisticated layout of an almanac, the most ubiquitous kind of cheap print.  164 Frontispiece and title page of John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea (1646).  175 The Gentleman’s Magazine’s attempt to demonstrate the variety and value‐for‐money that it offered.  184

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­List of Illustration

Figure 5.2

The “neat rivulet of Text … murmur[ing] thro’ a meadow of margin” characteristic of most first editions of eighteenth‐century poetry.  194 Figure 5.3 The subscriber list to James Thomson’s The Seasons.  199 Figure 6.1 The Tom’s Coffee‐House copy of Have at You All; or, The Drury‐Lane Journal.  208 Figure 6.2 The characteristic “half‐bound volumes, with marbled covers” that visually distinguished the holdings of an eighteenth‐century circulating library.  211 Figure 6.3 The “Dutch paper” binding used on many eighteenth‐century children’s books.  212 Figure 6.4 Large print for readers who need “to think on the Subject of OLD‐AGE.”  214 Figure 7.1 Frontispiece and title page of a volume of Jonathan Swift’s works reprinted in “The Poets of Great Britain” series (1778).  233 Figure 7.2 An alluring illustration in Charles Cooke’s edition of Joseph Andrews, part of his “Select Novels” reprint series.  235 Figure 7.3 An image of a circulating library, showing the supposed preferences of female patrons.  237 Figure 7.4 The Juvenile Library, catering specifically to children.  243 Figure 7.5 Diagram of the slave ship Brooks.  247 Figure 7.6 Author portrait and title page of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789).  249 Figure 8.1 The annual gift book, The Forget Me Not, as a mass‐produced gift.  260 Figure 8.2 The headpiece of Casell’s Illustrated Family Paper depicting an idealized Victorian scene of domestic reading.  270 Figure 8.3 The opening to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as serialized in The London Journal (October 2, 1852).  272 Figure 8.4 A typical page opening from Household Words.  273 Figure 8.5 The front and inside rear covers of a wrapper for a novel published in parts.  276 Figure 8.6 An engraving of “JONES, … at his Club,” reading the first part of Vanity Fair that appeared in the first part of Vanity Fair.  278 Figure 8.7 Robert Seymour’s satiric cartoon mocking a working‐class man for entering the “refined” space of a shop.  301 Figure 8.8 Orderly, yet inescapable advertising visually dominates the railway station, including a W.H. Smith bookstall.  308 Figure 8.9 Punch’s depiction of the chaos of Victorian street advertising, from the May 29, 1847, issue.  310 Figure 9.1 The “clean” typography of the Doves Bible.  322 Figure 9.2 The “Everyman’s Library” brought Art Nouveau to the masses with its bindings.  323 Figure 9.3 The dust jacket for Joseph Conrand’s The Shadow Line (J.M. Dent, 1917).  329 Figure 9.4 The complex layout of an opening in Pearson’s Magazine, enabled by mechanical typesetting.  334 Figure 10.1 Gollancz typographic dust jackets: Pigeon Irish by Francis Stuart (1932) and The Martyr by Liam O’Flaherty (1933).  350 Figure 10.2 Glory of Life by Llewelyn Powys (Golden Cockerel Press, 1934).  352

­List of Illustration

Figure 10.3

Two of the first 10 Penguins: Ariel by André Maurois and Gone to Earth by Mary Webb (1935).  357 Figure 10.4 Monotype keyboard, 1929.  363 Figure 10.5 Monotype typecaster, 1929.  363 Figure 10.6 Hague and Gill type specimen book.  364 Figure 10.7 The Times reports on its own new typeface (and some other ­significant news), October 3, 1932.  365 Figure 11.1 The area around St. Paul’s Cathedral, historic heart of the British publishing industry, in 1945.  375 Figure 11.2 An early “mushroom” paperback in the gangster genre: When Dames Get Tough by Hank Janson (Ward and Hutchon, c. 1946).  381 Figure 11.3 Tschichold’s grid layout for covers in the King Penguin series.  385 Figure 11.4 Cartoon panels from “Kitty Hawke and her All‐Girl Air Crew” (Girl November 16, 1951) and “Wendy and Jinx” (Girl November, 19 1952).  394 Figure 11.5 Hand‐drawn offset lithographic dust jackets: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (W.H. Allen, 1958) and The Foxglove Saga by Auberon Waugh (Chapman & Hall, 1960).  405 Figure 11.6 Setting “type” on the Linotype Linofilm phototypesetting system.  406 Figure 11.7 Inserting a glass font grid into the Linotype Linofilm photographic unit.  407 Figure 11.8 Double‐page spread from Mackean’s Introduction to Biology (1969 edition).  408 Figure 11.9 Layout for the January 5, 1969, front page of the Sunday Times, to be realized in hot metal.  409 Figure 12.1 Two well‐read Virago Modern Classics: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1991) and the very first in the series, Antonia White’s Frost in May (1978).  421 Figure 12.2 A typical Waterstones storefront in 2017.  436 Figure 12.3 The book section of a branch of W.H. Smith in 2017.  436 Figure 12.4 Shiny metallic colors draw attention to this small selection of the works of “Daisy Meadows.”  438 Figure 12.5 The Xerox 914: the first commercially successful xerographic copier, manufactured from 1959 to 1976.  440 Figure 12.6 Un‐numbered double‐page spread from Sniffin’ Glue, August–September 1977.  441 Figure 12.7 An early twenty‐first‐century issue of a church magazine from the south‐east of England.  442 Figure 12.8 Example page layout from Aldus Pagemaker 1.2, launched in 1986.  444 Figure 12.9 The Macintosh Plus, launched in 1986.  445 Figure 12.10 Micro‐publishing at the turn of the century: Cobralingus by Jeff Noon (Codex Books, 2001) and Punk Strips by Simon Gane (Slab‐o‐Concrete, 2000).  449 Figure 12.11 The first commercially successful e‐reader available in the United Kingdom, the Kindle 2.  453

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Introduction Zachary Lesser How does the material form of a text affect its meaning? What was the cultural impact of different technologies for producing texts, from the monastic scriptorium to moveable type and the printing press to the typewriter and the Xerox machine to the photo‐ offset lithographic printer and the desktop publishing application? Does it matter if a word is printed on paper, or written on parchment, or electronically rendered on a mobile device? Was the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon correct that the modern world had been ushered in by “the art of printing, gunpowder and the nautical compass,” which “have changed the face and condition of things all over the globe … so that no empire or sect or star seems to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than those mechanical things” (Bacon 2000, p. 100)? How do books – not merely the words they contain and the ideas those words express – shape political and religious movements? And how do people with different racial, gender, class, and sociocultural identities interact with books and the book trade? Who has been included in and who excluded from the world of books, and why? These are the kinds of big questions asked by the scholarly field usually known as “the history of the book.” Most fundamentally, scholars interested in the history of the book seek to understand the influence of material texts and textual formats on the world in which we live. As a field, book history is both theoretically and historically oriented. The principles and concepts underlying it – such as materiality and textuality, remediation, censorship and regulation, typography, mise‐en‐page, orality and literacy, addressed throughout the pages that follow – are broad and applicable across historical periods and geographical areas. But these concepts are only fully realized in specific historical moments, which differ greatly in the particularities of printing technology, the social organization of the book trade and its customers, the relationship of the state to the press, and so on. We have structured The Book in Britain as a narrative history, while developing key theoretical concepts over the course of that narrative, as the best way to introduce readers to the dynamic relationship between the abstract/theoretical and the particular/historical that is a hallmark of the history of the book as a scholarly field. But of course the material forms that texts take cannot be limited to “the book,” even though the field of “book history” has often focused on printed books, the printing press, and “print culture.” Scholars of the medieval period have long addressed questions of textual production, transmission, and reception through the intensive study of manuscripts. Indeed, much of the current dynamism of the field has been generated by a push to break down the supposed dividing line of Gutenberg’s “invention” of the printing press. (Precisely what, if anything, Gutenberg actually “invented” has also been the The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Introduction

subject of increased debate; see Smith 2001; Agüera y Arcas 2003). Manuscripts do not simply stop being produced after the invention of moveable type in the West. Nor do people stop writing by hand once they can type on a keyboard, just as they do not stop reading novels as printed books once they can carry around hundreds of them electronically on a Kindle. And not all books are printed as opposed to handwritten (or indeed entirely blank), if we understand the word book in one of its scholarly definitions, which has nothing to do with how the text in the book was produced: a series of pages sewn or glued together and bound between covers. It has been crucial in recent work in “book” history to stress the interaction at any given historical moment of multiple forms of material text – some of them “books” and many others not – and multiple ways of producing those texts. The term print culture itself, which once helped to cohere the field, has been heavily critiqued for its teleological focus on the supersession of manuscript by print and for the false uniformity it implies (Dane 2003; Ezell 2009). We continue to use the term in this volume – and the related term manuscript culture, even though the idea of manuscript (“written by hand”) is a back‐formation from print, as evidenced by the fact that the word itself dates only from the sixteenth century. But we use them with an awareness of and attention to the overlapping of different forms of textual production. The term book in the title of this volume is therefore clearly problematic; we use it for the sake of convenience because “book history” has been the most common name for this broad‐ranging scholarly field. But we discuss not only bound volumes but also unbound pamphlets, advertisements glued up on walls, office memos and stapled newsletters, texts inscribed and incised on metal, stone, and wood. “Book” may be a convenient shorthand, but we must be wary that its convenience does not make us forget the numerous other material forms in which we encounter texts in our daily lives and through which those texts transform us and our world. Indeed, this multiplicity represents one of the major lines of continuity in our study. Since our narrative covers some 1500 years of the history of the book in Britain, it may be useful to draw attention in this introduction to some of the threads that weave their way through its entirety, and this is the first one: 1) Modes of textual production and reproduction never simply supersede each other. Whichever modes are available in a given historical moment interact and overlap in sometimes surprising ways. The meaning of these forms may well change: manuscript signifies differently in a world in which it is distinguished from print; typewriting looks very different once laser printing becomes available. Newer forms of textual production often remediate older ones (see Bolter and Grusin 1999): early printing typefaces were based on different kinds of scribal handwriting; e‐book readers often reproduce the illusion of turning pages, as do websites like the Internet Archive that provide digital scans of print books; the PDF file format has been so successful because it appears to mimic the supposed fixity of print documents as opposed to the perceived ephemerality of digital text (see Gitelman 2014, pp. 111–135). Contrary to the narrative we often tell ourselves in the moment, forms of textual production almost never disappear completely. Equally worth unpacking is the other key word in our title: “Britain.” In a history as rich and variegated as the one we are telling here, it is impossible to cover everything, of course. We have limited ourselves to the British Isles to enable the level of detail

Introduction

necessary to do justice to the history of writing, printing, publishing, and reading. Any attempt to tell a global history would produce either a multi‐volume series or a narrative at such a level of abstraction and generality that it would obscure most of the subtleties that make this work so fascinating in the first place. At the same time, the very nature of material texts makes it impossible to tell their history strictly according to traditional geographic boundaries – and the geographic boundaries of “Britain” are, in any case, always shifting, no less so now than they were then. From the early monks who brought manuscripts back to Britain after trips to the Continent, to the sixteenth‐century Jesuits smuggling Catholic books into England, to the puritans bringing books to New England on the Mayflower, to the Victorian authors navigating the complexities of copyright in an increasingly global book trade, to the multinational corporations that own many publishing houses today and stage global media events around the release of mega‐bestsellers such as the Harry Potter books, the history of the book is marked by continual movement. 2) Books are mobile. They pass across boundaries, from one jurisdiction to another, posing problems for political, religious, and economic authorities that would seek to regulate the flow of texts. While rooted in the British Isles, therefore, our narrative comes to encompass continental Europe, North America, South Asia, Australia, South Africa – everywhere that the economic, cultural, political, and ideological investments in “the book in Britain” take us. I have stressed that we are interested not only in books but in material texts of all kinds, but it is also worth underlining that these material forms are not simply different vehicles for texts, different ways of moving a message from producer to consumer. Throughout the volume, we stress material texts as objects in the world as well as carriers of linguistic meaning, objects that can be put to a range of cultural uses quite apart from reading. 3) Books – and all material texts – are more than just vessels for words. They are symbolic objects that can support community formation, religious affiliation, cultural identification, or personal development. Books have been buried with saints and carried aloft into battle (see Section 1.7); the particular typeface chosen for a prayer book provoked riots and ultimately war between Scotland and England (see Section 3.9); radicals placed polemical pamphlets in their hatbands as a sign of their politics (see Section  4.1); annual “gift books” have been important tokens of friendship and familial bonds, even if unread (see Section 8.1); the aesthetics of papermaking, margin‐setting, and type‐design could function to distinguish an early twentieth‐century modernist “artist” from a “commercial” writer appealing to the masses (see Section  9.1); e‐readers like the Kindle become the focus of panicked declarations about the decline of literacy and reading – and in turn inspire nostalgically designed “retro‐books” (see Section 12.16). In none of these cases is actually reading the text in question of central importance. The signifying power of material texts  –  their ability to function both as symbolic objects in the world and as carriers of textual messages – distinguishes them from most other commodities and makes them especially suspicious to those in power. Particularly since the printing press made the multiplication of copies of a text vastly easier, the

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Introduction

book trade has been heavily regulated by the government, and this is the fourth thread that runs through our narrative: 4) Political, religious, and economic authorities have always attempted to control the spread of material texts, although in Britain that control has also always been tenuous. Press regulation emerges out of both ideological and commercial motives. The mobility of books makes them difficult to control, and factionalism within governing authorities has meant that enforcement was varied, often ad hoc and capricious. Licensing and regulation of books in Britain depended on a mutually beneficial relationship between the Crown and the guild of the book trade, the Stationers’ Company (see Section 3.2). The Stationers’ Company received a monopoly on printing, publishing, and bookselling and a guarantee that their intellectual property (later known as “copyright”) would be protected. The Crown gained the help of those in the trade in enforcing pre‐publication censorship and controlling the spread of “undesirable” texts. This relationship was continually under strain, however, and ultimately collapsed (see Chapters 4 and 5), leading to new forms of post‐publication prosecution for libel and obscenity. Repeatedly we see attempts to crack down and repeatedly we see agitation against censorship, with juries refusing to convict publishers and authors, whether the texts in question were partisan newspapers in the eighteenth century (see Section 4.7) or D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the twentieth (see Section 11.9). The relationship between the economic interests of the book trade and the ideological interests of political and religious authorities relates to the fifth thread: 5) Books  –  and material texts of all kinds  –  are produced out of a combination of motives, not simply profit‐driven commercial interests. In this sense as well, books tend to distinguish themselves from other commodities, since their textual content opens up a host of rationales for publication. Religious proselytizing and political propagandizing are two obvious examples. Think only of the huge numbers of religious leaflets handed out on the street in any major city today. In earlier centuries as well, the printing of some religious texts, along with official government documents like royal proclamations, was done with little or no expectation of turning a profit. Even here, however, various motives are intertwined: “jobbing” work such as the printing of proclamations or legal notices was a crucial source of income for printers, even if they were not produced in the normal way for the retail trade (Stallybrass 2007). In the period before printing in Britain, many manuscripts were produced in scriptoria (see Section 1.4) as part of the daily religious practice of monks and nuns, with no eye on the “market” for books. But neither should we presume that the medieval period was some completely pre‐capitalist world of devotion, free of the profit motive: in major urban and university centers such as London, Oxford, and Paris, the pecia system of piecemeal manuscript production developed to ensure the more rapid production of texts for purchase by students (see Sections 2.5 and 3.9). Economic and non‐economic interests are likewise intertwined at the end of our history of the book in Britain, as major twentieth‐century publishers often produced “loss leaders” such as modernist poetry, in essence subsidized by the sale of the bestselling fiction in their lists, which could not, however, provide the cultural prestige that top publishing firms wanted. This arrangement was crucial to the justification of the Net Book Agreement (see Sections 9.4 and 11.8), a restrictive arrangement among publishers and booksellers to prevent

Introduction

the lowering of retail prices. In some aspects similar to the monopolistic cartel of the Stationers’ Company in earlier periods, the Net Book Agreement too eventually fell as late‐capitalist ideas of “free trade” superseded long‐held beliefs about the public interest in having a wide range of books available on the shelves, even if some of them were not earning their keep in the marketplace. Just as twentieth‐century publishers attempted to balance “prestige” literary works with more commercially viable fiction, so too throughout much of the history of the book in Britain, we see a need to minimize risk by balancing the publication of new works against the reprinting of older, proven texts: 6) Book publication is a risky business, and “steady sellers” have always been crucial to the trade, even if these older, frequently reprinted texts have often been ignored by literary critics and historians focused on what was new in any given historical moment. The importance of the Bible (and related texts such as prayer books and psalters) to the history of the book in Britain cannot be overstated. While these were sometimes produced evangelistically without regard for profit  –  from those created by early monastic communities to the huge output of the nineteenth‐century Bible Societies (see Section 8.1) – plenty of Bibles were sold to book buyers in the usual way as well. Other steady sellers included school texts such as primers and ABCs, perennially useful books like almanacs, and, in later periods, the works of canonical literary authors. The durable value of the plays of Shakespeare, for example, remains important to contemporary publishers like Bloomsbury, who are also always seeking the next blockbuster bestseller like Harry Potter (see Section 12.4), a quest that inevitably results in more failures than successes. Likewise, James Thomson’s steady‐selling poem The Seasons was important enough to the eighteenth‐century book trade – valuable enough as an intellectual property, and appealing enough to so‐called book pirates – that it became the central text in a landmark court case concerning copyright (see Section 6.3), which brings us to another thread in our narrative history: 7) The formation of a canon of English Literature – and of the very idea of “English Literature” as a discrete category of text – was intimately linked to the book trade, and especially to the development of the notion of copyright. Book‐history scholars have argued, for instance, that while Shakespeare may have written his plays first and foremost for performance, his status as the most canonical British author had at least as much to do with the printing, publishing, and reading of his plays as books – both individually and in collection in the First Folio of 1623 (see Kastan 2001; Farmer and Lesser 2006; Smith 2015; Hooks 2016). The copyright to Shakespeare’s works was jealously guarded throughout the eighteenth century. But when the court decision surrounding The Seasons finally abolished the Stationers’ Company’s perpetual copyright, creating the modern idea of the “public domain,” a host of older literature became available for reprinting and repackaging in series of “great British authors.” The literary canon emerged in many ways alongside the public domain, a question of economics as much as aesthetics (see Section 9.2; St. Clair 2004). Major Victorian authors like Charles Dickens and Walter Scott carefully managed their authorial “brand” in print and in turn were carefully managed by their various publishers (see Sections 8.1 and 8.2). Between the world wars, the book trade was likewise integral to

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Introduction

the emergence of modernist literature, which located itself in a coterie environment that crucially included small presses and low‐circulation magazines (see Section 10.6). Modernist authors like Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot (himself a working member of the book trade at Faber & Faber) were keen analysts and manipulators of copyright law as they tried to forge a “new” literary aesthetic (Saint‐Amour 2003). This focus in our study may make it seem as if literature were the key driver of the book trade, but in fact it has usually been a decidedly secondary if not tertiary part of the world of print: 8) The landmark texts that are most important to literary critics and historians play a smaller role in the full history of the book than we might expect. More mundane and often overlooked material texts can have a huge influence. Newspapers, truly “quotidian” in the root sense of the word (“daily”), have been amply discussed by historians of the book for their role in nation‐building, the creation of a public sphere, and even the reorganization of our experience of time (Frank 1961; B. Anderson 1991; Sommerville 1996). The development of periodical newspapers and newsbooks plays a key role throughout our narrative history, and these texts were always among the most subject to government censorship and regulation. But our history also explores the effects on people’s daily experience of papal indulgences, which were in fact the earliest texts printed both by Gutenberg and by William Caxton, the first printer in England (Section 2.8); of weekly “Bills of Mortality” listing the causes and numbers of deaths in London (Section 4.5); of abolitionist slogans on teacups and other household objects (Section  7.3); of advertisements posted up in railway stations (Section 8.3); of Xeroxed punk rock ’zines and parish newsletters (Section 12.12) – among a host of other material texts that are often overlooked by scholars, and indeed by everyone, so familiar and ubiquitous are they. This is not to say that literature is unimportant – and cultural importance, in any case, cannot be equated simplistically with economic metrics like “market share.” Rather, it is to emphasize that the history of “the book in Britain” encompasses a very wide range of written, printed, lithographed, Xeroxed, digitally rendered, and otherwise produced material texts, which had far‐reaching and often unexpected effects on the cultures and societies of the British Isles, from the earliest years of that history to today. Our aim in The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction is to provide readers with a compelling narrative, one that takes in both large, ongoing trends like those outlined here and the smaller stories that reveal the false starts, dead ends, and forgotten byways that enliven and illuminate those broader histories. While we have written this book collaboratively to create that single narrative, as five scholars who specialize in different historical periods with different methodological emphases we inevitably approach our subject with particular interests, and we each pursue different paths through this history. We consider this methodological diversity to be a virtue, for the field of book history historically has been shaped by scholars from a range of traditional academic disciplines. Foundational work was done by intellectual and cultural historians like Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962) and Elizabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979), who sought to trace the large‐scale impact of the printing press on the course of history and the development of the human mind. They saw its effects in the emergence of Protestantism, modern scientific rationality, capitalism, and democracy. Like most scholars working

Introduction

today, we are more skeptical of such grand narratives and the “technological determinism” they seem to imply. But the relationship between technology and the history of ideas  –  now understood as a more flexible and less predictable one  –  remains a key focus of our work and of work in the field more broadly (see Darnton 1979, 1982, 1996; Johns 1998). Large‐scale narrative of a somewhat different kind was a specialty of the Annales school of French social historians. In L’Apparition du Livre, first published in 1958 and later translated as The Coming of the Book, Lucien Febvre and Henri‐Jean Martin (1976) used an early form of what we would now call “big data” to study the social and economic effects of the spread of printing throughout Europe. Their influence continues to be seen in important work that amasses quantitative data to understand trends in the history of publishing and reading, or to trace cultural patterns that cannot be perceived by studying only the traditional “canon” of texts (see St. Clair 2004; Moretti 2005; Suarez 2009b; Piper and Portelance 2016). While The Book in Britain is not dominated by statistical analyses, nonetheless data of this kind is crucial in drawing our attention to neglected areas of book history and in contextualizing key moments within it, and we draw on this strand of scholarship throughout our volume. By contrast with these wide‐angle views, many book historians working today are literary critics by training and instinct, used to “close‐reading” highly valued literary texts. They have been interested in the traditional literary question of how form affects meaning, but in this case form is not only or primarily the structure of a poem or a novel but also the way it is printed, packaged, and understood as a book or as pages in a periodical. Other strands of the field have emerged from disciplines traditionally associated with the study of literature: bibliography (mainly dealing with printed books) and codicology (dealing with manuscripts), the study of texts as physical objects that offer clues to how they were made; and textual editing, the attempt to establish the definitive text of a work that exists in various different versions. While this brief overview may seem to compartmentalize the field, however, most book historians have moved across scholarly disciplines. The cultural historian Roger Chartier, initially associated with the Annales school, has sometimes sounded more like a literary critic in books such as Forms and Meanings (1995) and The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind (2013). Meanwhile, especially with the rise of “digital humanities,” some literary critics who are focused on, or moving toward a focus on, book history have compiled masses of data and made their arguments in the form of graphs and charts, rather like the early Annales historians (see Moretti 2005; Farmer and Lesser 2005a, 2005b, 2013; Piper and Portelance 2016). And indeed in writing The Book in Britain, the five of us, who were all trained principally in the study of literature, have been made ever more aware that any study of the relationship between material texts and human culture cannot be delimited by traditional disciplinary boundaries. The Book in Britain therefore brings together all of these methodological strands that have been crucial to the development of book history as a scholarly field. Throughout, we provide clear explanations of the technicalities of printing and publishing, and of the formal elements of books and manuscripts, which are necessary to understand that history. And we explore the impact of changing textual technologies on texts themselves. But our focus, always, is less on technology than on culture: our world has been shaped and continues to be shaped by the material texts that surround us.

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Part I The Middle Ages and the Renaissance Siân Echard

11

1 Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066 1.1 ­Prequel I: Medieval Remediation Sometime around 731, the venerable Bede, an Anglo‐Saxon monk and scholar, finished his Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People]. The book is an account of the early history of England with special attention to the spread of Christianity. While the work would eventually be translated into Old English, Bede wrote it originally in Latin, as was the custom for learned men of his day. In the fourth book of his history, Bede recounts the story of an Anglo‐Saxon cowherd named Caedmon who, in a dream, saw a figure who told him to sing of the creation of all things. The illiterate man protested that he could not sing, but at the figure’s urging, found that he could. The song he produced is recorded by Bede in Latin translation as part of the story. Figure 1.1 is an early eleventh‐century Latin copy of Bede’s text. The text frames Caedmon’s song  –  now commonly called Caedmon’s Hymn  –  by saying, “This is the sense, but not the exact arrangement, of the words that he sang.” Bede’s Latin translation of the song precedes this remark, and explanation and translation are presented continuously in the text block. But in this particular copy, the Latin text has been bracketed in the right margin, and in the bottom margin a somewhat later hand has written the song in Old English, with points marking the breaks between the lines of the verse. This page dramatizes several crucial aspects of the early history of “books” in Britain. First, while today Caedmon’s Hymn often appears as one of the first entries in anthologies of English literature  –  in big books that suggest an orderly sequence of literary history  –  its first bookish appearance is very much post hoc, according to Bede’s account. Bede’s remarks about conveying the “sense” of the song reflect that he is writing down something which was not originally written at all, nor ever intended for a book. For many medieval works this gap between a non‐written creation and an eventual bookish transmission is an important fact. Second, Bede is not the only mediator between this work and its audience. This manuscript page materializes a textual history – the fact that someone added an Old English version at some later date – and dramatizes a linguistic fact. Bede translated the song from oral to written, and from Old English to Latin. The manuscript page arranges those facts in a particular way, effecting another kind of translation, a material and ­visual one that has the potential to affect meaning.

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction

Figure 1.1  An eleventh‐century copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, in Latin, with Caedmon’s Hymn added in Old English in the bottom margin. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Bodleian Hatton MS 43, folio 129r.

Third, this particular presentation of Caedmon’s Hymn is only one of several different arrangements, each likely to affect a reader differently. Not all Latin copies mark out the Hymn as the copy in Figure 1.1 does. What is more, the Historia ecclesiastica was translated from Latin into Old English, and in the manuscripts of that translation, the Old

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

English poem is simply written as part of the Old English text. The importance of the poem to Bede’s text – whether it is understood to be marginal or integral, both linguistically and spatially  –  would appear very different depending on which manuscript a reader saw. Fourth and finally, the manuscript in Figure 1.1 dates from the early eleventh century; that is, it is removed from Bede’s original writing by several centuries of transmission. There are eighth‐century copies of Bede’s work, and the normal scholarly editorial practice is to seek to establish a best text based on the earliest and most reliable witnesses. If we are thinking about how a medieval reader might have experienced Bede, however, then the variety of manuscripts (and there are many Latin manuscripts of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, as well as the handful of Old English ones) is at least as important as the reconstruction of an original text. We do not know where the manuscript featured in Figure 1.1 was produced, but we do know that manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History could be found across Britain. We also know that most reading situations would be local; that is, a typical reader would be likely to encounter very few copies of any given text. This kind of local, limited access means that the presentation of a text in a particular material manifestation is integral to how it might have been understood. At the same time, we also know that individual books (and scribes) traveled, and so a particular presentation could in some cases have an influence outside its original production context. Variety and singularity exist in a productive tension in medieval manuscript culture, determining the practices of both producers and readers alike. Remediation  –  “the representation of one medium in another” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, p. 45) – is a term originally coined by new media theorists to explore how digital technologies related to earlier technologies. It is also, however, an important element in the early history of the book in Britain. The period covered in this section of our study – from the early Middle Ages to 1640 – sees several major technological shifts, as works move from oral to written form, and then from manuscript to print. Each shift involves a two‐way and often messy process of social and cultural transformation and adaptation. Linguistic change, again as highlighted in the treatment of Caedmon’s Hymn, also enacts a kind of remediation, as both forms and expectations from one linguistic context adapt to (or cause adaptation in) new contexts. In the past, histories of the book have sometimes suggested a clean, teleological narrative of ever‐increasing technological and cultural sophistication, telling a supersessionist story in which a new technology wipes out its predecessor. Our book, by contrast, will often tack between technologies, crossing and recrossing various kinds of boundaries, as we attempt to show some of the complexity of the webs in which texts can be embedded. It will also move back and forth between individual objects, like the manuscript in Figure 1.1, and object‐traditions, like the various forms in which a text like Caedmon’s Hymn appears. Much book history is rooted in the careful examination of individual physical objects, whose materiality seems to offer a reassuring certainty: we may not know how everyone in the Middle Ages understood Caedmon’s Hymn, but we can perhaps know how the readers of the manuscript in Figure 1.1 might have received it. At the same time, book history may also concern itself with multiple objects – aggregates that offer useful information about broader cultural, social, and historical trends. Some critics have been suspicious of the generalizations and elisions that can result from such overviews (Dane 2003, 2013), but we believe that the combination of individual realizations with larger traditions will allow readers to see both forest and trees.

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1.2 ­Prequel II: Orality, Aurality, and Aureates Caedmon’s Hymn highlights the importance of the oral transmission of many medieval British works. Bede’s history is bookish from the start – written in Latin, and imagined as categorically different from the oral hymn that Bede relates by “sense” but not “exact arrangement.” Bede represents one kind of literacy, organized around the ability to read and write in Latin, the language of the Church: this is what litteratus meant to Bede and his contemporaries. This form of literacy was associated in Britain with the spread of Christianity, particularly the Roman form of Christianity, especially after Pope Gregory I sent missionaries to Britain in 597 to convert the Anglo‐Saxons (the story Bede tells in his Ecclesiastical History). As we will see, both the Roman and Celtic strands of Christianity had a central place for books, and thus for those who could read and write those books in Latin. Both monks and nuns, in the monasteries of Anglo‐Saxon England, might be charged with writing books, reading them, or both. Not everyone who could read could write, and people who could write did not always do so: many people of means or importance made use of secretaries to do their writing for them. Further down the social scale, too, people might have important relationships to the written word without necessarily being able to produce or read it themselves. As Michael T. Clanchy points out in his seminal study of literacy in medieval Britain, being “prejudiced in favour of literacy” (Clanchy 2013, p. 7) can over‐determine how we interact with the surviving evidence of medieval people’s relationship to the written word. Throughout the Middle Ages, “textual communities” (Stock 1983, p. 88) could organize themselves around the centrality of a book like the Bible, and even though the vast majority of people in those communities could not read, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, their lives could be profoundly influenced by books. While it is generally true that in the early Middle Ages in Britain literacy as we understand it was more likely to be found in the Church than among secular people, and in men rather than in women, this broad statement risks eliding these other important relationships to books. The reforms instituted in the ninth century by Alfred, King of Wessex (849–899; later Alfred the Great), emphasized the translation of Latin works into Old English, suggesting the growing importance accorded to vernacular, as well as Latin, literacy. In the later Middle Ages, we see vernacular literacy, including the ability to write as well as to read, appearing in the men and sometimes women of the merchant class, as represented for example by the Paston letters, the correspondence exchanged between male and female members of a gentry family between 1422 and 1509. But there were other forms of early written language that were not organized around Latin and the Church (see, for example, the discussion of runes and ogham in Section 1.6), and there were also other ways of experiencing texts, apart from reading them. Beowulf is one of the most famous examples of a poem that began its life in the oral world. This account of the monster‐killing exploits of Beowulf, hero and later king of the Geats, begins with an appeal for attention, “Hwaet,” variously translated as So, Listen, Lo, among other possibilities. It also includes many instances of oral story‐telling as part of its own fabric, as for example in the references to the songs of the scop (oral poet) and in the hero’s own retelling of his exploits to the poem’s several internal audiences (see Niles 2016). Any number of medieval British works bear similar markers of oral origins and transmission. Even after the rise in literacy in Britain after the Norman Conquest of 1066  –  something Clanchy attributes to the spread of documentary

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

administrative culture under the Norman kings and their successors (Clanchy 2013) – many people outside those professional circles could not read. Scholars continue to debate whether appeals for silence at the opening of the anonymous popular romances of the later Middle Ages are truly indicative of oral origins and performance, or whether instead these are artifacts of an oral past in a more literate present (see, for example, Coleman 1996; Zaerr 2012). And even when a medieval text is unequivocally bookish, self‐conscious invocations of various forms of reception remain. For example, in the second book of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus, seeking his niece, finds her sitting in a parlor with her women where, we are told, they “Herden a mayden reden hem the geste / Of the siege of Thebes” [Heard a maiden read to them the story of the siege of Thebes] (Chaucer 1986, II. lines 83–84). This situation, in which one person reads aloud from a written book for the entertainment of others, was a common one, particularly in well‐to‐do and noble households in the later part of the Middle Ages (Coleman 1996). Indeed, one famous frontispiece to a manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde appears to show the poet reading his work aloud to a listening aristocratic audience (Pearsall 1977).1 Thus, even when books (rather than scops or bards) have become the primary means of delivering texts, an oral/aural component remains very much part of how many people experienced those books. Scholars continue to debate the original date for the heroic Old English account of the exploits of Beowulf. Sometime around the year 800 is the date often given. The only surviving manuscript, however, seems to date from around the year 1000. Similarly, the Welsh Gododdin of the poet Aneirin, a series of elegies for British heroes who died in battle with the Saxons around 600, is preserved in only one manuscript, this one dating to c. 1265.2 Both of these poems have, then, been subject to the kind of remediation introduced at the start of this chapter, but they also point to another important thread in the story of British books: their post‐medieval reception. Caedmon’s Hymn has become important, in our era, as a starting point in the English canon, and canon‐formation and the search for foundational and aureate poets has been a powerful driver in the recovery and the remediation of British books, both within and beyond Britain. When Beowulf was first printed, in the early nineteenth century, its Danish‐Icelandic editor, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, presented it on the title page as the first Danish epic, and provided a parallel translation into Latin in order to heighten the work’s claim to a status similar to that of classical works such as the Aeneid. The Danish government supported Thorkelin in his preparation of an edition of the poem, and the first complete modern‐language translation of the text was an 1820 Danish translation. Today Beowulf has become so common a starting point for English literature survey courses that they are often described as overviews “from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf,” but the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century history of the poem shows how crucial Scandinavian national impulses were in drawing attention to this particular British book and its contents. Indeed, we would not know as much about the poem as we do, had it not been for Thorkelin’s project. In 1787, he commissioned a scribal transcription of the poem from the manuscript, and wrote out his own transcription as well. These were working papers, but they also ended up serving the purpose of preservation. The manuscript had been seriously damaged in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731 and was not properly conserved until the nineteenth century. Words that were still visible when Thorkelin and his copyist saw the manuscript had crumbled away by the time the manuscript was

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stabilized. Thorkelin’s transcriptions have thus become crucial to establishing the text of the poem, although the digitization of the manuscript has allowed some damaged sections to be read again (Prescott 1997). For its part, the Gododdin has been described by one of its most important scholars as “the oldest Scottish poem” (Jackson 1969). It is featured on a tourist information sign at Edinburgh Castle (the warriors in the poem depart from “Din Eidyn,” or the Edinburgh castle mound), while the National Library of Wales describes the manuscript of the poem, the Llyfr Aneirin / Book of Aneirin, as “one of the oldest and most important Welsh manuscripts.” This British book has since the nineteenth century been known as one of the so‐called Four Ancient Books of Wales (Skene 1868), a term coined by a nineteenth‐century Scottish antiquarian, William Forbes Skene. After years in the Cardiff Central Library, the manuscript was rehoused at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, an institution that has been at the forefront of digitizing medieval manuscripts, particularly those of importance to Welsh history and literature. This history illustrates, among other things, how fraught and slippery terms like “Welsh,” “Scottish,” and even the “British” implied by our title really are. In the pages to follow, we will be dealing with books produced in the areas we now call Wales, Scotland, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England. The political histories and relationships of those entities and their peoples shift frequently throughout the long period this book covers. For example, Figure 1.2, a map of England in the ninth century, shows the effects of multiple invasions in the period covered in our first chapter. The Roman occupation of Britain, which began in 43  ce, led to a period of influence that lasted until the Romans withdrew in 410, leaving behind traces in roads, buildings, and settlements, as well as in the practice of Christianity among some Brythonic‐speaking Celts, who would later convert other Celtic communities. From the mid‐fifth century onward, the arrival of pagan Germanic peoples from the Continent caused some Celts to migrate across the English Channel and settle in Brittany, while others remained in the areas we now call Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland. The Germanic invaders settled down, converted to Christianity, and established their own Anglo‐Saxon kingdoms and institutions. Next came the Vikings, first as raiders and then as settlers in the area of England called the Danelaw. The importance of the Scandinavian influence is exemplified in a figure like Cnut (c. 995–1035), who ruled parts of what we now call England, along with Norway and Denmark. It was no accident that Thorkelin saw Beowulf as a Danish text, even though it now stands, along with Caedmon’s Hymn, at the beginning of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Some anthologies have eschewed “English,” as for example does the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, which includes excerpts from the Gododdin in its opening pages. If we think of the Llyfr Aneirin as a “British” book, the term can encompass the Brythonic (early Celtic) roots of the manuscript, alongside its competing modern identities (Scottish and Welsh). Both Beowulf and the Gododdin were eventually written into national and nationalist canons and narratives of literary tradition and transmission. They have become foundational books, even though, at their inception, they were not books at all. Chapter  1 of our study will explore the role of medieval books as symbols and as meaning‐laden artifacts. We will also discuss pragmatic matters: where medieval books came from, how and where they were made, by whom, and for whom. This chapter takes us from the beginnings of book production in Britain, in the monasteries of the

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

Figure 1.2  England in the ninth century. Image provided by iStock.

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Anglo‐Saxon world, through the upheavals and changes that came with the Norman Conquest of 1066, setting the stage for the gradual expansion of manuscript production into urban contexts, explored in Section 2.5. Through a focus on a few particular books and their production contexts, we will lay out the technical vocabulary associated with the production and study of medieval manuscripts. And we will begin to trace a few themes that are constant throughout our study, such as the movement of books through time and space, their influence on the communities in which they circulate, and the long history of attempts to control and direct book production to any number of ideological ends.

1.3 ­The Saint Cuthbert Gospel: “The Earliest Intact European Book” In April 2012, the British Library successfully concluded a massive fundraising campaign and purchased, for £9 million, the St. Cuthbert Gospel.3 The campaign noted the Library’s role in “safeguarding the nation’s heritage” and described the effort as a “once‐ in‐a‐generation opportunity” to acquire “one of the most important books in the world and the starting point for books as we know them today” (British Library 2012a). While there was of necessity a certain amount of salesmanship involved in the efforts to sell the acquisition to the British public and to funding organizations such as the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the book is indeed a unique survival. It was written in the late seventh century and retains its original binding, making it, as the Library points out, “the earliest intact European book” (British Library 2012b).4 This small book, measuring about 13.8 × 9.5 cm, was perhaps St. Cuthbert’s personal copy, and as discussed later in this chapter, was found with the saint in his coffin. The main text consists of 90 parchment folios. The script is called capitular uncial. Uncial script was a major bookhand of late antiquity and the early medieval period, surviving in some 500 manuscripts from the fourth century onwards, and capitular uncial is a small, unornamented form of uncial characteristic of the Northumbrian monastery of Monkwearmouth– Jarrow (Bischoff 1990, pp. 68, 71). One element of the manuscript’s importance, then, is as a witness to the local production of books. While importing books from the Continent was important during the period of conversion to Roman Christianity (just as, in a later period, Bibles were imported from the Continent via Scotland to advance the Reformation, as discussed in Section 3.7), there was symbolic and practical significance in Britain having the means to make its own books as well.

1.4 ­Making and Using Medieval Manuscripts: Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, its Scriptorium, and its Library We have already used several terms  –  bookhand, folio, binding  –  that belong to the technical language of three of the disciplines that contribute to book history. These include paleography, which is the study of ancient handwriting, with an emphasis on the history of these scripts; codicology, which is the study of manuscripts, in particular their form; and bibliography, a term which, among other things, refers to the description of

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

both the form of books and their conditions of production and consumption. It is easiest to attach these and other terms to specific examples. Our first such example is the scriptorium of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, the monastery that Bede called home. While the monastery was undoubtedly an important producer and consumer of books in this early period, very little of its output survives. Nevertheless, the combination of Bede’s accounts of his monastery’s history; Bede’s own work, which allows us to make some conjectures about what books the monastery must have held; and the striking examples of the St. Cuthbert Gospel and the Codex Amiatinus, discussed further below, make Monkwearmouth–Jarrow a suitable peg on which to hang our first discussions of the technical aspects of manuscript production. While it is common today to refer to Monkwearmouth–Jarrow as if it were one place, in fact it was two monastic foundations in its origin, although both houses soon came under the rule of one abbot. St. Peter’s at Monkwearmouth had been founded in c. 673 by Benedict Biscop (c. 628–689), a well‐born Northumbrian who had professed a religious life and made his first trip to Rome in 653. His travels included a period in the monastery at Lérins (now on the French Riviera). In 669, Biscop returned to Northumbria (an Anglo‐Saxon kingdom in what is now northern England and south‐east Scotland) in the entourage of Theodore of Tarsus, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Biscop’s continental experiences were important in his plans for and work on the new monastery, and he continued to make periodic trips to the Continent in order to secure, among other things, books for the new foundation, as well as for its twin, St. Paul’s, founded in 681 or 682 at Jarrow. Bede, himself a monk of Jarrow, documents several of Biscop’s book‐related trips in his Lives of the Holy Abbots of Weremouth and Jarrow. For example, he writes that Biscop “accomplished a third voyage from Britain to Rome, and brought back a large number of books on sacred literature, which he had either bought at a price or received as gifts from his friends” (Bede 1843–1845, vol. 2, p. 86). In Bede’s telling, these books are instrumental in Biscop’s securing the means to found St. Peter’s: “He displayed the holy volumes and relics of Christ’s blessed Apostles and martyrs, which he had brought, and found such favour in the eyes of the king, that he forthwith gave him seventy hides of land out of his own estates, and ordered a monastery to be built thereon for the first pastor of his church” (Bede 1843–1845, vol. 2, p. 86). A fourth voyage to Rome brought even more books and earned even more royal patronage, leading to the foundation of St. Paul’s. By the time of Biscop’s death in 689, the monastery had a substantial library and a commitment to maintaining and fostering it. Bede recounts that on his deathbed, Biscop was thinking about books: “The large and noble library, which he had brought from Rome, and which was necessary for the edification of his church, he commanded to be kept entire, and neither by neglect to be injured or dispersed” (Bede 1843–1845, vol. 2, p. 92). The St. Cuthbert Gospel was produced under the rule of Biscop’s successor Ceolfrith (642–716), who had become abbot of both St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s on Biscop’s death. As Biscop had commanded, he preserved and expanded the twin foundation’s commitment to books. Bede records, for instance, that Ceolfrith had the monks make three copies of the “new translation” of the Bible (Jerome’s Latin Vulgate), an immense undertaking. One of these Bibles survives in fragments; a second is lost, as indeed are most of the books associated with Monkwearmouth–Jarrow (Ker 1964, pp. 104–105; Ker et al. 2009); but the third survives intact, and from it we may infer a great deal about the quality of book‐making at the monastery.

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This Bible was offered to Pope Gregory II as a gift. It is now referred to as the Codex Amiatinus.5 This enormous book (50.5 × 34 cm, weighing over 34 kg) is the oldest ­surviving copy of Jerome’s translation. The book is a pandect; that is, a single volume containing all the books of the Old and New Testaments. The script is uncial, which was, as noted above, a major Roman script used not only for Bibles but also, from the fourth century onwards, for many classical texts (Bischoff 1990, pp. 58–59). Italian books might also have provided models for the three major illustrations included in the Codex Amiatinus: a tabernacle, Christ in Majesty, and Ezra in his study. Figure 1.3, the Ezra miniature, is characteristically late antique in appearance and may have been copied from an Italian pandect that Biscop is said to have brought to the abbey (Marsden 1998; Marsden 2012, p. 417). The Codex Amiatinus is clearly a self‐consciously Roman production, then, and the significance of that packaging will be discussed in due course. First, however, the manuscript’s incredible size presents an opportunity to pause and think about the implications of its material construction and requirements. Like most British books until the very end of the medieval period, the Codex Amiatinus is written on parchment, that is, animal skin. In this case, the skins came from calves, but goats and sheep were also frequently used. Young animals produce finer‐grained and therefore higher‐quality parchment; this fine grade of material is sometimes called vellum, from the Old French velin, or veal. More than 500 calves were needed to produce the material for the Codex Amiatinus’s 1030 folios (Gameson 1992). Later medieval British book production would come to rely more on sheep than on cattle, but one basic fact remains: book‐making required a huge supply of animal skins. Writing of a later enormous Bible, the Winchester Bible (c. 1160–1175), Christopher De Hamel has suggested that these skins “were no doubt often a by‐product left over by the abbey butcher. Since a massive book like the Winchester Bible would probably have needed skins from some two hundred and fifty sheep, it is difficult to imagine so many animals being killed for the sole purpose of supplying vellum” (De Hamel 1994, p. 86). If this conjecture is correct, the monks of Jarrow must have eaten quite well during the production of the Codex Amiatinus. It is also possible that some monasteries purchased parchment: “Even in the early Middle Ages it is likely that parchment was manufactured commercially, and not by the monks themselves, in most cases. In the later Middle Ages, major centres at least had specialist providers of parchment” (Alexander 1992, p. 36). The conditions of life in the Anglo‐Saxon period would inevitably have affected the supply and quality of parchment, with factors as varied as the weather and Viking raids having an effect on the raising of livestock: “ensuring a regular supply of membrane in the right place at the right time undoubtedly required effort and organisation” (Gameson 2011, p. 16). The ability to provide or procure this material underlines the wealth and resources of a monastery such as Monkwearmouth–Jarrow. Books like the Codex Amiatinus witness the importance accorded at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow not just to the collecting of books, but to their production. The scriptoria (spaces set up for the copying of manuscripts; sing. scriptorium) of monastic foundations were a crucial source of books in Britain throughout the medieval period, and especially in the early Middle Ages. At first, as the accounts of Biscop’s buying trips indicate, many books essential for the foundation and spreading of Christianity were imported. Eventually, however, monasteries began to produce books for their own use and, at times, for the use of others. The provision for time devoted to labor in

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Figure 1.3  Ezra in his study, from the Codex Amiatinus. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatino 1, folio 5r. Licensed by Art Resource.

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monastic guidelines such as the sixth‐century Rule of St. Benedict coincided nicely with the need for monasteries to produce books, and before the movement of book ­production into urban centers  –  a feature of the later medieval period  –  monastic ­scriptoria were also a primary source of books for local laypeople. Still, while we tend to talk freely about monastic scriptoria, in fact we have little sense of their physical layout, particularly in the early period (Horn and Born 1986). We do know, however, the steps involved in making a medieval book. The first point to be made is that we are in fact generally talking about books – that is, about codices and not about the scrolls (usually made of papyrus) on which the ancient world recorded texts. A codex is a manuscript book made up of folded sheets, usually bound together. The codex began to displace the scroll in the late antique period, so that 90% of surviving fifth‐century manuscripts are in the codex form (O’Donnell 1998, p. 51). The term manuscript – which literally means written by hand – is often used to describe medieval books in general discussion, although a formal catalogue description will often use codex. For example, the British Library’s physical description of the St. Cuthbert Gospel begins “Fos. ii + 90. Approximately 137 × 95 mm. Parchment codex.” Notice that the description includes the number of folios (see below for more information about this terminology), the size, the material, and the format. Not all manuscript catalogue descriptions are the same, but most will include some basic descriptive information of this sort. They will also often include the place of production, if known, and an account of the provenance, which is the history of ownership for an object. The St. Cuthbert entry, for example, has one brief line on “Ownership: Apparently produced at Wearmouth‐Jarrow by a local scribe in the early 8th century.” Because the St. Cuthbert Gospel went into Cuthbert’s coffin in 698, that is the extent of the provenance description, but other medieval manuscripts will have very long provenance entries, often including what happened to, say, a monastic text after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century. The first step in making a manuscript was the preparation of this writing surface. The animal hides first had to be soaked in a lime solution to loosen and remove hair and grease, then stretched on special frames for scraping with a metal instrument called a lunellum, and finally dried. An abrasive chalky substance called pounce could be used to further clean and smooth the surface, and the hide could also be treated to produce a particular surface texture or color. Deluxe manuscripts of the Carolingian period (late eighth to early tenth centuries), for example, were sometimes written on parchment that had been stained purple. Sheets would then be cut from the prepared hides. As parchment was an expensive substance, it was common to try to get as large a sheet as possible out of any given hide, and so it is possible to find pages that include curves that witness the animal’s living form. Hides were sometimes damaged in the process of preparation, in which case they might either be recycled as scrap or, if the damage was not too severe, repaired by sewing or patching. Occasionally one can find pages where a small hole has been left, and the text simply written around it. Sometimes parchment would be reused, with an old text either scraped or washed off and a new one written over it, resulting in a layering of texts. This kind of manuscript is called a palimpsest (from the Greek for “scraped again”). In these cases, we can often recover the previous text through chemical treatment or photography with certain filters, as in the spectacular case of the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which the earliest known texts of the ancient mathematician – by some 400 years  –  were recovered beneath the writing in a thirteenth‐century Greek prayer book (Netz and Noel 2007).

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Once the parchment had been prepared and cut, an individual sheet would be folded in half to produce a bifolium. The resulting leaves – called folios – have a recto (front) and verso (back) side, and it was common to arrange the leaves so that, when a book was open, the same sides of the hide – hair or flesh – would face each other. This was not a universal practice, however, particularly in the early period; for example, the Cathach of St. Columba, an early Irish manuscript discussed in Section 1.7, does not observe this rule (Gameson 2011, p. 34). As the St. Cuthbert Gospel indicates, not all manuscripts would have been as large or magnificent as the Codex Amiatinus, and the preparation of the writing surface could involve further folding, to produce smaller sheets. A bifolium folded again yields four leaves in a size called quarto, and a final fold produces eight small leaves, in the format called octavo. Not all leaves of these smaller sizes were necessarily produced by the folding method  –  they might have been cut to size instead – but the terms have become standard and are still used today to describe book sizes, both for manuscript codices and for printed books. Usually these terms strictly refer to the format of books (how the sheets were folded) not their size, since the original sheet could be of variable dimensions, but a common table of approximations would yield 30 × 48 cm for folio; 24 × 30 cm for quarto; and 15 × 23 cm for octavo. There are larger and smaller conventional sizes, but these are the most common in the manuscript world. There is an observable “hierarchy of size” in the early manuscript books being discussed here, with Bible texts produced in the largest format, liturgical books in quarto, and reading books in octavo (Gameson 2011, p. 23). By the end of the medieval period, the range of liturgical books included psalters, which contained the text of the Psalms; missals, which contained the text of the Mass; graduals, which contained music for the Mass; breviaries, which contained texts for the Office, the prayers and texts set for reading throughout the day in ecclesiastical institutions; and antiphonaries, which contained musical texts for the Office. Some of these liturgical books were very large, probably intended for communal use by choirs. Even in the earlier period, a book like the St. Cuthbert Gospel indicates that it is use, as well as content, that determines size; that is, a biblical text could be rendered in a grand, public format, like the Codex Amiatinus and the great insular Gospel books discussed in Section 1.7, or in a smaller format designed for private reading, like Cuthbert’s own copy. The writing was done by scribes, people trained to copy text. In the early monastic period, these were usually monks of the foundation. They could also have been nuns: while the experience of Anglo‐Saxon women can be notoriously difficult to reconstruct from their limited appearance in historical sources (Lees and Overing 2009), some surviving books suggest female, as well as male, literacy, even in this early period, although as with men, literacy was most likely to be found in the higher levels of society, and in the Church (Lerer 1991; McKitterick 1994a, 1994b; Bell 1995; Brown 2001). Indeed, the first female author in the English language we can name was a late fourteenth‐century anchoress, Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love was a work of mystical theology. But women (and men) did not have to be literate to produce texts. Another female mystic contemporary with Julian, Margery Kempe (c. 1373–1438) is considered the author of the first autobiography in English, although she could not write herself and had to dictate the work to a male amanuensis. Patronage, too, could be the occasion of book production, and even in the Anglo‐Saxon period, there is reason to think of both men and women as involved in the commissioning of books and texts.

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The tendency for monastic scribes to learn their craft in close local circles doubtless contributed to the development of common forms of writing. We have already noted that the St. Cuthbert Gospel is written in capitular uncial, while the Codex Amiatinus is written in uncial. Malcolm Parkes argues that the formal uncial of the Codex Amiatinus was developed through imitation, while the capitular uncial of the St. Cuthbert Gospel was a genuinely local development (Parkes 1991, p. 96). E.A. Lowe has shown how a distinctive form of English uncial can even be found on the Continent: Anglo‐Saxon figures like Willibrord and Boniface founded monasteries abroad (Lowe 1960, pp. 13–14), and the habits formed in their English scriptoria traveled with them, doubtless along with books in their local script. Parkes and Lowe are both paleographers, and paleographers categorize scripts according to certain features. The aspect of a script is its general appearance. The ductus refers to the way that the letters are written, considering such things as the order, direction, and number of strokes. Distinctions are also made between calligraphic (formal) scripts – also known as bookhands – and faster, cursive scripts (Bischoff 1990, p. 51). The join between letters that is often found in these latter kinds of scripts is called a ligature. The individual letterforms, and more particularly, the parts of each letter, are also used to describe and differentiate scripts. The upright strokes that make up letters like i or n or m are called minims. Ascenders (as on a lower‐case b or d) are the strokes that rise above the baseline, while descenders (as on a lower‐case p) fall below. A serif is a short stroke at the top or bottom of a stroke (the common description of certain print fonts as “sans serif” means that they lack these kinds of strokes). The closed curve of a letter like p or b or d is called the bow. A hand is, properly speaking, an individual realization of a particular script, and paleographers can often recognize scribal hands through particular unique versions of the main strokes and forms of a script. Scribes would prepare their pages for writing by using a knife or awl to prick holes as guides for the drawing of lines that structured the placement of elements on the page (Figure 1.4 shows a scribe with his tools). The lines might also be made with a pointed instrument of some kind or, particularly later in the period, with lead or crayon (Gameson 2011, p. 60). Lines could be both horizontal (to guide the individual lines of text) and vertical (to guide left or right justification of the text column). In the later Middle Ages, red ink lines often became a decorative feature of the text. When a text was to be decorated, the scribe would typically leave space for that work, to be done later either by the scribe himself or by another who might specialize in decoration. It was not uncommon for decorative programs to be left incomplete: we can often still see the small letters that scribes left in the spaces to be later filled by large decorated capitals, and sometimes, mostly in later medieval manuscripts, written directions to artists for pictures to be included. It is not unusual for a manuscript to copy the text of its exemplar (the manuscript from which the new manuscript is being made), but with quite different plans for decoration. Sometimes, however, a decorative program can itself be copied, as we will see in the discussion of the Utrecht Psalter in Section 1.9. Scribes wrote with quill pens, favoring geese and swans (Thomson 2008, p. 81), using inks they made in a variety of ways. The typical ink of the ancient world was carbon‐ based, consisting of a dark pigment such as charcoal, an adhesive agent such as gum arabic, and water. More common in the early Middle Ages were iron‐gall inks; these are based on acidic matter from vegetable sources such as oak galls, mixed with iron salt and gum arabic (Thomson 2008, p. 82; Gameson 2011). The advantage of the acidic inks

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Figure 1.4  A portrait of the scribe, from the twelfth‐century Eadwine Psalter. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.17.1, folio 283v. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

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was that they would “bite” into the parchment and thus stand less chance of fading, although mistakes in the formula could lead to damage of various kinds – too much acid might damage the surface, while too much gum could lead to flaking. Pigments could be made from vegetable or mineral sources, powdered and mixed with binding agents including egg or gum arabic. Some of the sources for pigments depended on trade, so as with parchment, factors affecting trade routes and financial means played a role in the colors that might be used in decoration. Greens might be yielded by malachite or verdigris, for example, the former exotic in Britain, and the latter, produced by the exposure of copper to air (or acid), much easier to obtain. Blue might come from lapis lazuli, but the mineral had to travel all the way from Afghanistan to reach Britain. Red sourced from lead was easily found; red based on cinnabar, much less so. Gold and silver could be used in leaf or paint form. The Viking raids affected the choice of pigments: “between the mid ninth and the early tenth century the range of colours in general use declined, corresponding to the reduction in the quality and quantity of book production as a whole … it is likely that all but the most readily available ingredients were difficult to obtain during the Viking onslaught” (Gameson 2011, p. 77). As Figure 1.4 shows, a scribe would typically have a knife at hand, both to sharpen his pens and to scrape away errors made while writing. Scribes would sometimes test their pens before they began writing. These pen trials are often still to be found in inconspicuous parts of medieval manuscripts, as for example the flyleaves at the beginning or ending of a book. Where a book was intended to have more than one color, the black text would be written first, and then either the same scribe or another would add initial letters and various textual elements (book and chapter divisions, the opening incipit and closing explicit, colophons), often in red (hence the term rubric, from the Latin ruber, or “red”). When scribes found errors, they might scrape them out and write over the erasure, or they might strike out or put a series of dots beneath the offending word, and then write the correct word between the lines or in the margin. Longer insertions could be written in the margin and marked with a signe de renvoi, a symbol indicating where in the text the correction should go. Sometimes these corrections seem to be the result of a kind of supervision or checking stage not unlike what we might think of when we think of copyediting. Other corrections might be made by later readers, using similar methods, and so it is not always easy to tell at what stage of production an error was spotted. Pages were arranged in bundles called quires or gatherings; the most common Anglo‐ Saxon form was quires of eight leaves (Gameson 2011, p. 42). When a book was ready for binding, the quires would be stacked and then sewn together in a process that remained roughly the same throughout the pre‐modern period, whether for manuscripts or printed books. The rare survival of the original binding on the St. Cuthbert Gospel allows us to see that it was sewn with a chain stitch technique that originated in Coptic bindings (Marks 1998, pp. 31–32), and that might have been familiar to monks at Jarrow from the Italian books brought back by Biscop (Needham 1979, p. 57). Most commonly, horizontal thongs or cords were incorporated into the sewing, lying across the spine, so that the thread passes through the quire, around the cord, through the next quire, and so on. This kind of sewing distributes the stresses of the sewing more evenly. The text block was then attached to wooden boards, either by the thread being passed directly into holes in the boards, or by feeding the thongs into grooves (Marks 1998, p. 38). Hardwood was preferred; the boards of the St. Cuthbert Gospel, for example, are

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made of birch. The inner side of the boards could have material pasted over them to hide the binding grooves and attachments. These pastedowns, as they are called, were sometimes made from older, dismembered manuscripts. It is not uncommon to find valuable fragments of older manuscripts buried in the bindings of manuscripts or even later printed books. Once the text block had been attached to the boards, the boards would be covered with the outer binding material. The St. Cuthbert Gospel is covered with tooled leather, of either goat or sheep, that has been dyed a deep crimson. Tooling is a process in which heated metal tools are used to impress designs into the cover material; these were sometimes left as is (blind‐tooling) and sometimes filled with colored pigments. Other decoration on the St. Cuthbert Gospel resulted from the damp leather being molded over cords that had been glued to the boards, creating the pattern on the cover (Brown 1969, pp. 14–16). Clasps were often used to hold books closed, since the pressure helped to keep the parchment flat. Parchment responds to moisture by rippling and sometimes, in extreme cases, reverting to something approaching the shape of the original animal – obviously not a desirable result! Other metal fittings on a binding might include corner guards, and sometimes bosses. The bosses were particularly important in protecting the books, when they were stored, not upright as we are used to, but horizontally on shelves or in chests. In situations like this, the bosses protected the covers. Very large, luxury books might also have plaques of ivory or metal, sometimes studded with jewels, affixed to their covers. These elaborate “treasure bindings” were often broken apart for their valuable materials in later periods, as for example during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and so there are only a few surviving English bindings. For example, at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York is an eleventh‐century Anglo‐Saxon Gospel book that retains its original English treasure binding. Its survival can perhaps be attributed to the fact that its first owner, Judith of Flanders (c. 1030– 1095), donated it to the Bavarian monastery of Weingarten, where she was buried. The tendency of books to travel, which has been something of a theme in our discussions thus far, probably saved this particular binding. The breaking‐up of treasure bindings did not always result in absolute destruction; again, bits of books can likewise travel and thus survive. The Pierpont Morgan Library also holds an eleventh‐century German manuscript in a seventeenth‐century treasure binding that features an ivory plaque made in England in the twelfth century (see Needham 1979, pp. 53–54).6 As we have seen, few books produced at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow survive, and in pausing to discuss book production methods we have necessarily wandered from the English monastery in both time and space. A final aspect of early production and consumption contexts, however, allows us to return to our starting point and to consider the books that Jarrow owned, as well as those they made. These of course might often have been the same books; that is, while the purchasing of books has been an important part of the story thus far, the production of them for local use is also important. Under Ceolfrith, the scriptorium of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow developed considerably. Quite a few scribes, for example, worked on the Codex Amiatinus (Lowe 1960, p. 13; Gameson 1992; Parkes 1991), and finishing the book might have taken a year of work (Brown 1969, p. 11). As noted above, the book is illustrated, although not as splendidly as the great insular Gospels to be discussed further in Section 1.7. There must also have been more routine production. Scholars have, for example, drawn on Bede’s own writings to

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develop a sense of the contents of the Monkwearmouth–Jarrow library in the eighth century, suggesting that anywhere from 150 to 250 volumes might be witnessed in Bede’s work, making the monastery “one of the best libraries in England in the eighth century” (M.L.W. Laistner, quoted in Lapidge 2005, p. 36). Viewed in this way, the library is a working collection; that is, its purpose is to hold, and in some cases to produce, the books that would be needed by a monastic community like Monkwearmouth– Jarrow and by scholars like Bede. But as the production of the Codex Amiatinus suggests, book production also participates in another kind of economy, one that has to do with prestige‐building and various kinds of claim‐staking. The volume intended to be presented by the abbot of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow to the Pope in Rome was a tangible symbol of the success and status of the English Church. The uncial script in which it is written is witness to “the fierce allegiance of the Wearmouth / Jarrow communities to the papacy … It is a script specifically associated with Rome” (De Hamel 1994, p. 21). The Roman version of Christianity was not, as noted above, the only version with influence in Britain, as the Celtic Church was also well established and engaged in sending out missionaries of its own. By means of this book, then, the Anglo‐Saxon monks of Monkwearmouth asserted their connection to Rome, and their claims to be taken seriously as a successful new seed of the Roman Church. As Richard Marsden puts it, this “iconic gift” was “designed to advertise the achievements of the monastery at the ends of the earth” (Marsden 1998; Marsden 2012, p. 407). That monastery’s library, meanwhile, supported the work of scholars like Bede, who through their writing further added to its reputation and claims to status.

1.5 ­The Relics of St. Cuthbert The Codex Amiatinus shows us the book as a symbol of wealth, power, and influence (or the desire for it), all connected to a particular imperial and theological narrative about the spread of Roman Christianity. We can return to that other manuscript associated with Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, the St. Cuthbert Gospel, to see a book functioning in a completely different set of symbolic frames. Small books like this one, which could easily be carried close to one’s person, remain central to devotion throughout the Middle Ages. At the same time, this particular personal book – if that is indeed what it was – rapidly acquired significance through its association with St. Cuthbert (c. 635– 687). Cuthbert was an important figure, a monk and hermit who became bishop of Lindisfarne. He had a reputation for sanctity, and miracles were attributed to him both during his life and after his death. Bede recounts that Cuthbert was buried in the cathedral church on Lindisfarne when he died in 687, and when, the following year, the monks of Lindisfarne decided to move his bones above ground, they were astonished, upon opening his tomb, to find “his body intact and whole, as if it were still alive, and the joints of the limbs flexible, and much more like a sleeping than a dead man” (Colgrave 1994, p. 229). The monks moved Cuthbert’s body to a wooden chest placed on the floor of the church, and it is possible that the St. Cuthbert Gospel was put in the chest at that time, although there were several other moments, between 698 and 1104, when this might have occurred (Brown 1969, pp. 28–29). In the ninth century – a period of Viking raids  –  the monks moved to several locations in the north of England before finally

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settling at Durham. Cuthbert’s reliquary coffin‐chest accompanied them on all their travels, and became an important attraction in the Anglo‐Saxon church there and in the Norman cathedral that replaced it in the twelfth century. It remained at Durham until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540, and after a gap in its history, was eventually gifted to a Jesuit institution, Stonyhurst College, in 1769 (Brown 1969, p. 1). At the top of the opening folio of the manuscript, an inscription has been erased. This is a twelfth‐century note recording the discovery of the book in Cuthbert’s tomb when the tomb was opened at Durham Cathedral in September of 1104, when Cuthbert’s remains were moved to the new shrine in the Cathedral (this kind of relocation of a saint’s relics is called a translation). Durham made much of its association with Cuthbert, and the St. Cuthbert Gospel was sometimes shown to visitors as part of the veneration of the saint. For example, Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, held up the book during the sermon he preached on the day of the translation, and the miraculous preservation of the book is clearly aligned, symbolically, with the miraculous preservation of the saint’s own body (Crook 2011, pp. 151–152). One miracle story has it that an attendee at the translation stole a thread from the ties of the bag containing the Gospel, and Cuthbert himself is said to have singled out the thief (Aird 1998, p. 176). It has been suggested that the book might have been placed in the coffin as a kind of magical talisman, to protect it, and it has also been pointed out that many Irish “pocket Gospels” were small enough to be worn as amulets, and that the Gospel of John was often held to have miraculous powers (Brown 1969, pp. 30–38). In all these miracle stories and possible functions, then, the book becomes an extension of the saint (as well, of course, as a visible artifact among many that attracted paying pilgrims). This function – as relic, as object of veneration, as a kind of metonym for the saint – reminds us that books were more than just textual vehicles. This particular book is important as well because it points us to another reality of early medieval textual production in Britain: not all ­written texts are found in books, nor are they all in the Roman alphabet.

1.6 ­Runes and Ogham The wooden chest in which both the saint and the book were found was covered in incised decoration, including the symbols of the four Evangelists, and a depiction of Mary holding the infant Christ. A notable feature of the decoration is that it includes inscriptions in both Roman letters and in runes, the Germanic characters found on objects throughout Scandinavia and Anglo‐Saxon England. Runes were developed for writing in Germanic languages, and were brought to the British Isles by speakers of those languages, during the period of migration and invasion discussed at the opening of this chapter. When the Roman alphabet came to be used for writing the language we now think of as Old English, some runic characters like thorn (þ) and eth (ð) were adapted and incorporated in order to represent sounds not used in Latin. Runes are alphabetic symbols, and on the chest containing the remains of St. Cuthbert they are used to render some of the names: Matthew, Mark, and John, as well as part of the inscription for Christ (Page 1999, pp. 171–172). The Runic alphabet is sometimes called the futhorc, from the sequence of the opening letters: a famous English example is the seax (knife) of Beagnoþ, which includes the name of either the owner or perhaps the smith who forged it, along with a 28‐letter futhorc

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Figure 1.5  The Seax of Beagnoþ, a tenth‐century knife inscribed with the name Beagnoþ in runic letters, as well as with a runic alphabet, known as a futhorc. Source: Image © The Trustees of the British Museum.

(see Figure 1.5). This object may point to the talismanic or magical use of runes: the knife is unusual and expensive, and there seems no other reason for the presence of the futhorc aside from magic (Page 1999, p. 113). Many early runic inscriptions in the British Isles – found on objects like rings, brooches, and weapons – have a talismanic quality, so the mixture of Roman and runic alphabets on St. Cuthbert’s coffin might stem in part from the sense that these symbols have a particular power. Another key early text of the English poetic canon is, like Caedmon’s Hymn, witnessed in remediated form, in this case in a move from carved runic inscription to manuscript. In the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, the Cross upon which Christ was crucified speaks, telling of its own history and its witnessing of the Crucifixion. The poem survives in two main forms: the tenth‐century anthology of Old English texts known as the Vercelli Book; and, in a partial version, as runic text carved onto the Ruthwell Cross, a seventh‐ or eighth‐century stone cross from Northumbria (Figure 1.6). The cross is carved with biblical scenes, some of which are surrounded by Latin text in the Roman alphabet (just as some of the names on Cuthbert’s coffin were exclusively in Roman letters). It is also carved with runic text, which closely resembles part of the Dream of the Rood as it appears in the Vercelli Book. The cross thus materializes the poem’s subject, as it “speaks” the poetic text through the runes carved on it. This is “the most sustained piece of runic carving in Anglo‐Saxon England” (Page 1999, p. 148), although it is by no means the whole of the poem as witnessed in the Vercelli Book. An inscription in Old English, resembling two lines from the poem, is also to be found on the eleventh‐century Anglo‐Saxon reliquary known as the Brussels Cross, once thought to have held a relic of the True Cross (the cross on which Christ was crucified). In this case, the text is obviously appropriate, and while the characters are not runic, one can see again the fusion of textual signification with something more, and once again, the text is not in a book but on an object with visual appeal and ritual significance. Another early medieval writing system, ogham, was used for early Irish and is found chiefly in memorial stone inscriptions, marking territories or graves. Thus, while there is no ogham parallel to the rendering of The Dream of the Rood on the Ruthwell Cross, the alphabetic symbol here retains a similar aura of significance, and it is thought that, like runes, ogham could be used for magical and talismanic purposes. Both runes and ogham persisted in manuscript records long after their primary use on objects and memorials had ceased. In Lebor Ogaim, or the Book of Oghams, is an Old Irish text on the subject of ogham, including word lists. The earliest version of the text is found in a fourteenth‐century manuscript known as the Book of Ballymote (Leabhar Bhaile an Mhóta),7 a collection of what might be thought of as useful and entertaining texts, including saints’ lives, genealogical material, historical material, and stories of Troy and Alexander the Great. By the 1390s, then, ogham seems to be both desirable knowledge and, perhaps, something that requires a reference text.

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

Figure 1.6  The Ruthwell Cross, showing Mary Magdalene and Christ, surrounded by a Latin inscription. Source: Licensed by Art Resource.

Runes, too, could be the subject of explanatory texts, the most famous of which is the Old English rune poem, once preserved in a tenth‐century manuscript that was all but destroyed in a fire in 1731. We have the text of this poem because it was copied by the paleographer and Anglo‐Saxon scholar Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726), and published in 1705 by another Anglo‐Saxon scholar, George Hickes (1642–1715). The manuscript survivals of both ogham and runes, then, add another layer to the significance of alphabetic symbols: the antiquarian interest they eventually come to attract. As with many aspects of text‐technology transitions, the lines are blurry. Ogham survives in post‐ medieval manuscripts in part because it remained a living aspect of the training of Irish poets beyond the Middle Ages. As for runes, Figure 1.7 is a page from a manuscript often called St. Dunstan’s Classbook,8 described in the catalogue of the Bodleian Library, where it is now found, as “a medley of useful knowledge” (Madan and Craster 1922, p. 243). That knowledge includes this runic alphabet, along with material relating to geometry and to the calculation of the calendar. The context, in other words, is similar to that found in the Book of Ballymote.

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Figure 1.7  A runic alphabet in the ninth‐century St. Dunstan’s Classbook. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Auct. f.4.32, folio 20r.

Here, the runic alphabet is introduced in such a way as to suggest that the characters are regarded as somewhat exotic; the Latin original translates as: “Nennius devised these letters in response to a certain Saxon scholar who scandalously claimed that the Britons did not have even the rudiments of learning, and so he formed the letters

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immediately, through the workings of his mind.” By this account, runes are a ­spontaneous creation of unique genius. Even though runes were still in use in the ninth century, the Classbook could be seen to suggest a kind of antiquarian interest; a need, perhaps, to write the runes and their story down in order to preserve them. The Classbook is not the only item in this manuscript. In fact, it is one piece in a medieval assembly of four different parts. While this part was written around 820 in Wales, the other three parts have a range of dates, places of composition, and contents. One was written in Brittany in the second half of the ninth century, and contained the first book of the Ars of Eutyches, with Latin and Breton glosses. Another part was written in Wales, in the second half of the ninth century, and contained Ovid’s Ars amatoria, with glosses in Latin and Welsh. Still another part was an Old English homily on the finding of the True Cross, written at Glastonbury in the eleventh century. The composite manuscript, then, is a witness to the polyglot character of Britain in the first millennium, as well as to the efforts of medieval scholars to preserve and understand both the classical inheritance and older writing systems and languages of Britain itself. It also reminds us that books moved around  –  not just on special and spectacular journeys like those of the Codex Amiatinus to Rome, or the St. Cuthbert Gospel all over Northumbria in the saint’s reliquary, but also in more routine ways, as scholars or communities imported, created, carried, copied, and traded books.

1.7 ­Insular Gospels The Codex Amiatinus and other products of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow often witness, in their choice of script and decoration, the community’s affiliation with Rome and the Roman form of Christianity. But other influences also matter in such books. There were other important book traditions, and the period in which the books we have explored so far were produced also saw the flowering of the insular book style associated with Celtic Christianity. In Ireland, the conversion to Christianity, the language, and the production of script and books all had a distinct character. Ogham can be found in Ireland as early as the fourth century, with examples continuing into the ninth, but Latin writing was also produced in Ireland from an early period. The Cathach of St. Columba is a partial psalter written in Ireland in Latin, and dating to about 560–600. The book is traditionally associated with St. Columba, or Colum Cille in Irish (c. 521–597), an Irish abbot and missionary to what is now Scotland. Columba was said to have copied the manuscript himself with the aid of a miraculous light from a book owned by St. Finnian. Another tradition has it that Columba and Finnian got into a dispute over ownership of the manuscript after Columba copied the text, and the eventual result was a battle in 561 that resulted in many deaths. Columba founded the Celtic monastery at Iona in 563, and the monastery became a source of missionaries and books. The script used in the Cathach of St. Columba is not the Roman‐inspired uncial and capitular uncial favored by Saxon foundations such as Monkwearmouth– Jarrow, but rather an Irish majuscule. This is a script that developed in Ireland and  spread, through the efforts of Irish Christian missionaries like Columba, to Anglo‐Saxon England and beyond.

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This style of script and the decoration that comes to be associated with it is called “insular” (from the Latin insula, or “island”) because of its origins and use in the British Isles. It would eventually develop into such famous examples of insular style as the Book of Kells. Christopher De Hamel draws a link between early Irish books like the Cathach of St. Columba, and the ascetic and, from the Roman point of view eccentric, practices of the Irish Church: “The Irish – isolated, holy, ascetic, independent of Rome – produced no uncial manuscripts at all, and wrote entirely in their eccentric Irish majuscule and minuscule scripts. Their books were at first generally cramped and irregular and on poor‐quality vellum, consistent with the primitive nature of the communities … The leaves [of the Cathach of St Columba] are crooked and the lines uneven, but there is something deeply venerable about this relic” (De Hamel 1994, p. 22). The use of the word “relic” returns us to the function of books like the St. Cuthbert Gospel, and indeed the Cathach of St. Columba also eventually found its way into a reliquary container. In this case, this was a cumdach, or book shrine, made for the book at the monastery of Kells by Sitric between 1062 and 1098. Other Irish books have or had book shrines, but what makes the Cathach of St. Columba of particular interest is that it was carried into battle as a talisman. While it is somewhat larger than the St. Cuthbert Gospel, this too is a small, portable book (27 × 19 cm), even with its cumdach, and it was named “cathach,” or battler, in recognition of “the practice of carrying it thrice right‐hand‐wise around the field of battle as a talisman” (“The Cathach”). Indeed, the presence of the book inside the cumdach was eventually forgotten, so that when the shrine was opened in 1813, the manuscript was discovered afresh. The Cathach of St. Columba is, as noted above, an early example of Irish book production. Another book that had its own cumdach (in this case, the shrine was lost in the seventeenth century), the Book of Durrow,9 is sometimes described as “the earliest surviving fully decorated insular Gospel manuscript” (Meehan 1996, p. 9); that is, it is the earliest example of the insular decorative style which is only hinted at in the Cathach of St. Columba. It has several features that were to become ubiquitous in the great insular Gospel books of the period: elaborately interlaced, non‐script decorative pages called carpet pages; evangelist symbols and portraits; and elaborately decorated Chi‐Rho pages (the Chi‐Rho is the monogram for Christ, created by superimposing the first two Greek letters of Christ’s name). The date and place of production have both been the subject of considerable debate, as summed up by De Hamel: “Scholars have argued for origins in Ireland (c. 650), Iona itself (c. 665), or even right across at Lindisfarne (c. 680).” He goes on to note that the “size of the book suggests it could easily slip into a traveller’s saddle‐pack, and perhaps it was used in several missionary outposts” (De Hamel 1994, p. 22). This is another reminder that early books could travel, and in traveling could have influence, both religious (as the reference to missions suggests) and artistic. For example, the Echternach Gospels were produced in Ireland or Northumbria (Lindisfarne) c. 690, and were probably taken to Echternach, in what is now Luxembourg, by the Northumbrian missionary St. Willibrord (De Hamel 1994, p. 32).10 Willibrord founded a monastery at Echternach, and the abbey soon had an important scriptorium. Missionary activity like this led to significant numbers of insular books finding their way to important continental libraries (De Hamel 1994, p. 32). The influence of these books is then shown by the adoption of insular scripts and methods of decoration both in Britain and abroad: “The early and slow uncial script was abandoned, even in Canterbury and Wearmouth/

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Jarrow, and the insular script became standard both for the grand Gospel Books and for the simple missionary texts. In Ireland today it more or less still survives, the longest lasting European handwriting, far more than a millennium after the last Roman uncial was used. The script was so intimately linked with its Celtic origins that the ninth‐century library catalogue of St Gall listed together a whole group of missionary books as ‘libri scottice scripti’ [books in Scottish script]” (De Hamel 1994, p. 37). While the Synod of Whitby in 664 established the primacy in Northumbria of the Roman form of Christianity, the artistic influence of the insular tradition persisted. The best‐known of the insular Gospel books are the Book of Kells (c. 800, Figure 1.8) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 715, Figure  1.9).11 De Hamel suggests a connection between Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels, aligning the production of the manuscript at Lindisfarne with the first translation of Cuthbert’s remains: “The Lindisfarne Gospels was intended to be a showpiece. In 698 the monks of Lindisfarne reburied the body of St. Cuthbert in an elaborate wooden shrine, an event which brought many pilgrims to the monastery. The manuscript belongs exactly to this period and the colophon names St Cuthbert as co‐patron. The volume was probably on display for about a hundred years” (De Hamel 1994, p. 30). When the monks left Lindisfarne for Durham, they took the Gospels with them. The twelfth‐century chronicler Simeon of Durham writes that one night in a tempest, the monks lost a precious Gospel book overboard. One of the monks received a vision telling him where to search for the lost manuscript, and they all hastened to the sea: When these men reached the shore, the sea had receded much further back than usual, and going out three miles or more they discovered the volume of the holy gospels, which had lost none of the external brilliancy of its gems and gold, nor any of the internal beauty of its illuminations, and the fairness of its leaves, but appeared just as if it had never come into any contact whatever with the water … Moreover, the book which we have mentioned is preserved even to this present day in the church which is privileged to possess the body of this holy father; and, as has already been remarked, it exhibits no trace of having sustained injury from the water. There is no doubt that this is to be ascribed to the merits of St. Cuthbert himself, and of those other individuals who were employed in its production; that is to say, bishop Eadfrid of holy memory, who wrote it with his own hand in the house of the blessed Cuthbert; and his successor the venerable Aethelwold, who directed that it should be adorned with gold and gems; and the holy anchorite Bilfrid, whose skilful hand carried out the wishes of Aethelwold, and executed this beautiful piece of workmanship, for he was a master in the art of the goldsmith. These persons, influenced alike by their affection for this confessor and bishop beloved of God, left in this work a monument to all future ages of their devotion towards him. (Simeon of Durham 1855, pp. 662–663) Simeon is telling a miracle story, and he is doing so many centuries after the purported miracle is said to have occurred. The details about the production of the Lindisfarne Gospels that he gives, however, are strikingly explicit. The final folio of the Gospels includes an explicit and a colophon. “Explicit” simply means “here ends” (an incipit, Latin for “here begins,” comes at the beginning of a text). In this case, the brief

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explicit translates: “Here ends the book according to John.” A colophon is a passage giving details about the production or ownership of a book. Colophons are not uncommon in medieval manuscripts (or, as we will see later, in early printed books). This one is interesting for several reasons. It is clearly a later addition, and so not the work of the original scribe, as is sometimes the case. It does, however, name that scribe, as the first line of the colophon translates as, “Eadfrith, bishop of the church of Lindisfarne, first wrote this book, for God and for St Cuthbert and all those saints whose relics are in the island.” A description of the binding, attributed to Aethelwald and Bilfrith, follows. All of this so closely mirrors Simeon’s description of the Gospels that it seems clear he is drawing on the colophon. He must translate to do so, for while Simeon’s account is in Latin, the colophon – dated to the tenth century – is in Old English. Old English glosses can also be seen throughout the book, as in the examples written above some of the words in Figure 1.9. This running gloss, the colophon also tells us, is the work of Aldred (who was the provost of Chester‐le‐Street around 970). These glosses are a reminder that, while books large and small could, as we have seen, have significant symbolic value, they are also nevertheless textual supports. The Old English glosses show us an Anglo‐Saxon reader working through Latin, the language which was simultaneously the lingua franca of the Church and yet also foreign to some churchmen. The script that Aldred uses is much smaller and finer than the original letterforms of the manuscript, which certainly helps to keep the gloss clear by allowing him to align the Old English directly above its Latin equivalent. Even more important for the legibility of the gloss, however, is a feature that we tend today to take for granted: separation between the words. In the ancient world, words were not separated, but rather written in what is called scriptio continua, in which the words run together. This is a system that assumes high literacy and perhaps prior knowledge of the text in question; the text is in this context more an aide‐mémoire than a tool of discovery. Text would be read aloud, and punctuation was unnecessary because the rhythm of the (familiar) text aided a reader in knowing when to pause. While this system originated on the scrolls traditionally used for texts in the ancient world, it carried over into the codex form, and late antique manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth‐century copy of the Bible in Greek, and the Vatican Virgil, a manuscript of Virgil made around 400, are written in scriptio continua.12 A specialized form of punctuation, which divided lines of text by clauses and phrases, was called per cola et commata, and was to be found in biblical manuscripts. While its use was partly educational – intended, St. Jerome said, to make the meaning of the biblical text clearer – it also, like scriptio continua, assumed reading aloud, as the sense units were those that would guide the declamation of the text. In the St. Augustine Gospels,13 written in Italy in the late sixth century and traditionally said to have been brought to Britain by St. Augustine of Canterbury in 597 as part of the mission to Christianize the country, the words are not separated, but the beginnings of clauses are set off. This is a book for missionaries, and its layout reflects the Roman origin of those early missions (De Hamel 1994). But between the importation of books like the St. Augustine Gospels, and the creation of an indigenous book such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, there is a shift in the users of these books, one that is reflected in the glossing of the Lindisfarne Gospels discussed above. Aldred’s Old English gloss suggests that he is imagining at least some users of the book to whom Latin will be unfamiliar. The gloss is an aid to reading and perhaps also to language acquisition.

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The gloss is possible because the words of the biblical text in the Lindisfarne Gospels are divided from each other rather than run together as in the more ancient systems we have just discussed. The unfamiliarity of Latin is in fact at the root of this new form of writing text. Word separation can be traced to Irish scribes in the seventh and eighth centuries, for whom (like Aldred’s imagined Anglo‐Saxon speakers) Latin was a foreign language. Whether or not the St. Augustine Gospels is really a book that Augustine brought with him on his mission, his books would surely have looked like this, and would have been easily navigated by an educated Roman monk such as Augustine. Paul Saenger points to the different ways that Romans learned languages, as opposed to Irish and English readers, as being at the root of word separation: “In ancient Rome, the only foreign language had been Greek, which Roman children learned naturally as a spoken tongue … Irishmen and Englishmen learned Latin not as a spoken language, but artificially, in the schoolroom, from word‐separated grammars and glossaries. As a result, insular pedagogy emphasized word‐to‐word correspondence” (Saenger 1997, p. 91). Word‐separated text was not the only result of this approach to Latin. A whole new category of British books, word‐separated glossaries, developed in England and Ireland in the same period (Saenger 1997, pp. 90–91). Word separation, glosses, and glossaries all suggest what we might think of as a reading orientation toward the page; that is, these are aids to those who wish to access the text, the words. A shift from the ancient practice of reading aloud, to the practice of silent reading, accompanies these shifts in the form of both the book and the text on the page. At the same time, insular Gospel books such as the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells reveal, through their decoration, another possible stance in relation to the page. The historian Gerald of Wales, in his Topographia Hibernica (Irish Topography) of 1188, describes a book that has been taken to be the Book of Kells, although Gerald claims to have seen it in Kildare, not at Kells Abbey. Whether this is the Book of Kells or another, now lost insular Gospel, the description clearly shows the wonder that these highly decorated manuscripts evoked in viewers: Among all the miracles of Kildare nothing seems to me more miraculous than that wonderful book which they say was written at the dictation of an angel during the lifetime of the virgin. This book contains the concordance of the four gospels according to Saint Jerome, with almost as many drawings as pages, and all of them in marvellous colours. Here you can look upon the face of the divine majesty drawn in a miraculous way; here too upon the mystical representations of the Evangelists, now having six, now four, and now two, wings. Here you will see the eagle; there the calf. Here the face of a man; there that of a lion. And there are almost innumerable other drawings. If you look at them carelessly and casually and not too closely, you may judge them to be mere daubs rather than careful compositions. You will see nothing subtle where everything is subtle. But if you take the trouble to look very closely, and penetrate with your eyes to the secrets of the artistry, you will notice such intricacies, so delicate and subtle, so close together and well‐knitted, so involved and bound together, and so fresh still in their colourings that you will not hesitate to declare that all these things must have been the result of the work, not of men, but of angels. (Gerald of Wales 1983, p. 84)

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Like the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells has its own miracle story, in this case associated with its production. Gerald writes that an angel appeared to the scribe every night in a dream, showing him what was to be copied and enjoining the scribe to pray to St. Brigit before beginning his work. The language in the description above suggests that the drawings are a way into some kind of mystical or secret knowledge, and certainly some of the more elaborately decorated pages seem at first impenetrable to traditional reading. Figure 1.8 is the “Liber generationis” page from the Gospel of Matthew in the Book of Kells. The opening words of the Gospel of Matthew are “Liber generationis Iesu Christi filii David filii Abraham.” [The book of the ancestry of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham, etc.] Here, the letters of “Liber” are arranged almost as if a monogram, and intricate “liber generationis” pages are a common feature in insular Gospel books. The Chi‐Rho, which actually is a monogram, is also a frequent subject for this kind of treatment: Figure  1.9 shows the Chi‐Rho page from the Lindisfarne Gospels. In both cases, letters have become elaborate visual symbols, urging a viewer to pause, as Gerald suggests, and wonder at the intricacy of the design. The evangelist is shown holding a book, so the primacy of the book as the site or mediator of the viewer’s experience is clearly signaled. But while this is a textual encounter, it is not necessarily a reading one. The carpet pages also found in books like the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells contain no text at all. Some are purely geometric decoration; some, such as the carpet pages preceding each Gospel book in the Lindisfarne Gospels, may feature the cross. Writing about medieval memory practices, Mary Carruthers notes that these “are not pages which one can easily digest; like the texts they introduce they must be looked at and looked at again, ruminated, absorbed and made one’s own. The figures that peek through the interlace are not apparent until one looks long enough to begin putting together what seems at first fragmentary” (Carruthers 2008, p. 333). The activity imagined of a viewer here is contemplative and recursive. These books are magnificent showpieces, witnesses to the glory of God to be sure, but also to the skills of their producers. Some may have been intended for display on the altar. But while the great insular Gospel books have a ceremonial, monumental orientation, insular style can also be found in personal books. The Gospel book now known as the Book of Deer14 may be the earliest manuscript produced in Scotland, written sometime between 850 and 1000. While this Irish “pocket Gospel” book is by no means as elaborately decorated as are the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells, it features stylized initials, interlacing, and geometric decoration, as well as evangelist portraits and symbol pages. Personal reading, in other words, is still mediated through design features that encourage contemplation and meditation. The Book of Deer is also of interest because it includes twelfth‐century additions in Scots Gaelic; these are the oldest surviving examples of writing in Gaelic. Another insular Gospel book, this one in the monumental format, the St. Chad Gospels, contains the oldest example of Old Welsh writing (Figure 1.10).15 The manuscript dates to about 730, and the Welsh marginalia to between the ninth and tenth centuries. The Gaelic text in the Book of Deer includes details about land grants to a monastery, and the Welsh in the St. Chad Gospels includes accounts of legal disputes and land grants. Both books, in other words, have become repositories for material that, while clearly deemed significant, is not related to the text of the Gospels. The additions are also, like the Old English glosses in the Lindisfarne Gospels, a reminder of the multilingual climate in which many of these books functioned.

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

Figure 1.8  The opening of the Gospel of Matthew in the Book of Kells, starting with the words “Liber generationis.” Dublin, Trinity College, MS 58, folio 29r. Source: Licensed by Art Resource.

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Figure 1.9  The Chi‐Rho (the monogram for Christ) page from the Lindisfarne Gospels. London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D.iv, folio 29r. Source: Licensed by Art Resource.

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

Figure 1.10  The St. Chad Gospels, p. 141: this page includes legal memoranda written in Old Welsh. Source: Reproduced by permission of Lichfield Cathedral.

The common practice of naming such books for places of origin or domicile is striking in this context, as it tends to imply a kind of fixity where in fact the context might have been much more fluid. The St. Chad Gospels are a case in point. They have also been called the St. Teilo Gospels, the Llandeilo Fawr Gospels, and the Lichfield Gospels. The first of the Welsh marginal inscriptions, on page 141 of the manuscript, records the gift of the manuscript to the Church of St. Teilo by a man called Gelhi, who had traded his horse for the book. The Gospels left the Church of Llandeilo Fawr before the end of the eleventh century for Lichfield Cathedral. Both sites have, in our time, asserted their claims on the book. The donation story and the early Welsh marginalia are an important part of imagining the Gospels as “Wales’s Elgin Marbles,” as they have been called

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(Echard 2008, p. 215). Lichfield Cathedral, for its part, took the occasion of the archeological discovery in 2006 of the original shrine to St. Chad under the current building to announce the reunification of Gospels and shrine. As with the St. Cuthbert Gospel, the association of book with shrine with saint is a powerful one. In both cases, these books are more than just textual support; each is intimately and intricately embedded in a web of historical and cultural associations.

1.8 ­Books in English The St. Cuthbert Gospel and the Lindisfarne Gospels were, as we have seen above, among the treasures that the monks of Lindisfarne took with them when they finally left the monastery in 875. They were fleeing because of ongoing Viking raids: Norsemen had first raided the island of Lindisfarne in 793; Jarrow was a target in 794 and Iona, which may have been the birthplace of the Book of Kells, was raided several times between 795 and 806. The monastery founded in Wales by Dewi (Saint David, d. 589) became the site of a cathedral that was raided repeatedly and finally burned in 1087. As we have seen, by disrupting trade routes, Viking raids affected the appearance of books produced in Britain because certain materials for pigment were not being reliably imported. The raids also of course had an effect on what has survived from the period, and doubtless for every book saved in dramatic stories such as those surrounding the St. Cuthbert and Lindisfarne Gospels, many others were lost. This was not, however, the first invasion in British history with consequences for books, nor would it be the last. Before the Viking raids was the adventus Saxonum, the arrival of Germanic tribes in Britain from the fifth century, following the withdrawal of the Romans. We have been concerned thus far with Latin books produced in both Celtic and English (Anglo‐Saxon) contexts, but before leaving the Saxon period, it is important to note the great flowering of vernacular book production in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. It is to some of these English books – which are also books in English – that we now turn. The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch is one of seven surviving manuscripts of this Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament.16 The manuscript dates to somewhere between 1020 and 1040. There are 394 illustrations, many of them unfinished. Later Protestant readers valued this book because it provided support for the contested idea of vernacular translation of the Bible (Withers 2007, p. 4), and we will see other examples of sixteenth‐century humanist readers turning to the books of the Anglo‐Saxon period to bolster the theological and ideological positions of the Church of England. But what about eleventh‐century readers? How was an illustrated book like this intended to be used? The Hexateuch is quite a large book, with pages measuring 32.5 × 21.5 cm, large enough, it has been pointed out, for more than one person to view it at a time. We might imagine an audience of mixed literacy, perhaps of mixed laymen and clergymen, with the “physical relationship of text and image … [providing] a ­performative context, a theatrical backdrop against which small groups of privileged readers, listeners, and viewers might enact or learn to enact social roles based on texts while participating in or witnessing the reading of the manuscript” (Withers 2007, p. 176). Note that this is not simply a matter of passive spectatorship, but rather, a complex series of reading and viewing situations, perhaps pointing the way to how we are to understand similar uses of image in relation to text in medieval books.

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The Old English Hexateuch is a translation from Latin, as are other important Old English texts, such as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. The educational program and ambitions of Alfred, King of Wessex, provided the impetus for many such translations. During his reign, Alfred repeatedly defended his kingdom against Danish incursions and gradually consolidated the Saxon kingdoms, allowing for the spread of legal and educational reforms (and the books associated with these). Alfred translated some texts himself, including Boethius’s Consolation. Recopying meant that Alfred’s translation program continued to spread English versions of Latin texts after the king’s death. There was, in addition, a rich tradition of vernacular literature, and the years around the turn of the millennium saw the creation of the four major Old English manuscripts to which we owe most of what we know about the imaginative literature of the Anglo‐Saxon period. These are the Vercelli Book, of the late tenth century; the Exeter Book, c. 950–990; the Junius or Caedmon manuscript, c. 950–1050; and the Beowulf manuscript, which we have already discussed briefly above.17 The Vercelli Book contains a mix of apparently miscellaneous texts (religious in nature) in both prose and verse, including the poetic Dream of the Rood, which also appears in part, as noted in Section 1.6, in runes on the Ruthwell Cross. It may have been copied at St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, and while it was not rediscovered in Vercelli in Italy until the nineteenth century, it is generally thought that it left England sometime in the eleventh or twelfth century, perhaps carried by a pilgrim (Treharne 2007). The Exeter Book is a poetic manuscript (apart from some leaves added later) containing a wide range of material, including riddles, elegies, and religious works. There is debate as to whether it was made at Exeter, Christ Church Canterbury, or Glastonbury, but we do know that by 1072 it was in Exeter, where it remains to this day, as Bishop Leofric included it in a list of the cathedral’s treasures, calling it “i. mycel englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoðwisan geworht” [A large English book with everything written out in the manner of poetry] (Conner 1993, p. 4). The Junius manuscript contains four long poems in Old English on biblical material; these are called Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan, but it is important to remember that, as often happens with medieval texts, the titles are not part of the original manuscript but instead represent later editors’ decisions. Bede’s story of Caedmon, with which our study began, reports that Caedmon composed poetry on precisely these subjects, and so the manuscript has been called the Caedmon manuscript, although today scholars agree that the poems are by different hands and from different periods. This manuscript is the only one of those discussed thus far that has decoration: there are many half‐ and full‐page pen drawings at the beginning of the manuscript illustrating the biblical narratives, but after the first third of the codex, the spaces for decoration have been left blank. This decorative program might suggest a wealthy patron who perhaps paid the producing monastery to produce the book (Treharne 2006). The Vercelli and Exeter books are each written by a single scribe and seem to have been conceived from the start as single projects. The Junius manuscript is a bit more complex, because its first three items are in a single hand, while the last is in three somewhat later hands. It is still traditional, however, to view it as a medieval compilation and to note the thematic congruence of its material (Treharne 2006). The Beowulf manuscript is a somewhat different case, because it is a seventeenth‐century compilation of a number of originally separate medieval manuscripts. Beowulf is found in the

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section of this compilation sometimes referred to as the Nowell Codex, after Laurence Nowell (c. 1530–1570), an antiquarian who studied the Old English language. He ­collected material like the Beowulf manuscript, and he also transcribed Old English texts from other manuscripts. The Nowell Codex contained three other Old English texts in addition to Beowulf. When it came into the library of Sir Robert Cotton, a collector we will learn more about in Section 3.4, the book that had belonged to Nowell was bound with another collection of Old English material, called the Southwick Codex. While the Nowell Codex probably dates to around the year 1000, the Southwick material is later, from the twelfth century. The Southwick material is religious in nature, while the Nowell codex seems more eclectic, containing, in addition to Beowulf, a homily, the Marvels of the East, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and Judith. The Marvels section is illustrated with some of the fabulous beasts and creatures described. The Beowulf manuscript was seriously damaged by the fire in 1731 at Ashburnham House, where the Cotton collection was being housed. In an interesting twist of fate, another important Old English text damaged by this fire – Cotton Otho B.xi, a mid‐tenth century copy of the Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History – is known to us today mostly because of Laurence Nowell, whose surviving transcript of that manuscript preserves a text all but lost in the fire.18 These four (or five) major Old English books, then, testify to the rich tradition of literary and book production in England at the turn of the millennium, and remind us, too, of the many risks to medieval books. Water, fire, war, ideologically motivated destruction, neglect … all these have, over the centuries, plucked medieval books out of the stream of history. But books have a way of bobbing back up again, as our next side‐trip into books and their movements will show.

1.9 ­The Utrecht Psalter Sometime around the first half of the ninth century, a most unusual book, now called the Utrecht Psalter, was made near Reims, “the best‐known centre for book production in the early ninth century” (De Hamel 1994, p. 50).19 The script used for the Psalter, called rustic capitals, is backward‐looking (this, like uncial, was a Roman hand), and the 166 illustrations are ink drawings. The Psalter somehow traveled to England, and by the year 1000 it had reached Canterbury, which had become a major center of book production, with two significant scriptoria. It is not clear how or why the Psalter made its way to Canterbury, but it is widely accepted that the presence in Britain of this and perhaps other Reims manuscripts had a lasting influence on the book arts (van der Horst 1996, p. 33). Strikingly, the Psalter was copied three times over the next few centuries. These copies are the Harley Psalter, c. 1120; the Eadwine Psalter, c. 1150 (see Figures 1.4 and 1.11); and the Anglo‐Catalan or Paris Psalter, c. 1180–1190. Each of these copies shows how a book could be copied, and adapted, according to local use and tastes. The earliest copy, the Harley Psalter, is the work of a dozen artists and scribes associated with Christ Church, over a period of more than a hundred years (Noel 1996, p. 149).20 While the textual source, script, and layout were not the same as found in the Utrecht Psalter, the copies of the illustrations are often remarkably exact. Careful study of the layout and steps in making the Psalter have led to the conclusion that “Harley’s makers considered the illustrations to be a higher priority than the text in the book’s production” (Noel 1996, p. 148). The style of those illustrations points the way to the

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

eventual development of “a national artistic idiom” (Dodwell 1954, p. 1). This idiom is the work of artists on either side of the Norman Conquest of 1066. So, while the Conquest saw the installation of a new aristocracy and a new culture, there was continuity along with rupture. The latest illustrations in the Harley Psalter still ­display what has been called the “impressionistic style” (Dodwell 1954, p. 27) of the Utrecht Psalter, and C.R. Dodwell has suggested thinking of art after the Conquest as essentially “bilingual” (Dodwell 1954, p. 21). The Eadwine Psalter is, in many ways, “a complete contrast to Harley.” It has three Latin versions of each Psalm (these are called the Roman, Hebrew, and Gallican forms), along with extra Psalms and a Calendar not found in the Utrecht Psalter. It is “an encyclopedic book and not a picture book” (Noel 1996, p. 153), much bigger than the Harley Psalter, and with a much more complex page layout (see Figure 1.11). The three versions of each psalm appear in their own columns, with interlinear translations in Old English and Anglo‐ Norman French. William Noel thinks that this layout suggests the purpose of this copy is to allow comparison of the versions of the Psalms. We might think of the Eadwine Psalter, he says, as a kind of “pictorial concordance” (Noel 1996, p. 238). Elaine Treharne sees the manuscript – large, imposing, multilingual, learned – as “a cultural and perhaps political statement about the wealth of the community and the resources at its disposal, both in terms of its ecclesiastical and monastic eliteness and its intellectual superiority,” different from other deluxe twelfth‐century books such as the Winchester Bible, discussed in Section  2.1, in its insistence on multilingualism in general and English in particular (Treharne 2012, p. 172). The book contains a detailed drawing of Christ Church, and it is easy to see “its symbolic value for the entire Christ Church community” (Noel 1996, p. 155). Treharne’s insistence on the multilingual character of the book reminds us as well that it was not just a symbol but also a tool of language learning and, perhaps, integration. The final copy is the Paris Psalter.21 It too has a three‐column layout, but it no longer has the extensive Old English text found in the Eadwine Psalter, perhaps, Noel suggests, because it was made “nearly one hundred and fifty years after the Norman Conquest” (Noel 1996, p. 124). Its illustrations look very different from those in its model, as they are fully painted miniatures, rather than the line drawings of both Utrecht and Harley. The model is not the Utrecht Psalter, at least not directly, but rather, the Eadwine Psalter (Dodwell 1954, p. 98). Dodwell sees the style of the illustrations here as looking toward the Gothic, a more “international” style, even as they retain “much of the native affection for … pattern” which explained the attraction of the Utrecht Psalter to English copyists in the first place (Dodwell 1954, p. 40). The Eadwine Psalter speaks to and of a particular, complex moment in British history, while the Paris Psalter suggests a movement toward another, different moment. In a footnote to its British history that links the beginning and the ending of this section of our study, the Utrecht Psalter now contains Gospel leaves in the formal uncial characteristic of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow (Lowe 1960, p. 11). These leaves were probably bound into the Psalter when it was in the care of the collector Sir Robert Cotton, who is further discussed below (Parkes 1991, p. 95). It is not clear how Cotton obtained the manuscript, although he seems to have obtained it between the 1590s and the 1620s, and it is not known exactly how it made its way from Cotton’s collection to the University Library in Utrecht in 1716, but it is most fortunate that it made that last journey, since as a result it escaped the Ashburnham House fire of 1731, during which many of Cotton’s manuscripts were destroyed (van der Horst 1996, pp. 34–36). Once again we are reminded that books are, or were, mobile, and in this case, that was a very good thing.

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Figure 1.11  Folio 8r of the Eadwine Psalter, showing three versions of the Psalm in parallel columns, with interlinear translations in Anglo Norman and Old English. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.17.1. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

Notes 1 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61. 2 Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Cardiff, MS 2.81. 3 London, British Library, Additional MS 89000. 4 Like many of the manuscripts discussed in this section, this “oldest intact European

book” can be viewed online in a digital facsimile. See http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89000&index=6. 5 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatino 1. 6 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MSS M 708 and M 759. 7 Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23. 8 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. f.4.32. 9 Dublin, Trinity College, MS A.4.5. 10 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS latin 9389. 11 The Book of Kells: Dublin, Trinity College, MS 58. The Lindisfarne Gospels: London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D.iv. 12 London, British Library, Additional MS 43725, and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 3225. 13 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286. 14 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.6.32. 15 Lichfield Cathedral, St. Chad Gospels. 16 London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B.iv. 17 Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXVII; Exeter, Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3501; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11; and London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv. 18 Nowell’s transcript is now British Library, Additional MS 43703. 19 Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 32. 20 London, British Library, MS Harley 603. 21 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS latin 8846.

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2 From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530 2.1 ­Spectacular Displays: Giant Bibles and the Guthlac Roll Thus far, we have seen different kinds of pictures in British books, including the Italianate evangelist portrait of the Codex Amiatinus, the intricate interlaced decorations of the insular Gospel Books, and the lively pen‐and‐ink drawings of such quintessentially “English” books as the Junius manuscript and the Harley Psalter. As we move firmly into the High Middle Ages – the period from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries – we encounter many books and related objects that witness the sophistication of the book arts in Britain. The Winchester Bible is an enormous codex (58.3 × 39.6 cm) of 468 folios, the kind of monumental book commonly called a Giant Bible.1 There are several surviving Giant Bibles from England, but the Winchester Bible is the largest and most splendid of them all. It was probably made for Henry of Blois (c. 1096–1171), bishop of Winchester and the brother of King Stephen. Like the Codex Amiatinus, its sheer size would have required a significant investment in animal skins for the writing support; in addition, its illuminations feature precious blue pigments based on lapis lazuli, and the lavish use of gold. Made between 1160 and 1175, it was remarkably written by a single scribe (recall that at least half a dozen scribes worked on the Codex Amiatinus), but at least six different artists contributed to its decoration. Some of these artists might have been freelance professionals. For example, there are links between the style of at least two of them and the style of murals in a building in northern Spain, similarities that lead Christopher De  Hamel to describe the men as “travelling ­professionals” (De Hamel 1994, p. 105). The decorative program of the Winchester Bible  –  “the elaborate programme of illustration planned to historiate the initials of its text, and the three (possibly four) full pages of imagery” (Donovan 1993, p. 6) – was never finished. A historiated initial is one that contains “an identifiable scene or figures, sometimes related to the text” (Brown 1994, p. 68). A large decorated initial that includes human or animal figures, but without suggesting a specific scene, is called an inhabited initial. Other kinds of initials found in manuscripts include anthropomorphic initials, which are formed out

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

of human figures; gymnastic initials, which are made of acrobatic human or animal figures; and zoomorphic initials, which are made entirely out of animal figures. Figure 2.1 is an example of a completed historiated initial in a smaller but still richly decorated book, the Carrow Psalter, a manuscript made in East Anglia in the mid‐thirteenth century.2 This initial, from the opening of Psalm 68, shows two episodes from the story of Jonah. In the top curve of the S, sailors throw Jonah into the sea; in the bottom curve, he emerges from the mouth of the whale. The hand of one of the sailors in the top image reaches across the letter; in the Winchester Bible, too, the figures often break the lines of the letters or the frame of the initial, giving considerable energy to the scene. One of the artists of the Winchester Bible is called the Master of the Leaping Figures, a name that reflects this excitement. Decorated initials in elaborate manuscripts like these sometimes include heads, animal or human, terminating the strokes: these kinds of decorative flourishes are called drolleries. These figures, occurring in decorated initials as well as in borders and marginal illustrations, are called grotesques when they are hybrid or comic figures, and were popular from about the thirteenth century (Brown 1994, p. 63). The whole decoration in the example from the Carrow Psalter is in full color, in contrast to the outline drawing form of decoration that characterized the Utrecht Psalter and its first two copies, the Harley and Eadwine Psalters. The large letters of the opening words in Figure 2.1 are examples of display script, a larger, more elaborate, often colored script used to set off important sections of a text. The Winchester Bible and the Carrow Psalter are illuminated manuscripts, meaning that they are decorated with color, particularly gold (Brown 1994, p. 69). The term illumination can also be used for a miniature, which is an independent illustration (unlike the historiated initial we are discussing here). Two particular kinds of miniatures are presentation miniatures, which show the artist or author giving the book to a patron, and donor portraits, in which the gift of a donor – such as a book or a building – is commemorated. The Winchester Bible does not have miniatures of this sort, but there is what might be a portrait of Bishop Henry of Blois in one of the historiated initials. The Giant Bibles are “monumental Bibles intended for use on a lectern rather than for private study” (De Hamel 1994, p. 77). It is not difficult to imagine them being displayed, as the insular Gospel books discussed in Chapter 1 might also have been. Display may well have been the purpose of our next illustrated text as well, the Guthlac Roll.3 This is a long roll of almost three meters, made of four pieces of parchment, dating to the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century (part of a fifth sheet of ­parchment, and so part of the roll, has been lost). There are 18 roundels on the roll now, consisting of tinted outline drawings of episodes from the life of St. Guthlac (674–715), with brief Latin inscriptions. The roll is associated with Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire, a Benedictine foundation first established in the eighth century in Guthlac’s honor and subsequently rebuilt several times. The purpose of the Roll has been the subject of much debate. It is tempting to think that it might perhaps have been displayed to a congregation, but more commonly, it is discussed as a possible pattern for stained glass (or sculpture), in which case it is a useful reminder that the windows and walls of medieval British churches were alive with text and image – were, indeed, books of a sort, intended to convey important messages from religious texts to congregations of varying degrees of literacy. Stained glass, stone and wood sculpture, and wall paintings all can be textual supports, just as parchment was.

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Figure 2.1  Historiated initial from the Carrow Psalter, showing two episodes from the story of Jonah. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.34, folio 131r.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

2.2 ­Books Beyond Bibles Thus far, with the exception of the four major Old English poetic codices discussed in Chapter 1, most of the books we have explored have been religious (Christian) texts. Monasteries did not confine themselves to the production (or collection) of Christian books, however, particularly once the need to supply Christian missionaries had become less acute. The surviving books of two major medieval monasteries offer a glimpse of the full range of materials in monastic libraries. The Benedictine Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds was a center for pilgrimage, thanks to its possession of the remains of the Saxon martyr‐king Edmund, who was killed in 869. The abbey’s charter dates to 1020, and throughout the Middle Ages, until it became subject to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, it was one of the wealthiest and most powerful of English monasteries. It seems to have been a center of book production – either in the commissioning or perhaps the making of books. An unusual number of books survive from Bury: more than 270 items are currently listed in the online resource Medieval Libraries of Great Britain. To put this number in perspective, more than 400 of the 500 libraries that have been surveyed have fewer than ten books that can be firmly attributed to them (Ker 1964, p. xi). In the case of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, for example, we can only say for certain that the Codex Amiatinus, the St. Cuthbert Gospel, and fragments of a few other books were produced there. When one considers how important the library once was, these remains are shockingly few. The Bury books included theological material, biblical texts and commentaries, and service books, as one would expect (Ker 1964, pp. 16–22). But, as at many other libraries, there was also a wide range of other kinds of material: from grammatical texts and medical texts; to encyclopedic and educational works by figures such as Isidore of Seville and Boethius; to a translation of the Quran into Latin. Classical works included a copy of Apuleius’s De Deo Socratis, a twelfth‐century copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, and an illustrated tenth‐century copy of Prudentius’s Psychomachia. Medieval works include a copy of the History of Alexander the Great and one of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, as well as various chronicles and historical miscellanies. Between the extremes of plentiful and almost no survivals are places like the Benedictine Priory attached to Winchester Cathedral  –  an Anglo‐Saxon foundation that continued until it was closed during the Dissolution. About 78 books can be traced to this priory (Ker 1964, pp. 199–201). Many of these survivals are service books of various types, including the magnificent Benedictional of St. Aethelwold and the Winchester Bible discussed in Section 2.1, but there are other kinds of books as well, including some of the historical material to which we will turn more closely in a moment. For example, Winchester had a copy of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, a Royal genealogy, a copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People in Old English, and a copy of the Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks). Bede’s history is focused on the foundation and development of the English Church (and was a staple of medieval libraries, with surviving copies of the Latin version attributed to about 20 of them), but its presence also witnesses the broader interest in history and in related kinds of writing, such as encyclopedic writing, that comes to be displayed in many British book collections. There is not space here to survey all the books produced in response to this interest, but through the case of one wildly popular medieval history, we can get a sense of the growth of production and reading of such material.

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2.3 ­The Form of History: Copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie (History of the Kings of Britain), completed around 1138, was one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. It tells the story of the foundation of Britain by Trojan refugees and recounts a sequence of kings up to the last British king, after the Saxon invasions. The longest section of the book is devoted to the story of King Arthur. Some contemporary historians were highly critical of Geoffrey’s work, but they were in the minority, and the Historia survives in well over 200 complete manuscripts. It is also found in excerpts, and incorporated into other history writing. There are also over 70 independent manuscripts of the section of the text that deals with the Prophecies of Merlin. The earliest manuscripts date to the first half of the twelfth century, and copies were still being produced into the late fifteenth century. Many of the copies are of British provenance, as we will see in a moment, but it was also found in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and possibly elsewhere (Crick 1989). A sampling of manuscripts, all produced in Britain, from the twelfth through the fifteenth century, will serve to give a sense of the production and consumption of Geoffrey’s history. Our first copy belonged by the thirteenth century to Margam Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in Wales, but it was actually produced in the second half of the twelfth century.4 It contains two other historical texts, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum (a copy of which was also possessed by Bury St. Edmunds), and his Historia novella. It is a handsome, large book (38 × 26 cm), with large, decorated initials. Beautifully written in double columns, in a single large, formal hand, everything about this book speaks to the importance accorded to its contents. A smaller copy (23 × 16.5 cm) of similar date now at the Bodleian Library is also striking, written in two columns in a somewhat cramped hand, with a very elaborate, floral interlaced initial on the first letter of the text, occupying fully a third of the text column.5 Not all early copies of the Historia regum Britannie are this large or elegant, however. Some twelfth‐century copies are quite small and plain, with a single column of text and little or no decoration. Thirteenth‐century examples include another large, impressive copy in two columns, from the Benedictine abbey of St. Alban’s. The St. Alban’s manuscript is a large book (38 × 27.5 cm), containing, in addition to Geoffrey’s work, historical works by the historians Ralph of Coggeshall, William of Malmesbury, and Aelred of Rievaulx.6 The monastery added a table of contents to the manuscript somewhat later in the thirteenth century, and the volume also contains notes by the famous monastic chronicler and artist Matthew Paris, who was a monk of St. Albans. This volume is clearly intended as a collection of historical works, as are many of the manuscripts in which Geoffrey’s Historia appears. Geoffrey’s text is also found in more thoroughly miscellaneous volumes, such as a fourteenth‐century manuscript associated with the Benedictine Abbey of St. Mary in Abingdon.7 The contents of this book include Geoffrey’s Historia in an imperfect version, the annals of Abingdon, saints’ legends, and various chronologies and tables. Thus far, we have seen modest copies and grand ones, free‐standing copies and copies  in anthologies both more and less miscellaneous. There are also some strikingly unusual manuscripts of the Historia that tell us much about the reception of Geoffrey’s text, both in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. One example is a fifteenth‐century manuscript of the Welsh translation and adaptation of the Historia,

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

called the Brut y Brenhinedd (Chronicle of the Kings), decorated with almost 60 pictures of the kings being described.8 Only a few medieval Welsh manuscripts are illustrated, and this is likely the only one in the Welsh language. There are over 60 copies of the Welsh version of Geoffrey’s text, showing the enthusiastic response in Wales to the work. Another illustrated copy of the Historia, an early fourteenth‐century manuscript perhaps made in London, includes many drawings of medieval British cities in the margins and at the base of its pages: London, York, Bath, Winchester, Carlyle, Canterbury, Leicester, Caerleon, Gloucester, and Colchester are all featured.9 The drawings are detailed and varied: these are not completely generic skylines or buildings. They are also often labeled, and have attracted the attention of later readers as well, as this particular manuscript has many notes in a sixteenth‐century hand, suggesting the kind of antiquarian readership discussed below in Sections 3.5 and 3.4 on William Camden and Matthew Parker, respectively. Some of the copies mentioned above carry antiquarian notes, too, by figures such as John Dee (1527–1609), mathematician and astrologer at the Court of Elizabeth I, and Polydore Vergil (c. 1470–1555), an Italian historian who wrote, among other things, the Anglica historia, a history of England that angered some English readers by questioning the historicity of King Arthur – who of course featured prominently in Geoffrey’s work. Vergil’s rejection of Geoffrey’s history is perhaps to be expected in the humanist era, but his view was not universal, as suggested by a manuscript at the Bodleian Library.10 This copy dates to about 1450, and is written, not in a medieval book hand, but in a humanistic script, a style that originated in Renaissance Italy. Its initials are very similar to those found in an Oxford copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, in the Latin translation of Leonardo Bruni, an Italian humanist. Other medieval texts that were copied in England in humanist script include Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus and Guido della Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae (Wakelin 2016). This humanist manuscript of the Historia, then, brings Geoffrey’s work into the early modern period, and into a very different circle of readers. It is also of interest because it bears the ownership signature of William Laud (1573–1645), archbishop of Canterbury, chancellor of the University of Oxford, and benefactor of the library, to which he donated over a thousand manuscripts (DNB). The post‐medieval life of medieval books will be discussed further in Section  3.4, but the interest of these humanist collectors in manuscripts dealing with an explicitly British past points to our next theme in medieval British book production.

2.4 ­Images on the Page: Some “British” Illustrated Books As we saw in Section 1.4, the Codex Amiatinus, although produced in an Anglo‐Saxon monastery, is resolutely continental both in its features, such as the Roman‐inspired uncial script and the Italianate decoration, and in its ambitions, which were to demonstrate to the Pope in Rome the significance and abilities of the English Church. Indeed, throughout the period covered by this section of our study, influences, materials, workmen, and even whole books were routinely imported from the Continent. There are nevertheless also many characteristically British or English books, such as the insular Gospel books and the tenth‐ and eleventh‐century Old English books discussed in Chapter 1, as well as fourteenth‐ and fifteenth‐century books such as the Luttrell Psalter,

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the Taymouth Hours, the Sherborne Missal, and the Holkham Bible. These are all examples of the book arts in Britain in the later Middle Ages, and each shows some characteristically British elements in its decoration. Many of them also have acquisition stories that suggest the importance attached to the “English” or “British” elements in the books, reminding us that the significances of books are not encompassed exclusively by their initial point of production, but in fact continue to grow and shift as the worlds in which they move also change. The Luttrell Psalter was made for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276–1345), a Lincolnshire landowner, and includes a miniature of Geoffrey with his wife and his daughter‐in‐ law.11 The manuscript is famous for its illumination and particularly for its marginal grotesques and its drawings of everyday life (see Figure  2.2). The Luttrell Psalter’s images of such activities as plowing or milking have led to the manuscript’s being viewed as “a pictorial repository of traditional English life and customs” (Camille 1998, p. 10). That identification was crucial in its acquisition by the British Museum. The Psalter had been on loan to the Museum, but in 1929 its private owner offered it for sale at auction, and the Museum did not have the requested reserve price of 30 000 guineas (£31 500). J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), the famous American industrialist and book collector, loaned the Museum the money both for this manuscript and for another famous English book, the Bedford Psalter and Hours, that was part of the same sale.12 This intervention allowed the manuscripts to be withdrawn from auction, giving the Museum time to raise the funds. The Museum did so in part by appealing to the Englishness of these books; indeed, in the first newspaper stories about the dramatic developments at the sale, it was assumed that the Quaritch firm of British book dealers had fronted the money, because they “felt it was only right that the Psalter should remain in England” (New York Times, July 30, 1929, p. 14). Once Morgan’s involvement was revealed and the funds were successfully raised, the American’s intervention was commemorated on book plates pasted inside the front covers of the manuscripts (where they are still to be seen today). In the Luttrell Psalter we read, “This great monument of fourteenth century England was saved for the British Nation by the generosity of an American citizen, John Pierpont Morgan, who advanced the entire purchase money ….” The dedication in the Bedford Psalter and Hours is similar. The emotionally charged language – the manuscripts were “saved” for “the British Nation” – suggests how important the perceived Englishness of these two manuscripts was. And despite all the praise of Morgan’s generosity, an undercurrent of national competition is also perceptible in the press coverage of the events surrounding the struggle for the books. While the Museum raised the money for the Luttrell Psalter comfortably in advance of Bedford’s deadline, funds for the Bedford Psalter and Hours were proving harder to find. A story in the New York Times quotes Robert Witt, chairman of the National Arts Collections Fund, as the deadline for the second manuscript approached: “It needs only the response of all who are ashamed to allow Mr. Morgan’s generosity to be shown in vain to prove that this country is as determined to retain the book as America was eager to get it” (New York Times, July 24, 1930, p. 3). Frederic Kenyon (1863–1952), the director of the British Museum, appealed to the readers of the Times of London to prevent national catastrophe: “If this sum is not received before July 30, the great volume executed in England for the brother of Henry V., with its portrait gallery of Englishmen of the year of Agincourt, will pass finally and irrevocably to America” (Times, May 26, 1930, p. 10). The 1880s through the 1920s had seen many books and

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

Figure 2.2  Agricultural figures in the bottom margin of a page from the Luttrell Psalter. London, British Library, Additional MS 42130, folio 172v. Source: Licensed by Art Resource.

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manuscripts leave Britain, purchased from British owners by wealthy American collectors like Morgan, and that history provides the context for the concern over the fate of the Bedford Psalter and Hours. The story of the acquisition of the Luttrell Psalter (and the Bedford Psalter and Hours) shows how a medieval book with many functions – as an object of personal devotion, as an assertion of personal wealth, as a statement of identity – can be reframed in ways that may elide those functions. In Sir Geoffrey Luttrell’s day, as the art historian Michael Camille has shown, the images in the Luttrell Psalter formed a complex discourse about class, gender, and race, built on the exclusion of many groups seen as “other” (including, for example, the Scots) from both knightly and national identity (Camille 1998, pp. 276–277). In the afterlife we have just been exploring, the Psalter becomes a book that is the quintessence not only of Englishness, but also of a particular kind of Englishness, re‐imagined from a position that is simultaneously nostalgic and nationalistic. This particular way of valuing medieval British books is still very much with us. In 1998 the British Library acquired the Sherborne Missal, a purchase that, once again, required fund‐raising from government, charities, and the general public. While the public discussion of whether or not the astronomical price should be paid was more nuanced than in 1929, similar notes concerning national pride and markers of Englishness were at play (Echard 2008). There is no question of the Sherborne Missal’s significance. As discussed in Section 3.4, the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII led to the destruction of many medieval service books, associated as they were with Roman Catholic religious practice. The Sherborne Missal, made from 1400 to 1407 for the Abbey of St. Mary’s at Sherborne, is now “the largest, most lavishly decorated late medieval service book to have survived the Reformation intact,” as the introduction to the digitized version on the British Library site remarks (British Library 2018). Like the Bedford Psalter and Hours, the Sherborne Missal is notable for having many portraits of contemporary figures, including its commissioner, Abbot Robert Bruyning, its illuminator, John Siferwas, and various other ecclesiastical and noble figures. Like that of the Luttrell Psalter, some of its decoration has been identified as quintessentially English – in this case, a sequence of 48 English birds, painted in careful detail and most labeled in Middle English. These remarkable paintings have no equivalent in medieval manuscript production (Backhouse 2001, p. 5). The illustrations of agrarian and chivalric life in the Luttrell Psalter, or of British birds in the Sherborne Missal, have no obvious connection to the religious texts which they adorn. Another religious book, the Taymouth Hours, is an even more dramatic example of the incorporation of what we might think of as entertainment in what is for us an unexpected context.13 This manuscript is a Book of Hours dated to 1330–1340. Books of Hours are personal, devotional books that contain daily prayers. They were treasured objects, often passed down within families, and often associated with women (see, for example, Smith 2003). Michael Clanchy has pointed out that by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, much instruction in reading was domestic, oriented toward prayer, and often taught by women, as the popular iconography of the Virgin Mary teaching the infant Christ to read with a Book of Hours suggests (Clanchy 2013, p. 13). While the text of the prayers was generally in Latin, Books of Hours might contain rubrics or supplementary prayers in the vernacular, suggesting different levels of access to the book’s contents. They also often contained pictures, and these also needed to be “read” in the sense of contemplated and interpreted. As D.H. Green points out, the ubiquitous images

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

of holy women contemplating books modeled a relationship to the written word that encouraged the ownership and use of devotional works. Indeed, the visual arts are a significant source of the information we have about the relationship of women to the written word (Green 2007). Books of Hours that belonged to wealthy owners were often lavishly illustrated (as in the case of the Bedford Psalter and Hours). The Taymouth Hours includes, among its bas‐de‐page (bottom of the page) illustrations, scenes from the popular romance of Beves of Hampton, an exciting tale of knightly adventures that existed in both Anglo‐ Norman and Middle English versions. The scenes, some of which are labeled in Anglo‐ Norman, can be related to both the Anglo‐Norman and the Middle English version of the story, and in particular to the story as it appears in the Auchinleck manuscript (Brownrigg 1989, pp. 224–226), discussed in Section 2.7 as an example of manuscript anthologies. We often know who owned Books of Hours, because they were the kinds of treasured possessions to be recorded in inventories, and passed along in wills. The Taymouth Hours are sometimes thought to have been made for a royal woman, and the illustrations from romance speak to the tastes of a courtly audience. The presence of images like these in a book whose accepted purpose was to guide daily prayer suggests that the relationship of the reader to his or her book is potentially complex, and may include modes other than the contemplative. The Taymouth Hours is not the only manuscript to have decorative illustrations taken from popular British romance. The Smithfield Decretals, which dates to the same period, has illustrations that have been identified as belonging to the romances of Bevis and also of Guy of Warwick, although these illustrations lack captions.14 While their adventures include travel to exotic locations, Bevis and Guy are very local heroes, each with popular traditions and real British places (Arundel and Warwick) associated with their stories. The Smithfield Decretals is a legal book, a copy of the decretals – papal letters relating to church law – of Pope Gregory IX. It has nothing to do with popular romance or with local legend. The visual references to Guy and Bevis in these two fourteenth‐century manuscripts, one devotional and one ecclesiastical, suggest a practice of reflecting local context even in books whose subject matter is not British. The same is true of the Holkham Bible, a picture‐book collection of biblical narratives with brief Anglo‐Norman explanations, made c. 1327–1335, probably in London.15 The illustrations, like many in the Luttrell Psalter, reflect contemporary agrarian life. Figure  2.3 shows the shepherds hearing the angels’ annunciation of the birth of Christ. The scene is remarkable for featuring three of the languages used in medieval England in the fourteenth century: Latin, the language of the Church, spoken by the angels; Anglo‐Norman, the language preferred by the nobility, in the explanation of the scene; and (Middle) English, in the song the shepherds sing “with one steuene” [voice]. The biblical story is thus firmly located in the world of its audience, as the characters in the picture speak three of the languages heard every day in medieval Britain.

2.5 ­Words on the Page: Scribe D and the Rise of British Urban Scribes In discussing monastic production in and just after the Anglo‐Saxon period, we saw that while monastic scriptoria dominated both the copying and collecting of manuscripts, there were nevertheless also professional scribes, and a market for books beyond

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Figure 2.3  The annunciation to the shepherds, in the Holkham Bible, an illustrated Bible with captions in Anglo‐Norman French and Middle English. London, British Library, Additional MS 47682, folio 13r. Source: Licensed by Art Resource.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

the doors of the ecclesiastical foundations. We saw that monastic book production might sometimes make use of professional, traveling artists, as for example seems to have been the case in the Winchester Bible. In the later Middle Ages, monasteries still produced books for both ecclesiastical and lay consumption, so monastic production continued to co‐exist with professional production. The balance of various kinds of production and consumption shifted, however, and a notable characteristic of British book production in the later Middle Ages is the rise of the urban scribe. In a ground‐breaking article in 1991, Malcolm Parkes and A.I. Doyle challenged conventional wisdom about secular book production in Britain in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It had been common to imagine a workshop model, with scribes working under the direction and coordination of a supervisor. The basis for this understanding of book production was the Parisian book trade that developed in the thirteenth century. Even in the early Middle Ages, multiple scribes might work simultaneously on different parts of the same text, as for example was the case for the scribes of the Codex Amiatinus. Still, there was a shift to a more coordinated form of mass production in the high and later Middle Ages, associated at first with the rise of the university. Demand by students for copies of books required a form of production that could be swift and yet accurate enough to ensure consistency across important texts. A system arose in Paris in which sections of an exemplar, called pecia, could be distributed to individual scribes for copying, with the resulting quires then collected together in a bookshop. The master copies could be controlled and checked for accuracy – a method which, while it could not eliminate the variation endemic to hand production, did strive to ensure some kind of reliability. With this method, copying could proceed more efficiently. It was of course necessary to take care to keep track of the pieces and to assemble them correctly, and in the university context, it was important to have approved texts. Parkes and Doyle saw signs of similarly distributed copying in the manuscripts of English vernacular texts in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but not, they argued, of the same kind of central control. Instead they imagined a much more loosely coordinated network of scribes. One of the manuscripts they used in the development of their theories was a copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis at Trinity College, Cambridge, which contained five distinct hands, designated by Parkes and Doyle as A, B, C, D, and E.16 The appearance of these hands in other manuscripts began to give a picture of the kinds of scribes who produced English vernacular texts. One of the hands belonged to a known person, the poet and legal clerk Thomas Hoccleve. In recent years, some scholars have argued for the existence of urban literary coteries, drawn from the makers of texts, be they scribe, author, or, like Hoccleve, both (Kerby‐ Fulton and Hilmo 2001). Scribes, in this view, were an audience for, as well as producers of, literary texts. Lest we imagine the life of a city scribe as one of belletristic leisure, however, Hoccleve has left us a vivid picture of the discomforts attached to being a scribe. In his Regiment of Princes, the first‐person speaker explains his profession: … we laboure in travaillous stilnesse; We stowpe and stare upon the sheepes skyn, And keepe moot our song and wordes yn. Wrytyng also dooth grete annoyes thre, Of which ful fewe folkes taken heede Sauf we ourself, and thise, lo, they be:

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Stommak is oon, whom stowpynge out of dreede Annoyeth sore; and to our bakkes neede Moot it be grevous; and the thridde oure yen Upon the whyte mochil sorwe dryen. What man that three and twenti yeer and more In wrytynge hath continued, as have I, I dar wel seyn, it smertith him ful sore In every veyne and place of his body; And yen moost it greeveth, treewely, Of any craft that man can ymagyne. (Hoccleve 1999, lines 1013–1028) We labour in painful quiet; We stoop and stare at the sheepskin, And must keep our song and words to ourselves. Writing also causes three great annoyances, Which very few folk take heed of Except we ourselves, and lo, these they be: The stomach is one, for indeed stooping Bothers it terribly; and it does grievous harm To our backs as well; and third is our eyes, Which dry out from staring. Any man who has persevered, as I have, In writing for twenty‐three years and more, I dare say, it hurts him terribly In every vein and part of his body, And the eyes it grieves the most, truly, Of any craft that anyone can imagine. Names have gradually been put to more and more of these “city scribes” (Mooney and Stubbs 2013), and the picture of the London literary milieu has become more clear (Hanna 2005). Another of the scribes in the Gower manuscript at Trinity College is particularly interesting: Scribe D was clearly something of a vernacular specialist, responsible for surviving copies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; William Langland’s Piers Plowman; and, in whole or in part, an astonishing eight copies of Gower’s (very long) Confessio Amantis. When we consider that there are some 48 surviving copies of that poem, we can see how significant a contribution D made to the propagation and circulation of Gower’s work. Derek Pearsall has argued that the manuscripts of the Confessio are so consistent in their layout (called ordinatio or mise‐en‐ page) as almost to constitute a type (Pearsall 2004). This consistency of design (and text) was also once taken to support the idea that Gower exercised tight control over the production of his own work, even having a kind of personal scriptorium at St. Mary Overie, where he lived (Fisher 1964). While that view has subsequently been challenged (Nicholson 1987), not least by the kind of work that emphasizes the diffuse character of London book production in the period, the superficial similarity of the Confessio manuscripts, not to mention D’s involvement in so many of them, does tend to suggest a kind of standard production. But there are some details that complicate the picture.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

First is the nature of D’s own work. The Canterbury Tales that is in his hand is a famously idiosyncratic text, with an unusual tale order and many odd variant readings.17 Some scholars lay its idiosyncrasies at D’s door, suggesting that in this case he is as much reader and editor as he is copyist (Kerby‐Fulton 2001). Such a characterization matches the idea of the legally trained clerk who not only moonlighted producing vernacular manuscripts, but also eagerly read, circulated, and discussed them with like‐ minded scribes. D’s Confessio manuscripts are much more conventional textually, showing only the normal minor variations produced by copying. Tempting as it is to think of D happily engaging with Chaucer’s work, while simply dutifully copying Gower’s (one possibility that might explain the different approaches to copying the two poets), Ockham’s razor might suggest that it was the copyist of the exemplar for this copy of the Canterbury Tales who meddled with Chaucer’s text, and D simply copied it, just as he seems to have copied everything else. The case of D, and the different ways he has been imagined, is instructive because it says something about current trends, and desires, in manuscript scholarship. D’s hand has now been identified in guild records, and he has a name, John Marchaunt, who was another legal scribe like Hoccleve (Mooney and Stubbs 2013). In this case, adding the name and the profession does not materially change what had already been inferred about – indeed because of – D. But thanks to the naming of another famous scribe from that Trinity manuscript, scholars have been presented with a particular challenge. The hand designated B by Parkes and Doyle is also the hand of two of the most important manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts. Hengwrt has a claim to being the earliest surviving manuscript of the Tales, while Ellesmere has generally been reckoned a “best text,” serving as the basis for such standard editions as the Riverside Chaucer. The ordinatio of Ellesmere is more developed than that in Hengwrt, and the manuscript also features the famous portraits of the Canterbury pilgrims. It has the appearance, in other words, of a final state, while in this view Hengwrt is early and perhaps experimental. On the other hand, the earliness of Hengwrt might place it within Chaucer’s lifetime. The Tales were never finished, and the manuscripts show a variety of ways of ordering the parts. Some scholars have suggested embracing and exploring the fragmentary nature of the Tales in the manuscript record (Minnis 1985; Pearsall 1985; Meyer‐Lee 2008; Bahr 2013), but much energy has also been spent attempting to settle, once and for all, the dispute between Ellesmere and Hengwrt. If Hengwrt could be shown to have been produced in close proximity to – even in cooperation with – the poet himself, its text and ordering might gain some added authority. This would appear to be the now‐dismissed notion of the personal poetic scriptorium all over again, but scholars have pointed out that Chaucer expressed himself on the habits of scribes very explicitly in his poem addressed to a “scriveyn” (scribe) called Adam. It is worth reproducing in full: Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe, Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle, But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe; So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe, It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.

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Scribe Adam, if ever it should happen That you come to write Boece or Troilus again, May you develop a scalp disease under your long locks, Unless you copy more faithfully, according to my work. So many times in a day I have to fix your work, Correcting it and rubbing it out and scraping it off, And all is a result of your negligence and haste. (Chaucer 1986, p. 650) This poem suggests Chaucer’s exasperation at the efforts of a scribe who has apparently produced more than one of his works (a copy of Troilus and Criseyde and one of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy), and also suggests that the poet himself has played the role of overseer or corrector of the work, in a way that many have imagined Gower also doing. When Linne Mooney announced, then, that the hand of Scribe B belonged to a legal clerk named Adam Pinkhurst (Mooney 2006), it seemed we finally had the smoking gun of late medieval English literary production, a conclusive demonstration of a close link between a poet’s work and its initial production. It was easy to imagine Chaucer reading over Adam’s shoulder to make sure that his work improved. Some scholars, however, suggested that, exciting as the discovery was, it was important to remember as well that the poem to Adam was indeed a poem, a literary work by a famously tricky poet. Adam may be Pinkhurst, but he is also, of course, the first (sinful) man, and the identification of Adam as Chaucer’s “owne scriveyn” is based only upon the non‐authorial, scribal heading to the poem (Gillespie 2008). Furthermore, a recent review of the codicological evidence for the relationship between Chaucer and Pinkhurst concluded that “Chaucer had no input into the production of the Hengwrt manuscript” (Horobin 2010, p. 364). There are also scholars who doubt the identification of Scribe B as Pinkhurst at all (Warner 2015), and indeed, the whole question of the evidence necessary to declare that similar hands are in fact the same hands, remains very much a matter of discussion. There is no doubt that Chaucer was keenly aware of the conditions of production for his work. Gower, too, displays a consistent concern with the accurate representation of his words, writing a colophon carefully laying out his works. This colophon appears in almost 30 manuscripts of his poetry in English and Latin (Echard 2004, p. 100). William Langland’s Piers Plowman is another poem in which books and documents play a key thematic role. For example, the main character, Piers, at one point angrily tears up a pardon that Truth has sent him, and scholars see this as a central moment in the poem. In short, writers who worked in a manuscript culture clearly knew what that meant for the circulation and reception of their work, and they may indeed have tried to exert, and sometimes have succeeded in exerting, control over the production of their texts.

2.6 ­Interlude: Mouvance, Variance, and Establishing the Text Chaucer and Gower, as we have just seen, are very aware of the effects that scribal ­production could have on their texts, and so this may be an appropriate moment at which to pause and consider how the texts we read and use today are derived from

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

medieval manuscript books. This study opened with the example of different manuscript representations of Caedmon’s Hymn. We saw that everything from layout, spelling, and even language could differ from one copy to the next. Many medieval texts survive in only one manuscript copy (see the discussion of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Book of Margery Kempe, in Section 3.3, for example). Others, however, both Latin and vernacular, survive in many copies. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth‐ century Anglo‐Latin Historia regum Britannie survives in over 200 manuscripts. The Middle English Brut survives in more than 170 manuscripts. There are almost 50 manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and more than 80, in whole or in part, of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. What, then, is the path from multiple copies of a text  –  witnesses, as they are called – to the editions and classroom texts used today? Nineteenth‐century editors of classical texts, following methods codified by the German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), would compare manuscripts and variants, searching, by means of chains of transmitted text and errors, to establish relationships between copies and groups of copies, all in the interest of uncovering or reconstructing a text as close as possible to an author’s original. One way of representing the relationships was in a stemma, a kind of family tree of manuscript relations that looked back to an (often hypothetical) ancestor. M.J. Driscoll has neatly summed up the problem with the stemmatic method in relation to most texts: “[I]t assumes, among other things, that no two scribes will ever independently make the same mistake, which they frequently do, that they will always work from a single exemplar, which they frequently don’t, and that most scribes will tend to reproduce their exemplars exactly, which they almost never do, at least in the case of vernacular literature” (Driscoll 2010, p. 89). He goes on to describe the approach of Joseph Bédier, a French medievalist who advocated the “best text” method, which involved identifying the most authoritative manuscript in a tradition to use as the basis for editing – although editing could and did still involve comparing variants to arrive at occasional emendations. Take, for example, the opening line of the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as it appears in six of the surviving 82 manuscripts of the Tales. Each of these manuscripts is identified in the list first by its shelf mark, and then by its siglum. Sigla are the signs or abbreviations that editors use to designate particular manuscript witnesses to a textual tradition. At the end of the list is the text as established in the standard scholarly edition of Chaucer’s works, the Riverside Chaucer. Whan that Aprill. wt his schoures swote (BL Harley 1758: Ha2) Whan that aprille with his schowres swote (BL Harley 7334: Ha4) What þat Aprill wyþe his schoures soote (BL Lansdowne 851: La*) When that april with his showres swote (Bodley 686: Bo2) Whan that Aueryll wt his shoures soote (Hengwrt: Hg*) Whan that Aprillwith hise shoures soote (Ellesmere: El*) Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote (Riverside) These manuscripts are not all viewed by modern editors as equally authoritative. Four of them are marked in this list with an asterisk next to their siglum. These are among eight crucial witnesses that were printed by the Chaucer Society in full, six of them in a famous “six‐text print” that first appeared in 1869, that allowed readers to compare the manuscript variants as they were clearly displayed across the pages of this parallel‐text edition.

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Our sense of the most authoritative manuscripts – those upon which a text of Chaucer might be based – developed out of the work of John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, in their 1940 Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts. The current Riverside Chaucer (1986) is the third edition of a text first published by F.N. Robinson in 1933, and while there have been some changes to Robinson’s original work, the Ellesmere manuscript, which he regarded as the best text, is still the base text for the current edition. As noted above, both Ellesmere and the older Hengwrt are now thought to be by the same scribe, Scribe B. A casual glance at the list will show variants both small and, in the apparently French‐influenced “Aueryll,” potentially more significant. The work currently being done in identifying scribes is felt by many scholars to be important precisely because it might help to connect various manuscripts more or less firmly to potentially authoritative contexts, thus aiding editors in establishing texts more securely. It has been suggested, however, that attempts to fix and stabilize medieval texts, whether strictly or more lightly, are fundamentally at odds with the nature of medieval manuscript culture. Two key terms here are mouvance and variance. The first is the coinage of Paul Zumthor who, studying medieval French poetry, argued that the relatively fixed texts of named authors were the exception. The rule was anonymity and highly varied texts that were viewed as mobile and reworkable. The Brut manuscripts mentioned above, for example, routinely included local additions and modifications. Editing practice that depended on notions of authenticity and proximity to an authorial original were not well accommodated to representing the reality of this mouvance (Zumthor 1972). Variance, for its part, is the term used in 1989 by Bernard Cerquiglini to capture the differences between texts that inevitably result from the nature of medieval book production. Cerquiglini was concerned that the classical methods of editing, in their desire to fix the text (and demote variants to footnotes or textual apparatus), were ill‐equipped to represent the nature of medieval textual culture. How to deal with mouvance and variance came to be a central concern of what was called the New Philology (Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, published a special issue on the subject in 1990). Many new philologists argued that, given the basic instability of medieval texts, the most important thing was to study any particular materialization of that text. Influenced by D.F. McKenzie’s designation of bibliography as the “sociology of texts” (McKenzie 1986), scholars began paying more attention to specific copies and their complex production and transmission histories.

2.7 ­Fifteenth‐Century Anthologies A further wrinkle in the editing of medieval texts arises from the fact that some witnesses to a text might be partial, not because of damage, but because they were copied from the start as excerpts, rather than as full texts. Even full texts are often found in larger, perhaps miscellaneous manuscript contexts that can affect how we understand any given text (or at least, how we might imagine a particular reader of that particular manuscript might have understood his or her text). Anthologies – in the most general sense, manuscripts containing more than one text – are a feature of British book production from an early period. There are many types of such collections. Some are designed from the start to contain a range of texts. A famous example is the Auchinleck

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

manuscript, a collection of 44 Middle English texts, copied by five or six scribes around 1330–1340.18 It seems to have been copied in booklets that many scholars believe were designed for compilation from the outset (Shonk 1985; Hanna 2000, 2005). Other collections were created by binding together originally separate materials, sometimes in the Middle Ages, and sometimes much later. Some collections, whether at point of origin or later creation, seem to have thematic strands: Auchinleck contains romances, saints’ lives, devotional material, and political poetry, but – perhaps influenced by its apparent planned construction – scholars have argued for unifying themes across the whole book (Turville‐Petre 1996). Other anthologies seem genuinely miscellaneous, and indeed are sometimes called miscellanies, to distinguish them from anthologies (Boffey and Thompson 1989). The fifteenth century is a particularly interesting moment to sample this form of manuscript production, as this period, as we have already seen, is characterized by an increase in secular production and consumption of texts, alongside a rise in literacy. In this section we will look at three well‐known fifteenth‐century anthologies, the Findern manuscript, and two books produced by Robert Thornton of Lincoln, one now in the British Library in London, and the other in Lincoln Cathedral. The Findern manuscript is associated with the Findern family of Derbyshire, and was compiled in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.19 Its contents include excerpts from the works of major Middle English poets such as Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate; a prose chronicle of England that concludes in 1446; a popular romance; and 29 lyrics (most about love) that survive only in this manuscript. As many as 30 or 40 scribes contributed items to this vast collection; a few work in a way that suggest they are professional scribes, but many of the items are much more informally written (Beadle and Owen 1977; Harris 1983). The manuscript has attracted attention in part because it contains the names and signatures of several women, and many scholars have speculated about female authorship for some of the anonymous love lyrics (Hanson‐Smith 1979; McNamer 1991; Kinch 2007). Others focus on the manuscript’s role at the heart of a social milieu in which women were important participants; one scholar, for example, imagines the book being left open on a table in a kind of game, so that visiting (female) neighbors could add to its contents (Hanna 1987). A recent study of the gentry readership of romance in Britain in the later Middle Ages demonstrates the spiderweb of intricate social connections that can be traced through Findern’s pages (Johnston 2014). This collection showcases the tastes, as well as the literacy, of both male and female members of the gentry; reading communities were not confined to the urban contexts discussed above. Like the Finderns and their associates, Robert Thornton (c. 1397–1465) was a member of the landed gentry: he owned the manor of East Newton in Yorkshire. He is known to us now as the copyist/compiler of two manuscripts for his personal use.20 He is not a scribe of the sort described in Section 2.5 on city scribes and legal and guildhall clerks. There is no indication that he attended university (DNB), and his handwriting has been called “a fairly typical mid‐fifteenth‐century cursive hand … It is not that of a professional scribe, and, though the writer knew Latin, there are many mistakes. All points to an educated man of literary tastes” (Brewer in Brewer and Owen 1975, p. vii). That education seems likely to have happened at home. George Keiser points to the family chapel at East Newton as evidence that the estate could “have brought into the household, at least for temporary periods, a clergyman … with some responsibility for the education of the young Robert Thornton.” He suggests that a “monastic sensibility” can

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be seen in Thornton’s selection of certain texts (Keiser 2014, pp. 68–69) – although the selection is quite varied, and includes both popular romance and devotional works. Susanna Fein describes Thornton’s motives as a “long‐term, worshipful endeavour to compile a sizeable library for his own personal use and the edification of his family,” pointing to the many meditations and prayers as evidence of Thornton’s Christian piety (Fein 2014, p. 15). Scholars agree that the business of compiling these manuscripts must  have been ongoing  –  Thornton would have needed to borrow exemplars, for ­example – and probably simultaneous. Some paper stock is shared across the two miscellanies (Thompson 1987, p. 1). The books may have been copied in booklets of varied length and rearranged several times as Thornton worked. Both manuscripts have been damaged over the years, and are missing material from both beginning and end (Fein 2014, p. 15). The British Library manuscript now consists of 179 folios, while the Lincoln manuscript has 312. Like the Findern manuscript, both of these manuscripts are on paper, made from rags, rather than parchment. The spread of paper along with the rise of the printing press are discussed later in this chapter, but as these gentry anthologies make clear, some late medieval British manuscripts were already making use of this new writing surface. Most of the contents of both of Thornton’s volumes are in English, although there is some Latin, particularly in Thornton’s own incipits, explicit, and prayers (Fein 2014, p. 16). The Lincoln manuscript begins with a series of texts that are for the most part popular romances, before moving on to a large section of devotional work. The division between types is not absolute, however, as a Life of St. Christopher and an account of Marian miracles are mixed in with the secular romances. There is some more miscellaneous material as well, including Three Charms for a Toothache. The London manuscript is much more miscellaneous in arrangement, moving, for example, from extracts from Cursor Mundi (a  Middle English universal history), to poetry on the Passion of Christ, to the Charlemagne romance The Sege off Melayne. Judging from other manuscript survivals, most of Thornton’s texts were very popular. For example, the Lincoln manuscript contains the Prik of Conscience, a work that survives in 118 complete manuscripts. Both Thornton’s Lincoln manuscript and the Findern manuscript include the romance of Sire Degrevante. Still, some of the texts in Thornton’s manuscripts are unique copies; these include the Sege off Melayne and another Charlemagne romance, Duke Rowlande and Sir Otuell of Spayne. Particularly important among these is the Alliterative Morte Arthure, one of the most highly regarded poems of the so‐called Alliterative Revival. It is the fourth item in the Lincoln manuscript, coming after the Prose Life of Alexander, a few folios of weather predictions, and a short text called the Lamentacio Peccatoris (the prologue to the Adulterous Falmouth Squire). The poem starts a new quire, one whose opening folio is damaged and considerably darker than what follows, suggesting that it might have been left unbound for some time (Brewer in Brewer and Owen 1975, p. viii). Writing of the London manuscript, John J. Thompson argues that “Thornton compiled his collection from a series of irregularly‐sized gatherings … [and] that he assembled some material in sequences of unbound gatherings which were susceptible to considerable wear and tear, and perhaps even some disarrangement …” (Thompson 1987, p. 36). It is easy to picture Thornton coming across unusual, appealing works like the Alliterative Morte and ­seizing the opportunity to copy them, perhaps some time before they were eventually gathered together into the manuscripts’ current form.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

At the end of the poem, Thornton has written “Here endes Morte Arthur writen by Robert of Thornton. R. Thornton dictus qui scripsit sit benedictus amen” [May the aforesaid Robert Thornton, who wrote this, be blessed, Amen].21 This Latin motto  –  sometimes in abbreviated form as here, where underlining signals letters ­omitted  –  is used four times in the Lincoln manuscript, and once in the London ­manuscript. The discussion of print in Section 2.9 looks at printers’ devices – unique visual marks, often alluding to and even punning on printers’ names – as a means by which printers call attention to their role in making books. Thornton’s rhyming motto/ prayer/signature performs a similar task, although here there is no suggestion (as there is for printers) of any attempt to carve out a recognized place in a market. Instead, Thornton is asserting his own activity and interaction with his book. Phillipa Hardman has argued that Thornton’s choice of texts emphasizes a concern with both “Christian identity” and “particularly English interests” (Hardman 2001, p. 61). Thornton’s signature and motto show us the pious English gentleman at work, about 30 years before the coming of a technological innovation that would eventually change how readers like Thornton – and everyone else – interacted with text.

2.8 ­The Coming of Print The first book printed in English was not printed in England at all. William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troy appeared in Bruges (or Ghent; see Hellinga 2010) in 1473 or 1474. Caxton (c. 1415–1492) was an English merchant who had spent time in Bruges in the 1450s and settled there permanently by the 1460s. He was governor of the community of English merchants in Bruges by 1465. By 1471, he had moved to Cologne, and it seems to have been there that he acquired both the knowledge and the equipment for a new technology, printing with moveable type. The idea of printing was not, in itself, new. Books printed from carved blocks can be found in Korea as early as the eighth century, and the oldest dated printed book of this sort, the Diamond Sutra, was produced in China in 868. In Europe, woodblocks were used to make playing cards and devotional prints. The oldest surviving dated piece of European woodblock printing is an image of St. Christopher, from 1423. Moveable type, too, existed in Asia, with surviving examples of characters in ceramic, clay, wood, and bronze from at least the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Around the time that Caxton first moved to Bruges, the entrepreneur Johannes Gutenberg  –  whose associates seem to have included goldsmiths and metalworkers – had been experimenting with what was, in the West, the innovation of printing with moveable type. He also innovated the casting of type using matrices and hand molds, something discussed further in Section 2.10. (While cast type already existed in Korea, the methods used there differed from those developed by Gutenberg.) While he had earlier printed single‐sheet indulgences, documents indicating the remission of the punishment due to sin, Gutenberg is most famous for printing the first complete book from moveable type, in 1455 in the German city of Mainz: the “42‐line Bible” (so‐called from the number of lines per page), better known as the Gutenberg Bible. Given his association with the merchant trade in Bruges and then Cologne during this period, William Caxton was well placed to see the birth of the new technology. His first book, the Recuyell, was his own translation from the French, as was his next book, the

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Game and Playe of Chesse, which he printed in Bruges in 1474. Sometime in 1475 or 1476, Caxton decided to return to England and set up a printing press there. He established himself in Westminster, rather than in London proper, thus putting himself in close proximity to the royal court. Like Gutenberg, Caxton began his printing there with indulgences. While he also printed a few Latin service books, and quite a few English devotional texts, his output overall in the 1480s emphasized vernacular literature. His own translations from French include the tales of Aesop; the romances of Blanchardin and Eglantine and of Paris and Vienne; the crusading romance The Siege of Jerusalem; a chivalric text known as the Feats of Arms and another called the Order of Chivalry; religious and devotional works such as the Golden Legend and the Mirror of the World. He translated Reynard the Fox from Dutch and printed the popular beast epic in 1481 and 1489. English writers printed by Caxton include Chaucer (Anelida and Arcite; Boece; Canterbury Tales; House of Fame; Parliament of Fowls; Troilus and Criseyde), Gower (Confessio Amantis); John Lydgate (The Churl and the Bird; The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose; Pilgrimage of the Soul; Stans puer ad mensam; Temple of Glass); and Thomas Malory (Morte Darthur). Even from this partial list, it is easy to see why Norman Blake characterizes the majority of Caxton’s output as “courtly” and strongly influenced by the tastes of the Burgundian court (Blake 1969, pp. 66–69). At the same time, Caxton was a shrewd businessman who made sure to appeal to what we would think of as middle‐class customers, attracted in part by the fashionable cachet of Caxton’s carefully cultivated aristocratic associations. Caxton did not, of course, work alone. Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/1535), who took over Caxton’s shop after the printer’s death in 1492, began working with Caxton in Cologne in 1471 (DNB), and the shop would also have had other workers, some of whom, like de Worde himself, would doubtless have come from the Continent, since the new technology of printing required both workers and materials that were not, initially, available in England. Indeed, the origins of the earliest printers suggest the continental origins of print technology. De Worde was probably from the Rhineland (DNB); Richard Pynson (c. 1449–1529/1530) was a Norman who had spent time at the University of Paris (DNB), Julian Notary (c. 1455–1523) came from Brittany (DNB), and Peter Treveris (fl. 1525–1532) is thought to have been a foreigner (DNB). Furthermore, English‐born printers like John Rastell (c. 1475–1536) would still have required the services of skilled immigrant laborers. An act passed in 1484 by the Parliament of Richard III restricting the participation of “aliens” in trade, but specifically exempting those involved in the book trade, demonstrates both the need for, and contemporary concerns over, foreign labor (although scholars do not always agree about the nature of those concerns; see Blayney 2013). The important point here is that at its inception, printing in England was a craft generally learned abroad, and many of its resources  –  human and material alike – came, in the first instance, from somewhere else. Many books did too; Caxton himself imported books throughout his career, as English booksellers would continue to do over the centuries. Caxton is thought to have printed over 100 editions by the time of his death (DNB). These books, like all early printed books dated before 1500, are sometimes called incunabula, from the Latin term for “swaddling clothes” or “cradle” (the singular form is incunabulum, sometimes anglicized as incunable). In other words, Caxton’s books belong to the first beginnings of print, and they display aspects that look both back to the manuscript tradition, and ahead to what print would become. The next section of this study examines some of the new materials and features of print.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

2.9 ­Claiming the Page: Colophons and Printer’s Marks We have already seen that medieval manuscripts sometimes carried colophons with detail about their production contexts. Caxton, too, makes use of colophons at the end of many of his books, and they often speak to the kind of work he performed on the text. At the end of his printing of the Doctrinal of Sapience, for example, the colophon reads, “Thus endeth the doctrinal of sapyence the whyche is ryght vtile and prouffytable to alle crysten men, whyche is translated out of Frenshe in to englysshe by Wyllyam Caxton at Westmesster fynysshed the .vii. day of may the yere of our lord, M ccc lxxx ix.” This colophon dates the work, locates it, tells us that Caxton did the translation himself, and also makes claims about the moral value of the text contained: it is useful and profitable to all Christian men. The colophon is followed by two claim‐staking gestures: on the same page, a motto frequently used by Caxton, “Caxton me fieri fecit” [Caxton had me  made], and on the verso of this page, his printer’s device or mark, which in Caxton’s case is a monogram of his initials. Caxton first used this device in 1487. Printer’s devices are a common feature of early print, and continue in use throughout the early modern period, with “at least 660 different devices in the 15th century for the whole of Europe” (Davies 1935, p. 113). They often feature initials, as well as distinctive pictures. Sometimes, they contain punning references to printers’ names. The early Scottish printer Andro Myllar, discussed in Section 3.9, used a windmill device, for example; Richard Grafton (c. 1511–1573) matched his initials with a grafted fruit tree (see Figure  2.4); and Nicholas Ling (fl. 1570–1607), an important

Figure 2.4  The printer’s device of Richard Grafton, showing a grafted tree growing out of a barrel (tun). From Iniunccions geveñ by the moste excellent prince, Edward the sixte (London 1547). Source: Image courtesy Trustees of the Boston Public Library, Benton 28.21.2.

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publisher of Shakespeare, used a ling fish. The marks could appear at the front or the back of a book, and in some cases might be one of the most visually arresting elements of the design. Sometimes the elaborate blocks for the devices would be passed from one printer to the next. The materials for the new technology were expensive and ­difficult to obtain, and so it is common to find them being reused, a phenomenon discussed further in Section 2.10.

2.10 ­New Materials I: Type and Woodcuts Moveable type is made from letter punches cut from metal. The letter punch is made from a hard metal (steel, in the case of early print) and has the image of the desired letter carved on it. The punch is used to strike the impression of the letter into a soft metal such as copper, thus producing a matrix; that is, a hollowed form of the letter. The matrix is inserted into a mold, into which molten metal (such as a lead alloy) is poured, a process that must be repeated for each letterform to create a unique piece of type, or sort. A full set of sorts is called a fount (font comes from this term). Cutting the punches was a difficult and time‐consuming process. Caxton brought his first type with him from the Continent and later bought more types there, and the fact that they were not designed originally for English led, for example, to the need to sometimes print “w” by using double v’s. Even in 1574, a century after the introduction of print to Britain, Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, had to seek out continental expertise to print his edition of a homily by the eleventh‐century abbot Ælfric of Eynsham with a type that replicated Anglo‐Saxon letterforms (Lucas 1999). Indeed, early printing ­ventures in Britain sometimes show the strain of deploying type not designed for the language in question. The first book printed in Welsh, Siôn Prise’s Yny lhyvyr hwnn (1546) used an eth (ð) to render the Welsh “dd” sound, and the combination of l and h for the double ll. The first Welsh translation of the Bible, printed in London in 1588, used dd and ll throughout; that is, no special sorts were designed to represent sounds in Welsh that do not have English equivalents, and the visual result on the page can be overwhelming and confusing. Early print in Britain was essentially based on French type (Carter 1969), in part because Caxton brought (and bought) matrices of fonts based on French manuscript forms, and in part because French, Dutch, and Flemish workers brought continental methods and materials to England. Punch‐cutters, matrix‐makers, and mold‐makers were all skilled craftsmen who were, at first, scarce in Britain. The dominant form of type used in Britain in the early period is called black letter, a style based on the Gothic scripts used in manuscripts. One of the types that Caxton brought with him from Bruges was based on the scripts of luxury Burgundian manuscripts (Hellinga 1999, p. 74). Figure 2.5 shows the Burgundian style of type in Caxton’s first printing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Caxton continued to obtain type abroad, buying a fount of textura (another kind of black letter or “gothic” type) from Paris in 1490 or 1491, and this became a preferred style for Caxton and his successors (Hellinga 1999, p. 75). Harry Carter writes that the French version of black letter was the “national idiom” in England from 1490 to 1540, and black letter based on Flemish and Dutch types continued to dominate for another 50 years or so after that (Carter 1969, p. 63). Other kinds of type were based on different models. Roman type (the preferred form in Italian printing) was used in England as early as 1509, by Richard Pynson, and italic,

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

Figure 2.5  A page from William Caxton’s 1476 printing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, showing the beginning of The Merchant’s Tale. Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 5082, folio 108v.

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developed by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), began to be used around the same time. Sixteenth‐century books routinely used different typefaces to distinguish different parts of the text (see Figure 3.7), as the discussion of Camden’s Britannia in Section 3.5 shows. Still, black letter dominated vernacular printing until the late sixteenth century, when Roman replaced it as the major font. Even later, ­however, bibles like the Bishop’s Bible and the King James Bible, discussed further in Section 3.7, used black letter for the main text, perhaps at this point because religion and nationalism had become intertwined, typographically speaking (see Lesser 2006). Harry Carter suggests “it is probable that Roman type had in British minds associations with puritanical Calvinism, or perhaps rather with dissent, for the Romanists favoured it too. As late as 1637 Archbishop Laud insisted on the Book of Common Prayer for Scotland being set mainly in Black Letter. The last of our Black Letter Bibles was of 1640.” (Carter 1969, p. 92). Lotte Hellinga points out that there might also have been linguistic biases, as romance‐language countries tended to use Roman type, while Germanic areas, as in England, favored black letter for vernacular texts (Hellinga 1999, p. 76). So, what might have begun as a purely practical matter, resulting from the need to import both materials and expertise from abroad, eventually acquired other overtones. Type was not the only aspect of early printing in which the English were at first indebted to continental models and materials. Figure 2.6 is an illustration for Wynkyn de Worde’s printing of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Pictures like this were created by including woodblocks as part of the setting of the print page (a process discussed further in Section 2.11). A woodblock has the desired image carved in relief; that is, the artist carves away the wood, leaving raised lines which can then be inked and printed. As noted above, woodblocks had been used to create individual images before the coming of the printing press, but the method was particularly suitable as a way of adding illustrations to books whose text was printed with moveable type. Because both woodblocks and metal type are relief methods of printing, a page with both type and pictures could be printed at the same time, with a single piece of equipment. The resulting image is called a woodcut. (Intaglio methods of printing like engraving, discussed in Section 3.6, required much more pressure and so called for a different kind of press). Woodblocks, like type, tended to pass from printer to printer. Generic pictures in secular texts include images of knights fighting; messengers arriving at Court; royal figures; lovers; and weddings. Decorative borders and letters were also used. Individual elements were sometimes combined to create new scenes. The generic quality is not necessarily different in kind from the practice in manuscript illumination, which could also see replication of certain scenes, figure types, and the like, even though black and white woodcuts could not rival the color and detail possible in good manuscript illumination (although occasionally woodcuts could be colored by hand before sale). At the same time, as in manuscript production, illustrations could be designed specifically for certain works. Figure 2.6 is a case in point. De Worde’s printing of the Morte was based on Caxton’s edition from 1485, but de Worde added pictures, and some, like this one, were custom‐made to illustrate very specific scenes in the text. Caxton sometimes reprinted texts with added illustrations too. For example, when he printed the Canterbury Tales for a second time, in 1483, each pilgrim in the General Prologue had a woodcut portrait, and while some of them were repeated, in general they are clearly intended as specific representations of Chaucer’s text. Perhaps the woodcuts in Caxton’s second

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

Figure 2.6  Woodcut illustrating the opening of Book II of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498. Source: Courtesy of The University of Manchester, John Rylands Library 15396, c2v.

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edition of the Canterbury Tales were designed to convince people who had bought the first edition that they needed the second (Blake 1991, pp. 112–113). Certainly, as printing progressed in England, woodcut illustrations became more common.

2.11 ­In the Print Shop The relationship between de Worde’s edition of Malory and Caxton’s points to an important development in the rise of print. While de Worde drew on Caxton’s printing for his own edition, Caxton printed his text from a manuscript. The reliance of print on manuscript culture has implications for the consistency and reproducibility we tend to assume as the hallmarks of print. For example, because for first editions a printer’s copy text (the text from which he set his own printing) was always a manuscript, it sometimes happened that a printer might find a better manuscript while a print run was under way. He might then decide to reset the affected sheets, but not necessarily discard the previous sheets, and so a single “edition” could contain several, and even many, different versions of the text (McKitterick 2003, pp. 101–102). But the reliance on manuscripts is not the only source of variation within a single printed edition. The technical processes of making an early printed book were difficult, and expertise, particularly at the start, was variable. These factors also produced errors that, if noticed in the process of printing, could lead to the stopping of the press and resetting of anything from a small bit of text to an entire sheet. When this happened, too, economical printers generally did not discard the erroneous pages, and thus individual copies of printed editions almost always have a mix of both “uncorrected” and “corrected” sheets bound up together. We can explore the “messy reality of running a printing house” (McKitterick 2003, p. 7) by taking a look at the many people and processes that have to come together to produce the final product. Figure 2.7 shows an artist’s idea of an early modern print shop around 1600, illustrating many of the methods to be discussed below. The process of setting a page of type involved composition of the text letter by letter, line by line. Type was stored in cases, with the different letters, punctuation, and variously sized spaces arranged in such a way that the person responsible for setting the type could easily lay hands on what was needed (see Figure 2.7). Our terms upper‐ and lower‐case derive from how type was arranged in these cases. The person taking the type from the cases was the compositor, who would make text by arranging the elements he selected on a composing stick. This was a tray of wood or metal, often of adjustable length, held in the left hand (see Figure 2.8). The individual pieces of type were collected and set in place with the right hand. The line would be set from left to right, but it is important to remember that the type was set upside down, from the perspective of the compositor, and so it is easy to see how errors could occur. Strips of lead would be inserted to create space around lines of text; this is the origin of our term leading, for the white space above and below lines of print. When he finished a line of type, the compositor would adjust the spacing and even the spelling of words in order to justify the right margin. After the compositor checked them for accuracy, the individual lines would be transferred to a tray called a galley, and the page would gradually take shape. Once filled, the galley would be surrounded with blocks of wood, metal wedges, and a frame. Now locked tightly into a forme, it could then be picked up and laid in the bed of the press, ready for inking.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

Figure 2.7  A print shop: illustration after Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, c. 1600. The image shows compositors picking type from cases; a forme being inked; a pressman working the press; and sheets being gathered up and set out to dry. Source: Image from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

2.12 ­New Materials II: Ink and Paper As described in Section 1.4, a typical medieval manuscript ink was water‐based, and included ingredients to allow it to bite into parchment. It was also formulated to flow easily from the scribe’s pen. Printing required changes in the composition of ink. Metal type needed a more adhesive, viscous formula, and so the inks developed for printing were oil‐based. The inks first used for printing in England derived from a formula used in Flemish painting. A new piece of equipment was also necessary – a means to spread the thick ink evenly onto the surface of the forme. Large balls made of wool, encased in leather, were used to roll the ink onto the type, and to repeat the process after each printing (Hellinga 1999, p. 92). Dampened sheets would be fixed into a frame and positioned above the forme. The platen of the press – a flat plate – would be pressed down by means of a screw or lever, and the ink would transfer to the sheet. The newly printed sheets would be hung up to dry (all these processes are illustrated in Figure 2.7). These sheets were usually, but not always, paper. The use of paper for books pre‐ dated the arrival of print by many centuries in Europe. An invention of Chinese origin dating perhaps to the early second century (Burns 1996, p. 413), paper made its way into Europe via Muslim influence, with the first paper mills appearing in Spain in the

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Figure 2.8  Type being arranged on a composing stick, illustrated in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick exercises: or, the doctrine of handy‐works. Applied to the art of printing (1683). Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, M3014, plate 24.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

mid‐twelfth century. Paper was made from rags of hemp, linen (flax), or cotton that were softened in solution and pounded or beaten to a pulp that was then sieved into a mold made from wire mesh framed in wood. During this process, a watermark could be created in the paper, by means of a design made of wire and attached to the mold. Watermarks are one of the chief methods of tracing and dating early paper stock, as will be discussed more with respect to Caxton’s paper below. Once the liquid had drained from the mold, the resulting sheets were pressed between felt and stacked; the imprint made by the felt can still be seen on early paper today. Paper was being manufactured in Italy by the thirteenth century, and by the fourteenth century, paper production had reached northern Germany (Burns 1996). The earliest surviving piece of European woodcut printing (mentioned in Section  2.8), a devotional woodcut of St. Christopher dated to 1423, is printed on paper, and was preserved in a manuscript produced in Bohemia in 1417.22 Papermaking was slow to come to England, with the first mill established only in 1490, and that venture was short‐lived. Not until the late 1580s was there a more successful commercial paper mill in England. Still, as with type, early printers like Caxton were able to import materials, and there is no question that the rise of the printing press created an enormous appetite for paper. At the same time, as with many things at this watershed moment in the history of book production, there is considerable movement across the manuscript/print divide. While parchment is by far the most common surface for English manuscript books, mixed‐material and paper manuscripts were also produced, both before and after the arrival of the printing press. For example, of the 48 surviving manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis – all of them produced in England – seven are written on paper. There are also mixed Confessio manuscripts with both parchment and paper; these copies tend to be smaller and plainer than the parchment Confessio manuscripts, many of which are quite splendid indeed. When their ownership can be ascertained, they often seem to have been intended for a mercantile readership, rather than for the Court and aristocratic circles for whom the more deluxe Confessio manuscripts might have been intended – although here too we must be cautious, as there are deluxe manuscripts that belonged to merchants and modest ones to be found further up the social hierarchy. Still, it seems that paper, in the pre‐print manuscript culture of medieval England, occupied a different niche than parchment. From the fourteenth century onward, paper is commonly used for administrative purposes such as court documents, government documents, and guild records (Da Rold 2011, pp. 24–25). Paper could appear in a supporting role in literary manuscripts: in one of the mixed Confessio manuscripts, for example, paper was used for the outer leaves of each quire, as if intended to protect the parchment folios within (Pearsall 2004, p. 84). As paper became more common, access to and familiarity with the material among the kinds of scribes described above may well have facilitated the gradual rise in the use of paper for vernacular literary manuscripts (Kwakkel 2003; Da Rold 2011, p. 25). One famous vernacular paper manuscript from the late Middle Ages is the Winchester manuscript.23 This is the only surviving manuscript copy of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and its story positions it squarely in the transition from manuscript to print. The manuscript was discovered in 1934; up until that time, every edition of Malory’s Morte could ultimately be traced back, not to a medieval manuscript source, but to Caxton’s edition (which itself survives in only one perfect copy). The Winchester manuscript is a large paper manuscript, with 473 folios measuring 28.5 × 20 cm, carefully

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written in black and red by two scribes, sometime around 1471–1483. Those dates mean it was written not long after Malory is thought to have composed his text, and not long before Caxton printed his edition of Malory in 1485. What is more, the manuscript clearly spent some time in Caxton’s shop. We know this to be the case because its pages were closely analyzed, with the help of forensics experts from Scotland Yard, for evidence, such as ink or other traces, that might suggest its past locations. This analysis found offsets (reverse images left by a transfer of wet ink when a printed sheet is placed on top of another surface) of some of Caxton’s type on some of the manuscript’s pages (Hellinga and Kelliher 1977). Yet despite its presence in Caxton’s shop, it does not seem that the Winchester manuscript was Caxton’s copy text. Pages were not usually printed in reading order: factors such as limited type stocks and the planned size of a book required calculations relating to the structure of the book and the setting of the pages in the forme, and these calculations can still be found in the margins of printers’ copy texts. The Winchester manuscript does not bear any of the other marks commonly found in manuscripts used as sources for early print. The paper on which the Winchester manuscript is written is French, with three different watermarks that would allow datings to c. 1471–1480 and 1477. Caxton also used French paper in his print shop. In other words, both modes of production in this period – manuscript and print – relied on imported paper. And while most printing was done on paper, Caxton and other early printers also printed occasionally on vellum. At first, this might have stemmed from a desire to mimic manuscript practice. Twelve of the surviving 49 copies of Johann Gutenberg’s famous 42‐line Bible were printed on vellum, for example, and decoration in early printed books was carried out by hand. There are also early English examples of printing on vellum. The earliest survival is a text printed at Oxford in 1481, and William Caxton’s first vellum book was probably printed in 1486, although dating is difficult since only scraps survive (Duff 1902). It has been suggested that some early English printing on vellum might have represented deliberate archaizing, as in Caxton’s Myrrour of the Life of Christ, or Wynkyn de Worde’s Book of Hawking from 1496 (Hellinga 1999, p. 95). Other books, such as missals, breviaries, and Books of Hours, might have been printed on vellum out of a sense of the importance of the book and perhaps, in the case of heavily used service books, out of practicality, as vellum lasts better than paper.

2.13 ­Printing and Truth‐Claims The source of Caxton’s printed edition of Malory’s Morte has not been found, and we do not know how or why Caxton came to have the Winchester manuscript in his shop. What we do know is that Caxton and printers like him often made explicit claims about the foundations of their editions. The search for a “true” text becomes an important element in the development of print. Clearly, medieval producers and consumers of books were concerned with the quality of their texts. Scribes corrected their work at the point of production, and readers, in their glosses, routinely commented on, extended, and corrected texts. The pecia system (see Section 2.5) developed to ensure the swift production of necessary texts, but it also represented an attempt to exercise some degree of control over core texts, and vernacular poets like Chaucer or Gower reflected awareness of, and concern for, the variation characteristic of manuscript culture.

From the High Middle Ages to the Coming of Print, 1066–1530

As with many things having to do with the shift from script to print, then, a concern for textual fidelity is not so much something new as it is something that comes to be magnified by the new technology. As we have seen, print produced variation. Printers and consumers alike knew that printed copies could err. Errata sheets were common and often blamed the printer or included a printer’s apology. Caxton himself suggested that the second edition of the Tales was necessary because he had learned of flaws in his first. In the Prohemye (the proem, or introduction) to the 1483 printing he writes that … one gentylman cam to me, and said that this book was not accordyng in many places vnto the book that Gefferey chaucer had made. To whom I answerd that I had made it accordyng to my copye, and by me was nothyng added ne mynusshyd. Thenne he sayd he knewe a book whyche hys fader had and moche louyd, that was very trewe, and accordyng vnto hys owen first book by hym made; and sayd more yf I wold enprynte it agayn he wold gete me the same book for a copye…. To whom I said, in caas that he coude gete me suche a book trewe and correcte, yet I wold ones endeuoyre me to enprynte it again, for to satysfye thauctour, where as to fore by ygnouraunce I erryd in hurtyng and dyffamyng his book in dyuerce places in settyng in somme thynges that he neuer sayd ne made, and leuyng out many thynges that he made… (Chaucer 1483, sig. A2v)24 The emphasis here on producing a true and correct text is echoed in many early printers’ prefaces, and is often of particular interest to modern scholars, given our ideas about textual scholarship. We should not assume that a “better” text would automatically draw early book buyers, but nonetheless Caxton clearly feels that one way he can sell his book, whether to buyers who already own the first edition or to others who might be on the fence, is to emphasize his role in securing the best copy texts. Wynkyn de Worde often reprinted books printed first by Caxton, and presumably had the problem of how to sell copies to people who might already own them. One attraction might be a more elaborate printing, as with de Worde’s addition of woodcut illustrations to his 1498 edition of Morte Darthur (see Figure  2.6). The promise of a better text was another strategy for securing sales. As William West has noted, when de Worde reprinted Caxton’s edition of Ranulph Higden’s Polycronicon, he promised readers that his “newe” printing had added material to bring Higden’s universal history up to date – but it did not. West suggests that here, the marketing pitch is the updated text (West 2006, pp. 263–264); again we can see that there is a kind of truth‐claim being made. The claim is undoubtedly intended to sell books, but these sorts of statements also suggest the beginnings of a new way of framing and understanding text. Similar remarks are easy to find in later generations of printers, too. Thomas Berthelet, discussed further in Sections 3.1 and 3.2, promised purchasers of his 1532 edition of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, “ye shall se hym (as nere as I can) sette forth in his owne shappe and lykeness” (sig. A1v), and Robert Crowley, introducing the first printed edition of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which he produced in 1550, writes, “I did not onely gather togyther suche aunciente copies as I could come by, but also consult such men as I knew to be more exercised in the studie of antiquities, then I my selfe haue ben” (sig. *2r). These kinds of remarks offer a context for the famous lines in the Preface of

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the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, printed in 1623. John Heminge and Henry Condell, who compiled and edited the text, tell their readers that previous printings have “abus’d” them “with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors”; these works are now, however, “cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them.” These textual physicians are also concerned with their bottom line, of course, repeatedly urging readers to “buy … what euer you do, Buy” (Shakespeare 1623, sig. A3r). Like Caxton, Berthelet, and Crowley before them, the compilers of the First Folio use truth‐claims to sell their work. Whether or not we believe their claims, which modern Shakespeare editors have doubted (Kastan 2001, pp. 73–76), Heminge and Condell’s striking metaphor of texts as bodies that can be cured and perfected by editorial care directed at textual fidelity, demonstrates how print comes to be understood as “fixing” text.

Notes 1 Winchester, Cathedral Library, MS 17. 2 Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.34. 3 London, British Library, Harley Roll Y.6. 4 London, British Library, MS Royal 13.D.ii. 5 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 514. 6 London, British Library, Royal MS 13.D.v. 7 London, British Library, Arundel MS 326. 8 Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 23C. 9 London, British Library, Royal MS 13.A.iii. 10 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud. Misc. 579. 11 London, British Library, Additional MS 42130. 12 London, British Library, Additional MS 42131. 13 London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 13. 14 London, British Library, MS Royal 10 E iv. 15 British Library, Additional MS 47682. 16 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2. 17 London, British Library, Harley MS 7334. 18 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Adv. 19.2.1. 19 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6. 20 Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91; and London, British Library, Additional 21 22 23 24

MS 31042. Underlining indicates that an abbreviation has been expanded. Manchester, John Rylands Library, JRL1200357. London, British Library, Additional MS 59678. Underlining indicates that an abbreviation has been expanded.

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3 Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640 It is common to write of the shift from manuscript to print as a watershed moment in western European history. In Elizabeth Eisenstein’s classic study, for example, the printing press was an “agent of change” (Eisenstein 1979), intimately connected with the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science. Certainly by 1640, when this chapter ends, the world of book production, distribution, and consumption had changed beyond all recognition from the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, and while later scholars have modified and qualified some of the grander claims that used to characterize discussions of the rise of print, one need only look at the title page of William Thynne’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Figure  3.1) to see that something has changed. Whether the printing press caused those changes, or provided opportunities that fit with developing cultural imperatives, it seems clear that the understanding of what books are, and what they might do, was shifting. Some of those changes can be unpacked through a reading of title pages to early printings of Chaucer’s works. We can begin with Thynne’s title.

3.1 ­Packaging and Pitches in Early Print Caxton printed many works by Chaucer (Anelida and Arcite, The Canterbury Tales, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde), clearly signaling the importance of the poet to the late fifteenth century, but he never printed a collected “works” of Chaucer or any other writer. This is not to say that there was no sense of an author attached to a body of work. There are medieval manuscripts that could be thought of as attempts to anthologize a particular writer’s work  –  the Trentham ­manuscript, addressed to Henry IV and containing examples of the poetry of John Gower in all three of his languages, has sometimes been read as a self‐conscious demonstration of the poet’s prowess (although a recent argument by Arthur Bahr has shown that this is no simple demonstration; Bahr 2011).1 And the idea of laureate – we might say canonical – authors is also already implied in medieval culture, as for example when fifteenth‐century writers such as George Ashby or William Dunbar identified Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate as the founders of English poetic tradition. Late medieval English vernacular manuscript culture suggests a growing interest in the idea of the author and his relation to his books (Gillespie 2006). Nevertheless, it is with printing that we first

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Figure 3.1  Title page of William Thynne’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1550. Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 5074, copy 2.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

see the kinds of books we might recognize as forerunners of the collected editions of canonical authors we so take for granted now. The title page to Thynne’s edition, printed by Nicholas Hill (the illustration is from the 1550 edition; the first edition was 1532), presents the public with “the workes” of Geoffrey Chaucer: Thynne intended to collect into one volume everything believed to have been written by the poet (although some of the poems included by Thynne are no longer considered as Chaucer’s). The very fact of the title page is itself telling of the shift that took place with print. Title pages are a gradual development that can be seen as resulting from a combination of the pragmatics and the economics of print. First, the pragmatics. As we have seen, manuscript books tended to be produced to order, and even systematized production practices such as the pecia approach used for feeding the university market did not produce copies in numbers like those produced in a typical print run, even at the start of the shift to print. Margaret Smith has attributed the origins of the title page to the demands of the new technology: because hundreds of copies of a book were printed simultaneously in a single edition, and because they were often sold unbound – just roughly “stab‐stitched” with string to hold the pages together – the practice developed of inserting blanks to protect these unbound copies. These blanks might then have had identifying labels printed on them (Smith 2000). By the time of Thynne’s title page, that real estate at the front of the book had become valuable advertising space, a place to signal the significance of a book’s content – as well as, gradually, to claim rights over that content, as we will see later. The decorative elements are part of that signaling, and so too is the publisher’s pitch. A purchaser of Thynne’s book will secure “the workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed, with dyuers workes whiche were neuer in print before: As in the table more playnly dothe appere.” I will return to the idea of canonical collections in a moment, but first I would like to consider the other elements pointed to on this title page. The “table” is the table of contents. Such tables are not an innovation of print, but they certainly become a frequent feature in early printed books and can be part of the sales pitch. Caxton, for example, provided a table of contents to his 1483 printing of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis because, he said, “there been comprysed therin dyuers hystoryes and fables towchynge euery matere” (Echard 1997). Other finding and reading aids commonly found in manuscripts, such as running titles or chapter markers, also become standard in printed books, and again may be imagined as intended to appeal to purchasers. When Caxton printed Malory’s Morte Darthur in 1485, for example, his preface noted that “for to vnderstonde bryefly the contente of thys volume, I have deuyded it into xxj bookes, and euery book chapytred as here after shal by goddes grace folowe: … The somme is xxj bookes, whyche conteyne the somme of v hondred and vij chapytres” (sig. IIIv–IVr). Because early print was generally a black‐and‐white affair (a Psalter printed in Mainz in red and black in 1457 and 1459 is a glorious exception), one of the major tools used in manuscripts to signal textual divisions, the deployment of colored initials, was not available. Display letters could be used, particularly as the printing industry matured and printers had more type available to them. But from the start, chapter markers were used, and keyed to tables of contents. Printing did not invent these kinds of paratexts, but it did advance and develop their use. The editorial activity implied by Thynne’s collecting of Chaucer’s works is another part of the sales pitch given space on the title page, as is the promise that these works have not been seen in print before. We have already seen something similar in the

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preface to Caxton’s second edition of the Canterbury Tales, when Caxton announces that he is printing a new edition because he has found a better manuscript source for the text. When Thomas Berthelet printed John Gower’s Confessio Amantis for the first time in 1532, he began with an address to the reader that expressed his confusion over the significant variations he had found between Caxton’s edition of the text and the manuscript copies he himself had consulted (here noticing the varying states of Gower’s work that led later editors to refer to three “recensions” of the text). Berthelet writes: In tyme paste whanne this warke was prynted, I can not very well coniecte, what was the cause therof, the prologue before was cleane altered. And by that mene it wold seme, that Gower dydde compyle it at the requeste of the noble duke Henry of Lancastre. And all though the bokes that be wrytten, be contrary, yet I haue folowed therin the prynt copie, for as moche as it may serue both weyes, and bycause most copies of the same warke are in printe: but yet I thought it good to warne the reder, that the writen copies do not agre with the prynted. (sig. aa3r) He then goes on to print the alternate lines from the prologue. Thus by 1532 – the same year as Thynne’s edition of Chaucer – Berthelet seems to expect that his audience will want to know, not only that the text is correct, but how exactly it came to be. Notice, too, that Berthelet explains his editorial decision in part in terms of the fact that copies of Caxton’s text are still in circulation. Even today, publishers must contend with the existence of previous printings of books when they set out to persuade consumers that they need new copies, and Berthelet’s preface suggests that concern existed in the early days of print as well. The tendency to declare (often on title pages) that a text was “newly printed” or “corrected” thus speaks to the fact that publishing was a business, and the business was to sell books. The claim to textual fidelity is good advertising, but it would be foolish to assume that such claims always reflected the truth, particularly early in the history of print, when readers were not necessarily able to compare texts all that readily (although the story told by Caxton in the preface to his second edition of the Canterbury Tales reminds us that even at the inception of print, some readers were positioned to test a printer’s claims).

3.2 ­Printers, Booksellers, Publishers, and Privilege It is common to speak of Thynne’s Chaucer, and Berthelet’s Gower, but while both Thynne and Berthelet positioned themselves as editors in relation to their materials, only one of them, Berthelet, was also a printer. In this respect he is like Caxton, who, as we have seen, was often translator, editor, and framer of the texts he also printed. In the early days of print, one person often performed multiple roles, but soon specialization became common. William Thynne, for example, was not a printer. The 1532 “workes” was printed by Thomas Godfray, a lesser‐known printer active between 1530 and 1537 (Blayney 2013). Subsequent printings of Thynne’s edition appeared under the imprint of Richard Grafton and Nicholas Hill, and these printings were produced for booksellers including John Reynes (who was also a binder), William Bonham, Richard Kele, Thomas Petyt (also a printer), and Robert Toye. In other words, in the print history of

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Thynne’s Chaucer we can see the growth of specializations within the book trade, with figures who variously emphasize editing text, printing it, packaging it, and selling it. Sometimes several or all of these activities might be carried out by one person, but increasingly we see division of labor. The roles include printer, publisher, bookseller, and binder, and while one person might perform more than one of these roles, it is worth pausing to clarify what each role entailed. Printers are of course the people like Caxton, or Wynkyn de Worde, or Thomas Godfray, or Thomas Berthelet, craftsmen who (whatever else they might do) were ­specialists in actually producing the printed text of a book. At first they sold what they made, but gradually their wares came to be more frequently handled by others. Title pages increasingly declare that a book has been printed “by” a printer “for” a particular bookseller. Booksellers sold books (locally produced or imported), and might also arrange for the binding of books, either before sale or afterwards, through craftsmen with whom they had associations. Booksellers could also put up the capital for the printing of an edition, or facilitate such arrangements, an activity that suggests some of our modern sense of what a publisher does. Eventually, members of the English book trade became more firmly differentiated into those who practiced the book crafts – such as printers, pressmen, and binders  –  and those who focused on the book trade, such as booksellers and publishers (Lesser 2004, p. 29). All these producers could be members of the book‐trade guild that came to be known as the Stationers’ Company, an organization which was to play a key role in the regulation and control of the publishing industry. The Company was first established in London in 1403; that is, well before the arrival of the printing press. Its original members were those craftsmen and artists involved in producing manuscripts. By the sixteenth century, the Company was lobbying to secure and protect the rights – often the exclusive rights – of its members to print books. By 1534, Parliament had been persuaded to pass a statute to restrict foreign competition (Clegg 1997, p. 6), a striking change from the beginning of the print trade, when, as noted above, skilled workers from the Continent supplied much of the labor. In the same year, a Royal Charter was granted to the fledgling press at Cambridge, and thereafter, one can witness skirmishes between the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and London printers. In order to control what it saw as the ideological dangers of the printing press, the Crown eventually limited the number of printers allowed in England, and required them to be under the control of the Stationers’ Company, but the universities were granted exceptions, a tense situation that provided fodder for repeated regulatory battles between London stationers and the university towns. For instance, at one point Cambridge students were forbidden from buying books printed anywhere in England other than Cambridge; at another moment, the university traded its right to print certain books in exchange for an annual payment from the Stationers’ Company (Roberts 1921). The Stationers received a Royal Charter in 1557 which, among other things, granted its members exclusive rights to print copies of a title. Copyright, in our modern sense of the term, is a development that will be explored later in our study, but even at this early point, print rapidly became a site of struggle over who should control, and profit from, the products of the press. The Charter also laid out the basic system of press regulation and pre‐publication censorship that would obtain until the Civil Wars of 1642–1649 (see Blayney 1997; Clegg 1997, 2001), and (with some modification) into the late seventeenth century. While this system changed in its details during the period, we can focus

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here on the broader outlines, which required that, before being printed, every new title had to be allowed by one of a group of named ecclesiastical authorities working under the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London. This authority would typically sign his allowance on the manuscript as an official imprimatur (Latin for “let it be printed”). A printer or bookseller interested in publishing this text would then bring it to the authorities within the Stationers’ Company to receive the Company’s license to print. This license gave the stationer the “right to copy” the text, protecting his or her investment by preventing anyone else from publishing a text that infringed on it. While in theory all texts were meant to have the official allowance before being licensed, in practice if a text seemed innocuous enough, the Stationers’ Company officials typically licensed it regardless. By the 1580s the fee for licensing had become standardized at sixpence (Blayney 1997, p. 400). The publisher could pay an additional four pence to enter his or her right to copy in the Stationers’ Register, the guild’s official record of these rights. This entrance provided the best proof of the right to copy; it was “an insurance policy: paid for, it provided the best possible protection, but the price had to be weighed against the risk” (Blayney 1997, p. 404). But the right was granted by the license itself, and entrance in the Register was not strictly required until new regulations were issued in 1637, which explicitly mandated that every book “shall be first lawfully licenced and authorized … and shall be also first entered into the Registers Booke of the Company of Stationers” (quoted in Blayney 1997, p. 403). In practice, official censorship was limited by bureaucratic inefficiency, factionalism among different parts of the regime, and the lack of a unified theological agenda among the official censors, among other factors. Generally, only the more egregious cases of perceived heresy, treason, or scandalous attacks on powerful individuals were punished. For the Jacobean period, Cyndia Clegg estimates that “employing the most conservative estimate of the number of books that issued from England’s presses between 1603 and 1625, fewer than 1 percent were in any way involved with efforts to suppress them or punish their authors or printers” (Clegg 2001, p. 19). Pre‐publication censorship often functioned more as an after‐the‐fact justification for punishment than the regulations implied: “Books that could offend nobody … were often published without authority, and no stationer is known to have been punished for failing to have an inoffensive text perused and allowed” (Blayney 1997, p. 397). The Royal Charter is best understood as a mutually beneficial arrangement between the Crown, invested in controlling the ideological aspects of print, and the Stationers’ Company, invested in protecting its members’ economic interests. Thus, the Company gained not only the “right to copy” embodied by the Stationers’ Register, but also the right to undertake searches of bookshops and print shops, looking for pirated material. For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Crown and the Stationers’ Company operated harmoniously and in tandem, but the entire system would break down in the 1640s under the pressures of the Civil Wars, and in the 1680s and 1690s during the Exclusion Crisis and (more permanently) in the wake of the “Glorious Revolution” (see Chapter 4). Even before the Charter, the Crown’s concern with printing is clear. Returning to Thynne’s title page (Figure 3.1), we can see that it declares the book has been produced “cum priuilegio.” The first appearance of the phrase “cum priuilegio,” indicating a work

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

produced under the auspices of royal privilege, was in 1515 (Clegg 1997, p. 8). The exact level of control exercised by the Crown over printing shifted in this period, and the phrase need not imply direct oversight. Nevertheless, its presence on Thynne’s title page underlines the fact that various forces increasingly sought, through the sixteenth century, to control the lucrative and potentially explosive business of printing. Another way the Crown asserted control over the ideological aspects of printing was by appointing the King’s or Queen’s Printer. The first royal printer was William Faques, who was appointed to the role in 1504, by letters patent, to print the statutes of Parliament. Thomas Berthelet, whose edition of Gower was discussed in Section 3.1, was King’s Printer from about 1530 to 1547. The royal printer helped the Crown to administer the government, publishing royal proclamations and other official documents. And for the stationer, this could be a lucrative position: royal printers often had exclusive rights to print certain books, playing an important role in, for example, the printing of the Bible, discussed in Section 3.7. Even in 1532, then, we can use the title page of Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s works to see how much printing has progressed, as a business and as a medium of textual production and dissemination, from the time of Caxton’s first printing of the Canterbury Tales in 1476. Another 60‐year interval from Thynne’s Chaucer brings us to the final Chaucerian title page to be considered here, Thomas Speght’s new edition of Chaucer’s works, in 1598 (Figure 3.2). Speght’s edition drew on the work done by John Stow for his 1561 edition, and for his second edition, in 1602, Speght also responded to criticisms of the 1598 edition made by Francis Thynne. The 1598 imprint is the work of Adam Islip (the printer), “at the charges of Thomas Wight” (the publisher). The elaborate frame offers a number of classicizing elements, including a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“Seris venit usus ab annis, Met. 6:29” [experience comes with ripe years]), and Chaucer himself is now “our Antient and Learned English Poet.” The familiar marketing phrase “newly Printed” recurs, but notable as well is the list of paratextual material with which the purchaser is lured: In this Impression you shall find these Additions. 1) His Portraiture and Progenie shewed. 2) His Life collected. 3) Arguments to euery Booke gathered. 4) Old and obscure words explaned. 5) Authors by him cited, declared. 6) Difficulties opened. 7) Two Bookes of his, neuer before Printed. The book is in every way monumental, as suits the poet now clearly configured as the father of the English literary tradition – and indeed more than one scholar has remarked on the significance, for that identification, of the portrait of Chaucer, surrounded by the names and arms of his descendants (Pearsall 1992, pp. 285–305; Driver 2002; Bishop 2007). Author portraits, sometimes in the form of presentation images, are not a new feature of print. Thomas Hoccleve, for example, features in a presentation portrait in one copy of his Regiment of Princes, offering his book to Prince Henry, the future Henry V.2 The 1598 portrait, by John Speed (c. 1552–1629), draws on the tradition of Chaucer portraiture found in the manuscripts of the Regiment of Princes, although scholars today do not view these as Speed’s direct source.3 The engraved, printed

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Figure 3.2  Title page of Thomas Speght’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1598. Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 5079.

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portrait combines the heraldry of the Chaucer tomb at Ewelme with a likeness that seems most closely related to a single manuscript leaf now at the British Library, which has a life of Chaucer on one side and a sixteenth‐century portrait of Chaucer (backdated to 1402) on the other (Driver 2002, p. 241).4 In the 1598 portrait, then, we see print taking up an element already found in some manuscripts and consolidating it; after this point, portraits of Chaucer become ubiquitous. Chaucer is also now positioned as both venerable and perhaps difficult, given the apparent necessity to explain both “old and obscure words” and his use of other authors (see Cook 2011). These features look forward to the scholarly and student editions of the modern period, giving readers a Chaucer who is to be studied but, perhaps, less immediately accessible than he was to, say, Hoccleve, to whom he was “flour of eloquence,” “universal fadir [father] in science,” and “firste fyndere of our fair langage” (Hoccleve 1999, lines 1962, 1964, 4978). Hoccleve is positioned at the beginning of the canonization of Chaucer, with his praise of the poet and his relationship to the portrait tradition. Still, Hoccleve’s “fadir” has, on Speght’s pages, become a much more remote and monumental figure. Thus far we have been looking at early printing through the lens of what might be described as prestige printing, but printers produced many different kinds of materials, and some of these, while not elite in their appeal or appearance, could provide a printer’s bread and butter. One such category of material is the broadside. A broadside is a single sheet of paper printed on one side. Material found in this format includes indulgences, advertisements, church calendars, and ballads. Broadside ballads, popular from the sixteenth century onwards, comprised both traditional material, such as the stories of medieval heroes like Guy of Warwick or Bevis of Hampton, and new material, often dedicated to events and controversies of the day. The sheet typically included one or more woodcut illustrations and an indication of the tune to which the ballad should be sung. These broadsides were very inexpensive, with costs running from a halfpenny early in the century to a penny by the middle of the seventeenth century. A low estimate based on entries in the Stationers’ Register (not all ballads were registered) suggests that something like “3,000 distinct ballads” were printed in the second half of the sixteenth century, a figure which implies that there could have been at least “600,000 ballads ­circulating” in that period (Watt 1994, p. 11). The popularity, and popular culture content, of some of the broadside ballads attracted both condemnation from some Protestant Reformers and attempts to capitalize on the form, in such things as broadside sermons and moralizations of popular ballads. Broadside ballads might be the lucrative mass printing that kept a printer of other, more specialized material afloat. As the trade developed, there were also printers who ­specialized in ballads. These were not sold only from the bookseller’s shop: they were also commonly distributed by chapmen, itinerant traders of the kind immortalized by Shakespeare in the character of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. Like Autolycus, these chapmen peddled not only printed matter but also general goods including clothing and household objects to the public (“chap” comes from the Old English word ceap, which means barter or business). Chapbooks, discussed more in Section 6.1, take their name from these sellers. The booksellers who increasingly specialized in ballads also organized themselves, and these chapmen, to promote and proliferate the trade ­ (Blagden 1954; Würzbach 1990).

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A more formal trading organization, available only to those higher up in the Stationers’ Company, was the so‐called English Stock, discussed at more length in Section 4.6. This was established in 1603 by grant from King James, consolidated out of a variety of ­royally granted monopolies held by individual stationers for other kinds of lucrative printing, including schoolbooks (primers and alphabets), psalters, and, above all, almanacs (see Figure 3.3). Complaints from those in the book trade who did not have these monopolies, and anti‐monopoly sentiment in Parliament late in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, led to the abolition of these royal privileges, which the Stationers’ Company then successfully campaigned to monopolize for the elite among the guild (Blagden 1955). Almanacs, like the Farmers’ Almanac with which many modern readers are familiar, included weather predictions, calendars, and practical information such as important historical dates, holidays, and agricultural and medical information. They also typically included astrological material and prophecies, and were both popular and, like the broadside ballads, sometimes viewed with suspicion (Capp 1979; Smyth 2013). They were very inexpensive, growing cheaper in relation to wages over time but printed in such vast numbers – into the millions of copies by the seventeenth century – that they represented a significant potential for profit (Simmons 2002; Kassell 2011). The proliferation of this kind of material points to an important fact that accompanies the development of print: a rise in literacy. In Section 1.2, we saw that literacy was specialized and limited, with the term referring largely to the Latin competence of male and some female religious figures, although famous examples of lay literacy, such as Alfred the Great, also existed. The rise of documentary governmental culture under the Angevin rulers in the twelfth century, alongside the rise of universities and other kinds of schools, extended what we might think of as professional literacy, and by the end of the Middle Ages, we find vernacular literacy penetrating the gentry class (see the discussion of the Thornton and Findern manuscripts in Section  2.7) and the merchant class (as witnessed most famously by the Paston letters; see Section 1.2). While, as discussed below, initial attitudes toward the printing and distribution of English Bibles after the Reformation were mixed, a characteristically Protestant emphasis on studying scripture at home meant that, by the end of the sixteenth century, the ability to read English could be seen as a necessity of spiritual practice, although its actual penetration throughout Britain was uneven and sharply marked by class and gender (Cressy 1980, pp. 3, 43). The ABCs and primers that taught literacy were nevertheless important, and the incredible number of almanacs printed suggest ever‐greater penetration of at least a basic level of literacy, although a great many people, particularly in the lowest levels of society, continued to be able to read only very simple material and were often unable to write at all (Cressy 1980, p. 13). While throughout the early modern period women’s literacy consistency trailed men’s, nonetheless the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a significant rise in the number of women able to read and write. While one‐third of English men in the 1640s could write their own names on official documents (a significant, if far from perfect sign of literacy), for women the number was only 1 in 10. By 1700, however, a quarter of English women could do so. In London, this “signature literacy” was higher for both women and men; at the end of the seventeenth century, the majority of London women could sign their names. By this measure, London women “were as literate as men in the countryside” (Cressy 1993, p. 314). But it is important to recognize that this measure tells only part of the story. More recently, scholars have argued persuasively that studies

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.3  Title page of An almanacke, and prognostication, for the yeare of our Lorde God. 1565, printed in London by Henry Denham for William Pickering. Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 462.2, A1r.

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primarily focused on signatures, long considered our main documentary evidence for literacy, systematically distort the evidence along gender lines and seriously underestimate the number of people, especially women, able to read. Early modern “patterns of instruction yielded far more female readers than writers,” and “legal and state practices led to the severe under‐representation of female signers and markers of these ­documents” (Brayman Hackel 2010, p. 20). Particularly for women, early modern Britain  may have been “a much more ‘literate’ environment than has ever been fully appreciated” (Fox 2000, p. 409). This must have been particularly the case for women of the urban merchant class. Among these merchant‐class women were printers and booksellers. Women worked in printing houses and bookshops alongside their husbands, and when (as was often the case) their husbands died first, widows frequently carried on the business in their own names. These “widows were automatically made free of the Company with the right to take apprentices and hold shares in the English Stock” (H. Smith 2012, p. 95). They entered titles in the Stationers’ Register to claim their right to copy; they put their names on title pages as printers and publishers; they used the Court of the Stationers’ Company to resolve business disputes. We should imagine the activity of these widows as only the tip of the iceberg of women’s work in the book trade, however: that work became visible when women became widows, while remaining largely ­invisible behind the name of their husbands while they lived. Widows who remarried another Stationer retained all these rights, but those who married outside the book trade lost them. We therefore find widows marrying former apprentices, or men who must have been friends and business associates. But women also carried on under their own names for significant periods of time without remarrying. Joan Broome worked for a decade as a bookseller and publisher after her husband, William, died in 1591; her work included publishing the first editions of John Lyly’s plays Endymion, Gallathea, and Midas (Lyons 2011). Elizabeth Allde’s husband, Edward, ran one of the largest printing houses in early seventeenth‐century London; when he died in 1627, Elizabeth carried on the work until her own death in 1636. Edward’s own mother, Margaret Allde, had herself run the shop after Edward’s father, John Allde, died. This was a printing dynasty that depended on women’s work for its survival. Jane Bell was partly responsible for keeping Shakespeare in print during the years in which the theaters were closed during the Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642–1660): only two new Shakespeare editions appeared during this period, and Bell’s King Lear (1655) was one of them – even though she apparently owned the rights not to Shakespeare’s play but to the anonymous King Leir that competed with it (Kastan 1999, p. 229, n. 11). Women were also understood to be important to the book trade in another role: as book readers, owners, and even collectors. While not as sizeable a portion of the reading public as they would become in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – when numerous periodicals specifically targeting women were launched (see Sections 7.1 and 9.5) – women were increasingly addressed by publishers and authors in dedications and prefaces (Hull 1982). For example, the subtitle of Barnaby Rich’s frequently reprinted collection of stories, Rich his farewell to Militarie profession, insistently makes clear his imagined readership: Gathered together for the onlie delight of the courteous Gentlewomen, both of England and Ireland for whose onelie pleasure they were collected together, and vnto whom they are directed and dedicated (quoted from the 1594 e­ dition). The publisher Humphrey Moseley apparently saw women as the primary audience for

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

his printed plays, as he wrote in a preface to his 1647 collection of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher. Moseley omitted previously printed plays from this collection, he wrote, because including them would have made the volume so bulky “that Ladies and Gentlewomen would have found it scarce manageable, who in Workes of this nature must first be remembred” (Beaumont and Fletcher 1647, sig. A4r). Recent work by feminist historians of reading has uncovered troves of previously unexplored archival evidence of women’s reading (Thompson and Roberts 1997; Brayman Hackel 2005; Snook 2005; Brayman Hackel and Kelly 2008). We are now much more familiar with the reading habits of aristocratic women such as Lady Anne Clifford (whose diary, extant books, and commissioned portrait document her extensive reading and book collecting), and also of the more humble women who wrote their names in their books to claim them. In one delightful example, a woman apparently thought her copy of Nicholas Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives would be mistakenly thought to belong to her husband, so she inscribed it: “Elizabeth Hunt her Book not his” (quoted in Brayman Hackel 2005, p.  215). A member of the minor country gentry, Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677) had an extensive collection of books, perhaps 400 or more (Morgan 1989). She inscribed each of them with her name and “her book,” and she left detailed instructions about them in her will, most importantly that her son should lend them to his brothers and sisters when asked but also “carefully keepe them together” as a distinct library (quoted in Morgan 1989, p. 201). Sometimes, after writing her name in a book, Wolfreston added a bit of literary criticism, as in her copy of an edition of Othello, which she labeled “a sad one” (see Figure 3.4). And women were also contributing to the book trade at the most fundamental level: as writers of the texts that made their way into print. As in the earlier cases of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (see Section  1.4), much of the published writing by women in this period was religious. Given the public nature of the printed book trade, in which texts circulated far more widely than Julian or Kempe’s manuscripts did, for early modern women writers the spiritual nature of this writing offered some protection from patriarchal critique: this was a topic that “women writers in particular could discuss without having to devote considerable effort to justifying their entry into the literary sphere” (Ostovich and Sauer 2004, p. 132). The first English author to publish a sonnet sequence was not Shakespeare, or Spenser, or Philip Sidney, but Anne Locke, whose devotional sequence A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner appeared in 1560, although without authorial attribution. Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (1611), a long religious poem on the Passion, does include her name prominently on the title page: “Written by Mistris Æmilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the Kings Majestie.” Often said to be the first published book of poetry explicitly acknowledged as written by an English woman, Lanyer’s volume also included the secular poem “The Description of Cookeham,” in the country house genre that Ben Jonson would later make famous with “To Penshurst,” published five years later. In fact, Isabella Whitney had earlier published secular poetry and also has a claim on this “first,” but one of her works is attributed only to “Is. W.” and her longer work, A Sweet Nosegay (1573), lacks the title page in the only surviving copy, so we do not know if she was named in full as author. While no woman is known to have written a play for the public theater, Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is an important closet drama, an early example of dramatic writing by a woman before Aphra Behn’s stellar career in the later seventeenth century. In the sonnet genre, Locke was followed by Mary Wroth, whose

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Figure 3.4  Frances Wolfreston’s copy of the 1655 edition of Othello: “a sad one.” Source: Courtesy of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. EC Sh155 622oc.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) is a powerful sonnet sequence, embedded within her romance Urania; both texts are in conversation with and rival the work of her uncle Philip Sidney. Margaret Cavendish (1623?–1673) wrote in a wide range of genres, including natural philosophy, literary epistles, drama, poetry and prose fiction, and the strange and fascinating early science fiction The Blazing World (1668). As with all of these women writers, Cavendish has received intensive attention in recent years thanks to feminist scholars who have returned them to prominence after centuries of neglect, although many were very well known and widely read in their own day. In all of these ways, women were contributing to the book trade. For some, these contributions could be lucrative: as mentioned above, both male and female members of the Stationers’ Company could hold shares in the English Stock and receive annual dividends that virtually guaranteed a nice income; by 1644, in fact, more than 25% of shares were owned by women (Johns 1998, p. 260). Other attempts to create similar joint‐stock partnerships (a Latin Stock, an Irish Stock) did not succeed, but the English Stock remained profitable into the nineteenth century. Not all members of the Stationers’ Company were able to gain access to the highly coveted shares, however, and this division would exacerbate tensions between the printers and the publishing booksellers of the Company (see Lesser 2004, pp. 34–36). As the printing industry developed and matured, then, it became a site for many different kinds of contests, as various actors attempted to control it for ideological, political, and economic ends.

3.3 ­Across the “Divide”: The Persistence of Manuscript in the Age of Print Even as print proliferated and gradually came to dominate the business of disseminating text, manuscript persisted. Sometimes the reasons were simply pragmatic, a reflection of the fact that print took some time to take hold. For example, a manuscript copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis now in the Bodleian Library dates to sometime between 1500 and 1550, at least a generation after the arrival of the printing press in Britain.5 It is a relatively modest book, measuring 31 × 22 cm, with little by way of decoration apart from red initials, some red bracketing, and some use of red for the Latin text. In a tradition rich with deluxe copies, this is a relatively insignificant manuscript. It is an appropriate introduction to this section of our study, however, because it is copied, not from another manuscript, but from William Caxton’s printed text of 1483. As noted in Section 3.1, Caxton included an unusually well‐developed table of contents in his printed version of Gower’s long poem, and this manuscript copies that table, along with the printer’s introduction of the poem. This copy of Gower’s Confessio, then, exemplifies the focus of this section: the porousness of the script/print boundary. In one sense, of course, it is obvious that the transition from manuscript to print would inevitably involve some back‐and‐forth communication. The first printers based their texts on manuscripts, after all, and once print copies entered the marketplace, it is not hard to imagine how they could themselves become the source for hand‐copying. The personal and household miscellanies of the fifteenth century discussed in Section 2.7 remind us that many people produced their own books, out of the materials at hand, and these materials, by the early sixteenth century, doubtless often included

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print. Broadside ballads, for example, sometimes show up copied in personal manuscripts. Another example: Matthew Parker, the sixteenth‐century archbishop of Canterbury discussed further in Sections 3.4 and 3.5, owned a thirteenth‐century manuscript copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie that, when it came into his hands, was lacking the opening of the text.6 Parker often corrected, added to, rearranged, or otherwise manipulated the manuscripts in his collection (Page 1993), so it was quite natural for him to have the loss made up by copying from another text. The first 12 folios of the manuscript are copied in two sixteenth‐century hands, one of which is clearly attempting to look like a black letter typeface – perhaps because the source for this copy was also a printed book, the first printed edition of Geoffrey’s Historia, which had appeared in Paris in 1508. Just as the scribe of the Gower manuscript copied Caxton’s table of contents, here too the scribes include paratextual ­material from the Parisian edition, in this case the chapter headings found in print. It is also important to remember that in many cases, early print may witness a lost manuscript tradition. There are texts that survive from the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages only because those manuscripts at some point served as a printer’s copy text, but were subsequently lost. A particularly dramatic illustration of this fact centers on the year 1934. Up until that point, two medieval texts that are now considered very important, the Book of Margery Kempe and Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, were known only through print copies. Before 1934, Margery Kempe’s work was quite obscure. Part of the obscurity can be attributed to its subject matter – the Book is an apparent autobiography of the decidedly eccentric mystic Margery Kempe (c. 1373– 1438) – but the only partial survival of the text is doubtless also a reason. Until 1934, the Book was known only through excerpts. In 1501, Wynkyn de Worde printed a brief, 7‐page extract as “a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon … taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of lyn,” and in 1521, Henry Pepwell used de Worde’s pamphlet in producing a collection of mystical texts. Only a handful of these printings survive. Unlike the Book of Margery Kempe, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur did survive the Middle Ages in its complete form, and that, along with its uptake in the Victorian medieval revival, made it the polar opposite of Kempe’s text in terms of recognition and popularity – but it, too, depended on an early print survival. Caxton printed the text in 1485, and that edition survives in only one perfect copy. All subsequent printings of Malory, up until 1934, depended ultimately, directly or indirectly, on Caxton’s text. And then came an annus mirabilis for manuscript discovery. For Margery, a complete manuscript written around 1440 was discovered in a family collection, identified by Emily Hope Allen, and, eventually, bought by the British Library in 1980.7 For Malory, the Winchester manuscript discussed in Sections 2.11 and 2.12 was discovered in 1934 by Walter Oakeshott, in the collection of Winchester College; it dates to c. 1471–1483.8 So while today scholars can consult medieval manuscripts apparently quite close in time of production to the texts that they witness, for both Margery and Malory, by the time of the discoveries, reliance on the print record had already penetrated and perhaps molded scholarship. For other medieval texts, the record of early print is all that remains. For example, Golagros and Gawane, discussed in Section 3.9 in relation to early Scottish printing, survives in only one printed copy of a 1508 edition. The Squyr of Low Degre was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1520 but that copy survives only in fragments, and so our sense today of the romance depends in part on a text printed some 40 years later. While we assume that medieval originals lie behind these and other early prints, the

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.5  The opening of Book I of The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser. These pages include Red Cross Knight’s battle with the monster Error, who vomits up printed pamphlets when the knight kills her. Source: By permission of Rare Books and Special Collections, The University of British Columbia Library. PR2358.A1 1609.

medieval manuscript record is now gone, and print – the technology we tend to imagine as looking forward to a new future – is central here in allowing us to look back. Some writers embraced print and its possibilities. Figure 3.5 is a page from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, first printed in 1590 (the copy in the Figure is from 1609). Spenser (1582?–1599) was still alive when the Faerie Queene appeared, and the book included his dedication to Elizabeth I. As Harold Love writes, Spenser was a “print‐fixated poet” (Love 1993, p. 145), highly aware of the reach and impact of print, and crafting his political verse from the start with an eye to its appearance on the page. Love points, for example, to “the look of the poem on the page, its magisterial succession of stanzas, each grounded on the concluding Alexandrine, progressing past with the air of a fleet in full sail  –  a design that … seems so perfectly adjusted to the strengths of Renaissance typography” (Love 1993, pp. 145–146). Print is part of Spenser’s thematic repertoire as well. Early in Book I of The Faerie Queene (1590), Red Cross Knight and Una (allegorical figures representing England and the True Church) encounter the monster Error. Spenser describes Red Cross’s plight when, after he strikes the beast, she wraps him in her coils: Much daunted with that dint, her sense was daz’d; Yet kindling rage, her selfe she gather’d round, And all at once her beastly body raiz’d With doubled forces high aboue the ground:

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Tho wrapping vp her wreathed sterne around, Leapt fierce vpon his shield, and her huge traine All suddainly about his body wound, That hand or foot to stirre he stroue in vaine: God help the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine. (1.1.18) Error’s “endless train” is, allegorically, incorrect religious thinking, a point Spenser drives home when his knight kills the monster: There‐with she spewd out of her filthy maw A floud of poyson horrible and black, Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw, Which stunk so vilely, that it forc’t him slack His grasping hold, and from her turne him back: Her vomit full of bookes and papers was, With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lack, And creeping, sought way in the weedy grass: Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has. (1.1.20) The role of the press in the religious controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is here made manifest, as Spenser uses print to combat print. While Spenser exemplifies those who deliberately exploited the print medium, there were other writers who equally deliberately avoided it, preferring “scribal publication” in smaller coteries (Love 1993). Verse in particular often circulated scribally in this period, with very little of the poetry of a figure like John Donne appearing in print during his lifetime. Plays, too, discussed further in Section 3.8, might circulate in manuscript, even alongside print publication, as was the case with Thomas Middleton’s blockbuster, and politically dangerous, hit A Game at Chess, which survives in three different printed editions of 1625 and six contemporary manuscript copies, including one in the hand of Middleton himself (Taylor 2007, pp. 712–848). Coterie reading ­circles of the sort described above with respect to medieval city‐scribes continued to produce scribal publication for private circulation, and household transcription was another hand‐focused practice that continued into the age of print, sometimes with an oddly moralizing cast. We turn now to two examples of hand production of books that depended, simultaneously, on a strong moral sense and a good supply of printed material. John Foxe (1516/17–1587) is most famous for his Actes and Monuments (often called the Book of Martyrs), a massive martyrology that traced, in excruciating detail, the deaths of Protestants at the hand of Catholics (see Figure 3.6). This was a truly monumental printing, appearing first in 1563 and in three further expanded editions in Foxe’s lifetime (1570, 1576, 1583). The book continued to appear in various versions after Foxe’s death (it was, for example, published as part of the English Stock in 1596). It was an almost unprecedented project. As John King notes, “the chronic shortage of capital and almost complete absence of domestic paper manufacture militated against the printing of big books by London printers” (King 2006, p. 9). Yet Foxe’s book was printed in the largest, folio, format. For the 1570 edition, the printer, John Day (1521/2–1584), had an insufficient supply of the large paper needed and had to paste smaller sheets

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.6  The martyrdom of William Tyndale, in a 1570 copy of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 11223, copy 1, v. 2, p. 1229.

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together to make up the shortfall (King 2006, p. 88). Type, too, was pressured by Foxe’s grand project. The larger the page, of course, the more type was needed to set the page. Because printers had only limited supplies of each letter, a large‐format book meant that “only a very few pages could be set in type at any one time … [and] constant redistribution of type necessitated rapid reading of proofs before each print run” (King 2006, p. 87). Because it was reprinted so many times, it is often assumed that the Book of Martyrs was very popular, but it is also the case that many powerful people supported its publication for political and ideological reasons (see Evenden and Freeman 2011). Certainly, the production of this book must have been a tense, exhausting, and financially precarious affair, with the first edition apparently failing to meet John Day’s sales expectations (Evenden and Freeman 2011, pp. 136–137). And yet Foxe is fully convinced of the value of print, adding to the 1570 edition an essay called “The Invention and Benefit of Printing.” He presents printing as a gift from God: hereby tongues are knowen, knowledge groweth, judgment increaseth, bookes are dispersed, the Scripture is sene … truth decerned, falsehode detected … and all (as I sayd) through the benefite and inuention of printyng. Wherefore I suppose that either the Pope must abolishe printyng, or hee must seke a new worlde to reigne ouer: for els, as this worlde standeth, printyng, doubtles, will abolishe him. (Foxe 1570, p. 858) Foxe’s printer, Day, for his part, had “a lifelong commitment to the dissemination of Protestant books and pamphlets” (King 2006, p. 81) – to material, in other words, that would counter what spews from the mouth of the monster in the Faerie Queene. Like Spenser, then, Foxe made deliberate use of the potential of print to spread what he saw as right doctrine (that is, the Protestant, rather than the Catholic, form of Christianity). A lesser‐known work by Foxe, his Pandectae locorum communium (1572), demonstrates the overlap between print and manuscript with which this section opened. The book is, at first glance, a typical production of John Day. It has a handsome title page featuring the liberal arts (used also for Day’s printings of Asser’s Life of Alfred the Great, Euclid’s Geometry, and the commentaries of Peter Martyr Vermigli), a Latin preface by Foxe, and then – nothing. Or rather, almost nothing: the vast majority of the pages are blank, with only a headword printed at the top of each. The second edition, printed by Hugh Singleton in 1585, has even more pages, again mostly blank. The purchaser of the book is meant to fill these blank pages with aphorisms related to the headwords; this is, in other words, a printed book intended to facilitate the collection and transcription of commonplaces. Few of the 11 surviving copies of the first edition have been filled in, and the sole surviving copy of the second is likewise unannotated, although the copy belonging to Sir Julius Caesar, a lawyer who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1606 to 1614, is an exception, with all of its pages meticulously filled. Caesar obtained the book in 1577, when he was 19, and completed it in 1629. Caesar passed the book on to his son, suggesting the value he personally placed on it; by contrast, Day seems to have been left with unsold extra copies of the first edition, as he used pages from the run to print other books (Sherman 2008, p. 138). The 1572 first edition owned by Caesar had 768 headings, but Caesar added almost as many of his own, and his extensive

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

system of cross‐referencing and indexing has led William Sherman to describe Caesar’s copy of the Pandectae as his “search engine” (Sherman 2008, p. 127). The kind of work suggested by the structure of and preface to Foxe’s Pandectae locorum communium is an industrious, moral, bookish activity that imagines a reader seeking wisdom in books, digesting and reproducing it. The preface refers, among other things, to the “flowers” to be collected from reading, making use of a metaphor of industrious compilation popular with medieval commentators as well (see Stallybrass and Chartier 2007). Here, this is a reading practice that begins with both manuscript and printed texts  –  substantial reading across this supposed divide would generally have provided the matter intended to fill in the pages – and whose results are recorded on printed pages, but which is nevertheless marked by the patient industry of the hand. William Sherman points out that the British Library categorizes Caesar’s copy as a manuscript rather than a printed book (Sherman 2008, p. 130). Finally, as if to complete the circle, printed texts themselves began to include markers – typically marginal quotation marks – to indicate to readers the most sententious passages, neatly pre‐selected for transcription into manuscript commonplace books (Lesser and Stallybrass 2008). Our second example (or rather, set of examples) of a handmade book that relies on the resources of print comes from near the end of the period covered by this part of the study. These are the 15 “harmonies” created at the Protestant community of Little Gidding between the years of 1625 and 1642. Little Gidding was home to Nicholas Ferrar (1593–1637) and his extended family, who together established a community centered on the reading and production of religious texts. One of Ferrar’s favorite books was Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, and selections were read aloud at meals in the household (Aston 2007, pp. 83–85). “Harmonies” were works that attempted to unify biblical texts, usually the Gospels, into a single narrative. There were printed harmonies, but the ones from Little Gidding are handmade books created by cutting up printed materials (books and prints) and pasting the cuttings into arrangements on scrapbook pages. The work of cutting and pasting was done largely by the women of the household, and the books were not only intended for the use of the family, but also served as presentation copies, including one that was given to King Charles I himself (Trettien forthcoming). The early harmonies were not illustrated, although the later and grander ones made use of prints to provide pictures. The resulting books appeared to the community at Little Gidding as “a new kind of printing” (Ransome 2005, p. 27) and would not have been possible without the printed raw materials. And yet they were also, of course, entirely the product of the human hand.

3.4 ­Collecting and Re‐Collecting Manuscripts After the Middle Ages Our study so far has emphasized the mobility of books both within and beyond Britain: we have seen books as objects to be imported and exported, loaned and traded, and, sometimes, seized and plundered. As we have seen, some of the earliest commentary on books and how they were perceived comes from stories surrounding the Viking age, with tales of loss and miraculous survival. But traumatic as the Viking raids on places such as Lindisfarne undoubtedly were, they pale, at least in terms of the damage done

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to books and manuscripts, when compared to the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1534, Henry VIII formalized his break with the Church of Rome through the Act of Supremacy, by which he became Supreme Head of the Church of England. Between 1536 and 1540, Henry passed a range of measures to strip English monasteries of their power and possessions. Smaller foundations were closed first, but eventually the larger houses were targeted as well, with the last monastery, Waltham Abbey, surrendering to the royal commissioners on March 23, 1540. Many monasteries had significant libraries, and their contents suffered various fates. Some books were destroyed for religious or political reasons, either at the time of the Dissolution, or in 1550, under the auspices of Edward VI’s Act Against Superstitious Books and Images (Summit 2008, p. 102). Some were torn apart, as John Bale records in The laboryouse journey & serche of Johan Leylande for Englandes antiquitees (1549): “A great nombre of them whych purchased those superstycyouse mansyons, reserued of those lybrarye bokes, some to serue theyr iakes [i.e. their toilets, as toilet paper], some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, & some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sope sellers” (sig. B1r). Many of the medieval books explored in the first part of this study are remarkable, magnificent, monumental volumes – the books most likely to be protected, preserved, or, indeed, seized and transferred to new owners. Writing of great early Bibles like the Codex Amiatinus or the insular Gospel books, Richard Marsden has pointed out that in terms of production, these represent the exception rather than the rule: “The splendid books which attract our attention today are not representative,” for many more modest books must have been made, used, and kept in monastic communities to support their daily activities (Marsden 1998, p. 155). This situation is doubtless true for medieval books more generally, and so it is important to remember that the destruction that accompanied the Dissolution was not necessarily uniform. What is clear is how much was lost. Studies that compare medieval inventories of monastic libraries with the number of surviving volumes often discover huge discrepancies between those inventories and the few manuscripts that remain, usually in other hands. Neil Ker’s Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, an attempt to catalogue all surviving medieval manuscripts from religious houses, cathedrals, and colleges in England, Wales, and Scotland, lists about 6000 volumes in all in its second edition. Ker did not include books belonging to the medieval libraries of the universities and colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, if they were still in place; nevertheless, the number of survivals is small, when one considers that the list represents some 500 medieval libraries. The list also shows the often arbitrary nature of post‐Dissolution survivals, with some important medieval foundations represented by only a few books, and other, less significant houses with almost all their books surviving, although often widely dispersed (Ker 1964, p. xi). The Dissolution was not the only time library collections were threatened in the early modern period, and ecclesiastical foundations were not the only libraries to suffer. The history of the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a case in point. A relatively small collection of books had been housed in the Old Congregation House from the fourteenth century. Then Humfrey of Lancaster, duke of Gloucester, bequeathed his collection of manuscripts to the University of Oxford on his death in 1447, and the second story added to the Divinity School to house the books – a project eventually completed in 1488 – came to be called Duke Humfrey’s Library. In 1550, after King Edward VI passed legislation aimed at eradicating the last traces of Roman Catholicism from England, the books in Duke Humfrey’s Library, suspect because of both their texts and their images, were

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

dispersed, some destroyed and some repurposed into the collections of reformers. In  1598, Sir Thomas Bodley provided funds and books to restore the library, and in 1610, he arranged for the library to receive a copy of every book printed by the Stationers’ Company, in a forerunner of the copyright depository agreements made with the many national libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The library was protected from yet another threat as a result of religious conflict during the Civil Wars, when Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary commander‐in‐chief, ordered a special detachment of soldiers to protect the collection after he took control of the city in June 1646. Figures like Fairfax were rare, but throughout the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were deliberate attempts to take notice of the fate of books. In the case of the Dissolution, John Leland (c. 1503–1552) was apparently commissioned by the king “to peruse and dylygentlye to search all the lybraryes of monasteryes and collegies” (DNB) for books. His initial activities took place before the monasteries were dissolved and resulted in a list of the books in their possession, called the Collectanea. He seems to have continued some of this work after the Dissolution. It has been assumed that he played a major role in assembling the royal library in the wake of the Dissolution, but in fact “less than a dozen of the hundreds of monastic books in the Royal Collection can be shown to have arrived there” as a result of Leland’s activities (DNB). English books did, however, certainly make their way into the king’s hands. Ker notes that the manuscripts in Henry VIII’s royal library “were mainly of English monastic provenance”; major libraries represented include the monasteries at Rochester, St. Alban’s, St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, Ramsey, Merton, and Worcester (Ker 1964, p. xi). Furthermore, hundreds of volumes from medieval monasteries made their way into the hands of private collectors: “Local collectors up and down the country were actually much more effective than the king in preserving monastic books,” and the period from 1560 to 1640 might be considered “the golden age of the English private collector and the great formative period of the modern public and college collections of manuscripts” (Ker 1964, pp. xii–xiii). The great national libraries belong to a later period than that dealt with here: the British Museum library was established in 1753; the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh was opened in 1689 and became a national copyright library in 1710; the National Library of Wales was officially established in 1907; and the National Library of Ireland dates to 1877. However, the dispersal and re‐collecting that happened during and after the Dissolution did a great deal to lay the groundwork of these later collections. For example, Matthew Parker, discussed below, acquired manuscripts in this period, some of which became part of the collection of Corpus Christi College Library, and others of which he gave to the Cambridge University library. Stephen Batman, a member of Parker’s circle, collected not just for the archbishop but also for himself. Sir John Prise (Siôn ap Rhys, c. 1502–1555), the Welsh politician, royal commissioner, and scholar who compiled the first book printed in Welsh (Yny lhyvyr hwnn, discussed in Section  2.10), collected at least 100 manuscripts over his lifetime. As Jennifer Summit has shown, much collecting activity was motivated at least in part by ideas about nation‐building, as the writings of John Leland, John Bale, and others suggest (Summit 2008, pp. 102–103). By reassembling into new patterns the scattered survivors of the great monastic collections, this collecting activity also helped to create a new vision of both past and present: “the post‐Reformation library was dedicated to reshaping cultural memory from remnants salvaged from the ruined monastic past” (Summit 2008, p. 106).

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In the seventeenth century, Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571–1631) built a massive collection that came to function as the most important library for antiquarian research in England. While the library was his private collection, he routinely allowed scholars access to its contents, motivated by his belief that the country needed a national library, which he was unable to persuade the king to found (Tite 1994, p. 20). During his lifetime, Cotton’s collection had six major emphases, many of which suggest an interest in the nation’s past: Anglo‐Saxon manuscripts, monastic registers, Bibles and related books, genealogical and heraldic material, chronicles and other historical materials, and state papers (Tite 1994, p. 24). Cotton had a vast network of correspondents, and his library became a hub for historical research, its importance being witnessed in part by the fact that in 1629, King Charles I ordered it closed, fearing that scholars were using the books and manuscripts it contained to question royal prerogatives. The national significance of Cotton’s library was solidified when it became one of the core collections of the newly established British Museum library in 1753. The fire in 1731 at Ashburnham House, where the collection was stored, was another horrific destruction of books, this time by chance. All of these collections show us the book in a new light, as the subject of scholarly research. Of course, throughout the Middle Ages, readers consulted manuscripts to settle questions of theology, philosophy, or history; they learned from books, and they were entertained by them. But it is in the early modern period that we see the beginnings of historical research and scholarly editing practices that are the recognizable forerunners of our modern approaches. In discussing book collectors, we have thus far been concentrating purely on their library‐building activities – but of course men like Robert Cotton collected books at least in part in order to read them, and as the story of the temporary closing of Cotton’s library makes clear, that activity could be deeply political and embedded in current controversies. Clearly antiquarians were reading, and using, the manuscripts in their libraries. Matthew Parker (1504–1575), the archbishop of Canterbury from 1559, was a famous collector, reader, and producer of books, and a key figure in the transmission of medieval texts to the early modern period. We are particularly well placed to explore how books were collected, read, and produced in his circle because he gave his ­collection of books and manuscripts to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1574, and these items not only remain at Corpus Christi to this day, but the manuscripts, including early modern transcriptions made by Parker and his circle, are also accessible through a digitization program called Parker Library on the Web, with over 500 manuscripts currently available online. Parker was particularly interested in Old English material, in part because, as archbishop of Canterbury in the post‐Reformation era, he sought grounding for the practices of the English Church in the documents of the Anglo‐Saxon period. Many items in Parker’s collection came into his hands as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. From Bury St. Edmunds, for example, there is a twelfth‐century Bible, a fourteenth‐century historical miscellany, a twelfth‐century copy of the works of Anselm, the Chronicle of Bury, and a fourteenth‐century prophetical manuscript. From Durham, Parker obtained a tenth‐century copy of Bede’s life of St. Cuthbert; from Winchester, a pontifical, Ordinale, the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle and Laws and Sedulius, the Lives of the Saints, the Annals of Winchester and the Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, and the Winchester Troper. This is not mere acquisitiveness, but rather, a purposeful assemblage of materials closely related to Parker’s interests.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

At the same time, Parker certainly cared about how his manuscripts looked. He routinely manipulated the books in his collection, taking them apart and rebinding them in new configurations, for example, and even moving leaves from one manuscript to another, to make it suit his sense of what a complete copy of any particular medieval text should look like. One of the most dramatic examples of this kind of intervention did not, in fact, happen. We know from a letter that Parker considered intervening in the Vespasian Psalter,9 planning to move the image of David with his harp from folio 30v to the front of the manuscript (which lacked its opening), further mulling over the possibility of having the missing text written on the back of the leaf, in a hand that would “counterfete… antiquitie” (Echard 2008). Whether Parker thought better of this plan or simply did not get around to executing it is not clear, but it shows the attitude of the archbishop, not just to his books but to books in general. Because so many of our encounters with old books – whether medieval manuscripts or early modern print – are mediated by strict institutional settings that control how we interact with those books, it can be difficult to remember that for men like Parker, books were to be used. The manuscripts in his collection are often marked up with notes made by the archbishop himself, in his characteristic red crayon, or by members of his circle. They contain framing and contextual material, such as brief biographical accounts of the medieval authors, or transcriptions of portions of the text, or alphabets. These are learning and reading aids, suggesting the antiquarian stance toward the remains of the increasingly unfamiliar past. The working nature of Parker’s library is also witnessed in the many ways that his manuscripts, and the transcripts of manuscripts he did not own, are marked up as part of Parker’s own print‐related activities: he, or members of his circle, published editions of several medieval authors and texts, based on the materials in the archbishop’s collection. In discussing the coming of print, we emphasized the role of medieval manuscripts as the first printers’ first copy texts. Parker’s library shows us another transmutation of those medieval materials into print, this time through scholarly and editorial attention.

3.5 ­ Britannia and the Development of Print The survival of Matthew Parker’s library allows us to trace how early modern antiquarians interacted with surviving medieval books, and also how that interaction turned into print production. As we have seen, Parker’s own printed books were part of his larger ideological program to establish the English Church on a firm historical footing. In turning to the slightly later antiquarian William Camden (1551–1623), we can trace even more closely the marrying of the antiquarian impulse with print production and with a developing national consciousness. The many editions of Camden’s magnum opus, Britannia, allow us to explore changes in technologies and audiences for the kind of antiquarian activities shared by both Parker’s and Camden’s circles. Camden was not a churchman; he was, as far as it was possible to be, a professional historian, holding, at various times, positions at the Westminster School and, eventually, as the Clarenceux King of Arms, a heraldic position that gave him the leisure, and the considerable support of the resources of the College of Arms, to pursue his research into the material remains of the British past. Britannia is a chorography, a description of Britain arranged county by county. In its first imagining, it had a decidedly classical framing. Camden began Britannia to work

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out something which preoccupied more than one early modern British historian: the Roman history of Britain. He had the classical Antonine Itinerary, a list of the routes across Britain with the names of forts and settlements along the way, and he set out to find its traces in the sixteenth‐century British landscape. His method, as was typical for the first antiquarians, was primarily textual: he learned ancient languages so that he could interpret place‐names through ingenious etymological explanations. He also read classical (as well as medieval) historians. This was the genesis of the project and of Camden’s method, but Britannia’s many editions, some by Camden himself and others expanded by later generations following his death, show a shift in historical methods, from a reliance on text and on linguistic research (particularly etymologies), to an ever‐ greater emphasis on artifacts (Parry 1995, p. 3). Like John Leland, Matthew Parker, and other antiquarians, Camden and his circle were motivated in part by a keen awareness of the disappearance of these materials remains, and many historically minded scholars copied inscriptions and other textual material from monuments, churches, and old books, in part to preserve such remains (Parry 1995, pp. 14–15). They also shared what they found; for example, through his network of correspondents, Camden was able to expand the number of Roman inscriptions in Britannia from 12 in the first printing, to over 110 by 1610 (Hepple 2003, p. 160). The book grew in size as Camden added notes from others and from his own travels through the countryside. It also grew because of increasing attention to illustration. The first edition, in Latin, was printed in 1586 in London, for the bookseller Ralph Newbery. It was a relatively small but fat volume, an octavo of about 550 pages. This edition had only two illustrations, about which we will have more to say in a moment, but it already displayed some of the design features that suggested an important interface between print and text. There are several distinct types for different aspects of the text. The text proper is in a Roman font. Roman inscriptions, of which there are many (Camden had a particular interest in epigraphy, the study of inscriptions), are presented in Roman capitals. English place‐names are rendered in a black letter font that resembles early print (which was itself modeled on manuscript letterforms). Italics are used for some of the Latin etymologies and for Latin verse, and finally, an Old English font is used for Saxon names. This system creates both finding‐aids and a kind of visual hierarchy on the page, with the old place‐names visually distinct from the learned discussion of them. It was not uncommon, in printing of this period, to use black letter types that mimicked Gothic manuscript hands for vernacular texts, and Roman type for Latin text (see Lesser 2006). Figure  3.7 shows the deployment of different types on a page from William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, a local history published in 1576, a few years before the first, Latin edition of Britannia. Lambarde’s book, like Camden’s, also included a special font for Old English letters, seen in Figure 3.7 in the printing of the Saxon name for Canterbury. The first illustration in the 1586 edition of Camden’s Britannia is the inscription from the Glastonbury Cross, the famous Arthurian artifact apparently unearthed, with King Arthur’s tomb, by the monks of Glastonbury in 1191. The second illustration is a stone archway over the door of a church in St. John sub Castro, recording the enclosure of a Danish prince as an anchorite in the church. This inscription seems to have attracted Camden’s attention because of its unusual characters; perhaps the Glastonbury Cross was of interest for the same reason. The next edition of Britannia appeared in 1587, only a year after the first, and it was already almost 100 pages longer. It opened with a

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.7  Examples of black letter, Roman, italic, and Anglo‐Saxon typefaces: from the opening of the description of Canterbury in William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent. Source: By permission of Rare Books and Special Collections, The University of British Columbia Library. DA670.K3 P4.

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table of the Roman alphabet equivalents for Saxon characters, suggesting – as does the work of Matthew Parker and his circle – both a growing interest in, and the growing obscurity of, the Old English language. The difference, of course, is that thanks to print circulation, Britannia was able to make samples of the language and its script more widely available than to the relatively rarefied audience of Parker’s circle, although at  this point the work was still in Latin and so necessarily still somewhat limited in its reach. By 1590, the book had grown to 760 pages, and for the first time, other images, these of coins, began to appear in the text. It is significant that these images reproduce both sides of the coin. While early modern collectors had long been interested in coins, they had tended to focus on the portraits, as in Andrea Fulvio’s Illustrium imagines of 1517, a book in which engravings of the portrait sides of coins introduced brief biographies of great historical figures. Presumably because Camden was interested in inscriptions, the images of coins in Britannia displayed both sides from the start. The next edition of Britannia appeared in 1594, the first quarto printing. While there were no new illustrations, this edition continued the process begun in earlier printings of elaborating the decorative elements, so that more and more inscriptions and illustrations were set off by frames, for example, and these became decorative rather than simple lines. By 1600, the book was approaching 900 pages and had an elaborate engraved title page featuring a map of Britain flanked by classical figures and vignettes, with several leaves at the front of the book devoted entirely to engravings of coins. These were the work of William Rogers, whose other work included portraits of royal and noble figures, heraldic title pages, and a map of Cheshire intended for John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, a book with some similarities to Britannia (Hind 1952, pp. 259–260). The 1600 edition of Britannia is also the first to feature engraved, highly detailed maps, and a wonderful full‐page illustration of Stonehenge (Figure 3.8). Some of the Roman inscriptions are now pictured in situ, on the monuments on which they were found. In 1607, the book was printed in folio, with 57 maps as part of its decorative program (see Figure 3.9). In this edition, the Glastonbury Cross inscription is for the first time depicted arranged on the object itself (rather than simply as several lines of script), so that while the interest in letterforms clearly remains, this is also, now, an illustration of a whole artifact. Several other new illustrations of archeological remains also occur in this printing, and the elaboration of engravings of coins and inscriptions continues, with many more decorative renderings, not only of Roman inscriptions but also of other plaques and epigraphic curiosities. Curiosities is perhaps exactly the right word: by the time of the 1607 folio edition, Britannia has become the print equivalent of the “­cabinets of curiosities” which were becoming popular with collectors. Not everyone could possess their own collection of coins and antiquities, but the ever‐more profusely illustrated pages of Britannia delivered a compelling substitute to a growing audience for such things. The next landmark was the 1610 English translation of the text by Philemon Holland. The switch to English made the book accessible to a much wider audience, at least among those who could afford it: “This new edition in folio, enhanced with a splendid engraved title‐page, became a common item in gentlemen’s libraries, and did more to create a readership for antiquarian writings than did any other volume of the age” (Parry  1995, p. 48). It is important, though, that the volume is splendid; that is, the

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.8  The engraving of Stonehenge, which first appeared in the 1607 edition of William Camden’s Britannia. This image is from the 1610 edition, which was the first English translation of the text. Source: By permission of Rare Books and Special Collections, The University of British Columbia Library. DA610.C17 1610.

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Figure 3.9  Surrey, one of the engraved county maps that first appeared in the 1607 edition of William Camden’s Britannia. This image is from the 1610 edition, which was the first English translation of the text. Source: By permission of Rare Books and Special Collections, The University of British Columbia Library. DA610.C17 1610.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

appeal is at least in part material, and the continual advances of printing technique (and  of engraving, as discussed further in Section  3.6) certainly contributed to the book’s attractions. An abridgement of the English text that appeared in 1626, in the smaller quarto form, with only 132 pages, made the book more affordable. Camden’s work was also being incorporated into similar books, such as John Speed’s History of Great Britain (1611) and Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), again with illustrative programs that emphasized maps, coins, and in Speed’s case, shields and seals. Peter Burke has argued that over the course of the seventeenth century, images come to replace texts as ­evidence in antiquarian works (Burke 2003), particularly for the “barbarian” past that lacked documentary records: the engraving of Stonehenge falls into this category. Camden’s work continued to be expanded and printed in ever‐more elaborate ­editions after the period covered by this portion of our book, with major overhauls in 1695 and 1722. As new antiquities and archeological sites were discovered, new text and images were added. The proliferation of pictures and maps, whether in books like Camden’s or Speed’s, or in individual sheets sold separately for consultation and display, certainly contributed to the rise of what some scholars identify as a visual sense of the English past in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Aston 1973; Woolf 2003, 2005).

3.6 ­Intaglio Illustration The woodcuts that are characteristic of early printing (and that, as we have seen, pre‐ date it) were produced by a relief method; that is, the carver removed material from the block to leave raised lines, which then could be inked and would transfer an impression onto paper. It was relatively easy to transfer images in this way, in the same press and simultaneously with printing text. Indeed, woodblocks could be used even in the absence of a press, as the rubber stamps used in craft‐making today, or the potato stamps children often make, nicely illustrate. Most of the illustrations in Camden’s Britannia, by contrast, are engravings. Engraving was not a new technique for mass‐producing illustration in the sixteenth century, as it had been in use for this purpose since at least the fifteenth century, although not initially in England (Hind 1952, p. 1). And the craft of engraving itself, of course, had a much longer history in metal‐ and glasswork; as with the production of moveable type, techniques from metalworking carried over into the arena of print. But engraved illustrations in books became more widespread over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unlike woodcuts, engravings are produced by an intaglio technique: lines are incised into a plate. Some of the patterns for the images in Camden’s text were probably produced by tracing or rubbing of monuments and inscriptions. Others might have been drawings or paintings that then formed the basis for a plate. In order to create the plate, an artist used a tool called a burin to cut lines into the metal. When the plate was inked and then wiped clean, the incised grooves held the ink that was washed away from the flat parts of the plate. In order to transfer the image, considerable pressure was necessary, so a special roller press was used. For this reason, intaglio printing often results in a plate mark, which looks like an embossed border around the image, witnessing the pressure necessary to transfer the picture. Wood could be used for the plate, but copper was the preferred material until the introduction of steel‐plate engraving in the eighteenth century.

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A related intaglio process is etching, again a sixteenth‐century adaptation of methods from metalwork. In etching, a metal plate is covered with a wax or resin that is then scratched away in the desired design, using a fine needle. The plate is dipped in an acidic solution that eats away at the exposed portions of the metal, leaving grooved lines. As with an engraving, the resulting plate is inked, wiped, and printed under heavy pressure. Both etching and engraving could achieve much greater detail than was common in the woodcuts of the period. At the same time, the need for a separate press made these methods more expensive and difficult, and so woodcuts continued to be used widely in the sixteenth century, and often featured in inexpensive printing, such as broadside ballads and chapbooks, into the seventeenth century and beyond. The artists involved in the development of engraving repeat a pattern we have seen many times in the course of this history, with the first significant engravers coming from abroad: “The earliest recognised line‐engraver in England was a foreigner, Thomas Geminus, and throughout the Tudor period in England there were about as many foreign as English practitioners” (Hind 1952, p. 9). Matthew Parker – discussed above as a book collector, scholar, editor, and commissioner of type founts – was also a patron of engraving (Hind 1952, pp. 12–17), encouraging, among other things, the engraving of maps – which would, of course, become such a central feature of later editions of Britannia. The county maps in the 1607 edition were produced by William Kip, a Dutch or Flemish engraver who seems to have specialized in cartography (Hind 1952, pp. 210–211). Kip worked in England, but the maps produced for John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain were done by a Dutch engraver named Jodocus Hondius and shipped over from Amsterdam (Hind 1952, p. 156). Trade with the Continent is also important in our next theme, the buying, selling, and printing of the Bible.

3.7 ­Consolidation and Control: Printing the Bible As we have seen, the first major book to be printed in the West using moveable type was a Bible, Gutenberg’s 42‐line Latin Vulgate, printed in 1455. It might seem surprising, then, that printing in Britain did not immediately address itself to the production of Bibles. Caxton did not print a Bible, nor did other English printers of the incunabular period. The first English printer to print the Bible  –  a Latin Vulgate  –  was Thomas Berthelet in 1535, and that remained the only Latin Bible printed before the reign of Elizabeth I (King 2006, p. 9). The limitations to capital, technology, and materials discussed in Section 3.3 in relation to the printing of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs doubtless contributed to this dearth of English‐printed Bibles, as it was cheaper to import Latin Bibles than to print them (King 2006, p. 9). As for the Bible in English, one reason for the relatively slow pace of printing was the controversy, carried on from the medieval period, over the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. Struggles over who should translate the Bible, and who should control its printing and distribution, are central to the history running up to (and indeed following) the appearance of the Authorized or King James Bible in 1611. John King and Aaron Pratt argue that the understandable tendency to focus on religious and ideological struggles in this period have perhaps led to an underestimation of the material dimensions of Bible printing in Britain: “Printed Bible translations in English underwent gradual transformation from dissident documents, the reading or ownership of which warranted the death penalty, to a series of

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official versions (Great Bible, Bishops’ Bible, and KJB), whose reading in English parish churches was mandated by government order” (King and Pratt 2010, p. 62); these changes are reflected in the material aspects of printed Bibles. The history of Bible printing in Britain is too vast and complex to cover adequately here, but we can pick up on King and Pratt’s suggestion and focus our discussion on the appearance of some of these new Bibles. Along the way, we will touch on key historical moments that allow us to see Bible printing as exemplifying attempts at the consolidation and control of the printing press in Britain, first outlined in Section 3.2 in our discussion of the Stationers’ Company and pre‐publication allowance, license, and entrance. The medieval theologian and reformer John Wyclif (d. 1384) has traditionally been associated with the production of the first (Middle) English translation of the Bible, although this seems largely to have been the work of his followers. There are hundreds of surviving Wycliffite Bibles. Their popularity does not, however, indicate easy acceptance by religious authorities of the idea of translation into the vernacular, and suspicion of the practice remained after the coming of print, even as these manuscripts were clearly still being bought, sold, and read in the sixteenth century (Daniell 2003, p. 67). The first printed English Bible was not in fact printed in England at all, but rather at Worms, in 1526: this was a new translation of the New Testament by William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), who had left England in order to be able to produce the work. A first effort, at Cologne in 1525, had to be abandoned when the print shop was raided (DNB). The book is small in format, perhaps so that it could be easily carried or concealed. A surviving copy in the British Library (only three copies survive) shows evidence of careful reading, as each Gospel is annotated with cross‐references to the others. The  activity is the same that underlies the making of the Little Gidding Harmonies, discussed in Section 3.3, and William Sherman notes that cross‐references are one of the major categories of early modern Bible annotation (Sherman 2008, p. 80). These were books that were used, even though at first, in England, they were also contraband. The 1526 New Testament was smuggled into England and Scotland, much to the alarm of ecclesiastical authorities: Cuthbert Tunstal, bishop of London, preached a sermon against the book, and had copies burned at St. Paul’s on October 27, 1526 (DNB). More copies of the Tyndale New Testament poured into England from abroad, and more attempts to suppress the book followed. Undeterred, Tyndale produced a revision of his work in 1534, again printed outside England, in Antwerp. Anne Boleyn owned a copy of this version, printed on vellum and carefully decorated. The decoration includes painting over Tyndale’s name on the title page (King and Pratt 2010, pp. 65–66). The copy thus simultaneously locates Tyndale’s New Testament in the most exalted social circles, while also indicating that the book’s status is still not entirely comfortable. With his New Testament circulating, Tyndale, still in Antwerp, went to work on his translation of the Old Testament, safe, he thought, in the English House, the headquarters of the English merchants in the city. But in 1535, he was tricked into leaving the house, arrested, and imprisoned in a castle outside Brussels before finally being executed as a heretic in 1536. He thus became one of the martyrs immortalized in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (see Figure 3.6). As for Tyndale’s Bible, it had a life beyond Tyndale himself. John Rogers (c. 1500–1555), the English House chaplain, seems to have rescued Tyndale’s work after his arrest (DNB), and he arranged Tyndale’s materials, combined them with material from the Coverdale Bible, discussed below, and oversaw the publication of the resulting book in Antwerp in 1537. The printing was done by Matthew Crom

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for the London publishers Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch. The book is presented on its title page (Figure 3.10) as “The Byble, which is all the holy Scripture: In whych are contayned the Olde and Newe Testament truly and purely translated into Englysh by Thomas Matthew,” and the book is, we are told, “Set forth with the Kinges most gracyous lycence.”10 The pseudonym on the title page and at the end of the preface (the latter addressed to the king) led to the book’s being called the Matthew Bible or Matthew’s Bible. We will follow the trail of the Matthew Bible into England in a moment, but first we need to consider another important English Bible produced outside of England, the Coverdale Bible. Like Tyndale, Miles Coverdale (1488–1569), a former Augustinian canon and now a priest of reformist tendencies, left England fearing persecution for his religious views. He ended up in Antwerp, where his complete translation of the whole Bible was printed in 1535 by Martin de Keyser (Daniell 2003, p. 179). The title page (Figure 3.11) is a composition acutely aware of the various modes by which the word of God could be disseminated, featuring vignettes of Moses receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments, various preaching scenes, David playing his lyre and, in the bottom center of the page, King Henry VIII handing a copy of the book to the bishops. This was a handsome, well‐illustrated book, “complete and pleasing” (Daniell 2003, p. 185), offering a “sharp contrast to the humility of copies of Tyndale’s prohibited translation” (King and Pratt 2010, p. 66). As the title pages to both the Coverdale and the Matthew Bibles suggest, the printing of English Bibles, while at this point still occurring abroad, is now being presented as a licensed, rather than as a seditious, activity. At this point, the stories of the Matthew and Coverdale Bibles begin to merge. As noted above, the Matthew Bible contained some of Coverdale’s work. The 1500 copies underwritten by Grafton and Whitchurch were shipped into England in 1537. Also by 1537, the Coverdale Bible had been printed in England, in folio and quarto, with a preface dedicated to the king, and the quarto – like the Matthew Bible – had at the foot of the title page the declaration that the book had been printed with the king’s license (Daniell 2003, p. 180). By this time Coverdale was back in England, having returned in 1535, where he printed his English metrical psalm collection called Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songs Drawen out of the Holy Scripture. The status of biblical text in English was shifting, thanks to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s secretary, chief minister, and advisor in matters relating to the establishment of the Church of England. In 1536, Cromwell issued an injunction requiring every parish church to have copies of the Bible in both English and Latin. There were not enough English Bibles to fulfill this requirement, and so Coverdale went to work on his next project, a revision of the Matthew Bible intended to meet demand. After an abortive start on the work in Paris, in the end the book, known as the Great Bible, was printed in London in 1539. Like the Matthew Bible, the title page of the Great Bible (Figure 3.12) emphasizes the distribution of the word of God, but here the king has moved from the bottom to the top of the page, where he is much larger and more central. In a bravura reading of this title page, David Daniell points out that in this “Englyshe” Bible, God, above (though smaller than!) Henry, speaks in Latin, and it is the “verbum dei” [“word of God”] that is passed to the king’s adoring subjects. These subjects also speak Latin, as it turns out, exclaiming (most of them), VIVAT REX, in monumental capitals on speech scrolls (Daniell 2003, pp. 205–209). Even the king’s license is now given in Latin, as the book is declared to have been printed by Grafton and

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.10  Title page of the Matthew Bible, 1537. Licensed by Art Resource.

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Figure 3.11  Title page of the Coverdale Bible, 1535, showing Henry VIII handing a copy to a bishop. Source: Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. 1971 +159.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.12  Title page of the Great Bible, 1539, with the king in the center. Source: Licensed by Art Resource.

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Whitchurch “Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum.” There is no question that this title page institutionalizes and authorizes the English Bible, locating that authority very firmly with the king. What is interesting is the degree to which the various vehicles for distribution of the verbum dei have here been reduced, in comparison to the title page of the Coverdale Bible. There is one preaching figure, but the other means of transmission  –  Moses and his tablets, the figures reading aloud from a book, David and his harp – are all gone. The title page of the Great Bible is jammed with figures, but this appearance of variety masks a much more univocal message as the sacred word descends from the king. Once again, we can see attempts to claim control over print: anxiety over who should give, and receive, the Bible is made manifest in this title page. By 1539, then, English Bibles were authorized and, increasingly, ubiquitous. While Cromwell was in the ascendancy, there was “a brief interval (c. 1535–1541) when about 29 extant English New Testament and thirteen extant English Bible editions were printed in England and abroad” (King and Pratt 2010, p. 66), and Daniell writes that the flood of Tyndale and Coverdale Bibles into England – almost 50 000 copies – meant that “by 1539, the English Bible was seeping into the English way of life” (Daniell 2003, p. 135). The Great Bible was printed in eight editions between 1539 and 1541 (King and Pratt 2010, p. 68). Cromwell’s eventual fall and execution in 1540 speaks to the turbulence of the times, as does Coverdale’s life after the publication of the Great Bible. He would flee to the Continent twice more, from 1540 to 1547 (after the Act of Six Articles of 1539 made England inhospitable for religious reformers) and from 1555 to 1559 (after the ascension of the Catholic Mary to the throne made life dangerous for Protestants). The period between the end of Henry’s reign and the beginning of Mary’s was, briefly, more hospitable to the production – and ownership – of English Bibles, as the reign of Edward VI (b. 1537, r. 1547–1553) was dominated by Thomas Cranmer, the reform‐minded archbishop of Canterbury. During this period, “ordinary people experienced unprecedented access to the English Bible” (King and Pratt 2010, p. 69), and Edward’s reign also saw the creation and publication of the Book of Common Prayer, which codified and formalized an English liturgy. It was first printed in 1549, and again in a revised version in 1552. But then Mary came to the throne, Cranmer was burned at the stake after renouncing an earlier recanting of his Protestant beliefs, and the attempt to restore England to Roman Catholicism began. This was the point at which Coverdale, after what seems to have been a period of imprisonment or house arrest, fled England for the third time. Toward the end of his exile, he may have spent some time among the Calvinists of Geneva, working on the Geneva New Testament, the next English translation of the Bible (DNB). The Geneva Bible appeared in 1557, and copies seem to have made it into England even during Mary’s reign (Daniell 2003, p. 289). The first complete Geneva Bible appeared in 1560, by which time Elizabeth I (b. 1533, r. 1558–1603) was queen, and renewed official ­support of a Protestant‐affiliated Bible in English is exemplified by that fact that the Geneva Bible went through 140 editions before 1644, becoming “the Bible of the English people” (Daniell 2003, p. 294). The title page of the first edition emphasizes the scholarship that underlies its text as its source of authority, rather than the Crown: the book is “translated according to the Ebrue and Greke, and conferred with the best translations in diuers langages. With moste profitable annotations vpon all the hard places, and other things of great importance as may appeare in the Epistle to the Reader.” This is a reader’s Bible, as the title page draws attention to its annotations to

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

guide personal use: it was “the first complete study guide to the Bible in English, intended to illuminate at every point” (Daniell 2003, p. 295). The very success of the Geneva Bible contributed to the creation of its next competitor, the Bishops’ Bible. The reformist Protestant associations of the Geneva Bible were not welcome to some English churchmen, and so Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury, organized a group of about 40 bishops to produce a rival translation that would carry the authority of the Church. This Bible appeared in 1568, printed in London by Richard Jugge, who was given exclusive license to print the text. It featured on its title page a portrait of Elizabeth, surmounted by the symbols of Ireland, England, and Wales. Decorated initials printed in the Bible included portraits of the patrons William Cecil (1520–1598) and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532–1588), but despite the panoply of court and church approval for the Bishops’ Bible, the Geneva Bible remained far more popular. That popularity once again led to an attempt to rival the Geneva Bible, and so we come to the King James Bible of 1611. Produced by six teams of translators, from 1604 to 1611, it began its life at a conference at the beginning of the reign of James I (b. 1566, r. as James I of England 1603–1625). Printed in London in 1611 in a format as large as the Bishops’ Bible by Robert Barker, the King’s Printer (who had the monopoly on printing the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, among other things), the biblical text was in black letter, perhaps deliberately eschewing the Roman type that predominated in editions of the Geneva translation. Daniell draws attention to the “impenetrable wall” on the title page of this first edition (Figure 3.13), arguing that “the intention of solid, and forbidding, authority is unmistakable” (Daniell 2003, plate 27). The point is well taken, but the authority here is not, as in the Great Bible or the Bishops’ Bible, visually presented as directly associated with the Crown (although Barker is identified as the King’s Printer). Thanks to the portraits of the Evangelists framing the composition, we find ourselves in the world of the scribing (rather than the regally distributing) hand, and that is where we stay. Other title pages used by Barker, either to open the New Testament or for subsequent printings of the whole Bible or the New Testament portion, certainly witness authority in references to the fact that the Bible is “Appointed to be read in Churches,” or was prepared “by his Maiesties speciall Commandement,” and appears “cum privilegio.” At the same time, the decoration of the pages insists on the human role in transmitting the divine word. A later 1611 title page shows the evangelists writing in books that appear to be blank, two of them at the base of the page gazing upward to the tetragrammaton (the Hebrew characters for the name of God) in the clouds at the top of the page. A 1613 title page presents the Gospel‐writers, pens in hand, set below books (even though any writer in the ancient world would have written on a scroll, not in a codex) which are clearly scripted rather than printed (and in what appear to be humanistic cursive or contemporary hands, rather than archaic scripts). All of these title pages draw an intimate link between the biblical text and the process by which it was written. But these Bibles also insist on the features of mechanical reproduction: they include printers’ names and marks, and artists’ monograms and signatures. So much is true of any printed, illustrated book from the period, of course, but that is precisely the point: as significant as these Bibles are, they are also books, and so participate in all the circuits (commercial, cultural, social, and historical) with which we have been concerned throughout this study.

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Figure 3.13  Title page of the King James Bible, 1611. Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 2216.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

3.8 ­Stage to Page While religious texts made up more than 40% of the Elizabethan print marketplace (Farmer and Lesser 2013, pp. 33–34), many other kinds of material suggest the range of readers’ interests. Topical and ephemeral material like the broadside ballads and almanacs already discussed shared the marketplace with scientific texts, dictionaries and handbooks of specialized vocabulary, works of politics and history, and, of course, works of literature. Indeed, the market share of literary works rose sharply at the end of the Elizabethan period (Farmer and Lesser 2013, pp. 33–34). The place of plays – the texts of the hugely popular new London entertainment industry, the theater – has been a site of controversy, with scholars arguing at different times that playbooks were popular and profitable, or that they were risky and unprofitable for printers (see the summary in Farmer and Lesser 2005a, pp. 1–3; see also Blayney 2005). While there is not the space to settle those arguments here, we can return to the connection between print and canon‐formation and explore the print presentation of Britain’s most famous playwright. In 1623, almost one hundred years after Thynne’s edition of the first collected works of Chaucer, the First Folio of the collected works of William Shakespeare appeared (Figure  3.14); the Second Folio was published only nine years later. Like Thynne’s ­edition, the Folios are doing the work of packaging, and selling, an author as canonical. The title page of both editions features the famous engraving of the playwright by Martin Droeshout, above which a title announces Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies. Facing the title page is an address to the Reader by Ben Jonson: This Figure, that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; Wherein the Grauer had a strife with Nature, to out‐doo the life: O, could he but haue drawne his wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face; the Print would then surpasse All, that vvas euer vvrit in brasse. But, since he cannot, Reader, looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke. The poem monumentalizes the book and makes it a synecdoche for the man. It also manifests deep self‐consciousness about print production, with reference to the technical aspects of engraving (the use of words like figure, cut, graver, brass) and print itself. The book is offered to the reader as an acceptable vessel for the essence of Shakespeare, the “wit” that Droeshout cannot capture, however faithful the likeness. Many features of the Folios are familiar from earlier canonizing books explored above, such as Thynne’s and Speght’s editions of Chaucer in the sixteenth century. What is different is that the Shakespeare Folios collect and monumentalize works originally created, not for the page, but for the stage. Early modern playwrights typically ­ ­produced plays for the theatrical companies that performed them and usually had no rights to or control over a play’s printed text. The Folios are posthumous publications

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Figure 3.14  Opening of the First Folio of the works of Shakespeare, showing the engraving by Martin Droeshout, and the address to the reader by Ben Jonson. Source: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22273, fo. 1, no. 9.

(as is also true, of course, for the Thynne and Speght Chaucers). During his lifetime, 19 of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto format, and one in octavo; one more play followed in quarto before the First Folio appeared in 1623. Some of the quartos have been regarded by later scholars and editors as corrupt; Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, for instance, were each printed in two very different quarto versions, one of which has often been labeled a “bad” text, thought to have been created by “memorial reconstruction” by one or more actors, or by shorthand transcription by a spectator. These theories have been heavily critiqued in recent years, as has the language of “good” or “bad” or “cheap” quartos that surrounds them. Many scholars have explored the implications of such language for our understanding (or misunderstanding) of how Shakespeare’s text was produced (Werstine 1990; Maguire 1996; Dane and Gillespie 2010; Lesser 2014). As the First Folio invites us to do, we are predisposed to see Shakespeare as sui generis, and thus perhaps to lose track of the larger trade in which his books were embedded. A recent study has pointed out, for example, that the so‐called cheap quarto format of the playbooks is shared by many highly prestigious printed works in the period (Pratt 2015). There is a necessarily retrospective quality to any print publication of a performed play, and indeed, that quality can also be seen in the manuscript context: some of the manuscripts that preserve the medieval mystery plays are clearly antiquarian in nature. This is not to say that early modern playwrights – and audiences – did not care about books.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

One need only look at the opening of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (2008) to see the importance accorded to the material word. Faustus casts aside his learning by casting aside his books. When he discards theology, for example, he takes up a Bible: When all is done, divinity is best; Jerome’s Bible, Faustus, view it well. Stipendium peccati mors est: ha! Stipendium, etc. The reward of sin is death? That’s hard. Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas. If we say that we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us. (1.1.37–43) Faustus reads the Latin and then, as part of his study of the meaning of the text he cites, he translates into English. In other words, the use of biblical text discussed in the previous section is here dramatized. Dramatized too is the aesthetic, affective appeal of the material book, as Faustus goes on to praise books of necromancy: These metaphysics of magicians And necromantic books are heavenly! Lines, circles, schemes, letters and characters! Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires. (1.1.49–52) Alchemical manuscript books were often lavishly illustrated. When Faustus later says that he has been “ravished” by magic, in part what he has been ravished by is the material beauty of these books. In discussing the intricacies of insular Gospel book pages in Section  1.7, we noted that they suggest a meditative, recursive reading ­practice. Faustus’s story perhaps represents the danger of too much “study” of books, particularly of certain kinds of books, a danger also dramatized in The Tempest, in which Prospero becomes so secluded in his library, “all dedicated / To closenes, and the bettering of my mind,” that his brother is able to usurp his dukedom (Shakespeare 1623, p. 2). In Faustus’s emphasis on the desirability of his necromantic books, there is also a suggestion of acquisitiveness, a greedy desire for books as material objects. We have already seen various means by which printers sought to create this desire among potential customers. The Shakespeare First Folio includes an address to the reader that rather charmingly foregrounds the economics of book production: From the most able, to him that can but spell: There you are number’d. We had rather you were weighed. Especially, when the fate of all Bookes depends vpon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priuiledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a Booke, the Stationer saies. Then, how odde soeuer your braines be, or your wisedomes, make your licence the same, and spare not. Judge your sixe‐pen’orth, your shillings worth, your fiue shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the iust rates, and welcome. But, what euer you do, Buy. (Shakespeare 1623, sig. A3r)

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Buy indeed; here, the buyer’s desire for the book and the seller’s desire to sell the book are part of the “fate of all bookes.” The market for plays reflected in the Folio’s exhortation to buy was a source of controversy in the period; despite the proliferation of serious books, and of the Bible for that matter, there was clearly a market for the output of the popular press. We have already noted, in Section 3.2, that some people were critical of broadside ballads and almanacs (particularly of their “prognostications,” the astrological/ prophetic material they often contained). The Puritan mistrust of the theater, rooted in objections to performances of plays – with their upending of social categories, use of boy players cross‐dressed as women, and general tendency to encourage vice and sin – found a particularly bookish expression in the reformer William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix, published in 1633. Prynne is particularly bothered by the contrast between the material treatment of plays and the Bible: Some Play‐books since I first undertooke this subject, are growne from Quarto into Folio; which yet beare so good a price and sale, that I cannot but with griefe relate it, they are nowe new‐printed in farre better paper than most Octavo or Quarto Bibles … Besides, our Quarto‐Play‐bookes since the first sheetes of this my Treatise came unto the Presse, have come forth in such abundance, and found so many customers, that they almost exceede all number, one studie being scarce able to holde them, and two yeares time too little to peruse them all. (sig. **6v) For Prynne, the theatrical press is akin to Spenser’s Error, vomiting forth pernicious pamphlets in overwhelming torrents, to turn people from true belief. In the Faerie Queene, Red Cross Knight slays Error. Prynne and his fellow antitheatricalists had to wait until the outbreak of civil war and the 1642 act of Parliament that banned the performance of plays in London. By that time, however, both Folios of Shakespeare’s work had been printed, along with the first and second folios of Ben Jonson’s works (1616, 1640–1641). Plays were, for a time, banished from the stage, but they had made a successful transition to the page.

3.9 ­Printing Beyond London Our discussion of printing thus far has focused largely on books printed in Westminster and London. Wynkyn de Worde, who took over Caxton’s business after Caxton’s death in 1492, moved from Westminster to London in 1500 or 1501, setting up shop in Fleet Street and thereafter working at the center of a growing network of London‐based printers such as Richard Pynson and Julian Notary. There were also significant concentrations of the book trade in Paternoster Row and on London Bridge (see Christianson 1987, 1990). The most important center was St. Paul’s Churchyard (see Blayney 1990); so great was the demand for space in that area that the Cathedral eventually rented out space in the crypts for booksellers to use as stockrooms (Raven 2007, p. 28). Many factors served to make London the center of book production. We have already seen, in Section  2.5, that there was a well‐developed scribal production system in the city and its environs, with the London book trade assuming a cooperative, interdependent, and professional character. This system meant that London had ample

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supports for a scribal and documentary culture. For example, in his study of the archival records of London Bridge between 1395 and 1540, C. Paul Christianson has documented references to over 70 book artisans, including “textwriters, manuscript artists (called limners), parchment sellers, bookbinders, and, eventually, printers and booksellers” (Christianson 1987, p. 2). Many of the crafts that served manuscript book production served the printing trade as well. The city was also, of course, a source of reading audiences and economic power. These factors were in place before the Stationers’ Company monopoly came into force and indeed before print. After 1557, the Stationers were in a position to extend their control over the trade and seek to limit it to London. But just as in the Middle Ages, so too, in the early modern period, there were significant centers of book production outside London. The universities were obvious consumers, and so also obvious potential producers, of books. As noted in Section 3.2, Cambridge received a Royal Charter for its press in 1534, and received a special exemption from the terms of the 1557 Stationers’ charter, although it did not exercise its rights immediately. Oxford University had its own stationers by the fourteenth century, who kept master copies of important texts, and a statute of around 1380 required them, and anyone who loaned out exemplars, to ensure that the copies were true (Carter 1975, p. 3); this is reminiscent of the system serving the university in Paris, where the pecia method of production originated. As in London, then, there was already a community of book artisans in place when the printing press arrived, which it did at Oxford around 1478, with the first book printed being a commentary by Rufinus on the Apostolic Creed (Gadd 2013, p. 3). The history of early printing at Oxford is one of appearances and disappearances, but by 1584, Joseph Barnes was aided by the Convocation in setting up a press (Carter 1975, p. 19). A petition, the Supplicatio, was presented to the chancellor in 1584, noting that Oxford’s lack of a printing press put it considerably behind European universities (Peacey 2013, p. 52). The petition evidently succeeded, and Barnes set up shop, although he only occasionally used the university arms or presented himself as printer to the University in the pages of his output (Peacey 2013, p. 53). When a Star Chamber decree of 1586 confined printing to London, there were some concessions to the presses at Cambridge and Oxford: “none of the Prynters in Cambridge or Oxford for the tyme beinge shalbe suffered to have any more apprentices then one at one tyme at the most. But yt is and shalbe lawful to and for the sayd Prynters and eyther of them and their Successors to have and use the helpe of any Journeyman beinge freeman of the cyttye of London without contradic[tion]” (Carter 1975, p. 22). Cambridge’s permission to print Bibles gave it an edge, but by 1636, Oxford finally obtained “a firm legal warrant for its printing” (Carter 1975, p. 29). From the start, the Oxford press had its own character. Harry Carter notes that Barnes’s stock of type “was the best that the French typefounders working in London could supply … and from the first it included Greek.” Carter points out that the university audience was conditioned to favor continental approaches, because the Oxford colleges had been importing books from abroad: they “had grown accustomed to reading the Latin classics as they were printed in Venice, Antwerp, and Paris, and the Bible and Calvin in Roman type from Geneva” (Carter 1975, p. 21). Oxford booksellers tended to be foreigners up to the 1580s, perhaps because they “had better access to books produced abroad” (Jensen 2013, p. 38). The press at Oxford was “conceived of as a learned press from at least the 1630s” (Jensen 2013, p. 5), and the production context discussed above suggests that the

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university audience was a determining factor in the kinds and forms of books produced and sold in the city even before the consolidation of the official university press; similar remarks could be made about Cambridge. The university presses, then, fed a particular appetite for books, much as the city scriptoria of Paris had done in the Middle Ages. But there were presses outside the university cities as well. York had printers from around the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, perhaps supported by patronage from York Minster (Gee 2000, pp. 38–39, 43). The city also had a significant number of stationers who imported and sold books from abroad; some of these were Frenchmen, and they continued to operate in the city even after the 1534 regulations aimed at foreign merchants (Gee 2000, pp. 44, 46). Indeed, because the law specifically forbade the importation of bound books (and because bound books were in any case more expensive to transport), the bookbinders of York prospered (Gee 2000, p. 47). Books from London also made their way to York, and Wynkyn de Worde had dealings with the York printer Hugo Goes, and the stationer John Gachet (Gee 2000, p. 50). The incorporation of the London Stationers in 1557, and the resultant restrictions on printing to London alone (with the exceptions noted above for the universities), has traditionally been taken to mark the end of the book trade in places like York. It is important to remember, however, that centralization of printing in London does not indicate a centralized market for the distribution and sale of books. Every large town had its booksellers, who sold to their local customers the books printed in the capital. The first book printed in Welsh, discussed in Section 2.10, was actually printed in London in 1546, by Edward Whitchurch, and the first Welsh translation of the Bible, in 1588, was printed by Christopher Barker, the Queen’s Printer, again in London, and we will see below that some books intended for Ireland were also printed in London. Furthermore, a history of printing in the British Isles involves more than just the history of English printing. Scotland was independent of England for much of the period we are discussing here. The union of the crowns occurred in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Ireland, but the full Act of Union did not occur until 1707. The first books printed in Scotland were produced in Edinburgh in or around 1508, after James IV granted a patent to Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar to establish a press. Chepman was an Edinburgh merchant, and Myllar seems to have learned the craft of printing in France, probably at Rouen (Dickson and Edmond 1890, pp. 28–31). As in England, there were some restrictions placed on the book trade: the patent allowed Chepman and Myllar “to furnis and bring hame ane prent, with all stuff belangand tharto, and expert men to use the samyne” [to furnish and bring home a press, with all stuff belonging thereto, and expert men to use the same], but forbade the importation of foreign books, both in recognition of the expense and commercial risk being undertaken by Chepman and Myllar, and because of concerns about books intended for religious use (Dickson and Edmond 1890, pp. 7–8). The nine earliest books that survive from their output are called the Chepman and Myllar prints, and today survive collected into one volume. These are small books, even booklets, although Chepman would print more substantial books as well, such as the Aberdeen Breviary, discussed further below. The provision of church books such as this was the main impulse behind the licensing of the press, but these first books speak to other, public tastes. The texts include romances such as Golagros and Gawane (which survives only in this printing) and Syr Eglamour of Artois; poetry by John Lydgate; and poetry by the Scottish poets

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

William Dunbar and Robert Henryson. Some of these texts also appear in sixteenth‐ century Scottish manuscript miscellanies such as the Asloan Manuscript, the Bannatyne Manuscript, and the Maitland Folio manuscript, witnessing, as we have seen in other  cases, the co‐existence and inter‐relationship of manuscript and print culture in this period.11 The Aberdeen Breviary was printed by Chepman in 1510. (Myllar’s name does not appear in the book, and it has been assumed that he was no longer Chepman’s partner). It was in order to produce this work that William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen and founder in 1495 of the university there, supported the establishment of Chepman and Myllar’s press. A breviary is a service book that contains the psalms and the set prayers for the liturgical year, and the dominant form in England was the Sarum Rite or Use of Salisbury. The patent, dated September 15, 1507, given by James IV to Chepman and Myllar names Elphinstone and declares the Scottish Crown’s interest in ensuring that religious books appropriate to Scottish use should be made available: And als it is divisit and thocht expedient be us and our counsall, that in tyme cuming mess bukis, manualis, matyne bukis and portuus bukis efter our awin scottis use, and with legendis of Scottis sanctis, as is now gaderit and ekit be ane Reverend fader in god, and our traist counsalour Williame bischope of abirdene and utheris, be usit generaly within al our Realme alssone as the sammyn may be imprentit and providit, and that na maner of sic bukis of Salusbery use be brocht to be sauld within our Realme in tym cuming. (Dobson 1887, p. 72) And also it is devised and thought expedient by us and our council, that in time coming mass books, manuals, matins books and portuus books [abridged breviaries] after our own Scottish use, and with legends of Scottish saints, as is now gathered and increased by a reverend father in God, and our trusted councillor William bishop of Aberdeen and others, be used generally within all our realm as soon as the same may be printed and provided, and that no manner of such books of Salisbury Use be brought to be sold within our realm in time coming. Elphinstone was responsible for establishing the contents of the breviary, and its Scottish character is suggested by the lives of Scottish saints, such as Kentigern and Ninian, which he is thought to have written himself. This octavo book is not particularly large, but it is nevertheless substantial, containing over 1500 pages across two volumes. It is also printed in red and black, a feature that would have added considerably to the difficulty and expense of production. Two of William Caxton’s books that are printed in red and black were in fact printed for him in Paris, perhaps suggesting the difficulty of the task. George Painter notes that 10 of the 12 known fifteenth‐century editions of the Sarum Missal – like a breviary, a missal is a book containing texts for use during the church year – were printed abroad, “no doubt [due to] the inability of English printers to meet the exceptional technical demands of high‐quality red‐printing …” (Painter et al. 1976, p. 159). By the early sixteenth century, missals were printed in red and black in London by Richard Pynson and Julian Notary, but the technique was still rare, and so its use in the Aberdeen Breviary speaks both to the importance of the book and to the ambitions of the printer. It is not known how

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many copies were printed: only four copies survive, none of them complete. Three “lost” copies are documented, and there are also a number of fragments surviving (Holmes 2011, pp. 176–177). Service books were heavily used, and it is not uncommon for few copies to survive as a result; the Bay Psalm Book, with which this part of our study ends, similarly survives in only a handful of copies, for the same reason. Like Caxton’s press, the first Scottish press relied on continental sources for its type. Scottish printers gradually diversified their type stock, as happened elsewhere in Britain too. So, for example, the first English Bible printed in Scotland, by Thomas Bassandyne at Edinburgh in 1579, is printed in a handsome Roman type, as was the Geneva Bible which was its source (Daniell 2003, p. 295). The distinctiveness of Scottish publishing came to be linked to the nation’s desire to maintain other distinctive characteristics, such as the Presbyterian form of Protestantism. When the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church was introduced into Scotland in 1637 under the auspices of Charles I and William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, a riot ensued when the book was used in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, due to elements of the liturgy denounced by Scottish theologians as Catholic‐leaning. Unrest soon spread, and the turmoil culminated in the First and Second Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640, which saw the forces of the Scottish Covenanters facing off against Charles’s army. Scottish Protestants were accustomed to the Roman font used in their own prayer books, and in the Geneva Bibles commonly found in Scotland, so the black letter font in Laud’s book appeared to be part of Laud’s “papist” attempt to enforce conformity with the English Church (Lesser 2006, p. 107). There were presses elsewhere in Scotland during the period with which we are dealing here. Early signs of the spread of printing can be seen in the establishment of presses at St. Andrews from 1552 (founded by the Edinburgh printer John Scot) and briefly at Stirling, although “it was really not until the seventeenth century that printing spread to the provinces of Scotland” (Edmond 1886, p. x). Unlike in England, there was no Stationers’ Company, so it was the authorities in the “burghs” who dealt with disputes regarding the book trade (Mann 2000, pp. 14–16). The monopoly of the London Stationers did gradually impinge on the Scottish book trade (Mann 2000, pp. 98–99), and as in England, concerns of both Church and Crown about the potentials and dangers of the press were manifested in licenses and restrictions. Chepman and Myllar effectively acted as the king’s printer, and by the seventeenth century, the title had been officially granted to a succession of Edinburgh printers, including Thomas Davidson, Robert Lekpreuik, and Alexander Arbuthnot (Mann 2000, pp. 115–116). In the seventeenth century, we find presses at Aberdeen from 1622 and at Glasgow from 1638. St. Andrews, Aberdeen, and Glasgow, like Edinburgh, were cities with universities, and the output of these presses included church books (both service books and statute‐books), books aimed at students, political and religious tracts and polemics, and, sometimes, vernacular literary texts. The press of Edward Raban (d. 1658) in Aberdeen is a particularly interesting case. Raban, an Englishman of German descent, first set up as a printer in Edinburgh in 1620, but moved to St. Andrews and then, in 1622, to Aberdeen, where he printed books for the university and for the town council; the latter paid him 40 pounds a year (Edmond 1886, p. xiii). He had learned his trade in Leiden. He was a prolific printer, producing over 150 books and related materials (DNB), much of it religious or devotional. One product of his press was a 1630 printing of the popular medieval family romance

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

concerning Bevis of Hampton, which he printed for David Melvill, a local bookseller who distributed many of the more popularly oriented books from Raban’s press (Edmond 1886, p. xv). This book may speak to the same popular tastes suggested by the Chepman and Myllar prints more than a hundred years earlier; it may also indicate the circulation of English stories and, perhaps, the books that contained them. The tale of Bevis, despite the protagonist’s many adventures in exotic, “heathen” locations, is firmly rooted in England, and his tale even includes a carefully localized battle through recognizable streets in London. How and why, then, did this romance makes its way to Aberdeen? Bevis had a long print history in England, stretching back to the very beginnings of print: it was printed by Wynkyn de Worde, Julian Notary, and Richard Pynson. Pynson’s edition, from 1503, is illustrated with woodcuts that were clearly made for the tale, and these illustrations are remarkably stable across many later printings; even when the woodblocks wore out and needed to be replaced, the new illustrations tended simply to copy the old ones. Furthermore, the text itself persists in more or less its original, metrical form up until 1711 (Echard 2008, p. 67). Raban’s The Historie of Sir Bevis of South‐Hampton is a clear example of this very unusual survival. While the related family romance of Guy of Warwick also had a print life well into the eighteenth century, by the time of Raban’s printing of Bevis it already had been turned into prose and substantially adapted to suit early modern tastes. Raban’s Bevis, on the other hand, appears resolutely medieval, and remains, textually, very close to the medieval version of the poem. There are a few markers of modernity in the design of the book: while the text is set in black letter, Raban uses Roman type for names and for chapter summaries, for example. These summaries are the same as those used in a 1585 printing by Thomas East in London, and East, like Raban, sets the chapter summaries and names in Roman. Unlike most editions of Bevis, including East’s, Raban’s is not illustrated, but it is a handsome work, not at all one of the cheap printings in which highly abbreviated and adapted versions of both Bevis and Guy of Warwick would eventually appear throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike Scotland, Ireland was under the control of the English Crown at this period, and Ireland’s early print history begins considerably later than does Scotland’s. As with Wales, some early Irish printing was done outside Ireland; for example, a translation of John Knox’s Book of Common Order was printed in 1567 in Edinburgh, and in the early seventeenth century, Irish Franciscans established a press in Belgium (first at Antwerp, and then at Louvain) that printed counter‐Reformation material in Irish. The first book printed in Ireland itself was in English, a Book of Common Prayer printed by Humphrey Powell, an Englishman, in Dublin in 1551. Powell had been sent to Dublin by the Privy Council in London, but (as was the case in Wales), a considerable amount of printing for Ireland continued to be carried out in London (Gillespie 2005, pp. 55–56). It would be another 20 years before the first book in the Irish language appeared, a translation of the catechism printed with specially made Irish type: Elizabeth I paid for the cost of the type, and encouraged as well the publication of an Irish New Testament, although the latter did not appear until 1602 (McCabe 2014, pp. 24–25). The Irish catechism, Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma, was a very small book, a sextodecimo, measuring 15 × 10 cm, appropriate for a personal, portable book such as a catechism, but perhaps also reflecting the chronic paper shortage in Dublin. Indeed, it has been suggested that lack of both materials and markets help to explain the relatively low output of the Irish press up to

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the early seventeenth century. Raymond Gillespie suggests that “government was prepared to pay only for the practical necessities of prayerbooks, Bibles and proclamations,” and the demand for other kinds of material simply did not exist (Gillespie 2005, pp. 56–57). Here too, we eventually see the consolidation of control that characterized printing in London after 1557. In the case of Ireland, the London Stationers became the king’s printer in 1618 (eventually selling the patent in 1639), a role that saw them both importing London books for use in Ireland, and continuing to operate the Dublin press, the latter mostly for government work. Some Dublin books were printed for export to London (Gillespie 2005, p. 59). In all of these ways, the circulation of books within countries and across borders that we saw first with the earliest British manuscript books remains important in this period as well.

3.10 ­Books Abroad On November 26, 2013, a small, rather nondescript book sold for $14 165 000 at Sotheby’s, setting a new record price for printed books at auction. This was one of 11 surviving copies of The Whole Booke of Psalmes, commonly called the Bay Psalm Book, printed by Stephen Day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640 (Figure 3.15). As we have seen, some of the first manuscripts in Britain were missionary books, brought from Rome to support the conversion of the Britons and the growth of the British Church. The Bay Psalm Book, while not exactly a missionary text, has a similarly central role in supporting a newly established religious community, in this case in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The particular copy sold at Sotheby’s was one of two copies still belonging to Boston’s Old South Church, a Congregationalist community first gathered in 1669. The Church’s website suggests that the utilitarian nature of a psalm book may explain why, of a print run of 1700, only a few copies survive. This was not the first book printed in the so‐called New World – the printing press had arrived in Mexico City via Spain almost a hundred years earlier – but it is the first English book printed in North America, and so marks a logical stopping point for this part of our study. Just as Caxton imported the materials for his press from the Low Countries to England, so the Reverend Jose Glover brought the materials necessary to establish a printing press with him when he sailed to Massachusetts in 1638. Accompanying him was his family, and Stephen Day, an indentured locksmith. Reverend Glover died on the journey, and when they arrived in Boston, his widow Elizabeth worked with Day to establish the print shop, although neither had any training in printing, and Day has been described as “barely literate” and a “rank amateur” (Amory 2005, pp. 40, 48). Here again we see the importance of women in printing, even in an amateur environment like this one; along with Day, Elizabeth Glover has a claim to be considered the first printer in what is now the United States. Stephen’s son Matthew seems to have worked with him, and eventually took over the print shop. Records show that Glover had brought over a printing press, 240 reams of paper, and a case of used English‐made type, perhaps sourced from “the stock of a sympathetic printer” (Amory 2005, pp. 37–38). Glover had obviously gone to some trouble and expense to assemble the materials necessary to support a printing press. The question, though, is why? Hugh Amory has suggested that the first colonists had little need for a printing press, pointing out that calls for skilled laborers to emigrate never ask for members of the

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Figure 3.15  Psalm 123 from the Bay Psalm Book. Source: Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. MLm405 640b.

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printing trade (Amory 2005, p. 43), a telling point when we recall the Henrician statute designed to allow and encourage the immigration of skilled laborers from the Low Countries in the first years of the printing trade in Britain. Amory regards the decision to bring along everything necessary for a press as related to the “neuroses” of Glover’s “individual psyche” (Amory 2005, p. 43) rather than to the needs of the colonies. We should remember, though, the importance placed on the printing press as an agent of the Reformation by such figures as John Foxe. The colonists might not have needed a press at the outset, but neurosis is not the only explanation for Glover’s enthusiasm. A printing press can have a powerful symbolic, as well as practical, function. It is true that the Puritan colonists brought religious books with them on their journeys, readily supplied by the English printing trade. Numerous copies of the metrical psalms suitable for singing, including the most famous and frequently reprinted version by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, made the voyage to the colonies. Another book available to the colonists was a new translation of the psalter directly from the Hebrew, done by Henry Ainsworth and published in Amsterdam in 1612. (Sternhold and Hopkins had worked from English prose without knowledge of Hebrew.) The Mayflower pilgrims brought Ainsworth’s psalter with them when they sailed in 1620, and it continued to be used in the Plymouth Colony until 1692 (Dorenkamp 1972, pp. 6–7). There were plenty of religious books available in the new colonies, then, just as the buying trips of early Anglo‐Saxon abbots had begun to stock the monasteries of Britain. But as in the Old World, so in the New: book production, or at least a certain sort of book production, came to be seen as important for the new settlements. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decided to create and print a new translation of the Psalms directly from the Hebrew: this became the book we now call the Bay Psalm Book. Like many of the printed books discussed above, the Bay Psalm Book used typography to make distinctions between parts of the text. In the preface, the translators explain their emphasis on plain, faithful translation – “Gods Altar needs not our pollishings” – and carefully note: As for all other changes of numbers, tenses, and characters of speech, they are such as either the hebrew will unforcedly beare, or our english forceably calls for, or they no way change the sence; and such are printed usually in an other character. (sigs **3v–**4r) This “other character” is italic, while most of the text is in Roman. There is also an attempt at display type, with larger capitals used for the opening word, or for some of the opening letters of the first word, of each psalm. The effect on the page, however, is very different from that of the beautiful sixteenth‐century books such as Camden’s Britannia, or Thomas Berthelet’s edition of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, or, indeed, religious texts roughly contemporary with the Bay Psalm Book, such as the early seventeenth‐century Bibles and prayer books discussed above. The pages of the Bay Psalm Book are jumbled and confusing, the layout shaky and cramped, and the type clearly worn (see Figure 3.15). Much of this “ill‐sorted type” seems to have been discarded after the printing of the Bay Psalm Book (Amory 1989, p. 12). In many ways, this first printing venture in New England was premature and its first product unsatisfactory – but the Bay Psalm Book underlines the centrality of books in establishing and reinforcing communities and identities.

Consolidation and Control in the World of Print, 1530–1640

Notes 1 London, British Library, Additional MS 59495. 2 London, British Library, Arundel MS 38, fol. 37r. 3 See, for example, London, British Library, Harley MS 4866, fol. 88r. 4 London, British Library, Additional MS 5141. 5 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodleian MS Hatton 51. 6 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 292. 7 London, British Library, Additional MS 61823. 8 This manuscript is now London, British Library, Additional MS 59678. 9 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A.i. 10 Underlining indicates that an abbreviation has been expanded. 11 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 16500; National Library of Scotland,

Adv. MS 1.1.6; and Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys MS 2553.

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Part II

The Interregnum and the Long Eighteenth Century David A. Brewer

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4 Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695 The year 1641 marks a more obvious turning point than we often get in the history of the book. Typically, we are dealing with slow transformations and gradual shifts, the significance of which are often only apparent in retrospect. With 1641, however, we have a sharp moment dividing much of what we have been examining into a clear before and after. It is not the only such moment in our history, of course, and not all aspects of the book were equally affected. But it would be hard to overestimate how far the consequences of this year would ultimately extend. What happened? The short version is that, as part of the increasing tension between Parliament and King Charles I in the lead‐up to the Civil Wars, the system of pre‐publication censorship and post‐publication punishment that we discussed in Section 3.2 collapsed. Before this array of regulations, often collectively known as Licensing, could be successfully reimposed, the floodgates opened enough to give the English a taste of what a more or less free market in print might look like. The result was that the genie could never be wholly put back into the bottle. Subsequent regimes (from as early as 1643) attempted to reintroduce Licensing in various guises, and were often successful for a while. But the partnership between the state and the Stationers’ Company that was the foundation of pre‐1641 press regulation could no longer go without saying. As with the monarchy itself in this decade of war and upheaval, Licensing was stripped of whatever sacred aura had helped it seem self‐evident and became merely one of a number of potential ways of doing things: expedient or necessary, perhaps, even morally proper (for some), but hardly the only option that could be imagined. The collapse of Licensing in 1641 matters, however, not merely as an episode in the history of press regulation. It also helped inaugurate long‐term shifts in the physical forms that printed material would take, in the ways such material would reach its readers, in the status that authors, readers, and booksellers would accord (or deny) printed words and images, and in the ways that authors, readers, and booksellers interacted with – or imagined interacting with – one another.

4.1 ­Fighting Words It has become a commonplace to describe the marked increase in the number of titles published right after the collapse of Licensing as an “explosion.” The standard bibliography, which excludes periodicals, records 848 titles for 1640, 2034 titles for 1641, and 3666 titles for 1642, a 432% increase in only two years (Barnard and Bell 2002, p. 783). The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction 8000 7000

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Figure 4.1  A graph of the changing annual number of surviving titles, excluding periodicals, from 1600 to 1799. Source: Created by Olaf Simons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESTC‐Title‐ count‐1600‐1800.png. Licensed under Creative Commons CC‐BY‐3.0, https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0/.

These numbers can be quarreled with around the edges (for some useful cautions, see Raymond 2011b, pp. 60–61), but the overall trend is unmistakable, as can be seen in the graph in Figure 4.1 (which counts titles according to a slightly different methodology). However, even a cursory glance at the books in question quickly reveals that there was nothing like a four‐ or fivefold increase in the amount of print being turned out; for one thing, there was not enough paper in the kingdom to produce such quantities. Rather, what changed was not the total volume of print so much as the number of titles: there were significantly more books coming off the press, but they were, on average, smaller and shorter – pamphlets, rather than tomes. This is not to say that earlier books were primarily large or long; they were not. The economics of the print trade had always meant that most long books were exceedingly risky to produce. But the early 1640s “explosion” felt to most observers like a difference in kind, not merely degree. And the texts which comprised it were available from far more sources: not only did booksellers “encrease … ten fold in number,” but “mercuries” (hawkers) began to roam the streets of  London offering books and pamphlets to potential readers for as little as a penny (Taylor 1642, sig. A4v). The production levels of 1641–1642 could not be sustained, although subsequent moments of political crisis – such as the trial and execution of the king in 1648–1649, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the 1679–1681 attempts to exclude the future James II from the line of succession, and the so‐called Glorious Revolution that deposed him in 1688–1689  –  all prompted significant spikes in the number of titles. But the general increase was permanent. Almost never again would the total number of titles published in a year dip as low as the highest number prior to 1641, and usually that total was at least twice the pre‐war levels, although the exact size of the increase will probably

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

always remain a mystery: we simply do not know how much has been lost, especially prior to 1641 when the great collections of ephemera began to be assembled and preserved. Equally permanent was the shift from fewer, longer, typically larger, and more expensive books to more, shorter, smaller, and so at least potentially cheaper books. Big folios (the largest book format, comprised of sheets folded only once to form two leaves), while they remained a prestigious form, comprised a smaller segment of the market than they had in the earlier seventeenth century, and the average number of sheets in a volume declined. The consequences of these shifts in book size and the number of titles were profound and far‐reaching. The massive increase in pamphlets not only established them as the form of choice for political, religious, and (later) literary controversy, but also helped make print itself seem more ephemeral – because the shelf life of any given text tended to be shorter. Similarly, many of these new, shorter texts were produced as periodicals, a form that barely existed a decade prior to the collapse of Licensing and that, if included in the statistics cited earlier, would make the transformation across the year 1641 even more dramatic. Periodicals solicit a fundamentally different relationship with their readers, one in which the world, the text, and time (as measured by the calendar) are intertwined in an ongoing, regular way (see Anderson 1991b; Sommerville 1996). And the advent of pamphlets and periodicals, along with the heady political and religious struggles that filled their pages, prompted new sorts of social interaction between readers, both multiplying the number of people a given copy could reach and increasing the amount of talk (reasoned or otherwise) that a given text might provoke. Consider, for a moment, the sheer range of topics taken up by the unprecedented number of titles produced in 1641. There were transcripts and purported transcripts of speeches by Members of Parliament (MPs), along with accounts of Parliamentary votes, and the texts of petitions submitted to Parliament by various constituencies – all genres that had never before been printed. Traditionally, Parliament forbade publication of its activities, on the grounds that the governed did not need to know the details of how they were being governed, although manuscript copies of speeches and debates had quietly circulated for decades. Now they were being printed for anybody to read who could spare a few pennies. Some of these printings were authorized and paid for by Parliament; others were released by MPs in the hope of rallying support to their side; still others appeared without any sort of permission (and sometimes became targets for suppression). There were polemics for and against Parliament’s ability to constrain the actions of the king and for and against a wealthy Established Church, devoted to ritual and headed by bishops with seats in the House of Lords. Quite often these polemics were bloodthirsty and harsh in their rhetoric, even by seventeenth‐century standards. The vast majority of the pamphlets denouncing the imprisoned William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, “were clear that he could not avoid hell; the only question … was whether he should be burnt as a heretic or hanged like a common criminal” (McElligott 2011, p. 607). To further fan the flames, there were accounts of alleged Catholic plots to murder the leaders of the nation and bring back the Inquisition, and (exaggerated, but not wholly inaccurate) tales of the rape, torture, and massacre of thousands of Protestants in Ireland. Many of the latter were illustrated “with woodcuts more graphic than ­anything that would be presented photographically today” (Morrill 2001, p. 22). For example, one account, not content to relate how “7 Papistes” broke into the house

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of “one Mr. Atkins … & beate out his braines, then riped upe his wife with Childe, after they had ravished her & Nero like vewed natures bed of conception,” illustrated its prose with a woodcut of a man with a bloody knife kneeling over the corpse of a naked, disemboweled woman, while his companion heaves her baby head‐first into a bonfire (reproduced in Ohlmeyer 2011, p. 47). And to help drive home how far these calls for and reports of violence might extend, there were blow‐by‐blow descriptions of the impeachment, attainder, and subsequent beheading for treason of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who became a scapegoat for the failures and injustices of the king’s attempt to rule without Parliament. The collective effect of all this was a rhetoric “drunk with the blood of others,” a “civil war in print” that “may have made” the actual Civil Wars “both more likely and more bloody” (McElligott 2011, p. 608). At the very least, “by distributing information about the conflict,” these pamphlets “encouraged their readers to take a position” and dig in (Raymond 1993, p. 7). The weapons of this “civil war” were not particularly remarkable‐looking objects. Most were small quarto pamphlets (recall that a quarto is a medium‐sized book format, comprised of sheets folded twice to form four leaves; see Section 1.4). Their average size is about 18 × 13 cm, and they are composed of only one to three sheets, stab‐stitched together (that is, roughly sewn along the left margin without any other binding). Little or no attention was apparently paid to design, although some of what looks like shoddy workmanship may be a deliberate attempt to make it harder to track a particular work back to the press responsible, by using borrowed type, old and worn ornaments (­decorative woodcuts or pieces of type, like the winged head with tassels in Figure 4.2), and so forth. Yet these modest artifacts were often making far from modest demands. For example, the Parliamentary petition to the king in Figure 4.2 contains fewer than four and a half pages of text, printed on off‐white paper in a competent but hardly attractive manner. But in its mere 13 paragraphs we get a request that the king “concurre with the … desires of your people in a Parliamentary way,” deprive “the Bishops of their Votes in Parliament,” remove the “unnecessary Ceremonies” that are keeping “your loyall Subjects” from joining together “against the Papists,” “remove from your Counsell all” who have been favoring and promoting these “corruptions,” and turn over any land forfeited by Irish rebels to compensate the taxpayers for the war (Petition 1641, pp. 3–4). In return, Parliament offered to pay for the war in Ireland and to “support your Royall estate with honour and plenty” (p. 5). That is, Parliament would bankroll the king, but only if he was willing to submit to their authority and radically purge the Church and State of all that the more puritanical members found objectionable, which is to say, pretty much all of the High Anglican ritual and unfettered royal power that he and Archbishop Laud had pushed for and instituted over the past decade. Aggressive negotiations of this sort were nothing new. Indeed, they were part of why Charles I had tried to govern without Parliament for 11 years (and why he tried to dismantle resources like Sir Robert Cotton’s library that could lend support to such demands, as discussed in Section 3.4). But those past negotiations had been largely kept secret among the political elite. Never before had ­ordinary citizens been informed and solicited in this manner. Not surprisingly, such “Appeals to the People” were widely condemned, at least when it came to the dissemination of material with which one disagreed (Clarendon 1702–1704, vol. 1, p. 246). For example, a 1642 petition to Parliament from a group of Kentish gentlemen (including the poet Richard Lovelace) condemned “the odious and abominable Scandal of schismatical and seditious Sermons and Pamphlets.” Yet to many

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

Figure 4.2  An unremarkable‐looking, but politically incendiary petition to King Charles I. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. DA396.A2 E3 1641.

MPs, that very petition – which asked them to reconcile with the king and uphold the Established Church, denouncing their assertion of control over the militia as “arbitrary power”  –  was itself “scandalous, dangerous, and tending to Sedition” (Journal of the House of Lords March 28, 1642), and so the presenters were arrested and printed copies were ordered to “be seized where‐ever they are found; and burnt by the Hands of the

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Common Hangman” (Journal of the House of Commons April 7, 1642). While in jail, Lovelace wrote his most famous poem, the one whose final stanza begins: “Stone Walls doe not a Prison make, / Nor Iron bars a Cage” (Lovelace 1649, p. 98). When outright destruction of the books of the opposition was not an option, the parties involved often resorted to what Lord Clarendon, the most prominent royalist chronicler of the Civil Wars, called “Paper‐Skirmishes” (Clarendon 1702–1704, vol. 1, p. 372). For instance, the July 1645 publication, “by speciall Order of the Parliament,” of The Kings Cabinet opened was immediately seen as a devastating blow to royal credibility. This collection of Charles I’s correspondence, seized after the battle of Naseby, revealed that the king and queen had pawned the crown jewels to fund their army, had been scheming to land thousands of foreign, mostly Catholic troops in England, and had otherwise routinely lied in their public pronouncements. The supporters of the king published no fewer than six sputtering replies in the first half of August 1645 and continued to attack it for the next three years, although with markedly little success: several prominent royalists abandoned the king’s cause after learning of his duplicity. And like the actual skirmishes of the war, “Paper‐Skirmishes” were rarely confined to a single round of attacks and counterattacks: consider only the title of A Reply as true as Steele, to a Rusty, Rayling, Ridiculous, Lying Libell; which was lately written by an impudent unsoder’d Ironmonger and called by the name of An Answer to a foolish Pamphlet Entituled, a Swarme of Sectaries and Schismatiques (1641). This is a reply to an answer to a pamphlet itself purporting to “discover … the strange preaching (or prating)” of artisans who set up as unlicensed ministers offering godly commentary on the times (Taylor 1641, title page). As this last exchange should suggest, the proliferation of titles that we have been examining was not simply a matter of the traditional centers of power, such as Parliament or the Court, turning to print to mobilize support in new ways  –  although it should be noted that the royalist strongholds of Exeter, Oxford, Newcastle, Worcester, and York all had presses during the war, and one printer “boasted of accompanying Charles I’s army with a traveling press” (Johns 1998, p. 150). Rather, entirely new voices emerged as well, both in politics and religion. For example, in 1647 the Levellers – a segment of the army who insisted that they were fighting not merely against the king, but against all tyranny, including that of Parliament – put forward An Agreement of the People for a firme and present Peace, upon grounds of common‐right and freedome, proposing electoral reform, universal manhood suffrage, and an end to any state compulsion in the realm of religion. However, given the radicalism of these demands (which the senior officers of the army and their Parliamentary allies rejected as leading to anarchy and the abolition of private property), it was not enough simply to publish An Agreement of the People and hope that it would persuade. Rather, the sheer magnitude of support for their cause had to be made visible, and so the Levellers took to wearing copies of the Agreement pinned to their hats, some with a slogan added in manuscript: “England’s Freedom, Soldiers’ Rights.” When General Fairfax, the protector of the Bodleian Library whom we met in Section 3.4, confronted and successfully cowed the Levellers into backing down, he did so in part by plucking these pamphlets off the soldiers’ hats – although the summary execution of one of the most vocal protesters probably also helped. As we saw in Section  1.5 with the Cathach of St. Columba being carried into battle as a talisman, a book is here functioning as far more than just a vehicle for a text; it is a material artifact loaded with symbolic meaning, around which a community may rally.

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

A less dramatic, but more lasting example of the use of print “from below” may be  seen in the rise of the Religious Society of Friends (now generally known as the Quakers, a name bestowed upon them by their enemies). Like the Levellers, the Quakers rejected traditional social hierarchy in a way that seemed both an affront and a potential threat: for example, they refused to remove their hats in the presence of their alleged superiors and used the same familiar pronouns  –  “thee” and “thou” – regardless of whom they were addressing. And like the Levellers, the Quakers employed print to bolster their movement, in this case by strengthening “weake frends” through accounts of the “inward light” available to all believers and through “Convinceing the world” that the ordained clergy resembled the “false prophets” of scripture (Green and Peters 2002, p. 70). They also used print to “witness,” on a massive scale, “against the oppression of Tithes” and other Parliamentary attempts to thwart them: a petition from 1659 included the names of more than “seven thousand … Hand‐Maids and Daughters of the Lord,” while another was “subscribed by more than fifteen thousand hands,” despite the fact that the total sect probably only numbered 30 000–40 000 (These Several Papers 1659; Copie of a Paper 1659). And they came up with clever ways of evading attempts to suppress their voices: William Penn “would dictate … directly to the compositor,” thus ­giving the printer plausible deniability, if questioned by the authorities (Johns 1998, p. 135). Given the widespread persecution the Quakers faced and the sheer number of texts they wished to produce – upwards of 1400 in their first decade (Barnard and Bell 2002, p. 790) – it is not surprising that they also developed their own highly organized production, distribution, and financing networks using exclusively Quaker labor, with each meeting ­getting a set number of copies and contributing to the costs of printing the next round. Even the timing was “carefully controlled” by the leaders of the ­movement: “tracts were distributed in advance of the arrival of a particular Quaker speaker … [so that] in the wake of the tract would come the living text of the Quaker prophet” (Green and Peters 2002, p. 71; Smith 2002, p. 425). Much as was happening across the ocean with the Bay Psalm Book examined in Section 3.10, print here helped hold the fledgling denomination together in the absence of a more traditional religious infrastructure “such as church buildings and a beneficed ministry” (Corns 2001, p. 83). The vast majority of the titles produced for these new uses and by these new voices exist in only one or two editions. They were published as interventions in particular debates and crises, and once their moment had passed, so too did the market for the books and pamphlets in question, however brisk the demand for them might momentarily have been: the 1644 A Prophecy of the White King supposedly sold 1800 copies in three days (Lilly 1715, p. 45). The general impression an avid reader of the 1640s or 1650s would have had was one of constant turnover and ephemerality, a continuous parade of what Clarendon would call “the most Invective, Seditious, and Scurrilous Pamphlets, that … Wit and Malice could invent” (Clarendon 1702–1704, vol. 1, p. 160). As always, though, there were exceptions to these trends. One of the most dramatic was the instantaneous and lasting success, despite Parliamentary attempts to suppress it, of the supposed thoughts and prayers of the executed Charles I: Eikon Basilike (Greek for the “image of the king”), often called “the King’s Book.” Thirty‐five editions of the Eikon appeared from English presses within a year of the beheading (most within the first five months, before Parliament clamped down on its publication). Presses from outside the kingdom added another five, and the text was immediately translated into

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Danish, Dutch, French, German, and Latin to help rally Continental support for the king’s cause. Another nine editions of portions of the Eikon appeared in that same timeframe, excerpting Charles’s last instructions to his children, his final prayers, a versification of those prayers, and his rejection of the “pretended Jurisdiction” of the court that convicted him. And many of the surviving copies of these various editions bear traces of having been purchased at a considerable mark‐up: generally two to three and a half times the customary price of a volume that size (Madan 1950, p. 4, n. 10, 16). Of the complete editions in English, 12 were in octavo (comprised of sheets folded three times to form eight leaves), whose bindings were often ornamented with royalist emblems or with the edges stained black in mourning. These were substantial, yet portable volumes, averaging 17 × 10 cm. Abraham Wright even describes a copy “bound up in a Cover coloured with His Blood,” that is, the blood that spurted from Charles’s body when his head was severed: a latter‐day relic “richer” than anything Rome could “show” (Parnassus 1656, p. 54). It is easy to imagine how books like these could have served as objects of veneration or rallying points for small groups of royalists, especially given the ways in which the text presents Charles as a Christ‐like martyr for the sins of his people. Indeed, An Elegie on The Meekest of Men (1649) proclaimed the Eikon second only “to hallowed writ, and sacred page” in its capacity to “busie pious wonder” (p. 14), while the famous frontispiece to the Eikon (see Figure 4.3) goes so far as to depict the king grasping a crown of thorns while gazing upon a celestial crown (his earthly crown of gold and jewels lies abandoned on the floor). The other 28 editions in English were all duodecimos (a more portable book format, comprised of sheets cut into unequally sized parts, with the larger portion folded three times and the smaller portion folded twice to yield a total of 12 leaves). These editions were mostly in the 12 × 8 cm range, but a few were significantly smaller. Tellingly, the latter, which run about 10 ×  5 cm, were all produced after Parliament arrested the printers of the larger editions and effectively drove the market for the Eikon underground. These small books were well suited to private, furtive devotion, particularly if the book was thought to have “literally [taken] the place” of the now absent king (Wheeler 1999, p. 122). The idea that Eikon Basilike was not merely a vehicle for the words of Charles I, but somehow a surrogate for the sacred body of the monarch himself may help to explain the sheer hostility it aroused, not only as a text, but as an object. In this way, it is akin to the statue of the king in Winchester Cathedral that Parliamentary soldiers “hacked and hewed” with their swords (Mercurius Rusticus 1646, p. 212). For example, the 1649 Eikon Alethine [the “truthful image”] insisted that much of the problem stemmed from the very medium of the book: the author of the Eikon Basilike, whoever he may have been (for this writer, it cannot have been Charles himself ), was counting on the fact that “every thing in Print goes for Gospel with the multitude” (sig. A1v). Similarly, John Milton, recently appointed as one of the chief propagandists for Parliament, not only denounced the text of the Eikon as plagiarism (and worse, plagiarism of “Prayers offerd to a Heathen God” in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia), he also titled his 1649 point‐ by‐point refutation Eikonoklastes [“image breaker”], as if to drive home that this “Idoliz’d Book” had led astray the “Image‐doting rabble” (Milton 1649, pp. 12, 13, 241). In order to thwart this new “civil … Idolatry” (sig. B3v), Milton presented his work as a superior book in every way, starting with his title page (Figure 4.4), which at first glance resembles that of Eikon Basilike, with its titles in both Greek and English

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

Figure 4.3  The frontispiece to Eikon Basilike helped cement the executed Charles I’s status, among royalists, as a martyr. Source: Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. By37 30gm.

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Figure 4.4  The title page of Eikonoklastes (right) attempts to counter and overwhelm the title page of Eikon Basilike (left). Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. DA400.E5 1648 and DA400.E5 M5.

often printed in two colors. But Milton identifies himself as “The Author” (whereas it was widely suspected that Charles I had a ghost writer), provides three scriptural tags to the Eikon’s one, offers a far more extended classical quotation, trumpets that his text was “Published by Authority,” and flaunts its legality by providing information regarding where to purchase it. Milton’s work is also simply a larger volume  –  a 17.8 × 13.3 cm quarto – and “well over twice” as long (Sharpe 2010, p. 400). Despite these features, however, Eikonklastes only ran to two editions (and a translation) in the period we have been considering, and “there is no evidence that any reader’s view of the Eikon Basilike was changed … by Milton” (Potter 1989, p. 184). Nonetheless, royalists found the book troubling enough for Charles II, less than three months after his return from exile in 1660, to issue a proclamation ordering his subjects to surrender their copies to be burnt by the public hangman. Thus far we have been tracing the unprecedented variety of books and pamphlets produced in the wake of the 1641 collapse of Licensing and the ways in which print became an indispensable part of politics, not only for heterodox voices, but also for the traditional institutions of power. Never again would the political elite conduct their operations in ways that did not filter down into print, although there would be many attempts over the next century to restrict their doing so. Never again would the press be an only optional part of how would‐be transformers of society organized themselves and called attention to their positions. But the explosion of political pamphleteering is only one aspect of the post‐1641 “bookscape.” Another, equally dramatic development

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

deserves sustained attention before we move on to the later seventeenth century: the advent of periodicals.

4.2 ­Diurnals and Mercuries Irregularly published “newsbooks” had been around, on and off, in England since the 1620s (largely to report the shifting fortunes of the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War), and individual pamphlets and ballads on particular events – comets, murders, monstrous births – had been a staple of printing from well before that. But periodicals in the sense that we now know them are an invention of the mid‐seventeenth century: relatively short, often sequentially numbered publications with varying but topical content that come out (and are expected to come out) at a regular, explicitly dated interval under more or less the same title and conducted by more or less the same hands, with some consistency from issue to issue in terms of style, appearance, and characteristic interests. The idea caught on rapidly: if we count each individual issue as a publication, about a quarter of all titles produced between 1641 and 1700 were some sort of periodical (Nelson and Seccombe 1986, p. 1), and at moments “they represent up to one third of the total number of titles” (Raymond 2011a, p. 386). Indeed, in 1644 they amounted to “almost 40 per cent of total press output, and in 1654 almost 36 per cent” (Raymond 2011b, p. 62). The initial impetus for periodicals was, as with many other sorts of publications, the tensions leading up to the outbreak of civil war. The public’s thirst for information was evident, and the 1641 abolition of Star Chamber (the royal prerogative court) and the ecclesiastical High Commission, which were charged with overseeing the press at this time, made it finally possible to report domestic news. The printed newsbooks of the 1620s and 1630s almost never mentioned anything “having to do with England,” except “a few references to British soldiers serving in continental armies” and perhaps the arrival of “an English ambassador … at a foreign court” (Frank 1961, pp. 5–6). Accounts of what was going on at home were almost exclusively confined to weekly or fortnightly manuscript newsletters produced by commercial scriptoria. Such newsletters were expensive (an annual subscription could cost between £6 and £20 a year) and generally only circulated among the upper ranks of society; it was rare for more than 100 copies of a given issue to be produced. Not surprisingly, then, when the legal constraints on reporting domestic news evaporated, 64 periodicals were launched within 12 months, most of them weekly one‐sheet quarto pamphlets called diurnalls (from the Latin for “daily”). However, figuring out what the public wanted proved very difficult: of those 64 titles, 30 did not make it to a second issue, and only 6 were able to produce more than 20 issues (Nelson and Seccombe 1986, p. 14). The next year, only 39 titles were vying against one another, and thereafter the number varied quite widely, with peaks in years of political unrest and valleys when the current regime had matters more in hand (see the graph in Nelson and Seccombe 1986, p. 12). Like most of the other publications of the 1640s we have been investigating, these early newsbooks were small and generally unremarkable‐looking objects: quartos about 18 × 14 cm. The earliest ones had title pages (with blank versos) and so resembled pamphlets. But in a one‐sheet quarto, that only leaves six pages for the news, so by early 1642, publishers abandoned the title page in favor of a head title that occupied only a

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fraction of the first page, thereby allowing them to fit in 20–30% more material (and so offer better value to their potential purchasers). These head titles are the forerunner of the modern masthead. And to counteract the felt ephemerality that might accompany the explicit dating of a newsbook (why should we care about the news “from Tuesday October 24. to Tuesday October 31. 1648” once that week had passed?), most publishers continuously numbered and paginated the issues of each title as if to suggest that they were worthy of being collected and bound together  –  as indeed, some were. Hence number 16 of The Moderate, whose dates we just cited, starts on page 129 (reproduced in Frank 1961 between pp. 194 and 195). It should be noted, however, that not everyone was persuaded by these devices: when Samuel Butler refers to the “Deathless Pages of Diurnal” in Hudibras, the single most popular poem of the later seventeenth century, he was laying the irony on quite thick (Butler 1967, p. 62). Some of these conventions seem to have fallen into place pretty easily. Others took more trial and error. As often happens when a new form takes off, newsbook publishers spent a lot of time trying to imitate their more successful competitors, without necessarily understanding what exactly readers found appealing (see Moretti 2000). In some cases, this took the shape of actually pretending to be the competition: at several points in later 1642 and early 1643, at least three different publishers were offering newsbooks entitled a Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament. Similarly, there were three rival versions of Mercurius Melancholius in September 1647 and again in July 1648. In a more baroque variant, in March 1642, A Continuation of the true diurnall occurrences and passages in both Houses of Parliament found itself competing with A Continuation of the true diurnall of passages in Parliament, A Continuation of the true diurnall of all the passages in Parliament, and A Continuation of the true diurnall of proceedings in Parliament. And while these “counterfeits” were generally driven by a desire for commercial gain, other motives inevitably crept in, given the times. For example, Elizabeth Alkyn, a London “mercury,” “sold counterfeit Royalist papers in an effort to locate … the real distributors” and so revenge herself on the Cavaliers, who had hanged her husband (Achinstein 2001, p. 62). Periodicals also presented themselves as explicit alternatives (generally political) to their competitors. Hence, the chief royalist publication, Mercurius Aulicus [Court Mercury], was countered by the pro‐Parliamentary Mercurius Britanicus [British Mercury]. There were also (briefly) an Anti‐Aulicus, a Mercurius Aulicus‐Mastix [a Whip for Mercurius Aulicus], a Mercurius Anti‐Britannicus, and a Mercurius Diutinus (not Britanicus) [the Long‐Lasting Mercury]. These attempts to discredit the opposition worked at both the macro‐ and the micro‐levels: the journals not only mocked one another in general, but also attempted to rebut specific claims in particular articles. For example, when Mercurius Aulicus reported in its December 17–23, 1643, issue that an unnamed Parliamentary prisoner was caught “committing Buggery on the Keepers owne Mare” (and, moreover, had skipped church to do so), Mercurius Britanicus insisted the following week that “the truth is … he committed … onely burglary” – that is, it was an escape attempt, not a perversion. Not content with this correction, however, Mercurius Britanicus went on to suggest that if anyone was likely to commit such “trespasses,” it would be a royalist, perhaps Edward Lyttleton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, “for I hear he hath a pretty dappled Mare, which he keeps for his own saddle.” Similarly, after the writers of Mercurius Britanicus published an apology for insulting the king, Aulicus his Hue and Cry Sent forth after Britanicus (1645) denounced it as “the

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

vomit[ing] out” of “poysoned Crocodile teares in slanders” (p. 6). However, the “mercuries” did not only battle one another; they also presented themselves as wittier and more elegant than their down‐market rivals, a distinction brought out by their more spacious typography – sometimes including marginal commentary – which differentiated them visually from the shoddier‐looking diurnals. These attempts to compete on multiple levels, with multiple rivals, in an ongoing but ever‐shifting struggle to attract readers offer perhaps the earliest example of a modern media market. The first newsbooks were generally published on Mondays, so that Londoners could read them and then send them on to friends and relations in the country (the weekly post to the north left on Tuesday morning), thereby “sav[ing] much labour in writing of Letters” (The Daily Intelligencer of Court, City, and Countrey, January 30, 1643). Mercurius Aulicus made a point of appearing on Sunday, however, so as to flout Puritan Sabbath‐keeping and further highlight its anti‐Parliamentary stance: a good reminder that in tense times even things like the calendar can be politicized. And by 1643, some of the London‐based diurnals were branching out to the other days of the week (except Sunday), apparently content to rely on metropolitan readers who wanted more current news than was available from the competition. Some of the more successful publishers also began to offer two newsbooks a week, but under separate titles. This soon became the standard practice for official government publications. Hence between 1655 and 1660, one could get The Publick Intelligencer. Communicating the Chief Occurrences and Proceedings on Mondays and Mercurius Politicus, Comprising the Sum of Forein Intelligence, With the Affairs now on Foot in the Three Nations on Thursdays. The print run for a given issue of a newsbook typically ranged between 250 and 1000 copies, although it could occasionally go significantly higher: in later 1647, a Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages in Parliament’s circulation probably “climbed beyond 2,000” (Frank 1961, p. 120). Printing fewer than 500 made it difficult to turn a profit, as newsbooks typically sold for a penny apiece. Producing more than 800 or so would require setting the type multiple times and then using more than one press simultaneously, since doing that many on a single press would take too long for the news in question to remain current. Many of the most successful titles did use multiple presses, but that increased the logistical complexities and possibilities for error. It often made more sense to reprint issues that had proven particularly successful, or that were hard to obtain because of the war: there were several Scottish reprints of English newsbooks, and Mercurius Aulicus was regularly reprinted in London after demand for it outstripped the number of copies that could be smuggled out of Oxford. Furthermore, 500 copies did not mean only 500 readers. Newsbooks were routinely passed around in households and workshops and then mailed to others. A conservative estimate would suggest that each copy had four or five readers (Frank 1961, p. 57), and quite possibly several more auditors. And for most of the 1640s, there were at least 500 (and often 800) newsbooks – total issues, not titles – being produced each year (Nelson and Seccombe 1986, p. 13). Some of these were being purchased en masse by the same individuals: collectors attempting to document the unprecedented times, like George Thomason, or compulsive readers, such as Nehemiah Wallington, who lamented how “these little pamphlets of weekly news about my house … were so many thieves that had stolen away my money before I was aware of them” (Seaver 1985, p. 156). But the vast majority of the, say, 2.7 million copies of newsbooks produced in the 1640s (roughly 5400 issues at an average of 500 copies per issue) were bought by readers who might

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only have had enough disposable income to purchase a single title – or even a single issue. Any attempt to calculate the total readership of newsbooks is going to be based upon an uncomfortably large number of assumptions, but it is possible that we might be talking about “half the literate males in … London” (Frank 1961, p. 57) and a substantial number of their country cousins. Newsbooks were not a mass medium in the nineteenth‐ or twentieth‐century sense, but they probably reached far more men and women than any of the texts we now regard as the glories of seventeenth‐century literature and political theory. The tactics and tone of newsbooks varied widely, although few of them would satisfy the requirements of modern journalistic objectivity. One observer summed up their stance as “not above three lies, but many truths left out” (Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Montagu 1900, p. 147). Even the moments of relatively straightforward reporting were often shot through with hints of emotion or judgment: England’s Memorable Accidents reported that some victorious Parliamentary troops were reduced to drinking water, “because the Cavaliers had let out all the Beere in Brainford” (November 14–21, 1642). To help underscore the proper interpretation of events, these reports were often framed with fiercely partisan rhetoric. Mercurius Britanicus concluded its report of a rumor that Charles I had fled to Ireland with a “Hue and Cry after him,” the oral equivalent of a wanted poster. All law‐abiding citizens were to be on the lookout for “a wilfull King, which hath gone astray these foure yeares from his Parliament, with a guilty Conscience, bloody Hands, a Heart full of broken Vowes and Protestations: If these marks be not sufficient, there is another in the mouth; for bid him speak, and you will soon know him,” because the king had a speech impediment (Mercurius Britanicus, July 28–August 4, 1645). Likewise, for its January 15–22, 1646, issue, Mercurius Civicus [the Civic Mercury] replaced its customary woodcut of Charles I with one that showed him without a crown: a not so subtle hint as to what could happen if the war continued to go against him. Some journals even seem to have resorted to outright fabrication: for example, Perfect Occurrences of Parliament claimed (improbably) that the cardinals had poisoned the Pope because they thought him “a Puritan,” who refused to “comply with the Jesuits in their massacring of Protestants” (June 7–14, 1644), while Lucy Hutchinson once complained that an unsavory local gentleman “kept the diurnal makers in pension, so that whatever was done in any of the neighboring counties against the enemy [in the Civil Wars] was ascribed to him” (Hutchinson 1995, p. 92). Not surprisingly, given these tactics and the lingering suspicion that, as Roger L’Estrange would put it, “a Publick Mercury … makes the Multitude too Familiar with the Actions, and Counsels of their Superiours” (The Intelligencer, August 31, 1663), newsbooks were not always held in very high esteem. Referring to the generals of the Parliamentary army, one commentator claimed newsbooks “have done more mischief in the kingdome than ever all my Lord of Essex’s, or Sir Thomas Fairefaxes whole traine of Artillery ever did” (Fresh Whip 1647, p. 6). Another thought Mercurius Morbicus (bad Latin for “Mercury, the Bringer of Disease”) suitable only for use in the wake of a laxative: “I may to many now seem to deface him, / But when I physick take, O then, I’le grace him” (Taylor 1647, p. 1). Yet the sheer number produced testifies to the public’s demand for information, however imperfect, as does the premium readers were willing to pay when their favorite titles were not readily available: as royalist hopes dimmed, Mercurius Aulicus, which officially sold for a penny, was supposedly going for up to 18d a copy (True Character 1645, p. 3).

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

As a specific publication format, newsbooks barely made it into the 1660s, when they were largely replaced by single‐sheet, multi‐column newspapers). But their impact lasts to this day. They profoundly changed readers’ relation to the world‐in‐time. Previously, when news was printed at all, it only appeared when (and because) something big had happened. Newsbooks taught readers to expect a weekly or twice‐weekly dose of information, regardless of how much or how little seemed to be going on. That is, they imposed the calendar on the world in a new way. And the availability of a regular, expectable packet of news, in turn, changed readers’ sense of what was worth being printed, prompted new sorts of curiosity, and established a new kind of ongoing demand: one buys a book only once (usually), but with a periodical, there is the possibility of purchasing it again and again and again. Finally, newsbooks irrevocably changed who had access to written news, which, for all its faults, was generally thought far more reliable than the sort of oral rumor that had previously been the principal means through which non‐local news reached all but the most elite ranks of the population (Raymond 2011a, p. 396).

4.3 ­Print and Regime Change Perhaps the single biggest legacy of the 1640s and 1650s in terms of the history of the book was the irreversible entanglement of print and politics. The monarchy may have been restored in part through an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion that insisted, officially, that the Interregnum never happened, and the king’s authority was certainly bolstered by the annulment of all legislation passed without royal assent (that is, between 1641 and 1660), but there was nonetheless no going back to the world of the 1630s. For all the ways in which the Restoration narrowed the field of political possibility (an English Republic has never again been a real option), the later seventeenth century continued – and in its own way expanded – the dependence of politics on print that had developed during the Interregnum. As Charles II and James II discovered to their repeated chagrin, anyone hoping to govern Britain in the decades following the Restoration had to consider public opinion in a way that their father did not (until it was too late), and the best way both to gauge and to sway such opinion was through print. At the same time, those decades saw print become an ordinary and integral part of daily life in areas far removed from what we would ordinarily think of as politics. In sum, the history of the book in the later seventeenth century can, in large part, be described as a sustained attempt to come to terms with the opportunities and problems brought about by the startling reorientations of the world of print that we have been tracing in the 1640s and 1650s. A good index of how the Interregnum’s entanglement of print and politics outlasted the events that produced it can be seen in the fact that both of the “regime changes” of the later seventeenth century began with a burst of printed propaganda by the would‐be next ruler. In late 1659 and early 1660, when the chaos following the death of Oliver Cromwell began to make a restoration of the monarchy seem possible, royalists started publishing pamphlets describing the future Charles II’s “moderation, integrity, and generosity of spirit” (Keeble 2002, p. 59), all by‐products of his devotion to “the Protestant Religion” (Turenne 1660, title page). This paved the way for a proclamation that Charles, who had been in exile for almost nine years, sent to General George Monck from Breda,

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in the Netherlands. It promised religious toleration and a pardon to all of his and his father’s enemies (if they acknowledged him as king), and vowed not to meddle with any of the land transfers that had occurred during the Interregnum. Monck, at that point probably the most powerful man in Britain, shared the proclamation with Parliament, who ordered it printed and invited Charles to return and be king. So, for several months before Charles set foot again in Britain, his prospective subjects were being reassured that he was not the haughty absolutist that many had thought his father, nor a crypto‐ Catholic as many feared his time in France and the Spanish Netherlands (present‐day Belgium) had made him, but a loving and inclusive monarch who would rule with Parliament as an equal partner. Obviously, the reality turned out to be a bit different, although the most intolerant and hateful aspects of Charles II’s reign were largely the result of a thirst for vengeance on the part of the royalists readmitted to Parliament and the Church, rather than any action from the Crown. But the mere fact that the exiled prince and his supporters thought such printed assurances necessary testifies to a profound transformation of the role of print in the relation between governors and the governed. So too does the fact that the Declaration of Breda, which had no legal force, was printed in black letter, the standard typeface for official proclamations. No previous monarch, no matter how contested his accession had been, would have bothered to mount such a campaign. In 1688, William of Orange (James II’s nephew and son‐in‐law) went even further, issuing two declarations from the Hague “of the reasons inducing him, to appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England, for Preserving of the Protestant Religion, and for Restoring the Lawes and Liberties of England, Scotland and Ireland,” which is to say, the reasons why he was invading England with more than 20 000 Dutch soldiers. Sixty ­thousand copies of the first declaration (a half‐sheet quarto pamphlet) were printed in Holland and smuggled into England to be distributed by William’s supporters as soon as his fleet was underway. Additional “bundles of free copies were sent to booksellers to be sold at a price set by themselves” and “copies were posted through the penny post and sent anonymously to private citizens” throughout London (Jardine 2008, p. 31). As the Dutch army advanced toward the capital, the declarations were read aloud to the citizens of every town through which it passed. Translations of the declaration were also issued in Dutch, French, and German to justify the coup to William’s continental allies and rivals: “altogether twenty‐one editions in the four languages appeared in 1688.” And a separate declaration aimed at Scotland “was circulating north of the border” (Jardine 2008, pp. 31, 30). This propaganda offensive came on the heels of a 1687 open letter describing William’s belief in religious toleration, which itself appeared in an edition of 45 000 copies (Harris 2007, p. 257). And once the invasion was underway, hundreds of further pamphlets were produced (some from the press that William brought over with him), most of which were probably read aloud in coffeehouses and so reached an audience several times the number of copies printed. James II attempted to stop the flood by declaring it treasonous “to read, receive, conceal, publish, disperse, repeat, or hand about” any of William’s proclamations, but it was too late (Schwoerer 1977, p. 859). It is in large part due to the success of William’s propaganda campaign that what amounts to the last successful invasion of England by a foreign power – an invasion that ultimately took the lives of upwards of 30 000 people, mostly in Scotland and Ireland – was able to be characterized, both then and now, as a “Bloodless” and “Glorious Revolution.”

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

Thus far we have been examining how pamphlets and proclamations reported the news and attempted to persuade their readers to adopt a particular stance toward it: say, to believe that the restoration of the monarchy would bind up the nation’s wounds, rather than further inflame them. But the later seventeenth century also saw the advent of a new role for print: to actually create the news. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, Britain was in crisis. Charles II had no legitimate children and so the heir to the throne was his brother James, whose Catholicism (it was feared) might translate into tyranny and bloodshed and perhaps even an undoing of the Reformation. Faced with this prospect, a significant chunk of Parliament sought to exclude James from the line of succession: a move that would overturn long‐established laws of inheritance and conceptions of royal authority in order to ensure that a Protestant would remain on the throne. Not surprisingly, Charles and James fiercely opposed Exclusion and the nation once again tottered on the brink of civil war as subjects were asked to choose between what was lawful and what was likely to yield what the majority of the English would regard as a favorable religious outcome. Amidst the chaos and panic, conspiracy theories abounded, most of which were invented, often out of whole cloth, by pamphlets. The most famous of these was undoubtedly the so‐called Popish Plot, an alleged Jesuit conspiracy to poison Charles II, stir up insurrection in Scotland, land a French army in Ireland, shut down Parliament, murder any other claimants to the throne who interfered, and once again burn London to the ground (the Great Fire of 1666 that had left 100 000 people homeless was allegedly the work of Catholics). This, in turn, would supposedly prompt English Catholics to rebel and slaughter Protestants by the thousands in order to restore Popery by force. The (almost completely made‐up) plot was brought to public attention with a pamphlet written by Titus Oates: A True Narrative of the Horrid Plot and Conspiracy of the Popish Party against the Life of His Sacred Majesty, the Government, and the Protestant Religion (1679). Hundreds of titles followed, most of them looking a great deal like Oates’s work: short folios with “wide margins, large, clear type and generous white space,” accompanied by some sort of pseudo‐legal certification of their truth, such as a claim that they contained sworn testimony or were published at the behest of Parliament (Love 2002, p. 655). These pamphlets provided additional damning details, challenged the veracity of previous accounts, and often described still further conspiracies. So, for example, Catholics insisted that the supposed Popish Plot was actually cooked up by Presbyterians to deflect attention away from their own plot to destroy the monarchy and forcibly return Britain to the days of harsh, Puritan republicanism. Some of the more radical Protestants in turn claimed that this Catholic counter‐narrative was itself a sham aimed at framing and discrediting those who had uncovered the (very real) Popish Plot, which was even worse than initially thought. And so on. Modern historians have found very little evidence that any of these plots were more than paranoid pipe dreams, or opportunistic attempts to exploit the crisis. Certainly none were anything close to the existential threats to the realm and reformed religion they were reported to be. But the fact that the plots recounted by these pamphlets were largely made‐up did not prevent them from having very real consequences: hundreds of thousands of Britons gathered in towns large and small to burn the Pope in effigy, dozens of men were executed or died in prison, and Catholics were excluded from serving in Parliament for the next 150 years. And booksellers recognized the place of pamphlets in all this. They were not only m ­ aking history, they

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were history and so deserved preservation: three catalogs of “all the stitch’d books and single sheets printed since the first discovery of the Popish plot” were produced and sold as “Very useful for Gent. that make collections” (Love 2002, pp. 654, 656). Indeed, this may be part of why the plot pamphlets were produced in a larger format (folios averaging 32 × 22 cm) and with better paper than had hitherto been the standard. The political uses of print in the later seventeenth century were not confined to books and pamphlets, however. Some of the most intriguing attempts to shape public opinion can be found in the packs of playing cards that were produced in the immediate aftermath of the various plots and uprisings that threatened to plunge the nation back into civil war. Like other playing cards, these were made by printing an entire pack as an etching or engraving, hand‐coloring the resulting sheet (if desired), pasting it onto cardboard, and then cutting apart the individual cards. However, rather than just bearing the customary numbers, suits, and faces, these cards revealed the sinister forces supposedly at work in the realm. So, for example, in one pack, published in December 1679 at the height of public hysteria about the Popish Plot, the Nine, Ten, and Knave of Spades depict the stalking and strangulation of Sir Edmund Godfrey, a London magistrate to whom evidence of the Plot had been presented, while the Five through Eight of Spades shows the disposal of his body (Figure 4.5). Similarly, a November 1685 pack uses the King of Spades to reveal “Devills in ye Ayre Bewitching” the Duke of Monmouth’s “Army” (reproduced in Kunzle 1973, p. 145) and thereby explain why several thousand men rose up in arms against the newly crowned James II – Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, led a rebellion against his uncle, ostensibly to save the kingdom from Catholicism. And a pack from February 1689 shows, on the Eight of Spades, “a consecrated Smock” sent “from Rome” for the christening of James’s supposed son (reproduced in Kunzle 1973, pp. 148–149), further confirmation that the Pope was in on what many Protestants claimed was a plot to usurp James’s staunchly Protestant daughter’s place in the line of succession by smuggling an unrelated baby into the queen’s birthing chamber. In all of these cases, a particular political position is being championed, but subtly, in the form of cards, rather than with the full polemical aggression of most of the pamphlets taking up these issues, although puzzled users of the Popish Plot cards did have the option of ­purchasing a supplementary “Book to explain each Figure” (Dr. Otes 1680, broadside). We have no evidence of how gamblers reacted to these accounts, but it is not hard to imagine that a vision of Jesuits under the beds could have taken hold almost imperceptibly as these cards were handled and studied for far longer blocks of time than most pamphlets of the same price range (4d to 1s) ever received. And it may have been harder, at least for ardent gamblers, to avoid this particular variety of political persuasion: “cards … were often provided by the owner of the coffee‐house or … tavern where [a] game was taking place” and so anyone wishing to play might need to do so with a partisan analysis of the nation’s woes quite literally at his fingertips (Harris 1987b, p. 108). However, printed materials were not only instruments of power in the later ­seventeenth century. They also became newly potent emblems and rallying points. As a public gesture of suppression and contempt, book burning goes back to antiquity. As we saw in Section 3.7 with Tyndale’s Bible burned outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, the vast majority of the medieval and early modern books that met the flames did so because of their alleged heresy and so were standing in for the religious beliefs of an individual or a sect. In the 1660s, however, Britons learned that the foundations of entire political regimes should also be destroyed with fire. One of the first acts of the Parliament elected after the Restoration was to order the Solemn League and Covenant (the 1643 military

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

Figure 4.5  The spades in the Popish Plot playing cards. Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

and religious alliance between Parliament and the Scots against the king) to “be taken down out of all Churches and publick Places” and burned (Journal of the House of Commons May 18, 1661). “Many thousand Bonfires” soon followed (The Kingdomes Intelligencer, May 27–June 3, 1661), and the Irish Parliament issued a similar proclamation. Ten days later, the English added to the burn list the bill creating the court that tried the king and the enabling legislation transforming England into a Commonwealth. And similar gestures recurred throughout the period we are investigating: a 1679 rebellion in Scotland began by burning all the “sinful and unlawful” acts of Parliament that had targeted “our Covenanted Reformation” (Harris 2006, p. 196). An equally charged emblem, with far more destructive consequences, can be seen in the reintroduction of the Book of Common Prayer. Arguably, this book was one of the causes of the Civil Wars: as discussed in Section 3.9, the forced imposition of the English prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland in 1637 prompted rioting and tensions that ultimately led to the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–1640, which in turn helped create the conditions under which fighting in England could break out. As we have seen, the very typography of the book may have marked it out as alien: English religious books were generally printed in black letter, Scottish in roman (Lesser 2006, p. 107). Parliament

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abolished the Book of Common Prayer in January 1645 (the same day that Archbishop Laud was condemned to death) and replaced it with the more Puritan Directory for Public Worship. However, the restoration of the monarchy was also a restoration of the more ceremonial and hierarchical wing of the Church of England (as Charles II’s grandfather, James I, put it: “no bishop, no king”). So as soon as it became clear that the king would return, churches began again to use the (still illegal) Book of Common Prayer. In 1662, despite the Declaration of Breda’s promise of religious tolerance, Parliament passed a law requiring “every minister to use the Book of Common Prayer in places of worship, and only the Book of Common Prayer, and never to pray or preach without it” (Keeble 2002, p. 118). Every clergyman who held a position in the Church had to annually and publicly “assent and consent” to everything in the Book of Common Prayer or lose his job. However, very few copies of the new version had yet been printed, much less distributed outside London, so thousands of priests were forced to endorse every last detail of a book they had never seen. Moreover, as of 1665, any clergyman who refused to embrace the Book of Common Prayer was forbidden from living within five miles of the parish where he used to preach or any town whatsoever, unless he swore never to try to alter the Church or State in any way. Ultimately, these and related attempts to purge the Church of Dissent ejected “nearly 1,000 ministers – roughly 10 per cent of the [English] clergy” from office, often after they had served their parishes for decades. In Scotland, the percentage was roughly a third and in some areas went even higher: in Galloway, “34 ministers were deprived in a total of just 37 parishes.” And many of those parishes were themselves full of Dissent: a third or more of some English towns (and “somewhere in the region of 15–20 per cent” of Londoners) had serious misgivings about the official rituals and governance of  the Church, and “most conformist Protestants … would have known dissenters” (Harris 2006, pp. 53, 114, 29). Given the ferocity with which the Book of Common Prayer was reimposed, then, it is not surprising that it occasionally became the object of intense hostility. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary “a disturbance in a church”: “a great many young [people] knotting together and crying out ‘porridge’ [a derogatory Puritan term for the book] often and seditiously” and then taking “the Common Prayer‐Book … away” and “tear[ing] it” (Pepys 1970–1983, vol. 3, p.178). Pepys found this “very ominous,” possibly because one of the things that Parliamentary soldiers had done in the Civil Wars was to seize and destroy the Book of Common Prayer, demanding that preachers instead offer “extemporary Prayers” (Walton 1678, sig. G3v). Indeed, at least one soldier had not stopped with the Prayer Book: bursting into a churchyard in Surrey in 1648, he proclaimed that the Sabbath, tithes, ministers, and magistrates were all “abolished,” and then set fire to a Bible to show how it too was “abolished,” now that “Christ is in Glory amongst us, and imparts a fuller measure of his Spirit to his Saints then this can afford” (Walker 1649, p. 153).

4.4 ­Beyond Politics The mid‐ to late seventeenth century was arguably the most politicized period in British history. Nonetheless, even then, not everything was necessarily or automatically political. The period also saw the extension of print into a number of new areas with at least the possibility of existing apart from the grand struggles of Church and State.

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

Consider the case of music books. While a royal patent for printing music had been granted in 1575, most written music – excluding Psalms – was only available in manuscript well into the 1640s, which meant that access was largely determined by one’s connections, since manuscript circulation networks largely overlaid pre‐existing social networks (Love 1993, p. 83). The market, especially for instrumental and cathedral music, was small, and music printing is exceptionally difficult (and hence expensive) in terms of typesetting. So households and taverns and church choirs often performed even the most supposedly familiar tunes in markedly different ways, and anyone wishing to learn how to read music generally had to copy scores out by hand (or hire someone to do so). Starting in the 1650s, however, booksellers, led by John Playford, began to figure out how to make printed music commercially viable, first by targeting specific audiences and frequently updating their offerings with new material, and later by switching from typesetting to engraving. Even then, however, they had to contend with “those Mistakers, who have taken up a new (but very fond) opinion, That Musick cannot as truly be Printed as Prick’d [i.e., written by hand], (and which is more ridiculous) that no Choice Ayres or Songs are permitted by Authors to come in print” (Lawes 1669, sig. A1r). The ultimate result, however, was the beginnings of a national music, both traditional (ballads and country dances) and modern (the latest overtures and songs from the London theaters). Print made it possible for a young woman in Yorkshire to know and be able to play (or gracefully dance to) the same music as her counterparts in Somerset or Kent, a useful skill in the increasingly countrywide marriage market. It also allowed amateurs to assemble collections of music with far greater ease: if someone wanted to sing “Great Jove once made love like a bull” – a “hilarious dog‐hating romp” – on the heels of Henry Purcell’s tender “What shall I do to show how much I love her?” all one needed to do was to purchase the engraved song‐sheets for 6d apiece (Walkling 2012, p. 9). Musical scores are, of course, instructions for performance. As such, they are akin to one of the other important extensions of print in the later seventeenth century: the rise of how‐to manuals. Such books were not unknown before, but new titles had more or less disappeared in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, only to reemerge after 1650 with a dramatic increase in both variety and sheer numbers. Perhaps in part spurred on by Nicholas Culpeper’s 1649 translation of the College of Physicians’ Pharmacopoeia, which broke the Society of Apothecaries’ decades‐long attempt to keep patients from preparing their own medicines, print became an increasingly important source of information that had previously only been transmitted through face‐to‐ face instruction. Books now purported to offer easy and comprehensive training in not only the preparation of drugs, but also things like beekeeping, pastry making, and vermin killing. Professional skills, such as how to prepare legal documents or accurately calculate interest, were offered up in vade mecum form. Titles like The Art of Angling or The Compleat Gamester claimed to be able to instruct their readers in recreational activities like fishing and gambling. There was even a 1685 guide to the new chemicals that were transforming British palates and the rhythms of work: The Manner of Making Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate. And conduct manuals appeared offering to help middling readers, especially women, learn how to be more refined and attractive to prospective suitors, customers, and patrons (see Ezell 2008). It is hard to know how many of these books were translated into action. Kenneth Burke once claimed that “in by far the great majority of cases, … readers [of self‐help books] make no serious attempt to apply the book’s recipes. The lure of the book resides

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in the fact that the reader, while reading it, is then living in the aura of success” (Burke 1938, p. 12). But at least some surviving copies suggest more than merely symbolic use: a copy of The Compleat Surveyor has “handwritten labels” added “to a table for the conversion of links and chains to feet” (Glaisyer 2011, p. 514). Similarly, it may be telling that only a single copy survives of The Tradesman’s Copy‐Book, which advised its users to cut it “in parts” and roll them “up in a Pen‐Case” (Glaisyer and Pennell 2003, p. 7). Note that in both examples, it seems likely that the users were not complete novices, but rather working artisans who were employing the book to acquire new skills or do their jobs more efficiently. This may be why many of the recipes and instructions in seventeenth‐century how‐to manuals will not work unless one already knows enough to fill in the gaps: that is, they are devoted to teaching casual workers and journeymen how to become masters (in an age when traditional apprenticeship was breaking down), rather than to making outsiders self‐sufficient enough not to need professionals in the first place (see P. Smith 2012). This orientation toward those already in the field did not preclude laymen from learning a great deal from these books. Samuel Pepys’s life was changed by reading John Brown’s The Description and Use of the Carpenters‐Rule (what we would call a slide‐ rule). Brown’s book taught Pepys how to use this new kind of mathematical instrument, and Pepys, in turn, showed up both his subordinates and his patron’s rival, Sir William Penn, by accurately measuring some timber at the Royal Shipyard. This success then allowed him to steer a lucrative contract to a friend and raise “his professional reputation, social importance, and financial worth” in ways that ultimately led to a friendship with the future James II (Loveman 2015, p. 76). But envisioning ambitious artisans as the principal audience for books along these lines may help explain why they were published and priced as they were, including, in the case of Joseph Moxon’s 1678–1684 Mechanick Exercises (the source of much of what we know about early modern printing techniques), appearing in 38 monthly installments at 6d apiece, so as to be more ­affordable to working printers.

4.5 ­Periodicals in the Later Seventeenth Century Newsbooks of the sort we were investigating earlier barely survived the Restoration. But the idea of periodicals that they inaugurated expanded and became a permanent fixture of the landscape for readers, writers, and booksellers. In 1660, no one would have guessed that newsbooks were on their way out. The restored royal government changed the titles and personnel involved, but otherwise continued the pattern set under Cromwell of producing a twice‐weekly official newsbook (with different titles for the Monday and Thursday issues). All other newsbooks were forbidden, although in the chaos of late 1659 and early 1660 a number of unauthorized journals briefly set up shop. In 1665, however, as the court took refuge in Oxford from the plague that was ravaging London, a new kind of publication appeared, one that would forever transform the ways in which readers encountered the world. The Oxford Gazette (retitled The London Gazette in 1666, when the court returned to the metropolis) was the first newspaper in English. Rather being a short quarto pamphlet, in which the news is spread out over eight pages and read like a book, The London Gazette was a two‐columned half‐sheet folio (that is, an unfolded, half‐sheet of paper

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that was the equivalent of one leaf of a folio). Copies typically measured about 29 × 18 cm. Its price remained the same as its newsbook predecessors, one penny, and each issue was still dated and sequentially numbered (see Figure 4.6). But by virtue of appearing on a single leaf, the contents of The London Gazette could be taken in at a glance, and new combinations of information could be created by the juxtaposition of the two columns. So, for example, the catastrophic destruction of the English fleet by the Dutch in the Battle of the Medway may have seemed all the more embarrassing when it appeared opposite an account of how the galleys that Naples was sending to assist Venice, Malta, and the Pope in their war with the Ottoman Empire were “well furnisht with all Necessaries” and “150 Soldiers in each Galley” (June 13–17, 1667). It is easy to imagine a reader being struck by how the Catholic nations of the Mediterranean were working together against the supposed common enemy of all Christendom, while England was going down to ignominious defeat at the hands of another Protestant power. The London Gazette’s account of the Dutch raid put as positive a face on the events as possible, perhaps to dissuade readers from perceiving this ironic juxtaposition, claiming that the Dutch “can have but little reason to Brag of their Success.” The potential for reading against the grain was also tempered by the fact that every issue appeared

Figure 4.6  The entirety of an early issue of the first newspaper in English. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. J7.G6 no. 165.

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under the same title and trumpeted that it was “Published by Authority,” which together gave “the appearance of a more rapid” and potentially reliable “flow of news” (Nelson and Seccombe 2002, p. 545). The result was an object that offered a rather different set of spatial and temporal experiences to its readers than the newsbooks had. This was not necessarily a more exciting experience: The London Gazette concentrated overwhelmingly on foreign news and delivered it “in a dignified and impersonal manner” (Sutherland 1986a, p. 10). And it studiously avoided making “any invasion upon the secrets of State” (St. Serfe 1668, p. 26). But what news it did report was generally reliable, in a way that the Interregnum newsbooks often were not. At the very least, it identified “the government’s public position on an issue” (Loveman 2015, p. 106), and it often reached a substantial readership some issues appeared in editions of 6000 (Pollard 1941, p. 124). During the periods when Licensing was in effect, The London Gazette was often the only source of printed news, although manuscript newsletters continued to be produced and were often vital: a 1688 newspaper that sprang up in the midst of the Revolution (when the nation effectively had no government) complained that the official sources of news had been so guarded “that modest enquiry where his Majesty, or his Royal Highness the prince of Orange was, or what they were doing, could scarce be resolved, till the news had been exported and imported in a Foreign News‐Letter” (McKenzie 2002d, p. 155). However, in the midst of the struggle over Exclusion in 1679, Charles II dissolved Parliament, which meant that the Licensing statute, due to expire, could not be renewed. The fierce passions aroused by Exclusion had begun to organize themselves into the world’s first political parties: the Whigs, who wished to impose limits on royal power and urged tolerance toward Protestant Dissenters, and the Tories, who did not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Licensing expired, almost 40  newspapers sprang up to take advantage of the opening, most of them with clear partisan objectives. The first to appear was tellingly entitled The Domestick Intelligence; or, News both from City and Country and claimed to be “Published to Prevent false reports.” That is, it was positioning itself as almost the anti‐London Gazette, informing its readers of all that the official paper was supposedly distorting or omitting. Readers would have quickly noticed that it was anything but impartial – the editor’s “anti‐Catholic and pro‐Whig bias soon became blindingly obvious” (Sutherland 1986a, p.  13)  –  but they may well have welcomed it and its counterparts nonetheless, because of the unprecedented amount of information it provided regarding the dramatic events unfolding at home. Despite the absence of a Licensing statute from 1679 to 1685, the government found ways to suppress most of the newspapers that popped up, including having a judge declare that all unlicensed news was a breach of the peace (Sutherland 1986a, p. 15). However, the papers that were put down were often replaced by new ventures involving the same people, and so supporters of the regime began a campaign of ridicule, what Roger North called “counter writers,” in effect conceding that they could not “keep news and commentary from the public,” only attempt to shape their interpretation of it (Nelson and Seccombe 2002, p. 547; Goldie 2008, p. 69). Two journals, Heraclitus Ridens [laughing Heraclitus], a weekly, and The Observator, first a twice‐weekly, then a tri‐ weekly, and briefly even a quad‐weekly, appeared in 1681 to mock and discredit publications that opposed the government’s agenda or disseminated inconvenient or embarrassing news. Heraclitus Ridens, despite its promise “to give you a true Information of the state of things, and advance your understandings above the common race of

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Coffee‐House Statesmen who think themselves wiser than the Privy Council” (February 1, 1681), folded after a year and a half. The Observator, on the other hand, ran for almost six years – well after Licensing was restored – and became “the favourite (perhaps the only) reading” of “country squire[s],” maybe in part because it presented itself as “the voice of crude commonsense” conducted as a dialogue between Whig and Tory (Sutherland 1986a, p. 19; Birrell 2002, p. 661). Of course, the Tory always had the best lines and got the final word. This popularity may ultimately have proved a double‐ edged sword for the government, however: Robert Stephens, a former assistant to Roger L’Estrange, who ran The Observator, thought the paper had inadvertently served as “the great Publisher [that is, publicist] of all the Phanatic Books, which are hardly known till they are mention’d in the Observator” (quoted in Johns 1998, p. 133). However, the real innovation of post‐1660 periodicals (beyond the invention of the multi‐column newspaper as a format) is their extension of seriality to realms beyond news, at least in its customary sense of political and military developments. These decades saw the rise of periodicals devoted to topics ranging as widely as the current price of commodities, the dying confessions of criminals, and the moral quandaries of readers. Perhaps the two most significant developments, however, are the advent of the world’s first scientific journal and the transformation of weekly demographic statistics into a tool for public health. Philosophical Transactions: Giving some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in any considerable parts of the World began operations in 1665 and continues today (as does The London Gazette: they are the two longest‐running periodicals in the Anglophone world). Each month it published reports of scientific inquiries, many by members of the newly founded Royal Society, some of whom were also antiquarians collecting medieval manuscripts, of the sort we met in Section 3.4. Like all seventeenth‐century scientific ventures, the Philosophical Transactions brought together topics that our current system of scholarly disciplines keeps far apart. So, for example, issue 96 (1673) offers, among other things, a new design for a beehive, an account of how the use of a “Blood‐staunching liquor” during an amputation made the patient look “very cheerful,” an explanation by Isaac Newton of how the color white is produced, and a letter from Danzig (now Gdańsk, in present‐day Poland) “about an odd effect of Thunder and Lightning upon Wheat and Rye in the Granaries of that City.” The point of publishing accounts like these was to provide a public register or storehouse of shared data, in both verbal and visual form, so that “natural philosophers” (what we would call scientists) could build upon on one another’s work and push forward the frontiers of knowledge. In theory, experiments and observations were presented in sufficient detail that they could be replicated by anyone reading the journal (and copies were sent to scholars all over Europe). In practice, however, it was often difficult or impossible to do so  –  for example, experiments with vacuums could be thwarted by local atmospheric conditions – and so the Philosophical Transactions, like other early scientific publications, had to convince readers to accept, on faith, its accounts as reliable. A key part of doing so, beyond striking a dispassionate tone and highlighting its contributors’ status as gentlemen, was printing letters that corrected or extended previous articles, thereby fostering a sense of the journal’s intellectual modesty in pursuit of the truth (see Shapin and Schaffer 1985). An equally consequential (and for many, far more pressing) kind of periodical was the Bills of Mortality. These were weekly quarter‐sheets, published each Thursday and sold

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for a penny, that listed the number of christenings and burials in each parish of greater London, along with the various causes of death for the latter: say, “Consumption” or “Griping in the Guts” (Jenner 2011, pp. 298–300; for reproductions, see Slauter 2011, pp. 3–4). These figures (and their official nature) helped make the city comprehensible, especially in times of medical crisis, like the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665 that, at its height, probably killed 10 000 Londoners a week; the total death toll has been estimated at 100 000, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire population of the city. Printed Bills of Mortality date back to 1603, but it was not until the 1660s that their utility was really exploited to track and contain disease. Early demographers like John Graunt realized that they could use past Bills to establish “a fairly constant baseline of mortality,” against which departures, like the plague, could be measured and predicted (Greenberg 2004, p. 512). And ordinary Londoners discovered that by purchasing or subscribing to the Bills (for 4s a year), they could follow the spread or retreat of the disease by comparing the death toll of the different parishes week to week. This in turn could help them decide when (and whether) to return to the city or venture into certain neighborhoods (Slauter 2011, pp. 5–6). What had begun as a governmental effort to monitor the size and whereabouts of its population became a resource for both pioneering efforts in epidemiology and simple self‐protection. Thus far we have been considering the new forms of print that proliferated after 1641. But amidst all these changes, there were two important continuities that would have prevented the bookscape of the early 1690s from being completely unrecognizable to a time traveler from 1641: the persistent popularity of steady sellers, like psalm books and almanacs, and the government’s recurring attempts to find a way to control the press without resorting to the politically untenable methods developed by Charles I and Archbishop Laud before the outbreak of the Civil Wars.

4.6 ­Steady Sellers Most of the titles we have been considering were produced in editions of 500–1000 copies, and in many cases a single edition sufficed to satisfy the market. Even long‐running periodicals, which Joad Raymond suggests should be considered a “kind … of best‐ seller,” rarely produced more than a few thousand copies of a given issue (Raymond 2011b, p. 63). Collectively, these publications constituted a significant portion of the total volume of print in the period we are considering. But individually, the footprint of even the most successful texts we have touched on so far – such as Eikon Basilike or The London Gazette – is dwarfed by that of the almanacs, psalters, schoolbooks, and other items that comprised the English Stock. As discussed in Section 3.2, the English Stock was a collection of royal patents and other monopolies granted to the Stationers’ Company by King James I in 1603. The poorer printers and binders in the Company were hired, out of charity or to dissuade them from engaging in illegal work, to produce the books included in the English Stock. The profits those books generated were divided into shares, the majority of which went to the wealthiest and most senior members. Most years, the English Stock was incredibly profitable, paying a 10–12.5% dividend, when the vast majority of other investments would be lucky if they yielded 6% (Blagden 1955, p. 163).

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What made those dividends possible was the astonishing sales of the books in question. Between 1664 and 1687, the annual output of almanacs ranged from roughly 290 000 to 376 000 copies per year: enough for a third of all households in England (Blagden 1958, table I; Capp 1979, p. 23). And that is just almanacs in pamphlet form. Sheet almanacs for pasting on the wall accounted for an additional 25 000–70 000 copies per year. Similarly, in the fiscal year 1676–1677, the Company sold about 70 000 primers (introductory‐level schoolbooks): a figure larger than the number of boys entering school that year (Barnard 1994, p. 18). The previous year, they arranged for the production of over 20 000 books of metrical psalms for use in singing, 17 000 prose psalters for morning and evening prayer, and 10 000 ABCs (Barnard 1999a, table I). And demand along these lines continued year in and year out: by the end of the century, John Barnard estimates, the Stationers had probably printed nearly 400 000 psalm books, about 350 000 psalters, and “over two million” primers (Barnard 1994, p. 17), which were distributed to the farthest reaches of the kingdom by peddlers and village shopkeepers, as well as the usual network of booksellers, and, in London, street hawkers. Moreover, at least periodically, the Stationers’ official count only represented part of what was actually available: in 1674, for example, they caught one of their members pirating their primer in what was intended to be an edition of 13 500 (Barnard 1999a, p. 374). Similarly, the printer who held the exclusive right to produce Bibles (a separate monopoly from the English Stock) complained in 1680 that smuggled “Dutch Bibles … to the equal shame and damage of the nation, supply half this Kingdom, all Scotland, all Ireland, and all our Plantations” (Gutch 1781, vol. 1, p. 270). And, of course, the Stationers’ monopoly only covered England. Other parts of the Anglophone world ­produced these sorts of books at a similar rate: for example, two of the first three ­editions of the Bay Psalm Book, discussed in Section 3.10, amount to 3700 copies, at a time when the entire Massachusetts Bay colony probably only had 14 000 inhabitants (Amory 2002, p. 745). Very, very few of these books have survived. Tens or hundreds of thousands must have been lost in the Great Fire of 1666, which consumed the Stationers’ warehouse and sent burnt leaves aloft as far as Windsor Forest, 30 miles away. Millions more copies were probably read to death and then recycled as waste paper: of the hundreds of thousands of primers produced in the 1670s, only one copy survives (Barnard 1999b, p. 149). But these sorts of steady sellers loomed far larger in most British households than any of the titles we now tend to study. Towering above all else, at least in terms of the sheer number bought and sold every year, was the almanac. As discussed in Section 3.2, almanacs offered a calendar, weather forecasts, astrological guides, various sorts of helpful information, and (often) a diary in one small package. They were not only the most ubiquitous form of secular print in the nation, but, for many Britons, the most useful. Indeed, for those Welsh who could not read English, almanacs might well be the only secular print available. Generally small, unbound, and hastily printed on cheap paper, almanacs often look crude. But appearances can be deceptive. For all their lack of production values, almanacs were marvels of ingenious typesetting, two‐color printing (red helped users navigate busy pages, but required a second pass through the press for each sheet), and efficient use of space, which combined to provide value for money unmatched by other forms – and a surprising level of fame for their creators: “‘When the King Enjoys His Own Again,’ perhaps the

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most popular song of the mid‐seventeenth century, contained puns on the names of six … almanac‐makers” (Capp 1979, p. 23). At 2–6d in the Interregnum and probably 3–8d later in the century, they were not the absolute cheapest kind of print, and, of course, they became at least partially obsolete within a year. But they packed a remarkable amount into their 32 or 48 octavo pages. Consider just a single opening from William Andrews’s News from the Stars: or, An Ephemeris for the Year, 1686 (see Figure 4.7). The headers at the top tell users the number of days in the month, when the different phases of the moon will fall (helpful for work or travel at night in an age before electric lighting), and when the then‐known planets would align with the moon, which was important for astrology. The calendar on the left shows how the date lines up with the day of the week (indicated by their dominical letters: the Sundays this month are marked with a red “c” – visible in the black‐and‐ white figure as slightly lighter text), saints’ days (still used even after the Reformation to date fairs, court terms, and official documents), fast days, weekly weather forecasts, tri‐monthly calculations of when the sun will rise and set, and a range of astrological information. On the facing page, there are tables for converting the “Old Stile” (Julian)

Figure 4.7  The sophisticated layout of an almanac, the most ubiquitous kind of cheap print. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. AY751.N49 1686.

Politics and Periodicals, 1641–1695

calendar still used in Britain into the “New Stile” (Gregorian) calendar employed on the Continent, a brief explanation of what will be going on that month astrologically, and a weather forecast for the entire month, including potentially supernatural events: “Unusual Sights in the Air.” The right‐hand side of the opening also provides some blank space, which was often used to keep a diary or ledger, since because of their portability and usefulness, almanacs were typically the paper closest to hand. Elsewhere in this almanac we learn where the planets will be in the sky in the coming year, the timing of high tide in a variety of locations, a diagram of which signs of the zodiac govern the different parts of the human body, an explanation of an atmospheric phenomenon of the previous year that had made it briefly look like there were three suns, a horoscope for the coming year (predicting foreign battles, good fortune for the Catholic Church, and late autumn snow), and an advertisement for a doctor specializing in the treatment of hernias. And, of course, the title page makes sure to inform us that it has been two years since the last leap year and 5635 years since the Creation of  the World. Other almanacs included still more features: condemnations of the compiler’s rivals, calculations of the rise, meridian, and setting of the moon over the course of the year, predictions of eclipses, scraps of doggerel, a list of the reigns of English kings (often used to date land transactions), a chronology of important dates (again, often since the Creation of the World), lists of major fairs and of towns along the principal roads in the kingdom, a table of how to calculate interest or discount the price of a lease already underway, and instruction in basic geometry, farming, or medicine. Provincial and colonial towns had their own almanacs, with the calculations based upon their ­longitude and latitude. And because of how frequently almanacs doubled as diaries or ledgers, many were sold with a built‐in writing implement and interleaved with blank paper, which was sometimes even treated so as to make it erasable when the writing was done with a metal stylus (Stallybrass et al. 2004). Indeed, one of our best sources for life in seventeenth‐century Oxford, the diary of the antiquarian Anthony Wood, was kept in a series of almanacs. Their commitment to astrology, especially judicial astrology (predicting the future), varied and it is not at all clear that purchasing an almanac necessarily meant that one believed all of its contents. For many users, almanacs may just have been “tools for marking time” (Kassell 2011, p. 440). Indeed, aware of the decreasing faith in astrology, most almanac‐makers seemed to hedge their bets by remaining within the realm of the probable: for example, Merlini Anglici Ephemeris for 1684 predicted that “many aged persons” would die next winter (sig. A7v). Doing so also helped keep them within the law, which periodically clamped down upon politically charged ­forecasts in almanacs (Capp 1979, pp. 47–50).

4.7 ­The Fate of Licensing The single biggest events in our other continuity – press regulation – in the years we have been examining are those that define the chronological bounds of this chapter: the collapse of the traditional system of pre‐publication censorship and press regulation in 1641 and Parliament’s refusal in 1695 to renew the Licensing statute that had been enacted at the Restoration. In between we see a series of attempts, by a series of regimes, to do more or less the same thing – prevent the publication of material deemed hostile

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to the current configuration of Church and State – without ever having the full governmental infrastructure to do so. As discussed in Section 3.2, after the granting of the Stationers’ Company charter in 1557, the government devised a complex system of overlapping attempts to control the press. In theory, representatives of the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, and other high officials examined all manuscripts prior to authorizing them for publication and removed anything heretical, seditious, or at odds with the current practice of the Church of England. All imported books were likewise to be examined. When offensive texts circumvented or hoodwinked these officials, the Company might be enlisted to hunt them out on behalf of the government. And the Privy Council, the Court of Star Chamber, and the Court of High Commission kept up their own surveillance for books and pamphlets that had slipped through the cracks, punishing their producers (­especially their authors) in an often spectacular way. While this system had long functioned in a somewhat ad hoc manner, with only a very small minority of texts landing their authors in trouble (see Clegg 1997, 2001), in the late 1630s and leading up to the Civil Wars, King Charles and Archbishop Laud began to implement it in a more draconian way – at least, as perceived by their opponents. The most famous example is the Presbyterian William Prynne, who, in 1637, was not only forced to stand in the pillory while his books attacking the Church and State were burned, but also was branded “S.L.” on his cheek, to mark him out as a “seditious libeler.” All that was on top of his sentence in 1634 to have his ears severed and to suffer “­perpetual imprisonment,” and importantly, after his second offense, his confinement was tightened to deprive him of pen, ink, and all but the most religiously orthodox books (Cressy 2006, p. 287). Under this increased surveillance of the press, even publications that had been previously deemed bulwarks of the nation, such as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (a copy of which was supposed to be placed in every parish church), could not be reprinted without a new license. Nor was pre‐publication authorization a guarantee of future safety: the book for which Prynne was punished in 1634 had been duly allowed by the authorities, as was a 1637 treatise by the imprisoned bishop of Lincoln, copies of which were confiscated from booksellers in 1640 (Cressy 2006, pp. 287, 290). All told, press regulation in the later 1630s was often fearsome and kept much of what the Church and State wanted to suppress out of print. However, beginning in 1640, while England was losing the (deeply unpopular) Second Bishops’ War with the Scots, this regime began to crumble. Scottish books and pamphlets were smuggled into England in substantial numbers and helped buttress a g­ rowing discontent with how high‐handed Licensing had become, especially how disproportionately the penalties seemed to fall on “godly” (i.e. Puritan) books, rather than on books thought to be sympathetic to Catholicism. Parliament stripped the ecclesiastical Licensers of their authority. Prynne and some other supposed martyrs of the press were not only freed, but lionized. And the institutions that had pursued the harshest post‐ publication punishments, such as Star Chamber, were abolished. Collectively, these changes marked a permanent shift in the authority to control the book trade, transforming it from a prerogative of the Crown to a power vested in Parliament. It is doubtful that anyone in Parliament in 1641 wanted to do away with press regulation altogether: they “wanted a godly press, not a free one” (Cressy 2006, p. 303). Rather, they just thought that Licensing, like many other previously royal powers, should be under Parliamentary control. However, given the tumultuous times, a shift to Parliamentary control effectively

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meant the end of control. There were hundreds of orders to arrest individual printers or destroy particular editions, and a number of attempts to institute a more overarching set of regulations, but for close to two years they came to naught, in large part because Parliament was reluctant to do anything to prop up the patents and monopolies created by the Crown, including those in the book trade. At the same time, however, the trade itself was in tumult, since the end of Star Chamber meant the end of restrictions on how many printers could operate and removed state support both for the enforcement of patents (which were limited in term, although renewable, and governed entire classes of material, such as Bibles or law books) and for the Company’s granting of the “right to copy” (which was perpetual, but only pertained to a single title). As a result, many of the poorer members of the Stationers’ Company (those without shares in the English Stock), who had previously worked as wage laborers, set up shop on their own and printed material that had previously been the exclusive property of the Company elite. In June 1643, Parliament finally passed an Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing that attempted to reinstate pre‐publication censorship (Licensing) and the protection of intellectual property (the right to copy via entrance in the Stationers’ Register), and to enlist the Stationers’ Company to help enforce these laws. The former was what Milton belatedly objected to in Areopagitica as “crept out of the Inquisition”: a “bondage” that was “the immediat image of a Star‐chamber decree” (Milton 1644, pp. 4, 39). As Milton recognized, this was essentially an attempt to revert to how things had worked prior to the Civil Wars, but this time under Parliamentary control. Licensers appointed by Parliament were to review all manuscripts prior to publication, approving only those that were acceptable. Those manuscripts were then registered with the Stationers’ Company to show which member of the Company owned the rights to reproduce them. If something seditious or blasphemous slipped through, the Company was to search for, seize, and obliterate it, along with the equipment used to produce it, drawing upon their specialized knowledge of the trade (indeed, they scrutinized type and ornaments every bit as closely as a modern bibliographer would). In return, as in the earlier system, the government granted the Stationers’ Company a monopoly over printing, with power to confiscate and destroy unauthorized publications and the presses and type used to create them, regardless of how innocuous their contents might be. Under this scheme, a book could be illegal in two completely different ways, which did not necessarily overlap: it could be unlicensed – because it was thought dangerous to Church or State – or it could be pirated – because it was reproduced by someone other than the holder of the right to copy or his agents. And, of course, a legal book could be transformed into something dangerous, and at least quasi‐illicit: Francis Ash, a bookbinder in Worcester, “found an extraordinary Trade” in “joyn[ing] pictures to the English Bible” for Catholic recusants in the 1640s (Sparke 1652, p. 6). In theory, as in earlier periods, this arrangement allowed the government’s interest in the suppression of heresy and dissent and the Company’s interest in maintaining their monopolies to be aligned with one another. However, those two years without any effective press control meant that far more printers and booksellers were in business for themselves than had ever previously been the case. It proved much harder to convince them than to convince the wealthiest booksellers, who had previously dominated both the Company and the trade, that their interests actually were aligned with those of the government and the Company. For example, only 20% of the extant titles published in 1644 were registered with the Company (McKenzie 2002c, p. 131). It would seem that

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most book producers either did not think it worth their while to pay the fee of a few pennies for registration (perhaps because the item in question was sufficiently ephemeral that it was not likely to be pirated), or they did not want to leave a paper trail of their involvement: in the same year, only 46% of publications bore a printer’s name and only 32% a bookseller’s name. Moreover, the Company’s ability to police itself came increasingly into question: when one of the wardens of the Company tried to seize “a scandalous Pamphlet,” its printer “told him, whosoever laid their Hands upon his Goods, he would be the Death of him” (Journal of the House of Commons August 24, 1641). Similarly, when the master of the Company tried to arrest the wife of one of its searchers for selling unlicensed pamphlets, he was himself taken into custody (Clyde 1933, p. 52). Still further complications arose when the government Licensers tried to impose a Presbyterian orthodoxy and thwart publications advocating freedom of conscience and the disentanglement of Church and State: positions dear to many in the book trade. This all meant, in effect, that while technically there was Licensing from 1643 on, it was only intermittently effective, and had periodically to be renewed and augmented with additional penalties and provisions (in 1647, in 1649, in 1653, in 1655). This is not to say that the state could not disrupt or even ruin the lives of book trade personnel (it certainly could), only that it tended to take the form of “unsystematic … harassment,” rather than the actual thwarting of noxious publications (Raymond 2011b, p. 73). In large part, this was because the interests of the state and those of the Stationers’ Company (much less its individual members) were not nearly as closely aligned as they were supposed to be. The government did not much care about protecting the intellectual property claims of the Stationers: it was a monopoly and many MPs were opposed to monopolies on general principle, although few went as far as John Lilburne in condemning the Stationers as “soul‐starving” “deadly enemies to all goodnesse” and “the Common‐wealth” for their attempts to keep Bible prices high (Lilburne 1645, pp. 41–42). And the Stationers, both as a group and as individuals, knew that politically or religiously controversial material could sell very well and so were tempted to let it slide – or, indeed, to take a hand in producing it, or even to seize it from its actual producers and sell it themselves, as Richard Royston did with the sheets of “Richard Alleine’s popular but … unlicensed Vindication of Godliness,” and as a number of booksellers did with the smuggled Dutch Bibles they’d confiscated (Raven 2007, p. 88; see also McMullin 2002, p. 468). Indeed, one Licenser later calculated that “the Gayn of Printing some Books, is Ten times Greater, if they Scape, then the Loss, if they be Taken” (L’Estrange 1663, p. 30). Not surprisingly, then, “the vast proportion of the searches and  seizures carried out by the Company … involved” piracies of titles that were part of the English Stock, rather than “unlicensed seditious or heretical” books (Treadwell 2002, p. 764). The restoration of the monarchy did not mean that control of the press passed back to the Crown. Rather, in May 1662, Parliament passed an “Act for Preventing the frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious, Treasonable, and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets; and for the Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.” Except for a fraught hiatus in 1679–1685, this Act was in effect, with renewals, until 1695. Like its predecessors, the 1662 Act attempted to limit the number of printers and typefounders in business, the number of presses each print shop could operate, and the number of apprentices who could work in those shops. It also mandated that at least one journeyman be employed by each shop, so as to cut down on the number of skilled printers with an incentive to

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take on illegal work. All presses were to be registered, and no one was supposed to build a press or cast type without informing the Stationers’ Company. Printing was restricted to members of the Company and to the printers for Cambridge and Oxford Universities and in York. Booksellers could only be members of the Company or (in the provinces) retailers licensed by their local bishop. Books had to be both licensed by the authorities and entered in the Stationers’ Register and could contain nothing heretical, seditious, or offensive to good manners, the Established Church, or the government (including local officials). Each book had to bear the name of its printer, and the printer had to know the name of the author and give it up, if questioned. Books also had to include a printed statement that they had been licensed, with the date on which the license was issued and the name of the Licenser. No books in English were allowed to be imported and foreign books in other languages (primarily Latin) had to be inspected by an agent of the archbishop of Canterbury before they could clear customs. In order to make this all work, the 1662 Act created several new government positions: the surveyor of the press, who took over most of the Licensing, and the messengers of the press, who did much of the investigative work, rather than, as earlier, relying on the Stationers to do it for them. The government also offered rewards to informers: 5s for the location of someone selling seditious material, 10s for uncovering unlicensed printing, 40s for revealing the whereabouts of a secret press, and £5 (upwards of a month’s income for most workers in the print trades) for the details of a libel being produced. At times, the rewards could go much higher: in 1678, £50 was offered for the “Discovery … of the Printer or the Publisher” of An Account of the Growth of Popery and £100 “for the Hander of it to the Press” – that is, the author, whom we now know to have been Andrew Marvell. And if “the Discoverer” of the author was a printer, he would be allowed to set up his own press, even if that meant going beyond the number of presses permitted under the 1662 Act (Kelliher 1978, p. 113). Meanwhile, the old arrangements with the Stationers (to search out illicit materials on behalf of the state in return for a monopoly on book production) remained in effect, although the Company often had to be threatened in order to keep up its end of the bargain, especially after 1677, when a court ruled that the king could not withdraw, as punishment, any of the patents he or his predecessors had granted (Siebert 1952, pp. 247, 259). The post‐Restoration system of press regulation, if consistently enforced, could have suppressed most or all of the printed dissent in the realm and perhaps propelled it toward the absolute monarchy that both Charles II and James II would have liked to govern. However, like most aspects of late Stuart rule, it tended to lurch from crisis to crisis without enough resources to be lastingly effective. For example, while the messengers of the press were granted considerable power in order to make them independent of the Stationers’ Company, they were poorly paid (with their salaries often in arrears) and so had a strong incentive to accept bribes from those they caught. Similarly, the generally draconian L’Estrange, when surveyor of the press, would apparently “wink at unlicens’d Books, if the Printer’s Wife wou’d but — —” (Dunton 1705, p. 349). And the Licensers were overwhelmed by the sheer volume through which they were supposed to wade. This may be why Thomas Tomkins, chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury, only objected to a single line in Paradise Lost (the comparison in Book One of Satan to an eclipse that “with fear of change / Perplexes Monarchs”), despite the far more inflammatory tone of many later passages: he may simply not have gotten any further in the poem (Keeble 1987, p. 118).

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This is not to say that there were not casualties of the regime. Three printers – John Twyn, William Disney, and William Anderton  –  were executed for helping produce books advocating rebellion against the reigning monarch (Charles II, James II, and William III, respectively), and several authors went to the scaffold for their work: two Scots, James Guthrie and Archibald Johnson, in the early 1660s and an Englishman, Stephen College, in 1681 (Mullan 2007, pp. 152–154). Similarly, those thought to be dealing in heterodox material were subject to periodic harassment: Henry Marsh was arrested twice in 1663 without ever going to trial (Keeble 1987, pp. 109–110); in 1664, “the houses and warehouses of thirty‐one printers and publishers” were searched and 130 000 pamphlets and books were seized (Greaves 1990, pp. 168–169); in 1678, a Stationer searching for copies of An Account of the Growth of Popery carried away a large portion of Francis Smith’s stock and destroyed £50 worth of it before Smith could get the confiscation overturned (Crist 1979, p. 51). But most of the punishments involved fines, apologies, becoming an informer, or posting bonds for good behavior in the future, rather than anything more corporeal, despite L’Estrange’s insistence that “Libells were not only the Forerunners, but, in a high Degree, the Causes of our late Troubles” and that illicit publishing therefore threatened to plunge the nation back into regicide, heresy, and civil war (L’Estrange 1662, p. 6). As in the Interregnum, enforcement was mostly ad hoc and after the fact, rather than the vigorous prevention of dissent and heterodoxy that the authorities would have liked. Otherwise, a title like Jus Populi Vindicatum could never have appeared: it not only justified a 1666 Scottish uprising (which the Crown had savagely suppressed with torture and mass executions), but also insisted that everything the monarchy and Church had done since the Restoration was an “unlawful” “subversion of the fundamental constitution of our Christian and reformed Kingdome” (Stewart 1669, p. 5). Nor could 55% of the extant titles of 1668 have gotten away with omitting their printer’s name, much less 84% have gone unregistered, and 89% have failed to “bear some form of license” on the actual artifact, even if they had obtained one (McKenzie 2002b, pp. 115, 118). Twenty years later, the percentage of titles without the name of their printer was even higher, almost 69% (McKenzie 2002d, p. 163, n. 25). No doubt, the vast majority of these publications were perfectly innocuous – one scholar has estimated that only 0.4% of the titles produced between 1641 and 1700 were “suspect” (McKenzie 2002a, p. 566) – but the sheer extent to which the official requirements of the law were disregarded suggests a far from complete oversight of the trade. So too does the ease with which even loyal subjects could obtain unlicensed books, albeit perhaps at a premium: in 1668, Pepys paid 24s for a second‐hand copy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan; new copies were going for 30s, “it being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again,” despite its being “now mightily called for” (Pepys 1970–1983, vol. 9, p. 298). It had originally sold, in 1651, for 8s. Participants in the book trade also periodically risked punishment at the hands of those not officially charged with its oversight. John Dryden, the Poet Laureate, for example, was savagely beaten in 1679 for supposedly being the author of An Essay on Satire, a poem circulating in manuscript which was actually the work of his patron, the Earl of Mulgrave. Dryden walked with a cane for the rest of his life. In 1683, L’Estrange received an anonymous death threat in response to his partisan journalism. Among other things, it reminded him that “we have very convenient alleys in town to slit a man’s windpipe or to drub or hamstring him, to send him to a tobacco plantation, etc.” (Hinds 2002, p. 21). And in the midst of the 1688–1689 Revolution, “a London mob

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attacked Henry Hills’s printing shop and destroyed the presses of James’s favorite printer” (Backscheider 1989, p. 46). When the 1662 Act expired in June 1679 amidst the brinksmanship of the Exclusion Crisis, the government was faced with a dilemma. Clearly, Licensing had not prevented objectionable material from appearing. The other alternatives available (for example, charges of seditious libel or treason) posed their own set of problems, not least the fact that they were far harder to prosecute than violations of Licensing: a jury could easily decide the factual question of whether or not a book had been licensed; it was considerably harder to convince them of a defendant’s malicious intent. However, given the sheer number of books and pamphlets critical of the regime and supportive of some version of Exclusion that began to appear in the summer of 1679, the government felt that it had to do something. Here, as with our investigation of the early 1640s, the numbers alone are illuminating: excluding the dozens of periodicals which we touched upon earlier, we know of 1174 titles published in 1678, 1730 in 1679, and 2145 in 1680 (the highest total since the Restoration). The figures go slightly down after that, as the political tide turned against the Whigs, until 1685, when there was another spike (to 2034), as the long controversial James II came to the throne. Then, with the resumption of Licensing, the numbers immediately plummet to 1084 (Barnard and Bell 2002, pp. 783–784). So L’Estrange’s report “that there has not been so little as 30 000 Ream of Paper spent upon” sedition in the previous two years, while unabashedly partisan, might well be accurate, as could his sense that booksellers sent “an impression or two” of every “remarkable pamphlet” out into the country before releasing it in London, so that some copies would escape any attempts at suppression (L’Estrange 1681, p. 10; McKenzie 2002d, p. 159). Certainly books appeared in these years, such as John Bunyan’s The Holy War, in which “persecution, politicking, and intrigue … are the driving force of the plot,” that could never have made it through the Licensing process (Keeble 1987, p. 111). Early on, the government’s chief strategy lay in the shameless manipulation of the courts. Led by Lord Chief Justice William Scroggs, the courts systematically attempted to bully and harass offenders into submission. Street hawkers were rounded up and put to hard labor. Whig printers and booksellers were pilloried and given massive fines which, when they were unable to pay, sent them to prison. The Stationers were intimidated into purging anyone sympathetic to Exclusion from their leadership (which, in turn, tended to reduce the income of the men in question). Petty delaying techniques were employed to keep suspects in jail. Defendants were threatened in the hope of getting them to turn on those higher up in the chain of liability. Following L’Estrange’s argument that “the Person in whose possession” an “unlawful Book” “is found” should “be Reputed, and Punish’d as the Author of the said Book, unless he Produce the Person … from whom he Receiv’d it,” Scroggs proclaimed “one author found is better than twenty printers found” (L’Estrange 1663, p. 2; Crist 1979, p. 61). On occasion, arbitrary and clearly unconstitutional rulings were made from the bench: for example, banning the future “printing or publication” of The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome “by any person whatsoever” (Crist 1979, p. 62). Despite their variety, these strategies, except for the delaying techniques, all relied upon the same thing: pliant juries willing to give the Crown what it wanted. Starting in later 1680, however, the Whigs took control of local government in London and began to pack the juries in politically charged trials with their supporters. As a result, no matter how damning a case the prosecution could present, the usual verdict became

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“ignoramus” (basically, “we still do not know what the truth is, so we cannot make a decision”). A form of jury nullification, this tactic put an end to the most egregious Tory manipulations of the courts. Thereafter, until Licensing was restored in 1685, the government – operating without Parliament, which the king refused to call – had to rely upon harassment, mockery (in Heraclitus Ridens and The Observator), and their general campaign to remove Whigs from positions of power at all levels and in all trades: the so‐called Tory Reaction. Despite the widespread discontent with the 1662 Act (and the realm’s six‐year experience of life without it), no one was able to devise a politically and logistically viable alternative, so when James II became king in 1685, the Act was revived and kept on being renewed, notwithstanding the Revolution, until 1695, when the House of Commons finally balked. The House of Lords tried to renew it, the Commons objected and appointed a committee to draft a new law, the Lords acquiesced, and then the proposed replacement went nowhere, leaving the existing law to expire, after Parliament was prorogued in May. As with the lapse in 1641 with which we began, what turned out to be the end of Licensing was not, for most MPs, based upon any principled objection to pre‐publication censorship, although, in his capacity as advisor to the committee, the political theorist John Locke championed that position. Rather, the longstanding Parliamentary suspicion of monopolies, coupled with a sense that Licensing had become a tool for partisan score‐settling and that the Stationers’ Company was not holding up its end of the bargain, left the Commons disinclined to grant them any special privileges. This was especially the case since it seemed that post‐publication prosecutions, including the 1693 execution of the printer William Anderton for treason, would accomplish the government’s ends at least as well as Licensing had done (for the Commons’ 18 objections to the law, see Thomas 1969, pp. 329–332). Almost immediately, however, the bookscape changed: newspapers opposed to the government sprung back up, publication was no longer restricted to members of the Company, and printing could legally take place beyond London, Cambridge, Oxford, and York. We will investigate these changes in Chapter 5.

4.8 ­The Place of Literature The mid‐ to late seventeenth‐century texts we now most read and value tend to be literary: the lyrics of Marvell, Paradise Lost, Restoration comedy. In some ways this is a distortion of the place of literature in the market of the period: only a small fraction of the titles produced were literary by even the most generous definition, and most of those were never reprinted. But it is an understandable distortion, both because literature looms disproportionately large in these decades in terms of its prestige and because several of the period’s publishing innovations continue to shape the ways in which we conceive of the literary. Among the most lasting and consequential of these innovations was the routine use of authors as a means of organizing and branding collections of current or recent literature. Vernacular authors had certainly been invoked as an organizing principle for collections in earlier eras, but generally only for the most prestigious genres (say, epic) or, as we saw in Chapter 3, the best known names, such as Chaucer or Shakespeare. Starting in the mid‐1640s, however, a far wider variety of poets and dramatists, most

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of them contemporary, began to serve as the basis on which collections of literature would be put together. The publisher Humphrey Moseley, for example, dedicated himself to “the Productions of the best Wits of our … Nation” (Suckling 1659, sig. A3v), assembling the works of, among others, Beaumont and Fletcher, Brome, Carew, Chapman, Cowley, Crashaw, D’Avenant, Denham, Donne, Massinger, Middleton, Milton, Quarles, Shakespeare, Shirley, Suckling, Vaughan, Waller, and Webster (see Kewes 1995; Kastan 2007). Such single‐author collections effectively kept Cavalier verse and the pre‐Civil War drama (much of which had never been printed) alive at a time when both royalists and the theater companies despaired that the institutions they loved would ever be restored. Similarly, after the Restoration, Henry Herringman published collections of Beaumont and Fletcher, Carew, Cowley, Crashaw, D’Avenant, Denham, Donne, Robert Howard, Jonson, Killigrew, Orrery, Philips, Shakespeare, Suckling, and Waller. A few decades later, Richard Bentley and Jacob Tonson covered an updated version of the same territory, issuing collections of Behn, Milton, Rochester, and Walsh. And late in the century, other London booksellers got in on the act, putting together nonce collections out of the extra copies of Dryden, Lee, Otway, and Shadwell they had lying around their shops. Most of these volumes, both the planned ones and the nonce collections, not only included the writing of the author in question, but also something to encourage readers to regard that work as a coherent whole: a frontispiece portrait (see Figure 4.8), a dedication or preface outlining the poetics supposedly exemplified by the work, commendatory verse by other writers praising the author and the texts included. Generally these volumes were offered in the same format as their counterparts, so as to encourage collecting and perhaps the consideration of them as an emerging canon of English literature. Occasionally, booksellers went even further: Tonson’s 1695 folio of Paradise Lost offered illustrations of each book, an index of “the most remarkable Parts” broken down by “Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches,” and 321 pages of notes, thereby putting Milton on a level with the most revered authors of classical antiquity (Milton 1695, p. 344). Collectively, these books helped define recent and contemporary literature as a distinct and important sector of the market: one that was author‐centered, dominated by poetry and drama, and largely published by a few specialized houses. However, we should not presume that these similarities between the later seventeenth century and today mean that our current conceptions of the literary can simply be transferred over to explain, say, the 1670s. Much of what we might look for is not to be found; much of what we would encounter now seems (at best) unfamiliar. For example, translations of classical literature loomed far larger than they do today, both commercially and as a trophy for ambitious booksellers to pursue. Some of these took the now standard form of single‐author/single‐translator collections of complete works. But others, such as the 1666 Poems of Horace or the 1693 Satires of Juvenal, were proudly the joint translation of “Several … Eminent Hands.” And still others seemed wholly uninterested in providing anything like complete works. The single most successful series of poetic miscellanies (anthologies of contemporary verse) was assembled by Tonson and largely featured translations and imitations of bits from a whole range of classical writers. Examen Poeticum, the 1693 third installment in the series, offered its purchasers a thick octavo (19.1 × 11.7 cm) containing, in addition to some contemporary verse, three imitations of Anacreon; two epigrams of Catullus; three selections from Homer; three odes and a satire of Horace; portions of the first, ninth, and

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thirteenth books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; six of his elegies; a chorus from Seneca’s Thyestes, the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid; and two passages from the Georgics. For readers without Latin, this collection of classical translations opened up an entire world of exciting literature, whose cultural status  –  unlike contemporary literature in English  –  was absolutely unassailable. And even among the men who had had Latin flogged into them (and still remembered it), if they had not gone on to university and a career in the clergy, the odds were good that they did not know Greek. However, while these printed plays and romances and collections of verse (both current and from antiquity) comprised the majority of the literary bookscape, they hardly represent all that was available. As in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there was a significant parallel universe of poetry that circulated primarily or exclusively in manuscript. Print had not wholly supplanted manuscript in any part of the world we are examining – witness only the persistence of handwritten newsletters and the day‐to‐day dependence, in both business and government, on correspondence and ledgers. But literature took advantage of manuscript circulation in particularly complex and resonant ways. This was not a new phenomenon, as we can see from the case of John Donne mentioned in Section 3.3. But it took on additional significance in the wake of the mid‐century “explosion” in print. First and foremost, handwriting could be used to transmit verse too blasphemous, obscene, or politically inflammatory to get past even the sleepiest Licenser, which is why L’Estrange thought their libels “commonly … more seditious & scandalous” than what appeared in even the most clandestine print. However, because manuscript circulation tended to line up with already extant (and generally elite) social networks, what would prompt swift punishment, were it in print, was often greeted with a quiet chuckle in manuscript, despite L’Estrange’s insistence that manuscripts were “the more mischievous of the Two: for they are comonly so bitter, and dangerous, that not one of forty of them ever comes to ye Presse, and yet by ye help of Transcripts, they are well nigh as Publique” as print (quoted in Love 1993, p. 74). It was possible, however, to go too far: in late 1673, the Earl of Rochester was banished from Court after mistakenly handing the king a poem suggesting that since “his Scepter and his Prick were of a length,” “she may sway the one who plays with t’other” (Rochester 1999, pp. 85–86). Just as importantly, however, manuscripts were tangible signs of one’s position: obtaining them required access to someone with a copy, which is to say, access to someone with connections to the Court or a prominent wit. Even aristocrats were sometimes left out in the cold: in 1682 the Viscountess Campden wrote to her daughter, the Countess of Rutland, “There are sad lampoons made of all the [Court] ladies, but I cannot get a copy of them” (Manuscripts of … The Duke of Rutland 1888–1905, vol. 2, p. 69). And unlike with most printed materials, money could not compensate for a lack of connections: aspiring purchasers still had to know where to go. Robert Julian, “Secretary to the Muses” and supplier of manuscript libels, did not keep a shop. This rarity, in turn, gave manuscript verse an allure and frisson seldom granted to print, and so allowed it to serve as an instrument in the ongoing struggles for power and social prominence that defined not only the Court, but also the emerging fashionable West End of London, what was coming to be termed “the Town” (see Love 2004). As such, it gives us a glimpse of what modern critics all too often forget: that literature is not simply a set of texts to be experienced privately, but an active force in the world.

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Figure 4.8  A frontispiece and title page attempting to transform the rather miscellaneous verse of a contemporary poet into the cohesive and authoritative oeuvre of an author. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR3718.A1 1646.

4.9 ­Coffeehouses And it is with the ways in which books work in the world that we should conclude this chapter, because the later seventeenth century saw the invention of a social space every bit as transformative as the proliferation of pamphlets and the advent of periodicals that have so occupied our attention: the coffeehouse. Prior to 1650, caffeinated beverages were unknown in Britain. By the 1690s, hundreds of coffeehouses had opened across the three kingdoms, including two in Dorchester, a town of fewer than two thousand inhabitants. Early on, the proprietors of coffeehouses realized they could attract more customers if they stocked a range of newspapers, pamphlets, and (occasionally) manuscript newsletters or libels and so permitted their patrons to have their “News and [their] Coffee for the same charge” (Character of a Coffee‐House 1673, p. 1). The gambit paid off handsomely: tens of thousands of Britons regularly stopped in to sip, smoke, read, and animatedly discuss what they had read, often with perfect strangers (Pincus 1995, p. 812). Indeed, a fictional “Coffee‐Man” conceded that “the main end of going thither is perusing of news and holding of arguments” (Ale‐Wives Complaint 1675, p. 5). This meant that far more people could encounter a given copy of a publication than had previously been the norm. If an average Interregnum newsbook had four or five users, a

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Restoration newspaper or pamphlet in a coffeehouse might have upwards of 20. Sometimes the copy in question would be read serially by one patron after another. Other times, someone would read aloud and thereby extend access to patrons who were illiterate or only marginally literate (Harris 1987b, p. 99). Either way, the text would probably be interspersed with commentary and discussion. This was not necessarily reasoned, fair debate (then, as now, most people socialized with those they thought like‐minded, which can easily produce an echo chamber). Nor was it necessarily well‐informed: The Character of a Town‐Gallant (1675) insists that the typical would‐be libertine, like the figure in its title, invoked Hobbes’s Leviathan to justify his pose of atheism, although “he never saw it in his life, and for ought he knows it may be a Treatise about catching of Sprats, or new Regulating the Greenland Fishing Trade. However the Rattle of it at Coffee‐houses, has taught him to Laugh at Spirits, and maintain that there are no Angels but those in Petticoats” (p. 7). Nonetheless, coffeehouses helped make the informal, public use of print one of the defining features of the age. This multiplication of the number of users a given copy could expect to receive, along with the advent of the periodicals that were so often the recipients of such use, would prove to be central to the decades to come.

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5 Partisan Strife and the World of Print, 1695–1740 1695 marks an easy dividing point between the period treated by the last chapter and the period covered in this one. The collapse of Licensing changed the number, kind, and legal status of publications in a way every bit as significant as the similar collapse in 1641 with which we began the last chapter. However, the end point to the current chapter – c. 1740 – is necessarily a bit more vague. It roughly corresponds with the fall of Sir Robert Walpole and so the end of the hyper‐partisan atmosphere that politicized almost every aspect of life in the first four decades of the eighteenth century, including the bookscape. But it is at least as much a convenient line drawn before the advent of the major developments of the 1740s, such as circulating libraries and monthly periodicals devoted exclusively to book reviews, that take us into a different world than the one with which we are presently concerned.

5.1 ­The Proliferation of Periodicals Perhaps the most immediate and lasting consequence of the end to Licensing was the reemergence of domestic news and politics (including the military’s fortunes overseas) at the heart of most newspapers. As we have seen in Section 4.7, after the initial explosion of newsbooks in the 1640s, successive governments (no matter who was in charge) had all attempted to restrict or ban the printing of most news about Britain, especially if it came in the relatively cheap  –  and so broadly accessible  –  form of a periodical. It was only when Licensing was in abeyance and other forms of press control were not working – typically because the government was collapsing or in crisis – that anything like direct reporting of the events that most Britons were likely to care about was able to take place. Almost immediately after the expiration of Licensing, five rivals to the official London Gazette sprang up, three of which flourished for decades: The Post Boy, The Flying Post, and The Post Man. As their titles suggest, these papers were timed to come out on the days that the mail coaches left London for the countryside: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. And to increase their appeal to Londoners, these papers – roughly 38 × 24 cm folio half‐sheets formatted much like The London Gazette – often left some blank space at the end of each issue, so that purchasers could buy the paper in the morning, add their own manuscript news later that day (or have the “mercuries” or coffeehouses from which they obtained the paper do so for them), and send the now enhanced paper to The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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their friends and relations in the provinces that evening. On the occasions that something major happened during the day, the papers would issue a postscript (an additional half‐sheet, generally in larger type, not set in columns, and only printed on one side) around 4 p.m. that could be purchased at an additional fee for inclusion in the papers going out that evening. As texts, these printed postscripts were imitations of the handwritten additions (i.e. postscripts) for which they had been supplying blank space. But because they were in print, they had a different reach and authority, which was why “sham” postscripts were sometimes commissioned by unscrupulous merchants or stockbrokers hoping to manipulate the markets with false reports: e.g. of the death of Louis XIV (Sutherland 1986a, p. 29). By 1710, this had become enough of an issue that The Post Man began to print its postscripts on special paper watermarked in the margin with its title, so as to authenticate its offerings and discredit any imposters (for an image, see Morison 1932, between pp. 67 and 68). However, the demand for the “freshest advices” was not only satisfied with printed postscripts. Two other innovations quickly arose to quench what Joseph Addison would soon term his countrymen’s “general Thirst after News” (Spectator 1965, vol. 4, p. 90). Beginning in 1695, tri‐weekly papers were launched to appear on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and thereby capture that segment of the London public who did not care about coordinating with the post days, but did want news that was more current than what had appeared in the last issue of the post‐oriented papers: which, on a Monday, would have been a full two days out of date. Alternately, in 1696, Dawks Newsletter started up as an evening paper, coming out between 4 and 5 p.m. on post days. Its timing meant that it could synthesize the various morning papers and include whatever news had arrived that day, without having to resort to a postscript. As its title hints, Ichabod Dawks was trying to emulate, in print, the felt intimacy and reliability of manuscript newsletters. He used type that looked like script, set it all the way across the page (rather than in columns), and addressed the paper, as if it were a letter, to “Sir” (for an image, see Morison 1932, p. 49). But because it was printed, the cost per issue was significantly lower and Dawks could charge 10s a quarter for a subscription: one‐third less than the price of even the cheapest manuscript newsletters. Other evening papers that came out a bit later in the day and looked and were priced far more like their morning counterparts began to appear in 1706. These were generally compact half‐sheet quartos (approximately 27 × 20 cm) and so particularly well suited to go through the post. This, along with their ability to offer what John Toland scornfully dismissed as “fresher passages, commonly made up of scandal and sedition” meant that the morning tri‐weeklies lost readership, especially in the countryside (quoted in Hanson 1936, p. 137). The success of the competing kinds of tri‐weeklies made it clear that there was probably a market for a daily paper, and so in 1702 The Daily Courant was launched. Published six days a week (there were no Sunday papers until 1780), The Daily Courant soon became a full folio – and occasionally a six‐page paper – and so could present itself as offering more complete coverage than its physically smaller tri‐weekly rivals or The London Gazette (which was the same size, but still only appeared twice a week). It had no direct competitors until 1719, and therefore monopolized the realms in which daily information was essential, such as advertisements for theatrical performances (which could change on short notice, depending on audience response). It also offered a difference in tone, with the editor promising in the opening issue that “he will not, under Pretence of having Private Intelligence, impose any Additions of feign’d Circumstances

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to an Action, but give his Extracts [from foreign papers] fairly and Impartially,” citing the source of each, so “that the Publick, seeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowance of that Government, may be better able to Judge of the Credibility and Fairness of the Relation.” Dutch papers, produced in a commercially oriented Protestant republic, were, presumably, more trustworthy than those printed  under the absolutist thumb of Louis XIV. Similarly, the editor vows not “to give  any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact; ­supposing other People to have Sense enough to make Reflections for themselves” (March 11, 1702). In 1712, weekly papers, generally known as journals, began to appear, typically on Saturdays, partly as an attempt to exploit a loophole in the new Stamp Act. This law attempted to regulate periodicals by taxing them out of the reach of the poor (see Section 5.2 for further discussion). Until 1725, in order to avoid the provisions of the Stamp Act, these journals had to be produced on at least a sheet and a half of paper (six pages in a folio format). Generally, they did not have enough news and advertisements to fill all the available space and so added scathing political commentary, essays, poems, trivia, “hieroglyphic” illustrations requiring explanation, etc. These non‐news items quickly became the journals’ principal attraction, and the successful ones all developed a specialty: Mist’s Journal was the place to go for borderline treasonous dissent, Applebee’s Journal offered extensive crime coverage, and so on. Even after 1725, when the loophole in the Stamp Act was closed, these journals thrived, although their format almost immediately shifted to a half‐sheet quarto (roughly 34 × 26 cm) with three columns of text on each page. Many were especially popular in the provinces, where perhaps the incendiary commentary could help compensate for the staleness of the news. Early on, none of these papers, other than The London Gazette, the paper of record for royal proclamations and official announcements, had particularly large circulations. A 1704 estimate put The Daily Courant’s circulation at 800 an issue, The Post Boy at 3000 an issue, The Post Man at 3800–4000 an issue (depending on the day), and The London Gazette at 6000 an issue. But given that these papers appeared somewhere between two and six times a week, they (plus a few other titles included in the estimate) amounted to a total production of 43 800 issues a week (Sutherland 1934, p. 111). Many of those copies would go through multiple hands: in groups of friends that clubbed together for the purchase, in coffeehouses, as part of being recycled for waste paper: “contemporaries calculated that a single copy of a London daily … could have as many as 20 readers and a popular weekly up to 40” (Harris 1978, pp. 91–92). And of course, the papers had auditors as well: a High Church polemicist complained that the illiterate “will Gather together about one that can Read, and Listen to an Observator or Review (as I have seen them in the Streets) where all the Principles of Rebellion are Instill’d into them” (Leslie 1708, sig. A2r). Nor were such multipliers just a London phenomenon: a parson in Yorkshire would “invite a good number of his friends to his house” every week to hear him read aloud and comment upon The Examiner, a Tory political paper. Thereafter “all … week,” he would “carrie it about with him to read to … parishioners” he thought “weak in the faith” and in need of having “the eyes of their understanding opened” (Manuscripts of … the Duke of Portland 1891–1931, vol. 4, p. 641). As readers became more and more accustomed to and reliant on newspapers, their numbers, in terms both of titles (20 a week by 1712; 23 a week, including 6 dailies, by the early 1730s) and of the total quantity of issues produced, increased still further.

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After the Stamp Act went into effect in August 1712, the circulation of those papers following the letter of the law dropped temporarily. Nonetheless, even with their prices often doubled as a result of the new tax, the law‐abiding papers alone were still producing an official average of 46 000 issues a week, and there is evidence to suggest that their print runs were quietly augmented with copies on which the tax had not been paid (Snyder 1968, p. 215). A decade later, these figures were higher still. For example, in 1722, the government decided to silence one of its critics, the weekly London Journal, by purchasing the paper. That single action removed about 10 000 issues a week from the hands of its enemies. Another more fearsome weekly, The Craftsman, had a similar circulation, with particularly controversial issues pushing the total as high as 13 000. And the figures for the more down‐market (and inflammatory) Mist’s Journal amounted, according to a rival, to “many hundreds more than the … Craftsman” (Sutherland 1934, pp. 116–120; Harris 1978, p. 86). And these are only the most popular papers of the political opposition. Their less successful compatriots, those papers loyal to or sponsored by the government (such as The Free Briton, which appeared in editions of 4000– 5000 in 1731), and those trying to stay neutral and just go about their business, would add several tens of thousands more each week. So too would the fly‐by‐night titles that appeared on unstamped (and so tax‐evading) paper, whose numbers have been estimated at 50 000–60 000 a week in the late 1730s (Harris 1987a, p. 190). And these totals would be bolstered still further by the provincial papers that sprung up in three English towns in the first decade of the eighteenth century and grew to 20 titles in 1730 and 42 titles by 1746 (Raven 2007, p. 261). Generally weeklies, their circulation was typically smaller than that of the London papers, averaging only 250–400 copies a week in the 1720s (Harris 1978, p. 88). Their counterparts in Edinburgh, Dublin, Glasgow, and (further afield) Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg were not much larger in terms of their print runs, although several of the Edinburgh papers appeared two or three times a week, and some of the Dublin papers were twice‐weeklies. Nonetheless, they all helped knit their towns and regions into a “more homogeneous” system of politics, news, and advertising not wholly dictated by the metropolis, although they frequently reprinted London material, including political commentary from the likes of The Craftsman (for which the proprietors of Farley’s Bristol News Paper and the Newcastle Courant found themselves arrested). Indeed, Pat Rogers has argued they were crucial to the development of a national literary sensibility as well: “it is doubtful whether [the works of Alexander] Pope … ever went to a single locality where the pedlars [distributing newspapers] had not penetrated” (Rogers 1985, pp. 22, 21). And they offered a welcome distraction from the tedium of everyday life: an East Anglian farmer, William Coe, was once thrown from a horse, as he “rode a slow trott reading the Northampton news paper” (Coe 1994, p. 250). However, the commercial success of the newspapers should not be taken as automatic evidence that they satisfied their purchasers. Readers complained, often bitterly, about misleading or inaccurate reporting, over‐credulity, and partisan distortions. Papers were supposedly full of “designed uncertaintys … to give occasion to fill the next newspaper with contradicting the former & making of false news to puzell us” (quoted in Wahrman 2012, p. 36). Indeed, a character in one of the most successful plays of the period thought that the fact that a marriage was reported in “the News‐Papers” made it “likely it mayn’t be true” (Vanbrugh and Cibber 1728, p. 34). According to satirists, these failings only encouraged their already obsessive readers, who spent their time agonizing

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“how to reconcile the Supplement with the English‐Post,” “The Daily‐Courant,” “the Post‐Boy,” and “the Post‐Man” (Tatler 1987, vol. 2, p. 371). Newspapers were “as pernicious to weak Heads in England as ever Books of Chivalry” were to Don Quixote (Tatler 1987, vol. 2, p. 471). In April 1709, in part to provide an alternative to newspapers, Richard Steele – then editor of The London Gazette – launched a new kind of periodical: The Tatler. A double‐columned folio half‐sheet appearing three times a week on post days and selling for 1d, The Tatler looked much like its competitors. But its contents, especially once he was joined in the endeavor by Joseph Addison, offered something quite different. Rather than speaking in the voice of an unnamed editor presumed to be more or less interchangeable with the actual producer of the paper, The Tatler offered commentary supposedly stemming from one “Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.” Rather than primarily providing news (although there was some in the early issues), it offered guidance on “what to think” about “all Matters of what Kind soever that shall occur to Me,” along with “Entertainment” for “the Fair Sex” (Tatler 1987, vol. 1, p. 15). And rather than reporting “musty Foreign Edicts, or dull Proclamations” (vol.1, p. 16), it focused on matters of concern to ordinary, if fairly elite men and women in London: how to converse on a range of topics, the proper way to behave in various social situations, the ridiculousness of fashion, the best and worst aspects of the current theater. Drawing upon the prior life of his pseudonym as a fictional astrologer – invented by Jonathan Swift – who had predicted the death of a real astrologer, John Partridge, and then triumphantly published pamphlets proclaiming Partridge’s death (notwithstanding the latter’s protestations to the contrary), Bickerstaff also gave “all Men fair Warning to mend their Manners,” lest they be included among the “good for Nothing” whom he planned to name in his own version of the “Bills of Mortality” (Tatler 1987 vol. 1, p. 23). After a few months of experimentation, Addison and Steele settled upon the form that would not only characterize the remainder of the run of The Tatler, but dominate this sort of periodical for the rest of the century: an issue‐length essay on a single topic, done in a polished, yet informal style that aimed to gently reform its readers. Sometimes these essays were occasioned by letters from readers, real or invented; sometimes they offered a contemporary counterpart to one of the mottos in Greek or Latin that appeared as an epigraph beneath the title. But regardless of the impetus for particular essays, the provision of a steady stream of sprightly, moral, but not moralistic commentary on the amusements and preoccupations of modern life struck a chord. The Tatler was a success on a scale that no previous non‐news periodical had ever been. Indeed, one admirer thought it “incredible to conceive the effect his Writings have had on the Town: How many Thousand follies they have … quite banish’d, … how many People they have render’d happy, by shewing them it was their own fault if they were not so.” Not surprisingly, then, soon after The Tatler came to a close, “the Coffee‐ houses began to be sensible that the Esquires Lucubrations alone, had brought them more Customers than all their other News Papers put together” (Present State of Wit 1711, pp. 13, 11). Another reader, Lady Marow, hoped that her daughter had The Tatler on hand “to prepare you for discourse, for no visit is made … but that Mr. Bickerstaff is mentioned” (Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth 1887–1896, vol. 3, p. 148). Certainly the book trade was keen to get in on the action. Several different publishers competed, first to reprint the papers while they were still appearing (as a serial in Edinburgh and Dublin; in multi‐volume sets in London) and then to continue the title after Steele

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brought it to a close. For brief moments in January 1711, there were three separate publications claiming to be The Tatler, none of which involved Addison and Steele. There were also stand‐alone periodicals offering themselves as somehow related: The Female Tatler (which itself appeared in two competing versions), The Growler, The Tatling Harlot, Titt for Tatt, The Tory Tatler, The Whisperer (allegedly written by Bickerstaff ’s sister, Jenny Distaff ). Edinburgh even had its own Tatler, “By Donald MacStaff of the North.” An even more successful imitation was Addison and Steele’s next venture: The Spectator, which began less than two months after the last issue of The Tatler. Like its predecessor, The Spectator presented itself as the antithesis of an ordinary newspaper: it would “let” its readers “into the Knowledge of ” themselves, rather than “what passes in Muscovy or Poland” (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, p. 45). Together, the two papers set the standard for the rest of the century for periodical essays and were widely credited with having made the nation more “polite” in its behavior, especially toward women. Most subsequent attempts at the form did what they did (in terms of tone, editorial personae, the inclusion of letters from supposed readers, and so forth) because it was what The Tatler and The Spectator had done. Indeed, the latter was, if anything, still more acclaimed and influential than The Tatler had been. By its tenth issue (12 days into the run: the paper appeared six times a week, a hitherto unheard of frequency for a non‐ news periodical), Mr. Spectator, its chief editorial persona, was boasting that not only were “Three Thousand” copies “distributed each day,” but each one was receiving an average of “Twenty Readers,” so “I may reckon about Three‐score thousand Disciples in London and Westminster” (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, p. 44). The number of readers per copy may be an exaggeration – one modern scholar has estimated that a public of 40 000 might be a better guess (Hume 2014, p. 378, n. 18) – but it nonetheless registers how quickly The Spectator was to be found “in every ones Hand, and a constant Topick for our Morning Conversation at Tea‐Tables, and Coffee‐Houses” (Present State of Wit 1711, p. 20). Nor was it an exclusively London phenomenon. Like The Tatler (copies of which were sent to Germany and read aloud in Lincolnshire), The Spectator had readers – and correspondents – all over the English provinces, and in Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Scottish highlands, colonial Massachusetts, even a military outpost in Sumatra (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, pp. xl, lxxxv–lxxxvi). In London, the paper was thought influential enough that its political enemies – ardent Tories – stole copies from a coffeehouse to prevent them from being read (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, p. lxxv). Complete sets of the paper, updated monthly (with reprinting of individual issues as necessary to maintain the supply), were available for those who wished to catch up or binge‐read. Some readers even “made up separate Sets” of different issues, arranging them by topic – “Wit, … Operas, … Points of Morality” – or the editorial personae involved (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, pp. 507–508). And like The Tatler, the early issues of The Spectator were reprinted as a multi‐volume set while the paper’s initial run was still underway (and many, many times thereafter). Indeed, the volume or set of volumes soon became a new way of conceiving of this sort of periodical, one that highlighted its durability and coherence, rather than its responsiveness to day‐to‐day events (see Knight 1986). For example, soon after he revived The Spectator in 1714, Addison became so swamped by his other responsibilities that he could no longer write any essays. But rather than close the journal down, he entrusted it to two of his protégés until another volume’s worth of papers

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had been published. Apparently the prospect of leaving a handful of issues uncollected for posterity was thoroughly unacceptable. As the circulation figures cited earlier should suggest, the early eighteenth century saw a proliferation of periodicals that made it increasingly difficult for anyone to keep up on everything. In part, this was the result of the “rage of parties” that pitted Tories against Whigs (or later, the “Country” against the “Court”) in vehement, often vicious argument. Back in the 1640s, such passions led to civil war. Now the violence could (mostly) be confined to paper. One bibliography lists 157 separate periodicals in the reign of Queen Anne alone (McLeod and McLeod 1982). Many of those were short‐ lived, but still. Later decades were a bit less volatile in terms of the sheer number of titles, but the total volume of print was, if anything, even more unmanageable. In 1720, for example, in London alone there were three daily papers, five tri‐weekly papers, six weekly journals, and probably another six illegal  –  because not paying the stamp tax – tri‐weeklies (Harris 2009, p. 422). This did not mean that there were 57 completely distinct sets of content every week: papers routinely and shamelessly copied from one another, and many advertisements were repeated verbatim for long stretches. Nonetheless, no one could read all the periodicals that appeared and have time for anything else. Nor could the vast majority of their customers afford to purchase that many publications. Even the coffeehouses, which so relied upon their subscriptions to bring in business, began to balk in the late 1720s and make noises about starting their own paper, which would then be the only one they would carry. Hence the attraction of the other big journalistic innovation of this period: the magazine. In January 1731, Edward Cave launched what would become the single most popular periodical of the entire century: The Gentleman’s Magazine. Prior to this, “magazine” had meant “storehouse.” Cave extended that idea to the realm of reading: the first issue announced that this new venture would be a place “to treasure up, as in a MAGAZINE, the most remarkable Pieces” published the previous month. That is, at the end of each month, The Gentleman’s Magazine would reprint – sometimes verbatim, sometimes in abridged form – the best essays from that month’s weekly journals, along with some verse, a list of “Domestick Occurrences” (elite births, marriages, deaths, military promotions, and preferments in the Church), a report on stock and commodity prices, a summary of the month’s news, and a catalog of recently published books. As the 1730s wore on, Cave sponsored poetry contests for his readers and added original essays, thinly disguised reports of Parliamentary debates (which were officially illegal: only the votes of Members of Parliament [MPs] were allowed to be published), and the occasional map or diagram. All told, there was good reason to believe the title page’s claim that, at 6d, it offered “more in Quantity, and greater Variety, than any Book of the Kind and Price” (see Figure 5.1). Indeed, to underscore the value-for-money it was providing, each issue featured a vignette depicting the magazine’s headquarters at “St JOHN’s GATE,” flanked by lists of the fifty‐some journals and newspapers on which it was drawing. And to drive home the national (indeed, imperial) scope of the magazine’s coverage and supposed appeal, the editorial persona was named “Sylvanus Urban,” a figure joining together the country (sylvanus, Latin for “of the woods”) and the city. The papers from which The Gentleman’s Magazine took its excerpts complained loudly of piracy, but the copyright statute then in effect (see Section 5.5) only covered books and pamphlets, and so Cave was well within his rights and was soon joined by two competitors: first The London Magazine in 1732

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Figure 5.1  The Gentleman’s Magazine’s attempt to demonstrate the variety and value‐for‐money that it offered. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. AP4.G33 v.5.

Partisan Strife and the World of Print, 1695–1740

and then the Edinburgh‐based Scots Magazine in 1739. By the late 1730s, the Gentleman’s alone was selling 10 000 copies an issue. For many readers, the magazines, along with an almanac and perhaps a local paper, provided all the secular ­reading they desired.

5.2 ­Controlling the Press The end of Licensing in 1695 also meant that the state, which was rapidly expanding to meet the demands of almost perpetual war with France, needed to figure out a way to regulate the press that did not depend on pre‐publication censorship or the cooperation of the Stationers’ Company. The challenge had not lost its urgency: within a month or two of the lapse of the 1662 Act, the secretary of state was bemoaning how “London swarmes with seditious Pamphletts” (quoted in Astbury 1978, p. 317). As in previous decades, there were very few people in authority who were committed to the notion of a free press; indeed, over the next seven years, six bills were introduced in Parliament to restrain the book trade in one way or another. It was simply a question of what the best strategy would be, although most MPs were convinced that Licensing – and the monopolies and opportunities for partisan score‐settling that came with it – did not work. At roughly the same time, treason became significantly more difficult to prove, and, as a capital crime, came to seem a harsher punishment than was often politically palatable: the only member of the book trade to go to the gallows for his work in this period was an 18‐year‐old apprentice named John Matthews, who was hanged in 1720 for his role in printing a Jacobite pamphlet (that is, one suggesting that the Revolution was an illegal usurpation of the throne from its rightful heir, the exiled son of James II, whose birthright should be restored, if necessary by force). Therefore three broad strategies emerged as an alternative to Licensing: an enhanced use of harassment and prosecution, taxation as a means of restricting access, and subsidy of pro‐government propaganda. As Section 4.7 should suggest, prosecutions and harassments were hardly new in the mid‐1690s. But they took on a new urgency and several new forms in this period. A  crime previously treated primarily as a last resort when other charges would not stick – seditious libel – was redefined in the years surrounding 1700 in order to become one of the government’s principal tools against its critics, largely by removing the requirement that in order to be a libel, a text had to defame a specific individual, thereby reclassifying anything “likely to bring into hatred or contempt, or to excite disaffection against” the government as a potential libel (Hanson 1936, p. 17). The Blasphemy Act of 1697 prohibited the public denial of the Trinity, the divine authority of scripture, or the truth of Christianity, along with any assertion that “there are more Gods than One,” thereby covering most of the challenges to religious orthodoxy and the institutional power of the Church of England that could not be accommodated within the umbrella of seditious libel. And in 1727, a new crime was invented: obscene libel, which enabled the suppression of pornography. Prosecutions for these three crimes became a key element in the government’s attempts to squelch all who would challenge its legitimacy, which – in the wake of the Revolution and Parliament’s blatant manipulation of the line of succession, skipping over dozens of legally stronger claims in order to ensure that the throne remained Protestant – was easy to call into question.

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Certainly the most famous case of seditious libel in the period was that of Daniel Defoe, whose (anonymously published) The Shortest‐Way with the Dissenters so successfully ventriloquized the murderous resentment lurking within High Church attempts to exclude non‐Anglicans from public life that it was taken as a call for blood in the streets, rather than the self‐discrediting mimicry of Tory bigotry that Defoe intended. The Speaker of the House, stung by the pamphlet’s apparent criticism of Parliament’s tolerance toward Protestants who disagreed with the Established Church, asked the government to issue a warrant for the author’s arrest, which was soon bolstered by a £50 reward to encourage informers. Soon thereafter, Parliament ordered the hoax to be burned by the common hangman. After more than four months on the run, Defoe was captured by the messengers of the press, tried and convicted, and then sentenced to stand in the pillory in front of the Royal Exchange three times, pay a fine of 200 marks (a little over £133), and remain in prison until he could “find good sureties” for his behavior over the next seven years (Backscheider 1989, p. 110). Of these punishments, the pillory was probably the worst. In addition to the discomfort and public disgrace it brought upon those who stood in it, it also stripped them of the right to vote and serve on juries and often subjected them to physical, sometimes lethal violence: crowds would hurl mud, stones, rotten eggs, and even dead kittens at those immobilized. Defoe managed to avoid the worst of it: ordinary Londoners (perhaps hired by the Whigs) surrounded him in a protective ring, copies of a new poem – A Hymn to the Pillory – were handed out, and the only objects thrown were flowers. He was also quietly released from prison and pardoned in return for agreeing to become a spy and propagandist for the government. But for the rest of his life his having been pilloried was the first (and sometimes only) thing that most readers knew about him. Traditionally, printed obscenity, when dealt with at all, was considered a matter for the ecclesiastical and local courts, not prosecution by the Crown. But those cases rarely resulted in penalties severe enough to serve as a deterrent. So in 1727, after a number of failed attempts to prosecute lewd material under the existing statutes, would‐be reformers devised the new crime of obscene libel. The idea was that, as the attorney general put it, pornography “tends to corrupt the morals of the king’s subjects” and so, like other sorts of libel, amounted to a breach of the peace and a threat to “good order and government” (quoted in Foxon 1965, p. 15). The first – and for a long time, only – person convicted was Edmund Curll, who was fined 50 marks (a little more than £33) for publishing A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs and Venus in the Cloister. As the title of the latter suggests, its eroticism was of a piece with its anticlericalism, which is presumably why a dissenting judge in the case thought the book ought “rather to be published to expose the Romish Priests, the Father Confessors, and Popish Religion” (quoted in Baines and Rogers 2007, p. 167). And even though the prosecution took pains to establish an entire new crime, there is good reason to believe that the government was not particularly worried about the spread of obscenity. Not only was no one else prosecuted for obscene libel for many years, but the case against Curll may well have been “a proxy … for his publication of politically embarrassing memoirs by John Crawford … a double agent between Walpole’s ministry and the Jacobite court” (Keymer 2009, p. 240). This is not to say that the government was wholly unconcerned about blasphemy or obscenity, but political self‐preservation certainly came first. Of course, prosecution was no guarantee of conviction. The government sometimes encountered fierce resistance in the courtroom. The printers of The Craftsman and of

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one of Swift’s pamphlets championing an Irish boycott of English goods were both acquitted in acts of jury nullification (although the verdict for the latter was overridden by the trial judge and so the printer spent upwards of another year in prison). Similarly, two successive Dublin grand juries refused even to indict the printer of what have come to be known as The Drapier’s Letters, although once again the victory was a hollow one for the printer, who died in prison while the chief justice tried to browbeat the jurors into changing their minds. Meanwhile in colonial Manhattan, a jury ignored the clear evidence of John Peter Zenger’s having printed The New‐York Weekly Journal and found him not guilty in order to reward the paper’s campaign against the deeply unpopular governor. Resistance could take more muted forms as well: after two borderline seditious pieces were removed from the posthumously published Works of John Sheffield, … Duke of Buckingham, Buckingham’s supporters (many of them Jacobites) quietly arranged to have those leaves “replaced in manuscript, or with a new setting of type, on different paper” (Ximenes, item 78). Given these obstacles, the government sometimes ordered the arrest of book trade personnel whom it had no intention of actually prosecuting: the harassment and financial loss was often enough to at least temporarily silence its critics. Politically provocative journalists like Nathaniel Mist and John Tutchin, for example, were repeatedly hauled before Parliament, berated, and made to ask for pardon on their knees. Similarly, the printer of The Freeholder’s Journal was arrested in 1722 and held until he could post bail. Unable to raise the sum required (possibly £1000), he languished in jail until the paper folded the following spring (Sutherland 1986a, p. 39). And one did not necessarily have to be involved in the production of supposedly seditious material in order to get into trouble: John Dawson was held in jail for three months simply for being in possession of English Advice to the Freeholders of England, a borderline Jacobite pamphlet attacking the Whigs and the newly crowned George I (Colclough 2007a, p. 86). But even when successful, prosecutions are (unavoidably) after the fact and so punish those responsible for spreading sedition, blasphemy, or obscenity without necessarily preventing their spread. Indeed, prosecutions often only increased the public’s desire for the offending material: as James Bramston quipped, “can Statutes keep the British Press in awe, / While that sells best, that’s most against the Law?” (Bramston 1733, p. 8). Hence, in 1712 after several years of deliberation, the government passed the Stamp Act, a tax on newspapers and – to a lesser degree – pamphlets. Officially the tax was on almost any short publication. But since religious books, daily accounts of imports and exports, the Bills of Mortality, and advertising handbills were exempted, it was pretty clear that newspapers were what was being targeted and that the goal of the Act was first and foremost press regulation, not the generation of revenue; the most the tax ever brought in was about £6000, in a total government budget of more than £13 million (Snyder 1968, p. 219). Publications subject to the tax were supposed to be printed only on special paper bearing a government stamp, which cost 1d per sheet (or ½d per half‐ sheet). This tax effectively doubled the cost of newspapers, thereby putting them out of reach of the poorest – and so supposedly most volatile – segments of the population. For the Tory government trying to prevent the Whigs from rallying the sort of political street mobs that they themselves had used to great effect against the Whigs in the previous decade, this was a self‐evidently wise move. And violators could be prosecuted simply for tax evasion, a much easier charge to prove than seditious libel (and one unlikely to further propagate any damaging information about the government).

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Failure to use the stamped paper could result in a £20 fine and the forfeiture of all of the publisher’s copyrights – a terrible punishment, since, as we will see, it meant the loss of an effectively perpetual monopoly on every title they had published. Any periodical that appeared at least weekly also had to pay 1s for every advertisement they accepted, making it difficult for them to subsidize the tax on paper with advertising income and thereby keep their prices at the original level (Siebert 1952, p. 312). Initially, the Act seemed to have accomplished what its framers desired. About half of the papers being published on the eve of the Act promptly went out of business and the circulation and advertising revenue of the survivors dropped significantly. Swift crowed that “the Observator is fallen, the Medleys are jumbled togethr with the Flying‐post, the Examiner is deadly sick” (Swift 2013, p. 442). And the carnage was not limited to the explicitly political papers: the non‐partisan Post Man went from a circulation of ­somewhere between 3800 and 4450 a week down to 2000 (Snyder 1968, pp. 211–212), while the (mildly Whiggish) Spectator lost half of its advertisements (Siebert 1952, pp. 314–315). However, the men who drafted the legislation presumed that the only forms a newspaper could take were those they had taken to that point: a half‐ or full sheet folio or quarto. This left a gaping loophole: any paper that used more than one sheet per issue would legally count as a pamphlet: a publication of more than one sheet and fewer than 20 sheets in folio, 12 in quarto, or 6 in octavo. As such, it would be taxed, not per copy, but by the edition, in proportion to its length (2s per sheet). To put this in perspective, a single issue of a half‐sheet newspaper with a circulation of 3000 (as Mr. Spectator boasted of having), would be taxed £6 5s, more than 41 times the 3s that each issue of a sheet‐and‐a‐half “pamphlet” would owe. Not surprisingly, sharp‐eyed publishers pounced on this, with one paper, The British Mercury, shifting to a six‐page, sheet‐ and‐a‐half format for its very first issue after the Act went into effect (Snyder 1968, p.  217, n. 6). Most of the provincial papers followed suit and were soon joined by many of their London counterparts, including, on occasion, The London Gazette, whose ­evasion of the spirit of the statute cannot have increased other publishers’ inclination to obey it. Most of these new sheet‐and‐a‐half papers became weeklies (if they were not already): it would remain virtually impossible to produce a paper that long on a more frequent basis until the introduction of steam presses in the early nineteenth century, and very difficult to do so until the invention of automatic (“hot‐metal”) composing machines in the late nineteenth century (see Section  9.2). But even on a weekly schedule, simply printing the available news and advertisements risked being unable to fill the issue and so, as we have already seen in Section  5.1, publishers began to add various sorts of entertainment, including inflammatory political commentary. And because of the tax loophole, with low‐quality paper and ample advertising income, some journals were even able to drop their prices to ½d, thereby underselling the more politically tame dailies and tri‐weeklies. As a result, far from squelching political news and keeping it away from the poor, the Stamp Act may actually have increased its volume and availability, albeit with the slight time lag imposed by a weekly publication schedule. In 1725, this loophole was finally closed, with the tax becoming a simple 1d per sheet or ½d per half‐sheet for all news publications, regardless of their length. The revised tax does not seem to have driven any papers out of business, but it did prompt an immediate end to the sheet‐and‐a‐half format for the weekly journals, which

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shifted to a half‐sheet quarto done on significantly larger  –  and sometimes coarser  –  paper, with tighter margins, more columns, smaller type, and no space devoted to elaborate ­headpieces or ornaments (Sutherland 1986a, pp. 36–37). Because of these changes, the journals lost their visual distinctiveness and came to look like other newspapers (for before‐and‐after images, see Morison 1932, pp. 96, 102). But because they were now technically half‐sheets, they still only had to pay ½d per copy in tax, rather than the 1½d the government was expecting (and which would have more than doubled their price). Other papers tried similar gambits, thereby encouraging the development of ever larger sheets (Pollard 1941, p. 127). Once again enforcement was lax: by the late 1730s, there were somewhere between 6 and 10 periodicals being produced on unstamped paper with a total weekly circulation of over 50 000. Several of these sold for a farthing (¼d) – less than the paper they were supposed to have been printed on would have cost (Harris 1978, pp. 88, 86). Indeed, to avoid being caught with unstamped papers, street hawkers would sometimes just throw copies into the open windows of their customers and settle up later (Harris 1987a, p. 29). And publishers seem to have decided that since the law now specifically targeted periodicals offering news, rather than (with exceptions) all short publications, they could serialize popular books, including the Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels, on a separate sheet of unstamped paper and sell it as a package with the newspaper, thereby enhancing the latter’s appeal without increasing their tax burden or significantly raising their price (Wiles 1957, pp. 55–58). The third strategy for press regulation adopted in the wake of the collapse of Licensing was the subsidy of pamphlets and newspapers supportive of the government (and, where necessary and possible, the buying off of antagonists). Paying pamphleteers to write on behalf of a cause is probably at least as old as pamphlets themselves. But doing so in a sustained way for political benefit is really the product of the rise of parties in the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s and early 1680s. And it was not until after the Revolution that most members of the political elite were willing to concede that partisan divisions, however nasty, were tolerable and could help stave off actual civil war. Implicit in that realization (with its admission that perfect unanimity in politics was a pipe dream) was an acknowledgment that political discussion could not simply be squelched; at best, it could sometimes be shaped. And so the Whigs and Tories set out to shape it. At first they just commissioned pamphlets to help sway public opinion, in the guise of merely “stat[ing] facts right” and preventing “the Generality” from “err[ing] for want of knowledge, & being imposed upon by the storys raised by ill designing men” (quoted in Hanson 1936, pp. 93–94). Later, they expanded their campaigns by subsidizing a range of newspapers and weekly journals to champion their position issue after issue and systematically counter the publications of the Opposition. Given the “rage of parties” that dominated these decades, there was an extensive market for many of these titles: 8000 copies of Thomas Burnet’s 1715 pamphlet, The Necessity of Impeaching the Late Ministry, were sold (Hanson 1936, p. 101), while “in every Alehouse” in Birmingham, customers supposedly had “the London Journal in their Hands, shewing to each other wth a kind of Joy the most Audacious Reflections therein contained” (quoted in Realey 1935, p. 11). Indeed, Swift reported that “those who are expert in the Trade” thought “the Author and Bookseller” of Steele’s The Crisis “will be greater Gainers” from it “than from … any Folio that hath been published these Twenty Years” (Swift 1714, p. 4). Almost all the writers of the period (including Addison, Delarivier Manley, Matthew

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Prior, Steele, and Swift) were enlisted in one way or another, although none did as much as Defoe, who wrote dozens of pamphlets and contributed significantly to at least 10 political papers, three times as a double agent. Indeed, his longest running venture, The Review (1704–1713), amounts to “approximately 4 million words of prose in over 5600 pages of print,” produced more or less single‐handedly (Cowan 2014, p. 80). Individual pamphleteers tended to be either paid directly (often with untraceable funds from the Secret Service or the petty cash of the secretary of state’s office) or given government positions with handsome salaries that did not require much work: the Opposition writer Thomas Gordon was persuaded to support the government by being appointed first commissioner of the wine licenses, while Matthew Concanen was made attorney general of Jamaica. Newspapers were more often subsidized indirectly: either the government bought a substantial number of copies of each issue – presumably enough to ensure that the other copies sold were pure profit – and distributed them to prominent families and coffeehouses in the provinces (Hanson 1936, pp. 109–110), or else the paper was allowed free postage, thereby increasing its profit on the copies sold outside of London. By the early 1730s, the Whig prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, was underwriting at least five, and possibly as many nine, different newspapers to the tune of approximately £10 000 a year (Hanson 1936, p. 109; Siebert 1952, p. 343), although this was cut in half after 1735, when three papers were consolidated into one new venture: The Daily Gazetteer, which announced in its inaugural issue of June 30 that “the Cause we have undertaken is, to vindicate Publick Authority from the rude Insults of base and abusive Pens; to refute the Calumnies, and the injurious Clamours, of factious dishonest Men; to expose the Insincerity of Mock Patriots” and “to set the Proceedings of the Administration in a true and faithful Light.” The post office could also be directed to work against the Opposition, seizing or mysteriously delaying or losing the papers they backed. Local magistrates would periodically forbid the coffeehouses and taverns in their jurisdictions from carrying certain titles (Sutherland 1986a, p. 40). And where necessary, the government could simply try to buy out its enemies. In the early 1720s, it purchased the fiercely critical London Journal and British Journal and converted them into (much less popular) champions of the ministry. Similarly, in 1741, it seems to have convinced the then‐impoverished future novelist Henry Fielding (whose career as a playwright had come to a crashing halt with the imposition of pre‐performance censorship at the theaters in 1737) not only to stop mocking Walpole, but even to find some kind words for him. As with most other aspects of eighteenth‐century political life, when threats and obstacles and persuasion failed (or seemed too much of a bother), unabashed bribery could generally be counted on to save the day.

5.3 ­New Sizes and Formats Part of why press regulation seemed so urgent (beyond the political volatility of the decades surrounding 1700) was that the sheer volume of print seemed to be increasing, in terms of both the number of titles appearing and the number of copies and editions of those titles. This perception was broadly correct: the valleys in Figure 4.1 for the years we are investigating in this chapter (1695–1740) are higher than all but the most dramatic peaks of the period covered in Chapter 4 (1641–1695). But that perception was probably

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amplified by the increasing number of what might now be termed “media events.” For example, a bookseller advertised in 1699 that “all the Pamphlets against a Standing Army” were available at his shop (Answer 1699, p. 15). Similarly, Defoe’s The True‐Born Englishman, a mocking dismissal of xenophobic criticism of the (Dutch‐born) king, was answered at least a dozen times and was widely pirated. Indeed, Defoe claimed five years later that 80 000 unauthorized cheap copies had “been sold in the Streets for 2d. or at a Penny” (Defoe 1705, sig. A3r). It was also copied into numerous manuscript miscellanies. In 1705, a Tory MP complained that for weeks prior to each election, “pamphlets and broadsides … descended ‘thick as hail’” (quoted in Holmes 1967, p. 32). And the ­proposed Union between England and Scotland (enacted in 1707) prompted more than “530 pamphlets, sermons, poems, and treatises” to warn, persuade, or otherwise move the legislators involved and their constituents (Hoppit 2000, p. 253). Three years later, that number was easily surpassed by the controversy surrounding Henry Sacheverell’s trial for seditious libel. Sacheverell was the walking embodiment of the High Church intolerance that Defoe got in trouble for ventriloquizing. In 1709, he gave a sermon before the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and Council of London at St. Paul’s Cathedral that charged that the bishops and Whig politicians leading the kingdom were “FALSE BRETHREN” actively working to “Weaken, Undermine, and Betray” the Church and State. In their support for the Revolution and Parliament’s alteration of the line of succession, they were violating the “Absolute, and Unconditional Obedience to the Supream Power, in All things Lawful” that, by traditional Anglican theology, good Christians owed their king. And in their willingness to tolerate and work with Protestant Dissenters, they were nourishing a “Brood of Vipers” “Contriving, and Plotting our utter Ruine” (Sacheverell 1709, pp. 27, 19, 34, 36). In January 1710, the House of Lords impeached Sacheverell for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the standard way of prosecuting figures otherwise beyond the reach of the law because they had not violated any explicit statute. The ensuing trial gripped the nation. To his supporters, Sacheverell was a latter‐day martyr enduring persecution for the sake of the Church, which was often breathlessly proclaimed to be “in Danger” in these years. To his detractors, he was a crypto‐Jacobite seeking to undermine all the liberties ensured by the Revolution. But either way, the crisis played out in print on a scale hitherto unimaginable. Close to a thousand editions of various addresses, answers, ballads, defenses, letters, remarks, reflections, replies, true accounts, and vindications would “swarme in our streets” between November 1709 and December 1710 (quoted in Cowan 2012, p. 8). And some of those editions may have been large. The authorized editions of Sacheverell’s sermon at St. Paul’s and a similar one preached earlier that year in Derby certainly were: their bookseller testified to ­having printed somewhere between 36 500 and 41 500 copies of the former and 12 750 copies of the latter (Madan 1978, pp. 23–24). Subsequent and pirated editions probably brought the total number of copies of the two sermons to 100 000, most of them selling for just a penny or two (and only a handful made it into the flames when the Lords ordered them burned by the common hangman). Supposedly apt legal precedents and theological arguments from centuries past were reprinted. Parts of the St. Paul’s sermon were put into “burlesque rhime” and a faux‐advertisement was printed for “Dr. Sacheverell’s most admirable and incomparable love‐powder” (Madan 1978, pp. 33, 135). Thirty‐seven different engravings were produced: some satirical, some laudatory, some just documentary. There were even consumer goods: a printed silk handkerchief,

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an “emblematical fan,” a set of playing cards (Madan 1978, p. 269; the fan is reproduced in Winn 2014, p. 520; the cards in Kunzle 1973, p. 150). The press runs in the tens of thousands that we have seen with The True‐Born Englishman or Sacheverell’s sermon at St. Paul’s – edition quantities hitherto reserved for almanacs, chapbooks, schoolbooks, and a few devotional titles – were only possible because the copies produced were so cheap and therefore within reach of a far wider public than that which typically bought books. The principal way in which the price could be brought down to a penny or two was to reduce the amount of paper required, which meant moving to a smaller format with more text crammed onto each page. For example, the first authorized editions of Sacheverell’s The Perils of False Brethren took up seven sheets in quarto and three sheets in octavo. The cheap reprints, both authorized and otherwise, only used one or one‐and‐a‐half sheets (Madan 1978, pp. 19–21). However, this movement toward smaller formats was not confined to cheap reprints. The entire trade shifted in a pretty decisive way, turning its back on the seventeenth‐ century hierarchy of prestige that put thick folios at the top, and instead adopting a system in which quartos or sometimes octavos were the norm for ambitious first editions and longer texts were split into multiple volumes. Addison nicely captures the change with the tongue‐in‐cheek pride that Mr. Spectator expresses at the prospect of his papers being collected: “I am … informed by my Bookseller, that six Octavo’s have at all times been looked upon as an Equivalent to a Folio, which I take notice of the rather, because I would not have the Learned World surprized, if after the Publication of half a dozen Volumes I take my Place accordingly” (Spectator 1965, vol. 4, p. 387). A more sustained example of the shift can be seen in printed drama. In the seventeenth century, individual plays were almost always produced in quarto, while collected editions would appear in folio. In the mid‐1710s, however, octavo became the norm for first editions of single plays, with reprints in duodecimo and collected multi‐ volume sets in quarto or octavo, if going for prestige, or duodecimo, if offering value. These shifts did not, for the most part, reduce the price of the books in question: indeed, in many cases, the price went up, although rarely as dramatically as Pope’s 1725 six‐volume quarto edition of Shakespeare, which retailed for more than six times the cost of the 1685 Fourth Folio (Hume 2014, pp. 374–375). Not all segments of the market shifted at the same time as drama, but almost all underwent a similar change. For 1703, excluding single‐sheet items, books in folio or quarto make up slightly more than half of all that is extant from that year. Forty years later, folios and quartos had dropped to a combined total of 30% (Suarez 2009b, p. 57). And given the lower survival rates of smaller formats, it seems likely that these figures err on the side of generosity; that is, small formats probably made up even more than 70% of the books produced in the early 1740s. The move toward smaller formats meant books were becoming more portable, which enabled them to be more easily perused – or hidden – in bed or in a carriage or on a walk. It may also have encouraged greater illustration: one of the most popular pornographic titles of this period shifted from typically appearing as an octavo with 16 plates to a duodecimo with 24 or 36 images, presumably in order to maintain what the publisher had discovered was an alluring ratio of image to text (Foxon 1965, p. 23, n. 11). Be that as it may, the embrace of smaller formats certainly opened up new possibilities for distinction. One of the most successful gambits at the luxury end of the trade was “large paper” copies, which are exactly what they sound like: a limited number of

Partisan Strife and the World of Print, 1695–1740

copies printed on larger, generally higher quality paper. For example, purchasers of the first trade edition of Pope’s translation of The Iliad who were willing to part with an additional 11 shillings could get copies that were 7.9 cm taller and 4.9 cm wider (Foxon 1991, p. 56; an opening is reproduced on p. 70). And later works of Pope were advertised as “Beautifully printed in … the same Sizes with Mr. POPE’s HOMER” (for an example, see McLaverty 2001, p. 114), so an entire collection of large paper copies could be assembled. Similarly, readers who chose the large paper version of the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels received a book whose untrimmed leaves were 6.2 cm taller and 3 cm wider than their regular‐size counterparts (Teerink 1963, p. 194). Copies like these were impressive display objects (and most eighteenth‐century bookshelving was done by size, with the larger volumes more readily accessible). They also constituted a form of conspicuous consumption, a sign that you could afford to pay a significant premium for a book whose text and layout, except for wider inner margins, were identical to the ordinary copies of the same edition. But even when large paper copies were not available, new verse still tended to buck the trend and appear in folio, flaunting what Sir Benjamin Backbite, in The School for Scandal, would later call “a neat rivulet of Text … murmur[ing] thro’ a meadow of margin” (Sheridan 1973, vol. 1, p. 367). Similarly wasteful uses of the page would be a part of much of the “fine press” printing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consider, for example, an opening from the first London edition of Swift’s On Poetry: A Rapsody (see Figure  5.2). In a 31.3 × 39.5 cm expanse of paper, there are only 38 lines  –  232 words – of poetry. And even the ordinary (non‐large paper) volumes of The Iliad were 28.2 × 18 cm, hardly small enough to slip into a pocket. Similar gestures periodically occurred with other genres as well. John Gay’s Polly, his 1729 self‐published sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, appeared as a luxurious quarto (23.1 × 17.5 cm), after its performance had been forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain. A typical octavo play in its first edition from that same printer, John Watts (for whom the young Benjamin Franklin once worked), would only have measured about 20 × 12 cm. Those who purchased Polly in its authorized edition (there were several piracies in octavo) could thus signal their support of Gay – and perhaps their disgust with the government that sought to silence him – through the very size of the artifact they purchased, displayed, and perhaps even performed from in an amateur setting. Of course, books are three‐dimensional objects and so can be altered in terms of their thickness as well as their height and width. One of the other major developments in this period with respect to size is the advent of part publication as a significant means of distributing and acquiring texts, especially from the 1730s on. By publishing a text in multiple parts over time – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, even annually – booksellers could gauge the market for a text more accurately and print additional or fewer copies of the subsequent parts as demand dictated, or cancel a publication altogether if it proved a flop. Income from one installment could also be used to finance the next, thereby minimizing the amount of capital at risk at any given moment. The advantage for readers was, as The Grub‐Street Journal put it, that it allowed “multitudes of persons to peruse books, into which they would otherwise never have looked” (October 30, 1732). Because it essentially amounts to payment on an installment plan, part publication permitted the purchase of titles that would have been prohibitively expensive if bought all at once. Parts tended to cost 1½ to 2d a sheet and rarely involved more than four sheets, if that, stab‐stitched together with a wrapper of blue paper.

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Figure 5.2  The “neat rivulet of Text … murmur[ing] thro’ a meadow of margin” characteristic of most first editions of eighteenth‐century poetry. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR3724.O5 1733.

Yet  once bound, they were indistinguishable from volumes published all at once. So for 6d or less a week, or the equivalent each month – a sum within reach of many households, if they made it a priority  –  a reader could acquire a work that would otherwise have been completely beyond reach. For example, the two folio volumes of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia, one of the standard reference works of the eighteenth century, cost 2 guineas. But one could purchase three sheets of it a week for only 6d (Wiles 1957, p. 8). The total text would cost a bit more, but the expense would have felt far more manageable. And with certain particularly successful texts, such as Paul de Rapin de Thoyras’s Histoire d’Angleterre, there were rival editions (in Rapin’s case, competing translations) and price wars that could bring the cost down still further: say, to five sheets a week  –  which supposedly contained the equivalent of six sheets of their competitor’s version  –  for only 6d (Wiles 1957, p. 107). The result, according to The Craftsman, was that “no Historian was ever so universally read, by all Degrees of People, in this Kingdom” (January 10, 1736). Another observer thought “Thousands were sold every week” (quoted in Wiles 1957, p. 188, n. 1). Of course, this greater ease of access was not without its frustrations: the folio format meant that someone interested in, say, Henry VIII would have to wait almost eight months and spend upwards of 17s before getting to that reign.

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5.4 ­Mocking Other Readers The expansion of the reading public, both real and perceived, did not only mean that there were more readers reading more newspapers, books, and pamphlets. There were also more opportunities to assess, often sneeringly, the reading of others and so divide the public into distinct segments of varying worth (a practice that has continued to the present, with our habit of invoking categories like “chick lit”). Indeed, gestures of this sort were a staple of satire in this period. Consider only the scene in John Gay’s The What D’Ye Call It, in which a rustic, forcibly drafted into the army after stealing a hen and now about to be shot as a deserter, is told to “Repent thine Ill, / And Pray in this good Book.” He stammeringly “reads and weeps,” crying out “lend me thy Handkercher – The Pilgrim’s Pro‐ / (I cannot see for Tears) Pro‐Progress – Oh! / – The Pilgrim’s Progress – Eighth – Edi‐ ti‐on / Lon‐don – Prin‐ted – for – Ni‐cho‐las Bod‐ding‐ton: / With new Ad‐di‐tions never made before. / – Oh! ’tis so moving, I can read no more” (Gay 1715, p. 20). The Pilgrim’s Progress had gone into far more than eight editions by 1715, but the point seems clear enough: the people who attend “Tragi‐Comi‐Pastoral Farces” at Drury Lane are here encouraged to laugh at the people who read Bunyan, who are presented as abject yokels so unsophisticated and marginally literate that they do not even know which parts of a text are supposed to be moving. Or, for that matter, which parts of a text are referential in the ways that matter: one of the members of the mob in Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, a 1730 droll performed at Bartholomew Fair, is confused by his leader’s insistence that they owe no allegiance to the king, since “England is not once mentioned in the whole Bible.” After all, “I am sure that in the latter End of the first Side of my Bible at home, I read – London, printed by – ” (Wat Tyler 1730, pp. 14–15). This sort of distinction‐through‐mockery focused not only on what other people read but also on the uses to which those books were supposedly being put. The best example of the latter is the incessant joking about the future that awaited unsuccessful publications. Such jests were hardly new: remember only Dryden’s dismissal, in Mac Flecknoe, of “neglected Authors” as “Martyrs of Pies, and Reliques of the Bum” (Dryden 1682, p. 8) or the Whig insistence that The Observator was “the delight of those that love to dung and read at the same time” (A Sermon 1682, p. 12). But they became ubiquitous in the period we are now examining. For example, Pope ventriloquized the “distemper’d” publisher Edmund Curll berating his own unsold productions: “Damn ye all, … Rags ye were, and to Rags ye shall return … To my Shop at Tunbridge ye shall go … and thence be drawn like the rest of your Predecessors, bit by bit, to the Passage‐House: For in this present Emotion of my Bowels, how do I compassionate those who have great need, and nothing to wipe their Breech with? Having said this, and at the same Time recollecting that his own was yet unwiped, he abated of his Fury, and with great Gravity, apply’d to that Function the unfinish’d Sheets of the Conduct of the E— of N————m” (Pope 1716, pp. 20, 21–22). Curll’s output is thus not only destined for the privy (where much cheap print actually did end up), it would be best for all involved for it to go there directly without bothering to engage in the pretense of its being worth reading. Implicitly, then, anyone interested in perusing The Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham (which never appeared; Nottingham’s son apparently paid to suppress it) is, at best, an idiot willing to pay a steep premium for handsomely bound toilet paper. As the references to breech‐wiping should suggest, one of the principal ways in which other kinds of readers were mocked and scapegoated was by suggesting that their books

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might as well not even contain texts: their only utility was as an object. Unsurprisingly, some satirists took this to its logical conclusion and invented readers whose books went completely unread. The Spectator, for example, described “a Lady’s Library,” in which “there were Counterfeit Books … on the upper Shelves, which were carved in Wood, and served only to fill up the Number” (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, p. 153). Later on, we learn that these include “all the Classick Authors” and “a Set of Elziviers by the same Hand” (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, p. 156; “Elziviers” are elegant pocket editions modeled after those produced by the Dutch printing dynasty of that name). Since most of the library had been “got together … because she had heard [the titles or authors] praised,” it sufficed to have plausible looking spines on her shelves (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, p. 154). And even the books belonging to this lady that were real often bore traces of either having been put to uses other than reading – Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding has “a Paper of Patches [i.e. beauty patches] in it” – or having been subject to the wrong sort of reading: the alternately gory and bawdy Tales of Thomas D’Urfey were “doubled down in several places” and Clelia, a romance, “opened of it self in the Place that describes two Lovers in a Bower” (Spectator 1965, vol. 1, pp. 155–156). As a guide to the reading and collecting habits of actual women, this is, of course, deeply suspect. But as an index to how the reading public was thought to have grown to the point that it could be readily divided into various configurations of us and them, this description, like the other satirical evidence, seems telling indeed.

5.5 ­Managing Risk We should be careful, however, not to overstate the expansion of the public. Upwards of 90% of London tradesmen could write their names in the 1720s, but only about two‐ thirds of their counterparts in provincial East Anglia could do so. Similarly, more than half of London women could produce a signature, but only a quarter of the female population of East Anglia could follow suit (Cressy 1993, p. 316). Estimating the ability to read from the ability to write one’s name (which is generally all we have evidence of ) is an imperfect art. Since reading was taught earlier than writing, probably more of the population could read in an at least rudimentary way than these figures would indicate. But they probably correspond fairly well to the percentage of the nation that could read fluently. However, the ability to read does not automatically translate into the ability to purchase reading material, much less the desire to do so. Most books and many periodicals remained beyond the economic reach of a substantial majority of the population and booksellers were often mistaken in their assessment of what would sell. Bankruptcy was distressingly common at all levels of the trade. Accordingly, booksellers devised various means for limiting their risk, each of which transformed the bookscape in far‐reaching and often unpredictable ways. Perhaps the simplest of these strategies for risk management were the partnerships between booksellers called “congers” (possibly because the large eels of the same name would devour their smaller competition). These were agreements to share the costs and potential losses of a publication or series of publications in return for a proportional share of the profits – and often a proportional stake in the copyrights. Typically, when there is a lengthy list of names at the bottom of an eighteenth‐century title page, it is

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because that book was financed by a conger. For example, Penelope Aubin’s first four novels were all “Printed for E. BELL, J. DARBY, A. BETTESWORTH, F. FAYRAM, J. PEMBERTON, J. HOOKE, C. RIVINGTON, F. CLAY, J. BATLEY, and E. SYMON,” with the names arranged either in order of their seniority in the trade or by their descending levels of investment. Some partnerships were one‐offs for a particular publication; others continued in more or less the same form edition after edition; still others morphed over the years as various members retired or died and their holdings were sold at auction, often in quite small fractions: in 1697, Richard Bentley’s estate included a one‐ forty‐eighth share of Rider’s Dictionary, a steady seller first published in 1589 (Mandelbrote 1997, p. 94). Regardless of the duration of a given conger, however, their attraction was the same. Not only did they enable booksellers to put their eggs in multiple baskets, with a partial investment in a number of different titles, but they were also entered into at different moments and so could help maintain a steady cash flow: the sales from one title might come in just as those from another title were drying up and the paper for a third needed to be purchased (Suarez 2009a, p. 30). But this security came at a cost, especially for readers. The close cooperation and ongoing relationships between booksellers that congers fostered also discouraged competition and so helped keep prices high. A similar gambit, albeit one as much concerned with political as economic risk, was the use of what modern bibliographers have (somewhat confusingly) come to call “trade publishers.” Unlike a current “trade publisher” (a business that risks its own capital to publish books for a general audience in the hope of making a profit), these men and women had no financial stake in the titles they offered: they lost nothing if a book sold poorly, they gained nothing if it flew off the shelves. Rather, they were paid by the booksellers (and occasionally the authors or printers) who did have a stake in a book to be its public face, both in order to facilitate its distribution and to take the fall if the authorities decided to clamp down on a title. Not surprisingly, trade publishers tended to be used for pamphlets and other brief topical works for which the demand was likely to be short‐lived, although they also dealt in longer works, such as Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, for which some sort of legal harassment or other embarrassment was possible. Traditionally, bookseller‐publishers who also had retail operations got most of their stock by exchanging copies of their own publications with those of others. That way, each shop could have a few copies of a fairly wide range of titles. For works with a steady or intermittent demand, that system worked fairly well. But for controversial pieces that might sell hundreds of copies in their first week or two and then almost nothing, it made more sense to have a centralized supply, especially since so many of those texts were responding to other texts. Trade publishers could thus provide something close to one‐stop shopping for those in search of the latest skirmishes in whatever paper war was then being waged. Indeed, the vast majority of trade publishers’ shops were within two or three blocks of each other near St. Paul’s Cathedral, so a Londoner trying to acquire the full range of positions on a topic could easily do so in a single trip (and could do pretty well just patronizing one of the “mercuries” or street hawkers in his or her neighborhood, since those were, in turn, supplied primarily by the trade publishers). Trade publishers could also provide plausible deniability for booksellers wishing to conceal the fact that they were working both sides of a controversy and for authors trying to preserve their ­anonymity – unlike booksellers, with whom authors typically had some sort of contract, trade publishers often would not know who wrote a given piece and so could not give

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them up in gossip or under interrogation (Treadwell 1982, p. 121). John Morphew once testified that he frequently did not even know which booksellers he was working for: “it is a very usual thing for persons to leave books … at his house …, and a long time after to call for the value thereof, without making themselves known …, and if the Government makes enquiry concerning the authors of any books … so left, in order to bring them to punishment, it often happens that nobody comes to make any demand for the value of the said books” (quoted in Hanson 1936, p. 51). This combination of concealment and convenience was clearly attractive to the booksellers, especially in moments of political crisis when the demand for pamphlets spiked at the same time as they became more dangerous to be associated with. But it seems probable that the system of trade publishing also encouraged controversial writing and the “rage of parties” it fostered. Political debate would most likely have been neither as central nor as nasty a part of the early eighteenth century had trade publishers not been in place to facilitate a polarization at moments so extreme that “social contact with those of contrary political opinions became almost unthinkable” (Holmes 1967, p. 21) and the cousin of a Tory MP could count himself fortunate to have “come off with a whole skin” after “stepp[ing] into a Whig coffee‐house” on the eve of an election (quoted in Holmes 1967, p. 22). Partisan division also haunted subscription publishing, another means of managing financial risk that transformed the world of books and reading in profound ways, giving well‐off but not necessarily aristocratic readers a chance to “play … at being patrons” without having to spend on the scale necessary to be an actual patron (Lockwood 2001, p. 132). Subscription to a book is simply a pre‐publication commitment to purchase a copy or copies of a specified format and quality (often superior to what would be sold to the public), generally accompanied by half of the purchase price as a down payment, with the other half due when the book was delivered. Typically, subscriptions would have been solicited by an author and his or her friends, either directly or through printed proposals or advertisements in the newspapers. The monies collected could then cover the production costs of the book, making it far more of a sure thing for the bookseller than an ordinary speculative publication would be. The practice dates back to the early seventeenth century and gained momentum in the 1670s, but it did not fully take off until the 1710s and 1720s. Early on, subscribers often got their copies at a discount, but by the end of the period we are investigating, they were paying an average “surcharge of 55%, merely for the pleasure of seeing their names in print” (Amory 1995, pp. 103–104). As Hugh Amory’s quip suggests, the books in question would almost invariably begin with a list of everyone who had contributed so that the subscribers’ munificence might be known. If any members of the royal family had subscribed, they appeared first, followed by everyone else in (at least rough) alphabetical order. Yet even within the seemingly leveling system of the alphabet, the titled and the particularly generous were still singled out for special recognition. In James Thomson’s The Seasons, for example (see Figure 5.3), “Mrs. Grace Ballard” gets to keep company with “The Right Hon. George Dodington, Esq;,” but it is clear that she is just a respectable gentlewoman, while he is one of the lords of the Treasury (and, it turns out, the dedicatee of Summer) and has subscribed for a princely 20 copies, although he may actually have taken fewer than that, allowing Thomson to, in effect, sell the remaining copies twice (Amory 1995, p. 103). What is not as clear to us, but would have been obvious to the sorts of people who subscribed to quartos of poetry in 1730 is that it is a strongly Whig list (Speck 1982, p. 56).

Partisan Strife and the World of Print, 1695–1740

Figure 5.3  The subscriber list to James Thomson’s The Seasons. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR3732.S4 1730.

Conversely, the list of subscribers to Joseph Trapp’s 1718 The Aeneis of Virgil, Translated into Blank Verse was staunchly Tory, shading into Jacobite, a dangerous position in the wake of the failed uprising of 1715–1716 that aimed to put the “Old Pretender,” the would‐be James III, on the throne. No doubt part of this slant was simply due to the strong presence of Oxford dons and alumni (Trapp was Professor of Poetry), but Pat Rogers seems right to insist that “to subscribe to Trapp’s book was to stand up and be counted” (Rogers 1972, p. 1540). The mere act of helping underwrite a new translation of Virgil could be a demonstration of political dissent and perhaps even hope for regime change. This is not to say that subscribing was always a gesture of partisan allegiance. Pope’s translation of Homer, with its innovative use of pictorial headpieces in the copies for subscribers, attracted supporters from across the political spectrum (and made him rich), as did Matthew Prior’s extraordinarily successful Poems on Several Occasions (Speck 1982, pp. 56, 60). But a surprising number of subscription lists lean to one side or the other in a pretty dramatic way, suggesting not only the inescapability of party in this period, but also perhaps the ways in which a faction’s sense of itself could be reconfigured and extended even through the patronage of books that would not ordinarily seem to have anything to do with politics. And as in any adversarial system, of course, a piece of evidence like a subscriber list could be put to use by the other side as well: hence the delight with which a Tory paper pounced upon the “Right Hon. Lord Walpole[’s]” subscription for 30 copies of Samuel Johnson of Cheshire’s wonderfully nonsensical play, Hurlothrumbo, either not noticing or not caring that the Walpole in question was not the prime minister, but his brother (Lockwood 2001, p. 130).

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The final method booksellers found to manage risk is the one most seemingly familiar to us: copyright, which began in this period to develop into a more recognizably modern form. But here, as elsewhere, we should be careful not to ignore what is distinctive and characteristic about the early eighteenth century in our relief at finding something more familiar to our present ways of doing things. We tend now to think of copyright as a system designed to encourage creativity by granting authors a monopoly over the reproduction of their work for a limited period of time. In the decades we are investigating, however, the situation was rather different. Recall that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Stationer’s “right to copy” a text (other than those covered by royal patents) was a privilege enshrined in the Royal Charter granted to the Stationers’ Company that undergirded the mutually beneficial system of press regulation (see Section 3.2). Under that system, with a few exceptions, only a Stationer could legally reproduce a text and so the vast majority of writers had no choice but to give or sell their manuscripts to a member of the Company, who would then document his (or occasionally her) claim to it by having it licensed by a Company authority and perhaps paying a small fee to have it entered it into the Stationers’ Register as insurance against any future disputes. Such disputes over “copies” would be resolved within the Company, which had its own court overseen by the senior members. This “right to copy” existed in perpetuity and so could be bequeathed or sold or divided as the owner wished. There was no such thing as the public domain. Had things continued as they were in 1667, the heirs or assigns of Samuel Simmons would still possess the exclusive right to reproduce Paradise Lost, which they had purchased from Milton for £5, with the promise of another £5 after 1300 copies were sold and two additional payments of £5 if the poem ran into successful second and third editions. However, with the collapse of Licensing in 1695 came something close to a collapse of the right to copy as it was then conceived. The Stationers’ Company lost its monopoly and booksellers found themselves without any legal recourse when “pirates” wanted to produce unauthorized editions of texts that they had purchased or inherited and thought they owned. A certain amount of moral suasion and/or bullying could be brought to bear on fellow members of the Company, but copyright holders were largely powerless against interlopers and those, like Henry Hills, Jr., who simply did not care about preserving the good will of their colleagues. Hills had served as a messenger of the press in the late 1680s and 1690s, but by the middle of Queen Anne’s reign he was reprinting The Tatler and hundreds of sermons and poems, often as small single‐sheet octavos claiming on the title page to be published “For the Benefit of the Poor” (Dawes 1707). The books in question were not particularly attractive  –  one satirist mocked “Pirate Hill’s brown Sheets, and scurvy Letter” (Gay 1974, p. 40) – but they cost only a small fraction of the authorized editions. Nor was Hills alone: the 15 years after the end of Licensing saw a huge spike in the number of (generally cheap) reprints published by someone other than the bookseller who had purchased the manuscript. As we have seen, these “piracies” (which, in reality, violated no law) contributed in a major way to media events like the Sacheverell affair. But they left booksellers feeling like their hard‐ won property could evaporate at any moment. Indeed, Defoe proclaimed “the printing of other Mens Copies” to be “every jot as unjust as lying with their Wives, and breaking‐up their Houses” (Defoe 1704, p. 21). Once it became clear that the old system of Licensing would not be returning, therefore, the Stationers began to push for some new form of legal protection to permanently

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secure what they regarded as their property, and through this process the modern concept of copyright would ultimately, if fitfully and circuitously, emerge. Their attempts to get such a bill through Parliament failed in 1707, but in the spring of 1710 “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, By Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, During the Times Therein Mentioned” was passed (for the text of the act, see Deazley 2004, pp. 233–238). As its title suggests, the statute gave the owner of a copyright “sole right and liberty” to reproduce a text. However, one did not have to be a member of the Stationers’ Company to possess such rights, which were now limited to a specified period of time: 21 years for texts already in print, and 14 years for new texts, after which, if the author was still alive, the rights reverted to him and he could claim or transfer them for another 14 years. It was expected that, in most cases, authors would continue to sell their manuscripts outright to a bookseller, thereby transferring the copyright. For this reason, registration was still to be handled through entry in the Company’s “Register‐Book … in such manner as hath been usual.” But ownership was now, at least theoretically, decoupled from membership in the Stationers’ Company. It seems unlikely that the drafters of the legislation cared that much about authors. Rather, they were, once again, opposed to monopolies on general principle. Authors were a rhetorically convenient way of turning the Stationers’ breathless claims against them: during their lobbying for a perpetual copyright exclusive to themselves, the Stationers had repeatedly described how much they had paid authors for manuscripts and so how much the “Widows and Children [of authors] who at present Subsist wholly by the Maintainance of this Property” would be left destitute if they did not receive the protection they sought (quoted in Rose 1993, p. 43). However, implicit in the idea that the ownership of copies was vested “in the Authors or Purchasers” was a conception of texts modeled upon Locke’s conception of property more generally. In this way of thinking, texts were the result of individual “Labour” (thought, expression) “mixed … with” what was previously “common to all Men” – language – and thereby made the “Property” of that specific person (Locke 1967, pp. 305– 306). This notion was to cause problems for decades to come because it suggested that authors and their assigns had a natural, common law right to their texts, rather than simply a temporary privilege granted to them by Parliament as a means of encouraging a socially beneficial goal. The former should, logically, be perpetual; ownership of other things did not automatically disappear after 14 or 21 years. However, the statute made it clear that the term of copyright was limited, just as it was for patents on mechanical inventions. Read one way, the statute seemed like it was just confirming and protecting a pre‐existing common‐law right to literary property. Read another, it created the ownership of which it spoke, and there was no right other than what it explicitly granted. Hence while the letter of the law said that texts already in print when the statute went into effect would cease to be protected by copyright in April 1731, the trade collectively ignored that expiration date and carried on as if copyright was still effectively perpetual. And the courts often obliged them: for example, in 1735 granting an injunction against the reprinting of Richard Allestree’s 1657 devotional work, The Whole Duty of Man (Rose 1993, p. 51). Such injunctions, while not official legal determinations, were often enough to discourage would‐be competitors. Nor was this just a matter of preserving copyrights long held, although that was often where the real money lay. Booksellers routinely acted as if the law had no force when it came to the acquisition of new titles. Accordingly, it is not particularly unusual that the contract in which Benjamin Martyn

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transferred the copyright to his 1730 tragedy, Timoleon, specified that its purchaser would “enjoy the Right … for ever, any Law or Statute to the contrary … notwithstanding” (the contract is reproduced in Milhous and Hume 2015, p. 86). In the face of the trade’s acting “as if the Act meant what they wanted it to mean” (Feather 1987, p. 5), aspiring competitors had four principal options, none of them without peril. They could directly pirate books, giving them a false or misleading imprint and hoping enough could be sold quietly, perhaps through trade publishers, to make a profit before the copyright owner noticed and was able to clamp down, either legally or by bullying the vendors. A good example would be the 1729 octavo of Pope’s Dunciad Variorum supposedly “printed for A. Dob” – some of the authorized editions had been distributed by Anne Dodd (Ximenes, item 101). Similarly, ambitious entrepreneurs could forge volumes to make them look as if they were produced before the statute went into effect. For instance, the British Library holds a copy of Congreve’s Love for Love that closely resembles, at least on its title page, the 1695 first edition. But its text is clearly drawn from either the heavily revised 1710 edition or its 1719–1720 reprint (Milhous and Hume 2015, p. 74). Openly pirating either of the latter would risk prosecution. Quietly producing something that looked outwardly like the 1695 edition and selling a few copies at a time could make it appear as if you were just getting rid of some old stock. Another option was simply to take the law at its own word and risk the wrath of those still asserting ownership. Texts already in print in 1710 supposedly entered the public domain in 1731. So in theory, Robert Walker was legally in the clear when, in 1734, he began to publish individual plays of Shakespeare’s and offer them for just 4d (when they would normally have gone for 1s or 1s 6d, if they were even available: most of Shakespeare’s work was only sold as part of expensive multi‐volume sets). However, the Tonson family, who had owned the copyright to Shakespeare for several decades, was not about to give up its monopoly. After threats and bribery did not work, the Tonsons began their own series at 3d a play, combined with an advertising campaign declaring Walker’s editions “Useless, Pirated, and Maim’d” and mocking them for including “TATE’s KING LEAR instead of SHAKESPEAR’s,” despite the fact that Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, notorious for its happy ending, had been the only version to appear on stage in more than half a century (London Prodigal 1734, p. 131; Tragedy of Locrine 1734, p. 60). A price war ensued, the market was flooded by the Tonsons with copies that went for as little as 1d (and were produced in editions as large as 10 000), and Walker was forced to admit defeat. His stock was bought up by one of the Tonsons’ partners, the cheap copies were withdrawn from the market, and prices soared back up to where they had been prior to Walker’s intrusion. The effect on prices was temporary, but many thousands more copies of Shakespeare were in the hands of the public than the putative “Proprietors” would otherwise have ever produced. The final option was geographic. The statute only covered books produced in Great Britain (that is, England, Scotland, and Wales), which meant that publications originating in Ireland  –  a separate kingdom with the same monarch  –  or elsewhere could appear with impunity, so long as they were not imported into Britain. However, the penalties specified for doing so were not very severe. Accordingly, a quiet but substantial trade was done with Irish and, to a lesser extent, Dutch reprints. For example, the Hague publisher Thomas Johnson brought out upwards of 60 English plays, Pope’s

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Works and translation of the Iliad, and a number of other titles in the 1710s and 1720s (McMullin 1993). He did not own the rights to any of them. In the Netherlands, that was not a problem; indeed, he was providing a valuable service for expatriates. But in Britain, Johnson’s books were illegal and so had to be smuggled in, sometimes bearing false imprints, such as “London, Printed for the Company,” to make their origins more obscure. The same was true, on a larger scale, with Irish books (although, of course, they also served the not insignificant Irish market). Indeed, London booksellers lobbied Parliament repeatedly in the later 1730s for additional protection against the Irish and Dutch imports that were undercutting their wares, not only in the metropolis, but also in provincial towns like Preston, Lancashire, where one bookseller testified he was present “when a Bale of Books arrived from Dublin.” This shipment was comprised entirely of reprints of “English Books” (that is, books protected by English copyrights), including William Burdon’s The Gentleman’s Pocket‐Farrier (Journal of the House of Commons March 12, 1735). Eventually, a law was passed in 1739, forbidding the importation of any book in English that had been printed or reprinted within England or Wales in the preceding 20 years and imposing stiffer penalties than had been implicit in the 1710 statute. The new penalties drove smuggling further underground, but hardly stopped the influx. Cheaper paper, sometimes cheaper labor or “hidden abridgment,” and not having to pay anything to authors meant that Irish and Dutch books could almost always be offered at a lower price (Raven 2007, pp. 232–233). For example, a Dublin reprint of The Dunciad Variorum was available for about a third of the price of the authorized London editions, which retailed for 6s 6d (Ximenes, item 105; Foxon 1991, p. 114). Many readers had no qualms about breaking the law when it meant they could afford books otherwise beyond their reach.

5.6 ­Print’s Growing Entanglement with Everyday Life Perhaps the single biggest development of the period we have been exploring is also the hardest to pin down. Put simply, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, print became an inescapable, commonplace, and hence largely unremarkable part of daily life for most Britons, whether or not they were literate or had the disposable income to purchase anything printed. Obviously, this state of affairs had been a long time coming and no single tipping point can be identified with confidence. But some indication of the sheer ubiquity of print in the opening decades of the eighteenth century can be seen in its apparently unquestioned use in aspects of life that had previously thrived without it. Two quick examples should suffice. In 1701, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge set out to reform the working poor. They sent “800 of the King’s Cautions against Swearing” to “the Hackney Coachmen,” 1000 pamphlets against drunkenness and another 1000 against “Uncleanness” to the admirals for distribution to their sailors, and 5000 copies of The Soldier’s Monitor to enlisted men in the army (Hoppit 2000, p. 237). Campaigns to improve the conduct of the lower orders were nothing new in 1701. But the presumption that that was best done by thrusting tracts into their hands marks a significant change in strategy, one that testifies not only to a new sense of the literacy of the poor, but also to a new faith in the power of print to reach even the most entrenched of reprobates.

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Or consider the case of John Cannon, a 16‐year‐old Somerset boy, whose mother caught him “being bolder than ordinary in reading” Nicholas Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives and then confiscated the book, making it impossible for Cannon to “see or finger it afterwards” (Cannon 2010, vol. 1, p. 36). Teenage boys finding unorthodox ways to masturbate probably dates back to prehistory. But having readily available printed images with which to do it points to just how much the products of the press had become irrevocably entangled with everyday life. For better or worse, Britain had become suffused with print – so much so, that new institutions were required to help its inhabitants manage their interactions with it and keep from drowning. It is with these institutions that we will begin our next chapter.

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6 Managing the Flood of Print, 1740–1780 The last chapter closed with a brief exploration of the growing ubiquity of print in even the most intimate aspects of life. Most of the features of the decades we are about to explore could be described as an attempt to manage or come to terms with that ubiquity, which felt to many like a flood threatening to overwhelm all in its path. We begin around 1740, when circulating libraries and other institutions enabling ordinary readers to engage with books without having to purchase them became a staple of metropolitan life. We close in the years surrounding 1780, after a series of court decisions invalidated the claims to perpetual copyright and other monopolies that had been at the heart of English bookselling since the advent of print. These rulings promised (and largely delivered) a world of unregulated, cheap reprints of older titles that would transform the bookscape beyond recognition and set the stage for the mechanical changes in printing and paper manufacture that would thrust the nineteenth century into modernity.

6.1 ­Keeping One’s Head Above Water Three major innovations of the period we are now exploring can help illuminate its profoundly felt need for help in coping with the sheer amount of print on offer: commercialized book sharing in places like circulating and coffeehouse libraries, routine book reviewing, and a newfound effort to visually distinguish books according to which segment of the market they served. None of these were wholly new, but they became customary and expected in the mid‐eighteenth century and flourished as never before. It is worth noting that there was not necessarily much more textual material being produced in the 1740s than in the preceding two decades, although the 1750s and 1760s did see a noticeable rise in the number of titles (see Figure 4.1). Nor were there significantly more readers (most of the increasing demand is probably the result of the social elite purchasing more books). But Samuel Johnson spoke for many when he insisted that “one of the peculiarities which distinguish the present age is the multiplication of books,” and so Britons began to search out tools that could help them navigate their way through the sea of print, rather than drown in it (Johnson 1963, p. 264). One strategy for dealing with the rising tide was simply to decouple the time available for reading from the funds available to purchase material to read. Much of the gentry and not a few of the “middling sort” were willing and eager to read more than they could afford to acquire. Books could be borrowed from one’s friends, relations, and The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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employers, of course, but doing so depended upon their having acquired something of interest and was necessarily caught up in the ongoing social dynamics of those relationships. Among peers, book sharing could often further cement friendships, as it seems to have done for Thomas Thistlewood, a small plantation owner in Jamaica, who borrowed from and lent to other landowners a range of titles, many of which had nothing to do with the day‐to‐day brutality of slaveholding and sugar cultivation: for example, John Armstrong’s versified sex‐ed manual, The Oeconomy of Love, Jean‐Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Hall 1989, pp. 87, 244, 252). But in a more hierarchical relationship (say, between a vivacious young woman and her more reserved and pious guardians) the desired book would, most likely, not only be unavailable, but the very request for it could cause problems. Hence the appeal, at least among the reasonably well‐heeled, of a (relatively non‐judgmental) commercial establishment that would rent books to all who were willing to pay. Ad hoc rental arrangements with booksellers eager to earn a little extra from their stock go back to the earliest days of print – occasionally a note from a Stationer detailing the arrangement can still be found written in an early book – but the stand‐alone circulating library is largely a creation of the 1740s (Allan 2008, pp. 125–126). The basic business model is one still familiar to us from streaming video and DVD rentals. For three or four shillings a quarter (or 10½ to 12 shillings a year), one could subscribe to a circulating library and read as much of its collection as one liked. This was a far from negligible sum and beyond the reach of most of the population, but for avid readers with the means to do so, it opened up an exponentially larger world of reading than they could afford to own. Consider only the case of novels, the genre with which circulating libraries were most closely identified. Depending on whether and how they were bound, most mid‐century fiction ran to several volumes and sold for 2½s sewn (that is, in paper wrappers or boards) or 3s bound per volume. Indeed, the most canonical novels of the period (Tom Jones and Clarissa) originally appeared in six and seven volumes, respectively. So for less than it would cost to purchase a single copy of those (admittedly quite lengthy) titles, which could be plowed through in a week or two, one could rent an entire year’s worth of reading from a circulating library. Some libraries had different levels of membership, which dictated how many volumes one could have out at a given time. Some offered the option of just renting an individual title for 2d without having to join, or made subscriptions available by the week to attract those only visiting the area. But all provided the possibility to become, in the words of Fanny Price, “a renter, a chuser of books!” (Austen 1814, vol. 3, p. 191). Lest we forget, this was not nearly as clear an option in other realms of pleasure, as “Sukey Saunter” sarcastically pointed out in a letter to The Morning Post: “Are the two play‐houses better than circulating libraries? … at Mr. Noble’s [a circulating library] we may chuse our entertainment, and there the managers chuse it for us” (February 3, 1775). And the circulating libraries offered the possibility of choice not only in London (where there were at least 20 operating by 1760, some with collections numbering in the thousands), but also in an increasing number of provincial towns, including places like Beverley, Chelmsford, and Penrith, whose populations were only a few thousand. There was a similar spread in Ireland, Scotland, and the North American colonies, including Annapolis, Belfast, Boston, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, and Philadelphia. Circulation records for the commercial libraries are almost non‐existent for the period we are investigating, but the few that do survive suggest that “book buying and

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borrowing are very different activities, even if they are carried out by the same person.” Novels and works of travel writing tended to be rented, while almanacs and self‐­ evidently “serious books,” like Paradise Lost or Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, were purchased (Fergus 1984, pp. 171, 190). No doubt the twain occasionally met, but probably not that often. The narrator of The Life and Opinions of Jeremiah Kunastrokius (1760) admits that his hope that “immediately after you have read this Book from the Circulating Library, you were to take the Money out of your Pocket, in order to purchase it, and become the sole Proprietor” is highly improbable (p. 86). As a result, despite the wider range of titles that most of their collections contained, circulating libraries came to be thought of first and foremost as purveyors of novels and so, for the crusty moralists who hysterically denounced the form, one of the “great inlets of vice and debauchery” connecting the metropolis to the countryside (Craddock 1774?, p. 53). The idea was that were it not for the titillating tales of adultery and defiance of paternal authority that novels contained, young people would never have had such thoughts. Hence as Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals puts it, “a circulating library in a town is … an ever‐green tree, of diabolical knowledge! – It blossoms through the year! – And depend on it, … they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last” (Sheridan 1775, p. 12). In addition to the circulating libraries, there were several other options for multiplying the number of books to which one could have access. Across the empire, hundreds, perhaps thousands of clubs were formed to pool the funds and collections of somewhere between 6 and 25 like‐minded individuals, mostly minor clergy and earnest men of the “middling sort.” Members would each contribute 8–12 shillings a year to finance new acquisitions of mutual interest, and books whose appeal had been exhausted would be sold off to make the club’s budget go perhaps 50% further (Allan 2008, pp. 32, 44, 46). Sometimes the club would meet to read aloud and discuss the books purchased, perhaps over a well‐lubricated dinner; other times, the club was simply a convenient means for its members to gain individual access to more than they could separately afford. Several of these clubs, including Benjamin Franklin’s Junto, were later transformed into subscription libraries  –  in Franklin’s case, the (still operating) Library Company of Philadelphia. Subscription libraries demanded a more expensive and lasting ­commitment than the circulating libraries and featured permanent collections of high‐minded nonfiction that could further the process of collective and respectable self‐improvement. Not surprisingly, given the barriers to women’s participation in most of the prestigious kinds of public activities, both the clubs and the subscription libraries were overwhelmingly male institutions. An intriguing alternative to the circulating and subscription libraries, at least for men in London – and to a lesser extent, Cambridge and Oxford – were the collections maintained by a number of coffeehouses (see Ellis 2009). These specialized in pamphlets and periodicals, including back issues that others had discarded; indeed, James Boswell had to go to one to find his “old essays,” since neither he nor the publisher of the paper in which they had appeared several years earlier had bothered to keep copies (Boswell 1959, p. 172). The collections did not circulate, but they included all sorts of things that the other libraries were likely to pass over as too controversial, ephemeral, or immoral, such as The Secret History of Pandora’s Box, a 1742 piece of faux‐classical scholarship that, according to its title page, “displayed” “the Characteristical Parts of the Fair Sex … proving that nothing in Nature is more beautiful” and worthy of veneration.

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Similarly, Tom’s Coffee‐House – run by the Twining family that founded the tea company still operational today  –  had, among the titles it acquired in 1752, a bunch of pamphlets on Mary Blandy (who poisoned her father with arsenic, later claiming she thought it was a love potion that would make him look more favorably on her suitor, a bigamous Scottish aristocrat) and a run of Bonnell Thornton’s Have at You All: or The Drury‐Lane Journal, a sheet‐and‐a‐half octavo monthly devoted to mocking other periodicals in a wonderfully over‐the‐top fashion (see Figure 6.1). It is easy to imagine the patrons of Tom’s boisterously roaring over the snarky jabs made by its editorial persona, Madam Roxana Termagant, toward the wit of some of the rival coffeehouses, who mistakenly believed that she was a pseudonym for one of their own. And presumably the denizens of the Bank coffeehouse, whose copy of Have at You All has also survived, had some choice things to say about the acumen of the devotees of Tom’s. Moreover, such pleasures were available for potentially far less than it cost to join a circulating library: membership was only 1s a year, although one was also expected to purchase caffeinated or alcoholic beverages on a fairly regular basis. But gaining access to more reading material than one could afford to purchase did not  solve the problems posed by what Johnson called “the multiplication of books.” If anything, it risked making them worse: there were just that many more opportunities

Figure 6.1  The Tom’s Coffee‐House copy of Have at You All; or, The Drury‐Lane Journal. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR3735.T3 H3 1752.

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to feel ashamed or left out for not having read what supposedly everyone else was reading. Some sort of guide or intermediary was necessary that could help readers figure out what was worth spending their time on, what they should be able to talk about without necessarily having read (an important skill, then as now), and what they should avoid altogether. As we saw in Section 5.1, a similar need had led in the early 1730s to the advent of The Gentleman’s Magazine and its imitators, which excerpted the supposed best of a wide range of periodicals. In May 1749, The Monthly Review was launched to fill this gap in the realm of books, offering its services, as the advertisement at the end of the first issue puts it, at a time “when the abuse of title‐pages is obviously come to such a pass, that few readers care to take in a book, any more than a servant, without a recommendation.” Initially a mostly descriptive venture promising to “shew” its readers “by a fair Representation, what they may really expect from any new Piece, before they lay out their Time and Money on it” (advertisement in The General Advertiser, December 20, 1749), the Monthly was pushed to become more evaluative – and often rude or dismissive – by what would become its greatest rival, The Critical Review, founded in 1756. Other journals and regular review sections in the newspapers and magazines soon followed. Periodicals devoted to book reviews were not an entirely new phenomenon, but previous attempts, mostly short‐lived, had been much spottier in their coverage and tended to focus on learned treatises, rather than works of probable interest to the general public. The individual articles in the Reviews were all anonymous, which encouraged cutting (and sometimes catty) pronouncements and disguised how many of them were done by the same few individuals or involved conflicts of interest: James Boswell and Oliver Goldsmith both reviewed books that they themselves had written; Ralph Griffiths, editor of the Monthly, went so far as to review the Memoirs of Fanny Hill, which he had published and for which he had been arrested only four months earlier (see Section 6.2). And the reviews were not always particularly timely, especially when it came to novels, which often had made whatever splash they were going to make before a review ever appeared. Nonetheless, the Reviews quickly established themselves as permanent (and for many, indispensable) institutions mediating the relationship between books and their readers, many of whom supposedly “scarce ever ventur[ed] to purchase without the Sanction of their Opinion” (The Public Advertiser, May 14, 1761). The Monthly’s circulation shot up from between 500 and 1000 copies an issue in 1749 to 2500 an issue in 1758 to 3500 an issue in 1776, even as its price remained constant at 1s (Knapp 1958, pp. 216–217). George III, for whom price was no obstacle, still made a point of asking Johnson which Review “was the best” on the one occasion when they met (Boswell 1934, vol. 2, p. 40). And Frances Burney even dedicated her first novel, Evelina, “to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews.” However, the prominence of the Reviews was not simply a reward for their labors as the self‐proclaimed “literary police” devoted to preventing their readers “from being gulled out of their money” (Critical Review, January 1766, p. 61; June 1764, p. 439). They also quickly became a source of advertising blurbs and a convenient means of keeping up on a wide range of reasonably current publications. Indeed, the extracts that accompanied (and padded) many of the individual reviews were often substantial enough to make reading the actual books superfluous, or at least to make authors and booksellers complain that such culling had made their customers “neither … inclined to purchase, nor even look into, the rifled nursery, where [these flowers] originally grew” (Mallet 1759, p. xi). It is not surprising then that subscriptions to the Reviews were among the

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first things that many book clubs spent their money on (Allan 2008, pp. 37, 43): they instantly multiplied the number of useful or entertaining books that their members could at least know something about, even as they offered reassurance as to how many other books could be skipped without regret. They were similarly popular with subscription libraries (Forster 2001, p. 187). And like the satire we were considering in Section 5.4, the Reviews, especially the Critical, made a point of dividing up the reading public, so that their subscribers could scornfully dismiss other groups, such as the “novel readers, from the stale maiden of quality to the snuff‐taking chambermaid,” who, possessed by “a sort of fames canina [dog‐like hunger] … devoured the first part” of Tristram Shandy “with a most voracious swallow, and rejected the last with marks of loathing and aversion” (Critical Review, April 1761, p. 316). Similarly, the patrons of circulating libraries were dismissed as “idle templars, raw prentices, and green girls” – lazy law students, inexperienced apprentices, and adolescent girls with unsatisfied sexual longings (Critical Review, November 1756, p. 379). The Reviews could help readers decide what they wanted to peruse next, and printed catalogs could assist them in figuring out whether it was available from the circulating or subscription libraries to which they had access (although the actual retrieval of the books was generally done by an employee). In coffeehouse libraries, apparently one just asked the waiter, either for a specific title or simply the latest publications. But none of those aids would necessarily help when confronted with a mass of books that one could scan and perhaps browse through: in a bookshop (which were becoming larger and more common), at a market stall, on a table in someone’s private library. Hence the third major development of the period: the emergence of more sophisticated and striking ways of visually distinguishing different kinds of books from one another. Of course, as we have seen, distinctions by size and quality of workmanship long pre‐date the invention of print, and distinctions by typeface were being made by 1500 or so. But the mid‐eighteenth century saw some significant advances in the visual differentiation of books for various segments of the market. Chief among these was the advent of more specialized forms of trade and publishers’ bindings. Traditionally, most volumes larger than a pamphlet in Britain were stored in sheets and bound as demand required by their wholesaler or retailer. Contrary to long‐standing bibliographic myth, while it was almost always possible to purchase a book in sheets and commission a binding of one’s choice from a third party, the vast majority of books, especially those in smaller formats, were sold bound. But their bindings were done by a variety of people at a variety of times in a variety of places. Accordingly, while there were certainly strong period and national conventions in binding, there was no reason to expect visual uniformity across an edition: a copy bound in London one year would bear, at best, a family resemblance to one bound in York the next, and even books sold wholesale at more or less the same time would be “placed with multiple binders” “to insure that sufficient copies would be available,” because binding was a labor‐intensive process still done largely the same way as described in Section 1.4. Spreading out the orders in this way “guaranteed that such editions appeared in diverse bindings” (Bennett 2004, pp. 57, 59). Beginning in the mid‐eighteenth century, however, several kinds of books began to bear a distinct, uniform appearance that set them apart from the general mass of volumes bound in calf or sheepskin (or, for particularly luxurious bindings, goatskin). For example, circulating libraries often used leather just for the spine and perhaps the corners of their books, covering the boards themselves with marbled paper (see Figure 6.2).

Managing the Flood of Print, 1740–1780

Figure 6.2  The characteristic “half‐bound volumes, with marbled covers” that visually distinguished the holdings of an eighteenth‐century circulating library. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR3291.A1 A28.

Paper was marbled by touching it against swirled paint that, with the aid of ox gall (which changes surface tension), had been floated upon a solution of water and some sort of gum. The use of marbled paper saved on costs, of course, but it also served as advertising: one could easily tell which books came from a circulating library. The pages in circulating library copies were also generally left uncut – that is, without cutting off the “deckled” or ragged edges that were a by‐product of the papermaking process (Bennett 2004, p. 53). That way, if the book was subsequently purchased (the collections of many libraries overlapped with the stock of a bookseller), its edges could then be trimmed when the book was rebound, giving it “every appearance of being new” (The Use of Circulating Libraries 1797, p. 28). The more frequently one encountered these “half‐bound volumes, with marbled covers,” the more ubiquitous and potentially attractive the circulating libraries might seem. Of course, given the strong association between circulating libraries and the novel, that ubiquity could also feed the flames of anti‐novelistic hysteria: Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals concluded by the mere sight of two such bindings in the hands of Lydia Languish’s maid “how full of duty … her mistress” would prove (Sheridan 1775, p. 12). A similar kind of visual distinction emerged in the new realm of children’s books. Traditionally, children from economically comfortable families read either religious texts (say, James Janeway’s 1671 A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the

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Figure 6.3  The “Dutch paper” binding used on many eighteenth‐century children’s books. Source: Courtesy of Bromer Booksellers.

Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of several young Children) or the chapbooks  –  abridged and crudely illustrated versions of chivalric romance  – ­primarily targeted at the rural adult poor. In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, Uncle Toby (a gentleman with enough independent wealth to spend his days reenacting battles in miniature on his bowling green) spent his “pocket money” as a boy on “Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Parismus and Parismenus, and Valentine and Orson, and the Seven Champions of England” (Sterne 1760–1767, vol. 6, p. 127). Similarly, during his first extended visit to London, James Boswell sought out the bookseller who “ushered into the World of Literature, Jack and the Giants, The seven wise men of Gotham and other Storybooks which in my dawning years amused me as much as Rasselas does now” (Boswell 2010, p. 267). But starting in the 1740s, booksellers, especially Thomas Boreman and John Newbery, began regularly to publish books specifically written for children, such as Gigantick Histories (a set of miniature guidebooks to popular London attractions, complete with ghost stories) or The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread, A Little Boy who lived upon Learning. These tended to be quite small  –  the Gigantick Histories averaged 6 × 4 cm – and were far more didactic than most children today would enjoy (Roscoe 1973, p. 7). Nonetheless, they created an important and lasting new niche in the market. In order to make these objects more alluring, both for children with their own money and the “CHILDREN SIX FOOT HIGH” (A Collection of Pretty Poems 1757?, title page) who accompanied them, their boards were covered with brightly colored – and sometimes gilt – “Dutch paper” printed in a floral pattern (see Figure 6.3). Compared to the sea of brown that a shelf of ordinary bindings would present, these bursts of pink, yellow, green, red, and purple would have stood out and marked a book as something likely to appeal to a child, perhaps even something to be bought as a gift

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intended simply to delight, rather than instruct or improve the soul. To make it an especially memorable acquisition, one could sometimes add a toy: A Little Pretty Pocket‐ Book (1760) advertised on its title page not only that it included “Two Letters from Jack the Giant‐Killer,” but also that for an additional 2d it came with a ball and a pincushion to “infallibly make Tommy a good boy, and Polly a good Girl.” And in an attempt to ensure repeat customers, Newbery’s books made a point of mentioning his other wares, both textual and pharmaceutical: in order to demonstrate “something … better than money,” a character in The Twelfth‐Day Gift (1767) took “Mr. Newbery’s Valentine’s Gift out of her Pocket” and read a fable (p. 127), while the father of the heroine of The History of Little Goody Two‐Shoes (1766) “died miserably” when he was “seized with a violent Fever in a Place where Dr. James’s Powder was not to be had” (p. 13). Unsurprisingly, Newbery was the principal London retailer of the latter. Visual distinction could also be a mark of geography and so of one’s place in the fast‐ growing empire. British books destined for the colonies were mostly exported bound in calfskin (although in 1767 the Nova Scotia Gazette was advertising “all Mr Newbery’s pretty books,” so they were probably shipped in their Dutch paper covers). Books printed in the colonies, on the other hand, tended to be bound in sheepskin “probably because the production of salt beef for the Caribbean discouraged the early slaughter of cattle” (Amory 2007, p. 54). Additionally, colonial books were typically shorter, smaller, and, with the exception of almanacs and sermons, reprints of older “steady sellers.” So without even opening a volume, a colonist could tell from the color and grain of the leather surrounding it whether the book was something local or if it hailed from the far‐off metropolis, and could make a good guess as to whether it contained anything topical or current, at least in a secular way. Sometimes, of course, a volume’s being visually distinguishable as a particular sort of book could be an embarrassment or liability. Yet in the face of “the multiplication of books,” it was still helpful – and often imperative – that a book’s nature be able to be determined by a quick glance within. Accordingly, certain segments of the market began to develop more sophisticated methods of self‐designation. For example, a few texts started to be printed in both regular editions and in a “Large Letter, for the Curious, Aged, and such as cannot use a smaller Print” (Lancaster 2011). They might cost a bit more: the large print edition of An Answer to all the Excuses and Pretenses which Men ordinarily make for their not coming to the Holy Communion sold for an additional 3d, largely because it took up five sheets, rather than only two. But someone with impaired vision could, by flipping to any random opening in the book, immediately determine that it was designed for them and so would make preparing for the sacrament a less demanding experience, at least optically. And occasionally, the title page would offer a subtle hint to signal the aid it offered while attempting to avoid the notice of those inclined to sneer at the infirmities of age: a frequent source of cruel humor in the eighteenth century (see Dickie 2011). Consider only Benjamin Franklin’s 1744 edition of Cicero’s Cato Major, or, His Discourse of Old‐Age. As he explains in the preface, Franklin used “a large and fair Character,” including on the title page (see Figure 6.4), so that its purchasers might “not … by the Pain small Letters give the Eyes, feel the Pleasure of the Mind in the least allayed” (Cicero 1744, p. v). But the care with which he laid out and printed the book could easily make it seem like the principal attraction of the volume was its graceful design (it is quite possibly the most elegant book ever produced in colonial North America), rather than the size of its type or its subject matter.

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Figure 6.4  Large print for readers who need “to think on the Subject of OLD‐AGE.” Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PA6296.C2 1744.

Managing the Flood of Print, 1740–1780

A more elaborate set of techniques for self‐designation arose with the expansion of home‐grown erotica and pornography that began in the 1740s. Traditionally, most texts of this type were in French or Italian (or were translated from those languages) and were quietly sold to those who asked for them. The classic example is Samuel Pepys’s 1668 purchase of “that idle, roguish book, L’escholle des Filles; which I have bought in plain binding [simple leather without lettering or decoration] … because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand … among [my books], to disgrace them if it should be found.” The next day, he “read through” it, masturbated, and “after I had done it,” destroyed the evidence (Pepys 1970–1983, vol. 9, pp. 57–59). But in the period we are now investigating, a new kind of erotica was being developed in English, one that aimed more at being the center of a jokey homosociality than the object of solitary pleasure. These new texts were more openly advertised and sold, especially to all‐male groups, such as army officers (Harvey 2004, pp. 54–55). But in the wake of Edmund Curll’s conviction for obscene libel (discussed in Section 5.2), a certain amount of discretion was still warranted. Hence the popularity of forms of self‐designation that required a little – but only a little – perusing of the volume in question. For example, at first glance A New Description of Merryland. Containing A Topographical, Geographical, and Natural History of that Country looks plausibly like a work of travel writing (or perhaps, given the name of the country, satirical faux‐travel writing). It is only several paragraphs into the preface that we learn that the author’s name is “ROGER PHEUQUEWELL,” which then sets the stage for an extended pseudo‐geographical tour of the female body, including a note that some sailors, rather than approach by “the upper Course … called LPS [lips]” or “the lower Course,” which requires running “boldly up the Straits of Tibia,” “incline sometimes to go about by the Windward‐Passage, but this I do not so well approve; in some Circumstances indeed it may be convenient, but I believe it is commonly done more for sake of Variety than Conveniency” (Stretser 1741, pp. i, 44–46). Lest anyone miss the joke, the bookseller “even seems to have had his printer use a damaged ‘E’ in some editions, so that the surname look[ed] more like ‘PHFUQUEWELL’” (Keymer 2009, p. 243). A disguise like this cannot bear any real scrutiny, but it allowed those in the know to quickly identify what sort of book it was without having to resort to the whispered inquiries and sales from under the counter that something like A Chinese Tale … or, Chamyam with her Leg upon a Table would have required, given its “curious Frontispiece” depicting a woman examining her genitals in a mirror (Hatchett 1740, title page). Perhaps that ability to appear semi‐publically was part of why A New Description of Merryland supposedly ran through seven authorized editions in its first three months, plus “some Thousands of pirated Copies that were sold in Town and Country” (Merryland Displayed 1741, p. 3).

6.2 ­The Unsustainability of Press Regulation The line between erotica, which was tolerable, at least legally speaking, and pornography, which was obscene, was a blurry one. In 1745 the government prosecuted the printer and sellers of The School of Venus (a retitled version of L’École des filles that Pepys had read and burned). Unlike A New Description of Merryland, The School of Venus was extremely explicit, both textually and in the “twenty‐four curious Copper‐ Plate Prints” that accompanied it. A similar charge targeted the persons responsible for

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A Compleat Set of Charts of the Coasts of Merryland (presumably a set of pornographic images). Yet no moves were made to clamp down on the Merryland texts or others like them. So the Griffiths brothers, Fenton and Ralph, could be forgiven for thinking in 1748 that they were in the clear to publish John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure: it avoided the “rank words” of a text like The School of Venus and was not illustrated. And for the novel’s first year, all was well. Indeed, Cleland later claimed, in a plea for leniency, that “more Clergymen bought it, in proportion, than any other distinction of men” (quoted in Foxon 1965, pp. 55, 54). But in November 1749, apparently under pressure from the bishops, the government arrested Cleland, Ralph Griffiths, and the book’s printer. It does not seem as if anything came of their court appearance. A few months later Griffiths published an abridged “pocket volume” as Memoirs of Fanny Hill, and advertised it as “divested of its obscenity” (British Magazine, March 1750, p. 144). The bishop of London was disgusted, calling the abridgment “the Lewdest thing I ever saw,” and asked the secretary of state “to stop the progress of this vile Book, which is an open insult upon Religion and good manners, and a reproach to the Honour of the Government, and the Law of the Country” (quoted in Foxon 1965, p. 57). Cleland, Griffiths, and the printer were again arrested, and again do not seem to have been much punished; indeed, there is a not wholly reliable story that Cleland was even rewarded with a pension of £100 a year to keep him from being tempted to write along these lines again. And both the full text and the abridgment were reprinted with impunity several times in the coming decades, despite a 1755 general warrant authorizing a search for “lewd and infamous Books and Prints” and “the Person or Persons, in whose Custody they shall be found” (Copies Taken 1763, p. 55). Presumably, Cleland was right to predict that the bishops could “take no step toward punishing the Author that will not powerfully contribute to the notoriety of the Book, and spread what they … wish supprest” (quoted in Foxon 1965, p. 54). However, these later editions often appeared with false imprints to suggest that they were just leftover copies of the first editions (Foxon 1965, pp. 59–63). This dynamic of unpredictable liability and arrest that did not necessarily lead to very draconian punishment is characteristic of the attempts at press regulation more generally in the period we are now investigating. Again and again, the government tried to crack down on material it found offensive or seditious. Again and again, its victories were at best pyrrhic or fleeting. Jury nullification of the sort we saw in Section 5.2 continued to be a significant obstacle in the government’s prosecutions of seditious libel, especially in London, which, as the center of the book trade, was necessarily where most of the cases had to be tried. The few convictions the government was able to obtain involved figures who posed no real threat to the regime, such as John Shebbeare, who was sentenced in 1758 to the pillory and imprisonment for libeling the long‐dead William III and George I as foreign kings who favored their native lands to Britain’s detriment. Even his time in the pillory was not much of a punishment, though: rather than being locked in it, he just leaned against it, with a servant holding an umbrella over his head. Embarrassed by the revelation of how much Sir Robert Walpole had spent on the press, the government abandoned direct subsidy of periodicals after he left office in 1742, although it continued to buy off individual writers and returned to subsidies in the early 1760s in an effort to counter the fierce criticism that greeted George III’s first prime minister, the Earl of Bute. Parliament continued to haul in and harass those it

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thought had insulted it and to order offending publications burned by the common hangman, even though doing the latter often publicized works that would otherwise have gone unnoticed by most readers. However, harassment became less effective as prominent members of the Opposition, including the Prince of Wales, began to quietly indemnify or compensate those who wrote or published on their behalf, thus removing the threat of financial ruin that had often accompanied high fines or imprisonment until exorbitant bail and sureties for good behavior could be raised (Hanson 1936, pp. 48, 52). The stamp tax was increased by ½d on newspapers in 1757, but as in 1712, a loophole was left puzzlingly open for papers of more than one sheet, which meant that almost as many new periodicals started up as were shut down by the tax. And Parliament’s 1765 attempt to extend the Stamp Act to the North American colonies (at a lower rate than was paid in Britain) was a complete disaster and one of the principal rallying cries binding the different colonies together in the run‐up to rebellion in 1775. Even the financial incentives offered to informers seemed less effective than they used to be: the printer of a paper supporting the radical politician John Wilkes (about whom more below) got himself arrested by his own assistant and taken before Wilkes in his capacity as a London magistrate. Wilkes then released him and sent the boy to the Treasury to claim the £50 reward (Morison 1932, p. 167, n. 2). All told, the strategies that had worked well enough in the 1710s and 1720s grew less and less tenable as the century wore on, and the approaches devised for other media – for example, the 1737 reintroduction of pre‐performance censorship for theatrical productions – rarely made much of a difference in the realm of books: indeed, passages or entire plays that the Lord Chamberlain’s Licenser had forbidden to be performed were freely printed, often with the offending lines somehow marked to call extra attention to them. The unsustainability of the government’s strategies for press regulation became blindingly obvious in 1763 with the prosecution of number 45 of The North Briton, a 2½d weekly journal published to counter the government‐subsidized The Briton. Its name was a jab at the Scots who were supposedly flooding London and taking all the good jobs, including that of prime minister. Its first 44 issues were certainly inflammatory, but no more than the rest of the Opposition press had been for decades. In number 45, however, the editor, John Wilkes, broke with tradition and took not only the king’s ministers to task, but also the king himself, describing George III’s speech to Parliament on the treaty ending the Seven Years’ War “as the most abandoned [that is, actively immoral] instance of ministerial effrontery ever attempted to be imposed on mankind” (April 23, 1763). The paper closed with a reminder of what had happened to the Stuarts when they embraced the kind of absolutist tyranny that George III was supposedly now being duped by his ministers into pursuing. The king was incensed and a general warrant was issued for everyone involved, with 48 arrests in three days (Siebert 1952, p. 378). Wilkes was among them, but as a Member of Parliament he was supposed to be immune from arrest while Parliament was in session. His attorneys submitted a writ of habeas corpus and he was released and began a suit for false arrest. Seventeen of the other men arrested filed their own suits and they were all awarded damages. Lord North later admitted that “the total cost … to the government amounted to more than £100 000” (Siebert 1952, p. 379). Parliament tried to make up for the government’s loss of face and proclaimed the paper a seditious libel, ordering it burned and Wilkes to appear before them to stand trial. In the meantime, Wilkes had fled to Paris after fighting a duel over another issue

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of The North Briton with an opponent paid £41 000 by the government for his “special and secret service” (quoted in Thomas 1969, p. 94). The Commons expelled Wilkes, he was tried in absentia, found guilty, and pronounced an outlaw. When he returned in 1768 and was elected to a new seat in Parliament, he was arrested for both The North Briton and a privately printed work of pornography, again found guilty, fined, and sentenced to almost two years in prison. However, on the day his sentence was supposed to begin, the authorities were met by a crowd of 6000 protestors, one of whom was killed by a government agent. The secretary of state offered the use of the army to suppress further mobs. Wilkes found out, published the secretary’s letter with choice commentary, and had his latest election to Parliament declared invalid. Over the next year, while still in prison, he was reelected three times, each one being declared invalid. He won his last election by a margin of more than 4:1 (Thomas 1969, p. 95). Not only had the government failed to silence one of its chief critics; as a result of its ham‐fisted attempts at prosecution (and arguably assassination), “Wilkes and Liberty” became a rallying cry throughout the Anglophone world. He remained an icon for decades and became the namesake for many people on both sides of the Atlantic, including President Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Any remaining hopes that the government’s strategies for press regulation might still accomplish their goals were dashed by the debacle of the “Junius” trials. “Junius,” named after the man who led the overthrow of the Roman monarchy and the creation of the republic, was the pseudonym of a (still unknown) contributor to The Public Advertiser, who spent most of 1769–1771 not only insisting that the prime minister deserved to die, but, like Wilkes, reminding the king of what had happened to the Stuarts: “The Prince, who imitates their Conduct, should be warned by their Example; and … remember that, as [George III’s title to the crown] was acquired by one Revolution [that of 1688–1689, which put the Hanoverians into the direct line of succession], it may be lost by another” (December 19, 1769). Indeed, “Junius” went so far as to predict the loss of the North American colonies, if the government continued on its current course (not something most other Britons would seriously contemplate until the shooting began six years later). The printer of the paper, Henry Woodfall, anticipated a market for such incendiary rhetoric and printed an additional 1750 copies of the issue in which these charges appeared. Nonetheless, it sold out by noon on the day of publication, and was immediately reprinted in several other newspapers and magazines. Woodfall and the printers of the other papers were arrested and prosecuted, along with John Almon, who sold one of the reprints in his bookshop. Of the six men charged, only Almon was convicted of anything, and his case was hardly a resounding finding of guilt: sale was technically considered a form of publication, and a master was legally responsible for the actions of his servants, hence a single copy sold by one of Almon’s servants, when he was out of the shop, counted as the publication of a seditious libel. The jury in Woodfall’s case refused to go even that far, finding him “guilty of printing and publishing only.” This was not one of the available options: a defendant was simply guilty or not guilty – a jury had no authority to say that someone was partially guilty of a particular charge. A retrial was therefore scheduled, but never pursued, supposedly because the foreman of the first jury “walked off with the prosecution’s only copy of Woodfall’s newspaper” – remember the entire edition had sold out – although that was probably just a convenient excuse for abandoning a case

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that looked unwinnable (Siebert 1952, p. 388). The other cases ended in outright jury nullification. Part of their objection was political: neither the ministry nor the king was very popular in these years, and many ordinary Britons were disinclined to help them prosecute their critics. But part of it was more principled: juries increasingly rankled against the procedural rules that kept them from determining whether or not a text was libelous, which was supposedly a matter of law that only the judge could determine. All that juries were supposed to do was to decide whether or not the person charged was responsible for the publication and if the text meant what the prosecution said it meant. Eventually the law would change, but not until Parliament acted in 1792.

6.3 ­The End of Perpetual Copyright The government was not alone in its increasing inability to control what appeared in print. The London booksellers’ claims to perpetual copyright were becoming less and less self‐evident. Starting in the 1740s, Scottish booksellers, convinced that the 1710 statute granted copyright for a limited term and only to those titles that had been entered into the Stationers’ Register, began to openly reprint popular English texts, often at a fraction of the cost of the London editions, and to sell them not only in Scotland, but also in England and the North American colonies. When sued by the London booksellers who claimed that they owned the rights to those titles, the Scottish Court of Session (to whom the 1710 statute gave jurisdiction over cases in Scotland) upheld the Scottish booksellers’ vision of copyright as a limited privilege granted by the statute, rather than a perpetual right under the common law. This meant that the Scottish booksellers were free to continue on this path, within the boundaries of Scotland. However, the English courts saw things quite differently, and so the two segments of the book trade were set on a collision course, not only by their competing commercial interests, but also by the peculiarity of having two legal systems operating within what had officially become a single nation. Ultimately, the question would be decided, at least in principle, in 1774 by the House of Lords, the highest court in the land. But that decision came only after decades of uncertainty, full of posturing and claims to be acting in the public interest on both sides. After their claims to perpetual ownership were rejected by the Scottish courts in 1748, the London booksellers turned back to harassment as their principal means of deterring would‐be competitors, both in Scotland and in the English provinces. John Baskerville, perhaps the single most gifted printer of the entire century, was threatened by Jacob and Richard Tonson with legal action if he tried to produce an edition of Paradise Lost in Birmingham and was ultimately only able to do so by crediting the Tonsons’ ownership on his title page and “acknowledging” in his preface “the generosity of Mr. Tonson; who with singular politeness complimented me with the privilege of printing an entire Edition” of a book that, by the 1710 statute, anyone was free to publish (Milton 1758, sigs. A3v–A4r). In 1759, the London booksellers organized a new campaign, sending letters to all the bookshops of England “offering to take off their hands any Scottish or other pirated editions of English books at the price they actually cost and to provide the same value in genuine English editions” (Rose 1993, p. 74). Those who

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refused this offer would be prosecuted. Soon thereafter, the Tonsons filed suit against a leading provincial bookseller, Benjamin Collins, in order to try to establish their legal claims once and for all. At issue was Collins’s sale of a Scottish reprint of The Spectator. The Tonsons’ father had lawfully purchased the copyright of The Spectator from Addison and Steele in 1711. However, by the terms of the 1710 statute, the text of the paper had been in the public domain for at least 20 years. So if the Scots were correct that copyright was only granted by the statute, then the Tonsons (and by extension anyone claiming a perpetual right) had no case. But if they could get a court to agree that the statute only confirmed a pre‐existing common law right, then they could immediately shut down the operations of the Scots, at least in England. It seems likely that the booksellers chose this moment to make their move because the newly appointed Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield, was thought to be sympathetic to their cause. However, the judges refused to allow the case to proceed when it became clear that the Tonsons were colluding behind the scenes with Collins and that he had no intention of appealing a judgment that went against him. Nonetheless, the lawyers for each side were allowed to make their arguments, which set the terms on which “the question of literary property” would be debated for the next 15 years. The plaintiffs argued that authors had a natural, Lockean right to the fruit of their labors and so their writings constituted a form of property that, like other sorts of property, was perpetual and could be sold or bequeathed. The defendants claimed, on the other hand, that texts were essentially ideas and, as such, had no material substance and so could not be property in the usual sense: any right to them was a temporary grant from the state as a form of encouragement, much like the patents to mechanical inventions. A similar case, Millar v. Taylor, was brought 10 years later (again in King’s Bench, this time without any collusion), and the English court found for the London booksellers, albeit in a split decision, which was highly unusual. However, this judgment was at odds with how the Scottish Court of Session had ruled. So in England, authors had a natural right to their work that continued in perpetuity and could be transferred, thereby giving the booksellers who purchased those rights a monopoly for all time. In Scotland, however, authors and their assigns (typically booksellers) only had the rights granted to them by the statute, and there was a widespread sense that preventing the establishment of such monopolies was in the public interest. The man who published some of the supposedly pirated books sold by Robert Taylor was Alexander Donaldson, a Scottish bookseller who had been reprinting English texts in Edinburgh for upwards of a decade. However, in 1763, he had opened a branch of his operation in London, advertising it as “The Only Shop for CHEAP BOOKS”: his wares sold for “thirty to fifty per cent under the usual London price” (Raven 2012–2013, p. 131). A “barrage of harassing Chancery lawsuits” (Rose 1993, p. 93) failed to shut him down; indeed Donaldson went on the offensive, denouncing the “unlawful combination, whereby the London booksellers have conspired to beat down all opposition, and to suppress the sale of every book reprinted in the other part of the united kingdom” (Donaldson 1764, p. 10). Donaldson quickly became public enemy number one for the London trade. Thomas Becket got a permanent injunction in the English Court of Chancery against Donaldson’s reprinting of James Thomson’s The Seasons in 1772, but the Scottish Court of Session ruled for Donaldson in a different case in 1773, so he appealed the earlier injunction to

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the House of Lords in an attempt to resolve the issue for both jurisdictions once and for all. In February 1774, after several weeks of passionate debate, both within Parliament and in the press, the Lords ruled overwhelmingly to overturn the injunction, despite the advice of the senior judges of England, the majority of whom favored the London booksellers’ theory of literary property as a common law right. As with the debate over the statute in 1710 (and that over Licensing in the mid‐1690s), the Lords’ rejection of the booksellers – and of the subsequent bill they quickly proposed that would have created, by statute, the rights they had previously claimed to already possess – seems to have largely come down to Parliament’s longstanding distrust of monopolies and their discomfort with violating the apparent intent of the 1710 statute in the name of a new kind of property. Regardless of their motives, however, their decision meant that copyright extended no further than what the statute granted (under its provisions, The Seasons had been part of the public domain since 1758). At long last, all of Britain was bound by the same law, which divided the world of texts into the comparatively recent, which were protected by copyright, and the older, which were available to all comers. Scholars have sometimes exaggerated the impact of Donaldson v. Becket. Prices did not immediately drop for out‐of‐copyright material, nor did Scottish and provincial printing instantly take off. And despite the London booksellers’ claims that they had lost £200 000 of capital overnight, there was not a sudden rush of bankruptcies. Indeed, many of the informal customs of the trade, when it came to literary property, remained unchanged. Authors even continued to be presented with contracts – such as one made in 1786 between Isaac Bickerstaff and William Lownds – that ceded their rights “for ever,” “any Law, Custom or Usage to the contrary … notwithstanding” (quoted in Milhous and Hume 2015, p. 87). Nonetheless, the Lords’ creation of a formal public domain marks a significant turning point in the history of the book in Britain. Among other things, it made it logistically possible for the London trade (which remained dominant) to print multi‐volume series that brought together the supposedly best English or British writers, regardless of who had originally published them, thereby giving material shape to the literary canon in a powerful and lasting way. Anthologies and series along these lines were not unheard of before 1774 – witness Robert Dodsley’s important Select Collection of Old Plays (1744), which reprinted most of the pre‐Civil War drama for the first time in a century – but, with the exception of a few Scottish ventures, which were not always available south of the Tweed, they had not attempted to systematically assemble all of the most celebrated authors of the language (because doing so would have been a logistical nightmare in terms of permissions and profit‐ sharing). And what few prior experiments in this vein existed certainly did not offer the attractive extras that became common after 1774, such as illustrations or Samuel Johnson’s “Prefaces, Biographical and Critical,” which remain some of the most e­ ngaging and insightful literary criticism ever written. Price might well still be an obstacle – the series Johnson was involved in was only available as a 68‐volume set (Bonnell 2009, p. 707) – but it was now possible to comprehend, say, “British Theatre” or “the English poets” as a whole in a way that it had not been under the presumption of perpetual copyright. A similar turning point – not perhaps as exciting for us, but far more financially consequential to the trade – came a year after Donaldson v. Becket. John Newbery’s step‐ son, Thomas Carnan, took the Stationers’ Company to court to challenge the injunction they had obtained, under the authority of the royal patent that was part of the English

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Stock, to prevent him from publishing an almanac. Given the Lords’ decision, the judges in Carnan’s case had no choice but to throw out that monopoly, which imperiled the investment that had provided stability to the London book trade since the formation of the English Stock in 1603. Members of the Company could still publish almanacs, of course, but they no longer had the exclusive right to do so and quickly lost many of their customers and a very significant revenue stream: prior to the decision, “nearly half a million” Company almanacs went out the doors each year, generating an annual £2000 in profit (Blagden 1961, pp. 23–24). Thereafter, they would have to compete not only with London booksellers like Carnan, who had never joined the Company and was distributing “well over 100,000 Almanacks a year” by 1781, but also with the printers of almost every town in the realm (Blagden 1961, p. 32). By the 1790s, the Company had found new ways to flourish, but, as with the reprint series, they had to do so in a market that was far more open and unpredictable than their forefathers could ever have envisioned.

6.4 ­Periodicals Saturate the Land One of the chief areas in which Britons experienced “the multiplication of books” did not involve books per se at all. In the decades we are currently investigating, newspapers grew larger and even more ubiquitous than they were in the period we explored in Chapter 5. At the same time, magazines began to develop their own market niches that went beyond simply providing a manageable overview of the contents of the newspapers. The result was that, with the assistance of some other forms of relatively ephemeral print, the few remaining areas of life previously untouched by the bookscape became more and more inextricably intertwined with it. Given how high book prices remained, we perhaps cannot talk about a mass market for print until the nineteenth century, but the everyday lives of Britons were certainly saturated by print by 1780 or so, when this chapter ends. In the early eighteenth century, the different kinds of newspapers each had a quite distinct role: the dailies provided a steady stream of information to metropolitan readers, the tri‐weeklies (and provincial weeklies) kept readers in the country at least semi‐ current regarding what was going on, the weekly journals offered entertainment and political commentary, and essay papers like The Spectator aimed to improve their readers in one way or another. By the mid‐eighteenth century, however, these functions were beginning to blur into one another. Several of the most celebrated essay series of the age appeared not as stand‐alone papers, but as columns in other ongoing ventures. For example, Samuel Johnson’s second attempt at essay‐writing, “The Idler,” served as the opening page of the weekly Universal Chronicle in 1758–1760. Similarly, Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Citizen of the World” – the supposed letters home of Lien Chi Altangi, a Chinese visitor to London, who, as an outsider, noticed all the ridiculousness and vice to which Londoners had grown inured – was a regular feature in The Public Ledger in 1760–1761. And the fiery letters of Junius, which we examined earlier (see Section 6.2), appeared in The Public Advertiser, a paper, as its name suggests, primarily devoted to printing advertisements. For example, the Junius letter that was prosecuted was surrounded by, among other things, ads for theatrical performances and “LEAKE’S justly famous Pill, well known for curing a certain Disease … when all other Methods avail

Managing the Flood of Print, 1740–1780

nothing,” a caution to pawnbrokers not to accept a “Dozen … silver Table‐spoons” bearing the crest of “a Griffin’s Head on a Ducal Coronet,” and an announcement that a surgeon in Hampstead was now offering smallpox inoculations at his “large and convenient” house in a “Situation remarkable for its Healthfulness and Purity of Air” (December 19, 1769). For those whose tastes were not confined to the political, the Middlesex Journal combined its pro‐Wilkes, libertarian stance with a weekly “PIECE OF MUSIC, consisting either of a SONG, CATCH‐GLEE, or MINUET … (never before attempted in a News‐Paper)” (April 8–10, 1773). The latter gambit proved too expensive to sustain, but the very fact that it was tried suggests the degree to which newspapers were attempting to satisfy a range of their customers’ needs, whether or not they involved “news,” strictly speaking. Part of what made this increased breadth possible was that the papers themselves were larger. To minimize the tax due under the Stamp Act, most papers continued to be printed on what was officially a half‐sheet. But the size of the full sheets from which they derived increased, thus making these half‐sheets about 20% larger than their early eighteenth‐century counterparts and more than twice as large as early issues of The London Gazette (Pollard 1941, pp. 123–128). Most papers also either moved to a four‐column format in the later 1750s or went to eight pages, either way allowing them to pack more into a given issue. Much of this added space was taken up by advertising, which became increasingly important to the finances of most papers. In 1746, The London Daily Post carried 12 254 advertisements – an average of 39 an issue (Harris 2009, p. 425). By 1780, The Daily Advertiser was averaging 200 per issue (Briggs 1994, p. 30). But space also became available for verse (including the prologues and epilogues to popular plays), innovations like the music included in The Middlesex Journal, and even the occasional illustration. For example, the August 26–September 2, 1758, issue of Payne’s Universal Chronicle devoted an entire page to engraved maps as part of its coverage of the siege of Louisbourg, one of the first bits of good news for the British in the Seven Years’ War. In the years we are investigating, newspapers also became even more ubiquitous than they had previously been. In 1750, in England as a whole, 7.3 million sheets or half‐ sheets were stamped for use in newspapers. That figure went up to 9.4 million in 1760, and 12.6 million in 1775. Those figures seem astonishing, until we remember that in 1760 London alone had four dailies, five or six evening tri‐weeklies, and a number of weeklies and fortnightlies (not even counting the magazines). Meanwhile, there were about 36 provincial papers, mostly weeklies (Brewer 1976, p. 142). Many of the London papers had circulations in the thousands. The provincial papers certainly reached at least several hundred purchasers each, and in a few locales, such as York, that figure rose into the thousands. Most papers copied shamelessly from one another, as did the magazines, so a popular item (such as The North Briton or the letters of Junius) might appear in several tens of thousands of copies of various publications (Brewer 1976, pp. 154–158). Even Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, which in its initial form as a twice‐ weekly pamphlet sold fewer than 500 copies an issue, had its essays reprinted in 25 different magazines and provincial papers (Tankard 1999, pp. 71–72). And, as in earlier decades, each copy sold might well reach a dozen‐plus readers and auditors (even more if it ended up in a coffeehouse). The numbers add up so quickly that it is no wonder that one commentator claimed that the powers‐that‐be regarded the late 1750s as possessed by a “dangerous and now epidemic frenzy of reading News‐papers,” while another

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described the moment as overwhelmed by a “raging Thirst for News, which is excited by the very Multiplication of the Means of satiating us with Occurrences” (Northern Revolutions 1757, p. 28; St. James’s Chronicle, March 1–3, 1770). Much of this thirst was political in nature. The nationalism roused by repeated wars with France and Spain, the anti‐Scots prejudice exploited by Wilkes, the questions of liberty and taxation without representation playing out on both sides of the Atlantic, these mobilized a political nation far larger than those who actually had the franchise. This mobilization – and the “multiplication of books” more generally – was aided by significant improvements in transportation (better roads, the beginnings of canals) and in the speed and reliability of the postal service. The result was that “the amount of … information available in the provinces in 1760 was incomparably greater than it had been a generation before” (Brewer 1976, p. 158). However, the attractions of newspapers were not only political, although the latter were prominent enough to make “coffee‐house politicians” as much a character type in mid‐century satire as they had been in The Tatler. The newspapers also served as a medium for gossip: remember only Lydia Languish’s wish, in The Rivals, for an elopement that could generate “such paragraphs in the News‐Papers!” (Sheridan 1775, p. 84). Sheridan had himself been the subject of such paragraphs several years earlier, when he ran away with and fought two duels for Elizabeth Linley, a stunningly beautiful singer from Bath. Newspapers allowed readers to find a mate or to recover lost property, including, especially in the colonies, people: by 1755, a full 13% of the advertisements in Benjamin Franklin’s paper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, were for runaway slaves and servants (Waldstreicher 1999, p. 250). During her brief stint as a grocer, Charlotte Charke “constantly took in the Papers to see how Matters went at Bear‐Key; what Ships were come in, or lost; who, in our Trade, was broke; or who advertised Teas at the lowest Prices.” But the point of her doing so was not to improve her meager business, but to furnish herself “with as much Discourse, as if I had the whole Lading of a Ship in my Shop” (Charke 1999, pp. 37–38). Like her earlier foray into medicine, in which she “had recourse to a Latin Dictionary” for “a few physical hard Words … to establish my Reputation” as an apothecary (Charke 1999, p. 19), Charke’s engagement with the papers was a form of self‐fashioning, a means of making herself into the kind of person she was, at that moment, trying to be. A more disingenuous version of the same phenomenon can be seen with Bampfylde‐Moore Carew and John Escott, who “constantly and carefully perused” “the News‐Papers” for accounts of shipwrecks and then ­pretended to be seamen cast ashore from those vessels, which led to their being “always … very liberally reliev’d” by the very authorities who would have driven them off for begging (Life 1745, pp. 30–31). The variety of uses to which newspapers were put was, in large part, the product of their own miscellaneousness, which in turn stemmed from their attempts to provide a bit of something for everyone (or at least everyone of the same political persuasion). A similar, perhaps more self‐conscious multiplicity continued to characterize the most established of the magazines: The Gentleman’s Magazine, The London Magazine, The Scots Magazine, The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. There was even a brief‐lived Magazine of Magazines that took the principle of miscellaneous selection to a whole new level. But at the very moment when the newspapers were most aggressively diversifying their coverage, a countermovement began, in which new magazines ceased trying to be all things to all people and instead focused on a particular area of interest.

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A number of magazines presented themselves as written especially for women; others specialized in poetry, or music, or religion, or jokes, or the various professions: law, medicine, building, commerce, farming (Tierney 2009, pp. 493–494). By 1768, there  were 17 magazines competing with one another, not counting the Reviews (Harris 2009, p. 428). Perhaps the most intriguing and successful of these new ventures was The Town and Country Magazine, which featured each month a new installment of its “Histories of the Tête‐à‐Tête.” This series described the supposed love affairs of various celebrities, especially aristocrats and clergymen, using dashed‐out names or thinly disguised pseudonyms, such as “Baron Otranto” for Horace Walpole (the aristocratic author of The Castle of Otranto) and “Mrs. Heidelberg” for Kitty Clive, a comic actress who played a social climber of that name in The Clandestine Marriage, one of the most popular plays of the 1760s. Each account was introduced by a pair of engraved oval portraits of the alleged lovers in question. Between the resemblance offered by the portraits, the clues given by the names, and the tender or salacious details of the “histories” themselves, it was not difficult for readers to figure out who was being described. These narratives were not always accurate (all the evidence suggests that Walpole and Clive were just good friends). Nor were they necessarily meant to be. The unlikelihood of Clive’s being romantically involved with Walpole may have underscored what the story claimed to be denying, namely that Walpole was “suspected of a certain crime,” presumably sodomy (Town and Country Magazine, December 1769, p. 618; McCreery 1997, pp. 210–211). But veracity aside, the Tête‐à‐Têtes struck a chord and rapidly became something of a cultural touchstone. They cropped up in plays, including Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, were cut out for scrapbooks, and were repeatedly held up as either evidence of or contributions to the nation’s moral decline.

6.5 ­Print Becomes a Fact of Life Of course, periodicals were not the only form of print saturating Britain in the decades we are now investigating. For example, elections were often buried in paper. A 1768 contest in Essex, where 6000 men were eligible to vote, generated 33 700 copies of “pamphlets, broadsides, squibs, and songs.” Even an uncontested seat in 1779 still apparently required “over 6,500 handbills” (Brewer 1976, p. 147). And as in the period we explored in Chapter 5, yet even more so, all sorts of areas previously independent of books came to be hopelessly entangled with them in the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s. Three examples will have to suffice. In 1766, the Duchess of Leinster was so struck by Jean‐Jacques Rousseau’s Émile that she wrote to Rousseau asking him to serve as the tutor to her children. When Rousseau declined, she hired another tutor and had him set up “a vigorous programme of Rousseauean exercise,” in which her eldest son (and later seven of her other children) gardened, “[caught] chickens, work[ed] in the stables,” drew, sewed, harvested hay, and otherwise embraced “the countryside, … games, … and loose clothing,” as outlined in Émile (Tillyard 1994, pp. 218–219). In so doing, Her Grace turned her back on generations of accumulated tradition as to how children were to be raised, embracing instead a systematic new theory laid out in a book. The theories may have changed, but anxious parents today often find themselves doing much the same thing.

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Books not only began to shape how elite children were raised, they also became important tools in how those children were perceived by their peers. As an old woman, Lady Louisa Stuart remembered how, as “a girl of fourteen not yet versed in sentiment, I had a secret dread I should not cry enough,” while reading Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), “to gain the credit of proper sensibility” (Private Letter‐Books 1930, p. 273). That is, for a period in the later 1760s and early 1770s, the social reputation, perhaps even the marriageability, of wealthy young women depended upon their being known for their exquisite sensitivity to suffering, but one of the principal means of demonstrating such sensitivity was publicly crying at the wholly fictional scenes of woe in Mackenzie’s novel. Thus a short book available to all with 2s 6d to spare (or able to rent a copy from the circulating library) became crucial evidence that one had that within which passeth show. Depth of character could be performed with 11 and a half sheets of paper, some ink and thread, and a bit of self‐generated salt water. Perhaps the most telling example of print’s entry into realms of life that had previously gotten along perfectly well without it is the long‐running and successful series called Harris’s List of Covent‐Garden Ladies; or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar (1760–1795). As its title should suggest, this is a guide for prospective patrons of high‐end London prostitutes. It came out every year – hence the “Kalendar” in its title – and was sometimes augmented and expanded in a second edition a few months later (Freeman 2012, p. 432). Each volume, bound in eye‐catching red sheepskin and openly displayed in bookshop windows, told its readers not only where to find the ladies in question, but also what they looked like, what they charged, and anything else a first‐time visitor might need to know (Freeman 2012, p. 446). So, for example, prospective patrons of Miss Maddox, who lodged in “Brownlow Street, Holborn,” were warned that “she can so well counterfeit the passions of love and lust, that many of the most knowing rakes of the town would be easily deceived” by what was really a “cold indifference” toward her clients (Harris’s 1773, p. 109). Nancy Fortescue, in “Marybone‐street, Picadilly,” on the other hand, was so “passionate” that “bottles, glasses, &c. unexpectedly will fly at your head, if you give her the least provocation” (Harris’s 1773, p. 120). And while Mrs. Pritchard, of “Wardour‐street, Soho,” was once famous for resembling “Lady Sarah Bunbury” (a society beauty notorious for her adultery), “by a miscarriage and a child, her face has rather lost its plumpness.” Nonetheless, “the warmth of her bosom is a better recipe for impotency, than every stimulus and provocative the whole materia medica can furnish” (Harris’s 1773, pp. 32–33). It is unclear how much these descriptions appealed to casual daydreamers and how much they were used to facilitate actual encounters; the strong market for back issues suggests that no longer being current did not wholly diminish the List’s appeal (Freeman 2012, p. 433). But even if a majority of the purchasers of the thousands of copies that were produced each year had no intention of ever patronizing the women described, a significant number of readers almost certainly did (Rubenhold 2005, pp. 299–301). The world’s oldest profession had gotten by with cruising, word‐of‐mouth, and recommendations by pimps and brothel keepers for centuries or millennia. But amid the “multiplication of books” that characterized the middle third of the eighteenth century, even this most private and borderline illegal activity was transformed by a culture of reviewing and an expectation that print had an important mediating role to play. The technological and institutional innovations of the nineteenth century (steam presses, machine‐made paper, an end to “taxes on knowledge” like the Stamp Act) were still decades in the future, but the stage for them had nonetheless been set by the 1770s. Never again would books be an optional part of British life.

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7 Consolidating Change, 1780–1820 One of the themes of this chapter is, tellingly, the same as in the previous section: There was a significant increase in the number of titles being produced in the last 20 years of the eighteenth century. James Raven has calculated an “average publication growth rate” of nearly 3.5% per year for the period from 1780 to 1800, an expansion even greater than the previous decades (Raven 2009a, p. 92, n. 36). Anecdotal evidence about the flood of material flowing from the press in the 1780s and 1790s supports the suggestion that across all types of publication the annual production of titles almost quadrupled from about 2000 in 1740 to close to 7800 in 1800 (see Figure 4.1). Of course, title counts give equal weighting to everything from a petition printed in very small numbers to a steady seller with a print run of 2000 or more. During this period most edition sizes continued to be calculated in multiples of 250, and the average print run of 750 copies was much the same as it had been earlier in the century. Some very large editions of popular texts were produced during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however, and their visibility, along with the rise in reprints of out‐of‐copyright titles following the ­decision in Donaldson v. Becket, would have increased the sense of living in what many contemporaries called “the Age of Books” (Raven 2007, p. 131; Piper 2009, p. 2). The number of newspapers, periodicals, and magazines also significantly increased in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, with many now being printed in the major towns as well as the capital cities of Dublin, Edinburgh, and London with which printing was most associated. Both an improved newspaper distribution system and the appearance of advertisements for texts in newspapers played an important role in the diffusion of printed works. The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, which covers only books rather than all publications, suggests a continued expansion in “the number and choice of titles available to the customer,” with a rise from around two thousand per year in 1801 to around four thousand in 1820 (Weedon 2003, p. 47). The general speeding up of print culture in the period 1780–1820 – marked by both an increase in the number of book and periodical titles being produced and the increased availability of texts from bookshops and commercial libraries – meant that, for those who could afford to purchase or rent them, the world was indeed full of texts. Handwritten texts (such as commonplace books, albums, and recipe books) are of course not included in databases such as the English Short Title Catalogue, from which much of the above evidence is compiled. However, these “invisible books” continued to be an important part of bookish culture, and, as we have stressed in earlier chapters, recent work on the history of the book in this period as well has attempted to break The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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down the supposed divide between manuscript and print and to restore “the presence of handwritten texts in a print culture” (Ezell 2009, p. 57; see also Colclough 2007a; Levy 2008). As was the case from the beginning of printing in Britain, certain sorts of texts were too personal, too scandalous, or of insufficiently broad interest to warrant seeking out print publication.

7.1 ­New Production Techniques and Methods of Distribution Significant changes in British print culture are sometimes thought to depend upon new technologies of production. However, the proliferation of print in the late eighteenth century was achieved by the production of more titles and more editions, rather than major technical innovations. This was still the age of the hand press: “papermaking, punch‐cutting, type‐casting, composition, inking, and binding were all done by hand” (Banham 2007, p. 273). There were, however, more presses and pressmen. The Strahan firm in London, for example, added 13 iron presses to their new two‐story printing house in 1811–1812 (Raven 2007, pp. 311–312). The new iron presses, of which Stanhope’s was the most famous and the Albion the most widely used, were much stronger than the common wooden press. They also included a much larger platen (the flat surface that presses the paper against the inked type) which meant that “large forms could be printed in one pull, whereas the wooden press had required two” (Banham 2007, p. 275). Although they required less physical effort to use, however, these presses were not significantly faster. Indeed, their main impact was on “jobbing” – small orders done on demand and paid in advance, usually single sheets such as blank forms, business cards, or advertisements  –  and on illustration, as they made both posters and wood‐engraved illustrations easier to produce (Banham 2007, p. 277). There were also some improvements in papermaking in the early years of the nineteenth century. By 1807 Fourdrinier papermaking machines were available. The increased availability of paper may well have helped the increase in production seen in the second decade of the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1830s that machine‐made paper became common (Eliot 1994, p. 20). Of course, many books printed in the British Isles were exported. By 1784 American bookshops and libraries were once again placing large orders with British printers and distributors after the disruption caused by the War of Independence which began in 1776 (St. Clair 2004, pp. 380–381). For example, both before and after the war, the Charleston Library Society in South Carolina regularly appointed a London bookseller to supply them with a selection of new and antiquarian works. The Society appointed Lackington, Allen & Co. in 1801, perhaps because their sheer size allowed them to fulfill the Library’s complex orders (Raven 2002). Conversely, many British titles were reprinted on American presses. This had begun in earnest before the war and significantly increased in the 1780s. There were good reasons for this: books were heavy items to transport, took up to six months to deliver, and the “additional costs of shipping and handling, duty, and insurance” needed to be “passed along to American consumers as a surcharge” (Sher 2006, p. 506). The American book trade of the late eighteenth century was dominated by printers and booksellers

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

who had previously worked in Scotland and Ireland, and by the late 1780s large numbers of British books and periodicals were being reprinted in Philadelphia, including Thomas Dobson’s “Greatly Improved” “First American Edition” of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published from 1790 to 1798 (Sher 2006, pp. 556–561). The specifically American intellectual property regime that became law in 1790 gave copyright protection only to the works of American authors printed in America. British texts (both new and old) were thus effectively free for American printers, and so they were often produced in cheaper editions than could be purchased by British audiences (and cheaper editions than American authors could appear in, which became a source of perennial complaint among the latter). Some of these were imported back into Britain, and some British pirates put false Philadelphia imprints on copyrighted works, but there was not an organized trade in American reprints. Of course, the same property regime allowed some American works to appear in British editions (St. Clair 2004, pp. 384–391). However, it was not until the 1830s that reprinting of American texts occurred in ­significant numbers (Garside 2013, p. 38). Britain’s other overseas markets continued to expand in the early nineteenth century with both the British East Indies and the new settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand demanding more books for their expanding populations of British readers (Barnes et al. 2009). As several recent studies have noted, the book trade often played a role in imperialist practices, training, for example, generations of Indian school children in the glories of English literature. Studies of the “postcolonial book” are sensitive both to the destruction of local reading practices by colonization and to the emergence of counter activities that challenged imperialism, or which helped to shape postcolonial conceptions of nationhood (Joshi 2002; Fraser and Hammond 2008a, 2008b). If the expansion of print culture in this period was not dependent upon new technologies, it certainly helped create new production techniques and methods of distribution and retail. Advertising and other presentational strategies encouraged demand, and publishers became increasingly expert at selling texts to a variety of targeted audiences. Expensive quartos signaled their importance via size and price, whereas duodecimo novels were aimed at the young and fashionable who were as likely to borrow as to buy. “Ladies” were targeted with texts deliberately designed to flatter contemporary ideas of ideal gender constructions. Books for children became more widely available from shops designated “juvenile” libraries (Grenby 2011). Most new books continued to be expensive objects aimed at middle‐class and elite readers with a disposable income, and library and bookshop design frequently emphasized exclusivity of access (Raven 1996). The commercial libraries established in seaside resorts and other places dedicated to leisure sold themselves as meeting places for the fashionable (Colclough 2007a). However, those new to print were also targeted. From the 1770s, reprint series were aimed at aspirant readers unfamiliar with the landscape of print. The cheapest complete works in Cooke’s “Pocket Library,” which began publication in 1793, cost only 6d (Raven 2007, pp. 223–224, 299). Reprints of out‐of‐copyright works, such as those published by Cooke, were an important feature of late eighteenth‐century print culture. As detailed in Section 6.3, 1774 has traditionally been regarded as the year when “the concept of perpetual copyright was killed” (Altick 1957, p. 53). William St. Clair has recently argued for 1774 as the moment of Britain’s birth as “a reading nation.” He argues that by the 1810s, reprints of the “old canon” (those texts that were out of copyright and so could be reproduced

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cheaply enough to reach the poor) were available to anyone able “to find sixpence (0.5 shillings) from their income to buy a book” (St. Clair 2004, p. 138). By contrast, Thomas Bonnell (2008), James Raven (2007), and Richard Sher (1998, 2006) interpret the legislation of 1774 as merely confirming established changes. They argue that although this decision was “undeniably historic,” its “importance as a turning point in eighteenth‐century publishing should not be overstated” (Bonnell 2008, p. 32). As the cheap “English Poets” series launched by Robert and Andrew Foulis of Glasgow in 1765 ­demonstrates, the competitive reprinting of out‐of‐copyright works was already a ­feature of the Scottish trade (Bonnell 2008, p. 57). Nonetheless, as we saw in Section 6.3, Donaldson v. Becket did not completely eliminate the trade’s de facto presumption of perpetual copyright. Resistance to the new legislation continued well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, many of the established elite booksellers “attempted to preserve their traditional system” by forming groups (such as the Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society) dedicated to persuading the local trade to continue to operate as if copyright were perpetual. This meant that “considerations of publishing priority continued to be respected by a considerable segment of the book trade, especially in London” (Sher 1998, pp. 36, 81). If many “English Classics” made it into the cheap reprint series of the “old canon,” some contemporary prestigious works were not widely republished because this concept of “honorary” or “de facto copyright” dissuaded the trade from handling reprint editions. For example, in the 1790s, the eminent London bookseller Thomas Cadell attempted to dissuade Bell & Bradfute from wholesaling Scottish reprints of The Poems of Ossian and Hume’s History as he considered these works his “property whether protected by the Statute or not” (quoted in Sher 1998, pp. 40–41). That Bell & Bradfute continued to advertise cheaper editions alongside those published by Cadell & Strahan suggests that such pressure did not always win out. Nevertheless, Cadell’s defense of “honorary” copyright was effective in limiting the number of cheaper editions, and shares in these titles continued to be sold by the London trade well into the nineteenth century (Sher 1998, pp. 41–42). While the legal defeat of perpetual copyright was important, in other words, many of the leading publishers bypassed the legal regime “by establishing and enforcing regulations within the trade itself ” that helped to maintain an older notion of literary property. These measures included the register of titles held at the Chapter Coffee House by senior members of the London trade (Sher 2006, p. 26). Still, significant changes appeared in the wake of the 1774 decision of the House of Lords. The fashion for reprints may well have had its roots in the 1760s, but as more and more series emerged in the 1780s and 1790s their publishers devised new and ingenious ways of appealing to a “new demographic” who desired to combine “cultural enrichment” with “ornament and display” (Bonnell 2008, p. 265). The sheer size of John Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (1777–1782), which stretched to 109 volumes by 50 poets born between 1328 and 1728, was a suitable monument to the increasingly confident “British” (that is, neither English nor Scottish nor Welsh, but a newly invented composite of all three) culture in which these new book buyers wished to participate. Advertisements for this and the accompanying “British Theatre” series emphasized that they could be bought either as single volumes at 1s 6d or in “complete sets” from £8 8s to £33, according to the desired binding. These books were commodities designed to appeal to multiple audiences, some of whom might

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

Figure 7.1  The canonizing ambitions of eighteenth‐century reprint series. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR1171 .B43 v. 52.

slowly accrue the set a volume at a time, while others acquired a uniformly packaged library in a single purchase. Bell’s list was comprehensive, with each author offered “complete” rather than abridged. His major achievement was to define the appearance of “the classic.” Each volume included a frontispiece by an “eminent” artist and every author gained a portrait (see Figure 7.1), a standard title (“The Poetical Works of…”), and a prefatory life (Bonnell 2008, pp. 98–106). Bell’s “interest in appearance” helped to inspire significant changes in the layout and design of the book. His main printer was Gilbert Martin at the Apollo Press in Edinburgh, although he also worked with the equally innovative Fry & Couchman, who helped develop new typefaces. Bell’s success led “the Bell style” of typography  –  his use of “lightweight types” and thin and thick “rules” (lines) to separate sections of the page such as the headers from the body text – to take “universal hold” (Barker 2009, p. 264). The design of these books, when combined with new innovations in wood engraving by Thomas Bewick and others, also helped to revive the use of illustration more generally. Despite its name, wood engraving is actually a relief process like the traditional woodcut, not an intaglio process like engraving on copperplate or steel. While woodcuts are produced using boards sawn along the grain like ordinary wooden planks, wood engraving is done using blocks sawn across the grain. The resulting hardness of the wood

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facilitates the use of an engraver’s burin rather than the woodcutter’s knife, chisel, or gouge, and enables the wood engraver to produce finer lines than were possible in conventional woodcuts. Wood engravings thus have much of the delicacy of copperplate engravings, but can be printed simultaneously with moveable type. Combining the ­benefits of copperplate and steel engraving with those of woodcuts, wood engravings became an increasingly important method of illustration. Bell’s success was much imitated. The Works of the English Poets, for which Samuel Johnson was commissioned to contribute the biographical introductions, was conceived by Edward Dilly and 35 other booksellers who judged Bell’s series to be “an invasion of what we call our Literary Property” (quoted in Bonnell 2008, p. 132). The English Poets also began with Chaucer, but Johnson’s slowness led the introductions to be issued as Prefaces (1779), better known as Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), rather than as the initial 10 volumes of the series. If the 68 volumes of this series failed to match Bell’s innovations, other publishers built on Bell’s work. Charles Cooke’s major innovation was to offer parallel series of various genres in matching formats at a cheaper price than his rivals. “Cooke’s Select British Novels, or Novelist’s Pocket Library” began in 1792. It was followed in 1794 by “Cooke’s Cheap and Elegant Pocket  Library,” which included a Pocket Edition of Select British Poets as well as “Sacred Classics” and other genres all packaged in an identical format. Bell’s Poets had originally been published at 1s 6d per volume, whereas Cooke’s “numbers” offered some complete works for as little as 6d. The “Select Novels” were advertised as “cheap and elegant pocket novels,” small enough “that a volume may be carried in each pocket without the least encumbrance.” Imagined as “travelling companions,” Cooke’s texts helped extend the possibilities of reading outside or in private (St. James’s Chronicle, January 1, 1795). The competitive price and innovative layout established the pocket library as a cheaper alternative to both the high end of the market and Bell’s cheap editions. Bell was adept at packaging the same contents in a range of different bindings, but it was Cooke who offered ­different sets of content at different prices. The sixpenny numbers contained just one illustration, whereas the “Superior” 1s edition was printed on better quality “hot‐pressed” paper and contained more illustrations than Bell’s; a 2s “First Edition” was even more elaborate and included hand‐colored plates (Bonnell 2008, pp. 238–239). Cooke’s edition of Fielding’s Tom Jones appeared in nine numbers with 11 illustrations. Interpreting the relationship between image and text was an important part of the reading experience. William Hazlitt recalled that as a teenager he had taken a voyeuristic pleasure in Cooke’s edition of Joseph Andrews which included “a picture of Fanny” (see Figure 7.2) that the reader “should not set his heart on, lest he should never meet with anything like it; or if he should, it would, perhaps, be better for him that he had not. It was just like — —!” (Hazlitt 1825, pp. 139–140). It is too simplistic to suggest that Cooke aimed to please new readers by adding a layer of titillation to otherwise old‐fashioned texts, but many of the paratextual materials of his editions (such as the prefatory “Life”) initiated inexperienced readers into contemporary reading practices. Reprints made “the medium of the book intelligible and thus legible” to those unfamiliar with print (Piper 2009, p. 11). However, if the reprint series inaugurated new consumers into the world of print by stressing their affordability, other series, such as Strahan & Cadell’s quarto histories, were reassuringly expensive to those who preferred that not everyone had access to the latest works.

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

Figure 7.2  The dangerously alluring power of book illustrations. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR3454 .J6 1793.

Despite the increase in the number of titles published during the last 30 years of the eighteenth century, many newly written works, including novels, continued to have a restricted audience. By the late 1790s, most came in two‐ or three‐volume sets priced at between 3s and 4s per volume (Raven 2000, p. 99). Cooke, by contrast, published his novels as “eighteens” (or octodecimos, a quite small format comprised of sheets cut into four unequally sized parts, which were then folded one to four times, depending on their size and shape, to yield a total of 18 leaves). This made them both smaller and cheaper than most new books. The Joseph Andrews that Hazlitt so fetishized measures only 14.1 × 8.5 cm, while the nine numbers of his Tom Jones (one of the longest novels of the century) cost a total of 4s 6d. Shorter novels, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, were advertised for as little as 1s or 6d. The narrowness of the audience for new novels is suggested by their short print runs. Most of the 11 novels published by Longman & Rees between 1794 and 1800 had runs of just 750, and none was issued in more than 1000 copies. Similarly, very few of the 1421 English novels published between 1770 and 1799 made it into a second edition.

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However, more than twice as many titles were being produced in the 1790s as in the 1770s (Raven 2000, pp. 112, 36, 94). This late‐century surge can, in part, be accounted for by the increased number of commercial circulating libraries purchasing these texts. Late eighteenth‐century novels were made to rent. Many libraries were supplied directly by “the founders of formula novel publication,” William Lane, Thomas Hookham, and Francis and John Noble (Raven 2000, p. 74). Lane published one‐third of all new titles printed in London during the 1790s. His “Minerva Library,” named after his own ­circulating library, helped to stock library shelves throughout the nation. Hookham and the Noble brothers also owned commercial libraries. As discussed in Section 6.1, these circulating libraries were of two main types: those that charged for each book borrowed or those that demanded an annual or seasonal fee for membership. Libraries with a small stock of books were often an adjunct to bookselling or another business and tended to charge on a nightly or weekly basis. Three pence per volume per week was common in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but some charged as much as two pence per night. Between 1780 and 1807 the Cirencester bookseller Timothy Stevens charged 4s per quarter, or 3d per volume, for use of his library of about 500 volumes (Fergus 2006, p. 34). A common annual rate during the last two decades of the eighteenth century for those borrowing from a bookshop was 12s (Allan 2008, p. 148). By the end of the century a number of large commercial libraries existed for those attending fashionable resorts such as Bath and Brighton or wishing to rent books in London. These tended to be more expensive. A common annual fee in the 1780s was 16s, but all of the libraries in Bath began to charge a guinea (21s) in 1797 and Hookham’s in London took two guineas (Manley 2000, p. 30; Allan 2008, p. 150). The exact number of commercial libraries in England at this time has been much debated. Paul Kaufman (1969) calculated that there were 112 in London alone at the turn of the nineteenth century and Raven argues for “at least 250” outside the capital by 1790 (Raven 2000, p. 85). However, these figures probably underestimate the number of smaller libraries. David Allan suggests national figures more in line with contemporary claims of between 1000 and 1500 libraries in total, with most holding significantly larger numbers of volumes than usually assumed (Allan 2008, pp. 119–162). Contemporary stereotypes of the circulating library associated them with novel reading, especially by women. An 1804 etching, The Circulating Library (see Figure  7.3), provides a caricature of a fawning library proprietor serving a shop full of women who have nearly emptied it of “novels,” “romances,” and “tales,” while hardly touching the more respectable “history” and “sermons.” But in Northanger Abbey (first completed in 1803, but not published until 1819), Henry Tilney admits to having read “all Mrs Radcliffe’s works and most of them with great pleasure,” undermining the contemporary stereotype of readers of the Gothic as young and female (Austen 1995, p. 103). Austen’s work suggests that novel reading was part of the everyday experience of families wealthy enough to join a circulating library. So too do the few surviving records of the libraries themselves, several of which seem to have been supported by schoolboys (Fergus 2006). Many such libraries, including that run by John Sanders in the Cornmarket at Derby, were dominated by novels, poetry, and plays, but as The Circulating Library attests, they also stocked other works (Allan 2008, p. 138). Although most novels were not reprinted, a few did become “bestsellers.” Still-read titles by Frances Burney, William Godwin, and Ann Radcliffe, whose The Italian (1797) entered into a second edition just four months after the first, were among the 46 novels

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

Figure 7.3  The supposed preferences of female patrons of circulating libraries. Source: Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

published between 1780 and 1799 that went through more than five editions before 1801. Longman often paid £60 for the copyright of novels in the 1790s, and payments of  between £5 and £100 were common (Raven 2000, pp. 39, 52–54). Those with an established reputation, however, enjoyed large fees. Cadell & Davies paid £800 for the copyright of The Italian, and Strahan, Cadell & Davies gave the same amount to publish John Moore’s Edward (1797) in a 3000‐copy edition (Sher 2006, p. 245). Moreover, ­bestselling novels were often imitated and so multiplied their “footprint” in the literary landscape. Burney’s Cecilia (1782) spawned “the Cecilia school” and Radcliffe’s novel helped bring the Gothic to particular prominence in the 1790s. Deidre Lynch has argued that a distinct mode of novel reading emerged in the late eighteenth century. It combined “new techniques for reading” – including the “silent scanning” associated with “close reading,” and the prolonging of texts through rereading – with the “notion that sharing a space of sensibility with a fictitious character could occasion a therapeutic recovery of one’s real feelings.” Lynch draws on contemporary accounts of “character” and reviews of “the new style of novel” or the “Burney School” as evidence of this new concern with “interiority” (Lynch 1998, pp. 129, 125, 143). The letters of several early nineteenth‐century readers certainly reveal a fascination with “character.” Mary Russell Mitford confirmed that she would acquire a copy of Catherine

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Hutton’s The Welsh Mountaineer (1817) because she cared “nothing for story, and all for character” (Mitford 1870, pp. 72–73). However, in practice, skimming and skipping may well have been more the norm. Not all books were meant purely for reading, of course. The range of “Pocketbooks” with blank sections for diary entries available for less than two shillings in the last quarter of the eighteenth century is evidence of the increased commercialization of such “ego documents.” As we have seen in Section  4.6, almanacs as early as the sixteenth century had included blank pages for writing – sometimes with erasable leaves – but this period saw a huge expansion in this kind of stationery, in multiple varieties as the market continued to be divided into segments. The standard model of Kearsley’s Gentleman and Tradesman’s Pocket Ledger was “1s 8d bound in red Leather with Pockets for Letters, Bills &c” but it could also be bought “in Morocco and other Bindings with silver or steel locks” (Public Advertiser, November 20, 1772). As this advertisement attests, innovative publishers had become increasingly expert in promoting their wares. Advertisements for books “Published this Day” appeared regularly in London newspapers from the 1750s. Surrounded by puffs for other ­products, these adverts placed books at the center of consumer culture. In 1762, up to three‐quarters of all advertising in the London Chronicle was for books. However, there was a significant reduction in the number of adverts being placed by booksellers in the 1770s and 1780s. In the Chronicle, for example, the average number declined from 16  per day in the 1760s to just five in 1785. There is no simple explanation for this, although a close to tripling of the tax on newspaper advertisements in 1780 was no doubt a factor. Some newspapers had been founded by publishers who used them to advertise their own products, but by the 1780s many were in joint ownership and could not afford to give free advertising (Tierney 2001). However, the London Chronicle did continue to carry large extracts from works published by its owners, who included Robert Dodsley and Richard Strahan. Excerpts from Strahan’s edition of John Moore’s A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany (1779) helped it become a bestseller (Sher 2006, pp. 263–264). With newspaper advertising becoming more expensive, booksellers sought to make the most of their money. Rather than advertising every work published, they began to target specific markets. Long “cloud” advertisements, in which several books “recently published” were grouped together, became increasingly common. Even conservative publishers such as Oxford University Press (OUP) began to realize the importance of advertising. Having invested £2 6s on raising anticipation of the publication of volume three of Clarendon’s State Papers (1786), once it was out they spent a further £4 7s 6d on “a long advertisement in five morning and two evening papers.” Another 11s went on advertising in Jackson’s Oxford Journal, showing the importance of the market located on the Press’s doorstep (Colclough 2013, p. 675). The majority of scholarly books published by OUP between 1779 and 1820 had an advertising budget of five guineas. This was quite a modest figure. John Murray, whose advertising costs ranged from 15 to 30% of the cost of production, spent 10 guineas on each number of the quarterly Medical Commentaries in the period up to 1786 (Zachs 1998, p. 86). Longmans, Dodsley, and Newbery all undertook “large and expensive full‐column newspaper advertising.” Longmans regularly spent over 3% of the total production costs of a novel on advertising in the late 1790s, and in some instances much more (Raven 2000, p. 102).

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

The text itself was also made to act as an advertisement. Some imprints included the addresses of circulating libraries owned by the publisher, and other works were often recommended in their end papers. The printed catalogue came into use as a major marketing tool in the 1780s. Strahan & Cadell issued 11 500 copies in 1779–1780 alone, “given away gratis” or “bound in the back of books” (Sher 2006, p. 369). Giving out free copies of books themselves was rare at this time, but Longmans reserved six copies of each novel for the Reviews, and OUP’s books “For the Use of Schools” were sent gratis to teachers at the leading private schools (Raven 2000, p. 114; Colclough 2013, p. 676). As already noted, by the 1790s Cooke’s “Pocket Library” had made some complete “poetical works” and novels available for as little as 6d. However, for most book buyers, new books (as opposed to reprints of old titles) were “more, not less, of a luxury item by 1800” (Raven 2009a, p. 98). Indeed, William St. Clair concludes that in the period 1780– 1830 as a whole, newly written books were “expensive luxuries which could be bought, if at all, only by the richest groups in society.” He notes that if the average income for male “members of the upper‐ or upper‐middle classes” is taken as £5 (100 shillings) per week in this period, a bound copy of the first quarto edition of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) “cost about half the weekly income of a gentleman”; for many further down the social scale, new works, even in the cheaper octavo and duodecimo formats, were out of their reach (St. Clair 2004, pp. 194–196). St. Clair refers to the production of these cheaper editions as “tranching down,” whereas Sher prefers the term “downsizing” (Sher 2006, p. 84); both emphasize the segmentation of the book market by cost, format, and elaborateness of design. Sher argues that “the Dublin book trade kept the pressure on British publishers by printing some books in smaller formats” as soon as “the potential for high‐end sales had been exhausted.” These late eighteenth‐century Irish editions helped spread cheaper editions of new works throughout Ireland, Scotland, and America and encouraged mainland publishers to produce cheaper editions of works published in quarto. However, after the extension of copyright law to Ireland in 1801 (as part of the political incorporation of Ireland into the United Kingdom), the influence of Irish reprints significantly declined (Sher 2006, pp. 501–502). St. Clair notes that in the 1810s some new books took many years to appear in a cheaper duodecimo format even if they were successful. Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), for example, went through 14 octavo editions priced at 14s before it appeared as a 5s duodecimo (St. Clair 2004, pp. 198, 619–620). Of the 360 Scottish enlightenment books published between 1746 and 1800 that Sher examines, more than one‐third were never reprinted during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. However, 31% of these titles were reprinted in more than four editions, with 46 books (13%) being published “in at least ten distinct British editions” before 1820. It was common for books published in quarto to be “downsized” to the cheaper octavo format for their second edition, but more unusual for an octavo to subsequently appear as a duodecimo. It was also unusual for a first edition to be published as a duodecimo, although some imaginative works and titles aimed at school or university students, such as Alexander Adams’s Roman Antiquities (1791), became “bestsellers” in this cheaper form (Sher 2006, pp. 88–94). Of course, without knowing the average print run of an edition, the term bestseller is difficult to quantify. Because of the limits placed upon economies of scale by the speed with which a hand press could be operated, eighteenth‐century books tended to be produced in print runs of between 500 and 2000 copies. From 1735 to 1785 “more

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than 90 per cent of the 514 books printed at Strahan’s large London printing house were in editions of less than 2,000 copies” (Gaskell 1979, p. 161). Fewer than 500 made it very difficult to recoup one’s costs; more than 2000 would typically tie up one’s capital for too long and reduce the potential profit. Only 12 out of the 124 first editions studied by Sher fall outside this 500–2000 range (Sher 2006, pp. 26–27). By the late eighteenth century, long print runs were usually reserved for steady sellers with a guaranteed market. The genres of these steady sellers were not all that different from the lucrative works incorporated into the English Stock in 1603: schoolbooks, religious works, dictionaries, and spelling books or ABCs such as Fenning’s Universal Spelling Book, which Longman printed in an edition of 18 000 copies. Contemporary dramatic works could also appear in large editions of between 2000 and 4500 copies (Raven 2007, p. 304). Such works may not have entered into as many editions as those first issued in small runs of less than 1000 copies, but should certainly be considered as bestsellers. More work needs to be done on the actual prices charged at the turn of the nineteenth century, but there was a considerable variation for first editions, especially when they appeared in octavo, with prices ranging from 2s 6d to 9s per volume. However, 6s or 7s per volume appears to have been a fairly common price for an octavo “in boards,” and most quartos sold for between £1 1s and £1 5s per volume (Sher 2006). As already noted, in the final quarter of the eighteenth century most novels appeared in duodecimo and were priced at between 3s and 4s per volume. For this genre, the average price per volume had risen by between 6d and 1s since the previous decade (Raven 2000, pp. 99–100). Even accounting for the rampant inflation of the 1790s (largely caused by the war with revolutionary France), the price of new works was becoming more expensive in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Both Raven and St. Clair suggest that the increased number of new titles being produced during this period were being sold to “an already book‐reading section of the population” (St. Clair 2004; Raven 2009a, p.  100). By 1800, private libraries had become important signs of status. It was not uncommon for such libraries to contain upwards of 2000 items. The “status‐conscious purchaser” often achieved “a more impressive display of his property” by purchasing expensive library furniture to go alongside his or her books (Allan 2003, pp. 102–103). We might wonder how often the books themselves functioned as much as furniture as reading material. This period also saw a new interest in the conspicuous accumulation of rare volumes, encouraged by the work of the bibliophile Frognall Dibdin, whose Bibliomania (1809) helped train readers in the language of bibliography. As the demise of perpetual copyright helped to encourage the development of a canon of British ­literature, so too many new collectors began to seek out rare first editions of Shakespeare and other canonical authors. However, the accumulation of the rare went hand in hand with the expansion in the production of new works which were often marketed as collectable. What St. Clair terms “the censorship of price” prevented many newly written works from reaching a potential audience who could not afford them even when they were “tranched down” into a cheaper edition. The cost of the second, octavo edition of Childe Harold (1812) was the equivalent of six weeks’ income for a maid working in a provincial hotel (St. Clair 2004, pp. 256, 195–196). If some readers were excluded from the latest works because they were too expensive, “the censorship of price” could also have a more draconian side. As St. Clair makes clear, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The Rights of Man (1791–1792) was considered safe when it first appeared in a 3s 6d edition, but once

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

a 6d edition appeared it was quickly suppressed by a government worried that working‐class readers would be able to access this rejoinder to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Paine was convicted of seditious libel, and a number of booksellers who continued to sell the pamphlet were imprisoned, leaving Burke “­triumphant in the field as the main political text of the time” (St. Clair 2004, p. 257). It is sometimes suggested that the late eighteenth century saw the replacement of “booksellers” by increasingly independent “publishers” who withdrew from “joint publishing enterprises” and from the retailing of books in order to invest in products from which they took all of the profits, rather than just a share (Feather 2006, p. 76). These publishers are usually said to include a newcomer to the trade, John Murray, and John Rivington and Thomas Norton Longman, who had inherited established businesses. John Feather has argued that a new pattern of book trade organization in which “publishers injected risk capital into new books, wholesalers distributed them, and at the end of the chain the retail booksellers laid them before the public” had fully emerged by 1800. He uses George Robinson as an example of a specialist “wholesale bookseller” whose business was “largely” concerned with “buying from the publishers and selling to the retailers,” and John Hatchard (whose bookshop opened in fashionable Piccadilly in 1797) as an example of a specialist retailer. However, to suggest that “the pattern which was to prevail throughout the nineteenth century” was “firmly established” in the 1790s (Feather 2006, pp. 81–82), or even by 1818 as Terry Belanger (1978) has argued, is to ignore the complex and gradual transformation of the publishing business. Collaborative publishing and the exchange of stock between booksellers that we considered in Section 5.5 continued to play an important role in the viability of many early nineteenth‐century editions. In June 1815, the Edinburgh‐based Oliver & Boyd exchanged stock worth more than £307 with Newman & Co. of the Minerva Press. The evidence of such deals suggests that Scottish and “provincial” publications were much more widely distributed than some assessments of the provincial trade have allowed (Beavan 2009, pp. 7–8). Of course, collaborative publishing between members of the book trade in London and Edinburgh had been widespread since the middle of the eighteenth century. Such collaboration “served to distribute the capital outlay and the risk of publishing new books among two or more firms” and allowed the participants to “take advantage of the optimal conditions for printing and the supply of paper” by choosing whether to use a London or Edinburgh printer (Sher 2006, p. 271). Most agreements were drawn up on a share basis so that upon publication “a participating publisher in the secondary city” was sent the number of copies appropriate to “his shares in the copyright” (Sher 2006, p. 270). One of the most important London–Edinburgh collaborations of the late eighteenth century was the informal partnership between the London‐based bookseller George Robinson and John Bell (later Bell & Bradfute) of Edinburgh that began in 1785 with the publication of Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785). As was the case with their publication of Archibald Allison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1789), Robinson put up to two‐thirds of the production costs and undertook most of the advertising. Both of these works were published in an expensive quarto format in a relatively small run of 750 copies, and the partners seem to have been content to make relatively little profit (Sher 2006, pp. 390–398). The period we are investigating also saw the continuing development of booksellers specializing in a particular kind of book, a practice that had certainly existed since the sixteenth century (Lesser 2004) but that increased as the overall book trade grew

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in size and capital. Leigh’s New Picture of London for 1818 contains 21 “booksellers who chiefly sell modern publications,” for example, and retailers specializing in law, medicine, religion, drama, works for children, and German, French, and Italian works are also listed (Leigh’s 1818, pp. 198–200). At least some of these retailers were to evolve into “the most eminent nineteenth‐­ century publishing houses” (Pollard 1978, p. 36). For example, Colburn & Co. made the transition from retailers with a circulating library to become listed as new‐style “­publishers” in the 1824 edition of Leigh’s New Picture (p. 387). The increasing importance of designated “wholesale booksellers who chiefly supply the town and country booksellers” (of which eight were listed in 1818) suggests one of the ways in which the trade adjusted to the growing number of retailers outside the main publishing centers who needed to acquire orders. Taken together these sources suggest the coincidence of the modern publisher, wholesaler, and specialist retailer with long‐established methods of production, distribution, and retail. As Asa Briggs has argued, it was Longman’s “friendly rival John Murray II who did most to establish the role of ‘publisher’ as it subsequently came to be pursued during the Victorian years,” but Murray nevertheless “continued sometimes to describe himself as a bookseller” (Briggs 2009, p. 407). During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the small bookseller remained “a highly volatile but not endangered species” even as the new larger firms began to develop (Raven 2007, p. 227). It is, however, true to say that the period 1770–1800 saw the emergence of an increasingly specialized print culture in which booksellers began to package texts for named readerships, including children. By 1800 Benjamin Tabart, John and Edward Wallis, and William Darton Junior, were among the publishers who specialized in works for children. Following Newbery’s lead in the 1750s and 1760s, publishers of children’s books “found that success depended upon the lure of the physical book.” Hand‐colored illustrations, miniature books, and books in series (such as Harris’s “Little Library”) helped attract customers into specialist bookshops. Tabart’s School and Juvenile Library in London’s New Bond Street was one of a number of shops that dealt exclusively in children’s books. The large windows and low counters shown in illustrations (see Figure 7.4) were designed to allow children to participate in book buying (Levy 2008, p. 77; Grenby 2011). As we have seen, women were particularly targeted by publishers of novels and magazines; Alexander Hogg’s New Lady’s Magazine was launched in 1786, an important early entry in what would become a massive industry that continues to this day. However, Jan Fergus’s study of the men and boys who subscribed to the Novelist’s Magazine at Clay’s bookshop in Daventry questions the traditional association of such magazines with an exclusively female audience. These “printed bargains” catered for an audience including “artisans, apprentices, shop assistants and the occasional servant and even labourer” who rarely purchased books. At 6s 6d, the annual subscription for a magazine was the same price as a single two‐volume novel (Fergus 2006, p. 197). Likewise, in the late eighteenth century the “provincial printers” of Ireland gained “a steady source of income” from chapbooks. Small farmers and “skilled labourers and artisans, earning three to four shillings a day” could periodically afford the 3d or 6d charged for such texts, which consisted of between 48 and 144 pages decorated with a single illustration. However, they rarely purchased such texts from the printer or a conventional bookseller. Rather, as they had for centuries, these customers continued to get them from the chapmen and peddlers who traveled throughout rural Ireland (O’Ciosain 2010, pp. 65, 26–27).

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

Figure 7.4  The advent of bookshops catering specifically to children. Source: Courtesy of Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Eng 18 14520.

7.2 ­Distribution and Consumption The number of bookshops in the British Isles increased significantly during the late eighteenth century. By 1810 most of the 60 British towns with a population of more than 10 000 could support several retail outlets. The number of shops in London alone increased from 72 in 1763 to 479 by the 1820s (Grenby 2011, p. 144). Some of these were large establishments that specialized in new forms of selling, such as James Lackington’s “Temple of the Muses,” which opened in Finsbury Square, London, in 1794. Including second‐hand copies and remainders among his vast stock, Lackington operated on a very unusual “cash only” basis, whereas most booksellers gave customers credit for six months or more (Raven 2009b, p. 305). However, as John Feather has argued, the bookshop of a small country town “was a world away from the Temple of the Muses.” Most were “full of paper and bottles and packets of tea, sharing the shelves with Bibles, prayer books, chapbooks, school books, and a couple of hundred other volumes, some of them for loan rather than sale” (Feather 1985, p. 87). Trade directories confirm that most shops associated with the print trade sold a variety of goods alongside books, newspapers, and stationery (Bell and Hinks 2009). The booksellers of the five English market towns studied by Jan Fergus made a range of texts both new and old available to buy or rent, including chapbooks, children’s books, novels, and magazines (Fergus 2006). These shops often printed and sold newspapers and cheap texts tailored to a local or regional audience.

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Regional bookshops also provided links in the chain of distribution for books printed in London and the other British print centers. In the early 1780s, John and Robert Clay of Daventry “sent weekly orders to various dealers in London” and were able to “distribute copies of magazines published in London a day after they appeared” (Fergus 2006, p. 22). Many advertised that they had steady sellers in stock. Most shops handled orders for copies of books that they didn’t have in stock, either via direct address to the publisher or via a wholesaler who usually dealt with such orders on their behalf. Multiple copies of popular works could also be acquired in this way. The amount of discount allowed on these orders was particularly important to the profitability of smaller bookshops. Most newspapers and some books were acquired on “a sale‐or‐ return basis” (Feather 1985, p. 55), which reduced the risk to the retailer. Feather notes that books published in London were acquired by a wholesaler at a discount of around 30% off the retail price; they were sold on to the bookseller, who could expect to make between 17.5 and 30% profit on each sale according to the amount of discount offered by the wholesaler (Feather 1985, p. 57). In order to encourage larger orders, it was still common, as it had been since the earliest days of print, to give one free copy for every 25 purchased. The size of a bookseller’s premises and the range and value of the stock it contained was extremely varied. Some also acted as agencies for insurance companies or stamp distributors; most also sold patent medicines, tea, and sugar. In 1807, the “printer, book‐ binder, book‐seller and stationer” John Soulby of Ulverston sold 12 patent medicines, including the famous “Duffy’s Elixir,” which purported to treat ailments ranging from epilepsy to hemorrhoids to scurvy. Soulby also stocked paper for a variety of uses, including writing, drawing, wrapping, music, and decorating (advertisement reproduced in Twyman 1970, p. 7). As far as books went, Soulby stocked a range of steady sellers, including dictionaries, schoolbooks, “Bibles and Testaments,” jest books, and “Children’s Books by Newberry & Marshall.” An advertisement for his “enlarged” shop (c. 1807) shows that “new publications” and the latest “Magazines, Reviews & all Periodicals” were regularly delivered by coach (Tywman 1966, p. 23). The continued expansion of the turnpike system (toll roads built or maintained by a private trust, which were kept in far better condition than the public roads) meant that by the late eighteenth century most towns and cities had good communications with the major sites of print production. The book trade in Suffolk expanded during the 1770s because of better road communications with Cambridge, London, and Norwich. Messengers employed to deliver newspapers to customers on the routes between the major towns also carried parcels of books and other goods advertised in the newspapers (Sterenberg 1983). When combined with the postal system, such networks allowed books and newspapers to reach even quite remote localities (Ferdinand 1997). Soulby’s shop also contained “a large circulating library” (Tywman 1966), not surprisingly since commercial libraries and newsrooms run by enterprising printers and booksellers had become common in most British towns by 1800. Private subscription libraries and book clubs of the sort we examined in Section 6.1 remained popular in the late eighteenth century. These are often interpreted as part of a general trend for “associationalism, self‐improvement, civic pride” and “the commodification of culture” (Allan 2003, p. 92). Subscription libraries closely scrutinized those who applied for membership, often aiming to bring together like‐minded individuals. Although traditionally associated with male readers of serious texts, the actual social structure of

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

institutionalized reading was more complex. In 1797, the “tight‐knit group of 101 subscribers” to the Whitehaven Library in Cumberland “included just eleven women” and was dominated by “the merchant oligarchy” of this “key Atlantic port,” but other libraries included substantial numbers of women and were more socially diverse (Allan 2008, p. 78). By the 1820s, some libraries for working‐class readers, such as the Birmingham Artizan’s Library, operated on a similar basis. However, most subscription libraries demanded a much higher annual fee than Birmingham’s 1s 6d. New entrants to the libraries at Hull and Liverpool were charged a whopping £10 10s (Allan 2008, p. 92). By the 1820s, many of the libraries founded some 30 or 40 years earlier held substantial collections. Despite their reputation for serious works, many included novels and other light reading. In 1798, the catalogue of the Sheffield Subscription Library (founded in 1771) listed 248 novels and had a separate category for travel writing (Colclough 2007a). Despite this apparent inclusiveness, the subscription library was a policed space. Some collections were constructed by committees who rejected titles concerned with political and theological debate. Some even had rules warning against the nomination of certain genres (Allan 2008, p. 108). During the late 1790s, a number of libraries voted to ban texts associated with radical ideas. At Shrewsbury, works by Rousseau, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft were removed (Jackson 2001, p. 78). Both Shrewsbury and Sheffield excluded the Analytical Review, which was viewed by conservative writers as an important source of opposition to the war against revolutionary France. Sheffield replaced the Analytical with the government‐sponsored Anti‐Jacobin Review (Colclough 2007a). As these examples suggest, subscription libraries were more than just places from which books and periodicals could be borrowed. They were also places of debate in which decisions about what it was appropriate to read were taken. Members became actively involved in the discussion of contemporary print culture. Such institutions may have been successful precisely because they encouraged “intelligent discussion and agreeable companionship” (Allan 2008, p. 109), but this idea of a harmonious reading community is not always reflected in the recollections of contemporary readers. Joseph Hunter (1783–1861) was just 16 when the Analytical Review was excluded from the Sheffield Library. He used his diary to inveigh against its successor, the Anti‐Jacobin Review, and judged the exclusion of the Analytical and other “Jacobinical” texts as a “virulent attack” upon not just his own reading practices but those of other “friends of liberty” (Colclough 2007a, pp. 108–109). Book clubs were another important way of sharing books. Usually smaller in scale than subscription libraries, they sold off the books at the end of each year. Most restricted the number of members to 30 or fewer, and fees were usually cheaper since they did not maintain a permanent library. In theory, texts circulated more quickly among a smaller group, and the fact that members were often brought together by similar interests may well have meant that there was less conflict over what to buy. After becoming disillusioned with the Sheffield Library, Hunter joined the smaller and cheaper “Chapel Book Society,” which had only 22 members (as opposed to 117) and charged 6s (rather than 10s) as an annual fee. It contained just 70 volumes in 1798, but they included radical works such as Wollstonecraft’s Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794). This suggests a shared interest among its members in what was beginning to be defined as subversive reading (Colclough 2007a). This club seems to fulfill the often repeated claim that book clubs concentrated on theological and political debate, but Sheffield was not necessarily typical. The Faversham Book Society, founded

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in 1791, ordered novels, poetry, and periodicals as well as works on medicine, law, and theology that reflected the professional interests of its members (Allan 2008, p. 51). The expensive entrance fees, annual subscriptions, and rules on nomination kept a tight control on the membership of most book clubs and subscription libraries. This suggests that their success was predicated as much on the desire for sociability as it was on the need to acquire texts. Those excluded because they did not fit the social profile of the group, or whose reading was deemed inappropriate, may often have found the commercial library more welcoming. This may have been particularly true for women, who, although not excluded from book clubs and subscription libraries, appear to have always been in the minority at such institutions. The expanding print culture of the late eighteenth century encouraged readers to be users as much as consumers of books, to take up the pen as an integral part of reading. Joseph Hunter made extracts from the books that he rented or borrowed from various libraries in a series of notebooks and his journal. Many late eighteenth‐century texts, such as the range of “Pocket Books” for ladies and gentlemen offered for sale in most bookshops, show that much that was printed was designed to be written in. Manuscript collections of recipes and favorite verse, commonplace books, and albums continued to be annotated and written in, just as in earlier generations, but they were now much more likely to include passages from contemporary works or “scraps” gathered from newspapers and magazines.

7.3 ­Print Culture and the Abolition of Slavery This expansion of print culture, the proliferation of printed material throughout daily life, could be mobilized to powerful effect by political movements, none more so in this period than the abolitionist movement. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) was founded in a print shop in London in 1787 by a group of mainly Quaker men, and they immediately put the printing press to use in their cause. One of their first acts was to create a symbol of their movement, an engraving featuring the image of a kneeling African man in chains, with the slogan “Am I not a man and a brother?” The ceramics industrialist Josiah Wedgwood was a supporter of the group, and he quickly replicated the image on countless cameos and medallions, and on household objects including teapots, sugar bowls, cups, and saucers (Oldfield 1995, pp. 155– 184; Margolin 2002). The SEAST emblem has been critiqued by modern scholars for depicting enslaved Africans as helpless supplicants in need of saving by white Europeans (Hartman 2007, pp. 167–169; Wood 2010, pp. 35–89). It is easy to imagine that the middle‐ and upper‐class men and women sipping tea and pouring sugar from their china imprinted with this symbol, or writing letters on stationery that featured it, were as invested in demonstrating their own sophistication and sensibility as they were in furthering the cause. Wedgwood demonstrated that “abolition could be made fashionable and given its own status meaning” (Oldfield 1995, p. 3). Nonetheless, the imagery proliferated throughout Britain and helped ensure that the cause of abolition remained in the public eye. Another ubiquitous printed document produced by SEAST, again artfully combining image and text, was the diagrammatic rendering of the slave ship Brooks (Figure 7.5). The diagram was first published as part of a pamphlet and separately as a broadside by

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

Figure 7.5  This diagram of the slave ship Brooks was the most powerful image of the abolitionist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Source: Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Folio BrSides By6 1789.

the Plymouth chapter of the Society in March 1789. The following month, two different versions were produced in London, and in May through July three variants were ­published in Philadelphia (Ferguson 2008). Over the ensuing years, the “Description of a Slave Ship” would be reproduced in numerous newspapers, pamphlets, and posters

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through copperplate engraving, wood engraving, woodcuts, etching, and virtually all other methods for producing images. The example reproduced here is one of the London broadsides, with the illustrations done with woodcuts; this was the version that would become the most widely reproduced, sold in shops but also passed out in the streets, posted up in taverns and coffeehouses, and used as plans for scale models of the  ship, such as the one that the abolitionist crusader William Wilberforce owned (now in the Wilberforce House Museum in Hull). The broadside shows the plans for packing the ship with people to maximize efficiency during the voyage from Africa to Jamaica, a trip the Brooks made numerous times. Writing a history of the abolition movement in 1808, Thomas Clarkson wrote that this “print seemed to make an ­instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it, and … it was therefore very instrumental, in consequence of the wide circulation given it, in serving the cause of the injured Africans” (quoted in Baucom 2005, p. 265). While the broadside was redrawn and reworked many times, itself a sign of the image’s proliferation, an emphasis on scientific objectivity and exactitude was common to all versions. Precise measurements of each dimension of the ship, numerical data on the number of enslaved men, women, and children on board, the amount of space allotted to each person – all of this added to the impact of the emotional print by seeming to speak in purely objective terms. Nonetheless, the Brooks print “offers only one perspective, that of the abolitionist witnessing cruelty,” while “the perspective of those who are suffering the cruelty is predominantly absent” (“The Brookes” 2007). Its visual rhetoric of objectivity and its diagrammatic approach gives the (implicitly white) viewer the experience of a kind of divine omniscience, as the viewer stares down at the helpless people crammed into the ship, people who are precisely quantified and whose individuality is systematically erased. Some of the same dynamics of power are at work here as in the SEAST emblem, in other words. We should therefore acknowledge both the power and the importance of these printed images and words in the history of abolition, but we must also be careful not to focus on the actions of white abolitionists while ignoring those of enslaved and formerly enslaved people themselves. Also in 1789, and with support from some members of SEAST, a West African man formerly enslaved in the West Indies, Virginia, and South Carolina published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (see Figure 7.6). With an engraved frontispiece portrait facing the title page, the format of the book itself accords the dignity of authorship to Equiano, as this layout had become the norm for important literary figures (see Section 4.8). Equiano joined the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group composed of Africans living in Britain; he lectured widely and published commentary in London newspapers. His autobiography was immediately successful and influential; published in numerous countries, it went through nine editions in five years, was translated into Dutch and German (Gates 1988, p. 153), and was understood at the time to have “played a key role in the abolition of the British slave trade” by Parliament in 1807 (Lovejoy 2006, p. 317). Closely associated with Equiano, and also a member of the Sons of Africa, Ottobah Cugoano was a formerly enslaved African (born in what is now Ghana) who had been brought to England from the West Indies by an English merchant. After gaining his freedom, he published Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species in 1787 (Gates 1988, pp. 146–147).

Consolidating Change, 1780–1820

Figure 7.6  Author portrait and title page of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789). Source: Courtesy of the Black History & Literature Collection of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State University Libraries. HT869 .E6A3 1789 v.1.

The book sold well enough to be reprinted in a revised edition supervised by Cugoano in 1791, and Cugoano traveled to “upwards of fifty places” throughout Britain on an abolitionist speaking tour (quoted in Hochschild 2005, p. 136). Equiano and Cugoano were the most famous black Londoners raising their voices against the slave trade, but  they were not the only ones. Newspaper advertisements for the various London debating societies record the presence of an “African prince who lately spoke in this Society” and several other African speakers (“London Debates” 1994). Women too spoke at these debates and were prominent in the abolition movement. A few decades later, Mary Prince became the first black woman in Britain to publish her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831). Prince’s book had an immediate impact, running through three editions in its first year, and her vivid narrative of brutal treatment in the West Indies spurred action toward the abolition of slavery throughout Britain’s colonies in 1833 (Woodard 1999, pp. 133–148; Paquet 2002, pp. 28–50). In all of these figures, both named and unnamed, we can see black Britons mobilizing the resources of print to campaign for abolition. They provide an important alternative perspective to the more famous images of the Africans in the Wedgwood medallions, sugar bowls, and teacups, and in the Brooks diagram.

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The works of Equiano, Cugoano, and Prince made for highly successful books in an expanding British book trade that was addressing itself to a broader range of readers. The period 1780–1820 was in many ways a time of consolidation. Earlier innovations in repackaging texts for targeted audiences multiplied, and “old canon” reprints put substantial printed works into the hands of many who had never been able to acquire them before. Newspapers and periodicals increased in number and circulation, and the expanding numbers of monthlies dedicated almost solely to reviews of new works, such as the Analytical Review (est. 1788) and the British Critic (est. 1793), suggest a public increasingly conscious of the dynamics of a changing print culture (Forster 2001). However, new works remained expensive, and not everyone could gain entrance to the kinds of library so easily accessed by young middle‐class men such as Joseph Hunter.

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8 The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870 In the first half of the nineteenth century, British print culture underwent what Simon Eliot has termed a “distribution revolution” (Eliot 1994, p. 107). This period witnessed the widespread take‐up of new and improved technologies of reproduction and distribution. Machines for printing, binding, and papermaking allowed books, newspapers, and magazines to be produced in far greater numbers. Although steam‐powered presses had been invented in the 1790s, the process did not become commercially viable until the 1820s, and it was at this point that the use of stereotyping (explained in Section 8.1) also became widespread. The first steam presses were platen presses, operating on principles similar to wooden and metal hand presses but eliminating the reliance on human muscle power. However, these were soon joined by rotary steam presses, whose construction was radically different. Type was arranged not on a flat bed, but on the curved surface of a drum. Paper ran under the type, rather than being laid on top of it, and pressure was not applied to the whole sheet at once, but rather in a movement that swept along the sheet as it passed under the roller. The type was inked as the drum rotated, and in the late nineteenth century, presses were developed that could be fed directly from giant rolls or “webs” of paper, with sheets being cut and folded after printing. The result was that printing speeds increased from a few hundred per hour in the early nineteenth century to many thousands per hour by the end, with corresponding increases in the total volume of print in circulation. It was newspaper and magazine production that usually led the way in adopting these new technologies for commercial production, but Bible societies (such as the British and Foreign Bible Society [BFBS]) played an important role in persuading the university presses to take up new technologies for the mass production of religious texts for audiences both at home and abroad. This period also saw important changes in government legislation with the gradual abolition of the so‐called taxes on knowledge and changes in copyright law. As in the eighteenth century, however, much of this legislation was formed in reaction to changes in the print trade, rather than producing those changes. New, cheaper methods of distribution and transport, such as the “penny post” and the rapid expansion of the railway system in the 1840s, stimulated the “cheap books” debate of the early 1850s. Some of the dominant textual forms of the period, such as part‐novels, the cheap railway edition (or yellowback), and periodicals of all sorts, were designed to serve an increasingly mobile readership. The key distribution centers of the mid‐nineteenth century were the railway bookstall and the large‐scale circulating library, both of which depended on the exploitation of the new systems of reproduction and distribution for their success. The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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8.1 ­New Innovations in Text Production: Bibles, Novels, Gift Books, and Magazines The early nineteenth century witnessed some major changes in the way in which texts were produced. One of the new innovations in typesetting, stereotyping, involved producing a cast of typeset matter as a metal plate (Gaskell 1979, pp. 200–205). Until this point, producing a second printing of a book had meant resetting it from scratch. But if the type was cast, this labor could be saved. In the early nineteenth century, the process was similar to that used in the production of bronze sculptures: a forme of type was cast in plaster, producing a mold into which molten metal could be poured. From the middle of the century, laminated‐paper molds called “flongs” became the norm, replacing the earlier plaster casts (Dooley 1992, p. 60). Once released from the mold, the stereotype plate needed “finishing”: a process which included the excision of bits of plaster and excess metal by the “picker.” A proof was then taken and compared to one produced using the original forme before casting. Any small faults, such as reversed letters and missing words, were then corrected by modifying the plate (Gaskell 1979, pp. 201–205; Dooley 1992, p. 61). Despite some resistance from the printing trade, who feared that compositors might be put out of work, “stereotyping was in regular if not widespread use” by 1820 and “within sixty years it had become the preferred technology for all but small or specialized printing jobs” (Dooley 1992, p. 56). The advantages of this process were numerous. Once the plate was created, the type itself could be removed from the forme, returned to the compositor’s case, and immediately used again. Type was expensive, and most printing houses needed to avoid leaving too much of it “standing.” The production of multiple plates allowed the same work to be printed simultaneously on several different presses (even in several different places) without having to set type multiple times; stereotyping could thus speed up the printing of time‐sensitive texts. That each printing was guaranteed to be identical to the previous one saved not only on compositing, but also on proofreading expenses. As David McKitterick (2003, p. 216) has noted, innovations such as stereotyping were “simultaneously innovative and conservative.” They allowed texts to be reproduced more cheaply for new markets but at the same time “were designed to produce books bearing close resemblance to their predecessors.” The breakthrough moment for this technology took place in 1804 when Earl Stanhope’s “practical man,” the London printer Andrew Wilson, made an agreement with the Syndics of Cambridge University Press (CUP) and the University Printer Richard Watts to share with them the secrets of a new method of producing plates. As in the days of manuscript and the beginnings of print, the principal driver of innovation was demand for Bibles on an ever‐increasing scale. It is not surprising, therefore, that the BFBS, founded in 1804, waited until CUP was equipped for stereotyping before they placed an order for 6000 Bibles and 5000 New Testaments in the English language, and 20 000 Bibles and 5000 New Testaments in Welsh (Howsam 1991, p. 79). Their aim was to distribute accurate versions of these texts to a working‐class audience as cheaply as possible, as part of a broader push to evangelize the lower orders. However, cheapness, accuracy, and speed of production were not guaranteed during stereotyping’s early years. CUP struggled to produce orders on time and on budget, and both the English and Welsh testaments contained some glaring errors. Oxford University Press (OUP) had also negotiated with Wilson for the secret and quickly began to stereotype the Bible

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

and other steady sellers as a matter of course. In 1809 they became the BFBS’s second supplier and despite the efforts of both university presses to prevent orders also being given to the King’s Printer, such was the importance of the BFBS that the latter also became a supplier in 1812 (Howsam 1991, pp. 74–120). All three presses enjoyed the greatly increased revenues that resulted from their dealings with the BFBS and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). The great Bible societies were OUP’s most important customers in the early nineteenth century. The BFBS demanded 10 000 nonpareil Bibles (that is, Bibles using very small type) in 1810, and their orders continued to grow over the next 20 years. The BFBS “alone purchased 53.6 per cent of the Oxford bibles, prayer books, and testaments produced from 1837 to 1847,” and many orders placed by the SPCK and the BFBS were worth more than £10 000 (Flanders and Colclough 2013, p. 385). Such huge orders resulted both in the rapid expansion of OUP, which added steam presses to its new printing works in 1834, and in a reduction in the average price of religious works. In 1811, a duodecimo nonpareil edition was the only Bible available for under 4s. By 1846, however, 45 different formats of the Bible were available, 11 of which were priced below 2s (Flanders and Colclough 2013, pp. 378, 386). However, quality was sometimes sacrificed for quantity in the mass production of these texts. The disadvantages of stereotyping included the rapid wearing down of plates, which meant that print quality diminished toward the end of a long run. Simon Eliot has argued that the joint decision to maintain prices taken by Cambridge and Oxford in 1806 allowed both university presses to benefit from “the savings ­delivered by stereotyping” and thus to “increase their profit margins substantially” (Eliot 2013a, pp. 131–132). However, stereotyping did not necessarily dominate Bible production. By the 1840s, both university presses had enough room to store standing type, and at OUP the stereotype foundry was closed. The BFBS recorded that 500 000 impressions could be taken from standing types, and by the mid‐1840s “most of the English editions were thus printed” (Howsam 1991, p. 111; Eliot 2013a, p. 154). The Bible societies demanded quality and the presses they employed delivered what they wanted: “printed in great quantities, and distributed by volunteers at affordable prices,” these texts were serviceable objects “geared to the economic requirements of working‐ class readers” (Howsam 1991, p. 100). What did these books look like and how much did they cost? The BFBS had originally offered English readers a single‐volume nonpareil duodecimo Bible, but the small print of such works (about 6‐point type by modern measurements) was not always legible to those with poor eyesight, or those reading in poorly illuminated housing. In 1807–1808 the Society decided to use the larger (11‐point) “small pica” type in octavo format. Divided into two columns of text and with 53 lines per page, the small pica Bible was a single volume containing 1292 pages. After a redesign in 1814, it was printed on larger paper (in the “royal” octavo format), which reduced the book to 1272 pages and allowed for full headings to the chapters. This version also had more blank space at the head and foot of the page, as well as in the margin, so that readers could insert notes (Howsam 1991, p. 105). Portability was important to the BFBS, and they began selling “Pocket editions” (24mo) in the very small (5‐point) “pearl” type in 1811. Large numbers of testaments in the even smaller “ruby” and “diamond” type (3½‐ and 4½‐point, respectively) were produced in the 1830s and 1840s as the number of formats offered increased. The diamond 32mo Testament was produced for the BFBS in 1842 in a remarkable

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200 000 copies, and the same size Bible went into production the following year (Howsam 1991, pp. 107–108). We are a long way from the monumental decorated Bibles of the manuscript period such as the Winchester Bible discussed in Section 1.4, or even from the smaller and plainer copies that medieval scribes also produced, but the importance of Bible production to the trade remained consistent. These small Bibles sold at 6d ready‐bound, but they were not designed to be an ordinary marketplace commodity. During the early nineteenth century, the BFBS developed several innovative methods for supplying books to working‐class communities at cost rather than trade prices. BFBS books were not sold via the traditional book trade, and the Society first developed “the subscription system, then Auxiliaries and Associations,” and later, in the 1850s, their own version of “colportage,” the traditional system through which chapbooks had been distributed in rural areas (Howsam 1991, p. 38). The Auxiliaries and Associations were very successful at gathering subscriptions which paid for the production of Bibles to be distributed both at home and abroad. By the late 1810s, they were raising money from collectors who visited working‐class subscribers (Howsam 1991, pp. 50–52). Both the contributions made by working‐class subscribers and the fact that the BFBS charged at least cost price for the Bibles delivered meant that this was not a straightforwardly philanthropic relationship. According to the Report of the BFBS in May 1817, by teaching people how to obtain “a Bible at a sacrifice that is scarcely felt even by the most indigent,” the “visits of the collectors” were designed to inculpate both good moral and good economic behavior in “the poor” (quoted in Howsam 1991, p. 49). As the scenes of exchange between the wealthy and the working class frequently imagined on the covers of tracts suggest, in such instances the book meant much more than the words on the page. Numerous religious tracts were distributed for free and, as many literary representations suggest, they often remained unread by their unwilling recipients (Price 2012, p. 154). By making this exchange into a commercial transaction, the BFBS aimed to ensure that its Bibles would be valued, rather than cast aside as an unwanted imposition from meddling outsiders. The BFBS’s system of selling Bibles to the poor a penny at a time was less effective in the new industrial cities of the north of England, and by the 1850s it had been replaced by the use of “colporteurs,” essentially chapmen who dealt exclusively in religious texts. It was the inability to supply adequate numbers to Manchester in 1846 that led to this innovation, which was adopted throughout Britain in 1854 (Howsam 1991, pp. 165– 166). By the end of the decade, professional hawkers (including Bible‐women) were a regular sight in town and country. The success of these various distribution systems meant that Bibles and tracts distributed by the BFBS and other religious societies were the most commonly found – if not necessarily read – printed objects in working‐class homes during the first half of the nineteenth century. Using the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, Simon Eliot suggests that 21.5% of the listed output of the trade consisted of religious titles in the period 1821–1860, an increase from 17.6% in 1801–1820 (Eliot 2013b, p. 636). This increase in religious titles spurred on religious controversy. However, cheap Bibles and tracts were in competition with a vibrant popular culture of relatively cheap broadsheets and chapbooks that don’t often feature in the sources used for quantitative book history. Dickens thought London’s Seven Dials synonymous with the printing and sale of the “first effusions, and last dying speeches” published by John Pitts and James Catnach (Dickens 1994, p. 90). The range of subjects covered by broadsheet ballads selling at a penny or two was broader than

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

Dickens suggests. In the early 1820s, many of William Hone’s radical squibs on the Queen Caroline affair were published “in cheap bowdlerized versions by Catnach” (Wood 1994, p. 161). The anti‐Poor Law movement of the 1830s, of which Dickens’s own Oliver Twist was part, found expression in broadsides such as The New Poor Law Bill in Force (c. 1836), which combines an engraving with a satirical dialogue and song. Much as they had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such texts were a multimedia experience. They often set new words to an old tune and were performed by singers who sold print as part of the exchange for their performance (James 1976). Not all ballads were radical or sensational; as in earlier periods, ballads expressed a wide range of positions. Early nineteenth‐century Welsh ballads often dealt with popular loyalty or religion. Every British town “of any size had its chapbook and broadside publishers.” Both Dublin and Newcastle were well‐known centers of activity and there were as many as eight centers for the production of Welsh‐language ballads in the principality in the early nineteenth century (James 1976, p. 38; O’Ciosain 2010; Jones 2012). In contrast to these genuinely popular texts, some of which were produced in many thousands of copies, newly written books remained available only to a relatively small audience. From the 1780s until the late 1810s, for example, most new novels were published in duodecimo and often came in two, three, or four volumes. In the late 1810s, however, the novel began to take on a new shape as three‐ and one‐volume editions became more common and the duodecimo began to be replaced by the larger octavo format. Octavo had long been favored for serious works, such as history, and these alterations in form are aligned with fiction’s changing cultural status. In the post‐ Waterloo period, the novel was moving “from the sofa to the study” as fiction came to be seen as an increasingly masculine and morally serious form (Ferris 2009, p. 484). Peter Garside’s assessment of the 2272 prose fiction titles produced between 1800 and 1829 shows that more than 20% of the novels produced in the 1820s were in octavo, as compared to just 5.8% in the 1800s and 4.4% in the 1810s (Garside 2000, p. 92; Garside 2013). Although still in the minority, many bestsellers, including Scott’s influential Ivanhoe, were octavos. Published in December 1819, Scott’s new book was printed “on good quality post paper, and in a new smaller type,” unlike its predecessors, which had appeared as duodecimos “on paper of no particular quality” (Millgate 1994, p. 798). Ivanhoe helped make the novel feel “new” again. Male authorship also began to dominate in the 1820s. The proportion of novels by named female authors fell from 31% in the previous decade to 17%, while almost 35% of total output was by “male writers whose works were originally published anonymously” (Garside 2000, p. 75). Although these figures are useful in establishing that the novel was becoming an increasingly male‐dominated genre, they also show that more and more novels were being published anonymously or pseudonymously. Determining who the author of a text actually was, or connecting one title with another via title‐page clues, was all part of the contemporary reading experience. Of the 70 novels published in 1820, some 33 were anonymous or pseudonymous – including three by Scott hiding under the disguise of “the author of ‘Waverley’” – and by 1829, 66 out of 81 did not explicitly acknowledge their author. Of course, some “anonymous” authors (like Scott) were already well known. With the designation “the author of ‘Waverley,’” Scott and his publishers had created an important brand. Many other publishers, like the Minerva Press, assumed that readers were more likely to remember titles than names. As most commercial library catalogues listed novels by title, this was a good strategy.

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Some publishers were increasingly committed to a roster of male writers and by neglecting to name female authors on the title page opened up a discursive space that allowed customers to assume that such texts had a male author. The success of Scott and the new Scottish publishing houses, Blackwood’s and Constable, was particularly important in shifting the notion of the novel from a female to a male genre, with only 14 out of the 95 titles “managed by Edinburgh publishers” during the 1820s being produced by “identifiable” women (Garside 2000, p. 75). The “masculinization of the novel” continued into the 1830s and gave rise to new genres “such as military‐nautical fiction and the Newgate novel” (Garside 2013, pp. 32–33). Some changes in the novel’s appearance pre‐date the 1820s. From 1807 onwards, novels were no longer advertised as “sewed” – that is stitched with paper wrappers – but only “in boards” – that is, “covered with two sheets of stiff card … usually with printed labels on the spine” (Garside 2000, p. 93), whereas in the earlier period customers were offered a choice between the two (Hill 1999, p. 263). By the middle of the 1820s, however, some novels were being sold in cloth‐covered boards that would have made them look similar in appearance to annuals such as The Keepsake (discussed later in this section). The 1820s was also the decade in which the three‐volume form came to prominence. Nearly half (44%) of all titles were three‐deckers (a term apparently coined in the 1830s; it refers to the three decks of guns that large warships would have), although this form was surpassed in growth terms by the single‐volume novel, which accounted for 27.5% of all titles (a rise from 13.7% in the 1810s). The decline in the production of novels in four volumes is probably accounted for by the imitation of Scott’s success, although publishers may also have been thinking about reducing production and ­distribution costs (Garside 2000, p. 91). If the status of the novel was rising in the 1820s, so was its price. Despite the general deflationary nature of the national economy at this time, the cost of the average three‐ volume novel rose from 21s at the beginning of the decade to 31s 6d in 1826. Scott’s work was again influential and it was the success of Kenilworth; A Romance … In Three Volumes (1821) which helped set the price of many new novels at 10s 6d per volume in boards. However, not every new novel appeared at the same price or in the same format; different publishers tailored their wares to different price points within the fiction market. For example, the three‐deckers published under the Minerva Press imprint by A.K. Newman were duodecimo (rather than octavo) in format and, at 16s 6d and 18s, retailed “well below Colburn’s market leaders” (Garside 2000, pp. 93–94). Although most single‐ volume works sold at 10s 6d – the same price per volume as for a three‐decker – they often contained more reading due to the use of smaller type. Both reprints (for as little as 5s per volume) and new genres (such as the short evangelical tale) helped the single‐ volume novel to secure a prominent place in the marketplace. Similarly, some new works were also serialized, usually at the price of 6d per number, or in monthly parts at 2s. Catherine George Ward’s The Mysterious Marriage (1820) cost 13s 6d for 27 numbers and was later reissued in volume form (Garside 2000, p. 96; Garside 2013, p. 29). The “Scotch” or “Highland” novel was one of the major genres of the 1820s with many titles, such as the Minerva Press’s The Highland Castle, and The Lowland Cottage (1820), published in imitation of Scott. The Edinburgh firm of Blackwood (often working in combination with Thomas Cadell) became one of the most important novel publishers of the period. Blackwood was appointed as the Edinburgh agent for John Murray in 1811 and from 1813 for James and John Ballantyne, the printers of Scott’s works.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

Blackwood and Murray co‐published Scott’s Tales of My Landlord in 1816. However, “Scott’s connection with the House of Blackwood was terminated soon afterward,” because they dared to suggest that the author change his work (Finkelstein 2002, p. 8). Blackwood’s was an innovative publisher. The success of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (relaunched in October 1817) allowed them to build up an impressive roster of authors, and the firm pioneered “the publication in book form of works first serialized in the magazine, predating Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley’s use of such marketing strategies by several years” (Finkelstein 2002, p. 9). Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818) and The Inheritance (1824), for example, both first appeared in the pages of the Edinburgh Magazine. It was the success of the Magazine that allowed Blackwood’s to offer authors fees equivalent to those paid by the largest London firms and to survive the financial problems suffered by many other publishers in the mid‐1820s. Ferrier, for example, was rumored to have been offered £1000 for the copyright of The Inheritance (Garside 2000, p. 90). If Blackwood was innovative in exploiting the power of the periodical press to create a buzz around the work of his authors, and even some texts that did not yet exist, Constable aimed to exploit different levels of the emerging middle‐class market for fiction by producing Scott’s work in a number of different forms and formats (Finkelstein 2002, p. 9). Between 1819 and 1825 he published Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley, which consisted of all of Scott’s novels to date, in five different editions. The 12‐volume octavo set of 1819 (priced at £7 4s) was followed by 16 volumes in duodecimo in 1821 (£6) and an 18mo set in 12 volumes in 1823 (£4 4s). With second sets of the octavo and duodecimo editions issued in 1822 and 1825 respectively, Constable aimed to enlarge the market for the novel with most of “an exceptionally large impression of 5,000” copies of the “1823 ‘miniature’ set” being sent to London for bulk distribution by Hurst, Robinson & Co., who also supplied illustrations for this edition (Garside 2007b, p. 227). With the market awash with imitators of Scott and innovations in the Scotch novel, the 1820s closed with Cadell’s launch of the 48‐volume “Magnum Opus” edition of Scott’s fiction in June 1829. William St. Clair has argued that this edition, issued monthly in cloth‐bound 18mo volumes at 5s each, truly deserves to be described as a “commodity text,” as it was designed to be consumed regularly by middle‐class readers in much the same way as they might purchase a bottle of a favorite wine (St. Clair 2004, p. 31). Actual figures of the sales of each volume are difficult to ascertain, but some appear to have sold between 30 000 and 35 000 copies. The uniform appearance of these texts was important to the many “Collected Works” series that were to follow. Each volume was extensively annotated and contained a new introduction, title‐page illustration, and steel‐engraved frontispiece. Many of these features overlap with those found in the canon‐building anthologies of the previous two decades. By capturing key scenes, these illustrations opened up new ways of interpreting otherwise familiar texts. Their presence gave a living author’s work apparent canonical status and helped raise fiction’s status as a genre. This “Magnum Opus” was aimed at a wide, national audience. Cadell’s advertising campaign claimed that its 5s price tag put it within reach of “readers of all classes,” but it was very much a Scottish production. Cadell took full advantage of the use of the new technologies of production such as stereotype plates and steam printing (the latter from mid‐way through the series) in order to keep control of production in Edinburgh (Millgate 1987). Editions of the Poetical Works (1833–1834), for which Scott had first

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become famous, and the Miscellaneous Prose (1834–1836) were to follow and helped make Scott one of the most ubiquitous writers of the period (see Garside 2007b, pp. 230–231). However, the idea that the “Magnum” edition was affordable to everyone should be dismissed as a fantasy or marketing ploy. At 5s a volume, it would have been within the means of some readers of the middling classes but not of those below them on the economic ladder. Ina Ferris has argued that despite the continued categorization of novel reading as an ephemeral, feminine activity during the early nineteenth century, “a new and newly powerful critical discourse” emerged to re‐gender the novel as a serious male pursuit. Scott’s Waverley series was the culmination of this period of transformation, but, as Ferris’s work makes clear, the “modern historical novel” was itself dependent upon the invention of a number of new “serious” novelistic genres (the national tale, the domestic novel, the evangelical novel) created mainly by female authors (Ferris 2009, pp. 474, 476, 484). Contemporary readers certainly recognized these new genres. John Gibson Lockhart thought that the anonymously published Clan Albin: A National Tale (1815) was similar to both Scott’s Waverley (1814) and The Saxon and the Gael (1814) (Lockhart 1897, vol. 1, p. 74). Mary Russell Mitford thought it “a pretty thing – only too Highlandish” (see manuscript notes in Mitford 1819). The success of Waverley produced many imitations, and it is in this context that Mitford thought of this text as generic. If, in this instance, familiarity led Mitford to condemn with faint praise, she was later to suggest that one of the pleasures of reading the Waverley novels was the feeling of “intimate … familiarity” that returning to the same genre and the same author provoked (Mitford 1852, p. 230; Lynch 2009). The commodification of the “Author of Waverley” in expensive first editions and cheaper (but not cheap) reprints made him into one of the most widely read authors of the entire century and helped fiction establish a new legitimacy as a serious genre. The other great publishing sensation of the post‐Waterloo period was also a form of serial. The annual was a gift book that purchasers were encouraged to renew each year. It was the publisher Rudolph Ackermann’s Forget Me Not: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1823 which started this trend. (Ackermann was an immigrant from Germany, where the literary annual was already established.) Clearly aimed to boost book sales during the October–December season, which was still not as large as January–June in the 1820s, these illustrated collections of verse and short stories proved to be one of the biggest hits, and most innovative forms, of the 1820s and 1830s (Eliot 1995b, pp. 32–33). By 1831, the Forget Me Not had spawned more than 60 rivals. Most were “pocket‐ sized” duodecimos, but with the launch of The Keepsake in 1828 the size was increased to octavo, and they tended to get bigger as time went on. Those who wanted to particularly impress the recipient might choose a “large paper copy” or a royal octavo “with India proofs of the prints,” a strategy that Blackwood’s Magazine suggested must always end in marriage (Manning 1995, p. 45). Elaborate bindings, such as “crimson silk” or “embossed leather” became common as publishers added more decorative features to make their title stand out from the crowd. The Keepsake and The Amulet were both bound in watered silk, “with titles hand‐blocked in gold” (Pickwoad 2009, p. 288). In the late 1820s, the volumes of Friendship’s Offering were uniformly bound in blue embossed leather, with a lyre, the publisher’s name, and title of the volume picked out in gold. Large sales justified the expense lavished on their appearance. The Keepsake sold 20 000 copies in 1829 alone, and The Literary Souvenir maintained a circulation of

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

15 000 copies per season at the height of its fame. With the print run for new novels generally ranging between 500 and 2000 copies in the 1820s, these are remarkable figures, especially given that, like the novel, annuals were expensive. Indeed, at 12s for Friendship’s Offering and 1 guinea for The Keepsake, these texts were more expensive per volume than the average novel. However, with up to 400 pages of “exquisitely printed” letterpress and large numbers of engravings, many annuals were considered a “cheap luxury” (Manning 1995, p. 47). The first Keepsake contained 18 plates. Spread evenly throughout each annual volume, these images usually accompanied text written on demand to accompany them, rather than the other way round. In using steel (rather than copper) plate for the illustrations, The Forget Me Not was at the cutting edge of technology. Developed during the first decade of the nineteenth century but not taken up commercially until the 1820s, the great advantage of steel plates over copper was that they were tougher and could thus be used in long print runs without needing to be repaired or replaced. After the success of the annuals proved their value, they began to be used in many publications (such as guide books) which “combined the need for great delicacy and long runs” (Twyman 1970, p. 24). In 1828, The Keepsake introduced an engraved presentation plate that allowed whoever was giving the text to inscribe his or her sentiments. The competitors soon followed suit (see Figure  8.1). Andrew Piper has suggested that “while books had always functioned as gift objects,” the annual “was emerging at precisely the moment when books were overwhelmingly being defined by their status as commodities” (Piper 2009, p. 23). Their success thus depended both on their being produced in a uniform fashion for the Christmas market while at the same time looking like a personally crafted gift inscribed with the handwriting of the giver. Often thought of as books for an exclusively female audience, and thus assumed to be something presented by men to women, surviving inscriptions suggest that they were also given by women to women (often mother to daughter) and by women to men (Piper 2009, p.  132). Although female readers were certainly important (see Hoagwood and Ledbetter 2005), like all of the most successful books of the 1820s, they were designed to appeal to a family audience. The annual mimicked the combinations of short text and image that had once been the preserve of the manuscript album, and like the album, it was consumed communally. It was only in the much more competitive world of the 1830s that some annuals, such as Heath’s Book of Beauty, came to be aimed exclusively at women. By the early 1830s, the Scotch novel and its Scottish producers had begun to play less of a role in the fiction market. Archibald Constable went bankrupt in 1826, as a result of a more general financial panic that began the previous year. For the next few years, the number of new novels and other literary texts being published seriously declined. This decline in numbers was short‐lived, however (Eliot 1994, pp. 44–46). The new novel publishers, such as Colburn & Bentley and Saunders & Otley, were part of an increasingly professionalized London trade. Like Blackwood’s, they also often controlled magazines in which their novels were either puffed or serialized. One of the most important “nautical” authors of the 1830s, Frederick Marryat, was the editor of Saunders  & Otley’s Metropolitan Magazine (Garside 2013, p. 38). During the 1820s and 1830s, publishers were beginning to target wider audiences with texts such as the cheaper editions of Scott’s novels and the annuals aimed specifically at an aspirant ­middle‐ and lower‐middle‐class audience. Jon Klancher (1987) has argued that it was

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Figure 8.1  The annual (in this case, The Forget Me Not) as a mass‐produced gift. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. AY13 .F55 1837.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

quarterly magazines such as the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) and the Quarterly Review (1809–1967) that had helped to create a broad, middle‐class reading audience. By the 1820s, however, the long articles of such publications began to appear old‐ fashioned in comparison to the newer, cheaper monthlies, such as the New Monthly Magazine (1814–1884), Blackwood’s (1817–1980), and the Literary Gazette (1817–1863) (Shattock 2007). Magazines, annuals, and other forms of new publication helped give this audience a taste for the serialized and the miscellaneous. Once seen in literary historical terms as the lull between Romantic poetry and the Victorian novel, the 1820s and 1830s are now increasingly recognized as a period of literary experimentation, especially in the short forms best suited to magazine publication (Cronin 2010; Stewart 2011). However, as the work of James Secord has demonstrated, during the 1830s, new publishers, such as Longman, also successfully marketed “reflective treatises” on ­science to an audience prepared to pay 6s for a new work (Secord 2014, p. 23).

8.2 ­“Popular Literature” and the Diversity of Print, 1820–1870: From the Cheap Miscellany to Reading for the Rail It is tempting to think of the steam press, like the railway engine, as an agent of revolutionary and irreversible change, but developments in cultural production and dissemination do not take place overnight. “As in other industries, there was a world of difference between invention and development, and widespread acceptance and application” (McKitterick 2009b, p. 76). In the early part of the nineteenth century, both the steam‐driven printing “machine” and the improved hand‐driven printing “press” operated together. Only five London printers installed steam presses before 1820, among them the Times (Weedon 2003, p. 70). It was not economically viable for many printers to turn to the new technology in the 1820s because most books were produced in small print runs. It was, however, ideal for the production of newspapers and weekly magazines. The first issue of the Times to be printed on a Koenig steam press appeared on November 29, 1814. Whereas the iron hand press could produce 300 sheets per hour, these machines were capable of 1100. However, the paper for these machines still needed to be fed in by hand, and the large sheets used for newspapers were difficult to handle. A modification of Koenig’s design by Applegarth & Cowper was installed by the Times in 1827. This new machine was a “four‐feeder” which produced more than 4000 sheets an hour (Banham 2007, p. 276). Speeding up the printing process in this way allowed the Times to go to press later than its rivals. By the mid‐1830s it had a much larger circulation (about 9800 copies) than either The Morning Chronicle or The Morning Herald (at about 6200 copies each) (McKitterick 2009b, pp. 76–77). Newspapers and periodicals continued to drive the development of printing machines after 1830. However, the Applegarth & Cowper machine also increased the economic viability of printing books by steam. In the 1830s and 1840s, many printers installed steam‐driven “double‐platen presses,” which could print as many as 800 impressions per hour (Weedon 2003, pp. 70–71). As already noted, the university presses and the “not for profit” Bible and tract societies were among the first to use the new technologies of steam printing and stereotypes to produce long print runs for books. Although

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fundamentally different in their attitudes toward religion, the BFBS and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) aimed to reach the increasingly literate working‐class audience emerging in the early nineteenth century. By the late 1820s, some commercial publishers shared both their “ambitions for popular education and cheap print, and their early use of technologies” (Fyfe 2012, p. 8). The SDUK’s Prospectus (1826) declared that their mission was to provide “useful information to all classes of the community, particularly such as are unable to avail themselves of experienced teachers, or may prefer learning by themselves” (SDUK 1826, p. 1). The “Treatises” that they produced were issued fortnightly at just 6d. Each issue of “The Library of Useful Knowledge” included 32 pages of small type divided into double columns with wood engravings and tables. Under the publisher Charles Knight’s influence, the SDUK’s attempts to make learning “Entertaining” as well as “Useful” were “purposeful and well intended,” even if titles such as “Natural Philosophy” and “History of Science” were not “the most gripping” on offer (Turner 2010, p. 119). The 1820s also saw the birth of a new phenomenon: the cheap miscellany. The most successful of these new twopenny weekly publications, John Limbird’s Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–1849), reported sales of 10 000–15 000 copies per issue (Topham 2005). Published in a format designed to evade the newspaper stamp, the abridged edition of William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register had proved that there was an audience for twopenny periodicals when it was issued in November 1816, and a range of politically radical publications followed in its wake. Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf (1817–1824) and Richard Carlile’s Republican (1819–1826) “enlarged on Cobbett’s narrowly political content to incorporate literary and cultural material reminiscent of the ‘miscellany’ format of the mainstream polite magazine” and the radical anthologies of the 1790s (Haywood 2004, p. 88). These titles played an important role in creating and articulating the mass politics of the period. In 1819, for example, the rhetoric of the Black Dwarf had an enormous influence upon the mass meeting at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester that came to be known as “Peterloo” after the authorities attempted to disperse it with cavalry, using tactics similar to those used against foreign armies at Waterloo. This flowering of cheap radical print was then curtailed by the repressive “Six Acts” issued by the British government in December 1819. The “hawking and distribution of unstamped literature” was made illegal, and the definition of a newspaper was extended “to include any paper or pamphlet which contained news,” was published more frequently than every month, and sold for less than sixpence (Haywood 2004, p. 100). The Six Acts meant that radical and other weeklies became subject to the 4d stamp tax, which raised the cover price to 6d, taking them out of the reach of a mass readership, and so making it harder to organize new protests along the lines of the one in Manchester. It was in these conditions that the new twopenny miscellanies of the 1820s were conceived. It is sometimes suggested that in the period following the imposition of the “Six Acts” there was a shift from radical political activism to self‐improvement, but the work of Brian Maidment (1992, 2001, 2013) and Jonathan Topham (2004, 2005) complicates any simplistic notion of such a transition. Limbird was responsible for several new periodicals before the Mirror of Literature became a bestseller, including the Literary Journal (1818–1819) and the Literary Chronicle (1819–1828), and worked with many members of the print trade involved in the production of radical weeklies, including the publisher of Cobbett’s Register, Thomas Dolby. In creating the Mirror, Limbird combined

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

elements of the radical weekly with the more respectable press. His 6d Literary Chronicle had already copied elements of Colburn’s Literary Gazette (1817–1863), which crammed three columns of closely printed type onto each of its 16 pages for a shilling. The Mirror added additional elements from another new twopenny weekly, The Hive, Or, Weekly Entertaining Register (1822–1824), by the well‐known radical publisher and pirate Joseph Onwhyn. Consisting of 16 octavo (rather than quarto) pages and divided into two columns of small type (like most of the radical weeklies), the publishers of The Hive had come up with an ingenious way of saving on paper costs, which made up “between half and two‐thirds” of the cost of production at this time. Both Hive and Mirror were filled with a mixture of original articles and cut‐and‐paste journalism. Limbird’s innovation was to integrate wood engravings, a move quickly copied by the Hive (Topham 2005, p. 89). The greater durability of wood engravings as opposed to woodcuts allowed longer print runs. Elite magazines such as The Gentleman’s Magazine had begun to drop small vignette illustrations into the text in the early 1820s. The proliferation of such images in the twopenny press suggests it played an important role in the democratization of “bourgeois visual pleasure” (Haywood 2004, p. 112). Although some of the material carried by the miscellanies had been printed elsewhere, the careful arrangement of extracts from recent books and periodicals provided an up‐to‐date summary of contemporary culture for readers who could not otherwise afford it, much like the earlier incarnations of The Gentleman’s Magazine had done in the eighteenth century. Although many established bookshops refused to carry the Mirror “because of its cheap price,” Limbird’s active campaign of advertising and distribution via small shopkeepers ensured that the Mirror often sold 10 000 copies per week, and sales figures go much higher than that if reprints are included (Topham 2005, p. 92). The production costs of The Literary Gazette had been reduced in 1818 by the use of the steam press, but the Mirror was still produced by hand. Limbird did, however, take advantage of the new technology of stereotyping, which allowed each issue to be produced simultaneously on multiple presses, thus speeding up production without the need for steam. Paper and storage costs were also reduced by printing only as many copies as were needed. Stereotyping allowed the Mirror to be available in three different ­formats – weekly numbers, monthly parts, and biannual volumes – without the cost of resetting the type. Back issues and bound volumes were important sources of additional income (Topham 2004, pp. 57–58; Topham 2005, pp. 89–90). It is difficult to establish who actually bought periodicals such as The Mirror, but their cheap price appealed to both middle‐ and working‐class readers. A number of threepenny weeklies aimed at a more defined audience also emerged at this time, including The Mechanics’ Magazine and The Lancet, both launched in 1823. Although different in tone than the radical press suppressed by the Six Acts, the periodicals of the early 1820s mark a new and distinctive moment in British print culture. Addressed to a large ­audience hungry for print, they anticipate in technique (and often personnel) the illustrated newspapers of the 1840s as much as the SDUK’s “useful knowledge” publications, with which they are often associated, and which certainly borrowed from them in terms of page layout and price. In her classic study The Pauper Press, Patricia Hollis (1970, p. 95) notes that “between 1830 and 1836 several hundred unstamped newspapers were floated.” Working‐class newspapers had continued to evolve after the Six Acts had forced all newspapers to carry and pay the 4d newspaper stamp, but it was not until 1830 that several publishers

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decided to challenge the often arbitrary application of the law. What is often termed the “war of the unstamped” began in the last months of 1830 with the publication of William Carpenter’s Political Letters and Pamphlets, Henry Hetherington’s Penny Papers for the People, and Richard Carlile’s Prompter. Carlile was prosecuted for seditious libel and Carpenter and Hetherington for publishing an unstamped newspaper. As newsvendors and booksellers who normally distributed newspapers could not sell these texts without fear of prosecution, the unstamped newspapers were primarily available from the shops run by their proprietors and from a new breed of street vendors and agents that stretched out into the provinces. By 1832, the successor to Hetherington’s Penny Papers, The Poor Man’s Guardian, was available from a large number of provincial agencies in England and Wales. It encouraged members of the National Union of the Working Class to ­distribute texts, and many small sellers were prosecuted, but as sales increased, more and more were prepared to take the risk. The “unstamped press,” as these papers were collectively known, was available in beer shops and barber shops, and sellers were as likely to be shoemakers, weavers, and hairdressers as they were stationers. This allowed print to reach new and novel locations, but the main agents still operated from well‐ stocked shops, such as that run by James Guest in Birmingham, and the most successful acted as wholesalers. Abel Heywood, who went on to become a major wholesaler and give evidence to the Newspaper Stamp Committee in 1851, “subcontracted agencies to the smaller towns” within 20 miles of Manchester “and supplied a host of streetsellers, making a penny a dozen from selling to the trade” (Hollis 1970, p. 113). This evidence shows that the “unstamped” was distributed in much the same way as the stamped press. It was a commodity, and like other newspapers, needed to be advertised using bills or placards. However, the publishers of the unstamped were interested in more than just publicity. Advertisements for Richard Lee’s The Man declared their opposition to “Despotic Governments” (quoted in Hollis 1970, p. 114), and Carlile and Hetherington used placards to call attention to prosecutions and imprisonments. With the frequent prosecution of retailers and occasional seizures of deliveries to the country trade, sales of unstamped titles fluctuated. However, their circulation certainly outstripped all “legal” rivals, with The Poor Man’s Guardian selling as many as 16 000 copies at a time when the circulation of the Times was less than 10 000 (Altick 1957, p. 393). Ian Haywood has argued that the range of new titles advertised in The Poor Man’s Advocate in 1832 “is a striking testament to the remarkable expansion of ‘cheap’ print culture in the adversarial climate of the unstamped wars.” Titles included both “useful knowledge” such as the Penny Cyclopaedia and “entertaining knowledge” such as The Penny Story Teller (Haywood 2004, p. 112). By 1834 the publisher of The Poor Man’s Guardian was the owner of “Hetherington’s Unstamped Repository and General Periodical Publication Warehouse” in the Strand, where he supplied “his Friends, the Trade, and the Public” with all the main titles in what William St. Clair has termed the “Radical canon,” including Shelley’s Works, Byron’s Don Juan, Southey’s Wat Tyler, and Paine’s Rights of Man. These were books whose copyrights were unenforceable for various reasons (typically because their texts were borderline seditious or blasphemous), and so could be reprinted, at low cost, by anyone willing to take the legal risk of ­producing an edition of something the authorities might clamp down upon (St. Clair 2004, pp. 337, 319). However, Hetherington also supplied new titles, such as the twopenny Weekly Police Gazette, and SDUK publications, such as The Penny Magazine

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

and Knight’s The Printing Machine (The Poor Man’s Guardian no. 2, p. 71). As new publishers entered the field, the “cheap” print culture of the early 1830s became ever more diverse. By the mid‐1830s, the politically radical “quarto” papers, such as The Poor Man’s Guardian, were losing out in terms of popularity to new broadsheets the size of the Times, such as Charles Penny’s People’s Police Gazette and Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette. By May 1835 the circulation of the Poor Man’s Guardian had been reduced from 16 000 to around 4000 copies, while the circulation of the Weekly Police Gazette reached 40 000 in the following year (Hollis 1970, pp. 122–124). The Weekly Police Gazette (1834–1836) was one of the first unstamped newspapers “to mix political news with coverage of non‐political events like sensational crimes, strange occurrences, and excerpts from popular fiction” (Jacobs 2008, p. 225). Hollis (1970) suggests that the radical political cause of newspapers written for the working class was undermined by these new, more “sensationalist” newspapers. However, the fact that Cleave’s was one of the presses seized by the government in a final attempt to repress the unstamped in August 1835 suggests that his Weekly Police Gazette was repackaging the radical cause in a new format. From March 1835 the Weekly was particular vociferous in its demand for the legal and constitutional change of the stamp laws which effectively constrained ­working‐ class access to political news. From this date its masthead included both the slogan associated with the Poor Man’s Guardian, “Knowledge is Power,” and a banner inscribed “For a Free Press & Equal Laws” (Jacobs 2008). The accompanying representation of a hand press may well have been chosen to celebrate artisanal labor in opposition to the steam presses used by The Penny Magazine and other “useful knowledge” publications. As Edward Jacobs argues (2008), some historians of British print culture have thus been too quick to condemn the Weekly Police Gazette as merely a market‐driven production. It was, perhaps, the more nuanced approach to political reform invented by Cleave that allowed middle‐ and working‐class radicals to collaborate against the stamp duties, with the result that the fourpenny stamp was reduced to a penny in September 1836 (Jacobs 2008). The presence of SDUK publications in Hetherington’s warehouse is testament to the Society’s desire to give this new audience an alternative to the cheap periodicals supplied by Limbird and the radical press. The best‐known and most successful of the SDUK’s joint projects with Charles Knight, The Penny Magazine (1832–1846), was an illustrated weekly that claimed an astonishing early circulation of 200 000. Knight also issued similar works, such as The Companion to the Newspaper (1833–1837), under his own imprint. Both The Saturday Magazine (published under the auspices of the SPCK) and The Weekly Visitor (the Religious Tract Society) were also first published in 1832–1833. Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal (CEJ) first appeared in February 1832, priced at 1½d. Lacking illustrations, Chambers’s four pages were each divided into four dense columns of text. In declaring that it would provide “a meal of healthful, useful and agreeable instruction” at a price suited to an audience with an “appetite for instruction,” the first editorial was optimistic about the cultural advancement of the working classes. However, as Aileen Fyfe has noted, it was also openly critical of “charitable organisations” such as the SDUK and the SPCK that “claimed to diffuse knowledge,” although neither is mentioned by name (CEJ, February 4, 1832, p. 1; Fyfe 2012, p. 22). Like The Penny Magazine, Chambers’s carried articles that chimed with the contemporary desire to make useful knowledge available to the less well‐off, but it also included stories

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and poems, and eventually serialized fiction. The lack of recycled articles and illustrations was designed to differentiate it from both the unstamped press and SDUK ­publications (Fyfe 2012, pp. 23–24). Fyfe’s detailed history of William and Robert Chambers’s publishing business shows how important the Journal was to the expansion of the Edinburgh‐based firm. In order to reach a national audience, the brothers embraced the latest printing techniques, including stereotyping, steam printing, and simultaneous publication in more than one city (Fyfe 2012, p. 27). Extensive advertising and the use of agents in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dublin, and London helped to ensure sales beyond their home city. The first 12 issues sold around 30 000 copies and sales “very nearly doubled” when “at the thirteenth number an impression was commenced in London” (CEJ, February 2, 1833, p. 1). This took some of the pressure off the Edinburgh printers and cut down on the time and money spent on transporting 10 000 or 20 000 copies per week via the coastal route to the south (Fyfe 2012, pp. 45–48). From the twenty‐first number on, impressions were taken from a stereotype plate produced in Edinburgh instead of setting type in London. This made the English and Scottish editions identical, reduced composition costs, and allowed the production of reprints only when needed, thus saving on printing and storage costs in much the same way as Limbird had done in the previous decade. The combined print run was 50 000 copies, and the successful scheme of transporting stereotypes rather than copies was extended to Ireland (CEJ, February 2, 1833, p. 1). The success of the Journal allowed for a radical solution to the problem of producing 30 000 copies per week in Scotland using the hand press (Fyfe 2012, p. 56). Rather than transferring more work to London, where the steam presses of William Clowes and Bradbury & Evans were proving efficient, Chambers set up their own print works and installed steam‐powered machines. In order “to maximise the return on the investment in premises and equipment,” Chambers began to use their extra production capacity to launch a series of new publications (Fyfe 2012, p. 61). These included The Information for the People, which, although it looked like and sold for the same price as the Journal, was issued in 50 parts (or numbers) which built up into an encyclopedia of “information.” They chose its title to differentiate this series from the SDUK’s more expensive “Library of Useful Knowledge,” but the firm’s texts were also clearly in competition with other “numbers” and “serials” of the sort that could be found in Hetherington’s warehouse. Sixpenny serials such as “The Modern Poets of Great Britain” (published by Jones & Co. in the 1820s) boasted that “Each Number” contained “more reading for Sixpence, than was originally published at 5s!!” (reproduced in St. Clair 2004, p. 117). St. Clair suggests that “the revival of selling in numbers probably helped to bring many groups into the reading nation.” Priced between 3d and 6d in the 1820s, these texts fell to as little as a penny per issue in the 1830s, when series such as the “Penny National Library” were issued (St. Clair 2004, p. 206). The numbers trade is included in St. Clair’s discussion of the “old canon,” the out‐of‐copyright (and, at least when it came to medical writing, often out‐of‐date) texts that poorer readers had to make do with. However, the fortnightly Information for the People and the SDUK’s weekly Penny Cyclopaedia show that there was some new material available for less than 2d by the early 1830s, even if the former took two years to complete its run of 50 numbers and cost 6s for the whole. Much that was innovative in the production of books in series during the 1820s was certainly too expensive for readers who could only afford what was priced at 6d or below. Following in the wake of Cadell’s “Author’s edition” of Scott’s Waverley novels

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

(5s a volume), a number of publishers began to experiment with single‐volume reprints of recent novels. Launched in February 1831, Richard Bentley’s series of “Standard Novels” brought many of the expensive triple‐deckers published in the post‐Waterloo period to a new audience in a single 6s volume (McKitterick 2009a, p. 6). Bentley purchased the copyright to six of Jane Austen’s novels in 1832–1833. With their “modest steel‐engraved frontispiece and a second title‐page with engraved vignette,” this was the first illustrated edition of her works (Sutherland 2005, p. 2). Bentley’s version of Emma certainly looked very different from its first edition, issued in three volumes for a guinea in 1815, and the minor emendations that he introduced continued to be reproduced until at least the 1860s (Sutherland 2005, p. 214, n. 26). Bentley seems to have broken even on the early “Standard Novels” after selling about 3300 copies (Gettmann 1960, pp. 45–54). The first 10 novels included made a profit, but the series’ prosperity “began to diminish after about ten years,” when many cheaper competitors had entered the field (Gettmann 1960, p. 51). This period also saw innovations in the publication of original nonfiction. John Murray’s “Family Library” (1829–1834) consisted of new works, not reprints. Issued in the 5s small octavo format used by Cadell for the cheap volumes of Scott, this “handy pocket size” was to become “standard for inexpensive book production” (Secord 2000, p. 48). As the publisher of Byron and the Quarterly Magazine, Murray’s venture into cheap publication made quite a stir. The series was widely praised and The Literary Gazette recorded that its “early volumes” had quickly sold out (Literary Gazette September 12, 1829, p. 601; Bennett 1976, p. 142). The series began with a two‐volume edition of the Life of Napoleon by John Gibson Lockhart. Murray’s records show that 19 950 copies of each volume of this adaptation of Scott’s longer work were sold (out of an enormous print run of 27 500 copies). This large sale was achieved using the same methods of distribution used for Murray’s other works. Copies were sold direct to ­individual booksellers throughout the English trade and via agents in the bookselling capitals of Edinburgh and Dublin (who were entitled to return unsold stock), as well as via his own London shop. The trade discount was one‐third off the list price, with the twenty‐fifth copy given free. However, as Murray realized in August 1830, even sales in such large numbers were not enough to make The Life of Napoleon profitable (Bennett 1976, pp. 143–144, 162). Murray’s accounts show that the series was profitable until the end of 1830 (when interest in it was high) but afterwards remained “always in the red.” In 1834 the unsold volumes were bought by the remainders specialist Thomas Tegg (Bennett 1976, p. 151). Scott Bennett suggests that the failure of the “Family Library” was the result of a combination of factors, including the fact that the “Dramatic Series” (begun in April 1830) never made a profit. Murray’s advertising and production costs (including an average of £221 per title paid to the author for the copyright) were high, meaning that he needed to sell 5625 copies of his average print run of 8000 before generating a profit. Although “63% of the first printing of the ‘Family Library’ volumes proper not only cleared costs but earned a profit as well,” the problem for Murray was sustaining sales over a long period, and he often seems to have reprinted in large numbers only to find that the market for the book was exhausted. Eleven of the 17 reprints he undertook were still in the red when the remaining copies were remaindered (Bennett 1976, pp. 145, 152, 153). In the final year of the “Family Library,” titles were produced in smaller editions of between 3000 and 5000 copies. When Tegg acquired the 148 634 unsold volumes in

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November 1834 it was “the largest outlay” of his career. Costing a shilling per volume, Tegg needed to pay Murray a total of £8000 over two years. This enabled him to drop the retail price to 3s 6d per volume “but it is not clear whether he recovered his investment” (Barnes and Barnes 2000, p. 54). Murray’s failure was, in part, due to the fact that he was dealing with books that had much slimmer profit margins than those he was used to and his traditional system of accounting for stock and expenses left him vulnerable to rapid fluctuations in sales. In order for series to become successful they needed to be less “capital‐intensive.” Smaller print runs and less spending on copyrights was the key to profitability. Bohn’s “Standard Library” of nonfiction (which began publication in 1846 at 3s 6d) was printed in “short runs of 250 or 500” thus “keeping his capital investment to a minimum” (Weedon 2003, p. 101). William and Robert Chambers were experts at keeping costs down. By the late 1830s they were able to sell nonfiction for less than 2s per volume and still make a profit. They did so by combining the tricks for reducing paper and binding costs first used by Limbird and others with the techniques of production employed for their own Edinburgh Journal and Information for the People. They either selected out‐of‐copyright works or commissioned short new works from authors willing to take low rates. Production costs were minimized “by using a small typeface, closely printed lines and double columns” (Fyfe 2012, p. 71). After the initial success of their steam‐printing of George Combe’s Constitution of Man in 1835, they launched the very cheap “Educational Course” series, which cost between 6d and 4s per volume. Most of this series, including the Introduction to the Sciences (1836, 9d), consisted of new works by little‐known authors, or was ­constructed from reused materials. By contrast, their People’s Editions (which sold at prices ranging from 1s 6d to 2s 6d) contained a mixture of classic “old canon” texts with more recent European works (unprotected by British copyright) in translation. At 1s 6d, the People’s Edition of Paley’s Natural Theology was much cheaper than many other versions of a title out of copyright since 1816. With just 100 double‐columned pages, it looked quite different too. It was, however, very successful, with sales totaling 14 500 copies by the end of 1842. And because the book was stereotyped, later impressions “needed only to cover the printing and paper costs” so that “between 1842 and 1847” profits “rose to £22 12s per 1,000” copies, as compared to £12 9s 9d per 1000 that it earned in 1837–1838, back when the type still had to be reset in order to produce a new edition (Fyfe 2012, p. 74). By combining the new production processes of stereotyping and steam printing devised by the religious societies, university presses, and the newspaper trade, and embracing and extending the methods for reducing the costs of authorship and paper devised by the printer‐publishers of magazines and serials during the 1820s, Chambers and others were able to significantly reduce the unit costs of production. It was this breakthrough that allowed the profitable publication of texts aimed at a mass audience to take place. What evidence do we have for the readership of these works? An article celebrating the second birthday of Chambers’s Journal was confident that it was being read by the “poorer classes,” although it also admitted that many purchasers belonged to “the middle and upper ranks” (CEJ, February 1, 1834, p. 2). In 1847 it recorded that of the 80 000 copies “of each number,” some 30 000 were sold as “single sheets” and 50 000 in “monthly parts.” The latter were assumed to be “purchased by the higher class of families” as monthly magazines (CEJ, February 6, 1847, p. 87). Similarly, sales of the later numbers of the SDUK’s “Library of Useful Knowledge” also appear to have been mainly

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

consumed by middle‐class readers. The young Emily Shore (1819–1839), daughter of a respectable middle‐class teacher, recorded that she had listened to her father read “as much of the article ‘Boroughs’” as had “come out in the last monthly number of the Penny Cyclopaedia,” and was disappointed at its concluding “in the middle of the word ‘resolution’” (Shore 1991, p. 135). However, there is plenty of evidence that working‐class readers engaged with The Penny Magazine and other texts designed to replace the radical unstamped press (Anderson 1991b, pp. 154–156). Suggestions that Knight and Chambers ultimately failed in their mission to provide working‐class readers with “civilizing” materials and instead provided “cheap print” for a “respectable readership” are, therefore, over‐ simplistic. That there are plenty of anecdotal examples of both working‐ and middle‐class readers of these widely reproduced texts is testament to the emergence of a new mass audience that cannot easily be described by the language of class. As Patricia Anderson has argued, the market for periodicals in the early Victorian period is best thought of as part of a new and developing “mass culture” characterized by its “social diversity”: “such a culture was never exclusively the experience of any one group or class, and for this reason ‘mass’ must be understood to designate multiple social layers.” If the unstamped radical press of the 1820s and 1830s had found a working‐class audience, periodicals such as Limbird’s Mirror of Literature and The Penny Magazine had helped to establish  an “unprecedentedly numerous and socially diverse public” (Anderson 1991b, pp. 11–12). In the 1840s and 1850s a series of new cheap weekly texts (often described as penny fiction magazines), emerged to serve the new “socially diverse public” created in the 1820s and 1830s by the combined efforts of the religious societies, innovative publishers, and radical instigators of the “unstamped press.” They included The London Journal; and Weekly Record of Literature, Science, and Art (1845–1906), Reynold’s Miscellany (1846–1869), Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–1932), and the Family Herald (1843–1940). Sometimes condemned as reliant upon “melodramatic” fiction to maintain a high circulation, recent work on these publications argues that they had much more in common with the cheap illustrated miscellanies of the 1820s, such as Limbird’s Mirror of Literature, than with Chambers’s Journal or the other “useful knowledge” publications to which Altick (1957) negatively compared them. Like the Mirror of Literature, The London Journal was a 16‐page weekly that carried an illustration on its front page. However, there are also major differences from the earlier miscellanies. The new titles sold for a penny (not 2d), were quarto rather than octavo in size, and contained more illustrations and original material, although they were not above cutting and pasting (Maidment 1992; King 2004). It was the triple‐columned layout that made the London Journal appear different from its two main rivals, Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany (1843–1846) and the Family Herald, which were double‐columned. The London was perhaps designed to assure readers that they were getting more for their money, and this format became increasingly “standard for entertainment periodicals” in the wake of its success (King 2004, p. 54). Although referred to as “penny‐novel journals” by Wilkie Collins (1858), most of these magazines contained much more than fiction. The Family Herald included an editorial and had sections headed “Scientific and Useful,” “Statistics,” “Varieties,” “Random Readings,” “The Riddler,” and “To Correspondents,” as well as serialized f­ iction and single‐episode tales. The London Journal added some new sections such as “Poetry”

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and “Reviews” which often included extensive quotation from contemporary works. As  the titles Reynold’s Miscellany and Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany suggest, it is probably best to think of these publications as miscellanies aimed at a mass audience. That several refer to the “family” in their titles suggests that their publishers had learnt the lesson of the annuals and gift books in how to achieve a large audience. John Gilbert’s headpiece for Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper depicts an idealized “family” group who gather close to their father’s chair, not only to hear him reading, but to look over his shoulder at the illustration on the Paper’s front page (see Figure 8.2). It was the combination of fiction and illustration that captured the attention of contemporary commentators, such as Margaret Oliphant (1858) and Collins (1858). After the London Journal began the serialization of George W.M. Reynolds’s Faust in October 1847, the front page illustration was normally a half‐page in size and sat below the magazine’s title and above the first three columns of what was usually a new chapter of the work being serialized. Andrew King has shown that although the circulation of The London Journal was at its highest during the early 1850s, when Woman and Her Master (1854) and other works by the editor J.F. Smith were being serialized, his work was not the only attraction. Sales figures increased rapidly after 1846 with the serialization of “the liberator” Daniel O’Connell’s Memoir and Eugene Sue’s Martin the Foundling, and in the 1850s, earnest and important contributions appeared in its pages (King 2004, pp. 83–84), including Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography. Some front‐page illustrations were clearly designed to titillate and excite (see Figure 8.3). The British Quarterly was disappointed if there was not at least “a dishevelled villain in a slouched hat shooting a fair gentleman” on the front page. However, to characterize these illustrations as being “with few exceptions” of “a violent and sinister quality” is to ignore the range of materials on offer which frequently rejected the dominant style of caricature associated with Dickens’s work (“Cheap Literature” 1859, p. 333).

Figure 8.2  The headpiece of Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper depicts an idealized Victorian scene of domestic reading. Source: Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library and Archives. Folio AP4 C37x.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

How was the new miscellany produced? The production of a penny weekly incurred costs for composition and correction, stereotype production, paper, printing, folding, woodcut production (usually two originals per issue), advertising, payments to contributors, and the editor’s salary, as well as difficult‐to‐calculate overheads for premises, warehousing, and insurance. The only way for an illustrated miscellany like the London Journal to make a profit was to use the cheapest paper available “and/or employ labour at well under the standard rates.” If the publisher had paid the standard rates for composition, correction, printing, and folding he would have lost between £25 and £30 on the 20 000 copies of the first issue, but by cutting back on these costs, a smaller loss on the first issue (about £12) would have been made into a substantial profit – “at least £20” – as the circulation accelerated toward 100 000 within the first six months (King 2004, pp. 93–94). With a trade price of 9d for 13 copies at wholesale, the penny miscellany probably needed to sell in excess of 30 000 copies per week to make a profit. Additional production costs generated by monthly numbers and semi‐annual volumes were usually passed on to the customer who paid a higher price for the text in a colored cover. As the London Journal increased in popularity it also generated profits by charging more for advertising on its covers (King 2008). With an average combined circulation of “around ¾ million copies per week” for The London Journal and Reynolds’s Miscellany, the “penny‐novel journal” was one of the most popular and provocative items in circulation (Huett 2009, p. 135). As new titles emerged in the 1850s, cheap literature was discussed at length in the monthly reviews. If the Family Herald was the paterfamilias, the Quarterly joked, the Guide to Literature and Welcome Guest were “the twin Todlikins,” having been born only the year before (“Cheap Literature” 1859, p. 329). Some rivals came into the field not to make a profit, but to draw readers away from the most popular titles. The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Entertainment, launched by the Religious Tract Society in 1852, was an attempt to wean the masses away from fiction (“Pure Literature” 1856). With “sixteen large pages” and “engravings by eminent artists,” it certainly looked like the other penny weeklies. It also mimicked the economics of the penny press by charging 5d for “monthly parts” in a “neat wrapper” (Publishers’ Circular, December 4, 1851, p. 399). Unlike the other weeklies, however, it was published on Thursday in order to keep Sunday free for the reading of sacred texts. During the 1840s, the Religious Tract Society had stopped being an exclusively religious publisher and had begun to publish “general nonfiction,” such as A Book About Animals, which still concludes its discussion of oxen and how “the people called Hindoos, … will not eat [their] flesh” with a reminder that “when any people are without the Bible, they fall into great error … How thankful we should be that we have that holy book! Were we without it, we should be as ignorant as are the poor idolaters” (1852, pp. 18–19). Like these texts, The Leisure Hour was infused with a “distinctly Christian tone.” Advertised widely, it was published without the Society imprint in order not to put off its intended working‐class audience, who were often hostile toward would‐be evangelists and tract distributors (Fyfe 2004, pp. 34, 178–180). Although it maintained a large circulation of over 50 000 copies per issue throughout the 1850s, The Leisure Hour never equaled “the 125,000 copies a week sold by the Family Herald, let alone the 450,000 of the London Journal” (Fyfe 2004, p. 268). Such success didn’t go unnoticed. “Conducted” by Charles Dickens, Household Words (1850–1859) was a weekly magazine addressed to a slightly different audience than that chosen by The Leisure Hour. As Lorna Huett notes, Dickens’s periodicals were twice as expensive as the penny miscellanies, and even the halfpenny difference from Chambers’s

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Figure 8.3  The opening to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as serialized in The London Journal (October 2, 1852), alongside a more sensational illustration on the front page of the same issue. Source: Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library and Archives. Folio AP4 L55.

Journal may be considered significant. Dickens was aiming for the middle ground between the penny journals and expensive monthlies like Bentley’s Miscellany. Household Words included serialized fiction by Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and other influential authors (see Figure 8.4). Although it was not illustrated, its physical appearance had more in common with the “limp unbound picture quarto” described by Collins (1858) than many later commentators have noted (Huett 2009). Printed on a single sheet of cheap paper, and with very little white space to be seen on the page, Household Words resembled the penny press, but at 24 rather than 16 pages it was considerably longer. In other words, Dickens’s magazine recalled the penny press, but was not of it. By using his own name as a brand, Dickens persuaded middle‐class r­eaders  familiar with his novels to participate in the market for “cheap” literature. However, as Henry Mayhew noted in London Labor and the London Poor (1851), 2d was still a cheap enough price to allow some working‐class readers to acquire copies (Mayhew 1968, p. 250). How did the large audience for weekly periodicals acquire these texts? Blackwood’s recommended that anyone who wanted to understand “the enormous diffusion of periodical literature” should pay a visit “to any flourishing newsvender.” These shops are described as “loaded with periodicals of all sorts and sizes” at “prices from a halfpenny up to a shilling” (“Popular Literature” 1859, p. 101). Such a wide range of prices suggests that they catered for a broad audience that included readers of both The London Journal and Household Words, but not the more expensive magazines, such as Bentley’s, which sold for 2s 6d. However, both Knight (1854) and Collins (1858) noted that “the

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

Figure 8.4  Household Words brought the look and value‐for‐money of “cheap literature” to the respectable middle class. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. AP4 .H84 v. 14.

penny‐novel journal” could also be bought from a range of venues largely unknown to the middle class, such as “fruit‐shops,” “oyster‐shops,” and “lollypop‐shops,” as well as at the “small stationer’s or small tobacconist’s” more often associated with the sale of print. Knight concluded that they were “rarely sold in the shops of regular booksellers” (1854,  p. 264). Collins estimated that the penny novel journals had one million ­purchasers and three million readers. This huge circulation was achieved by ignoring the traditional mode of distribution: the “regular” bookseller. In 1847, Chambers’s Journal decried the traditional trade’s inability to deal with the retailing of weeklies: “booksellers generally encourage the monthly part or book form, as everyway less troublesome.” It concluded that “at present” very few working‐class customers “frequent these establishments.” The new penny press of the 1840s and 1850s had moved the trade to the backstreet shopkeeper who was used to the task of making “small profits on numerous transactions” rather than the “large profits on few transactions” that Chambers’s associated with the traditional bookshop (“Booksellers” 1847, p. 88). Knight’s description of those entering into the backstreet retailer says something about the diversity of an audience including “the schoolboy,” “factory girl,” and the “small shopkeeper” (1854, p. 264). Any text purchased by such a diverse audience could be read in very different ways. While some might have experienced the idealized family

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reading depicted in the headpiece of Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, others may have known a more public form of communal consumption. Mayhew describes how the London street vendors (known as costermongers) often gathered in small groups to hear texts read aloud. The text itself was circulated during such events so that each audience member could see the accompanying “picture.” Such audiences contained a range of different reading competencies and included some who were unable to read at all (Mayhew 1968, pp. 25–26). Jonathan Rose (2001) has suggested that these texts are little mentioned in working‐class autobiographies because they had less intellectual impact than the works of canonical writers. However, it is possible that their absence has more to do with the reproduction of prejudices against the popular press. As Patricia Anderson notes, the “Northumbrian pitman, later Labour MP” Thomas Burt (1837–1922) refers to the “over‐spiced” stories of the London Journal, but also describes the powerful effect of its serialization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Anderson 1991b, p. 148). Something of the target audience for these periodicals is revealed by their “Answers to Correspondents” columns. The numbers of “Apprentices,” “Mechanics,” and “Labourers” who wrote in must have “represented a wider readership of others much like themselves,” as must the numbers of enquiries from women (Anderson 1992, p. 68). Penny novels in parts, or “penny numbers,” also sometimes referred to as “penny bloods,” were another new phenomena of the 1830s and 1840s. This disturbing sobriquet was acquired in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the “literary garbage” being issued by Lloyd in penny numbers was regularly decried even in the 1840s and 1850s. The Ragged School Union Magazine called attention to a housebreaker’s reading of these “bad books,” and Mayhew noted that costermongers were always “most eager” to hear “Reynold’s periodicals, especially ‘The Mysteries of the Court’” (People’s Newspaper, June 20, 1847; Meteyard 1850, p. 220; Mayhew 1968, p. 25). Charles Knight’s description of them as “brutal and vulgar” is reflected even in modern chronicles of popular culture which associate them with the “semi‐literate”: in his famous study of The English Common Reader, Richard Altick condemned both their attenuation and their poor production values, using the example of a version of Black Bess that “ran to 2,067 pages and was issued over a span of almost five years” (Altick 1957, pp. 292–293). However, more recent work has questioned this reputation in order to argue that the “penny number” had a much more central role in Victorian culture (Maidment 1992; Haywood 2004; Humphreys and James 2008). Some of the earliest examples were crude, but by the 1840s, Lloyd, Reynolds, and others were producing clearly printed and well‐ designed works. Lloyd’s Don Caesar de Barzan: A Romance of Spain (c. 1845) ran in just 32 parts (rather than over five years) and its double‐columned text is broken up by irregularly shaped woodcuts that add to its excitement (James and Smith 1998, p. 546). The penny numbers of “Lloyd’s Pictorial Library of Standard Works” were as well ­produced as any contemporary illustrated book (Haywood 2004, pp. 162–191). Historians have tended to separate these “penny” publications from the other texts published by Lloyd and Reynolds, but there is a clear overlap between the audience for the penny bloods and that for the same publishers’ weekly newspapers. These links were actively forged by Lloyd, who gave away free copies of the first number of a serial with his newspapers. Don Caesar de Barzan was “presented gratis with no. 246” of Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times, and Abdalla the Moor and the Spanish Knight includes an advertisement leaf for Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper (James and Smith 1998, pp. 546, 22). Lloyd began publishing newspapers in 1842; his Weekly London Newspaper

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

sold for 3d. Advertising in its pages reveals the overlap between “penny weekly numbers” and the “threepenny newspaper” in a way that suggests that the supposed barrier between these two price points may be something of a later construction. Indeed, an examination of the full list of works published by Lloyd, which were advertised to the same mixed working‐ and lower‐middle‐class audience that bought his newspapers, make “subsequent distinctions between respectable and unrespectable reading” difficult to sustain (Haywood 2004, p. 167). On this view, the threepenny newspaper, the penny blood, and the “penny‐novel journal” were all open to the same “mass” audience described by Charles Knight as patronizing the backstreet retailer’s shop. Both Lloyd and Reynolds also produced cheap imitations of Dickens. Issued when the popularity of the original was at its height, Lloyd’s Posthumous Notes of the Pickwick Club (1837) was “edited by ‘Bos’” (a play on Dickens’s own nickname, “Boz”) and became better known as The Penny Pickwick (James 1963, pp. 50–51). The Posthumous Papers of the Cadger’s Club (1838), Oliver Twiss. by Poz (1838), and Current American Notes by “Buz” (1842?) prolonged Lloyd’s reworking of Dickens into the 1840s (James and Smith 1998, pp. 463, 125). Reynolds’s first commercially successful serialization was also a version of Dickens, but Pickwick Abroad: or the Tour in France (1838–1839) was published in 20 monthly parts, rather than as a penny weekly, as was his other Dickens pastiche, Master Timothy’s Bookcase (1841–1842). Once judged as debased versions of Dickens’s originals, scholars now view these works as complex re‐imaginings, which placed figures from bourgeois culture, such as Pickwick, in new politically radical contexts (Humphreys and James 2008). The penny novel version of Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), for example, even carries advertisements for portraits of Chartist leaders (James and Smith 1998, p. 37). Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London, the first series of which was issued in weekly penny numbers between October 1844 and September 1846, was a particularly influential text. Although it is sometimes suggested that Reynolds’s desire for profit conflicted with his more radical Chartist politics, recent readings of his work suggest that his desire to reach large audiences was part of his democratic politics. Although Lloyd and Reynolds owed some of their success to sales of their Dickens imitations, Dickens had taken “the idea of the novel in parts from the working‐class form” and gone “upmarket with it.” Weekly parts at a penny became monthly parts at a shilling (Eliot 2001a, p. 44). There were some reprint novels available at 1s a part (with illustrations) when Pickwick began publication in April 1836, but it was the success of this title that led several other publishers to imitate the form. “Dickensian serialization” consisted of a new novel published in 20 parts over 19 months at 1s per part, with the last issue a double part for 2s. Each part was 32 pages long and contained two illustrations, which were placed separately at the beginning of the text. The final double number also contained additional front matter so that anyone who had collected all 20 numbers might have them bound into a complete novel. It was a unique form that remained fashionable until the late 1850s (Sutherland 1995, p. 87). Readers choosing to bind the numbers into a complete novel needed to remove the uniformly illustrated wrapper and “advertiser” that surrounded the text (see Figure 8.5). Advertising was an important source of revenue for this form of publication. Indeed, the “very periodicity of the serial made it appropriate, like a newspaper or magazine, for advertising” (Patten 1978, p. 67). Chapman & Hall placed notices of their own works in the third number of Pickwick and charged other publishers for “inserts.” The first

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Figure 8.5  The front and inside rear covers of a wrapper for a novel published in parts. Source: From a private collection.

“Pickwick Advertiser” was included with the next number. Beginning as a four‐page quarto insert, it grew to 24 pages, and additional inserts swelled it still further. The “advertiser” included with the first part of Dombey & Son (1846–1848) was 16 pages long. It cost £60 10s to print and “brought in £124 7s 6d” with an additional £10 10s generated by payments for the inclusion of inserts. By the end of the novel’s run the Dombey “advertiser” had earned Dickens and his publishers Bradbury & Evans more than £2000 (Patten 1978, pp. 184–188). The advantage to the reader of the monthly shilling serial was that he or she was able to acquire a long (unbound) novel for £1, rather than the usual 31s 6d. Bound versions of the text, made up from unsold copies of the monthly parts, were also usually available at 21s. But the novel in parts, one of the major forms of mid‐Victorian publishing, came about largely by accident. The young Dickens had made an agreement with Chapman & Hall to produce a sheet and a half of letterpress each month to accompany four illustrations by Robert Seymour. He was to be paid £14 3s 6d with the chance of an increase if the project was a success. Chapman & Hall had purchased the copyright of both letterpress and illustrations, and they would have needed to sell around 2000 copies per issue to make a profit (Patten 1978, p. 64). The first number of Pickwick was not a success, however, and the print run for the second was reduced to 500. It was only after Seymour’s suicide that the familiar pattern of 32 pages of letterpress and two

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

illustrations became the norm. The reduction in the number of illustrations meant that they could both be printed on a single sheet, and this significantly decreased the costs of production. Dickens fee was increased to £21, but Seymour’s replacements were not as expensive. Sales were encouraged by an increased advertising campaign, which helped readers to anticipate the next number, and by offering the text to provincial booksellers on an unusual “sale or return” basis. By May 1837, Chapman & Hall were selling 26 000 copies of each number. Increased press runs led them to adopt technologies associated with mass production. From Part IX “the instalments had to be printed from stereotype as well as moveable type,” and from Part X, duplicate steel plates were used for the illustrations so that they could survive the extended printing process. With sales of some of the last parts reaching 40 000 copies, Chapman & Hall “cleared £14 000” “on the numbers alone” and went on to bind the remaining or reprinted parts for sale at 21s (in cloth), 24s 6d (half morocco), and 26s 6d (“full morocco with gilt leaves”) at little extra cost to themselves (Patten 1978, pp. 68–73). With the success of this shilling serialization, many authors and publishers imitated both the style and the material form of Dickens’s novels. Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong (1839–1840) and Frederick Marryat’s Poor Jack (1840) were shilling imitations of Oliver Twist. By 1839–1840 it was possible for an addict to spend “15 shillings to a pound a month on novels in parts” (Sutherland 1995, p. 93). Many of these publications, of course, failed. Despite an extensive advertising campaign, Poor Jack was reduced, mid‐publication, from 20 to 12 numbers. Success was difficult to achieve because the costs of production were high. Most bestsellers matched a popular author with a well‐known illustrator. As the prominence of Hablot K. Browne’s pseudonym “Phiz” on the wrapper of Nicholas Nickleby attests, illustration was important to “Boz’s” success. Illustrations, along with the “lavish advertising” needed to promote and maintain interest, didn’t come cheap. Bradbury & Evans began working on the publicity for Dombey & Son months before the first number was published in October 1846 and spent £163 on advertising in the period up to December 31. The cost of “composition, printing, stitching, letterpress and plates came to £284 18s 1d” for a print run of 25 000 copies (Patten 1978, p. 185). The accounts show just how much money could be made from a successful serial. On December 31, 1846, Bradbury & Evans had sold 122 035 copies of the first four numbers (out of a print run of 130 000), which gave them gross receipts of £4106 19s 2d, to which £556 17s 6d was added from sales of advertising. Dickens himself received three‐quarters of the profit, while Bradbury & Evans got one‐quarter of the profits and a 10% commission on each number. Dickens had earned “almost £375 on each number” or just short of £1500 in total, while his publishers received just under £1000 (Patten 1978, p. 186). If “this kind of serialization was a rich man’s game” it could also produce great wealth and fame (Sutherland 1995, p. 93). In January 1847, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair joined a market still overcrowded with shilling monthlies. After a hesitant start it went on to be even more popular than Dombey & Son. Also published by Bradbury & Evans, who had acquired the magazine Punch in 1842, Thackeray’s “Novel Without a Hero” added new “Punchified” pleasures to the serial format. Thackeray was his own illustrator, and Vanity Fair makes greater use of the interplay between image and text than many other serials. The image of Jones reading a copy of the serial, which appears mid‐page in the first issue (see Figure 8.6), is just the beginning of a playful intertextual game. The success of Vanity Fair turned Thackeray into a rising star, and in 1848 he was able to

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Figure 8.6  An engraving of “JONES, … at his Club,” reading the first part of Vanity Fair that appeared in the first part of Vanity Fair. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR5618 .A1 1847.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

increase his fee “from £60 to £100” for the publication of its successor, Pendennis (Sutherland 1995, p. 97). That Dickens returned to part‐issue for his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), seems in part to have been a nostalgic desire to return to a form displaced in terms of cultural significance by a new sort of shilling entertainment. The new shilling monthlies of the late 1850s and 1860s were distant cousins of the expensive monthly magazines of the 1830s (such as Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country), crossbred with the penny miscellany and Dickens’s twopenny magazines, but they arrived as a media event. The publisher George Smith built anticipation for the launch of The Cornhill Magazine in January 1860 with a huge advertising campaign. Disposable “handbills, newsagents’ and booksellers’ window bills,” “adverts on billboards” and in the literary weeklies announced a new magazine with Thackeray as its star editor. Thackeray’s name was given pride of place, but the advertisements also stressed the magazine’s “affordable price (one shilling)” and elegant style (Maunder 1999, p. 244). Despite Thackeray’s prominence, The Cornhill was a miscellany, and part of its attraction was the diversity of material on offer. At a consistent 128 pages per issue, it contained a wealth of written and visual material (Hughes 2007). The shilling monthly is usually associated with serialized fiction, but it also provided access to poetry, travel writing, history, science, biography, and political writing. John Ruskin’s radical work of political economy Unto This Last, for example, began serialization in The Cornhill in August 1860. Several other magazines aimed at middle‐class readers emerged in 1859–1860, including Bradbury & Evans’s illustrated Once A Week (1859), Macmillan’s Magazine (1859), and Ward & Lock’s Temple Bar (1860). The latter had a similar format to The Cornhill and published some of the most important “sensation” novels of the 1860s, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862). Its editor was Augustus Sala, who had been talent‐spotted by Dickens. As with Thackeray’s appointment as first editor of The Cornhill, a named editor was important, and Braddon herself went on to edit Belgravia from 1866 to 1876. As editor‐contributor, Thackeray was paid well for both his work and the use of his name as an attraction; a particularly generous payment for one novel led him to complete two more in a single year, and in April 1860, his annual editorial stipend was doubled to £2000 (Sutherland 1986b, pp. 106, 144–148). As Linda Peterson has argued, it was the continued expansion of the periodical press from the 1820s through to the 1860s that helped consolidate authorship as a profession that could be entered into by men and women from a diverse range of backgrounds, even if their identities were not always revealed on the page (Peterson 2009). The first number of The Cornhill sold 109 274 copies. The Bookseller even went as far as to suggest that it had “opened our eyes to the great fact of there being a very large and hitherto overlooked mass of readers” (Bookseller, April 26, 1860, p. 213). The Cornhill had not in fact discovered an entirely new shilling‐paying audience, but other than Household Words, very few titles published before 1859 sought out the middle‐class reader “who did not enjoy, or who could not afford the respectable monthlies such as Fraser’s or Blackwood’s” (Wynne 2001, p. 15). Jennifer Phegley (2004) has suggested that the so‐called shilling monthlies may be better termed “family literary magazines.” From the acquisition of Thackeray as author through to the decision to produce an orange colored wrapper, The Cornhill had set itself up as a commodity designed to appeal to a wide readership who wanted something more obviously respectable than the cheap miscellanies. Both The Cornhill and Belgravia were frequently attacked by the old,

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established monthlies for their commercialism or promotion of sensation fiction, but they frequently refused to defer to the status of these older titles. Sala’s “The Cant of Modern Criticism,” published in Belgravia, even went as far as to use “sensational techniques” (such as hyperbole, the piling up of adjectives, and the depiction of violence) to  stage a devastating critique of the critical strategies associated with Blackwood’s (Palmer 2011, p. 61). With the growth of the penny blood, the penny miscellany, the cheap weekly newspaper, the novel in shilling numbers, and the more respectable, bourgeois versions of “cheap print,” such as The Cornhill Magazine, the period 1830–1860 can be considered as much the age of the periodical as the book. However, the 1840s also saw the emergence of a new kind of book aimed at readers on the move. During the period from 1830 to 1850, “the market‐building activities of publishers … gave rise to a wider variety of titles in a greater range of prices than had been available before” (Weedon 2003, p. 89). The reprint series was one of the areas in which publishers most obviously practiced market‐building. By packaging books in series, such as “Murray’s Family Library” and “Bentley’s Standard Novels,” publishers could accrue “symbolic” as well as real capital. Such series helped to enhance the reputation of the publisher, who was seen as a guarantor of quality as long as he had bought wisely when compiling the list. Such sets were often marketed and packaged in such a way as to encourage readers to buy the entire series. The producers of “Family Libraries,” “Traveller’s Libraries,” and “Useful Libraries” hoped that their customers would buy them all even though “there is no reason why a man who has purchased Sheridan’s dramatic works should next invest his money in Wheatley on the Common Prayer” as was the case for anyone completing “Bohn’s Standard Library” (“Popular Literature” 1859, p. 101). Uniform bindings, the numbering of sets, and aggressive advertising were all used to encourage readers to collect each series as a whole. Longman, for example, advertised Thomas Macaulay’s Warren Hastings as “The First Part of the Traveller’s Library.” Also launched in 1851, Murray’s “Reading for The Rail” was announced as “A Series of Cheap Books in large Readable Type” “such as shall deserve a permanent place on the shelves of the library.” Longman also made much of the fact that their “Traveller’s Library” contained “works of acknowledged merit” previously confined to a “narrow circle of readers” due to their price (Publishers’ Circular, May 1, 1851, p. 150; October 1, 1851, p. 316). Each volume in Longman’s “Traveller’s Library” was priced at 1s, whereas those in Murray’s series varied from 1s to 3s. That Murray was prepared to advertise his work as “cheap” suggests that this appellation had begun to lose something of its stigma. The “collective editions” of contemporary “star” authors, inaugurated by Chapman & Hall’s 1847 “Cheap” edition of Dickens “selling at 1½d a part and (on average) 3s 6d the entire novel,” were a significant innovation in cheap publishing. Chapman & Hall also issued a mid‐priced collected edition of Edward Bulwer‐Lytton’s novels, but it was Routledge who entered into an exclusive deal to make them part of his “Railway Library” for as little as 1s 6d in boards (Sutherland 1976, p. 31). The major innovators in cheap series were George Routledge and Simms & M’Intyre of Belfast. The latter’s “Parlour Novelist” series, launched in February 1846, was unusually cheap at 2s 6d per volume in cloth and 2s in paper wrappers. It was replaced in the following year by the even cheaper “Parlour Library,” which sold at 1s in boards and 1s 6d in cloth. The first book in this series was not out of copyright but an original novel, William Carelton’s The Black Prophet: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1847), which had appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

1846. This series also included some names (such as Austen) familiar from earlier reprint series, and the complete novels of G.P.R. James, whose work had previously been published in a collected edition by Smith, Elder at 8s per volume (Sutherland 1976, p. 31; Spiers 2007, p. 58). By packaging a mixture of contemporary works and classics in a foolscap octavo format covered in green glazed paper for just 1s, Simms & M’Intyre had discovered the formula that was to dominate cheap publishing for the next few years (Spiers 2007, pp. 52–62). In response, existing series such as Bentley’s “Standard Novels” were reduced to 2s 6d and 3s 6d per volume and needed to be “supplemented by his ‘Shilling Series’” and “‘Railway Library’ at 1s”(Sutherland 1976, p. 31). The way in which these series were marketed was important. The “Parlour Library” included a scene of domestic reading on its green covers, whereas Routledge’s “Railway Library” (est. 1848) was aimed at those who wanted “amusement while travelling” and included a railway motif. By the end of 1854, advertisements for Routledge’s “Railway Library” referred to 70 titles, including a large number of works by James Fennimore Cooper, whose The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea was listed as number one in the series. New titles were added on a fortnightly or monthly basis. In March 1855, Bulwer‐Lytton’s Devereux was advertised as the new addition to the “railway library for April,” but Routledge’s new publications list also included two other series, “Original Novels” (at 1s or 2s) and “Books for the Country” (1s) including titles such as Cattle: Their Management (Athenaeum, March 31, 1855, p. 368). Accounts of cheap books often concentrate on fiction, but Routledge’s “Cheap Series” contained several nonfiction titles at one or two shillings, including E.T. Freedley’s How to Make Money. Routledge is famous for selling texts for a shilling “in fancy boards,” but he took a modular approach to most of his series, issuing them in a range of different bindings as “illustrated present books.” Illustrated versions of his “British Poets” series, for example, sold at 5s each in cloth, but could also be bought at 10s 6d in a more elaborate binding. Bulwer‐Lytton’s Devereux was available both at 1s 6d as part of the “Railway Library” and at 3s 6d in the collected edition of his “Novels and Romances” (Athenaeum, February 3, 1855, p. 133). As early as 1849, the Dublin University Magazine was referring to the “curious little volumes” of fiction “with embellished covers,” available from “itinerant vendors” on the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) as “railway literature” (“Railway Literature” 1849, p. 280). That they were selling well on this line is suggested by the fact that the bookstall managers of W.H. Smith & Son ordered new stock from a list of “Parlour and Railway Libraries &c” (Colclough 2004). There is also some evidence to suggest that Smith’s entered into special wholesale terms for copies of Bentley’s “Standard Novels” and Routledge’s “Railway Library” to be sold at the bookstalls (Barnes 1964, p. 106; Fyfe 2012, p. 127). Cheap literature certainly needed to sell in large numbers in order to break even. Routledge’s “Cheap Series” was “planned with a break‐even point of 10 000 or more” sales (Fyfe 2009, p. 583). Although print runs increased from 2575 in the mid‐1840s to 3142 a decade later, an average run in the 1850s was still less than 1000 copies (Weedon 2003, p. 49). Routledge’s “Cheap Series” was produced in impressions of 2000 copies so that if a title wasn’t a success the unsold stock was less problematic than it had been for Murray when he over‐produced the “Family Library” in the 1830s (Fyfe 2012, p. 131). That the cheap series of the 1840s and 1850s were produced in such large numbers, and in a visually striking material form that made them appear to dominate the stock of a new and innovative space for selling, the railway bookstall, meant that they were among the most important texts of the period.

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The appearance of “railway literature” also helped transform the look of the cheap book. Early editions of Routledge’s “Railway Library” mimicked the distinctive green glazed boards of Simms & M’Intyre’s “Parlour Library” and both resembled the brightly colored gift books of the 1820s. Like those earlier texts, they used glazed printed paper bindings. What was unusual in the 1820s was becoming commonplace by 1850. Printed “either letterpress or by lithography, and with decorations either drawn (for lithography) or engraved in wood (for letterpress),” glazed paper boards helped transform the printed environment of the mid‐century (McKitterick 2009b, pp. 102–103). Color was everywhere. The new technology of lithography had been invented in the 1790s by the German dramatist Alois Senefelder. Unlike both the traditional relief process of letterpress and woodcuts (or wood engraving) and the intaglio processes of copper engraving and etching, lithography exploits the chemical properties of oil and water to reproduce images. As invented by Senefelder, it involves writing or drawing with oil‐based ink or an oily crayon on a prepared block of limestone (hence the prefix litho, from the Greek word for “stone”). Even after the pigment has been cleaned from the surface, traces of oil remain in the areas of the stone that were written or drawn upon. When water is spread over the stone before and between printings, it is repelled by the oil and remains only on those parts of the stone that were unmarked, in a near‐perfect negative of the original drawing or handwritten text. Then, when oil‐based printing ink is rolled across the surface, it is repelled by the wet areas, adhering only to those that were kept dry by the aforementioned traces of oil. Paper is then pressed directly onto the stone under very high pressure, causing it to pick up ink. The resulting images could include lines nearly as sharp as if printed by relief processes, as well as soft shading comparable to that produced by aquatint (a form of etching using powdered resin to achieve variations in tone) and mezzotint (a spectacularly labor‐intensive form of engraving that involved roughening the entire surface of an intaglio plate until it would print solid black and then selectively polishing it to produce whites and grays). Subsequent innovations included (in the late nineteenth century) the use of transfer paper for the creation of the original image, freeing image creators from the need to work directly (and in mirror image) upon unwieldy slabs of stone, and (in the twentieth century) the replacement of stone by sheet metal, which, together with the development of photographic processes for transferring images onto those sheets, completed the transformation of lithography from a craft into a high‐precision industrial process. Lithography was initially used for producing short run texts: for example, a playscript could be written out by hand and printed in enough copies for the use of the cast ­without the time‐consuming and expensive process of setting type. It quickly replaced copper engraving as the principal technology for music publishing, and became an important medium for the dissemination of visual art, in the hands first of craftspeople who produced lithographic copies of paintings, and then, after the invention of transfer paper, of late nineteenth‐century masters, such as the London‐resident American John Singer Sargent, who developed it as an artistic medium in its own right. But its most immediately obvious impact on the book came about through its facilitation of the nineteenth century’s most successful form of color printing: chromolithography. All methods of color printing viable for large print runs involve the application of different colors of ink in successive stages. For example, if red and black words or ornaments are required on a page of letterpress type, these can be set in different formes and

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

inked in different colors, with the type in one forme used to overprint the page after it has been printed with the type in the other. Chromolithography works on an analogous principle: to create the same kind of effect, one draws the red parts of the intended image on one stone or sheet of transfer paper and the black parts on another. The explosion of color in printed books in the mid‐century was enabled in large part by this new technology. We can see some of the cultural effects of chromolithography in the cheap “railway literature” of the 1850s and later. These books became known as “yellowbacks” when Routledge and others started to use eye‐catching color to startling effect in combination with a front board woodcut image, decorated spine, and advertising on the back. Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were both given a “yellowback” makeover when they appeared as part of Routledge’s series (Sutherland 2005, pp. 4–5). This enthusiasm for color and illustration was not restricted to fiction. Some titles in Routledge’s “Books for the Country” included color illustrations. Many a Victorian reader may have got their first taste of Austen from a “Railway Library” volume. However, these series did not just include out‐of‐copyright British authors. American writing remained unprotected by copyright until 1891, and many of the “Cheap” series of the 1840s and 1850s contained new works by American authors, since one good way to lower the cost of production was to save on authors’ fees. Bentley issued Uncle Tom’s Cabin for 3s 6d “as a new book but it would have cost nine times as much had Mrs Stowe been one of his authors and not some American powerless to protect her copyright” (Sutherland 1976, p. 19). However, although British copyright law meant that many American writers remained unprotected, John Murray was successful in protecting his editions of works by Washington Irving and Herman Melville from reprinting by Routledge, and he took out advertisements celebrating the latter’s surrender of “all copies of such works as have been illegally published by him” (Publishers’ Circular, July 1, 1851, p. 220). Despite such skirmishes over publication rights, recent works by American writers played a very important part in the success of the British cheap series. In the following year, Routledge was one of a large number of British publishers that produced an edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, helping to make it one of the best‐known works of the period (Parfait 2007; Fyfe 2012, p. 128). The sale of 32 800 copies of Samuel Phillips’s Memoir of the Duke of Wellington (1852) in Longman’s “Traveller’s Library” suggests just how popular such texts could be, but a rapid decline in sales left them with almost as many copies unsold (Fyfe 2009, p. 584). Although several publishers made “the first attempt to reach a mass market” in the 1850s, they were not always successful, and some firms struggled to maintain their ­business in the following decade (Weedon 2003, pp. 48–49). Edward Bell thought that the “Pocket Volumes of English Classics” series, launched by George Bell & Sons in 1861, had failed because its price (ranging from 2s 6d to 3s 6d) was too high and not “uniform” enough for the market. Successful series were as cheap as possible and often called attention to this fact by having “cheap” or “shilling” in the title (Weedon 2003, pp. 102–106). A new and even cheaper version of the reprint novel began to appear in the late 1860s when “Routledge, Hotten and others” began producing “paperbound books at sixpence” (Eliot and Nash 2009, p. 423). As noted above, lithography was also extremely useful in printing music, which had hitherto relied upon the more labor‐intensive process of intaglio engraving. In 1859 Blackwood’s noted that a recent trend for “cheap music” had resulted in Cocks & Co.

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offering Handel’s Messiah at the “extraordinary” price of 1s 4d (“Popular Literature” 1859, p. 98). The company run by Alfred Novello (1810–1896) from 1829 to 1866 was one of several firms to benefit from the commodification of music in the nineteenth century (Cooper 2003). Choral groups and societies provided these publishers with an audience who wanted to buy texts for performance, but there is also contemporary testimony that audiences including working‐class members often “followed the ­ ­performance from the cheap editions of Novello and Cocks” (quoted in Cooper 2003, p. 19). This market determined Novello’s emphasis on the publication of large sacred works. By 1858 they were producing long print runs of the Messiah in multiple formats: 6000 copies of the octavo edition (the format of choice for performance) were produced in May 1859, alongside 7500 copies of the cheaper pocket version (Cooper 2003, pp. 72–73). Music publishers also aimed to supply music for performance around the domestic piano. Novello’s Glee‐Hive: A Collection of Popular Glees and Madrigals (c. 1851) is typical of texts published for performance by four or five voices and piano. Like many other collections, it could be “purchased singly or in a complete set” with each piece priced at 4s (Cooper 2003, p. 23). Volumes in Davidson’s Musical Treasury, Vocal and Instrumental, for the Family Pianoforte, begun by the publisher G.H. Davidson in 1848, could be bought in shilling parts or at 3d per sheet. In an advertisement used for the front endpapers of many of his books, Davidson boasted that these works were cheap because they did not contain “coarse and lascivious” illustrations (Davidson 1860). Davidson undoubtedly had in mind songs such as Harding’s Language of the Eye (1857) published by Metzer & Co. for 2s, which featured a pair of female eyes “ogling the ­passers‐by with intense pertinacity” (“Railway Bookselling” 1857). Such “lithographic embellishments” were given by Mayhew as one of the reasons for the decline in the sale of “bare” manuscript sheets on the streets of London in the 1850s. Until that time, the latest song could usually be acquired in a handwritten “pirated” copy from a street stall at a price much cheaper than that charged by a specialist retailer (Mayhew 1968, p. 305). Copying of music by choral societies was commonplace. Many of Novello’s editions were made available to such groups at discounted prices in order to make pirated manuscript editions less attractive (Cooper 2003, p. 114). Novello was expert in buying copyrights, deciding on pricing, and marketing his latest publications through magazine advertising.

8.3 ­From Manuscript to Print? Production and Dissemination in the Mid‐Victorian Period For the publisher, the first stage in book production was often the commissioning or receipt of a manuscript. The Copyright Act of 1842 had extended copyright to 42 years or 7 years after the author’s death (Seville 2009). One consequence of this increased protection of authorial rights (or at least the interests of those to whom an author assigned his or her rights) was an increase in the number of unsolicited manuscripts that publishers received. The acceptance of a manuscript or book proposal was usually followed by the issuing of a contract. In 1846, for example, Thackeray took a sample of his work to Bradbury & Evans and emerged with a contract for £60 per monthly installment of Vanity Fair, “with the prospect of half‐profit to follow” (Sutherland 1976,

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

p. 101). Publishing on commission, half profits (that is, splitting whatever profits accrued), and outright sale of copyright were the three most common kinds of contract issued during the period up to 1870. Anthony Trollope entered into half‐profits contracts for both his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1845), and The Warden (1854). Under such arrangements, the publisher accepted the costs and risks of production, but the author received nothing in advance and would not see any return until his or her book had cleared off the production costs. It was “a rule of thumb” in the early nineteenth century that an edition of 750 copies needed to sell at least half that number to  clear these costs, which might well include advertising (St. Clair 2004, p. 169). The  Macdermots, contracted with Richard Newby and produced in an edition of 400 copies, wasn’t successful enough for Trollope to see any return on his outlay. If the edition had sold out, however, the author and publisher could have expected to divide about £150 between them. As a single volume, The Warden had modest production costs and Longman was able to pay Trollope £9 8s 8d on sales of 388 copies (out of a print run of 1000) within six months of publication. Trollope was so discouraged by its small sale that he stopped work on his next novel. However, once The Warden turned profitable, he continued to receive small payments until 1859, when Longman issued the book in a “cheap edition.” With a print run of 1750 it nearly sold out within six months and went on to be reissued for the next 20 years (Sutherland 1976, p. 48). The modest sums given to Trollope suggest that profit‐sharing contracts were more attractive (and profitable) to publishers than they were to authors. The most common copyright agreement drawn up between Bentley and his authors was outright sale of copyright, but some worked for half profits, often being granted an advance. Florence Marryat received £100 in advance on half profits for her second novel, Too Good for Him (1865), for example (Bassett 2010, p. 68). During the 1840s, outright sale of copyright, with its promise of ready cash, appealed particularly to young writers. Typical fees for the copyright of a first novel varied from £50 to £100, the sum given by Chapman & Hall to Elizabeth Gaskell for Mary Barton (1848). If the text sold well, or was well received, “a novelist could look for a considerable rise in the value of his or her copyrights” (Leary and Nash 2009, p. 177). Most discussions of mid‐Victorian authorship have tended to consider an individual who surrenders the copyright of a manuscript to the publisher for a set fee, as this is the model most commonly associated with novel production. However, much of the authorial work undertaken in the mid‐nineteenth century was not of this type. Editorial and translation work was paid by the job, and many contributors to periodicals and reviews were paid by the sheet. By the 1840s, a new class of professional writers of nonfiction was beginning to emerge who “could expect to earn a few pounds for an article, some tens of pounds for a short book, and perhaps a hundred pounds for a longer book.” Full‐time writers of scientific works might earn a respectable £300 per year if they were lucky, although Aileen Fyfe suggests that between £150 and £250 a year was more typical. It was these writers, “together with their part‐time colleagues,” who produced “the science articles in magazines which reached a hundred thousand people each week and the books that sold fifteen or twenty thousand copies,” while often remaining ­anonymous (Fyfe 2005, pp. 204–205). With the increase in serialization and the more frequent publication of cheap editions of novels within a few years – and by the 1860s, within a few months – of the first edition, literary authors became increasingly expert in protecting their copyrights. Some

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sold their copyright for an edition of an agreed size (such as 750 copies) and then renegotiated if a second edition was proposed. Other contracts allowed the copyright to revert to the author after a set period of time. For example, in the early 1860s, the Irish novelist Sheridan Le Fanu sold Richard Bentley the copyright for three novels, Wylder’s Hand (1864), Uncle Silas (1865), and Guy Deverell (1865), increasing his fee each time by £50. The contract for Wylder’s Hand is typical. Bentley agreed to pay Le Fanu £200 “one month after the day of publication,” with a further £100 “on the sale of the work reaching fifteen hundred copies.” The copyright was to revert to the author after two years, but during that time Bentley could republish the novel “in any form” as long as it was not sold for less than 5s. Bentley did not often enter into agreements that stipulated a time limit because it offered little advantage to the publisher, and the clause excluding publication for less than 5s meant that Bentley could only issue the novels in his 6s “Favourite Novels” series and not as part of his 2s “Popular Works.” In the 1860s, Bentley often brought out a 6s single‐volume edition just 10 months after the 31s 6d triple‐ decker. By having the copyright revert to the author within two years, and by preventing the publication of his novels in a cheap edition, Le Fanu was able to benefit from selling his copyright once again, this time to W.H. Smith, who published several of his works under Chapman & Hall’s “Select Library of Fiction” imprint. These arrangements allowed Guy Deverell (1865) to appear as a triple‐decker, then just a few months later as a single‐volume 6s “Favourite Novel,” and finally in 1869 as a 2s volume in the “Select Library.” By including a time limit on his initial contract, Le Fanu was able to make the most from reselling his copyright while his work was still fresh (Colclough 2006). Le Fanu’s contracts also had a clause ensuring that his work appeared first in the Dublin University Magazine (of which he was proprietor and editor). It was common in the mid‐Victorian period for novels and some nonfiction to appear first as a serial, with the book version often being published a few weeks before the final installment. Le Fanu’s contract demanded the “simultaneous publication” of the final installment and the triple‐decker to maintain the sales of his own magazine. The emergence of the new shilling monthlies in the 1860s inflated the fees that were paid to authors for a combination of both magazine serialization and the resulting volumes. George Smith was able to lure George Eliot away from Blackwood by offering her £10 000 for the appearance of Romola in The Cornhill. Eliot actually settled for “£7,000 on condition that the number of parts was reduced and the copyright reverted to her after six years” (Shattock 2012, p. 15). Another common form of contract at this time was for publishing “on commission.” Authors who published in this way accepted all of the costs and risks of production. The publisher oversaw printing and production and usually charged a 10% commission either on sales or on top of the costs. This guaranteed a profit for the publisher regardless of whether the book sold any copies at all. The Brontë sisters’ Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) was produced in this way. Charlotte had purchased a copy of Saunders & Otley’s The Author’s Printing and Publishing Assistant (1839), which she consulted while instructing Aylott & Jones to produce the work. She asked for “clear type,” “long primer,” as the Assistant suggested was the norm for poetry, and after settling the bill, insisted that the publishers placed advertisements and sent out review copies. The sales were famously disappointing, but this may have had more to do with genre than mode of publication (Peterson 2012, pp. 151–158).

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

Not all commissioned books were failures. Like many of the works published by John Churchill, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) was published at the author’s own expense, with the publisher taking a 10% commission on all copies sold to the trade. This synthesis of contemporary scientific and theological ideas, which pre‐ dates Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) in arguing that humans had evolved from apes, went on to be one of the most widely read books of the Victorian period. Churchill was carefully chosen by its author, Robert Chambers (who wished to remain anonymous), as his imprint was associated with reputable medical and scientific works (Secord 2000). Most publishers dealt with a mixture of commissioned and unsolicited works. Normally a manuscript would need to be carefully perused by the publisher before it was accepted. Decisions about format, design, print run, and price, which “determined access, sales, and therefore potential readership,” were normally made by the publisher, not the author (St. Clair 2004, p. 166). Publishers’ readers, who had begun to be employed by some firms in the 1810s, helped make decisions about suitability. Many of the reports compiled for Bentley in the 1860s and 1870s show how Geraldine Jewsbury and others were as concerned with “audience, publics and sales” as they were with “composition and literary merit” (Griest 1970; Fritschner 1980, pp. 84–85). Jewsbury advised against Across the Andes and Down the Amazon in 1860 simply because she judged it not to have mass appeal, not because she thought it was a bad book (Fritschner 1980, p. 85). However, even rejections might not be entirely negative. It was the encouraging note enclosed with the returned manuscript of The Professor that led Charlotte Brontë to submit Jane Eyre to the same publisher. The final decision to go to press was taken by the publisher. As already noted, during the early nineteenth century, print production was beginning to move from the press powered by hand to the press which ran on steam (Dooley 1992, p. 78). Indeed, by the 1840s, the entire print shop was becoming increasingly mechanized. In 1839, The Quarterly Review reported that its own printer, William Clowes, owned a very large works on the South Bank of the Thames. Clowes was also the producer of The Penny Magazine and many of Longman’s books, and his print works included space for “the great steam‐presses,” a paper warehouse, and a “type and stereotype foundry,” as well as “apartments for compositors, readers, &c.” The Review was particularly impressed by the scale of Clowes’s establishment, noting that the largest of the “five compositors’ halls” was 200 ft in length, and that each of the “nineteen enormous steam‐presses” was “capable of printing 1000 sheets an hour” under the supervision of just two boys (“Printer’s Devil” 1839, pp. 12–13). The printing machines that Clowes primarily used were Applegarth and Cowper “perfecting” machines (“Commercial History of a Penny Magazine – IV” 1833, p. 510). Perfecting machines printed first one side of the sheet and then the other in an uninterrupted operation using two cylinders; they were capable of printing up to 1500 sheets per hour (Dooley 1992, p. 81). In 1833 The Penny Magazine provided a detailed breakdown of the production of 160 000 copies of the Magazine’s “Monthly Supplement,” which could be completed in “only five days” with four sets of stereotypes and two printing machines (“Commercial History of a Penny Magazine – III” 1833, p. 473). However, such machines did not always produce the best‐quality book work and were better suited to newspaper and periodical production. In 1835, the cylinder machines installed at OUP in the previous year were supplemented by “double flat‐surfaced printing machines, sometimes called ‘bed and platen’ presses,”

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which could produce “very high‐quality work, though more slowly” (Eliot 2013a, pp. 149–150). From the 1860s, such machines were largely superseded by single‐cylinder machines (known as Wharfedales) which printed only one side of the paper at a time but which could achieve double the output because they took much larger paper (Gaskell 1979, p. 253). With the machines running continuously for 11 hours per day in the 1830s, this was print production on an industrial scale. Even in such large factories, however, steam‐driven machines did not completely supersede the hand press. In the rooms above the machines were 23 hand presses, each operated by two men, and every compositors’ room included a hand‐operated proofing press (“Printer’s Devil” 1839, p.  13). Hand and machine combined to produce a wide range of books, periodicals, and part‐ issue novels. On the day of the Review’s tour, 19 different texts were in production, ­including 20 000 copies of “The Way to be Healthy, Wealthy & Wise,” which was being produced in a print run of 300 000. If the early nineteenth‐century book was still a “handmade” object with type set by  hand and sheets printed by two or three people to make an edition of less than 1000 copies, the coming of the machine press did not necessarily transform things overnight (Dooley 1992, p. 79). In 1833, Charles Manby Smith began work as a compositor in a small but busy printing office near St. Paul’s that employed fewer than 20 men (12  of them apprentices) in the production of religious books and magazines. The “machine in the cellar” used for most of the press work, he later wrote, was driven “by an Irish engine of flesh and blood” who “turned the handle for half‐a‐crown per day” (Manby Smith 1967, pp. 166–169). The mid‐nineteenth‐century book was thus very much a “hybrid,” produced by a combination of hand and machine (Secord 2000, p. 116). All printed objects needed to go through a number of production stages before they reached the printing press. Once a manuscript copy of a new work reached the print shop, the printer’s reader would estimate its printed length before dividing it up into “takings,” from which individual compositors would work. The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, for example, was printed by the firm owned by Thomas Choate Savill, who, like Clowes, used steam‐driven machines to produce books and magazines. Although typesetting machines had already been invented, protests against them severely limited their use until the 1860s, and so the first stage of transforming Chambers’s manuscript into print was little different than it would have been in earlier centuries. The first edition of Vestiges was a duodecimo, and the font chosen for the main text was a standard small pica, a form that had become common throughout Europe and America in the 1820s and 1830s (Gaskell 1979, pp. 207–213; Secord 2000). Charles Babbage’s contemporary discussion of printing provides an “analytical statement of the expense of the volume now in the reader’s hands.” He notes that composition was usually charged “by the sheet” and that the exact cost was “regulated by the size of the letter [i.e. the type], on which the quantity in a sheet depends.” Extra charges were usually incurred for passages in Greek and “other languages, requiring a different type,” and for insertions in smaller type, as was the norm for quotations or notes. Figures and mathematical tables (known as “table work”) were charged at a higher rate, as they took longer to compose and were sometimes immediately stereotyped to prevent extra work in the future (Babbage 1832, pp. 256–257). Once the compositors had created a forme (for Vestiges, 12 pages of type), they began to print proofs. Manby Smith recalled that “in the course of a few hours from the commencement of composition a bundle of sheets of first‐proofs” were collected by the

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

overseer who then distributed them “with the copy, to the several readers to whom the volume had been allotted.” Once read, these sheets were returned to the compositors “who set about the disagreeable business” of making corrections. Once corrected, a second proof (sometimes called a “first revise”) was printed for the “press‐reader” to check, and further corrections were then undertaken by a single compositor, before the text was read again and, if all was well, sent to be “worked off ” on the main “press or the machine.” For books like Vestiges, “clean proofs” were sent to the publisher and author. The publisher’s reader also read them, marking changes that might be integrated with the author’s alterations (Manby Smith 1867, pp. 275–276). At Clowes’s, the reader listened to the copy being read aloud by an “intelligent boy” and was expected to correct authorial errors, including “faults in grammar” and punctuation (“Printer’s Devil” 1839, p. 10). For most books produced in the 1840s, the author’s proofs were likely to be sent in batches as most small printers could only afford to keep a limited amount of type standing. Edward Bull’s Hints and Directions for Authors (1842) warns that smaller printers might send out only two or three sheets at a time to the author and would wait until these were “corrected and worked off ” before returning to the composition of the ­project. “Six, or twelve, or even more” sheets might be set up by the “largest printing office.” Dooley suggests that 10 or 12 sheets of text could be composed in a week by the larger firms if the proofs were returned promptly (Dooley 1992, p. 17). Babbage, who preferred to see proofs before giving his work a final polish, was fortunate enough to see his entire volume in proof “slips,” as it was printed by Clowes, whose ability to make type on the premises allowed more works to remain standing than most smaller printers (Babbage 1832, p. 258). His discussion suggests that most mid‐nineteenth‐century writers used proofs for revision, not correction, and that they accepted the amendments made to grammar and punctuation by the printer’s reader. Most authors would not have been able to revise their original manuscripts, as those remained at the printers (Dooley 1992, pp. 38–41). Throughout the nineteenth century, as in previous centuries, paper was one of the most significant costs in text production. In Babbage’s calculations, the “total expense of paper” for an edition of 3052 copies was £99 4s 6d out of a total cost for the edition (excluding binding) of £266 1s (Babbage 1832, p. 256). The paper cost included excise duty, and Babbage was one of many to oppose this “tax on knowledge,” which was finally abolished in 1861. Weedon (2003, p. 66) suggests that by 1891 the cost of paper was reduced to as little as one eighth of the total cost of book production, whereas it had accounted for about one‐quarter in the 1850s (and upwards of half for most of the handpress period). Paper had become very much a product of the industrial age. Improvements to the papermaking machines introduced into Britain in the 1800s meant that by the 1830s machine‐made paper was “commonly used in all kinds of printing, including the production of books” (Banham 2007, p. 274). The supply of machine‐made paper was much more reliable than that of handmade paper, which meant that there was less fluctuation in its price and that publishers no longer needed to keep large stocks on hand. Clowes informed the 1837 Select Committee on Foudrinier’s Patent that the “paper machine” had been as essential as the “printing machine” in effecting “a complete revolution” that allowed him to print an edition of 5000 rather than 500 copies. One advantage of machine‐made paper was its size. Clowes noted that he could now obtain “double

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demy” paper “twice the size” of that previously available and that this had reduced production time by half (quoted in Plant 1974, p. 331). When matched with the new machines, the new paper led to reduced material and labor costs. Of course, not all print works were as advanced as that owned by Clowes. Only “about a fifth of book paper” was of the size used on his machines at this time; however, the average size of paper used for printing was to increase throughout the rest of the century, so that by 1906, “quad” papers four times the size of a standard sheet were the norm (Weedon 2003, p. 65). The price of paper declined significantly from the late 1860s onwards, when further changes in production techniques occurred. When choosing what paper to use, a publisher had to think about both cost and appearance. For the first edition of Vestiges, Churchill chose good quality paper which was made from linen rags, as had been customary for centuries, and had undergone the further production stage of “coldpressing,” in order for it to accept the delicate impression of fine printing (Secord 2000, p. 119). Other publishers often selected cheaper paper. To meet demand (the supply of rags was not inexhaustible), papermakers experimented with all sorts of raw materials: cotton, straw, old rope, bark, even the wrappings of Egyptian mummies. The most reliable new source of fiber proved to be wood pulp. Alas, unless carefully treated, wood pulp is acidic and so paper made from it turns fragile as it ages, which is why most books from the later nineteenth century are significantly more prone to tearing and crumbling than their counterparts from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. At Clowes’s factory, the paper was prepared in the “wetting room” where a man and his young assistant spent their entire working day giving each quire “two dips.” Once wet, the paper was squeezed in a screw press for 12 hours, and then left to dry for two days before being used for printing (“Printer’s Devil” 1839, pp. 26–27). Wetting was an essential part of the machine printing process, as the ink (made of oil and lamp‐black) would smear if printed on dry paper (“Commercial History of a Penny Magazine – IV” 1833, p. 510). After printing, the wet bundles were transferred to a steam‐heated drying room where they were subdivided into “lifts.” Once both the ink and paper were dry, a gang of boys known as “gatherers” selected a sheet from each pile, which the “collator” then compiled before they were sent to the binders (“Printer’s Devil” 1839, p. 27). Binding was an expensive part of the production process. Weekly periodicals, tracts, and other forms of “cheap” publication could be easily folded and stitched through the spine, and the larger monthlies usually came in wrappers, but books needed something more permanent (Gaskell 1979, p. 234). During the early years of the nineteenth century, some schoolbooks and religious texts could be bought ready bound in calfskin or the cheaper sheepskin, but most were issued in plain paper boards with the author’s name, the title of the work, and (often) its price printed on a label attached to the spine (Plant 1974, p. 342). However, during this period many books produced “in boards” were actually hybrids backed in cloth with the boards covered in paper, the cloth spine giving extra strength to the solid back bindings. Such bindings were designed to be permanent and could be highly finished (Hill 1999). The use of cloth as a binding material was an innovation of the 1820s. “Bookcloth” – a dyed cotton fabric, the weave of which was “filled,” generally with starch, so that it would hold a decorative impression and stick to the boards when glued as part of binding – was devised by Archibald Leighton for William Pickering as a cheap alternative to leather. “Cloth boards” (cloth‐covered cardboard bindings) quickly became

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

established, as cloth was much easier to work with than leather (Potter 1993). By the 1840s, there were several bookbinding firms that employed two to three hundred workers in factory environments (Potter 1993, p. 259). The importance of a uniform “edition binding” had been established in the early 1820s with the rise of the annuals, whose success depended on their outward appearance. The major innovation in edition binding was the mass production of complete, prefabricated binding cases for attachment to sewn and cut page‐blocks. Prefabrication both speeded up the binding process through the increased use of machinery and lowered the unit price of binding, making it more economical to bind larger numbers of books at a time within each edition (Gaskell 1979, p. 231). Most publishers were now responsible for binding a complete edition, whereas in the earlier part of the century, this had often been done by the wholesaler, retailer, or customer. Two of the largest London‐based binderies, Westleys & Clark and Remnant & Edmonds, who had risen to prominence by dealing with large orders for annuals and the Bible societies, had very large premises. The Penny Magazine toured the six floors of Westleys & Clark’s factory in 1842. Books in cloth boards were the most common product, but they also bound books in a range of other materials. In the “roan shop,” books were bound in expensive “Russia” (calfskin soaked in birch‐tar oil), “Morocco” (brightly colored goatskin), and calfskin, as well as in cheap roan (sheepskin) and even rubber. Whatever the binding, all books went through three processes: “making up” (also known as “forwarding”), “covering,” and “decorating.” Labor was strictly divided into different processes, with female employees “folding the sheets, gathering them into groups,” and “sewing them into the form of a book,” while the male workforce was engaged in “gluing, pasting, cutting, hammering and pressing” (“A Day at a Bookbinder’s” 1842). After folding, the “gatherings” were sent on to the “collators” “who checked for correct order and folding, using the signature marks printed at the bottom of each sheet” (Secord 2000, p. 120). Once collated, the gathered sheets were either immediately sewn (if the work was to appear “in boards”), or compressed if it was to be “bound.” In the early 1840s, “compressing” was done either by separating the text into sections or “beatings” that were “beaten with a heavy hammer” or by placing it in a rolling press (“A Day at a Bookbinder’s” 1842). Operated by a man and a boy, the rolling press was one of the innovations of the 1830s that helped to reduce labor costs (Potter 1993, p. 269). After being collated for a second time and having any extra plates inserted, the sheets were then passed on to the sewer, who placed them in a sewing‐press: a frame that held the cords of the binding upright while the folded sheets were sewn to them. The 200 women working at Westleys & Clark’s might sew as many as 3000 sheets each per day (“A Day at a Bookbinder’s” 1842). The first stage in covering involved “the assembled back‐edges of all the sheets” (known as “the back”) being glued in order to give extra strength. Before the glue was set, the text block was then “backed” by lightly hammering the backs of the first and last few signatures in order to give the spine the rounded shape that made this “modern style” of binding so distinctive. Using a “cutting press,” the top, bottom, and front edges of the text block were cut. For books bound in cloth, the cloth “cover” was pasted to the boards and then the latter were glued to the endpapers of the book. This kind of binding thus allowed both boards and cloth to be cut in advance of covering an edition. This sped up production, and because it could be done by semi‐skilled laborers, reduced labor costs (Potter 1993, p. 276).

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Decoration was usually added to the cloth cover before “the case” (as the combined cover and boards were known) was attached. Westleys & Clark’s owned two cloth‐ embossing machines which worked by forcing an “engraved plate” down onto the cover “to impart its device to the leather or cloth” (“A Day at a Bookbinder’s” 1842, p. 383). Machine decorating, or “blocking,” only became economic when the cost of engraving the blocks was “spread over a large number of copies” (Potter 1993, p. 270). The deployment of such machines thus went hand in hand with the increased demand for uniform, “edition” binding. The ability to easily add decoration to cloth meant that it could both resemble and compete with traditional leather bindings. Once the cover had been decorated, the case was attached and the book was then pressed flat before being sent to the publisher. By the early 1840s, edition binding in cloth boards was organized on “mass production lines to match the growing industrialization of printing and publishing” (Potter 1993, p. 280). However, even Westleys & Clark’s factory continued to produce books in a variety of binding styles. Gift books, religious works, and textbooks were still commonly bound in leather until at least the 1860s (Gaskell 1979, p. 247; Potter 1993). Prefabricated paper boards printed with eye‐catching colored images on the front and sometimes the spine were another alternative that developed in the 1840s. These were chiefly used for reprint series (such as Routledge’s “Railway Library”) and looked “startlingly different from the cloth‐bound editions of the period” (Gaskell 1979, p. 249). If the external look of the mid‐Victorian book was very different from those produced earlier in the century, it was also more likely to include illustrations. As explained in Section 7.1, wood engraving dominated most areas of illustrated publishing between 1820 and 1870 because it produced a finer image than traditional woodcuts while still allowing text and illustration to be printed together. The period from the mid‐1850s to the 1870s is often regarded as the golden age of wood‐engraved illustration for both books and magazines. Much attention has been paid to the relationship between illustration and text in both high‐end works such as Edward Moxon’s edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857) – which included work by artists such as John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti – and more ordinary periodicals like The Cornhill Magazine (Hughes 2007; Goldman and Cooke 2012). Other techniques were, of course, available, and some publications combined wood engravings with plates printed separately from the text using intaglio processes such as copper engraving, etching, and aquatint. Some books in which the combination of text and illustration was essential, such as Edward Lear’s 1846 Book of Nonsense, were produced entirely by lithography (Twyman 2009, pp. 122, 123). One of the most radical changes in the “look of the book” was the use of images derived from photographs. Between 1839 and 1880 many photographs were reproduced as wood engravings, sometimes by transferring images onto wood as a guide to the engraver, and sometimes from blocks, plates, or stones produced directly from photographic images (of which the collotype process invented in the 1850s is perhaps the most famous). Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844) was the first book to include pasted‐down photographs using his own method of photographic reproduction that involved making of a negative from which multiple copies could be derived. Known as calotypes or Talbotypes, books illustrated with pasted‐in photographs became relatively common in the 1860s (Twyman 2009). For example, each volume of Chapman & Hall’s “Library Edition” of Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works contains a pasted‐down photograph of the author. It was not until the final 20 years of the century that the

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

photomechanical production of illustrations replaced wood engraving as the principal means of image reproduction (Beegan 2008). The mid‐Victorian book also exploded into color. Color had been added by hand on a commercial basis to some of the more luxurious books produced in the last decades of the eighteenth century; and the same had occasionally been done by publishers, and more often by individual readers, for centuries before that. But it was not until the 1830s that chromolithography and other methods of color printing emerged. The publishers of books on art, education, and science quickly saw the potential for colored illustrations to enhance the communication of new ideas. Charles Knight, the originator of a method called “Illuminated Printing,” achieved large sales of his Old England (1845–1846), which contained both color plates  –  separately printed sheets that were bound together with the rest of the book – and monochrome wood engravings. Some texts, such as the supplements to the Illustrated London News, were produced in color using woodblocks alone, but it was chromolithography that emerged as the most frequently used method of color printing (Twyman 1970, 2009). For some markets, such as children’s books, religious works, and gift books, illustration was essential. Adding illustration was also a common way of presenting an existing work to a new audience without needing to revise the text itself. The quality of both binding and illustration selected by the publisher affected both the look and the cost of the book. Among the decisions that a publisher always needed to take was the size of the edition and whether it was likely to be reprinted. Writing in 1843, George Dodd argued that there were “three modes of arranging for a reprint”: standing type, stereotyping, and recomposing. He concluded that for bookwork “the usual system” of reprinting involved the type being “set up anew” (quoted in Dooley 1992, p. 92). By the 1850s, the increased efficiency of printing machines helped to offset cost of keeping type standing, which enabled some books, including the first edition of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), to be reprinted from standing type. Before the introduction of the “flong” method of stereotype production, only those books that the publisher thought were guaranteed a sustained demand were stereotyped as a matter of course. For the vast majority of new books published before 1860, a reprint (or second edition) needed to be profitable enough to “exceed the cost of recomposing the text in a new typesetting” (Dooley 1992, p. 94). With the first editions of many mid‐Victorian books (especially novels) produced in small numbers and expensive to buy, largely because they were aimed at commercial circulating libraries, they needed to be recomposed for a cheaper second edition. During the 1860s, for example, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novels were normally reset for a single‐volume 6s edition, which often emerged some six to nine months after the original triple‐decker (Eliot 1985, p. 45). Of course, several of these texts had already made the transition from part‐issue or magazine serial. Recomposing the text normally allowed the author a chance to revise as well. Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Trollope, and Thomas Hardy all revised their work during this sort of transition (Dooley 1992, p. 94). The “Select Library of Fiction” version of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Wylder’s Hand, for example, has a number of small but significant differences from the original triple‐decker. This novel needed to be recomposed as it had not previously appeared as a single volume, but some Victorian authors were also allowed to make minor revisions to texts that had been stereotyped, since the plates could allow for small changes (a word here and there), although the kind of wholesale rewriting that sometimes occurred when a text was recomposed was impossible. Le Fanu is again

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t­ ypical: when the “Select Library of Fiction” bought the stereotype plates for one of his novels, he asked only for minor corrections (Colclough 2006). Although first developed in the 1840s, the paper method of stereotype production did not become the norm until sometime after 1860. In this process, a sheet of flong (similar to papier‐mâché) was applied to the oiled types of the form. The dampened flong was then “beaten” to force it down onto the typefaces. Once dried, the “paper matrix” could either be used to produce a series of plates or be stored for later use. Because this method didn’t need type to be specially composed, as was the case with the earlier plaster method, the publisher could have the paper matrices made before printing an impression from the same set of types and could wait to see whether a second edition was demanded by the market before casting expensive plates (Dooley 1992, pp. 64–68). From the 1860s, “stereotyping was so cheap and easy, and the capacities of machine equipped printing houses so great, the publishers were able to minimize the risk of overestimating demand” (Dooley 1992, p. 95). The success of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation clearly took its publisher by surprise. Churchill had neither demanded that the types be kept standing nor paid for stereotypes to be produced so that, when he gained the author’s agreement to a second edition in a run of 1000 copies, the book had to be reset. This also quickly sold out, and the third edition gave the author a chance to revise his work. By the time it entered into a sixth edition in 1847, it had expanded from 390 to 512 pages and increased in price from 7s 6d to 9s. This “Library Edition” incorporated major scientific revisions made in response to critical reviews. It was quickly supplemented by an “inexpensive” 2s 6d “People’s Edition” which contained exactly the same revised text only in a smaller octavo format. The 516 pages of the “Library Edition” were condensed into 298 pages by  using “bourgeois” (9‐point), rather than “small pica” (11‐point) type. Although the “People’s Edition” was much smaller, the major difference between the two was the binding. Appearing in stiff paper wrappers, the “People’s Edition” was as cheap as the volumes in Simms & M’Intyre’s “Parlour Novelist” series, but the reader was getting an essentially new work rather than a reprint (Secord 2000, pp. 146–150). The appearance of Vestiges in a cheap edition provides a particularly striking example of the way in which the meaning of a text which is linguistically stable can be transformed by its reproduction in a new format for a new audience. Throughout the period 1820–1880 many publishers reworked their steady sellers in this way. Liddell and Scott’s Greek‐English Lexicon (1843) and its abridgement, the Lexicon Chiefly for the Use of Schools (1843), were among the most successful new books produced by OUP in the 1840s. Initially printed in an edition of 3000 copies, and sold at £2 2s, the first edition of the Lexicon quickly sold out, with the 12s abridgement also selling 1058 copies in less than six months. While it was in fact a reworking of an existing lexicon, Liddell and Scott became an iconic text (and Liddell went on to become the father of the Alice for whom Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). During the following decades, both versions were “revised throughout” for the expanding school market. By 1860, the price had dropped to £1 12s for the fourth edition of The Lexicon and 7s for the fifth edition of the abridgement. In May of the following year, OUP entered into a “joint agency” with Longman for their sale and the new “Longman” editions were widely advertised (Colclough 2013). Regularly revised and repackaged, steady sellers like Liddell and Scott had a profound influence over generations of middle‐class school children. As Howsam notes, Macaulay’s suggestion that “every schoolboy” knew certain facts about global history

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

was predicated on the fact that history books continued to rehearse familiar narratives. However, such works only survived in the marketplace by offering a mixture of the familiar and the new. The Liddell and Scott of narrative history was Henry Ince’s Outlines of English History (1834), which by the 1850s had been “corrected and very much extended” by the publisher James Gilbert, who now held the status of co‐author. That Ince and Gilbert’s Outlines continued to be revised and republished into the twentieth century shows just how much care needed to be taken to maintain the continued success of a steady seller (Howsam 2009, pp. 9–23). Recent work on the publisher’s series has shown that the replication of out‐of‐copyright works in the guise of “British classics” had a profound impact upon the cultural identities of readers who only ever experienced them in such mediated forms (Spiers 2011a, 2011b). During the nineteenth century, many books were produced from existing published works (rather than ­manuscripts), and editors, translators, and abridgers are in many ways just as important as authors to the history of the book in this period. In order for a book to become successful, it needed to be promoted. The increased “attention paid to the advertising and promotion” of books in the mid‐1860s was one of the factors that made it possible for publishers to make a profit on “mid and low‐priced works” (Weedon 2003, p. 103). Promotional strategies, including advertising in newspapers and magazines, were often combined with the free distribution of “presentation copies” to stimulate reviews. During the 1860s, Bentley often reserved 40 out of 500  copies to be distributed between the author, the reviews, and the legal deposit libraries, which were supposed to receive a copy of every new publication in Britain: the British Museum, the Bodleian in Oxford, Cambridge University Library, the Faculty of Advocates Library in Edinburgh, and the library of Trinity College, Dublin (Bassett 2010). When Alexander Macmillan took over as the publisher for OUP in 1863, he increased the number of presentation copies and the amount spent on advertising. Between 35 and 100 copies of each new title were distributed for free, and most were given an advertising budget of between £10 and £25. In 1869, for example, 45 copies of Wordsworth’s Early Latin (1869) were “given away” and £35 put aside for advertising (Colclough 2013). Done right, advertising might consume between 25% and 50% of the costs of production for a three‐volume novel (Sutherland 1976, pp. 14, 47). Between 1865 and 1870 Bentley spent an average of over £97 on the promotion of an edition of 1000 copies (Bassett 2010, p. 70). By contrast, George Bell & Sons spent just 3% of the production costs of one of Margaret Gatty’s stories on advertising, as compared to 36.1% on illustrations (Weedon 2003, p. 81). For Bentley, the bigger the edition, the more he spent on its promotion. His advertisements regularly appeared in weekly literary journals, such as The Athenaeum and The Academy, and newspapers such as the Times. Similarly, Smith, Elder & Co. ran an effective campaign for Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), which was advertised alongside other new works in The Literary Gazette, Athenaeum, and The Examiner on October 16, 1847. The fact that subsequent advertisements in newspapers included extracts from favorable reviews in The Atlas and The Weekly Chronicle demonstrates the importance of sending out free copies. Some advertising campaigns even helped to direct the way in which texts were read. T.C. Newby’s ­infamous campaign to promote Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (1847), by “Ellis” and “Acton Bell” (the pseudonyms adopted by Charlotte’s sisters, Emily and Anne), encouraged readers to think that their work was produced by the same “Bell” then ­finding fame with Jane Eyre. Such advertisements provided an important framework for reading these novels (Colclough 2012).

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At 31s 6d, the purchase of Jane Eyre would have represented about 20% of the gross weekly income of a middle‐class family earning £400 per year (Eliot 2001b). However, advertisements for expensive first editions rarely mentioned the price as they were often headed “now ready at all the libraries.” The tax on advertising (set at 3s 6d in 1815) was reduced to 1s 6d in 1834 and finally abolished in 1853. Newspaper advertising remained expensive, however, and publishers also used other means to promote their  wares. Most included catalogues with every new work and advertised recent ­publications on the end pages. This was targeted advertising. The “Select Library of Fiction” edition of Charles Lever’s The Knight of Gwynne (1872), for example, included four pages promoting the series. Advertising could also be tipped into books and periodicals. It cost £25 in 1833 to insert a four‐page catalogue into a monthly part of The Penny Magazine estimated to reach 80 000 readers (Beavan 2007, p. 129). Some publishers benefited from inserts provided by booksellers eager to promote their stock. George Bell of Fleet Street had a list of OUP’s religious works tipped into Ainsworth’s Magazine in January 1846 for this purpose. Other promotional tools included display cards for bookshop windows and handbills distributed at the counter, as shown in an engraving of Tilt’s shop in Fleet Street (Cruikshank 1836, back cover). Menzie’s accounts for advertising Hood’s Comic Annual for 1832 included the cost of 36 000 handbills, 30 packs of cards “for windows,” and 11s worth of circulars for the “Trade” (reproduced in Weedon 2003, p. 20). Making the trade aware of new publications was an important part of promotion. Many annual lists of works published were issued until Sampson Low’s The English Catalogue (1864) replaced them, but these were a much less effective means of promotion than the trade publications. There were three major trade magazines: Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser (1805–1858), The Publishers’ Circular (1837–1939), and The Bookseller (est. 1858; still in operation), into which Bent’s was incorporated. The Bookseller’s unique selling point was its inclusion of reviews. One way to avoid negative reviews was to issue lists of works with “brief paragraphs puffing the firm’s new titles,” as was the case with Longman’s Notes on Books launched in 1855 (McKitterick 2009c, p. 562). Published fortnightly, the Publishers’ Circular sent free copies to the various audiences that publishers needed to reach, including the “Country” and London ­ ­booksellers, clergymen, “heads of colleges,” and “book societies and literary persons” (Publishers’ Circular, January 1839, p. i). Themed issues allowed publishers to make the most of their advertising. With the rapid growth of educational publishing in the 1860s, the biannual “education issue” was particularly attractive to those vying for a portion of the market for books for the “nursery,” “schools,” and “self‐tuition.” Who did publishers sell these books to? Publishers continued to offer discounts to the trade, giving 13 books for the price of 12, or 25 for the price of 24. Even individual copies were usually sold at a trade discount of 25%. Several of Bentley’s subscription lists from the 1860s have survived. Le Fanu’s triple‐decker Wylder’s Hand was offered to the public at the usual retail price of 31s 6d. It is, however, important to note that after 1852 (when “free trade in books” became the norm), bookshops often allowed a discount of “2d or 3d on the shilling off the list price” if the customer paid in cash (Griest 1970, p. 64). In this instance, the subscription price for wholesalers and retailers was set at 24s, while the “sale” price for subscribers paying in cash was slightly lower at 22s 6d. However, those signing up for orders “on this day” were also entitled to a range of special deals. That day’s

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

offer for “13 as 12” was 21s 6d, or a shilling less per copy than the “sale” price; “26 as 24” reduced the price again by another 6d (with the actual unit price further reduced, of course, by the additional free copy). Mudie’s Circulating Library (discussed below) took “100 as 96” at 19s, but no one was tempted by “250 as 240” at 18s.1 These were, of course, substantial discounts, and the price paid by large wholesalers and retailers “dropped by at least 25 percent” in the 20 years between 1850 and 1870 (Griest 1970, p. 66). Throughout the period 1865–1870, Bentley sold most copies of his triple‐deckers “to circulating libraries” for “18s per set less discounts,” 25 as 24. This meant that with an average sale price of 16s per set, Bentley needed to sell just 295 copies out of an edition of 500 to make a profit. This contrasts with the “break‐even point of 10,000 or more” in sales on which Routledge’s “Cheap Series” operated (Fyfe 2009, p. 583; Bassett 2010). That Bentley continued to make a profit on most of the triple‐deckers that he produced during this period (usually in small editions of between 500 and 1500 copies) shows that, with the support of the libraries, the triple‐decker was a “commercially safe” f­ ormat (Bassett 2010, pp. 74–76). Bentley did not only produce triple‐deckers. His subscription lists also reveal the rates paid by the book trade for other popular genres and formats, including his single‐ volume reprints. In the 1860s, volumes appearing in Bentley’s 6s “Favourite Novels” series were sold on “subscription” at 4s 6d for “13 as 12.” Those paying in cash reduced the price to 4s 2d per copy. When the 6s version of Ellen Wood’s The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863) was subscribed in November 1864, two of the major Victorian wholesalers, Simpkin, Marshall and W.H. Smith & Son, bought 234 and 416 copies, respectively. Mudie’s did not acquire any copies, but single‐volume fiction could be found in this and other major circulating libraries. Both Smith’s and Mudie’s bought 104 copies of another  single‐volume text, Memoirs of Henrietta Caracciolo: Ex Benedictine Nun (1864) subscribed “13 as 12.” Bentley’s lists show that he was offering titles to the trade in a variety of formats (from one to three volumes), retailing at a range of prices (1s to 31s 6d). However, three prices dominated his list: 31s 6d (12 out of 42 titles subscribed), 21s (13 titles), and 6s (8 titles). Simon Eliot has argued that the structure of book pricing was simplified during the 1850s. There were now several regular price points, and Bentley’s three prices are  among those that remained common until the 1890s (Eliot 2001b, pp. 180–181). By the mid‐1850s most titles retailed at less than 6s, so Bentley’s 21s and 31s 6d were high prices, and his 6s “Favourite Novels” was a mid‐priced rather than cheap series (Weedon 2003, pp. 104–107). The preponderance of high‐priced texts confirms that Bentley was mainly concerned with the production of short runs of expensive texts for sales to the libraries and the luxury market. These subscription lists provide useful data about the trade discounts offered by producers of expensive books. However, by the late 1860s, subscription sales were becoming much less important than they had once been. Many publishers appear to have entered into private negotiations with large libraries and wholesalers like Mudie’s and Smith’s rather than offering the same terms to everyone (Griest 1970, p. 66). The new technologies of “flong” stereotyping and rapid presses also meant that books could be produced virtually on demand should a title prove a hit with the reading public (Dooley 1992, pp. 96–97). Under these conditions, wholesalers, retail booksellers, and librarians were increasingly reluctant to commit funds to large orders for new and untested works.

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Throughout this period, publishers continued to use agents to promote and sell their works as they had done earlier in the century. The main role of the agent was to act as wholesaler and retailer within a defined territory. For example, the Edinburgh firm of Oliver & Boyd acted as the Scottish agents for John Murray from 1819 until the twentieth century. By the 1860s, Oliver & Boyd were one of the dominant Scottish wholesalers, and their list included both English and Scottish publishers. An agent usually received an additional discount on the books that they sold on to the retail trade and sometimes secured a “short‐term monopoly” on sales (Alloway 2007, p. 386). As Scottish agents for Chapman & Hall, John Menzies fiercely defended his right to distribute Dickens’s Christmas book The Chimes (1844) against other wholesalers. Agents promoted new works by including them in their catalogue of books available and usually placed advertisements in local newspapers and periodicals (Colclough 2009b). When Oliver & Boyd became the agents for Simpkin, Marshall in 1828, they informed the London firm that they would employ an advertising agent to deal with this part of the business. They might also employ commercial travelers to carry advance copies and to receive orders and collect payments. Those employed by Oliver & Boyd provided essential links to the trade in Ireland and England. Their assessment of the “creditworthiness of their retail customers” was vital to a trade in which stock could be paid for at a later date (Beavan 2007, p. 132). Agents sometimes also entered into arrangements for joint publication, but this was far more risky financially than merely acting as an agent. For Oliver & Boyd, who had joint agreements with Longman among others, wholesaling “ensured they received around 10 per cent on every book” (Alloway 2007, pp. 393–395). Fraser’s Magazine noted that the main beneficiaries of the subscription system were the “large wholesale houses” who regularly spent between £100 and £800, rather than the retail booksellers, many of whom acquired their stock from these “literary middlemen.” In the mid‐nineteenth century, very few publishers and wholesalers offered books on “sale or return.” This meant that most retailers limited the possibility of loss by ­holding a relatively small stock of new books and steady sellers. Fraser’s complained that many local shops continued to be outlets for “patent medicines, pins and needles, stationery, sealing wax, smelling‐bottles [bottles of smelling salts], and Berlin patterns [to create images in cross‐stitch],” rather than books, which the proprietor usually ordered for the customer from a “town” wholesaler, with whom they did regular business (Parker 1852, pp. 723–724). During the early nineteenth century, the growth of regional wholesalers, such as Lewis Smith in Aberdeen, speeded up the process. By  the  mid‐1850s, they were able to supply local booksellers with publications by 14 ­publishers for whom they acted as agents, or for “whom they held extensive stock” (Beavan 2007, p. 126). During the nineteenth century, a range of new spaces for the renting and retailing of books evolved. By the 1830s, most major cities contained bookselling zones. Many of Edinburgh’s publishers and booksellers were located in the North Bridge area, Princes Street, and the New Town squares. They included specialists in law, medicine, and travel. When William Blackwood transferred his premises to the New Town in 1830, it included an “elegant domed salon” in which customers could inspect the latest works (Garside 2007a, p. 88). In London, similarly luxurious spaces for buying books had begun to develop in the period between 1780 and 1820, especially in Pall Mall, Piccadilly, St. James’s Street, York Street, and Bond Street, which are to the west of the traditional

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

center of the book trade. The best known of these shops was that of the publisher‐ bookseller Hatchard, which occupied No. 190 Piccadilly from 1801. The Picture of London for 1816 noted that “Ridgeway’s, Stockdale’s, and Hatchard’s, all in Piccadilly” were “frequented as lounging shops” because they were “provided with all the new publications, newspapers etc” (quoted in Laver 1947, p. 14). However, as Leigh’s New Picture of London for 1830 reveals, not everyone had moved west. The eight major wholesale booksellers, who supplied the country trade – including Baldwin & Cradock, Simpkin, Marshall, and Whittaker, Treacher & Co. – were all still located close to Paternoster Row and St. Paul’s Churchyard. John Murray and some of the other so‐called new publishers, who concentrated on wholesaling their own publications, had premises to the west, but of these, Cadell was to be found in the Strand and Valpy in Fleet Street. The central west–east printing and publishing spine that had run from the Strand to Cheapside (east of St. Paul’s) and Cornhill for much of the eighteenth century and even back to the sixteenth, had expanded to include not only Piccadilly and St. James’s in the west, but the streets and squares north of Oxford Street and Holborn where many circulating libraries were found. By 1830 there were 56 “Retail Booksellers and Publishers,” 57 “Booksellers who chiefly sell modern publications,” and 28 “Booksellers who keep Circulating Libraries.” Many of these shops specialized in a particular genre or field, such as the law (11 shops), medicine (7), religion (16), theater (3), “French and Italian” (8), German (5), or children’s books (7) (Leigh’s 1830, pp. 318–323). Hatchard’s was the kind of bookshop that tailored its services to a wealthy clientele with time to browse. Similarly, Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley established their “fashionable premises” in New Burlington Street in 1829 (Garside 2000, p. 88; Raven 2009b, pp. 297–298). With a new novel costing more than the weekly income of a working class family in the 1820s, it is perhaps not surprising to find that many of London’s West End bookshops looked like retailers of luxury goods. By the late 1840s, “London’s foremost shopping street” was the Strand, which ran from the newly completed Trafalgar Square in the west to Fleet Street in the east. When John Chapman established his famous shop and publishing business there in 1847, his neighbors included Ackermann’s “Repository of Arts” and J.H. Parker’s bookshop (the main retailer of OUP books), as well as dealers in luxury goods (Ashton 2008, p. 3). For every new work in circulation, there were of course many more old ones. Most early nineteenth‐century bookshops continued to hold a stock of second‐hand books, but the distinction between old and new bookselling was more clearly demarcated than in the previous century. Leigh’s New Picture of London (1830, pp. 321–322) lists 72 “dealers in second‐hand books,” including some of the most influential members of the antiquarian trade, John and Arthur Arch in Cornhill, Bohn & Son in Covent Garden, Payne & Foss in Pall Mall, William Pickering in Chancery Lane, Thomas Rodd in Great Newport Street, and Thomas Thorpe in Bedford Street. The antiquarian trade, which sold rare books and manuscripts, was highly respectable (Raven 2007, pp. 332–333; McKitterick 2009d). Not all dealt only in antiquarian books: Payne & Foss were also the main London retailers for new OUP books until 1832. Here, both new and old books were expensive. Payne & Foss’s Catalogue of Books in Foreign Languages (1827) included a “new and very neat” folio edition of Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica (1707) at £3 3s and “a good copy in old binding” of the same text for £2 10s. With some books on OUP’s new list dating back to the 1760s, the distinction between modern and antiquarian was probably blurred in such shops.

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If the antiquarian trade catered for those who could afford to spend several guineas on an old book, other London retailers sold cheaper texts from “easier to afford premises between the West End and the city” (McKitterick 2009d, p. 642). In the early nineteenth century, Holywell Street and the area north of the Strand were renowned for the sale of second‐hand, politically radical, and pornographic books. However, by the end of the century William Roberts (1895, p. 122) was able to argue that this area had been “the locus standi of the reputable second‐hand book trade” for the past 50 years. Visual images of Holywell Street from mid‐century reveal a “world of street retailing; with displays spilling out from interiors on to the walls and pavements, and second‐hand clothes, old furniture and print shops trading next door to each other” (Nead 2000, p. 174). Holywell Street was a fascinating and alarming space for the mid‐Victorians precisely because it combined the “reputable” second‐hand trade with the illegitimate trade in pornography. In 1857, the Daily Telegraph worried that those innocently browsing in Holywell Street were being exposed to the “sin‐crammed shop‐windows” of premises dealing in illicit pleasures (quoted in Nead 2000, p. 184). The second‐hand bookstalls of Holywell Street were far removed from the spectacular gas‐lit shops of the main thoroughfares. However, most of the stalls pictured in representations of Holywell street operated as “appendages to shops, being merely a display of wares outside the bookseller’s premises,” and were thus quite different from the peripatetic “book barrows” and “street bookstalls” run by (although not exclusively for) members of the working class. According to Henry Mayhew, there were 50 barrows and 20 stalls in London at mid‐century. Most could be found in “well‐frequented” but “not so ‘shoppy’” streets such as City Road, New Road, and the Old Kent Road (Mayhew 1968, p. 292). Although many of the books priced from 1d to 4d were 30 or 40 years old, Mayhew was told that they also sold more recently published books reduced from 2s 6d or 3s 6d to 10d or less, including gift books for children and annuals published in the previous year (Mayhew 1968, p. 294). In Manchester, the working‐class stall‐holder James Weatherley had a varied stock of between 1800 and 2000 volumes. He specialized in the sale of music, and like many street vendors, he also sold prints (Powell and Wyke 1998). According to Mayhew, the average price of a volume on a street stall was 9d and, as this relatively high price suggests, bookstall customers came from all walks of life. “Gentlemen on their way from the City,” “Bankers’ clerks,” “Mechanics,” and some “women” and a few “boys” were among the customers who visited one of the stalls on the City Road (Mayhew 1968, pp. 294–295). It was the accessibility of the stalls and barrows as much as their low prices that made them important to working‐class customers. Seymour’s comic cartoon of a dustman buying sheet music in a pristine‐looking shop much to the horror of a female assistant suggests the difficulty of working‐class access to most bookshops (see Figure 8.7). In contrast to such spaces, laborers could access the stalls without first needing to go home to wash. The Religious Tract Society’s Story of a Pocket Bible (1859) includes an illustration of a laboring man reading at a stall appended to a second‐hand bookshop. In this image, an “odd volume” is labeled 4d and the Bible being read still has its price ticket attached. Most stalls of this sort also included “shilling and sixpenny” boxes. Several similar images reveal that the shop owner could be communicated with via an open window through which he also policed his stock. Despite being observed in this way, some visitors took the opportunity to “read for half an hour or an hour” without ever buying (Mayhew 1968, p. 295).

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

Figure 8.7  A mockery of a working‐class man attempting to enter the “refined” space of a shop. Source: Courtesy of San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. NC 1479 .S5 1836.

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How easy was it to acquire new printed materials outside of the major production centers during the 1840s and 1850s? The records of bookselling and printing for 28 English provincial towns analyzed by Maureen Bell and John Hinks (2009) indicate that there is a correlation between the level of print‐trade activity and the overall rise in population in the period 1700–1850. Their research suggests the increasing importance of printing from the mid‐1820s onwards, a trend that they put down to the increased need for the posters, forms, and tickets associated with urbanization. This trend is reflected in the North Wales town of Caernarfon, where a population increase of just over 2000 between 1831 and 1851 saw the addition of both a new bookseller and a new printer to the town. With a population of nearly 10 000 in 1851, Caernarfon was able to support six retail bookshops usually operating in some combination with the allied trades of bookbinding, stationery, and printing. Hugh Humphreys added bookselling and stationery to his “Columbian Printing Office” in 1840. Newspaper advertisements boast that he sold a varied stock of books, stationery, paper, and prints and that “articles from London” could be “regularly and expeditiously procured” (North Wales Chronicle [NWC], November 24, 1840). The bookseller William Pritchard of Caernarfon regularly contacted a single London agent to fulfill his orders.2 The metadata gathered from the trade directories used by Bell and Hinks (2009) to construct their broad survey can sometimes obscure regional trends, and the overlapping of various functions (bookselling, printing, binding) makes general trends difficult to identify with absolute certainty. The North Wales town of Pwllheli, for example, complicates the relationship between population increase and the expansion of the print trade. Despite a population that was stagnant between 1831 and 1851, by 1856 the town had acquired two “Booksellers and Binders” and a “Letter Press printer” where none appear to have existed before. A surviving invoice from one of these booksellers, John Thomas, provides the kind of detail about the everyday business of such shops that is absent from the directories. Described as a “bookseller and binder” in the local trade directory, Thomas’s invoice reveals that he was also a printer, engraver, “newsagent, stationer, dealer in paper hangings, maps, charts and prints” and that his shop was the local depository for the Religious Tract Society.3 This Society was particularly ­proficient in the distribution of cheap works such as their monthly series of books which sold for 6d in paper covers and 10d bound. Thomas’s invoice reminded his customers that “new books, periodicals [and] music” could be “procured at a short notice” and that newspapers could be paid for via a “half‐ yearly” account. Anyone who didn’t clear their newspaper account after six months was charged interest, but a bill sent to a Mrs. Lloyd in 1856 included goods bought six years earlier, suggesting that credit was generous. This account, which totaled just £2 13s, reveals a customer who purchased domestic goods as well as books, newspapers, periodicals, and stationery. Most of the books cost 2s 6d or less. Several were issued by publishers associated with the cheap (mainly reprint) series discussed in Section 8.2, including Chambers, Routledge, and Simms & M’Intyre. Catherine Long’s novel Sir  Roland Ashton (1854), for which Lloyd paid the full price of 2s, was “No. 41” in Routledge’s “Cheap Series.” Also listed are a “Child’s book” at 6d and two “Scripture Pocket” books at 5d each. Lloyd’s newspapers and periodical purchases included the Illustrated London News (for which she paid a penny more than the cover price), The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, and the NWC. This bill is a chance survival, but it suggests the importance of low‐priced texts to shops that survived by combining the sale of inexpensive goods with printing, bookbinding, and other trades.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

Thomas’s boast that texts could be “procured at a short notice” is confirmed by other Welsh booksellers. In 1848, William Shone’s “Book and Music parcels” arrived “twice a week” and “Periodicals on the day of publication.” When Thomas Catherall took over Shone’s shop in Bangor in 1851, he promised books from London “two or three times a week,” and “every London and Country newspaper” and periodical on the day of publication, “or forwarded regularly through the post.” The weekly NWC in which these advertisements appeared was printed on Friday in time to be circulated by post and put on sale the following day by “agents” in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, including Thomas in Pwllheli (NWC, November 7, 1848; August 14, 1851). By the 1850s, the Edinburgh distributor John Menzies was using the railway to distribute mixed bundles of English and Scottish newspapers to retailers throughout much of Scotland. Menzies had weekly newspapers such as the Welcome Guest sent from London via the cheapest route, and they usually arrived on Monday morning for redistribution later that day. However, this meant that Scottish readers often received their periodicals 24 hours later than readers in the English capital (Colclough 2007c). Immediacy was central to Victorian print culture and it is significant that Shone and Catherall promised r­ eaders in Wales that their periodicals and newspapers would arrive on “the day of publication.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, an ever larger number of bookseller‐printers located outside of the main printing capitals were producing books and other texts. Excluding the main printing capitals and Oxford and Cambridge, there were 13 regional centers of publication that produced more than 1000 titles a year between 1800 and 1869. Industrial centers such as Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool catered for both regional and national audiences (Weedon 2003, pp. 34–38). Regional retailers often advertised locally produced texts because they were involved in their production or because the texts were aimed at a specifically local audience. For example, the Welsh‐ language newspaper Y Cymro advertised books by the Welsh publisher Thomas Gee that were of particular interest to a local audience that was still predominantly Welsh‐ speaking, including a translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That Y Cymro also contained advertisements for the London publisher Cassell’s Caban F’ewythr Twm suggests that the Welsh‐language market was large enough to attract English attention, but it also reveals that local newspapers were filled with advertisements placed by London and Edinburgh publishers (Y Cymro, December 31, 1852). The establishment of “free trade” in books in 1852 meant that retailers were unconstrained by fixed prices. Until the gradual introduction of “net” books in the 1890s (see Section 9.4), customers were sometimes offered a discount on new books of between 1d and 3d in the shilling for cash. Cuthbert Bede (1864, pp. 289–290) argued that the most common discount in London was “twopence in the shilling.” S. & T. Gilbert offered a range of new works reduced by this sum, including an illustrated edition of Tennyson’s works (published at 21s) for which they charged 17s 6d. However, Bede complained that many “large percentage booksellers” (especially outside London) were continuing to sell books without a discount “for a ready‐money payment.” Bede suggested that customers boycott booksellers who didn’t offer a discount and recommended the use of postal orders and the Book Post (established by Rowland Hill in 1848) to place orders with those who did. Even after adding the additional cost of using the more expensive parcel post, Bede calculated a saving “of nearly half‐a‐crown” on a book selling over the counter for 1 guinea. Despite his demands for lower prices, Bede was alert to the retailers’ costs, which included “shop expenses” (such as staff and display fixtures) and the placing of “daily

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and weekly advertisements” (Bede 1864, pp. 288–289). Advertisements often reveal the actual discounts that book buyers were allowed. In 1855, Cuff Brothers of Preston offered “a discount of ten per cent for cash” on “all publications amounting to 5s and upwards” either in stock or ordered from their “book and stationery establishment” (Preston Chronicle, August 12, 1855). In the same year, Catherall of Bangor allowed a “reduction of Three Pence in the Shilling from the published price” on “the newest music from the principal London publishers.” However, that Catherall and his local rival Martin only ever advertised music at this discount rate suggests that their other stock probably retailed at the published price. Martin, for example, advertised Routledge’s “Cheap Series” at the regular price of 1s in boards (NWC, December 15, 1855; December 22, 1855). Of course, Routledge’s various shilling series were among the cheapest ­modern works available, and discounts may well have started on new stock at 5s or above, as the Cuff Brothers’ advert suggests. By the mid‐Victorian period, the weeks before Christmas had become the most important time of the year for sales, and retailers tended to place more advertisements referring to specific titles or genres (Eliot 1995b). In December 1855, for example, Catherall announced that the “pocket books, almanacks, tide tables, and the annuals for 1856” were now available from his shop, alongside Macaulay’s England and the first issue of Dickens’s Little Dorritt. At the same moment, Catherall’s rival Martin made known that he had “just received a supply of Routledge & Co.’s Christmas Books” (NWC, December 15, 1855; December 22, 1855). After Christmas, the number of adverts placed by both declined. By the mid‐nineteenth century, retailers outside of the main print capitals aimed to draw potential customers into their shops by the promise of readily available new works (such as Macaulay’s England) that were in stock rather than needing to be ordered. The availability of local wholesalers, such as Lewis Smith in Aberdeen and Menzies in Edinburgh, made retail ordering more efficient. Not all shops were as ostentatious as those in the bookselling zones of London and Edinburgh. According to London as it is Today (1851), booksellers and stationers were to be found on most of the key thoroughfares and on the smaller side streets near the West End squares of the capital. These were well‐stocked and would send out to Paternoster Row for any book a customer desired. Dealers in “Cheap Publications and Newspapers” were far more numerous than the main street booksellers, and “tens of thousands” of Londoners were reliant upon them for “all the intellectual food that their scanty means afford” (1851, p.431). Such shops were usually found in the suburbs and often combined the retailing of texts with other forms of business, as both Knight (1854) and Collins (1858) recorded. In the early 1850s, the Religious Tract Society was worried that shops selling “cheap and irreligious” works were spreading. In 1851, there was one such shop to “each 500 of the population” in Manchester, and the parishes of St. John’s and St. Margaret’s in Westminster contained 38 similar venues (Fyfe 2004, p. 174). Such shops supplied the weekly penny papers. The evidence given by the Manchester wholesaler Abel Heywood to a government Select Committee in 1851 confirms that weekly newspapers were sold almost exclusively over the counter, whereas the more expensive dailies were taken either by subscribers (who paid an annual fee) or delivered to commercial newsrooms which charged for access. Heywood was supplied with copies of the penny weekly Family Herald (printed in London) via the railway at such a cheap rate that he was able to sell them again at “9d a dozen to the trade.” The Committee established that about 1700 copies of a penny weekly could be sent via the slow “­luggage”

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

trains from London for as little as 2s (Report 1851). With the cost of carriage so easily subsumed into the profits on bulk orders, distributors like Heywood were able to ensure that weekly newspapers were sold at a uniform price in backstreet shops. The weekly “unstamped” press could be transported by the slow trains as it was prevented from containing the latest news. From 1825, “stamped” newspapers could pass through the mail as many times as desired without further payment. However, during the 1820s and 1830s, most London newspapers were already 12 hours old before they left the capital on the night mail coaches for subscribers and newsrooms in the provinces. Those who wanted their news hotter off the press paid for a distributor, such as W.H. Smith or William Lewer, to send their subscription via the new day coach system that left London soon after the newspapers were published (Colclough 2009a). By the early 1850s, “an association of newsmen” could send newspapers via the Post Office in St. Martin Le Grand and expect them to arrive in towns within a hundred miles of the capital, such as Birmingham, later that morning (“Newsboy’s Day” 1853). Smith’s made sure that their large parcels of newspapers left the capital as early as possible by delivering them direct to the earliest trains rather than entrusting them to the Post Office. Most daily newspapers were expensive items in the early 1850s. The Times, Public Ledger, and the Morning Herald sold for 5d. W.H. Smith informed the Select Committee that a Manchester subscriber might expect to pay £1 13s 6d per quarter, or “a fraction over 5d per copy,” for the early arrival of his or her newspaper (Report 1851, p. 421). Given that some newsvendors charged an additional penny for early copies of the ­dailies, it is not surprising to find that the communal consumption of newspapers, either via newsrooms or through redistribution via the mail, was still common in the early 1850s. Alan Lee has argued that the pattern of distribution and reading was changed by a combination of the repeal of the stamp duty in July 1855 (which reduced prices by 1d) and the ending of the privilege of free postage in 1870, which meant that newspapers could no longer pass through the postal system numerous times without payment (Lee 1976, p. 64). The patterns of collective purchase faded as new penny dailies (such as the Daily Telegraph, est. 1855) were cheap enough to be purchased outright. However, newspaper reading rooms became a significant feature of the new public libraries after 1870, and some commercial newsrooms remained in operation until the middle of the twentieth century. The venues for collective purchase and consumption are well documented. In London, many “newsvendors” lent newspapers at the rate of 2d per hour, and most hotels, coffeehouses, and taverns contained “a variety” of periodicals (Cruchley’s Picture of London 1851, p. 217). Among the most notable innovations of the early nineteenth century was the coffeehouse that served mainly respectable working‐class men. By the early 1840s, there were “upwards of two thousand” in London alone including one “in the vicinity of the Haymarket” that served “from 1500 to 1600 people daily” (Reach 1844). One open “from four in the morning until eleven at night” gave anyone who could afford 1½d for a cup of coffee access to “forty‐three London newspapers,” “seven country papers,” “six foreign papers, twenty‐four monthly magazines, four reviews, and eleven weekly periodicals” (“Coffee‐Shops in London” 1840). In the same decade, newsmen, newsboys, and the “the great flaming placards” used to advertise their wares became a common sight in London and other major cities (“Fourth Estate” 1841). Chambers’s description of a London newsboy’s day follows his progress from delivering to individual customers

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within the city (as London deliveries were excluded from free distribution) to sales at the railway station. That railway purchases were particularly the reserve of the wealthy is suggested by the boy’s special attention to “the first‐class carriages” (“Newsboy’s Day” 1853, p. 306). Perhaps the most important new print space to emerge in this period was the railway bookstall. Book historians from Richard Altick (1957) to Aileen Fyfe (2012) have argued for their significance to the spread of cheap books and newspapers, but they also stocked books for rent and provided a major site for advertising consumer goods. Newspaper sellers began to appear on railway platforms in the early 1840s. When the LNWR put the right to sell books on their line between London and Manchester out to bid in 1848, there were already 21 bookstalls mainly run by local booksellers operating along the route. It was W.H. Smith that won the privilege to serve this line. During the 1850s, that name became synonymous with bookstall provision in England, Wales, and Ireland – by 1861 they owned 167 stalls on various lines – while those in Scotland were largely controlled by John Menzies (Colclough 2005). Using figures supplied by Smith’s, an article in The Saturday Review claimed that “the shilling and eighteen penny novels form the great bulk of the sales on railways.” Bulwer‐Lytton, Walter Scott, and Frederick Marryat were the biggest sellers. Many of the titles in Routledge’s “Cheap Series” are listed as selling between 25 and 1200 copies per month across the network. Some original cheap works, such as Bede’s The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green (1853–1856), which appeared as part of Blackwood’s “Shilling Series,” were also extremely popular. In 1857, 4000 copies of Joseph Turnley’s The Language of the Eye (1857) were sold “at Messrs Smith’s stalls alone.” Novels at 5s or 6s also sold well, but the Review usefully divided the stall’s stock into “dear and cheap,” “taking two shillings or half‐a‐crown [2s 6d] as the limit which divides the two.” “Cheap” texts thus accounted for “nine‐tenths in  number and three‐fourths in value” of the books sold by Smith’s (“Railway Bookselling” 1857). For those rich enough to travel by rail, these were affordable, portable texts. The picture of the bookstalls drawn by The Saturday Review is confirmed by documents in the Smith’s archive. A single surviving return of newspapers and books sold at their stall in Rugby in December 1856 records that 86 books priced at 1s and 75 at 2s were sold between December 15 and 20. The titles of these works are not recorded, but they came mainly from the “Parlour and Railway Libraries.” Of a further 22 books listed by title, only 13 sold for more than 2s 6d, which suggests that the Review’s division between “dear and cheap” was accurate. The most expensive book sold at Rugby was an atlas at 9s 6d. The Review noted that large sales were often achieved by “publications at nine, ten, and twelve shillings.” Sales in the 2s 6d to 9s range at Rugby included novels, ­collected volumes of popular magazines, poetry, and nonfiction (Colclough 2004). The stalls also stocked some of the more expensive books of the season, and at least one hundred travelers bought the last two volumes of Macaulay’s History of England at the full price of 36s (“Railway Bookselling” 1857). With some stalls containing as many as 5000 new volumes, these new print spaces offered a diverse range of genres at a variety of prices. Sales of newspapers and magazines were crucial to Smith’s bookstall business. Rugby was a large “junction” station where 11 daily and 25 weekly titles were sold. The most popular daily was the Times (327 copies), but two of the new unstamped penny newspapers, the Daily Telegraph and Star, also sold in large numbers. The Illustrated London

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

News was the biggest selling weekly, perhaps because it was a special Christmas double issue that week. In Scotland, Menzies’s stalls contained a similar range of English weeklies and a number of Scottish dailies, including The Scotsman. Newspapers and small books were also sold by peripatetic newsboys who traveled between stations without permanent stalls (Colclough 2007c). Although this evidence confirms the centrality of the bookstall within contemporary print culture, it is important to note that they were not the cheapest places to acquire new works. Convenience came at a premium. Smith’s early contracts allowed them to charge “6d for a 5d paper,” and because many of their customers were just passing through, they did not offer credit and so had no incentive to give a discount to those who paid cash (Colclough 2005). As the Saturday Review noted with some incredulity, those paying 36s for Macaulay at the bookstall would have paid 9s less at a bookshop. Penny miscellanies, such as The London Journal, were available at Smith’s and Menzies’s railway bookstalls in the 1850s, but the absence of “penny bloods” and other very cheap texts may be one of the reasons that Smith’s had a not‐entirely‐deserved reputation for guarding the nation’s morals. However, the railway platform itself was a policed space. Smith’s deal with the LNWR prevented sales of anything of “an indecent or immoral character” and banned advertisements of a “seditious character” and those that referred to medicines for “ailments of an indecent nature.” This made the railway platform a very different space from the omnibus or street. Punch complained that omnibuses were “stuffed” with advertisements referring in “elaborate detail” to “all the diseases” that ointments and pills were said to cure (“A Nation of Advertisers” 1847). The frontispiece to Sampson’s A History of Advertising (1874) shows that major railway termini were designed to display advertising to its greatest advantage (see Figure 8.8). In the early 1850s, the Edinburgh advertising agent Hugh Paton controlled advertising at 117 stations on four major Scottish lines, including the Caledonian Railway from Edinburgh to Greenock via Glasgow. The annual charge for a large advertisement of about two feet by three feet to appear at each of the 57 stations on this line was £55. With more than 60 million journeys being taken along the 6635 miles of track open in Britain in 1850 (Spiers 2007, p. 52), it is not surprising to find that the competition for advertising and bookstall contracts was fierce. As Paton’s own persuasive advertising noted, the railway’s captive audience included “almost every person of rank, property, or influence in the kingdom.”4 This was exactly the audience with disposable income that those advertising consumer goods or selling cheap texts needed to target. Smith’s and Paton’s customers could change their advertisements up to once a week. The constant demand for posters, handbills, trade cards, and other modes of advertising kept many a mid‐century printer busy with “jobbing work.” Printing “which had persuasion as its prime motive needed to be larger and more circulated in order to be able to outdo its competitors” (Twyman 1970, p. 12). Paton’s double demy size railway station posters were much larger than those produced in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, which were often foolscap (17 × 13.5 in.) or demy (22.5 × 17.5 in.). By the 1860s, the New Adelphi Theatre in London was using thousands of “six‐sheet posters (probably 90 × 40 in.)” to promote new plays. “Large, bold, eye‐catching types” designed specifically for advertising, such as “fat face,” “antique,” and “shaded” (which looked three‐dimensional), were an innovation of the first 20 years of the nineteenth century. The new iron presses of this period allowed the printer to produce large areas of dense type more easily than before, and antique types provided a strikingly dense

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Figure 8.8  Orderly, yet inescapable advertising visually dominates the railway station, including a W.H. Smith bookstall. Source: From Henry Sampson’s A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (1875). Courtesy of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. HF5811 .S2 1875.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

concentration of black ink. White letters on dark grounds, ornamented letters with illustrations engraved on their faces, and the bold use of sans serif were among the innovations of the 1830s. In the 1840s, theater bills and posters began to appear in two or three colors (usually red combined with blue, green, or black), requiring multiple impressions. By the 1860s, posters that included “multi‐coloured pictorial images and letterforms” produced using woodcuts were common, and some lithographed posters, such as those used to promote Vauxhall Gardens, were very large and almost entirely pictorial (Twyman 1970, pp. 68–71, 45–46, 108). Jobbing work was much more important to most printers than book production, as indeed it had been since the beginning of printing (Stallybrass 2007). In Wales, the “more enterprising print establishments” had “adopted copper‐plate printing by 1810” (Rees 1998, p. 126). The publisher of the NWC regularly advertised that his Caxton Printing Office was capable of undertaking both copperplate and lithographic printing. The circulars, handbills, pamphlets, and catalogues that he offered to print in both Welsh and English were the lifeblood of any small printer. Parish officials and local branches of religious and secular societies often put their printing out to tender. In the first quarter of 1856, the county of Denbigh spent more than £150 on printing registers of voters, advertising, stationery, and bookbinding (NWC, May 10, 1856). As all of this job printing makes clear, Victorian readers needed to develop skills to negotiate a world of printed objects beyond books and periodicals – including everything from advertising to patent medicine labels to railway timetables  –  that informed their quotidian experience. Visual and written representations of bill‐stickers, billboards, men wearing sandwich‐ boards, and advertising vans (which obstructed the traffic in major cities) are commonplace in the mid‐Victorian period. This was in part a reaction to a world in which “text was no longer something which had to be sought out and paid for dearly,” but which demanded to be read as part of everyday life (Thornton 2009, p. 32). In John Orlando Parry’s painting A London Street Scene (1835) and Punch’s “The Billstickers’ Exhibition” (1847; see Figure 8.9), the spectacle of overlapping posters displayed on the temporary fencing around building sites or on the windowless “dead” walls of buildings stops pedestrians in their progress down the street. Images like these seem to fear a kind of textual anarchy at the same time as they revel in the unwittingly comic juxtaposition of advertising slogans and announcements. In “Bill‐Sticking,” Dickens (1851) recounts a journey through London in which advertising covers almost every surface, including the underside of bridges over the Thames and the “very stones of the pavement.” His litany of names familiar from advertising (“Holloway’s Pills, Carburn’s hair oil … Dakin’s tea, Du Barry’s constipation medicine”) reveals a peculiarly modern experience: “a literal branding of the brand name upon the brain” (Thornton 2009, p. 42). It was the very anarchy of street advertising (with its potential to offend) that led to its downfall. The careful display of advertisements at the railway stations was the herald of a future in which advertisers paid to display their posters for a designated period on advertising hoardings designed for the purpose. The prominent position of posters for the Daily News, Punch, and Lloyd’s Weekly London News (“sale over half a million”) in the railway station depicted in Sampson’s History of Advertising suggests that public advertising was a particularly effective way of informing the public of a text’s availability (see Figure 8.8).

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Figure 8.9  Punch’s depiction of the chaos of Victorian street advertising, from the May 29, 1847, issue. Source: Courtesy of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. AP101 .P8 v.12.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

8.4 ­Mudie’s, Smith’s, and the Circulating Library in Victorian Britain As in the eighteenth century, most mid‐Victorian readers experienced the latest books by renting, rather than buying them. Commercial circulating libraries played a particularly important part in the distribution of both new and second‐hand texts throughout the period 1820–1870, with new branches opening at Smith’s railway stalls from 1860. In the 1830s and 1840s, working‐class libraries were generally annexed to tobacco and stationery shops and charged between 1d and 3d a volume (James 1963, p. 6). In 1838, the Statistical Society’s report on “the State of Education in Westminster” recorded that 38 such libraries served “the poorer classes” of the parishes of St. George, St. James, and St. Anne. The 10 that were “thoroughly analyzed and counted” contained a total of 2192 volumes of which only 10 were described as “decidedly bad” (Edgell 1838, pp. 478–492). Many mid‐Victorian bookshops contained small libraries similar to those found a generation earlier, as renting and selling continued to go hand in hand (Hodson’s 1972). More work needs to be done on the average size of the stock contained in these adjuncts to bookselling, but Simon Eliot has suggested that the “smaller libraries tended to stock conservatively,” with those containing fewer than 500 titles being made up of 70–90% “canonical” works (Eliot 2006, p. 127). Of course, what we might now consider “­canonical” was not necessarily thought of as “conservative” on first publication. The availability of the Brontë sisters’ work at the smaller commercial libraries ­suggests that these businesses provided access to many of the latest novels. In 1848, Mrs. Deighton’s combined library and bookshop in Worcester rented Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to anyone able to pay 3s 6d for a month’s subscription. Similarly, Griffiths’s Library in Ludlow included Jane Eyre among 555 titles for rent at 3d per volume. Vibert’s in Penzance and Thurnham’s in Carlisle were even cheaper. In the mid‐1850s, the former rented all of the Brontës’ novels (with the exception of Wuthering Heights) at 2d per volume for four days, while Thurnham’s offered Emily’s at 1d per volume “per evening” or 2d per week (Colclough 2012). The two most successful circulating libraries of the Victorian period, Mudie’s Select Library and the Subscription Library of W.H. Smith & Son, operated on a national scale. Founded in a typical bookseller‐stationers shop in Bloomsbury in 1842, Mudie’s moved to larger premises in New Oxford Street a decade later, and it was here that the famous neo‐classical round hall opened with a magnificent celebration in 1860. Mudie’s is best known for its low annual subscription rate of 1 guinea (21s). Guinevere Griest has argued that this rate, which entitled subscribers to one volume at a time, was significantly cheaper than those offered by the other central London libraries. Exact comparisons are difficult to make because some libraries allowed subscribers to keep up to 2  guineas’ worth of books at the end of the year, but Griest notes that Bull’s Library charged 6 guineas, Saunder’s & Otley’s 5, and Churton’s 4 (Griest 1970, p. 17). However, Mudie’s guinea rate applied only to “Town” subscribers resident in London, or, from 1860, to those exchanging their books at branches in Manchester and Birmingham. These subscribers were entitled to exchange their books at pleasure (but not more than once a day) by visiting the Library. For those who couldn’t visit, the minimum annual subscription for “Country” customers cost 2 guineas. This entitled them to exchange four volumes at a time, not just one. Members of the section of the Library known as the

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“London Book Society” paid the same fee to have up to three volumes delivered by special messenger. “Second class” “country” subscriptions were also available at a lower rate, these did not provide access to the latest titles. Mudie’s also supplied local book clubs and libraries. Mudie’s cheap rate didn’t put the other London libraries out of business. During the 1840s and 1850s, many advertised that they now charged the same or similar rates as the Select Library. In 1849, Coombe’s Library in Regent Street supplied “4 volumes in Town, or 8 in the Country” for 2 guineas, while Westerton’s “English and Foreign Universal Library” matched Mudie’s minimum rate of 1 guinea. When Churton’s combined with Booth’s in 1856 to become the United Libraries, they offered this same rate. However, Mudie’s was not just cheap: by 1863 it had an enormous stock of more than one million volumes. Advertisements for “works added during the present month” ­frequently noted that some titles had been bought in large numbers. Gaskell’s Ruth (150  copies), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (150), Fullerton’s Lady‐Bird (100), and the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews (both 100) were among the titles advertised as available in multiple copies in January 1853. Holding multiple copies meant that subscribers were much more likely to receive the books that they most wanted, whereas libraries that made their patrons wait for the hottest titles were likely to lose their customers to the competition. Given the need for a successful library to have both a huge stock and multiple copies of the most sought‐after titles, it is not surprising to find that existing libraries either joined together (as the United Libraries) or boasted of the size of their stock when advertising. However, 150 or 200 copies of popular titles soon proved insufficient to satisfy Mudie’s large subscriber base, and by 1857 over 1000 copies of several titles, including the third and fourth volumes of Macaulay’s History of England (2000 copies), were being bought by the Library. That many of these titles were nonfiction suggests that Mudie’s reputation for supplying mainly three‐volume novels is not wholly warranted. As Eliot notes, 75% of the pages in Mudie’s catalogue for 1857 were given over to nonfiction titles, and before 1861 more than two‐thirds of the Library’s fiction stock was made up of single‐volume texts (Eliot 2006). If the existing libraries reformed themselves in Mudie’s image, with cheap fees, large collections of books, and careful attention to “Country” deliveries, two new library companies attempted to compete for Mudie’s national trade: the Subscription Library  of W.H. Smith & Son (est. 1860) and the Library Company Limited (1862). The  Library Company halved Mudie’s famous subscription rate to half a guinea per annum. With central offices in Pall Mall and St. James’s Square, they also hoped to undermine Mudie’s by using existing shops as local depots. Mudie’s financial backers were particularly fearful about the loss of corporate subscribers (such as book clubs and libraries) because the Library Company also offered cheaper fees to these customers. Although the latter’s challenge ended “disastrously with bankruptcy in 1864,” its existence forced Mudie to develop “more aggressive book purchasing policies” in order to “retain and attract existing and potential customers” by offering ever greater numbers of popular titles. This additional expenditure, combined with the loss of corporate customers and the need to repay loans for the buildings opened in 1860, drained Mudie’s of its profits (Finkelstein 1993, p. 22). As already noted (see Section 8.3), publishers like Bentley were guaranteed profits on high‐cost books in small print runs by sales to Mudie’s and the other libraries (which meant that they were unlikely to publish

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a­nything that failed to meet Mudie’s announced moral standards). Given Mudie’s importance to the publishing industry, it is perhaps not surprising that the Library was bailed out by the major publishing houses during this period of crisis. Most accounts of British print culture refer to Mudie as a puritanical or prudish figure who helped to police what it was possible to publish by insisting that everything the library carried had to be able to be shown to a respectable young woman without making her blush. Or, as George Moore would later put it, the principal criterion to which fiction was being held was “would you or would you not give that book to your sister of sixteen to read?” (Moore 1887, p. xiv). However, in the 1840s, Mudie was considered “Liberal in theology and radical in politics” (Secord 2000, p. 140). References to Mudie’s perceived radicalism sit rather oddly with the general consensus that his library was not only “Select” but censorious. Mudie certainly did exclude some books from his Library. In April 1858, a letter to the Critic accused Mudie of not fulfilling his pledge to provide “all the principal new works as they appear,” and the editorial confirmed that Charles Reade’s Cream (1858) had been excluded. Mudie defended himself by arguing that his advertisements promised only the “principal” books and that Reade’s short story collection (including “The Autobiography of a Thief ”) was excluded because it was “unworthy” of a “place in any select library” (Critic, May 1, 1858, p. 196). He also changed his advertisements so that they now referred to the “higher class” rather than the “principal” new works (Griest 1970, p. 142). In the face of further accusations, Mudie argued that even though his Library needed to protect subscribers against “the lower floods of literature,” 165 445 volumes of fiction had been added since January 1858 (Athenaeum, October 6, 1860, p. 451). This statement has been used to construct the “commonplace that Mudie refused to circulate what he perceived as immoral fiction” (Fryckstedt 1995, p. 25). However, the contemporary debate shows that there was as much concern with the exclusion of texts on “sectarian” as “moral” grounds. In September 1860, The Literary Gazette argued that Mudie excluded works either because the publisher refused to meet his demands as to price, or because they would damage his “cause” as a “Dissenter.” They went on to accuse Mudie of acting as an “autocratic critic” by deliberately excluding “High Church fiction,” such as Miriam May (1860), and of promoting “sceptical” works, such as Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857–1861) (Literary Gazette, October 13, 1860, pp. 302–308; Literary Gazette, October 20, 1860, pp. 327–332). Mudie denied the charge and argued that he would not circulate any novel that “egregiously” misrepresented “the views of any religious party.” Despite this defense, the list of “High Church Books” “not allowed in the Library” began to grow, and two “High Church” authors accused Mudie of persecution (Literary Gazette, October 27, 1860, pp. 355–356; November 3, 1860, p. 380). Only the New Quarterly Review was concerned with novels banned on the “alleged ground of ‘impropriety,’” and it accused Mudie of hypocrisy in allowing Ernest Feydeau’s notorious Fanny while excluding Annie Edwards’s The Morals of May Fair (1858), Winwood Reade’s Liberty Hall (1860), and Henry Jebb’s Out of The Depths (1859) (“Retrospect of the Literature of the Quarter” 1860, p. 209). Liberty Hall and the others were probably excluded for the moral reasons referred to by Mudie in the Athenaeum, but it is important to note that the majority of attacks against him were less concerned with morality than with sectarianism. Most participants in the “Mudie Controversy” agreed that libraries should only exclude texts on the grounds of gross indecency. Augustus Sala’s support of the Library

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Company was based on the fact that unlike the “individual” Mudie, the new “corporation” would not be hampered by a conscience (Critic, February 8, 1862, p. 153). This widespread desire for a circulating library that did not select its books is also reflected in the Library Company’s advertisements which claimed that “no work of general interest is, on any pretext whatever, excluded from the collection” (Athenaeum, August 16, 1862, p. 221). Mudie’s decision to exclude some works on either “moral” or “sectarian” grounds was thus somewhat out of step with the very liberal views about censorship being put forward by some in the early 1860s, but even such exclusions do not mean his Library deserves the moralistic reputation with which it is still associated. Indeed, the presence among the Library’s nonfiction stock of progressive works such as Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and the religiously skeptical Essays and Reviews (1860), which used Darwin and the latest German scholarship on the Bible to debunk scriptural accounts of miracles, confirms Mudie’s radical credentials. A consideration of the attacks on Mudie as in part determined by his inclusion of dissent thus alters the way in which we think of the Library’s subsequent reputation for censorship. Indeed, this reputation undoubtedly has more to do with the attacks staged in the 1880s by George Moore and others writing in favor of a new, more naturalistic approach to literature. With advertisements boasting that one million volumes were available for those with a taste for “higher Literature,” Mudie proved expert in manipulating the rhetoric of availability and selection in the 1850s and 1860s. However, during the early 1860s, several magazine articles began to argue that Mudie might want to extend his “discrimination” to the “unwholesome” sensation novels contained in his catalogue (“Philosophy of Sensation” 1862, p. 345). Throughout the rest of the decade, Mudie’s was associated with some of the most controversial texts of the period, such as Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863), with its notorious scene of the flogging of a stable hand by a young woman. Readers of the Christian Remembrancer were warned “to scrutinize Mudie’s” parcels so that “young ladies” might be protected from their sensational contents (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 1863, p. 234). That these novels were actively promoted by inclusion in the Library’s “Books of the Season” suggests that this genre was important to Mudie’s financial recovery. That Mudie’s was more often attacked for its inclusion of popular sensation novels in the 1860s than for its exclusion of immoral works helps us to locate the Library at the center of an evolving print culture. Mudie’s most successful competitor was W.H. Smith & Son, whose library was founded in 1860 after a proposed branch of Mudie’s at Smith’s Birmingham warehouse was abandoned (Colclough 2003). By 1862, Smith’s customers could pick up library books at any of their bookstalls in England and Wales, as well as from some stations in Ireland. Both “London” and “Country” subscribers were charged Mudie’s famous guinea subscription for borrowing a single volume at a time. Mudie’s, however, could only match this low fee for customers outside London who exchanged their books at their branches in Birmingham and Manchester. Although Mudie’s 2 guinea “Country” customers received four volumes at a time as opposed to Smith’s subscribers who received three, the latter could pick up their books from the bookstall at no extra charge, whereas Mudie’s customers needed to pay for carriage. Placing orders selected from the monthly catalogue was the norm, but Smith’s was innovative in allowing customers to browse a “small selection” of library books at each stall. This allowed some customers to pick up a new volume at the beginning or end of their journey without having pre‐ordered from the catalogue. Those with a special “travelling subscription” could even pick up a book at one stall and return it to another, but they paid significantly more for the privilege.

The Distribution Revolution: Innovation and Diversity, 1820–1870

All of this evidence suggests that Smith’s began competing with Mudie’s for both personal and corporate subscribers from the moment that their library was founded. Mudie’s may have been “the Leviathan,” but in the 1860s, British readers could rent the latest books from a range of different circulating libraries which delivered to their doorstep (or the nearest railway bookstall) if they could afford a basic subscription. This gave relatively wealthy women access to a greater range of books than ever before. Smith’s were able to offer free delivery to the bookstall because they paid a single fee to the railway company for the carriage of all goods to their bookstalls. When conducting contract negotiations with the Great Northern Railway in 1861, W.H. Smith noted that the recent addition of a library to the stalls was likely “to involve a larger outlay than return” for “some time to come.” In an abstract model of library finance, the money coming in from subscriptions should always be greater than that being spent on new stock, but all Victorian circulating libraries had two main sources of income: subscriptions and bookselling. As already noted, a large stock was essential to any library hoping to compete with Mudie’s, and in the first few months of its operation, Smith’s spent nearly £4000 on books and received less than £2500 in subscriptions. The library eventually made a profit some five and a half years after it was founded. By 1865, a significant increase in the number of subscribers was generating an annual income of £11 979, but with stock costing £16 818 it was bookselling, worth £9417, that dragged the library into profit (Colclough 2003). As the above figures suggest, the large circulating libraries needed to be effective retailers of second‐hand books in order to survive. Mudie’s advertised “surplus copies” in the literary weeklies, and Smith’s regularly issued “Reduced Prices” catalogues. These lists often contained very recent titles (the demand that required libraries to carry hundreds of copies of a hot new title often faded within weeks). Mudie’s offered Brontë’s Villette (1853) at 19s just three months after it first appeared for 31s 6d (Athenaeum, May 14, 1853). Of course, as long as it had been bought at one of the usual trade discounts, Mudie’s would have made a profit of between 1s and 4s on this book without it needing to have circulated, and the same advertisements show that copies were still available for rent. A month later, Cawthorn & Hutt’s library in London was offering Villette, Georgiana Fullerton’s Lady‐Bird, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth for 13s each, a significant saving for anyone wanting to own some of the books of the season (Athenaeum, June 18, 1853). Mudie’s reduced Brontë’s novel to 9s in January 1854 in advertisements that targeted the smaller circulating libraries who were unable to command discounted rates from the publishers (Manchester Times, January 4, 1854). In the 1860s and 1870s, the increased competition between the major libraries and the more rapid publication of cheaper second editions of popular texts led to a decrease in the price of second‐hand books offered by the libraries. Smith’s now regularly reduced three‐volume novels to less than 5s. Ainsworth’s Old Court (1867?), for example, was available for 3s if it had circulated and 5s new (A Catalogue of Modern Books 1868). Despite Simon Eliot’s suggestion that Smith’s dealt almost exclusively with single‐ volume texts, a range of formats (including titles in two‐ and three‐volume sets) were offered at reduced prices. However, Eliot is correct to point out the suitability of the single‐volume reprint to railway reading (Eliot 2006). In July 1867, almost all the titles in Bentley’s 6s “Favourite Novels” series (including Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas) were reduced to 2s 6d at Smith’s stalls. Smith’s account books show that by 1867 the library was budgeting separately for “purchases for reading” and “purchases for sale.” With income generated from sales roughly equivalent to that generated by subscriptions at this time, it is

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perhaps not surprising that they began to sell off the library’s stock at a reduced price almost immediately after it arrived. Indeed, in 1868, bookstall staff were told to use “discretion” when selling “new” library books, but they were allowed to sell them at “a discount of not more than 25 per cent (3d in the shilling) off the retail price” (Colclough 2003). Although most customers might expect a reduction of between 1d and 3d in the shilling when paying in cash at a booksellers’ shop, Smith’s main stock was sold at the published price, thus making the library books (new or circulated) the cheapest books on the stand. The period 1820–1850 had witnessed enormous changes in the production and retailing of texts. Experiments with the mass production of religious texts in the 1810s were taken up by the publishers of the new penny periodicals in the 1820s and 1830s. The number of periodical titles increased rapidly: from the 1820s, “and more especially from the 1850s,” it “grew at a faster rate than the number of book titles” (Dawson et al. 2004, p. 8). By the mid‐1850s, penny miscellanies and cheap newspapers had become common objects, read (if not owned) by many who were literate, and regularly seen or heard by others who were not. Similarly, experiments in the 1830s with the production of cheaper single‐volume texts aimed at middle‐class readers who could afford 5s or 6s, were applied in the following decades to books selling at a shilling “in fancy boards.” Again, by the mid‐1850s, a wide range of books retailing at between 1s and 2s 6d were available, and many were aimed at a new “mass” audience including members of the working class who had not been targeted before. With an increase in the actual numbers of copies being produced (not just the number of titles) as average print runs increased, secular works became increasingly common objects, and religious texts became displaced from their centrality in book culture. Nonetheless, an unprecedented surge in print production in the early 1850s was not sustained in the following decade, a useful reminder that what is sometimes termed “the industrial book revolution” was not necessarily a smooth or continuous process (Eliot 1994, pp. 106–107). Not all the experiments of the 1840s and 1850s succeeded, and true “mass production” was to wait until the later years of the century.

Notes 1 Bentley’s trade subscriptions lists are held by the British Library. MS Additional 46672. 2 See “Francis Pritchard (Bookseller),” MS:XD2, Gwynedd Archives, Caernarfon. 3 See “Invoice: John Thomas (Bookseller),” MS:XD/50/986, Gwynedd Archives, Caernarfon. 4 National Archives, Rail 414/292.

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9 The Age of Mass Production, 1870–1920 9.1 ­Expanding Markets and Reduced Prices In the second half of the nineteenth century, the American market and the so‐called colonial trade continued to expand (Raven 2007, p. 329). In the first half of the century, India was the largest export market, although Australia took over from the 1850s. Exports to British North America and the Canadian Federation were also twice the size of the Indian trade by the 1860s. By the end of the century, however, the South African trade was worth more than that with either British North America or the East Indies (Weedon 2003, pp. 41, 38). John Murray’s “Colonial and Home Library,” launched in 1843, was an early attempt to market a series to the “colonial” market. However, as its revised title  –  the “Home and Colonial Library”  –  suggests, it met with only limited success, in part because it wasn’t different enough from the other cheap series imported into the colonies, often in pirated copies. It was Macmillan that made the idea of selling British books cheaply to the colonial market “such a resounding success” that by the end of the century “virtually every major British publisher” had “their own Foreign, Colonial, or Imperial Library series” (Joshi 2002, p. 94). In 1863, Alexander Macmillan noted an upturn in sales to India where his firm supplied commercial libraries and book clubs. He was particularly interested in supplying “native” readers with educational works, and it was the “Text Books for Indian Schools” series that laid the groundwork for Macmillan’s future success. These were books tailored for the Indian market, not books already successful in Britain. The six Books of Reading, for example, were authored by an Indian professor from Calcutta. Launched on March 1, 1886, Macmillan’s “Colonial Library” made up a sizable proportion of the 156 titles that the company produced that year (Eliot 2002). Macmillan knew India well: the series was pitched at a price lower than Wheeler’s “Indian Railway Library,” which sold for one rupee (equivalent to about 1s 6d), but higher than the ½ rupee market for cheap texts printed in India (Towheed 2011, p. 144). It is sometimes suggested that British publishers dumped unwanted books on the colonies, but most of Macmillan’s “Colonial Library” titles were published simultaneously in Britain and India, since waiting to see if a book was successful would have allowed pirated copies to undermine sales, given how long it would take to ship additional copies from Britain (Joshi 2002, p. 115).

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Although the “Colonial Library” included both fiction and nonfiction, its bestsellers were novels. Marion Crawford, H.S. Merriman, and Mary Augusta Ward were ­particularly successful, with the latter’s Robert Elsmere (1888) printed in an edition of 41 000 copies (Joshi 2002, p. 113). The extent of Macmillan’s success is suggested by their opening of book depots in Bombay (1901), Calcutta (1907), and Madras (1913) (Chaterjee 2002; Joshi 2002, p. 98). They were not, however, the only publisher to “regionalize the provision” of educational and other works. Thomas Nelson’s “Special Canadian Series” included indigenous sources whenever possible, and Bentley’s second “Colonial Library” series, begun in 1885, contained various “national” series (Fraser 2008a; Rukavina 2011). It is often assumed that these series were bought by British emigrants, but the work of Joshi (2002), Towheed (2011), and others suggests that most were designed for both emigrants and the indigenous population.

9.2 ­Copyright and Publishing in the Late Nineteenth Century The late nineteenth century saw significant changes in copyright arrangements. International copyright protection was one of the major concerns of the Society of Authors founded in 1884. In 1886, the Berne Convention created a “Union for the ­protection of the rights of authors over their literary and artistic works.” The British government’s International and Colonial Copyright Act of the same year made only minimal changes in order to permit it to sign, but “the absence of America from the list of signatories” limited the convention’s power (Seville 2009, p. 232). The 1886 Copyright Act did, however, give protection throughout the empire to any text published in the colonies. The United States did not extend copyright protection to the works of non‐American authors until 1891 with the passing of the so‐called Chase Act. Until 1891, works published in America had immediately fallen into the public domain, and books by British authors could be printed there without permission or payment. Collected volumes of J.M. Barrie’s journalism, for example, circulated widely in America without the author’s consent. The International Copyright Act of 1891 allowed authors, such as Barrie, to make large profits from the American market. This market was expanding rapidly, and British authors like Robert Louis Stevenson were able to demand large fees for the serialization of their work in Scribner’s and other American magazines (Nash 2007, p. 390). In 1909, American legislation ruled that in order to establish copyright, the American edition needed to be both set and printed in America. This protectionist “manufacturing clause” was to remain in place until 1957 (Gaskell 1979, p. 309). Across the nineteenth century, almost all the major genres, from newspapers to novels, underwent significant changes in form and price. In order to map general trends between 1800 and 1919, Simon Eliot divided the book prices listed in the main trade journals into three categories: “low (up to 3s 6d), medium (between 3s 7d and 10s) and high (over 10s)” (Eliot 1994; Eliot 1995b, p. 39). The early nineteenth century was dominated by books in the high price category. At 10s 6d per volume in the 1820s, a new novel was an unaffordable luxury for most, but by the 1850s “the price structure typical” of the early part of the century “had been reversed,” with low‐priced books “now accounting for the

The Age of Mass Production, 1870–1920

largest percentage share” (Eliot 1995b, p. 40). Most new novels continued to be priced at 10s 6d per volume, but more than 60% of all books published were less than 3s 6d, with some 12.6% “in the 1d–6d band” (Eliot 1994, pp. 64–65). In the 1860s and 1870s, paperbound reprints of canonical novels began to be offered by Dicks and others for sixpence or under, and the increased rapidity with which popular three‐volume novels were being turned into attractively packaged single‐volume reprints made the 31s 6d triple‐decker appear increasingly outmoded as well as expensive. By the 1880s, with ever more backlist series priced at 3s 6d, and out‐of‐copyright works and “yellowback” editions of recent hits available for just one or two shillings, it is not surprising that some new works began appearing in a single volume for 6s. The same decade saw the emergence of the short paperback novel often known as the “shilling shocker,” of which Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is the best known example. Once the triple‐decker began to be available as a 6s reprint within just a few months of its first publication, thus undermining the circulating libraries’ trade in second‐hand editions, its fate was sealed. From the mid‐1890s, most new novels were published at 6s in a single volume. By 1905, the percentage of literary titles selling at between 1d and 6d had increased to 16.4% from 3.1% in the previous decade, largely due to the experiments undertaken with “very cheap reprint series” by “the more go‐ahead publishers” such as Macmillan and Chatto & Windus (Eliot 1994, p. 73). Sixpenny large‐ format paperbacks began to displace yellowbacks from the railway stalls, and were in turn displaced in the 1900s by the pocket‐sized cloth‐bound books “with a colour frontispiece and wrapper” known as “sevenpennies” (Eliot and Nash 2009, p. 425). Weedon has concluded that there was “a fourfold increase in production and a halving of book prices” in the period from 1846 to 1914 (Weedon 2003, p. 57). These changes were not just a result of a reduction in the costs of production but of changing publishing practices. From mid‐century, publishers had begun to avoid tying up capital in unsold stock by using new methods of production to print most books in small print runs (1000 copies or less) and only reprinting them if the market demanded. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “the economies of faster and larger powered presses” allowed publishers to operate with smaller profit margins. The basic unit cost of a book was significantly reduced from the 1870s onwards due to the widespread adoption of the factory methods introduced by William Clowes in the 1840s. Modern print works housed quad‐sized presses designed to take large sheets of paper. The use of first stereotype and then electrotype, as well as later developments in mechanical typesetting, helped to reduce composition costs and make production more flexible. Mechanical (“hot‐metal”) composing machines, used widely in the early twentieth century, allowed the operator to set 6000 letters per hour as compared to 2000 by hand. The best‐known mechanical typesetting systems were developed by the Monotype Corporation and the Mergenthaler Linotype Company from the 1890s onwards. They were invented to reduce the labor costs of typesetting by eliminating the time it took for the compositor to move sorts from the case to the forme and then back to their correct places in the case after use. Instead of being loaded with ready‐founded sorts to dispense, these systems were loaded with type matrices and a reservoir of molten type metal; type was founded just before use and recycled as soon as it was no longer required. The principal distinction between the two systems was that the Linotype (“line o’ type”) machine would cast each complete line of type as a single slug, while the Monotype system consisted of a pair of machines  –  one used to control the

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other – which would cast sorts individually and arrange them into lines that could if necessary be corrected by hand. In both cases, the operator would use a keyboard to select the required matrices. As might be expected, the machines were both bulky and expensive, and incurred considerable operating costs: melting the type metal and maintaining it in a liquid state required large amounts of fuel, and the recycling ­process could never be 100% efficient. Their use was therefore only feasible for the busiest printers, especially the in‐house printers of newspaper companies. For commercial publishing houses, the average print run doubled between 1836 and 1916. Works of “proven and strong demand” could thus be issued in cheap editions retailing for just a few pence (Weedon 2003, pp. 59, 88). Thomas Nelson’s new factory, built in 1907, was “capable of producing 200 000 books a week” (McCleery 2007, p. 110). Across this period, the major reductions in production costs came from a cheapening of raw materials and the benefits of mechanization. The costs of labor gradually increased as pay and conditions steadily improved. By the end of the nineteenth century, publishers had become expert in issuing fiction in many different forms aimed at many different audiences. Despite the speeding up of reprints of works that were in copyright, out‐of‐copyright “classics” produced in series continued to be important. Toward the end of the century, these books shrunk in both size and price. One shilling was a common price for a small octavo reprint in the 1880s, but by the end of the decade, customers could expect to pay “threepence in paper and sixpence in cloth” for a classic in 16mo (Eliot and Nash 2009, p. 440). George Newnes and W.T. Stead entered the market with their various “Penny” series in the late 1890s. Cassell’s “National Library” (begun in 1887) specialized in presenting relatively short works (such as a single Shakespeare play) at an affordable price. Issued weekly at 3d (or 6d cloth), each volume contained about 45 000 words including a scholarly introduction (Fraser 2011). Between 1880 and 1910, publishers began to aim their reprint series at a new mass audience, while at the same time imbuing these editions with a new sense of cultural authority that suited aspirant self‐educators. The early twentieth century was dominated by series such as “Collins Illustrated Pocket Classics” (1903) and Dent’s “Everyman’s Library” (1905) that aimed to provide reliable editions of canonical texts introduced by short scholarly essays. Made up of out‐of‐copyright works, Dent’s advertisements claimed that three million volumes of his Library had been sold by 1907. “The World’s Classics” series associated with Oxford University Press (OUP) was actually started by the innovative publisher Grant Richards in 1901 and only transferred to OUP in 1905. These were advertised as smart‐looking pocket‐sized books (6 × 4 in.) bound in cloth boards with a gilt back. OUP was prepared to take over because Grant and others had succeeded in making “respectability a defining feature” of the shilling series (Hammond 2006, p. 96). Grant’s original series, which contained fiction, poetry, essays, and scientific works (including Darwin’s Origin of Species), was expanded by Henry Frowde, who employed well‐known literary figures to provide introductions. It was Frowde’s job to make sure that the series made money. Out‐of‐copyright works returned the most profit, and Frowde watched keenly for the emergence of new titles. However, like most of the more expensive series, it also included some works still in copyright. For these the author or copyright holder would receive “a halfpenny royalty on all sold at 1s or 1s 6d; 1d on all sold at 2s or 2s 6d; or a royalty of £20 for each 10  000 sold of the whole impression,” which usually consisted of 12 000 copies (Hammond 2006, p. 102). ­

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Available  in a range of bindings, from cloth for a shilling to “tree calf with marbled edges” for 5s 6d, Frowde’s own advertising claimed that by 1906 over “1½ million ­copies” had been sold. These turn‐of‐the‐century series are often thought of as utilitarian products aimed at an audience who desired culture. However, the “World’s Classics” repackaged and revitalized the canon by adding just enough new material to keep it fresh. Some of these series, including T. Fisher Unwin’s “Pseudonym Library” launched in 1890, focused on new writing. Unwin used ample margins to make short stories by “Ouida,” “Rita,” “Vernon Lee,” and others fit the dimensions of a standard reprint. Between 1890 and 1920, Unwin’s series included the “Adelphi Library” (3s 6d), the “Green Cloth Library” (6s), Unwin’s “Shilling Novels,” and Unwin’s “Sixpenny Editions.” Such series were priced to match “the tastes and demands of various segments” of a market that included the literate working class (Nesta 2011). When William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891, it was in part out of his opposition to the aesthetics of the mass‐produced book. However, the revival of older methods of production by what is usually termed the private press movement also had a political dimension. These presses aimed to replace the alienated labor of the modern print works with the satisfactions of artistic autonomy. Kelmscott Press books were produced using iron hand presses, handmade paper, and types based on fifteenth‐ and sixteenth‐century designs. However, Morris was not entirely backward‐looking. Kelmscott used photography when necessary and was influenced by Emery Walker’s lectures on typography given to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Walker was to further influence book design via the Doves Press, which he founded with T.J. Cobden‐ Sanderson in 1901. The Doves Press abandoned Kelmscott’s ornate style for the strikingly clean typography of the Doves Bible, published from 1902 to 1905 (see Figure 9.1). This artistic approach to book production also influenced publishers aiming at a mass market: the early volumes of Dent’s “Everyman’s Library” series of cheap editions of significant out‐of‐copyright works were designed in the Kelmscott style by Reginald Knowles with hand‐lettered titles and golden ornaments stamped on the spine (see Figure 9.2). A distinctively British version of art nouveau found its way to millions of readers via this series (Rose 2007, p. 346). Many of the publishing firms associated with the “art for art’s sake” aesthetes of the 1890s and the modernist literature of the early twentieth century were founded around 1890. Authors published by Methuen (founded 1889) included Henry James, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot; Grant Richards (1897) went on to publish both James Joyce’s Dubliners and A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. William Heinemann’s use of the ­single‐volume, 6s format for Hall Caine’s The Manxman (1894) helped to change the way in which the novel itself was published. Peter McDonald has argued that in the 1890s opposition between “the ‘new’” and “the ‘outmoded’” played a particularly important role in structuring both literary culture and publishing practice. Despite occupying apparently rival positions in the literary field, avant‐garde and elitist publishers like the Bodley Head (founded by John Lane and Elkin Mathews in 1889) in fact shared a need to project themselves as “new” with companies like George Newnes Ltd. that specialized in cheap periodicals. This shared ideology of the “new” notwithstanding, the literary discourse of the period from 1880 to 1914 frequently set up an opposition between “the purist” producer of avant‐garde works for a small audience and “the profiteer” ­aiming for large sales. Because publishing involves “invest[ing books] with prestige”

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Figure 9.1  The “clean” typography of the Doves Bible. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. BS185 1903 .H3.

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Figure 9.2  The “Everyman’s Library” brought Art Nouveau to the masses with its bindings. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. G460 .C76 1906b.

it  was particularly important for any author who wanted to be taken seriously to be published by one of “the purists” (McDonald 1997, pp. 13, 11). The publication of Arnold Bennett’s first novel, A Man From the North (1898), with Lane’s Bodley Head shows how the latter combined the symbolic value of the “purist” with the management and marketing techniques of a “profiteer.” It was the rejection of familiar bookish aesthetics in Lane’s “Keynote Series” that first attracted Bennett. To appeal to advanced tastes, these books were simply and elegantly designed, and printed with wide margins on “laid” paper (as opposed to the ubiquitous “wove” paper typically made by machine) with deckle edges redolent of pre‐mechanized book manufacture. The appearance of these books helped Bennett to establish himself as an “artist” rather than a commercial writer. The limited print run of 750 copies suggested a disregard for mainstream success, even an appeal to a coterie audience, but the book was priced at an inexpensive 3s 6d. Despite appearances, however, Bodley Head books were decidedly produced to make a profit. Exploiting a flaw in the copyright legislation, Bennett’s novel was produced in America to cut costs, and the author’s royalty was a modest 5% on the first 2000 British copies. Lane’s advertising frequently played on a title’s exclusivity by emphasizing its limited print run (McDonald 1997, p. 74). In other words, Lane used all of the modern methods of production and marketing to sell to an audience determined to show its distaste for mainstream bourgeois culture. Histories of British print culture often reproduce the negative views of the mainstream market promulgated by early modernist writers. However, recent work by Mary

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Hammond (2006), Joseph McAleer (1992), and Peter McDonald (1997) gives a much clearer picture of what was actually read in this period without dismissing the popular as “middlebrow.” The reports from urban retailers and wholesalers included in The Bookman from 1891 to 1906 give a good sense of what was popular (Bassett and Walter 2001). Most short‐term “fastsellers,” long‐term “steadysellers,” and out and out “bestsellers” were novels retailing at 6s. Marie Corelli’s The Mighty Atom was a “fastseller,” whereas Ian Maclaren’s Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894) and George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1895) were bestsellers. New Woman fiction, historical romance, religious fiction, and the Kailyard School of Scottish fiction, of which Maclaren’s work is an example, were popular genres. However, the majority of bookshops “listed more non‐fiction titles than fiction, and some shops (such as in East Central London) catered to an almost exclusively non‐fiction audience.” Three titles stand out as nonfiction bestsellers: Frederick Sleigh Roberts’s Forty‐One Years in India (1897), Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894), and the body‐builder Eugen Sandow’s Strength and How to Obtain It (1897). The bookshop lists also pick up important regional differences. In the factory‐ town of Burnley, for example, sales of books on socialism increased in 1893 due to local industrial unrest. Nonfiction costing less than 6s accounted for about 60% of sales by this retailer (Bassett and Walter 2001). A similar survey undertaken by W.H. Smith in 1912 emphasized the importance of “new editions” or “books published in a cheaper form.” Shilling editions of Dracula (1897), Ben Hur (1880), and Richard Dehan’s more recent The Dop Doctor (1910) were among the bestsellers at the bookstalls, as were works in series by Maud Diver, Charles Garvice, Hardy, Ian Hay, Baroness Orczy, Stevenson, and Wilde. Extensive sales of “sevenpennies” are also noted (Newsbasket, March 1912, p. 67). Some of these authors, including Harold Begbie, Elinor Glyn, and Florence Barclay, whose novel The Rosary (1909) was one of the “bestsellers” of the age, failed to maintain an audience after World War I (McAleer 1992, pp. 31–34). Hammond suggests that Barclay offered “a new position within the literary field – the popular as harmless, clean escapism” by writing against the politics and decadence of the fin‐de‐siècle (Hammond 2006, p. 173). The categories used in Smith’s lists  –  “Art,” “Fiction,” “Science,” “Miscellaneous,” “Standard Works,” “New Editions,” and “Collected Editions” – help us to think about the publishing field rather than just the literary field. Smith’s “Science” category covered technical and political works. Gardening books, such as Saturday in My Garden (1911), were popular in the summer of 1912, but it was “books and booklets” on the “great question of insurance” (that is, social welfare and unemployment insurance) that sold “by the hundred thousand” (Newsbasket, April 1912, p. 166). By revealing that the most popular books before World War I included not only a large number of reprinted novels but a good deal of contemporary nonfiction on everything from gardening to socialism these lists help to restore a consumer’s eye view to a period often associated with the emergence of the purist aesthetics of modernism.

9.3 ­Getting into Print How did new authors get into print during the last quarter of the nineteenth century? During this period the publishers’ reader played an increasingly important role in deciding which texts were published. Perhaps the best‐known reader of the period was

The Age of Mass Production, 1870–1920

John Morley, who worked for Macmillan from the 1860s until 1914. Chapman & Hall’s reader, George Meredith, famously helped to shape Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies, after its rejection by Morley (Millgate 2002). Another intermediary between author and publisher, the professional literary agent, also came into being at this time. A.P. Watt began advertising his services in 1881. Watt “undertook all the negotiations between the author and the publisher, in return for a proportion, usually 10 per cent, of the author’s income from any book for which he was the agent” (Feather 2006, p. 140). Those he represented included Walter Besant, who helped found the Society of Authors. Most agents were just as interested in providing publishers with the kinds of work they wanted as promoting their authors. Although at first openly resistant to their charms, William Blackwood used Curtis Brown, William Morris Colles, J.B. Pinker, and the Literary Agency founded by C.F. Cazenove and G.H. Perris to supply his Blackwood’s Magazine. Pinker helped build the careers of Bennett, Wells, and Conrad, but it was Blackwood’s reader David Storrar Meldrum who encouraged the latter to publish “Heart of Darkness” (1898) and other stories in the Magazine. Pinker was successful in raising Conrad’s fee for serialization from £13 to £22, before taking him elsewhere for higher rewards (Finkelstein 2002, pp. 129–149). Conrad found Pinker’s talents useful for making it look as though he had no interest in becoming a popular author, when the reverse was in fact true (Gillies 2007). One reason for the emergence of the literary agent was the increasing complexity of author–publisher relations. By the 1890s, authors needed to consider publication in a range of different formats and a number of international territories. Before launching the “Colonial Library,” Macmillan approached Hardy with a proposal to include The Mayor of Casterbridge in the series. Hardy was handling his own affairs and first had to approach its publisher, Smith, Elder, for permission. Once granted, Macmillan reassured Hardy that colonial sales would not affect the cheap British edition and offered him a “contract for £25 to cover royalties.” Macmillan went on to give Hardy “a standard and bundled contract” that included a royalty of 4d per volume on all subsequent works appearing in the Library. By 1902, Hardy held a variety of different royalty rates. As well as the (roughly) 11% royalty on colonial volumes, he was earning 25% on 6s editions, 20% on 4s and 5s editions, and “16.5 per cent on books priced below 4d” (Towheed 2011, pp. 138, 140). The 25% that Hardy earned on each 6s book sold put him at the top of Macmillan’s authors. The implementation in 1900 of the Net Book Agreement ended the widespread practice of retail discounts: booksellers now had to sell each book at a fixed price set by its publisher if they wished to continue buying from participating publishers on preferential terms. The Agreement made royalty contracts increasingly attractive to authors: one can accept an offer linked to the value of each copy sold with greater confidence if the retail price of a copy has been agreed in advance. The Society of Authors was strongly in favor of royalties, and its willingness to enter on the side of authors in negotiations with publishers over payments indicates the improved status of the author. It was its ideal to attain a royalty of at least 10% of the net price of every book sold, as well as for copyright and overseas and translation rights to remain with the author (Feather 2006, p. 141). However, not all royalty contacts were as generous as Hardy’s. Authors who entered into a “reserve agreement” only earned royalties after an agreed number of copies had been sold, while those entering into a “contribution” contract paid some of the costs of publication and only received royalties after a certain number were sold (Howsam 1998, pp. 128–131).

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The contracts issued by Kegan Paul and Macmillan in the 1880s and 1890s suggest that royalty payments were still relatively unusual. In offering 44% of authors a royalty arrangement in 1899, Macmillan (who had been fundamental in proposing the Net Book system in 1890) was probably leading the way, but outright sale of copyright, half‐ profits, and commission remained common options (Eliot 2002). Bentley’s contract with the novelist Mary Cholmondely for Diana Temple (1893), for example, included £250 for serialization in Temple Bar and £150 for the novel, with bonus payments for later large sales (Peterson 2009, p. 211). With magazines in the ascendant, it was increasingly common for authors to sell the rights to serialization, but this version of the ­outright sale of copyright is almost identical to that offered to Le Fanu in the 1860s. Perhaps most surprising is the continued importance of publishing on commission. Fifty‐seven percent of Kegan Paul & Trench contracts were sponsored directly by their authors (Howsam 1993). Even at Macmillan, publishing on commission was actually increasing during the 1890s (Eliot 2002). More research needs to be done on just how typical commission contracts were across the industry as a whole, but they remained an option for authors and publishers until at least the 1920s; contemporary “self‐­publishing” with online outlets such as Amazon.com shows that the same basic structure continues to be viable. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this kind of publication not only provided unorthodox authors a “vehicle for self‐expression” (as long as they could afford it), but also allowed radical points of view, such as those expressed by C.R. Conder in the anonymously published Rabbi Jeshua: An Eastern Story (1881), to appear within an otherwise market‐driven economy (Howsam 1998, pp.  131–136). At Macmillan, the number of “half‐profits” contracts was in decline, but agreements in which the publisher undertook all the costs of production and then shared any profits with the author (“either fifty‐fifty or at the rate of two‐thirds to the author”) were still common elsewhere (Howsam 1993, p. 59). The virtual disappearance of the three‐volume novel, along with other changes in the publishing environment in the mid‐1890s, meant that authors and publishers now almost always entered into contracts for the text rather than the book. Serialization rights were often worth much more than publication in volume form. From the mid‐ 1870s onwards “syndication in groups of provincial weekly newspapers with complementary circulations” via Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau and other agencies meant that newspapers were now a major outlet for serials (Law 2000, p. 33). Chatto & Windus paid Ouida £1000 for the novel Othmar (1885) and sold on the serialization rights to Tillotson’s, who placed it “in various provincial newspapers” (King 2013, p. 25). By the early twentieth century, many of the magazines founded in the 1860s (including Temple Bar) had disappeared to be replaced by weekly magazines, such as Newnes’s The Strand Magazine (1891), which included self‐contained short tales, including most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, rather than serialized novels. During the 1910s, the sale of film options provided a new source of income for authors and publishers. In the 1880s and 1890s, Chatto & Windus acquired the rights to reprint many of Ouida’s novels. These sold well, but as the author’s star fell, publisher and author relied more on foreign and dramatic translations. A change in the copyright law in 1911 (which extended the right from 7 to 50 years after the author’s death) allowed Chatto & Windus to continue to profit long after Ouida’s death in 1908. In 1916, it produced a cheap edition of Under Two Flags (1867) to accompany a film of the same name. By 1920, film rights (and book tie‐ins) helped prolong the

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value of an author’s name, with the result that Ouida arguably became one of cinema’s first stars (Weedon 2003, pp. 149–154). The period 1880–1920 also saw authors using new tools to present their work to the publisher. The first mass‐produced typewriters were manufactured in the 1870s. Although there is little evidence of authors writing on these machines, they helped to revolutionize both the revision process and the nature of the script handed over to the publisher. Braddon and Wilde often had their manuscripts professionally typed because “a typescript allowed the author to see a work in that distanced way previously associated only with proofs,” but without the expense of involving a compositor and printer. Wilde often demanded to see what his work looked like in typescript before revision. The ability to produce carbon copies of a typescript also meant that multiple identical copies could be produced. Wilde’s theater scripts were often produced in this way, and many early twentieth‐century authors first circulated their work in typescript for ­comment (Guy 2010, p. 27).

9.4 ­Distribution, Promotion, and Sales The period 1880–1920 saw the consolidation of the wholesale business into fewer and larger companies. In 1907, the great Victorian wholesaler Simpkin, Marshall merged with two other companies to form “the largest book wholesaler in the world”: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Its giant warehouse contained books from almost every British publisher. As Bert Taylor (who began work there in 1920) recalled when interviewed, the essence of wholesaling on such a scale was the ease with which a bookseller could provide orders for individual customers and update the shop’s stock: Instead of writing out twenty orders to twenty different publishers, he [the ­bookseller] put them all on one order to Simpkin’s. Later, he got the whole bill on one invoice, supplied from one wholesaler. That’s the beauty of wholesale ­bookselling – if you can get the terms right (Bradley 2008, pp. 1–3). Simpkin’s offered different trade rates for different genres, but that “for general fiction” was “twenty‐five per cent off, or sometimes a third” (Bradley 2008, p. 3). These were in essence very similar trade rates to those offered by wholesalers in the 1860s. However, after the Net Book Agreement came into force on January 1, 1900, there were fewer opportunities for retailers to offer books at less than the advertised published price. Proposed by Macmillan and a consortium of publishers in the 1890s, and tried out by Dent among others, the idea of “net books” was initially rejected by the booksellers, but as fiercer competition threatened to bankrupt some retailers, the newly founded Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland (1895) agreed to the idea. Dent’s experiment, which fixed the price of his “Temple Shakespeare” series at “1s 6d net,” showed that the system could work if supported by the wholesalers. The “notorious ‘cutting’ bookseller Stoneham” initially bypassed the system by obtaining the series from Simpkin’s and selling it at 1s 4d. Under pressure from Dent, Simpkin’s refused to supply Stoneham with any of Dent’s publications unless they capitulated. Not all books were included in the Net Book Agreement, however: “School books, prize books,

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‘juvenile literature’ and contract supplies to libraries and institutions” were excluded. Net books were largely “confined to literature and adult non‐fiction retailing at more than six shillings per volume.” The final version of the Agreement gave almost all the power to the publishers, who were able to dictate prices and discounts and punish defaulters by refusing to supply stock at trade prices (Stevenson 2010, pp. 10–16). However, with net prices often only applied to books over 6s, there was still room for competition among the retailers, and “underselling” continued well into the second decade of the twentieth century. The first major challenge to the Net Book Agreement came in 1905–1906 with the launch of the Times Book Club (TBC) which was both a circulating library and a bookshop. Anyone purchasing a newspaper subscription was entitled to borrow three volumes at a time. The TBC was designed to attract new readers to the newspaper and thus needed to pay for itself via book sales. However, unlike most circulating libraries, which sold off stock once it had been in circulation, the Times allowed subscribers to automatically buy the books they had borrowed. Books that had been in circulation only a matter of weeks were also being offered at 20% off their “net price.” Offering net books at discounted prices was a direct challenge to those obeying the Agreement. With some net books reduced from 36s to 7s in the TBC sale of May 1906, the Net Book Agreement was redefined so that “anyone who resold net books within six months of publication was liable to a publishers’ boycott.” It was at this point that the so‐called Book War “commenced in earnest” (Barnes 1964, p. 148; Eliot 1995a). The publishers refused to supply the TBC with books or the newspaper with review copies and withdrew their advertising. The Times used its columns to attack the book trade as a monopoly and planted a letter accusing Murray of profiteering. Murray’s victory in a lawsuit helped precipitate the newspaper’s sale to Alfred Harmsworth, who ended the TBC’s “challenge to bookselling” by signing the Net Book Agreement (Eliot 1995a, p. 164). Having survived this skirmish, both the Publishers Association and the Associated Booksellers added to their membership and increased their power. However, the British book trade remained divided into these two, often opposed, factions. The new century saw many of the newer publishers adopting innovative marketing methods, with advertising becoming more important than reviews. Martin Secker even “broke new ground by advertising Compton Mackenzie’s first novel The Passionate Elopement (1911) in the elevators of London Underground stations” (Nash 2011, p. 8). By the early twentieth century, picture covers were common for novels, and the spine tended to give prominence to the price (see Figure 9.3). With shops now organized so that books were arranged in tempting displays in windows, on shelves, or set in piles on tables, the dust jacket (widespread from the 1890s) needed to instantly inform the browser about price and genre. Hurst & Blackett informed the trade that Amelie Rives’s Shadow of Flames (1915) was packaged in “an attractive coloured pictorial wrapper” designed to “ensure sales.” They also planned “bold” advertisements “in the Press” and “striking posters” in shops and on “the Tubes.” “Show Bills” were promised to help “Secure Big Sales” (Publishers’ Circular, August 21, 1915, p. 1). The key to “Big Sales” was to combine advertising with wide and easy availability. The shop was increasingly used by publishers as a marketing tool, and many were refitted so that they looked more “modern” and could contain more stock. A major change in retailing occurred in 1905 when W.H. Smith lost several of its bookstall contracts and chose to move to the high street. Between October 1905 and

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Figure 9.3  Dust jackets provided new opportunities to promote both the specific book in hand and the author and his or her publisher more generally. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. PR6005. O4 S45 1917.

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January 1906, they opened 144 new shops as replacements for 250 stalls (Wilson 1985), often refitting existing bookshops. By 1913, each shop was divided into several “Departments” and a version of the traditional bookstall usually stood in the doorway to catch passing trade. The shop’s “ever open” doors were designed to funnel customers into the news department (or “inner bookstall”), from where they passed “on to the book section” with its “booktables and ‘window’ cases” used for “special displays.” Beyond this was the long display counter of the stationery department (“a real order producer”), and at the rear was the library. This ensured that anyone returning books  needed to pass through each tempting “department” (Newsbasket, May 1913, pp. 100–101). With their uniform branding of cream lettering on a green background and “WHS” logo, Smith’s shops brought a new feature to the streets of England and Wales – a multiple outlet retailer of newspapers, periodicals, books, and stationery. Despite the reduction in book prices, British audiences of all levels continued to rent books. By 1900, Smith’s and Mudie’s had a new rival in the library business. Boots Booklovers’ Library went on to become perhaps the most important commercial library of the period before World War II. Its 10s 6d annual subscription was half the 1 guinea rate of Smith’s and Mudie’s. Customers willing to leave a deposit of 2s 6d could borrow books at 1d or 2d a time. With 256 branches by 1907, this was a national operation like Smith’s. These libraries gave middle‐ and working‐class readers cheap and convenient access to a well‐stocked library in the high street (Wilson 2011). However, some ­middle‐ class readers continued to pay their subscriptions to the more expensive commercial libraries, such as Eason’s in Dublin, because they were presented as hygienically clean spaces quite unlike the public libraries, which were often associated with communicable diseases (Farmar 2011). The right of the commercial libraries to ban works was widely debated in the 1890s after Smith’s refused to stock George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), which tells the story of a seduced and abandoned kitchen maid who decides to be a single mother. Many major novelists, including Hardy and Gissing, thought that such actions were holding back the progress of the realist novel. Chatto & Windus often used what Richard Aldington called “pre‐publication censorship” in anticipation of the perceived conservatism of the Circulating Libraries Association (formed by Mudie’s, Smith’s, Boots, and the Times in 1909), which had banned Hall Caine’s The Woman Thou Gavest Me, Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, and W.B. Maxwell’s The Devil’s Garden in “quick succession” in 1913. Smith’s ability to expand a library ban to its retail spaces could curtail or ruin an author’s career. However, much as in the 1860s, the rules of censorship in the early twentieth century were neither consistent nor transparent and, at least in the case of Hall Caine, a ban could actually lead to increased sales (Wilson 2011, pp. 41–43). The success of the commercial circulating libraries in the early twentieth century can in part be put down to their continued projection of an image of protective censorship, luxurious comfort, and cleanliness. The limitations of the Public Libraries Act of 1850 meant that by 1886 only 125 local authorities had adopted the legislation allowing “free” libraries to be funded by local taxation. By 1918, however, there were 556 library authorities, many of which operated multiple branches. Gifts from Andrew Carnegie and other philanthropists had greatly expanded the number of purpose‐built libraries in the pre‐war period. It is estimated that roughly 79% of the urban population had access to a library on the eve of World War I. Libraries in rural locations became increasingly common after the legislation was extended to county councils in 1919 (Black 2006).

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Between 1890 and 1914 “the great fiction question” dominated discussion of library provision. Most recent discussions confirm that the “mostly middle‐class patrons” of the public libraries “borrowed mostly fiction” and that library professionals devised various ways to manage this desire, which, left unchecked, would supposedly lead to moral slackening and wasted time (Hammond 2006, p. 24). Thomas Greenwood, author of the frequently revised Free Public Libraries (1886), took a typically pragmatic approach by encouraging libraries to provide for both recreation and study. New innovations in the period between 1893 and 1914 included “several schemes to encourage library readers to choose widely and read progressively,” such as the provision of copies of Baker’s Descriptive Guide to the Best Fiction (1903). By 1903, 33 libraries allowed National Home Reading Union meetings on their premises. Open access, which allowed patrons to increase their knowledge by browsing the shelves, gradually became the norm (Hewitt 2006; Snape 2006, p. 46). These schemes largely failed to persuade readers to give up fiction, but we need to be careful not to simply reinstate the opposition between “serious” study and “trivial” fiction found in the library discourse of the period. Public libraries actually provided a range of services. Many authorities spent more per year on newspapers and periodicals than on novels. Most libraries included newspaper reading rooms. In Whitechapel, the Public Library also included ladies’ and boys’ rooms, each with a range of newspapers and periodicals. In 1901, the Belfast newsroom’s “average daily attendance was 4580” (Baggs 2005, p. 281). Large numbers used such rooms because access was unrestricted, whereas those borrowing books needed to register. London’s “suburban” free libraries served both those desperately searching the ads for work and those perusing “monthly magazines and illustrated papers” for relaxation (“A Day at the London Free Libraries” 1892). Reference rooms were also common and often included rare books. The 114 000 volumes in the Manchester reference library were used over 440 000 times in 1897–1898 alone (Baggs 2005). The proliferation of notices to be silent, rules about the cleanliness of patrons, and the creation of separate rooms for ladies suggests that public libraries were very much concerned with the production of normative ideas about gender and class. Some working‐ class readers avoided them for this reason (Black 1996). Mechanics’ institutes and working men’s colleges provided alternative spaces as did the libraries linked to the university extension movement (Goldman 1995).

9.5 ­The “New” Print Media: Newspapers, Magazines, Propaganda By the end of the nineteenth century, many newspapers and magazines had very large circulations. Founded by George Newnes in 1881, the penny weekly Tit‐Bits was selling an average of 350 000 copies per week by 1888, making it, in Joseph McAleer’s view, “one of the first truly ‘mass’ publications” (McAleer 1992, p. 23). As the title suggests, Tit‐Bits was a new form of miscellany, and it spawned several imitators including Answers to Correspondents (1888) and Pearson’s Weekly (1890) founded by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) and C. Arthur Pearson. However, the penny Sunday newspapers founded in the 1850s were already securing similar circulations. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper averaged sales of 750 000 in 1886 and had reached

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one million by the end of the century (Salmon 1886, p. 110; Williams 1961, p. 199). The Sunday newspapers served an audience that was still unable to afford a daily newspaper, but there was undoubtedly something new and innovative about Tit‐Bits and its successors. Newnes “quickly established a successful format for Tit‐Bits” that combined jokes and competitions with “Tit‐Bits” of legal and “general information” (Jackson 1997, p. 205). What was offered by such periodicals is still sometimes dismissed as “junk food” (Wiener 2011, p. 163). However, Kate Jackson’s analysis of the various sections of Tit‐ Bits reveals a magazine well suited to a readership made up “of a lower‐middle and aspiring middle class” that desired guidance (Jackson 1997, p. 202). The section on legal queries was particularly pertinent to women readers who needed advice about recent changes in the law, such as the Married Women’s Property Act (1882), which allowed married women to control their own property, keep it after a divorce, and make wills and enter into legal contracts without the consent of their husbands. Newnes’s claim that “any person who takes in Tit‐Bits for three months will at the end of that time be an entertaining companion” suggests that he knew how to address the cultural aspirations of his audience (Tit‐Bits October 1881, p. 1). The recent re‐examination of the popular newspapers and periodicals of late Victorian Britain has helped to replace a dismissive discourse originating in the period with a much more nuanced appreciation of their engagement with a mass audience (Brake et al. 2012). The serious work of cultural re‐evaluation suggests just how much fun these new publications offered. As made clear in Scott Banville’s analysis of an episode from Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884–1923), in which two moral reformers are humiliated after removing a risqué poster, these pleasures were often subversive (Banville 2008). A range of new halfpenny evening newspapers, such as T.P. O’Connor’s Star (1888), also began to gain large readerships in the 1890s. W.T. Stead had taken over the editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1883, and his innovative techniques (“the interview, the cross‐heading, and American style headlines”) were adopted by O’Connor and others (Williams 1961, pp. 198–199). In 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette published “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” an expose of child prostitution which led to both Stead’s imprisonment and a change in the age of consent. As this incident suggests, in Stead’s conception what was to become known as the “new journalism” had a democratic, political agenda (Stead 1886). This phrase, made famous as part of a critique of the modern newspaper by Matthew Arnold (1887), was defended by O’Connor, who suggested that even the more traditional newspapers were beginning to reproduce “some of the features of the New Journalism” (O’Connor 1889, p. 423). Even the new “socialist” press, such as Robert Blatchford’s Clarion, began to adopt its style (Mutch 2005). The publication of the Review of Reviews (est. 1890) brought together three of the major forces of the “new journalism”: Stead, Newnes, and Pearson. As Laurel Brake argues, the Review of Reviews’ “‘index and guide’ elements were linked to a larger project of improvement and education for general readers” (Brake 2012, p. 80). An amicable split later that same year, however, underlines the fundamental differences between these three publishers. In an exchange of letters, Newnes distinguished his own journalism (“giving wholesome and harmless entertainments” to the “hardworking”) from Stead’s, which “directs the affairs of nations” (quoted in Baylen 1979, p. 74). British journalism of the late nineteenth century needs to be seen within a transatlantic context. As O’Connor declared in The Pall Mall Gazette, the “American paper” was the “model” for his halfpenny evening newspapers the Star and the Sun (not connected

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with the present‐day British newspapers with the same titles). These used “American style cross‐heads (‘sub‐heads’) and multiple decks which until then had appeared only intermittently in Britain” (Wiener 2011, p. 173). These “decks” – newspaper jargon for short summaries below the headline or in the middle of an article – helped to divide a story into digestible chunks, but they could also be deliberately controversial, as with the Star’s “The Ripper Surpasses Himself in Fiendish Mutilation.” Up‐to‐the‐minute coverage of cricket, football, and racing was also a very important part of the Star’s success, helping it to become “the most popular British evening newspaper of the late nineteenth century” with an estimated 120 000 readers (Wiener 2011, p. 177). During the last decades of the nineteenth century, changes in the technology of reproduction altered the look of newspapers and magazines. Ever since the breakthrough publications of the 1840s, such as The Illustrated London News and Punch (both founded in 1842), illustrated periodicals had employed wood engravings. The Illustrated London News’s great rival, The Graphic (founded 1869), was famous for its illustrated fiction, such as Rider Haggard’s She (1886). However, during the 1880s and 1890s, magazines and newspapers began to adopt new photographic technologies for producing relief printing blocks. These processes relied on photoetching to create the blocks themselves. Photoetching involves coating the surface of a block in a “photoresist”: a chemical that would protect the block from erosion by acid but whose own solubility was affected by light. The simplest image process used was “line process,” which involved the reproduction of images consisting entirely of pure black and pure white, without intermediate shades. Photographing the original “line art,” exposing a block covered in photoresist to light projected through the photographic negative, washing away the unexposed photoresist, and immersing the block in an acid bath would result in the creation of a relief block on which the areas corresponding to the black parts of the original image would stand proud and the areas corresponding to the white parts had been eaten away. “Halftone process” was more complicated, because it started either with an ordinary photographic negative or with the negative of a softly shaded artwork such as a painting. In relief printing, an area of a block either prints because it is raised or does not print because it is recessed, so it was necessary to transform the intermediate tones of the original image into hard black and white when producing a halftone block. This was done by interposing a glass screen ruled with a regular pattern of opaque lines that would break up the continuous tones of the negative into spots of light that would yield larger or smaller dots of insoluble photoresist depending on the intensity of the light. The printed result was an image in which the grays of the original had been replaced with a grid of solid black dots that could create the illusion of subtly graded intermediate tones when viewed at a sufficient distance. Fine black lines had long been used to similar effect in wood engravings, but the various forms of halftone process replaced the craftsperson’s skill and judgment with the interactions of impersonal laws of physics and chemistry. By 1888, both The Graphic and The Illustrated London News were using halftones alongside the more familiar wood engravings. Magazines such as Black and White (est. 1889) and The Sketch (1890) embraced these new technologies of reproduction which allowed images to be photographically enlarged or reduced. They reproduced photographs of authors at their desks and actresses in their dressing rooms to accompany interviews. Many maintained a hybrid visual style of pen and ink sketches and photographs reproduced via photorelief. Mechanical typesetting using Monotype or Linotype

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machines made complex page layouts integrating text and image much easier and cheaper to produce, and allowed for longer newspapers and periodicals to be produced more frequently (see Figure  9.4). The new monthlies, such as Newnes’s The Strand, appeared strikingly modern with photographic images often set at extreme angles to the text (Beegan 2008, pp. 115–129). Most of the new‐style newspapers and magazines of the 1880s and 1890s tailored sections to stereotypically female pursuits. Some titles, including Dorothy’s Home Journal (1889) selling at 1d, were aimed exclusively at women. Evelyn March‐Philips (1894) listed 18 weekly newspapers intended for the “feminine reading public,” including the Lady’s Pictorial (1880) and Woman’s Signal (1894). Usually 48 pages long, tabloid in size, and generously illustrated, the retail price of 6d didn’t cover production costs. As with the majority of middle‐class news‐weeklies, it was sales of advertising that allowed the lady reader to get “her shilling’s worth for sixpence.” Advertising in, and the promotion of, newspapers changed radically in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. American style “display advertising” within newspapers was adopted by the Daily News and other penny press titles in the 1870s. Most featured woodcuts, “and many appeared on the front page” (Wiener 2011, p. 110). Advertising was now beginning to be targeted at specific groups defined by gender or class. The sexually alluring “seaside girl” (like Gerty MacDowell in Joyce’s Ulysses) was designed to titillate male readers and attract female customers to Beetham & Son’s pills and potions. By 1901,

Figure 9.4  Complex layout, such as this opening in Pearson’s Magazine, was made far easier by the advent of mechanical typesetting. Source: Courtesy of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries. AP4 .P35 v.1.

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one‐third of a typical number of Pearson’s Magazine contained advertisements that encouraged readers to become familiar with such brand names (Richards 1991, pp. 214– 235). Even Welsh‐language newspapers, such as Gwalia, included large advertisements in English for widely available consumer products. From 1885, the circulation of Tit‐Bits was boosted by its offer of a “New System of Life Insurance” which guaranteed £100 to the next of kin of any person “killed in a railway accident” while reading “the current issue” (Tit‐Bits 8.189 [May 1885], p. 97). This scheme appealed to commuters and was widely copied. Carrying Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday brought with it “the advantage of a Railway Accident Life Policy for £150” (April 21, 1888, p. 1). Benedict Anderson’s (1991) theory that nationally circulating newspapers and periodicals helped to create a uniform sense of Britishness has been questioned by recent work on Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the north‐west of England, which suggests that Anderson’s conclusion results from examining only the bestselling titles. Local newspapers and periodicals fostered alternative social identities based upon regional identities and languages. The short‐lived humorous magazine Manchester Figaro, for example, was one of many magazines that attempted to mimic Tit‐Bits while at the same time catering for a specifically local audience (Powell and Wyke 2009). The range of magazines sent out by the Scottish distributors Lewis Smith & Son to retailers in Aberdeen and the surrounding countryside shows that they handled about 840 copies per issue of major London publications, such as The Strand, but they also stocked periodicals published in Glasgow, Stirling, and Aberdeen aimed at a specifically Scottish audience (Beavan 1988). A new kind of cheap daily newspaper was nevertheless emerging in the 1890s. Harmsworth used the income from Answers and boy’s magazines such as the Wonder (1892) and Marvel (1893) to take over the Evening News in 1894 and start the halfpenny Daily Mail in 1896. The Evening News had already been “partially transformed into an American style newspaper” under the editorship of Frank Harris in the 1880s, but Harmsworth made it one of the most popular evening newspapers in Britain. New innovations included an edition dedicated to football results and a column entitled “Woman’s World” (Wiener 2011, p. 202). The Daily Mail brought many of these “evening” innovations to the morning newspaper and in the process became the first daily to reach a circulation of a million copies (Wilson 1985, p. 195). Harmsworth’s publications employed female journalists who often specialized in columns aimed at women readers. Launched in 1903, the Daily Mirror was intended as a newspaper for women, but in January 1904 it was relaunched as the Daily Illustrated Mirror with an all‐photographic front page. It became the first “successful pictorial tabloid,” with sales of more than one million copies per day by 1914 (Wiener 2011, p. 206). The arrival of the unstamped penny press in the 1850s had helped to shift the consumption of daily newspapers from communal institutions such as newsrooms, but subscriptions remained important until at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the proliferation of cheap evening newspapers, such as the halfpenny Echo (est. 1868), increased the viability of street sales. Commuters picking up something to read on their way home were a particularly important audience for the new evening papers, and their front pages were designed to attract the reader on the move. As T.P. O’Connor (1889, p. 434) declared, the modern newspaper needed to express its views in “the strongest and most striking manner it can command” because it was “not read in the secrecy and silence of the closet as is a book” but “picked up at a railway station and hurried over in a railway carriage.” Discussions of contemporary print frequently represented the commuting reader, “whirled by omnibus or train from his

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suburban home to his office in the city” (“The Small Change of Literature” 1889). It was said that newspapers and modern miscellanies, such as Tit‐Bits, suited the short attention span of railway readers. It is significant that the couple who embrace in the film The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) must first set aside their periodicals (Hammond 2006, p. 83). Such images startlingly subverted the everyday behavior of commuters who tended to shelter behind the printed page in order to avoid human contact. The late nineteenth century also saw a great increase in the number of newsagents. These shops usually distinguished themselves from booksellers or grocers, but often sold newspapers and other texts alongside consumer goods. Between the 1850s and the end of the century, the number of newsagents in Preston, Lancashire, for instance, increased tenfold. The biggest increase occurred in those areas populated by textile workers “whose relatively high disposable income drove the growth of music hall” and other working‐class leisure pursuits (Hobbs 2011, p. 133). In the 1880s, these venues were identified as a key distribution center for the “cheap juvenile fiction and boys’ papers” (sometimes called “penny dreadfuls”) produced from the 1860s to the mid‐ 1890s by the Newsagents’ Publishing Company (Springhall 1990, p. 227). Because weekly newspapers and magazines needed to reach the market as quickly as possible, Aberdeen distributors Lewis Smith & Son sent them to newsagents via fast passenger trains. Iain Beavan has calculated that these retailers made 18.6% gross profit on copies of Tit‐Bits (Beavan 1988). One sign of the increased importance of these small retailers was the growth of retail newsagents’ associations, such as the United Kingdom Federation of Newsagents (UKF). In 1914, the UKF negotiated special arrangements with Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press for every newsagent in Manchester. By paying 4½d for 13 copies of the halfpenny publications, these newsagents made a profit of 2d on every 13 sold. With the backing of the UKF, the newsagents of Lancashire even staged a successful strike against the increased distribution fees demanded by one major wholesaler (Colclough 2009b). By the time the Lancashire strike concluded, Britain was at war. In the conflict’s early days, everyone wanted to hear the latest news. The reduction of the Times (owned by Harmsworth since 1908) to 1d in March 1914 had massively increased its sales and the August 4 issue documenting the outbreak of war sold more than 275 000 copies. Popular and tabloid newspaper sales surged during wartime. The Daily Express increased its circulation from 295 485 copies per day in 1914 to 578 832 in 1918. However, with increased production costs raising many halfpenny newspapers to 1d, circulations often fluctuated or fell. When the Daily Mail became a penny paper in 1917, its sales declined from over one million to 938 211 copies per day, but its ­circulation increased again in the war’s final year. Paper was, of course, a vital war resource, and in 1918, a “no returns” order was made law under the Defence of the Realm Act. The order had been ­strenuously resisted by the print trade up to this point because the ability to return unsold newspapers to the publisher protected retailers against fluctuating sales (Colclough 2007c). The widespread fear that the demand for books would fall during the early months of the war proved unfounded. The Camps’ Library (founded in October 1914) sought to furnish those on active duty, while the War Library supplied books to the sick and wounded. Novels and the New Testament were particularly in demand on both fronts. Staff shortages, rising production costs, and a lack of materials led many publishers to reduce the number of titles that they produced. J.M. Dent and Collins virtually stopped

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production of their series of classics. The number of first editions and reprints being produced was significantly reduced in all subject areas (Potter 2007). “Literature” fared somewhat better than many other subjects, but the cheap novel became gradually more expensive as the war progressed. By Christmas 1917, the “shilling” novel was 1s 6d. According to Newnes’s adverts, however, sales of “the sixpenny paper novel” were “booming” due to the increased price of magazines and the scarcity of cloth‐bound books (quoted in Colclough 2007b, p. 32). Most leading publishers tailored their new titles to the public’s interest in the war. Hodder & Stoughton “swiftly organised a War Book Department that produced some of the most profitable and popular books of the war,” including the 1914 Princess Mary’s Gift Book (Potter 2007, p. 16). Profit and patriotism often went hand in hand. Although Heinemann’s list had room for dissenting voices such as Enid Bagnold, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, and while George Allen & Unwin published both Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Social Reconstruction and Margaret Hobhouse’s “I Appeal Unto Caesar”: The Case of the Conscientious Objector, many of the major publishers entered into agreements with the government’s propaganda bureau, Wellington House. The latter either bought copies of existing texts thought suitable for propaganda ­purposes or actively commissioned books and pamphlets by paying the publisher £5 for the use of its imprint and £5 toward advertising costs. The most active propaganda publisher was Hodder & Stoughton, who produced 130 titles (Potter 2007). The public’s interest in war topics is confirmed by a February 1915 list of Smith’s bestsellers which included Robert Baden‐Powell’s Quick Training For War. Their overall bestseller was Robert Blatchford’s Germany and England, at 145 000 copies. Many of the Hodder & Stoughton titles produced for Wellington House, such as Belgium in War Time (1917), were available to buy from their bookstalls and shops (Newsbasket, February 15, 1915, p. 28). Of course, not everyone supported the war. The National Labour Press, Headley Brothers, and C.W. Daniel were among those who published pacifist writing that was “politically subversive” and “urgent in its idealism.” Daniel was jailed for publishing Rose Allatini’s novel about conscientious objection, Despised and Rejected (1918), which was banned under the Defence of the Realm Act (Brockington 2007, p. 47). The government’s changing propaganda message is testament to the success of the pacifist press. In 1917, the new National War Aims Committee (NWAC) moved to distribute pamphlets on a national scale. Wellington House had always encouraged texts to be sold to the public at a nominal fee of at least 1d, but some of the new propaganda was to be given away. Smith’s put their huge distribution network at NWAC’s disposal in late 1917 and promoted penny pamphlets such as William Stephen Sanders’s Germany’s Two Voices by using all the marketing techniques associated with a bestseller. The new propaganda was designed to undermine recent left‐wing and pacifist titles while manipulating an anti‐German ideology that condemned the actions of the “Hideous Hun” (Colclough 2007b, p. 38). That some NWAC pamphlets sold more than 1.5 million copies shows just how effective the use of Smith’s vast distribution system could be. However, it was the propaganda distributed for free that reached a truly mass audience. Smith’s managers were informed that propaganda work was “a duty of considerable National Importance” and were encouraged to target theaters, factories, football crowds, and “tank bank” (war fundraising) meetings (Colclough 2007b, p. 40). By these methods, four million copies of the pamphlet Murder Most Foul: An American Observer on the Western Front were circulated. Combining sales with free distribution allowed

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the new propaganda to reach a truly mass audience that included those unable  –  or unwilling – to purchase the texts commercially produced for Wellington House. During wartime, the number of first editions and reprints being produced was significantly reduced. However, the book trade had fully recovered by 1924, when the number of new and repackaged older works being published was higher than before the war. As the “least expensive and most adaptable of leisure activities,” reading was well suited to wartime conditions and continued to thrive in the depression years of the 1920s and 1930s (McAleer 1992, p. 52). As a photograph of a man dressed as a Smith’s bookstall in order to enter a fancy‐dress competition in the spring of 1914 attests, the venues from which print was distributed and marketed to the public were very much a part of everyday life in the 1910s. When Smith’s offered to help distribute propaganda in 1917, their letter to the government emphasized that they had “practically 2,000 branches and sub‐ branches” and supplied “several thousands of newsagents” (quoted in Colclough 2007b). A recruitment poster with Kitchener’s pointing finger is just one of the many texts visible in a 1917 photograph of a stall in Glasgow owned by John Menzies. That Smith’s and Menzies’s shops and stalls were chosen as sites for the display of propaganda images suggests just how effective they were at placing texts in front of potential customers. Stocked with halfpenny newspapers, sixpenny novels, magazines, postcards, and posters, the mass distribution of texts affordable by large numbers of the British population had been achieved in the years leading up to World War I. And as the almost immediate impact of cinema upon the production of the novel suggests, print, as the first mass media, was to enter into a productive relationship with the new forms of broadcast media that were to dominate the twentieth century.

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Part IV The Twentieth and Twenty‐First Centuries Daniel Allington

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10 Minority Culture and Popular Print, 1920–1940 The “peace” between the two world wars was not notably peaceful. Border disputes, ethnic conflicts, and even civil war were widespread in continental Europe, and by the middle of the 1920s, there were millions of European refugees. Meanwhile, nationalist anti‐colonial movements gained strength in British colonies in Africa and Asia. Reductions in wages led in 1926 to a general strike whose abandonment and failure led to falling membership for the Labour Party, the trade unions, and the tiny Communist Party. By 1930, the world was in the grip of the Great Depression, which began in the United States and spread rapidly. Fascist movements gathered strength, leading Communists to espouse a “popular front” politics, attempting to make common cause with the Labour Party. Meanwhile, the Conservative government’s policy of low taxation led to chronic underfunding of Britain’s armed forces relative to those of the rapidly re‐arming Nazi Germany, and  –  as surely as the opposition Labour Party’s pacifism under left‐winger George Lansbury – all but demanded a policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler that ended only with the latter’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Coming a week after the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, this took Britain into war against Germany just as the Communist Party switched sides and began campaigning against the Allied war effort. As the remainder of this chapter will show, there was scarcely an aspect of British publishing in the period that was not shaped by this wider narrative. This was partly because publishing was no more immune to the global storms of war, economic depression, political extremism, and impending decolonization than any other British industry. But it was also because the mass media were reaching larger audiences than ever before and because, among those media, the preeminence of print had not yet begun to erode. In such a world, one could aspire to shape public opinion with a book.

10.1 ­First Among the Mass Media As we saw in Chapter 9, print was the first mass medium, but by 1921, it was already far from being the only one. Many British towns had “picture houses” by the second decade of the twentieth century, and the first British radio broadcasts got underway in 1920. Soon afterwards, gramophone records overtook printed sheet music as the primary medium for music publication. The first British television broadcasts were made

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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in  1936, although they ceased for the duration of the war, and mass ownership of ­television sets did not begin until the 1950s. But while these new media provided print with competition for consumers’ time, money, and attention, they did not eclipse it. In fact, each of them provided new ­opportunities for print, which – as in previous centuries – continued to play a mediating role for all other forms of culture. Without the publication of radio listings, how would people have known when to tune into their favorite programs? Without the publication of celebrity gossip, how would the singer or the movie star have become the intimate stranger that we know today? Print was not simply first of the mass media – that is, the one to establish itself soonest  –  but first among them  –  the one on which all ­others relied, and without which none could have become what it ultimately did. From the early twentieth century, there was an intimate link between periodical publishing, cinema, and the radio. Picturegoer: The Picture Theatre Magazine was founded in 1913 and ran until 1922 under various titles, providing cinema fans with news and articles about films and their stars. The unrelated Picturegoer, which was founded in 1921 and ran until 1960, also under a range of titles, capitalized still more directly on this new audience by being offered for sale in the picture houses themselves. When the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was founded in 1922, it was perceived as a competitor by some newspapers  –  especially the Daily Express, which campaigned against it and demanded a broadcasting license of its own – and early attempts were made to protect their market by restricting it from making news broadcasts before 7 p.m. (Briggs 1985, pp. 42–43). Although newspapers’ crucial advertising revenues were protected by the terms of the BBC’s license  –  it was barred from broadcasting commercials, and funded instead by a license payable by all households in possession of a radio receiver – many newspapers initially refused to carry program listings, for which reason the BBC began to publish its own. These appeared in a new magazine called The Radio Times, whose launch in 1923 marked the beginnings of the BBC’s vast twentieth‐century periodicals output – although the magazine was originally published by George Newnes, as the BBC’s publishing wing would not be ready to take on full production responsibilities for the magazine until 1937. The Radio Times was followed in 1929 by another weekly BBC magazine, The Listener, which featured special coverage of the BBC’s more intellectual output as well as regular and extensive book reviews  – ­further evidence of the indivisibility of print from the other media of the time. This too faced opposition from periodical publishers who saw it as a subsidized competitor. Thus, while some publishers perceived the BBC’s activities as a threat for strictly ­commercial reasons, radio actually required support from periodical publication, and probably increased the volume of print in circulation: quite apart from The Listener’s role as a publicist for “respectable” books, The Radio Times would become Europe’s bestselling magazine. Today, it has become commonplace to view audiovisual and electronic media as a seductive distraction from print. But in the early twentieth century, it was widely assumed that the new mass media would promote reading, and this appears to have been the case. A tradition of adapting literary works for the cinema had been established in the second decade of the twentieth century, and this trend was increasingly exploited by authors and publishers. It appears that “the cross‐media publicity effects from the release of a few film adaptations, such as the 1920 version of At the Villa Rose and the 1917 and 1919 Pimpernel movies, were very large indeed, at least in terms

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of their immediate influence on book sales” (Barnett 2010, p. 23), and the sale of film options for the work of nineteenth‐century popular novelists such as Wilkie Collins and Ouida began to generate substantial revenue from the 1920s onward (Weedon 1999; see Section 9.3). After the adaptation of his novel The Woman with the Iron Bracelets (1921) proved a box office success, the now‐forgotten author Frank Barrett received an incredible 75% royalties from his publisher and “enthusiastically prepared cinema synopses and scripts of his other works for Chatto to put to his producers, hoping that ‘the success of the film may lead to production of other books’” as films (Weedon 1999, p. 201). Radio too proved to have a considerable hunger for material, and the Society of Authors proposed a royalties system for radio dramatizations in 1922, to which the BBC eventually agreed. By the early 1930s, the Readers’ Library (est. 1924) and its imitator, the Novel Library, had both moved from selling sixpenny editions of popular classics to selling similarly priced “books of the film” (Leavis 1932, pp. 14–16). Print had interacted with other cultural distribution systems since its earliest days: as we have seen, ­sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century playbooks advertised their previous success as stage performances, and early modern publishers probably gained valuable insight about the marketability of a printed play from its previous career in another industry, just as film and radio producers did with the intellectual properties that were their twentieth‐­century stock in trade.

10.2 ­Periodical Publishing Periodicals were a truer “mass medium” than books. The circulation of The Radio Times surpassed two million in the early 1930s. The most popular reading matter aimed at a young female market appears to have been magazines of school stories, such as School Friend, Schoolgirl’s Own, and Schoolgirl’s Weekly, all published by the Amalgamated Press; for slightly older female readers of the working class, there were the “blood and thunder” magazines, such as Peg’s Paper, launched by Pearson in 1919, and Oracle, launched by the Amalgamated Press in 1933: popular weekly papers whose primary content consisted of romantic fiction in the form of serials and complete stories of up to 10 000 words (White 1970, pp. 93–98; Hilliard 2014a, p. 251). The nineteenth‐century “story papers” for boys continued to reach a large market among both boys and girls. The Amalgamated Press’s Boy’s Friend, Boy’s Realm, and Nelson Lee Library sold around a hundred thousand copies each per week in 1924, and between 1920 and 1921, D.C. Thomson launched Adventure, The Rover, and The Wizard: three rival titles that far exceeded those circulation figures, with the first issue of The Wizard selling well over half a million copies (McAleer 1992, pp. 172–173). Meanwhile, magazines oriented toward an adult female readership sold in still greater numbers that rose while the sales of boys’ papers declined: in 1932, Woman’s Weekly had a circulation of over a million in England and Wales, while the three next most popular “ladies’ papers,” Home Notes, Home Chat, and Red Letter, were each selling over half a million copies every week. D.C. Thomson’s venerable Scottish women’s weekly, The People’s Friend (est. 1869 and still going strong) had an estimated readership of over 1.5 million in a country whose population was then not much more than four times that size (see McAleer 1992, p. 175). The Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine, ­published by the Religious Tract Society and simultaneously aimed at young girls and their

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mothers, sold steadily at close to 60 000 copies per week throughout the 1920s and the 1930s (McAleer 1992, p. 224). Such weekly papers or magazines featured light fiction as well as advertisements and editorial material of various sorts, and when one takes into account the industry assumption that individual copies were shared by multiple readers, it seems likely that they will have provided the bulk of what we might think of as “literary” reading experiences during the period. British newspapers also sold in vast quantities, which grew and grew as rival papers competed for circulation. In 1921, the nationally distributed London morning papers had combined national circulation figures of nearly 5.5 million, with over 2.5 million of those accounted for by the middle class tabloids The Daily Mail, owned by Lord Northcliffe, who also owned the Times and the Amalgamated Press papers, and The Daily Mirror, owned by his brother, Lord Rothermere (Jeffery and McClelland 1987, table 2.1). After Northcliffe’s death the following year, Rothermere took control of The Daily Mail, although he failed in his attempt to purchase the Times after the great‐ grandson of the newspaper’s founder secured enough financial backing to outbid him for Northcliffe’s shares, paying well in excess of what might have been considered their business value (Times 1952, pp. 740–766). This willingness to pay sums that could not be justified in terms of a financial return on the investment hints at the special value of the information business. While newspapers have always been run as commercial enterprises, their role as both chroniclers and interpreters of current events gives them huge political importance in a representative democracy, providing their proprietors with considerable political power. Ownership of the mass circulation newspapers provided influence over voters, but the Times was read by an elite, many of whose members could exercise political power directly; it was thus significant that it would not be owned by the same person as the major tabloids. But while John Walter IV had no political career of his own – unlike Northcliffe and Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook, who had held government posts – he was a member of Lloyd George’s circle, and had been encouraged in his ambitions to return the newspaper to his family by concerns that the paper had recently been too critical of the government (Times 1952, p. 740). Thus, the Times remained very much the voice of the establishment; it has even been argued that “[u]nder the editorship of Geoffrey Dawson, who had the ear of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, it became almost an instrument of government policy” (Lake 1984, p. 83). Although the Daily Mail had begun the 1920s as the world’s bestselling newspaper, its market share fell as other tabloids captured a greater share of the expanding market. In 1935, the trade union‐owned Daily Herald became the first British paper to achieve a circulation of two million, although by the end of that decade, the leader was the Daily Express, whose average sales in 1939 exceeded 2.5 million (Jeffery and McClelland 1987, table 2.1). But even the tabloid market was coming to be understood as differentiated by social class, and each tabloid paper increasingly appealed to a distinct niche (see Jeffery and McClelland 1987, pp. 33–35), just as earlier news publishers had sought to target readers associated with particular religious or political positions as far back as the Civil Wars of the 1640s. What was the effect of this massive penetration of the electorate by newspapers that reflected the views of a handful of men (always men)? Both Beaverbrook and Rothermere were strong advocates of appeasement during the 1930s, which meant that the vastly popular Express and Mail were too. And the Mail went beyond supporting

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appeasement of Hitler to support Hitler himself, along with the British Union of Fascists. The broadsheet Daily Telegraph, owned by Lord Camrose, was rather more critical of appeasement, but reached a more socially exclusive audience than any other major paper but the Times. All the aforementioned newspaper owners were members of the Conservative Party, although they and therefore their editors were sometimes hostile to specific individuals within it or to specific policies that it espoused, and in 1929, Beaverbrook even launched a short‐lived right‐wing party of his own. News with a less conservative orientation was provided by the News Chronicle, formed from a merger of two other papers in 1930 and owned by the Cadbury family of industrialists, and the Daily Herald, which supported the Labour Party – a tradition that continued even after a majority stake in the paper was sold to Odhams Press in 1930, but did not long survive the paper’s late twentieth‐ century purchase by Rupert Murdoch under its new brand identity as The Sun. As for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, also launched in 1930, most of the major wholesalers refused to stock it (Howkins 1980, p. 240). Today it survives as the Morning Star  –  and continues to adhere to a pro‐Kremlin editorial line despite the fall of communism.

10.3 ­Public Education Thanks to successive improvements in the school system, most families in the United Kingdom had by the 1920s been literate for several generations. As in previous decades, the influence on the book trade was threefold. First, widespread literacy ensured that the overwhelming majority of adults would become at least potential customers, although a 1942 survey found that 20% of the unskilled working class never read books, with working class women in particular complaining that they did not have time to read books, or could only do so while engaged in more materially productive activities such as knitting (Hilliard 2014a, p. 264). Second, it expanded the population of publishers’ potential authors and employees – and while the state‐educated have remained under‐ represented at the higher levels of every walk of British life, authors (and, less visibly, publishers) of working‐class origin became far less exceptional than previously. While some of these people would undoubtedly have become readers and writers without an extensive formal education, they would not have become the same readers and writers: a state education became the default cultural background for British people from the working (and, increasingly, middle) classes, just as a private education remained (and remains) the default cultural background for the elite. Lastly, the educational system itself came to consume an increasing diversity and volume of printed texts as part of its day‐to‐day functioning – and while the real explosion in educational publishing would not come until the period covered by Chapter 11, publishers such as Nelson, Longman, and the university presses produced large volumes of increasingly high quality books for the school market in the inter-war period. For example, from 1920, J.M. Dent and Sons produced the Kings’ Treasuries of Literature: anthologies of writing by renowned authors, for use in schools (Rose 1991, p. 93). But schools were not the only environment in which education took place, and ­children were not the only people being educated. In 1919, the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction recommended increased expenditure on

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adult education, and from 1924, grants were provided to universities for “extension courses” and to certain other “approved associations,” such as the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), for one‐year and terminal courses (Kelly 1992, p. 268). While the WEA received state funding, which the President of the Board of Education defended in 1925 as a cost‐efficient means of restricting the spread of socialist ideas (Fieldhouse 1996, p. 176), the National Council of Labour Colleges was able to be more radical although (thanks to its reliance on funding from anti‐communist trade unions) not overtly Marxist. Around 13 000 students were enrolled in the latter’s courses in 1936, some of them taught by figures as eminent as A.J.P. Taylor and Harold Laski (McIlroy 1996), while by the 1938–1939 academic year, the WEA had nearly 40 000 students (Kelly 1992, p. 273). The expansion of adult education relied upon cheap books, such as Benn’s Sixpenny Library, which consisted of 150 paperbacks, each surveying a particular academic area (Kelly 1992, pp. 310–311). J.M. Dent’s Everyman series of out‐of‐ copyright literary works, which sold at a similar price, found similar use, as did Penguin’s Pelican series of original nonfiction from the late 1930s.

10.4 ­Getting Hold of Books Although Mudie’s, the great Victorian circulating library, was in decline throughout the period covered by this chapter and finally closed its doors in 1937, other kinds of ­libraries were on the rise. The Adult Education Committee of 1918 had declared that “the library is part of the educational fabric, just as much as the art room or the school clinic” and that “[b]oth school and library will be immeasurably strengthened when the artificial line of demarcation [between the two] is obliterated” (Adult Education Committee et al. 1980, p. 127). As we have seen, from 1918 in Scotland, thanks to the Education (Scotland) Act, and from 1919 in England, thanks to the Public Libraries Act, public libraries could be set up by county councils under the direction of county education committees (Kelly 1992, p. 312). By 1920, over five hundred library authorities were running libraries as a public service. In 1929, the year that the Depression struck, the Library Agreement was signed, modifying the Net Book Agreement to give public library authorities a 10% discount from named book suppliers on condition that their annual purchases from those suppliers remained above a certain threshold (Feather 2006, p. 156). By 1935, seven million readers were borrowing nearly 300 million books per year from public libraries (McAleer 1992, p. 49), and while a Mass‐Observation survey in London c­ onfirmed that most working‐class people did not use libraries in the 1930s, it found that most of those who did use a library used a public library (Hilliard 2014b, p. 213). Where the network of public libraries expanded too slowly to meet demand, charitable libraries were established, especially in South Wales, where, by 1934, colliers had set up over a hundred libraries funded by deductions from wages and a tax on employers (Rose 2007, p. 348). The decline of Mudie’s notwithstanding, commercial libraries remained a major source of books. At one point in the 1930s, there were 450 branches of Boots Booklovers’ Library, while W.H. Smith’s library peaked at 675 branches (Manley 2012, p. 345). Boots became such an institution among the middle classes that, in his 1940 poem “In Westminster Abbey,” John Betjeman acerbically placed ‘Books from Boots’” first in his satirical list of things “our Nation stands for” (Betjeman 1958, p. 85). But the most

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notable development in this area was perhaps the rise of the “twopenny libraries” in the 1930s. These libraries were so named because they allowed readers to borrow books for the sum of two pence, requiring neither a subscription nor a deposit and thereby ­making themselves accessible to a lower‐middle‐class and working‐class clientele. Q.D. Leavis disdainfully referred to these libraries as “tuppeny dram‐shops” (Leavis 1932, p. 8), equating the sort of literature they dealt in with strong liquor and evoking longstanding fears about drunkenness among the lower social orders. The first such library appears to have been opened by Ray Smith in Harlesden, North London, in 1930. Springing up in huge numbers apparently overnight, they were sometimes referred to as “mushroom libraries.” Branches of these libraries were mostly established by small shopkeepers such as newsagents and tobacconists, although they could also be found within department stores and factories and on board ships. By 1934, Argosy & Sundial Libraries had 2217 branches, while Foyle’s Libraries had 747 (McAleer 1992, pp. 49–50). Perhaps inspired by the success of the small twopenny libraries to be found within other kinds of businesses, sweetshops and chemists also began to sell books, which publishers controversially supplied on “trade” terms (Hilliard 2014a, p. 266). In 1936, legislation was passed in order to regulate the opening hours of commercial libraries in the same way as those of other retail businesses, and give their employees the same protections: a necessary step, as many had been forcing their employees to work excessively long hours and denying them time off, even on Sundays (Manley 2012, p. 348). By 1942, the Ray Smith Libraries operation had grown to incorporate a five‐story warehouse with room for 100 000 books, supplying branches throughout London as well as a network of independent shops that might maintain a “library” as small as a single bookshelf. Many shopkeepers also set up small libraries on their own, buying cheap remaindered books, or old circulating library stock (Hilliard 2014b, pp. 203–206). A Mass‐Observation researcher’s field notes provide an atmospheric impression of what these libraries were like: The place is a social meeting ground for young mothers of the [unskilled working] class, aged groups 30–35 yrs. Prams block the outside windows. Obs. frequently heard “Hello, Win – what book did you bring in?” Nearly all the children coming in the shop with their mothers address the young lady in charge as “Auntie.” (quoted in Hilliard 2014b, p. 209) Innovative means were also found to sell books on a more industrial scale. From 1928, the Phoenix Book Company (founded by J.M. Dent & Sons, the publisher of Everyman’s Library) sold books on an installment plan, helping buyers to spread the cost in a variation on the Victorian “shilling serial” and other ways of selling novels in parts discussed in Section 8.2. The Book Society purchased books in bulk from the publisher on the recommendations of a panel of respectable authors, then sold them on to members at the net price. Here, the advantage of membership had nothing to do with cost: it was simply that of having one’s book‐choosing and book‐buying done by someone else. The idea merited a full five pages of scorn from Cambridge don F.R. Leavis, who fully believed that the masses could not choose books for themselves but was outraged that the choosing should have been delegated to individuals such as J.B. Priestley, whom he viewed as “middlebrow” anti‐intellectuals (Leavis 1930, pp. 20–25). By contrast, the Readers

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Union was a cut‐price reprint publisher on the model of the Book of the Month Club and Literary Guild in the United States; founded by the Phoenix Book Company in 1937, it sold over four hundred thousand books in its first 10 years (Rose 1991, p. 91). Many other book clubs were to follow, and in 1939, the Publishers Association issued the Book Club Regulations, which stipulated that a book club edition of a title could not be made available less than a year after the regular edition (Feather 2006, p. 158). Requiring substantial and regular expenditure, clubs such as these appealed to a ­middle‐class clientele. If a working‐class reader were to buy a book, it was more likely to be from a small local shop that principally dealt in other goods, or perhaps from Woolworths: the British arm of the American cut‐price retail chain, F.W. Woolworth Company, whose stores were evocatively described by Q.D. Leavis: Here, while passing from counter to counter to buy cheap crockery, strings of beads, lamp‐shades, and toffee, toys, soap, and flower‐bulbs, and under the stimulus of 6d. gramophone records filling the air with “Headin’ for Hollywood” and “Love Never Dies,” the customer is beguiled into patronizing literature. If it is a country town, the bazaar is packed on market‐day with the country folk who come in once a week to do their shopping, so that Woolworth literature supplies the county with reading; if it is a city, the housewives of the district make their regular tour on Saturdays, although a constant stream passes along the counters handling the goods throughout the week. So paper‐covered novels by Nat Gould, Charles Garvice, and Joseph Hocking, P.C. Wren, Sabatini, and Phillips Oppenheim; American magazines – Ranch Romances (“Love Stories of the Real West”), Far‐West Stories, Love Romances (“Gripping clean love stories”), The Popular Magazine (“America’s Best and Brightest Fiction Magazine”), Marriage Stories, Detective Classics, Black Mask (“Detective Fiction”), Gangster Stories (“A Magazine of Racketeers and Gun Molls”); and sixpenny books – Harem Love (“by Joan Conquest, author of Desert Love”), Officer (“An Underworld Thriller by Hulbert Footner”), The King of Kings (the story of the super‐film of Christianity); all go home in the shopping baskets. (Leavis 1932, pp. 17–18) For the Leavises, this was yet more evidence of the debasement of mass culture. But from another perspective, it describes a lively and cheerful scene of the integration of books (and music) into the everyday life of a social class whose members would – just a few generations earlier – have been unlikely to have possessed even a copy of the Bible.

10.5 ­Giving the Public What it Wants The book trade was depressed following World War I, and it was not until 1924 that production of new fiction titles reached the levels it had held before the outbreak of hostilities (McAleer 1992, p. 52). Production costs had risen hugely, with the result that the break‐even point rose from half of an edition of a 1000 in 1914 to nine‐tenths of an edition of 2000 in 1919 (McAleer 1992, p. 54). This necessitated a focus on books that could be sold to a wider market at a lower price point, which in turn meant a need for stronger branding, more effective advertising, and more attentive catering to the tastes

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of lower‐middle‐class readers. Moreover, while World War I gave rise to a “memoir boom” in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a strong move toward light fiction as a trade publisher’s mainstay, with most titles published in book form now being novels. All of these trends are exemplified by Hodder & Stoughton’s “Yellow Jacket” series of hardback novels, whose striking full‐color dust jackets were much imitated (e.g. in Hutchinson’s “Red Jacket” series). Launched in 1923, but inspired by earlier Victorian “yellowbacks” (see Section 8.2), the Hodder & Stoughton Yellow Jackets featured some of the most popular fiction of the day, including Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond series and many of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novels, as well as the works of Zane Grey. Thus, the branded publisher’s series was built around brands with clear generic ­identifications and – in the case of Bulldog Drummond and the Pimpernel – an iconic recurrent central character on whom advertisements could focus, and in whom readers’ interest could be maintained across multiple novels. Interest was also built across multiple media: during the period, Bulldog Drummond and Scarlet Pimpernel stories also appeared in Hutchinson’s magazine, and in adaptations for stage and screen. These literary brands were shaped by market demand, with writers effectively producing to order. In concert with Orczy’s agents at A.P. Watt, Hodder & Stoughton pressured the writer to produce more Pimpernel stories and to build them more closely around the Pimpernel himself. In consequence, Scarlet Pimpernel stories rose from a quarter of Orczy’s novelistic output before she joined the publisher to a full half between 1930 and 1940 (Dugan 2012, pp. 109, 121–122). Although successfully marketed as a realistic war writer throughout World War I, Sapper was only reinvented as an author of lowbrow thrillers when his first novel after the armistice proved a commercial failure (Jaillant 2011). Once the new formula that he had hit upon had proved a success, novels in the same vein could continue to be churned out without his input: the Bulldog Drummond series was taken over by Gerard Fairlie after Sapper’s death in 1937. Advertisements and distinctively branded covers were also key elements in the ­success of one of the period’s most iconic publishers: Victor Gollancz. After a spell working in the army and as a teacher, Victor Gollancz gained employment in 1921 at Benn Brothers Limited, where he rapidly developed the flair for advertising that would characterize his later career (Schneller 1991b, p. 126). In 1923, Gollancz was made ­managing director of his employer’s new company, Ernest Benn Limited. He shifted the direction of that company from art books toward middlebrow fiction, publishing novels by H.G. Wells in 1926 and by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1927, but left the firm in 1927, setting up on his own as the governing director of Victor Gollancz Limited and inviting the innovative typographer Stanley Morison, with whom he had worked at Ernest Benn, onto the board. This was a difficult time to start a new publishing venture, as publishers were finding it harder to sell new books and consequently relying more and more heavily on their backlists (Feather 2006, p. 167). But Gollancz was adept at spotting future bestsellers, as when, in 1927, he bought the British publishing rights to the autobiography of the actress Isadora Duncan, who had died that autumn. Sayers followed Gollancz to his new company, where she was soon joined by other bestselling middlebrow authors such as A.J. Cronin and Daphne du Maurier. From the outset, the books Gollancz published were recognizable by their distinctive dust jackets, printed on bright yellow (or sometimes gray) paper, and  –  unlike those of the Hodder & Stoughton Yellow ­ Jackets  –  eschewing any form of pictorial illustration, instead employing purely

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Figure 10.1  Gollancz typographic dust jackets: Pigeon Irish by Francis Stuart (1932) and The Martyr by Liam O’Flaherty (1933). Printed in two colors (the VG monogram is in red) on yellow paper. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington, with thanks to Maggs Bros Ltd.

typographic designs. Gollancz invested heavily in advertising, and treated the covers of books as advertisements for the texts within, innovatively featuring quotations from reviews, snippets of content, and what can only be described as advertising copy, as well as book titles and authors’ names (see Figure 10.1). Even after Morison’s departure in 1938, Gollancz continued to use jackets in this style for several decades, and later in the  century revived the iconic blaze of yellow, black, and red as the basis for some paperback cover designs. At the end of the 1920s, publishers were further squeezed by the Great Depression, which had a negative impact both on investment and on consumer spending. As one of the cheapest forms of entertainment, reading thrived – but reading did not necessarily equate to purchase: Hodder & Stoughton, for example, saw sales through bookshops fall by more than half by the mid‐1930s (Dugan 2012, p. 138). Faced with the reality of falling sales, publishers quickly recognized the importance of the commercial libraries and learnt to exploit them as a market: none more successfully than Mills & Boon. Although Mills & Boon had started out as a general publisher, and was for some time the sole British publisher of Jack London, romance had always formed an important part of its output, and was increasingly associated with the firm as time passed. From 1930, Charles Boon (now in direct control of the firm, following his business partner’s death two years before) recognized that the solution to the problem of falling book sales and rising library usage was to reorient the company’s output toward the library market (Mulholland 1991, p. 222). Patrons of the twopenny libraries were understood to take

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little interest in individual authors’ names, and Boon capitalized on this trait by ­reconceiving his company as the purveyor of an instantly recognizable, standardized product, marketed by brand rather than by author. This meant focusing on a single genre, with romance – one of the most popular categories of novel in the commercial libraries  –  being an obvious choice. Mills & Boon published almost nothing but romances from that point onwards, with the result that the “Mills & Boon novel” became an almost universally recognized cultural reference point for twentieth‐century British readers, practically all of whom would have had some idea of what to expect from such a book, and of whether it was the sort of thing that they would be likely to enjoy. Romance authors with significant name recognition in their own right, such as Georgette Heyer (the founder of the “regency romance” genre), Catherine Cookson (whose spectacular popularity with public library users will be covered in Section 12.7), and the even more successful Barbara Cartland (many hundreds of millions of copies of whose books would be sold worldwide) tended to publish elsewhere: of the three just mentioned, only Heyer ever published a book with Mills & Boon, and that was in 1923.

10.6 ­Minority Culture One can detect a note of horror in much contemporaneous writing on popular taste in books: the reading public had expanded, but from the point of view of some cultural authorities, it was reading all the wrong things. However, even as publishers such as Hodder & Stoughton, Gollancz, and Mills & Boon were mass‐producing the “lowbrow” and “middlebrow” culture that led the Leavises and their circle to conclude that “the prospects of culture … are very dark” (Leavis 1930, p. 30), modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and the Sitwells were defining an elite “minority culture” that would become familiar to relatively large numbers of people, often through the same channels that conveyed more obviously “popular” works to their reading public. Edith Sitwell’s I  Live Under a Black Sun (1937) was published by Gollancz, for example, and sold 2500 copies in its first 10 days (Schneller 1991b, p. 128). The situation has been described as follows: In the first half of the twentieth century, two rival intelligentsias squared off against each other, competing for audiences and prestige. One was middle‐class, university‐educated, and modernist, supported largely by patronage and private incomes; the other was based in the working and clerking classes, mainly Board school graduates and the self‐educated, more classical in their tastes, but fearlessly engaged in popular journalism and the literary marketplace. One appealed to an elite audience; the other wrote best‐sellers and feature films. One was inspired by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the other [by] Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin. (Rose 2001, p. 431) The dichotomy may have been overstated (see Hilliard 2006, p. 61), but its psychological reality to many authors and publishers of the day can be seen from highbrow and middlebrow writers’ invectives against one another. Highbrow modernist poetry and fiction had a distinctive economy, with each work being published first in a small magazine, second in a limited edition, and third in a commercial edition (Rainey 1998, p. 99).

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Figure 10.2  Glory of Life by Llewelyn Powys (Golden Cockerel Press, 1934). Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington, with thanks to Maggs Bros Ltd.

The limited editions were explicitly produced as collectors’ items for the rare books trade. Some of the most beautiful were produced by the Golden Cockerel Press, whose publications were characterized by original woodcut illustrations and exquisitely hand‐ set text (see Figure  10.2, which shows a double‐page spread from Glory of Life by Llewelyn Powys, published in an edition of 277 with wood engravings by Robert Gibbings). Another noted limited‐edition publisher, the First Edition Club, provided an introduction to the publishing business for Richard Lane, who would later co‐found Penguin Books (Kells 2015, p. 113). There were various reasons for which highbrow writers chose small‐scale publication. Some authors found it to be a good way to maximize income from a literary work and manage its reception, as we see from Rainey’s publishing history of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). In the United Kingdom, this poem was first published by The Criterion, whose editor was Eliot himself. It was simultaneously published in the United States by The Dial, another small magazine, in a deal brokered by Ezra Pound. In return for the chance to publish The Waste Land before anyone else on their side of the Atlantic, its editors agreed not only to pay for the poem but to award Eliot the second annual Dial Prize for it – and incredibly, they entered into this arrangement without having first read the work in question (Rainey 1998, p. 88). As Rainey shows, Boni & Liveright’s commercial edition was deliberately delayed to give the Dial and Criterion time to bring the poem out first. A limited edition in book form was then published the following year  by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, ensuring that  –  in the

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United Kingdom at least – the poem would be published by a small press before being published commercially by Faber (whose connection with Eliot is discussed in more detail later in this section). In other cases, a small edition was a legal necessity. In the 1920s, the works of numerous modernist writers, from D.H. Lawrence to Radclyffe Hall, were considered obscene by the Conservative government, its supporters in the press, and key figures in the legal establishment. But “privately issuing a limited edition to subscribers was not technically publication, and so was a way of circumventing the Obscene Publications Act of 1857”; furthermore, “[i]f a publishing house could show that a potentially obscene book was directed at an elite, it might have a hope of escaping conviction” for depraving “­working‐class adults assumed to be poorly defended against corruption” (Hilliard 2008, pp. 176–177). One book by the scandalous Welsh modernist James Hanley was sold in a hand‐printed edition of 90, at a price 10 times that of a new middlebrow novel (Hilliard 2008, p. 171). A limited edition book with artisanal production values was a collector’s item and could therefore command a high price – with the price alone being enough to demonstrate the absence of intention to corrupt, even if the subscription‐ based business model were not taken to imply exemption from the normal rules ­applying to publications. Even a much larger limited edition could be sold as a collector’s item. Ulysses appeared first as a serial in the American Little Review, which had a circulation of about a ­thousand, and the British Egoist, which had an even smaller circulation of about two hundred and was edited by Joyce’s patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver. Weaver tried to arrange publication in book form by the Hogarth Press, but Ulysses was too long to be hand‐ printed, and the Woolfs could not contract the job out, being unable to find a commercial printer who would risk being prosecuted for obscenity (Gaither 1991, pp. 157–158). Instead, Joyce entered into an agreement with Sylvia Beach of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris to publish the book in a limited edition of 1000, for sale at three different price points depending on the quality of the paper: it was “dealers and speculators in the rare book trade who bought the overwhelming majority of copies of the first edition” (Rainey 1998, p. 44). Works by D.H. Lawrence were also published overseas in limited editions, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover was at one time printed in Britain under a false overseas imprint; in both cases, Lawrence’s work reached British readers through the rare books trade (Hilliard 2008, pp. 178–179). The social exclusiveness of modernist literary culture would be impossible to deny. The elite private (so‐called public) schools of Eton, Rugby, Harrow, and Westminster, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, come up again and again in the ­biographies of highbrow authors and publishers. In many cases, they were linked by astonishingly close social, familial, and professional ties. Virginia Woolf, for example, was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and the half‐sister of Gerald de l’Etang Duckworth, the founder of Gerald Duckworth and Company, which published her first works, along with those of Evelyn Waugh (whose father, Arthur Waugh, was the managing director of Chapman & Hall and a literary critic for The Daily Telegraph), as well as taking over publication of new work by the aristocratic Sitwell siblings after their first publisher, Grant Richards (nephew of the novelist Grant Allen and first publisher of Evelyn Waugh’s older brother, Alec) was declared bankrupt in 1926. One could go on – as indeed did many of the dynasties in question (Evelyn Waugh’s eldest son, Auberon, became a journalist and published five novels between 1960 and 1972).

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Britain’s most influential publisher of modernist poetry is a case of point. In 1920, Sir  Henry Burdett died, leaving the Scientific Press to his daughter, Lady Alsina Gwyer. The latter’s husband, Sir Maurice Gwyer, recruited Geoffrey Faber, a graduate of his alma mater, Christ Church College, Oxford, who had worked for Oxford University Press (OUP) before the war, to transform this highly successful specialist publisher into the trade publisher Faber and Gwyer. The following year, Faber recruited T.S. Eliot as a literary advisor (and soon afterwards, a member of the board), giving him a free hand in developing the poetry list (Baylen 1991, p. 115). In 1929, Faber bought out the Gwyers, and gave the company its enduring name of Faber & Faber, frequently referred to simply as “Faber” (there was no second Faber). Faber & Faber almost inevitably produced the first British commercial edition of The Waste Land, which has remained one of the publisher’s most important titles, later described as “the crown jewels of [its] poetry imprint” (BBC 2011). Faber & Faber was also Joyce’s first choice among British p ­ ublishers for a commercial edition of Ulysses (McCleery 2002), and in 1934, T.S. Eliot personally made enquiries with the Home Office on this matter (Birmingham 2014, p. 332), but fear of prosecution allowed the honor (and the profits) to fall to the Lane brothers at the Bodley Head, in 1937. If Faber shied away from the legalities of publishing certain kinds of modernist work, however, others did not – and the shady nature of the business appears to have opened it up to people outside the British elite at that time. Charles Lahr bought the Progressive Bookshop in Red Lion Street in 1921, also setting up a short‐lived small magazine called The New Coterie and a small publishing company called the Blue Moon Press. At that time, small metropolitan bookshops played a role not only in distributing books but in offering a social space within which writers and others could meet – and some of the most notable also had a sideline in publishing. After all, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris was the first publisher of Ulysses, and the main publisher of the Georgian poets (mostly exterminated by World War I) had been Harold Munro, the owner of the Poetry Bookshop (which remained open until Munro’s death in 1924). As a former razor grinder and bakery worker who had been interned as an enemy alien during World War I, Lahr had none of Munro’s wealth and status, and – being based in London – lacked Beach’s immunity from British obscenity laws. Nonetheless, he became a key figure in a network of writers, book dealers, and small publishers in the 1920s, and was the mastermind and principle distributor of a faux‐Italian edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for which Lawrence secretly received royalties (Hilliard 2008). The close‐knit network of small Holborn and Bloomsbury presses included Boriswood, Furnival Books, Scholartis, Fanfrolico Press, the Mandrake Press, and Parton Press, which was attached to David Archer’s poetry bookshop and in 1934 published Dylan Thomas’s breakthrough volume, 18 Poems (Hilliard 2008). This network certainly published much work that was obscene without being modernist. Moreover, it appears to have attracted some whose behavior was criminal in more troubling ways: Lahr’s daughter claims that she and her sister were not the only children to fall victim to molestation by Ross Nichols, the poet, Cambridge don, and future founder of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (Lahr 1990s, chapter 14, paragraph 31). But without those presses and bookshops, some of the most vital writing of the period might never have been published at all – or might (as in Lawrence’s case) have circulated primarily in pirate editions that brought little or no benefit to the authors.

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10.7 ­Penguin and the Reinvention of the Reprint What would come to be remembered as the “paperback revolution” was the brainchild of the same brothers who published the first commercial British edition of Ulysses: Allen, Richard, and John Lane. Allen Lane was the nephew and adopted heir of the John Lane who had co‐founded the Bodley Head (see Section 9.2), and become chairman of the board of directors in 1930. A flamboyant self‐publicist, he is usually credited with inventing the British paperback single‐handed, although recent scholarship has shown that the brothers operated as a decision‐making team, with Richard and John doing much of the work (Kells 2015). According to his own legend, Lane began contemplating a move into paperback publishing in 1934, when he found himself without a book to read on his way back from a visit to the mystery novelist Agatha Christie. The reading matter available from the railway station vendors was supposedly cheap but of low quality; Lane famously (but implausibly) claimed to have at that precise moment seen a gap in the market for affordable paperback editions of the sort of books that sold well in hardback. Reprints were clearly good business: the number of reprint titles published had been continuously rising since 1918, outstripping first editions from 1927 (see McAleer 1992, figure 2.1). But reprint editions tended either to be of old, out‐of‐copyright books or of books that the publisher already held the rights to print. Rather than issue reprints of existing Bodley Head titles, the Lane brothers planned to acquire reprint rights to other publishers’ books, package them cheaply but tastefully, and retail them at sixpence a copy: the price of a packet of cigarettes. The idea had been established in Germany: Tauchnitz had been publishing books in its original‐language Collection of British and American authors since 1841, and John Holroyd‐Reece and his German business partners Max Wegner and Kurt Enoch had launched the Tauchnitz competitor, Albatross Books, in 1932, purchasing the rights to English‐language books for sale outside the English‐speaking world in cheap, original‐language editions. Albatross paperbacks had covers in single, bold colors, unillustrated apart from a stylized albatross logo, with titles and authors printed in modern typefaces. The Lane brothers were evidently taken both with the business model and with the approach to design, because they knowingly copied both: as an internal memo reveals, they originally planned a joint venture with Albatross (McCleery 2002). In this context, Penguin’s ornithological name and logo can hardly be considered a coincidence. There were essentially two innovations involved in the Lanes’ business model, neither of which intrinsically relied upon the use of paper bindings, but both of which would come to be associated with it as integral parts of the “paperback revolution.” The first was the use of what were for the time extraordinarily long print runs, which played a far greater role than the abandonment of hard covers in the reduction of unit costs. The  second was the effective takeover of publishing rights from the company that had ­published the original in hardback – rather than publishing out‐of‐copyright works, as J.M. Dent did in the Everyman series, or republishing works to which the publisher already owned the rights, as Victor Gollancz had done with his Mundanus imprint, or purchasing rights to publish for sale in territories outside the original publisher’s area of operation, as Albatross did. This made it possible to publish contemporary authors in the place where their market was largest while reducing the risks involved, enabling the publisher to avoid speculating on original manuscripts and publish only books that had recently proved themselves in the market. And those risks needed to be reduced, because they

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were vast: the Lanes calculated that, just to break even, they would have to sell 17 500 copies of every single one of Penguin’s first 10 titles (Feather 2006, p. 177). For comparison, the Everyman series managed long‐term sales of up to around 300 000 copies for the most popular titles, but individual print runs were far smaller than Penguin’s: up to 10 000 for an initial run, with subsequent runs that could potentially reach around ­double this size if an edition was selling well (Rose 1991, p. 89). The first 10 Penguin books, published in 1935, while Penguin was still an imprint of the Bodley Head, were Ariel by Andre Maurois (originally published 1924), A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929), Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater (1929), Madame Claire by Susan Ertz (1923), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers (1923), The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie (1920), Twenty‐Five by Beverly Nichols (1926), William by E.H. Young (1925), Gone to Earth by Mary Webb (1917), and Carnival by Compton Mackenzie (1907). Following an Albatross convention, different colors were used to distinguish genres, with blue covers for the two works of nonfiction (Ariel and Twenty‐Five), green for the two works of detective fiction (The  Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and The Mysterious Affair at Styles), and orange for other fiction (the remaining six books). The covers were purely typographic, like Gollancz dust jackets: a part of the Penguin formula that would be retained for many years (see Figure  10.3). All of these works were in copyright, but just two had originally been published by the Bodley Head, with the rights to the remainder having been purchased – the lion’s share of them from Jonathan Cape. Only 2 of the 10 had been published more than 15 years before the first Penguin edition, and all had been good sellers in hardback. The choice of titles was also highly indicative of Penguin’s direction at the time, which might best be summed up as “respectable entertainment.” These books were clearly selected to appeal to the widest possible middle‐class readership, with nothing morally outrageous, formally challenging, or otherwise threatening to such an audience. Although the Lanes had demonstrated a willingness to publish modernist writing that was all three of those things – as shown by the gamble they took on the first British edition of Ulysses, financed with their own capital – there was only a single modernist work in Penguin’s first 10. But the safety of these choices was vitally important to Penguin’s success, and if there is anything surprising about the early Penguins, it is that they were not more conservative: E.H. Young, for example, was an early feminist with a highly unconventional private life. But the Lanes’ determination to publish Ulysses (against the judgment of the Bodley Head’s board of directors) had shown that they were unafraid of taking a stand for a book they believed in. Before the launch of the series, the Lane brothers went in search of pre‐orders. However, despite traveling the United Kingdom and beyond with a mock‐up copy of Poet’s Pub, they were unable to obtain even half of the orders that would be needed to break even until Allen Lane hit upon the idea of selling to Woolworth’s (Gaither 1991, pp. 253–254). As the quotation from Q.D. Leavis in Section 10.4 makes clear, this was a somewhat down‐market outlet, and while it already sold books in paper bindings, those were of exactly the kind from which Penguin books would have to distinguish themselves. Allen Lane pitched the series in person, but without success – until (by chance) the buyer’s wife arrived and announced that, as a customer, she would buy the whole set at the price (Gaither 1991, p. 254). Won over by his spouse’s enthusiasm, the buyer placed an order for an incredible 63 500 books, single‐handedly rescuing the business

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Figure 10.3  Two of the first 10 Penguins: Ariel by André Maurois and Gone to Earth by Mary Webb (1935). Printed in blue and black (Ariel) and orange and black (Gone to Earth) on white paper. In comparison with the Gollancz dust jackets in Figure 10.1, the typography appears cluttered and badly set (note in particular the inaccurate centering) – but this was clearly no obstacle to mass‐market success. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

venture. It seems ironic that the British publisher that would come to be identified so strongly with “values more important than those of the sales chart” (Hoggart 1982, p. 122) should have had for its savior the very retailer that Q.D. Leavis had used to exemplify the corrupting effects of American commercialism on the ordinary British reader. Although Penguin was an imprint of the Bodley Head, the latter was unable to benefit from its success: as with the limited edition of Ulysses, the capital invested had come not from the company itself, but from the Lane brothers. On New Year’s Day, 1936, Penguin Books Limited came into existence as a new company, based in the crypt of the Holy Trinity Church on Euston Road: a sinister and poorly lit space without toilet facilities. In 1937, Penguin moved to new warehouses and offices in Harmondsworth, a village outside London, near the Great West Aerodrome (now Heathrow Airport). That was also the year in which Penguin launched its “Pelican” and “Penguin Special” ranges of original nonfiction in paperback format, discussed in more detail in Section 10.8. Once it became clear that Penguin was going to be a success, other publishers swiftly moved to copy what it had done. Within a year of Penguin’s launch, Pearson had released a series of genre fiction titles in orange paper covers at exactly the same price (McCleery 2002, p. 165). But these were not quite paperbacks in the Penguin mold: the authors

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were not at all well known. In 1939, the Reprint Society was founded by Hodder & Stoughton, Heinemann, Macmillan, and William Collins in order to produce large paperback editions of their own books. This was closer to being a replication of the Penguin strategy. However, it was handicapped by rationing when war broke out the same year: as we shall see in Section11.1, a publisher’s paper allowance was proportional to its consumption the previous year, when Penguin had achieved spectacular sales and the Reprint Society had not existed. This historical accident protected Penguin from serious competition, and enabled it to establish itself as a national institution (Joicey 1993, p. 30).

10.8 ­Political Books Publishing in the 1920s and 1930s was highly politicized. The highest‐volume publishers specialized in periodicals, especially newspapers, several of which were used by their owners to exercise direct influence over the electorate. Moreover, to publish certain kinds of literature during the period was a direct challenge to the moralism of the government of the day. But there was another kind of political publishing in the period, whereby publishers with particular political commitments supported the work of authors who shared those commitments more or less closely. The most obvious example of a political book publishing program was that of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This was originally facilitated through the Party’s own publisher, Martin Lawrence, although in 1936 the latter amalgamated with Wishart Books, which was founded in 1927 by the wealthy communist heir, Ernest Wishart. The resulting company, Lawrence & Wishart, was based in Wishart’s existing premises at 2  Parton St., next door to the radical bookshop and publishing house belonging to another independently wealthy left winger, David Archer (see Christie 2014, p. 73). This location embedded Lawrence & Wishart into the “honeycomb of [left‐wing] cafes and bookshops in the old artisan areas of Soho and Holborn” that included Collet’s in Charing Cross Road  –  known as the “Bomb Shop”  –  and the Workers’ Bookshop in Theobalds Road, which was run by the Communist Party (Howkins 1980, pp. 249–250). Lawrence & Wishart continued Martin Lawrence projects such as editions of the works of Marx and Lenin, and eventually became a noted publisher of academic books. It also published a great deal of proletarian writing in the 1930s, effectively “subsidising ­working‐class writers without expecting to recoup [their] costs,” although its chaotic and disorganized approach to distribution, record‐keeping, and payment was combined with slow decision‐making and “insensitiv[ity] to the demands that writing made on authors without means” (Hilliard 2006, p. 49), which generated much resentment from the very writers its staff and owners hoped to cultivate. A different approach was taken by Victor Gollancz, who built on the success of his initial list of novels and general interest books to publish a wide range of nonfiction by socialist and anti‐fascist authors such as G.D.H. Cole and Ralph Fox. In the year of Wishart’s merger with Martin Lawrence, Gollancz launched the Left Book Club, whose  members, like those of the book clubs described in Section  10.3, committed themselves to the purchase of a book a month at a particular price. The Left Book Club was unlike other book clubs in that the texts it sold were new, specially published for the purpose, and (at least initially) available through no other channel. Titles were selected by a panel consisting of Harold Laski, a Labour Party‐supporting academic,

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and the politician John Strachey, who had been a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party but was at that time a Communist and an anti‐fascist organizer, as well as by Gollancz himself (Reid 1979, p. 194). The Left Book Club also organized discussion groups, of which there were over two hundred by the end of the year; by 1939, there were 1200 such groups and a total of 58 000 members (Reid 1979, pp. 194–195). In addition to publishing a wide selection of books dealing with topics ranging from economics to colonialism, the club also published longer pamphlets such as Gollancz’s 40‐page critique of appeasement, Is Mr Chamberlain Saving Peace?, which was sold by club members to the general public in March 1939 (Reid 1979, p. 203). Reid argues that, by introducing thousands of members of the public to discussion of political affairs, the club “contributed to the victory of the Labour Party in 1945 … [influenced] attitude[s] to such questions as the independence of India, and… laid the basis for an understanding of the nature of ­fascism, of anti‐semitism, and of racism in a whole generation” (Reid 1979, p. 206). But there was a darker side to this publishing venture. The Left Book Club published a justification of one of the Soviet show trials, and “manuscripts submitted to the Left Book Club for publication were often read by [Communist Party] members and discussed within party circles,” such that “George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was rejected for its revelations and criticism” and even works by Marxist‐Leninists would go unpublished if their authors were out of favor with the Kremlin (Shindler 2012, p. 90). While the Club did publish the first edition of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a study of the British class system that excoriated Communist Party members and middle‐class socialist “cranks,” it did so only with the addition of an introduction (written by Gollancz himself ) that all but begged readers not to take the book seriously. Gollancz and Strachey turned against the Communist Party once the Nazi–Soviet Pact came to light, and in 1941 the Left Book Club published a ­collection of anti‐Soviet essays, but for years, it functioned as a propaganda organ that rarely challenged, and often directly supported, the murderous and repressive Stalin regime. Gollancz’s general list was also politically influential, featuring works by Orwell as well as A.J. Cronin, the former doctor and now largely forgotten middlebrow novelist whose sixth novel, The Citadel (1937), broke industry records by selling 40 083 copies in just nine days (McAleer 1992, p. 56), was adapted into an Academy Award‐nominated film starring Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell, and 10 years later, took third place after the Bible and Gone With the Wind in a public poll of best books (McAleer 1992, p. 56). The Citadel’s depiction of Britain’s then wholly private medical system had a huge influence on public discussion of public health and the medical profession, and probably contributed to the climate of public opinion that led to the creation of Britain’s National Health Service in 1946 and 1947. In this respect, Gollancz’s output can be compared to that of Martin Secker & Warburg, formed in 1936 when the recently failed Martin Secker was purchased by Roger Senhouse together with Frederic Warburg, a World War I veteran who had joined Routledge as an apprentice in 1922. The firm had an anti‐Soviet, social democratic political mission, publishing books by C.L.R. James and Joyce Cary, as well as by Orwell, whose Homage to Catalonia (1938), The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), and Animal Farm (1945) all appeared under its imprint rather than Gollancz’s. Penguin’s move into overtly political publishing began with its Pelican series of original nonfiction paperbacks on serious topics: the very first title was George Bernard

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Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism (1937). From November 1937, these were complemented by the Penguin Specials series of extended political pamphlets costing 6d each. Sales sometimes attained levels more usually associated with newspapers: Blackmail or War by Geneviève Tabouis (1938) sold a quarter of a million copies (MacKenzie 1991, p. 255). The Specials were edited by the Indian independence campaigner V.K. Krishna Menon, who had worked for both Penguin and the Bodley Head and would later become a powerful figure in Indian politics. The pamphlets that comprised the series were for the most part written from what would now be regarded as a social democratic, as opposed to a strictly socialist, point of view, “stressing the need for a rational international order based upon the universal values of international organisation, collective security, democracy, and personal freedom” (Joicey 1993, p. 32). However, after the first three drew criticism from British conservatives for their attacks upon the Chamberlain government’s policy of appeasing Hitler, Penguin responded by including in the series a self‐proclaimed argument for “a more sympathetic understanding of Herr Hitler’s point of view” by a Conservative politician, the Marquess of Londonderry. This may have been done purely for the sake of appearances (Joicey 1993, p. 34), but it suggested a willingness to promote political debate itself, rather than a specific political position. The Specials diversified to include many titles that were supportive of the government, once it had done as the Lanes evidently wished and declared war on Germany: a war in which Richard and John Lane would fight, and John would die in action.

10.9 ­Publishing for the Colonies Although British publishing undeniably acted to disseminate British culture, British ideas, and the English language around the world  –  especially to Britain’s overseas ­colonies – it should be remembered that it was always primarily an economic rather than a political endeavor. With the exception of missionary publishers (who were not, it should be said, entirely innocent of financial motives; see Newell 2002, p. 15), British publishers sold to the colonies not to control the circulation of cultural representations within the British Empire but to turn a profit; in this, of course, they were typical of other British businesses at the time. Moreover, the manner in which they did so was determined not by political ideology but by the persistence of nineteenth‐century ­commercial agreements that gave deep discounts and generous terms of credit to ­booksellers in the colonies, especially in Australasia and South Africa. These agreements resulted in the continued production of cheap “colonial editions” for export only. Until the middle of the twentieth century, Australia and New Zealand were the greatest importers of these editions per capita, with Australia the largest export market for British publishers; over 400 000 colonial editions of novels were exported to Australia in 1919, more than half a million in 1934, and over a million in 1946 (Johanson 2000, p. 280). At the same time, the notion of a “colonial edition” became increasingly abstract, with export editions becoming physically almost identical to those sold to the home market from around the time of World War II, distinguished more by their special terms of sale than by anything else. Conditions broadly comparable to those existing in Australasian markets applied through much of the rest of the British Empire and Commonwealth, with the exception

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of Canada and the Caribbean colonies, where American, rather than British, publishers dominated the market for English‐language texts. On the other hand, there were significant differences from one context to another. India was perhaps the only part of the British Empire to develop an indigenous English‐language publishing industry capable of challenging British imports during the colonial period: throughout the 1920s and 1930s, British publishers saw sales to India’s valuable textbook market decline, and the Indian subsidiaries of OUP and Macmillan came to operate with increasing independence in order to compete by publishing books with genuine Indian appeal (Feather 2006, p. 188). In South Africa, the situation was complicated by the presence of two major settler communities: the community of English speakers who identified with the British Empire, and the longer‐established Boer community, which regarded itself as independent from Europe and spoke Afrikaans, a language closely related to Dutch. Afrikaner antipathy toward the British, stoked by memories of British atrocities in the second Boer War, led to state support for Afrikaans‐language publishing rather than obstruction of the English‐language book trade, with the result that  –  at least for a while – British publishers were initially able to export books to South African sellers in much the same way that they did to Australia. Before long, however, they found themselves losing market share to the South African publishers, with the Department of Public Education by 1940 adopting a policy of giving “preference … to South African publications over overseas publications wherever quality and price are equal” (Davis 2015, p. 133). As we shall see in Section 11.6, this only meant exclusion from the market represented by “white” schools, however. The export of texts to British colonies in West Africa had initially been motivated by primarily religious considerations, with missionary book distributors explicitly setting out “to bring good Christian literature to the natives … and to exclude the trade in books not suitable for the minds and hearts of our people” (Newell 2002, p. 9). In this nineteenth‐century mission, British Christian organizations appear to have been very successful: until the mid‐1930s, the great majority of texts available to readers in British West Africa had been printed or imported by missionary organizations (Newell 2002, p. 85). But competition was growing, especially from British educational publishers. In the 1920s, Longmans, Green, & Co. began to export “simplified” or “reduced” editions of English novels for the colonial school market, and in the 1930s, OUP started a line of cheap publications aimed specifically at colonial schools (Newell 2002, pp. 11–12). Missionary organizations in Africa also acted as publishers and educators, and, discerning “the vital bond between a reading culture and an energetically produced printed literature” (Fraser 2008a, p. 97), commissioned stories and books of practical information from local authors for publication in local languages, alongside the expected religious titles. The long‐term influence of such publishing is clear: although the oral roots of much African writing are undeniable, so are its roots in the missionary‐dominated African textual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Pilgrim’s Progress was translated into 80 African languages (see Hofmeyr 2004). Through exploitation of business opportunities opened up by colonialism–including those represented by the huge expansion in the worldwide readership for English‐­ language print brought about by multiplication of the number of people able to read English – commercial British publishers magnified the global influence of British culture. But given the economic importance of exports to their business success, it is as

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reasonable to ask about the indirect influence of the colonial book trade on British culture as it is to ask about its direct influence on culture in British colonies and former colonies. Just as the overseas activities of the British and Foreign Bible Society played a key role in the transformation of the British printing business in the nineteenth century (Howsam 1991), colonial export was central to the operation of British publishers throughout the twentieth century. Unwin’s figures for a “typical” first novel in the mid‐ 1920s reveal that the colonial edition would have accounted for 27% of the print run and been “the largest single portion of the whole publishing program” (Johanson 2000, p. 84). It would be pointless to speculate about what twentieth‐century British literature would have been without British colonialism, but it evidently could not have been the institution that we know today: not only because of the artistic importance of colonial and postcolonial themes to the literary texts that were actually published, but because of the centrality of export to business practices in the industry whose product “British” literature was. If the “literary” market was traditionally subsidized by bestsellers – as late as 1966, Jonathan Cape was still quite deliberately plowing profits back into loss‐ making poetry publication, for example (de Bellaigue 2004, p. 135) – the “home” book trade was also in a certain sense subsidized by colonial sales.

10.10 ­Technological Developments in the Printing Industry The most important technological change during the period covered by this chapter was the growing popularity of the Monotype and Linotype hot‐metal composing machines described in Sections 9.2 and 9.5 (see Figures 10.4 and 10.5). The shift from hand composition toward mechanical composition offered an opportunity for a thorough refresh of the stock of types then in use by the industry. The refresh was achieved both through a revival of old typefaces and through the creation of new ones, but such a process could not happen by itself. Printers had little incentive to invest in the purchase of new types, and the Monotype Corporation itself was primarily interested in selling machines. The key figure in the typographic renaissance that occurred was Stanley Morison. The details of Morison’s career were for many years obscured by his tendency toward self‐mythologization, so we owe most of what we do know to the work of James Moran (1971), on which the following account draws liberally. Morison was a Catholic convert who grew up in a working‐class family in London and acquired an interest in the history of typography. His entrance to the industry was a job working for the nephew of Wilfred Meynell, managing director of the Catholic publisher Burns and Oates. Meynell gave Morison a job as assistant to his son, Francis Meynell, who was at that time in charge of book design at Burns and Oates, and introduced him to his circle of Catholic intellectuals, which included the Catholic convert, craft revivalist, and (as we now know) pedophile and bestialist Eric Gill (see MacCarthy 1989). Before founding the famous Nonesuch Press, Francis Meynell founded the Pelican Press and appointed Morison to run it while his energies were engaged elsewhere. From there, Morison moved to take charge of design at the newly launched Cloister Press near Manchester in 1921, but after becoming unemployed the following year as result of financial difficulties at the firm, he took on part‐time jobs as typographical adviser to various companies, including Cambridge University Press and the Monotype Corporation. 

Minority Culture and Popular Print, 1920–1940

Figure 10.4  Monotype keyboard, 1929. Source: Courtesy of Metal Type metaltype. co.uk/wpress.

Figure 10.5  Monotype typecaster, 1929. Source: Courtesy of Metal Type metaltype. co.uk/wpress.

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Although the British printing trade was mostly opposed to the cutting of new typefaces, Morison used his influence with publishers to create demand for them, and in this way played a key role both in the revival of old typefaces and in the creation of new ones. Morison was responsible for the book font Bembo, cut in 1929 on the model of one of Aldus Manutius’s types, as well as for several fonts whose design he was able to commission from Gill after overcoming the latter’s ideological resistance to dealing with any form of machine‐based production. These included the roman book face Perpetua (Gill’s first typeface) and Gill Sans, a sans‐serif display type (see Figure 10.6, a double‐ page spread from a specimen book by Hague and Gill, the printer that Gill co‐founded). Together with Bembo, these came to be among the most distinctive and popular British fonts of the twentieth century, with Perpetua and Bembo being extensively used in fine book production and Gill Sans appearing on countless posters (and, in the late twentieth century, becoming a house font of the BBC). In 1929, Morison was taken on as a typographic adviser to the Times, and the ­following year, he persuaded the board of directors that a total redesign was necessary, including the creation of a new typeface. The initial drawings were provided by a Times draughtsman, Victor Lardent, working under Morison’s supervision on the basis of a specimen of Plantin type that Morison supplied. The resulting typeface, Times New Roman, appeared for the first time in the October 3, 1932, issue of the newspaper. It was announced on page 14, in a report which endeavored to impress upon its readers the sheer scale of the undertaking (requiring the production of 320 000 new type‐casting matrices for the newspaper’s linotype machines in addition to the punching of 40 000

Figure 10.6  Hague and Gill type specimen book, featuring several fonts of the Gill Sans face (including the hand‐carved Gill Woodletter). Source: Courtesy of the Collection of the St. Bride Foundation Library.

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Figure 10.7  The Times reports on its own new typeface (and some other significant news), October 3, 1932. Source: Digitized by Daniel Allington.

patterns for its monotype machines) and proudly noted the approval of the new type by commentators in Italy and France (see Figure 10.7). Times New Roman became one of the world’s most widely used types, especially from the 1990s after a version of it was licensed by Microsoft as the standard font for its market‐leading word processor.

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The process of rotogravure grew in popularity alongside hot‐metal composing. Rotogravure is an intaglio process, essentially an automated version of much older ­processes such as steel engraving, copperplate etching, and mezzotint. In all such processes, ink is trapped in pits or grooves in the surface of a sheet of copper or steel, then transferred to a sheet of paper either directly or indirectly. In place of the flat sheets of metal used in earlier craft processes, rotogravure employs copper cylinders. While the cylinders can be engraved, they are more usually etched: a resist is used to protect a negative of the image on the surface of the cylinder, which is then immersed in acid, eating away a recessed positive of the image to be printed. Once the resist has been removed, the cylinder can be installed in a form of rotary press. As it rotates, the cylinder picks up ink, which is then cleaned from the non‐recessed parts of its surface by a blade, leaving ink only in the etched recesses. Paper picks up the remaining ink while passing between the wiped cylinder and a roller. Multiple cylinders can be used in order to produce full‐color prints. Rotogravure is particularly useful for color printing and the reproduction of photographs. However, it is very expensive to set up, because of the cost of the cylinders. It has therefore tended to be employed for items printed in very large editions, and then often only for specific parts therein – for example, the color supplements to periodicals.

10.11 ­What Was Actually Read? Although raptures over the classics of nineteenth‐century literature play a key role in many autobiographies published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Rose 2001; see also Section  8.2 of the current volume), these cannot be assumed to have been ­typical reading experiences. What Q.D. Leavis called “the universal need to read something when not actively employed” (1932, p. 48) would diminish only with widespread television viewing, and for most readers, it was fulfilled by light fiction, whether of the respectable “middlebrow” variety or of the more down‐market kind sold by Woolworths in the days before Penguin. Middlebrow fiction was primarily aimed at middle‐class readers, but analysis of the stock of twopenny libraries in the period shows that bestselling middlebrow authors such as A.J. Cronin, Arnold Bennett, and J.B. Priestley were also in demand from working‐class readers (Hilliard 2014b, pp. 218–219). Popular enthusiasm for light fiction was not unique to this period, and can be seen in the years both before and after. Analysis of soldiers’ diaries and notebooks shows that, despite “the official narrative of Shakespearean relevance to the [First World W]ar,” in fact “it was popular fiction that soldiers read most assiduously” (King 2013, p. 241). Meanwhile, a survey of use of 182 library centers in the United Kingdom showed that, for every category of borrower in 1917–1918, “fiction” was by far the most popular genre, with “literature” well behind, accounting for a mere 4% of issues to adults in both ­circulating and stationary libraries (Adult Education Committee et al. 1980, pp. 131–132). A study of colliers’ libraries in Wales likewise finds that fiction titles accounted for a massive and steadily increasing proportion of borrowings from 1918 onwards, apparently sometimes exceeding 95% of borrowings in a single year (Baggs 2001). Unsurprisingly, this appears to have been fiction of the lighter sort: Charles Dickens and Walter Scott were the most popular authors in terms of the total number of volumes on

Minority Culture and Popular Print, 1920–1940

the shelves, but such issue data as are available suggest that “it is unlikely that miners avidly read them, even if Dickens was often recommended in local newspapers” and that “the main ingredient of the average miner’s reading was popular fiction” (Baggs 2001, pp. 290–297). Thus, while the managers of the institutes that ran the libraries saw authors such as Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, and Anatole France as “popular” or “in good demand,” and therefore purchased their works in great numbers, library users “complained of the dearth of bestselling contemporaries such as [Zane] Grey, [Ethel M.] Dell, Charles Garvice, [E.P.] Oppenheim, William Le Queux, and Edgar Wallace” (Baggs 2001, pp. 293–294). Come World War II, it was much the same: while it has been claimed that “the kitbags of intelligent laymen usually carried a Penguin or a Pelican or two” (Hoggart 1982, p. 119), that publisher’s high‐minded selections for the Services Central Book Depot were unappreciated by many of their intended recipients, with one request for “a more liberal supply of fiction and adventure books” being supported by the observation that “the majority of the books [supplied] are of a heavy type, and seldom find any demand by the men of this unit” (Joicey 1993, p. 41). A 1947 survey of libraries in Middlesex similarly found that there was most demand for “lightweight” authors, with only an eighth of fiction loans being accounted for by classics or by modern literary writing (Rose 2007, p. 350), and it seems that, in the colonies, things were much the same. An analysis of library loans in Australia shows that, whatever readers may afterwards have claimed to have read, light fiction was the most popular reading matter (Lyons and Taksa 1992), and things were much the same in British West Africa, with, for example, a teacher at a Ghanaian college complaining in 1932 that “if we bought books in accordance with students’ desires, we should have bought Marie Corelli and Hall Caine in bulk” (Newell 2002, p. 104). Could this have been a matter of working‐class versus middle‐class taste? Apparently not: Q.D. Leavis was horrified to find that the crime fiction author she contacted in her researches received most of his fan mail from “schoolboys, scientific men, clergymen, lawyers, and business men generally” – as she put it, the “social orders … [which] in the last century would have been the guardians of the public conscience in the matter of mental self‐indulgence” (Leavis 1932, p. 51). In defiance both of conservative and of radical cultural authorities, most readers thus seem to have spent most of their reading time with works of light fiction. But in a certain sense, the above array of evidence is unnecessary. We know what people wanted to read, because we know what publishers were able to sell to them. Adventure stories, romances, and detective novels would not have been produced in such vast quantities had the greatest demand been for Dickens and Carlyle (or, for that matter, for Hegel and Marx). And while it is true that sales figures may under‐represent the readership of what were then and are now considered “good books,” the same applies equally to the most popular kinds of writing, which are not intrinsically less susceptible to being shared, borrowed, scavenged, or bought second‐hand. How is it possible that autobiography should suggest a “cultural diet” (Rose 2001, p. 3) so much at variance with what appears to have been bought (or even borrowed) for consumption? If a comparison with a more literal kind of diet may be drawn, nutrition researchers have long recognized that “people habitually lie in food diaries or forget what they ate” (Boseley 2013, p. 20): just as one may eat a chocolate bar at one’s desk but remember only the salad that one dutifully purchased in the canteen, one may read a detective story for fun but remember only the classic work whose influence on one’s

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mental development one knows must surely have been more profound. To return to the case of reading during World War I, Edmund King argues that Shakespeare fulfilled patriotic and nostalgic functions for some officers, and acted as a “symbol of cultural literacy” for autodidacts in the ranks, giving his works an importance in published accounts of combat that had little to do with what was actually read in the trenches (King 2014, p. 240). In conducting interviews for their oral history of Australian reading in the early twentieth century, Lyons and Taksa found that “[w]hile interviewees were happy to impress us with their familiarity with Dickens, they were not so forthright about their excursions into the world of popular thrillers and romances” (Lyons and Taksa 1992, p. 56). No one would admit to having enjoyed the works of Ethel M. Dell, for example: that was always something that other people had done. With published memoirs, the problem increases, because published authors of working‐class origin are almost by definition likely to have left the class of their birth and upbringing behind. As Leah Price argues, “the dominance of rags‐to‐riches stories” in these autobiographical materials leads one to suspect the “adult narrator [of ] read[ing] his middle‐class milieu backward into the experiences of the working‐class youth described” (Price 2004, pp. 315–316). There are many apparent examples of this in the memoirs that Jonathan Rose analyzes, such as the distinct note of contempt that Rose detects in the recollections of a journalist who claimed that his “reading of the great books made it intolerable [for him] to continue as a cog in the industrial machine” (quoted in Rose 2001, p. 43). Because the evidence is that such literature was little read, autobiographical emphasis on “great books” should perhaps not be taken at face value. However, it can be seen as  an important aspect of the culture of reading in the period: discourses of self‐ improvement or self‐discipline revolving around the rejection of “popular” culture in favor of serious books were so pervasive that they could come to structure a whole genre of writing, with the individual’s discovery of “great” literature playing a ­conventional narrative role similar to that which would once have been played by an inspirational encounter with the Bible (Allington 2010). The “mass culture as drug” trope was conventional in the 1920s and 1930s (Hilliard 2014a, p. 269); that such fears should have become manifest not only in the polemical works of academic elitists like the Leavises but also in memoirs written by individuals from very different social ­backgrounds indicates that they were taken seriously. Of course, somebody must have been reading the more intellectual books of the day, or those would not have been published either. But such readers are certain to have been a minority. For example, while there are many autobiographical sources whose “authors cite the Marxist and other leftist books they read via [Miners’] Institute libraries” and write of following “the canon of English and even European literature, including Meredith, Dickens, and Honoré de Balzac” in their novel reading, nonetheless the miners and ex‐miners who published autobiographies represent an elite – they were mining community leaders, trade union and political figures, even occasionally men of letters. The same individuals attended Ruskin College and the Central Labour College, ran or attended [National Council of Labour Colleges] classes, and wrote articles for local newspapers discussing books and reading. That these individuals read Marx, Jack London, and Henri Barbusse cannot be judged surprising or typical. (Baggs 2001, p. 288)

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When dealing with such sources, then, it is important to avoid a tendency to “pounce upon statements left by thoughtful readers … and … suppose that such evidentiary scraps speak for a fellowship of readers who were neither diarists nor forced to articulate their reading habits” (Griswold 2002, p. 277). But if we are careful to avoid drawing hasty generalizations, there is much to be learned from those “evidentiary scraps.” An example of this is provided by Catherine Feely’s study of reading by Frank Forster, an apparently ordinary Communist Party member who kept a diary in the inter‐war period in which he “refashion[ed] … [Communist philosopher Joseph] Dietzgen’s cosmology into a program of personal growth” that included not only reading but also such activities as learning to dance (Feely 2010, p. 100). Forster presented his responses to books as proof that a manual laborer could do “much reading, much thinking” (quoted in Feely 2010, p. 94). Like Rose’s autobiographers, he appears to have used his engagement with intellectual culture to distance himself from other working‐class people (Feely 2010, p. 95) – although it also seems to have provided him with opportunities to associate with and gain status among political radicals: he joined the Left Book Club committee for his town and served as Literature Secretary of the local branch of the Communist Party. But the special interest of Forster’s case lies in the apparent idiosyncrasy of his reading of Dietzgen, which hints at the ways in which reading was incorporated into the fabric of everyday life – and thus at the necessity to study apparently unreliable records of reading if we are to have a chance of understanding what books meant to people, and not only what books people read. Foster’s reading may have been influenced by his prior encounter with specific works of philosophy and psychology that also appeared in his diary. But lacking “the support of a group of comrades to discuss [Dietzgen’s work] with, or the institutional structure of the ‘Party’ to guide him in its correct interpretation … [h]e was … forced to create his own interpretative framework out of an eclectic mix of the everyday popular culture that surrounded him” (Feely 2010, p. 101). This begins to hint at the ways in which the reading experience was already being transformed in the period covered by this chapter: in the heyday of the Hollywood musical, expectations formed through experience of one medium might shape responses to another, and in a world where reading had become one among several recreational pursuits to be served by industry, even the reading of left‐wing philosophy might be influenced by daydreams of the dance hall. However, if we are to understand the responses of more typical readers, we may have to ask them directly – insofar as this can still be done (one can only wish that it were possible with readers from the earlier centuries covered by this book). The following is an excerpt from an interview conducted in 2008 with Olive, a British woman born in a coal mining village near Leeds in 1921. A lifelong enthusiast for romantic fiction who claims to have read all the works of Barbara Cartland, Olive had the following to say about reading in her youth (note her initial use of the word “book” to refer to a magazine, a usage common among working‐class British readers throughout much of the early twentieth century): int: So tell me what you used to read before that – when you were young. olive: When I was young, a lot of weekly books. One weekly book, it came out regularly, I think it cost tuppence, it was called Peg’s Paper. They were highly romantic stories and the … and, oh my gosh, I’ve forgotten, so many new magazines came out after that. They were not anything you could learn from. [inaudible] escapisms [laughs] more like fairy tales. They all had a happy hending – ending, sorry.

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int: When did you read Peg’s Paper? olive: Peg’s Paper, my sister older than me used to buy it, it was tuppence, it was a lot of money then, and when she ha‐ as soon as she’d put it down I was supposed to get hold of it. int: How old were you? olive: Oh, about twelve, thirteen. I’ve never really read classics. int: Tell me about Peg’s Paper. olive: Oh they were just highly romantic, improbable stories. int: Did they have lots of stories in them? olive: Yes, there were about four stories in there, as far as I remember. There were all, had tragedy going through them, but they all had a happy ending. [laughing] Waste of money, waste of time! [quietly] I’m afraid I didn’t learn much from them. int: Did you – were you a member of a library? olive: I belonged to a library, but there again it was these romantic stories. int: Where was the library? olive: It was in a little village shop. And in my work my lunch hour, it was a little lending library, they were all new books to start with [inaudible] old [inaudible] a bit dog‐eared. I’ve forgotten how much they used to charge for a book. If you went over a week, you’d to pay a fine. Sometimes I paid for the value of the book in fines! [laughs] … olive: So then I got a group of friends when I started work [in Leeds], same age as me, the office girls, and we exchanged magazines. Then again, they were nonsense, nothing to further education at all, just escapism. I mean, when you lived in a village, there was nothing to do. While it is never wise to draw hasty conclusions from single pieces of data, Olive’s interview gives clues as to how a less ideologically driven reader might have negotiated British print culture in the inter‐war period. As confirmed elsewhere in the interview, she had learnt to read at school, where, among other things, she had memorized a poem by Shelley and become acquainted with works of Dickens. But these did not become part of her leisure reading, except as a point of contrast with what she actually read, and enjoyed reading: without prompting from the interviewer, she spontaneously disavowed any interest in “classics,” and repeatedly judged her own choice of reading matter in negative terms. These negative judgments seem to draw on the same discourse of self‐ improvement observed by Jonathan Rose (“not anything you could learn from,” “I didn’t learn much from them,” “nothing to further education at all”), indicating that notions of the potential benefits to be had from reading the “right” kind of books may well have circulated within Olive’s community. But if so, there is no evidence that such ideas had any influence on her reading habits, whether at that time or subsequently. And why should they? Reading was for Olive very clearly an enjoyable and sociable activity, one that played a role in her relationships with her older sister and (subsequently) with her workmates. Let anyone inclined to take at face value her dismissal of this practice as “waste” remember that.

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11 The Age of the Mass‐Market Paperback, 1940–1970 World War II caused a drop in book production comparable to that created by World War I just over two decades previously. Unlike that earlier conflict, however, the devas­ tating new war caused massive and direct material damage to the institutions of the British book industry, with calamitous levels of destruction inflicted upon premises, paperwork, and stock. But once European hostilities and materials shortages were resolved, the book trade soon returned to form, and what we might call the economy of letters began once more to grow at a tremendous rate. Throughout the mother country and its disintegrating empire, millions of children and adults were educated to a higher level than ever before, requiring vast numbers of new books and periodicals. This democratization of reading was partial and unruly, with comparatively few people choosing for themselves the kinds of reading matter that the cultural authorities would have chosen for them: a survey of British children carried out in 1971 found that boys read more than girls, that younger children read more than older children, that children whose fathers held non‐manual occupations read more than children whose fathers held manual occupations, and that 77% or more of children’s book reading was of ­narrative genres, with the bulk of this consisting of books judged by the researchers to lack literary merit (Whitehead et al. 1975, pp. 10–11, 23). But books were books and text was text, and there was more of both about than ever. The success of Penguin led to the rapid development of a new form of reprint publish­ ing, resulting in print runs and sales that would have seemed inconceivable just a few years previously. But while one response to the new market conditions was to concen­ trate resources on small numbers of titles, the total number of titles published in the United Kingdom rose from 11 738 in 1950 to 18 794 in 1960 and to 23 512 in 1970 (Feather 2006, p. 208). Some old certainties passed away, with a resurgence of censor­ ship being quickly followed by the passage of more liberal legislation that permitted previously banned books to reach a mass audience. New competition for consumers in search of entertainment emerged with the resumption, after the war, of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television broadcasts, which in 1955 gained commer­ cial competition of their own in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) network of independent regional broadcasters. And new printing technologies were developed, although their adoption was slow and sporadic. The commercial environment was becoming more complicated, but authors were assisted in their dealings by a growing number of agents: the number of literary agencies operating in the United Kingdom

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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rose from 35 in 1946 to 55 in 1966 (Greenfield 1989, p. 63), with about half of published authors being represented by agents during the 1960s (de Bellaigue 2008, p. 111). Yet there was much continuity. The major publishing houses after the war were – to a great extent – the same as those that had dominated the industry before the war, and people still read the same newspapers, which were still for the most part owned by members of the same families. Pulp fiction bloomed in strange, cheap forms, and the rules of the mass‐market reprint game were still being written, but the publishing of hardback originals went on much as it had, albeit that the stakes had changed: the reprint rights to a successful hardback book could now be sold to a paperback publisher for a royalty to be shared between the hardback publisher and the author. At a respect­ able publisher such as Jonathan Cape, the decision to publish was based on three factors in balance: a sense of “the firm’s reputation” and of “the book’s [prospects for] financial success” as well as of the book’s “literary merit” (Low 2012, p. 90). These were essentially the same standards that would have applied at any time in the preceding hundred years. Books were a more profitable and a less regulated commodity than they had been, but at the top end of the market, things went on much as it seemed they always had.

11.1 ­Publishing on the Home Front When the war for which Britain was so badly prepared finally came, its first impact on the book trade was through its fundamental raw material: paper. With few forests, Britain had long relied on imported timber, both for construction and for the produc­ tion of wood products such as pulp. With the seas no longer safe, and with vast supplies of paper required for the administration of the war effort, paper became a scarce and precious resource in need of political management. The government launched a paper salvage scheme (non‐compliance with which would later be criminalized), but the ­recycling processes of the day were only capable of turning out very low‐grade pulp. And so the Control of Paper Order came into force on April 13, 1940, marking the beginning of an essential but draconian r­ egulatory regime that would come to define almost every aspect of British publishing until normality was restored in 1949, several years after the cessation of hostilities. Although paper rationing was a straightforwardly negative measure, acting to limit production, its effects upon the publishing industry were far more complex than could have been predicted. This was principally because of the lack of alternatives to the ­products that the publishing industry supplied. Television was still in its infancy in the mid‐twentieth century – and in any case, broadcasts were suspended throughout the war. This meant that the only accessible news and entertainment media were cin­ ema, radio, and print. Print possessed distinct advantages over its competitors: it was easily portable, and it could provide a diversity of choice that neither cinema nor radio could match. Radio in particular offered highly restricted choices: at the start of the war, the BBC merged its national and regional broadcast programs into the single BBC Home Service, and it was not until the creation of the Forces Programme, intended to provide entertainment for men in military service but tuned into by large numbers of civilians, that radio began to provide genuinely popular entertainment (much of it American). Under such circumstances, people needed print more than ever, and so – despite the difficulties that the book trade would face in supplying its market – there was no danger that the market might wither away. So it was far from a bad time to be a

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

bookseller, even though the potential for really large profits was curtailed by the brake that paper rationing placed on printing and therefore on total sales. These unique circumstances did not merely protect the industry: they also benefited those companies that had established themselves in it by the time that war broke out. The Control of Paper Order banned all new periodicals, for example, which insulated existing ones from competition  –  even when rationing forced them to cut back to a mere half dozen pages or fewer, which had a drastic impact on their ability to carry ­fiction, and contributed to the decline of story magazines in the United Kingdom (as compared to the United States, where they long remained a significant market for writers). Less paper was allocated to book publication than to newspapers, and it was divided up according to levels of consumption in the last year of peace. The order ini­ tially set a publisher’s paper ration at 60% of the same publisher’s consumption in that year, although the Book Production War Economy Agreement that came into force on New Year’s Day in 1942 reduced that by more than a third, and explicitly required the use of smaller type and reduced white space (Rose 2007, p. 351). These rules meant that if one publishing house had used more paper than another in 1938–1939, then it could continue to do so every year until controls were lifted. It also meant that new publishing houses should in theory have been impossible to found  –  although, as we shall see, that turned out not to be the case. This had far‐­ reaching consequences. Because the demand for reading material would far outstrip its supply, not only throughout the war but for as long afterward as it would take for pre‐ war conditions to be restored, almost any book could sell out its print run. On the other hand, it effectively placed a publisher’s books in competition with each other: a bigger print run for one had to mean a smaller print run for others, even if both runs sold out. For perhaps the only time in the history of the book, publishing thus became a strictly zero sum game: a copy of one book printed was a copy of another of the same publisher’s books that could not be printed, and growth from one year to the next was almost impossible (except through increased retail prices). As the war progressed, rationing gave rise to the strange phenomenon of authors leaving their publishers for rivals with more paper (Edwards 1991, p. 294). As in every other era, then, there were winners and losers. But if all this strangeness had one primary beneficiary, it was Penguin. In a market where there could be no greater competitive advantage than that of having used a lot of paper in 1938–1939, the Lane brothers were kings. Their commercial experiment had paid off just in time – not only to save Penguin from bankruptcy in its first year of trading, but also to see it re‐ investing capital in a hugely ambitious publishing program during the very year that would provide the benchmark for a decade of paper allocations. Penguin sold – and, more importantly, printed – more books than anyone else in that crucial last year of peace, and thus guaranteed that it could print – and, in the distorted wartime market, therefore sell  –  more books than anyone else in every subsequent year until a free ­market in paper was re‐established. It was a stroke of luck that ensured continuing ­success: the experiment had not only paid off, but paid off in such a way as to prevent any of the company’s competitors from repeating it until Penguin’s dominance of the market had already been consolidated (see Joicey 1993). If paper rationing had mixed results for the book trade, the effect of the 1940–1941 air raids by the Axis powers  –  the so‐called Blitz  –  was unambiguously catastrophic. Publishers’ warehouses and editorial offices were often at the same central London addresses, and suffered the same fate, editions and account books consumed in the

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same fires. The single worst airstrike from the point of view of the book trade took place on the night of Sunday, December 29, 1940, which saw a devastation of British books unparalleled since the Great Fire of 1666 (see Section  4.6). Duckworth lost around 400 000 unbound books in one go (Beare 1991, p. 106); all told, about 20 London pub­ lishers lost their entire stock (Feather 2006, p. 196). At the outbreak of the war, there had been no fewer than 26 publishers headquartered beneath the shadow of St. Paul’s on Paternoster Row, but in that single night, almost every building in the street was destroyed (Kent 1947, p. 36). The mighty Simpkin, Marshall wholesaler (see Section 9.4) had six different premises in the vicinity, all of which burnt down. The next morning, the staff arrived to find that – in the words of one who was there – “Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane, and bordering onto Ludgate Hill, was just a scene of smouldering ruins, and what had been Simpkin, Marshall’s was just a heap of smoking rubble” (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 1). The vice chairman of the company formed to replace Simpkin, Marshall (see later in this section) lamented that “[a]ll the old records of the business, going back a hundred and thirty years, were destroyed,” including “the great cataloguing system, the only one of its kind in the world, dating back for a hundred and fifty years” (quoted in Kent 1947, p. 37). Uncounted books had been incinerated over­ night, over a million of them in the Simpkin, Marshall warehouse (see Figure  11.1; Paternoster Row invisibly crosses the devastated triangle of ground between the Cathedral and the major road on its far side). It was not only existing books that were destroyed, but also the materials from which their replacements could have been made. In 1939, Secker & Warburg had had the fore­ sight to lay down a vast stock of paper in Plymouth, but heavy air raids on that militarily important port city saw every remaining sheet of it reduced to ash in March 1941, together with 150 000 unbound volumes (Edwards 1991, p. 294). The numbers are stag­ gering; it has been estimated that altogether as many as 20 million volumes may have been destroyed in the war (Feather 2006, p. 196). While the destruction of far smaller numbers of volumes in the manuscript era could easily result in the permanent loss of particular works from the cultural record (see Section 3.3), it is a testament to the size and resilience of the mid‐twentieth century British publishing business that, despite its centralization in one of the most heavily bombed cities in Western Europe, it was able to recover so quickly once hostilities and rationing were at an end. Indeed, some publishers survived the war largely unscathed, including Heinemann, Macmillan, and Penguin – the latter having benefited from the Lanes’ decision to move the center of operations from London to the then‐rural village of Harmondsworth (today dominated by Heathrow Airport). The university publishers too were saved by their distance from the capital. Like Secker & Warburg, Oxford University Press (OUP) had also laid in vast stocks of paper in 1939: such vast stocks, in fact, that even after government requisitioning, they lasted until 1944, although they would have run out sooner without a reduction in the press’s sales of general interest books in favor of those required by schools and universities (Sutcliffe 1978, pp. 248, 264). But the destruction of the Simpkin, Marshall premises had far‐reaching implications for the trade as a whole, because the company had been the channel through which books passed from British publishers to markets throughout Britain and its empire. The loss of Simpkin, Marshall thus meant the loss of something more than the million or so volumes that it had warehoused and the countless commercial documents that had been filed away in its offices and archive: it meant the loss of the distribution system upon which virtually

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Figure 11.1  The area around St. Paul’s Cathedral, historic heart of the British publishing industry, in 1945. Ministry of Information Second World War Official Collection.

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the entire British book industry had relied. Once it became clear that it would be ­impossible to raise the necessary capital to rebuild and restock, the company entered voluntary liquidation. Recognizing the extent to which the trade as a whole had depended upon Simpkin, Marshall, a consortium of publishers founded the new company of Simpkin, Marshall Ltd. (1941), which, like its predecessor, aimed to stock every title that every British publisher had in print. Orders could be made by post or by telephone, and would be sent out the same morning. But the new Simpkin, Marshall struggled to fill the space left by its namesake, and 10 years later, it was sold to Robert Maxwell (who will be dis­ cussed further in Section 11.5). After four years of its new owner’s irregular financial practices, the company went into liquidation with accumulated debts of £656 000 (DNB). In addition to the financial loss this caused to the company’s creditors, it led to a tremendous loss of stock for publishers, many of whom had stored their books in its warehouse on un‐invoiced consignment arrangements that made it impossible to prove ownership (Bradley 2008, p. 10). Hearing rumors of Simpkin, Marshall’s impending ­collapse, some were able to rescue their stock the night before the company went into receivership; the others lost everything.

11.2 ­Publishing for the Armed Forces As already noted, the need to keep men in military service entertained had been recog­ nized in the creation of a new BBC radio station. But they needed something to read as well as to listen to. Because the structure of the British broadcasting and publishing industries were radically different, with the former being a state monopoly funded by a tax in all but name, and the latter being an immensely complicated network of relatively small profit‐making companies, the means by which this need would be fulfilled was very different: there was no central authority that could provide a solution by decree. While the Forces Programme was an entirely noncommercial venture, it was character­ ized by the broadcasting of popular American music and the re‐broadcasting of com­ mercially produced American radio shows: and necessarily so, not only because the program had to cater to American servicemen stationed in the United Kingdom, but because their British counterparts also preferred such programming to the compara­ tively staid fare that predominated on the Home Service. Thus, even though the BBC was funded through the compulsory sale of licenses, it came to provide a genuinely popular range of entertainment that also became the listening material of choice for many civilians. One might have expected book publishers to follow suit, given that it was in their commercial interests to serve the same market. But paper rationing stood in their way – and where the government allowed its rules to be bent, this was in the service of noncommercial ideals. Penguin was, naturally, the major player. In 1940, it published a typically high‐minded Pelican volume: A Short History of English Literature by B. Ifor Evans, the noted aca­ demic and future peer. Evans sent a copy of this work to Lord Macmillan, who was at that time the president of the Pilgrim Trust: a charity empowered by its American founder to award grants in support of almost any endeavor perceived to be in the British public interest. Macmillan proposed to the Secretary of the Pilgrim Trust, Thomas Jones, that providing “a few thousands” of copies of Evans’s book to British “sailors, soldiers, and airmen” would constitute precisely such an endeavor, as “there must be

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

many among [those men] who would find in [it] just the sort of reading they want in their scant leisure” (quoted in Joicey 1993, p. 40). It is not difficult to find fault with Macmillan’s reasoning on that point. But, recogniz­ ing that the general principle might be extended to other Pelicans, Evans wrote directly to Allen Lane, suggesting that he contact Jones through W.E. Williams, a former school­ teacher who simultaneously held the posts of Secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education and Editor‐in‐Chief of Penguin Books. The result was the founding of the Forces Book Club, a collaboration between Penguin and the Army Welfare Department (Morpurgo 1979, p. 162). The arrangement was that Penguin would issue 75 000 books each month in the form of 10‐volume sets to be distributed to subscribing military units; on the assurance that the company’s motives were philanthropic, its paper ration was generously increased despite the protests of its competitors (Joicey 1993, p. 40). This bending of the rules was not unique  –  when the Foreign Office recognized the propaganda value of the Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, a series of short texts on the war and its causes, it ordered 70 000 copies in English and 100 000 copies in each of the other major Western European languages from OUP, permitting that publisher an extra allocation of paper for the purpose (Sutcliffe 1978, p. 249)  –  but its rationale appears to have been uniquely ideological. The venture was not a success. While it seems indeed to have been motivated by philanthropy, that philanthropy was not on the terms of its intended beneficiaries, who were expected to commit to the purchase of 10 books a month without any choice in the matter of which titles would be delivered. Nor had the philanthropists any interest in asking: they wanted to provide servicemen not merely with reading matter, but with reading matter of which they personally approved, and the consequent “refusal to choose the books which the forces required” (Joicey 1993, p. 41) appears to have led to disappointing numbers of subscriptions and the abandonment of the scheme after less than a year. Penguin had been granted a monopoly, but the very terms on which it had been granted not only prevented the publisher from exploiting it commercially, but prevented it from fulfilling the purpose for which it had been granted: the boosting of morale among the troops. This problem can be traced back to the very conversation that led to the granting of the monopoly, in Macmillan’s proposal that the Pilgrim Trust would finance the free distribution of a history of English literature much as evangelical Christian organizations had long financed the distribution of free bibles. Penguin had more luck when selling to those in military service (or to those who might want to give them presents) in the ordinary way: famously, its books were just the right size for a soldier’s pocket, and much of the fiction that it published had undeniable popular appeal. Importantly, its move into original nonfiction publishing via the Pelican label enabled it to produce titles of practical use to men in the forces, with a particularly popular book being one on how to recognize aircraft (MacKenzie 1991, p. 257). The real problem with the Forces Book Club was in its incompatibility with the spe­ cific nature of the book business, which strictly limits the potential for top‐down manipulation of people’s reading behavior. In this, publishing can be contrasted with other cultural industries. In 1935, W.E. Williams had pioneered the British Institute of Adult Education’s touring “Art for the People” exhibitions of works on loan from galler­ ies and private collectors. The exhibitions were counted a success, but we do not know how well they were appreciated by “the People”; indeed, it arguably did not matter, because they were funded not through ticket sales but by the aforementioned Pilgrim

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Trust. Like many of those who are in Britain referred to as “the great and the good,” Williams achieved influence by deciding what ought to be made available to the public at somebody else’s expense. In 1941, he established the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts with another grant from the Pilgrim Trust; in 1946, that organiza­ tion became the publicly funded Arts Council of Great Britain, of which Williams would be appointed secretary general five years later. It was in this capacity, which he held until 1963, that Williams became “Britain’s arch‐dispenser of patronage” (Morpurgo 1979, p. 269), although he remained editor‐in‐chief of Penguin Books until 1965. The war also led to the production of newspapers, magazines, and news‐sheets for the armed forces. Some were produced in Britain, but others sprang up wherever British forces were stationed throughout the world, using whatever facilities were availa­ ble – especially existing local presses. These papers sold for a fee to cover costs, and some also featured advertisements. Content consisted of propaganda, news reporting, and features, much of it contributed by servicemen keen to see their names in print. Service newspapers could only operate with the consent of the military authorities, and as such operated under strict limits on free expression. But they were willing to print letters from servicemen representing a surprisingly broad range of views, ranging from an anonymous gunner who wrote in support of the fascist Oswald Mosley to a group of Indian airmen protesting racial segregation in the British armed forces – and even to an avowed Communist who described himself as “a Red for fourteen years and a redder Red after nearly four years of armying” (Anglo 1977, pp. 71, 76–77, 55). Some of these publications were the work of soldiers with no experience of the news­ paper business, but others were produced by some of the foremost journalists and edi­ tors of the day. Hubert (Hugh) Cudlipp, who had been an editor at the Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial before the war, was editor‐in‐chief of Union Jack, published in Tunis, while the Rock, published in Gibraltar, was edited by his older brother Reginald, previ­ ously a sub‐editor on the News of the World. Seac, the newspaper of the South East Asia Command, was launched by Frank Owen, previously editor of the Evening Standard, with the assistance of Len Jackson of the Telegraph and George Chisholm of the Sketch (Anglo 1977, p. 14). All these men had given up their jobs to join the forces, but found themselves returning to their editorial vocation while in uniform.

11.3 ­Paperback Originals: The Heyday of the British Pulp One of the most remarkable publishing successes of the war years was the debut of René Raymond, who would become one of the twentieth century’s most successful thriller writers under a range of noms de plume. Raymond had spent a large part of the inter‐war period working in book wholesaling and retail, and he knew there was a market for crime fiction in the American “hard‐boiled” style. He composed his first novel while working in the Simpkin, Marshall warehouse, telling his co‐workers that he was “writing a book to get out of this place” (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 5). The novel’s plot was closely based on that of William Faulkner’s 1931 novel Sanctuary, and it employed an approximation of the vernacular English of the American hard‐boiled writers. It was entitled No Orchids for Miss Blandish, and in 1939, Jarrolds published it in hardback under what would become Raymond’s best‐known pseudonym: James Hadley Chase.

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

No Orchids tells the story of an American heiress, kidnapped first by one gang and then by another, and subjected to rape and torture. Despite plagiarism from Faulkner, the book’s most frequently noted stylistic influence was James M. Cain, but once the setting and the faux‐American vernacular are set aside, its most striking difference from the bleak and bloodthirsty work of other British thriller writers of the 1930s is its inclu­ sion of sexual content (although that took a back seat to the male‐on‐male violence that was also the mainstay of Sapper and Wallace). No Orchids for Miss Blandish sold half a million copies during the war, achieving its greatest popularity during the Blitz. Perhaps because the authorities had more important things to do at the time, Raymond and his publishers were not prosecuted over that particular book, but his next was banned. Writing in 1944, George Orwell hoped that the success of No Orchids would prove to be “an isolated phenomenon, brought about by the mingled boredom and brutality of war” (Orwell 1954, p. 178). But it was not – and not merely in that Raymond himself would enjoy a long and successful career, with his Chase novels achieving huge popular­ ity not only in the West but also in Africa and Asia (Wakatama et al. 2007, pp. 39–40). Thirteen years after Orwell published his lament for a lost era of more gentlemanly crime writing, Richard Hoggart decried the ubiquity of a whole genre of gangster nov­ elettes characterized by savagery, sexual violence, and a “weak imitation of tough American talk” that is at its most expressive when it “immerses itself in the detail of pain” (Hoggart 1957, p. 219). These sub‐Chase thrillers were the work of what have been termed “mushroom pub­ lishers” (Holland 1993): a now largely forgotten species of small commercial outfits that sprang up, mushroom‐like, in the strange and apparently inhospitable market condi­ tions created by paper rationing. Gangster fiction was perhaps their most distinctive product because it was the genre that flirted most dangerously with libel law and as such was the one that larger publishers were least willing to take a risk on. Such publish­ ers prospered in large part because this was a time when print was a central form of entertainment, but – thanks to paper rationing – was in such terribly short supply that a shoddily manufactured booklet containing a single, hastily written short story could sell for as much as a shilling. This meant that the key determinant of a title’s moneymak­ ing ­potential was not the quality of the manuscript but the quantity of paper available for the edition. While rationing made large quantities of good paper very difficult to acquire, smaller quantities of lower‐grade paper could be got hold of with only a little ingenuity. Publishers and jobbing printers sometimes found it more profitable to sell part of their paper ration than to use it, and the ends of the reels of paper used for the rotary print­ ing of newspapers also found their way onto the market (Harbottle and Holland 1992, p. 30). A conventional publisher would have had no use for such limited and unpredict­ able sources, but entrepreneurs with no background in the book trade were able to set themselves up in business through the opportunistic acquisition of paper – not merely ­circumventing the problems created by rationing, but profiting from them, at times producing books of such miserably poor quality that they could not possibly have sold before the war. One printed children’s books on food wrapping paper and on the dis­ carded backing sheets of transfers, for example, and even single‐sided silver paper is reported to have been used when a quantity of it happened to become available (Holland 1993, p. 14). Once rationing began to be relaxed, the resulting books grew in length, with the constituent booklets side‐stapled together and bound in lurid

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full‐color covers (see Figure  11.2). The publishers who produced them frequently failed within months of starting out in business, typically due to problems with cash flow: many were so severely under‐capitalized that a single book’s failure in distribu­ tion was enough to sink the whole enterprise. But others prospered for a time, and, as we shall see, at least two were eventually able to transform themselves into conven­ tional publishing firms. The books that were published have been described as “imitation American paper­ backs” (Ashley 2005, p. 76), and three of their primary genres were quintessentially American: hard‐boiled crime fiction, Westerns, and space opera (the fourth main genre was faux‐French erotica). But they were original works rather than reprints, probably for the simple reason that rights for actual American books would have been more expensive to acquire. The publishers did not pay royalties, but purchased manuscripts at a going rate per word. That rate was pitifully low, but so were the expected standards, which made it possible for a writer to earn a decent income if he (they all appear to have been male) could work fast enough for sufficiently long hours. Frank Dubrez Fawcett, an established writer who turned to writing gangster novelettes under such names as Ben Sarto, Coolidge McCann, and Elmer Elliot Saks, spoke of “writing a book every fortnight, straight onto the typewriter without even a read‐through till I got the printer’s proofs,” by which means he was able to earn nearly as much in a single sitting as the average worker would have made in a week (quoted in Holland 1993, pp. 28, 36). The incredibly prolific Norman Firth somehow managed to publish five million words under more than a hundred pseudonyms before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, leav­ ing nearly £1500 to his wife and small daughter: a sum that, adjusting for inflation, would be worth nearly £50 000 in today’s money (Holland 1993, pp. 35–36). Very high levels of productivity were not unknown in more respectable forms of popular fiction: the now‐forgotten John Creasey, published by Hodder & Stoughton, penned a total of 560 novels, 24 of them in 1946 (Greenfield 1989, p. 9). But Firth’s health problems hint at the toll that such a punishing work rate was likely to have taken on many of those who kept the mushroom presses supplied with low‐value intellectual properties. Two inde­ pendent witnesses confirmed that a writer of gangster fiction had been kept a virtual prisoner in the cellars of Scion Ltd.: “a thin and wasted creature … said to work all day and far into the night, and kept working at weekends too” (quoted in Harbottle and Holland 1992, pp. 60–61; see also Holland 1993, p. 70). It is hardly surprising that books written under such conditions should have been for­ mulaic. But they were popular with readers who would not have read other fiction. In his contribution to what has been called the “what‐do‐the‐masses‐read genre” of social commentary (Hilliard 2014a, p. 269), Richard Hoggart provides the following sketch: What are [young, working class] men to read, apart from picture dailies, the more sensational Sunday papers, and newspapers/magazines? … One needs to look … at those “magazine shops” of which there is always one in every large working‐ class shopping‐area. Their window‐space is littered and over‐hung with paper‐ backs in varying stages of disintegration, since they operate a system of exchanges – an expensive one, usually, since paper‐backs originally costing two shillings change hands at sixpence a time. Here … there is a rough division of material into three themes – Crime, Science Fiction, and Sex novelettes. (Hoggart 1957, p. 205)

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

Figure 11.2  An early “mushroom” paperback in the gangster genre: When Dames Get Tough by Hank Janson (Ward and Hutchon, c. 1946). This 24‐page booklet – with a paper cover printed in blue, red, orange, and back – retailed for a shilling in the sellers’ market of the mid‐1940s (reproduced here in black and white). Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

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But by the time Hoggart published the above, the party was over. Practically all of the mushroom publishers to survive the 1940s had gone out of business by the middle of the next decade, due to a combination of obscenity fines, increased competition from larger and better capitalized publishers no longer held back by paper rationing, and the print­ ers’ strike of 1956. Scion, for example, was completely wiped out, even though it had been one of the largest. A tiny minority struggled on as they had, but those that did best were those best able to operate like conventional publishers. Bernard’s Publications Ltd., one of several mushroom publishers associated with members of the Assael and Babani families, still survives as the technical publisher Bernard Babani Books, just a stone’s throw from its original offices in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Founded in 1943 by Henry Assael and Joseph Pacey, Hamilton & Co. Ltd. was once an archetypal mush­ room publisher, but from 1955, the company began publishing paperback reissues of successful hardback novels under its Panther imprint. Before long, the Hamilton name was dropped, and the company became known as Panther Books Ltd. (Some sources report Panther to have been founded by two airmen on their demobilization after World War II, but that is a legend with no basis in fact.)

11.4 ­Mass‐Market Paperbacks: Reprint Publishing Comes of Age As we have seen, the approach to publishing that Penguin had adopted from Albatross  –  purchasing the rights to publish reprints of books that had done well in hardback, and printing them in large runs – was a success that could not be replicated due to wartime circumstances (at least in the United Kingdom: Pocket Books success­ fully imitated the Penguin formula in the United States from 1939). However, that would change once the war was over, as restrictions on paper were first relaxed and then com­ pletely dropped. First off the blocks was Pan Books, which was founded in 1944 as a subsidiary of the Book Society, a members‐only book club. In 1947, it was bought by Hodder & Stoughton, and by 1950, the year after rationing ended, it had already become the largest paperback publisher after Penguin. Pan’s policy was to restrict itself to a short list of heavily promoted titles: a strategy that paid off with total sales of eight million copies on a mere 150 titles in 1955. By contrast, Penguin’s list had swelled to 650 titles by the end of its first 10 years. In 1962, Pan was purchased by Macmillan and Collins, and in 1965, its sales reached 21 million – nearly a third of which were accounted for by reprint James Bond novels, all of which had first been published in hardback by Jonathan Cape (Princep 1991, p. 244). The decision to focus on the highest‐selling titles at the expense of the mid‐list would become increasingly characteristic of the industry as a whole as the twentieth century wore on, further enhancing the existing income disparity between the top sellers and the rest: in 1957, a Society of Authors survey of its members found that just 4% of respondents earned over £2500 per annum from writing, while 10 times that many earned less than a tenth as much (Greenfield 1989, p. 20). Pan’s approach worked, but intensive advertising is not the only way to reach a large market. A very different project was launched in 1945: the Penguin Classics series of translations. These were edited by E.V. Rieu, who had begun his publishing career at OUP and who produced the first translation in the series: a prose rendering of the Odyssey. The latter might have seemed an uncommercial prospect, but it sold half a

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

million copies in the 1950s in the United States alone, and the Classics series that it launched continues to be one of Penguin’s most valuable assets (MacKenzie 1991, p. 258) – although it should be noted that the series now focuses on classics of English literature rather than works of Classical literature translated into English. Such sales were possible because of the educational and academic market, in which a good reputa­ tion counts for a great deal. Indeed, the power of the Penguin reputation was such that some have regarded the company as a sort of public‐service publisher. Introducing a survey of the first two decades of Penguin Classics with a proposed remedy to the series’ perceived flaws, the formidable Classics professor Donald Carne‐Ross admitted that there would be no chance of an “American commercial publisher” acceding to his demands, but insisted that, “[f ]rom the Penguin editors, we have a right to expect some­ thing better” (Carne‐Ross 1968, p. 399). Whatever Carne‐Ross may have felt he could assume, Penguin was never an academic publisher. Its aim was to sell an affordable but respectable product to the largest possi­ ble market  –  and this it did admirably well. To commemorate the 90th birthday of George Bernard Shaw in 1946, Richard Lane hatched an unusual idea: to release a 10‐volume series of Shaw’s works as Penguin paperbacks, each with a cover price of a shilling and an initial print run of 100 000 copies (Kells 2015, p. 191). The audacious scheme was a success, and the “Shaw Million” (as it was called) sold out. Other Penguin “millions” followed, demonstrating the lucrative rewards available to the paperback publisher who could get hold of the capital and the paper. And with paper rationing over, those with the former didn’t have to wait long for the latter. Transworld Books entered the paperback market in 1951 with its Corgi imprint, in its first year releasing titles ranging from lowbrow cowboy fiction by Louis Trimble to the meditative Southern Gothic writing of Carson McCullers. Penguin’s reputation gave it such special status that a consortium of literary publish­ ers, including Chatto & Windus, Faber & Faber, and Hamish Hamilton, agreed to offer it first refusal of reprint rights for all their books from 1948 onwards. However, the Corgi Books example showed that reprint publishing on the Penguin model could also work for less conspicuously legitimate books. One of the most curious publishers to enter the market was Four Square Books, which was founded in 1957 by Godfrey Philips, a tobacco company based in East London. Godfrey Philips moved into publish­ ing because it already owned a small printing works that it used for its existing business purposes, and Four Square Books was named after one of its brands of pipe tobacco (Bradley 2008, p. 141). Notable for being one of the first publishers to advertise on tel­ evision (Bradley 2008, p. 153), Four Square was run by Gordon Lansborough, a former journalist who received his introduction to the book trade as production manager for the mushroom publisher Hamilton & Co. (Harbottle and Holland 1992, p. 46). From 1962, the former Hamilton & Co.  –  now known as Panther  –  made a deter­ mined effort to capture some of Penguin’s market share, investing heavily in reprint rights to major novels and recruiting William Miller, who had begun his career at Four Square. As managing editors of Panther, Miller and his colleague John Boothe embarked on a highly ambitious publishing program that included new British writers and renowned literary authors in translation (Peace 2009). Lansborough’s attempts to improve Hamilton’s science fiction line had been frustrated by a business model based around the publication of short manuscripts purchased for the cheapest possible fee, but the Panther Science Fiction imprint became especially influential, publishing

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everything from reprints of “golden age” North American authors such as Isaac Asimov and A.E. van Vogt to collections of the very different kind of science fiction then appear­ ing in the British New Worlds magazine (see Section 11.7). It was a similar list to that being built up by Gollancz, which by that time had also moved into reprint publishing on the Penguin model and likewise made a name for itself in science fiction. Although reading faced more competition from other media than ever before, espe­ cially with the launch of commercial television in 1955, books had never been a more popular form of entertainment or instruction, and production was once again on the rise, in terms both of the number of titles and of the total number of copies. Such high‐volume manufacture of books required the development of a new approach. Penguin was, as ever, the innovator, bringing in the brilliant modernist typographer Jan Tschichold, who had fled Germany after an arrest by the Nazi authorities and lived out most of the period of the Third Reich in Switzerland. Tschichold was appalled by the poor standards of design and typography that had until then characterized Penguin books, and, given control over book production, set to work improving mat­ ters through painstaking attention to detail and incremental revisions to the basic Penguin design. In 1947, his first year at Penguin, Tschichold produced the famous Penguin Composition Rules, which covered word spacing, indenting of paragraphs, capitalization, references and footnotes, as well as the usage and spacing of punctua­ tion marks, with special rules for the printing of poems and plays (see Tschichold 2006). These rules were necessary because Penguin’s vast output required the work of many different printing houses located throughout the United Kingdom, with more than one sometimes being employed in the production of a single title. Under such circumstances, uniformity relied upon conformity to a standard  –  but Tschichold found many British printers to be difficult to work with, being both deficient in craft skills and resistant to instruction: Things began to improve towards the end of my time there, in the summer of 1949. Probably my layouts were generally given to the same compositors, and they eventually began to understand what I wanted. … [M]y layouts had to be far more exact than would be necessary in Switzerland. I had to specify not only the amount of letter‐spacing but also the word spacing; if I did not do this, I infallibly got monstrously wide word spacing, which is for me the clearest proof of incom­ petence in the composing room. (quoted in Doubleday 2006, p. 142) The wage Tschichold demanded was immense, exceeding the combined salaries of both the surviving Lane brothers (Kells 2015, p. 198)  –  but so was the impact he achieved. By educating British compositors on the need for exactitude, Tschichold also expanded what Penguin’s competitors would be able to achieve – even as he set new standards for design with the more than 500 titles for whose appearance he was responsible during his three‐year tenure. He demanded better quality paper stock – insisting on cream colored paper, rather than the gray paper on which Penguin books had previously been printed – and brought in a new range of typefaces, most characteristically the classically inspired Monotype fonts for which we have Stanley Morison to thank (see Section 10.10). In order to standardize design, Tschichold also devised an innovative grid system, with each grid defining the visual identity of a

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

Figure 11.3  Tschichold’s grid layout for covers in the King Penguin series. From Richard Doubleday, Jan Tschichold, Designer: The Penguin Years (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press 2006). Source: By permission of Oak Knoll Press.

particular series of books by specifying their overall dimensions and page area, as well as the placement and style of lettering on the cover and spine (see Figure  11.3; Doubleday 2006, p. 35). This typified Tschichold’s approach: never planning to stay in the United Kingdom for long, he established parameters whose constraining influ­ ence would enable his successors at Penguin to produce more harmonious and – above all  –  consistent book designs than his predecessors. After Tschichold’s return to Switzerland, he was succeeded by Hans Schmoller, a fellow German who remained in post for 25 years and ensured that the traditions Tschichold had established would continue to define the Penguin style into the 1970s. Large sales were not the only way to reach a mass audience, of course. By 1949, Mills  & Boon had sold 406 473 copies of books by the prolific Mary Burchell – a fact that sounds impressive enough by itself, but which hugely understates the likely reader­ ship, given that these were long‐lasting hardback books that were overwhelmingly pur­ chased by commercial libraries (McAleer 1992, p. 111). The following year, the publisher

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launched a survey to discover the actual rate of borrowing for its books. It turned out that the average for a single copy was 165 loans, although one library in Taunton pos­ sessed a 15‐year‐old volume that had been checked out an astonishing 740 times (McAleer 1992, p. 110). But the rise of the mass‐market paperback is inextricably linked to the decline of the commercial libraries from the 1950s onwards. While many ­working‐class readers still found the public libraries unwelcoming, the price of a ­paperback was now so low that there was little need to borrow reading matter if one did not wish to, with the result that the pre‐war networks of commercial libraries began to wither away. Those commercial libraries that served a middle‐class clientele disap­ peared fastest, with W.H. Smith’s library closing in 1961, and the Boots Booklover’s Library in 1966, but some of the more down‐market outfits were able to continue trad­ ing for many years. Argosy & Sundial Libraries closed in 1962, but its national network of local agencies was broken up and taken over by smaller companies. South Country Libraries, which took over Argosy & Sundial’s operations in the south of England, man­ aged to stay in business into the 1980s, but had fewer than 150 agents left by 1978, down from 1200 in 1969 (Manley 2012, p. 355). The decline of the commercial libraries inevitably had its greatest impact on the pub­ lishers that had targeted them most intensively. Mills & Boon initially responded by attempting to diversify beyond the romance genre, purchasing educational publisher Allman’s in 1961 and taking over its list of textbooks (Schneller 1991a, p. 112). But the firm’s strength was in its brand, which commercial library patrons had long recog­ nized and sought out, and this meant that its most promising future remained in romance – provided that a substitute for the intermediary agency of the libraries could be found. Because bookshops remained largely confined to large towns, Mills & Boon elected to sell through newsagents and began issuing paperback editions of its own books in the early 1960s. By 1972, it was publishing at a monthly rate of 14 hardback and nine paperback novels, with total yearly sales of 27 million in the United Kingdom alone (Schneller 1991a, p. 112). Once bought, a great many of those copies are likely to have  circulated further. A 1968 survey of subscribers to the Mills & Boon summer ­catalogue mailing list found that 75% of respondents lent their copies to other readers; one wrote of sharing the books with two relatives and a neighbor before donating them to the residents of what she described as “a home for elderly and infirm ladies” (Mann 1969, p. 17).

11.5 ­Educational and Academic Publishing The Education Act of 1944 provided children with free and compulsory education until the age of 15. At the age of 10, children entered the final year of primary school and took an exam called the Eleven Plus, with the results determining the kind of secondary school that they would be able to attend. Although the initial intention was for a more complicated system, with provision for some children to receive a specialist technical and scientific education, the system that came into being was one in which pupils scor­ ing highly in the Eleven Plus would go to a “grammar school,” where they would study academic subjects similar to those taught in fee‐paying “public” schools (this name being an anachronism, as the schools were in fact private), while lower‐scoring pupils

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would go to a “secondary modern school,” which would prepare them for low‐skilled occupations. Grammar schools vastly increased the number of people qualified to study at university level, but even by the early 1960s, the proportion of the population receiv­ ing a university education remained very low by the standards of the developed world (Wyness 2010, p. 4). Following its acceptance of the recommendations of the Robbins Report in 1963, the government committed itself to the expansion of the university system, both by building new universities and by reclassifying certain kinds of colleges as universities. The universities created were (and would for many years remain) entirely state‐ funded, and they had a dramatic effect on the book trade, both in terms of their imme­ diate need for books and in terms of their probable long‐term impact on the market for fiction and general interest books: it has been observed that “the typical book buyer is a graduate professional with an income significantly in excess of the national average” (Feather 2006, p. 208), and the expansion of the educational system served to expand the number of such people in the United Kingdom. The secondary school market was effectively a new one. While the handful of private schools that pre‐dated the war were still in existence, there were thousands of new sec­ ondary schools. Textbooks were not subject to the Net Books Agreement, so a network of specialist suppliers bought them at a discount from the cover price and sold them onward in class‐sized sets (Rix 2008, p. 174). In the period covered by this chapter, the market was served by about 40 publishers, most of them small outfits, but among them large publishers such as Heinemann, Longman, Macmillan, and the ancient university presses. These publishers commissioned books after consulting with teachers via edu­ cational representatives, and benefited from steady sales, with some titles selling in unaltered form for two decades or more (Rix 2008, pp. 174–175). Despite the conserva­ tism this implies, there was also notable innovation. For example, Jonathan Cape entered the educational market with the Jackdaw series of reproduction historical docu­ ments in dossier form, bringing secondary school history learning closer to the work of professional historians. The first Jackdaw, The Battle of Trafalgar, was published in 1963, and over a hundred such titles were eventually produced (de Bellaigue 2004, p. 135). This boom in the home market was paralleled by huge growth in the equivalent markets within former British colonies  –  a phenomenon discussed in greater depth in Section 11.6. The new universities too required textbooks, and these represented a particular opportunity both for the established university presses and for a new breed of reprint publishers (see Section  11.10). Moreover, the US higher education system was also expanding, and the four million American students enrolled in 1960 provided a lucra­ tive export market for British publishers able to supply them with good quality paper­ back editions of standard texts (Sutcliffe 1978, pp. 272–273). From 1959, Cambridge University Press innovated by reprinting its own titles in paperback, using the same sheets as the hardback edition in cheaper bindings; such “trade paperbacks” became a staple of educational publishing (Feather 2006, p. 179). And as well as textbooks, the new universities also required staff – especially full‐time academic staff able to spend some of their time carrying out and writing up research whose documentation would require publication. This led to an expansion in the production both of learned journals and of various genres of scholarly books, including conference proceedings, edited

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c­ ollections of essays, and monographs: book‐length essays presenting new research on specialized topics. The communication of ideas is only one of the monograph’s ­functions; indeed, it is arguably secondary to its role in organizing, credentialing, and preserving knowledge in order that it can be built upon in the future. For this reason, the market for the typical monograph is small, consisting of the libraries of universities and other research institutions, where only a few titles will be consulted more than occasionally. Over time, monograph publishers developed a distinct publishing model, revolving around small print runs, high cover prices, long backlists, and direct market­ ing to research libraries. The boom in scholarly journals had a paradoxical consequence in launching the career of one of the twentieth century’s most unprincipled publishing magnates. Robert Maxwell (born Ján Hoch) fled his native Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation, which saw his mother, father, grandfather, and three of his siblings all murdered at Auschwitz (DNB). He spent most of the war in the British army, where he was promoted to captain and decorated for exemplary courage in active service. After the war, he set up in business importing German newspapers, but soon recognized that there was more money to be made from scientific publications, and became the international dis­ tributor of the German academic publisher Springer Verlag before it entered into part­ nership with the long‐established British firm of Butterworth. In 1951, Maxwell purchased the newly formed company of Butterworth‐Springer, re‐named it Pergamon Press, and used his contacts in the Communist Bloc to become a near‐monopolistic publisher of East European and Soviet scientific journals with high demand in the West (Feather 2006, p. 204). To these, Maxwell added hundreds of new periodicals in the fields of science, technology, and medicine, and thus – despite a richly deserved reputa­ tion for shady business practices, reckless extravagance, and domineering behav­ ior – played a major role in the international communication of scientific knowledge. His destruction of the post‐war Simpkin, Marshall wholesale firm has already been noted (see Section 11.1). Maxwell stood as a candidate for the Labour Party and was elected to Parliament in 1965, but was repeatedly investigated by the authorities, and, after his unexplained death in 1991, was found to have stolen nearly half a billion pounds from his own employees’ pension funds. The story of his dealings in the publishing business will be taken up in Chapter 12. At the same time that publishing for a strictly scholarly market was booming, edu­ cated readers outside the university system were kept up to date with modern knowl­ edge by a separate industry producing popular publications on science, the humanities, and the arts. The Penguin “Modern Painters” series, edited by art historian and National Gallery director Kenneth Clark and founded during the war, provided a generation of British artists with their first exposure to modernism (Joicey 1993, p. 51). History Today was launched in 1951 under the editorship of the biographer Peter Quennell and the historian Alan Hodge; from the outset the magazine was characterized by authoritative but accessible essays commissioned from experts, and it continues to reach a wide audi­ ence in the twenty‐first century. The New Scientist, a magazine resembling the far older US periodicals Popular Science and Scientific American in its aim to explain scientific discoveries to a general audience, was launched in 1956 under the editorship of Percy Cudlipp, brother of the aforementioned Hugh and Reginald, and previously the editor of the Evening Standard and Daily Herald. It continues today under the slightly differ­ ent title of New Scientist.

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11.6 ­Decolonization, the Export Market, and the Origins of Postcolonial Literature British publishers continued to do a great deal of business with the colonies: Penguin’s Australian branch sold three‐quarters of a million books per year in the mid‐1950s (MacKenzie 1991, p. 258), and every week, the rebuilt Simpkin, Marshall would dis­ patch 400 bags, each containing up to 66 pounds of books, on the passenger liner to Durban (Bradley 2008, p. 9). After Simpkin, Marshall’s collapse, its export business was taken over by W.H. Smith. While trade books were sold in huge quantities, the mainstay of the export market was educational publishing. In the 1940s, this simply meant the supply of British textbooks to British colonies, but that arrangement could not survive the decolonization of sub‐Saharan Africa, which was both demanded by African nationalists and promoted as a key policy of the Macmillan government. In response to or anticipation of the decolonization process, British publishers began producing titles specifically tailored to the requirements of these new markets. They had long had to do this for the Indian market, because India had many indigenous publishing companies with which British imports had been forced to compete even before the 1947 declaration of independence. But it was different when Ghana became the first nation in sub‐Saharan Africa to declare its independence from European rule, 10 years after India, or when Nigeria became independent in 1960. The newly independent African nations had newly independent educational systems, with newly independent priorities. This meant that books had to be created especially for them. But the publishing industries of those nations were generally undeveloped, and examinations boards and ministries of education in both East and West Africa tended to be managed by expatriates from the former colonial powers, which resulted in a preference for British and French textbooks, and for textbooks written by expatriate British and French teachers (Davis 2005, p. 230). In South Africa, the market repre­ sented by “white” schools was served by South African publishers, but a separate mar­ ket for textbooks aimed at “black” schools was created first by the introduction of mother tongue education for children of African descent in 1937 and then by the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which provided British publishers such as Longmans with sales for decades to come (Davis 2015, pp. 136–138). From 1947, publishers targeting former British colonies enjoyed the protection of the British Commonwealth Market Agreement, which stipulated that the holder of a text’s UK rights was also the holder of the text’s rights throughout the entire Commonwealth. This state of affairs generated a substantial market for a handful of British publishers, especially OUP, Heinemann, Macmillan, Longman, and Evans (Davis 2005, p. 230). Evans only entered the African market after World War II, but swiftly established a base in Nigeria, where it was able to exploit the country’s rapidly expanding education sys­ tem, funded by newfound oil wealth. Joop Berkhout, the company’s manager from 1966, later left to found Spectrum Books, an independent, Ibadan‐based publisher that has produced everything from novels to roadmaps, as well as the ubiquitous schoolbooks. Macmillan sought a partnership with the Ghanaian government that would have seen it take control of the entire textbook market in that country, and benefited from the advo­ cacy of Harold Macmillan, who would, a competitor at Longman alleged, “tend to have a word with the minister of education in favour of Macmillan” when visiting African

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nations in his capacity as British Prime Minister (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 43). The importance of such deals was immense: by 1957, overseas sales accounted for more than half of Longman’s educational publishing business, for example (Davis 2015, p. 135). At the same time, indigenous writers were coming to be recognized as a source of texts for British publishers. One of the first such to achieve lasting fame was Amos Tutuola. Following an introduction by Jocelyn Oliver of the missionary publishing house Lutterworth Press (which had rejected the handwritten manuscript), Faber & Faber agreed to publish Tutuola’s first and still most frequently read work, The Palm‐ Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm‐Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town, as an ethnological artifact based on Yoruba folktales (Lindfors 1982). The title itself bears witness to the book’s treatment as an exotic curiosity: in the manuscript, the main character is referred to both as a “drinker” and as a “drinkard,” with the regularization of the Standard English former to the non‐standard latter apparently being made on the insistence of Geoffrey Faber himself (Low 2011, pp. 11–12). It was arguably the beginning of “postcolonial” literature as a product of the British publishing industries. However, the way would be  led by those who had the largest pre‐existing stake in the African book market: the educational publishers. Both OUP and Heinemann Educational Books launched series of literary African writing in 1962. These endeavors must be understood in the context of the two compa­ nies’ interest in the lucrative African textbooks market and of the growing power of nationalist and anti‐colonial movements across Africa. Indeed, they can be seen as an accommodation to that changing political reality. OUP editor Rex Collings (formerly an editor at Penguin) employed the following argument in overcoming his manager’s opposition to his wish to publish a volume of Wole Soyinka’s plays: I am convinced also that there is still a place for us in African publishing if we can plainly show that we are not in fact only interested in selling enormous quantities of primary school books by expatriate authors. This is quite commonly felt and believed although it is not altogether true in fact. Politically, therefore, it is also important that we should publish [Soyinka’s book]. If we don’t, I think we will have missed the bus. (quoted in Davis 2005, p. 227) By 1963, OUP had branches in South Africa, Nigeria, and East Africa (the latter being headquartered in Kenya) that did not merely act as distributors, but commissioned and published titles in their own right, for sale both within and beyond the borders of the nations in which they were based. Further branches were opened across Africa in the 1960s. The South African branch published in Afrikaans and indigenous languages as well as in English, but most branches concentrated on English‐language books. Everywhere, the focus was on the schools market, which underwent exponential growth as millions of African children entered into the educational system for the first time. OUP increasingly depended on the overseas market, which accounted for most of its sales: in 1967, 75% of sales were outside Britain, with most of that figure being accounted for by exports rather than titles published by overseas branches (Sutcliffe 1978, pp. 268, 281). As Rex Colling’s comments suggest, it was in defense of the lucrative textbook‐­ publishing business that OUP was persuaded to enter into the business of publishing literary African authors, defending the press against anti‐colonialist critique by giving it

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a reputation for disinterested promotion of African culture even though “in actuality [its] investment in African literature was insignificant in comparison with the considerable profits obtained from the African educational market” (Davis 2005, pp. 228, 232, 242). The result was that OUP’s Three Crowns series, in which Soyinka’s plays appeared, became primarily identified as an imprint publishing works of drama by African authors. Its main competitor was the African Writers Series published by Heinemann Educational Books, which engaged the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe as editorial adviser in a move calculated to structure the imprint in opposition to the naive mytho­ logical writing represented by Tutuola (Low 2011, p. 3). This series was marketed to African schools, and imitated the orange‐jacketed design of Penguin’s general fiction list (Fraser 2008b, p. 183). It was launched in 1962, and for the next 30 years, it brought African writers to primarily African readers, making 80% of its sales in Africa (Bejjit 2015, p. 224). But like Three Crowns, the African Writers Series also served a public relations purpose that benefited its publisher’s more profitable line in textbooks. As  James Currey, editorial director of Heinemann Educational Books from 1967 to 1984, put it, the African Writers Series became, partly accidentally, an exploitative part of Heinemann’s strategy in Africa. Again and again, it gave Heinemann a presence which seemed far greater than the real size and strength of the firm. It was a key factor in enabling Heinemann to seize educational contracts from under the noses of established companies with a far longer presence than upstart Heinemann. (quoted in Davis 2005, p. 234) It therefore seems ironic that Three Crowns and the African Writers Series served as a platform for writers highly critical of British colonialism, including both Soyinka and Achebe – although individual editors and readers such as Collings may well have had a noncommercial commitment to the writers’ work and used apparently commercial arguments only in order to justify the publication of potentially unprofitable books (Low 2011, pp. 35–36). Similar ambiguities would come to surround the Booker Prize, which was launched in 1968 and would become one of the most important forces in shaping and marketing what would be understood as postcolonial literature. It will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 12.

11.7 ­Newspapers, Comics, and Magazines Just as newspaper publishing earlier in the century had been dominated by Viscount Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere, newspaper and periodical publishing came to be dominated by their nephew, Cecil Harmsworth King. A Rothermere protégé, he became director of the Daily Mirror in 1929 and chairman of the Mirror Group in 1951. The latter owned not only the Mirror and its sister publication, the Sunday Pictorial, but also a huge chain of local newspapers. Through the group’s purchase of Northcliffe’s old Amalgamated Press in 1959, King unified the former holdings of both press barons (with a few exceptions, notably the Mail and Times newspapers) and formed a new company, named Fleetway Publications Ltd. The same year, Odhams Press acquired rival publishers the Hulton Press and George Newnes; Odhams was purchased by

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Fleetway in 1961, and in 1963, all these companies became subsidiaries of the newly formed International Publishing Corporation (IPC). This was an unprecedented level of consolidation in the industry, and could have had far‐reaching political consequences had King exercised more caution in the pursuit of his ambitions: while the Daily Herald, published by Odhams, had fallen in circulation, the Mirror – remodeled as an American‐ style tabloid  –  was the most popular newspaper of the day, and now both of these national newspapers (along with literally hundreds of magazines and local newspapers) belonged to a single company. In 1964, the monopoly became still  more entrenched when IPC acquired the Trades Union Council’s 49% stake in the Daily Herald (defeating Robert Maxwell’s attempted purchase) and rebranded that newspaper as the Sun. That was the year that saw Alec Douglas‐Home’s short‐lived Conservative govern­ ment replaced by a Labour government with Harold Wilson at its head (and Robert Maxwell on the benches). Having supported the Labour Party since 1945, King expected to be made a hereditary viscount like his late Conservative‐supporting uncle, so, when he was merely offered a life peerage, he began plotting against Wilson, in 1968 attempting to instigate a military coup. After Earl Mountbatten refused to take part in this treasonous plot, King decided to use the influence of the Mirror to unseat the Prime Minister. Hugh Cudlipp, who had returned to the Mirror on demobilization and edited it ever since, shrewdly persuaded King to do this not through an editorial, but through a signed letter to be published on the front page (see entry for Cudlipp in DNB). This left no doubt as to who held responsibility. The epistle declared “enough is enough,” attacking Wilson and demanding his overthrow by unspecified means (King 1968, p. 1); it appeared on May 10, as French students and workers rose on the streets of Paris. Despite the Mirror’s huge circulation, which had peaked at over five million the previ­ ous year, the only coup that resulted was against King himself: at the end of the month, IPC’s outraged board dismissed him for damaging the company’s interests, and replaced him with Cudlipp. It was the end of King’s career, both at the Bank of England, of which he had recently been made a director, and as a publisher (although he continued to write for the Times). The IPC’s various holdings were reorganized that year, and some – includ­ ing the rebranded Sun – were sold. The latter was bought by the Australian newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch, as was the (until then) entirely separate Sunday newspaper, News of the World, after Maxwell’s interest in both titles was rebuffed. While the Daily Mirror’s circulation declined, it was still by far the most popular daily newspaper at the end of the decade; the News of the World’s circulation had declined from a highpoint of eight million in the mid‐1950s, but it remained more popular overall, with a circulation of about six million throughout the 1960s. It was as the sister paper of the latter that the Sun would eventually become Britain’s most popular daily. In addition to a continued rise in newspaper readership, the period covered by this chapter saw the emergence of the British comic book industry. Publications devoted solely or primarily to cartoon strips had first appeared in America in the early 1930s, and by the end of that decade, D.C. Thomson had launched its own versions, in the form of the Dandy Comic and the Beano: humorous weekly publications for children, generally featuring full‐color front pages and two‐color or single‐color printing within. The two comics came to be characterized by slapstick humor and a range of strips, each with its own cast of characters, most famously Korky the Cat (star of the Dandy) and schoolboy bully Dennis the Menace (star of the Beano). They quickly established a

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visual style that would survive virtually unchanged for years to come, despite its increas­ ing anachronism: a 1971 survey found the Beano and Dandy each to be read by 38% of boys and at least 30% of girls aged 10–11 (Whitehead et al. 1975, p. 14), and the Beano is still ­published today. However, American publishers had also learnt to cater to an older audience with detective comics that told dramatic and violent stories. During the war, an audience for these took shape in the United Kingdom, served in the first instance by American imports. After the cessation of hostilities, an import ban was imposed on periodicals to preserve the country’s balance of payments, which prompted British publishers to print their own editions of American action and adven­ ture comics. It was several years before a genuinely British competitor was launched in the shape of the Eagle. This was the brainchild of a Church of England priest named Marcus Morris, who wanted to create a respectable alternative to the existing comics of the day (Chapman 2008, p. 56). While Morris’s first idea was for a purely religious comic, he wisely settled for a publication dominated by secular content, including feature journalism and the long‐running science fiction serial Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. This was created by Frank Hampson, an artist who had worked with Morris on his ambitious but loss‐mak­ ing parish magazine, The Anvil. As the comic’s lead strip, Dan Dare became the defin­ ing feature of its visual identity. The Eagle was launched by Hulton Press in April 1950 at a cover price of 3d, and reportedly sold 900 000 copies of its first issue, eventually reaching a peak circulation of over a million and even being exported to the United States. The production and licensing of spinoff goods had provided an important source of income since the early twentieth century for the creators of popular fictional works, and an extensive range of Eagle merchandise was sold, including Dan Dare clothing, footwear, board games, furnishing fabric, jigsaws, sweets, toy guns, and a reusable, gas‐ powered firework modeled on one of Dare’s spaceships (Tatarsky 2010, p. 187). Just as the Religious Tract Society had released magazines targeted at boys and at girls, Morris realized that there was a potential market for a female‐orientated children’s comic and, in 1951, launched Girl. The success of the latter was initially limited by a too‐direct attempt to translate Eagle for a feminine audience, casting female characters rather than males as pilots etc., but it swiftly adapted by pioneering the girls’ boarding school story genre with its Wendy and Jinx strip (see Figure 11.4). Faced with declining sales for its pre‐war boys’ story papers thanks to competition from comics that targeted a young male readership, D.C. Thomson & Co. also moved into the girls’ comics market, launch­ ing Bunty in 1958 (McAleer 1992, p. 169). This comic featured its own girls’ boarding school serial, The Four Marys, and ran for 43 years. In 1971, it was read by nearly 29% of girls aged 12–13 (Whitehead et al. 1975, p. 15). Morris’s success with children’s comics led to a brilliant career in women’s magazines. A notorious flirt despite his holy orders, he evidently understood the target market well, and became managing editor of Hulton’s Housewife magazine in 1954, in 1972 launch­ ing the UK edition of Cosmopolitan at the National Magazine Company. These maga­ zines competed in a highly active market where the most successful titles were IPC’s Woman & Home and the American Family Circle: monthlies of incredible longevity, founded in the 1920s and still published today. The 1960s also saw developments in the publishing of magazines for men, which took advantage of a censorship regime that no longer judged all publications by reference to

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Figure 11.4  From “Kitty Hawke and her All‐Girl Air Crew” (Girl November 16, 1951) to “Wendy and Jinx” (Girl November, 19 1952). Source: Reproduced by permission of Time Inc.

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

the presumed effect that they might have on children (see Section 11.9). In 1965, Fisk Publishing launched Mayfair as a rival to the American Playboy, which had been launched over a decade earlier and was imported into the United Kingdom. Like Playboy, Mayfair initially had some intellectual ambitions and published general inter­ est features and short stories, including works by beat author William S. Burroughs (Skerl 2013, p. 120). Over time, however, it came to focus almost exclusively on porno­ graphic content – as did its older British competitor, Men Only, which had begun as a general interest magazine for a male audience. None of the men’s magazines achieved more than a fraction of the readership of the top women’s monthlies, and the most popular magazines of all were the Radio Times and its ITV equivalent, the TV Times, each of which achieved a circulation not far behind that of the mass‐market Sunday papers in the late 1960s (JICNARS 1969, table 2). Story papers aimed at an adult female audience remained immensely important pub­ lishers of a kind of fiction that has mostly escaped critical attention. Some D.C. Thomson titles even increased in circulation between the 1930s and the 1940s, with the estimated readership of both the working‐class‐oriented Red Letter and the Scottish‐oriented People’s Friend being around a million in 1947 (McAleer 1992, p. 173). Over time, ­however, they lost market share to competitors imported from the United States, with the most popular story magazines at the end of the 1960s being the Macfadden titles True Story and True Romances, each of which was estimated to be read by more than 1 in 10 British women (JICNARS 1969, table 5). Attempts to replicate the success of American science fiction magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction, which had had a UK reprint edition since 1939, were less commercially successful, but arguably had more long‐term influence on the develop­ ment of British writing. The first and the most important of these, New Worlds, was published between 1946 and 1947 by Pendulum, a mushroom publisher run by Stephen Frances, a former office worker and freelance journalist (Holland 1993, p. 125). The magazine sold up to 15 000 copies per issue, but it ceased publication when Pendulum’s buyer went bust (Harbottle and Holland 1992, p. 27). It was revived in 1949 by a group of fans who founded the company of Nova Publications for the purpose. New Worlds was the most successful magazine of its type, but its cultural impact was minimal until the arrival in 1963 of Michael Moorcock, who had already proved his abilities as the editor of Tarzan Adventures, which he took over in 1957 at the age of 16. Moorcock effectively transformed the magazine from a British imitation of Astounding, for the most part featuring authors whose models were on the other side of the Atlantic, to a uniquely British product, built around an uncompromising vision expressed not only through editorial choices but through pseudonymous book reviews in which Moorcock excoriated writers he considered to be insufficiently ambitious. Pulp science fiction, like most light fiction aimed at a masculine audience, had been characterized by what the writer E.C. Tubb described as “[f ]ast moving adventure stories against ­colourful backgrounds” (quoted in Holland 1993, p. 74). Moorcock wanted complex, contemplative, emotionally unsettling narratives, largely shorn of the genre’s traditional trappings – an ideal typified by his own bizarre Jerry Cornelius novels, as well as by the works of J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss. Aldiss had been a contributor to the magazine before Moorcock’s arrival, but was an unconventional science fiction writer with the ability to write beyond the genre; his first novel, The Brightfount Diaries, was a series of witty sketches of life in the book trade,

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serialized by The Bookseller and collected by that most highbrow of publishers, Faber & Faber in 1955. Ballard was even more radically divorced from the science fiction of recent decades, and his debut, The Drowned World – a visionary tale of psychological disintegration during a climate‐change apocalypse – had been published by Gollancz in 1962. This was the “New Wave” of science fiction, and it returned British science fiction to an international prominence it had not held since the time of H.G. Wells. However, such writing was not to the taste of some of the magazine’s readers, whom one of Moorcock’s editorials arrogantly castigated as “people who read very little fiction other than science fiction and are [therefore] unable to form true standards” (quoted in Latham 2005, p. 206). By refusing to accommodate to the expectations of the science fiction audience that existed at the time, Moorcock was making a bid for what Pierre Bourdieu has called “autonomy,” replicating the early‐nineteenth‐century process by which the world of Parisian letters “isolated itself in an aura of indifference and rejection towards the buy­ ing and reading public,” and sought the “power to define its own criteria for the produc­ tion and evaluation of its products” (Bourdieu 1993a, p. 115). But he was also putting the magazine’s circulation in jeopardy – and, unfortunately, it still needed to be financed somehow. Thanks to an application from Aldiss, New Worlds secured a subvention from the Arts Council, and, far from treating the magazine as a source of income, Moorcock reputedly came to subsidize it with his own earnings as a novelist, increasing his own rate of production whenever necessary – and, in the process, turning out some decidedly pulpy sword‐and‐sorcery novels that one feels would have been unlikely to impress him as a critic. While W.E. Williams had tried to tell the masses what to read, Moorcock – and, presumably, the post‐Williams Arts Council – believed that certain kinds of literary writing should be published regardless of how many people could be induced to read them. As the following section will show, this attitude had considerable traction at the time, and provided moral justification for a business practice that might otherwise have been judged illegal.

11.8 ­The Net Book Agreement and the Public Interest In essence, the Net Book Agreement (see Section 9.4) was a price fixing agreement between commercial entities – one of thousands of such agreements that existed in the first half of the twentieth century. Today, we may feel inclined to view it as some­ how different from the others, but its difference was not obvious at the time. All such agreements were founded on the understanding that full competition on retail prices tends to drive down the total amount of money that can be collected from the public. If one retailer can undercut others without trading at a loss, the short‐term result will be commercial advantage for that particular retailer, but the long‐term result is likely to be disadvantage for the industry as a whole, as other retailers will be forced to adjust their prices downwards to match. On the flipside, this is usually considered to benefit the buying public, which becomes able to acquire goods and services at a lower cost to itself. From the end of World War II, both Labour and Conservative governments took action to promote competition on price, and to this end passed Restrictive Practices Acts in 1948, 1953, and 1956. It was the third of these that proved decisive. The Restrictive Trade Practices Act of 1956 declared collective resale price maintenance

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agreements to be illegal unless they could be proved to be in the public interest (Dennison 1959, p. 66). To establish whether particular agreements were against the public interest, it also created the Restrictive Practices Court, which began operating in 1958. A register of restrictive practices was compiled, and  –  because such practices were now considered illegal by default – without a decision to the contrary by the Court, inclusion on this register effectively spelled the end of an agreement. The first case to be heard was that of the Chemists’ Federation’s Agreement, which prevented anyone but a qualified pharmacist from selling products such as aspirin and cod‐liver oil (Dennison 1959, p. 69). The Federation argued that the agreement was necessary in order to protect the public from injury  –  an argument that the Court rejected. The next four cases to be heard related to cotton yarn, blankets, bread, and water‐tube boilers, and in no case were the agreements in question proved to provide “‘specific and substantial’ benefits to consumers,” with the result that all were found to be against the public interest and confirmed in their illegality (Dennison 1959, p. 70). It was clear that most of the thousands of restrictive practices on the register were going to have to be abandoned, and it seemed very likely that the Net Book Agreement would be among them  –  unless it could be established that there was something different about books and the book trade. What might be different? This question gets to the heart of the book industry at the time. Because publishers have to keep turning out new books in order to survive, but cannot know in advance which of those texts will be the biggest sellers, there are limits to their ability to narrow the product range. They therefore have a shared interest in ensuring the continued existence of retailers who stock a wide range of titles, and in preventing those retailers from being driven out of business by competitors who reduce costs by stocking only the fastest‐selling titles. As explained in Section 9.3, publishers protected this interest by giving discounts only to those retailers who refused to under­ cut their competitors. The aim was not so much to preserve the price of all books as to preserve the price of the minority of books that enabled both publishers and booksellers to stay in business despite producing and stocking large numbers of less profitable texts. Today, the received wisdom is that price fixing agreements are counterproductive, because they perpetuate commercially inefficient behaviors such as those just described. But there is arguably a cultural and intellectual need to preserve a diversity of texts in circulation: if all books but the bestsellers disappeared, then we would be impoverished in a way that we would not if, for example, we lost all detergents but the leading brands (not to mention that the need to produce new bestsellers requires experimentation and therefore a tolerance for failure). The inefficiency of publishing and bookselling could therefore perhaps be seen as intrinsic to their cultural value, and a case could be made for this restrictive practice that could not be made for others: by enabling the manufac­ turers and vendors of books to avoid streamlining their businesses, it permitted them to continue operating on the basis of what John Sutherland calls “the trade wisdom that bestsellers pay for art” (Sutherland 1978, p. xii). In some cases, of course, the boundaries between the two categories were unclear: Stanley Unwin apparently published J.R.R. Tolkien’s three‐volume epic The Lord of the Rings on the basis of his son Rayner’s opin­ ion that it was a great work of literature that would probably make a financial loss (Unwin 1960, pp. 300–301). But there is no question that publishers had a range of priorities besides profit – and that this could have economic as well as cultural benefits (as with The Lord of the Rings, about whose sales potential Rayner Unwin could not have been more wrong; see Section 12.3).

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In 1962, the Publishers Association voted to defend the Net Book Agreement. Witnesses for the defense argued that the Agreement was necessary to protect smaller publishers and that half the members of the Publishers Association would suffer losses without it (Greenfield 1989, p. 240). Ian Parsons of Chatto & Windus testified to the noncommercial nature of much publishing at the time: “I like publishing poetry and I do not mind losing money on it,” he told the court (quoted in de Bellaigue 2004, p. 133). A company’s overall publishing program had to make money – as Chatto & Windus’s did – or it could not continue, and the Net Book Agreement helped to ensure the compatibility of that goal with the knowing publication of books that were likely to make a loss. The defense of the Net Book Agreement prevailed because it was considered to be in the public interest for certain kinds of books to be published even if they stood little chance of making a profit, and because it was accepted that the most practical way of facilitating such publication was through cross‐subsidies from high‐selling books whose prices were maintained through collusion. That such kinds of books were unprofitable precisely because the public did not really want them was beside the point – or at least, beside the point as it was then understood. The publishing of unpopular books could be seen as a sort of public service, and if it were to be carried out by profit‐making compa­ nies, then those companies could be allowed a little latitude in their commercial ­dealings in order to protect the profits on which they (and therefore the art of letters) were forced to depend.

11.9 ­The End of Obscene Libel Perhaps the most important cultural shift in the period came in regard to censorship, which first intensified and then (in the absence of public support) largely fell away. In 1950, Sir Theobald Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions, refused to support action against the Penguin edition of Ulysses on the grounds that, when considered as a whole, it was evidently “not … pornographic in the ordinary sense that it was written with the intention of attracting readers to whom such publications have an appeal,” being instead “a vast experiment in all the possibilities, and impossibilities, of the use of English prose” (quoted in Bradshaw 2013, p. 143). But 1951 saw a return to power for Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party, which meant a resumption of the state’s interest in questions of morality. This included the persecution of gays and lesbians (who were purged from govern­ ment jobs and routinely imprisoned for the offense of “gross indecency”) and a drive to prosecute the authors, publishers, distributors, and vendors of “obscene” books. The legal authorities were specifically empowered to destroy such books under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, and, under common law, “obscenity” had been defined for nearly a century in terms of a vaguely conceived propensity to “deprave and corrupt.” The 1868 case Regina v. Hicklin had established a precedent for interpreting this sup­ posed propensity in relation to the most vulnerable audience possible, for example an audience of children. This practice became known as the “Hicklin Test”: if it was con­ sidered that a book might deprave and corrupt a child, then it was pronounced obscene. Acceptance of this test was far from universal. When the undersecretary of state, the director of public prosecutions, and the attorney general had met to decide on their response to the Bodley Head edition of Ulysses in 1936, the attorney general had rejected

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the Hicklin Test as “inadequate,” and a decision had therefore been made to take no action (Birmingham 2014, p. 336). But despite such apparent progress, the early 1950s effectively saw a return of the Hicklin Test as the basis on which the authorities waged their war against “dirty books,” and 1953–1954 appears to have been a high‐water mark in the history of obscene libel. There were more prosecutions for obscenity, and more destructions of supposedly obscene books, photographs, and postcards, than at any time before or since, with the Hicklin Test being applied so stringently that one magis­ trates’ court even ordered the destruction of the Decameron – although this action was halted on appeal (Bradshaw 2013, p. 146). Given that many of the offending books were  incinerated, it seems appropriate that Ray Bradbury’s anti‐censorship novel Fahrenheit 451 should have been published in 1953, for all that its immediate context was McCarthyism and the persecution not of alleged pornographers but of suspected communists. The mushroom publishers and their gangster novelettes were a major target of the censors. It should be emphasized that the problem the authorities had with these books was not the brutality that had distressed Orwell in the works of James Hadley Chase and Hoggart in those of the latter’s imitators, but the mere fact of sexual content. The crime with which publishers and authors of gangster novelettes were charged was not, in other words, the sadistic representation of non‐consensual sex, but the representation of any kind of sex at all, in any manner whatsoever. This is particularly important to remember when considering the most prominent obscenity case of the early 1950s, which concerned what appear to have been among the least objectionable works of gangster fiction to be published by the mushroom presses: the novels of Stephen Frances, the aforementioned first publisher of New Worlds. Frances wrote under the pseudonym of Hank Janson, telling stories from the perspec­ tive of a reporter rather than that of a detective or a crook. Like other mushroom paper­ backs in the gangster genre, Janson’s works represented relations between men and women – and, for that matter, between women and women, and men and men – in a crude, animalistic way. But they implied the sexual act rather than describing it, their eroticism relying instead upon frequently euphemistic references to female body parts and states of undress. That such references were objectifying and often made in the context of very violent scenes might strike the thoughtful reader as problematic, but this was not what troubled the authorities of the day: the issue was simply that sexual feelings might be evoked in the reader, and not that there was something especially bad about how the writer had gone about evoking them. In November 1953, Frances’s pub­ lisher, Reginald Carter, and his distributor, Julius Reiter, were jointly charged with obscene libel in relation to seven specific Janson novels. Carter and Reiter were among the most influential people in the underworld of post‐war popular publishing, and their prosecution cannot have been unexpected, although they had been attempting to act within the law: Reiter in particular had repeatedly sought advice from the police on whether particular works were obscene, but had never received a definitive answer (Hilliard 2013, p. 670). In court, the defense argued that the books should not be considered obscene, given other books that were legally on sale at the time, but the judge insisted that the defini­ tion of obscenity was not subject to change, and instructed the jury to find the defend­ ants guilty (Holland 1993, pp. 139–150). Moreover, the lord chief justice saw to it that prosecutions were subsequently brought against the people responsible for five of the

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comparator books that Reiter and Carter’s defense had produced as evidence of changed standards (Craig 1961, p. 239). Reiter and Carter were sentenced to six months’ impris­ onment and fined a total of £4000, with hundreds of thousands of books in their posses­ sion being impounded and destroyed. While Frances’s case never reached court due to confusion over the authorship of his works, it was the end of what had been a short but highly successful writing career – although, thanks to the unscrupulous Carter’s owner­ ship of the pseudonym, novels attributed to “Hank Janson” would continue to appear for many years. Many other mushroom publishers were also brought down at about the same time. Scion, one of the largest, was for example destroyed by a succession of fines levied in 1952 and 1954, with what remained being sold to the printers, Dragon Press (Holland 1993, p. 166). As for the five books brought to the attention of the authorities by Reiter and Carter’s defense, their authors and publishers faced a mixed fate once cases were brought in 1954. In the trial of Hutchinson & Co. over the publication of Vivian Connell’s September in Quinze (1952), Sir Gerald Dodson instructed the jurors that their estimation of the book’s tendency to deprave and corrupt “should be applied [by reference] to the most vulnerable person who might conceivably encounter the material” (Fenwick 2009, p. 469). Unsurprisingly, given this uncompromising application of the Hicklin Test, the publisher was found guilty  –  as were Werner Laurie Ltd. and Kathryn Dyson Taylor (writing as Margot Bland) over Julia (1952). But things did not always go the censors’ way. Heinemann Ltd. and Walter Baxter were acquitted after two juries disagreed over The Image and the Search (1953), Arthur Baker was acquitted over Hugh Patrick McGraw’s The Man in Control (1953), and Martin Secker & Warburg were acquitted over Stanley Kauffman’s The Philanderer (1953) in an influential judgment that will be discussed in more detail later in this section. Still more dramatic measures were taken against imports and reprints of American hor­ ror comics such as The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and Tales from the Crypt. These were the best known titles, and were produced by the genre’s pioneer, EC Comics, publisher of the enduring MAD Magazine. These comics are often remembered as quite bestial publications, as in Marcus Morris’s understanding of them as “produced for American servicemen of limited intelligence” and characterized by “pictures of savage sexual assaults on busty women” (DNB). But while the stories the comics told were often gruesome, they depicted neither sex nor sexual violence, and as such would not have led to successful prosecutions for obscene libel. Moreover, they were far from stupid, with the EC Comics titles frequently featuring intelligent satirical material (some of it authored by no lesser a writer than the aforementioned Ray Bradbury). The attack on these comics was initially driven by the Comics Campaign Council – which was, as Martin Barker has discovered, a front organization for the British Communist Party. Official Communist International policy of the day (dictated by the Kremlin) was to promote seemingly broad‐based national anti‐American causes, and in the United Kingdom, the result was the creation of “pseudo‐radical myths about the dangerous power of American comics” and the promulgation of those myths “as a sub­ stitute for recognisable class politics” (Barker 1992, pp. 170–171). With perhaps unknowing echoes of nineteenth‐century moral panics over “penny numbers” (see Section 8.2), these “myths” involved an assertion that comic reading was somehow to blame for a supposed rise in criminality among children and young people. The National Union of Teachers took up the cause in 1954, and the following year, the government

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passed the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, which made it a crime to publish or otherwise disseminate printed matter that is largely composed of pictures, that is “of a kind likely to fall into the hands of children or young persons,” and that portrays “the commission of crimes; or … acts of violence or cruelty; or … incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature … in such a way that the work as a whole would tend to corrupt a child or young person into whose hands it might fall” (Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955, p. 1). By the time the Act was passed, ­however, the source of the comics that it was intended to control had already dried up, thanks to the US comics industry’s voluntary submission to regulation by the Comics Code Authority. Their like would not be seen again in Britain until the 1970s, and the launch of the female‐orientated gothic horror comics Spellbound and Misty (see Round 2017). Literally hundreds of prosecutions for obscene libel were made in the early 1950s, targeting authors, publishers, and booksellers – including the small traders who dealt in mushroom paperbacks. Many of those prosecutions were uncontested, and in some cases, instructions to the jury all but guaranteed a guilty verdict. But just as in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Sections 4.7, 5.2, and 6.2), there was growing resistance to the tide of prosecutions, both within and without the legal profession. The prosecution of Martin Secker & Warburg over The Philanderer was led by Mervyn Griffith‐Jones, a highly experienced lawyer who played a role in many obscen­ ity cases. Following standard practice, he issued the jury with typed pages of quotations from the novel, all taken out of context. But the judge, Sir Wintringham Stable, a popu­ lar and respected justice of the high court who “loathed bureaucratic stupidity and oppression of the weak” (DNB), intervened. “Would you mind reading it from cover to cover?” he asked the jurors: “Read it as a book. Do you follow? Not picking out bits that you think have, shall we say, a sort of immoral tendency, but read it as a book” (quoted in Cummins 2010). Stable emphasized that notions of obscenity had changed over the last century, and  –  in implicit contradiction of the advice given in the Hutchinson case  –  further cautioned the jurors that, while there existed a “mass of literature … [that] is wholly unsuitable for reading by the adolescent … that does not mean that the publisher [of such literature] is guilty of a criminal offence” (quoted in Williams 1955, p.  639). Everyone involved in the publication of that particular book was acquitted, and  the verdict was hailed as a victory for good sense. But the good sense that had prevailed was the good sense of a particular judge and a particular jury, and the law remained ambiguous and unpredictably enforced. Legislation was clearly required to resolve the situation. In 1955, the Society of Authors proposed a draft bill to the government, and in 1957, a cross‐party Select Committee on Obscene Publications was formed. The resulting Obscene Publications Act, which became law in 1959, was explicitly intended to establish a legal distinction between, on the one hand, pornography, and, on the other hand, texts that dealt with sexual topics but, being non‐pornographic, were considered to deserve protection. There were two principal ways in which the Act achieved this aim. First, it defined as obscene a work that, when “taken as a whole,” would “tend to deprave and corrupt per­ sons who are likely … to read, see, or hear the matter contained or embodied in it” (Obscene Publications Act 1959, p. 1). These references to the work as a whole (as opposed to decontextualised fragments thereof ) and to its likely readership (as opposed to the most vulnerable individual who might conceivably come into contact with it)

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echoed both Mathew’s and Stable’s pronouncements. Second, the Act contained the following two paragraphs: 1)  A person shall not be convicted of an offence against … this Act … if it is proved that publication of the article in question is justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern. 2)  It is hereby declared that the opinion of experts as to the literary, artistic, sci­ entific, or other merits of an article may be admitted in any proceedings under this Act, either to establish or to negative the said ground. (Obscene Publications Act 1959, p. 4) The first of these paragraphs explicitly provided writers and publishers who were not pornographers with grounds on which to defend themselves from prosecution. And the second told them how those grounds were to be established, that is, through expert opinion. However, without a test case to demonstrate that the legal situation had indeed changed, the authorities carried on as before, with customs officials continuing to treat books previously declared obscene as contraband. What was necessary was a trial under the new legislation in order to establish whether the legal realities had changed. That trial was prompted by Allen Lane. Late in 1959, Lane conceived the idea of a branded edition of the works of D.H. Lawrence, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover forming a natural part of such a set (McCleery 2002, p. 174). Under the common law definition that had applied until the passage of the above act that very summer, the unexpurgated version of the book was clearly obscene: it contained such words as “fuck,” and, without the guiding hand of a judge like Wintringham Stable, that was all that would have needed to be said in order to convict its publishers. But in a trial under the Obscene Publications Act, much more would need to be said if a conviction was to be achieved: it would need to be argued both that the book as a whole would tend to “deprave and corrupt” its likely readers, and that its publication could not be justified in the interests of literature. Given that Lawrence was at the time regarded as one of the most impor­ tant British novelists of the twentieth century, the latter part of the argument was clearly going to be a challenge. The Labour MP Alan Thompson asked for reassurance that publication of the Penguin edition would not lead to prosecution, but his request was refused, virtually guarantee­ ing that criminal proceedings would result. It was therefore difficult to find anyone willing to print the book, but Western Printing Services eventually agreed on condition that Penguin would indemnify it against legal fees and fines (McCleery 2002, p. 176). Lane’s determination on this point was remarkable. Although he had been willing to risk his own capital for the sake of the Bodley Head edition of Ulysses, he had dismissed Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre (published against his will by Penguin’s American branch in 1946) as pornography, and in 1965, would personally burn the entire edition of a book of drawings that he considered obscene (MacKenzie 1991, pp. 258, 259). He clearly saw Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a different beast entirely. The operation was carefully planned. Lane held back from distribution in order to keep retailers out of trouble until the legal business was concluded, and pre‐empted the prosecution by delivering a copy of the book directly to the police (MacKenzie 1991, p. 259). He also insisted on trial by jury, as this would not leave Penguin at the mercy of the magistrates (McCleery 2002, p. 177). The trial lasted six days, and provided a storm

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of publicity for Lawrence, Chatterley, Penguin, and Lane. Penguin’s defense lawyer, Gerald Gardiner, began by explaining Penguin’s track record of publishing affordable editions of “great” books in complete series, giving the Shaw Million as an example and emphasizing that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was also part of a series: Penguin had pub­ lished a set of 10 of Lawrence’s books on the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1950, and was now marking the thirtieth anniversary with a series comprising the remaining seven titles (Squires 2013, p. 174). The establishment of this context not only made it difficult to impeach Penguin’s motives in publishing this particular work of Lawrence’s, but also clearly framed the publication as a service to literature. Furthermore, Gardiner could call upon a range of experts to testify for the novel’s literary merits, including E.M. Forster, Rebecca West, Richard Hoggart, and C. Day Lewis, while the sole witness for the prosecution, led (again) by Mervyn Griffith‐Jones, was a police officer (MacKenzie 1991, p. 259). Ridiculous though it seems today, the latter’s reading of a book would once have been sufficient to incriminate it: judgments of obscenity were routinely made on the basis of passages marked up by law enforce­ ment professionals with no specific training. But in 1960, old assumptions were evapo­ rating. When Griffith‐Jones asked the members of the jury whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was “a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read,” several of them apparently laughed at him – as well they might have done, given that three of them were women and, to judge by their declared occupations, few if any would have been able to afford domestic staff (Hilliard 2013, p. 654). Penguin was found not guilty, and two million copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover were legally sold in the last month and a half of the year (McCleery 2002, pp. 177–178). Publicity was such that, for a brief period, the book was also sold through outlets out­ side the trade, even being spotted on sale in a butcher’s shop in the West Midlands town of Solihull (Bradley 2008, p. 180). The following year, Penguin was floated on the  stock market, achieving a valuation of £1.5 million on sales worth £2 million (de Bellaigue 2006, p. 118). The Chatterley verdict seemed to signal the unfolding of a new era in literary freedom and social mores, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem “Annus Mirabilis”: “Sexual inter­ course began / In nineteen sixty‐three / … Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP” (Larkin 1974). The Crown no longer held the power of arbitrary destruction over editions and reputations, companies and careers, because  –  at last – there were solid legal grounds on which to respond to an accusation of obscenity. And the government was clearly losing its appetite for censorship, in a process doubt­ less accelerated by the political establishment’s own loss of moral standing in the public eye: in 1963, Harold Macmillan was forced to resign as prime minister following a sex scandal involving a teenage model and one of his cabinet ministers, and the following year, his successor, Alec Douglas‐Home, was defeated at the polls. But there were retro­ grade steps to come: the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act was renewed in 1965, and in 1966, the Conservative MP Sir Cyril Black initiated the prose­ cution of the publishers of Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, with its portrayals of drug taking and homosexuality. Having learnt the lesson of the Chatterley trial, Black found expert witnesses for the prosecution, albeit not academics and authors but pub­ lishers: Basil Blackwell, who rather pompously declared “I feel [the book] has damaged my soul” (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 178), and Black’s colleague from the other side of the House, Robert Maxwell. But while Selby’s publishers were found guilty, the ban stood only until 1968 before being overturned.

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It was now clear that things had changed. 1968 was also the year in which Jackie Collins, sister of the Hollywood movie star Joan Collins, made her debut with The  World is Full of Married Men  –  and it was published not by some disreputable backstreet pornographer, but by the entirely respectable W.H. Allen Ltd. Shocking by the standards of the day, but by that point unquestionably legal, this glamorous but unromantic tale of adultery and (male) regret became an international bestseller, with its author ultimately becoming a star as great as her actress sibling. Neither highbrow nor lowbrow fiction, nor indeed nonfiction, would now be held back from a broad pub­ lic by the mere fact of sexual content – as we see from Panther’s success, under Miller and Boothe, in bringing sexually explicit feminist and gay literature by authors such as Fay Weldon and Jean Genet to a mass market, along with translations of the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden (Peace 2009).

11.10 ­Offset Lithography Although the nineteenth‐century process of lithography had long been used in the printing of posters and music, it was far slower than relief printing, which therefore had no serious competitor with regard to the production of ordinary book text until offset lithography came into wide use from the late 1950s onwards. There are three principal differences between offset lithography as it was practiced throughout most of the twentieth century and traditional lithography as invented by Alois Senefelder (see Section 8.2). The first of these differences is in the use of a metal plate rather than a limestone block, which renders the term lithography (“stone writ­ ing”) something of a misnomer. This had an obvious impact on the appearance of the finished product: whereas one can achieve a subtly graded range of tones by drawing on stone or transfer paper with washes of lithographic ink, metal litho plates either print solid color or nothing at all, much like relief blocks. The second principal difference is in the lack of contact between the plate and the paper to be printed on: whereas paper is pressed directly onto stone in a traditional lithographic press, in an offset press, ink is carried between plate and paper by the intermediary agency of a rubber‐covered roller (hence the term offset). The third principal difference is in the preparation of the plate, which is coated in a photosensitive emulsion and then exposed to a negative of whatever is to be printed. After the plate is developed, printing ink adheres only to those parts of the plate that have been exposed to light. As in relief photoetching, halftone screens were used when the printing of solid colors was not desired. But while relief photoetch­ ing was used to create image blocks for printing alongside type, offset lithography was used to print both text and image from a single plate. This had also been possible with rotogravure, but the high cost of rotogravure cylinders meant that only a publication with a very high print run could be produced that way. In the nineteenth century, pages for lithographic reproduction had been produced entirely by hand, incorporating hand‐drawn images and hand‐lettered text: a practice that continued with the production of color dust jackets and paperback covers (Figure 11.5 shows two such covers, here in black and white: each color in the two dust jackets is effectively a separate piece of hand‐drawn artwork, combined through over‐ printing). But the ability to produce a litho plate of virtually anything that could be photographed meant that offset lithography facilitated a new approach to layout that

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Figure 11.5  Hand‐drawn offset lithographic dust jackets: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (W.H. Allen, 1958) and The Foxglove Saga by Auberon Waugh (Chapman & Hall, 1960). Printed in three and four colors (respectively) on white paper (reproduced here in black and white). Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington, with thanks to Maggs Bros Ltd.

completely changed the working practices associated with print design. A designer could work at a desk, cutting out type galleys with a sharp knife and gluing them to a layout board. Images and mechanically lettered text could be easily laid out together on the board; striking compositions involving text set at angles or overlapping images could be achieved in ways never possible before. When the designer’s “paste up” was finished and approved, the board would be taken away to be photographed, with ­halftone images dropped in at that stage. The hugely influential journalist and editor Sir Harold Evans wrote as follows: Photo‐composition makes easy what is impossible with hot metal. Pictures or headlines can be printed at a tilt by the make‐up man [sic] pasting the photoset headline or picture print at a tilt on the page. Shapes are unlimited. The cut‐out or pierce does not involve cutting metal. You can have any shape you want in the print. (Evans 1976, p. 166) But how were the galleys to be created in the first place? It was possible but inefficient to do this on a proofing press. The real offset revolution did not therefore take place until galleys began to be produced using phototypesetting machines. These machines

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were modeled on hot‐metal typecasters and manufactured by the same companies. Just as a Monotype or Linotype machine contained molds for letterforms, a phototypeset­ ting machine contained transparent negative images of letterforms. The first experi­ ments with phototypesetting were carried out in the 1930s by George Westover, the Monotype Corporation’s London manager. However, Monotype lost interest in the system, with the result that the first model to see commercial use did not go on sale until 1957 (Boag 2000, pp. 58–60). By that time, the Photon Corporation and Mergenthaler Linotype had been producing such machines for nearly a decade (see Figure 11.6). As with a hot‐metal typecaster, the operator would use a keyboard to select letter­ forms in the correct order. The machine would shine a strong light through the nega­ tives onto a sheet of photographic paper, which would be chemically treated to reveal a positive image of the letterforms. To change point size, the operator had only to adjust the level of magnification. To change typefaces, he or she had to change the negatives, but this was simply a matter of removing one small sheet of glass and slotting another into its place (see Figure 11.7). Figure 11.6  Setting “type” on the Linotype Linofilm phototypesetting system. Source: Digitized by David M. McMillan, dated to July 1949 with the assistance of Jim Gard.

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

Figure 11.7  Inserting a glass font grid into the Linotype Linofilm photographic unit. Source: Digitized by David M. McMillan, dated to July 1949 with the assistance of Jim Gard.

Phototypesetting was clean and quiet, and could conveniently be done in an office. However, early offset presses were large and expensive, and few printers could afford to replace their existing technology, so the demand for phototypesetting services – and therefore for the expensive new machines required – grew slowly. Only five Monotype phototypesetting machines were installed for commercial purposes in the first year, with the first appearing in 1958 at a newly founded company in Basildon (Boag 2000, p. 63). But as the new technologies became more widespread, designers began to take advantage of the more flexible integration of image and text that was now possible. This flexibility was put to increasingly creative use, especially in textbooks, which could now contain more diagrams, drawings, and photographs. An early example of such production was Introduction to Biology, originally written by D.G. Mackean and first published by John Murray in 1962 (see Figure  11.8). Images and text were fully integrated, and the book’s various versions had sold altogether eight million copies worldwide by 2008 (Rix 2008, p. 175). Offset lithography also facilitated relatively cheap color printing for shorter print runs. But the internal typography of fiction books was little affected. From the reader’s and the designer’s point of view, a page of a novel was still a page of a novel, and it was still set by a man or woman positioning individual letterforms, one line at a time. While the phototypesetting machine gave finer control over point sizes, there was no need to vary them within an ordinary book. And while offset lithography gave the designer greater freedom in the layout of illustrations and text, illustrations had long since fallen almost completely out of use in adult fiction. Thus, the pages of books printed by offset

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Figure 11.8  Double‐page spread from Mackean’s Introduction to Biology (1969 edition).

lithography were for the most part practically indistinguishable from those printed by letterpress. Magazine layouts, posters, vinyl record sleeves, hardback dust jackets, and paperback covers changed enormously, ­however, with arrangements of mechanically produced lettering being splashed across full‐color images with increasing bold­ ness – often in the form of negative, non‐printed letterforms created by applying white Letraset transfers to the underlying images before photographing them for lithographic reproduction. Thanks to resistance from a strongly unionized workforce, British national newspapers continued to be typeset in hot metal until 1986, although creative use of the column grid gave the editorial staff considerable design freedom: article text would typically be set within single columns of consistent width (with a typical broad­ sheet paper having eight columns per page), but photographs, headlines, and occasional pieces of text could be sized to fill rectangles two or more columns wide (see Figure 11.9). Perhaps the most immediate impact of offset lithography on textual production, then, was in the facilitation of a new model of reprint publishing – one that required little input from a typographer. Because plates could be prepared from photographs of already‐existing pages, reprints could be produced still more easily than by stereotyp­ ing. This new approach was sometimes used in producing British editions of American books or vice versa, and enabled the many new universities founded in the United Kingdom from the 1960s onwards to stock their libraries with reprint editions of classic texts. Small presses started up with the specific purpose of producing lithographic reproductions of monographs and journal back issues, and facsimiles of the first edi­ tions of historic books. OUP used the technique to issue reprints of its most popular reference books (Feather 2006, pp. 214–215). At the bottom end of the fiction market,

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

Figure 11.9  Layout for the January 5, 1969, front page of the Sunday Times, to be realized in hot metal. Source: By permission of Sir Harold Evans.

cheap reprints of obsolete relief‐printed editions were produced in the same manner. These reprints, characteristically printed on low‐grade paper, can be recognized by their antiquated typefaces and slightly degraded appearance, as well as by the occa­ sional reproduction of creases and tears in the original pages.

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11.11 ­Mergers and Takeovers Among Book Publishers Although publishing has long been an industry in which it is possible to launch a new company with little capital, it is not hospitable to small companies in the long term. Trade publishing is a gamble in which an editor “bets on” a book and hopes that the investment of production costs, marketing, and an advance against the author’s royal­ ties will pay off in terms of sales. Under such circumstances, the only secure strategy is to bet on many titles at once – but that is precisely what a small company with little capital cannot do. Moreover, the rewards of a good bet require cash flow to enjoy, as it is impossible to sell more copies of a book than one can print. These factors were exac­ erbated by increased costs, with both printers’ wages and the cost of paper rising steeply throughout the 1960s, with a negative impact on the royalties and advances offered to authors. In 1967, Penguin became the first paperback house to set up its own hardback imprint (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press), and began to offer contracts for both hardback and paperback publication (Bradley 2008, pp. 145–146). “Vertical publishing,” as this approach was called, enabled publishers to offer much larger royalties than would have been possible for hardback publication alone, and removed the necessity for authors to share paperback royalties with their hardback publishers (de Bellaigue 2008, p. 111). But it was a higher risk strategy for the publisher, and required more capital up front. Under these circumstances, the advantage was with larger publishers – and they were begin­ ning to get larger. The Bodley Head is a good example. It went bankrupt in the 1930s and was subse­ quently purchased by a consortium led by Stanley Unwin. In 1956, Unwin sold the now profitable Bodley Head to another consortium, consisting of the publisher Max Reinhardt and three partners of the Henry Ansbacher merchant bank; Reinhardt’s friend, the novelist Graham Greene, was installed as a director the following year (de Bellaigue 2004, p. 138). With financial backing from Ansbacher, the Bodley Head was able to aggressively acquire numerous other publishers. The outright purchase of smaller companies by larger ones was becoming an increas­ ingly important dynamic – and the purchasers were increasingly coming from outside the book trade. Roy Thomson, the owner of a large share of the ITV franchise holder Scottish Television, purchased the Sunday Times and its associated provincial newspa­ pers in 1959, and then moved into book publishing, by the end of 1965 having taken possession of Michael Joseph, Hamish Hamilton, and the Edinburgh‐based Christian publisher Thomas Nelson. Sidney Bernstein inherited a vast property empire, built a chain of theaters and cinemas, and founded Granada Television – another ITV fran­ chise holder  –  before acquiring a string of publishers in the 1960s. These included MacGibbon and Key, Rupert Hart‐Davis, and Dragon Books, which had become a suc­ cessful children’s paperback publisher under former mushroom publisher Gordon Lansborough. In 1962, the Granada Group bought a 41.7% stake in Jonathan Cape, but its largest purchase was of Panther (formerly Lansborough’s old employer, Hamilton & Co.), for more than half a million pounds in 1965. The various publishers now owned by Thomson continued to operate independently, but the fully owned Granada publishers ultimately became imprints of a single company. This was becoming the more typical pattern, resulting in fewer but larger and more financially robust publishers.

The Age of the Mass-Market Paperback, 1940–1970

Publishing had until this point been a notably dynastic business, with houses such as Collins bearing the names of the families that had owned them for generations. But as it became a more and more corporate affair, such arrangements could not long con­ tinue. The most dramatic signal of the impending transformation was the purchase of Longman by Pearson in 1968. The publisher had been controlled by members of the Longman family since 1724, but had become a public company in 1948. Mark Longman was the last in the family to direct the company, which he did until his death in 1972. Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that smaller publishers should have begun to consolidate. Much of this process was comparatively low‐key, and the preser­ vation of independence was often a priority. For example, Chatto & Windus absorbed the Hogarth Press in 1947, having bought John Lehmann’s former share from Leonard Woolf the previous year (Gaither 1991, p. 161), and in 1969, the year of Woolf ’s death, it formed a group with Jonathan Cape and associated with the university presses of St. Andrews and Dundee, which had already grouped under the name of the Scottish Academics Press (Schneller 1991a, p. 116). Chatto & Windus was the smaller partner and therefore owned fewer shares, but the excess shares owned by Jonathan Cape came with no voting rights for a period of 15 years, so that neither of the two publishers could exert control over the other (de Bellaigue 2004, p. 137). Only non‐editorial functions such as warehousing were shared, and the Chatto & Windus and Jonathan Cape edito­ rial offices were kept separate. Mills & Boon – at that time still a relatively small pub­ lisher – entered into its historic partnership with the Canadian firm of Harlequin Books in 1958, but until 1972, there was no formal merger, with the two companies simply importing and distributing one another’s books on a reciprocal arrangement. Capital was moving into trade publishing not only from other British industries, but also from abroad. In 1961, the US‐based Times Mirror Company purchased the ram­ shackle Four Square Books (see Section 11.4) together with Ace Books – an even more down‐market paperback publisher  –  and transformed the two into the New English Library or NEL (Bonn 1992, p. 77; Bradley 2008, p. 142). This was named to match Times Mirror’s publishing arm back at home: the New American Library (NAL), formed when the American directors of the original New York branch of Penguin Books bought out Allen Lane’s stake following editorial disagreements in 1948 (MacKenzie 1991, p. 258). Like the NAL – whose purchase by Times Mirror has tended, perhaps unfairly, to be presented as “the archetype of … book publishing mergers that have contributed to the decline of literary publishing” (Bonn 1992, p. 71) – the NEL was an unabashedly populist publisher. In 1969, it brought out the first paperback edition of The World is Full of Married Men: a novel of the post‐Chatterley publishing environment, but one with which Lady Chatterley’s first paperback publisher would have wanted no associa­ tion whatsoever. It was a sign of things to come; the mass‐market paperback had truly been born.

11.12 ­The Defenseless Reader The old idea that readers – or certain kinds of readers, at least – were vulnerable to the influence of print, and needed to be protected from the ideas it might convey to them, had not gone away. By the wrong books, young readers and working‐class readers could

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be “depraved and corrupted,” they could be induced to commit crimes and become “delinquent,” they could be led to behave in ways counter to their own interests or those of wider society. And this was not an idea confined to the legal and political authorities. Many publishers espoused it too: Mills & Boon authors were prohibited not only from describing certain physical displays of affection, but also from writing anything that might encourage their readers to have large numbers of children (McAleer 1992, p. 114). But commonly expressed though this idea was, it was not universally held – which perhaps explains the rapid collapse of the old censorship regime after the failed prose­ cution of the Penguin Chatterley. Take, for instance, the horror comics, whose tendency to “corrupt” children or young people seems often to have been considered an unchal­ lengeable fact. It was asserted that parents across the nation were revolted by the com­ ics, demanding their removal from sale. But as we have seen, this was not the case: the outcry against the comics had been manufactured by an organization with ulterior motives. How did parents view the comics before the campaign? We don’t really know, because the issue was not considered important enough to merit public discussion. But that in itself is an indicator: if there was no grassroots campaign, then perhaps the grass­ roots had no complaint. A chance survival from the period supports that interpretation. In 1953, an amateur performance of a version of “Der fröhliche Wanderer” was broadcast by the BBC and subsequently parodied by a 12‐year‐old schoolboy named Arthur Compston at a public recital of traditional Scottish and American music that took place late in the same year. By good fortune, the recital happened to be recorded by the poet and folksong collector Hamish Henderson. Compston entitled his parody “The Horror Comic Song,” and its final verse and refrain were as follows: Oh, may I go a‐slaughtering Down by the graves again! Oh, may I always pounce and kill With ghosts that were once men! Draculee, Dracula – Draculee, Dracula‐ha‐ha‐ha‐ha‐ha Draculee, Dracula – With ghosts that were once men. (Compston 1953 ) How did the adults in the audience react? Far from being shocked, they sang along with the refrain. And why not? The traditional repertoire of the British Isles is replete with ghosts and murders. When Compston had finished his performance, the master of ceremonies asked him if it had been his first attempt at song‐writing, and – receiving the affirmative in response – pronounced it “damn good, too.” As indeed it was. The recording provides evidence of at least some members of the general public for whom horror comics were no more to be taken seriously than a schoolboy’s sweetly warbled wish to “go a‐slaughtering.”

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12 Big Business and Digital Technology, 1970–2018 From the 1970s onwards, every aspect of book production and retail went through immense changes. The publishing industry’s process of consolidation, begun in the 1960s, accelerated to the point where the market was overwhelmingly dominated by a handful of publishers which bought up smaller operations largely for the sake of their backlists, retaining the names only as imprints to distinguish one product line from another. Before long, however, these seemingly giant publishers were all owned by still  larger corporations for which books represented only a tiny proportion of overall business. This was a radical change: no comparable ownership structure had ever been seen in the history of print. And while its consequences may not have been obvious to consumers, the same could not be said of parallel developments in book retail, which came to be dominated by chains of bookshops that in turn went through their own process of consolidation before losing much of their custom to supermarkets and a vast, transnational retailer that owned no shops, paid almost no tax, and pioneered an entirely new form of publishing independent of print. Whatever readers thought, authors certainly felt these changes in their pockets. A shift toward volume sales of heavily discounted “big books” as the primary focus of business for publisher and bookseller alike exacerbated the longstanding downward pressure on royalties, such that a twenty‐first‐century author would be likely to get no more than 10% of recommended retail price for a hardback sold at full price, and 6% for a discounted paperback (de Bellaigue 2008, p. 113). When we remember that successful novelists of the mid‐twentieth century could achieve over 20% royalties, the contrast is stark. Combined with the ever‐growing importance of screen adaptations, the new ability to shift huge quantities of books at knockdown prices resulted in tremendously increased sales potential for a tiny minority of titles. Thus, while royalties fell, advances for potential “big books” paradoxically rose, with vast sums being offered for anything that looked as though it might turn out to be a hit. The benefits were not widely shared among authors – indeed, that was arguably the point, with large advances being offered specifically in order to attract the authors of books with exceptional sales potential. Nonetheless, the annual production of new titles by British publishers roughly doubled from around 3650 in 1981 to somewhere near 7000 in the year 2000, up from roughly 2400 on the eve of World War II (English 2005, pp. 325–326). Underpaid or not, writers kept on writing.

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Book production was twice revolutionized on a technological level: first as computer technologies changed the means by which books were written, edited, designed, and manufactured, and then as the digital download became the first serious alternative to the codex in a thousand years. And bookselling too was subjected to technological ­revolution, first with digital systems for stock control and ordering that changed the operations of bookshops behind the scenes (and for the first time enabled the aggregation and publication of accurate sales figures, which came to play a major role in ­editorial decisions) and then with the rise of online retail and a purely digital product. Penguin, Collins, and Virago all either opened or purchased bookshops, and Hodder Headline Ltd. briefly belonged to the bookselling newsagent W.H. Smith, but none of these arrangements was particularly long‐lived, and the separation of publishing from retail, established in the early nineteenth century and since bridged only on a small scale, therefore continued without significant interruption until Amazon’s expansion from bookselling into publishing brought true vertical integration. For the newspaper industry, the consequences of digitalization have thus far been catastrophic. For the book industry, they remain unclear.

12.1 ­The Corporate Publisher On July 7, 1970, Allen Lane died. Having driven his only surviving brother out of the business nine years previously, he had no heir. For a while, he had been persuaded to share the management of Penguin with the other members of a committee of six (Kells 2015, p. 196). But publishers – even large publishers constituted, as Penguin had been for most of the 1960s, as public limited companies – were still relatively small and old‐­ fashioned businesses, each of them closely identified with the man (and it was always a man) at the top. All this would now change. The publishing business that took shape after Lane’s death was an entirely different place  –  much more a part of the corporate world, but also rather more diverse in terms of its key players, having put to rest what has been wittily termed “the ‘& sons’ model of patrilineal descent” (Murray 1999, p. 21). The preceding decade’s strengthening of commercial links across the Atlantic and between media industries continued. In 1972, Mills & Boon, Britain’s best‐known publisher besides Penguin, merged with its Canadian partner, Harlequin, and in 1976, the commercial broadcaster London Weekend Television followed fellow Independent Television (ITV) franchise holders Granada and Thomson into the publishing business with its purchase of Hutchinson. The 1970s also saw British publishers acquiring American operations, as in William Collins’s purchase of World Publishing in 1974 and Pearson’s purchase of the distinguished hardback house Viking Press in 1975. This made Viking a part of the Penguin Group, where it would be joined 11 years later by the British literary hardback house of Hamish Hamilton. Such purchases began to erode the distinction between hardback and paperback publishing, so that, well before the end of the twentieth century, “vertical publishing” would become the norm – which was of course what it had been before 1935 (although not under that name). The Penguin business model, in which reprint publishing was accomplished through the sale of rights between entirely separate commercial entities, had turned out not to be the future after all.

Big Business and Digital Technology, 1970–2018

Collins and Pearson were very large publishers with a substantial income from religious publishing (in the case of Collins, which was an authorized printer of the King James Bible) and educational publishing (in the case of Pearson), but such acquisitions were increasingly driven by high finance (de Bellaigue 2006, p. 118). For example, in 1985, Octopus raised the money to buy Heinemann through a sale of shares, and in 1987, Reed bought the entire Octopus group using money raised in the same way. Other buyouts were funded by venture capital, as was the founding of the independent publisher Bloomsbury. The 1980s was the period in which the last of the great publishing dynasties came to an end, and in which most of British publishing passed into the hands of transnational media corporations. When William Collins V, the chairman of William Collins, died in 1976, he was succeeded by his son W. Jan Collins, who was forced to resign from his executive duties just three years later, when the company began to make substantial losses. After Collins and his mother sold their shares to newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch in 1981, Murdoch was able to buy further shares from rival magnate Robert Maxwell, bringing his stake in the company close to the 50% necessary for a takeover. On the suggestion of the board, many Collins authors wrote to the media in protest. Murdoch backed down, not completing his takeover of the company until 1989, by which time Collins had purchased Granada’s publishing interests (including the famous Panther imprint), and Murdoch had not only founded the Sky satellite broadcaster but purchased one of the five major Hollywood studios, along with the various American television stations that he reorganized as the Fox Broadcasting Corporation. William Collins was then merged with Murdoch’s recently purchased US publisher, Harper & Row, to form HarperCollins. As a subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corporation (now News Corp.), this entity subsequently acquired many other publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Through its acquisitions, HarperCollins became one of the largest book publishers in the world, although it remains a comparatively small part of Murdoch’s media empire. All the biggest publishers have similar stories. Pearson acquired Penguin shortly after Allen Lane’s death, having bought Longman two years earlier. In 2013, Bertelsmann and Pearson agreed to merge Penguin with Random House, henceforth sharing ownership of the resulting company. In 1973, the Bodley Head joined the Chatto and Cape group, which in 1987 was purchased by the American publisher Random House, which in turn was purchased by the German media corporation Bertelsmann in 1998. The French publisher Hachette now owns Hodder Headline, into which the old family firms of Hodder & Stoughton and John Murray had previously been subsumed, and since 1999 the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group from Germany has been the sole owner of both Macmillan and Pan (now Pan Macmillan). By 2001, the “big five” of English‐language publishing  –  that is, Bertelsmann, Hachette, HarperCollins, Hodder Headline, and Pearson – jointly held over 50% of UK market share (Squires 2007, p. 21). Following the Pearson/Bertelsmann deal, there is really only a “big four.” These changes in the ownership structure of British (and, indeed, American) trade publishing have had far‐reaching consequences for the industry’s culture. Writers have fewer publishers with which to place books, and editors have more limited options for publishing them, because the corporations that own the publishers they work for are expected to achieve year‐on‐year growth. This expectation has contributed to a focus

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on bestsellers, and led many in the business to complain that slower‐selling forms of writing are being disadvantaged. Following the Random House buyout, for example, Tom Maschler of Cape (quoted in de Bellaigue 2004, p. 156) commented that “literary trade publishing is doomed to fail the profits test of a quoted company” (that is, one whose shares are publicly traded on a stock exchange). The following decades did little to prove him wrong. The world of publishing is now a very different world from that of the 1960s, when the most important publishers of the day defended the Net Book Agreement in order to continue publishing unprofitable books. Indeed, much of the excitement in contemporary publishing seems to revolve around fads such as adult ­coloring books, or humorous titles making ironic use of 1970s illustrations: novelty formulae that dominate the bestseller charts for a year or so, spawn increasing numbers of imitations, and then slip from prominence. However, not even bestsellers can generate long‐term growth, because the market for English‐language books is mature. When the customers of an industry spend more or less the same sums on its products from one year to the next, the only possible form of growth consists in acquisition of or merger with one’s competitors – but in an industry this heavily consolidated, few opportunities for such enlargements of operations now remain. It has been argued that the problem is essentially insoluble and will lead to increasing conflict between publishers and their owners over time thanks to “the expectation of substantial growth in a market that is largely flat” (Thompson 2012, p. 381). The limited prospects for growth in their traditional markets have led some English‐ language publishers to attempt to expand into markets for books in Asian languages (Brouillette 2007b), although the long‐term success of that venture remains unclear.

12.2 ­The Crisis of the 1970s The rise of digital distribution threw all the pre‐digital media industries into crisis (see Hesmondhalgh 2013, pp. 341–363). But British publishing had been in severe crisis before, and in living memory. Although the costs of printing and of paper had risen throughout the 1960s, publishers were able to compensate through gradual price increases that did little to hurt sales. Indeed, the market for books was then expanding, enabling even literary publishers to make a good profit (despite what the Section 11.8 has characterized as their intentional inefficiency). Growth seemed unstoppable – but then it ran into an entirely unexpected wall, and was thrown into reverse. The cause was far from Bloomsbury Square. In 1973, Egypt and Syria mounted a surprise attack upon Israel in an attempt to regain territories lost in the war of 1967. The conflict escalated in typical Cold War fashion, with the Arab states receiving military equipment and other support from the USSR, and Israel receiving the same from the United States. In retaliation for the latter arrangement, Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on exports to the United States as well as to other countries that assisted the latter in supplying the Israeli military. This triggered what is remembered as the first “oil shock”: a rapid rise in the price of crude oil and its derivatives, which in turn hiked the cost of transport, manufactured goods, and food. Finding themselves struggling to afford basic necessities, British workers demanded higher wages, but when such demands were granted, the costs were passed further down the line, pushing the rate of inflation over 24% in 1974. The resulting recession led to the collapse of the Conservative

Big Business and Digital Technology, 1970–2018

government that had taken office in 1970, and in 1976 to that of the Labour government that replaced it. Recessions can be tough for all sorts of businesses, but inflation presents additional problems for those that rely upon credit or export. As manufacturers with international markets, publishers relied on both. Printing costs rose by around 30% per year, and the price of books rose by at least as much, so that the typical price of a new novel rose from around £2 in 1972 to just under £4 in 1976 (Sutherland 1978, p. xiv). This was a faster rise than consumers were able to accommodate comfortably, which meant that retail sales to the home market fell, while library purchases also declined because local authority finances were stretched. The cost of borrowing rose, making it difficult to finance new editions, and the relative strength of the pound against the severely weakened dollar made British books uncompetitive in relation to American equivalents at a time when roughly 30% of sales were exported (de Bellaigue 2004, p. 164). Matters again deteriorated from 1979 to 1980, when a second oil shock hit the global economy thanks to the revolution in Iran, which resulted in the near cessation of Iranian oil production and a drop in production in neighboring Iraq after the opening of hostilities between the two countries. Under the challenging circumstances that prevailed for much of the 1970s, most British trade publishers made losses in one or more years. In 1974, Penguin nearly halved the planned number of titles to be published and withdrew entirely from educational publishing (Baines 2005, p. 162), but still could not stave off the effects of recession: in the five years to 1979, its annual sales fell from £42 million to £39 million, while its borrowings doubled and a £1.8 million annual profit became a loss of £300 000, worsening to £1.62 million the following year (Greenfield 1989, p. 133). Collins swung from a profit of over a million pounds in 1978 to a loss of not much less than that in the first half of 1979, precipitating the changes in leadership and ownership discussed in Section 12.1. Oxford University Press (OUP) too reported vast losses, and the industry as a whole was clearly in a bad way. Multiple publishers responded by selling premises, making cuts to all categories of staff, and publishing fewer books. Matters improved with the end of the recession in the early 1980s, but dedicated hardback publishers were made vulnerable by the rising importance of the paperback market: in 1983, paperback turnover exceeded £68 million and for the first time ­surpassed hardcover turnover, which was then at nearly £58 million (Greenfield 1989, p. 155). Some publishers never recovered, and when Random House acquired the Chatto, Virago, Bodley, and Cape group in 1987, roughly £3 million of the purchase price was used simply to cover the group’s debts (de Bellaigue 2004, p. 157).

12.3 ­Reprinting and Derivative Rights From the 1970s onwards, paperback publishing as pioneered by the Lane brothers gradually came to an end, and “vertical publishing” became once more the norm. Except in the very early days of Penguin, paperback reprint rights had generally been sold for a fixed period only, after which they would revert back to the hardback publisher, who could sell them again. With the growing importance of the paperback market, hardback houses began to issue their own paperback editions once the rights reverted to them, and became reluctant to sell reprint rights in the first place, while paperback houses sought to follow Penguin into hardback publishing in order to maintain a supply of new

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titles. This erosion of the distinction between hardback and paperback houses was in large part achieved through the already described pattern of mergers and acquisitions that saw both types of publisher swallowed up by larger entities (see Section  12.1). However, paperback and hardback publishing continued to be carried out by different units within publishing companies, since the tasks involved and the markets targeted were different, and separate imprints were often used for paperback and hardback books issued by the same house. For example, Penguin was able to issue hardbacks under the Hamish Hamilton and Allen Lane imprints (for fiction and nonfiction, respectively), and then reprint them as Penguin paperbacks. In contrast with the struggling world of publishing, the larger mass media were growing all the time in complexity and size, with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) having launched a second channel in 1964, and with Channel Four, a publicly owned but for the most part commercially funded station, launching in 1982. As broadcasters that invested heavily in the production of new content, Channel Four, ITV, and the BBC had a tremendous impact on the publishing industry, for example through production of tie‐in books. These included novelizations of the popular children’s TV series Doctor Who, published by Target Books, and the hugely successful Life on Earth, published in 1992 by Collins in association with BBC Books (now run and majority‐owned by Penguin Random House). But television companies could also turn existing books into bestsellers by adapting them for television. An early example of this process is provided by Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). Posthumously recognized as Trollope’s masterpiece, this appeared in OUP’s prestigious World’s Classics series in 1941 but failed to reach much of an audience beyond students and professionals in higher education. For that, it apparently needed not republication, but rather reinterpretation in a new medium. Although Penguin rejected the book as too unprofitable for its “English Library” series in 1969, a 1970 BBC miniseries adapted from the novel saw it return to print in several paperback editions, with the Penguin “World’s Classics” edition coming to sell a steady 2000 copies per year (Sutherland 1988, p. 583). But the very nature of adaptation has now changed, as we see from Kristin Thompson’s 2007 study of the Lord of the Rings franchise. As Thompson argues, the New Line Cinema film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson is not a literary adaptation per se but a series of genre films constructed on the basis of Tolkien’s three‐part novel. The result was no mere film franchise but – in common with recent Hollywood tradition – a multimedia franchise. This meant that revenue was generated not only through sales of cinema ticket and broadcast rights – as in the mid‐twentieth century – nor even through these means plus the additional sale of movies on physical media for home viewing (such as VHS cassettes and DVDs), but through all of the above plus the licensing of a staggering range of products including toys, trading cards, video games, spinoff books, and “collectable” items including replica props. By launching products across several media simultaneously or near‐simultaneously, advertising them extensively, providing news for specialist publications and newspaper columns, leveraging the internet‐based Tolkien fan community as a pre‐existing audience, and exploiting licensing opportunities to reach potential audiences through non‐media outlets, New Line Cinema was able to saturate the cultural environment with Lord of the Rings‐related material. As a side effect, this led to new editions of the original books and boosted their already

Big Business and Digital Technology, 1970–2018

remarkable sales, half a century after they were published in the false expectation of a financial loss (see section 11.8). Similar techniques were used in the creation of further multimedia franchises on the basis of intellectual property originally published in book form, such as J.K. Rowlings’s Harry Potter series.

12.4 ­Independent Trade Publishing Although the major story of the period covered by this chapter is one of extreme consolidation throughout the industry, the years since 1970 have also seen the formation of large numbers of independent publishers, albeit that many were short‐lived or came to be absorbed into the corporate world. Faber & Faber continued, supported in its independence by the medical journals it had published since the beginning, as well as by its backlist, which included some of the most widely taught poetic works of the twentieth century – and thus became the only significant British publisher to follow what Pierre Bourdieu saw as the business model of the French literary publisher: “always loss‐­ making, if only its new publications are considered, but liv[ing] on … the profits regularly accruing from those of its publications which have become famous” (Bourdieu 1993b, p. 99). If bestsellers can no longer pay for art, Faber nonetheless proves that the past can pay for the future (provided that copyright is enforced). However, some of the most innovative publishing has been done by much more recently founded houses. Quartet Books was founded in 1972 by four Granada executives: Ken Banerji, John Boothe, William Miller, and Brian Thompson. One of its first publications was The Joy of Sex, by British doctor Alan Comfort – an extensively illustrated sex manual that was humorously organized like a cookery book. Under the ownership of Palestinian businessman Naim Attalah, who took over in 1976, the company remains independent, as do the dedicated poetry publishers Carcanet Press, founded in Oxford by Michael Schmidt in 1969, and Bloodaxe Books, founded in Newcastle by Neil Astley in 1978. Two other independent publishers were both founded in 1986: Serpent’s Tail and Bloomsbury Publishing. Serpent’s Tail was a decidedly intellectual publisher, publishing Colm Tóibín’s debut novel The South in 1990 and quickly gaining a reputation for literary fiction. Backed by venture capital with Liz Calder as its first editor, Bloomsbury had by contrast more commercial ambitions, and achieved rapid growth, with its 1994 flotation on the stock market raising £5.5 million. This cash injection was used to fund the launch of Bloomsbury’s paperback and children’s lists the following year. The second of these turned out to be an especially profitable investment: Bloomsbury was the ninth publisher to be offered and the first to accept J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; subsequently published as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by Scholastic Books in the United States), which was the first installment in what would become one of the most commercially valuable intellectual properties of the early twenty‐first century. Bloomsbury published the British hard‐ and paperback editions of all the Harry Potter books, which were adapted into films and video games from 2001 onwards and sold many millions of copies – thanks in part to the popularity of the wider franchise. This success led to a string of acquisitions, including valuable lists such as the heavily annotated Arden Shakespeare editions (widely used in schools), as well as the launch of a scholarly imprint, Bloomsbury Academic.

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Other independent publishers of the period included Profile Books, which was founded in 1996 and concentrated on nonfiction, eventually producing an international bestseller in the form of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003): part of a longstanding tradition of popular writing on English grammar, including the perennial favorite Usage and Abusage, published by Penguin in 1942 and written by Eric Partridge, the director of Scholartis (see Section 10.6). Salt Publishing was founded in Cambridge in 1999, and initially focused on poetry, like Bloodaxe and Carcanet, but diversified into literary fiction, producing many acclaimed novels and short story collections and reaching the Man Booker shortlist for the first time in 2012. Political commitment drove many small publishers. These included Black presses such as New Beacon Books, founded in 1966 by John LaRose and Sara White, and Bogle L’Overture Press, founded in 1968 by Jessica and John Huntley, which published and distributed books and pamphlets that would have got nowhere in the commercial ­publishing system, including Bernard Coard’s How the British educational system makes the West Indian child educationally subnormal and Walter Rodney’s How Europe underdeveloped Africa (see Beckles, 1998). The radical bookshops through which many of these publications were sold had to unite against sustained persecution from racists, with at least 22 attacks on Black bookshops in London in 1977 (Beckles 1998, pp. 64–66). For these organizations, publishing was not a means to make money but a direct form of opposition to racism and exploitation. However, commercial and ideological motivations could be successfully combined, as we see from the example of Virago, founded in 1973 as an imprint of Quartet Books by Carmen Callil, who – like Quartet’s directors – had also left Granada. The purpose of Virago was not only to publish nonfiction and literary writing of specifically female interest, but also to do it profitably, including through “explicit appeal to a readership of males as well as females” (Murray 1999, p. 59). The company issued high quality originals and reprints in distinctive dark green paper bindings with an apple logo that alluded to the biblical story of Adam and Eve (Figure  12.1 shows two such covers, here in black and white). Although the press’s commercialism was regarded with suspicion by some feminists, it brought feminist writing to a wide audience and revived the careers of near‐forgotten authors such as Rosamond Lehmann and Antonia White. As Callil recalled, “Antonia was so broke … she was living on the smell of an oil rag. But when we published Frost in May, people loved the book as much as I did, and her life was changed completely” (quoted in Picardie 2008, p. 39). The publisher’s most famous creation was the Virago Modern Classics series, launched in 1978; it benefited from the adoption of many of its texts by new undergraduate and postgraduate courses on women’s writing (Murray 1999, p. 54). Following conflicts with the Quartet board, Virago was bought out in 1976 using a bank loan and personal pledges from its directors (Murray 1999, pp. 53–54). It was thenceforth owned by Callil, together with Harriet Spicer, who had originally been Callil’s assistant, and Ursula Owen, who had joined as a part‐time editor; two years later, they were joined by Alexandra Pringle and Lennie Goodings, the latter of whom remains publisher of Virago today (Callil 2008). In 1982, Virago joined the Chatto, Bodley Head, and Cape group. The group’s initial plan had been for Callil to take over the running of Chatto & Windus, of which Virago would become a subsidiary; following objections from Owen and Spicer, Virago was purchased for £244 000, becoming a full member of the group under the managing directorship of Owen and Spicer, while Callil remained

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Figure 12.1  Two well‐read Virago Modern Classics: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1991) and the very first in the series, Antonia White’s Frost in May (1978). Covers such as these exploited the potentials of photolithography and color separation: white lettering on dark green and paintings by female artists were as much a part of Virago’s visual identity as the bitten apple logo. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

as non‐executive chairperson but effectively moved to Chatto (de Bellaigue 2004, pp. 143–144). Two months after the purchase of the group by Random House in 1987, Callil, Owen, and Spicer used a management buyout financed by Rothschild Ventures and Robert Gavron to return Virago to independence, with Random House retaining a 10% stake. Virago was a highly successful company, the British publisher of authors such as Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. But by 1996, it was in trouble, with its profit ­margin falling below 5% despite high sales; the same year, it was sold to the American publisher, Little, Brown (at that time part of the Time Warner multimedia conglomerate) for a reputed £1.3 million (Murray 1999, pp. 46–48) following the resignations of Callil, Spicer, and Goodings. Virago henceforth became an imprint of Little, Brown but exercised considerable independence and retained its distinctive character, for example publishing the debut of Sarah Waters, who was initially perceived as a lesbian writer of minority interest but quickly recognized as one of the United Kingdom’s leading literary novelists (see Allington 2011, p. 135). But the company’s influence was far greater than this history would suggest: by demonstrating that there was a market for literary writing specifically by women authors, Virago encouraged other commercial publishers to move into that market. Publishing had hitherto been a very male‐dominated profession, with large numbers of female employees who worked hard but were unable to progress to positions of power and responsibility. As increasing numbers of women fought their way upwards into positions where they had the ability to accept books for publication, they were able

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to follow the example set by Callil and her colleagues and bring books to market that would likely have been overlooked in the “gentlemanly” days of publishing. Philippa Harrison, an editor with many publishers from the 1960s onwards and chief executive officer of Little, Brown at the time of its purchase of the company, argued that the “­concept of Virago” had been influential for many of her generation of publishers, so that they gradually “all began to publish the sort of books that would have gone to Virago” (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 215). While this was a good thing for women’s ­writing, it was not necessarily such a good thing for Virago: “the decline of [its] Modern Classics list was ironically hastened by its manifest market popularity, a commercial strength which inspired mainstream competition and rivalry for the rights to out‐of‐ print women’s titles” (Murray 1999, p. 38).

12.5 ­Literacy and the Educational Market It is clear that, by the 1970s, a major shift had happened with regard to the ideology of reading. While early to mid‐twentieth‐century educators and moralists of the left and right had fulminated against the dangers of light fiction, now books as a whole were regarded as a “good,” to be contrasted with non‐textual or less intensively textual forms of entertainment such as television, radio, comic books, and the cinema. The ideology was well expressed by children’s author Roald Dahl in one of the numerous comic poems contained within his 1964 novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The most important thing we’ve learned, So far as children are concerned, Is never, NEVER, NEVER let Them near your television set – Or better still, just don’t install The idiotic thing at all. … So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. (Dahl 2013, pp. 161–163) As a professional writer for children, Dahl had a vested interest in persuading parents that television is a danger to young people (and that books, by contrast, are so wonderful that even the shelves on which they sit are “lovely”). But the idea that reading – specifically book‐reading – was under threat and needed to be protected had by the last three decades of the twentieth century become absolutely entrenched, with many of the same metaphors once applied to disfavored kinds of books now being applied instead to all media that could be consumed without being read. It was not that all kinds of books were now considered to be good – pornographic texts were still bad, for example, even if it was no longer quite so obvious when they should be considered to have crossed the line of legality – but that moral panics were now less likely to be aroused by unworthy reading than by non‐reading. But if the modernists could not stop people from reading

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Ouida, then the moralists of the late twentieth century can have had little chance of persuading anyone to stop watching television. What happened instead was a series of interventions in the educational system, ­carried out in the name of a crusade against falling standards. This crusade was not identified with any particular political position. Almost identical claims of declining literacy came from the right‐wing Daily Mail in 1975 and the left‐wing Daily Mirror in 1976 (Aldrich 2000, p. 43). Similar unanimity was seen from politicians of the left and right, with members both of the government and of the opposition calling for a centralized system to monitor standards of literacy. In fact, there was no evidence of falling literacy rates, nor of widespread adoption of the “progressive” forms of pedagogy blamed for the supposed fall, but the campaign led to increasing levels of political interest in and control over education – a process culminating in the 1988 introduction of the National Curriculum, which stipulated precisely what was to be taught in all subjects, and not just English (Soler and Openshaw 2006, pp. 13-41). It is therefore ironic that available survey information for the period 1948–1996 should show only one period of decline in children’s reading standards: one that followed immediately upon the introduction of the National Curriculum, and lasted several years (Brooks 1998; Galton 1998; Aldrich 2000, pp. 44–45). Government policy has had a major impact on the British textbook market since the 1970s. The public spending cuts of the early 1980s required not only a reduction of the teaching workforce by tens of thousands but a 26% drop in spending on schoolbooks (Soler and Openshaw 2006, pp. 55–56). Many publishers dropped out of the school market throughout the 1980s, and the introduction of the National Curriculum posed huge challenges. It was no longer possible to develop textbooks in (say) chemistry or biology for sale throughout the Anglophone world, because the British educational market was now divorced from the global English‐language educational market by a National Curriculum that specified exactly what a pupil should be studying at each point in his or her educational career. And while schools still retained autonomy with regard to the choice of books, their hands were tied by the centralized  –  and highly politicized  –  decision‐making process behind the curriculum itself, whose precise details could not be known at the time when the books that were to support it were in development. This meant that publishers had to make educated guesses as to what would be required, making large financial losses when they got it wrong, and while the market eventually settled down, much diversity was lost. As Tim Rix of Longman remembers, there was unavoidable “product convergence,” indeed considerable sameness, even blandness, in the educational materials published in the early 1990s. The  emphasis was on marketing power and the ability to invest. The costs of origination of schoolbooks increased threefold. The number of major educational publishers fell to seven, who, to get returns on their investments, had to stick to larger projects in the major subjects. (Rix 2008, p. 176) Because of the international nature of the business engaged in by British educational publishers, their fortunes have followed a different track than that of trade publishers. Although the late 1970s were very challenging years for most British publishers, some

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educational publishers generated huge profits, especially on textbook sales to Nigeria. Nigeria’s educational system was financed by royalties charged on petrochemical exports, which were boosted by the unusually high price of crude oil from 1973 until 1980. As the oil boom drew to a close, however, Nigeria’s economy collapsed, leading its government to impose restrictions to halt the flow of money out of the country: while Longman received £10 million from its Nigerian branch in 1979, it received nothing at all the following year, leading to major cuts in its Africa division (Bradley 2008, pp.  44–45). This left Longman’s African business almost completely dependent on “black” schools in South Africa’s racially segregated Apartheid education system, which had provided it with significant sales since the 1950s and from which it had long resisted pressure to divest (Davis 2015, pp. 138, 142). Having once generated yearly profits of £2 million from its African (and especially Nigerian) operations, Evans Brothers fell heavily into debt and in 1980 was sold to Harold Lever, who broke it up, selling its periodicals list to Scholastic, its educational and general lists to Bell & Hyman, and the remainder of the company to Otunda Ojora, a Nigerian businessman who moved its African publishing operations to Africa itself (Bradley 2008, p. 46). At the same time that the former colonies were becoming harder to exploit as educational markets, larger markets were opening up elsewhere as a result of the increasing importance of English language teaching. Following Braj Kachru (1982), linguists often conceive the English‐using regions of the world as divided into three “circles”: an “inner circle” of nations where the majority community is one that has historically used English as its main language, an “outer circle” of nations in which English has a special status as a result of British colonialism, and an “expanding circle” of nations which are seeing increased levels of English usage for other reasons, especially international commerce. From a publishing point of view, inner circle nations have historically operated as a pair of trading blocs, one dominated by Britain and the other by the United States, while outer circle nations have been the target for missionary and educational publishing efforts from within the inner circle, with their own publishing industries providing competition on a largely local level. Increasing use of English as a global lingua franca has led to worldwide growth in the numbers of private language schools offering English language tuition, which has in turn created growth in the market for teaching and learning materials originating in the inner circle, thanks to its association with “correct” standards of usage. This new market was cornered by longstanding educational publishers, who – having previously exported to Kachru’s “outer circle” under the aegis of the British Empire – were now faced with an opportunity to export to “expanding circle” nations. Of the six that had come to dominate the English language teaching market by the end of the 1990s, four were British: Cambridge University Press (CUP), OUP, Pearson/Longman, and Macmillan (de Bellaigue 2006, p. 120). The appearance of the first two publishers in this list requires explanation, because most university presses deal solely or primarily in scholarly publications purchased only by research libraries and individual subject specialists. However, from the 1980s, OUP and CUP were able to make use of their post‐imperial distribution networks to become major players in the rapidly expanding market for English language teaching materials. CUP additionally benefited from its association with the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, which is the largest assessment agency in Europe and administers some of the most widely recognized practical English language qualifications worldwide. Involvement in the lucrative field of English language

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teaching has played a major role in making OUP and CUP into by far the largest university presses in the world, turning over £366 million and £121 million respectively in the year ending March 31, 2001, while the largest American university press turned over less than £25 million (Thompson 2005, p. 87). For some years, educational publishers also continued to publish imaginative writing by “local” authors. Heinemann’s African Writers Series and the Three Crowns series from OUP both continued into the period covered by this chapter with their characteristic brands of serious fiction and drama in a largely realist mode (see Section 11.6). By contrast, Macmillan aimed at a broader African audience in publishing new works of popular fiction in its Pacesetters series of paperback romances and thrillers, launched in 1977. An experiment in category publishing, these were “heavily edited, written in compliance with the publisher’s generic specifications, printed and bound in Hong Kong, exported to African bookshops and advertised in Macmillan Education’s colourful, glossy catalogues which are produced in Basingstoke, Britain” (Newell 2000, p. 93). But the Pacesetters, the Three Crowns series, and the African Writers Series all ground to a halt in the 1980s, in large part due to the collapse of the Nigerian economy. Fortunately for the more literary writers, the loss of African markets was to a certain extent compensated by the rise of Black Studies in American universities and eventually elsewhere: although Africa once accounted for 80% of sales in the African Writers Series, this declined to 20%, while markets in the African diaspora expanded to account for as much as 50% of sales during the same period (Fraser 2008b, p. 182). This shift was a key moment in the development of “postcolonial literature” as a distinct genre whose primary audiences lay in the developed world. But we should not allow the intercontinental trajectory of the postcolonial genre to obscure the enduring influence of these writers within Africa itself: a 1998 survey of undergraduate students at four Ghanaian colleges found that while the favorite writers of most female respondents were popular female novelists from Britain and the United States, the favorites of most male respondents were male African novelists brought to prominence by the African Writers Series (Newell 2000, p. 50).

12.6 ­Postcolonial Writing and the Booker Prize Launched in 1968 and first awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize was funded by Booker, McGonnell Ltd. Booker, McGonnell owned the rights to works by a number of popular British writers, including Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, which it had purchased as an investment. However, its main source of income was from the food industry, and it had until recently enjoyed a monopoly over sugar production in British Guiana: a Caribbean colony that declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1966. The 1972 and 1973 winners, John Berger and J.G. Farrell, used their acceptance speeches to denounce Booker, McGonnall for its colonial history, and, while subsequent winners declined to bite the hand that feeds in quite such a dramatic way, the winning books have nonetheless often been ones that critically addressed the legacy of colonialism, evincing “a process of negotiation by individual writers of the changing relations among nations, tribes, and cultures in the aftermath of empire” (Strongman 2002, p. 237). Because the Booker was open to authors not only from Britain itself, but from ­throughout the British Commonwealth  –  an organization of nation‐states most of

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which were at one time territories of the British Empire – it has been possible for these “individual writers” to include people born in British colonies and former colonies. The prize has thus arguably played a greater role than any other institution in shaping what would come to be known as “postcolonial” or “diasporic” literature, which in the late twentieth century became not only a publishing genre but a lively subdiscipline of English Studies, with dedicated conferences, journals, and monograph series. In 2000, Booker, McGonnell’s sponsorship of the Booker Prize ceased, following its purchase by the British supermarket chain, Iceland, which sold off the company’s literary assets. The prize was rescued by Man Group plc, the world’s largest hedge fund manager, and relaunched in 2002 as the Man Booker Prize. Under the sponsorship of the Man Group, a range of other literary prizes was launched under the Booker brand, including a prize for translated works not originally composed in English, and in 2014, the Man Booker Prize itself was opened to writers throughout the world, including the United States. By then, the prize of £50 000 was nominally 10 times what it had been in 1969 – but only worth about two‐thirds of its original value when adjusted for inflation. The international nature of the prize has always tended to generate interest throughout – and, indeed, beyond – the Commonwealth. Nonetheless, the Booker’s most frequent beneficiaries have been either born or based in Britain itself. Of the first 20 winners, there were two South Africans (Nadine Gordimer in 1974 and J.M. Coetzee in 1983), two Australians (Thomas Keneally in 1982 and Peter Carey in 1988), and one New Zealander (Keri Hulme in 1985), but of the other 15, 11 were British and the remainder had strong ties to the country: V.S. Naipaul (winner in 1971) was born in Trinidad but completed his education at Oxford, became resident in the United Kingdom, and worked for the BBC; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (winner in 1975) was born in Germany and spent much of her life until the time of her win in India, but was educated in Britain; Iris Murdoch (winner in 1978) was born in Ireland but educated in Britain, where she spent most of her life; and Salman Rushdie (winner in 1981) was born in India but educated in Britain, where he lived and worked until many years after his win. This national bias is especially important in view of the prize’s international reputation: tracking translated editions and their sales across European markets, Miha Kovač and Rudiger Wischenbart (2010) find the Booker to have the ability – unique among comparable prizes – not only to enhance an author’s international impact, but also to launch the international career of a previously unknown author (see Allington 2014 for a case study). As well as serving as publicity for (mostly) British and British‐connected authors, the prize thus affirms the gatekeeping status of British cultural institutions. And as in the early twentieth century, with its overtly colonial publishing economy, these gatekeeper institutions include British publishers. What is called “postcolonial literature” can thus be seen as an essentially metropolitan literature – edited, published, and often written in Western cultural centers, especially London and New York  –  that is nonetheless marketed for its marginality and exoticism. Its publishers typically emphasize the “local biographical affiliation” of its authors (Brouillette 2007a, p. 4), which typically means their having been born in former colonies of the British Empire, or being otherwise connected with diasporic communities originating in those colonies. There is a two‐way connection between Anglophone postcolonial literature and the prize, as “the prestige bestowed on writers reflects back to the Booker, which then represents itself as progressive in its consecration of non‐white and/or postcolonial writers” (Squires 2012, p. 100).

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Authors marketed in this way often display deep ambivalence with regard to their position as “authentic” representatives of particular communities (Brouillette 2007a)  –  and this ambivalence suffuses their writing, which Squires characterizes as “English‐language fiction [that] is relatively ‘sophisticated’ or ‘complex’ and often anti‐ realist … is politically liberal and suspicious of nationalism … [and] uses a language of exile, hybridity, and ‘mongrel’ subjectivity” (Squires 2007, p. 61). Their writing is also fiercely critical of British colonialism, despite (and perhaps in part because of ) the fact that many of its key representatives have been educated in Britain – and in this, we may discern a continuity between it and the more realist Anglophone African literary writing discussed in Section 11.6, as there is evidence that Ngugi wa Thiong’o embraced the radical political position for which he is now remembered while studying at the University of Leeds (Bejjit 2015, p. 238). These characteristics were arguably established as typical of postcolonial literature by the success of Salman Rushdie, who famously described his work as a celebration of “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs” (Rushdie 1991, p. 394), and whose career as perhaps the central figure in postcolonial literature was effectively launched by his 1981 Booker win with Midnight’s Children, a novel of Indian decolonization. Robert Fraser observes that “Rushdie and his successors are far less translated [into Indian languages] than were their far less internationally renowned predecessors,” and that in India, “a perception persists … that these are Western authors, simply because most of their readership is perceived to lie in the West” (Fraser 2008b, pp. 185–186; see also Sadana 2012). In the United Kingdom, the genre operates in a context where non‐white literary authors appear to be considered publishable in a way that non‐white, non‐literary authors are not (Squires 2012), and are marketed as representatives of particular ethnic communities, with their potential sales assessed by comparison with sales for authors perceived to originate in the same communities (Saha 2009, pp. 123–128).

12.7 ­The Public Lending Right The idea of a royalty paid to authors when their books are borrowed from public libraries was proposed by the Arts Council in 1968. The idea became law as the Public Lending Right in 1982, with the first payments being made in 1985. These came from a public fund, with the total payment to any single author being capped at £5000. The cap did not keep pace with inflation, and by 2015 had risen only to £6600 (that is, to just under half the inflation‐adjusted value of the 1985 cap). However, such a sum is not to be sniffed at when half of UK authors earn little over one and a half times as much per year. The public lending right is useful for the historian of reading, because payments give a clear picture of what library‐goers were reading in any given year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this picture is dominated by popular fiction; interestingly, the figures have also tended to favor authors who have been familiar to the British public for a very long time. Analysis of the very first payments shows books by the romantic novelists Catherine Cookson and Barbara Cartland – both of whom had begun their careers in the early twentieth century  –  to have been checked out of libraries 10 times as frequently as those of more recent (but still well‐established) literary writers such as

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Margaret Drabble and William Golding (Greenfield 1989, p. 255). In fact, the Public Lending Right’s annual lists of most borrowed authors and titles show Cookson to have remained the most popular author among British library‐goers until several years after her death in 1998. It was not until 2002–2003 that Cookson fell from first to fourth place, overtaken by Josephine Cox, Danielle Steel, and – leading the field – the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson (PLR 2003, 2004). All three were reliably bestselling authors born in the 1940s; Steel (the only non‐British writer of the four) and Wilson had been publishing for decades, while Cox, the relative newcomer, had published her first book 10 years previously. The single most frequently borrowed book of that year was The Summons, by the long‐established American author of legal thrillers John Grisham – although just a short time previously, it would have been astonishing for that honor to be taken by a book by anyone other than Cookson, whose works crowded almost everything else out of the top 10 until the end of the twentieth century. In fact, despite this falling‐off in popularity, Cookson would still become the most borrowed author for the period 1996–2016, with a total of 27 million UK library issues (PLR 2017). Especially when we bear in mind her lifetime sales of over 100 million books (Thomas and Robert 1998), there would clearly be an argument for seeing Cookson as the twentieth century’s most important British novelist  –  from the point of view of reading experiences, as opposed to critical acclaim. To find the kinds of authors likely to be assigned to students of modern British literature, one must dip far below the top 10. For example, it took a second Man Booker Prize win to transform Hilary Mantel from the 404th most borrowed author of 2011–2012 to the 177th most borrowed author of 2012–2013: a year remarkable in that it saw what the Public Lending Right Office described as “two rare Top 10 appearances by literary novels,” one being Mantel’s prizewinner and the other being a work by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (PLR 2014). In the rankings, authors who, from the point of view of literary critics, might just as well not have existed towered above the acclaimed Mantel, as did some who literally did not exist: the second and eighth most borrowed “authors” in the latter year were the collective pseudonyms Daisy Meadows and Adam Blade, to whom we shall return in Section 12.11.

12.8 ­Academic Publishing The British university system saw massive growth from 1960 onwards. While only 13 universities had been founded in the first six decades of the twentieth century, the 1960s saw the founding of nearly twice as many. In the same decade, an even larger number of polytechnics – university‐like institutions whose degree‐validating powers were originally centralized in the Council for National Academic Awards  –  were founded, increasing the number of people teaching and studying on undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs still further. The entire system saw rapid growth from the 1970s onwards, with total numbers of students enrolled at British universities increasing by about 90% from the mid‐1970s to the mid‐1990s, when they exceeded half a million for the first time (Universities Statistical Report 1997). This led to a consequent growth in demand not only for degree‐level textbooks, but also for authoritative editions of classic literary texts. Surprisingly, however, what had long been the central form of academic publishing – the monograph, a publishing genre

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discussed in Section  11.5  –  was widely perceived to enter into a crisis, with sales of individual titles falling to such a level that early twenty‐first‐century academic publishers were typically budgeting for a break‐even point in the low hundreds. The obvious solution was to reduce monograph production and increase textbook and reference book production, but this threw publishers into conflict with their authors, who were under contrary pressures thanks to periodic government audits that only recognized the publication of primary research (in the United States, the tenure system exerts a comparable pressure). Because these audits have rewarded universities only for employing authors of monographs and peer‐reviewed journal articles, textbook authorship has come to be seen as a waste of time, except for “academics who are retired (or near to retirement), or who are teaching at institutions or departments which do not aspire to perform well [in audits of research]” (Thompson 2005, p. 284). The relative unprofitability of monographs was caused by a number of factors. Chief among these was a change in the role of university libraries from the 1980s onwards (see below). However, the most widely publicized factor in the declining expenditure on monographs has been a dramatic rise in annual subscription costs for a minority of periodicals, especially high‐demand journals covering STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subject areas and produced by commercial publishers, coupled with a much smaller rise in subscription costs for the far cheaper journals that cover HSS (humanities and social sciences) subjects and that are often produced by non‐profit publishers such as university presses. With some justification, this rise has often been interpreted as evidence of profiteering, although it also reflects inflation and the growth of successful journals over time: as a journal becomes more prestigious, it tends to attract more article submissions, which increases the cost of managing the peer‐review process and leads to the publication of more issues per year. Library budgets were placed under further strain by a change in role. Increasing volumes of information were available in electronic form, and the responsibility for ensuring access to these for students and staff fell to libraries. The importance and expense of commercially produced databases and other electronic resources gradually led toward the twenty‐first‐century reconceptualization of the university library as a digital resource center and training provider. But even in the late 1980s, investments were already having to be made in computer equipment, both for library staff and for students (the library often being the only place in which the latter could access computers), and increasing numbers of technical specialists were required within university libraries from the 1990s onwards. Moreover, new electronic resources of a kind that had not previously existed came to compete with books and journals. In UK libraries, the proportion of the acquisitions budget spent on periodicals remained flat throughout the 1990s, but the proportion of expenditure devoted to electronic resources rose by a factor of 5. This rise alone is more than sufficient to explain the drop in spending on books, which fell from 40.2 to 32.6% of total expenditure over the same period (Thompson 2005, p. 104). Libraries have thus been expected to shoulder much of the burden for scholarship’s transition into the digital age while continuing to foot much of the bill for academics’ research publication needs – a clearly unsustainable situation, given that global university and research funding has grown at several times the rate of library funding (Poynder 2011). Unfortunately, publishers have received much of the blame for this state of affairs.

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Despite the problems noted above, production of both books and journals for the library market appears to have risen. Such growth is driven by academics themselves. Career progression (and even job security) for research‐active academics has been increasingly tied to publication in credentialing venues, leading to spiraling numbers of book and article manuscripts in need of publication. A total of 20 609 new academic and professional books were published in the United Kingdom in 1991, but more than 42 424 were published in 2000 (Thompson 2005, p. 106). At the same time, academic research has diversified into increasing numbers of highly specialized sub‐fields and interdisciplinary fields, and this diversification has been accompanied by a proliferation of journals to serve the academic communities in question. Drawing on a survey of journals carried out by Jerry Jacobs (2013), Casey Brienza argues (2015, p. 149) that the majority of newly launched journals “exist primarily to define and develop new fields of enquiry and thereby legitimize them within the academic profession.” The publishing of journals involves a staggering range of tasks that incur direct and indirect costs, and which are typically outsourced to publishers (see Anderson 2018). In a small minority of cases, the academics behind academic journals elect to take on such duties themselves in order to reduce or eliminate costs by donating their unpaid labor (see Shieber 2012 for an example), but there is simply too little spare capacity in the university system for such voluntarism to contribute in a major way to scholarly publishing on the scale that is now required (Anderson 2013). The considerable costs of this system have traditionally been met by subscribers. However, institutional subscribers such as university libraries typically subscribe to journals not as individual titles but as components of “big deals” wherein subscriptions to dozens or even hundreds of journals are bundled together and sold at a knockdown fee. Such arrangements help to keep costs per title relatively low, but prevent libraries from unsubscribing to bundled journals that turn out to have lower‐than‐expected demand from staff and students. This has led to considerable resentment toward publishers on the part of librarians, who would understandably prefer to reduce costs by subscribing only to the most frequently read journals while continuing to enjoy the discounts associated with “big deals.” But were this permitted, the greatest losers would be the communities of academics who read, publish in, peer review for, and edit the many journals whose financial viability depends on being sold through bundling with more individually lucrative titles. Among the journals that would be driven out of b ­ usiness, one would almost certainly find a disproportionate number of the highly s­ pecialized titles that have helped to establish and sustain the current diversity of a­ cademic disciplines. From the 1990s onwards, the contradictions and pressures of the increasingly fraught academic publishing ecosystem, together with the apparent potential for low‐cost online alternatives, led to the formation of what would come to be known as the Open Access movement. At its best, this has involved serious inquiry into questions about the proper cost of academic publishing, about whether it should be paid for by authors or by readers, and about whether it is more efficiently carried out by for‐profit publishers such as Elsevier or non‐profit publishers such as CUP: journals published by the former tend to be substantially more expensive than those published by the latter, although the precise reasons for this are unclear. At its worst, it has involved demonization of all publishers as parasites and profiteers, along with the absurd but frequently reiterated accusation that academics or the public are “forced” to “buy back” knowledge that they have already created or at least paid for – when in reality, the subscription costs are a

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price charged not for academic knowledge but for the provision of publishing services to the university system. Baffled by the differences between the economy of scholarly publishing (wherein universities desire for their employees’ research to be published and to that end pay to support the system that makes it possible) and that of newspaper publishing (wherein publishers desire to sell advertising space, and to that end pay writers for copy to accompany it), the left‐wing Guardian journalist George Monbiot even went so far as to describe scholarly publishing as a “racket” or “scam” perpetrated by “the most ruthless capitalists in the western world” (Monbiot 2011). A watershed moment for the movement against scholarly publishers was Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers’s 2012 proposal of a boycott of journals published by Elsevier, which has had a longstanding although possibly undeserved reputation for engaging in particularly aggressive pricing practices (see Thompson 2005, p. 100). The boycott had little or no immediate practical effect because few scholars followed it. But it had a powerful symbolic effect in popularizing the idea that academics could solve the problems of the current scholarly publishing system simply by withdrawing from it: to pay for … escalating costs[, library resources] have been diverted from investment in other materials, most notably HSS monographs … This has, in turn, put pressure on non‐profit university presses to become market‐oriented … A vicious cycle thus emerges: HSS researchers who need a book for tenure blame university presses, university presses blame the libraries, and libraries blame corporate journal publishers like Elsevier. In the past, libraries would also have shifted blame onto STEM researchers, who need journal articles for tenure and demand that the libraries maintain … expensive subscriptions to these prestigious, paywalled publication venues. In recent years, however, scientists and funding ­bodies have increasingly come out in favour of open access … and so … divert[ed] the animosity away from themselves and back toward the multinational for‐profit publishing conglomerates and the evils of capitalism. (Brienza 2012, pp. 162–163) In this way, the quintessentially capitalist demands of clients who want more from their suppliers at lower cost came to be misidentified as a revolutionary socialist cause. In the United States, the outcome was the growing popularity of voluntary open access archiving arrangements, whereby researchers could deposit manuscript versions of their work in special repositories for free download. In the United Kingdom, journal articles reporting on publicly funded research are required to be made available for free download, and public funds were provided for the payment of subventions to publishers facilitating this. These funds are administrated by university libraries, cementing the historically central role of those institutions in the financing of publishing services for the academic community. In addition, researchers are required to deposit manuscript copies of unfunded articles in repositories also typically run by university libraries, which thus become publishers of a sort in their own right. As of the time of writing, there remains no credible business model for Open Access monograph publishing on a sufficiently large scale to replace the current system, and – despite the assertions of some polemicists – scant evidence of any real demand for it among academic authors, especially in the humanities (Deegan 2017, pp. 44–46; see also Jubb 2017, pp. 181–188 for in‐depth discussion of the challenges typically

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glossed over by advocates). However, given the limited industrial value of the knowledge produced by those disciplines that prioritize monographs, as well as an understandable pattern of public disinterest in works written for an audience of subject specialists, this is unlikely to be perceived as a problem by many beyond the community that defines itself through ideological commitment to Open Access. Indeed, it seems likely that most or all of those scholars able – by virtue of a charismatic style combined with a focus on topics of general interest – to command an audience beyond the circle of their students, their peers, and the students of their peers are already doing so through trade publishing and the broadcast media. The works of the historian Simon Schama, for example, are available as Penguin paperbacks, while those of the classicist Mary Beard are published by Profile Books – and both those noted academics are familiar faces on BBC television. It is much the same in periodical publication. The commercially published New Scientist and History Today, mentioned in Section 11.5, continue to provide the many thousands of readers of their print editions with an accessible and stimulating digest of academic knowledge, but it is hard to imagine much public excitement being aroused even by free downloads of Journal of Molecular Cell Biology or Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (both currently published on a subscription model by the non‐profitmaking OUP). In true scholarly publishing, tiny audiences are an inescapable fact of life, by no means to be lamented. After all, the small and unprofitable audiences for poetry have been seen as a virtue  –  and indeed served as an ethical justification for the agreement that stabilized the book trade as a whole for nearly a hundred years.

12.9 ­Bookshop Chains and the End of the Net Book Agreement Britain’s first true bookshop chains emerged in the 1980s. Until that time, the only large chain that dealt extensively in books had been not a dedicated bookshop at all, but the newsagent W.H. Smith. But bookselling was ripe for modernization and consolidation, with computerized systems for very large‐scale stock control and ordering having been facilitated by the introduction of the Standard Book Number – later, the International Standard Book Number or ISBN – system in the 1960s, which enabled every new book to be unambiguously identified (Bradley 1992). The largest of the new chains was Waterstone’s, founded in 1982 by a former W.H. Smith employee, Tim Waterstone. Its first major competitor was the Dillon’s chain, founded by Terry Maher when his investment company, Pentos PLC, purchased a large bookshop on Gower Street from the University of London (the chain was named after Una Dillon, who had managed the latter bookshop for many years). The two chains opened dozens of large, attractively fitted shops known for their wide stock and knowledgeable staff. Like other kinds of retail chains, Dillon’s and Waterstone’s expected to benefit from the use of price promotions – but the Net Book Agreement stood in their way. In 1988, both Tim Waterstone and Terry Maher sought to have the agreement re‐ investigated by the Office of Fair Trading, arguing that it was anti‐competitive. But by the time it was found to be illegal after nobody took the trouble of defending it, the Net Book Agreement had already been abandoned.

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This finally happened in 1995 and was the result of private discussions between Random House, HarperCollins, and W.H. Smith. The first sign of change came when Random House and HarperCollins announced that their books could now be sold at any price whatsoever, without fear of sanction. Later that same day, W.H. Smith announced a major price promotion on Random House and HarperCollins books. These announcements were made just two days before the Publishers Association was due to debate the question of whether to defend the Net Book Agreement, and effectively canceled the debate. There was simply nothing left to talk about. Much though it had benefited smaller businesses, the agreement was simply pointless if two of the “big five” publishers and the country’s largest bookseller were no longer party to it (W.H. Smith was at that point the owner of Waterstone’s). The literary agent Carole Blake recalls: The very next morning … I got a phone call from a publisher saying, “We’ve got a chance to do a high discount deal with a chain. Will your author accept a lower royalty than the one in the contract?” And I thought, “Ah, it’s the Wild West. Contracts no longer mean anything.” It really was as fast as that. Then we had to start negotiating clauses for what authors’ royalties would be on high discount deals. … [But] even with these newly agreed clauses, there are publishers who ring up, perfectly legitimately, to ask if this big new deal they’re doing with Tesco can carry a ten per cent of price‐received royalty. … I’d rather not [accept], but there is no other way of getting those big deals from the supermarkets. (quoted in Bradley 2008, pp. 233–234) The major consequence of the Net Book Agreement’s abandonment was to accelerate the existing trend toward concentration on bestselling books as the central focus of the industry. Indeed, bestselling books were key to the new, price‐based approach to marketing that the major retail chains had attacked the agreement in order to adopt. Booksellers would drive customers toward actual or predicted bestsellers by offering deep discounts (typically a third off the recommended retail price) or by selling them on a “buy one get one free” or “three for the price of two” arrangement, and would identify such books by placing stickers on the covers and often also by displaying them face‐ upwards on tables rather than on the shelves. Such discounts are ultimately paid for by the books’ publishers and authors, but the increased volume of sales more than makes up for it when a predicted bestseller fulfills its expected potential. However, those extra sales come at the cost of reduced sales for everything else. Only small numbers of books can be displayed on tables (which are a comparatively inefficient use of floor space), and where volume of sales is lower, such discounts cannot be justified by publisher or retailer, with the result that less popular titles become harder to spot and more expensive to purchase. Preferential display space within shops is reserved for books whose publishers are willing to pay for it, with the use of such “bung” arrangements naturally benefiting the titles publishers believe likely to sell in the highest numbers. The divide between the “big books” and the rest was further exaggerated by the activity of supermarkets, which took advantage of the Net Book Agreement’s disappearance to stock a very narrow range of fast‐selling titles, and to sell them at huge discounts. Because of these emerging practices, growth shifted from paperbacks to hardbacks – but only with

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regard to heavily discounted “big books.” “Literary” authors, whose audiences were smaller, increasingly found themselves published straight to paperback  –  a fate that just a few years before would have been reserved for authors of the most down‐market genre fiction. The results were predictable. One typical publisher found that its average discount to retailers rose from 39% in the mid‐1980s to 55% in 2008; during the same approximate period, it has been estimated that the proportion of books that failed to earn back the advances paid to their authors rose from roughly half to 70–80% (de Bellaigue 2008, pp. 113–114). Given the vulnerability of small publishers and the pressures placed on editors at the big publishers to cut losses and raise profits, the latter statistic could only have one consequence: a winnowing‐out of relatively low‐selling writers. Philippa Harrison, Publishers Association president in the late 1990s, spoke of authors “who may have had a respectable, decent, middle‐selling writing career for twenty years … just being dropped all over the place” once the Net Book Agreement was no longer in force (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 234). The effects upon independent bookshops were similarly unsettling: unable to negotiate the sorts of discounts offered to larger outfits, they sometimes found themselves buying “big books” from publishers at a higher price than that at which they were available from the local supermarket. Numbers of such shops fell and continued to fall. Many of the survivors reinvented themselves as cultural centers for their local communities, hosting reading groups, “meet the author” events, and even informal classes in subjects such as literature and philosophy. The aim was to create sufficient customer loyalty to keep people buying what they know they could have more cheaply elsewhere. But such an approach to business relies upon a particular kind of consumer: cultured enough to enjoy the added value, and affluent enough to pay for it by buying books at higher cost. By 2005, there  were just 1535 independent bookshops in Britain; by 2013, there were 987 (Campbell 2014). In 2008, the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading carried out an investigation into the effects of the Net Book Agreement’s abandonment on productivity (in the technical sense of the monetary value of each worker’s output per hour), comparing the performance of publishers and retailers after the end of the agreement with their performance before it, as well as with the performance of comparable companies in France and Germany, where retail price maintenance is still practiced. The investigation found that the abolition of the Net Book Agreement was accompanied by a sharp rise in productivity for the large bookselling chains, followed by an extended decline that took productivity below the level it had held before the agreement’s abolition, as a probable result of increased competition on price from internet and supermarket retailers that would likely have achieved much lower market penetration had the agreement still been in force. As for publishers, they continued to enjoy growth in productivity, although at a lower rate than under the Net Book Agreement (Center for Competition Policy 2008, pp. 10–11). Waterstones (as the chain is now known, following an apostrophe‐culling rebrand) reported losses in every year from 2008 until profit in 2016, surviving only thanks to its 2011 purchase by Alexander Mamut, a Russian oligarch who invested £100 million in the business (Butler 2017, p. 23). Calls are periodically made for the revival of the agreement, but its abandonment was no more than an acknowledgement that it no longer served the interests of the most powerful players in the industry. The Net Book Agreement existed in order to protect a

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commercial ecosystem characterized by small, independent bookshops stocking a wide range of slow‐selling titles and by small, independent publishers happy to publish loss‐ making books provided that their overall finances remained stable. It is not unreasonable to feel nostalgic for that ecosystem, but it is gone, replaced by one dominated on the one hand by supermarkets and online retail (discussed in Section 12.16), and on the other by corporate publishers whose owners’ ideal (if not their own) would be to publish nothing but bestselling books. The entities that would most welcome a new Net Book Agreement – independent bookshops and publishers, lower‐selling authors, and perhaps now even the chains that broke the agreement in the first place – are precariously situated in the new ecosystem, and a renewed agreement could only work with the consent of those at the center, whose interest is in preserving or enhancing their own dominance of the market. Just as the independent bookshops began to disappear in the 1980s and 1990s, the chains too began to struggle in the twenty‐first century. By 1999, seven chains – Books etc., Borders, Dillons, Hammicks, Ottakar’s, Waterstones, and W.H. Smith – accounted for 42% of retail sales of books to consumers (Squires 2007, p. 31). But diversity was in fact rather narrower than this list suggests. Books etc. and Borders both belonged to Borders (UK) Ltd.: a subsidiary of the Borders Group that was established in 1998, became independent from its owner in 2007, and went bust in 2009, with the consequent closure of all its outlets. Moreover, both Dillons and Waterstones passed into the ownership of the music retailer, HMV, following its 1995 purchase of Dillons from Pentos and its 1998 purchase of Waterstones from W.H. Smith. The new owner soon rebranded most Dillons branches as Waterstones stores, with the result that many towns found themselves with more than one of the latter. The other Dillons branches were sold to Ottakar’s, which Waterstones acquired in 2006, thus cornering roughly 25% of the retail market (Squires 2007, p. 31). This meant that, when the final remaining Hammicks store closed in 2015, Waterstones and W.H. Smith were the only remaining bookshop chains (to the extent that W.H. Smith is a bookshop chain) of any significant size (see Figures 12.2 and 12.3). But by 2015, not even Waterstones seemed safe. Given that books take up only a small part of the floor space of a typical W.H. Smith branch, the potential demise of the Waterstones chain could therefore be viewed as a quite catastrophic possibility for publishers and readers alike: between 2000 and 2006, one major trade publisher saw its proportion of sales through independent bookshops fall from 8% to 3% (Thompson 2012, p. 58), underscoring the vanity of any hopes that the hole that would be left by the disappearance of the chains that emerged from the 1980s might be filled by a resurgence of the kind of booksellers that they drove from the market long before.

12.10 ­“Big Books” The production and sale of “big books” was at the center of this new commercial reality. But what makes a “big book” so big? One example has already been alluded to: once a successful multimedia franchise had been constructed on the basis of the Harry Potter books, the release of any additional Harry Potter book became a national event, with  some bookshops even opening at midnight on the day of publication so that ­purchasers would not have to wait until 9 a.m. before purchasing the new hardback.

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Figure 12.2  A typical Waterstones storefront in 2017. Note the price promotions. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

Figure 12.3  The book section of a branch of W.H. Smith in 2017. Price promotions are everywhere. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

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But big publishers are also capable of producing “big books” without the assistance of Hollywood, given suitable materials with which to work. The paragon example of this can be seen in Claire Squires’s (2007, pp. 177–180) detailed study of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which was published early in 2000 by Penguin’s Hamish Hamilton imprint. Central to the production of White Teeth as a “big book” is what Squires calls “the manufacture of the public authorial presence as an adjunct of the marketing process” (Squires 2007, p. 180). The then‐unknown author’s agent negotiated a contract on the basis of an 80‐page sample of the unfinished manuscript, enabling her to begin being promoted as a literary celebrity while she was still writing her first book. The Daily Telegraph, The Times, and The Independent on Sunday all mentioned Smith in articles published in December 1997 and January 1998, two years before White Teeth was actually published. An extract was placed with the literary magazine Granta in 1999, and the same year, The Bookseller published an interview piece that “relates a publishing story of high advance levels, pre‐publication hype, and publishers’ marketing spend” (Squires 2007, p. 177), ensuring interest within the trade. An endorsement from Salman Rushdie appeared on the cover of the hardback edition and was featured in the high‐profile marketing campaign, which included front‐page advertising in The Bookseller, and took the author (rather than the book) as its central theme. Reviews were glowing, often highlighting Smith’s biographical similarities with one of the characters in the novel, and other press coverage was extensive, often focusing on the author’s personal beauty and on her multicultural origins as the daughter of a white British man and a black woman from Jamaica. Bungs were paid for, almost certainly contributing to the book’s emergence as a bestseller (Kean 2002). White Teeth was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book Prize, the Guardian First Book Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread First Novel Award, ensuring its – and its author’s – repeated appearance in the news. It was adapted for television in 2002, leading to renewed bookshop promotions. The whole exercise was, in short, a quite stupendous success. But the resources necessary for such a coup are only at the disposal of the largest publishers and can only be directed toward a tiny minority of books and authors – in particular, at those that are seen to be particularly “marketable.”

12.11 ­The Rationalization of Authorship and Publishing Increasingly, the unit of children’s fiction is not the book, but the series: a visitor to the children’s and teenagers’ sections of any British bookshop in the early twenty‐first century is likely to be struck by the proliferation of novels in carefully branded sets. Series of books with persistent themes, characters, and settings have long been a feature of printed fiction, as we saw with the Scarlet Pimpernel, Bulldog Drummond, and Hank Janson novels (see Sections 10.5 and 11.9). Moreover, these have often required the input of multiple writers over time, as in the case of the exceptionally long‐running Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series from America. But the juvenile market’s hunger for such series now far exceeds the ability of individual writers to create them even in the short term. And, across the creative industries, there has been a shift in emphasis toward formats rather than individual works, with “the production of ‘more of the same’, or at least very similar” becoming centrally important as a “strategy for overcoming the

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Figure 12.4  Shiny metallic colors draw attention to this small selection of the works of “Daisy Meadows” (reproduced here in black and white). Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

indeterminacy and inconsistencies of the cultural marketplace” (Banks 2007, p. 76). These two trends come together in the collective authorship company Working Partners Ltd. Working Partners develops concepts for children’s series and associates them with house pseudonyms, then works up specifications for individual titles and collectible sub‐series and assigns them to freelance writers. Once these specifications have been written up as short novels, they are published in clearly branded series. The best known to date have been the “Rainbow Magic” and “Magic Animal Friends” series, published under the fairytale name of “Daisy Meadows” and marketed to young girls, and the “Beast Quest” and “Sea Quest” series, published under the more macho name of “Adam Blade” and marketed to young boys (see Figure 12.4). A stupendous rate of production has been achieved through this industrial approach to authorship, with over two hundred Daisy Meadows books published since 2003, and approaching two hundred Adam Blade books published since 2007. Working Partners books are rigidly formulaic, but that is part of their appeal, with readers knowing exactly what to expect from each new title. For example, every Rainbow Magic story tells of the rescue of a magical artifact or creature from the villainous Jack Frost and his goblin henchmen by the young friends, Rachel Walker and Kirsty Tate, together with a female fairy, with the object of the quest and the identity (and, crucially, the apparel) of the fairy changing from one book to the next. The success of the Working Partners approach has already been hinted at in relation to the

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public lending right. Indeed, Daisy Meadows has been the second or third most borrowed “author” from British libraries in every year since 2006–2007, while Adam Blade has steadily climbed to sixth place. This has been achieved through careful m ­ anagement of the creative process: “We call it ‘collegiate’ fiction,” says Chris Snowdon, the MD of Working Partners. “We’re not interested in being approached with a single concept for a series. Developing ideas together is what makes our work exciting.” Initial concepts are brainstormed by the larger team, and three or four writers and editors will then write a full treatment of several thousand words, which will get farmed out to  writers to submit several chapters, before a final author is chosen for a ­single book. Several writers will write books within a series, and writers and editors ­frequently swap roles. “No single person owns an idea, because ownership brings preciousness,” declares Snowdon. “We’d have tension within the team if one ­person owned a concept or character.” (Stroud 2014) Although Working Partners is an extreme example, its approach reflects a general trend toward rationalization in the production or acquisition of manuscripts, which relies less and less on individual creativity and taste (which are what Snowdon seems to mean by “preciousness”) and more and more on assessments of risk based on knowledge of how the market has reacted in the past. This information is provided by Nielsen BookScan, which has since 2001 tracked cash register sales in major retailers and thus provided publishers not only with real‐time information on how their own books are selling, but also with the same information on their competitors’ titles. Anamik Saha found one publisher complaining that sales managers now have more say than anybody else in the commissioning process, which an editorial director described as follows: it’s the salespeople who give us the figures over whether [a new book is] going to work or not. It’s not done any more on what I feel in my gut instinct, because there’s so much more data around now. And you could say, I feel very passionate about this novel but the salespeople can come back at you and say, “yes but no debut novels sell more than 10,000 copies” … [E]very time I take a new book and say “I quite like this, I want to do it,” our salesperson would go straight to a computer, look it up, or look up something similar rather, and say, “that sold very little, I don’t think we should take a risk on this.” (quoted in Saha 2009, pp. 122–123) The usefulness of such data‐driven decision‐making is, however, limited by the inherent unpredictability of publishing, in which it is never safe to assume that the future will resemble the past. A later study found commissioning editors to rely on a range of criteria, including personal taste, a sense of what the company’s list might currently be lacking, and – crucially – the potential to develop a convincing sales pitch for a new book (Squires 2017).

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12.12 ­Xerography and the Amateur Periodical The development of xerography by the Xerox Corporation (originally known as the Haloid Company) led to a boom in amateur publishing, especially of periodicals, from the 1970s onwards. The mechanics of xerography are in some ways similar to those of photolithography. At the heart of a xerographic copier is a selenium‐coated drum that is given a positive electrostatic charge. A strong light is shone onto the image to be copied; where the image is dark, the light is absorbed, but where it is not, it reflects onto the drum, dissipating the charge. Negatively charged particles of a dry, black substance called “toner” are attracted to the parts of the drum that remain charged, and subsequently transferred from it onto a new sheet of paper, to which they are fused at high temperature. (The dry toner gives xerography its name, which is Greek for “dry writing.”) High‐contrast originals consisting of type and line art tend to result in the clearest copies, although continuous tone originals such as photographs and pencil drawings can also be reproduced with some degree of success. The entire process is automated, taking place within the cabinet of an enclosed machine known as a “photocopier” (see Figure 12.5). The quality of reproduction is low, production time per copy is high, and there are inflexible limitations with regard to color and to page size, but cost per copy is independent of edition size: the cost of a single copy is the cost of a sheet of paper plus the cost of one cycle of the machine, and the cost of n copies is simply n times the cost of a single copy. To begin with, xerographic photocopiers were manufactured exclusively by Xerox, but as competitors became able to Figure 12.5  The Xerox 914: the first commercially successful xerographic copier, manufactured from 1959 to 1976. Source: Courtesy of the Xerox Corporation.

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enter the market in the 1970s, xerography became more affordable, and thus more widespread, with all large offices soon having their own photocopiers, and photocopying bureaux opening in large towns. Xerography typically used ordinary office paper, giving it a major advantage over other short‐run copiers such as mimeographs, spirit duplicators (Dittos), or Photostats. Xerography was not used as a means of book production by commercial publishers, both because of the poor quality of reproduction and because the cost per copy was far higher than that which could be achieved with more established technologies, given a reasonably large print run. But as retailers and libraries began to offer photocopying as a service, an amateur xerographic publishing industry was born. One of the most striking products of this industry was the “fanzine”: a magazine produced by and for fans of a sports team, television show, rock band, or similar. A fanzine’s contributors could start by running off 50 or so copies of a fanzine for their friends, and then – if demand proved to be more widespread – just as easily run off another 50, and then another, and another. Xeroxed fanzines were sold in local shops and bars, by mail order, and at conventions and music performances. Perhaps the most influential British fanzine was Sniffin’ Glue, edited by Mark Perry and running from 1976 to 1977 (see Figure 12.6). Text was set using a toy typewriter, with page numbers and headlines clumsily added in felt‐tip pen, and copies were produced on the photocopier installed in the office where Perry’s girlfriend was employed, with print runs that may have reached 10 000 by the time of the final issue (Triggs 2006, p. 72). The defiantly amateurish Sniffin’ Glue aesthetic was imitated by countless music,

Figure 12.6  Un‐numbered double‐page spread from Sniffin’ Glue, August–September 1977. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

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Figure 12.7  An early twenty‐first‐century issue of a church magazine from the south‐east of England. It was typeset using entry‐level software and reproduced on standard office supplies in a local printing shop. Far more painstakingly constructed than the intentionally sloppy fanzine shown in Figure 12.6, it nonetheless retains a “home‐made” aesthetic that sets it apart from the products of the mainstream periodical publishing industry. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington. With thanks to the Watling Valley Partnership.

sport, and television fanzines of the 1970s and afterwards. But similar technologies were employed in the production of less glamorous publications, such as parish magazines and club or community newsletters, most of which made an effort to approximate more professional production values (see Figure 12.7). Xerography transformed most aspects of life in the late twentieth century, from office work and government administration to the day‐to‐day running of religious institutions, clubs, and schools (see Gitelman 2014, pp. 83–110). And amateur xerographic publications were an important aspect of print culture, providing a venue for countless amateur writers. While most such publications had very few readers indeed, their combined readership was considerable, as was their cultural influence. Music fanzines like Sniffin’ Glue could provide exposure for cultural forms yet to receive serious coverage in more conventional publications, such as the punk rock of the day; conversely, they could also constitute a “‘little world’ of publishing that … arise[s] after its subject matter has … been discarded by the mainstream” (Atton 2001, p. 30). Community newsletters

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assisted the circulation of information among groups too small to be served by professional media, and sports fanzines provided an alternative (and often highly critical) take on a subject extensively discussed in local and national newspapers. Because of the ease of producing small editions, combined with the difficulty of producing and distributing larger editions, xerographic publishing has “historically offered a way to publicise ­[cultural] scenes both in and beyond their geographic points of origin … without necessarily making them vulnerable to the forms of overexposure that often result in their decline” (Eichhorn 2015, p. 365). Indeed, some producers of such publications may have valued their limited distribution precisely as a way of restricting access to readers whom they knew, trusted, or felt an affinity with (see Eichhorn 2001, p. 570). Such forms of “coterie” circulation had been seen before, as in the use of limited editions to avoid censorship (see Section 10.6), or the use of manuscript rather than print at any time from the early modern period onwards (see Section 3.3). Many amateur publications came to take advantage of consumer‐level desktop publishing software in the 1990s, and toward the end of the century, they were increasingly replaced by websites and social media as “the [fanzine] movement … slowly migrated onto the internet” (Millward 2008, p. 302). However, in 1999, there were over 2500 British print fanzines devoted to the game of soccer alone (Triggs 2001, p. 48), with one former member of their number, When Saturday Comes, achieving a national circulation of over 40 000 that year (Green 1999, p. 21). It is still published today.

12.13 ­Digital Design and Digital Printing By the 1970s, offset lithography had become the normal means by which to print books. Internal text was re‐keyed by the operator of a phototypesetting machine, and dust jackets and paperback covers were typically pasted up by graphic designers for reproduction in full color (for all that Gollancz has never quite abandoned the purely typographic dust jacket). But in 1986, two events took place that moved textual production into the approximate form that it still holds today. The first of these was effected by newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch. Knowing that the printing unions would never accept the introduction of phototypesetting and offset lithography (as these would require a much smaller workforce), Murdoch secretly established a high technology printing works in Wapping, East London and  –  in a ­surprise move  –  responded to the inevitable strike by dismissing the thousands of employees who had hitherto operated the typesetting and printing machines at the old headquarters in Fleet Street. Using the new digital technology, journalists could key in their own articles for publication. Some went on strike in solidarity with the printers, but it was a lost cause. The second event was the launch of Aldus Pagemaker 1.2 – the first desktop publishing package to use the PostScript page description language (see Figure 12.8). For the first time, a designer could create an entire page layout onscreen knowing that every page element – right down to the individual letterforms – would be positioned identically on the printed page (provided that the printing system also used PostScript). From that point onwards, the characteristic site of the graphic designer’s work was not the

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Figure 12.8  Example page layout from Aldus Pagemaker 1.2, launched in 1986, here running on an emulated Macintosh Plus.

paste‐up board but the Apple Mac (see Figure  12.9). The impact on workflows was dramatic, and led to the redefinition of working roles from the 1980s to the 1990s: The ability to preview designs – with typography and imagery combined – on‐ screen made it possible to try out multiple solutions quickly, and if necessary, for discussions to take place around a computer. The merging of creative and production roles was met with misgivings by some (reflecting concerns throughout the graphic design profession generally), but the positive aspects of the new ways of working made it possible for a greater dialogue to occur between editors, picture researchers, and designers. (Baines 2005, p. 166) Just like their newspaper counterparts, book publishers increasingly came to expect texts to come to them in digital form – initially on floppy disk, and later as email attachments – for direct insertion into the designer’s layout. This meant that the publisher was often responsible for the first appearance of a text in physical form, resulting in the elimination of the very concept of “manuscript” or “typescript” in many genres of writing – except in a metaphorical sense, referring to a so‐far unpublished digital text awaiting publication. Just as the new technology of the typewriter had changed how authors related to their texts (see Section 9.3) – even if they still initially wrote them in longhand and had someone else type them up – so too the word‐processing program transformed notions of creativity, authorship, and revision. Today, the word processor’s seeming “dematerialisation of the written act” enables the production of an apparently “perfect

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Figure 12.9  The Macintosh Plus, launched in 1986. Source: Photograph by Rama (2007), https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MacIntosh_Plus_img_1317.jpg, licensed under Creative Commons CC‐BY‐SA‐2.0‐fr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐sa/2.0/fr/deed.en.

document” that “bears no visible trace of its prior history … as though [it had] … emerged, fully formed in its first and final iteration, from the mind of the author” (Kirschenbaum 2016, p. 36). Like all revolutions, the digital printing revolution set in gradually. Digital phototypesetting first replaced film‐based optical phototypesetting systems by producing galleys on photosensitive paper, with physical paste up for the process camera continuing into the 1990s in many newspaper offices and other publishing establishments. But computers were increasingly used to create entire layouts ready for the press, color‐ separated halftone images included. Other forms of technology simultaneously made it much easier to produce physical copies of pages laid out in this way. The Xerox Corporation developed a new form of xerographic printing where computer‐­ controlled laser light, rather than light reflected from an original, was used to apply an electrostatic charge to the drum. This led to the development of the laser printer, now commonly installed even in home offices, either as a desktop unit or inside a digital photocopier (essentially, a computer acting as a controller for a scanner and a printer that can operate independently of one another despite being housed in a single unit). In common usage, a “printer” is no longer a person like William Caxton but rather a ubiquitous electronic device. Higher‐end laser printers are used in short‐run digital printing and the revolutionary “print on demand” publishing model, where books do not physically exist until they have been ordered, and are then produced in exactly the required quantity, eliminating any need for warehousing. This approach to printing was originally used by Danka Services International in the production of user manuals and other documentation for IBM, but in the late 1990s was adapted for book production by Lightning Source, a print‐on‐demand company set up by the largest book wholesaler in the United States.

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In partnership with Britain’s second largest book wholesaler, Bertram’s, Lightning Source expanded into the United Kingdom in 1999, where it saw especially enthusiastic take‐up from university presses, who were able to bring out‐of‐print titles back into circulation with only minimal investment (Thompson 2005, pp. 422–423). Digital printing tends to produce a less aesthetically appealing end product than offset printing, but that is not a priority for most scholars, and while it remains less economical than offset printing for long runs, those are (for reasons noted in Section  12.8) now highly uncommon for monographs.

12.14 ­Censorship and Influence The late 1980s saw two very high profile attempts at censorship, one originating inside and one originating outside the British government. The first of these was the failed bid to control the circulation of Peter Wright’s memoir, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, which was published in Australia in 1985. A former British spy, Wright had lived in retirement on the island of Tasmania for many years and wrote the book to make up for lost income when his British pension was reduced. His recollections were highly embarrassing for the British government, as they not only revealed operational details about Wright’s former employer but also contained details of several potentially scandalous affairs. An attempt was made to ban the book in the United Kingdom, but because the case was brought in an English court, it had no effect in Scotland, with the result that imported copies could be freely sold there and carried over the border. Repeated British attempts to ban the book through the Australian courts failed, and the book became an international bestseller, with the allegations it contained becoming widely known when several British newspapers chose to ignore a ban on reporting its contents. In 1988, the ban on the book was lifted on the grounds that its contents could no longer be considered secret – an effective admission of the uselessness of post‐publication censorship as a means of control over sensitive information in the modern world. Indeed, the occurrence of subsequent Spycatcher‐like events was prevented by entirely different means: the 1989 Official Secrets Act simply made it a criminal offense for current or former members of the security and intelligence services to disclose information relating to their work, and thereby prevented individuals in Wright’s position even from seeking publication. This change involved implicit recognition that regulation of the book trade within national borders was no longer an appropriate tool for the protection of state secrets. As we have seen, since the medieval period the mobility of books – the ease with which they cross borders and move from one regime of authority to another – has always posed problems for governments seeking to regulate print for their own ends. The Official Secrets Act was not an abandonment of official censorship; it was official censorship by other means, but one that, significantly, took place without the direct involvement of the book trade. The Spycatcher affair was followed by an attempt at censorship that had more ambiguous long‐term consequences. This came with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988). Although the book’s primary narrative was set in the contemporary world, it contained an embedded narrative that satirized the origins of Islam. In dream sequences, one of the novel’s two main characters finds himself

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in the place of the Archangel Gabriel, dictating Qu’ranic verses to a camel trader who subsequently becomes a theocratic tyrant. While just one of the book’s British national newspaper reviews alluded to its religious significance – with a baffled question as to “why exactly [we are] being treated to a fanciful recreation of selected aspects of Muhammad’s story” (Tomalin 1988, p. 28) – the book was quickly banned by a succession of states, starting with India on October 5, 1988. A representative of one British Islamic organization claimed that Muslim leaders had “pleaded with the publishers and the government to stop the publication” (Siddique 1989, p. 6), but in fact, British protests followed Indian protests only after a considerable delay, beginning with relatively low‐key public demonstrations in the north of England: a copy of the book was publicly burned in Bolton on December 2, and another was burned in Bradford on January 14, 1989. Exactly one month later, the dying Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a legal ruling calling for the assassination of Rushdie and his publishers. This obliged the British government to provide full police protection for Rushdie, who went into hiding for several years. The Bolton book burning was totally ignored, but the organizers of its sequel in Bradford notified the local newspaper, which dispatched a reporter to cover the event. Redolent to Western eyes of the acts of Germany’s former Nazi government, the burning turned public sympathy against the protestors even before Khomeini’s barbaric demand for murder  (which most other Islamic authorities of the day regarded as contrary to law). The British government was petitioned to prosecute Rushdie for blasphemy, but this came to nothing once it was determined that the United Kingdom’s effectively moribund blasphemy laws pertained only to Christianity. In mid‐1989, the representative of a group of conservative Christian politicians introduced a Parliamentary bill to extend those laws to protect non‐Christian religions, with the intention of reinvigorating blasphemy law, and thereby enabling successful prosecutions for blasphemy against Christianity as well (see House of Commons Hansard Debates for Friday, June 30, 1989, Column 1211). But the bill was not passed, indicating that Parliament was no longer interested in using censorship to prevent the contradiction or questioning of articles of religious faith. This did not mean that religious censorship was at an end, however: it simply meant that its instrument would no longer be the courts but the organized and occasionally violent expression of offense. On September 13, 1989, a bomb exploded outside the Penguin bookshop in York, with further bombs being discovered at three other branches of the chain (Daily Telegraph, September 14, 1989, p. 34), and on July 12, 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death in his office. As Brian Winston (2014) has shown, the Satanic Verses affair unfortunately provided the model for a whole series of attempts to control the cultural industries through extra‐legal intimidation by individuals and organizations claiming to represent the interests of supposedly aggrieved religious groups. The absence of censorship does not, of course, imply total freedom of speech. Publishing is not, for the most part, run as a public service, and – whether we consider periodicals or books – commercial publishers are under no obligation to represent any particular point of view. In 2017, most of Britain’s national newspapers remained in the hands of the small group of billionaires who are understood to exercise relatively direct control over their newspapers’ editorial standpoints: the Sun, the Times, and their Sunday sister papers (along with other Sun newspapers such as the Scottish Sun) belong

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to News Corp, which is controlled by Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen since 1985; the Daily Express, the Daily Star, and their Sunday counterparts belong to the pornographer Richard Desmond; the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday belong to Jonathan Harmsworth, the fourth Viscount Rothermere, officially resident in France for tax reasons; the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph belong to David and Frederick Barclay, resident on the island of Brecqhou, which they own; and the Independent and the Independent on Sunday belong to Russian oligarch and former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny, who also own the influential London local newspaper The Evening Standard. The only major UK national newspapers not beholden to individual owners in this way are the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, which belong to the Trinity Mirror Group, a publicly owned corporation without a single dominant shareholder, and the Guardian and Observer, which belong to the Guardian Media Trust, a non‐profit organization created to guarantee their editorial independence. The political importance of newspaper proprietors becomes especially apparent at election time, when tabloid newspapers in particular directly instruct their readers on which party they should vote for. After the general election of April 1992, the Sun notoriously declared its influence with the front page headline “IT WAS THE SUN WOT WON IT!” While Murdoch later testified to having given Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie “a hell of a bollocking” for this tasteless boast (Kissane 2012, p. 1), the fact remains that this particular tabloid has backed the winning side in every general ­election or UK‐wide referendum since 1979, the year after it overtook the Mirror as the nation’s bestselling daily paper.

12.15 ­The Micro‐Publishers Although independent publishers such as Virago and Serpent’s Tail were tiny by comparison with the multinational media corporations that had come to dominate the industry, they were relatively conventional outfits. The same could not be said of Creation Books, a division of Creation Records, one of the United Kingdom’s most ­successful independent record labels. The publisher was founded in 1988 by Alan McGee, the founding owner of the record company, along with his friend James Williamson. Neither had any previous experience of publishing, and their first book, Raism (1989), was written by Williamson under the pseudonym of James Havoc (Williamson 2014). Creation Books specialized in nonfiction of an extreme or disturbing character, as well as books of musical or subcultural interest. In 1999, it moved into fiction with the launch of the shortlived Attack! Books imprint, edited by music journalist Steven Wells. A handful of short and intentionally offensive novels appeared under the imprint, with one of Wells’s own in the first batch. Creation Books published its last titles in 2012, having left Britain first for New York and then for Bangkok following a series of commercial setbacks (Williamson 2014). Creation Books was part of a confusing proliferation of small operations, perhaps best thought of as “micro‐publishers.” Distinct from self‐publishing operations such as the Orwell Press (which publishes works of political analysis by its owner, Richard Webster), they specialized in niche authors or genres that could not have sustained the large print runs required by truly commercial publishers. A notable example was the Do‐Not Press, founded by music promoter Jim Driver, which launched in 1994 and ran for 10 years

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before closing after a failed Waterstones promotion (Driver 2017). Despite its small staff, the press produced over a hundred titles. Still smaller was Codex Books, founded in 1996 as an offshoot of independent record company Overground Records and run out of the latter’s office and warehouse in Hove. Simon Strong, who had designed the covers for many Overground releases, took on the role of editor and designer, initially running the publisher almost as a one‐man operation: while Stewart Home posed as the press’s fiction editor in his foreword to the first Codex novel, Strong’s own A259 Multiplex Bomb “Outrage” (1996), this was only in order to disguise the fact that the book was essentially self‐published. Following Strong’s departure the following year, the publisher was taken over and subsequently reconstituted as an independent entity by Hayley Ann, a former Overground employee. Best known as the publisher of the underground musician, artist, and (mostly) self‐published poet Billy Childish, Codex came to operate as the sister company of Slab‐o‐Concrete: a comics distributor and micro‐ publisher that had established its office in a neighboring street. Slab‐o‐Concrete was run by graphic artist Peter Hernu, who also designed most Codex titles. The two ­companies carved out a reputation for “off‐mainstream” books with editorial and ­production standards to match the major commercial publishers (see Figure  12.10). But  like all micro‐publishers, they were entirely dependent on the energy that their

Figure 12.10  Micro‐publishing at the turn of the century: Cobralingus by Jeff Noon (Codex Books, 2001) and Punk Strips by Simon Gane (Slab‐o‐Concrete, 2000). Although the illustrations were created using older technologies (pen and paper, xerography, glue), the books themselves were designed and typeset on a Mac and delivered to the printers in digital form. Source: Photograph by Daniel Allington.

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owners were able to contribute, and both ceased trading in the early years of the twenty‐ first century – by which point, others had sprung up to take their place. Much like the mushroom publishers discussed in Section 11.3, and the limited edition presses of Section 10.6, the small independent publishers of the late twentieth century constituted a loose ecosystem. The fragile but innovative micro‐publishers tended to produce books in single, short print runs (typically in the low four figures), relied on press coverage for publicity because they could not afford advertising, and (as the discussion above will have suggested) in many cases had closer links to the music industry than to the corporate publishing world. Many of them were distributed by Turnaround, which continues to specialize in independent publishers and was also a major distributor of imported erotic publications for the gay market. They also shared a common pool of authors who had enough name recognition to attract press coverage but would have seemed a risky investment for larger publishers. For example, the experimental and frequently obscene works of Stewart Home were published by Do‐Not Press, Codex Books, and Creation Books (under the Attack! imprint), as well as by the larger but still “edgy” Serpent’s Tail and the US‐based anarchist publisher AK Press. As we have seen, publishing is an unforgiving business for a small commercial operation to be involved in. From the 1990s, the increasing focus on discounting and the need to deal with large retailers increased the challenges for small players, encouraging some independents such as Fourth Estate to sell up to larger publishers in order both to access their distribution channels and to benefit from their position of strength when negotiating with retailers (Squires 2007, p. 23). Indeed, since the 1970s, the most likely fate of an independent trade publisher has been to go bust, get bought up, or be abandoned by its owner within a few years of opening. With pitifully little capital to invest even in titles that were selling well, the micro‐publishers of the late twentieth century often found it difficult to achieve growth, and had no reserves to fall back on when titles failed. And to make matters worse, bookselling was increasingly becoming the business of very large, multi‐site retailers, often with centralized buying policies. Such organizations ­purchased certain titles in very large numbers but had little interest in retaining stock that was not selling fast. The economics of such a market discriminated against publishers accustomed to short print runs and lacking the capital to finance larger ones at short notice. Because book sales rely heavily on a buzz of word‐of‐mouth marketing, a publisher cannot afford to let supply fall behind demand. But because there will eventually come a time when the book that everyone was talking about is no longer being talked about quite so much, while retailers continue to buy stock in the expectation of a refund if it cannot be sold, it is virtually inevitable that any successful book will be over‐ produced, with the publisher being left to pick up the tab. As one agent put it, “you can end up doing your reprints so fast that you get ahead of yourself and are left with a lot of copies in the warehouse when demand begins to slow down” (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 235). A single miscalculation could financially destroy a small publisher: Imagine this: you’re a small publisher who prints small print runs of books, but suddenly one of the big UK chainstores orders 3000 copies of a new title. You think it’s great news, so you go ahead and borrow money from the bank to print the copies, which puts you in debt. But of course you can pay that debt, and also make some profit, once the chain pays you. Six months later, you’ve had no payment, then suddenly all of the books are returned unsold, most of them still in the

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original boxes … Suddenly you have a debt to the bank you can’t pay, thousands of unsold and unsellable books, and no money to print your next book or pay bills … That’s how easy it is for a small publisher to go out of business. (Williamson 2014) Even the larger independent publishers frequently faced financial struggles. Virago’s loss of independence has already been discussed (see Section 12.4). Serpent’s Tail similarly became an imprint of the decade‐younger Profile Books in 2007, although others have endured: Profile itself continues to operate independently, and, with J.K. Rowling on its backlist, Bloomsbury would appear to have the potential for considerable longevity. New publishers continue to be founded, fueled by passion for a vocation that refuses to die – and even without a commercial hit on the scale of Harry Potter, other options have been opened by the emergence of state funding for literature. Several publishers, including Bloodaxe, have been sustained by Arts Council grants. If commercial publishers are no longer willing to subsidize uncommercial books with the profits from ­bestsellers (especially with the latter no longer protected by the Net Book Agreement), it seems that state agencies may in some cases be willing to do so with the revenues from general taxation. Whether that arrangement should be considered “better” or “worse” is beyond the scope of this volume.

12.16 ­Digital Distribution and the (Potential) Death of the (Professional) Author In the 1970s and 1980s, bulletin boards and “file transfer protocol” sites – little more than remotely accessible hard drives – facilitated a form of publishing (and pirate distribution) for anything that could be stored in the form of a digital file, especially software and text. The first step toward a more flexible publishing system was taken by the British scientist Tim Berners‐Lee, who worked for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN already provided information to other research organizations via the internet, but Berners‐Lee saw a need for an easily readable and updatable “front page” for CERN’s internet presence. This would be the world’s first web page, but before he could create that page, Berners‐Lee needed to create a computer program that others could use to view it: the first browser, which was named WorldWideWeb. When this was made available for download in 1991, its source code was released into the public domain, enabling other programmers to build upon and improve it, and encouraging other organizations to produce web pages of their own. The idea caught on, and what came to be called the “World Wide Web” – that is, the network of interlinked hypertext pages available via the internet – became an increasingly important means of scholarly publication, especially in computer science and the natural sciences. Indeed, in some fields, the uploading of research reports into databases available to all became the primary form of scholarly communication, with peer‐ reviewed journal publication being used only as a form of credentialing, establishing the validity of the research after its essential details had already been communicated. Outside the university system, however, the consumer impact of the web was initially

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limited, as computers were still to be found in only 12% of British homes by 1999 (Green 1999, p. 25). But this changed in the first years of the twenty‐first century, with the introduction of internet‐enabled television sets, the bundling of telephone and broadband services with cable TV subscriptions, and the appearance of ultra‐cheap laptop computers on supermarket shelves. Few people wanted to read books on the digital devices available at the time, so the first impact of the commercialization of the web upon the book industry was an increase in the proportion of printed books sold through websites. Online retail accounted for about 5% of book sales in 2000, rising to 8% in 2004 and 10% in 2005 (Squires 2007, p.  33). The leader in that field is Amazon, founded in 1998 by Jeff Bezos. Although books now represent only a small part of Amazon’s retail business, and retail is increasingly taking a back seat to cloud computing services provision in Amazon’s overall strategy, books were the first things that the company sold and formed the initial foundation for its growth. A survey of British readers carried out in 2011 found that 23% purchased books from Waterstone’s and 23% from the various supermarket chains, but 56% purchased them online, with 80% of the latter group purchasing them from Amazon (Campbell 2011). Amazon has thus become the dominant force in UK book retailing, and has exploited this position not only to negotiate the deepest discounts but to assert an unprecedented degree of control over its suppliers. For example, in 2014 it demanded permission to issue its own print‐on‐demand copies of books if they were ever out of stock (Page 2014). However, its most radical impact has been in digital publishing. In 2007, Amazon launched the first in a range of book‐sized, dedicated electronic text display devices under the Kindle brand, which immediately became the market leader. The screens of the first Kindles worked in a highly innovative way, using particles of an electrically charged “e‐ink” substance to produce a reading experience arguably closer to that provided by printed books than that provided by luminous computer screens (see Figure 12.11). Although these devices are described as “e‐readers,” their primary purpose is to capture sales traffic for Amazon’s download site, the Kindle Store: while a Kindle e‐reader can be used to display text from other sources, its direct connection to Amazon’s site virtually guarantees that the owner of a Kindle will purchase more titles from Amazon than from its competitors. Such purchases are not of books, but of the license to view books – a system that prevents customers from redistributing the “e‐book” files that they download and thus gives publishers a measure of protection from piracy. The introduction of free Kindle “e‐reading” (which is to say, e‐purchasing and display) software for other computing platforms has ensured that Kindle Store customers are not limited to Kindle owners: one can also download and read Kindle e‐books on a laptop or desktop computer, or (more typically) on a touchscreen device such as a mobile telephone or a “tablet.” Thanks to the popularity of such software, much reading of “books” now takes place on networked electronic devices that are also used for a huge range of other tasks, such as watching television, listening to music, and playing video games, and that make their users available for remote contact every second of the day that they are switched on. It has also meant the creation of a virtual monopoly on e‐books, at least in Britain: in 2015, Amazon handled approximately 95% of UK e‐book purchases (Farrington 2015). Not bad for a company that famously pays almost nothing in tax (Griffiths and Milmo 2012; Rankin 2017; Shephard 2018). In the same year as the first Kindle devices, Amazon introduced Kindle Direct Publishing: an online platform to which authors could upload their own work for sale in

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Figure 12.11  The first commercially successful e‐reader available in the United Kingdom, the Kindle 2. Source: Photograph by Evan‐Amos (2010), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amazon‐kindle‐gen2.jpg.

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the form of a licensed Kindle download. Although the Kindle Direct program is ­presented as a “self‐publishing” arrangement, it was effectively an entry into trade publishing, albeit of a much less conventional form than that practiced by Amazon Publishing, a wing of the company formed later through acquisitions of existing publishers. Through Kindle Direct, Amazon publishes and retails books, and pays authors a royalty on sales. However, Kindle Direct bypasses key functions of a traditional publisher, such as quality control, editorial services, design, marketing, and legal services (for example, with regard to copyright infringement). All of these responsibilities are offloaded onto the individual author, as is the core function of the traditional publisher: the shouldering of financial risk, manifest most obviously in the payment of advances against future royalties. In Kindle Direct publishing, authors commission editing and design services or (more typically) carry out this work themselves, while Amazon simply provides access to the technical and commercial infrastructure that it created and owns. (Certain other obligations of the traditional publisher, such as application for ISBN numbers and provision of books to legal deposit libraries, are typically left unfulfilled.) In theory, the arrangement was made attractive by the higher royalties available: at between 35 and 70%, these have been far higher than conventional publishers can possibly offer. But self‐published e‐books tend to sell for much less than conventionally published books, so this is a larger fraction of a smaller pie; and of course a conventionally published author would not be expected to handle marketing, proofreading, and design. In practice, then, this form of publication has understandably appealed mostly to authors who would have been unable to secure publication through the traditional route. These have included authors who have been conventionally published in the past but lost the support of their publishers due to low sales, authors of books on subjects likely to appeal neither to large audiences nor to university libraries, and people who wish to claim status as the authors of books in an area of professed expertise, especially freelance providers of consultancy services or training. Thus, while the immense majority of writers publishing through Kindle Direct are probably earning next to nothing from the platform, they are for the most part writers who would not have been published at all if Kindle Direct did not exist. The question of whether Kindle Direct is capable of supporting authorship as a profession in the way that conventional publishers have been expected to do remains open. An article in the business magazine Forbes provides a revealing glimpse of the working life of one of the stars of the Kindle Direct system – indeed, “one of the self‐publishing success stories that Amazon likes to wheel out when journalists … come knocking” (McGregor 2015). This is the British writer Mark Dawson, who published one book with Pan but was “put off writing for a few years” because “[t]he amount of effort required simply didn’t translate into real‐world results – financial or otherwise” (quoted in McGregor 2015). Over a decade after giving up on conventional publishers, Dawson published a book through Kindle Direct, and – when it failed to sell – reduced its price to zero, leading to 50 000 downloads. This success provided exposure on which Dawson capitalized by beginning a series of fast‐paced thrillers, all released via Kindle Direct. He also began a policy of replying to all fan messages, collected thousands of email addresses for a mailing list to use in marketing new books, and spent $370 per day disseminating self‐penned advertising through the Facebook social networking service. By the time of his interview in April 2015, Dawson had published six novels in the series,

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and reported that he had “pocketed ‘six figures’” in 2014 (quoted in McGregor 2015)  –  although it is unclear how much of that vague sum was profit, given that his marketing expenses alone will also have amounted to “six figures” over the course of a year. The article suggests that Dawson is typical of successful Kindle Direct authors, writing fast and publishing often, and marketing his work at the risk of his own capital – if need be, to individual readers. But perhaps the most important thing to note is that a “six figure” income is regarded as newsworthy by the wealth‐obsessed Forbes only because of an expectation that a “self‐published” author would earn nothing at all (as, of course, most of them do). The fact that one of the most popular Kindle Direct authors is making over a hundred thousand pounds or dollars by writing three full‐length novels per year and taking personal responsibility for their editing, design, and marketing seems rather less remarkable when set in context of a conventional publishing system whose biggest selling authors have reputedly earned $35 million for a single book (Thompson 2012, p. 69). A 2013 survey of professional authors in the United Kingdom found that only the top 10% of “self‐published” authors (most of whom are likely to have been Kindle Direct authors) were making £7000 per year or more. When we bear in mind that £7000 is considerably less than the median income of all authors in that ­survey, this is sobering – especially given the financial risks of publishing in this way. Those risks were highlighted by the same survey’s finding that the bottom 20% of “self‐ published” authors were making an annual net loss of £400 or more (ALCS 2015, p. 5). An analysis of the 115 000 bestselling Amazon e‐books in 2015 found that 55% of sales by volume and 65% of sales by value were of titles produced by small, medium, and “big five” publishers, as compared to just 30% by volume and 23% by value for independently published titles and those from single‐author publishers (Author Earnings 2015). Given the huge numbers of authors published through the latter channels, as well their lack of access to the (much larger) market for print books, it is easy to see why most of them might not be making very much money. Perhaps the best outcome for a self‐published book is therefore republication by a conventional publisher: the 2011 international bestseller 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James was adapted from a work of “fanfiction” noncommercially published on the internet, and a recent study of commissioning editors found that some were willing to treat the Amazon self‐publishing charts as a sort of “digital slush pile” (Squires 2017). Across the media industries, the age of the internet has meant widespread piracy, collapsing sales of physical media, and a race to the bottom on the price of legally distributed intellectual property, copies of which must compete with free counterfeits of themselves on an almost level playing field. In combination, these trends have meant nosediving revenues for those whose business is the production of cultural goods and skyrocketing revenues for the tech corporations that distribute those goods, legally or otherwise (Levine 2012). The temptation is to blame the product, to accuse writers and publishers of having failed to provide readers with what they want. But nothing could be more unfair. To make a comparison with another form of publishing, the Guardian’s website overtook that of the New York Times to become the world’s second most popular non‐Chinese online newspaper in late 2014, with 42.6 million unique visitors in a single month (Sweney 2014), but its losses the following year amounted to more than a million pounds per week (Felle 2016). It now appends begging messages to every article, imploring readers to sign up as “supporters” and altruistically commit to a monthly

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payment (essentially a donation). Across the industry, the result has been a collapse in employment opportunities for journalists, with local newspapers in particular virtually ceasing to recruit. Digital distribution was introduced to the book industry much later than the ­newspaper industry, but there is little reason to expect a different outcome. So far, the individuals hardest hit appear to have been authors: between 2005 and 2013, the ­inflation‐adjusted median income of professional authors in the United Kingdom fell by 29% to £11 000 (ALCS 2015, p. 5). This was less than half the median income for a full‐ time British worker, and roughly equivalent to what one would earn by working just 33.5 hours per week at the legal minimum wage. Further falls can be expected if e‐books become the norm. In 2014, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos argued that, when compared to “reading blogs and news articles and playing video games and watching TV and going to see movies,” book reading is in danger of becoming unappealing to consumers, and must therefore come down in price. His primary comparator was Candy Crush Saga: a mobile phone‐based puzzle game that is downloaded for free but monetized through micro‐payments that the user must make in order to continue playing: If you only think about books competing against books, you make really bad decisions … You’re competing against Candy Crush and everything else. If we want a healthy culture of long‐form reading, you have to make books more accessible. Part of that is making them less expensive. Books, in my view, are too expensive. (quoted in Shaffi, 2014) In competing with the products of industries that operate on entirely different economic models, it seems possible that books may be driven to a price point so low that professional production ceases to be sustainable on the basis of sales. But this is not necessarily a danger for Bezos, as it has already become clear that, even without credible financial returns, writers will continue to produce books for sale through his website, the economics of which appear indifferent to the distinction between selling 100 copies each of a million titles and a million copies each of 100 titles: as the Forbes journalist who interviewed Mark Dawson put it, “[a]uthors don’t need to be a success for Amazon to succeed” (McGregor 2015). But e‐book sales are no longer a growth sector of the overall book market: having reached a plateau at around 30% of the total British book market (Farrington 2015), they fell by 3% in 2016, while physical sales rose by 8% (Publishers Association 2017). The reading public appears to have a strong emotional – and perhaps also ethical – commitment to physical books and the “bricks‐and‐mortar” retailers that stock them, and it now seems possible that this commitment may prevent publishing from being absorbed entirely into the digital economy. It is a commitment that Penguin attempts to capitalize on and further engender by publishing luxury editions of “great books” from the past in embossed cloth covers. Elegantly designed, ruggedly durable, and issued under the Penguin Classics imprint originally reserved for modern translations of ancient texts, these collectible volumes – lacking anything so frivolous as a dust jacket – stand like monuments to the codex as timeless embodiment of literary value. One could dismiss such innovations as conservative, which of course they quite literally are, but in the absence of evidence that the sort of literary production we have come to value could be

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sustained in a world without print (and in the presence of troubling indications to the contrary), the cultivation of bibliophilic nostalgia is not necessarily a bad thing. And this new attention to adults’ books as value‐laden artifacts coincides with a renaissance in the materiality of children’s book publishing: books such as those in Andy Stanton and David Tazzyman’s Mr Gum series (published by Egmont) or Liz Pichon’s Tom Gates series (published by Scholastic) teem with ornaments, black‐and‐white drawings, and typographic curiosities, while Coralie Bickford‐Smith, who designed the aforementioned clothbound Penguin Classics, has produced what can almost be described as mass-produced artists’ books for children, such as the shockingly beautiful The Fox and the Star (published by Penguin in 2016). Such splendid creations of paper, ink, and card are made to be treasured – as no one would treasure a download. Bibliophilia can begin almost at birth. But whatever happens, we must acknowledge that the profession of authorship is flexible, and does not necessarily require that income be generated through sales to readers. Thus, we may conceivably see authors viewing publication only as a credentialing procedure and seeking income from elsewhere. Indeed, this may already have happened: while 40% of professional authors earned their income entirely from writing in 2005, only 11.5% did so in 2013 (ALCS 2015, p. 3). Individuals able to claim the identity of “authors” have potential access to a range of other income sources, especially the teaching of “creative writing” to individuals aspiring to that same identity: an arrangement whose resemblance to a pyramid scheme will become more pronounced the more authors must rely on it in order to survive, but which has long been considered normal for poets. Moreover, the United Kingdom is seeing a resurgence of forms of literary patronage, especially in the form of “writer‐consultant” positions with property d ­ evelopers who contract authors to produce public inscriptions (Brouillette 2014, pp.  154–174). These are interesting developments because they remove the economic connection, not only between authors and publishers, but also between authors and readers. That they replace it with financial dependence on the dreams of aspiring authors and on the public relations needs of companies operating outside the cultural sector is unlikely to be celebrated as an unambiguous boon, but we currently have no way of knowing what alternatives will exist in a decade or more. And we should remember that the expectation that an author’s primary source of income should derive from the sale of books is a relatively modern one that would have seemed alien to some of the greatest writers of earlier centuries, such as John Donne and Edmund Spenser, let alone to the monks of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow who produced the St. Cuthbert Gospel and the Codex Amiatinus (see Section 1.4).

12.17 ­The Book Endures In spite of everything, books remain at the center of British culture. On the other hand, the elitism of British culture ensures that the “center” is an exclusive place to be. Analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey not only found the class background of workers in the creative industries to be highly exclusive, “closely mirror[ing] that of Britain’s highest occupational class,” but found authors, writers, and translators to be the most exclusive group of creative industries workers, with 47% of them (as opposed to 14.1% of the population as a whole) being the children of people from the highest occupational class (O’Brien et al. 2016, p. 123, table 3). As for publishing, it is often argued to be a

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more diverse profession than it once was, and it is certainly true that being a white man with an independent income has become less of an entry requirement since the 1970s. But as one publisher has stated, it still seems “staggering how few people there are in senior managerial roles in British publishing who are not white and upper‐middle class” (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 282). “Sonny” Mehta, who ran Pan Books from 1972 until 1987 and became chairman of Knopf Doubleday, is one of the few non‐white people whose name one is likely to encounter in a history of British publishing, but as the Cambridge‐educated son of a diplomat, he had advantages that few will possess, regardless of the color of their skin. Margaret Busby complained as follows: I probably know every black person involved in publishing in any significant role, and you don’t need two hands to count them. I still go to literary events where I’m the only black person. I first met Ellah Allfrey, who is now an editor for Cape at Random House, at a book launch a few years ago – hey presto, there was another black woman – so we ended up talking. Another black editor is Elise Dillsworth at Virago. Alison Morrison, who was marketing manager at Walker Books, came into the industry through an Arts Council scheme by which African or Caribbean candidates spent time as trainees in a publishing company. (quoted in Bradley 2008, p. 283) But despite the social inequality manifest in the book industry, the experience of reading often appears to transcend such considerations – and indeed, that may be one of the reasons why a proportion of consumers continue to seek it out, despite the easy availability of louder, brighter, more distracting multimedia entertainments. No matter what separates the author and the reader, the reading of a book – fiction or nonfiction – has always seemed to be the communion of two minds, two subjectivities: as the tragic Bruno Schulz wrote in 1937, “any true reader … will understand me … when I look him straight in the eye and try to communicate my meaning … For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?” (Schulz 1998, p. 99). And the subjective reality of this experience remains no less powerful today. In the introduction to an ethnography of the Henry Williamson society, Adam Reed explains how the society’s twenty‐first‐century members conceive their relationship with that largely forgotten writer whose career reached its height in the early ­twentieth century: For the first time, Williamson readers claim to experience a person from the inside out: to live, as opposed to guess or interpret, alien character and intentionality. What they believe they achieve is an extraordinary, previously undreamed sense of intimacy with another subjective mind; readers know Henry in a way that they cannot possibly know anyone else … Indeed, by comparison, kin, colleagues, friends, or neighbours may appear more rather than less like strangers. Readers then do not escape the existential dilemma of being alone in a plural world, but they do get to live that loneliness twice, from inside two separate minds. (Reed 2011, p. 10) Perhaps this is why the book refuses to die. But it is important not to let the apparent autonomy of literature and of the individual reading experience blind us to the

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socioeconomic conditions within which both are possible. Sociologists have long established that both the production and consumption of “legitimate” cultural forms  – ­classical music, serious literature, and other art forms enshrined in the system of formal education that has done so much to keep the “great books” in circulation – are markers of high status in an unequal society. In fact, books of almost any kind are a status symbol, with one mid‐1980s survey finding that the proportion of respondents currently reading books declined from 64% in the two highest occupational grades to 40% in the two lowest (RSGB 1984, p. 1). And such inequalities persist in the twenty‐first century. One interview‐ and survey‐based study of cultural preferences in the United Kingdom finds that “cultural enthusiasm, especially for legitimate culture, concentrates among those in occupations specifically concerned with education and culture,” with book reading being far less widespread than the reading of newspapers and magazines, and with “[t]hose few interviewees who choose modern literature titles” being “graduates and professionals in ‘cultural’ occupations of various kinds” (Bennett et al. 2009, pp. 181, 100). Other recent studies have confirmed the impression of reading as a popular but socially segregated activity. Analysis of five years of data from an annual government survey found 64% of the population to be in the habit of reading for pleasure at least occasionally, making it a more widespread pursuit than gardening, sports, video games, or the pub (Taylor 2016, p. 172 and online appendix A, table 3). But reading for pleasure does not necessarily mean reading of books, much less “great” ones: analysis of a very large 2012 survey found reading rates for classic fiction to be as low as 5.5% and 10.8% for male and female manual workers (respectively) but as high as 28.4% and 47.3% for men and women in the professions (Atkinson 2016, pp. 255–256; for contemporary literary fiction, the class difference was even more stark, with reading rates being very similar to those for classic fiction within the professions but as low as 2.3% among manual workers of both sexes). The reading experience at the heart of the Henry Williamson society can thus be seen as a form of privilege: indeed, Reed describes its membership as almost exclusively white, with most members having or having retired from salaried careers in highly respectable middle‐class occupations and with almost all being “long‐term homeowners” (Reed 2011, p. 13). This recalls the situation in the mid‐twentieth century, when the Penguin revolution removed barriers of price from modern literature, but the majority of readers continued to prefer lighter fare, at the higher end of the market buying it in book form or borrowing it from public libraries and at the lower end buying it in periodical or booklet form or borrowing it from the twopenny libraries whose most dedicated supplier was Mills & Boon. Today, simply reading a book is widely regarded as an ethical act, underpinned by a vague ideology of rejection (whether conservative or progressive) of the perceived commercialism and manipulativeness of contemporary popular culture – despite the integration of major publishers into the same multinational media corporations whose product that culture not infrequently is. We don’t always know quite what this ideology requires of us, but, insofar as we are the kind of people who adhere to it, it keeps us coming back to the library and the bookshop – and whenever we stop coming back, those institutions do what they can to remind us of its call, and to show us the value they can add to our (for the most part, middle‐class) lives: running enjoyable events, b ­ eguiling us with books we didn’t know we wanted, and – of course – cultivating that particular kind of relationship that good salespeople always cultivate with their customers.

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As Peter Donaldson – the owner of an independent bookshop still thriving after four decades of business in a provincial English town – told the author of these chapters, who bought books from him as a child, “Booksellers … are extraordinarily creative and they’re mostly really passionate about the thing that they sell  –  and with those two things, there will always be a future for real books sold by real booksellers, as opposed to online.” The book has been perceived to be under threat for decades. Despite its relative cheapness – especially when the services of a library are engaged – it has never been the democratic medium for which it is sometimes mistaken. But it has been the forum for the establishment and contestation of knowledge and belief, and the vessel for collective and individual dreams. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the unique social and emotional investment that readers make in books may be sufficient to keep authorship, reading, publishing, and bookselling alive, in some form or other, for decades – if not generations – to come. Rival entertainments notwithstanding.

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Wynne, D. (2001). The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ximenes Rare Books (n.d.). Occasional List No. 110: Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Zachs, W. (1998). The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth‐Century Book Trade. London: British Academy. Zaerr, L.M. (2012). Performance and the Middle English Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Zumthor, P. (1972). Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

505

506

Index Figures are indicated by italicized page numbers.

a Aberdeen Breviary  126, 127–128 abolitionist movement  6, 246–250, 247, 249 academic market. See scholarly publishing and monographs; schoolbooks, textbooks, primers The Academy 295 An Account of the Growth of Popery 170 Ace Books  411 Achebe, Chinua  391 Ackermann, Rudolph  258, 299 Act Against Superstitious Books and Images (1550)  102 Act for Preventing the frequent Abuses in Printing (1662)  168–169, 171, 172 Act for the Encouragement of Learning (1710) 201–202 Act of Six Articles (1539)  118 Act of Supremacy (1534)  102 Act of Union (1707)  126 Adams, Alexander: Roman Antiquities 239 Addison, Joseph  178, 181–183, 220 Adult Education Committee  345–346 adventure stories  367, 395 Ælfric of Eynsham  70 Aelred of Rievaulx  52

Africa decolonization and the export market 389 Heinemann’s African Writers Series  391, 425 Macmillan’s Pacesetters series or paperback romances and thrillers in 425 OUP publishing in  390–391, 425 popularity of light fiction in interwar years (1920–1940)  367 publishing exports to  361 textbook sales to  424 Afrikaans  361, 390 Ainsworth, Harrison Jack Sheppard 275 Old Court 315 Ainsworth, Henry  132 Ainsworth’s Magazine 296 AK Press  450 Alain de Lille: Anticlaudianus 53 Albatross Books  355, 356, 382 Aldington, Richard  330 Aldiss, Brian: The Brightfount Diaries 395–396 Aldred (provost of Chester‐le‐Street, c. 970)  36, 37 Aldus Pagemaker 1.2  443–444, 444 Alfred the Great  14, 43, 90

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction, First Edition. Edited by Zachary Lesser. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Index

Alkyn, Elizabeth  148 Allan, David  236 Allatini, Rose: Despised and Rejected 337 Allde family of stationers  92 Alleine, Richard: Vindication of Godliness 168 Allen, Emily Hope  96 Allestree, Richard: The Whole Duty of Man 201 Allfrey, Ellah  458 Allison, Archibald: Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste 241 Alliterative Morte Arthure 66–67 Allman’s 386 Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday  332, 335 almanacs 90, 91, 121, 124, 162, 163–165, 164, 222, 238 Almon, John  218 alphabets Roman 108 Runic 29–30 Saxon 108 Altick, Richard: The English Common Reader  274, 306 Amalgamated Press  336, 343, 344, 391 amateur publishing and periodicals  440–443 Amazon.com  326, 414, 452–456 American colonies bindings of books exported to  213 British papers in  180, 182 Franklin’s edition of Cicero’s Cato Major considered as most elegant book of 213, 214 importing books from England  130–132 newspaper advertising for runaway slaves and servants in  224 Amory, Hugh  130–132, 198 The Amulet 258 Analytical Review  245, 250 Anderson, Benedict  335 Anderson, Patricia  269, 274 Anderton, William  170, 172 Andrews, William: News from the Stars 164–165 Aneirin: Gododdin  15, 16

Anglican Church. See Church of England Anglo‐Norman French  45, 57 Holkham Bible  57, 58 Anglo‐Saxons  14, 15, 16, 20, 23, 27, 29–30, 36, 42–43, 53. See also Old English Ann, Hayley  449 Annales school  7 Anne (Queen)  183, 200 Anselm 104 Answers to Correspondents  331, 335 anthologies Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill 232–234 in eighteenth century  221 in fifteenth century  64–67 for school use  345 The Works of the English Poets 234 anthropomorphic initials  48–49 Anti‐Aulicus 148 Anti‐Jacobin Review 245 antiphonaries 23 anti‐Poor Law movement of 1830s  255 antiquarians and rare books  101–111, 161, 240, 299–300, 331 obscenity charges avoided by publishing rare book editions  352–353 Antonine Itinerary  106 The Anvil 393 A.P. Watt  349 Applebee’s Journal 179 Applegarth & Cowper  261, 287 Apple Mac  444, 444–445 Apuleius: De Deo Socratis 51 Arbuthnot, Alexander  128 Arch, John and Arthur  299 Archer, David  354, 358 Archimedes Palimpsest  22 Argosy & Sundial Libraries  347 Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics and Politics 53 Armed Forces, publishing for  367, 376–378 Armstrong, John: The Oeconomy of Love 206 Army Welfare Department  377

507

508

Index

Arnold, Matthew  293, 332 Arthur (King)  52 art nouveau  321, 323 The Art of Angling 157 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society  321 Arts Council of Great Britain  378, 396, 427, 451, 458 Ash, Francis  167 Ashburnham House  15, 44, 45 Ashby, George  81 Asian languages, expansion into book market of  416 Asimov, Isaac  384 Assael, Henry  382 Asser: Life of Alfred the Great 100 Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland  327, 328 Astley, Neil  419 Astounding Science Fiction (magazine) 395 astrology  164–165, 181 The Athenaeum  295, 313 The Atlas 295 Attalah, Naim  419 At the Villa Rose (film)  342 Atwood, Margaret  421 Aubin, Penelope  197 Auchinleck manuscript  57, 64–65 Augustine of Canterbury, Saint  36–37 Aulicus his Hue and Cry Sent forth after Britanicus 148–149 Austen, Jane Bentley as copyright owner of works of 267 Emma 267 Northanger Abbey 236 popularity in interwar years (1920–1940) 367 Pride and Prejudice 283 Sense and Sensibility 283 Simms & M’Intyre editions  281 “yellowback” editions of works of 283 Australia as export market  231, 317, 360, 389 popularity of light fiction in interwar years (1920–1940)  367

author–publisher relations. See also copyright advances for potential “big books” 413 agents and literary agencies, proliferation of 371–372 author payments in Victorian era 284–285 collective authorship for children’s series 438–439 complexity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century  325 getting published  324–327 income drop of authors in digital age 456 income sources for authors other than from publishing  457 literary patronage arrangements  457 “on commission” publishing  286–287, 326 reserve agreements  325 royalty contracts  325, 413 selection of books for publication and use of publishers’ readers  287 text sent from author in digital form 444 Victorian‐era contracting between publisher and author  284–285 in World War II  373 autobiography. See also diaries first in English  23 of former slaves  248–250 Margery Kempe’s  96. See also Kempe, Margery reading choices mentioned in World War I and after  367–368 Aylott & Jones  286

b Babbage, Charles  288, 289 Bacon, Francis  1 Baden‐Powell, Robert: Quick Training For War 337 Bagnold, Enid  337 Bahr, Arthur  81 Bailey, Nathaniel: Universal Etymological English Dictionary 207 Baker, Arthur  400

Index

Baker’s Descriptive Guide to the Best Fiction 331 Baldwin, Stanley  344 Baldwin & Cradock  299 Bale, John: The laboryouse journey & serche … for Englandes antiquitees  102, 103 ballads  89, 112, 121, 124, 254–255 Ballantyne, James and John  256 Ballard, J.G.  395–396 Banerji, Ken  419 Bantu Education Act (South Africa 1953) 389 Banville, Scott  332 Barclay, David and Frederick  448 Barclay, Florence: The Rosary 324 Barker, Christopher  126 Barker, Martin  400 Barker, Robert  119 Barnard, John  163 Barnes, Joseph  125 Barrett, Frank: The Woman with the Iron Bracelets 343 Barrie, J.M.  318 Baskerville, John  219 Bassandyne, Thomas  128 Batman, Stephen  103 Baxter, Walter: The Image and the Search 400 Bay Psalm Book  128, 130, 131, 132, 143, 163 BBC. See British Broadcasting Corporation BBC Books  418 Beach, Sylvia  353, 354 Beano comics  392–393 Beard, Mary  432 Beaumont, Francis  93, 173 Beavan, Iain  336 Beaverbrook, Lord  344, 345 Becket, Thomas  220–221 Bede  19, 27–28 Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum 11–13, 12, 14, 43, 44, 51 Life of St. Cuthbert 104 Lives of the Holy Abbots of Weremouth and Jarrow 19

Bede, Cuthbert  303–304 The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green 306 Bedford Psalter and Hours  54, 56, 57 Bédier, Joseph  63 Begbie, Harold  324 Belanger, Terry  241 Belgravia 279–280 Bell, Edward  283 Bell, George  296 Bell, Jane  92 Bell, John  241 The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill 232–234 Bell, Maureen  302 Bell & Bradfute  232, 241 Bell & Hyman  424 Benedictine religious order  22, 49, 51 Benedictional of St. Aethelwold  51 Bennett, Arnold  325, 366 A Man From the North 323 Benn’s Sixpenny Library  346 Bentley, Richard  173, 197, 287 advertising and promotion budget of 295 “Colonial Library” series  318 copyright agreements used by  285, 286 “Favourite Novels” series  286, 297, 315 London bookshop of  299 pricing structure of  297 royalty and contract options to authors from 326 sales to circulating libraries  312–313 serialization published prior to book 257 “Shilling Series”  281 “Standard Novels” series  267, 280, 281 Bentley’s Miscellany 272 Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser 296 Beowulf  14–16, 43–44 Berger, John  425 Berkhout, Joop  389 Bernard Babani Books  382 Bernard’s Publications Ltd.  382 Berne Convention (1886)  318 Berners‐Lee, Tim  451 Bernstein, Sidney  410

509

510

Index

Bertelsmann 415 Berthelet, Thomas  79, 84, 85, 87, 112. See also Confessio Amantis Bertram’s 446 Besant, Walter  325 Betjeman, John: “In Westminster Abbey” 346 Beves of Hampton  57, 129 Bewick, Thomas  233 Bezos, Jeff  452, 456 Bible BFBS distribution network for  254 Bishops’ Bible  72, 113, 119 Black Letter  72, 119, 128 controversy over translation into vernacular 112–113 Coverdale Bible  113, 114, 116, 118 Doves Bible  321, 322 exclusive license to print and pricing  163, 168 format during medieval period  23 Geneva Bible  118–119, 128 Giant Bibles  48–49, 50 Great Bible  114, 117, 118, 119 in Greek  36 Gutenberg Bible  67, 78, 112 Holkham Bible  54, 57, 58 importance to the book trade of  5, 254 imported from Continent  18, 112, 113, 118, 163, 168 Irish New Testament  129 King James (or Authorized)  72, 112, 119, 120, 415 Little Gidding harmonies and  101, 113 Matthew Bible  114, 115 pandect 20 “Pocket editions”  253 printing of  112–119 technological changes in printing for Bible societies (early 1800s)  251, 252–253, 261 Tyndale New Testament (1526, 1534)  113, 118, 154 Vulgate Bible  19, 112 Welsh translation  70, 126 Winchester Bible  20, 45, 48–49, 51, 59 Wycliffite Bible  113

Bickford‐Smith, Coralie: The Fox and the Star 457 billboards and bill‐stickers  309 Bills of Mortality  6, 161–162, 187 binding bookcloth, replacing leather binding 290–292 Charles I’s Eikon Basilike 144 Coptic 26 edition binding  292 in eighteenth century  210–212, 211–212 exports to American colonies  213 in medieval period and treasure bindings  18, 26, 27, 36 nineteenth‐century bookbinding 290–294 of novels after early 1800s  256, 258 stab‐stitching as opposed to  83, 140, 193–194, 256, 290 uniform binding of series to encourage purchase  280, 282 women in the trade  291 Biscop, Benedict  19, 20, 26 Bishops’ Wars (1639–1640)  128, 155, 166 Black, Cyril  403 Black and White 333 Black Bess serial  274 Blackwell, Basil  403 Blackwood, William  298, 325 Blackwood’s (publishing house)  256–257, 259, 272, 286, 306, 325 Blackwood’s Magazine  257, 258, 261, 279, 280, 283, 325 Blade, Adam (pseud. of collective group of authors)  428, 438–439 Blake, Carole  433 Blake, Norman  68 Blandy, Mary  208 Blasphemy Act (1697)  185 blasphemy law debate (1989)  447 Blatchford, Robert: Clarion and Germany and England  332, 337 Bloodaxe Books  419, 420, 451 Bloomsbury Publishing  5, 415, 419, 451 Blue Moon Press  354 Bodley, Thomas  103

Index

Bodley Head  321, 323, 354, 355, 356, 357, 360, 398, 402, 410, 415 Boethius 51 Consolation of Philosophy 43 Bogle L’Overture Press  420 Bohn & Son  299 Bohn’s “Standard Library”  268, 280 Boleyn, Anne  113 Bonham, William  84 Boni & Liveright  352 Boniface, St.  24 Bonnell, Thomas  232 book burnings  154–155, 166, 447 book clubs  210, 245–246, 348 Booker, McGonnell Ltd.  425–426 Booker Prize  420, 425–426, 428, 437 The Bookman 324 Book of Ballymote  30, 31 Book of Common Prayer  72, 118, 119, 128, 129, 155–156 Book of Deer  38 Book of Durrow  34 Book of Kells  34, 35, 37–38, 39, 42 Book of the Month Club  348 Book Post  303 Book Production War Economy Agreement (1942) 373 book reviews  209–210, 250, 342, 395 The Bookseller  279, 296, 396, 437 Books etc.  435 bookshops. See book trade Book Society  347, 382 Books of Hours  56–57, 78 book trade advertising and catalogues  238–239, 295–296, 304, 307 agents, role of  298, 303 author in. See author–publisher relations backlists  319, 349, 388, 413, 419, 451 binding. See binding bookselling zones in major cities 298–299 bookshops also selling variety of goods  243, 435 bookshops, chain and giant retailers  413, 432–435 bookshops in decline (1970–2018)  434

bookshops redesigned in early 1900s 328 Christmas as most important time for sales 304 complimentary copies to encourage large orders 244 congers and collaborative agreements  196–197, 241 copyright’s effect on. See copyright; Licensing statutes distribution methods. See circulating libraries; distribution revolution (1820–1870); mass production, era of (1870–1920) e‐books vs. print sales  452, 456 exports. See export markets half‐profits contracts  285 imperialism and  231. See also colonies imported books  68, 125. See also imported books increase in number of titles published over time  137–139, 138, 205–215, 229, 371, 413 literary annual, introduction of  258 London as center of  124–125, 298–300, 374, 375 luxury trade in eighteenth century 192–193, 194 mass production. See mass production, era of (1870–1920) mergers and corporate publishing 414–416 online sales and digital distribution 451–457. See also Amazon.com Parliament’s control of  166–168. See also censorship; copyright; Licensing statutes; regulation of book trade pricing. See pricing printing. See printing production methods. See distribution revolution (1820–1870); mass production, era of (1870–1920); paperbacks; printing provinces, publication and distribution in  241, 243–244, 302–303, 324 publishers’ readers, role of  287, 289

511

512

Index

book trade (cont’d ) racial profile of publishing industry 457–458 regulation of  1, 4, 84–95, 185–190, 215–219. See also censorship; Licensing statutes; Stationers’ Company review copies and legal deposit library copies 295 risk management methods in  196–203, 241, 244, 298 second‐hand market  300, 315, 319 separation of publishers, wholesalers, and retail sellers  241 serialization of books  193–194, 256–261, 269–277, 270, 286 small booksellers in early nineteenth century 242 small print runs in nineteenth century 319 specialization in  85, 241–242, 243 subscriptions 198–199, 199 trade discounts. See pricing trade publishers  197–198 wholesalers. See wholesalers women in. See women word‐of‐mouth marketing  450 Book War (1905–1906)  328 Boon, Charles  350–351 Booth, John Wilkes  218 Boothe, John  383, 419 Boots Booklovers’ Library  330, 346 Borders 435 Boreman, Thomas  212 Boriswood (press)  354 Boswell, James  207, 209, 212 Bourdieu, Pierre  396, 419 Bradbury, Ray  400 Fahrenheit 451 399 Bradbury & Evans  266, 276, 277, 279, 284 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth  293, 327 Aurora Floyd  279, 314 Brake, Laurel  332 Bramston, James  187 breviaries  23, 78, 127 Brienza, Casey  430 Briggs, Asa  242

Britannia (Camden)  72, 105–112, 109–110, 132 British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS)  251, 252–254, 262, 362 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) BBC Home Service  372, 376 expanding to second channel (1964) 418 Forces Programme  372, 376 founding of  342 The Listener (magazine)  342 The Radio Times (magazine)  342 royalties for radio dramatizations  343 during World War II  372 post‐World War II  371 British Commonwealth Market Agreement 389 The British Critic 250 British Institute of Adult Education  377 British Journal 190 British Labour Force Survey (2014)  457 The British Mercury 188 The British Quarterly 270 British Union of Fascists  345 The Briton 217 Broadview Anthology of British Literature 16 Brontë, Anne Agnes Grey 295 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 311 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre  287, 295, 296, 311 The Professor 287 Villette  312, 315 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights 295, 311 Brontë sisters: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell 286 Brooks (slave ship)  246–248, 247 Broome, Joan  92 Brown, Curtis  325 Brown, John: The Description and Use of the Carpenters‐Rule 158 Browne, Hablot K.  277 Bruni, Leonardo  53 Brussels Cross inscription  30 Brut y Brenhinedd  53, 63, 64

Index

Bruyning, Robert (abbot)  56 bubonic plague  162 Buckle, Henry Thomas: History of Civilization in England 313 Bull, Edward: Hints and Directions for Authors 289 Bull’s Library  311 Bulwer‐Lytton, Edward  306 Chapman & Hall editions  280 Devereux  280, 281 Bunty (comic)  393 Bunyan, John The Holy War 171 The Pilgrim’s Progress  195, 361 Burchell, Mary  385 Burdett, Henry  354 Burdon, William: The Gentleman’s Pocket‐Farrier 203 Burgundian manuscripts  68, 70 Burke, Edmund: Reflections on the Revolution in France 241 Burke, Kenneth  157–158 Burke, Peter  111 Burnet, Thomas: The Necessity of Impeaching the Late Ministry 189 Burney, Frances  236–237 Cecilia 237 Evelina 209 Burns and Oates  362 Burroughs, William S.  395 Burt, Thomas  274 Busby, Margaret  458 Bute, Earl of  216 Butler, Samuel: Hudibras 148 Butterworth‐Springer 388 Byron, Lord  267 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage  239, 240 Don Juan 264

c Cadbury family  345 Cadell, Thomas  232, 234, 237, 239, 256–257, 267, 299 Caedmon manuscript. See Junius manuscript Caedmon’s Hymn  11–12, 13–15, 16, 30, 63

Caesar, Julius (Chancellor of the Exchequer)  100–101 Cain, James M.  379 Caine, Hall effect of library ban on  330 The Manxman 321 popularity of  367 The Woman Thou Gavest Me 330 Calder, Liz  419 Caldwell, Erskine: God’s Little Acre 402 Callil, Carmen  420–421, 422 Calvinists and Calvinism  72, 118 Cambridge University Press (CUP)  85, 125–126, 169, 252, 362, 387, 424–425, 430 Camden, William  105–111. See also Britannia Camille, Michael  56 Campden, Viscountess  174 The Camps’ Library  336 Camrose, Lord  345 Canada as export market  317–318, 361 Candy Crush Saga 456 Cannon, John  204 canon of English literature. See also literature, works of autobiographies discussing reading of 368–369 bibliography to encourage purchase of 240 Chaucer’s place in  89 circulating libraries inclusion of  311 formation of  5, 81, 121, 257 out‐of‐copyright works and their reprints 231–232, 233, 250, 320–321 Carcanet Press  419, 420 Carelton, William: The Black Prophet: A Tale of the Irish Famine 280 Carew, Bampfylde‐Moore  224 Carey, Peter  426 Carlile, Richard Prompter 264 Republican 262 Carlyle, Thomas: Collected Works 292 Carnan, Thomas  221–222 Carnegie, Andrew  330 Carne‐Ross, Donald  383

513

514

Index

Carpenter, William: Political Letters and Pamphlets 264 Carrow Psalter  49, 50 Carruthers, Mary  38 Carter, Angela  421 Carter, Harry  70, 72, 125 Carter, Reginald  399–400 Cartland, Barbara  351, 369, 427 Cary, Elizabeth: Tragedy of Mariam 93 Cary, Joyce  359 Cassell’s 303 Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper 269, 270, 270, 274 “National Library”  320 Cathach of St. Columba  23, 33, 34, 142 Catherall, Thomas  303, 304 Catholics. See Roman Catholicism Catnach, James  254, 255 Cave, Edward  183 Cavendish, Margaret: The Blazing World 95 Cawthorn & Hutt’s library (London)  315 Caxton, William  67–68, 124 first vellum book printed by (1486)  78 papal indulgences printed by  6, 68 paper and materials imported by  77, 78, 130 printing role of  85, 112 red and black used in printing for  127 texts printed or translated by  67–69, 78 types imported by  70 Cazenove, C.F.  325 Cecil, William  119 CEJ. See Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal Celts 16 censorship. See also obscene libel, crime of of almanacs  165 book burnings  146, 154 circulating library bans  245, 313–314, 330 in later twentieth‐century  446–448 Licensing statutes and  165–172 men’s magazines and  393–395 Official Secrets Act (1989), effect of  446 post‐publication censorship, ineffectiveness of  446 pre‐publication, effect of  4, 330

of pulp fiction  379 Stationers’ Company control and  85, 86 translated Bibles, imported versions of 113 of unlicensed newspapers  160 Ceolfrith  19, 27 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 451 Cerquiglini, Bernard  64 Chambers, Ephraim: Cyclopedia 194 Chambers, Robert: The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation  287–290, 294 Chambers, William and Robert  266, 268, 269, 302 “Educational Course” series  268 The Information for the People  266, 268 People’s Editions 268 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (CEJ)  265–266, 268, 269, 271–272, 273, 305–306 Channel Four (television station)  418 chapbooks and chapmen  89, 112, 212, 242, 243, 254, 255 Chapman, John  299 Chapman & Hall  275–277 Arthur Waugh as managing director  353 “cheap” edition of Dickens  280 copyright agreements with authors  285 “Library Edition” of Carlyle’s Collected Works 292 Menzies as Scottish agent for  298 Pickwick Advertiser 276 publisher’s reader, role of  325 “Select Library Edition” of Lever’s The Knight of Gwynne 296 Chapter Coffee House  232 The Character of a Town‐Gallant 176 Charke, Charlotte  224 Charles I  101, 104, 128, 137, 140–144, 150, 166 Eikon Basilike, 141 143–146, 146, 162 Charles II  146, 151–154, 160, 169 Charleston Library Society  230 Chartier, Roger  7 Chase, James Hadley. See Raymond, René Chase Act (U.S. 1891)  318

Index

Chatto and Cape/Chatto, Virago, Bodley, and Cape  415, 417, 420–421 Chatto & Windus  319, 326, 330, 343, 383, 398, 411, 420 Chaucer, Geoffrey Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (translation) 62 Canterbury Tales 60–64 Caxton printing works of  68, 70, 71, 72–74, 79, 81, 84, 87 in Findern manuscript  65 first poet in The Works of the English Poets 234 manuscript culture and  78 portrait and heraldry of  87, 89 The Riverside Chaucer  61, 63–64 Speght edition (1598)  87, 88, 121, 122 Stow edition (1561)  87 Thynne editions  81, 82, 83–87, 121, 122 Troilus and Criseyde  15, 62 Chepman, Walter  126–129 Childish, Billy  449 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act (1955, 1965, & 1966)  401, 403 children’s books and papers “Beast Quest” series  438 comic book industry  392–393, 400–401 illustrations in  293 juvenile libraries in eighteenth century 231 “Magic Animal Friends” series  438 Mr Gum series  457 luxuriously designed  457 penny dreadfuls  336 printing during World II paper rationing 379 publication starting in 1740s  211–213 “Rainbow Magic” series  438 schoolgirl magazines in interwar period (1920–1940) 343 “Sea Quest” series  438 series as publication mode of  437 specialized bookshops for  242–243, 243 story papers for boys in interwar period (1920–1940) 343

survey of British children’s reading matter (1971)  371 television’s tie‐in effect with publishing 418 Tom Gates series  457 Working Partners Ltd.’s development of collective authorship for  438–439 China Diamond Sutra (oldest printed book in China) 67 paper invented in  75 woodcuts in  67 A Chinese Tale … or, Chamyam with her Leg upon a Table 215 Chi‐Rho pages  34, 38, 40 Chisholm, George  378 Cholmondely, Mary: Diana Temple 326 Christianity. See also Calvinists and Calvinism; Church of England; Protestants and Protestantism; Roman Catholicism Celtic Christianity  16, 28, 33 Roman Christianity  14, 18, 20, 28, 35, 36 spread of  11 Christian Remembrancer 314 Christianson, C. Paul  125 Christie, Agatha  425 Churchill, John  287–290, 294 Churchill, Winston  398 Church of England  42, 105, 113, 114, 156, 166, 185. See also Book of Common Prayer Churton’s (subscription library)  311, 312 Cicero’s Cato Major, or, His Discourse of Old‐Age (Franklin  1744 ed.), 213, 214 cinema  338, 341–342, 418–419 circulating libraries adjunct business to booksellers  236, 243, 244 bindings used by  210–211, 211 censorship exercised by  313–314, 330 creation in 1740s  205–210 decline of  386 discount sales by  315–316 hours, regulation of  347

515

516

Index

circulating libraries (cont’d ) in interwar period (1920–1940)  346–347 novels aimed at  293 novels listed in catalogues of  255 popularity continuing in early 1900s 330 railway expansion, effect of  251 in seaside resorts and other leisure venues 231 Times Book Club (TBC) as both circulating library and bookshop  328 in Victorian period  297, 311–316 Circulating Libraries Association  330 The Circulating Library (etching)  236, 237 Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642–1660)  92, 103, 124, 137–140, 151–156, 164, 170, 344. See also Charles I; Protestants and Protestantism Clan Albin: A National Tale 258 Clanchy, Michael T.  14–15, 56 The Clandestine Marriage 225 Clarendon, Lord  142, 143 Clarendon’s State Papers 238 Clark, Kenneth  388 Clarkson, Thomas  248 Clay, John and Robert  244 Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette 265 Clegg, Cyndia  86 Cleland, John: Memoirs of Fanny Hill  209, 216 Clelia 196 Clifford, Anne  93 Clive, Kitty  225 Cloister Press  362 Clowes, William  266, 287, 288–290, 319 Cnut 16 Coard, Bernard: How the British educational system makes the West Indian child educationally subnormal 420 Cobbett, William: Weekly Political Register 262 Cobden‐Sanderson, T.J.  321 Cocks & Co.  283–284 Codex Amiatinus  19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 33, 48, 51, 53, 59, 102, 457

Codex Books  449, 449, 450 Codex Sinaiticus  36 codicology  18, 62 Coe, William  180 Coetzee, J.M.  426 coffeehouses  175–176, 181–183, 207–208, 210 coins, engravings of  108 Colburn, Henry  257, 299 Colburn & Bentley  259 Colburn & Co.  242 Cole, G.D.H.  358 College, Stephen  170 Colles, William Morris  325 Collings, Rex  390, 391 Collins  414, 415, 417, 418. See also HarperCollins; William Collins Collins, Benjamin  220 Collins, Jackie: The World is Full of Married Men  404, 411 Collins, W. Jan  415 Collins, Wilkie  269, 270, 272–273, 304, 343 Collins, William, V  415 “Collins Illustrated Pocket Classics”  320, 336–337 colonies. See also Africa; American colonies; specific countries anti‐colonial movements and sentiment  341, 425, 427 British Commonwealth Market Agreement 389 colonial editions  360 decolonization and the export market  389–391 educational publishers and  387, 391 importance to British printing and literature 362 popularity of light fiction in interwar years (1920–1940)  367 publishing exports to  317–318, 360–362 Colonne, Guido della: Historia destructionis Troiae 53 colporteurs 254 Columba, St.  33 Combe, George: Constitution of Man 268 Comfort, Alan: The Joy of Sex 419 comic book industry  392–393, 400–401

Index

Comics Campaign Council  400 Comics Code Authority  401 Commonwealth countries, governed by British Commonwealth Market Agreement 389 Communist Party  341, 345, 358, 369, 400 The Companion to the Newspaper 265 The Compleat Gamester 157 A Compleat Set of Charts of the Coasts of Merryland 215 The Compleat Surveyor 158 Compston, Arthur: “The Horror Comic Song” 412 Concanen, Matthew  190 Condell, Henry  80 Conder, C.R.  326 The Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham 195 Confessio Amantis Berthelet as printer of  79, 84, 132 Caxton as printer of  68, 83, 84, 95 manuscript copies of  60, 63, 77, 95 paper vs. parchment manuscripts  77 recognition of distinct hands of scribes in 59 Scribe D  60–61 Congreve, William: Love for Love 202 Connell, Vivian: September in Quinze 400 Conrad, Joseph  325, 367 Conservative Party  341, 345, 353, 392, 396, 398, 416–417 Constable (publishing house)  256, 257 Constable, Archibald  259 A Continuation of the true diurnall occurrences and passages in both Houses of Parliament 148 Control of Paper Order (1940)  372, 373 Cooke, Charles  231, 234, 235, 239 Cookson, Catherine  351, 427–428 Coombe’s Library (London)  312 Cooper, James Fennimore: The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea 281 copyright. See also piracy 1710 statute  200–203, 220–221 1774 rejection of geographic limits of 1710 act  221 1842 Copyright Act  284

1886 International and Colonial Copyright Act  318 author’s perpetual copyright vs. temporary grant of right  219–222, 232 British Commonwealth Market Agreement 389 cheap editions, effect on  285–286 early modern playwrights, lack of rights 121 geographic limits of 1710 act  202–203 “honorary” copyright persisting even after 1774 change in law  232 import restrictions of 1739 statute  203 injunctions to enforce  201, 221 origins of  85–86, 167, 183 public domain. See public domain U.S. laws. See United States Corelli, Marie The Mighty Atom 324 popularity of  367 The Cornhill Magazine  279–280, 286, 292 corporate publishers  414–416 Cosmopolitan (UK edition)  393 Cotton, Robert  44, 45, 104, 140 Court of High Commission  166 Coverdale, Miles  114. See also Bible for Coverdale Bible Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songs Drawen out of the Holy Scripture 114 cowboy fiction  383 Cox, Josephine  428 The Craftsman  180, 186, 194 Cranmer, Thomas  118 Crawford, John  186 Crawford, Marion  318 Creasey, John  380 Creation Books  448 Attack! Books imprint  448, 450 The Criterion 352 The Critical Review 209–210 Crom, Matthew  113 Cromwell, Oliver  118, 151, 158 Cromwell, Thomas  114 Cronin, A.J.  349, 366 The Citadel 359 Crowley, Robert  79 Cruchley’s Picture of London 305

517

518

Index

Cudlipp, Hubert (Hugh)  378, 392 Cudlipp, Percy  388 Cudlipp, Reginald  378 Cuff Brothers  304 Cugoano, Ottobah: Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species  248–249, 250 Culpeper, Nicholas Directory for Midwives  93, 204 Pharmacopoeia (trans.)  157 cumdach (book shrine)  34 Curll, Edmund convicted for obscenity  186, 215 Pope mocking  195 A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs 186 Venus in the Cloister 186 Currey, James  391 Cuthbert, St.  18, 28–30, 35. See also St. Cuthbert Gospel C.W. Daniel  337

d Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 422 The Daily Advertiser 223 The Daily Courant  178–179, 181 The Daily Express  336, 342, 344, 448 The Daily Gazetteer 190 The Daily Herald  344, 345, 392 The Daily Illustrated Mirror 335 The Daily Mail  335, 336, 344–345, 423, 448 The Daily Mirror  335, 344, 391–392, 423, 448 The Daily News  309, 334 The Daily Star 448 The Daily Telegraph  305, 306, 345, 353, 437, 448 Daily Worker 345 Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future 393 Dandy Comic 392–393 Daniell, David  114, 118, 119 Danka Services International  445 Darton, William, Jr.  242 Darwin, Charles: Origin of Species 287, 314, 320

Davidson, Thomas  128 Davidson’s Musical Treasury, Vocal and Instrumental, for the Family 284 Davies, William  237 Dawks, Ichabod  178 Dawks Newsletter 178 Dawson, Geoffrey  344 Dawson, John  187 Dawson, Mark  454–456 Day, John  98, 100 Day, Stephen and Matthew  130 D.C. Thomson  343, 392, 393, 395 Decameron 399 Declaration of Breda (1660)  152, 156 Dee, John  53 Defence of the Realm Act (1918)  336, 337 Defoe, Daniel on copyright infringement  200 government subsidies for writing and taking role of double agent  190 A Hymn to the Pillory 186 punished for seditious libel  186, 191 The Review 190 The Shortest‐Way with the Dissenters 186 The True‐Born Englishman  191, 192 De Hamel, Christopher  20, 34, 35, 48 Dehan, Richard: The Dop Doctor 324 de Keyser, Martin  114 Dell, Ethel M.  367, 368 Denham, Henry, 91 Dent. See J.M. Dent & Sons desktop publishing  443–444 Desmond, Richard  448 detective comics  393 detective novels  367 de Worde, Wynkyn  68, 72, 74, 78, 79, 85, 96, 124, 126, 129. See also Malory, Thomas The Dial 352 Diamond Sutra  67 diaries  163, 165, 238, 367, 369 Dibdin, Frognall: Bibliomania 240 Dickens, Charles “Bill‐Sticking” 309 caricature associated with works of  270 Chapman & Hall’s “cheap” edition of  280

Index

The Chimes 298 Dombey & Son 276, 276, 277 Household Words (magazine)  271–272, 273, 279 Little Dorritt 304 Lloyd’s reworkings of  275 management of authorial brand  5 Master Timothy’s Bookcase (Reynolds pastiche) 275 The Mystery of Edwin Drood 279 Nicholas Nickleby 277 Oliver Twist  255, 277 Pickwick 275–277 Pickwick Abroad: or the Tour in France (Reynolds’s serialization)  275 popularity in interwar years (1920–1940) 366–367 on range of publications for sale 254–255 revisions made for subsequent editions 293 school curriculum including  370 serialization approach of  272, 275 dictionaries  121, 240 Dietzgen, Joseph  369 digital technology digital design and digital printing 443–446 reading vs. other entertainment media  422–423, 456 World Wide Web and digital distribution, effect of  451–457 Dillon, Una  432 Dillons  432, 435 Dillsworth, Elise  458 Dilly, Edward  234 Directory for Public Worship 156 Disney, William  170 distribution revolution (1820–1870) 251–316 Bible production and distribution networks 252–254 circulating library in Victorian period 311–316 innovations in text production  252–261 popular literature and diversity of print 261–284

diurnals and mercuries  147–151 Diver, Maud  324 Dobson, Thomas: Encyclopaedia Britannica (American edition)  231 Doctor Who 418 Dodd, Anne  202 Dodd, George  293 Dodsley, Robert  238 Select Collection of Old Plays 221 Dodson, Gerald  400 Dodwell, C.R.  45 Dolby, Thomas  262 The Domestick Intelligence; or, News both from City and Country 160 Donaldson, Alexander  220–221 Donaldson, Peter  460 Donaldson v. Becket (1774)  221, 232 Donne, John  98, 174, 457 donor portraits  49 Do‐Not Press  448–449, 450 Dorothy’s Home Journal 334 Douglas‐Home, Alec  392, 403 Douglass, Frederick: Autobiography 270 Doves Press  321, 322 Doyle, A.I.  59, 61 Drabble, Margaret  428 Dragon Books  410 Dragon Press  400 The Drapier’s Letters 187 The Dream of the Rood  30, 43 Driscoll, M.J.  63 Driver, Jim  448 Droeshout, Martin  121, 122 Dryden, John  170 Mac Flecknoe 195 Dublin University Magazine 280, 281, 286 Duckworth, Gerald de l’Etang  353, 374 Dudley, Robert  119 Duke Rowlande and Sir Otuell of Spayne (romance) 66 Du Maurier, Daphne  349 Du Maurier, George: Trilby 324 Dunbar, William  81, 127 D’Urfey, Thomas: Tales 196 dust jackets  328, 329, 349–350, 350, 405, 408, 443

519

520

Index

e Eadfrith 35 Eadwine Psalter. See Ultrecht Psalter Eagle (comic)  393 Eason’s (commercial library)  330 East Indies market for British books  231 East, Thomas  129 e‐books and e‐reading. See Kindle e‐readers and publishing EC Comics  400 Echo (newspaper)  335 Echternach Gospels  34 Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society  232 Edinburgh Review  261, 312 Edmund (Saxon king)  51 Education Act (1944)  386 Edward VI  102, 118 Edwards, Annie: The Morals of May Fair 313 Egoist 353 Eikon Alethine 144 Eisenstein, Elizabeth  6, 81 An Elegie on The Meekest of Men 144 Eleven Plus exam  386 Eliot, George  293 Romola 286 Eliot, Simon  251, 253, 254, 297, 311, 312, 315, 318 Eliot, T.S.  6, 321, 351, 354 The Waste Land  352, 353, 354 Elizabeth I  53, 90, 97, 118, 119, 129 Elphinstone, William  127 Elsevier  430, 431 England’s Memorable Accidents 150 English Advice to the Freeholders of England 187 English Stock  90, 92, 98, 162–163, 167, 168, 221–222 The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 302 engravings  72, 108, 111–112, 283, 292, 309. See also illustrations; woodcuts Enoch, Kurt  355 epigraphy 106 Equiano, Olaudah: The Interesting Narrative 248–250, 249 Ernest Benn Limited  349

Ertz, Susan: Madame Claire 356 Escott, John  224 Essays and Reviews 314 Estrange, Roger  150 Euclid’s Geometry 100 Eutyches: Ars 33 Evans, B. Ifor: A Short History of English Literature 376–377 Evans, Harold  405 Evans Brothers  389, 424 Evening News 335 The Evening Standard 448 everyday life, integration of print and reading into  203–204, 222, 225, 236, 348, 369–370 Examen Poeticum 173 The Examiner  179, 295 Exclusion Crisis  86, 153, 160, 171, 189 Exeter Book  43 export markets. See also Africa; colonies; specific countries in interwar years (1920–1940)  360–362 in second half of nineteenth century 317–318

f Faber, Geoffrey  354, 390 Faber & Faber  6, 353, 354, 383, 390, 396, 419 Facebook 454 Fairfax, Thomas  103, 142, 150 Fairlie, Gerald  349 Family Circle 393 Family Herald  269, 271, 304 fanfiction 455 Fanfrolico Press  354 fanzines  6, 441–442, 441–442 Faques, William  87 farce 195–196 Farley’s Bristol News Paper 180 Farrell, J.G.  425 fascism  341, 359 Faulkner, William: Sanctuary 378–379 Faversham Book Society  245–246 Fawcett, Frank Dubrez  380 Feather, John  241, 243 Febvre, Lucien  7

Index

Feely, Catherine  369 Fein, Susanna  66 The Female Tatler 182 feminism  95, 356, 404, 420 Fenning, Daniel: Universal Spelling Book 240 Fergus, Jan  242, 243 Ferrar, Nicholas  101 Ferrier, Susan: The Inheritance and Marriage 257 Ferris, Ina  258 Feydeau, Ernest: Fanny 313 Fielding, Henry  190 Joseph Andrews 235 Tom Jones  206, 234, 235 Findern manuscript  65, 66 Finnian, St.  33 First Edition Club  352 Firth, Norman  380 Fisk Publishing  395 Flambard, Ranulf  29 Fleetway Publications Ltd.  391, 392 Fleming, Ian  425 Fletcher, John  93, 173 The Flying Post 177 fonts, typeface, type size Bell style of typography  233 Bembo 364 Bible printing and type size  253–254 black letter  70, 72, 106, 107, 119, 155 foreign languages using different type 288 Gill Sans  364, 364 italic 106, 107, 132 Morison’s role in developing new typefaces  364, 384 Old English  106, 107 origin of term  70 Penguin adopting new range of typefaces 384 Perpetua 364 Roman  70, 106, 107, 119, 128, 132, 155 serif and sans serif  24, 309 Times New Roman  364–365, 365 Forbes 454–455 Forces Book Club  377 Forget Me Not  258, 259, 260 Forster, E.M.  403

Forster, Frank  369 Foulis, Robert and Andrew  232 Four Ancient Books of Wales  16 The Four Marys (comic serial)  393 Four Square Books  383, 411 Fourth Estate (publisher)  450 Fox, Ralph  358 Fox Broadcasting Corporation  415 Foxe, John  132 Actes and Monuments 98–101, 99, 112, 113, 166 Pandectae locorum communium 101 Foyle’s Libraries  347 France, Anatole  367 Frances, Stephen (Hank Janson, pseud.)  395, 399, 400, 437 Franklin, Benjamin  193, 207, 213, 214, 224 Fraser, Robert  427 Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country  279, 298 The Free Briton 180 Freedley, E.T.: How to Make Money 281 The Freeholder’s Journal 187 Friendship’s Offering 258–259 Frowde, Henry  320–321 Fry & Couchman  233 Fullerton, Georgiana: Lady‐Bird  312, 315 Fulvio, Andrea: Illustrium imagines 108 Furnival Books  354 Fyfe, Aileen  265–266, 285, 306

g Gachet, John  126 Gaelic in the Book of Deer  38 gangster genre  379–381, 381, 399 Gardiner, Gerald  403 Garside, Peter  255 Garvice, Charles  324, 367 Gaskell, Elizabeth  272 Mary Barton 285 Ruth  312, 315 Gatty, Margaret  295 Gavron, Robert  421 Gay, John The Beggar’s Opera 193 Polly 193 The What D’Ye Call It 195

521

522

Index

Gee, Thomas  303 Geminus, Thomas  112 Genet, Jean  404 The Gentleman’s Magazine 183–185, 184, 209, 224, 263 Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia regum Britannie  52–53, 63, 96 George I  187, 216 George III  209, 216, 217 George Allen & Unwin  337 George Bell & Sons  295 “Pocket Volumes of English Classics” 283 George Newnes Ltd.  320, 321, 332, 337, 342, 391–392 The Strand Magazine  326, 335 Tit‐Bits  331–332, 335, 336 Gerald Duckworth and Company  353 Gerald of Wales: Topographia Hibernica 37–38 Gesta Francorum 51 Giant Bibles  48–49, 50 Gibbings, Robert  352, 352 Gibbon, Edward: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 206 gift books  3, 258–259, 282, 293 Gigantick Histories 212 Gilbert, James  295 Gilbert, John  270 Gill, Eric  362, 364 Gillespie, Raymond  130 Girl (comic)  393 Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine 343–344 Gissing, George  330 Glastonbury Cross inscription  106, 108 “Glorious Revolution”  138, 152 Glover, Elizabeth  130 Glover, Jose  130–132 Glyn, Elinor  324 Godfray, Thomas  84, 85 Godfrey, Edmund  154 Godwin, William  236, 245 Goes, Hugo  126 Golagros and Gawane  96, 126 Golden Cockerel Press  352, 352 Golding, William  428

Goldsmith, Oliver  209 “The Citizen of the World” column 222 She Stoops to Conquer 225 Vicar of Wakefield 235 Gollancz, Victor  349–350, 351. See also Victor Gollancz Limited “Is Mr Chamberlain Saving Peace?” 359 Goodings, Lennie  420 Gordimer, Nadine  426 Gordon, Thomas  190 Gospel Books  27. See also Book of Kells; Insular Gospel Books; Lindisfarne Gospels pocket Gospels  29, 38 Gothic novels  236–237, 383 Gower, John  60–62, 65, 78, 81. See also Confessio Amantis Gowers, Timothy  431 graduals 23 Grafton, Richard  69, 69, 84, 114 Granada Group and Granada Television  410, 414, 415, 419, 420 Granta 437 The Graphic 333 Graunt, John  162 Graves, Robert  337 Great Bible  114, 117, 118, 119 Great Depression  341, 346, 350 Great Fire of 1666  153, 163, 374 Great Northern Railway  315 Green, D.H.  56–57 Greene, Graham  410 Greenwood, Thomas  331 Gregory I (pope, Gregory the Great)  14, 43 Gregory II (pope)  20 Gregory IX (pope)  57 Grey, Zane  349, 367 Griest, Guinevere  311 Griffith‐Jones, Mervyn  401, 403 Griffiths, Fenton  216 Griffiths, Ralph  209, 216 Griffiths’s Library (Ludlow)  311 Grisham, John: The Summons 428 grotesques  49, 54 The Growler 182

Index

The Grub‐Street Journal 193 The Guardian  448, 455–456 Guardian Media Trust  448 Guest, James  264 Guide to Literature 271 Gutenberg, Johannes  1–2, 67. See also Bible, for Gutenberg Bible papal indulgences printed by  6, 67, 68 Guthlac, Saint  49 Guthlac Roll  49 Guthrie, James  170 Guy of Warwick  57, 129 Gwyer, Maurice and Alsina  354 gymnastic initials  49

h Hachette 415 Haggard, Rider: She 333 Hague and Gill  364, 364 Hall, Radclyffe  353 Hamilton & Co.  382, 383, 410 Hamish Hamilton  383, 410, 414, 418, 437 Hammicks 435 Hammond, Mary  323–324 Hampson, Frank  393 Handel, George Frederick: Messiah 283–284 handmade books  98–101. See also manuscript production post‐Middle Ages Hanley, James  353 Hardman, Phillipa  67 Hardy, Thomas  293, 324, 330 Desperate Remedies 325 The Mayor of Casterbridge 325 Hardy Boys series  437 Harlequin Books  411, 414 Harley Psalter. See Ultrecht Psalter Harmsworth, Alfred (Lord Northcliffe)  328, 331, 335, 336, 344, 391 Harmsworth, Jonathan  448 Harold Lever  424 Harper & Row  415 HarperCollins  415, 433 Harris, Frank  335 Harrison, Philippa  422, 434 Harris’s List of Covent‐Garden Ladies 226

Harry Potter series. See Rowling, J.K. Hatchard’s bookshop (London)  241, 299 Hay, Ian  324 Haywood, Ian  264 Hazlitt, William  234, 235 Headley Brothers  337 Heath’s Book of Beauty 259 Heinemann  337, 358, 374, 387, 389, 400, 415 African Writers Series  391, 425 Educational Books  390 Heinemann, William  321 Hellinga, Lotte  72 Heminge, John  80 Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to Arms 356 Henderson, Hamish  412 Henry VIII  102, 103, 114, 116–117 Henry of Blois  48, 49 Henryson, Robert  127 Heraclitus Ridens  160–161, 172 Hernu, Peter  449 Herringman, Henry  173 Hetherington, Henry  264–265 Heyer, Georgette  351 Heywood, Abel  264, 304–305 Hickes, George  31 “Hicklin Test”  398–399, 400 Higden, Ranulph: Polycronicon 79 High Commission  147, 166 The Highland Castle, and The Lowland Cottage 256 Hill, Nicholas  83, 84 Hill, Rowland  303 Hills, Henry  171 Hills, Henry, Jr.  200 Hinks, John  302 historiated initials  48–49, 50 The History of Little Goody Two‐Shoes 213 History Today  388, 432 Hitler, Adolf, and Nazi Germany  341, 345, 360 The Hive, Or, Weekly Entertaining Register 262 HMV 435

523

524

Index

Hobbes, Thomas: Leviathan  170, 176 Hobhouse, Margaret: “I Appeal Unto Caesar” 337 Hoccleve, Thomas  59–60, 61, 87, 89 Hodder & Stoughton  350, 351, 358, 380, 382, 415 War Book Department  337 “Yellow Jacket” series  349 Hodder Headline Ltd.  414, 415 Hodge, Alan  388 Hogarth Press  352, 353, 411 Hogg, Alexander  242 Hoggart, Richard  379, 380, 382, 399, 403 Holkham Bible  54, 57, 58 Holland, Philemon  108 Hollis, Patricia: The Pauper Press 263 Holroyd‐Reece, John  355 Holtzbrinck Publishing Group  415 Home, Stewart  449, 450 Home Chat 343 Home Notes 343 Homer The Iliad 193 Pope’s translation of  199, 203 Hondius, Jodocus  112 Hone, William  255 Hookham, Thomas  236 Hopkins, John  132 Horace: Poems 173 horror comics  400–401 Housewife (magazine)  393 Housman, A.E.: A Shropshire Lad 321 how‐to manuals  157–158 Huett, Lorna  271 Hulme, Keri  426 Hulton Press  391, 393 Hume, David: History of England 232 Humfrey of Lancaster, library of  102–103 Humphreys, Hugh  302 Hunter, Joseph  245, 246, 250 Huntley, Jessica and John  420 Hurst, Robinson & Co.  257 Hurst & Blackett  328 Hutchinson, Lucy  150 Hutchinson & Co.  349, 400, 401, 414 Hutton, Catherine: The Welsh Mountaineer 237–238

i IBM 445 Igarashi, Hitoshi  447 illuminated manuscripts  49, 53–57, 55, 72 Illustrated London News  293, 302, 306–307, 333 Illustrated Old English Hexateuch  42–43 illustrations in Britannia. See engravings collotype process  292 copper plates used for  309 cover pictures for novels  328 etchings 112 frontispieces 173, 175 front page of periodicals in nineteenth and twentieth centuries  270, 270, 272, 335 half‐tone process  333, 404–405, 445 iron presses and  230 lithography technology  282, 292, 309 offset lithography technology  404–409 pen and ink sketches, use of  333 penny novel journals and serialization using, 272  274, 276–277, 278 photoetchings  333, 404 photographs, reproduction of  292, 333–334, 366 in posters  309 in reprints of eighteenth‐century titles 234, 235 steel (instead of copper) plates used for  259, 277 in Victorian era  292 imported books ban on (1662)  169 Bible imported from Continent  18, 112, 113, 163, 168 copyright violations in eighteenth century 203 English booksellers offering  68 erotica as  215 Irish Franciscans importing books in Irish 129 Oxford University’s use of  125 price effect on British publishers from 239

Index

Ince, Henry: Outlines of English History 295 incunabula 68 The Independent 448 The Independent on Sunday  437, 448 Independent Television (ITV)  371, 395, 410, 414, 418 India banning of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 446–447 Booker Prize winners, perceptions of 427 as export market  317–318, 360, 389 indigenous English‐language publishing industry in  361, 389 initials, types in medieval manuscripts 48–49 ink in lithography  282 in manuscripts of Middle Ages  24–25 in offset lithography  404 in printing press process  75–78, 111 in rotogravure  366 In Lebor Ogaim (Book of Oghams)  30 insular Gospel Books  23, 27, 34–35, 48, 49, 53, 102, 123. See also Book of Kells; Lindisfarne Gospels intaglio. See engravings International and Colonial Copyright Act (1886) 318 International Copyright Act (1891)  318 International Publishing Corporation (IPC)  392, 393 Interregnum. See Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642–1660) interwar years (1920–1940)  341–370 elite minority culture in  351–354 interaction of types of mass media (radio and cinema)  341–343 libraries, availability of  346–348 limited editions in  351–353 Penguin and reinvention of the reprint  355–358 periodical publishing in  343–345 political books in  358–360

popular print in  348–351 public education in  345–346 reading choices of general public during 366–370 technological developments in printing industry in  362–366 Ireland chapbook publication in  242 copyright law extended to (1801) 239 early printing in  129–130 outside of 1710 copyright act  202 periodicals in  180 Irish, first books in  129 Irving, Washington  283 ISBN (International Standard Book Number) 432 Isidore of Seville  51 Islam, and banning of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses 446–447 Islip, Adam  87

j Jackson, Kate  332 Jackson, Len  378 Jackson, Peter  418 Jackson’s Oxford Journal 238 Jacobites  185, 186, 187, 191, 199 Jacobs, Edward  265 Jacobs, Jerry  430 James I  90, 126, 156, 162 James II  138, 151, 154, 158, 169, 171, 172, 185 James IV  126, 127 James, C.L.R.  359 James, E.L.: 50 Shades of Grey 455 James, G.P.R.  281 James, Henry  321 Janeway, James: A Token for Children 211–212 Janson, Hank. See Frances, Stephen Jarrolds 378 Jebb, Henry: Out of The Depths 313 Jerome, St.  36 Jewsbury, Geraldine  287 J.H. Parker’s bookshop (London)  299 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer  426

525

526

Index

J.M. Dent & Sons  347 “Everyman’s Library”  320, 321, 323, 346, 347, 355, 356 Kings’ Treasuries of Literature  345 Net Book Agreement and  327 “Temple Shakespeare” series  327 World War I policies of  336–337 John Murray advertising by  238 “Colonial and Home Library”  317 copyright protection of American authors published by  283 “Dramatic Series”  267 “Family Library” series  267–268, 280, 281 as independent publisher  241, 242 London location of  299 Oliver & Boyd as Scottish agents for 298 phototypesetting used by  407, 408 “Reading for The Rail” series  280 Scott and  257 Times criticism of  328 using Blackwood as Edinburgh agent  256 Johnson, Archibald  170 Johnson, Samuel  205, 208, 209 Hurlothrumbo 199 “The Idler”  222 Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets 234 “Prefaces, Biographical and Critical” 221 The Rambler 223 Johnson, Thomas  202–203 Jonathan Cape  356, 362, 372, 382, 387, 410, 411 Jones, Thomas  376 Jonson, Ben First Folio (1616), 122 124 Second Folio (1640–1641)  124 “To Penshurst”  93 Journal of Molecular Cell Biology 432 journals. See periodicals and newspapers Joyce, James copyright law and  6 Dubliners 321 Ulysses  334, 353, 354, 356, 357, 398–399, 402

Judith of Flanders  27 Jugge, Richard  119 Julian, Robert  174 Julian of Norwich first female author in English  23, 93 Revelations of Divine Love 23 “Junius” letters in The Public Advertiser  218, 222–223 Junius manuscript  43, 48 jury trials for violations of print regulations  171–172, 216 Jus Populi Vindicatum 170 Juvenal: Satires 173 juvenile market. See children’s books and papers

k Kauffman, Stanley: The Philanderer 400, 401 Kaufman, Paul  236 Kearsley, George: Gentleman and Tradesman’s Pocket Ledger 238 The Keepsake  256, 258–259 Kegan Paul (& Trench)  326 Keiser, George  65–66 Kele, Richard  84 Kelmscott Press and Kelmscott style  321, 323 Kempe, Margery  23, 93 Book of Margery Kempe  63, 96 Keneally, Thomas  426 Kenyon, Frederic  54 Ker, Neil  102, 103 Khomeini, Ayatollah  447 Kidd, Benjamin: Social Evolution 324 Kindle e‐readers and publishing  2, 3, 452–455, 453 King, Andrew  270 King, Cecil Harmsworth  391, 392 King, Edmund  368 King, John  98, 112–113 King James Bible. See Bible King’s Printer  87, 119, 128, 130, 253 Kip, William  112 The Kiss in the Tunnel (film)  336 Klancher, Jon  259–260

Index

Knight, Charles  262, 265, 269, 272–273, 274, 275, 304 Old England 293 originator of “Illuminated Printing” 293 The Printing Machine 265 Knopf Doubleday  458 Knowles, Reginald  321 Knox, John: Book of Common Order 129 Koenig steam press  261 Korea, cast type in  67 Kovač, Miha  426

l Labour Party  341, 345, 359, 388, 392, 396, 417 Lachmann, Karl  63 Lackington, Allen & Co.  230 Lackington, James  243 Lady’s Pictorial 334 Lahr, Charles  354 Lambarde, William: Perambulation of Kent 106, 107 The Lancet 263 Lane, Allen  355–357, 373, 377, 384, 402–403, 411, 414, 417, 418. See also Penguin Books Lane, John  321, 323, 355–357, 360, 373, 384, 417. See also Penguin Books Lane, Richard  352, 355–357, 360, 373, 383, 384, 417 Lane, William: “Minerva Library” 236 Langland, William: Piers Plowman 60, 62, 79 Language of the Eye (song)  284 Lansborough, Gordon  383, 410 Lansbury, George  341 Lanyer, Aemelia: Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum and “The Description of Cookeham” 93 Lardent, Victor  364 Larkin, Philip: “Annus Mirabilis” 403 LaRose, John  420 laser printers  445 Laski, Harold  346, 358 Latin Bede’s writing in  11–13, 12 Camden’s Britannia in  108

Eadwine Psalter  45 Great Bible’s title page in  114–118 Historia regum Britannie in both Latin and vernacular  63 Holkham Bible  57 in Ireland  33 Lindesfarne Gospels  36 Oxford University’s use of imported books in  125 prayers in  56 restrictions on importing books in (1662) 169 Thornton manuscripts  65, 66 unfamiliarity with, in early Middle Ages 37 Vulgate in  19, 112 Laud, William  53, 72, 128, 139, 156, 162, 166 Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover 4, 353, 354, 402–403, 412 Lawrence, Martin  358 Lawrence & Wishart  358 Lear, Edward: Book of Nonsense 292 Leavis, F.R.  347, 351, 368 Leavis, Q.D.  347, 348, 351, 356, 357, 366, 367, 368 Lebedev, Alexander and Evgeny  448 Lee, Alan  305 Lee, Richard: The Man 264 Le Fanu, Sheridan  326 copyright reversions for works of 286 Guy Deverell 286 Uncle Silas  286, 315 Wylder’s Hand  286, 293–294, 296 Left Book Club  358, 359, 369 Lehmann, John  411 Lehmann, Rosamond  420 Leigh’s New Picture of London  242, 299 Leighton, Archibald  290 The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Entertainment 271 Lekpreuik, Robert  128 Leland, John  103, 106 Leofric, Bishop  43 Le Queux, William  367 L’escholle des Filles 215

527

528

Index

L’Estrange, Roger  150, 161, 169, 170, 171, 174 Levellers  142, 143 Lever, Charles: The Knight of Gwynne 296 Lewer, William  305 Lewis, C. Day  403 Lewis Smith & Son  298, 335, 336 Lhuyd, Edward: Archaeologia Britannica 299 libraries. See also circulating libraries; subscription libraries; specific libraries by name charitable libraries  346 public libraries  330–331, 346–347, 427–428 twopenny libraries  347, 350–351 Library Agreement (1929)  346 Library Company Limited  312–314 Library Company of Philadelphia  207 Licensing statutes  137, 160, 165–172, 177, 185, 189. See also Stationers’ Company Lichfield Cathedral  41–42 Liddell and Scott: Greek‐English Lexicon and Lexicon Chiefly for the Use of Schools 294 The Life and Opinions of Jeremiah Kunastrokius 207 Life on Earth 418 Lightning Source  445–446 Lilburne, John  168 Limbird, John  262–263, 265, 266, 268, 269 Lindisfarne Gospels  35–37, 38, 40, 42 Ling, Nicholas  69–70 Linklater, Eric: Poet’s Pub 356 Linley, Elizabeth  224 literacy decline alleged in 1970s  423 in Middle Ages  14, 15, 23, 36 new readers as target audience for reprint series 231 rise at end of Middle Ages  90 rise in fifteenth century  65 rise in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century  195, 196, 203–204 rise post‐World War II globally  371

vernacular literacy  90 widespread by 1920s  345 of women  65, 90, 92 literary agents, role of  325 literary annual, introduction of  258 Literary Chronicle 262–263 Literary Gazette  261, 263, 267, 295, 313 Literary Guild  348 Literary Journal 262 The Literary Souvenir 258–259 literature, works of. See also canon of English literature independent publishers focusing on literary fiction  419 market share in Elizabethan era  121 organizing principles in seventeenth century 172–174 popularity of, World War I and years following 367–368 Little, Brown  421, 422 Little Gidding harmonies  101, 113 A Little Pretty Pocket‐Book 213 Little Review 353 Lloyd, Edward Abdalla the Moor and the Spanish Knight 274 Don Caesar de Barzan: A Romance of Spain 274 Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times 274 Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany  269, 270 Lloyd’s Pictorial Library of Standard Works 274 Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper  274–275, 309, 331–332 mass audience of, crossover between newspaper and penny weeklies 274–275 reworking of Dickens  275 Lloyd George, David  344 Llyfr Aneirin/Book of Aneirin 16 Locke, Anne: A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner 93 Locke, John  172, 201 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 196 Lockhart, John Gibson  258 Life of Napoleon 267

Index

London, Jack  350 London and North Western Railway (LNWR)  281, 307 London as it is Today 304 London Chronicle 238 The London Daily Post 223 The London Gazette 158–162, 159, 177, 178, 179, 188, 223 London Journal  180, 190, 307 The London Journal; and Weekly Record of Literature, Science, and Art 269–272, 272, 274 The London Magazine  183, 224 London Weekend Television  414 Long, Catherine: Sir Roland Ashton 302 Longman  238, 239, 261, 285, 287, 345, 387, 389–390, 411, 415 educational publishing for Nigeria by 424 Liddell and Scott’s Greek‐English Lexicon jointly issued with OUP  294 Notes on Books 296 Oliver & Boyd agreements with  298 Traveller’s Library series  280, 283 Longman, Mark  411 Longman, Thomas Norton  241 Longman & Rees  235 Longmans, Green, & Co.  361 Love, Harold  97 Lovelace, Richard  140–142 Low, Sampson: The English Catalogue 296 Lowe, E.A.  24 Lutterworth Press  390 Luttrell, Geoffrey  54 Luttrell Psalter  53–57, 55 Lydgate, John Caxton printing works of  68 in Findern manuscript  65 as poet  126 Lyly, John  92 Lynch, Deidre  237 Lyttleton, Edward  148

m Macaulay, Thomas  294–295 The History of England  304, 306, 312 Warren Hastings 280

Macfadden 395 MacGibbon and Key  410 Macintosh Plus. See Apple Mac Mackean, D.G.: Introduction to Biology 407, 408 Mackenzie, Compton Carnival 356 The Passionate Elopement 328 Sinister Street 330 Mackenzie, Henry: The Man of Feeling 226 Mackenzie, Kelvin  448 Maclaren, Ian: Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush 324 Macmillan  319, 326, 358, 415 Books of Reading 317 British Commonwealth countries as market for  389 “Colonial Library”  317–318, 325 English language teaching market  424 Indian subsidiaries of  361 Net Book Agreement and  327 Pacesetters series or paperback romances and thrillers  425 publisher’s reader, role of  325 as textbook publisher  387 “Text Books for Indian Schools” series 317 in World War II  374 Macmillan, Alexander  295, 317 Macmillan, Harold  376–377, 389–390, 403 Macmillan and Collins  382 Macmillan’s Magazine 279 Magazine of Magazines 224 Maher, Terry  432 Maidment, Brian  262 Mail on Sunday 448 Malory, Thomas: Morte Darthur Caxton as printer of  68, 72, 73, 78, 83, 96 Caxton as source of subsequent printings 96 de Worde as printer of  72, 74, 79 Winchester manuscript  77–78, 96 Mamut, Alexander  434 Manby Smith, Charles  288–289

529

530

Index

Manchester Figaro 335 Mandrake Press  354 Man Group plc  426 Manly, John M.  64 The Manner of Making Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate 157 manners books  157 Mansfield, Lord  220 Mantel, Hilary  428 manuscript production in Middle Ages  18–28, 83. See also scribes alchemical manuscripts  123 bindings and treasure bindings  27 carpet pages  34 codex 22 collecting manuscripts after Middle Ages 101–105 colophons  35–36, 62, 69 corrections to errors  26 decorated 24 palimpsest 22 pastedowns 27 persistence in age of print  95–101 printer’s copy  74, 79 private collectors of  103 quires and boards  26–27 scriptio continua 36 scripts and letter formation  24. See also scripts sigla 63 signe de renvoi 26 tools and inks  24–25 variance  64, 74, 79 word separation  36–37 manuscript production post‐Middle Ages in digital age  444 handmade books  98–101 handwritten texts as “invisible books” 229–230 poetry in seventeenth century  174 recipe and verse collections  246 scribal publication in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries  98 Manutius, Aldus  72, 364 maps, 17, 108, 110 112 Marchaunt, John (Scribe D)  60–61 March‐Philips, Evelyn  334

Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus 123 Married Women’s Property Act (1882) 332 Marryat, Florence: Too Good for Him 285 Marryat, Frederick  259, 306 Poor Jack 277 Marsden, Richard  28, 102 Marsh, Henry  170 Martin, Gilbert  233 Martin, Henri‐Jean  7 Martin Secker & Warburg  359, 400, 401 Martyn, Benjamin: Timoleon 201–202 Marvell, Andrew  169, 172 Mary I  118 Maschler, Tom  416 Massachusetts Bay Colony  130–132 mass audience emergence in mid‐1800s  269 in late Victorian era  331–332 miscellanies aimed at  269–270, 279 reprints between 1880 and 1910 aimed at 320 selection of books for publication based on appeal to  287 unsuccessful attempts of publishers to reach 283 mass media cinema’s relationship with publishing  338, 342–343 internet, video games, and cinema as competition to print  456 introduction of radio and television 341–342 multimedia franchising  418–419 television as competition to print  371, 372, 422–423 during World War II  372 mass production (pre‐1870) edition binding  292 in high and later Middle Ages  59 Victorian‐era innovations  287–292 mass production, era of (1870–1920) 317–338 colonial and overseas markets  317–318 copyright in late nineteenth century 318–324

Index

distribution, promotion, and sales 327–331 getting published in  324–327 literary agents, role of  325 Morris and Kelmscott Press opposed to mass production methods  321 newspapers, magazines, and propaganda 331–338 rejection of mainstream bourgeois culture 323 mastheads, head titles as forerunner of 148 Mathew, Theobald  398, 402 Mathews, Elkin  321 Matthews, John  185 Maurois, Andre: Ariel 356, 357 Maxwell, Robert  376, 388, 392, 403, 415 Maxwell, W.B.: The Devil’s Garden 330 Mayfair (men’s magazine)  395 Mayhew, Henry  272, 274, 284, 300 McAleer, Joseph  324, 331 McCann, Coolidge  380 McCarthyism 399 McCullers, Carson  383 McDonald, Peter  321, 324 McGee, Alan  448 McGraw, Hugh Patrick: The Man in Control 400 McKenzie, D.F.  64 McKitterick, David  252 McLuhan, Marshall: The Gutenberg Galaxy 6 Meadows, Daisy (pseud. of collective group of authors)  428, 438–439 The Mechanics’ Magazine 263 Medical Commentaries 238 medieval period  1, 4, 11–47, 48–80 anthologies in fifteenth century  64–67 coming of print  67–68 establishing the texts of (“best text” method) 62–64 Giant Bibles  48–49, 50 gospels. See insular Gospel Books; St. Cuthbert Gospel Guthlac Roll  49 histories 52–53

illuminated and illustrated books 53–57, 55 ink and paper  75–78 making and using medieval manuscripts 18–28. See also manuscript production in Middle Ages orality and aurality  14–18 printer’s mark, use of, 69 69–70 printing houses  74, 75 psalters. See psalters; Utrecht Psalter relics of St. Cuthbert  28–29. See also Cuthbert, St.; St. Cuthbert Gospel remediation 11–13 runes and Ogham  29–33 scribes in  58–62. See also scribes vernacular literature in  42–44 Mehta, “Sonny” 458 Meldrum, David Storrar  325 Melvill, David  129 Melville, Herman  283 memoirs after World War I  349 recollections of books and reading in 368 Wright’s memoir Spycatcher, effect on national security laws  446 Memoirs of Henrietta Caracciolo: Ex Benedictine Nun 297 Menon, V.K. Krishna  360 Men Only 395 men’s magazines  393–395 Menzies, John  296, 303, 304 Scottish agent for Chapman & Hall  298 Scottish railway bookstalls operated by  306, 307, 338 mercuries  147–151, 177 Mercurius Anti‐Britannicus 148 Mercurius Aulicus  148, 149, 150 Mercurius Britanicus  148, 150 Mercurius Civicus 150 Mercurius Diutinus (not Britanicus) 148 Mercurius Melancholius 148 Mercurius Morbicus 150 Mercurius Politicus 149 Meredith, George  325 Mergenthaler Linotype Company  319, 406

531

532

Index

mergers and takeovers  410–411, 413, 414–415 Merlini Anglici Ephemeris (almanac)  165 Merriman, H.S.  318 messengers of the press  169, 200 Methuen 321 Metropolitan Magazine 259 Meynell, Francis  362 Meynell, Wilfred  362 Michael Joseph  410 micro‐publishers 448–451 Microsoft 365 middle‐class readers distribution revolution (1820–1870) and  257, 259–260, 268–269, 272, 279, 316 interwar years (1920–1940) and  347, 348, 349, 356 in late eighteenth century  231 mass production and  330, 331, 332 Middle English  57 Brut in  63 Holkham Bible in  57, 58 Wycliffite Bible in  113 The Middlesex Journal 223 Middleton, Thomas: A Game at Chess 98 Millais, John Everett  292 Millar v. Taylor (1769)  220 Miller, William  383, 419 Mills & Boon  350–351, 385, 386, 411, 412, 414, 459 Milton, John Areopagitica 167 Eikonoklastes 144–146, 146 Paradise Lost  169, 172, 173, 200, 207, 219 Miners’ Institute libraries  368 Minerva Press  241, 255, 256 miniatures  49, 242 miracle stories  29, 35, 38, 66 Miriam May 313 Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction  262–263, 269 miscellanies  65, 95, 104. See also anthologies cheap miscellany periodicals  261–263, 268–272, 279–280, 307, 316

mise‐en‐page  1, 60 missals  23, 78, 127 missionaries  360, 361, 424. See also Bay Psalm Book Mist, Nathaniel  187 Mist’s Journal  179, 180 Mitford, Mary Russell  237–238, 258 mobility of books  3 Cooke’s pocket editions and  234 in Middle Ages  33, 34, 43, 44, 45 regulation difficult due to  4, 446 smaller format produced in eighteenth century and  192 The Moderate (newsbook)  148 monasteries and monastic foundations Abbey of St. Mary’s at Sherborne  56 Bury St. Edmunds  51, 52, 104 Canterbury (St. Augustine’s)  34, 43, 103 Collectanea 103 Crowland Abbey  49 Dissolution of the Monasteries  22, 27, 29, 51, 56, 102–103 Durham 104 Echternach 34 Iona  33, 34, 42 Kells 34 Lindisfarne  28, 34, 35, 42, 101 Margam Abbey  52 Merton 103 Monkwearmouth–Jarrow  18–28, 33, 34–35, 42, 45, 51, 457 Ramsey 103 Rochester 103 St. Alban’s  52, 103 St. Mary in Abingdon  52 scribes 23–24, 25, 57–59 Waltham Abbey  102 Weingarten (Bavaria)  27 Winchester Cathedral’s Benedictine Priory 51 Worcester 103 Monbiot, George  431 Monck, George  151–152 Monmouth, Duke of  154 Monotype Corporation  319–320, 362, 406, 407 The Monthly Review 209

Index

Mooney, Linne  62 Moorcock, Michael  395, 396 Moore, George  313, 314 Esther Waters 330 Moore, John: Edward and A View of Society and Manners  237, 238 Moore, Thomas: Lalla Rookh 239 Moran, James  362 Morgan, J. Pierpont  54–56 Morison, Stanley  349, 350, 362, 364, 384 Morley, John  325 The Morning Chronicle 261 The Morning Herald  261, 305 Morning Star 345 Morphew, John  198 Morris, Marcus  393, 400 Morris, William  321 Morrison, Alison  458 Moseley, Humphrey  92–93, 173 Mosley, Oswald  378 Mountbatten, Earl  392 mouvance 64 Moxon, Edward  292 Moxon, Joseph: Mechanick Exercises, 76 158 Mrs. Deighton’s library and bookshop (Worcester) 311 Mudie, Charles Edward  313 Mudie’s Select Library  297, 311–315, 330, 346 Mulgrave, Earl of: An Essay on Satire 170 multilingualism  38, 45. See also translation Munro, Harold  354 Murder Most Foul: An American Observer on the Western Front 337 Murdoch, Iris  426 Murdoch, Rupert  345, 392, 415, 443, 448 Murray, John. See John Murray mushroom publishers  379–383, 395, 399–401, 410, 450 music books  157 cheap editions  284 gramophone records  341 lithography technology and  283 for performance around the piano  284

music industry, micro‐publishers’ links with 448–450 Myllar, Andro  69, 126. See also Chepman, Walter

n Naipaul, V.S.  426 Nancy Drew series  437 National Council of Labour Colleges  346 National Heritage Memorial Fund  18 National Home Reading Union  331 National Labour Press  337 National Magazine Company  393 National Union of Teachers  400 National Union of the Working Class  264 National War Aims Committee (NWAC) 337 Nazi Germany. See Hitler, Adolf, and Nazi Germany Nelson, Thomas  318, 320, 345 Net Book Agreement  387, 396–398, 416, 432–435, 451 New Adelphi Theatre (London)  307 New American Library (NAL)  411 New Beacon Books  420 Newbery, John  212, 213, 238, 242 Newbery, Ralph  106 Newby, Richard  285 Newby, T.C.  295 Newcastle Courant 180 The New Coterie 354 A New Description of Merryland 215 New English Library (NEL)  411 New Lady’s Magazine 242 New Line Cinema  418 Newman, A.K.  256 Newman & Co.  241 New Monthly Magazine 261 Newnes, George. See George Newnes, Ltd. New Philology  64 The New Poor Law Bill in Force 255 New Quarterly Review 313 newsagents, growth of  336 Newsagents’ Publishing Company  336 newsbooks  147–151, 158, 177 News Chronicle 345 The New Scientist  388, 432

533

534

Index

News Corporation/News Corp.  415, 448 News of the World 392 newspapers. See periodicals and newspapers; specific newspapers by name Newspaper Stamp Committee  264 New Testament. See Bible Newton, Isaac  161 New Worlds (science fiction magazine)  384, 395, 396, 399 The New York Times 455 The New‐York Weekly Journal 187 New Zealand as export market  231, 360 Ngugi wa Thiong’o  427 Nichols, Beverly: Twenty‐Five 356 Nichols, Ross  354 Nielsen BookScan  439 Noble, Francis and John  236 Noel, William  45 Nonesuch Press  362 Norman Conquest  14, 45 North, Lord  217 North, Roger  160 The North Briton  217–218, 223 Northcliffe, Lord. See Harmsworth, Alfred North Wales Chronicle (NWC) 309 Norton Anthology of English Literature 16 Notary, Julian  68, 124, 127, 129 Nova Publications  395 Nova Scotia Gazette 213 Novelist’s Magazine 242 Novel Library  343 Novello, Alfred  284 novels audience for and popularity of (1770–1810s)  235–237, 255 audience for and popularity of (1890–1914) 331 audience for and popularity of (in interwar period)  349 binding and outward appearance of  256, 258 character development and reader attachment to characters in  237–238

“cheap” editions of Victorian authors  280–283, 285, 306 circulating libraries and  236, 237, 255, 293, 297 cover pictures for  328 in Macmillan’s “Colonial Library” 318 market town bookshops selling or renting 243 new genres in early nineteenth century  256, 258 octavo format used for  255 penny‐novel journals  269–275 pocket editions of. See Cooke, Charles pricing of  256 re‐gendering of audience to male readers 258 shift from female to male‐authored genre 256 “shilling shockers”  319 single volume becoming favored format for  256, 316, 319 triple‐deckers (three‐volume format)  255, 256, 267, 286, 293, 296–297, 319 Nowell, Laurence, and Nowell Codex  44 nuns as scribes  23 NWC (North Wales Chronicle)  302, 303, 309

o Oakeshott, Walter  96 Oates, Titus: A True Narrative of the Horrid Plot 153 obscene libel  185–187, 215, 398–404 Obscene Publications Acts (1857, 1959)  353, 398, 401–402 obscenity. See pornography The Observator  160–161, 172, 195 The Observer 448 O’Connell, Daniel: Memoir serial  270 O’Connor, T.P.  332–333, 335 Octopus group  415 Odhams Press  345, 391–392 Office of Fair Trading  432, 434 Official Secrets Act (1989)  446 offset lithography  404–409, 405, 408, 443

Index

ogham writing system  30 oil embargo and price increases of 1970s 416–417 Ojora, Otunda  424 Old English Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle in  51 Bede’s writing in  11–13, 12 Eadwine Psalter in  45, 46 fonts 106 Illustrated Old English Hexateuch 42–43 Lindesfarne Gospels in  36 Roman alphabet and runes mixed in 29–30 Roman alphabet table with Saxon equivalents 108 rune poem  31 vernacular literature in  42–44, 53 Old Testament. See Bible Old Welsh  38 Oliphant, Margaret  270 Oliver, Jocelyn  390 Oliver & Boyd  241, 298 Once A Week (magazine)  279 Onwhyn, Joseph: The Hive, Or, Weekly Entertaining Register 262 Open Access movement  430, 431–432 Oppenheim, E.P.  367 Oracle (magazine)  343 orality 1 Beowulf’s origins in  14 Caedmon’s Hymn as oral prior to written form 11 Orczy, Baroness. See Scarlet Pimpernel novels Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing (1643) 167 Orwell, George  379, 399 Animal Farm 359 Homage to Catalonia 359 The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius 359 The Road to Wigan Pier 359 Orwell Press  448 Ottakar’s 435 Ouida 423

cinema adaptations of works of  343 Othmar 326 Under Two Flags 326–327 Ovid Ars amatoria 33 Metamorphoses  87, 174 Owen, Frank  378 Owen, Ursula  420–421 The Oxford Gazette (later The London Gazette) 158 Oxford University Press (OUP)  169 advertising by  238, 239, 295, 296 bed and platen presses used by  287 Bible printing by  252–253 colonial school market and  361, 389 English language teaching market 424–425 Faber working for  354 Indian subsidiaries of  361 J.H. Parker’s bookshop (London) as main retailer for  299 Liddell and Scott as bestseller for  294 offset lithography, effect of  408 “Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs” series 377 postcolonial market of  390–391 in recession of 1970s  417 stationers 125 Three Crowns series  391, 425 “The World’s Classics” series  320, 321, 418 in World War II  374

p Pacey, Joseph  382 pacifism  337, 341 Paine, Thomas: The Rights of Man  240–241, 264 Painter, George  127 paleography  18, 24 Paley’s Natural Theology 268 Pall Mall Gazette 332 Pan Books  382, 454, 458 Pan Macmillan  415 Panther Books Ltd.  382, 383, 404, 410, 415 Science Fiction imprint  383–384

535

536

Index

paper before and after arrival of printing press 75–78 cream colored paper, Penguin book using 384 expense of, in nineteenth century  289 first uses of  66 Fourdrinier papermaking machine  230 improvements in papermaking (1780–1820) 230 invented in China  75 machine‐made paper  230, 289 paper mills, first appearance in Europe and England  75–77 preparation for printing in wetting room 290 selection of  290 wood pulp, acidity of  290 World War II rationing of  358, 372–373, 376, 379 paperbacks age of mass‐market paperback (1940–1970) 371–412 educational market and  387 effect on circulating libraries  386 large format  319 offset lithography used for covers of  408, 443 “paperback revolution” of interwar years 355 pulp fiction  372, 378–382 sales exceeding hardback sales (1983) 417 “shilling shockers”  319 vertical publishing model  410, 414, 417 parcel post  303 parchment  20, 22–23, 26, 27, 75 Paris, Matthew  52 Parisian book trade (thirteenth century) 59 Paris Psalter (c. 1180–1190)  45 Parker, Matthew  70, 96, 103, 104–106, 108, 112, 119 Parkes, Malcolm  24, 59, 61 Parry, John Orlando: A London Street Scene (painting) 309 Parsons, Ian  398

Parton Press  354 Partridge, Eric: Usage and Abusage 420 Partridge, John  181 Paston letters  14 Paton, Hugh  307 patronage  23, 43, 199, 351, 457 Payne & Foss  299 Payne’s Universal Chronicle 223 Pearsall, Derek  60 Pearson  411, 414, 415 Pearson, C. Arthur  331, 332, 357–358 Pearson/Longman 424 Pearson’s Magazine, 334 335 Pearson’s Weekly 331 pecia system  4, 59, 78, 125 Peg’s Paper  343, 369–370 Pelican Press  362 Pendulum 395 Penguin Books  352, 355–358, 378, 459 Australian branch of  389 bookshops of  414, 447 Hamish Hamilton imprint. See Hamish Hamilton hardback imprint of  410 imitators of  371, 382, 383 Lady Chatterley’s Lover publication and obscenity lawsuit  402–403, 412 “Modern Painters” series  388 Pearson’s acquisition of  415 “Pelican” series  346, 357, 359–360, 376, 377 Penguin Classics  382–383, 456, 457 “Penguin Special” nonfiction  357 in recession of 1970s  417 reprint role from 1948 on, in arrangement with consortium of literary publishers  383–384, 418 scholarly paperbacks  432 “Shaw Million”  383, 403 Specials series  360 stock valuation (1960)  403 Tschichold’s Composition Rules 384–385, 385 “World’s Classics” series  418 in World War II  367, 373, 374, 376–377 Penguin Group  414

Index

Penguin Random House  418 Penn, William  143, 158 The Pennsylvania Gazette 224 Penny, Charles  265 Penny Cyclopaedia  264, 266, 269 The Penny Magazine  264, 265, 269, 287, 291, 296 “Penny National Library” (series)  266 Penny Papers for the People 264 The Penny Story Teller 264 Pentos PLC  432, 435 The People’s Friend  343, 395 People’s Police Gazette 265 Pepwell, Henry  96 Pepys, Samuel  156, 158, 170, 215 Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament  148, 149 Perfect Occurrences of Parliament 150 Pergamon Press  388 periodicals and newspapers  6. See also specific titles advertising in  178, 223, 238, 275–276, 279, 296, 334–335 American newspaper as model for halfpenny evening newspapers 332–333 circulation of  179–180, 182, 185, 223–224, 268, 271, 273, 331–332, 344, 392 coffeehouses and  175–176. See also coffeehouses comic book industry  392–393 community newsletters  442–443 commuters and evening newspapers 335–336 costs of daily newspapers delivered outside of London  305 distribution network throughout England and Scotland  303 editorial control of national newspapers (2017) 447 in eighteenth century  4, 222–225 experimental period of 1820s for  261 fanzines. See fanzines format of  177–178, 179, 188–189, 223 frequency of publication  178, 223 gossip in  224

government subsidies paid to gain support for government  189–190, 217 halfpenny evening newspapers in late Victorian era  332, 335 hot‐metal used for newspapers until 1986 408, 409 in interwar period (1920–1940) 343–345 invention and proliferation in mid‐ seventeenth century  147–148 journalism in digital age  455–456 in late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century  158–162 magazine, use of term  183 market town bookshops printing and selling local newspapers  243 men’s magazines  393–395 multi‐column format of  161, 223, 269 nationalism, relationship to  335 New Journalism  332 newsagents as sellers of  336 newsbooks  147–151, 177 non‐news‐related items published in  179, 181–183, 223 offset lithography and  408, 443 parish newsletters  6, 442 partisanship of (1695–1740)  177–185 pen and ink sketches, use of  333 penny miscellanies  271, 279, 280, 307, 316 penny novel journals  269–275 penny weeklies and penny Sunday newspapers 331–332 photographs, use of  333–334 pictorial tabloids  335, 392 postscripts 178 post‐World War II  372, 391–396 prevalence of  223–224 proliferation in period 1820–1850  316 provincial papers and papers in American colonies and Ireland and Scotland 180 public libraries providing  331 regional identities fostered by  335 scholarly journals  430–431 science fiction magazines  395

537

538

Index

periodicals and newspapers (cont’d ) scientific journals  388, 429, 451 self‐fashioning by readers of  224 serialization in. See book trade in seventeenth century  158–159 shilling monthly  279 socialist press  332 specialization in focus of  225 sports coverage  333, 335 Stamp Act, effect on  187–189 story magazines aimed at women  395 technological changes in printing and  251, 261, 265–266 unstamped vs. stamped newspapers  305, 306, 335 weekly journals  179 World War I and newspaper sales  336 World War II and  373, 378 Perris, G.H.  325 Perry, Mark  441 Peterson, Linda  279 Petyt, Thomas  84 Phegley, Jennifer  279 philanthropy  254, 330, 377 Phillips, Samuel: Memoir of the Duke of Wellington 283 Philosophical Transactions 161 Phoenix Book Company  347, 348 photocopiers, 440 440–441 Photon Corporation  406 Pichon, Liz: Tom Gates series  457 Pickering, William, 91  290, 299 Picturegoer (1921–1960)  342 Picturegoer: The Picture Theatre Magazine (1913–1922) 342 The Picture of London for 1816 299 Pilgrim Trust  376, 377–378 Pinker, J.B.  325 Pinkhurst, Adam  62. See also Scribe B Piper, Andrew  259 piracy in book trade  5, 167, 168, 202, 317, 455 e‐readers and  452 of music sheets  284 in periodicals and papers  183 Pitts, John  254 Playboy 395

Playford, John  157 Plays. See also specific playwrights by name in anthologies  221, 232 manuscript circulation at same time as print publication of  98 medieval mystery plays  122 OUP’s Three Crowns series specializing in African playwrights  391 pre‐performance censorship of theater productions (1737)  190, 217 printing of  121–124, 192, 217 print market’s relationship with theater performances 343 single‐author collections of  173 Pocketbooks  238, 246. See also Cooke, Charles Pocket Books  382 The Poems of Ossian 232 poetry. See also specific poets by name Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill 232–234 dedicated independent publishers of  419, 420 “English Poets” series of reprints (1765) 232 Georgian poets  354 manuscript circulation of  174 modernist  351, 354 “The Modern Poets of Great Britain” 266 Net Book Agreement, subsidy to poetry and less profitable books as rationalization for  398, 432 published usually at a loss  398 Poetry Bookshop  354 political propaganda and publications  4. See also seditious libel, crime of in Civil Wars and Interregnum pamphlets 139–147, 141, 145–146 in early eighteenth century  177–204 election‐related handbills, pamphlets, etc. 225 government subsidies paid to gain support for government  189–190, 217 in interwar years (1920–1940)  344–345, 358–360

Index

nationalism of 1760–1770s and  224 newspapers’ importance  344 Parliamentary petitions, speeches, debates, etc., publication of  139–140 penny novel journals’ political influence 275 “Peterloo” (1819) inspired by Black Dwarf 262 radical politics of early nineteenth century 262–263 in regime change of Restoration  151–156 small independent presses and  420 Stamp Act, effect on  187–189. See also stamp tax subscription library ban on works with radical ideas  245 during World War I  337–338 during World War II. See World War II The Poor Man’s Advocate 264 The Poor Man’s Guardian  264, 265 Pope, Alexander book sizes of works of  192–193 Dunciad Variorum  202, 203 Homer translation by  199, 203 mocking publisher Curll  195 Shakespeare edition (1725)  192 Works 202–203 Popish Plot  153–154, 155 Popular Science 388 pornography  185–186, 215–217, 218, 300. See also Obscene Publications Acts Lady Chatterley’s Lover publication and  4, 402–403, 412 Ulysses publication and  353, 354, 398–399, 402 The Post Boy  177, 179, 181 postcolonial literature  231, 362, 389–391, 425–427 posters, illustrations and print in  309, 408 The Post Man  177, 178, 179, 181, 188 PostScript page description language  443 pounce 22 Pound, Ezra  352 Powell, Humphrey  129 Powys, Llewelyn: Glory of Life 352, 352 Pratt, Aaron  112–113 Presbyterianism  128, 153, 155, 168

presentation miniatures/images  49, 87 presentation plates  259 prestige literary works vs. commercially viable fiction  5, 366–367 Price, Leah  368 pricing Bentley and  297 “big books” deep discounts of (1970–2018)  413, 433, 435–437, 452 bundling of journals for library subscribers and  430 circulating libraries selling stock at reduced prices  315–316 of drama and plays  192 in early nineteenth century  318–319 imported copies offered at lower prices 203 increases of 1960s  416 increases of 1970s  417 of Irish editions  239 library discounts  346 Net Book Agreement (1900)  4–5, 325–328, 346, 387, 396–398, 416, 432–435, 451 of novels in 1820s  256 of periodicals and newspapers  178, 180, 188–189 price wars of rival editions  194, 202, 234 Restrictive Practices Acts (1948, 1953, & 1956) 396–397 trade discounts  296–297, 303, 315, 325, 397 during World War I  337 Priestley, J.B.  347, 366 primers. See schoolbooks, textbooks, primers Prince, Mary: The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave  249, 250 Princess Mary’s Gift Book 337 Pringle, Alexandra  420 print culture  2, 229–230, 242. See also book trade; everyday life encouraging readers to become users as well as consumers of books  246 endurance of the book  457–461 negative views toward mainstream market and  323–324

539

540

Index

printing and printing houses. See also book trade 1586 decree confining to London 125–126 1643 Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing 167 1662 Act for Preventing the frequent Abuses in Printing  168–169 Albion printing press  230 binding process. See binding blank pages included for owner to write in 238 burin tool  111, 234 cast type  67 change to smaller format and size of books 192–194 chromolithography  283, 293 color printing  282–283, 293, 309, 366, 407 composing sticks  74, 76 compositors 74 corrected and uncorrected sheets bound together  74, 84 decoration of cover  292 development of print production 105–111 digital phototypesetting  445 downsizing of books into cheaper octavo format 239 drying room procedures  290 duodecimo  144, 192, 231, 239, 240, 253, 255–258 electrotype 319 errata sheets  79 flong  252, 293, 294, 297 fonts. See fonts, typeface, type size frontispiece 173, 175 galley 74 hand presses, continued use in Victorian era 288 hot‐metal composing machines  319, 366, 408, 409 illustrations. See illustrations ink. See ink iron press  230, 307 jobbing work  4, 230, 309, 379

large format books  98–100 laser printers  445 leading 74 Linotype machines  319–320, 333–334, 334, 362, 406, 406–407 lithography technology  282, 283, 292, 309, 404–409 mid‐nineteenth to twentieth century production costs  320 Monotype machines  319–320, 333–334, 362, 363, 406 moveable type  70 octavo  23, 192, 239, 255 offset lithography  404–409 paper. See paper phototypesetting machines  405–407, 406–407 platen  230, 251, 261 press, effect of  3, 6, 81, 100, 125 press reader, role of  289 printer’s marks, 69 69–70 printer’s reader, role of  288, 289 “print on demand” publishing model  445–446, 452 print runs of eighteenth‐century books  229, 235, 239–240, 259 printing houses in early modern period 74, 75, 84–95 printing houses in Ireland  129–130 printing houses in London and beyond 124–130 printing houses in Scotland  126–129 punches 70 quad‐sized presses in mid‐nineteenth century print works  319 quarto  23, 192 recomposition for subsequent editions 293 red and black type, use of  83, 127, 163 relief method of  72 roller press  111, 291 rotary steam press  251 rotogravure  366, 404 standing type  253, 293 Stanhope printing press  230

Index

steam‐powered press  251, 253, 261, 266, 268, 287–288 stereotyping  251, 252, 253, 263, 266, 268, 277, 288, 293, 294, 297, 319 table work, extra fee for figures and mathematical tables  288 title pages  85, 86–87, 175 upper‐ and lower‐case  74 watermarks 77 Wharfedales (single‐cylinder presses) 288 women as owners of printing houses 92 workers trained to use printing press  68, 230 “print on demand”  445–446, 452 Prior, Matthew  189–190 Poems on Several Occasions 199 Prise, Siôn  103 Yny lhyvyr hwnn  70, 103 Pritchard, William  302 Privy Council  166 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 432 Profile Books  420, 432, 451 Progressive Bookshop (London)  354 A Prophecy of the White King 143 Prospectus 262 prostitition 226 Protestants and Protestantism. See also Church of England; Presbyterianism Charles II and  151 condemning ballads  89 emergence of  6 Little Gidding and  101 martyrology of  98, 100 Popish Plot and anti‐papist sentiment 153–154, 155 printing and distribution of English Bibles 90 Protestant Dissenters  160, 186, 191 vernacular translation of Bible and  42 provenance 22 Prudentius: Psychomachia 51 Prynne, William  166 Histrio‐mastix 124

psalm books  162, 163 psalters  23, 33, 48–49, 53–54, 83, 90, 132, 162, 163. See also Utrecht Psalter; specific psalters by name pseudonyms, use of  255, 295 The Public Advertiser  218, 222 public domain creation of concept of  5 in eighteenth‐century copyright law  202, 221 Stationers’ Company not recognizing 200 in United States (pre‐1891)  318 public education  345–346 The Publick Intelligencer 149 The Public Ledger  222, 305 Public Lending Right law (1982)  427–428, 439 public libraries. See libraries Public Libraries Act (1850)  330 Public Libraries Act (1919)  346 Publishers Association  328, 398, 433 Book Club Regulations  348 The Publishers’ Circular 296 pulp fiction  372, 378–382, 395 Punch (magazine)  277, 307, 309, 310, 333 Purcell, Henry  157 Puritans  124, 132, 149, 150, 153, 156, 166 Pynson, Richard  68, 70, 124, 127, 129

q Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) 143 Quaritch firm  54 Quarterly Magazine 267 Quarterly Review  261, 287–288, 312 Quartet Books  419, 420 Quennell, Peter  388 quill pens  24 Quran 51

r Raban, Edward  128, 129 Radcliffe, Ann: The Italian  236, 237 radio broadcasting  341, 343, 372 Radio Times 395 The Ragged School Union Magazine 274

541

542

Index

railways. See also transportation improvements, effect of advertising in railway stations  6, 307, 308, 309 bookstalls  251, 306–307, 315, 319 life insurance offered in newspapers for people killed in railway accidents while reading 335 “railway literature”  281–282, 283, 306–307, 315, 328–329 Rainey, Lawrence  352 Ralph of Coggeshall  52 Random House  415, 416, 417, 421, 433, 458 Rapin de Thoyras, Paul de: Histoire d’Angleterre 194 rare books, acquisition of. See antiquarians and rare books Rastell, John  68 Raven, James  229, 232, 236, 240 Raymond, Joad  162 Raymond, René (James Hadley Chase, pseud.)  378, 399 No Orchids for Miss Blandish 378–379 Ray Smith Libraries  347 Reade, Charles: Cream 313 Reade, Winwood: Liberty Hall 313 Readers’ Library  343 Readers Union  347–348 reading. See also everyday life, integration of books into; literacy 1774 as birthdate for Britain as “a reading nation” 231 aloud in Middle Ages  15, 36, 42 coterie reading circles  59, 98, 323, 443 defenseless readers  411–412 family reading of penny novel journals, 270 273–274 interwar choices in reading matter 366–370 late eighteenth‐century techniques of 237–238 for pleasure (annual government survey on) 459 as popular but socially segregated activity 459 proof copies read aloud for correction purposes prior to publication  289

rereading 237 sensitivity and recovery of feelings through  226, 237 shift to silent reading  37 silent scanning technique  237 street vendors gathering to hear texts read aloud and see illustrations  274 targeted audience segments for books 231 Red Letter  343, 395 Reed International (publisher)  415 Reed, Adam  458, 459 Reformation  18, 81, 90, 132, 153. See also Protestants and Protestantism Regina v. Hicklin (1868)  398 regulation of book trade  1, 4, 185–190, 215–219. See also censorship; copyright; Licensing statutes; Stationers’ Company Reid, Thomas: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man 241 Reinhardt, Max  410 Reiter, Julius  399–400 relics  29, 34 religious texts  4, 254, 271, 290, 293, 296, 316. See also Bible; Book of Common Prayer; breviaries Religious Tract Society  265, 271, 302, 304, 343, 393 A Book About Animals 271 Story of a Pocket Bible 300 remediation  1, 2, 13. See also Caedmon’s Hymn Remnant & Edmonds  291 The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread 212 Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Montagu 150 reprints. See also Penguin Books and derivative rights (1970–2018) 417–419 Dublin book trade in, effect on British market 239 emergence of series in 1780s and 1790s 232–233, 233, 250 mid‐nineteenth to twentieth century fiction reprints  320

Index

modes of arranging for  293 offset lithography, effect of  408 out‐of‐copyright works  231–232, 320 out‐of‐print titles, on‐demand printing of  446, 452 post‐World War II, paperback publishers’ role 372 railway reading and single‐volume reprints 315 “sevenpennies” (pocket‐sized cloth‐ bound books)  319 single‐volume reprints of serialized works or three‐volume novels  253, 256, 267, 285, 286, 293, 297, 312, 316, 319, 321 U.S. reprinting of British titles  230–231 vertical integration of publishing replacing 414 Reprint Society  358 Restoration  151–154, 156, 158, 165, 168. See also Charles II Restrictive Practices Act and Court (1948, 1953, & 1956)  396–397 Review of Reviews 332 Reynes, John  84 Reynolds, George W.M. Faust serialization  270 The Mysteries of London serialization 275 Reynold’s Miscellany  269, 270, 271 Rich, Barnaby: Rich his farewell to Militarie profession 92 Richard III  68 Richards, Grant  321, 353 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa 206 Rickert, Edith  64 Rider’s Dictionary 197 Rieu, E.V.  382 risk management in book trade  196–203 Rives, Amelie: Shadow of Flames 328 Rivington, John  241 Rix, Tim  423 Robbins Report (1963)  387 Roberts, Frederick Sleigh: Forty‐One Years in India 324 Roberts, William  300

Robinson, F.N.  64 Robinson, George  241 Rochester, Earl of  174 Rock (military newspaper)  378 Rodd, Thomas  299 Rodney, Walter: How Europe underdeveloped Africa 420 Rogers, John  113 Rogers, Pat  180, 199 Rogers, William  108 Roman Catholicism  100, 102, 118, 128, 130 Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma (Irish catechism) 129 Bible and  67 Curll’s anticlerical writings  186 Irish Franciscans importing books in Irish 129 killings of Protestants  98, 139–140, 150, 153 Licensing statutes and  166 Popish Plot  153–154, 155 romances authors with name recognition  351, 369 Caxton printing  68 in later Middle Ages  15, 57, 65, 66, 68, 126 Mills & Boon as publisher of  350–351, 386 public demand for  367, 369–370 Public Lending Right payments to authors of  427 regency romance genre  351 Scottish printing of  126 The Squyr of Low Degre (1520)  96 Rose, Jonathan  274, 368, 369, 370 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  292 Rothermere, Lord  344, 391 Rothschild Ventures  421 Rousseau, Jean‐Jacques  245 Émile  206, 225 Routledge, George (publisher Routledge & Co.) “Books of the Country” series  281, 283 “British Poets” series  281 “Cheap Series”  280–281, 283, 296, 302, 304, 306

543

544

Index

Routledge, George (publisher Routledge & Co.) (cont’d ) “Christmas Books”  304 “Original Novels” series  281 “Railway Library”  280–282, 292 “yellowbacks” 283 Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter series  419, 428, 435, 451 Royalists. See Civil War and Interregnum royal privilege  87 Royal Society  161 royalties author contracts for  325, 413 Public Lending Right law paying royalties to public libraries’ most borrowed authors 427–428 Royston, Richard  168 Rufinus 125 Rule of St. Benedict  22 Runic alphabet  29–30 Rupert Hart‐Davis Ltd  410 Rushdie, Salman  426, 437 Midnight’s Children 427 The Satanic Verses 446–447 Ruskin, John: Unto This Last 279 Russell, Bertrand: The Principles of Social Reconstruction 337 Ruthwell Cross inscription  30, 31, 43

s Sacheverell, Henry: The Perils of False Brethren  191–192, 200 Saenger, Paul  37 Saha, Anamik  439 St. Augustine Gospels  36–37 St. Chad Gospels  38, 41, 41–42 St. Christopher woodcut (1423)  67, 77 St. Clair, William  231–232, 239, 240, 257, 264, 266 St. Cuthbert Gospel  18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26–27, 28–29, 33, 34, 42, 51, 457 St. Dunstan’s Classbook  31–33, 32 Saks, Elmer Elliot  380 Sala, George Augustus  279–280, 313–314 Salt Publishing  420 Sampson, Henry: A History of Advertising 307, 308, 309

Sanders, John  236 Sanders, William Stephen: Germany’s Two Voices 337 Sandow, Eugen: Strength and How to Obtain It 324 S. & T. Gilbert  303 Sapper (pen name): Bulldog Drummond series  349, 437 Sargent, John Singer  282 Sarto, Ben  380 Sarum Missal and Rite  127 Sassoon, Siegfried  337 satire and satirists  195–196, 200, 210, 224, 255 Saturday in My Garden 324 The Saturday Magazine 265 The Saturday Review 306–307 Saunders & Otley  259 The Author’s Printing and Publishing Assistant 286 Metropolitan Magazine 259 subscription library  311 Savill, Thomas Choate  288 The Saxon and the Gael 258 Sayers, Dorothy L.  349 The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 356 Scarlet Pimpernel novels  324, 349, 437 movie adaptations of  342–343 Schama, Simon  432 Schmidt, Michael  419 Schmoller, Hans  385 scholarly publishing and monographs  387–388, 428–429 Scholartis (press)  354, 420 Scholastic Books  419, 424 schoolbooks, textbooks, primers  5, 90, 162, 163, 240, 290, 294, 345, 386–388 academic publishing  387–388, 428–432 African market for  361, 424 English language teaching elsewhere in world 424 National Curriculum, adoption of (1988) 423 Net Book Agreement not applicable to 387 phototypesetting, effect of  407, 408

Index

The School of Venus 215 Schulz, Bruno  458 science fiction  383–384, 393, 395–396 Scientific American 388 Scientific Press  354 scientific publications and journals  161, 388, 429, 451 Scion Ltd.  380, 382, 400 Scot, John  128 Scotland collaborative publishing arrangements between London and Edinburgh  241 early printing in  126–129, 149, 166 Edinburgh’s publishers and booksellers, location of  298 Education (Scotland) Act (1918)  346 enlightenment books published between 1746 and 1800, reprinting of  239 Kailyard School of Scottish fiction  324 Oliver & Boyd as Scottish wholesalers 298 The People’s Friend (Scottish women’s weekly)  343, 395 periodicals in  180, 182, 185, 335 railway book stalls operated by Menzies in 306 reprinting of out‐of‐copyright works in 232 Scots Magazine  185, 224 The Scotsman 307 Scott, Walter “author of ’Waverley’” and  255, 258 cheaper editions of works of  259, 267 imitations of  256 Ivanhoe 255 Kenilworth; A Romance 256 “Magnum Opus” edition (Cadell)  257–258 management of authorial brand  5 Miscellaneous Prose 258 Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley 257 Poetical Works 257–258 popularity in interwar years (1920–1940) 366 shift of novel authorship to male domain and 256

Tales of My Landlord 257 Waverley series  258, 266–267 Scottish Academics Press  411 Scottish Court of Session  219, 220 Scottish Sun 447 Scottish Television  410 scribes Findern manuscript, multiple scribes involved in  65 mass hand production  59 monastic 23–24, 25, 57–59 need to establish identity of  64 pecia system  4, 59, 78, 125 scribal publication continuing in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 98 Scribe B (attrib. Adam Pinkhurst)  61–62, 64 Scribe D (attrib. John Marchaunt) 60–61 urban  59–62, 98 Scribner’s 318 scriptio continua 36 scriptoria  4, 20–21, 57 scripts ascenders 24 bookhands  18, 24 bow (part of a letter)  24 calligraphic scripts  24 categorization of  24 cursive scripts  24 descenders 24 display script  49 ductus 24 Gothic  70, 106 insular script  34–35 Irish majuscule  33–34 ligature 24 minims 24 rustic capitals  44 uncial script  18, 20, 24, 28, 33, 34–35, 45, 53 Scroggs, William  171 Seax of Beagnoþ  29–30, 30 Secker, Martin  328 Secker & Warburg  374 second‐hand book trade  300, 315, 319

545

546

Index

Secord, James  261 The Secret History of Pandora’s Box 207 seditious libel, crime of  170, 171, 178, 185–187, 191–192, 216, 217–218, 264 Selby, Hubert, Jr.: Last Exit to Brooklyn 403 Select Committee on Foudrinier’s Patent (1837) 289 Select Committee on Obscene Publications 401 self‐publishing operations  448, 455 Senefelder, Alois  282, 404 Senhouse, Roger  359 series as publication mode  437–438 Serpent’s Tail  419, 448, 450, 451 Seymour, Robert  276, 300 Shakespeare, William First Folio (1623)  5, 80, 121–122, 122, 123–124 Second Folio (1632)  121, 124 Fourth Folio (1685)  192 Arden Shakespeare editions  419 copyright of works of  5, 202 cultural literacy indicated by reading 368 durability of plays of  5 Hamlet 122 King Lear 92 Ling as publisher of  69–70 Othello 93, 94 Pope’s edition (1725)  192 quarto and octavo formats pre‐Folio 122 Romeo and Juliet 122 The Tempest 123 The Winter’s Tale 89 Shakespeare and Company (Paris)  354 Shaw, George Bernard  383 The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism 359–360 Shebbeare, John  216 Sheffield, John: Works 187 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  370 Works 264 Sher, Richard  232, 239, 240

Sherborne Missal  54, 56 Sheridan, Richard The Rivals  207, 211, 224 The School for Scandal  193, 225 Sherman, William  101, 113 Shone, William  303 Shore, Emily  269 Sidney, Philip  95 Arcadia 144 Siferwas, John  56 silence, appeals for in Beowulf ’s opening  14 in romances of later Middle Ages  15 Simeon of Durham  35–36 Simmons, Samuel  200 Simms & M’Intyre  280–281, 282, 302 Simpkin, Marshall  297, 298, 299, 327, 374, 376, 388, 389 Singleton, Hugh  100 Sire Degrevante (romance)  66 Sitric (monk)  34 Sitwell, Edith: I Live Under a Black Sun 351 Sitwell siblings  351, 353 “Six Acts” (1819)  262–264 Skene, William Forbes  16 The Sketch 333 Slab‐o‐Concrete 449, 449 slavery, abolition of. See abolitionist movement Smith, Elder & Co.  295, 325 Smith, Francis  170 Smith, George  279 Smith, J.F.: Woman and Her Master serial 270 Smith, Lewis  304 Smith, Margaret  83 Smith, Ray  347 Smith, Zadie: White Teeth 437 Smithfield Decretals  57 Sniffin’ Glue (fanzine)  441, 441, 442 Snowdon, Chris  439 socialism  332, 346 The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST)  246–249 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)  203, 253, 265

Index

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK)  262–265 “The Library of Useful Knowledge”  262, 266, 268–269 Penny Cyclopaedia  264, 266, 269 Society of Apothecaries  157 Society of Authors  318, 325, 343, 382, 401 The Soldier’s Monitor 203 Solemn League and Covenant  154–155 Sons of Africa  248 Soulby, John  244 South Africa educational publishing for  424 as export market  317, 360, 361, 389 indigenous publishers given preference in  361, 389 OUP branch in  390 South Country Libraries  386 Southey, Robert: Wat Tyler 264 Southwick Codex  44 Soyinka, Wole  390, 391 The Spectator  182, 188, 192, 196, 220, 222 Spectrum Books  389 Speed, John  87 History of Great Britain 111 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain  108, 111, 112 Speght, Thomas  87, 88 Spenser, Edmund: Faerie Queene, 97  97–98, 100, 124 Spicer, Harriet  420–421 Springer Verlag  388 Squires, Claire  427, 437 The Squyr of Low Degre 96 Stable, Wintringham  401, 402 stab‐stitching  83, 140, 193–194, 256, 290 stamp tax extension to American Colonies (1765) 217 increase in stamp tax (1757)  217 repeal of (1855)  305 Stamp Act (1712)  179, 180, 187–189, 223 in Six Acts (1819)  262–264

Standard Book Number  432. See also ISBN Stanton, Andy: Mr Gum series  457 Star (newspaper)  306, 332–333 Star Chamber  147, 166–167 decree on printing (1586)  125 Stationers’ Company. See also censorship; copyright; English Stock; Licensing statutes; regulation of book trade Bodleian Library to receive copy of every book printed by  103 Carnan suit over almanac publication 221–222 compared to Net Book Agreement  5 end of licensing monopoly, effect of  137–138, 147, 160, 167, 172, 177, 185, 200 in Great Fire of 1666  163 Irish publishing and  130 licensing monopoly of  4, 85–86, 125, 126, 137, 160, 167, 200 in open market of 1790s and after  222 perpetual copyright of  5, 85, 200 role in regulation and control of publishing industry  85–86, 166 royal charter  85–86, 166, 200 seeking legal protection to replace Licensing 200–201 women printers and  92 Statistical Society: “The State of Education in Westminster” (1838)  311 Stead, W.T.  332 Steel, Danielle  428 Steele, Richard  181–182, 190, 220 The Crisis 189 Stephen, Leslie  353 Stephens, Robert  161 Sterne, Laurence: Tristam Shandy  210, 212 Sternhold, Thomas  132 Stevens, Timothy  236 Stevenson, Robert Louis  318, 324 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 319 Stoker, Bram: Dracula 324 Stoneham, F. and E.  327 Stow, John  87

547

548

Index

Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin Bentley edition  283 as bestseller of Victorian period  283 Routledge edition  283 serialization of  270, 272, 274 Welsh translation  303 Strachey, John  359 Strahan, Richard  230, 232, 234, 237, 238, 239 The Strand Magazine 334 Strong, Simon: A259 Multiplex Bomb “Outrage” 449 Stuart, Louisa  226 subscription libraries  207, 210, 244–246, 298. See also circulating libraries Sue, Eugene: Martin the Foundling serial  270 Summit, Jennifer  103 The Sun (halfpenny evening newspaper) 332–333 The Sun (formerly Daily Herald)  345, 392, 447, 448 The Sunday Mirror 448 Sunday Pictorial 391 The Sunday Telegraph 448 Sunday Times, 409  410, 447 surveyor of the press  169 Sutherland, John  397 Swift, Jonathan  181 advocating Irish boycott of English goods 187 on government subsidies to newspapers and journals  189–190 Gulliver’s Travels  189, 193 On Poetry: A Rapsody 193 on Stamp Act  188 A Tale of a Tub 197 Syr Eglamour of Artois 126

t Tabart, Benjamin  242 table of contents  83, 95 Tabouis, Geneviève: Blackmail or War 360 Talbot, Henry Fox: Pencil of Nature 292 Talbotypes 292 Target Books  418 Tate, Nahum  202 The Tatler  181–182, 200, 224

The Tatling Harlot 182 Tauchnitz 355 Taylor, A.J.P.  346 Taylor, Bert  327 Taylor, Kathryn Dyson (Margot Bland, pseud.): Julia 400 Taylor, Robert  220 Taymouth Hours  54, 56, 57 Tazzyman, David: Mr. Gum series  457 technology. See digital technology; printing Tegg, Thomas  267–268 Temple Bar 279 Diana Temple serialization  326 “Temple of the Muses” bookshop (London) 243 Tennyson, Alfred  303 In Memoriam 293 Tennyson’s Poems 292 textbooks. See schoolbooks, textbooks, primers Thackeray, William Makepeace  293 Bradbury & Evans contract with  284 Pendennis 279 Vanity Fair 277, 278 Thistlewood, Thomas  206 Thomas, Dylan: 18 Poems 354 Thomas, John  302, 303 Thomas Nelson  410 Thomason, George  149 Thompson, Alan  402 Thompson, Brian  419 Thompson, John J.  66 Thompson, Kristin  418 Thomson, D.C.  343 Thomson, James: The Seasons  5, 198, 199, 220–221 Thomson, Roy  410, 414 Thorkelin, Grímur Jónsson  15–16 Thornton, Bonnell: Have at You All: or The Drury‐Lane Journal 208, 208 Thornton, Robert  65–67 Thorpe, Thomas  299 Thurnham’s (Carlisle)  311 Thynne, William  81, 82, 83–87 Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau  326 Times  261, 264, 295, 305, 306, 330, 336, 344, 345, 364, 437, 447

Index

Times Book Club (TBC)  328 Times Mirror Company  411 Titt for Tatt 182 Tóibín, Colm: The South 419 Toland, John  178 Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Lord of the Rings 397, 418–419 Tomkins, Thomas  169 Tom’s Coffee‐House  208, 208 Tonson publishing family  173, 202, 219–220 Topham, Jonathan  262 Tories  160, 161, 179, 182, 183, 186, 187, 189, 199 Tory Reaction  172 The Tory Tatler 182 The Town and Country Magazine 225 Toye, Robert  84 The Tradesman’s Copy‐Book 158 Trades Union Council  392 translation Bible translation from Latin into vernacular 112–113 Britannia translation from Latin into English 108 Latin and Greek into English  173–174 Latin into Old English  11–14, 43 Quran into Latin  51 relocation of saint’s relics as  29 transportation improvements, effect of  224, 244, 251, 303, 304–305 Transworld Books’ Corgi imprint  383 Trapp, Joseph: The Aeneis of Virgil, Translated into Blank Verse 199 Treharne, Elaine  45 Treveris, Peter  68 Trimble, Louis  383 Trinity Mirror Group  448 Trollope, Anthony  293 The Macdermots of Ballycloran 285 The Warden 285 The Way We Live Now 418 Trollope, Frances: Michael Armstrong 277 True Romances (story magazine)  395 True Story (story magazine)  395 Truss, Lynne: Eats, Shoots & Leaves 420 Tschichold, Jan  384–385 Tubb, E.C.  395

Tunstal, Cuthbert  113 Turnaround (distributor)  450 Turnley, Joseph: The Language of the Eye 306 Tutchin, John  187 Tutuola, Amos  391 The Palm‐Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm‐Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town 390 TV Times 395 The Twelfth‐Day Gift 213 Twining family  208 twopenny libraries  347 Twyn, John  170 Tyndale, William, 99  113, 154 typefaces. See fonts, typeface, type size

u uncial script. See scripts Union Jack (military newspaper)  378 United Kingdom Federation of Newsagents (UKF) 336 United Libraries  312 United States American authors unprotected by copyright in UK  283 American model for halfpenny evening newspapers 332–333 Black Studies in American universities 425 comic book industry in  392–393, 400–401 copyright law in (1790)  231 copyright protection to works of non‐ American authors (1891)  318 educational publishers and  387 as export market in second half of nineteenth century  317 importing British books after Revolutionary War  230 international commerce with, generating interest in learning English  424 manufacturing clause requiring U.S. printing to establish copyright (1909–1957) 318 reprinting British titles in  230–231 Universal Chronicle 222

549

550

Index

The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure 224 universities, expansion of  387, 408, 428 university extension movement  331, 345–346 University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate  424 university presses  125–126, 345, 374, 387, 411, 429, 446. See also specific universities by name Unwin, Stanley  397, 410 Unwin, T. Fisher  321, 362 Utrecht Psalter  44–46 Anglo‐Catalan or Paris Psalter copy of  44, 45 Eadwine Psalter copy of, 25  44, 45, 46, 49 Harley Psalter copy of   44–45, 48, 49

v Valentine’s Gift 213 van Vogt, A.E.  384 Vercelli Book  30, 43 Vergil, Polydore: Anglica historia 53 Vermigli, Peter Martyr  100 vernacular. See also Anglo‐Norman French; Middle English black letter used in vernacular printing 72 Books of Hours using  56 Caxton printing vernacular literature 68 Historia regum Britannie in both Latin and vernacular  63 literacy and  90 literature in Middle Ages in  42–44 manuscript culture and  81 vertical publishing  410, 414, 417 Vespasian Psalter  105 Vibert’s (Penzance)  311 Victor Gollancz Limited  349–350, 355, 356, 358, 384, 396, 443 Left Book Club  358–359 Mundanus imprint  355 Victorian period “cheap” editions of Victorian authors  280–283, 285, 306

circulating libraries in  297, 311–316 distribution revolution in  251–316. mass audience in  331–332 mass production in late Victorian era  317–338. See also mass production, era of (1870–1920) penny‐novel journals and serialization of novels 269–276 printing process in  287–292 production and distribution innovations 284–310 serialization of novels  269–276. See also book trade Viking Press  414 Vikings  16, 20, 26, 42, 101 Virago  414, 420–422, 448, 451, 458 Modern Classics series  420, 421, 422 Virgil Aeneid  15, 51, 174, 199 Georgics 174 Vatican Virgil  36 Vulgate Bible  19, 112

w Walker, Emery  321 Walker, Robert  202 Wallace, Edgar  367 Wallace, Lewis: Ben Hur 324 Wallington, Nehemiah  149 Wallis, John and Edward  242 Walpole, Horace  225 Walpole, Robert  177, 186, 190, 216 Walter, John, IV  344 Wanley, Humfrey  31 Warburg, Frederic  359 Ward, Catherine George: The Mysterious Marriage 256 Ward, Mary Augusta: Robert Elsmere 318 Ward & Lock  279 War Library  336 Waters, Sarah  421 Waterstone, Tim  432 Waterstones 432–435, 436, 449, 452 Watt, A.P.  325 Watts, John  193 Watts, Richard  252

Index

Waugh, Alec  353 Waugh, Arthur  353 Waugh, Auberon  353, 405 Waugh, Evelyn  353 Weatherley, James  300 Weaver, Harriet Shaw  353 Webb, Mary: Gone to Earth 356, 357 Webster, Richard  448 Wedgwood, Josiah  246 The Weekly Chronicle 295 The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome 171 Weekly Police Gazette  264, 265 The Weekly Visitor 265 Wegner, Max  355 Welcome Guest (newspaper)  271, 303 Weldon, Fay  404 Wellington House  337, 338 Wells, H.G.  325, 349, 396 Wells, Steven  448 Welsh ballads in  255 Bible printing in  252 English advertisements in Gwalia (Welsh newspaper) 335 first book printed in  70, 126 medieval manuscripts in  53 Wendy and Jinx (comic)  393, 394 Wentworth, Thomas  140 Werner Laurie Ltd.  400 West, Rebecca  403 West, William  79 Western Printing Services  402 Westerton’s English and Foreign Universal Library 312 Westleys & Clark  291–292 Westover, George  406 W.H. Allen Ltd.  404 W.H. Smith/W.H. Smith & Son bookstalls on railway lines  281, 306–307, 315, 328–329 copyright agreements used by  286 export business of  389 floorspace devoted to books in  435, 436 Hodder Healine Ltd. as part of  414 Net Book Agreement and  433 regional distributor of newspapers  305

relocation and redesign of shops 328–330 Subscription Library  297, 311–312, 314–316, 330, 346, 386, 432 survey on bestsellers  324 during World War I  337, 338 Wheeler’s “Indian Railway Library” 317 When Saturday Comes (fanzine)  443 Whigs  160, 161, 171–172, 183, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 195, 198 The Whisperer 182 Whitchurch, Edward  114, 118, 126 White, Antonia: Frost in May 420, 421 White, Sara  420 Whitehaven Library (Cumberland)  245 Whitney, Isabella: A Sweet Nosegay 93 Whittaker, Treacher & Co.  299 wholesalers agents acting as  298 consolidation into fewer and larger companies (1880–1920)  327 railway bookstalls and  281 regional suppliers  244, 298, 304 separation of publishers, wholesalers, and retail sellers (1780–1820)  241 subscription price and discount for 296–297 town and country market  242, 264 Wight, Thomas  87 Wilberforce, William  248 Wilde, Oscar  6, 324, 327 Wilkes, John  217–218, 224 William III  216 William Collins  410, 411, 415 William of Malmesbury: Gesta regum Anglorum and Historia novella  51, 52 William of Orange  152 Williams, W.E.  377–378, 396 Williamson, Henry  458, 459 Williamson, James (James Havoc, pseud.): Raism 448 Willibrord, St.  24, 34 Wilson, Andrew  252 Wilson, Harold  392 Wilson, Jacqueline  428 Winchester Bible. See Bible

551

552

Index

Winston, Brian  447 Wischenbart, Rudiger  426 Wishart Books  358 Witt, Robert  54 Wolfreston, Frances  93, 94 Wollstonecraft, Mary: Origin and Progress of the French Revolution 245 Woman & Home 393 Woman’s Signal 334 Woman’s Weekly 343 women in abolition movement  249 annuals aimed at  259 bookbinding jobs performed by  291 commercial libraries and  246 in decision‐making positions in publishing industry  421–422 as dramatic writers (1530–1640)  93–95 as early modern book readers, owners, and collectors  92–93 feminism  95, 356, 404, 420 Findern manuscript, female authors in 65 girls’ comics market  393, 394 illustrations in medieval manuscripts showing women readers  57 Julian of Norwich as first female author 23 ladies’ books of social manners  231 legal advice columns aimed at (1880s) 332 literacy of  65, 90, 92, 196 Little Gidding harmonies created by 101 newspapers and magazines aimed at  225, 334, 335, 343–344, 393, 395 New Woman fiction, popularity in late nineteenth century  324 as novel readers in late eighteenth century 236 nuns as scribes  23 as printers and booksellers (1530–1640) 92 pseudonym use by women authors 255–256 public libraries providing separate rooms for 331

“unwholesome” books in circulating libraries, protecting women from 314 Wood, Anthony  165 Wood, Ellen: The Shadow of Ashlydyat 297 woodcuts  67, 72, 73, 79, 111, 233, 309 anti‐Papist scenes  139–140 in Bevis of South‐Hampton 129 in Chinese and Korean printing  67 in Golden Cockerel Press books  352, 352 mid‐1850s to 1870s as golden age of  282, 292, 333 photomechanical production replacing 293 Woodfall, Henry  218 Wooler, Thomas: Black Dwarf 262 Woolf, Leonard  352, 353, 411 Woolf, Virginia  351, 352, 353 Woolworth’s  348, 356–357, 366 word‐processing programs  444–445 Wordsworth, John: Early Latin 295 Workers’ Bookshop  358 Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) 346 working‐class readers  269, 274, 300, 301, 321, 330, 331, 336, 343, 345, 346, 347, 366, 370, 395 working‐class writers  358 Working Partners Ltd.  438–439 The Works of the English Poets 234 World Publishing  414 World War I, effect on publishing industry  336–338, 349 World War II Blitz’s effect on book trade  373–374 Book Production War Economy Agreement (1942)  373 drop in book production during  371 paper rationing during  358, 372–373, 376, 379 publishing for Armed Forces  367, 376–378 start of  341 World Wide Web and digital distribution, effect of  451–457

Index

Wright, Abraham: Parnassus 144 Wright, Peter: Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer 446 Wroth, Mary: Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Urania 93–95 W.T. Stead  320, 332 Wyclif, John  113

x xerography and Xerox  6, 440, 440–443, 445

y Y Cymro (newspaper)  303 Yeats, W.B.  321 “yellowbacks”  283, 319, 349 York as printing center  126 Young, E.H.: William 356

z Zenger, John Peter  187 ’zines. See fanzines zoomorphic initials  49 Zumthor, Paul  64

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