The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Early Modern Book in England 9780198846239, 0198846231

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Part I Ways of Approaching the History of the Book
1. An Introduction: Thinking about the History of the Book
2. The Handmaids’ Tale: Book History, Shakespeare, and Women’s Textual Labour
3. Cataloguing the Past: Periodization and the Historiography of Print
4. The Scale of Book History: Data, Distance, Description
5. ‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’: Early Modern Book History and Premodern Critical Race Studies
6. Religion and the History of the Book
7. Printing and Book History: Insights from Practice
8. Monuments and Trifles: Which Books Do We Use to Tell the History of the Book?
Part II Making Books
9. What Was a Printing Shop, and What Happened There?
10. Scribes, Compositors, Correctors
11. Authors
12. Publishing Virginia (1608–​1615): Specialization, Commissioning, Networks
13. Regional Book and Print Trades
14. Representing the Labour of Printing in Image and Text
15. Printing and the Universities
16. Illustrated Books
17. Typography
18. Beyond the Book: Non-​Codex Texts
19. Science and the Book in Early Modern England
20. Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse: Or, What is the History of Books in Pieces?
Part III Moving Books: Selling, Circulating, Borrowing, Imagining
21. ‘The Book-​sellars Shop’: Browsing, Reading, and Buying in Early Modern England
22. Internationalism and the English Book Trade
23. ‘A Gifte of good Moment’: A New History of the Stationers’ Benevolence to the Bodleian Library, 1610 to 1616
24. Translingual and Multilingual print
25. Contexts for Circulation: Universities, Inns of Court, Households and Professional Circles
26. From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman: Buying and Selling Old Books in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
27. Conversations about Time and Space: Early Modern Books and Contemporary Artists’ Books
28. The Early Modern Book as Metaphor
Part IV Using Books: Reading and Marking, Collecting and Preserving
29. Past, Present, and Future: Early Modern Collections and the Work of a Curator
30. Self-​Reading Books: Marginalia, Prosopopoeia, and Book History
31. Book Modification
32. Early Modern Books and Phonography
33. Transience and Loss
34. Owning, Preserving, and Transmitting the Text: Early Modern Libraries and Their Users
35. Provenance Narratives in the Twenty-​First Century
36. Broken Books and Fragile Print: A Conservation Perspective
37. The History of the Early Modern Book in the Digital Age
Index

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

T H E H I STORY OF T H E B O OK I N E A R LY M ODE R N ENGLAND

The Oxford Handbook of

THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Edited by

ADAM SMYTH

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 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, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950145 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​884623–​9 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780198846239.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Figures  List of Contributors 

ix xvii

PA RT I   WAYS OF A P P ROAC H I N G T H E H I STORY OF T H E B O OK 1. An Introduction: Thinking about the History of the Book  Adam Smyth 2. The Handmaids’ Tale: Book History, Shakespeare, and Women’s Textual Labour  Claire M. L. Bourne

3

20

3. Cataloguing the Past: Periodization and the Historiography of Print  Megan Heffernan

47

4. The Scale of Book History: Data, Distance, Description  Jeffrey Todd Knight

66

5. ‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’: Early Modern Book History and Premodern Critical Race Studies  Brandi K. Adams

81

6. Religion and the History of the Book  Brian Cummings

100

7. Printing and Book History: Insights from Practice  Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence

123

8. Monuments and Trifles: Which Books Do We Use to Tell the History of the Book?  Jason Scott-​Warren

140

vi   Contents

PA RT I I   M A K I N G B O OK S 9. What Was a Printing Shop, and What Happened There?  Paul W. Nash

157

10. Scribes, Compositors, Correctors  Tamara Atkin

176

11. Authors  Stephen B. Dobranski

195

12. Publishing Virginia (1608–​1615): Specialization, Commissioning, Networks  Kirk Melnikoff

211

13. Regional Book and Print Trades  Rachel Stenner

230

14. Representing the Labour of Printing in Image and Text  Katherine Hunt

247

15. Printing and the Universities  Jason Peacey

269

16. Illustrated Books  Michael Hunter

285

17. Typography  James Misson

310

18. Beyond the Book: Non-​Codex Texts  Harriet Phillips

328

19. Science and the Book in Early Modern England  Adrian Johns

347

20. Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse: Or, What is the History of Books in Pieces?  Anna Reynolds

363

Contents   vii

PA RT I I I   M OV I N G B O OK S : SE L L I N G , C I RC U L AT I N G , B OR ROW I N G , I M AG I N I N G 21. ‘The Book-​sellars Shop’: Browsing, Reading, and Buying in Early Modern England  Ben Higgins 22. Internationalism and the English Book Trade  Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree 23. ‘A Gifte of good Moment’: A New History of the Stationers’ Benevolence to the Bodleian Library, 1610 to 1616  Tara L. Lyons 24. Translingual and Multilingual Print  A. E. B. Coldiron

385 410

427 446

25. Contexts for Circulation: Universities, Inns of Court, Households and Professional Circles  Michelle O’Callaghan

474

26. From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman: Buying and Selling Old Books in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries  H. R. Woudhuysen

493

27. Conversations about Time and Space: Early Modern Books and Contemporary Artists’ Books  Sujata Iyengar

510

28. The Early Modern Book as Metaphor  Jeff Dolven

531

PA RT I V   U SI N G B O OK S : R E A DI N G A N D M A R K I N G , C OL L E C T I N G A N D P R E SE RV I N G 29. Past, Present, and Future: Early Modern Collections and the Work of a Curator  Caroline Duroselle-​Melish 30. Self-​Reading Books: Marginalia, Prosopopoeia, and Book History  Emma Smith

551 569

viii   Contents

31. Book Modification  Georgina Wilson

585

32. Early Modern Books and Phonography  Bruce R. Smith

609

33. Transience and Loss  Alexandra Hill

633

34. Owning, Preserving, and Transmitting the Text: Early Modern Libraries and Their Users  David Pearson

651

35. Provenance Narratives in the Twenty-​First Century  Kathryn James

669

36. Broken Books and Fragile Print: A Conservation Perspective  Nikki Tomkins

686

37. The History of the Early Modern Book in the Digital Age  Whitney Trettien

704

Index

727

Figures

2.1. A page from a 1496 edition of Terence published in Strasbourg used to illustrate woodcut illustration and different typefaces (GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 337, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

26

2.2. A page of Measure for Measure from a copy of the First Folio in Bartlett’s teaching collection (GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 339, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

27

2.3. Bartlett’s attempt to reverse-​engineer a quarto sheet (using sticky tape) as it would have come off the press from an edition of An Interpretation of the Number 666 published in the 1640s (GEN MSS 336, Box 6, folder 308, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

28

3.1. Reference for Margaret Coule reused as scratch paper by the bibliographer William Herbert. Loose in Andrew Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (1595), Rare Books 54169, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

57

5.1. The title page of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie (1615). Public domain.

85

6.1. Liber donorum, York Minster Library MS Inc 7-​12, fo. 1r. Copyright Chapter of York. Reproduced by permission.

103

6.2. The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the Neuu (London: Robert Barker, and by the assignes of John Bill, 1631), York Minster Library: shelf mark HOB XI.H.32, showing detail of Exodus 20. Copyright Chapter of York. Reproduced by permission.

114

14.1. Jan van der Straet, Nova Reperta, plate 18: ‘Sculptura in aes’, engraving. Image courtesy Newberry Library (Case Wing folio Z 412.85).

250

14.2. Jan van der Straet, Nova Reperta, plate 4: ‘Impressio librorum’, engraving. Image courtesy Newberry Library (Case Wing folio Z 412.85).

252

14.3. Abraham Bosse, ‘The Engraver and Etcher’, etching. British Museum, R,8.16. Image courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum.

253

14.4. Abraham Bosse, ‘The Intaglio Printers’, etching. British Museum, R,8.15. Image courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum.

254

x   Figures 14.5. From Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, or The doctrine of handy-​ works . . . (1677–​83), plate 24, engraving. Image courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call no. UTT144 M68).

260

16.1. Title page of Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1539). This title page was reused fifty-​five times between 1534 and 1624. 104.5 × 64.5 mm. (EPB/​A/​1999.) © Wellcome Library, London.

286

16.2. View of Stonehenge from the 1610 edition of William Camden’s Britain, 252. This is a reuse of a plate by William Rogers from the 1600 Latin edition of Camden’s much reprinted work, with the faint pagination ‘219’ and with an English translation of the commentary added. Plate area 175 × 120 mm.

287

16.3. The burning of Thomas Cranmer, from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563). 130 × 180 mm. (Sel. 2.15b.) © Cambridge University Library.

289

16.4. ‘The Martyrdome of a blinde man, and a lame man, at Stratford the Bowe’, from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1583 edn.). 107 × 70 mm. (SSS.9.2.) © Cambridge University Library.

290

16.5. A forced march, a typical scene from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577). 79 × 130 mm. (Peterborough D.11.5) © Cambridge University Library.

291

16.6. William Hole, engraved portrait of George Chapman, from The Whole Works of Homer Prince of Poets (1616). 230 × 152 mm. (Dyce S Fol. 4896) © Victoria and Albert Museum.

293

16.7. Willem or Magdalena van de Passe, Sir Nicholas Bacon, from Herωologia (1620). 162 × 123 mm.

294

16.8. Richard Gaywood, ‘The Lady Elinor Temple’, from Sir Peter Temple’s Mans Master-​piece (1658). 120 × 70 mm.

295

16.9. Nisus killing Volscens, from Ogilby’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1654), [446]. Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar after Francis Clein, dedicated to Thomas Hanson. 294 × 192 mm.

296

16.10. The choir of St Paul’s Cathedral, from Dugdale’s History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658). Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, dedicated to Elias Ashmole. 318 × 223 mm.

299

16.11. Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne, ‘Astrologia’, dedicated to Sir William Ducie (later Viscount Downe); plate for Richard Blome’s abortive work on the ‘Arts and Sciences’ (c.1665). 280 × 192 mm.

302

16.12. A typical opening from Blome’s edition of Nicholas Fontaine’s History of the Old Testament, Extracted out of Sacred Scripture and Writings of the Fathers (1690), showing how each section of text is accompanied by a facing plate, in this case of the Judgement of Solomon. Engraving by Jan Kip after G. Freman, dedicated to Sir John Maynard. Plate size 335 × 205 mm. (From Rel.bb.69.4.) © Cambridge University Library.

303

Figures   xi 17.1. Conradus de Alemania, Concordiantiae Bibliorum ([Strassburg: Johann Mentelin, before 1475]), ISTC ic00849000. The Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford, Auct 1Q 1.20, part 4, [4d]5r. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

312

17.2. Martin Marprelate, The Epistle ([East Molesey: Robert Waldegrave, 1588]), STC 17452. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce PP 244 fo. 1v. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

317

17.3. Martin Marprelate, The Epistle ([East Molesey: Robert Waldegrave, 1588]), STC 17452. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce PP 2444. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

318

18.1. Anthony Wood’s copy of Monmouth Degraded (1685). Bodleian Library MS Wood 417(140).

331

18.2. The vale mans table (1589). © The Society of Antiquaries of London, Lemon 78.

334

20.1. Poor-​quality paper, possibly cording quires, in a copy of Urquhart’s Ekskybalauron (7–​8). The text is printed on top of the wrinkles: note the catchword ‘The’ on the left and ‘within’ at the bottom of right-​hand page. National Library of Scotland, L.C. 1457.

368

20.2. Leaves from Guillame Morel, Verborum cum Graecis Gallicisque conjunctorum (London: for Richard Hutton, [1583]), marked up by Thomas Thomas for his own dictionary and used as endleaves in Zacharias Ursinus, Explicationum catecheticarum (Cambridge: Thomas Thomas, 1587). Henry E. Huntington Library, 89966 PF.

371

20.3. A stab-​stitched, waste-​paper wrapper comprised of an unfolded and uncut sheet from Martin Finch, Animadversions Upon Sir Henry Vanes Book (London: for Joseph Barber, 1656). Thomas Plume Library, Plume Pamphlet 699.

374

20.4. The life cycle of the early modern book in pieces. A reconfigured version of Darnton’s communications circuit, highlighting the production, circulation, and use of waste paper at each stage in the life cycle of the book. 378 21.1. ‘The Book-​sellars Shop’ from Orbis sensualium pictus (1659). C5525, N8v. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-​ShareAlike 4.0 International License

386

21.2. No-​body, and some-​body (1606). STC 18597 Copy 2, A2r. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-​ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

388

21.3. Detail from Ralph Treswell’s survey of Cheapside, 1585. Object reference 1880,1113.3516. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

389

21.4. A bookshop with stall boards in Bologna, c.1640–​c.1660. Detail of RP-​P-​2001-​621, image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

391

xii   Figures 21.5. The frontage of a Bishopsgate bookshop from an engraving of 1736. Detail of Gough Maps volume 20, 29b. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

393

21.6. The interior of a Dutch bookshop, c.1607–​78, including a binder at work on the left. Detail of RP-​T-​1884-​A-​290, image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

398

21.7. Two street bookstalls in Whitehall, 1724, including one with a customer reading beneath the awning. Detail of Gough Maps 45, 92a. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

401

21.8. A bookstall in Stocks Market beside Cornhill, 1738. Detail of Gough Maps 19, 16a. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

402

22.1. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacræ (London: R.W. for Henry Mortlock, 1663), shelfmark 27, 28. 00069. Courtesy of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Denmark.

415

22.2. John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana (London: John Bill, 1629), shelfmark O 63-​3320. Courtesy of Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Constantijn Huygens wrote his name on the title page.

421

24.1. Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (London: John Wolfe, 1588), A2v–​3. STC 4781. Huntington Library 99009. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

449

24.2. Paruus Catho (Westminster: Caxton, 1483), A2v–​3. STC 4852. © British Library Board. Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

452

24.3. Elias Hutter, Sanctus Marcus (Nuremberg: s.n., 1600), A1v–​2. STC 2792.7 © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark: Asia, Pacific & Africa 01902.d.22.(2.) Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

454

24.4. Thomas More, Von der wunderbarlichen Jnnsel Vtopia (Basel: Bebel, 1524), A2. Source library: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 4 Pol.g. 162 d. Image published with the permission of the BSB (Daten für die Forschung). 455 24.5. Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham A Testimonie of Antiquitie (London: John Day, 1566), [B4v–​5]. STC 159.5. Huntington Library 12965. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

456

Figures   xiii 24.6. Archaionomia (Londini: ex officina Joannis Daii, 1568), [L3r]–​L.iiii. STC 15142. Huntington Library 62136. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

457

24.7. Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia (London: John Wolfe, 1588), Passion XXXVIII, [E3v]. STC 25118a. Huntington Library 79609. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

458

24.8. Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia (London: John Wolfe, 1588), Passions LXXXII and LXXXIII, [L1v-​L2]. STC 25118a. Huntington Library 79609. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

459

24.9. Abraham Fraunce, Arcadian Rhetorike (London, Thomas Orwin, 1588), [I4v–​I5]. STC 11338. Bodleian Library, Mal. 514 (2). Image published with permission of the Bodleian for academic use and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

461

24.10. Théodore de Bèze, ‘Ad serenissimam Elizabetham . . .’ (London: Bishop and Newbery, 1588), s. sh. fol. (on vellum). STC 1999. © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark 74/​K.T.C.7.b.6. Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

466

24.11. John Walker, ‘In optatum reditum . . .’ (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1660), s. sh. fol. Wing 393. © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark C.20.f.5.(56). Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

467

27.1. Bindings, Deb Rindl, Area of a Triangle (1996), Times Square (2001), Counting Crows (2005).

514

27.2. ‘3000 Errors’, title page, Isaac Keay, The Practical Measurer (1724).

516

27.3. Unfolded folio leaf (fos. 16-​19), Samuel Moreland, Vade Mecum [‘Playford’s Almanac’] (1749).

517

27.4. Letter S, ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden, by Judy Fairclough Sgantas (Vermont: Janus Press, 2012), copy 39/​120, binding designed by Claire Van Vliet and executed by Audrey Holden. Reproduced with permission.

519

27.5. Pressed plant, between pp. 404 and 405, John Gerard, Herball (1636).

521

27.6. Annotated endpaper, John Evelyn, Sylva (1664).

522

27.7. Gathering 7, Casey Gardner, Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth (Berkeley, CA: Set in Motion Press, 2013). Reproduced with permission.

524

xiv   Figures 27.8. Volvelles, in Francesco Giuntini (trans.), La Sfera Del Mondo (Lyons, 1582), 74–​75.

526

31.1. John Milton, Paradise Lost: a poem in ten books (1669). By permission of Balliol College Library, Oxford (525 a 5).

589

31.2. John Milton, Paradise Lost: a poem in ten books (1669). By permission of Balliol College Library, Oxford (525 a 5).

590

31.3. Inserted and mended page in The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New (1578). By permission of the Bodleian Library, Vet A1.b.13.

592

31.4. Thomas Cromwell’s erased coat of arms. The Byble in Englysh (1541), Bodleian Library, Bib. Eng. 1541 b.2.

595

31.5. The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (1695). By permission of University College Library, Oxford (B.220.20 (2) ).

596

31.6. Elizabeth I’s copy of the Geneva–​Tomson New Testament (1578), Bod Arch. G e.48.

598

31.7 ‘Place these two one upon another upon that page 315’. M Blundevile His Exercises (1636), Huntington Library 708329.

600

31.8. Edmund Gunter, The description and vse of the sector (1624), Huntington Library 29076.

601

31.9. Contents page to multi-​text volume including works by John Webster, Edward Ravenscroft, Aphra Behn, and William Shakespeare. Balliol College Library, Oxford, 530 b 1.

602

31.10. Tab reading ‘epilogue’ in Aphra Behn’s The Young King shows where the edge of this Sammelband used to be. Balliol Library, 530 b 1.

604

32.1. Horn book, early seventeenth century (STC 13813.5). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

612

32.2. Detail of Pepys ballad i. 78–​79 as mounted in Pepys’s Volume I. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

614

32.3. ‘It was a lover and his lass’, from Thomas Morley, The first booke of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole (STC 18115.5), sig. B4v–​C1. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

620

32.4. Chained folio book, Library of Merton College, Oxford. Photograph by J. W. Thomas. Reproduced by permission of Oxfordshire History Centre.

626

36.1. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 915 b 4 A. Pamphlet stitched with three holes. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

692

36.2. Diagram of a typical Nicholas Crouch tract volume, showing the cover decoration and chain staple holes.

693

Figures   xv 36.3. Image of the books displayed fore-​edge out. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

697

36.4. Example of a manuscript fore-​edge marker. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 905 f 2. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

698

36.5. ‘This leaf is turned the wrong way. By the ignorance of the binder.’ Balliol College Library, shelfmark 910 I 4 (9). Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

699

Contributors

Brandi K. Adams is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her research interests include the history of reading, the history of the book, premodern critical race theory of early modern England, as well as modern editorial practices of early modern English drama. She has begun working on her first monograph, tentatively titled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English Drama. Tamara Atkin is Professor Medieval and Early Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her last monograph, Reading Drama in Tudor England, was published by Routledge in 2018. She is currently working on early modern book reuse. Claire M. L. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020) and editor of Shakespeare /​ Text (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her research focuses primarily on early modern drama, book design, and textual editing. A. E. B. Coldiron (Krafft University Professor at Florida State University and Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews) is author of Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2015; repr. 2020) and other books and essays on early modern translation, book history, and poetry. Coldiron is coordinating a special topic issue of PMLA on translation (for 2023) and finishing an edition of five works by Christine de Pizan as translated in Tudor England (MHRA), as well as a monograph on them, Christine de Pizan in Early English Print: The ‘Mirreur and Maistresse’ of ‘Intelligence’ (University of Toronto Press). Brian Cummings FBA is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. He edited The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (repr. edn., Oxford World’s Classics, 2013), and is the author of Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford University Press, 2022). Stephen B. Dobranski is Distinguished University Professor of early modern literature and textual studies at Georgia State University. He is the editor of Milton Studies, and his books include Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (1999), Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (2005), The Cambridge Introduction to Milton (2012), and Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in ‘Paradise Lost’ (2015) all for Cambridge University Press. His most recent work is a new edition of Paradise Lost (Norton, 2022) and Reading John Milton: How to Persist in Troubled Times (Stanford University Press, 2022).

xviii   Contributors Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance, at Princeton University. He has written three books of criticism—​Scenes of Instruction (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Senses of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet, 2017)—​as well as essays on a variety of subjects. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the United States and the United Kingdom and in a volume, Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013). He is also an editor-​at-​large at Cabinet magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). Caroline Duroselle-​Melish is Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints, and Associate Librarian for Collection Care and Development, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. She has also held various positions in other academic and independent research libraries. Her publications reflect her research interests in the history of libraries, the Renaissance book trade, and the production and reception of early modern illustrated books. Alexandra Franklin is Co-​ordinator of the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book, based in the Department of Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania. In her library career she has catalogued and written about collections of broadside ballads, prints and printing surfaces, and the experience of practical printing for an understanding of printing history. Megan Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University and author of Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). She is at work on a new monograph on lyric form and the history of book conservation and care. Ben Higgins is Career Development Fellow in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, Its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford University Press, 2022) and has published widely on the textual history of Shakespeare’s writings and the early modern book trade. Alexandra Hill completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews and was a Research Assistant on the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project. After university she worked at Project Reveal, a collections digitization project at the National Trust for Scotland, before becoming the Librarian for Printed Rare Material at the Wellcome Collection in London. She has published articles on ballads and lost print as well as a monograph on Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557–​1640: An Analysis of the Stationers’ Company Register (Brill, 2018). Katherine Hunt is Lecturer in Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth-​Century Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her work is concerned with the relationship between writing and material culture in early modern England and Europe, and how these interactions affect us in the present. She is completing a monograph which asks how the technologies and processes of making in bronze and brass helped to shape writing in the early modern period. With Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado, Boulder) she organizes Literary

Contributors   xix Form After Matter, an ongoing series of events and publications that ask how we read early modern literature now. Michael Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Boyle: Between God and Science (Yale University Press, 2009) and principal editor of Boyle’s Works, Correspondence, and workdiaries (www.live​sand​lett​ers.ac.uk/​wd). His numerous other books include Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2020). Sujata Iyengar is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, where she teaches early modern British literature and Shakespearean adaptation. Her essays on Shakespeare in artists’ books, fine print editions, and as intermedia have appeared in Daniel Fischlin (ed.), OuterSpeares (University of Toronto Press, 2013); Shakespeare Quarterly (2016); Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Blackwell, 2016); The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Routledge, 2020) which she co-​edited with Christy Desmet and Miriam Jacobson; and Claire M. L. Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text (Bloomsbury, 2021). During 2014–​15 she was apprenticed to book artist Eileen Wallace at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia. Kathryn James is the Rare Book Librarian at the Yale Law Library. She is recently the author of English Paleography and Manuscript Culture, 1500–​1800 (Yale University Press, 2020) and co-​editor with Phil Withington of ‘Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization’, a special issue of Historical Journal (2022). Adrian Johns is Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book (University of Chicago Press, 1998), Piracy (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Death of a Pirate (Norton, 2010), and most recently The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2023), as well as numerous articles on the histories of science, information, and communications. He is currently co-​editing with James Evans a volume on the history and implications of algorithms and artificial intelligence. Jeffrey Todd Knight is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington and editor of MLQ: A Journal of Literary History. His books are Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and Shakespeare on the Page: Books, Texts, and Readers (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hanna de Lange is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, associated with the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) team. Her doctoral research is an investigation into the distribution of English books in the early modern Northern European book market. Richard Lawrence has an MA in Printing History from Reading University and has been a letterpress printer for more than forty years. He is a founding member of the

xx   Contributors Dürer Press Group which commissioned and maintains a reconstructed wooden press for teaching purposes, and teaches practical printing and printing history at the Bodleian Libraries Bibliographical Press. Tara L. Lyons is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University. Her scholarship on book history and early modern literature has been published or is forthcoming in ELR, PBSA, Philological Quarterly, and a number of edited collections. She has received grants from the Huntington, Folger, and Bodleian Libraries as well as the Bibliographical Society of America. Kirk Melnikoff is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Elizabethan Book Trade Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (University of Toronto Press) and has edited four essay collections, most recently (with Roslyn L. Knutson) Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge University Press). He has also published editions of both James IV and Selimus. He is currently finalizing (with Aaron Pratt and Breanne Weber) Playbook Wills, 1529–​1692 for the Revels Play Companion Library, editing Edward II for Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works, and completing a monograph on bookselling in early modern England. James Misson is a book historian interested in understanding print culture through computational methods. He recently finished a DPhil thesis on early English typography at the University of Oxford, and is Research Assistant in Digital Humanities at the University of Geneva. His forthcoming book is a data-​driven exploration of typographic variation and its meanings in the sixteenth century. Paul W. Nash is a bibliographer, librarian, and printing historian. He has worked with rare books in the Bodleian and RIBA libraries, and was superintendent of the Bibliography Room at the Bodleian between 2006 and 2015. He is currently editor of the Journal of the Printing Historical Society. Michelle O’Callaghan is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of The ‘shepheards nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and early Stuart political culture, 1612–​1625 (Oxford University Press, 2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and co-​editor with Alice Eardley of Verse Miscellanies Online: Printed Poetry Collections of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at UCL. He is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda in the Civil Wars and Interregnum (Ashgate, 2004), Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and The Madman and the Churchrobber: Law and Conflict in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2022). He also edited The Regicides and the Execution

Contributors   xxi of Charles I (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), The Print Culture of Parliament, 1600–​1800 (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and Making the British Empire, 1660–​ 1800 (Manchester University Press, 2020). With Chris R. Kyle he edited Parliament at Work (Boydell, 2002) and Connecting Centre and Locality: Political Communication in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2020). With Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber he edited Freedom of Speech, 1500–​1850 (Manchester University Press, 2020). He is currently working on Anglo-​Dutch relations in the seventeenth century. David Pearson retired in 2017 from a career managing libraries in London and elsewhere, to focus on his work as a book historian; he has written and lectured extensively on ways in which books have been owned, used, and bound, and his publications include Provenance Research in Book History (new edn., Bodleian Library, 2019), English Bookbinding Styles 1450–​1800 (British Library, 2005), Books as History (British Library, 2008), and Speaking Volumes: Books with Histories (Bodleian Library, 2022). His Lyell Lectures have been published as Book Ownership in Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 2021) and he will be Sandars Reader at Cambridge in 2023. He is a Past President of the Bibliographical Society and teaches regularly on the Rare Book Schools in London and Virginia. Andrew Pettegree, FBA is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including The Book in the Renaissance (2010) and The Bookshop of the World. Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (2019), both for Yale University Press. The Library: A Fragile History, co-​authored with Arthur der Weduwen, was published by Profile in 2021. Harriet Phillips is the author of Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–​ 1613 (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-​editor (with Claire Loffman) of A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts (Routledge, 2017). She has published essays on early modern print culture and the public sphere, and is co-​editing Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica for The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (Oxford University Press). Anna Reynolds is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. She works on the intersection of material practices and imaginative thought in early modern England and is currently completing her first monograph on waste paper in early modern England. Jason Scott-​Warren is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts. His most recent book, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (University of Pennsylvania Press), appeared in 2019. Bruce R. Smith is Dean’s Professor of English and Theatre at the University of Southern California, and is the author of seven books on Shakespeare, including The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 1999), The Key of Green

xxii   Contributors (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Shakespeare | Cut (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has chapters forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface (2022), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship (2022), and The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies (2023). Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. Her publications include Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers (Allen Lane, 2022). Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford University. His recent publications include Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and, with Dennis Duncan, Book Parts (Oxford University Press, 2019, paperback 2023). He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and is the co-​founder and co-​editor of Inscription: The Journal of Material Text—​Theory, Practice, History. Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in Literature 1350–​1660 at the University of Sussex. She has broad interests across the early modern and medieval periods, and her current research is about Tudor literature and print culture. She is writing a monograph about William Baldwin, and co-​editing his literary works. Her most recent book is a co-​edited collection of essays entitled Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Nikki Tomkins graduated from Camberwell Arts College in 2015 with an MA in the conservation of books. In 2016–​17 she was the project conservator for the Nicholas Crouch collection at Balliol College, Oxford. She currently works at the Oxford Conservation Consortium, who provide collection care for the historic library and archive collections of sixteen Oxford colleges. Whitney Trettien is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches book history and digital humanities. Her first book is Cut/​Copy/​ Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Georgina Wilson is Research Fellow in English Literature at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Her current book project, provisionally entited Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature, is on paper in the book trade and the early modern imagination; more broadly she works at the intersection of literary studies and material texts. Alongside her research, Georgina teaches Shakespeare, early modern literature, and material texts. H. R. Woudhuysen FBA is Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. He was co-​General Editor with Michael Suarez SJ of The Oxford Companion to the Book and was one of the General Editors of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series.

Pa rt I

WAYS OF A P P ROAC H I N G T H E H I STORY OF T H E B O OK

Chapter 1

An Introdu c t i on Thinking about the History of the Book Adam Smyth

There are different stories to be told about the books we study from the past: it is the task of this present volume to present some of the ways we have for accounting for, describing, analysing, and imagining the lives of books considered as physical objects. My aim in editing this collection is not to hand out a set of fixed procedures, but to convey a subject that is, in the best sense, in flux. In this opening chapter I want to take the example of one intensely popular seventeenth-​century printed book to suggest some of the different frames available for studying this bibliographical object. I want then, at the conclusion, to say something about the scope and ambition of the Handbook: to say what’s included, and what isn’t, and why this might be. The book we call Eikon Basilike, which was quickly known on publication as the ‘King’s Book’, was in fact titled Εἰκὼν Βασιλική, or the ‘Royal Portrait’, or, in its subtitle, The Pourtrature of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings. It was an international bestseller, and also a bibliographical problem: there are uncertainties and omissions in the history of this book. The date is probably best regarded as an attributable element (not all the imprints with 1649 or 1648 need have been printed that year), and not all editions with a London imprint were necessarily printed in London. Authorship, too, is infamously not what it seems in this book. The book offered itself as something like King Charles I’s spiritual (auto)biography, and claimed to have been written by the king some time before his execution outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London, on 30 January 1649. By the end of the seventeenth century, John Gauden, Bishop of Exeter, was considered the most likely author-​editor—​Gauden seems to have included documents written by the King along with his own plentiful additions—​and the attribution to him is generally accepted today. Libraries respond in different ways to the trickiness of these questions of attribution: the English Short Title

4   Adam Smyth Catalogue (ESTC, estc.bl.uk) and the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, www. ustc.ac.uk) attribute the work to Gauden; the Library of Congress (catalog.loc.gov) has Charles I as ‘supposed author’ and Gauden as ‘attributed author’; the Bodleian Library’s SOLO catalogue (solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk) assigns the book to Gauden, with Charles I noted as an ‘attributed name’. In a manner that might surprise us, print could be a rapid and nimble technology: copies of Eikon Basilike appeared by the day of the King’s execution, perhaps even before, and by the end of 1649, at least thirty-​five editions had been printed in England. That’s worth repeating: thirty-​five editions in less than a single year, creating, to put it mildly, a tension between the lonely monarch described in the text, ‘in his solitudes and sufferings’, and the wildly quick distribution of the book out to the public, across England and beyond. The rapid production and distribution of tens of thousands of copies (if not more) of the many editions of this book constituted a process of canon formation: in the words of Helmer J. Helmers, ‘the Eikon gained the status of an appendix to the Bible’, and soon became a central text for what is known as the Cult of Charles the Martyr—​the book seen as a relic of a martyr, alongside the handkerchiefs dipped in the King’s blood that were reported to have wrought miracles.1 What happens to a relic when everyone can get hold of a copy?2 The success of Eikon Basilike was also an international phenomenon. English-​ language editions were printed in England, Ireland, Holland, and France, and there were also translations. By early March—​less than five weeks after the regicide—​the first Dutch edition was published by Joost Hartgers in Amsterdam, titled Konincklick memoriael (‘Royal Memorial’); there were eight Dutch editions in 1649 alone, of which Hartgers published five.3 Editions appeared also quickly in French (the first printed for Jean Berthelin at Rouen), Danish (printed in Copenhagen), Latin (translated by Charles II’s tutor John Earle, and printed at The Hague by Samuel Browne), and German (translated from the Latin).4 An incomplete Welsh translation by the poet Rowland Vaughan survives in manuscript from about 1650.5 Thomas Wagstaffe, writing in defence of the King as the author of Eikon Basilike, caught this sense of a sudden, flaring popularity: The Book was no sooner publish’d, but it flew not only all over the Nation, but almost all over Europe, all Mens Mouths were full of it, and it was translated into several Languages, into Greek, Latin, French and Italian.6

A Greek and Italian translation looks like a rhetorical flourish: there is no further evidence of these. But Wagstaffe’s point about a book flying national boundaries, even as, in a stifling counter-​image, it stuffs up mouths, aptly captures the sense of a book in motion. Among its many significances, Eikon Basilike is a reminder for book historians to raise their eyes from the local, domestic, and national to take on the international, multilingual nature of print, even for a book so powerfully associated with the centripetal force of English monarchy.

An Introduction   5

Book-​Writing Perhaps the most obvious way to engage with Eikon Basilike is to recall the etymology of ‘bibliography’ (from the Greek, biblion (book) and graphos (drawn or written) ), and to describe the book. How can we convey Eikon Basilike in words? What do we include, and what do we exclude? What are the limits of our description? We can start with a bibliographical description in the most technical sense: the book described across a number of categories, in this case five, which answer these and other questions. Although the practice of bibliographical description varies, this might mean providing a quasi-​facsimile title-​page transcription, showing line breaks and typefaces; a format and collation formula; a note of signature positions, catchwords, type, paper, and plates; brief details of the book’s contents; and a list of individual copies examined and their location. This is a process of measuring, counting, listing—​although it’s worth noting that the sheer practical difficulty of parts of the process (how should one measure a deckle edge?) makes the task of objective description seem immediately elusive. Few books have been the recipient of the level of bibliographical description enjoyed, or endured, by Eikon Basilike, seen most vividly in Edward Almack’s A Bibliography of the King’s Book or Eikon Basilike (1896) and Francis F. Madan’s A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First, with a Note on the Authorship (1950).7 Crucially, a bibliographical description pins down not any individual copy, but an ideal copy, based on the consultation of as many copies as possible—​although in practice, and because in principle bibliographical descriptions should be derived from physical examination, this meant the consultation of copies in a relatively small number of prestigious libraries. The description of an ideal copy is a product of the conversion or accumulation of the features of individual copies into a generalized ideal that, in the uncharacteristically breezy words of Fredson Bowers, represents ‘the most perfect state of the book as the printer or publisher finally intended to issue it’. This bibliographical description of an ideal copy ‘aims to provide a standard against which individual copies can be measured’: a bibliographical description of an ideal copy is both an attempt to tell us something about what was intended in the printing house and a benchmark against which to measure (or identify) a copy. But because the ideal is often conjectural, it is frequently the case that no extant copies exactly match it.8 Our careful description of a book at rest before us has quickly become an imaginary object, or at least an object very close to, but not exactly the same as, the physical copies we might be able to consult; and the paradox of bibliographical description is that it is a minutely detailed description of a book that may not exist in this form. And while bibliographical description very usefully produces a way of talking about the concept of an edition, it is also ideological: it is a process of description that establishes a normative text which serves as a model against which other texts can be assessed, and found variously lacking, aberrant, or deficient. We see this registered in an often moralized language: bibliographical description, according to G. T. Tanselle, ‘rises above the limitations of a single copy by reporting what

6   Adam Smyth emerges as standard’. It is a form of book-​description in which ‘defects’, ‘deficiencies of individual copies’, and anything that is ‘abnormal or defective in a given copy’ ‘must be purged’.9 To focus briefly on one element of bibliographical description: the collation formula is a description of the structure of the book, recording the format, the ordering of gatherings, and the number of leaves, as they appear in the conjectural ideal of this book. For the first issue of the first edition, translating Eikon Basilike into a collation formula produces this: 8o: A4 [frontispiece after A4], B–​S8 [S8 blank] Like reading difficult Latin, we probably need to take things slowly to parse this strange piece of text. The formula conveys that the ideal copy of the first edition of Eikon Basilike—​from which extant copies might depart—​is octavo in format, and is composed of eighteen gatherings labelled A to S (J not being used), with a half-​sheet A gathering composed of four leaves, and gatherings B to S each of eight leaves. A separately printed frontispiece is tipped in between the A and B gatherings, and the final leaf is blank. By the time we get to the ideal copy of the tenth edition of Eikon Basilike, the collation formula looks like this: 12o: π2 [with frontispiece between the two leaves], [A]‌–​I12 [portrait between I4 and I5], K10 [K10 blank], L6 [L5 and L6 blank] To translate: this duodecimo (12o) book starts with two blank leaves (‘π2’), before nine gatherings of twelve leaves each, one of ten, and one of six. Collation formulae like these suggest the reassurances of scientific rigour, although through their relation to ideal copies, they work to a particular agenda. If this kind of bibliographical description—​we encounter it most frequently in catalogues such as the ESTC—​has been traditionally concerned with the establishment of edition-​level norms, more recent work within bibliographical studies has been preoccupied with the opposite: that is, with the copy-​specific. Copy-​specificity means thinking about books not at the level of the edition (where the useful fiction of a single ideal lets a whole edition run be conjured as one), but rather of the individual copy; it means attending to physical and textual features of particular copies, generally without the moralized language of defect or corruption. Indeed, the register of much recent work has been a delighted investment in granularity and difference and ‘the forever unfinished character of these books’10—​although, of course, a critique of the book as unitary and stable is itself an ideological position. A loud narrative within the history of the book for the last thirty years has emphasized that the printing press was an imperfect technology for duplication, and that earlier claims for the capacity of print to fix texts through the production of identical copies, a position often associated with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s formative

An Introduction   7 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979),11 need revision. This attention to the particular has grown in part because of an increasing interest over the last few decades in readers and, thus by extension, in their individual copies; and it’s been encouraged, too, by the capacity of social media, particularly Twitter, to rapidly and widely disseminate images of copy-​specific features found in libraries and archives to a liking audience. We can see this paradigm playing out in a number of exciting, and at the time of writing, contemporary, projects. Zachary Lesser’s work with Adam G. Hooks on The Shakespeare Census (www.shakes​pear​ecen​sus.org), inspired by the early twentieth-​ century labours of bibliographer Henrietta Bartlett (1873–​1963), is an attempt to identify and describe all existing copies of Shakespeare’s works up until 1700. An awareness of the potential for copies to vary within a single edition was always there in bibliographical description, but in resources like the Shakespeare Census there is a strong sense of the need to fully reckon with, rather than efface, the implications of these individual traits. Lesser’s book on the Pavier Quartos (1619)—​often seen as Thomas Pavier’s attempt at a one-​volume edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays, four years before the ‘First Folio’—​sustains this methodology. By examining ‘three bibliographic clues’—​faint ghost images carried from one page to an adjacent page; holes indicating prior stab-​stitching; and marks of post-​printing erasure—​Lesser finds, among other things, that copies of the third edition of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1617) were often included in, but were subsequently removed from, this ‘Shakespearean’ collection.12 As a result, Lesser is able to revise the traditional, edition-​ level story that has been told about this crucial collection, and, more fundamentally, to shift the scale of bibliographical analysis. This is close looking as much as close reading, and rather than read one copy, Lesser reads all 313 that he could find, often with visual enhancement technologies such as multispectral imaging not available to earlier bibliographers. This requires a certain kind of scholarship: for reasons of time, money, and carbon emissions, the future of this kind of work is surely collaborative, relying, in its maximal version, on thousands of volunteers with access to libraries and collections across the globe. Copy-​specific descriptions of Eikon Basilike are, compared to most volumes from the period, intensely detailed, and the care may be a version of the former Royalist reverence for a book that was also a relic (Almack, describing the bindings of Eikon Basilike, writes of volumes ‘to this moment wearing mourning for Charles the First’).13 Here, for instance, is the description of one copy held in the Royal Collection: Black goatskin binding; both boards and spine re-​backed onto a darker goatskin. Identical design on left and right boards. Gold-​tooled all over. Left and right boards contain a panel design, formed of an outer roll-​tooled border of semi-​circles and double fillet lines and an inner boarder of double fillet lines; central inner panel contains an additional diamond-​shaped dotted roll border, with large floral stamps on each of the points. Inner panel profusely decorated with floral, feather and swirling stamps. Spine re-​backed but contemporary with the right and left boards.

8   Adam Smyth Flat with no raised bands; outer roll-​tooled border of semi-​circles and double fillet lines identical to left and right boards. Diamond-​shaped floral stamps at the head and tail and centre of spine, and six horizonal stamps as if to give the impression of bands. Silk ties fixed to the boards through pairs of holes on either side. Inside of left and right boards contain modern (20th century?) pastedown and flyleaves, so that fixture of the ties on the inside of boards is not visible. 20.3 × 12.9 × 3.2.14

The book here is a site on which ornament plays out: the description is rather magnificently uninterested in the contents of the volume (W. W. Greg defined bibliography as ‘the study of books as material objects irrespective of their contents’15), and is instead shaped by the technical language of bookbinding: a vocabulary of tooling (the ornamentation of a leather book cover with designs impressed by heated tools); rolls (wheel-​ shaped tools with patterns engraved around the rim to create a continuous band of decoration); fillets (wheel-​tools for pressing lines rather than patterns in the leather); and bands (threads sewn around a strip of leather and attached to the text-​block at the top and bottom, providing strength and decoration). This genre of book-​writing is both highly specialized and, to most readers, fairly inaccessible, but it is also celebratory, both in the sheer fact of its sustained attention and in the meticulous enumeration of markers of expertise and worth (‘Gold-​tooled all over’). This register of restrained celebration speaks partly to the world of book auctions and buyers: an environment that since the seventeenth century has been crucial for the development of the way books are described, encouraging an attention to copy-​specificity, completeness, imperfection, uniqueness, rarity, and value.16 These descriptions are the product of a careful gaze that can appear myopic, but in these static portraits there is an expansive potential. Such descriptions can encourage us to understand a book not only in relation to other books, but also in relation to a broader non-​bibliographical material culture. The floral stamps pressed into the leather, for example, or the double fillet lines running round the edges of the covers, speak not to the insides of the book but rather to design conventions moving across Europe within crafts such as furniture design, metalwork, and architecture. The book is suddenly reframed, and might be placed in groups of different kinds of object. With a similar sense of expansion, the interlocking foliage or abstract designs of geometrical symmetry often found on oval or lozenge-​shaped centrepieces represent a so-​called ‘arabesque’ (or ‘moresque’) design which found its origins in Islamic bookbinding from the fourteenth century. That Islamic aesthetic spread across Europe from the fifteenth century via the Italian trading ports, flowing along the routes carved out by money and the movement of goods, before reaching the shores of England, as so often belatedly, around the time of Elizabeth I—​finding expression first in high-​ end workshops in London (the centre of the book trade), and then quickly filtering out more widely to Oxford and Cambridge, and beyond. The gold leaf used to produce the gilded tooling followed a similar trajectory: from the Arab world in the early thirteenth century, if not before, through Europe and then to England in the sixteenth century.17

An Introduction   9

Book People One way, then, to respond to Eikon Basilike is to describe it as an object, although, as I have tried to show, that process is not as simple as we might assume. Another is to give an account of the various agents of bookmaking. This means uncovering what D. F. McKenzie called the sociology of the book’s creation: ‘a sociology . . . directs us to consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption’.18 Here the author is only one origin point among many. Who made Eikon Basilike? What were they trying to do? How can we describe this community? Eikon Basilike presents a challenge on this front. Banned by Parliament, Eikon Basilike’s title page didn’t carry much of the detail we might normally expect: many editions feature the terse imprint ‘In R.M. Anno. Dom. 1648’ (‘In memory of the King, 1648/​1649’). Since title pages have long been used by bibliographers as a crucial site of information about book production—​New Bibliographical resources such as the Short Title Catalogue (STC) depended on title pages for their data, and newer digital resources in turn often rely on these underlying tools—​bibliographers have responded to this absence in part by studying the detail of type and decorative initials in order to discern the work of particular printers. The book’s first publisher was London Stationer Richard Royston, whose office in Ivy Lane was a well-​known focus of Royalist activity, and who was in frequent trouble with the Council of State. Royston wrote that on 23 December 1648 he received the manuscript of the text from the King’s chaplain, Edward Simmons, and had the printer John Grismond, with whom he regularly collaborated, produce an octavo, 269-​page first edition. Proof-​sheets were at Simmons’s house by early-​to-​mid-​January, but the process of book production was interrupted and slowed by Parliament’s raiding of Royston’s print shop and destruction of the books. Royston shifted his press outside the city and produced 2,000 copies, sold in the streets by itinerant hawkers whose names we no longer know. Demand was, in Madan’s words, ‘insatiable’. Royston was summoned before the Council of State in May and was banned from further publication of the book, but in 1650 he published four editions of the works of King Charles, including the text of Eikon Basilike. A second wave of Eikon Basilikes was published in March 1649 by Francis Eglesfield, printed by William Dugard, headmaster of the Merchant Taylors’ School who worked in his private house in Suffolk Street, next to the school buildings. Dugard employed one Dr Edward Hooker as corrector to his press. This edition included a number of new passages of text, including four prayers of the King. Dugard was arrested for printing this edition on 16 March, and was, in 1650, dismissed from his position at Merchant Taylors’ School and flung in prison. Stationer John Williams defied this climate of censorship around June 1649 by publishing a series of five miniature duodecimo editions, printed by William Bentley, which might be easily concealed: the average binding measurement of these is about 4 ⅛ inches (10.5 cm) × 2 ⅛ inches (5.4 cm). The

10   Adam Smyth famous engraved frontispiece to the first edition—​the kneeling martyr-​king in prayer, holding a crown of thorns before a richly allegorical landscape of palm trees weighted down and rocks buffeted by waves and windows—​is the work of William Marshall, probably working to a design by Gauden. Marshall would have carved the design onto a copperplate with a tool called a burin, and the plate would have been inked and passed through a rolling press. The image survives in at least seven subtly distinct states produced by Marshall for different editions, suggesting the image, in great demand, was worn down by frequent printing and re-​engraving. Versions based on Marshall’s original work were cut by engravers including Robert Vaughan, Thomas Rawlins, and Wenceslaus Hollar.19 In place of a singular author, however uncertain his identity, we have a community of bookmakers, and we can think about those makers both in terms of roles which require particular competencies (transcriber, compositor, pressman, illustrator, engraver, proofreader, corrector, binder, distributor, financier, seller), and in terms of the individuals who filled those positions, with all their talents, traits, flaws, and unknowable subjectivities: Richard Royston, Edward Simmons, John Gauden, John Grismond, Francis Eglesfield, William Dugard, Edward Hooker, John Williams, William Bentley, William Marshall, to name some, but not all. Such individuals need not always occupy the same role at all times: a printer could be a publisher could be a bookseller could be a bookbinder, and so on. Of course, the establishment of a group raises the question of its extent—​the exclusions and the inclusions—​particularly in the light of recent work on women and the early modern book trade. One of the defining features of the early modern book trade was the entangling of professional and familial connections, where ‘widow’ and ‘son-​in-​law’ could often signify ‘stationer’ and ‘apprentice’, and where businesses were also often domestic households. We see these entwinings of family and profession played out particularly vividly in stationers’ wills, like Francis Eglesfield’s, which declares that ‘my said loving wife ffrances shall have the full and sole benefit and profitt [from] . . . my . . . stock of one hundred and sixty pounds in the Hall or Company of Stationers in the Citty of London’. Royston also left much to his wife and made her executor.20 Helen Smith, Alan Farmer, and Sarah Neville, among others, have written recently on the ways women’s book trade agency has been systematically under-​ represented in discussions of the book trade, not least because tools like the STC lean heavily on patronymic imprints where women’s lives were overwritten.21 How might we conceptualize and map this sprawlingly collaborative publication history? While early twentieth-​century scholarship was often organized around the short individual biography,22 Robert Darnton famously drew the agents of bookmaking into ‘The Communications Circuit’, a formidably titled diagram that visualized the movement of text from author, to publisher, to printers, to shippers, to booksellers, to readers, and back to authors again. ‘So the circuit runs full cycle,’ Darnton writes, in lines that seem to mix the cadences of T. S. Eliot with a radio instructional manual, as it ‘transmits messages, transforming them en route, as they pass from thought to writing to printed characters and back to thought again’.23 The language of the ‘circuit’ and the ‘diagram’ has more recently been replaced by the ‘network’, a term drawn from the digital

An Introduction   11 world, which produces models for relations between agents that need not be enclosed or completed, but open to expansion; that can function on different scales, from the very local to the national to the international; that can, following the lead of Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), include agential objects as well as people in its map of relations; and which tends to promote a notion of bookwork that is collaborative and cooperative.24 Digital tools promise to map these networks with new range, precision, and visual flair.25 But while network maps are effective in conveying connection and even collegiality, they seem less able to map competition, hierarchy, and differentials of power. It is also a tautological problem that networks can only connect the already networked: they tend to discover their own condition. Caroline Levine may be right that ‘[i]‌t is the rule, not the exception, to be enmeshed’,26 but not everyone follows the rule: off-​road, or off-​grid, the lines of a network falter and die. Plotting a network of bookmakers assumes we know when the process of bookmaking starts and when it ends, but recent book-​historical work has understood the book as a continually-​being-​made, always-​in-​process object. An older version of bibliography as a return to a book’s origin has been challenged by recent feminist and ecocritical work that radically questions the notion of a book’s originary moment. If books were made from paper made from pulp made from rags gathered by female rag collectors, why do we exclude these women from the story of the book’s beginnings?27 And if, more expansively still, we follow the lead of Joshua Calhoun and trace the materials that composed the paper, boards, and bindings—​thinking as much about flaxseeds and ecological deep time as octavo formats and the Stationers’ Register—​then the book becomes not a bibliographical object with a prompt and tidy moment of beginning in January 1649, but ‘a provisional state in the circulation of matter’.28 Alongside this reassessment of the beginnings of books has come work that conceives of bibliography not as the return to a moment of production but as an account of the long and ongoing life of books, through time. This means, among other things, understanding readers and owners as agents in the history of bookmaking. For Eikon Basilike, this could mean noting owner names or bookplates, or handwritten annotations to the text, or any number of copy-​specific alterations and interventions: the name ‘Geo Green’, and the pen trials and notes written in the margins of one copy; or the evidence of another copy passing between family members (‘Mary Shepheard 1668’ and ‘Joseph Shepheard 1668’); or the widespread annotations by female readers including ‘Sarah Needham 1712’, ‘Eliza Fay’, and ‘Eliza Moore’.29 This study of book use—​and ‘use’ is a more capacious term than ‘reading’—​could include an account of bindings, often (but by no means always) commissioned by readers after they had purchased the book, and one of the most striking ways in which copy-​specificity announces itself.30 Many copies of Eikon Basilike carry the gilt monogram ‘CR’ (for Carolus Rex), often accompanied with a memento mori crown and skull, but there is a diversity of other embodiments, from the relatively simple—​seventeenth-​century vellum over pasteboard, with yapp edges, and blue sprinkled text-​block edges—​to more elaborate work with gold-​tooled stamps and centrepiece, concentric panel designs, corner fleurons, and gilded text-​ block.31 A desire to trace the onwards lives of copies of this book might end up in one

12   Adam Smyth of the many collections of Eikon Basilike that exist, including the sixty-​five volumes at Cambridge University Library, bequeathed by Francis Falconer Madan, that form the core of a collection of works about Charles I.

Political Bibliography If, then, we distinguish between a version of bibliography which is concerned with the origins of books, and another—​something like bibliography 2.0, which some might prefer to call book history32—​concerned with the life story of books as they move and circulate, we might think, too, of the political and ideological work that the material book was asked to perform. Eikon Basilike can give us an example of this, thanks in part to the work of David Ransome. In 1649, the religious community of Little Gidding, near Cambridge, exported lavishly bound copies of Eikon Basilike to the American colonies in an attempt both to make a profit (agents were to sell copies in return for tobacco or ‘any Commoditys they can’33) and, more urgently, to spread abroad the version of Anglican Royalism conveyed in the King’s book. This was both a commercial and an ideological project. We know an unusual amount about this because detailed records survive in the Ferrar Papers at Magdalene College, Cambridge.34 The community at Little Gidding was established by the charismatic and domineering Nicholas Ferrar in 1625 as a mixture of domestic retreat, Anglican monastery, and bookmaking workshop; it offers a striking instance of book production and the domestic sphere overlapping. The community became famous for the production of cut-​and-​ paste ‘Biblical Harmonies’: printed copies of the Gospels were cut up and glued back together in a new and it was hoped harmonious order, often luxuriously bound in velvet, and often with images added. These huge folio books were part print, part manuscript, the work of scissors and glue as well as pen and ink, and each one unique: they represent the kind of spectacular, exceptional text that, in challenging traditional bibliographical categories, has recently caught the attention of book historians. In their 1630s moment, they also earned Little Gidding a gathering fame: news spread to such an extent that King Charles I requested a copy in 1633 to borrow, and ordered another to be made for himself and his sons. After Nicholas’s death in 1637, leadership of the community passed to his elder brother John, who had been deputy of the Virginia Company of London in 1619, before its collapse in 1624. Ferrar began his aspiring export business just months after the publication of Eikon Basilike: his earliest note is for 30 June 1649. Ferrar worked with his daughter Virginia (named after the colony), his niece Mary Collett, and a network of family members, neighbours, and agents in London and the American colonies: five in Virginia; two in Barbados; and one in the Somers Islands (Bermuda). Records suggest that Ferrar ordered 246 pre-​bound copies and sets of quires of Eikon Basilike; that these books were often lavishly bound by Virginia Ferrar and Mary Collett at Little Gidding; and that 197 books were shipped overseas at a cost of £12,

An Introduction   13 from which Ferrar hoped to receive £19. (As David Ransome has shown, Ferrar was no great accountant, and some of his arithmetic looks off.) Ferrar deals with three editions of Eikon Basilike: in his own words, ‘3 Dozen of a Midd Sorte bound after up in Vellume all’ (octavo); ‘7 Dozen of the larger in Blacke leather’ (large octavo); and ‘2 Dozen and 2 Small ones Least Sorte in Blacke leather’ (duodecimo).35 The large octavos, supplied by Richard Wodenoth in London, were made up of five dozen ‘Sent w[i]‌th King Picture Gould head: in Blacke leather w[hi]ch we stringed’, and two dozen in quires. Of the copies in quires, Ferrar distinguished between ‘1 Dosen in quires he sent w[hi]ch MF [Mary Collett, often known as Mary Ferrar] bound up in Blacke leather C.R gilded Stringed’, and ‘1 Dozen he sent in quires but I sent them backe a gaine w[hi]ch he bound in leath[er] and w[i]th kings head gilded one [sic] them we Stringed them w[i]th Rib[bi]n’.36 (Stringing, here, means attaching ribbon to the book’s fore-​ edges, rather like the clasps which fell out of fashion on English books around the mid-​sixteenth century.37) These descriptions of books are examples of how a biblio-​ savvy individual trafficking in texts c.1649 might talk and write about books. The descriptions suggest not the lingering cadences of the connoisseur, but a bookmaker using material traits to distinguish between copies, and calibrating bibliographical features to potential readers. Once the binding and stringing had been done at Little Gidding, the volumes were despatched overseas: among them, ‘in a Bundell of Browne paper’, a dozen volumes ‘in Vellume grene and white w[i]‌th Ribbins in Midell, and Button’, sent to John Stirrup in York parish on the Charles River ‘In Mr Cookes ship the Hettie and John’, to be sold at 20 pence each.38 In addition to these 197, forty-​one volumes were sent as gifts or ‘tokens’ to powerful individuals, including the Governor, Sir William Berkeley, who was given ‘1 largest of the K [Kings’ Book]: In Blacke Velvett w[i]th the K. Pictur in Gould plate in Midell of it the Velvett guild the Strings Egged [edged] w[i]th Guld in a Case Cost 7 sh[illings]’.39 In comparison to the 20,000 books a year that were by about 1700 shipped from England to the American colonies, Ferrar’s attempt to sell domestically bound copies of Eikon Basilike to the colonial population was a modest operation. It also failed: ‘I bileve they would accept of them if they were given them,’ wrote one correspondent, ‘but to give 8 or ten pounds of tobacka apec [a piece] for them they will rather Let them alone.’40 Today there are no known Little Gidding copies of Eikon Basilike that survive, although some—​and this is a feature of a book-​historical research world that is connected online—​may well turn up. But Ferrar’s Eikon Basilike experiment, with its careful attention to the binding and physical make-​up of the book, reminds us of the transatlantic nature of the book trade, and the book as a commodity that could be shipped abroad beyond England’s borders to be traded for profit. Ferrar’s experiment shows also that Eikon Basilike was in this context understood not only as the portrait of a king, but also as a fungible object, available for exchange with, and so understood as equivalent to, commodities like tobacco, sugar, rice, or indigo;41 and that the book held out the potential to perform ideological work. The twenty-​six copies of Eikon Basilike that were bound and despatched to the Somers Islands were expressions of the same colonialist

14   Adam Smyth energy which drove the Company of the Somers Isles to rule the English colony as a commercial venture from 1615.42

The Politics of Citation What I hope to have offered in this introduction is a by no means definitive selection of book-​historical and bibliographical frames through which we can begin to approach Eikon Basilike. The most important implication is less in the particular details I have described, and more in the realization that there are many ways to think about books as material objects in the world. Book-​historical work within the last five years, and particularly since 2020, has developed a powerfully self-​ reflective quality which was absent from much (but not all) bibliographical work across the twentieth century, characterized as it often was by a kind of positivism and a resistance to theoretical reflection—​although there was, it must be noted, some hard thinking about the ‘theory’ of bibliography by Greg, Bowers, and latterly Tanselle, among others.43 National lockdowns and the closure of libraries and universities in 2020–​1 forced book historians to think harder about materiality, mediation, and access; debates about institutional racial inequalities prompted scholars to reconsider their discipline’s relationship to exclusion and inequality, and the complicity, or not, of their own work.44 One of the most resonant recent reflections is Kate Ozment’s ‘Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, which, in considering the question ‘what does book history value?’, lays out the tendency for book-​historical work to rehearse a narrow story of its development which excludes much scholarly work on books, and in particular to overlook systematically women’s work.45 (I use the word ‘work’ rather than ‘scholarship’ because Ozment shows the crucial contributions of librarians, cataloguers, indexers, and archivists, alongside more conventional academic researchers.) Ozment’s point is not only that we need to acknowledge book historical work performed by women, but more fundamentally that we need to think about how it is that book history has been created as a discipline that has perpetuated these and other exclusions. This means reflecting on the experiences of book production that are afforded significance (until recently, booksellers, printers, and printed authors), and those that are not. Why, in many book-​historical overview discussions is more space not given to conservationists (like Nikki Tomkins in this present volume), or curators (like Caroline Duroselle-​Melish and Kathyrn James, also in this volume), or librarians and cataloguers (like, for a later period, Dorothy B. Porter) who, in the most profound sense, organize, materialize, and enable the book-​historical field?46 It means also, and crucially, assuming a relation of continual critique, revision, and scepticism—​a kind of critical anti-​monumentality—​in relation to the histories that are told about our disciplines. Bibliography has repeated a loud and powerful origin story that draws from a small group of white male scholars, usually including some or all of the names W. W. Greg, Alfred W. Pollard, Robert Darnton, D. F. McKenzie, Peter Blayney, and Roger Chartier. All of these scholars are vital, enriching figures for the

An Introduction   15 histories of book history, bibliography, textual studies, or all three, but to reassert in the manner of a chant this exclusive coterie shuts off any number of other possible versions of book-​historical work, particularly work written by women and scholars of colour. To give one alternative vista: the Women in Book History Bibliography (www.womens​book​ hist​ory.org) records more than 1,600 items, and the resource constitutes, in Ozment’s rather understated words, ‘a useful foil to the field as generally represented’.47 As Brandi K. Adams, in relation to race, and Claire M. L. Bourne, in relation to gender, describe in this current volume, there are other names we need to acknowledge and learn from, and there are other ways of organizing research on material texts. This handbook sustains this mode of self-​reflection. It has been written and edited with an awareness that there are many introductions to book history available—​starting with the excellent Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2002), edited by John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie with Maureen Bell—​and that repeating material and topics that have already been discussed and indeed repeated serves little purpose. There is little or no need for more short summaries of already well-​known topics organized in familiar ways; the history of the book is too fast-​moving, and too dynamic, to fall back unthinkingly on old paradigms. Rather, part and chapter topics have been chosen to enable fresh, critical-​ analytical perspectives of topics within the history of the book. This means that some topics which previous companions have treated very well are not repeated; that some important topics which might have been organized as separate chapters—​a history of bookbinding, for example—​are found distributed across a number of chapters in order to bring out fresh possibilities; and that many new topics for discussion are addressed head-​on for the first time. At the time of publication, the List of Contributors contains both established names in the field and many scholars at or near the start of their careers. Most fundamentally, this volume aims to do two things: first, to analyse in a lively manner the nature and role of the book in early modern England (we might think of this as ‘content’); and second, to consider critically how we talk about the history of book (we might think of this as ‘approaches’). These two ambitions are not separated out into distinct parts, but rather run through all the chapters. It is hoped that, on finishing the Handbook, the reader will not only know much more about the early modern book, but she or he will also have a strong sense of how and why that object has been studied, and the scope for the development of new questions. One powerfully clarifying idea in recent discussions of disciplinary formations and exclusions has been what the feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, among others, has called ‘the politics of citation’. Ahmed considers the practice of citing other scholars as ‘a rather successful reproductive technology’, a technique of selection that makes ‘certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part’.48 Citation can be ‘a problematic technology’ that sustains the dominance of a particular group and a particular kind of work, and Ozment finds this practice playing out with particular influence in handbooks, companions, and the metalevel surveys that are crucial for disciplinary definition. ‘To cite narrowly,’ write Carrie Motta and Daniel Cockayne, in their discussion of citation, ‘to only cite white men . . . or to only cite established scholars’, results in the ‘uneven reproduction of academic and disciplinary . . . knowledge’.49

16   Adam Smyth But more thoughtfully and purposefully deployed, citation—​and we can think of citation in broad terms, as the names and works we invoke to explain and locate our intervention—​can also be a mechanism for creating new directions, recognizing new work, and imagining the paths not yet taken by the history of the book: to consider, in the words of Brandi K. Adams in this volume, ‘what is next, what is visible, and what is possible’.

Acknowledgements My thanks to Ian Gadd, Zachary Lesser, and Kirk Melnikoff for discussing this Introduction with me.

Notes 1. Helmer J. Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Anglo-​ Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 115. 2. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Relics and Remains’, Past & Present, 206/​5 (2010), 9–​36. 3. Helmers, Royalist Republic, 115–​116. 4. Francis F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1950), 8–​69. 5. National Library of Wales Brogyntyn MS II.56. 6. Thomas Wagstaffe, A Vindication of K. Charles the Martyr (1711), 136. 7. A list of the most exhaustively bibliographically-​studied books from early modern England would include Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) (the First Folio); the King James Version of the Bible (1611) (also known as the Authorized Version); and John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563) (known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’). 8. Karen Attar, ‘Bibliographical Description’, in Michael F. Suarez, SJ and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), online edition. 9. G. T. Tanselle, ‘The Concept of Ideal Copy’, Studies in Bibliography, 33 (1980), 18–​53, at 21. 10. Zachary Lesser, ‘The Material Text Between General and Particular, Edition and Copy’, English Literary Renaissance, 50/​1 (2019), 83–​92, at 92. 11. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-​ Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 12. Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 13. Edward Almack, A Bibliography of the King’s Book or Eikon Basilike (London: Blades East & Blades, 1596), 67. 14. www.rct.uk/​the-​eikon-​basil​ike, RCIN 1080417. 15. W. W. Greg, ‘Bibliography—​A Retrospect’, in The Bibliographical Society, 1892–​1942: Studies in Retrospect (London: Bibliographical Society, 1945), 23–​31, at 25. 16. David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–​ 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

An Introduction   17 17. David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles 1450–​1800 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2014), 176–​177. 18. D. F. McKenzie, ‘The Book as an Expressive Form’, in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9–​30, at 15. 19. Helen Pierce, ‘Text and Image: William Marshall’s Frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike (1649)’, in Geoff Kemp (ed.), Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 79–​86, at 82. 20. See Kirk Melnikoff, Aaron Pratt, and Breanne Weber (eds.), Playbook Wills, 1529–​1690 (Manchester University Press, 2020). My thanks to Kirk Melnikoff for sharing some of this material before publication. 21. Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 11. 22. Henry F. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907). 23. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111/​3 (1982), 65–​83, at 67. For an overview and critique of Darnton and other models, see Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), ch. 2. 24. Catherine Feely and John Hinks (eds.), Historical Networks in the Book Trade (London: Routledge, 2017). 25. See e.g. Allison Muri, ‘Print Culture as Distributed Social Network Grub Street Project, http://​grubst​reet​proj​ect.net/​dis​trib​uted​netw​ork.php; Mapping Manuscript Migrations (MMM) https://​mapp​ingm​anus​crip​tmig​rati​ons.org/​en; Six Degrees of Francis Bacon http://​www.sixde​gree​soff​ranc​isba​con.com/​. 26. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 114. 27. Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour, 47–​74, 75–​93, 29–​46 respectively. 28. Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 2. 29. Magdalen College Library, Old Library: u.8; Christ Church Library, Special Collections: Wd.7.6; www.lib.cam.ac.uk/​coll​ecti​ons/​depa​rtme​nts/​rare-​books/​coll​ecti​ons/​ eikon-​basil​ike-​cca-​e8. 30. For a revisionist account that questions the idea that readers generally bought books unbound, see Stuart Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 1660–​1800 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2004). 31. Bodleian Library Juel-​Jensen fo. 79; New College Library, Oxford, BT1.17.10. 32. It is worth clarifying terms, in broad strokes, even while noting that these terms are stretching and evolving all the time: bibliography traditionally refers to the study of books as tangible objects (The Collected Papers of Sir Walter W. Greg, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 267–​297), while book history is ‘broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print’ (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, statement in journal Book History). 33. Magdalene College, Cambridge, Ferrar Papers (FP) 141, fo. 20r. 34. FP 141, fo. 20r. The main FP sources are FP 141, fos. 8v, 9r, 16r, 22v, 22r, 21v, 21r, 20v, 20r, 19v, 19r. My summary is indebted to D. R. Ransome, ‘Little Gidding and the Eikon Basilike of

18   Adam Smyth Charles I’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 16/​3 (2018), 401–​414: my quotations from the Ferrar Papers come from Ransome’s article. For Little Gidding as a place of book production, see Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ch. 1; Michael Gaudio, The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England: Little Gidding and the Pursuit of Scriptural Harmony (London: Routledge, 2017); and Whitney Trettien, Cut/​Copy/​Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2021). 35. FP 141, fo. 22v. 36. FP 141, fo. 21r. 37. My thanks to David Pearson for help on stringing. 38. FP 141, fo. 22r. 39. FP 141, fo. 19v. 40. FP 1200. 41. Hugh Amory, ‘British Books Abroad: The American Colonies’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), with Maureen Bell, Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​ 1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 744–​752, at 748. 42. For the transatlantic book trade, see Jennifer Mylander, ‘Early Modern “How-​ To” Books: Impractical Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 9/​1 (2009), 123–​146. 43. e.g. W. W. Greg, ‘What is Bibliography?’, The Library, 12/​1 (Jan. 1913), 39–​54; Fredson Bowers, ‘Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 46/​3 (1952), 186–​208; G. Thomas Tanselle, Essays in Bibliographical History (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2013). 44. See e.g. SHARP’s roundtable ‘Decolonizing Book History’, 15 June 2020, www.yout​ube. com/​watch?v=​SRM_​dYS8​S9s. 45. Kate Ozment, ‘Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, Textual Cultures, 13/​1 (2020), 149–​178. 46. For Porter, see Laura E. Helton, ‘On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading’, Special Topic: Cultures of Reading, PMLA 134/​1 (Jan. 2019), 99–​120. Helton discusses how Porter, realizing that existing bibliographical categories offered little or no space for African American culture, reconstructed library protocols, ‘quietly dismantle[d]‌ Dewey’s decimals’ (105), and ‘altered information regimes in the face of official prohibition’ to create the possibility of a catalogued African American print culture at the Moorland-​ Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Helton is able to ‘reveal the seemingly non-​ literary work of building infrastructure as a high-​stakes form of literary practice’ (101). 47. Ozment, ‘Feminist Bibliography’, 156. 48. Sara Ahmed, ‘Making Feminist Points’, feministkilljoys.com/​2013/​09/​11/​making-​feminist-​ points, accessed 22 Feb. 2021. 49. Carrie Motta and Daniel Cockayne, ‘Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation toward a Practice of “Conscientious Engagement” ’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 24/​7 (2017), 954–​973. Motta and Cockayne argue that ‘citational practices can be a tool for either the reification of, or resistance to, unethical hierarchies of knowledge production’ (954).

Select Bibliography Bold, Melanie Ramdarshan, Gravier, Marina Garone Joshi, Priya, Cole, Jean Lee, Nishikawa, Kinohi, and Reyes, Andrea, SHARP roundtable discussion ‘Decolonizing Book History’, 15 June 2020, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​SRM_​dYS8​S9s

An Introduction   19 Calhoun, Joshua, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Helton, Laura E., ‘On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading’, Special Topic: Cultures of Reading, PMLA 134/​1 (Jan. 2019), 99–​120. Lesser, Zachary, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Muri, Allison, ‘Print Culture as Distributed Social Network Grub Street Project’, http://​grubst​ reet​proj​ect.net/​dis​trib​uted​netw​ork.php. Mylander, Jennifer, ‘Early Modern “How-​ To” Books: Impractical Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 9/​1 (2009), 123–​146. Ozment, Kate, ‘Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, Textual Cultures, 13/​1 (2020), 149–​178. Smith, Helen, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Wayne, Valerie (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Chapter 2

The Handmai d s ’ Ta l e Book History, Shakespeare, and Women’s Textual Labour Claire M. L. Bourne

In a lecture delivered at the Bibliographical Society’s February 1912 meeting in London, W. W. Greg had two things on his mind: a metaphor and a dream. I’ll come around to the dream at the end of this chapter, but I begin with the metaphor. Inspired by personal experience of confronting the tricky histories of Shakespeare texts, Greg indulged—​ presuming his audience’s consent—​in a vivid figuration of the relationship between bibliography and literature as an assault: I stumbled into bibliography by accident. Finding it impossible to obtain the information I required about a certain class of literature, I set to work to collect it. It was the results of bibliography that I wanted, but my search led me to the far greater discovery of the importance of the subject itself. Any value my literary work may have will be chiefly owing to that discovery. For, if I may be allowed a violent metaphor which is always coming to my mind, it is only by the application of a rigorous bibliographical method that the last drop of information can be squeezed out of a literary document. Thus in spite of my interest in bibliography it is as the handmaid of literature that I still regard it.1

Failing to ‘obtain the information’ he ‘required’ from literary texts, Greg describes himself resorting to bibliography (a set of methods for describing, analysing, and contextualizing books as physical objects) to coerce those details from the objects by which the texts in question were physically conveyed. The image of the ‘literary document’ being ‘squeezed’ to the ‘last drop’ by ‘a rigorous bibliographical method’ is one that Greg cannot stop thinking about: it ‘is always coming to my mind’. The violence Greg envisions—​and its persistence in his private imaginary—​is compounded by his description of bibliography, the agential force in his metaphor, as ‘the handmaid of literature’. Greg almost certainly means that he regards bibliography as subordinate to literary

The Handmaids’ Tale    21 studies, but of course, the image conjured also figures bibliography as a female servant, specifically one charged with bringing new life (here, knowledge about his ‘certain class of literature’, i.e., drama) into the world. As Greg’s career would demonstrate amply, the life (i.e., knowledge) that needed to be squeezed at any cost from the host body (the material text) was authorial intention (the author’s meaning). In this way, Greg’s ‘violent metaphor’ was one in which something immaterial was forcefully extracted from a physical object that was valuable only insofar as it transmitted authorial content. What’s more, for Greg, this was a process that required the assistance of service coded as auxiliary and feminized. This was no mere dream vision. This was—​and, in some ways, still is—​the way that bibliographic labour by women has been absorbed into male-​dominant narratives of textual history, especially around Shakespeare. (I focus on Shakespeare because the corpus of texts associated with his dramatic output, in particular, has served as a staging ground for modern bibliography, evolving editorial practices, and early modern book history.) The long history of the early modern book has been enabled by a shadow history of ‘service scholarship’—​collecting, cataloguing, editing, and the creation of reference works—​that dates back to at least the eighteenth century. Women have actively participated in gathering, organizing, and digesting information about early modern book culture, and that labour has been taken up by male scholars in the service of studying and reinscribing the Western literary canon.2 The efforts of these female scholars are unevenly recognized. In cases where their work has been publicly attributed, those credits have often been written out of the historical record or eclipsed by more famous or senior male colleagues. By way of introduction, I offer two brief examples. First, in the mid-​eighteenth century, Charlotte Lennox produced the first sustained study of Shakespeare’s sources by compiling and translating a number of intricately plotted works from French and Italian that seemed to her to have influenced Shakespeare. The result was the three-​volume Shakespeare Illustrated, Or, the Novels and Histories, On Which the Plays of Shakespear Are Founded (1753). Despite her confidence in the validity of her work, Lennox remained agnostic on whether her comparison between the sources and Shakespeare’s handling of them ‘will add to the Reputation of Shakespear, or take away from it’, leaving it up to the book’s dedicatee John Boyle, fifth Earl of Orrery, and others to ‘determine’ the impact of her source study on Shakespeare’s greatness.3 ‘Some Danger, as I am informed, there is, lest his Admirers should think him injured by this Attempt’, she noted. Nonetheless, she persevered in her project of illuminating Shakespeare’s indebtedness to other writers. Her efforts, as she feared, were seen to cast aspersions on Shakespeare’s talent and were, for this reason, dismissed and displaced by newer, more comprehensive, and less spiky forays by Richard Farmer, James Orchard Halliwell, W. C. Hazlitt, and Geoffrey Bullough. As Bullough put it in his still-​canonical Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957), ‘[Lennox] unwisely tried to show that Shakespeare spoiled many of his stories by complicating the intrigue and introducing absurdities’.4 Even Miriam Rossiter Small, Lennox’s biographer, considered her work a blemish on ‘her reputation as a Shakespearean critic and a judge of true values’.5 But as Margaret Anne Doody put

22    Claire M. L. Bourne it, ‘[W]‌hen Shakespeare seems to us, as to Lennox, not such a repository of pure “true values” as to be above social and psychosexual criticism, the work of Lennox may seem fresh and interesting’.6 Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter have recently pointed out that the largely dismissive reception of Lennox’s work is implicated in a nexus of gendered power relations, both those that Lennox was trying to expose by ‘defend[ing] women’s dignity and criticiz[ing] the plausibility of Shakespeare’s female characters according to the Augustinian standards of her time’, and those that caused her ‘pioneer’ work in this area (however flawed by modern standards) to be treated as ‘unwise’ even as the male scholars who followed her used her work as a cornerstone of theirs.7 My second example of bibliographic labour performed by a woman which was quickly erased (but nonetheless used) by male scholars is Evelyn May Albright’s 1927 monograph Dramatic Publication in England, 1580–​1640: A Study of Conditions Affecting Content and Form of Drama. In Albright’s own words, the aim of her book was ‘to explain certain conditions of the age which affected the content and form of the drama’, including the organization of playing companies, practices of ‘censorship’, proprietary rights over plays, the ‘sources’ of the manuscripts used as copy-​texts for printed playbooks, and the logistics of printing and publication that might have impacted the state of the book object as it was presented to potential customers.8 Notably, she brought together for the first time a range of primary materials that illustrated how play-​texts circulated in the theatre and book trade. Albright’s table of contents reads remarkably like the brand of book history that would flourish in the late 1990s and through the first two decades of the twenty-​first century—​that is, scholarship that took a keen interest in the institutional dynamics and circumstances of playbook publication. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume have rightly pointed out that Albright’s book was ‘a phenomenal piece of work for its time’ but has been ‘quite astonishingly scanted and often entirely ignored by almost all later scholars in the field’, including by G. E. Bentley, whose slim volume The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (1971) became the canonical citation on playbook publication for decades.9 For instance, Albright’s findings are not directly credited in two of the most prominent monographs about play publication from the early 2000s: Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003) and Zachary Lesser’s Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (2004). B. K. Adams argues that the relative neglect of Albright’s contributions to scholarship, especially among her contemporaries, had much to do with her ‘subtle objections’ to A. W. Pollard’s ‘creative yet knotty’ theory about ‘the shady behaviour of play publishers’, whom (he claimed) sought pirated copies of Shakespeare’s popular plays.10 Adams points out that Albright refused to centre Shakespeare in her near-​contemporaneous study of play publication and resisted the trend of blaming non-​authorial agents for the vagaries of so-​called opportunistic textual transmission that were seen to tarnish Shakespeare’s reputation (his ‘fairness’).11 Instead, Albright considered the variety of ways that acting companies ‘handled manuscripts’ and that those manuscripts found their way to press. As Adams puts it, ‘She treats the evidence that does exist instead of seeking the evidence that does not.’12 Like Lennox, Albright’s informed insights about the primary materials she gathered are written out of scholarly genealogies even as scholars quote the primary sources she cites directly from her book.13 In this way, subsequent scholarship has

The Handmaids’ Tale    23 benefited from her labour without engaging with the way she herself read the texts in question. She is not counted in the scholarly conversation. My intention in this chapter is not to dissect this all-​too-​common phenomenon, nor is my insight about the erasure of women’s work in the male-​dominated fields of early modern bibliography, editing, and book history an original one. Kate Ozment has demonstrated persuasively in a recent award-​winning article that women—​as both a subject of study and as the scholars producing such studies—​have been (and still, to some extent, are) consistently elided from the narratives told about early modern books.14 These erasures are becoming more and more conspicuous. Inspired by the uptake of early modern women’s writing in literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, book history scholarship about the activities of early modern women in the book trade, as readers, within networks of manuscript circulation, and as book collectors has proliferated over the last two decades. Much of this work was performed by women and came into being through a heuristic of recovery, that is, an approach to the textual past motivated by a sense of responsibility in the present for erased, forgotten, or uncatalogued lives, texts, and labours. Here, the language of revealing and making visible women’s ‘book work’ and participation in ‘book culture’ is used to frame methods of reading and (in many cases) rereading textual objects that testify to these various encounters and forms of use.15 In what follows, I account for the public careers of two twentieth-​ century bibliographers—​ Henrietta C. Bartlett and Alice Walker—​ whose scholarship anticipated—​and made way for—​book history as we know and practise it today, especially around Shakespeare and early modern drama. Bartlett and Walker may not have been able to anticipate the exact horizons of possibility they created for studying the long, complex lives of early modern books, but they deserve credit for modelling and enabling scholarly attention to—​even curiosity about—​the idiosyncrasies of copies and the labours of unnamed men and women who made Shakespeare’s books. All this was set against the backdrop of the New Bibliography drawing a bias towards the edition as a unit of analysis and the author as the source of creation. My readings of Bartlett and Walker’s careers do not technically fit the remit of ‘recovery’ scholarship since all the materials I cite were designed by Bartlett and Walker to be made public in one way or another. Indeed, the personal stories that emerge from the records of their public scholarship should make us think more carefully about the ethics—​and desirability—​of recovering women’s labour, especially its most private, intimate, and unpublished forms.

Henrietta C. Bartlett: Pedagogy, Enumeration, and the Making of Shakespeare’s Textual Corpus In March 1935, a good twenty years after Greg’s lecture to the Bibliographical Society in London, Henrietta C. Bartlett delivered her own series of lectures at Yale University

24    Claire M. L. Bourne on the topic of bibliography, which, she said, ‘needs explanation in any American University as [Americans] are far behind the Europeans in our appreciation of the necessity for it, or in knowledge about it’.16 By this point in her busy career, Bartlett was an expert on early printed books. She had worked as a private librarian and cataloguer for prominent collectors, including New York-​based investment banker William A. White whose collection of mostly Elizabethan books included several early Shakespeare editions.17 Her ‘hand-​list’ of items in White’s collection was published in 1914, followed two years later by the first edition of the scholarly work for which she would become best known, A Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, 1594–​1709. She prepared the latter in collaboration with the British bibliographer A. W. Pollard, then the assistant keeper of printed books at the British Museum and soon to be author of Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates, in which he proffered the stubborn theory of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos that Albright eventually took to task.18 Bartlett’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s textual history was so deep and her access to private American collectors so impressive that the Elizabethan Club at Yale commissioned her to be the London-​based Pollard’s American collaborator. Despite her undeniable suitability for the job, she still had to—​and did—​ negotiate for adequate compensation.19 Her close relationships to collectors and their respect for her also allowed Bartlett to mount at the New York Public Library the biggest ever American exhibition of ‘Shakespeariana’, timed for 1916 to coincide with the publication of the Census and the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death.20 The linked projects—​ Census and exhibition—​captured Bartlett’s range: her ability to produce knowledge in a scholarly context and to educate the public about early books. By the mid-​1930s, the US-​based Bartlett’s own career had tracked with the overseas flourishing of bibliography as a legitimate field of humanistic study. In her Yale lectures, she noted this development of bibliography over thirty-​five years from ‘an experimental method’ practised by ‘a few advanced scholars’ to ‘a regular science which has its acknowledged place in all study of the liberal arts, the humanities, as they have been called’.21 But the absence of bibliography from literary study in the United States was, for Bartlett, so much of a problem that she dedicated significant time and energy during her career to educating scholars, editors, librarians, and book collectors on how to analyse and assess books as material objects. She asserted that the reliance on reproductions (photostats, photographs, and facsimiles) distorted important ‘facts’ about early printed books and that determining ‘the physical makeup of the book’ as well as ‘the customs and laws governing the early printers and booksellers as well as the author’ required first-​hand study: ‘[W]‌e must learn from the books themselves’.22 Bartlett’s Yale lectures thus covered bibliographical terminology, the particularities of early paper and type, ‘book-​building’ (i.e., printing and binding), provenance, cataloguing, and English book illustration.23 Drawing liberally from R. B. McKerrow’s Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), which she referred to as ‘the Bibliographer’s Creed’, Bartlett’s lectures from the 1930s took shape around the book objects at Yale, items in the White collection, and particularly noteworthy copies of Shakespeare she had encountered while researching for the Census.24 Indeed, the content of these lectures might have served as

The Handmaids’ Tale    25 the foundation of a published manual (or handbook) on the subject—​an American update to McKerrow, or a precursor to Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972). But Bartlett’s modus operandi for educating both men and women about the conventions and idiosyncrasies of early book production and the objects that emerged from the English book trade was a decidedly live and embodied one. She was a hands-​ on teacher, and a small collection of bibliographic ephemera she gathered for the purpose of teaching is now preserved at the Beinecke with her lecture scripts: illuminated and rubricated pages from incunabula; examples of early woodcut illustration (Fig. 2.1), printed music notation, and two-​colour printing (a technique she used in her own lecture scripts to set off her own words from quoted language); several seventeenth-​century engraved folio title pages; and a damaged page from a copy of the First Folio (Fig. 2.2).25 To teach book format, she also taped together disbound pages from a copy of Francis Potter’s An Interpretation of the Number 666, which was printed at Oxford in the 1640s by Leonard Lichfield, printer to the university, to approximate how an unfolded quarto sheet would have come off the press (Fig. 2.3).26 This teaching aid is preserved with a lecture entitled ‘Early English Printers and their Books’. While Bartlett had one foot in academia (at least informally through her connection to the Elizabethan Club at Yale), she also used bibliography to educate both lay collectors on how to evaluate the rare books they might want to purchase and librarians on how to record information about material features of early printed books in their collections with clarity and accuracy. Bartlett was, after all, a cataloguing expert.27 In her view, bibliography empowered private and institutional collectors to determine which features of a book were ‘genuine’ by identifying which had been accreted since the moment of publication and first binding: sophisticated leaves, pen facsimile, rebindings, hallmarks of ownership, annotations, missing pages, and so forth. This knowledge allowed ‘intelligent’ collectors to determine a book’s ‘litery [sic], historical, artistic or personal value’. Bartlett’s papers include correspondence from many major American-​based book collectors and book dealers of the early twentieth century, seeking her expert advice on prospective purchases as well as information about books already in their collections. Her responses read as micro-​masterclasses in bibliography and reflect an effort to distinguish ‘bibliographers’ (those who ‘know the physical make-​up and history of the book, but who should be ^know also some thing of literary students ^value’) from bibliophiles (‘true lovers and students of books from all sides’ who treat book objects as ‘works of arts’) from ‘bibliomaniacs’ (‘indescriminate [sic] buyers’, like Henry Clay Folger before he opened his library, ‘who hoard, too ignorant to use, too churlish to lend’).28 Bartlett’s dig at Folger underscored her belief that rare books should be, to some degree, accessible to the public. When Bartlett is remembered and cited today, it is not for this wide-​ranging pedagogical labour but instead for the 1916 Census of Shakespeare quartos and, perhaps even more so, for the updated edition published in 1939 which she worked on solo due to Pollard’s deteriorating health.29 She nourished this aspect of her career by giving frequent lectures that demonstrated how the methods of bibliography could illuminate the textual histories of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. While many of the typescripts

26    Claire M. L. Bourne

Fig. 2.1  A page from a 1496 edition of Terence published in Strasbourg used to illustrate woodcut illustration and different typefaces (GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 337, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

The Handmaids’ Tale    27

Fig. 2.2  A page of Measure for Measure from a copy of the First Folio in Bartlett’s teaching collection (GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 339, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

28    Claire M. L. Bourne

Fig. 2.3  Bartlett’s attempt to reverse-​engineer a quarto sheet (using sticky tape) as it would have come off the press from an edition of An Interpretation of the Number 666 published in the 1640s (GEN MSS 336, Box 6, folder 308, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

for these lectures are undated, Bartlett had speaking engagements at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere in the 1910s (as she was preparing the Census) and was still updating her remarks well into the 1930s. In versions of her lectures from the 1920s onwards, she synthesizes scholarship by Pollard and Greg on the ‘bad’ quartos and the ‘Pavier Quartos’ respectively, framing her remarks from the collector’s point of view by consistently circling back to the question of ‘value’: ‘The

The Handmaids’ Tale    29 value of the early quartos ais not equal, some of them are confessedly bad texts, and for some of them good texts were issued shortly after by the reputable publishers’.30 The value she speaks of is, at once, cultural, literary, and monetary. Throughout her annotated Shakespeare lecture scripts, Bartlett focuses on scale and enumeration: numbers of editions and numbers of copies of editions. This emphasis on lists evinces Bartlett’s fascination not only with bibliography as a study of ‘the physical makeup’ of individual book objects but also with the labour—​past and present (i.e., her own)—​of establishing Shakespeare’s textual corpus in the first place. She can be seen emending the number of copies of each Shakespeare edition, presumably as new copies came to light during the long course of her research for the Census and its revision. But she also tracks where the existence of Shakespeare editions are recorded and when the knowledge of different editions emerged: ‘Gradually the ea^rly quartos sunk into oblivion and the record of the various first editions known to scholars is interesting.’31 For example, she lists the three ‘first editions early quartos’ bequeathed by William Drummond to Edinburgh University in 1627; the ten copies ‘catalogued’ by the second Earl of Bridgewater in 1649 and ‘sold to Mr. Huntington in 1917’; the first quarto of Hamlet ‘found’ by Sir Henry Bunbury in 1823 and ‘now in the Huntington’; and the copy of Q1 Titus Andronicus ‘discovered in Lund, Sweden and sold to Mr. Folger’ in 1905. The usefulness of early booklists—​those compiled by Gerard Langbaine in the late seventeenth century and others published as appendices to eighteenth-​century editions of Shakespeare’s Works—​to Bartlett’s own project of identification and textual enumeration varied. Many of the copies cited in these lists were easily findable, but some (especially those cited by Pope) have ‘not been possible to trace . . . to their present locations’. Bartlett’s short introduction to the revised 1939 Census addresses such impasses with frankness: Following the census itself appears a list of unidentified Quartos, including those which have been listed in catalogues or those described in the earlier edition of the Census which can not now be located. Every effort has been made to reach owners in England and the United States, but there still remain a number of copies hidden somewhere. As regards the earlier entries in the unidentified list, most of these are included in the census itself, but the lack of detail in the catalogue descriptions has made it impossible to identify them.32

The contingency Bartlett describes (even between the first edition of the Census and the second, when copies recorded as belonging to one owner in 1916 may have changed hands and gotten ‘lost’ in the process) figures the Census as a provisional document. Bartlett’s own handwritten emendations to a copy of the revised edition now at the Beinecke confirms that her recovery efforts persisted well beyond 1939.33 Neither edition of the Census claimed to be a definitive reference work. Both reflected the leveraging of imperfect personal networks, institutional power, and scholarly (and para-​scholarly) labour. Though focused elsewhere on collecting, monetary value, and Shakespeare’s cultural capital, Bartlett’s energies around the census project accepted a

30    Claire M. L. Bourne certain degree of not-​knowing around how this research would be used. For instance, although Bartlett touts first editions (or, the case of a ‘bad’ first edition, second editions) in her Shakespeare lectures and elsewhere, the scope of the Census, which records copies of editions up to 1709, distributes focus across the early textual history of the plays; that is, away from the singular pursuit of authorial origin and towards the possible (if unrealized) study of reception, whether editorial (in Sonia Massai’s sense of the practice) or reader/​user generated (in William H. Sherman’s sense of ‘used books’).34 Notably, Bartlett and Pollard, in their introduction to the 1916 edition of the Census, dismiss second-​plus quarto editions except for their use in attesting to Shakespeare’s ‘popularity’ throughout the seventeenth century and, in some cases, for their function as intermediary texts that help editors track the introduction of ‘errors’ between first quartos and the First Folio. Bartlett and Pollard recognized that these later quartos contained ‘emendations’ but claimed that modern editors would only be ‘within their rights’ to adopt these variants if they were explicitly marked as ‘early conjectures’ in the quartos themselves. However, Bartlett, working on her own to revise the census, softens this earlier take. As she puts it in the 1939 introduction, ‘[T]‌here is a certain amount of information to be had from later printings, and therefore these are included’.35 She does not specify the kind of ‘information’ these ‘printings’ might offer and, in this silence, appears to acknowledge the unexpected influences her research might have beyond the New Bibliographic aspiration to reclaim Shakespeare’s intentions. Bartlett’s dogged pursuit of more and more copies for the 1916 edition of the Census, the 1939 revision, and after seems to have been motivated not only by a desire to nuance the narratives of Shakespeare’s textual history or to create a functional reference work for scholars and editors. She was also acutely aware that access to these objects was a problem in America, not because England had a monopoly on the Shakespearean text but because (in her view) American institutions and collectors were decidedly more private or exclusive.36 Bartlett’s concern about access is wholly consistent with her work as a teacher of bibliography and flourishes in the enormous manoeuvring of knowledge and influence it took for her to stage a public exhibition of Shakespeariana at the New York Public Library the same year the Census came out. She served a scholarly community as much as she served a lay community. She served her subject (Shakespeare) as much as she served the method for better understanding his textual corpus (bibliography). The introduction to the 1916 Census, in its careful notice of which copies were in private hands and which were publicly owned, is shot through with this sensibility. Simmering beneath the surface is a campaign for wealthy American collectors to donate their books to public institutions: Shakespeare Quartos are too expensive for any public library to buy nowadays, and the curious thing is that they always have been too expensive for any public library to buy . . . It is to the imagination, the foresight, the pluck of the private collector that libraries in the British Isles owe 90 per cent of their finest treasures. . . . In the United States the movement is gaining strength. . . . The United States is not going to remain forever with the Barton collection at Boston, and the Lenox collection at New York as

The Handmaids’ Tale    31 the only Shakespeare Quartos (there is one at the Library of Congress) which a student can see without obtaining an introduction to a private owner.37

In other words, the Boston Public Library (BPL) and the New York Public Library (NYPL) (with collections bequeathed by Cora Livingston Barton, widow of Thomas Pennant Barton, and James Lenox respectively) were, at the time, the only two institutions where ‘a student’ without connections to the world of elite book collecting could see and study Shakespeare’s books. ‘[I]‌t needs no prophet to be sure that the movement will continue’, Bartlett and Pollard wrote of the trend towards the great collectors making their collections available. Indeed, in the more-​than-​two decades between 1916 and 1939, the Folger Shakespeare Library opened on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, and the Huntington Library opened in Pasadena, California. While neither was a ‘public’ library per se, both institutions lowered the barrier for the study of early modern books. And even if they had been ‘public’ like the NYPL or the BPL, the ‘public’ nature of public libraries in early twentieth-​century America, even in northern cities like New York and Boston, did not guarantee access for everyone. The NYPL reported ‘open access’ to all, but its provision of branches in black neighbourhoods meant that there ‘was not a real feeling of equality in the library’.38 Thus, the ‘student’ Bartlett envisioned seeking out—​and accessing—​Shakespeare quartos in the NYPL’s Lenox Library was almost certainly white, and what it meant for a library to be ‘public’ was always contingent. In attending to the histories of individual copies, especially their provenance, Bartlett recognized and publicized the intractable contingency of the textual survival of early books. Both the 1916 Census and its revision are organized alphabetically by play, then chronologically by edition, then by copy (alphabetically by owner). Over and above providing a bibliographic description and collation formula, the descriptions of copies include information (if known) about current location and owner, overall condition, size, damage, repair, binding, signs of ownership, and occasionally the presence (but not always transcriptions) of unattributable marginalia. This copy-​specific approach made it easier for future researchers to locate copies of interest and offered bibliographic information about the making and subsequent life of the book. As Evelyn May Albright wrote in her review of the expanded edition, ‘[I]‌t is obvious that the book is the result of a great many years of the most painstaking research carried on with high ideals of accuracy’.39 Albright also drew attention to the value of the book’s index: ‘The elaborate index . . . names every owner, bookseller, auctioneer, and binder noted in the Census, with the addresses of those still living, and, in many cases, brief notes of identification and historical information of great convenience to the student of bibliography and literary history as well as to the specialist on Shakespeare.’40 The index seems to have been compiled by Bartlett herself, given that she updated it by hand as she continued to add notes to her copy of the revised Census.41 With its useful index, the Census performed groundwork for the kind of longue durée studies of early modern books that have recently been taking hold in bibliography and book history, ones that tell diverse,

32    Claire M. L. Bourne time-​bending histories of reading, collection, rare-​book dealing, loss, and institutional ownership.42 Although the Census does not typically record the kinds of readers’ marks and evidence of use that historians of reading seek out today, it was a notable thing that the Census presented the copy as a viable unit of analysis. Bartlett’s ongoing insistence on broader access to materials and bibliographic methods implied that a copy of, say, Q5 Romeo and Juliet could stand as an exemplar of the whole edition, but only if the person studying it understood bibliography, that is, only if they were able to disaggregate features of the book related to publication from those having to do with the way the object had subsequently circulated. As Bartlett would say as something of a refrain in her lectures, someone practised in the methods of bibliography could only know how to read the ‘history’ of the book if they could read its ‘physical makeup’. The Census therefore stood in contrast to Greg’s monumental Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (BEPD) (1939–​59), which used the edition as its organizing principle. Greg’s Bibliography did include some information about known copies of Shakespeare editions as well as other early modern plays printed through 1660: typically, location and, if applicable, a note of missing pages. Behind the scenes, though, Greg was gathering and assessing information about various copies of the Shakespeare quartos for his Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles series. And, in those cases, the more pristine the copy was (that is, the more closely it approximated the book’s state at the moment of publication), the better.43 The goal in choosing clean copies was to erase the need for users of the facsimile editions to deal with copy-​specific idiosyncrasies. At the same time as Greg’s four-​volume BEPD was rolling out, University Microfilms (UMI) began publishing microfilm reels of black-​and-​white images of the early printed editions listed in the Short Title Catalogue (STC) and Donald Wing’s sequel catalogue of post-​1640 editions (1945–​51). These images were then published online in 1998 as Early English Books Online (EEBO). The idea was for the microfilms (and, later, the subscription database) to give scholars at institutions without robust rare book collections access to early editions.44 A single copy (typically chosen from among major elite collections such as the British Library, the Bodleian, the Huntington, and the Folger) was selected to stand in for all the copies that made up the edition (or issue). In the early 2000s, the Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) took the edition-​based BEPD and STC as organizational templates. Indeed, DEEP was created to support scholarship about the book trade and publication, where differentiation among copies (except for the most punctilious textual editors) was less relevant than the fact of the edition and the contexts (including authorial, theatrical, book-​trade decisions and practices) behind its creation. But as book historians have increasingly turned towards histories of reading, collecting, and other forms of book use, reference works like the STC, BEPD, EEBO, and DEEP offer limited help in identifying copies of interest. Even information about copy locations in the ESTC (the online inheritor of the STC and Wing catalogue) is incomplete and often unreliable, while the level of copy-​specific detail can vary widely within a single institution’s online catalogue, if copy-​specific details are provided in catalogue records at all. For a long time, the solution to the problem of copy-​specific research was

The Handmaids’ Tale    33 to ‘browse’ physical items in person. Often, notable copy-​specific features came to scholarly attention by accident, in the course of doing adjacent research.45 However, due in large part to Bartlett’s labour, it has, of late, become much easier to seek out copy-​ specific information about the surviving early books of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The online Shakespeare Census, which went live in 2018 and ‘attempts to locate and describe all extant copies of all editions of Shakespeare’s works through 1700’, ‘is modeled on and extends’ Bartlett’s ‘groundbreaking bibliographic work’ by ‘build[ing] on and incorporat[ing]’ information from the 1916 Census, the 1939 revision, and Bartlett’s handwritten notes in her copy of the 1939 edition.46 The result is a searchable, regularly updated database of copy-​specific entries featuring descriptions of unique material features (bindings, marginalia, provenance notes, and so on) as well as links to a growing number of digital facsimiles (when they exist). This open-​access online resource, while still (and, by its nature, always) a work-​in-​progress, manifests one logical extreme of Bartlett’s vision for public access to Shakespeare’s textual corpus. It is, indeed, her vision that made this kind of access possible.

Alice Walker: Compositor Studies, Editing, and the Making of the Shakespearean Text Like Bartlett before her, Alice Walker was a respected bibliographer whose significant scholarly output, dispersed as it may have been across articles, book reviews, editions, and short books, became increasingly focused on the question of accessibility and thus also accountability. To whom were scholars of the Shakespearean text ultimately accountable? For the likes of Pollard and Greg, the answer was almost always ‘the author’. But for Walker, the answer became murkier as she grappled with the value of old-​spelling editing and led the way in developing a method of studying printing-​house production known today as ‘compositor studies’. Both Bartlett and Walker dedicated their varied careers to learning—​and teaching others—​how to read the material processes and contexts that shaped Shakespeare’s plays in print. If Bartlett promoted ‘scientific bibliography’ as an essential means of assessing the materiality of a book in the present to understand its past, Walker’s subject was the concealed history of the printed text itself and the human labours, both conventional and idiosyncratic, that (in)formed it. Besides the publication of her doctoral thesis on Thomas Lodge as a short monograph in 1933, the only book-​length study that Walker ever saw to press was Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), a good twenty years into her scholarly career. In this book, she argued that six plays reprinted in the First Folio—​Richard the Third, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, and Othello—​were typeset using previous quarto editions corrected by printing-​shop recourse to ‘some independent manuscript authority’ in the form of handwritten mark-​up (‘correction’) of quarto copy.47

34    Claire M. L. Bourne (Walker presumes a ‘collator’ who corrected printed quarto witnesses against possibly, but not assuredly, holograph manuscript witnesses.) Even more notable was the attention that Walker paid to the working habits of the compositors (she identified at least two) who set type for the play collection. As reviewers of her book were quick to point out, the ramifications of Walker’s findings for editorial practice were enormous as they essentially put the ‘holy grail’ of the New Bibliography—​what Shakespeare actually wrote—​even further out of reach. And this, just three years after Greg had published his consolidated theory of ‘copy-​text’ which presented a set of editorial principles designed for just that: to get as close as possible to the thing itself.48 I will not rehearse or assess the particularities of Walker’s arguments, which have been variously expanded, challenged, revised, and critiqued since Textual Problems was published.49 Instead, I want to explore the fact, nature, and implications of her interventions, the way reviewers framed these implications, and the book’s relationship to Charlton Hinman’s magnum opus on the printing of the First Folio that came out a decade later. After all, it is not Walker’s name that Shakespeareans and book historians automatically associate with compositor studies. It is Hinman’s. Walker’s book was a proof-​of-​concept. Hinman’s study was presented as a comprehensive attempt to reconstruct the printing of the First Folio. The story of Walker’s undeniable influence and how Textual Problems was publicly received sits in tension with her ‘unorthodox’ career trajectory and her reputation as an intensely private scholar whose catalogue of unpublished papers was destroyed, at her request, after she died. Walker’s final scholarly act was one of textual obliteration that invites us to (re)consider the ‘recovery’ scholarship that has structured so much research in book history around gender over the last three decades. Walker helped to legitimize inquiries into what is now accepted as one of book history’s main centres of gravity, namely, studies of the labour behind the texts, not just as a means to an end (Shakespeare’s text) but also to establish a picture of book-​ trade practices at all levels. As Walker had it, compositors were not automatons of the print shop, unthinkingly setting type as they saw it in their copy-​text, nor were they necessarily sloppy intermediaries between author and reader. She argued that unless we understand particular compositors’ habits of spelling, punctuation, lineation, and ‘typographical style’, we cannot assess the status of the printed text vis-​à-​vis what Shakespeare might have written and, more immediately, in relation to the printed texts (set by other compositors) behind some of the Folio texts.50 By admitting extra layers of textual mediation behind a book that advertised itself as prepared from the ‘true originall copies’ (which her thesis does not rule out), Walker complicated previous schema for dealing with the realities of textual transmission, including Greg’s entrenched categories of ‘foul papers’ and ‘fair copies’. She took on received wisdom, most notably the general acceptance of apparently idiosyncratic spellings in the First Folio play-​texts as calling cards of Shakespearean authorship. Striving throughout her career to put textual minutiae in context, Walker challenged the argument that the spelling of certain words written by Hand D in the Booke of Sir Thomas Moore manuscript pointed to Hand D being Shakespeare. She called this evidence ‘valueless’ since ‘most of the spellings which

The Handmaids’ Tale    35 have been thought to be Shakespearian are far too common in manuscripts of the period to have any significance’.51 Walker’s contributions to bibliography have never fallen off the radar entirely, although major revisions to her arguments about the orthographical and typographical habits of the compositors she called A and B by Hinman and, more recently, by Paul Werstine, have displaced her critical—​as in explicative and crucial—​interventions to the point where her work is rarely cited or held up as exemplary. For instance, in The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text (2010), Gabriel Egan explicitly notes that, because of ‘economies of selection’, he had ‘not much represented’ Alice Walker even as he registers that ‘there is a case to be made for a feminist revaluation of [her] work’.52 Indeed, Laurie E. Maguire had initiated such an evaluation five years earlier.53 ‘[I]‌n truth’, Egan adds, ‘[Walker] did not have much impact on the actual developments of the New Bibliography and after’. The fact that Walker shows up several times in Egan’s ‘narrative’ to illustrate how subsequent male scholars engaged with her work (to extend it or critique it) simultaneously diminishes her contribution and undermines his point that she did what Egan calls ‘spin-​off ’ research.54 Male scholars were spinning their research off hers. She was a key interlocutor for Hinman and Werstine, and an unacknowledged precursor to D. F. McKenzie, who would replicate Walker’s focus on compositorial labour in the context of Cambridge University Press, an early modern printing operation for which detailed records do survive.55 In its own moment, Textual Problems was heralded as a watershed publication, even by seasoned bibliographers who quibbled with some of Walker’s claims. They recognized that Walker’s contentions about the complexities of textual mediation would shake a tradition of editorial practice conditioned to defer to what was judged to be the most authoritative text. James McManaway called Textual Problems ‘a turning point in the discussion of Shakespeare’s text’ and ‘a landmark’ for the way Walker ‘stud[ies] the bibliographical and textual minutiae of the Folio texts as they have never quite been studied before’.56 Philip Williams wrote that Walker ‘opens up a new and hitherto curiously overlooked subject for investigation’, calling it ‘disturbing’ that, except for a smattering of short studies and E. E. Willoughby’s 1932 book that began the exploration of compositor habits, ‘the compositors in Jaggard’s shop have been so completely neglected’.57 Although Willoughby had explored the usefulness of spelling patterns for compositor identification, Walker also attended to design patterns—​the use of italics; recourse to turn-​overs or turn-​unders versus splitting a long line into two short lines; the tendency for eye-​skipping and line omission—​to distinguish the work of individual compositors. G. Blakemore Evans noted that Walker’s observation that compositors had ‘working habits’ in the first place ‘must make an editor wary of merely uncritical acceptance of copy-​text’.58 J. M. Nosworthy affirmed that editors could not ignore Walker’s ‘assured percipience’: The ultimate fate of Dr. Walker’s contentions lies in the hands of future editors of the plays, on whom this book has palpable designs, for nothing short of the editorial process itself is likely to reveal what flaws, if any, lie hidden in Dr. Walker’s downright and persuasively argued chapters.59

36    Claire M. L. Bourne Walker’s book was thus a blueprint for editorial method, a caution against oversimplifying the relationship between the highly mediated printed text and the hope of achieving a clear view of authorial intention in practice. Still, though, reviewers figured Walker as a kind of siren tempting future editors to shipwreck. Philip Edwards underscored Walker’s ‘plea for the liberty of emendation and eclecticism’, but claimed that Walker had ‘invest[ed] textual studies with such grace that one [i.e., he] feels boorish to disagree with her’.60 He asked: ‘[I]‌s it not very dangerous to alter our present conservatism in emendation?’ Implied answer: it is. Walker’s own editing had ‘at times a touch of genius’, but Edwards said he did not trust others (save those he could count on ‘the fingers of one hand’) to proceed with the same degree of care to emend ‘only when error can be proved likely’. Nosworthy’s caution was more urgent: ‘It is to be hoped that editors of the right calibre will emerge, for this book has it in its power to lure fools to greater folly.’61 Walker’s scholarship was Circe-​like in its power to seduce all but the most restrained editors, upon whom she ‘had designs’. The editorial latitude invited by Walker’s study risked displacing the New Bibliography’s hard-​won but precarious fiction that Shakespeare’s intentions could be unveiled through rigorous scientific method.62 The notion that Walker’s book had little impact on scholarship is patently false. Indeed, Greg solicited a prepublication draft of Textual Problems, as he was working on his own study of the First Folio’s textual history.63 And in a review of Greg’s book, The Shakespeare First Folio (1955), Charlton Hinman noted that ‘Sir Walter’s position has changed—​chiefly in response to evidence advanced by . . . Dr. Alice Walker’.64 Ten years after Textual Problems was published, Hinman again acknowledged Walker’s ‘pioneer work’ on compositor labour in the preface to The Printing and Proof-​Reading of the First Folio: ‘Thanks almost exclusively so far to the efforts of a single investigator, important progress toward this goal [of identifying which compositors had a hand in which parts of the book] has already been made.’65 In a footnote, he revealed that that ‘single investigator’ was ‘of course . . . Dr. Alice Walker’.66 Thirty years on from Walker’s monograph, Paul Werstine observed that, while others had experimented in the first half of the twentieth century with methods of identifying compositors, ‘only rarely have editors felt the impact of such studies on their work that was felt by Shakespeare editors from the work of Alice Walker and Charlton Hinman on the printing and compositors of the First Folio’.67 Werstine was writing in the mid-​1980s at a key moment in the history of textual studies around Shakespeare, as critical theory, along with historical, economic, social, and political contexts, were made to intersect in new ways with bibliography. It was at this time that the field of ‘book history’, which took special interest in the broader cultural and societal forces that shaped the making of books and their reception, was beginning to coalesce. The so-​called ‘death of the author’ coupled with the New Historicist move to democratize textual output by giving texts not traditionally classified as ‘literary’ or ‘canonical’ equal consideration aligned with Werstine’s claims for the usefulness of printing house and compositor studies, which contextualized typesetting in Shakespeare texts within a shop’s broader output. Werstine credits Walker for giving the problem of determining the labour behind the

The Handmaids’ Tale    37 printed text ‘sharper focus’.68 Walker’s methods of distinguishing which features of the Shakespearean text were due to compositor habits and which were ‘foreign to their habits’ compelled editors to attend to ‘devotional works, courtesy books, sermons, romances, and . . . Ovidian mythological poetry’ produced by the same printer.69 Indeed, several textual genres that Werstine lists have ultimately become central to—​ and centred by—​studies of publishing, women’s writing, and reading practices in the period more broadly in the decades since. Likewise, Walker’s insistence on the contributions of unnamed workers to the creation of the Shakespearean text, even if this insistence was ultimately in the service of clarifying ‘what lay between Shakespeare’s manuscript and the Folio texts’, helped to train editorial and wider scholarly attention on the human toil behind the texts.70 And this very focus has been taken up by those working after Walker who have been widely credited with opening up more capacious methods of studying the people, materials, sites, practices, and larger structures and forces of the early modern book trade. In his influential study of the Cambridge University Press (CUP) workflow from its inception in the late seventeenth century, D. F. McKenzie cautioned against the notion of bibliography as an ‘exact science’ in light of the fact that ‘bibliographers . . . are becoming increasingly concerned to trace processes involving complex relationships less susceptible of conclusive demonstration’.71 Walker’s study of compositors complicated the ambition, long held by the likes of Greg, that authorial intention (or something close to it) was possible to retrieve through bibliographic study, even if she herself was not able to let go of that ambition entirely. McKenzie’s influence on the development of book history, especially the emphasis he placed on the social dimensions of bookwork and the expressivity of material form, is keenly felt. But as David L. Gants has pointed out, the dominant account of that influence often ‘mistake[s]‌reform for refutation, transformation for rejection’ in its portrayal of McKenzie rejecting the New Bibliographers’ project.72 As his work on the CUP records shows, McKenzie’s arguments about the ‘sociology of texts’ were informed by a long history of methodological trial and error around the materiality of bookmaking and textual transmission—​a history in which Walker was (for a time) at the centre. Accounts of how and why the study of books as material objects transformed in the last few decades of the twentieth century vary to some degree, but there is broad consensus that focus shifted from the author as the organizing principle of bibliographic scholarship to other figures of agency and authority. Bibliography’s long-​standing influence on editing persisted in Shakespeare studies as new theories of textual difference gave way to single-​text editing and a new legitimization of the playhouses and playing companies as sources of textual authority. Furthermore, the interest in book trade personnel and activities that had previously manifested in efforts, such as Walker’s, to differentiate non-​authorial interventions from Shakespeare’s hand quickly became subject matter in its own right. I am not suggesting here that Walker’s work on compositors in the Jaggard printing operation necessarily initiated this shift. But I am making the case that her efforts to determine how compositors interacted with the materials of their trade—​how they bridged the gap between copy and typesetting—​along with her

38    Claire M. L. Bourne commitment to these practices as an important topic of study marked a turning point in how the Shakespearean text might be treated. Although her contributions were recognized as significant by her contemporaries, they have been mostly written out of the narrative and, as we have seen, marginalized as subject matter for ‘feminist re-​ evaluation’ separate from larger histories of the field. The only such re-​evaluation in print at the time of my writing this is Maguire’s account of Walker’s career and contributions to textual studies.73 As Maguire wrote at the turn of the twenty-​first century: ‘She pioneered compositor analysis; [and] she acknowledged the subjectivity of textual studies.’74 Maguire also credits Walker with enlivening the way that textual matters, often tedious, were written about. Calling Walker’s distinctive prose style ‘Alice-​Speak’, Maguire shows that Walker appropriated vivid language from both early modern and regional idioms and was unafraid to write in a more colloquial register: ‘Such language creates a strong personal flavor, an idiolect; and épastime is not a characteristic associated with textual criticism in the decades in which Walker was writing.’75 Maguire traces the legacy of Walker’s writing style through Gary Taylor, who took on the Oxford Shakespeare when Walker’s version of it (which I discuss below) did not materialize. While Maguire admits that ‘it may seem odd to give Walker’s style equal weight with textual substance as a legacy’, she notes the unusually inventive ‘rhetorical play’ of Taylor’s prose stylings as a ‘direct descendent’ of Walker’s. The upshot for Maguire is that this change in ‘textual rhetoric’ to a more accessible, idiomatic, and playful language ‘accounts for the widespread interest in textual studies today’. The result? As Maguire puts it, ‘any textual critic under the age of 45’ (now, ±60 since Maguire’s piece was published in 2005) ‘owes more to Alice Walker’ than they realize since ‘the language in which we write is marked with her signature’.76 One major difference between Henrietta Bartlett and Alice Walker is that Bartlett’s papers survive in neatly organized boxes and folders at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. They contain unpublished typescripts of lectures and notes on Shakespeare’s textual history, along with ephemera from Bartlett’s teaching collection and letters from correspondents about her projects, including the Census. Many of these papers document Bartlett’s revisions to her findings over time and the logistics of her efforts to assemble materials for her public Shakespeare exhibition and to update her knowledge of Shakespeare quartos well after the second edition of the Census was published. Bartlett’s papers can be read alongside the archive of W. W. Greg’s career, as well as records of other careers in bibliography, including those of Donne and Jonson editor Evelyn Spearing Simpson and her husband Percy. Walker, on the other hand, left nothing behind her besides the outline of a scholarly life in ‘official files and the details of her publications’.77 As her former student T. H. Howard-​Hill wrote, Walker was reticent about details of her personal life and, not being in later life concerned to memorialize her career in biographical dictionaries, left no public account of it. . . . She did not join professional societies and, spending much of her life as a private scholar without academic affiliation and usually distant from the

The Handmaids’ Tale    39 centers of learning, had limited contact with scholars of her time. Consequently, the absence of published notices of her life or even obituaries leaves much of her life in the shadows.78

Although it is not necessary to know the details of Walker’s personal life to appreciate her contribution to the field, our perception of her privacy, compounded by her physical distance from scholarly institutions and networks (whether deliberate or not) for long stretches, is undeniably shaped by what Maguire has called ‘one of Walker’s clearest textual statements’: the destruction of her papers.79 Nine days before she died, Walker drew up a will leaving all her goods plus £2,000 to Gladys Orchard providing that Orchard ‘undertakes to my Trustees that she will destroy all my notes manuscripts and notebooks’.80 It showed surprising resolve for a scholar whose most prominent public lecture was an effort to recover the ‘forgotten’ textual labours of Edward Capell, the eighteenth-​century editor of Shakespeare whose textually innovative edition was crowded out by Malone’s.81 Walker’s end-​of-​life directive had implications not only for her own legacy but also for the history of textual scholarship. As Maguire puts it, ‘Walker died in 1982; so, in a sense, did the New Bibliography.’82 Maguire was not wrong to say so. Walker’s posthumous act of auto-​erasure resulted in the collateral loss of materials relating to a—​perhaps the—​major project of Walker’s career and of twentieth-​century editorial history: the old-​spelling Oxford Shakespeare edition that she had inherited (but not without keen doubts at the press and among male colleagues about her abilities) from R. B. McKerrow.83 Besides some correspondence preserved in the papers of other scholars and the Oxford University Press archives along with the Prolegomena for the edition that McKerrow published in 1939 to have some statement about the edition on the record, the work behind the project is entirely gone.84 Maguire reckoned that Walker lost ‘belief in what she was doing’ with the edition as her work on compositors made her (and others) see that spelling in the early books of Shakespeare’s plays (the copy-​texts for the Oxford edition) was a knotty amalgam of authorial, theatrical, and compositorial agency. What exactly an old-​spelling edition would preserve was unclear—​and the project could no longer be justified. The absence of the old-​spelling Oxford Shakespeare from the editorial tradition cleared a pathway for the 1984 Oxford Shakespeare that sought authority not in the author but rather in the idea of the play in performance. Perhaps because of her interest in Capell’s neat, uncluttered approach to the typographic presentation of the editorial page, Walker began advocating for fully modernized editions that addressed the ‘aesthetic problems’ posed by ‘inches’ of commentary notes.85 She rejected engorged annotations as ‘displeasing to the eye and distracting to the mind’, criticizing (for instance) an ‘inordinately long note (some seven inches of it)’ in a review of the New Arden edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost.86 Following Capell, Walker resisted the ‘paginary intermixture of text and comment’ by favouring compact notes, ones that would be both visually inconspicuous and helpful.87 Against the backdrop of her proactive suggestions regarding the current state of annotation practice and editorial mise-​en-​page in the 1950s, Walker’s pared-​down biblio-​editorial

40    Claire M. L. Bourne aesthetic was consistent with her desire to remove the clutter of unpublished material from her legacy. Downplaying her own contributions, she privileged a minimalist and highly curated approach to page design—​and published scholarship, it seems—​at the same time as she made space on the page to uplift the labours of those in the past whom time and history had overlooked. * I promised I would end with the dream that Greg described in his 1912 lecture: a dream in which the bibliographer would be able to determine ‘the extent to which . . . an author . . . exercised control over the first edition of his work, or over the first and subsequent editions as well’, all in the service of ‘trac[ing] the fortunes of English literature as they depend on the printed page’.88 In Greg’s dream world, the bibliographer is also a teacher who begins a series of lectures on the topic of bibliography with an account of the ‘steps’ that ‘intervene between the work as it is formed itself in the author’s mind and as it reaches modern readers’.89 The bibliographer of Greg’s dream is one and the same as the scholar in Greg’s earlier metaphor who applies bibliography like an extraction device to the literary text. Both are envisioned to ‘see that, whatever method is adopted, it is . . . made to yield the very best results of which it is capable’.90 Greg’s bibliographer is a taskmaster. (Writes Greg, ‘It is no light task that I have sketched.’) Greg’s bibliographer is a rare breed. (Writes Greg, ‘[W]‌e may well wonder how many men there are to-​day who would be capable of undertaking it with any chance of success’.) Greg’s bibliographer is a solitary creature, one who is ‘bold enough’ to be an expert in every facet of premodern textual production and transmission. Greg’s bibliographer is almost always the grammatical subject of his sentences. Greg’s bibliographer is always, invariably, ‘he’. Neither Bartlett nor Walker strove to be comprehensive in their findings, or to have the final say on their topic. Bartlett’s acts of enumeration in the Census were (and continue to be, perhaps more than ever) enabling to future scholars, just as Walker’s commitment to filling out the picture of who made the First Folio was methodologically innovative, forward-​looking, and avowedly provisional. Bartlett and Walker remind us not just that women played key roles in the public development of the field we now call ‘book history’, but also that this field (as it has evolved) is, in so many ways, defined by material absences and critical impasses. Bartlett and Walker both recognized the limits of their greatest scholarly endeavours. Walker’s reckoning was so powerful that she (with posthumous cooperation) decimated most evidence of her labour and doubt. In her notes and revisions, Bartlett acknowledged that even the most comprehensive-​seeming enumeration of books would never (re)capture a definitive picture of Shakespeare’s textual presence in the present or the past. Both Bartlett and Walker had unfinished projects when they died, and both projects were (or, had been) highly reliant on collaboration. Bartlett’s extensive annotations in her own revised copy of the Census testify to her abiding belief in the promise of textual discovery—​that, with persistently working her networks of contacts, new copies of Shakespeare would come to light and be reported to be listed among the growing number of physical books that made up Shakespeare’s textual presence across space and

The Handmaids’ Tale    41 in time. Her notes in her copy of the 1939 edition are in keeping with the kind of notes she kept in two copies of the 1916 first edition as she was working up to 1939 and thus gesture towards a third edition of the Census that never came to fruition.91 Walker’s faith in the Oxford Shakespeare was broken by her own scholarship on compositor activities, work that found some consolidation in Textual Problems but which she developed by publicly reviewing the work of other scholars. The truth is we will never know how far Walker got, or at what point she abandoned the project, even as correspondence from her editor Kenneth Sisam at the Clarendon Press suggests that some plays were fully edited and close to a publishable state. She made sure to edit her archive down to nothing. Like Lennox in the eighteenth century and Albright, their (near) contemporary, Bartlett’s and Walker’s contributions proffered a vision of the Shakespearean text that was both prospective (as in, oriented towards future use) and defined by the undeniably social and relational dynamics that forged the histories of the textual objects by which we know Shakespeare. Unlike Greg’s violent act of extraction, Bartlett and Walker preferred descriptive techniques to reorient the conversation around textual matters towards the messy histories of the book. The bibliographic particularities they recorded and illuminated (in Bartlett’s case, copy-​specific features; and in Walker’s, the tiny idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation that could distinguish the work of different compositors) had large-​scale implications for the way Shakespeare would come to be edited and for our very ability to study the survival, endurance, and various states of use, destruction, and repair to which these books have been subjected over the last four centuries. As the field of early modern book history reckons with its long-​standing insistence on objectivity and thus political neutrality, we must keep in mind that voices who do not serve the dominant narrative are written out of the record or superseded by those who do. While both Bartlett and Walker centred Shakespeare in their studies, their methods established a set of enabling materials and conditions for reassessing the extant books of Shakespeare’s plays and poems in ways that appreciate the hands that made, used, and preserved them.

Notes 1. W. W. Greg, ‘What is Bibliography?’, The Library, TBS-​12/​1 (1913), 47. 2. See Natasha Korda, ‘Shakespeare’s Laundry: Feminist Futures in the Archive’, in Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez (eds.), Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality (Aldershot: Routledge, 2016), 94–​111, esp. 97. Thank you to Dianne Mitchell for alerting me to this essay. 3. Charlotte Lennox, Shakespeare Illustrated, Or, the Novels and Histories, On Which the Plays of Shakespear Are Founded, 2 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1753), vol. i, p. vii. 4. Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. i (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), p. xi. 5. Miriam Rossiter Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), 190–​191.

42    Claire M. L. Bourne 6. Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Shakespeare’s Novels: Charlotte Lennox Illustrated’, Studies in the Novel, 19/​3 (1987), 297. 7. Dennis Austin Britton and Melissa Walter, introduction to Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3. The term ‘pioneer’ comes from Doody, ‘Shakespeare’s Novels’, 297. 8. Evelyn May Albright, Dramatic Publication in England, 1580–​1640: A Study of Conditions Affecting Content and Form of Drama (New York: D. C. Heath, 1927), preface [n.p.]. 9. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, The Publication of Plays in London 1660–​ 1800: Playwrights, Publishers and the Market (London: British Library, 2015), 3–​4. 10. B. K. Adams, ‘Fair /​Foul’, in Claire M. L. Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text, Arden Shakespeare Intersections (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), 40. 11. Adams, ‘Fair /​Foul’, 36–​37. 12. Adams, ‘Fair /​Foul’, 40. 13. See e.g. Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 126 n. 52. 14. Kate Ozment, ‘A Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, Textual Cultures, 13/​1 (2020), 149–​178. 15. For two excellent recent examples, see Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018); and Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). 16. Henrietta C. Bartlett, ‘Yale Lectures, Bibliography’, GEN MSS 336, Box 6, folder 301, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter, Beinecke). 17. Hand-​List of Early English Books Mostly of the Elizabethan Period Collected by W. A. White (New York: 1914). An expanded catalogue with bibliographic descriptions of the items in White’s collection was published twelve years later: Catalogue of Early English Books; chiefly of the Elizabethan Period Collected by William Augustus White (New York: privately printed, 1926). 18. Henrietta C. Bartlett and Alfred W. Pollard, A Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, 1594–​1709 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916). 19. GEN MSS 336, Box 1, folder 64, Beinecke. See also ‘Henrietta C. Bartlett’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://​en.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​Henr​iett​a_​C._​Bartl​ett, accessed 19 Oct. 2021). 20. The contents of the exhibition are recorded in Exhibition of Shakespeariana, April 2–​May 31, 1916 (New York: New York Public Library, 1916). 21. Bartlett, ‘Yale Lectures, Bibliography’, 1. 22. Bartlett, ‘Yale Lectures, Bibliography’, 2–​3. 23. See also GEN MSS 336, Box 6, folder 303, Beinecke. 24. Bartlett, ‘Yale Lectures, Bibliography’, 1. 25. GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 336–​9, Beinecke. 26. GEN MSS 336, Box 6, folder 308, Beinecke. The disbound leaves of the quarto could come from Wing P3028 (1642) or Wing P3029 (1647). 27. See GEN MSS 336 Box 6, folder 306, for Bartlett’s lectures about cataloguing. 28. GEN MSS 336, Box 6, folder 313, Beinecke. 29. Henrietta C. Bartlett, rev. Bartlett and Alfred W. Pollard, A Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto 1594 to 1709 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939). 30. GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 329, Beinecke.

The Handmaids’ Tale    43 31. GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 330, Beinecke. 32. Bartlett, rev., Census (1939), p. iv. 33. Bartlett, rev., Census (1939), BEIN REF Z8811 B366 1939, Beinecke. 34. See Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 35. Bartlett, rev., Census (1939), p. iv. 36. For a recent study on the tension between the feminist ethos of accessibility and private book ownership in Bartlett’s activities, see Eve Houghton, ‘Private Owners, Public Books: Henrietta Bartlett’s Feminist Bibliography’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116/​4 (2022), 567–​87. 37. Bartlett and Pollard, Census (1916), pp. xxxvi–​xxxvii. 38. Cheryl Knott, Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 11–​13, esp. 12. 39. Evelyn May Albright, review of A Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, 1594–​1709 (1939), Modern Philology 39/​1 (1941), 102. 40. Albright, review of A Census, 102. 41. For Bartlett’s additions to the index, see Bartlett, rev., Census (1939), 141–​165 (plus interleaves), BEIN REF Z8811 B366 1939, Beinecke. 42. See e.g. Whitney Trettien, ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies’, PMLA 133/​5 (2018), 1137–​1138. In a Shakespeare context, see e.g. Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips, and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 43. Greg’s efforts to identify and assess copies can be found in OSB MSS 162, Box 6, folder 1, Beinecke. 44. On the history of EEBO, see Ian Gadd, ‘The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online’, Literature Compass, 6/​ 3 (2009), 680–​ 692; and Diana Kichuk, ‘Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 22/​3 (2007), 291–​303 45. See e.g. Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘Invisible Ink: A Note on Ghost Images in Early Printed Books’, Textual Cultures, 5/​2 (2010), 53–​62. 46. ‘About’, in Shakespeare Census, ed. Adam G. Hooks and Zachary Lesser (2018), http://​ www.shakes​pear​ecen​sus.org/​about/​, accessed 7 July 2021. 47. G. Blakemore Evans, review of Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), for Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53/​3 (1954), 473–​476. 48. See W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-​Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950/​1), 19–​36. 49. As I discuss below, Charlton Hinman built on Walker’s methods and findings in The Printing and Proof-​Reading of the First Folio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). See also, e.g., T. H. Howard-​Hill, ‘The Compositors of Shakespeare’s Folio Comedies’, Studies in Bibliography, 26 (1963), 62–​106; Gary Taylor, ‘The Shrinking Compositor A of the First Folio’, Studies in Bibliography, 34 (1981), 96–​117; and Jeffrey Masten, ‘Spelling Shakespeare: Early Modern “Orthography” and the Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors’, in Queer Philologies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 40–​66. 50. Walker, Textual Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 8. 51. Walker, Textual Problems, 76.

44    Claire M. L. Bourne 52. Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-​Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10. 53. Laurie E. Maguire, ‘How Many Children Had Alice Walker?’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 327–​329. Maguire notes that she began writing the chapter even earlier—​in 2000 (29). 54. Egan, Struggle, 53. See also pp. 56, 81, 136, 240, and 250 for his treatment of Walker’s scholarship. 55. D. F. McKenzie, Cambridge University Press, 1696–​ 1712: A Bibliographical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 56. James McManaway, review of Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), for Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 48 (1954), 105–​106. 57. Philip Williams, review of Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), for Shakespeare Quarterly, 4/​4 (1953), 481. See E. E. Willoughby, The Printing of the First Folio of Shakespeare (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1932). 58. Evans, review of Textual Problems, 475. 59. J. M. Nosworthy, review of Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), for The Library, 5th ser., 9 (1954), 63–​64. 60. Philip Edwards, review of Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), for Modern Language Review, 49 (1954), 365–​367. 61. Nosworthy, review of Textual Problems, 65. 62. See e.g. Edwards, review of Textual Problems, 367. 63. W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. vi. 64. Charlton Hinman, review of W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (1955), for Shakespeare Quarterly, 7/​1 (1956), 99. 65. Hinman, Printing and Proof-​Reading, ii. 512. 66. Hinman, Printing and Proof-​Reading, ii. 512 n. 1. 67. Paul Werstine, ‘The Editorial Usefulness of Printing House and Compositor Studies’, in Play-​Texts in Old Spelling: Papers from the Glendon Conference (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 35. 68. Werstine, ‘Editorial Usefulness’, 36. 69. Werstine, ‘Editorial Usefulness’, 37. 70. Walker, Textual Problems, 12. 71. D. F. McKenzie, ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-​House Practices’, Studies in Bibliography, 22 (1969), 2, 5. 72. David L. Gants, ‘Bibliographical Scholarship and the History of the Book’, review of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695, for Huntington Library Quarterly, 67/​3 (2004), 478. 73. See also Molly G. Yarn, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 74. Maguire, ‘How Many Children’, 336. 75. Maguire, ‘How Many Children’, 338, 339–​340. 76. Maguire, ‘How Many Children’, 344. 77. T. H. Howard Hill, ‘Alice Walker (8 December 1900–​14 October 1982)’, in William Baker and Kenneth Womack (eds.), Twentieth-​ Century British Book Collectors and Bibliographers, Dictionary of Literary Biography Series, 201 (London: Gale Research, 1999), 298.

The Handmaids’ Tale    45 78. Howard-​Hill, ‘Alice Walker’, 297–​305. 79. Maguire, ‘How Many Children’, 344. 80. Quoted in Maguire, ‘How Many Children’, 344 n. 119. 81. Alice Walker, ‘Edward Capell and His Edition of Shakespeare’, Proceedings of the British Academy 1960 (1961), 131–​145. 82. Maguire, ‘How Many Children’, 344. 83. See Maguire, ‘How Many Children’, 331–​332; and Howard-​Hill, ‘Alice Walker’, 300 and 304–​305. 84. R. B. McKerrow, Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939). 85. Walker, ‘Capell’, 134. 86. Alice Walker, review of Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Richard David, Arden2, for Review of English Studies, 3 (1942), 385. 87. Edward Capell, introduction to Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London: J and R Tonson, 1768), 30. 88. Greg, ‘What is Bibliography?’, 52. 89. Greg, ‘What is Bibliography?’, 53. 90. Greg, ‘What is Bibliography?’, 52. 91. Some of her notes tracking the location and movement of quartos post-​1916 can be found in GEN MSS 336, Box 14, folder 392, Beinecke.

Select Bibliography Albright, Evelyn May, Dramatic Publication in England, 1580–​1640: A Study of Conditions Affecting Content and Form of Drama (New York: D. C. Heath, 1927). Bartlett Henrietta C., and Pollard, Alfred W., A Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, 1594–​ 1709 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916). Bartlett, Henrietta C., rev. Bartlett and Pollard, Alfred W., A Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto 1594 to 1709 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939). Brayman, Heidi, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Howsam, Leslie, ‘In My View: Women and Book History’, SHARP News, 7/​4 (1998), 1–​2. Knight, Leah, White, Micheline, and Sauer, Elizabeth (eds.), Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). Korda, Natasha, ‘Shakespeare’s Laundry: Feminist Futures in the Archive’, in Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez (eds.), Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality (Aldershot: Routledge, 2016), 94–​111. Laurie E. Maguire, ‘How Many Children Had Alice Walker?’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 327–​349. Lennox, Charlotte, Shakespeare Illustrated, Or, the Novels and Histories, On Which the Plays of Shakespear Are Founded, 2 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1753). Ozment, Kate, ‘A Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, Textual Cultures, 13/​1 (2020), 149–​178. Smith, Helen, Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Trettien, Whitney, ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies’, PMLA 133/​5 (2018), 1135–​1151.

46    Claire M. L. Bourne Walker, Alice, ‘Edward Capell and His Edition of Shakespeare’, Proceedings of the British Academy 1960 (1961), 131–​145. Walker, Alice, Textual Problems of the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Wayne, Valerie (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). Yarn, Molly G., Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Chapter 3

Catal o gu ing t h e Past Periodization and the Historiography of Print Megan Heffernan

Books are time machines, technologies that offer a portal to other moments. This is, of course, a metaphor frequently deployed in the literary imagination of the codex. In ‘A Valediction: Of the Book’, John Donne fantasizes about a history chronicle that will forestall the looming separation of two lovers. The speaker, on the verge of departing, commands his mistress ‘Study our manuscripts’, their copious love letters, and ‘Thence write our annals’, since ‘Love this grace to us affords: | To make, to keep, to use, to be these his recòrds.’1 Donne depicts the multiple functions of the book as a tool of history: the text creates their love, preserves its traces, and even promises access to its memory in the future. ‘This book—​as long-​lived as the elements | Or as the world’s form’ will withstand ‘the ravenous | Vandals and Goths’ who might otherwise threaten the couple’s ‘posterity’.2 Figured as ‘all-​gravèd tome’—​an (en)graved chronicle that is nearly a tomb—​their book achieves an impossible erotic permanence by casting love as an extended process of textual production and use.3 Beyond sponsoring imaginative encounters between the past and the future, books are technologies that quite literally weave together moments in time. The codex bears witness to the efforts of multiple and often anonymous textual agents: writers, certainly, but also rag-​pickers and papermakers, compilers and publishers, compositors and printers, binders and booksellers, not to mention the readers who consume, digest, and repurpose texts for their own ends.4 Many of these activities take place at multiple and unknowable moments before the imposition of a single publication date—​and some reoccur across the life of a book—​thus challenging linear chronologies of production and reception. ‘The history of reading’, Whitney Trettien has argued, ‘is also a history of mediating the material world, a narrative that, by its nature, pleats the past, present, and future.’5 As book historians delve further into the material mediation of time, we have come to understand how modern perspectives create the conditions of our access to the past. As Jeffrey Todd Knight explains, presumptions about what a book can and should be transform materials

48   Megan HefferNan with idiosyncratic trajectories into ‘icon[s]‌in a neater, more synthetic history, such as a literary history’.6 This chapter explores the polychronic history of the early modern book at three signal moments in the study of the English print trade. It considers how humanistic writing, broadly construed, has been understood (1) with a sense of the increasing pace of publication at the end of the sixteenth century; (2) through the simultaneous consolidation of literary history and print history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and (3) in challenges to narratives of periodizing rupture early in the twenty-​first century. As this outline suggests, I am charting not just a history but also a historiography of print, with a particular attention to its disciplinary intersection with English literature. My focus on print is deliberately partial. From the origins of book history in analytic bibliography, ‘the value of examining the physical setting of texts, which has been articulated with particular fullness for printed books’, as G. Thomas Tanselle puts it, has been applied ‘to all physical objects carrying verbal . . . texts in visible form’.7 One reason that print has been taken as a central paradigm for textual histories more generally is that it is easy to situate typography in time. The ‘identification of fonts of printing type’ helped to ‘attribut[e]‌books to particular printers; and the close scrutiny of variations in printers’ characteristic practices was understood to be a key to chronological ordering’.8 In what follows, I go beyond such apparent chronology to pursue a more fluid and transtemporal history of early modern print. For early histories of bibliography, the catalogue provided a conceptual framework that could explain the relationship between texts as a matter of chronology, a straightforward plotting of books as discrete units of time. Through this structure, the catalogue echoed the assumptions of temporal progress and rupture that underpinned traditional literary histories, which sought to define eras according to the ‘periodization boundaries dictated by political events’.9 But by recognizing the contingencies that contributed to the catalogues we have inherited today, we can begin to unsettle simple developmental narratives of print and literature. Far from an easy, intertwined progress of poetry and print, an attention to the active process of cataloguing allows us to read for the gaps and fissures in a patchy, polychronic record of early modernity. Following an opening section on recent theories of periodization, I offer two case studies of catalogues from a moment of disciplinary consolidation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the work of William Herbert and Francis Douce, we can witness how bibliographers and book collectors imposed an order on printed materials that were not understood chronologically in the moments when they were first made and used. What emerges is a sense of both the tremendous labour and the historical materials that have been rendered invisible by the ideologies of the catalogue, from the domestic workers who sustained Herbert’s household to Douce’s fragmentary sixteenth-​century texts, which were never fully integrated into literary history. This challenge to the norms of cataloguing is an attempt to reform bibliography’s typically quite narrow purview by recalling the much longer and broader histories of premodern books. Thinking across periods is political because it requires us to acknowledge that the

Cataloguing the Past    49 genealogies of knowledge, aesthetics, and property set in motion by the London print trade are intertwined with the epistemes of subsequent generations, including our own.

Theories of Periodization The first decade of the twenty-​first century sponsored a sustained conversation about the basis for humanistic approaches to history. After crossing into the new millennium—​ and perhaps in response to the unrealized predictions of the Y2K technology crisis—​ multiple disciplines began to question our models for theorizing the cultural past.10 Established narratives of premodernity were challenged by both post-​structuralist and postcolonial critiques of a ‘historicist consciousness’ that was not able to accommodate a ‘radically heterogenous’ experience of time.11 Political modernity, on this argument, was unable to escape the limits of its own ideology, imposing a periodizing logic of difference that was indebted to discourses of Enlightenment humanism. In Kathleen Davis’s formulation, the very ability to conceptualize the Middle Ages as a feudal past distinct from a Renaissance turn to modernity was the result of ‘a much later reification of categories that emerged as a means of legitimizing sovereignty and conquest’.12 The political and cultural dominion of the European West underpinned historical narratives that limited possible readings of the past, particularly in its potential to relate to the present. English literary history likewise developed by articulating moments of rupture within a long and continuous tradition of vernacular writing. Ted Underwood has argued that ‘the periodized, contrastive model of [literary] history that emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century was understood as a tacit attack on the logic of aristocratic distinction’.13 Modern authors and scholars alike began to ‘propose that literature had a unique ability to render discontinuity imaginable and meaningful’ by ‘dramatizing the vertiginous gulfs between eras, and then claiming vertigo itself as a source of meaning’.14 Those ideologies have proven remarkably difficult to shift, even though it is commonly acknowledged that ruptures of style and genre are the inventions of literary history. ‘We tend to regard periods as necessary fictions’, David Perkins writes. Even after we recognize the artifice of these divisions, ‘we require the concept of the unified period in order to deny it’.15 The impact of a discontinuous literary history has perhaps been felt most strongly by medievalists. The modern ‘formation of English studies’ in the nineteenth century, depended on the ‘teaching and literary representation of the Middle Ages’, Eric Weiskott writes.16 At the origins of the discipline, a continuous literary tradition was displaced by a ‘racialized-​linguistic factionalism’ that removed the Old English past from a forward history of culture and style. This division has proven nearly impossible to traverse. ‘For all the talk of continuities,’ David Matthews surmises, ‘the wall erected on the territory around 1500 remains well policed in English literary studies.’17 To the extent that this boundary has been spanned at all, it has fallen more to earlier periods than to later ones.

50   Megan HefferNan The result has been a ‘one-​way traffic’ of ‘medievalists working forward rather than early modernists working back’.18 At the turn of the twenty-​first century, this disciplinary split prompted a reconsideration of traditional narratives of continuity and rupture. Haunted by Fredric Jameson’s dictate ‘we cannot not periodize’, multiple conferences, special issues of journals, and edited collections took up the question of how a modern critical practice ought to figure its relationship with the literary past.19 In what now feels like a proleptic anticipation of the next decade of hiring freezes in English departments, particularly in historical fields, scholars of premodernity asked: what is the value of a past that resists a connection to the present? Margreta de Grazia answered acutely, ‘Whether you work on one side or the other of the medieval/​modern divide determines nothing less than relevance. Everything after that divide has relevance to the present; everything before it is irrelevant.’20 Periodizing rupture had become a threat to the future of the discipline. Resisting a synchronic orthodoxy, new cultural histories sought to bridge the ‘epistemic crevasses between periods’, with literature being taken as strong evidence for diachronic models of time.21 I have surveyed the periodization of literary history at such length because it was in many ways conceptually and theoretically richer than concurrent approaches to the history of the book. As an emerging interdisciplinary approach to literature and culture, book history was consolidating its own chronological boundaries at the same moment, but rather than moving beyond a traditional model of temporal rupture and progress, the field was entrenching itself in a rigid account of synchronic agency and influence. Shakespeare occupied an outsized position in the conversation. Advocating a return to history ‘after theory’, David Scott Kastan argued that ‘to read Shakespeare historically’ is ‘to restore his works to the specific imaginative and material circumstances in which they were written and engaged’, attending to the ‘meanings’ that ‘were generated as the plays were experienced by their audiences and readers’.22 This mode of historical understanding was oriented around the moment of creation—​in Shakespeare’s case firmly bounded by the closure of the theatres in 1642—​and defined by a method that Kastan dubbed ‘The New Boredom’, a ‘delight in particularity’ that gained force by accruing material details of production.23 Yet while this attention to granular specificity helped launch and sustain a culturally oriented history of the book, the method also made it difficult, Trettien argues insightfully, to ‘translat[e]‌these idiosyncratic case studies into deeper histories’. Indeed, ‘the materialist approach challenges the very possibility of such histories’ by resisting the synthesis of ‘larger narratives that help us connect to and make sense of the past’.24 Following calls to move beyond the constraints of periodization, more recent histories of the book have begun to attend to multiple and coexisting temporalities. In The Unfinished Book, Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch explain that, far from ‘a linear progression’, their sense is that ‘historical transitions happen recursively, in fits and starts, in part because books propel knowledge through time as well as space’.25 Early modern books have outlived the intentions of their first makers and users, thereby urging methods that can account for how these textual objects carry the cultural past

Cataloguing the Past    51 forward into the future. Zachary Lesser has advocated a new approach to ‘[t]‌hinking bibliographically’, which ‘must involve not merely seeing behind the later historical accretions that intervene’ after a book is first made. While acts of reception have most often been identified so that they can be expunged from a properly historicist bibliography, we ought as well to be ‘thinking through this long history’, the span in which the ‘past seems to be reconfigured by the present, violating the strict chronology that supports the before and after of traditional bibliographical analysis’.26 Books are objects that exist in time, and our histories need to chart the multiple meanings they have accrued within and across discrete moments—​indeed, the meanings they are still accruing today. To return to the metaphor that opened this essay, of John Donne’s metaphysical imagination of the codex as a time machine, I would suggest that poetry can offer a model for rethinking the rigid narratives that have traditionally guided our histories of the book. ‘Periods are time shapes’, Nigel Smith observes, and ‘can be thought of in figurative ways’ in their expression of ‘basic notions of causality and categorization’.27 Smith here reflects on the periodization of literature, but his point about how time is perceived figurally applies equally to the history of the book, a field that is perhaps even more concerned with tracing causes and naming categories. In the two case studies that follow, I take up this call to think through the shapes by which we figure time as history. Instead of taking the catalogue as a structure for a chronological history of print, figuring each book as a discrete moment in a longer sequence, I look through the gaps between the compiled items in order to recall some of the materials that have been cast aside by dominant narratives of temporal order. At stake is our ability to account for the agency of the myriad unknown, unacknowledged figures who have contributed to the maintenance of these books over the past centuries. Like lyric speakers, whose poetic power comes into focus in the moment their historical identities begin to vanish, the textual agents who stewarded premodern collections through time have been rendered invisible by the disciplinary conventions of bibliography, which are attuned to acts of production rather than the labour of care.

The Pace of Print and a History of Loss In 1595, the bookseller Andrew Maunsell set out to publish The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes. Planned as a set of three volumes, this ambitious project aimed to record a marketplace of print that was on the verge of disappearing. Maunsell laments that ‘many singuler Bookes’, ‘after the first Impression’, were ‘so spent & gone, that they lie even as it were buried in som few studies’.28 Whole editions were consumed at such a ferocious pace that ‘men desirous of such kind of Bookes, cannot aske for that they never heard of, and the Bookeseller cannot shew that he hath not’.29 The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes was a tool designed to restore what the print market had both created and lost, allowing stationers to ‘draw to your memories Books that you coulde not remember’.30 The result was not a record of English writing so much as a recent history

52   Megan HefferNan of the print trade, with the vast majority of books from the second half of the sixteenth century. While Maunsell positioned himself as the heir to earlier Latin catalogues, like John Bale’s Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum (1548), he also promoted his real commitment to print.31 Where previous catalogues had been oriented primarily around the identity of writers, mixing together works in print and manuscript, Maunsell limited himself to ‘onely Printed’ books, and to ‘none but such as I have seene’ across his three decades of work as a bookseller and publisher.32 In capturing the output of the print trade, The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes was developing the practices of other sixteenth-​ century catalogues. Undertaken by printers, publishers, and booksellers, catalogues were most simply ‘marketing, that is a list of items available for sale, sometimes augmented with editions that are out of print’.33 They were at first ephemeral, designed as both retail and wholesale advertisements, and often took the form of broadsides. At times, early catalogues did include blank spaces for manuscript annotations to fill out details like the price or the sale location unknown at the moment of printing. Catalogues thus speak as well to the mobility of early printed books, since it is clear that ‘some were meant to last for years and to be used abroad’.34 As historical evidence, they can provide insight into ‘the nature or the extent of the book trade’, both primary and second-​hand sales, and are ‘an essential corrective’ to modern short-​title catalogues because ‘they ignore national or linguistic boundaries’.35 Significantly, chronology was not a principle of Maunsell’s approach to ordering and presenting the books he was claiming to restore to living memory. The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes rather ordered entries by both the last name of authors and their subjects, distinguishing between works on ‘Divinitie, Law, Phisicke, &c’ that Latin catalogues had allowed to ‘mingle’ together.36 The volume published in 1595 was in fact two separate titles, each with its own title page and register. The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes contained ‘matters of Divinitie’, while The Second Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes was about the ‘Sciences Mathematicall’, conceived broadly ‘as Arithmetick, Geometrie, Astronomie, Astrologie, Musick, the Arte of Warre, and Navigation’, as well as ‘Phisick and Surgerie’.37 Within these broad categories of knowledge, each part was further divided alphabetically. Most entries followed the author’s last name, but Maunsell also included subject subheadings. For instance, ‘Comforts for the Sicke’, ‘Of Sinne against the holy Ghost’, ‘Of the heavie burden of Sin’, ‘Of Sin against the civile magistrates’, ‘True confession of Sinne’, and ‘Of the restitution of a Sinner’ all appeared on a single page.38 Such subheadings were used both to create a finding aid for books without known authors and for cross-​references to entries for named authors who appeared elsewhere in the catalogue. The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes equally contributed to a sense of the temporality of the print trade by attempting to lend a conceptual order and organization to sixteenth-​century books. Maunsell had planned three primary categories. After volumes devoted to religion and science, he announced ‘I should proceede to the thirde and last part, which is of Humanity’, and will ‘concerne matters of Delight and Pleasure’, such as ‘Gramer, Logick, Rethoricke, Lawe, Historie, Poetrie, Policie, &c’.39 Maunsell’s

Cataloguing the Past    53 episteme posits ‘Delight and Pleasure’ as the catch-​all designation for writing that offers no immediate utility. We might recognize the slightly uneasy allegiance between language, philosophy, government, history, and literature in the disciplines we have inherited from this world-​view. ‘Humanity’ is the category for knowledge that exceeds the practical value offered by the study of medicine and divinity. The breadth of this field posed its own practical challenge for Maunsell, who found that the third part of his planned catalogue eluded him: ‘finding it so troublesome to get sight of Books, and so tedious to digest into any good methode, I have thought good first to publish the two more necessarie parts, which if I may perceave to be well liked of, will whet me on to proceed in the rest’.40 Despairing at the effort required to identify and impose a logical method on books of pleasure and delight, the bookseller hedged his bets on the market for The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes and at first invested in the parts that readers would find most useful. Maunsell never did proceed to the rest of his catalogue. Perhaps there was not enough demand to justify the publication, but it is also likely that he was daunted by the sheer scale of cataloguing the humanities. This ‘business’, Maunsell anticipated in 1595, ‘is not to be performed, as the Invention of any booke’, that is, as the method of discovery laid out in any single piece of work.41 Rather, the effort ‘will aske long time to finde, and many places to search’ before anyone ‘may thinke he commeth neer the number of good books that have been published’.42 The limits of The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes were clear to Maunsell, who incorporated the gaps in his knowledge into the material design of the volume. Because he was committed to including only books that he had seen himself, the project would always be partial, in both senses of the word. So Maunsell devised a textual format that would accommodate books that his buyers might see, leaving ‘blancke roome here and there throughout my booke, that what I have left out may easily bee inserted, or what new Booke commeth may be placed in due order’.43 The result, for Maunsell and the compilers of other early modern catalogues, was a material form that could develop in response to the information it contained—​as well as any new information it might ever contain in the future. Catalogues frequently stretched the affordances of the codex to the breaking point by inserting blank leaves, devising systems of cross-​referenced entries, or allowing for handwritten annotations that treat the book as a living repository. We have multiple annotated copies of the 1620 Catalogue Univeralis Librorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana. One was probably interleaved under Bodley’s Librarian Thomas Barlow in the 1650s and another was used in an unidentified collection around 1748.44 In Maunsell’s case, several readers took advantage of the catalogue’s open and expansive format, both in early modern England and across the centuries, inserting new entries in the blank spaces under headings or even interleaving the volume to provide more space for their notes.45 Through a process of addition, accretion, and expansion, the history of English print developed out of the conceptual categories and material strategies devised to help sixteenth-​century London booksellers navigate the commercial market. Catalogues were both a record of the systems for acquiring and accessing books in early modern England and a template that would support work towards future literary and textual

54   Megan HefferNan histories. Methods for describing books and arranging them for discovery and retrieval—​and even the blank space in which to record them—​became foundational to generations of print historiography. The catalogue was not a neutral tool or method; rather, the list of books defined the history it was telling. By attempting to sort books by author and subject, and by predicting the inherent breakdown of this impossible project, The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes turned individual titles into units of measurement, a metric that can gauge trends in a broad field of cultural production. Cataloguing created a dynamic order that makes it possible to relate discrete titles to one another and, ultimately, to learn about their development over time. Two centuries later, a copy of The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes was owned by William Herbert (1718–​95), the polymath draper and bibliographer who was an important contributor to the history of English printing. Now at the Henry E. Huntington Library, Herbert’s copy demonstrates how Maunsell’s organization inspired later chronological and periodized histories of the print trade. Herbert annotated Maunsell extensively.46 His copy is interleaved, with multiple sheets between openings, and it contains smaller slips, some of which are tipped in to the binding and some of which remain loose in the volume. Herbert also wrote directly on the pages of The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes, both filling the blanks with more books, as Maunsell had intended, and introducing cross-​references to items elsewhere in the volume. Herbert’s hand shows that he returned to his notes multiple times, writing primarily in ink, but adding details from external reference works in red and numbering entries in pencil. For instance, he speculated about Maunsell’s entry for ‘An Harmony of the Confessions of the reformed Churches’ printed at Cambridge in 1586: ‘This book was stayed from printing, by a letter from the Abp. of Cant . . . How it happ[ene]d to be printed I do not know.’ He reports that ‘For some special causes’ the book was ‘rejected & not allow’d to be printed’, quoting from the archbishop’s letter, but then adds ‘for the same reasons, I presume, he would have had it stay’d from at Cambridge; and yet it was printed’.47 In this protracted study of the English print trade, Herbert was treating The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes as something between a source for his research and a filing system for his working papers. His copy was the foundation for a bibliographic practice that aimed to fill the gaps in the partial record of print Maunsell had begun nearly two centuries earlier. Herbert used the volume as a valuable resource in his decades-​ long revision of Joseph Ames’s Typographical Antiquities, being an Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Printing in Great Britain (1749). Ames was an antiquary and book collector, as well as an early proponent of returning to primary sources in the study of print. He was also the first bibliographer who ‘made typographical analysis the basis for dating’.48 Typographical Antiquities was arranged ‘as near as possible into a sort of chronological order of time, beginning with each Printer’s first work, then those books of his which followed; except those without a date, which are put at the end’.49 The scaffolding of this chronology allowed Herbert to expand and develop the history of English printers after Ames’s death. Working from Ames’s interleaved copy of Typographical Antiquities, Herbert published three revised volumes between 1785 and 1790.50

Cataloguing the Past    55 Herbert read voraciously in this process, delving into the early printed books held in private and public libraries, as well as the recent work of other antiquarians and book collectors. He even looked beyond work on typography to the emerging field of literary history. In this moment of consolidating the disciplines of literature and bibliography, I argue elsewhere, the first forays into a history of print were cross-​pollinated with a new cultural investment in the chronological development of poetry.51 For instance, Herbert filled out the list that Ames had attributed to the master printer Richard Tottel by comparing Typographical Antiquities to Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry, published in three volumes between 1774 and 1781. Tottel is today most known for Songes and Sonettes, often called ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’, which is famous as ‘one of the most important single volumes in the history of English literature’, because ‘the beginning of modern English verse may be said to date from its publication’.52 But Songes and Sonettes was nowhere on Ames’s list of Tottel’s books, likely because there are relatively few remaining copies.53 In 1785, Herbert added ‘ “Songes and Sonnettes of Henry Earl of Surrey”, & others’ to Typographical Antiquities, and he cited Warton as the source for his discovery, along with the observation that this book was ‘Frequently printed, and yet very scarce’.54 In this way, the literary history of Tottel’s Songes and Songes, which figures the book as an origin point that divides English lyric modernity from its medieval past, is written into the material history of print. A consistent commitment to chronology—​the forward progress of both print and literature—​made it possible for Herbert to splice together these two systems for measuring the development of English culture. Time was figured as continuous, measured, and universal, an orderly system onto which multiple overlapping histories could be mapped. Chronology was a belated innovation of history, associated with the rise of modern disciplinary formations in the later eighteenth century ‘[o]‌ur critical practices depend on it’, de Grazia concludes in a recent study of periodization. Chronology ‘performs a double critical function: it shuts the canon off from the world as a timeless self-​contained literary object, but it also opens it up to biography and history’.55 The distinction between the histories told by Maunsell and Ames—​and between Herbert’s use of each—​is illustrative of this transformation. Where the sixteenth-​century stationer felt the profound limits of his method and represented those gaps through the blank spaces in the design of his book, for Ames the impulse to read and think chronologically was a safeguard against the gaps in his own knowledge, which could be resolved by generations of future historians. As more research into the print trade was conducted, Typographical Antiquities would be updated again by Thomas Dibdin in 1810, further extending the revisions begun by Herbert. While the chronological figuration of time made it possible to craft an endlessly expandable history of print—​one that still underpins studies of the textual past today—​ it also foreclosed modes of reading and historicizing that did not identify the point of origin as the primary locus of meaning. For Ames, Herbert, and Dibdin—​and for the generations of bibliographers who followed the model that they launched—​early printed books were lashed into an order based on publication dates and, more narrowly, on the date of first editions, even if books went on to be reprinted for decades. Tottel’s

56   Megan HefferNan Songes and Sonettes is a case in point, since Herbert cited the first edition from June 1557 without reference to the (at least) ten further printings of the collection by 1587.56 The effect was to portray a book like Songes and Sonettes as the product of a single moment in time, fixing it in one position within the forward development of the print trade. The multiple editions of Typographical Antiquities were predicated on the assumption that a properly historical perspective required books to remain absent and distant, impervious to both the material practices and scholarly ideologies that were continually adjusting how they were understood in later moments. Herbert’s own method shows the potential shortcomings of figuring time chronologically. Like all of us who take notes, he sometimes wrote on whatever he had close to hand. Amazingly, one of his working slips was the back of a letter requesting references for ‘the character of Margaret Coule, a servant who lately lived with you as a cook’.57 (See Fig. 3.1.) Now loose inside the Huntington’s interleaved copy of Maunsell, this letter was penned by one Rose Dea and begs to know ‘whether she is sober, honest’, and most of all, ‘whether she understands common pastry’.58 It is startling to find this note addressed to the woman of the house, perhaps Herbert’s wife or perhaps his housekeeper, within an intellectual project committed to filtering out the intrusion of the present upon the past. The substrate on which Herbert wrote his bibliography holds the history of how he created a tool to visualize prior moments in time, even as he was simultaneously writing over both the materials and the people who supported his work. Jotted down on the back of a castaway piece of paper, a recycled trace of household maintenance, Herbert’s print history emblematizes the profound losses that follow from periodization. A commitment to chronology divided the past from the present, imposing a boundary between the practices of the early modern printing house and the lived experience of the bibliographers and the literary historians charged with explaining those acts of production. Attempts to frame the English book trade as a legible chronology also obscured the hidden labour of care that made Herbert’s project possible. The stories of how premodern books—​and the people who invested their labour in understanding them—​endured, of how the past lived on into the future, vanished without a trace. Ultimately, early printed books were lifted out of the forward progress of time, depicted as a singular event rather than ongoing processes with a duration that reaches beyond the moment of their initial creation.

Books in Time: Institutional Labour If we need to expand the frameworks through which we encounter textual histories, recognizing their embeddedness in a transtemporal cycle of book production and use, what other stories should a polychronic history of the book include? How might bibliography, a field that developed out of an ideological commitment to chronology, expand to accommodate the multiple moments in time that coalesce within the trajectory of any one printed text? Joshua Calhoun urges us to account for the non-​human materials

Cataloguing the Past    57

Fig. 3.1  Reference for Margaret Coule reused as scratch paper by the bibliographer William Herbert. Loose in Andrew Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (1595), Rare Books 54169, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

that record human thought and desire, attending to how ‘the affordances of a particular media form are determined by the affordances of the available plants, animals, and minerals used to create those forms’.59 While a focus on ecology offers the potential to refract and multiply our textual histories, Calhoun collapses the span of time between early modern acts of composition and the proliferating moments in which archives of the past have been received. The result—​like the bibliographies of Ames, Herbert, and Dibdin—​is to pry the records of early modernity apart from the movement of time. Of the rare book libraries that now house much of the history of early print, Calhoun

58   Megan HefferNan proposes that we ‘imagine the preservation of books as an ungrounded activity that just happens’, forgetting that ‘books are preserved in and from an environment’. Libraries, on this account, aspire to be placeless through their attempts to mitigate the local effects of climate: ‘What are we supposed to call the environment of the British Library? It is London, but it could be anywhere. Or nowhere.’60 Yet the environments that sustain early modern texts are as much a product of time as of place. More than a building in London, or anywhere, the British Library is an institution that was forged at the epicentre of a global empire that drew material wealth from colonial lands and peoples for centuries. Like all research centres, it continues to exist today through a tremendous investment of financial and human capital. Preservation and conservation are a case in point, since these activities require intensive labour from skilled professionals with advanced training. These fields were established as disciplines in the late twentieth century, specifically in response to the ecological disaster of the flood of Florence in 1966.61 The libraries that steward the past forward into the future are themselves flagrantly multi-​temporal, and their infrastructures weave these conglomerated threads of time through every fibre of our textual scholarship. ‘Bibliographic description, that most elementary form of book history,’ Knight observes, ‘operates precisely by mediating between institutions and “past forms” ’, navigating the ‘conflicting polychronic intricacy’ of our archives.62 To understand these institutions as resistant to history, or as attempts to sidestep time and place, as Calhoun does, is to foreclose the opportunity to interrogate their foundation and maintenance. It is to actively suppress the lives of people, both known and unknown, who made it possible to construct modern chronologies of print. One way to access these stories, even if they remain partial or incomplete, is to attend to the active formation of our textual histories, recovering the labour that lingers within the institutional forms of modern libraries, as well as in the material tools through which readers navigate those spaces. The broad outlines of the periodization established by eighteenth-​ century antiquarians persisted largely without challenge. Even as aspects of Ames’s and Herbert’s print histories were overturned in the twentieth century, their commitment to chronology was, if anything, intensified. As Laurie Maguire has argued, the New Bibliographers aspired to a scientific study of early modern print, developing an ‘objective, factual’ approach to textual criticism that ultimately resulted in ‘a taxonomic tidying of English literature’.63 The basic unit of this taxonomy was the edition, because the chronology of production was essential to the histories of authorial agency that lay buried within the commercial transactions of the print trade. The New Bibliography was invested, particularly in the case of Shakespeare, in ‘when these plays were printed and by whom, whether they were published according to the Stationers’ Company regulations . . . and why the dates and other information in their imprints had been falsified’.64 While the New Bibliographers developed important methods of textual analysis, their work has been critiqued for advancing grand narratives that are at odds with their evidence.65 This shortcoming has been particularly apparent, Lesser argues, in the ‘ideological barrier’ of ‘thinking in terms of editions rather than individual copies’.66 To move past these limits, he has urged a focus on multiple surviving copies of a

Cataloguing the Past    59 book; incorporating the particularity of each textual object can ‘foreground[d]‌the very long lives of these books’, showing ‘how our scholarly perceptions of them have changed and continue to change’.67 By reading for the variance between copies—​for how they have been bound and rebound, trimmed, annotated, soaked and stained, torn, and variously aged, or not—​we can begin to understand how the ‘work that collectors, curators, and scholars have put into these books has transformed the very objects that we study, rewriting the past’.68 Catalogues and other library records hold an important source of evidence for the history of this dynamic negotiation between present and past. First, catalogues mediate between the general and particular—​the ideal form of the edition and the granular details of a specific copy. They include details about publication, which was common across the edition, and in some cases, descriptions of condition, particularly for excessively damaged copies. Second, catalogues testify to the life of a book within an institution, to how it moved between shelves or collections, to how it has been rebound to join it to or separate it from related titles, to how it was preserved or has vanished with the passage of time.69 In other words, the evolving records of research institutions offer a diachronic perspective on the points of intersection between the material and conceptual history of the book, illuminating how the textual past has been remade to fit into systems of organization that we too often assume to be natural or timeless. In closing, I offer an example of how institutional context can redress the partial history of print by moving beyond the strictures of chronology. Instead of lifting books out of the moment in which they were encountered, successive library records can ground a textual history in multiple overlapping times, from publication, to early modern reception, to the long afterlife of printed books in the hands of modern collectors and networks of scholarly knowledge-​making. The scaffolding of Ames’s Typographical Antiquities was a template that guided the acquisitions of successive generations of book collectors, both private and institutional, and, as time went on, their priorities extended from books that emblematized the conceptual ideal of the edition to fragments that flagrantly defied bibliographic norms and forms. Arthur Freeman summarizes the late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century market for fragments as ‘motivated by an interest in printing history . . . or by editorial concerns, when scraps provided specific textual authority’.70 Unlike ‘[t]‌raditional bibliophiles’, who preferred pristine ‘perfect’ copies, a ‘new and special tolerance for the ugly duckling’ took hold at the end of the eighteenth century.71 One of these newly tolerant collectors was Francis Douce (1757–​1834), who ‘for almost the first time in British bibliophily’, purchased fragments not just for evidence of print history but ‘as specimens of literary text’, eventually leading to what ‘may be the earliest catalogue to provide bibliographically serious descriptions for such material’.72 Defying the norms and conventions of textual value, Douce’s collecting also pushed the limits of the catalogue, particularly when his fragments were absorbed into the broader context of the institutional collection. His tastes were omnivorous, ranging from coins and cakes of ink, to rare books and manuscripts on a broad range of topics, to specimens of bookbindings.73 Douce served briefly as Keeper of Manuscripts for the

60   Megan HefferNan British Museum, but his term ended unhappily, and when he passed away in 1834, he left much of his collection to the Bodleian Library. Not fully catalogued prior to arriving in Oxford, Douce’s bequest was a challenge to reduce into a navigable order. In the case of his fragments of premodern books and bindings, largely mounted in scrapbooks, his collections required ongoing cataloguing and rehousing, highlighting the porous boundary between these arms of archival maintenance.74 Douce kept a ‘List of my ancient fragments of printed books’, now mounted on stubs as the first few leaves in a slight cardboard album.75 The list unfolds around two vertical rules in red, marking out a manuscript that gives just abbreviated titles and the last name of the printer. But the early sheets do not match the rest of the guard book, which is nearly—​but not quite—​blank. This hybrid album emblematizes the astounding polychronicity of archives of early print. A slip pasted into the opening describes Douce’s own debt to earlier bibliographers: Douce was in the habit of preserving every fragment which came into his possession; he carefully examined all the old bindings of his books and thus uncovered specimens not only of many rare editions of known works, but of some romances of which not a single printed copy is now known to exist. These fragments are placed under their respective printers, in the same order as they appear (which is nearly chronological) in Herbert’s Edition of Ames’ Typographical Antiquities.76

The picture that emerges is of a relentless hunt for every scrap of evidence that might fill gaps in a print history that Ames had begun and that Herbert continued. Chronology was the ideological framework that made this material expansion possible. As Douce was riffling the bindings of his books to find the partial remnants of more books, his search was guided by the conceptual order that bibliography imposed on the unruly reality of the extant material record. This album is also a testament to the continual movement of texts through institutional book collections in which multiple histories jostle for prominence. While the pages that follow Douce’s list are nearly blank, they contain fragmentary evidence of the function for which the book was first fashioned. Some of the pages display outlines that limn the space where fragments used to be pasted down, either with the darker outlines of aged paper or with offsets from their blue wrappers. Each leaf is headed with two sets of notes. The first is a large scrawl—​in the same hand but sometimes in black ink, sometimes in pencil—​that records bibliographic descriptions of fragmentary texts: titles, publishers, leaves, and often a shelfmark that corresponds to Douce’s collection of fragments. The second, a tiny precise hand in red ink written over or under the first, comments again and again: ‘taken out—​4 March 1891 as apparently not Douce. E.W.B.N.’.77 This second set of notes was in the hand of Edward Nicholson, who was the head of the Bodleian Library from 1882 until his death in 1912. Nicholson was an eccentric figure, recalled as a ‘tornado’ in the library, with the ‘billowing sleeves of his M.A. gown scattering the papers of library readers as he dashed down Duke Humphrey’.78 Nicholson’s tenure in the Bodleian was a frenzy of reform: ‘he aimed at a

Cataloguing the Past    61 perfection that it was impossible to achieve. The merciless logic with which he applied sound principles too frequently led him to absurd conclusions.’79 In his notes on the movement of fragments that were, he ultimately concluded, ‘not Douce’, we can see Nicholson grappling with a historiographic commitment to (at least) three moments in time: the production of early modern print, contemporary provenance, and the forward maintenance of the past for future readers. Chronology could not ultimately smooth over the gaps between these discordant times because the partial, degraded state of the fragments resisted the informational logic that animated the bibliography sponsored by multiple editions of Typographical Antiquities. This album is the discarded exoskeleton of a provisional catalogue, an attempt within the much vaster infrastructure of the Bodleian to order, organize, and house slight fragments of the textual past. If that attempt at fitting a clutch of fragments into the structural outline of modern bibliography was ultimately impermanent, it is the more astounding to encounter its material and epistemological archaeology in the husk of the scrapbook left in the library today. What remains are traces of the movement of the slight texts as they shuttled throughout the library on the way to a more permanent place to rest. These traces, to be clear, are expressions of the labour, time, and material resources invested in preserving the textual past within the environment of the library. Like Nicholson’s initials, which simultaneously evoke and obscure the outlines of curatorial agency, this discarded scrapbook captures some of the myriad aporias in our histories, calling attention to the infelicities of design and the points at which knowledge breaks down across time. It is a record of the intersection of the multiple moments in which the sixteenth-​century print trade was received and refashioned by modern readings of the past. The curatorial management of the Douce collection, in this remaindered album and elsewhere, ultimately persists as a shadow history that is recalcitrant to standard narratives of the development of premodern print. Although generations of scholarship on bibliography and the history of the book have explained the conditions that supported textual production in early modern England—​from the origins of rag paper, to the shape of the type that bit into those sheets under the weight of the press, to the economic decisions of the publishers who speculated on these books—​less attention has been directed to the significantly longer afterlife of the London print trade. This legacy has assumed several competing figures and shapes as a result of the evolving discipline of bibliography and the organizational strategies prompted by that intellectual practice. Our institutional collections developed out of an Enlightenment impulse to catalogue, to reduce the complexities of a material record into an ideal chronology that can demonstrate the progress of technology and culture. But the very power of such models of historiography also risked the loss of a much more fitful—​and much more human—​ narrative of the improvised and continually evolving negotiation of the gap between past and present. The history of the collections in which these archives endured offers a fuller sense of the value that has been accorded to the textual past at distinct moments in time.

62   Megan HefferNan

Notes 1. John Donne, ‘A Valediction of the Book’, ll. 10, 12, 17–​18, in The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 268–​72. 2. Donne, ‘A Valediction of the Book’, ll. 1, 19−20, 24−25. 3. Donne, ‘A Valediction of the Book’, ll. 20, 4. 4. On the early modern rag and paper trade, see Heidi Craig, ‘Rags, Ragpickers, and Early Modern Papermaking’, Literature Compass, 16/​5 (2019), https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​lic3.12523; on the array of activities undertaken by publishers, see Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); on the numerous interventions of readers, see William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 5. Whitney Trettien, ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies’, PMLA 133/​5 (2018), 1138. 6. Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 30. 7. G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4, 5. 8. Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis, 14. 9. Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Shakespeare and “Textual Studies”: Evidence, Scale, Periodization and Access’, in Lukas Erne (ed.), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 23. 10. On the threat that the turn of the millennium posed to digital records, see James Lichtenberg, ‘Y2K: Compliance or Chaos? Publishing Confronts the Millennium’, Journal of Electronic Publishing, 5/​1 (1999), https://​doi.org/​10.3998/​3336​451.0005.104. 11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (new edn., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 46. 12. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 9. 13. Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 7. 14. Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered, 4. 15. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 65. 16. Eric Weiskott, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350−1650 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), p. xiv. 17. David Matthews, ‘The Medieval Invasion of Early-​Modern England’, New Medieval Literatures, 10 (2008), 229. 18. Matthews, ‘The Medieval Invasion’, 238. 19. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 29. 20. Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Modern Divide: From Either Side’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37/​3 (2007), 453. 21. Brian Cummings and James Simpson, ‘Introduction’, in Cummings and Simpson (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 22. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 11, 12.

Cataloguing the Past    63 23. Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory, 13. 24. Trettien, ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading’, 1136−1137. 25. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch, ‘Introduction’, in Gillespie and Lynch (eds.), The Unfinished Book, Oxford Twenty-​First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 12. 26. Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 23. 27. Nigel Smith, ‘Time Boundaries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies’, in Kristen Poole and Owen Williams (eds.), Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth-​Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 38. 28. Andrew Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (London: John Windet, 1595), sig. π4r. 29. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, sig. π4r. 30. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, sig. π4r. 31. On Bale’s bibliographic work, see Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1976). 32. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, sig. π4r. 33. Christian Coppens, ‘A Census of Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Catalogues up to 1600: Some Provisional Conclusions’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102/​4 (2008), 558. 34. Coppens, ‘A Census’, 561. 35. David McKitterick, ‘Book Catalogues: Their Varieties and Uses’, in Peter Davison (ed.), The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-​Century Bibliography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162. 36. McKitterick, ‘Book Catalogues’, 162. 37. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, sig. π1r; Andrew Maunsell, The Second Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (London: John Windet, 1595), unsigned. 38. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, sig. I6v. 39. Maunsell, The Second Part of the Catalogue, sig. 2¶1v. 40. Maunsell, The Second Part of the Catalogue, sig. 2¶1v. 41. Maunsell, The Second Part of the Catalogue, sig. 2¶1v. 42. Maunsell, The Second Part of the Catalogue, sig. 2¶1v. 43. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, sig. π4r. 44. Thomas James, Catalogus Universalis Librorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Oxford: John Lichfield and Jacob Short, 1620). These two copies are held at the Bodleian Library as Library Records e. 275 and MS. Eng. Misc. c. 106. 45. Annotated copies of The Catalogue of English Printed Books are held at Colchester; Cambridge University Library; Trinity College, Cambridge; the Henry E. Huntington Library; Harvard University; and the University of Michigan. For this list, which is not a complete census, see Elisabeth Leedham-​Green, ‘Maunsell, Andrew (b. c. 1560, d. in or after 1604?), Bookseller and Bibliographer’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sept. 2004, https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​ref:odnb/​18379. 46. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, Henry E. Huntington Library, Rare Books 54169. 47. Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, interleaved facing sig. D1r. 48. Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis, 8. 49. Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities, Being an Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Printing in Great Britain (London: W. Faden, 1749), unpaginated front matter.

64   Megan HefferNan 50. Robin Myers, ‘Herbert, William (1718–​1795), Bibliographer and Printseller’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sept. 2004, https://​doi-​org.ezpr​oxy.dep​aul.edu/​ 10.1093/​ref:odnb/​13062. 51. Megan Heffernan, Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 51. 52. Hyder Rollins (ed.), Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–​1587), 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), ii. 4. 53. Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities, 3 vols. (London: J. Robinson, 1749), i. 289. 54. Joseph Ames and William Herbert, Typographical Antiquities, 3 vols. (London: T. Payne et al, 1785), i. 812. 55. Margreta de Grazia, Four Shakespearean Period Pieces (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 61. 56. For the most up-​to-​date print history of Songes and Sonettes, see J. Christopher Warner, The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557: Songs and Sonnets in the Summer of the Martyrs’ Fires (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 11. 57. Rose Dea to the Herbert household, 8 Mar. 1774, in the Huntington Library’s copy of Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue, Rare Books 54169. 58. Rose Dea to the Herbert household, 8 Mar. 1774. 59. Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 8. 60. Calhoun, The Nature of the Page, 141. 61. On Peter Waters’s pathbreaking work in restoring the early modern printed books in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, see Sheila Waters, Waters Rising: Letters from Florence (Ann Arbor: Legacy Press, 2016). On the development of conservation from a craft into an academic science, see Ellen Cunningham-​Kruppa, Mooring a Field: Paul N. Banks and the Education of Library and Archives Conservators (Ann Arbor: Legacy Press, 2019). 62. Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘Institutional Forme’, in Gillespie and Lynch (eds.), The Unfinished Book, 250. 63. Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41. 64. Lesser, Ghost, Holes, Rips and Scrapes, 20. 65. See e.g. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts; Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 66. Lesser, Ghost, Holes, Rips and Scrapes, 20. 67. Zachary Lesser, ‘The Material Text Between General and Particular, Edition and Copy’, English Literary Renaissance, 50/​1 (2019), 83, 85. 68. Lesser, ‘The Material Text’, 86. 69. On how research into library catalogues and internal records can contribute to the history of early modern books, see Tara L. Lyons, ‘New Evidence for Ben Jonson’s Epigrammes (ca. 1612) in Bodleian Library Records’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 114/​3 (2020), 343–​364. 70. Arthur Freeman, ‘Everyman and Others, Part I: Some Fragments of Early English Printing, and Their Preservers’, The Library, 9/​3 (2008), 273. 71. Freeman, ‘Everyman and Others, Part I’, 273. 72. Freeman, ‘Everyman and Others, Part I’, 273–​274.

Cataloguing the Past    65 73. For a broad survey of Douce’s collecting, see the special issue ‘Francis Douce Centenary’, Bodleian Quarterly Record, 7/​81 (1934). 74. For instance, the scrapbook containing binding panels was so heavy and unwieldy that in 1964 it was broken up and the collection was remounted on individual sheets of stiff board now housed in archival boxes. See Giles Barber, ‘Bindings from Oxford Libraries, VI: The Douce Scrapbook and a Piece of Early English Leatherwork’, Bodleian Library Record, 9/​2 (1974), 167. 75. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Library Records d. 940. The majority of pages in this guardbook are unfoliated. 76. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Library Records d. 940. 77. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Library Records d. 940. 78. Edmund Craster, History of the Bodleian Library, 1845–​1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 153. 79. Craster, History of the Bodleian Library, 155.

Select Bibliography Coppens, Christian, ‘A Census of Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Catalogues up to 1600: Some Provisional Conclusions’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102/​4 (2008), 557–​565. Cummings, Brian, and Simpson, James (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). De Grazia, Margreta, Four Shakespearean Period Pieces (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Gillespie, Alexandra, and Lynch, Deirdre (eds.), The Unfinished Book Oxford Twenty-​First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Knight, Jeffrey Todd, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Lesser, Zachary, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). McKitterick, David, ‘Book Catalogues: Their Varieties and Uses’, in Peter Davison (ed.), The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-​Century Bibliography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 161–​175. Norris, Dorothy May, A History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing Methods 1100–​1850 (London: Grafton & Co., 1939). Smith, Nigel, ‘Time Boundaries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies’, in Kristen Poole and Owen Williams (eds.), Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth-​Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 36–​52. Trettien, Whitney, ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies’, PMLA 133/​5 (2018), 1135–​51. Underwood, Ted, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

Chapter 4

The Scale of B o ok History Data, Distance, Description Jeffrey Todd Knight

To speak of scale in the field of book history is to acknowledge that the master disciplines of twenty-​first-​century Anglo-​American academe are business and engineering. Not by accident has the last two decades’ ‘intense engagement with problems of scale’1 in the academic humanities coincided with the near-​total ascendance of a global tech industry. Products and services ‘scale’. The fruits of literary or historical study? It’s complicated. Even at the height of what the Stanford Literary Lab called a ‘moment of euphoria’ for the quantitative humanities, scaled-​up models for literary history struggled to yield insights about literature that were as robust or compelling to scholars as those of the native form of small-​scale analysis, close reading.2 Early modernists have an oft-​noted claim to the ‘macro’ side of the scalar debate, the intellectual home to ‘distant reading’, ‘macroanalysis’, ‘Big History’, and other digital data-​oriented approaches to humanistic inquiry.3 Shakespeare’s singular place in the literary canon has meant that an ambitious quantitative methodology has developed organically among scholars of early modern writing since the nineteenth century, when the tools of classical and biblical philology were first applied systematically to English literature. The Shakespeare variorum editions and concordances that scholars relied on in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, Alan Galey writes, ‘proto-​digital experiments in the management and visualization of an archive’.4 In the digital era, linguists and lexicographers specializing in early modern corpora were building e-​text interfaces and applications for word-​frequency measurement long before the Digital Humanities (DH) was an established area of study.5 The recent fervent use of machine classification in DH to identify aspects of literary style—​a distinctive ‘late style’, for example, or a genre’s stylistic fingerprint—​has a long-​standing counterpart in the scholarship on early modern drama, where competing claims of author and compositor

The Scale of Book History    67 identification are often, though not uncontroversially, arbitrated through quantitative modelling.6 As literary and historical periods lose some institutional priority to the inevitably larger time frames of data-​oriented research methods,7 the study of early modern Europe has been buoyed by a ready analogy between digital media and the historical rise of machine printing, which seems continually to renew part of the period’s claim to attention. As early as 1962, Marshall McLuhan called for the investigation of then-​new ‘electric media’ through writings by Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Donne, which he took to be prophetic on the socio-​psychological effects of the Gutenberg printing press: ‘We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.’8 Elizabeth Eisenstein explicitly took up McLuhan’s provocations in her magisterial study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), which cemented the notion of a printing revolution on a par with the technological upheaval of the modern era: ‘the process that began in the mid-​fifteenth century has not ceased to gather momentum in the age of the computer print-​out and the television guide. Indeed the later phases of an on-​going communications revolution seem altogether relevant to what is happening within our homes, universities, or cities at present.’9 At the turn of the twenty-​first century, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday prompted leading early modernists to take seriously the heuristic of a ‘Renaissance Computer’, the idea that ‘many of the functions and effects of the modern computer were imagined, anticipated, or even sought after long before the invention of modern computing technology’—​for example, in Ramist method, printed mise-​en-​page, Erasmian commonplace books, or humanist encyclopedias.10 Recently, Ann Blair has ascribed the conspicuously modern experience of ‘information overload’ to European scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ‘concerns, notably about the overabundance of books and the frailty of human resources for mastering them’ led to a flourishing of reference tools, many of which remain with us.11

Thinking Big The rootedness of early modern book history in a number-​crunching, big-​picture literary historiography (and here I use ‘literary’ in the capacious sense) is the field’s most familiar origin story. In his frequently referenced 1983 essay, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Robert Darnton noted that book history was ‘one of the few sectors in the human sciences where there is a mood of expansion’ and that the ‘current work represents a departure from the established strains of scholarship’, namely microscopic textual criticism and bibliographic description:

68   Jeffrey TodD Knight The new strain developed during the 1960s in France . . . The new book historians brought the subject within the range of themes studied by the ‘Annales school’ of socioeconomic history. Instead of dwelling on the fine points of bibliography, they tried to uncover the general pattern of book production and consumption over long stretches of time. They compiled statistics from requests for privileges (a kind of copyright), analyzed the contents of private libraries, and traced ideological currents through neglected genres. Rare books and fine editions had no interest for them.12

Likewise, in his 2018 monograph-​length introduction to the field, What is the History of the Book?, James Raven notes that ‘[i]‌n the early days of modern book history’, Annales-​ influenced historians such as Darnton ‘sought to bridge the early theoretical as well as bibliometric emphases of French and Continental contributions with the long tradition of collection-​based bibliographical and empirical scholarship in the Anglo-​American world’.13 In literary studies, D. F. McKenzie is credited mainly with throwing off bibliography’s empirical pretences and reinventing the subfield as a ‘sociology of texts’ that embraces the ‘dependence upon interpretative structures’.14 But that is only part of the story. By his own account, McKenzie appealed to sociology for that discipline’s facility with the ‘full range of social realities’, which he set against the narrow remit of not only analytic bibliography but also Russian formalism, Fredson Bowers’s editorial theory, the New Criticism, structuralism, and post-​structuralism.15 Where sociology promised a holism of perspective, McKenzie reckoned, these divergent schools of literary study were fatally limited by a ‘shared view of the self-​sufficient nature of the work of art or text, and in their agreement on the significance of its every verbal detail, however small’.16 Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts urged book historians to think bigger in ways that were overlooked or slow to be adopted. I have argued elsewhere that McKenzie’s largely unheralded emphasis on ‘institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present’ contained the rudiments of a roving literary institutionalism (now associated with the later work of Bruno Latour) that has been promoted in recent years by critics such as Caroline Levine, Mark McGurl, and Rita Felski.17 Similarly, McKenzie’s call for bibliographers to abandon the purview of textual self-​sufficiency was paired in the 1999 volume’s companion piece on print in early New Zealand with a critique of the geopolitical boundaries that constrain the scope and standpoint of book-​historical research. Only in the last ten or twelve years has anything like a global or transnational turn in book history taken hold as scholars have built on the successes of translation studies, postcolonial history, and the revisionist history of printing.18 Early modernist book historians especially have been wary of the distortions of a national orientation since the Gutenberg press was swept up in nationalist (and later, imperialist) claims to innovation, and because nations themselves fail to capture the incipient forms of early modern statehood. Books don’t respect the boundaries of locality or even language either, and never more so than in the period following the break-​up of Latin Christendom and preceding the standardization of print vernaculars. Recent work by literary scholars such as Warren Boutcher and A. E. B. Coldiron (including

The Scale of Book History    69 Coldiron’s chapter in the current volume) has reaffirmed the indispensably comparative dimension of early modern book history and shown how poised the field is to contribute to the much-​touted, macroscopic disciplinary projects of a reimagined world literature and world philology.19 Still, if there is a micro-​scale of study against which McKenzie positions himself in his field-​defining Bibliography, it is the original literary microanalysis of formalist close reading. Memorably, the centrepiece of McKenzie’s critique is a deft unmasking of the canonical New Critical essay, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946), in which William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley work to isolate a sphere of ‘internal’ textual evidence (‘every verbal detail, however small’) from external considerations such as author biography and intention, which they argue should not bear on a critic’s reading. McKenzie shows that in restricting the scope of textual analysis to only the words on the page, Wimsatt and Beardsley paradoxically lose sight of the texts they purport to analyse. The first four lines of their essay come from a liberally modernized edition of William Congreve’s Way of the World (1700), lines they read as evidence of Congreve’s writerly self-​effacement, but which do not in fact represent what Congreve wrote. In his own reading of the passage, McKenzie zooms in past the verbal details that preoccupy the New Critics to the minutiae of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, all substantially different in the modernized edition than in the original. The passage that Wimsatt and Beardsley attribute to Congreve in 1946, he finds, not only alters Congreve’s sense but reverses it, lending unearned support for the essay’s thesis: ‘One set of meanings [Congreve’s], which stress a writer’s presence in his work, is weakened in favour of a preconceived reading which would remove him from it.’20 In essence, McKenzie turns the method of microscopic close reading against its institutional architects. He goes closer than the New Critics’ scruples would allow, and in the play of scale, the ever-​ smaller particulates of typography point to worlds of meaning that elude the carefully circumscribed ‘verbal icon’. Book history’s now-​ingrained refusal of the cathexis of close reading is perhaps one reason why the field in its McKenzian guise has been reliably invoked as a model in the recent ‘reading wars’ or ‘method wars’ in literary studies, which brought scale as a methodological concept roaring into the discipline’s mainstream. To take a few prominent examples: Franco Moretti, in an opening salvo for ‘distant reading’ in ‘Graphs, Maps, Trees’ (2003), cites book history as the prototype for a collaborative, data-​driven approach that can give us ‘a more rational literary history’ than the one obtained by individuals poring over a small set of exemplary texts.21 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus in their vivisection of suspicious hermeneutics, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’ (2009), repeatedly appeal to book historians: first as ‘Those who take the greatest distance from symptomatic reading . . . as part of a larger project of attending to the material life of books’; second as archetypal ‘old’ surface readers, absorbed in ‘the literal surfaces of books themselves’; and third as a precursor to the ‘nonheroic critic’ who uses machine intelligence ‘to attain what has almost become taboo in literary studies: objectivity, validity, truth’.22 Heather Love, scrutinizing the metaphysics of depth in literary

70   Jeffrey TodD Knight interpretation, lists book history first among the critical practices forging a ‘break with the hegemony of close reading’, part of a ‘broadly sociological rejection of traditional literary methods’.23 James English, surveying these ‘new sociologies of literature’, places book history ‘among the approaches where affinities with sociology are strongest’, and as heir to the political imperative deriving from Raymond Williams ‘to “democratize” the “core circuit” of literary sociality, “restoring to view other vital nodes” in the productive process beyond the exclusive club of author, text, and reader’.24 Caroline Levine points to the ‘rich recent work on the history of the book’ on the first page of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015),25 a study whose aim is a programmatic expansion of close reading’s horizon of analysis. Katherine Bode, in an influential critique of how data science is applied to literature, takes Moretti and the macroanalysts to task for their ‘neglect of the activities and insights of textual scholarship: the bibliographical and editorial approaches that explore and explicate the literary-​historical record’.26 Bode locates the means to get beyond an increasingly stale debate between close and distant scales of analysis in that most humble genre of book-​historical research: the scholarly edition.

Getting Particular At a time when scholars in the humanities are enjoined to scale up in so many aspects of their work—​from methods of data collection to time-​period designations to meta-​ measurements of their own ‘impact’—​it goes against the grain somewhat to emphasize book history’s other lineage in a historiography of the small. But paradoxically, I would argue, as the disciplines of literature and history have sought more and more sweeping forms of methodological renewal in recent years, early modern book history has reinvested itself in particularity—​precisely those ‘rare’ and ‘fine points of bibliography’ that Darnton claimed in 1983 held no interest for the new and expanding field. Roger Chartier is the pivotal historian in this regard, having articulated not long after Darnton a ‘dissatisfaction with the history of the book in France in the last twenty or thirty years’, which had been ‘above all a question of constructing data sets, establishing quantitative thresholds, and noting the cultural equivalents of social differences’.27 The Annales approach was an essential step, Chartier argued, but it reinforced a ‘narrowly sociographic conception’ of reading that subordinated human embodiment, locality, and other cultural determinants to the abstractions of a social typology. ‘We must turn the perspective around and begin by designating the social areas in which each corpus of texts and each genre of printed matter circulates. Beginning with objects, in this fashion, rather than with classes or groups leads to considering that the French style of socio-​ cultural history has too long continued to exist on the basis of a mutilated conception of the social.’28 ‘Beginning with objects’ could serve as a motto for the variety of early modern book history that has flourished in literary studies since Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass crystallized a decade’s worth of scholarship on textual materiality and

The Scale of Book History    71 ‘unediting’ in their 1993 essay, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’. For De Grazia and Stallybrass in 1993, materiality meant the tangible properties of ‘work’, ‘word’, ‘character’, ‘author’, and ‘paper’ in a Shakespearean play text, small-​scale aspects of the book whose consideration, David Scott Kastan would note, had ‘for too long . . . been shunted off to unpopular bibliography courses or hidden among the offerings of the library school’.29 The renewed interest in literature’s objecthood was initially dressed in the language of Marxism (hence the nod to materialism), but it was as an alternative to the abstractions of theory and cultural studies that literary book history took hold.30 Where the dominant New Historicism spoke in totalizing terms about human subjects, texts as discourse, and the ‘circulation of energy’, early modernist book historians looked to the period-​specificities of authorship and the variant texts of King Lear and Hamlet, then to individual publishers and readers, empirical evidence of marginalia and ‘book use’, and the circulation of theatrical parts and other documents of early modern performance.31 Pressed to distinguish this version of book history from other forms of historicist literary scholarship at the turn of the twenty-​first century, Kastan remarked off-​handedly that ‘the difference may amount to little more than a greater delight in particularity’.32 But the thesis has been borne out, as a glance at the rhetoric of recent monograph publications will demonstrate. In a festschrift for Kastan taking stock of developments in the field, Heidi Brayman, Jesse Lander, and Zachary Lesser argue that early modern book history offers the discipline an ‘understanding of texts as objects produced by particular people in particular circumstances to speak to particular audiences’.33 Adam Hooks, in a study of Shakespeare’s booksellers, describes his process as ‘looking at the ways in which particular poems and plays were bought and sold within particular bookshops at particular times’.34 Joshua Calhoun, in a book on the eco-​materiality of early modern poetry, defines his focus as ‘a particular medium, paper, in a particular time and place, Renaissance England’.35 The currency of the particular—​particular agents, sites, historical moments, physical materials—​is easy to dismiss as antiquarianism in literary studies, a discipline with no coherent equivalent to, say, microhistory or microsociology in its advanced methodological repertoire. Since Nietzsche, an antiquarian stance towards literary history has been held up as a blinkered or naïve version of a critical stance.36 At turning points in the history of the discipline, when the scale and scope of analysis are being renegotiated, commentators have routinely looked to antiquarianism only to disavow it anew. The acute contraction of the literary object that took place under the practical and New Criticism of the mid-​twentieth century was a countermand to the model of a pedantic ‘historical scholar’, who will ‘spend a lifetime in compiling the data of literature and yet rarely or never commit himself to a literary judgment’.37 Fredric Jameson, inaugurating the era of historicist critique that extended the literary to encompass all of culture, singled out ‘simple antiquarianism’ for censure as bad-​faith ideology: not a principled refusal of abstraction, as the old historical scholars might have claimed, but a reactive empiricism that ‘is never a first-​degree position in its own right’.38 To dismiss particularity as antiquarian, however, is to evade obvious questions of its persistence and historical roles in the discipline (to say nothing of the contributions

72   Jeffrey TodD Knight of antiquarianism itself to literary history, which are currently being re-​evaluated).39 Catherine Gallagher has argued that the New Critics had their own ‘modernist emphasis on ‘particularity’, on meanings that were inextricable from their expression’, and that this emphasis was a veiled translation of ‘[t]‌heir sentiments about modern society . . . letting the “integrity” of the literary work stand in for the “integrity” of all forms of endangered specificity’.40 The historicists of the later twentieth century, though nominally concerned with the fungibility of expression, tethered the literary work to principles of period specificity and scholarship as Geertzian thick description, which recent commentators have attributed to anxiety or cynicism at the promised ‘end of history’ of the 1980s and 1990s.41 In either case, the turn to particularity has seemed to serve literary-​historical scholarship as a refuge from the contingency of events, a kind of methodological projection that becomes visible as such only in retrospect. What, then, drives the current particularism in early modern book history? Certainly it has loose affinities with concepts of ‘medium specificity’ that have gained purchase elsewhere in the humanities in an era of digital immediacy and virtuality.42 But its roots go deeper in the institutional history of literary study. The dominance of the McKenzian mode today has made it easy to forget that before bibliography was a sociology of texts, it was a fully-​fledged descriptive science with its microscopic lens trained on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. So central was the study of physical books to English as an emerging discipline that in 1913, R. B. McKerrow exhorted graduate students in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century literature to seek ‘elementary instruction in the mechanical details of book production’—​ideally a turn setting type on an Elizabethan printing press—​in order to become ‘scholars capable of serious work’.43 McKerrow’s objective was not merely to immerse students in a manual practice that shaped the works they study but to focus their attention on the particulars of books that made up the provisional, potentially distracting unities of literary history. The details of printing, he argued, need to be ‘grasped sufficiently clearly for the book to be always regarded not as a unit, but as an assemblage of parts each of which is the result of a clearly apprehended series of processes’.44 Beginning with objects in this sense was less a philosophical conviction born out of materialism as it would be for Chartier and McKenzie than it was a practical necessity in a time of unprecedented institutional expansion. As Fredson Bowers explained in his textbook Principles of Bibliographic Description (1949), published at the height of the unreformed field’s influence on the discipline, descriptive bibliographies ‘provide for the requirements of libraries and collectors. They serve as the permanent repository not merely for the “important” (which is a highly variable and subjective word) but for the relatively complete facts about the physical dress of a text . . . They are the foundation for literary history, and may indeed be literary histories in themselves.’45 Like his predecessors McKerrow and W. W. Greg, Bowers held that true bibliography was a bridge to authoritative literary criticism—​that critics need the facts about physical books to make reliable judgements about literature. But in codifying and systematizing the practice of bibliographic description, he laid the groundwork for its post-​war flowering as a para-​disciplinary aid to institution-​building. The following two decades

The Scale of Book History    73 saw unprecedented growth in Anglo-​American academic book collections and in descriptive-​bibliographic surrogates that facilitated archival work among a far-​flung, expanding humanities professoriate: ‘When scholars are distant from great collections, as frequently happens in the wide spaces of the United States, they may thereby be able to carry on researches of ultimate importance,’ Bowers wrote.46 The resurgence of a micro-​descriptive mode at our present time of institutional contraction is therefore as puzzling as it is conspicuous. The push to go big, to consolidate periods, to automate analysis, and generally ‘do more with less’ makes sense in an era of neoliberal austerity and decline for the academic humanities. Intellectually such postures can gain credence and heft from book history’s long association with big (or just bigger) data. But for early modernist book historians to fan out and focus on particular publishers or bookshops, ‘idiosyncratic mise-​en-​page’, or ‘the fibers in plant-​ based paper’ seems out of step, even wilfully so.47 To what purpose, we should ask, is an ever more granular articulation of the Shakespearean book trade or the materiality of early printed texts when the institutional basis for this form of knowledge—​research positions, funds, audiences—​is eroding?

The Microhistory of the Book Maybe an awareness of eroding future prospects is the point. In their recent reappraisal of the place of description in humanistic study, Stephen Best, Heather Love, and Sharon Marcus argue stirringly that description provides the material that gives future scholars (including the future self of the describer) the opportunity to engage differently with their objects, and serves as a building block for extending the collective and networked aspects of scholarly work across time. We see and want to encourage the essential generosity that can attach to description as a practice when it attends not only to its objects but also to the collective, uncertain, and ongoing activity of trying to get a handle on the world.48

That descriptive bibliography, the longest-​running explicitly descriptive practice in literary-​historical studies, is absent in Best, Love, and Marcus’s otherwise comprehensive account is not surprising; they focus on emergent modes of literalism and realism, humanists’ changing relationship to positive knowledge, and new configurations of agency and objectivity, all central in the current disciplinary vanguard. Yet it’s difficult not to think of the careful, indeed curatorial work of accounting for texts in their surviving forms as exemplary of a future-​oriented, network-​extending practice of literary-​historical observation. Here after all is where literary criticism and library cataloguing, judgement and preservation meet to define and make accessible the objects of inquiry. Here the question of instrumentality—​‘To what purpose?’—​is held in abeyance because the practice necessitates an open, unprejudiced sense of anticipation.

74   Jeffrey TodD Knight The describer cannot presume to know in advance what will be useful or generative to future readers. Descriptive bibliography as a branch of humanistic learning is a form of disciplined attention that precedes (in the multiple senses of that word) the practice of literary close reading. Fundamentally it asks what we can learn from the particular—​not just the particularity of a work or historical context, whose semblance of unity is provisional, but the radical particularity of an individual copy, feature, or fragment. As a method of preserving the objects of experience it connects book history to librarianship, but also to long-​forgotten animating forces in the enterprise of academic criticism. In one of the founding statements of modern critical method, ‘Criticism, Inc.’ (1937), John Crowe Ransom argued that advanced literary study is the reflexive investigation of the ‘desperate ontological or metaphysical manoeuvre’ of literature itself: the literary writer (whom Ransom calls poet) ‘perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch . . . The poet wishes to defend his object’s existence against its enemies, and the critic wishes to know what he is doing, and how.’49 The rationale of preservation has long since been abandoned or disavowed in critical theory, which overwhelmingly privileges subversion, dismantling, or other like-​minded approaches to literary objects. But the symmetry between Ransom’s founding vision and the inductive, almost pointillist strain of book history that arose in McKerrow and Bowers’s time, and that reappears with new urgency in ours, is uncanny. That making books is its own desperate ontological manoeuvre—​committing writing to paper, folding leaves into gatherings, stitching or binding a text-​block—​is perhaps not lost on scholars working at a time of diminishing cultural authority for literature, and diminishing trust and investment in literature’s institutions. The clearest testament to an emerging, felt preservationism in early modern book history has been the adoption of institutional library categories to recalibrate the literary-​ critical or literary-​historical gaze. Adam Smyth, in his recent wide-​ranging study of Material Texts in Early Modern England, borrows a technical term from rare-​book cataloguing, ‘copy-​specific notes’, to propose to literary scholars ‘a mode of reading we could call copy-​specific literary criticism: a reading that considers the interpretive possibilities (and not just the bibliographical or textual significance) of unique features of a book’.50 Jason Scott-​Warren’s recent study of the ‘paper trails’ of Richard Stonley, the first documented buyer of a book by Shakespeare, is a sustained elaboration of bibliographic provenance, another curatorial term, and Scott-​Warren makes explicit the link between a bibliographic approach and a broader, worldly curatorial purview: ‘The material turn does nothing if it does not invite us to care more about the things in the world.’51 Early modern book history has played host to numerous studies in the last decade focusing on the object life of a single title, such as Eric Rasmussen’s or Emma Smith’s books on Shakespeare’s First Folio, or Zachary Lesser’s book about the 1603 Hamlet.52 The microhistorical lens has proven especially versatile outside the field in public-​facing work, which taps into an enduring extra-​academic curiosity about literary artefacts and stories of their discovery.53 Peter Murphy has recently traced the fortunes of a single twenty-​one-​line poem, Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They Flee From Me’, from its earliest

The Scale of Book History    75 manuscript witness to today’s teaching anthologies, taking in the faintest ink smudges and transcription errors as evidence of something precious disappearing. ‘Entropy is the enemy,’ Murphy writes in meditation on what poetry, bookmaking, and criticism have in common: ‘We need to make sense out of chaos in order to survive, in order to know ourselves and our world. This desire was one of Wyatt’s motives when he made his poem, and might be one of the motives of reading old books.’54 How micro can the microhistory of the book in early modern studies get before it loses force as a methodological lens or experiment, before it seems again like a fetishization of the ‘rare’ or ‘fine’, or a pedantry of ‘every verbal detail’? A compelling movement elsewhere in scholarship on the period to home in on individual words or ‘keywords’ as one of the smallest meaningful units in language has resuscitated philology—​the original literary history, and ally to the older bibliography—​as both a method and an affective stance.55 Forensic approaches to literary and historical documents are going smaller-​scale still as the implicitly preservationist strain of book history continues to merge in productive ways with explicitly conservationist work in libraries. Since Franco Moretti’s establishment of the Literary Lab over a decade ago, the analogy to spaces of scientific research has been invoked in the Digital Humanities to imagine exhilarating, scaled-​up versions of literary and historical study. But the conservation lab, a literal laboratory that has been there all along, holds out a different set of possibilities: a means of investigating written objects at a molecular level, one carefully attuned to pressing problems both of climate degradation and human access to materials—​problems that were first confronted systematically, after all, with the establishment of libraries for public use in the later part of the early modern period. While there will presumably always be individual publishers and printers or typographic features left to explore, it could be that the field’s most fertile limit case lies over the horizon, not in parts or particulars but in particles.

Notes 1. James English and Ted Underwood, ‘Shifting Scales: Between Literature and Social Science’, Modern Language Quarterly, 77/​3 (2016), 279. English and Underwood’s special issue on ‘Scale and Value’ was one of several taking stock of the turn to scale in literary studies to appear between 2016 and 2019. See also Sandra Macpherson and Meredith Martin, ‘Essays from the English Institute 2017: Scale’, English Literary History, 86/​2 (2019), 267–​274 and Krishnan Kumar and Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Introduction’, New Literary History, 48/​4 (2017), 609–​616. The debate about scale in the discipline of history has different terms and stakes. See Jan de Vries, ‘Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano’, Past & Present, 242/​14 (2019), 23–​36. In this essay I focus primarily on my home discipline of English. 2. Mark Algee-​Hewitt et al., ‘Canon/​Archive: Large-​scale Dynamics in the Literary Field’, Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, 11 (2016), 1. For a critical account of the findings of macroanalytic literary studies, see Nan Z. Da, ‘The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies’, Critical Inquiry, 45/​3 (2019), 601–​639. Da argues that the

76   Jeffrey TodD Knight leading quantitative studies ‘divide into no-​result papers—​those that haven’t statistically shown us anything—​and papers that do produce results but that are wrong’ (605). 3. See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013) and Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013). Jo Guldi and David Armitage point to ‘Big History’ and ‘Deep History’ as ‘the seeds of a new conversation about . . . the big picture’ in history in The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 118. 4. Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 37. 5. For example, Ian Lancashire’s Renaissance Electronic Texts database debuted in 1996 and treated Elizabethan homilies, a 1596 dictionary, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Martin Mueller’s Wordhoard XML application for word frequency analysis started in 2004 with the corpora of Spenser and Shakespeare (http://​wordho​ard.north​west​ern.edu). 6. For representative examples of DH approaches to style, see Jockers, Macroanalysis, 63–​104; Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 147–​177; and Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So, ‘Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism between Close Reading and Machine Learning’, Critical Inquiry, 42/​2 (2016), 235–​267. For a brief overview and sampling of quantitative-​stylistic scholarship on early modern drama, see Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney (eds.), Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8–​14. On the controversies and stakes of stylistic identification in early modern literary scholarship, see Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 39–​66. 7. See Guldi and Armitage, History Manifesto, 8–​9, and Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 157–​175. 8. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 7, 1. 9. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 704. Eisenstein remarks in the prologue that McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy ‘stimulated my curiosity . . . about the specific historical consequences of the fifteenth-​ century communications shift’ (p. x), which led her to write the book. 10. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000), 12. 11. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 3. See also Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550–​1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64/​1 (2003), 11–​ 28, the special issue of which that essay is a part, and Ann Blair et al. (eds.), Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 12. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111/​3 (1982), 65–​66. 13. James Raven, What is the History of the Book? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 7. 14. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 16. The text is a republication of McKenzie’s 1985 Panizzi Lectures. 15. McKenzie, Bibliography, 14. McKenzie refers chiefly to the proto-​structural-​functionalist sociology of Herbert Spencer in clarifying his use of the term. For his methodological antagonists he refers to the ‘formalist theories of art and literature’ that were current ‘when [W. W.] Greg was writing in the 1920s and 1930s’, and he mentions Bowers and the New

The Scale of Book History    77 Criticism by name (15). Later he aligns ‘critical theory since 1946 . . . [S]‌tructuralism on one hand and poststructuralism and deconstruction on the other’ with the ‘hermetic’ position of Greg’s analytic bibliography (28). 16. McKenzie, Bibliography, 15. 17. McKenzie, Bibliography, 15. Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘Institutional Forme’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch (eds.), The Unfinished Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 246–​259. On ‘institutionalism’ in literary study, see Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 49–​81; Mark McGurl, ‘Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present’, New Literary History, 41/​2 (2010), 329–​349; and Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 147. 18. Raven: ‘New histories offer global comparisons in ways that are still in their infancy . . . To the fore are novel questions about transoceanic as well as transcontinental book production, circulation and reception, and of the localized creation and widely dispersed transmission of knowledge’ (What is the History of the Book?, 5). For foundational works in this vein, see Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Robert Fraser, Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script (London: Routledge, 2008); and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 324–​379. For an overview, see Sydney Shep, ‘Books Without Borders: The Transnational Turn in Book History’, in Books Without Borders, i: The Cross-​ National Dimension in Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 13–​37. 19. On world literature, see Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). On world philology, see Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-​ming Kevin Chang (eds.), World Philology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 20. McKenzie, Bibliography, 21. 21. Franco Moretti, ‘Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History’, New Left Review, 24 (2003), 68. 22. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108/​1 (2009), 6, 9, and 17 respectively. 23. Heather Love, ‘Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History, 41/​2 (2010), 373. 24. James English, ‘Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After “the Sociology of Literature” ’, New Literary History, 41/​2 (2010), p. viii. English is quoting Alan Liu. See also English and Underwood, ‘Shifting Scales’ (287) on book history as a precedent for current quantitative approaches to literature. 25. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1. 26. Katherine Bode, ‘The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-​Rich Literary History’, Modern Language Quarterly, 78/​1 (2017), 79. See also Da, ‘Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies’. 27. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 6. 28. Chartier, The Order of Books, 7 (my emphasis).

78   Jeffrey TodD Knight 29. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. Work, word, character, author, and paper are the subheadings that organize Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44/​3 (1993), 255–​283. 30. See e.g. the editors’ note in the inaugural (1998) issue of Book History, the flagship journal of the interdisciplinary field: ’With the exhaustion of literary theory, younger professors of literature are finding that book history provides a more rigorous, empirical approach to such issues as reader response, canon formation, and the politics of literary criticism’ (‘An Introduction to Book History’, Book History, 1 (1998), p. x). See also Raven, What is the History of the Book?, 4. 31. See respectively Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996); Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); William Sherman, Used Books: Markind Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 32. Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (London: Routledge, 1999), 13. 33. Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser, The Book in History, the Book as History: Intersections of the Material Text, Essays in Honor of David Scott Kastan (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2016), 13. 34. Adam Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 30. 35. Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), p. x. 36. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). 37. John Crowe Ransom, ‘Criticism, Inc.’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 13/​4 (1937), 587. See also I. A. Richards, who compared the advantageous reading of poetry to the ‘fastidious’ examination of its less important material aspects: ‘printing belongs to another branch of the arts. In the poetic experience words take effect through their associated images, and through what we are, as a rule, content to call their meaning’ (Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 2001), 108). 38. Fredric Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism’, New Literary History, 11/​1 (1979), 46. 39. See e.g. Megan Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 40. Catherine Gallagher, ‘The History of Literary Criticism’, Daedalus, 126/​1 (1997), 138. 41. See respectively Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered, 136–​156 and Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 81–​123.

The Scale of Book History    79 42. See e.g. Matthew Zarnowiecki’s punning concept of ‘medium-​close reading’ in Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 6–​9. ‘Medium specificity’ derives from art history and is called upon most often in literary and cultural studies in discussions of new media and contemporary digital fiction. See N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 18–​29. 43. R. B. McKerrow, ‘Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors of English Works of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 12 (1913), 220. The practice is still in place in some courses of graduate study, mostly outside the United States. 44. McKerrow, ‘Notes on Bibliographical Evidence’, 221. 45. Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 14–​15. 46. Bowers, Principles, 14. 47. Claire Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4; Calhoun, The Nature of the Page, 42. The seminal study organized by individual publishers was Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Hooks, Selling Shakespeare, and Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 48. Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, ‘Building a Better Description’, Representations, 135/​1 (2016), 4. 49. Ransom, ‘Criticism, Inc.’, 601. 50. Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 109. 51. Jason Scott-​Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 11. 52. Eric Rasmussen, The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 53. See e.g. Michael Schmidt, Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 54. Peter Murphy, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 88. 55. See Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and the TIDE: Keywords project begun by Nandini Das, João Vicente Melo, Haig Smith, and Lauren Working, http://​www.tide​proj​ect.uk/​keywo​rds-​home/​.

Select Bibliography Algee-​Hewitt, Mark, ‘Distributed Character: Quantitative Models of the English Stage, 1550–​ 1900’, New Literary History, 48/​4 (2017), 751–​782.

80   Jeffrey TodD Knight Bourne, Claire, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Calhoun, Joshua, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Cook, Megan, The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–​1635 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Craig, Hugh, and Greatley-​Hirsch, Brett, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Guldi, Jo, and Armitage, David, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Heffernan, Megan, Making the Miscellany: The Poetics of Compiling in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Lesser, Zachary, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Moretti, Franco, ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, Stanford Literary Lab, Pamphlet 2 (2011) doi: litlab.stanford.edu/​LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf Murphy, Peter, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). Scott-​Warren, Jason, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Shore, Daniel, Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). Smith, Emma, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Trettien, Whitney, Cut/​ Copy/​ Paste: Fragments of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

Chapter 5

‘Inl aid with i nk i e sp ots of jet ’ Early Modern Book History and Premodern Critical Race Studies Brandi K. Adams for Imtiaz Habib

I In the summer of 2020, at the start of the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic, members of the early modern academic community on Twitter (many of whom follow #ShakeRace) were abuzz with anticipation.1 Routledge had announced officially that it would issue the first paperback edition of Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–​1677: Imprints of the Invisible, by the late Professor Imtiaz Habib.2 Originally published in 2008, this revolutionary work provides researchers with a theoretical and archival introduction to both the idea and realities of black people who either chose or were compelled to live in early modern England. In his own words, Habib’s project examined the ‘empirical intimacy of the English construction of the racial other, and of the national-​imperial drive that is its most immediate occasion, both parallel to and independent of such formations in the travel literature of the period’.3 In addition to his trenchant observations about early modern travel writers, including Richard Hakluyt, who was instrumental in forming and perpetuating misconceptions about race in the early modern world, Habib’s work documents the seemingly impossible: it provides general and intimate details about people whose histories were previously hidden, systematically ignored, or deemed impossible to have occurred at all. His concentrated and painstaking efforts to examine countless archives miraculously recovered the personal histories of several black individuals living and labouring in early modern London (and beyond) in a variety of positions including that of a ‘trumpeter, diver, royal page, entertainer, laundress, servant, or maid’.4

82   Brandi K. Adams Over the last twenty years, scholars including Habib have explicated and articulated the ways in which race manifests and functions in early modern English texts. Margo Hendricks has outlined some of the guiding principles for scholars who engage in this type of research that she identifies as premodern critical race studies: PCRS (premodern critical race studies) actively pursues not only the study of race in the premodern, not only the way in which periods helped to define, demarcate, tear apart, and bring together the study of race in the premodern era, but the way that outcome, the way those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to our world. PCRS is about being a public humanist. It’s about being an activist.5

Habib’s theories and methodologies (as explicated by Hendricks) have encouraged countless researchers to reorient themselves to historical and literary archives in their collective search for records of diverse individuals. By altering their approach to this research, scholars may contend more fully with the complexities and realities governing the history of race in early modern England.6 The work of the premodern critical race studies (PCRS) community has also illuminated the various negotiations involved in the production of archival proof, often governed by expectations that ensure the erasure of people not fully described or memorialized in material housed in archival spaces.7 For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus upon the secondary part of the title of Habib’s project, Imprints of the Invisible, as it may read very suggestively to those interested in book history, bibliography, and the history of reading. As this title evokes images of early English books ‘emprynted’ by Wynkyn de Worde, or William Caxton; or the writing of clandestine messages using recipes for invisible ink; or even the writing, erasing, and rewriting of text on reusable surfaces, this part of the title incites the following questions: Exactly who or what are these imprints? Why are they invisible? By whom are they unable to be seen? Why are they unable to be seen? Perhaps more importantly, who exactly is able (or wishes to be able) to see the imprints and palimpsests left behind by these invisible people? I find that this particular phrase creates a necessary through line to both consider and articulate the relationships among book history, bibliography, and the history of reading as well as their various connections to the general history of race and, more specifically, to PCRS. In addition, I present some available initial interventions of PCRS into this famously described ‘undisciplined discipline’, through a series of observations about early modern English texts in conjunction with other significant research in the field.8 I will state emphatically that what I write here should not be read as a definitive methodology by which to reconcile what may be considered an incongruous relationship among subfields. Nor am I in any way attempting to reduce research in book history and PCRS to a formulaic construction in which I simply map one onto the other. This chapter is a preliminary attempt to consider how Habib’s secondary title provides a necessary opening for the addition of (premodern) critical race studies to James Raven’s description of research in the field:

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    83 Book history research informs, revises, problematizes and nuances broader narratives of practice, behaviour and representation, including diverse histories of subversion, revolution, reformation and conquest.9

To the above definition, I would add that book history research should also reflect on how it may reinforce, however unintentionally, structures and assumptions guided by whiteness (and maleness) in both research practice and exclusionary behaviour.10 This includes premature conclusions assuming that diverse histories must necessarily come from outside English and European contexts. I also provide a set of observations and examples that one may use to begin thinking about realities I understand in the field of book history: (1) The demands placed on scholars in race and book history to produce irrefutable empirical evidence of several, black, Indigenous, or other people of colour involved in the early modern English book trade in order for this possibility to be remotely considered as valid. (2) The conflation of racial whiteness (and at times, maleness) with neutrality, objectivity and the guiding lenses by which the field articulates its understanding of texts. (However unintentionally, this ‘objectivity’ has historically prevented or stymied those interested in book history from exploring the intersections of gender, race, and other markers of difference.) (3) How the field’s lack of diversity and adherence to ill-​defined traditions has discouraged the field’s practitioners from initiating or even supporting scholarly efforts that do not focus on well-​worn paths of scholarship. (Surprisingly, this has included the recovery of contributions of white Englishwomen to book history, bibliography, and the history of print—​even when these contributions were archivally and obviously present.) (4) That substantial challenges to the theoretical and cultural hegemony of the New Bibliographers, despite efforts to reconsider their work alongside other fields, or through new lenses, incite such visceral reactions that it can stultify the development of new ideas in the field. Habib’s research demonstrates that blackness and otherness exist within the English archive; these imprints, however faint, should be part of a holistic approach to book history. Furthermore, practitioners of PCRS have examined the racialized components inherent in the research practices Raven formulates. The tools and traditional approaches that have guided book historians will benefit from methodologies from PCRS scholars in order to identify and then deconstruct the ways that early modern English printers, publishers, and writers engaged with ideas and rhetoric about race, whether in industry practice or in ideologies proffered to their readers. Engaging with PCRS research may also begin long overdue conversations about the perceived neutrality of technical bibliographic practice as well as the editing of early modern English manuscript and printed texts. Initially, there is a seeming tension between the two terms Habib uses: imprint and invisible. Imprints are those which leave an impression, which could be either (1) metaphorical or (2) physical, left behind by handwriting or by ink in combination with type,

84   Brandi K. Adams woodcuts, or engraved plates upon paper. In an ideal situation, imprints signify a type of longevity—​particularly when describing extant printed books made by a printer using an early modern English printing press. This term, which implies stability (perhaps not for the text itself, but in terms of the physical printing of the page), counteracts with what Habib calls invisible—​that which cannot be seen or ‘that by its nature is not an object of sight’.11 What his work reveals are the ways that both archives and researchers are responsible for determining what by its nature is able to become visible and worthwhile material to focus upon. In her extraordinary volume Things of Darkness, Kim F. Hall also challenges scholars of early modern England to re-​examine what material has been considered to be perennially legible or visible in scholarly discourse. As she discusses early modern conceptions of race both economically and socially, Hall decouples the black/​white binary from a seemingly uncomplicated technical description used in early modern England to one that is imbued with complexities which demonstrate that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people were indeed cognizant of the social functions of race and difference. Using the metaphor of a chiaroscuro painting, Hall demonstrates that this effect often renders black people as simultaneously present and absent in the scene of a painting for particular viewers. She then enumerates the ways that both objects and people can be similarly obscured when examining a given literary text. This chiaroscuro effect at times resembles research in book history. The subject matter which continually captures scholarly light and attention has become the very focus of a discipline because it is easy to identify and locate. Whether it is printers and publishers related to Shakespeare, or the chief concerns of the New Bibliographers (all important work), this research continually resembles the brighter, clearer colours in a chiaroscuro painting, or the whiteness of a fair page.12 Without the research of individuals equipped to examine darker or less luminous parts of a painting, text, or archive, these less noticed elements become obscured, minimized, or effaced as they remain in the shadows. In early modern English texts and paintings, black or African people are sometimes conflated with Indigenous Americans, Indians, the Spanish, and at times even the Irish or Welsh. Together, they become the very people whose lived experience is overlooked as it occupies the obfuscated, ‘darker’ parts of early modern English manuscript and printed books.13 Representations of these individuals may also be passed over because the context of the material appears unclear or seemingly defies explanation. Take, for example, the 1615 edition of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: or Hieronomo is mad againe, printed by William White for John White and Thomas Langley (see Fig. 5.1). Book historians encountering this title page might initially notice that it contains a striking use of composite representation for an illustration of three figures (two men and a woman) standing in front of a fourth, who hangs by his neck from a bower.14 On the left-​hand side of the illustration, the first man, who stands to the immediate left of the hanging figure, holds a torch in his left hand and a sword in his right as his speech ribbon unfolds words of recognition, ‘Alas it is my son Horatio.’ The third figure from the left is a woman who is forcefully turned away from the spectacle of the hanging body towards a black male figure in the rightmost part of the framed scene. This black figure grasps the

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    85

Fig. 5.1  The title page of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie (1615). Public domain.

86   Brandi K. Adams woman with his white gloved left hand as he brandishes a sword in his right. His speech ribbon reads, ‘Stop her mouth,’ as she begs for help. This figure’s inky-​black face obscures the lines used to define his features as the white sclera of his eye contrasts distinctly with his black pupil and skin. Within the context of this illustration, the blackness of this figure differs slightly from those identified by Hall, who are often cloaked in darker parts of early modern paintings. This particular black figure’s extremely noticeable visage provokes a dissonance in the visual field as it pulls the viewer’s gaze to the right side of the woodcut—​decidedly away from the hanging body and towards the violent conversation taking place—​even as his blackness nearly fuses into the frame of the woodcut. The insertion of blackness (whether as a black person or as a figure in blackface) into this narrative invites a host of questions about the scene of the title page and its possible relationship to the role of blackness in this illustration (and others) in general, or in the following scenes of Kyd’s play. Unlike the text of the play, the illustration from the 1615 quarto makes the spectacle of Horatio’s hanging body a communal experience that Claire M. L. Bourne notes collapses events from the play synchronically into a synoptic image and moment that ‘raises more questions than it answers’.15 Several of these questions may have been asked by the play’s readers as they perused the text in their attempts closely to reconcile what they had read with the woodcut scene on the title page of their book. They may have eventually paired this illustration with the moment that the eponymous character Hieronomo discovers that it is his son Horatio who has been hanged: But stay, What murderous spectacle is this? A man h’ang’d vp, and all the Murderers gone; And in my Bower, to lay the guilt on me? This place was made for Pleasure, not for Death He cuts him downe. Those Garments that he wears, I oft have seen: Alasse, it is Horatio my sweet Sonne: O no, but he that who while was my Sonne.16

These readers might have determined the differences between the illustration and the lines of the play as they looked for an explication of the plot. As they returned to the title page, they might have noticed that Hieronomo is joined by Bel-​Imperia and the black male figure—​who may or may not be her brother Lorenzo—​in a re-​enactment of a conversation that takes place during the earlier scene of Horatio’s murder.17 This black male figure wears a turban marking him as someone from the East or Africa. This costuming also may have invited readers to search for markers of a black character who exists otherwise unidentified in the world of the play, and who features prominently in the illustrated climactic scene involving the demise of Hieronomo’s son Horatio. Early modern English readers primed to closely associate the black figure with the Spanish or the Portuguese may have done so—​as Kim F. Hall, Margo Hendricks, and Patricia Parker have argued—​in an attempt to differentiate and malign non-​English lived experiences,

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    87 allude to their darker skin colour (as a result of their personal histories of mixing with people of colour), and express a set of impossible desires—​in order to safeguard against physical and cultural adulteration of white early modern English people. The insertion of a black person into this illustration reinforces white racial formation while encapsulating the rising discomfort of a changing social and racial landscape of London in the early part of the seventeenth century that was also expressed in poems and plays of earlier centuries. The appearance of this black figure could represent a purposeful and political exculpation of English whiteness (both as a political designation and racial category) subtly addressed in the play, in an attempt to further limit the privilege of whiteness (or white Europeanness) to a select group of people.18 This printed woodcut also may have functioned as a synchronic expression of early modern English racial anxieties, in which a conflation of a variety of differences in people unfortunately results in a sweeping assignation of blackness and violence to describe non-​white (and occasionally white) people. Conversely, this illustration may have been reused from the publication of a ballad or it may have functioned as a clever advertising ploy.19 In a series of questions and provocations about this black figure in the 1615 edition of The Spanish Tragedie, Eric Griffin asks, ‘[w]‌as it simply a “humorous” advertising gimmick made to order for three printers who offered the play “to be sold at their shop over against the Sarazen’s head without New-​gate”?’20 If this figure is indeed turned into a marker for the bookseller and the shop, what does it mean that this particular character is connected to the printing and publishing of Kyd’s drama in this way? What does it mean that an embodied and sword-​wielding ‘Sarazen’ or black Moor in an illustration then becomes disembodied as the sign of the shop—​is it, perhaps, to demonstrate a type of revenge on the character or people who look like him? Is this yet another ‘murderous spectacle’? It is fair to say that, in the illustration, this figure clearly engages in an act of gendered assault that closely associates black Moorish men (especially ones living in England at the time) with violence against white women. Might readers of this have had this woodcut in mind as they read Shakespare’s The Tragoedy of Othello, The Moore of Venice for the first time seven years later in 1622? This illustration is a troubling representation of, if not a direct commentary on, black communities (however small) living in early seventeenth-​century London. This representation was then proliferated as it was printed countless times and displayed in bookshops, replaying for readers the violent act. Whether or not this image functioned as a ‘humorous’ advertisement to some viewers, the representation of blackness (or a figure in blackface), likely became associated with actual black people living in England. The Sarazen’s head may have been a geographic marker for a bookshop, but it also could have functioned as a bitter (and ironic) commentary on Spain’s relationship to blackness, whether through trade of enslaved people or the racial mixing that took place in parts of that country. This illustration demonstrates one way that print could repeatedly enact violence and solidify dangerous assumptions and stereotypes about difference for readers in early modern England.

88   Brandi K. Adams It is, perhaps, easy enough to dismiss this representation as anomalous or a caricature dissociated from actual people. However, the additional ink that was used in order to have this image of this figure’s face perpetually appear black invites constant attention and reading. More than what Griffin suggests is an English ‘fear of, or attraction to, “blackamoors” ’, black figures and characters of this kind are more than fetishized objects; they invite readers to transform them into printed text that may only be read and interpolated—​in an act that Miles Grier has identified as ‘inkface’. In this case, the black figure in the illustration of the 1615 Spanish Tragedie can only be read as a perpetrator of violence or a capitalist mascot who ‘assume[s]‌human shape from a pool of ink, the sum of Classical and biblical writing about their color and capacities’.21 Along with associating the disembodied Sarazen’s or Moor’s head as a symbol of violence, or the marker for a bookshop, what might it also mean as a symbol of literacy, particularly if Black Moorish men such as Othello could be constructed as ‘unbookish’?22 Darker-​skinned people, whether they are people whose lives are only partially recorded in archives, or characters in early modern English plays, or even the subjects of poems, also embody metaphors of printing that emphasize their otherness and capitalize on their skin colour’s resemblance to ink, the dense dark material that contrasts with the whiteness of the page.23 Conversely, people or characters associated with light, white, fair skin may be compared to the purity of the page, unblemished by the blackness of print.24 Premodern critical race studies in combination with book history allow for the re-​examination of objects like the physical pages of early modern English books to recover the rhetoric and language (some of which is highly racialized) used to describe its component parts. In a compelling exploration of this work, Miles P. Grier also explores this binary of black-​and-​white pages in conjunction with other racialized textual objects, including the figuration of Aaron the Moor’s child as printed page in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.25 These combined insights ensure that it is now possible to comprehend more fully how objects as well as people (in particular those identified as black) can be present in a text, painting, archive or culture, and not be fully visible or legible to a range of viewers, readers, or researchers. In subtle and important ways book historians interested in PCRS allow invisible imprints and palimpsests to begin to become more legible.

II Work in book history and adjacent fields has historically and traditionally depended upon the hypervisible (unlike the invisible imprints in Habib’s title)—​or what certain groups of scholars and readers can immediately recognize as extant or even worthwhile—​whether it is the physical copies of books that scholars examine; marginalia that provide insights to a reader’s habits or ideas; or the information that one can glean from the Stationers’ Register, the Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, or other archival sources. Zachary Lesser has noted that traditional bibliographic

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    89 method is anchored in a conservative tradition that in particular ‘seeks in the physical attributes of books the clues that can explain how things came to be as they are. This narrative structure impels us toward a solution, an unmasking; our bibliographic evidence pushes us toward a literary conclusion.’26 While Lesser rightly calls for a thorough re-​examination of the assumptions that dictate ‘how things are’ in the field, which would then no doubt alter some literary conclusions, there still remains a powerful focus on the physical attributes of books (and creative speculation about archive materials) made famous by A. W. Pollard, W. W. Greg, and other New Bibliographers that was subsequently reinforced by Fredson Bowers. Despite decisive challenges to this scholarly hegemony by Paul Werstine and Tiffany Stern, particularly in the ways that New Bibliographers articulated the relationship between the theatre, printing, and the publishing of Shakespeare’s plays (a most visible subject of study), language popularized by these scholars (including Good/​Bad Quartos and Foul Papers) continues to appear in current publications.27 This legacy persists in quietly influencing what research is deemed acceptable in the field and it can prevent students from understanding what could be possible beyond dominant research practices developed in the early twentieth century. This nostalgia also ignores the work of early twentieth-​century scholarship by women including Evelyn May Albright, who did not necessarily support the research conclusions made by her contemporaries—​as Claire M. L. Bourne explores in the present volume. As I have stated earlier, for certain scholars, in order for black (or other non-​white) people to become a subject of discourse in book history, there must be irrefutable proof of their existence. These same archival limits have been previously placed on scholars who focus on early modern Englishwomen who were printers, publishers, and other labourers in the book trade. The archive can occlude their activities because many of their lives were governed (at least in terms of historical records) by men. Even in books replete with careful, exact research that provides as much technical and historical detail as possible, including Valerie Wayne’s outstanding collection Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in England, as an editor, she nevertheless justifies their research methodology because it cannot necessarily mirror the same long-​established and traditional approach one would take for well-​documented men involved in the book trade. After enumerating all the materials scholars used to conduct their work, Wayne assures readers that this work is indeed viable: Finding women in these old and new resources can be difficult given the frequency with which women’s lives are overwritten by their male relatives. Yet these scholars do find them, and they speculate responsibly about the work that women accomplished based on the evidence they unearth, locating their contributions to print culture in a considerable range of texts and activities.28

This kind of work remains difficult (though not impossible) for scholars working on the relatively complicated but documented lives of women involved in the book trade. When asked to begin to ponder similar questions about black (or non-​white) lives in

90   Brandi K. Adams the Stationers’ archives, the task may seem almost impossible the moment the question is considered. It is an approach to the archival records that mediates absence as much as presence. At times, the literary archive provides both information and examples that demonstrate the relationships between print, gender, and race. *** In F.V.’s printed twelve-​line broadside poem ‘In Praise of Typography’ (1658), the speaker compares the act of printing a text—​in which metal type is ‘dress’d’ or covered in black ink and ‘press’d’ upon a white paper—​to a sexual act involving a white woman’s virginal body. The resultant ‘Beauty spots’ of blackness—​the product of intercourse among type, ink, and the page—​become a compromise that the speaker suggests ensures writerly immortality: Blush not to see a Virgin press’d Arts fairest Hand-​Maid, though she’s dress’d In Sable and in Argent, for Her Coat is Nobler than of Or: Black makes her Beauty spots, and Concenters to compleat Delight: Yet know unto her Dowry’s due Something for the Interview: And if your Liberall looks commend Her feature, she’l remain Your Freind, Not unto Death, for know that She Can give you Immortality.29

The entire printing process becomes governed metaphorically by a heteronormative early modern marriage in which the (presumably white male) creator of the text controls both production of print and how the text may be read. This arrangement also permits acts of intimacy outside the marriage union, even racialized ones, for the benefit of the speaker. As this inked body of type commingles and miscegenates, outside the expected confines of marriage, it nevertheless transforms into ‘Beauty spots’ on a page, a text that the speaker both conceives of and frames in whiteness that is ‘Concenter[ed]’, and aesthetically pleasing as it surrounds, contains, constrains, and controls the black text. Here, typography works as Claire M. L. Bourne has cogently described it—​‘operating in the fruitful space between limitation and possibility’ as it ‘mediates and materializes’ the text for readers.30 If one is able to examine the printed text of the broadside (which I was able to do, but only digitally), it may be possible to see (or touch) the visible impressions that roman typeface, italic fonts, printers’ ornaments, and ink can make on ‘virgin’ paper, the material traces that are visible beyond death of the person who initiated or consented to the act of printing. In the text of the poem, it becomes possible to envision how the physical printed page may embody or mediate structures—​be they political, bibliographical, or spatial—​that are intimately connected with race and gender. The speaker focuses upon ‘fairness’ or whiteness of the page, downplaying the

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    91 blackness of the type as necessary blemishes involved in the process of a pure and immortal endeavour. The whiteness of the page then functions as a larger metaphor for structures of white racial formation that govern the act of printing, not only in this poem, but in early modern texts in general. The compositor, printer, and publisher (at least of this poem) collaborate to instruct readers how to understand the intersection of race and gender in relation to print through this metaphor of typography—​as it becomes something which serves the speaker. The ultimate power of typography is rendered through not-​so-​subtle descriptions in which blackness and a woman’s body are subject to powers and structures that neither women nor people of colour can control. Poems, including this one, may recover the intersecting histories of race, gender, and print as they record the metaphors and language used to describe the act of printing. These literary representations—​in the forms of poems, plays, and prose fiction—​serve an important purpose as they demonstrate that material located in the historical archives is never exhaustive nor complete; furthermore, some significant answers concerning the relationship among race, gender, and print exist beyond archival space. Work of this type may also be as Saidiya Hartman suggests, a type of experiment to ‘exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive’, and perhaps ‘a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history’.31 Or, for scholars interested in examining historical whiteness or people of colour in book history, it may be imperative to make an unapologetic declaration similar to that which Helen Smith proclaims in the introduction to Grossly Material Things, her groundbreaking study about women and the history of the book in early modern England in which she sets the terms for book creation and production: My excavation of women’s productive encounters with the world of the early modern book contributes to an understanding of book creation as collaborative and contingent, and insists that all texts, not simply those attributed to women, were marked and mediated by numerous agents, rendering books more mobile and more complexly sexed than has been allowed. This understanding is further enriched if we recognize that creative action was distributed not only across networks of men and women but across the material and institutional environments in which they dwelt and which in part, constitute the work of production and consumption.32

Uncovering specific information about white individuals in early modern England remains difficult enough—​even those with significant archival records due to their participation in printing, publishing, or other trades. Encountering information in trace amounts that only signal a possibility of a person’s existence (whether it is of a woman printer or a black publisher) can be dispiriting at best and research-​terminating at worst. Fortunately, Habib’s book provides insights on how to manoeuvre against archival instability and the unfriendly mediation of time or those who recorded initial records.33 Finding black people specifically in the archive also demands an approach from researchers to consider the ‘refraction inevitably imposed on them by the mediation of their recorders’, while considering racial etymology that occurs in their naming.34 By providing an elastic rubric to translate descriptions of people, Habib’s theories begin to

92   Brandi K. Adams make the stories of black and other non-​white individuals less obscured in searches. Surnames and descriptors including Blackamoor, Negro, Ethiopian, and Moro indicated the recording of somatic differences in London; however, not all people in the archives are named, and many of them, according to Habib, were not welcomed or considered legal citizens.35 There are countless black lives that go unmentioned by name that are left to the archive’s murky silences. It is time for book historians to reflect both upon what has counted as evidence in the field, and who gets to decide what methodologies deserve to be challenged or what is constitutive of the field. Below, after a discussion about the search for elusive people in the archives, I make a preliminary attempt to examine the ways in which Joseph Moxon constructs a narrative history of printing in Mechanick Exercises that both depends upon and promulgates the superiority of white English and European printers. In this set of books, which ostensibly aims to detail processes associated with printing, he formulates connections between structures of whiteness and printing by a careful construction of a narrative that subordinates the technology of printing processes originating in China and negates the possible contributions of Indigenous Americans to mechanical devices. I also examine how, through the construction of his Dictionary at the end of the volumes meant to explain ‘abstruse words and phrases that are used in Typography’, Moxon closely binds metaphors of race with the material of printing in an attempt to firmly connect the history and evolution of printing with white racial formation.36

Printing Difference When searching for evidence of a black printer or publisher in early modern England, one dreams of finding evidence akin to Vera Jackson’s photograph entitled ‘Max the Printer’.37 In this undated twentieth-​century black-​and-​white portrait, Max, a young black American man wearing an untarnished plaid shirt, is seated leaning over a section of a large, looming, black printing press. He appears to be setting type—​holding the compositor’s stick with three fingers in his left hand as he stares intently forward at the work ahead of him. As a black woman photographer, Jackson fortunately recorded a moment in which her fellow black American was at work doubly contributing to a project of literacy and what she indicated was a story of racial uplift.38 She chronicled Max’s work as he set type that would eventually become printed words that people could read, interpret, and learn. Due to the extraordinary efforts of photographers, collectors, and archivists such as Jackson, scholars interested in representations of mid-​twentieth-​ century black participants in the history of printing and books are able to locate material that provides clear and compelling evidence of black people sharing in the physical work of printing. Nevertheless, in order to locate such compelling examples, including this photograph, one must at the very least put forth necessary effort to encounter this material, all the while assuming (or rather hoping) that it somehow remains extant in a mostly accessible archive.

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    93 Researchers interested in premodern critical race studies, book history, and bibliography allow for possibilities of finding an elusive ‘Max’ (or perhaps another black, Indigenous, or other person of colour) working in a printing house in London, or elsewhere in England. However, despite best efforts, there may only be traces of people who may or may not have been connected to the printing house or the London Book Trade. It is easy enough to determine hastily that unless there exists particular archival evidence exhibiting the sheer verisimilitude of Jackson’s photo, then it is simply impossible (or at least highly unlikely) for early modern England in particular to have had black and other non-​white printers, publishers, or booksellers. Emulating Joseph Moxon in his Mechanick Exercises in 1677, contemporary scholars dubious of this possibility may accept conversations about difference within the world of book history and bibliography by gesturing to moments in texts when early English writers and printers enumerate the separate (and in his estimation, certainly not equal) print technologies of East and West: Before I begin with Typographie, I shall say some-​what of its Original Invention; I mean here in Europe not of theirs in China and other Eastern Countries, who (by general assent) have had it for many hundreds of years, though their Invention is very different from ours; they Cutting their Letters upon Blocks in whole Pages or Forms, as among us our Wooden Pictures are Cut; But Printing with single letters Cast in Mettal, as with us here in Europe, is an Invention scarce above Two hundred and fifteen years old; and yet an undecidable Controversie about the original Contriver or Contrivers remains on foot, between the Harlemers of Holland, and those of Mentz in Germany: But because the difference cannot be determined for want of undeniable Authority, I shall only deliver both their Pleas to this Scientifick Invention.39

Here, Moxon both acknowledges the existence of print in lands beyond England or Europe and swiftly dismisses the work of printing in Eastern countries because he supposes this kind of printing lacks a certain complexity or nuance. He draws a comparison between ‘our Wooden Pictures’ and Chinese script and assumes that there could only be an uncomplicated relationship between script and print. He emphasizes what he believes is the obvious complexity inherent in ‘Printing with single letters Cast in Mettal’. With its advent and genesis in either Holland or Germany, the ‘Scientifick invention’—​which in a later paragraph he also designates as an art—​can remain exceptional within a clear (presumably white) European lineage. Moxon articulates an early version of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, in which the hegemony of European culture is ‘a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-​Europeans’ that ‘depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’.40 Moxon’s dismissal of Chinese printing as he compares it to the origins of European and English printing, counters what Jane Hwang Degenhardt41 describes as early modern English understandings of Chinese commodities, including porcelain teacups, which ‘[were] thought to embody superior Chinese technology and aesthetics’.42 Weibin

94   Brandi K. Adams Chen also examines the conflation of China and its exported products as a way for English monarchy and citizens to both revere and revile them. In terms of printing, Moxon rejects Chinese and Eastern technologies and connects himself to the legacy of Gutenberg expressing similar conflicts and ambivalences with China and its products that, according to Chen, become present after the 1630s on the English stage: These fragmentary glimpses of China and china sometimes came with reverence and admiration, but on other occasions were accompanied by defiance and mockery. Understood against the broad backdrop of the nascent global trade network, the complex references to China, whether the country or the commodity, not only reflect the interest of the playwrights and the audience in the country itself, but also reveal English awareness and appraisal of their place in the world. On the one hand, the far-​ away China operated as a projection of English ambition and a goal to emulate; on the other hand, because the goal seemed too far to reach, its attraction was denied. It is with this paradoxical attitude that England furthered its steps on the way towards China and the wider world.43

Moxon’s impressions were replicated in editions of his printing manuals—​and it is his separation of printing histories that may have underwritten the suppression (or brief mention) and effacing of the history of printing in China in subsequent histories of printing. His mention of Chinese printing techniques is not the only place print and race intersect in Moxon’s work. In the printer’s dictionary, amended to the end of the Mechanick Exercises, there are a few instances in which printing terms become particularly racialized, but in the entry for ‘Devil’, this conflation of blackness, difference, and printing is particularly vivid: Deuil. The Press-​man sometimes has a Week-​Boy to Take Sheets, as they are Printed off the Tympan: These Boys do in a Printing-​House, commonly black and Dawb themselves; whence the Workmen to Jocosely call them Devils; and sometimes Spirits, and sometimes Flies.44

As the boys ‘black and Dawb’ themselves with ink as a consequence of their work in the printing house, they are jokingly called names that can double as racial epithets in other early modern English texts. The ink becomes a prosthetic for dark skin as the boys perhaps mimic theatre actors who don blackface to play roles in Shakespearean plays including Titus Andronicus in which Aaron the Moor compares himself to a fly, and Othello (in which the eponymous character is compared by Iago to a devil, ‘Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you’).45 While I have not (yet) found a contemporary printer’s ‘Deuvil’ of colour in England, in the American Colonies, Wowaus, an Indigenous Nipmuc man (also called James Printer) was apprenticed as a compositor and printer’s devil in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1659. Wowaus attended a colonial grammar school before becoming apprenticed to Samuel Green of the Cambridge Press and then worked as a translator, compositor and printer of Algonquin Language texts

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    95 including the Bible.46 As a non-​white man working in a colonial printing house, was he perhaps subject to the same jokes of workmen that Moxon writes about? Would he have been called Devil, Spirit, or Fly before the black ink from the tympan touched his skin for the first time? If he had somehow managed to move to London, he might not have been hired as Moxon had little regard for Indigenous and other non-​European or English people or their technologies. At the start of his Mechanick project in 1677 he assures readers that his work will not mirror their work: ‘Nor would I have you understand, that when I name the Mechanicks, I mean that rough and barbarous sort of working which is used by the Natives of America, and some other such places.’47 As he did in colonial America, Wowaus may have appeared to Moxon as an anomalous figure able to control the press and the practices that Moxon details—​a real life printer’s ‘devil’ with pre-​inked skin. *** In 1951, when W. W. Greg first wrote his foundational article ‘The Rationale of Copy Text’, it is probably safe to write that he would not have imagined a world in which future scholars would attempt to reconcile his work with anything resembling premodern critical race studies. As he drew distinctions between what he calls ‘substantive’ readings of the text, those that affect meaning, and the ‘accidentals’, those that affect ‘formal presentation’, Greg likely did not consider his own race or gender in the work in his efforts to make early modern English text legible to fellow scholars and future students of bibliography. As he examined fellow bibliographer R. B. McKerrow’s ‘invention’ and use of the term copy-​text as a way to determine the most authoritative text on which to base an edition, he likely assumed that most of the people (including the women scholars) he interacted with academically were of a similar enough mind, and that his work was reasonable—​even if they did not always agree on findings, collations, or which edition to use as a copy-​text. He likely assumed that his academic community would cite his work for a time, and then after that there might be new research to be followed. As such, he left an opening for all kinds of work and approaches to book history in this well-​loved, well-​ cited article. He explains that he is simply providing one way to do bibliographic work: I began this discussion in the hope of clearing my own mind as well as others’ on a rather obscure though not unimportant matter of editorial practice. I have done something to sort out my own ideas: others must judge for themselves. If they disagree, it is up to them to maintain some different point of view. My desire is rather to provoke discussion rather than lay down the law.48

Somehow, his work and that of his fellow New Bibliographers became the laws by which particular scholars have fiercely adhered to in order to police others’ understanding of book history, editing and analytic bibliography; or (however unintentionally) to intimidate students who are women and/​or people of colour and to discourage them from exploring the field. Perhaps it is time to re-​examine thoroughly the work that Greg, McKerrow, Pollard, and others have done and choose to embrace the idea of newer

96   Brandi K. Adams scholarship that is not necessarily based on these foundations and ask what is next, what is visible, and what is possible. Finally, in a return to Habib’s configuration, Imprints of the Invisible, this introductory examination of the relationships between premodern critical race theory and book history abounds with tentative connections that emerge from the messiness of the archive and the re-​examination of racialized structures in early modern English printed material and illustrations. It embraces the necessity of questioning long-​practised beliefs, traditions, and research methodologies in the hopes of finding new scholarship and new theories about the history of the book. This combination of subfields may never produce the neat archivally driven research that emerges from work that strictly examines editions of a book, or inventories of books in professorial studies located in early modern English universities, or the list of books in personal libraries. Research in this field may never find the ‘Max the printer’ of early modern London. But what it does do, is open up the field to what Duncan Salkeld has identified as ‘the past’s obdurate variety . . . that confronts and challenges each generation, and it is an essential part of what the past does’.49 It also allows new and various scholars to participate in novel and significant areas of book history.

Notes 1. Founded by Kim F. Hall, #ShakeRace is a hashtag on Twitter for scholars to discuss premodern critical race in early modern English literature. It is a mini-​forum for education, outreach, and scholarship. 2. This project was initiated by several scholars including Professor Liz Oakley Brown who requested that Routledge reprint the volume in a tweet dated 3 July 2020: https://​twit​ter. com/​earl​ymod​atLa​ncs/​sta​tus/​1278​9608​1945​2207​104. Routledge agreed to issue the paperback volume on 18 July 2020. 3. Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–​1677: Imprints of the Invisible (New York: Routledge, 2020), 10. 4. Habib, Black Lives, 4. 5. Margo Hendricks, ‘Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race’, Sept. 2019, Folger Shakespeare Library. 6. See Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ & Writing in the Early Modern Period (New York: Routledge, 1994); Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 7. See Mario H. Ramirez, ‘Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative’, American Archivist, 78/​4 (2015), 339–​356. 8. Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘History of the Book: An Undisciplined Discipline?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54/​1 (2001), 221–​245. 9. James Raven, What is the History of the Book? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 5. 10. More than a specific identity, whiteness is ‘a concept based on relations of power’ that also operates as an extension or affect of property, expectation, and belonging as defined

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    97 by Cheryl I. Harris among others. See Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, in Crenshaw et al. (eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), 276–​291. See also Peter Erickson, ‘The Moment of Race in Renaissance Studies’, Shakespeare Studies, 26 (1998), 27–​36. 11. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘invisible’, accessed Feb. 2021. 12. Hall, Things of Darkness, 1–​24. 13. Hall, Things of Darkness, 633–​122, 211–​253. 14. Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 207. 15. Bourne, Typographies of Performance, 207. 16. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie: Or, Hieronimo is Mad Againe Containing the Lamentable End of Don Horatio, and Belimperia; with the Pittifull Death of Hieronimo (London, 1615), sig. D2r. 17. The magus and biblical figure Balthazar is represented as a black African man in medieval and early modern manuscripts and paintings; this illustration could be a mistake in which Balthazar (a known Black figure) appears in Lorenzo’s place and says his lines. 18. Hall, Things of Darkness; Hendrick and Parker (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing. 19. For the possible connection to the illustration of the 1615 quarto of The Spanish Tragedie to a contemporary ballad, see Bourne, Typographies of Performance. 20. Eric Griffin, ‘Nationalism, the Black Legend, and the Revised Spanish Tragedy’, English Literary Renaissance, 39/​2 (2009), 336–​370. 21. Miles P. Grier, ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’, in Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political (New York: Routledge, 2015), 206. 22. I have argued elsewhere about the connection between blackness and unbookishness; see Brandi K. Adams, ‘Black “(Un)bookishness” in Othello and American Moor: A Meditation’, Shakespeare, 17/​1 (2021), 49–​53. 23. See Grier, ‘Inkface’. 24. Brandi K. Adams, ‘Fair /​Foul’, in Claire M. L. Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​ Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Histories (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) 29–​49. 25. Miles P. Grier, ‘Black /​White’, in Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text, 319–​342. 26. Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips, and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 19. 27. See Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 28. Valerie Wayne, Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 2. 29. F.V., In the Praise of Typography (Oxford: s.n, 1658). 30. Bourne, Typographies of Performance, 12. 31. Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 12/​2 (2008), 11. 32. Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. 33. See Kim F. Hall, ‘I Can’t Love This the Way You Want Me To: Archival Blackness’, Postmedieval, 11 (2020), 171–​ 179 and Ambereen Dadabhoy, Race and Affect (Phoenix: ACMRS Press, forthcoming). 34. Habib, Black Lives, 11.

98   Brandi K. Adams 35. Habib, Black Lives, 120–​191. 36. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 367. 37. Vera Jackson, ‘Max the Printer’, in Artstor Slide Gallery, https://​jstor.org/​sta​ble/​commun​ ity.13718​481, accessed 11 Feb. 2021. For Jackson, a freelance photographer for a now-​ defunct African American newspaper called the California Eagle (1879–​1964), making this photograph must have been at least somewhat significant. In interviews, she cited reading African American newspapers with her father as a reason for her interest in both photography and literacy. 38. Jeanne Moutoussamy-​Ashe, Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers (New York: Writers & Readers, 1993). 39. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, Or, the Doctrine of Handy-​Works Began Jan. 1, 1677 and Intended to be Monthly Continued (London, 1683), sig Xr. Moxon was, of course, unaware of metal type that had been invented in the Joseon Dynasty in Korea at the same time as metal type in Europe. See Hee-​Jae Lee, World Library and Information Congress: 72nd IFLA General Conference and Council, 20–​24 Aug. 2006, Seoul, South Korea (Archive of online conference proceedings). 40. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 7. 41. Jane Hwang Degenhardt, ‘Cracking the Mysteries of “China”: China(ware) in the Early Modern Imagination’, Studies in Philology, 110/​1 (2013), 132–​167. 42. Degenhardt, ‘Cracking the Mysteries of “China” ’, 132–​167. 43. Weibin Chen, ‘That Far-​away Country and Far-​fetched Product: China on the Early Modern English Stage, 1595–​1637’, English Studies, 101/​7 (2020), 815–​832. 44. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, sig. Dddr. 45. William Shakespeare, The tragœdy of Othello, the Moore of Venice As it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at the Black-​Friers, by his Maiesties Seruants (London: Thomas Walkley, 1622) 46. Cathy Rex, ‘Indians and Images: The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal, James Printer, and the Anxiety of Colonial Identity’, American Quarterly, 64/​1 (Mar. 2011) 62–​93; For additional work on Wowaus/​James Printer and critical Indigenous studies, see Phillip H. Round, Removable Type Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–​1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); for work on critical Indigenous studies, see Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8/​4 (Dec. 2006), 387–​409; for work on Shakespeare and critical Indigenous studies, see Laura Lehua Yim, ‘Reading Hawaiian Shakespeare: Indigenous Residue Haunting Settler Colonial Racism’, Journal of American Studies, 54/​1 (2020), 36–​43. My plan is to learn and write more about Wowaus/​James Printer and possible connections he may have to the English book trade. 47. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises (1677), sig A3v. 48. W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-​Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950), 36. 49. Duncan Salkeld, ‘Shakespeare Studies, Presentism, and Micro-​ History’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 76/​1 (2009), 35–​43.

Select Bibliography Bourne, Claire M. L., Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’    99 Bourne, Claire M. L. (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Histories (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Chen, Weibin, ‘That Far-​away Country and Far-​fetched Product: China on the Early Modern English Stage, 1595–​1637’, English Studies, 101/​7 (2020), 815–​832. Clegg, Cyndia Susan, ‘History of the Book: An Undisciplined Discipline?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54/​1 (2001), 221–​245. Degenhardt, Jane Hwang, ‘Cracking the Mysteries of “China”: China(ware) in the Early Modern Imagination’, Studies in Philology, 110/​1 (2013), 132–​167. Erickson, Peter, ‘The Moment of Race in Renaissance Studies’, Shakespeare Studies, 26 (1998), 27–​36. Grier, Miles P. ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’, in Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political (New York: Routledge, 2015), 206. Griffin, Eric, ‘Nationalism, the Black Legend, and the Revised Spanish Tragedy’, English Literary Renaissance, 39/​2 (0000), 336–​370. Habib, Imtiaz, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–​ 1677: Imprints of the Invisible (New York: Routledge, 2020). Hall, Kim F., ‘I Can’t Love This the Way You Want Me To: Archival Blackness’, Postmedieval, 11 (2020), 171–​179. Hall, Kim F., Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Harris, Cheryl I., ‘Whiteness as Property’, in Kimberlé Krenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995). Hartman, Saidiya, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 12/​2 (2008), 11. Hendricks Margo, and Parker, Patricia (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ & Writing in the Early Modern Period (New York: Routledge, 1994). Lesser, Zachary, Ghosts, Holes, Rips, and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Ramirez, Mario H., ‘Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative’, American Archivist, 78/​4 (2015), 339–​356. Rex, Cathy, ‘Indians and Images: The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal, James Printer, and the Anxiety of Colonial Identity’, American Quarterly, 64/​1 (Mar. 2011). Round, Phillip H., Removable Type Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–​1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979). Salkeld, Duncan, ‘Shakespeare Studies, Presentism, and Micro-​History’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 76/​1 (2009), 35–​43. Smith, Helen, Grossly Material Things Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Smith, Ian, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Wayne, Valerie, Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). Wolfe, Patrick, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8/​4 (Dec. 2006), 387–​409. Yim, Laura Lehua, ‘Reading Hawaiian Shakespeare: Indigenous Residue Haunting Settler Colonial Racism’, Journal of American Studies, 54/​1 (2020), 36–​43.

Chapter 6

Rel igion and t h e H i story of the B o ok Brian Cummings

Religion and the book are inseparably linked. Religion is among the oldest motives for making texts in ancient Sumeria and Egypt. Moreover, the development of several religions is bound up with technological changes in bookmaking. The Jewish Torah is made in a scroll, its identity as Scripture bound up with physical form. In medieval and early modern synagogues, the pristine state of the text was preserved only on parchment, in rolls, with no markings of any kind, undertaken by a trained scribe (sofer). A typical Sephardi manuscript in the British Library (Add. MS 4707) from the fifteenth century is written in square Hebrew script on a continuous parchment in forty-​two uniform lines, 268 columns in total. Christianity developed from the texts of Judaism, making further inventions such as the gospel book. This literature, at once biography and a handbook for life, is found in almost all early surviving copies in the relatively new form of the codex. The codex in turn assists the speedy spread of the Qur’an in Islam. Early Muslims referred to Jews and Christians as (like themselves) ahl al-​kitāb, ‘people of the book’. In the early modern period, a nexus between religion and the physical formats of book production gained new currency. Martin Luther was quoted calling the printed book God’s ‘ultimate and greatest gift’, by which humanity will acquire ‘the roots of true religion’, just in time for the Apocalypse.1 In England, John Foxe gave force to an idea that print played a key role in disseminating Protestantism, describing it as a ‘diuine and miraculous inuention’.2 Confessional exceptionalism obscures the fact that Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa pre-​empted Luther in regarding print as an instrument of divine providence.3 The papal indulgence was an early case of a print bestseller. The history of the book as an academic discipline has found it harder to acknowledge a centrality of religious texts in the formation of book history. Nothing annoys a historian of early modern print culture so much as Foxe’s excitable statement about providence. Partly this goes back to the origins of bibliography, which W. W. Greg defined as ‘the study of books as material objects irrespective of their contents’.4 Anyone who thought otherwise he considered an ‘obstinate heretic’. This telling assertion contained

Religion and the History of the Book    101 an element of denial. Greg, along with A. W. Pollard and R. B. McKerrow, pioneered a new approach in England to the history of the book via a very distinctive interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. This had more than incidental influence on how they understood its principles. Part of this was studied indifference to religion (outside Pollard’s sentimental interest in English—​although no other—​Bibles).5 In the ‘New Bibliography’ of D. F. McKenzie and his followers, the imaginative concept of a ‘sociology of texts’, which might have presaged renewed interest in religious function, still followed the secular bias of 1960s sociology. Religion was key to the early printing history of New Zealand but not England.6 Meanwhile, religious historians, always interested in texts, tended (outside specialist areas such as biblical codicology) to follow the spirit rather than the letter. The pioneering bibliographical work of Josef Benzing on Luther may be held to be an exception, alongside Rodolphe Peter and Jean-​François Gilmont on Jean Calvin.7 Specialized confessional interests are also well represented, such as the study of clandestine Catholic books in England.8 As for a global interest in the culture of religious books, comparing Catholic and Protestant Europe alike, Gilmont’s edited collection La Réforme et le livre (1990) was a lonely if groundbreaking pioneer.9 In this way, religion has a habit of disowning all but religious books, and even all but the books of its own religion. In an early modern context, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s general history Reformation acknowledges the importance of both papermaking and print in revolutionizing ‘the speed of communicating information and ideas’.10 Nevertheless, however significant, he sees book history as merely instrumental to religion, a means to an end. In a parallel way, histories of English literature have tended to treat religion as a kind of genre (devotional), and early modern book history has tended to see it as a type of content (like science or travel). Yet this is a misnomer, since religion subsumes other categories. It is worth recalling that in the Short Title Catalogue (STC) 1475–​1640 far more liturgical books are listed than the combined works of Chaucer, Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden—​and we could easily throw in Virgil, Ovid, and Horace as well. This is reinforced by the fact that, to an extent that society today finds difficult to imagine, everyday life was constructed in religious terms. For this reason, books emanate from religious structures, so that other books appear like religious ones, rather than vice versa. Firstly, this is true in terms of readership. Up to 1450, it is estimated, 95 per cent of book collections, outside those of the gentry, belonged to ‘members of religious orders, priests, university men, lawyers and administrative clerks’.11 Literacy was defined along similar lines: in 1547, Stephen Gardiner still used the term literatus to mean those able to read Latin, by which he meant the priesthood.12 What is true of readership, a fortiori of production. Even in the later sixteenth century, religion predominated. Patrick Collinson estimated that of items in the STC, half were religious; privately he felt he had underestimated.13 Part of his problem is that the realm of religion reaches too far to be precise about the boundaries. By way of case study, we could consider the personal libraries of two of the grandest prelates of the era, each of whom was born in the last years of the reign of Henry VIII and rose to become archbishop under James I. Each was a great collector of several thousand books, and each chose to bequeath those books in order to refound a cathedral

102   Brian Cummings library, the largest surviving libraries of their kind to the present day. In the process, they mark a passage from the predominantly monastic home of libraries in the Middle Ages to the emergence of personal collections. Archbishop Richard Bancroft (1544–​1610) founded Lambeth Palace Library in his will. The collection was housed in a gallery around four sides of a cloister, and contained over 6,000 items. The library of Tobie Matthew (1546–​1628), bequeathed to York Minster at her death by his widow Frances Matthew, was about half that size. The liber donorum (Fig. 6.1) pays tribute to the munificence both of Tobias and Frances, who is called Dux Fæmina facti, a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid comparing her to Dido, Queen of Carthage. This epithet (‘the leader of the work was a woman’) was borrowed from medals commemorating Queen Elizabeth for her defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and puts women in the vanguard of Reformation learning as well as militant piety. Frances’s funerary monument of 1629 declared she gave the library ‘entirely to the publick use of this Church’, and by the end of the seventeenth century it was lending books (Laurence Sterne was one of its borrowers).14 Lambeth, too, early acquired something of the status of a ‘public’ library, if not in a modern sense.15 Both of these libraries contained items well beyond a modern category of ‘religious’: including modern as well as ancient languages, history, science, travel, politics, philosophy, and literature. While the writers of overtly religious tracts predominantly belonged to the clerical class, readers did not. Publishers and printers recognized a ready demand in creating stock for them. Throughout the period, a monopoly on the rights to produce what Ian Green calls ‘steady sellers’ was the jewel in a publisher’s crown.16 The details of licences reveal an interconnected competition. At the end of the 1570s, three different patents existed for printing psalms. Christopher Barker, recently risen to the rank of the Queen’s Printer, possessed a licence for the Psalms as part of his patent for English Bibles, and another as a part of the Book of Common Prayer. John Day, on the other hand, held the patent for metrical psalms, a lucrative business involving the popular ballad version of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins; while William Seres had one for pointed psalms included in catechisms and other instructional material. Book historians tend to prioritize economic motivation for printing over religious affiliation. This rather begs the question, since religion clearly sold best. The metrical psalms appeared in over 120 editions before the end of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare plays are sometimes called bestsellers by eager theatre historians, who would be loath to give the same accolade to a psalm or sermon. Yet Paul’s Cross attracted crowds much larger than the Globe. While the sermon may be considered a primarily oral genre, printed sermons were widely circulated.17 The recusant Manual of Prayers, Peter Blayney points out, was ‘far more popular than any printed play’.18 Commerce and confession were not incommensurate. What is hard to extrapolate is how far this also relates to religious patronage. Among publishers in the reign of Henry VIII, Edward Whitchurch, Richard Grafton, and Thomas Berthelet attached themselves to Thomas Cromwell, and thus also to his religious policy, which brought business opportunities. Reyner Wolfe worked with three Archbishops of Canterbury: Thomas Cranmer, Matthew Parker, and John Whitgift. Under Edward VI and Elizabeth, Day sought

Religion and the History of the Book    103

Fig. 6.1  Liber donorum, York Minster Library MS Inc 7-​12, fo. 1r. Copyright Chapter of York. Reproduced by permission.

104   Brian Cummings the religious patronage of Somerset, Parker, William Cecil, and the Earl of Leicester; Seres also with Cecil; Barker with Francis Walsingham. Other publishers, not so much in favour with the Established Church, became advocates and salesmen instead of ‘godly’ puritans. It was the same story after the Restoration, when Richard Royston printed works for the renewed bishops, while Brabazon Aylmer, Benjamin Alsop, and Nevill Simmons published ministers ejected in 1662, and a third grouping served the Independents, Baptists, and Quakers. Nevertheless, the business of print could always cross these boundaries as well. Also, in religion (as Henry Woudhuysen remarks in general), manuscript circulation rivalled print dissemination, and in some quarters was favoured, because of freedom from government control, or because the format itself possessed a ‘personal appeal’.19 Religion is so central to the politics of early modern England that it can be fruitless hunting the difference, and book history belongs to the complex. Religion and royal power are joined at the hip in control of books and their promotion. In 1521, Cardinal Wolsey organized a burning of Luther’s books at Paul’s Cross. In 1525, Sir Thomas More began searching for books in the German Steelyard, with a view to another bonfire. Eventually this led in June 1530 (as established definitively by Peter Blayney) to the first naming of banned books in an English proclamation.20 At the same time, this desire for control also led to the furtherance of royal privileges and patents in pursuit of religious policy. This could cut both ways, and Whitchurch and Grafton both profited from this, and then suffered temporary imprisonment when policy shifted. Policy shifted so much that it is possible to count five or more Reformations in the sixteenth century. What did not shift was the assumption that religion mattered more than anything to the making of books. The formal creation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, in the interim between two of those seismic moments, both channelled royal power in the protection of its interests, and protected printers and publishers in turn from the worst exigencies of political enforcement or persecution.

Books and the Holy This chapter considers the extraordinary reach of religion within the book trade before and after the Reformation. It describes how demand and supply of religious books tests (or breaks) most of the rules that bibliography has applied in the study of books in general. Confessionalization during the Reformation affected in complex ways not only printing but also monopolies and the stationers; the history of censorship; and the relations of bookmaking, book-​owning and book-​reading to religious humanism, devotion, controversy, and politics. Just as profoundly, it affected the physical nature of the book as an object, or its status in society. An important part of this is a gradual process of secularization, diminishing the liminal attachment to a book of a sense of the holy. Yet books retain this ambiguous tincture even as they metamorphose into mere contents.

Religion and the History of the Book    105 The largest event in sixteenth-​ century book history is the Dissolution of the Monasteries, both in terms of loss and in the recycling of books into collections in universities or private homes.21 Monasteries in England reached their zenith in the twelfth century, almost all having a library of some sorts. There are more than 1,800 titles recorded at the Abbey of St Augustine at Canterbury in around 1490.22 This included medical, scientific, moral, and literary items as well as theological. The libraries of Durham Priory, and of St Mary’s Abbey in York, also Benedictine, were even larger. The catalogue of the Premonstratensian canons at Titchfield in Hampshire shows that even a rich but small foundation (there were eight canons and three novices at its dissolution) possessed over 200 books in 1400. They are divided into sections beginning with Bibles and glosses; then patristic and scholastic authorities; hagiographic texts and sermons; canon and civil law; a large section of grammatica; and an exceptionally large one of medicine (mostly the result of a single donation). Yet even after another century, which included the arrival of print, the catalogue of Bancroft’s collection in 1612 shows a similar disposition to Titchfield in 1400, allowing for a little disturbance through the proliferation of confessional categories. On the west side were Bibles and biblical commentaries, patristics, Protestant works of controversy, Catholic and Protestant biblical commentaries, Hebrew commentaries, and Catholic works of controversy. On the south side sat sermons and homilies, scholastic writers, canon, civil and common law, and literature; the east side housed historical works; the north side manuscripts, liturgy (Catholic and Protestant), puritan works, further Catholic works, and dictionaries.23 In 1537, Titchfield’s sumptuous buildings were granted to Thomas Wriothesley, Henry VIII’s Secretary of State. Later in the century it became the home of his grandson Henry, patron of Shakespeare. Its books meanwhile dispersed (the medieval catalogue is now in the British Library). As well as the library, over one hundred books were kept in the church. These included, as listed by Richard Pfaff, eight antiphonals, five legendaries, and eleven processionals, as well as three complete missals (plus another fourteen ‘worn out’) and no fewer than twelve breviaries.24 These are ‘books for priests’.25 Every parish church had several. Breviaries (or portiforia, meaning portable books) were often divided into volumes, one each for the cycles of the Christian year. The temporal cycle covered all the Sundays of the year and festivals commemorating the life of Christ. The second cycle, or sanctoral, prescribed the feast days of saints, including the Virgin Mary. The purpose of the breviary was to contain the Divine Office for all the days of the year. It often contained an outline form of the Mass, as well, but a separate book, known as a missal, was required for this most holy action in the church. In assessing what is distinctive about the history of the early modern book in England, the Reformation is the key determinant. The Church provided a huge market for the medieval book trade, especially since daily use meant that (as at Titchfield) they wore out quickly and so, unlike books in a library, needed replacing often. Liturgy was also the context for the most popular books at the beginning of the early modern period. Books of Hours, as Eamon Duffy describes, were both ‘the most glamorous and the most familiar artefacts’; they provide a key to the life of prayer, and in that sense ‘the innermost thoughts and the most sacred privacies’ of the age.26 While varying somewhat

106   Brian Cummings in form, especially in early examples, the staple contents of Books of Hours comprised the daily divine office, from matins to vespers and compline; the gradual psalms and the penitential psalms; some short offices such as the Little Hours of the Virgin; the Litany of the Saints; and the Office of the Dead. This enabled laypeople with material for private devotion, as well as a companion during divine service. Horae (or to use their English name, ‘primers’) also often contained images which provided focus for devotion. These include elaborate borders and initials, which would guide a user in following the book; they also include single images for ‘devout contemplation’. Common among such set pieces were the Last Judgement, a dance of death, or else a figure of the donor at prayer; the holy face (‘Veronica’) of Jesus, or else his hands, wounds, or heart; or the Virgin in a variety of guises. It is these images, especially the most expensive and aesthetically beautiful, which have made Books of Hours so famous. Yet images are found in cheaper copies, and cheap primers were the largest sellers. For the first half of the sixteenth century in England, as for Europe as a whole in the era of incunables, Catholic service books provided the most lucrative market, and priests and churches were the greatest users of books. Indeed, it was a market too big for early English printers. Caxton could manage Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or the Golden Legend, as large books for individual readers, and among his early imprints are also isolated liturgical works. However, for mass supplies of the Sarum Use, priests and other buyers up to the 1530s turned to François Regnault in Paris. Altogether 120 printed editions of Books of Hours were produced for English readers before 1530; of them, more than forty were published by Regnault.27 These varied in format and expense; Regnault’s Paris competitor Simon Vostre produced a large folio on vellum (STC 15926) with full-​page illuminations. The first printed version of the York Use was made in Venice in 1493. The Rouen printers Pierre Violette, Pierre Olivier, and Nicholas le Roux all printed liturgical books for York from 1507.28 A steadier trade in York was to work as stationer for books printed abroad: Jean Gachet emigrated from France and lived in the Minster Yard; at least six editions of liturgies were printed in Rouen and Paris and then sold by him in York. Even after Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534, the Latin rites continued to be used in England until the King’s death. An ominous threat to traditional liturgical books appeared earlier than that, in Thomas Cromwell’s orders to remove the name of St Thomas Becket and of the Bishop of Rome in November 1538. In 1542, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, proposed removing all the names of saints that did not appear in Scripture, something that threatened the defacement of almost every page of a breviary.29 In 1549, religious rites finally underwent a Reformation of their own, with the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer. Outwardly, this consisted in a new order of service in the English vernacular, first celebrated officially by Cranmer in St Paul’s at Whitsun. However, a separate Act of Parliament (3 & 4 Edward VI, c.10) also provided for the destruction of liturgical books of the old religion. Not only missals, breviaries, and processionals, but also Hours had to be handed over and eliminated, with a small proviso that the Royal Primer of 1545 was still allowed if the names of popish saints were removed. While the overt motivation was ‘uniformity of religion’, a missal surviving from the parish of Faceby in north Yorkshire, imported by Gachet from Rouen in 1516,

Religion and the History of the Book    107 shows the force and the brutal zeal of the second Protestant Reformation. The image of Christ crucified, in its traditional place to mark the opening of the Canon of the Mass, is slashed through, in a crosswise fashion, deep into the book. Seven ‘wounds’ in all are executed on the Mass-​book.30 It is an indication of a deeper quarrel, not simply about religious doctrine but also about the bodily life of ritual. In this, the part played by the book as object, raised, kissed, breathed on, and incensed, is itself viscerally controversial. The book crosses the boundary between body and soul. Practically, too, the changes in religious rites created a revolution in book production. Every parish needed to obtain a copy of the English Book. For printers this was a boon: Whitchurch’s first edition is dated 7 March, and Grafton’s a day later, followed by two more by him perhaps by the end of the month. In all, there were thirteen separate editions of the 1549 book, and fifteen of the 1552 revised book that quickly replaced it. There were also seventeen editions each of the homilies and the new Protestant primer. Along with five editions of complete Edwardian Bible editions and five more of New Testaments approved for church use, and eight in total of the two folios of Erasmus’s Paraphrases, Peter Blayney estimates that 6,500 sheets were produced under the patent for service books in under four years.31 This does not include Grafton’s work as King’s Printer. On the debit side, parishes needed to raise the money to purchase the new books—​twice over including 1552—​and did so partly by selling off old Latin liturgical books, stripping the binding and selling scrap paper or parchment for reuse as flyleaves or as filler to strengthen the stitching, or else to patch windows or cover jam jars. The reign of Mary I reversed these same orders. Copies of the Book of Common Prayer met the same fate as their Latin forebears, while any remaining copies of missals and primers came back out of hiding, supplemented in 1555 by an increasing number of new imprints of old rites, most (as before) printed abroad. The relentless bouleversement of Tudor religious polity then shifted again in 1558. For the ensuing 1559 Book of Common Prayer, half the printing houses in London cooperated, shared between eleven printers, of whom only seven belonged to the Stationers’ Company. This involved the last embers of the printing work of old masters Grafton and Whitchurch, plus John Kingston (Grafton’s fellow Grocer), Nicholas Hill, and others. The ardent Reformer John Day helped Grafton with the printing of one of the editions of the 1552 Book, then spent some time under Mary in the Tower of London. However, other printers show confessional ties to be less of an impediment for business. John Cawood, a Henrician Catholic conservative, who never printed or published a book before becoming Queen’s Printer in July 1553 under Mary, renewed his title under Elizabeth. Yet while two of the editions of the 1559 Book name him on the title page with his fellow royal printer Richard Jugge (the other was by Grafton), Jugge did not print a page of the first, and only a few sheets of the other, since he did not yet own a press, and hired out the work to Day and others instead.32 Cawood printed only four sheets of the first, bringing in other printers on hire, and even reusing materials from 1552. The Book of Common Prayer has some claim to be the most important title in early modern England. Major regnal editions were produced not only for Elizabeth but also for James in 1604 and Charles in 1625. Except for the ban between 1553 and 1558, and the

108   Brian Cummings further one during the Civil War in 1645, the only years without an edition up to the end of the seventeenth century are 1593 and 1602. Using the STC as a guide, there were 117 editions during the reign of Elizabeth and more than 500 by 1750. The 1587 ‘Orders concerning Printing’, by which the Stationers’ Company limited print runs to 1,500 copies, specifically exempted the Book of Common Prayer. The exorbitant demands of the Book, in procuring so many sheets, made for good business but also threatened price, especially when the ordinal (for ordaining deacons, priests and consecrating bishops) was added, and increasingly also a psalter. Even for modern scholars the book has created problems; Katherine F. Pantzer in a note within the revised STC commented drily, ‘Most bibliographers are hesitant to deal with liturgies from the period before, during, and after the Reformation.’33 Blayney has identified many new editions, yet it could be said that the number of copies and complexity of the relation between imprints threatens the hermetically controlled terminology of the discipline, its tidy definitions of edition or print run. Despite the earnest endeavours of Edwardian Reformers, the Book also failed to end the argument over the status of the book as physical object. In a preface written for the 1549 Book, Cranmer tried to drive a line between ceremonies to be allowed and superstitions that are not, or between ‘the letter and the spirit’. Yet already by 1559 the ritual use of the Book, described in a cryptic rubric as ‘suche ornamentes in the church, as wer in use by aucthoritie of parliament in the second yere of the reygne of king Edward the vi ’, had become controversial. Kissing or breathing on the Book were banned, but ‘kneeling, crossing, holding up of handes, knocking upon the brest, and other gestures’ are allowed.34 The couple laid their hands upon the Book in marriage, as did a priest and bishop at ordination. Convocation in 1563 proposed removing signing with the cross, and for a while the vestments controversy suggested a move away from the religion of the body towards a more didactic and doctrinal discourse. After 1604, visitations of parishes by the bishops show how far prayer book use was scrutinized in the opposite direction. In the diocese of London, William Laud in 1632 instituted communion rails with the express purpose of endorsing kneeling.35 Up to the Civil War and beyond, this caused consternation and sometimes physical ruction in church. Yet it also inspired defences of the Book of Common Prayer. Sir Thomas Aston in 1641 championed its use as sanctioning a social order embodied in Protestantism since the time of Melanchthon or Calvin.36 Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici (1636) declared, ‘I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hands’ to demonstrate his inward devotion.37 William Juxon specifically endorsed kneeling at Communion, first as Bishop of London, and after the Restoration as Archbishop of Canterbury, as the Book of Common Prayer itself was revived in 1662, thereby excluding Nonconformists for nearly the next two hundred years from an Established religion defined around a single book.

The Bible in Early Modern England As everyone knows, the first book printed in Europe using moveable type was Johann Gutenberg’s Bible in Mainz in the Rhineland. In the context of twenty-​first-​century

Religion and the History of the Book    109 Christianity this seems unremarkable. However, it was only in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and then mainly in the Low Countries and later in Germany, that a large lectern Bible of this kind became fashionable.38 While the Bible in the vernacular has long dominated discussion of early modern English religious books, it is as well to remember that thousands of editions of Latin Bibles poured forth from Continental presses, and were bought, read, and sold in England continuously, before and after the Reformation. Indeed, Elisabeth Leedham-​Green’s index of Cambridge inventories suggests that numbers of Latin Bibles left in wills outweigh English ones by a factor of four to one.39 The catalogue of Bancroft’s books compiled for his successor, George Abbott, shows that he owned a folio and two quarto Bibles in English (one with a ‘Communion’) as well as one in Welsh; he also owned a folio in Greek, two Hebrew Bibles (plus one of Xanthus Pagninus’ literal Latin version of the Hebrew), a Plantin polyglot, and a Slavonic Bible, as well as at least a dozen Latin Bibles (including Jerome’s Vulgate translation, and several editions of the translation by the Jewish Protestant convert Immanuel Tremellius). This does not include a large collection of Latin New Testaments, biblical commentaries, and other aids. Yet no Latin Bible was printed in England before 1580. Indeed, most of the early editions of English Bible translation were printed on the Continent. Early English Bibles are now highly collectible, carrying national value, and part of their allure is an assumption that they are rare and clandestine. In the past, especially in the case of William Tyndale (the first translator of the New Testament from the Greek: he used Erasmus’s third edition), the vernacular has been taken to be dangerous. It is claimed, on the basis of Arundel’s 1408 Constitutions, that Tyndale was pursued and eventually executed for his translation work: but his trial was rather for heresy, including sacramentarian. Certainly, his New Testament attracted attention in Cologne when printing began in 1525, so that he moved work to Worms and then to Antwerp for a reprint, both in 1526. But it was Tyndale, not the Bible, that spelled danger. In Antwerp, the printer was Christoffel van Ruremund, who made twenty-​one books for sale in England in a five-​year period, including a grammar and eighteen Latin liturgical books. While Peter Schoeffer in Worms (who printed the 1526 New Testament), Johann Schott in Strasbourg, and Merten de Keyser in Antwerp printed books for surreptitious sale in England, Christoffel’s trade shows a general competitive advantage enjoyed by Continental printers until late in Henry’s reign. After all, John Fisher’s Assertionis Lutheranae confutatio of 1522, hardly unorthodox, was also printed in Antwerp. It was reprinted in Paris and in Cologne. Sir Thomas More used the Lord Chancellor’s powers to impound early copies of Tyndale’s New Testament, as part of a campaign against any books connected with Martin Luther. Some bishops no doubt thought that any vernacular scriptural reading encouraged heresy. However, the first complete printed Bible in English by Miles Coverdale, printed in Cologne in 1535, almost certainly entered the country openly, probably perused first by Thomas Cromwell.40 The title page depicts Henry VIII passing a copy to the bishops, presumably in the hope of official authorization. James Nicolson’s new edition in Southwark (STC 2064) the following year thereby became the first full English Bible printed in England. By 1537, he obtained a licence. Meanwhile the

110   Brian Cummings ‘Matthew Bible’ (STC 2066), using Tyndale’s published and unpublished translations, with filling from Coverdale where needed, was also printed in Antwerp. However, its publishers were Grafton and Whitchurch, who resolutely sought royal permission from Cromwell themselves. In 1538, they were granted a privilege, and in April or May Grafton and Whitchurch arrived in Paris, to seek out that old favourite of the English book trade, Regnault. Cromwell wanted what came to be called ‘the Great Bible’ to be printed on large demy paper, yet no press existed in London which could work on this scale.41 All went well for a while, Bishop Bonner (at this time an enthusiast for English Bibles) oiling the wheels as ambassador, and François I giving permission for the Englishmen to print Bibles ‘tam latine quam britannice sive anglice’ (both in Latin and in English). Then in October and again in December, Regnault was called to the Paris Inquisition. Cromwell by now had a complete copy of the New Testament, but confiscation of large numbers of sheets before the final ones had been printed meant that Grafton and Whitchurch had to supplement the stock that they did receive safely with sheets they printed themselves in London, using a large press bought from Regnault. The collective effort was colossal: one unbound copy weighed 11 lb 6 oz. To recoup the £400 Cromwell raised himself, as well as to pay for their own expenses, Grafton and Whitchurch needed to sell a lot of copies quickly. The desired market was the 8,500 or so English parish churches. As for missals and breviaries, and for the Book of Common Prayer later, this gives financial meaning to the hunt for privileges. Cromwell’s Injunction to the clergy of July 1536, revised perhaps in 1539, and later printed by John Foxe in the first edition of Actes and Monuments in 1563, provided not only for the purchase of the Great Bible (and a Latin Bible) by every parish, but also that it should lie ‘in the quiere for euery man that wyll, to loke and rede theron’. It is enough to warm the heart not only of Foxe but of unwise modern historians.42 This certainly enabled Grafton and Whitchurch to invest in several further editions of the Great Bible, but with it also came not so much a wave of popular evangelical enthusiasm as a premonition of the union of politics and religion that came to characterize the early modern English state. The conservative drift of Henrician polity meant that by 1543, the Act for the Advancement of True Religion severely constrained Bible-​reading. It also carried into its purview other non-​scriptural books: sermons, disputations, arguments, ballads, plays, rhymes and songs, ‘pestiferous and noysome’.43 This is contrasted with ‘a certen forme of pure and sincere teaching’ agreeable with God’s word, and aligned with the ‘catholique and apostolicall churche’. It is the meaning of that phrase that continued to be in doubt through the Tudor and Stuart reigns. The Bishops’ Bible of 1568, somewhat the ugly duckling of English Bibles, announced on its title page that it used ‘the translation that is appointed to be read in the churches’, and bore (like the Great Bible) the figure of the monarch, but it was not quite yet an authorized Bible. In the first edition it included a large number of woodcut illustrations. This was printed by the Queen’s Printers, Cawood and Jugge. After Jugge’s death, Christopher Barker paid a handsome sum to the Privy Council in 1577 for the sole rights to print English Bibles. By now what he had in mind was not only the Bishops’, but

Religion and the History of the Book    111 also the interloper Geneva, Bible. This was first published, as its name indicates, in the Swiss Protestant city-​state of Calvin. Calvin, like Luther in Wittenberg, was an extraordinary patron of the book trade. The Paris humanist printer Robert Estienne migrated to Geneva and worked closely with Calvin. His scholarly Bibles included his 1540 Vulgate, with a critical apparatus based on seventeen manuscripts. He began printing Greek Bibles in 1546; his third, the Biblia Regia of 1550, dedicated to Henri II, used a Greek fount designed by Garamond which superseded all previous efforts. Estienne based the edition on fifteen manuscripts, with variants appearing in the margins, so that the edition overtook Erasmus to become the Textus Receptus. This radical and beautiful Bible was the first to divide chapters into verses. The English Geneva Bible began as a project for the Marian exile congregation, Foxe among them. The translators included William Whittingham and Anthony Gilby, and the printer was Rowland Hall, using a press acquired by the exiles late in 1558. It shared many features commonplace in Geneva but well advanced from England: maps, diagrams, notes, verse numbers, and also the roman type favoured by French humanism. The English paratexts were often translated directly from French examples.44 The model indeed was not a church or lectern Bible, but the personal study Bible which was enjoying a considerable vogue among Genevans. Tyndale’s New Testaments are octavos, including revised versions (such as a specially bound copy made for Anne Boleyn), and also his books of the Pentateuch. Nicolson even published a quarto of Coverdale’s complete Bible in 1537 (STC 2065). However, Protestant enthusiasm has exaggerated the extent of personal Bibles before Barker experimented with reissuing the Geneva. He began with an octavo New Testament (STC 2876), perhaps to avoid Jugge’s monopoly. In 1578, after he acquired rights to the whole Bible, he followed with a folio of the whole, now in black letter (STC 2123). Perhaps in the same year, he also produced a sextodecimo psalter (STC 2351.7) from the Geneva text. Clearly, Barker was testing the market: in April 1578 he signed an agreement with William Seres, the client of William Cecil, whereby Barker printed psalters with a Bible or Book of Common Prayer, while Seres and his assigns printed psalters with morning and evening prayer. Barker’s share of this agreement had lucrative results, and increasingly he and his heir Robert issued editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the Geneva Bible, and the psalter together, of the same size in different formats, to be bound and sold together. It is frequently commented, as by Patrick Collinson, that the Geneva Bible was ‘the most popular version for personal and domestic use’, until well into the seventeenth century.45 This generalization depends on format, fount, and paratextual addition. Barker’s petition to the Queen (STC 1417.5) laying out plans for the newfangled alternative Bible mentions the ‘large notes and expositions’ as a distinguishing feature. His 1578 whole Geneva reprinted notes from 1560, more or less a translation of notes from popular French Bibles of the late 1550s, written by Calvin’s secretary, Nicolas des Gallars. These included marginal glosses, already used by Tyndale, justified in Whittingham’s preface to the reader: ‘considering how hard a thing it is to understand the holy Scriptures, and what errors, sectes and heresies grow dailie for lacke of the true knollage thereof ’. Of such type are also the verse concordances and the occasional supply of variant texts and

112   Brian Cummings meanings, using the original languages. However, the Geneva paratexts also included ‘Arguments’ for each book of the Bible, and summaries for each chapter, also borrowed from the 1559 French edition. At the end was an alphabetical table indicating the contents of the Bible for finding such arguments. The Argument to Romans contains a condensed version of Calvin’s theology of predestination, derived from his Institutio, the final edition of which also appeared first in 1559. Such notes went beyond the boundaries set out by Cranmer in his preface to the Great Bible: ‘I forbid not to read, but I forbid to reason.’ Cranmer’s prologue also appeared in the Bishops’ Bible, which Barker, now Queen’s Printer, reprinted in 1578 (STC 2124). Barker now owned the rights to two different translations of the Bible, one authorized for use in parishes, the other christened by Calvin, by now the theologian du choix of the Elizabethan Established Church. Yet again in 1578, Barker also produced a third version of the New Testament (STC 2880). This was a revised translation by Laurence Tomson, using Theodore Beza’s famous Latin New Testament, complete with his learned notes, of a much more scholarly character than those by des Gallars. They contained frequent reference to philological points, whether from the Greek or from ancient grammarians; to patristic and scholastic theology; and to present-​day confessional controversy. The 1578 English edition is also in roman letter, advertising its French humanist credentials, and opening up a different kind of readership. This book is sextodecimo, to be put in a large pocket. It can be carried around for reference as well as ready to hand in a study. New Testaments had existed like this for centuries, since the days of St Cuthbert, for devotional purpose but also for carrying on the person as a religious artefact.46 Barker suddenly saw an emerging market aimed at someone new: as it were, the Protestant intellectual. In 1579, Barker produced an octavo Concordance by Thomas Wilcox (STC 24917), in alphabetical order, enabling the reader to cross-​reference and search for words in Scripture. In the same year, he produced two quarto editions of the complete Geneva (STC 2126 and 2127), each with a prayer book and psalter bound in. He also produced an octavo of the complete Geneva without prayer book (STC 2129), and another octavo of Tomson’s New Testament (STC 2880.3), and also an octavo of the Bishops’ version of the New Testament (STC 2880.5). It is clear by now that Barker had a sophisticated sense of different readerships which he hoped to exploit. Black-​letter fount is preferred for church editions based on the original Geneva text of Whittingham and Gilby; roman is preferred for Tomson’s intellectual book. The 1579 Bishops’ New Testament has black letter for the scriptural text, but uses roman or italic for the apparatus, including novelties for this version like an argument for each book. In 1587, Barker produced an amalgam complete Geneva (STC 2146), all in roman type, with Tomson’s notes. Barker’s collection of parallel volumes, including now the concordance, could also be added to the publishing variables, along with new texts, such as the 1594 edition (STC 2160) with a translation of Franciscus Junius’s commentary on Revelation. This superseded Tomson’s notes for the book. Perhaps Barker himself wondered, as surely occurs to us, why nobody had the brainwave before 1576 of commandeering the Geneva for a general readership. This shows,

Religion and the History of the Book    113 perhaps, how much Bible-​ reading conformed (contrary to the ardent prejudices of English Protestant exceptionalism) more to a royal desire for uniformity and a publishing one for monopoly, than an incipient democratic vernacular (and insular) scriptural piety. The myth of English Protestantism includes a heavy dose of Genevan cliché, of varying kinds: that it was the popular Bible, rather than the established one (whereas Lancelot Andrewes had one to hand into the reign of King James); or that it was nonetheless feared because of its seditious notes, and thus in favour with hot puritans rather than mild conformists. All of these categories interfuse with each other, and Barker was more in tune with the mood of the times than historians have sometimes been. The popularity of the Geneva is a matter of print runs: Barker found he could sell more of them than anything else, and with a little exaggeration upwards of a hundred thousand were produced. Among its probable owners was Shakespeare, although he may have used a Bishops’ as well. King James in particular is said, over and again, to have disliked the Geneva Bible. He certainly commented at the 1604 Hampton Court Conference, with classic passive aggressiveness, on the marginal notes concerning ‘tyrants’.47 However, the Geneva Bible became the official version of the Kirk in Scotland in 1579, and the first edition was dedicated to James VI. When he moved to England, James may have wanted a new Bible simply because Elizabeth had had one. His bishops also wanted renewed theological control over content; the age of the Geneva, now fifty years old, with much of the New Testament text going back to Tyndale, allowed for a consensus to prevail that the advances of Protestant biblical scholarship demanded a full revision. The result is the colossus of the King James Bible, which by an irony of colonial history became the all-​ crushing version of American evangelicalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its origins in the translation committees of Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster have become as lauded as the actions of the Holy Spirit in producing the Septuagint by the Greek bishops of third-​century Alexandria. Miles Smith wrote in the preface: ‘The originall thereof being from heaven, not from earth; the authour being God, not man; the enditer, the holy spirit.’ What this statement elides is a renewed controversial argument about the status of the Church of England. For by now there existed a Catholic alternative version, in the Rheims New Testament (1582) and its Old Testament partner, also by Gregory Martin, which did not appear in print until 1609 and 1610 (from Douai). Smith’s championing of the Hebrew and Greek origins of the King James was a conscious aspersion of the basis of the Catholic translation in Jerome’s Latin. From a bibliographical point of view, the version of 1611, while complex enough in terms of number of editions, is less intricate than the Geneva. Robert Barker inherited the privileges of his father and purveyed them in orthodox fashion. His realm over the profits is notable for the fines he received for famous slips in reprints: Jesus as Judas in a Geneva (STC 2212), and ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’ in the 1631 King James (STC 2296). For the latter egregious error Barker and Martin Lucas were fined £300 and all copies suppressed, although over a dozen survive (Fig. 6.2). The scandal of what was later dubbed ‘The Wicked Bible’ was still being cited in puritan controversy in 1668 after the Restoration, showing how the

114   Brian Cummings

Fig. 6.2  The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the Neuu (London: Robert Barker, and by the assignes of John Bill, 1631), York Minster Library: shelf mark HOB XI.H.32, showing detail of Exodus 20. Copyright Chapter of York. Reproduced by permission.

King James Bible above all fulfilled a function of official authority. It was a quintessential lectern Bible, while even William Laud continued to use a Geneva privately. Not until John Baskerville’s editions in the eighteenth century did it truly become a home or study Bible.

Confessionalization and the Book Trade Barker’s 1578 New Testament contains Tomson’s preface to his patron, Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Secretary and chief enforcer. It also contains a calendar, linking use of Scripture to the uniform Book of Common Prayer. After 1583, when John Whitgift became Archbishop of Canterbury, conformity became the order of the day, embattled on either side by Catholics and puritans. Beyond liturgical and biblical texts, or their interpretative penumbra, a plethora of religious texts filled bookshops. Andrew Maunsell’s catalogue of 1595, the first full trade list of its kind, covering authors and titles over the previous two generations, has 123 pages devoted to divinity, followed by a much shorter volume of 27 pages with everything else.48 Religion still provides half of booksellers’ stock into the second half of the seventeenth century.49 For a learned divine, a steady stream poured out of theology and doctrinal explanation. From a lay reader, there arose an urgent demand for printed sermons, for guides to faith and arts of living and dying. Catechisms, whether in official or in alternative versions, form a bibliography unto themselves.50 A rich informal literature provided edifying life stories, providential tales, and cautionary examples. Women provided a higher proportion of

Religion and the History of the Book    115 the readership for religious texts than for any other. Private devotional reading was increasingly characterized as female.51 Mothers and daughters, neighbours, friends, and servants collected together to take part in communal reading.52 Elizabeth Isham around 1639 praises God, ‘remembering those good bookes of my Granmothers reading to my mother being weake in her Chamber’ during her illness.53 Less edifyingly, confessional controversy flourished on all sides. This material, though, while eye-​catching, does not always correspond to popularity or sales. The admonition controversy in 1572, appealing for a purer form of scriptural authority and church government, is more remarkable for its effects (such as the banishment of Thomas Cartwright) than its readership. This is just as true of the Arminian debates in 1625 surrounding Richard Montagu’s New Gagg for the Gospel?. Polemic is determined by the regime’s demand for obedience. In this way it showed its literary weakness. Indeed, Alexandra Walsham argues in relation to Catholicism that the Established Church played catch-​up in relation to the ‘sustained attack’ by Thomas Harding, Thomas Stapleton, and others, published in the dominant printing houses of Antwerp and Louvain, against John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562).54 As the situation in the Low Countries exacerbated with the Dutch Revolt, William Allen moved the focus of this printing bulwark to northern France, including Douai where he founded the English Jesuit seminary in 1568. Printing on the Continent was supplemented by secret presses, first in London and then in the woods at Stonor Park. Much of this literature was political, in what Michael Questier calls the ‘systematic answering machine’ in which arguments raged back and forth about the succession, loyalty tests, and the quarrel between papacy and monarchy.55 Once the English missions of Edmund Campion in 1580 and then of Robert Southwell and others in 1595 shifted attention to the example of individual martyrs, printed work acceded to a flourishing trade in manuscript narratives and tributes to the dead, brilliantly labelled by Nancy Pollard Brown as the ‘paperchase’. She shows that the Jesuits maintained their own supply of paper.56 Yet once again there are complexities in this book trade which are easy to miss. Campion’s Rationes decem, explaining ‘ten reasons’ for keeping the old faith, were distributed by hand to sensational effect in the University church of St Mary in Oxford. Yet while attention naturally centres on this insular event, most of the book’s dissemination happened through Continental presses in over sixty editions by 1632. An English translation was not made for many years, appearing only in a work refuting Campion. Yet there were two Czech versions, one Dutch, four Flemish, four French, nine German, one Hungarian, and two Polish. Most people read Campion in Latin. The brilliant bibliographical work of Allison and Rogers concentrated at first on the secret presses and the works in English; yet their second volume shows that this output is dwarfed by works printed abroad and especially in Latin. Conformist religious literature also plays more to these rules than the conventional history implies. Tobie Matthew, while still in Oxford, bought theology in bulk from Continental sources, such as several volumes of Peter Martyr all published by Christopher Froschover in Zurich between 1565 and 1567. One of them bears his signature in the year of publication. Bancroft’s catalogue has several pages of Catholic

116   Brian Cummings literature, not only of polemics concerning English affairs, but also of contemporary Latin theology and apologetics. Matthew, perhaps showing evidence of his personal history with Campion (they were contemporaries at Oxford), collected works associated with him. He owned six works by Campion himself, four by Allen, and fourteen by Robert Persons. However, he also owned twenty-​one by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. Matthew collected Catholic books as part of a theological campaign of refutation, also shown in the library of Antony Higgins, Dean of Ripon. Nevertheless, the inventories of John Foster, the York bookseller, also show Bellarmine on open sale outside the Minster. After his move to York in 1606, Matthew organized the local persecution of Catholics and their books. Eight polemicists can be identified as in Matthew’s close circle: Alexander Cooke, the Leeds Nonconformist, and his brother Robert; the Bunny brothers, Francis (prebend of Durham) and Edmund (prebend of York); John Favour (vicar of Halifax); Matthew Sutcliffe (Dean of Exeter); Thomas Morton (a canon of York, later bishop of Durham); and Thomas Bell (a former seminary priest), whose Hunting of the Romish Foxe (STC 1823) is explicitly dedicated to the Council of the North. Matthew’s advancement was partially connected with government concern about an area ‘overpestered with Popery’.57 Yet Catholicism was disseminated not only by polemic, but also by other kinds of book. Spiritual classics such as by the Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola, or the prolific Dominican Luis de Granada, spread widely in England, along with post-​Tridentine versions of Books of Hours and psalters. Not all such publications were surreptitious. While Southwell’s polemical work was banned, his beautiful Mary Magdalens Funerall Teares of 1592 passed the censors of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. Saint Peters Complaint, despite an implicitly papal title, and wide circulation in manuscript copies, attracted fifteen imprints in various versions (including one from Robert Waldegrave in Edinburgh), from 1595 to 1615, before it first appeared in St Omer in the Spanish Netherlands. This shows how a broader definition of religious literary culture can evade the tight lines desired by the religious professionals. Southwell’s poetry and poetic prose answered a devotional need felt by anyone, as long as it censored out more obvious signs of Catholic practice.58 His ‘Burning Babe’, sometimes treated as a quintessentially ‘Catholic’ poem, provided a model for the incarnation that was happily published in orthodox guise. Whitgift tried to impose conformity on all, and the apex of his exercise was to enforce the political order of the English liturgy and the authority of the bishops. He was therefore merciless in his treatment of Catholic agitators but also anything smacking of Presbyterian separatism, such as the mischievous Martin Marprelate tracts, which were aimed at Whitgift as much as their direct target, John Aylmer, Bishop of London. Waldegrave, showing again the religious inclusiveness of printers, printed the early texts, which then went underground in Warwickshire, where Elizabeth Crane took over. While Aylmer in 1558 declared ‘God is English’, he became the butt for Martin and also for Spenser in The Shepheards Calendar, where he is the bad shepherd. The satirical and poetic edge from the puritan end of the spectrum could be as sharp as anything, even Martin’s scourge, Thomas Nashe, happy to carry out Whitgift’s dirty work. Matthew, coming as he did from the puritan wing of the Church of England, tolerated

Religion and the History of the Book    117 Presbyterian sympathies, but he also regulated the boundary with scrupulous efficiency. He punished individuals who crossed into separatism, however much he sympathized theologically. Interesting in this respect is Richard Bernard, who lost his living in 1605 by failing to subscribe, but was encouraged back into the Church by Matthew in 1608.59 Bernard not only resubscribed but also published an attack on his separatist colleagues. In literary terms, however, Bernard was a success, and his Faithfull Shepherd appeared in several editions. Bancroft had his books pasted with small labels indicating ‘Pr’ for Protestant and ‘Pp’ for Catholic (‘Papist’), but readers often needed such labels to be able to tell which was which. The boundaries of religious books, if not always their owners, were porous, as much as anything involving the category of ‘religious’ itself. Hamlet criticism until Stephen Greenblatt managed to define a play as inherently secular which contains detailed theology of purgatory. One reason for this, though, is the prejudice of the religious as well as the literary. Tyndale urged his readers in The obedience of a Christen Man (1528) ‘not to beleve a tale of Robyn hode or Gestus Romanorum or of the Cronycles /​ but to beleve Gods worde that lasteth ever’.60 Here is one of the lasting legacies of Foxe’s claim about print and Protestantism, in that his book has come to embody a popular idea of rampant religion. No account of the subject, before Collinson’s systematic debunking, failed to mention the chaining of Actes of Monuments to every parish church. Foxe addressed himself aspiringly to ‘the simple flock of Christ, especially the unlearned sort’, yet the cost of the book was a working man’s annual wage.61 Government patronage rather than market forces ensured its success.62 If Foxe’s book was disseminated less widely than used to be thought, its contents are symptomatic of the literary culture of books in the early modern period in general. In the 1570 preface ‘To the True and Faithfull Congregation of Christes Vniuersall Church’, Foxe self-​consciously addresses both the history of books and the contents of his own: ‘Whose painefull trauaile albeit I cannot but commend, in committing diuers thinges to writing, not vnfruitfull to be knowen, nor vnpleasaunt to be read.’63 He weighs the literary productions of the monasteries against his own, and finds them wanting. Yet what is his work but an assemblage of writing, manuscript and printed, the sources from which he constructs a providential history? In this respect, Foxe has sometimes fallen victim to a standard of historiography which misunderstands or even underestimates him. He presents the Christians of the past and the future as creatures of the book. While this is characteristic of his account of the medieval Lollards, it comes to a head in the history of his own century. Here is the story of how Tunstall buys up the remaining stock of Tyndale’s New Testament from Packington the bookseller, only for the money to be passed on for a new edition. Apocryphal though it may be, the story defines the economics of the print shop, where a second edition is always the make-​or-​break moment. It is not so much believers as readers that he commemorates: John Porter is ‘cruelly handled, and that vnto death’ for reading the Bible in St Paul’s Cathedral. James Bainham, an avid reader, who seems to have worked as a bookseller and in 1531 purchased the freedom of London as a stationer, agonizes for months between recantations, and recantations

118   Brian Cummings of his recantations until he takes his English New Testament in his hand and kisses it, and ‘swears the Word against himself if he should forswear it again’. Thomas Sommers, paraded in London riding his horse backwards with his banned books round his neck as a necklace, seeing his New Testament about to be burned, throws it through the fire three times to save it. Throughout, the process of religion is articulated on the grounds of books: it is a history of reading where everything is on show. Foxe quotes from Mary I’s articles, which ask who has seen the aforesaid books, who has heard of them, where they have been heard of, and where they are to be found. John Bradford asserts: ‘That I haue written, I haue written’. Foxe then expatiates a whole theory of how writing relates to speech, the speech acts of intention and interpretability. The appropriately named John Leaf, forced to abjure with Bradford, and asked to sign his name, pricks his finger and writes in his own blood. In a series of woodcuts, Day represents signal moments of conscience around the agency of the writing hand under torture.64 While Foxe claims this style of martyrdom for Protestants alone, it is repeated in many stories of Catholics under Elizabeth. ‘Why do I use my paper, pen and ink?’ asked Henry Walpole in a poem after witnessing the hanging, drawing, and quartering of Edmund Campion.65 His name is one of hundreds of graffiti in the Salt Tower at the Tower of London. On 7 April 1595 he too was executed at York. In life and death, Walpole proves the changing parameters of religion and the book in the centuries of religious revolution, as new technologies were put to the stake.

Notes 1. Martin Luther, ‘Table Talk’, no. 1038, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Tischreden, 6 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1912–​21), i. 523. 2. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perrilous days, 2 vols. (London: Iohn Day, 1570), 858. 3. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 317. 4. Greg, ‘Bibliography—​ A Retrospect’, The Bibliographical Society, 1892–​ 1942: Studies in Retrospect (London: Bibliographical Society, 1945), 23–​31, at 25. 5. A. W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible: The Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English, 1525–​1611 (London: Henry Frowde, 1911). 6. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 95. 7. Josef Benzing, Lutherbibliographie: Verzeichnis der gedruckten Schriften Martin Luthers bis zu dessen Tod (Baden-​Baden: Heitz, 1966); Rodolfe Peter and Jean-​François Gilmont, Bibliotheca Calviniana: Les Œuvres de Jean Calvin publiées au XVIe sieclè, 3 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1991–​2000). 8. Anthony Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-​Reformation between 1558 and 1640, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989–​94).

Religion and the History of the Book    119 9. Jean-​François Gilmont (ed.), La Réforme et le livre: L’Europe et l’imprimé (1517–​v. 1570) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990). 10. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–​1700 (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 71. 11. Rodney M. Thompson and Nigel J. Morgan, ‘Language and Literacy’, in Nigel J. Morgan and Rodney M. Thompson (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ii: 1100–​1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 37. 12. The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. J. Miller (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 274. 13. Patrick Collinson, ‘Literature and the Church’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 374. 14. James Raine, A Catalogue of the Printed Books in the Library of the Dean and Chapter of York (York: John Sampson, 1896), p. xi. 15. James Carley, ‘From Private Hoard to Public Repository: Archbishops John Whitgift and Richard Bancroft as Founders of Lambeth Palace Library’, Sandars Lectures, 2010–​11. 16. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15. 17. Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 128. 18. Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005), 33–​50, at 36. 19. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–​1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 15. 20. Peter Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London 1501–​1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), i. 329. 21. Elisabeth Leedham-​ Green, ‘University Libraries and Booksellers’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B Trapp (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1400–​1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 353. 22. David N. Bell, ‘The Libraries of Religious Houses at the End of the Middle Ages’, in Elisabeth Leedham-​Green and Teresa Webber (eds.), Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain, i: To 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 140. 23. James P. Carley, ‘ “A great gatherer-​ together of books”: Archbishop Bancroft’s Library at Lambeth (1610) and Its Sources’, Lambeth Palace Library Annual Review (2001), 51–​64. 24. Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 300. 25. Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 200. 26. Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 1–​2. 27. Duffy, Marking the Hours, 121 and 124. 28. Stacey Gee, ‘The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of York before 1557’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 12/​1 (2000), 27–​54, at 38. 29. Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–​1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 142. See Dunstan Roberts, ‘The Expurgation of Traditional Prayer Books (c. 1535–​1600)’, Reformation, 15 (2010), 23–​49

120   Brian Cummings 30. Brian Cummings, ‘The Wounded Missal’, in Alexandra Walsham et al. (eds.), Memory and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 153–​170. 31. Blayney, Stationers’ Company, ii. 723. 32. Peter Blayney, The Printing and the Printers of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549–​1561 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 33. STC 2: 68. 34. The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 98 and 102. 35. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–​c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 188. 36. Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and the People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 169. 37. Religio Medici, in Selected Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1968), 8. 38. De Hamel, History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 228. 39. Elisabeth Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-​ Lists from Vice-​ Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ii. 94–​100. 40. Blayney, Stationers’ Company, i. 348. 41. Blayney, Stationers’ Company, i. 361. 42. David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 43. Brian Cummings, ‘Reformed Literature and Literature Reformed’, in David Wallace (ed.), Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 842. 44. Femke Molekamp, ‘Genevan Legacies: The Making of the English Geneva Bible’, in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 41. 45. ‘Literature and the Church’, 380. 46. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, Studies in Church History, 38 (2004), 123–​142. 47. Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: A. & C. Black, 1994), 45. 48. Maunsell, The first [second] part of the catalogue of English printed books (London: John Windet and James Roberts, 1595). 49. Green, Print and Protestantism, 13. 50. Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–​1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 51. Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt, and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Religious Publishing in England 1557–​1640’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63. 52. Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84. 53. Isham, ‘Booke of Rememberance’, Princeton University Library, Robert Taylor Collection, MS RTCO1 no. 62, fo. 4v. Online edition: https://​warw​ick.ac.uk/​fac/​arts/​ren/​rese​arch​curr​ ent/​isham/​texts/​. 54. Walsham, ‘ “Domme Preachers”? Post-​Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past & Present, 168 (2000), 72–​123, at 81.

Religion and the History of the Book    121 55. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–​1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–​18. 56. Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England’, in Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths (eds.), English Manuscript Studies, 1100–​1700 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 120–​143. 57. Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–​1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 137. 58. Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 80. 59. Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 229. 60. Tyndale, The obedience of a Christen man and how Christen rulers ought to governe (Antwerp: Merten de Keyser, 1528), sig. R4r. 61. Collinson, ‘Literature and the Church’, 384. 62. Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14–​16. 63. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1570), sig. iiv. 64. Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 110–​132. 65. Louise Imogen Guiney, Recusant Poets (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938), 178.

Select Bibliography Allison, Anthony, and Rogers, D. M., The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-​Reformation between 1558 and 1640, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989–​94). Blayney, Peter W. M., The Printing and the Printers of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549–​1561 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Blayney, Peter W. M., The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London 1501–​1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Carley, James P., ‘ “A great gatherer-​together of books”: Archbishop Bancroft’s Library at Lambeth (1610) and Its Sources’, Lambeth Palace Library Annual Review (2001), 51–​64. Collinson, Patrick, ‘Literature and the Church’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 374–​398. Duffy, Eamon, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Evenden, Elizabeth, and Freeman, Thomas S., Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Gilmont, Jean-​François (ed.), The Reformation and the Book, trans. Karin Maag, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Maltby, Judith, Prayer Book and the People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

122   Brian Cummings Molekamp, Femke, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Questier, Michael, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–​ 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Walsham, Alexandra. ‘ “Domme Preachers”? Post-​Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past & Present, 168 (2000), 72–​123.

Chapter 7

Printing an d B o ok History Insights from Practice Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence

Could you print like an Elizabethan? ‘It was hard work. Patient work, to typeset prose . . . to run the machine itself . . . Then the type had to be redistributed in the boxes.’1 And why would you want laboriously to set pages of text, letter by letter and space by space, and then put all the type away again ready to start again? ‘You can’t think how exciting, soothing, ennobling and satisfying it is.’2 For the past century, printing on the hand-​press has supported scholarship on the early modern book. This chapter explains the motivations for integrating practical printing with book history, and the means for setting up a workshop. A brief history of teaching workshops in the Anglo-​American world suggests that practical printing developed in university settings not as a purely academic exercise in bibliography, but from the same opportunities and challenges which, over the same period, supported private presses and the making of artists’ books. As some readers may have already suspected, the recollections quoted in the first paragraph are not the testimony of early modern printers, but of Anaïs Nin and Virginia Woolf, modernist writers who printed and published their own works in the twentieth century. Like the early hand-​press revivalists of the nineteenth century, of whom the best-​known is William Morris, these authors sought to use the press to promote their own aesthetic ideas. Morris’s designs at the Kelmscott Press were strongly shaped by his appreciation and deep knowledge of medieval manuscripts and fifteenth-​century books. Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press sought to promote a different aesthetic, a new kind of literary writing for the twentieth century. Each used the hand press to realize their own artistic visions. Where is the line between practical archaeology and artistic license? The history of the early modern book itself provides precedents for re-​creations using existing materials. What David McKitterick calls ‘typographical revivalism’ resulted in the production of imitations, facsimiles, or ‘perfected’ volumes.3 The durability of printing

124    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence equipment—​the type itself and, even more, the steel punches and copper matrices used to make type—​facilitated this activity. Early modern printing in England provides examples of the ‘long tradition of re-​use’ of materials for cheap printing of popular tales.4 An impulse to create, replicate, imitate, or improve upon the hand-​press book can be answered as long as equipment survives, and the connection is not so distant. As McKitterick observes, well into the twentieth century, ‘there was no shortage of means’ for reprinting in an older style. ‘Old cases of type remained half-​forgotten in the backs of printing houses.’5 This activity increased the importance of distinguishing imitations and later printings from the originals, and motivated bibliographers to describe and classify the types used by early printers, a challenging task before the widespread availability of photography. From an early period, then, bibliophilic and bibliographical interest in the early modern book have existed in symbiosis. Philip Gaskell, who founded several teaching workshops in his career as a scholar and librarian, enumerated the bibliographical presses working in 1965, counting twenty-​five in his census. He commented on the symbiosis between private presses and bibliographical presses, which drew on the same skills and stock of second-​hand equipment, and also the same enthusiasm. While Gaskell was himself an influential teacher, who constructed replica presses and taught bibliography through practical printing, he did not discount other factors in the founding of printing workshops in university settings, which had ‘nothing to do with bibliography’, remarking that they might be used ‘out of hours by enthusiasts’. Musing on why the craft of hand-​printing—​ ‘of all useless things’—​appealed to people in the mid-​twentieth century, Gaskell answered: ‘I do not know. Certainly I do not regret it, for printing is fun; and in the end scholarship is the gainer.’6 This chapter elaborates on Gaskell’s conviction that scholarship gains from practical experience of printing, but his other statement is equally significant: people print because they take pleasure in it, and because it is an art and a craft through which ideas are communicated. The same can be said of reading, a learned skill which affords the pleasures of discovery and which lends the history of the book its special significance at the intersection of humanistic disciplines. Inspiration for the establishment of bibliographical presses in the early twentieth century came from the analytical approach of the ‘New Bibliography’, which advocated the detection in copies of early modern books of all the physical clues to the manufacture of the edition.7 In one of the monuments of this school, ‘Notes on Bibliographical Evidence’ (1913), Robert B. McKerrow set out ‘elementary facts of the mechanical side of book-​ production’, but also called for instruction in practical printing to integrate these lessons in the student’s method of approaching an early modern book.8 The first bibliographical press was founded at Yale University in 1927 by the university librarian Andrew Keogh and the newly appointed printer to the Yale University Press, Carl Rollins. The origins of the Yale Bibliographical Press lay in the combination of the skills of Rollins and his friendships with contemporary typographers and the academic interests of Keogh.9 Twenty-​five years after the Yale founding, an article in the Times Literary Supplement voiced the hopes of their counterparts in the Oxford English Faculty members and

Printing and Book History    125 librarians who had founded the Bodleian Library’s Bibliography Room in 1949; they hoped that this would ‘give [Oxford students] the beginnings of a technical knowledge in which American scholars have recently shown themselves such excellent masters’.10 Now, a century after the founding at Yale, the field of book history has built upon the findings of the analytical bibliographers but has also in various ways reacted against their views of the purposes and possibilities of bibliographical evidence, particularly against the ‘collapsing of the term “bibliography” with that of “textual criticism” ’.11 What now is the role of the bibliographical presses which were in their early conception so tied to the methods and aims of the New Bibliography? Studying the early modern book as a material object requires a basic understanding of the early modern processes of making a book, and both Gaskell’s New Introduction to Bibliography (1974) and Sarah Werner’s recent practical guide give descriptions of the composition, imposition, and printing processes.12 Still, if it can be argued that ‘the hand versus the eye, practice versus reading, embodied muscle memory versus print information’13 are ‘competing ideologies’ in book history today, it is worth making a critical examination of what might be achieved through practical experience in an academic discipline. The promise of book history as a field has been that the material and the text might be examined with equal rigour. The question might be whether the same can be said of the field of book history now, as of the printing shops of the early modern period described by Anthony Grafton, from which the learned man or woman ‘could not escape without inky fingers’.14 To engage with a field of academic study through a creative activity seems at once the furthest extension of a materialist approach and a leap of imagination. When Philip Gaskell said in 1965 that ‘scholarship is the gainer’ from practical printing,15 he did not go on to enumerate these gains, but a notable example which soon followed was his own New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), a training in how to understand the structures and materials of hand-​printed books. D. F. McKenzie integrated his own experience of teaching and printing with textual and historical evidence in his scholarly work.16 Yet despite the generations of students who must have encountered at least an introduction to typesetting and printing at Yale, Belfast, Liverpool, London, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, evidence from personal printing practice is infrequently referred to in the literature. Informal and admittedly partial learning can be perilous to cite. Joseph J. Corn has drawn attention to ‘a scholarly practice that understates what historians of technology learn from objects’, further distancing academic writing from the ‘artifactual apprenticeships’ that may inspire scholarly work in the first place.17

It would surely be a wiser book historian, or two, who managed to print 250 sides of a sheet in one hour—​the ‘token’ for payment of early modern printers. Like making bone

126    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence fish-​hooks or stone axes, using the skills of the press engages us with manual skills and physical materials used in the past, not only as observers but as temporary participants in the mental and social contexts of craft practices. By performing these actions as well as reading about them, we bring into play another set of our human faculties in understanding the object. As Adam Smyth has written about his own experience of printing, setting type and printing became one way, among many, of thinking through these questions [of the literary imagination and its relationship to the technologies of production] . . . I came to wonder if the compositor engaged with text less in terms of semantic meaning and more as a spatial problem . . . and these new conceptions in turn became the questions I brought to printing, the questions that framed my engagement with the press.18

The fate of the bibliographical press movement since Gaskell’s article was published in 1965 has been chequered.19 Many of those on his list of twenty-​five closed in the following decades; on the other hand, in the past five years new workshops have opened in other universities. Bibliographical presses seem to occupy a similar ecological niche wherever they appear, which is to say, they are supported by alliances between disciplines and departments and by the enthusiasm of individuals.20 They exist in a new context, though. The twenty-​first-​century wave of practical printing in universities has emerged in the context of access to early modern editions, an interest in experimentation with early materials, connections with the contemporary book arts (as explored in this volume by Sujata Iyengar), and an interest in using digital techniques to enhance scholarship. Printing workshops today can be seen within the context of a ‘maker’ approach in the humanities.21 Some bibliographical presses are part of programmes which integrate book arts with book history, such as at the Iowa Center for the Book.22 An informal and non-​comprehensive survey of university-​based letterpress workshops at the time of writing polled the settings and contents of workshops in the United Kingdom and the United States. While several on Gaskell’s list had closed in the intervening years, at least one of those, at McGill University, was being renovated in 2019; the Rochester Institute of Technology and University of California Santa Barbara each bought Albion presses in the 2010s, and in the same decade new workshops opened in UK universities.23 Somewhere between the pressures on the humanities in general and the trend for ‘making and knowing’, the state of printing workshops is as healthy today as it was at the time of Gaskell’s census in 1965, even if their contexts and purposes have changed with the times. The aspiration of the librarians, professional printers, and professors of English literature who started bibliographical presses in the early twentieth century was to introduce students to the way books were made ‘before the advent of the power press’, before innovations that had already been widely adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century.24 Since 1950 there have been even more rapid and far-​reaching transformations of the processes by which text is transferred to the page, shaping the way we experience books. Today, a mass-​market printed book may give the typesetting information on the

Printing and Book History    127 reverse of the title page (Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016) is ‘Set in 9.968/​15.075 pt Anselm Ten’), but this is a modern digital translation of the typefaces, point sizes, and bodies used by early modern printers.25 More to the point, the page itself has by now taken digital form. Many of the readers of this and other texts—​even and especially early modern texts—​will read them on a screen. If mid-​twentieth-​century educators were worried that their students were unfamiliar with handmade books, concern about students’ familiarity with the codex form is now acute. One way to integrate practice into scholarship is through repeatable experiments. Claire Bolton’s work on the fifteenth-​century printer Johann Zainer incorporates the results of Bolton’s experiments with paper and printing.26 Stephen Pratt undertook printing experiments to contribute to a discussion of the type used by Gutenberg,27 and Ad Stijnman’s history of copperplate printing is supported by his own printing and manufacture of inks using traditional methods.28 The hypotheses of Needham and others about the printing of a fifteenth-​century book, the Catholicon,29 with two-​ line ‘slugs’ of type is the inspiration for practical research by Paul Nash who has tried making matrices for slugs (using pairs of lines of metal type) from clay, plaster, papier mâché (flong), and sand.30 Alan May’s construction of wooden platen presses has already been mentioned. Roger Gaskell’s scholarly work on engraving is complemented by his construction of a wooden rolling press.31 These experiments demonstrate what is possible with the early modern technology and can also provide clues to what would have been practical to achieve over a sustained period of production. Collectively, these printing studies provide a parallel line of research to the significant recent scholarship on materials and techniques in the production of parchment and paper.32 The intellectual benefit of these developments is demonstrated in Timothy Barrett’s preface to his work on early modern papermaking, providing an illuminating example of a change of aesthetic approach over several decades.33 Could we just read about it? Two significant manuals of printing were published in English in the early modern period: Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (1683–​4) and John Smith’s (1755) The printer’s grammar.34 Moxon’s was the first comprehensive book on printing in any language and covers all aspects of the crafts necessary to stock and operate a printing shop, but in language intended for the interested layman. Smith concentrated on the composition of type and his work is more clearly a reference or teaching manual. Scholars have profitably mined Moxon’s account of seventeenth-​century printing and also read it against the grain; the question of its intended audience and the representation of the authority structure within the craft is explored in several studies.35 The more critical of these warn against ‘treating Moxon’s manual and those of his followers as transparent windows onto the world of professional printing’,36 finding that Moxon ‘attempt[s]‌to impose and sharpen boundaries’ in the gender and social relations of the workshop, ‘rather than [provide] a description of existing practice’.37 From the practical point of view, what is missing from these manuals is the experience itself. In his preface Moxon wrote, ‘Hand-​Craft signifies Cunning, or Sleight, or Craft of the Hand, which cannot be taught by words, but only gained by Practice and Exercise; therefore I shall

128    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence not undertake, that with the bare reading of these Exercises, any shall be able to perform these Handy-​Works.’38 This was a polite caveat to his intended readers who were probably not members of the trade, but we are Moxon’s readers too and it can serve as a warning to us as well. The most valuable lesson from experience is that printing is in parts an intricate and skilled set of crafts and that, far from a single formula, there are often several answers to practical problems posed. Consider how early modern printers created a single page with both red and black text, commonly found on title pages and often seen in almanacs.39 The type for a single page in one colour is normally inked and printed all at once, and the methods for printing two colours usually involved two printings of the page. But which colour first? Moxon described printing the black text first,40 while a work by Martin-​Dominique Fertel some decades later41 advocated printing the red words through cut-​out windows in the frisket, before the type for these was removed and the black was printed. Moxon says the red type is underlain to make it stand proud when it is being printed, while Fertel says that extra packing (printers call it make-​ ready) is attached to the tympan to boost the impression on the red. Léon Voet reports of the great Plantin printing house in Antwerp that, from at least the later seventeenth century, overheight type was used to compose the red parts of the forme.42 More laborious methods were possible: to use two completely separate formes, or to ink a single forme à la poupée—​that is, placing each different colour of ink carefully on the chosen lines or words. Any of the ways listed here could work, and any might be used in certain circumstances. Frans Janssen offers a caution: [I]‌t is dangerous to assume that textbooks always reflect reality . . . Their authors are naturally exercised more to explain how a particular technique might be or ought to be put into practice than to record for posterity how it is in fact employed. The people who have to deal with it in practice, however, are by nature not readers; they are doers. . . . Often their method of working will produce qualitatively erratic and worse results than the described method, but it will demand less thought and attention, it will be ‘easier’ despite being more old-​fashioned, more laborious, more time-​consuming.43

Alan May, a modern craftsman and builder of replica wooden presses as well as a practical printer and printing historian, has observed: I have found in the past that just reading through such a text [Moxon], no matter how carefully, is never sufficient, so decided to first prepare drawings then to construct quarter scale models of the press framework in order to try and clear up any uncertainties before embarking on a full scale version.44

The final point of this section is that practical printing enables us to place the early modern book in dialogue with contemporary lived experience. This is because the material and skill requirements for teaching practical printing draw upon the knowledge of

Printing and Book History    129 a constellation of communities outside of academia. These communities make different, overlapping, contributions to keeping the craft of printing on the hand-​press alive, bringing the perspectives of technological requirements, commercial ambition, and artistic innovation. Museums gather the expertise of people with the skills to use, maintain, and reconstruct antique machinery.45 Private presses champion typographical excellence and editorial selection,46while contemporary book artists often mix newer technology with traditional book arts. As an example consider how the work of Amos Kennedy, a twenty-​first century Black American print artist, reflects the tradition of early modern broadsides and handbills produced with the same timeliness and responsiveness to local conditions. 47 As long as letterpress printing is a living art, the history of the early modern book reaches into the present.

Equipment for Setting Up a Bibliographical Press A reviewer of that monument of analytical bibliography, Charlton Hinman’s Printing and Proofreading of Shakespeare (1963), commented that few readers would have the skills or resources to appreciate the minute analysis of how individual type letters were used and reused throughout the printing of the First Folio, remarking that the ideal setting for reading Hinman’s work ‘would be a reconstructed Elizabethan printing house’.48 This was no idle comment: the reviewer was the librarian at the University of London and a replica seventeenth-​century press stood in the Department of English at University College London, the second of two presses constructed by Professor A. H. Smith, the first having been damaged by bombing in the Second World War.49 Bibliographical presses have never pretended to be accurate Elizabethan reconstructions. The conditions and material for the fitting-​out of hand-​press workshops in the twentieth century, whether for private publication or teaching, were provided in part by the further mechanization of the printing industry which left hand-​operated presses, and moveable type, spare to be used by small private presses or hobbyists. While some scholars, like A. H. Smith, Philip Gaskell, Roger Gaskell, and Alan May, have made full-​scale reconstructions of wooden presses, the majority of equipment and type is second-​hand from the printing industry. Philip Gaskell pointed to the source of the equipment for a typical bibliographical press within a university: ‘[t]‌he University press and other local printers’.50 David McKitterick is more explicit: ‘the wholesale clearances of the 1970s and 1980s as letterpress printing came to an end as a large-​scale commercial enterprise’.51 The experience of one of the present authors, in equipping workshops and teaching historical printing at the St Bride Foundation, the Bodleian Libraries, and the University of London is added to those insights in what follows. This is advice for setting up a modern

130    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence workshop to teach and demonstrate the methods of printing on the hand press with the material most easily available to hand, rather than an accurate account of the contents of the early modern printing house (for which, see Paul Nash’s chapter in this volume). Press: It has already been emphasized that most of the university workshops founded in the twentieth century relied on the more readily accessible cast-​iron hand presses of the kind used by small printing firms and by private presses. The connection continues today, with the Albion model in particular—​the style used by William Morris—​ furnishing several bibliographical press workshops. An Albion owned by Morris himself is used in the Cary Book Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology. The press should have a platen size capable of printing two, four, or eight pages at once, thus about 25 × 38 cm (10 × 15 inches). This will allow for practical learning about the imposition of multi-​page formes. A modern proof-​press (galley proof-​press or ‘precision’ machine such as a ‘Vandercook’) will print more reliably and is adequate and in many ways more rewarding for modern work, but students should be aware that the rhythms of production with such a press do not match the images of early modern workshops. Type: The composition of type is now, and was likely in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most significant time investment in manufacturing the printed book. The type involved, in the era of the hand press, will have been much more valuable than the press it was printed on. A workshop for teaching, wanting to accommodate concurrent setting by a number of students, requires a good quantity of a text size of type, ideally in 12–​14 pt. With attention directed first of all to the printing of type facsimiles as exercises, if this can be a ‘traditional’ typeface like Caslon, Baskerville, or Garamond, so much the better for the general look of the finished result, but it is the quantity that is important to ensure a functioning workshop. A single page of a typical book size, say royal octavo, might take 3–​4 kg of type to set up, meaning that to set one side of the sheet (four pages) you will need to have in the workshop a font of type weighing 16 kg, or a font of about 20 kg as inevitably the distribution of letters in the text will not be exactly the distribution of the font. A matching italic and also a black-​letter type, in smaller quantities, are useful, as are larger sizes of 16 pt and above. Machine-​made second-​hand type of the twentieth century is probably better made—​ squarer but probably also softer—​than early modern hand-​cast type. Type cast on a Monotype machine (‘hot metal’) generally does not last more than one printing of a trade book, but this might be thousands of impressions. ‘Foundry type’ is made with harder metal on different, though still machine-​driven, type-​casters.

Printing and Book History    131 Ink: The letterpress workshop room always smells of the linseed oil in the ink, and white spirit used for cleaning. Metal type needs oil-​based ink to get good coverage of the details of letters. Rubber-​based inks are an alternative, but they can have drying problems. Letterpress black and a small quantity of red will usually suffice, but other colours will increase the artistic range of the workshop. Paper: Examine an old book and you will find it is printed on a soft, absorbent paper with some ‘give’. Modern printing (offset litho and inkjet) demands smooth, relatively hard papers. Newsprint is not archival but has good characteristics for letterpress printing and is inexpensive. Plain wallpaper (lining paper) can be very good and relatively inexpensive. Specialist (artists’) printmaking papers are best, but expensive: keep some for printing archival copies and special jobs. Wallpaper and printmaking paper can be dampened without problems. Sundries: Extra type-​cases to divide your type so that several people can typeset at the same time. Several composing sticks for several people to work at once. A few galleys to store composed type on. Leads in a few standard lengths for interline spacing. Furniture in the same standard lengths for locking up formes. Quoins and a key for lock-​up. One or two chases that fit your press to make up formes in. A simple office paper-​cutter to trim paper. Working copies of Moxon or other manuals you can afford to get dirty. Desirable extras: A small hand-​operated rolling (etching) press to print intaglio plates. Very desirable: A person with knowledge of the craft of letterpress. In printing museums both materials and skills are preserved, and these are listed on the website of the Association of European Printing Museums.52 Contact with the letterpress community of private and hobbyist printers can be made through the Briar Press website.53

Practical Printing in Conversation with Early Modern Books While some scholars are able to absorb information about the characteristic actions and errors of type and paper from published scholarship and apply this knowledge to the examination of early modern books, experience in the workshop helps to see, in three dimensions, the narratives which gave rise to peculiar-​looking features of the page: frisket bite, rising type, blind bearing type. On the other hand, much academic

132    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence study takes place with digital copies and this is true even—​or especially—​of early modern editions. The exercises suggested here rely heavily upon the availability of digital facsimiles of early modern editions and authorial manuscripts. What shape is a book? A salutary lesson in the underlying structure of a book is provided by a view of the forme on the press, with several pages locked together, out of sequence or upside down to each other as the particular imposition demands. Exercise: For appreciation of the printer’s product as sheets, not books, strictly speaking printing itself is not even necessary. The ‘Shakespeare in Sheets’ project led by Tara Lyons at Illinois State University takes advantage of the digital reproductions now widely available and focuses students’ minds on the physical make-​up of a quired book.54 The transmission of a text. Contrasted with the speed of printing, setting type by hand is laborious and there are valuable lessons about the mental and physical skills required to transfer a text to a printed edition. The modern editor’s awareness that even the first edition of a printed text passed through the hands of compositors and correctors sets up a continual tension in the matter of readings. William H. Sherman turns the question around: What elements were supplied by the early modern compositor, and what can readers learn from those choices? Sherman looks at how modern editions standardize punctuation of early modern texts to the detriment of the play of meanings in which the original compositors were complicit.55 In a printing workshop which is used for teaching, the roles of compositor, printer, and indeed author can be tried out by every participant. Exercise: Typeset and print a piece of manuscript copy. You will rapidly discover that many of the minute choices are made by the printer or compositor and you will discover how small some of the choices are, right down to the size of the space between words. These minute decisions might mark out the individuality of a worker, like the several compositors (‘A’ to ‘E’) deduced by bibliographers from analysis of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, but as the designations reflect, the names of those compositors were not generally recorded in relation to any particular book, except in the business records which survive from some larger presses, such as those at the universities.56 Question

Who decides?

Influences?

What to print What page size What typeface Line length Spelling Punctuation Italicization Word spacing

Customer Customer, Printer Printer Printer Compositor Compositor Compositor Compositor

What sells, Personal interest, etc. Money, Press size, Available paper size What is there enough of? What is appropriate? Page size, Precedent Habit, Precedent Habit, Precedent Habit, Precedent; and if there is italic available Line length

Exercise: Give the same piece of manuscript copy (in digital facsimile) to a number of student compositors. Agree a line length and typeface and then compare the results.

Printing and Book History    133 Without prior agreement, each student compositor will make different choices and each printed result will be different from the others even working with the same copy, line length, and font of type. Errors. No special exercise is needed to draw forth errors. Experience will show that errors in typesetting are not always the compositor’s mistaken readings of the copy, and that some are more common than others. The spatial layout of the type-​case places certain letters in congruity with each other. Entirely unlike a typewriter or computer keyboard, though, is that each ‘sort’ or character you lift from the case has a specific width and weight. They feel different between the fingers. A simple example is that in the lower case, adjacent compartments hold the letters ‘a’ and ‘r’ which are also in most typefaces the same size. The narrowest letter, ‘l’, and the widest, ‘m’, are also adjacent to each other in the case. Confusion in the compositor’s fingers between ‘a’ and ‘r’, perhaps through a fouling of the case from the careless redistribution of the type, is far more likely than confusion between ‘l’ and ‘m’. Intaglio and relief. The distinction between the two principal methods of printing in this period is perhaps the fundamental lesson that students of the early modern book must learn. These two methods of printing require completely different processes; when joined on a single page they imply a two-​step chronology, a movement of half-​printed sheets between different presses. A good understanding of the required skills, equipment, and processes is necessary to appreciate the way each was used in early modern books.57 At a basic level the relative price of the object is revealed: broadsides with woodcut (relief-​printed) illustrations were ‘cheap’ because they were produced with only one forme of printable material and one pull of the press. Time being money, a broadside with an intaglio image—​requiring a second pass of the paper through a different style of press—​could not be ‘cheap’ in the same sense. Exercise: Attempt the title page of the First Folio, with the title in letterpress and Shakespeare’s portrait in intaglio. You can use drypoint etching on acrylic for the portrait. This exercise draws attention to another lesson: Making do with the materials at hand. The First Folio title page ascribes the contents to ‘VVilliam’ Shakespeare. To take an example from a different early modern printer, twenty-​three of Shakespeare’s sonnets begin with the letter ‘W’, but the compositors working for George Eld on the first edition in 1609, who started each sonnet with a large initial occupying the height of two lines of the text,58 resorted to different expedients for each of these. An initial, in today’s terminology a ‘display capital’, differs from a normal upper-​case letter in being specially constructed without a ‘shoulder’, the space normally occupied by descenders such as on the lower-​case ‘y’, to occupy the whole space between the ascender of the upper, and the baseline of the lower, of a number of lines of text. Perhaps Eld’s compositors simply did not have a ‘W’ in that display alphabet at all. Instead, in each of these positions is either an upper-​case ‘W’ of a larger size than the text type, but sitting well above the baseline of the second line of the poem, or a composite letter formed of two upper-​case ‘V’s, or two initial ‘V’s filling the full two lines, or an italic upper-​case ‘W’.

134    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence White space. A fundamental insight from practical printing is that blank space on the early modern page is, in physical terms, not the absence of text but the presence of carefully placed metal and wood lurking just below the type-​height of the forme. In typesetting, spacing the line takes more time and effort than finding the correct letters, once the layout of the case has been learned. Justification of text lines involves minutely changing the spacing between words or at the ends of lines as each line is set to fill the complete length of the composing stick. More complicated shapes defined by the text, or changes between prose text set justified and poetry set in shorter lines, require more time and skill.59 Larger areas of blank space, especially at the edge of the forme, might cause the platen of a hand press to tip into the lower-​ height portion slightly, creating uneven printing at the edge of the type. Expedients like blind bearing type were used by early modern printers to ensure the platen met an even surface.60 Advanced exercise: Change the format of an early modern publication. For a project in anticipation of the five-​hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-​Five Theses (1517), students of German literature at the University of Oxford undertook to set a broadside version of the theses using an early pamphlet version as their copy. Among other calculations, this required ‘casting off ’ or estimating the number of letters in the copy, to estimate the amount of type required for setting the text. A decision to number the theses in lower-​case Roman numerals from i to xcv taxed to the limit the workshop’s supply of ‘x’s, and the decision was made to set and print the single side of the sheet in two formes. A trial setting of the first six theses should have provided a fairly accurate indication of how to divide the copy into two halves. The first half was then typeset and printed in two columns before the second half was typeset and printed to result in a four-​column poster. When the second forme was ready it was recognized that the second ‘half ’ was appreciably longer than the first. The pamphlet copy incorporated many standard abbreviations in the Latin text, which were spelled out by the student compositors five hundred years later. The sixteenth-​century compositor had increased the frequency of the abbreviations towards the end of the text, presumably in anticipation of running out of either type or space in the booklet format. As for the modern reprint, the result is a four-​column broadside which conceals its origin as two separate formes. Dry and dampened paper. It is much easier to print on dampened paper with metal type. Using softer packing and dampened paper, even damaged type prints well. In contrast, modern machine-​made paper can yield an imperfect impression. Peter Blayney has provided a detailed discussion of the wetting and drying of paper, and the behaviour of the oil-​based ink.61 This adheres, or sinks into, damp paper equally well as with dry paper. The ink itself will not ‘dry’ through evaporation, because it is not water-​based. It dries through absorption or reaction with the paper fibres. Early modern depictions of European printing show workmen and women, and usually also children, going about their routine tasks in the workshop without exhibiting much

Printing and Book History    135 emotion. In The Book in the Renaissance, Andrew Pettegree writes that ‘one can only imagine the sense of triumph’ of Gutenberg’s workmen when their labours at the wooden press produced the printed sheets for a book.62 Nineteenth-​century images of the Birth of Printing reintroduce the drama, catching the triumphal moment in quietly heroic terms with the master printer—​Gutenberg or Caxton—​holding aloft a newly cast piece of type or critically appraising a printed sheet fresh off the press, heralding the dawn of an information revolution.63 Anyone who has demonstrated printing to a public audience knows the expressions of delight and amazement of a crowd at the ‘reveal’, when the tympan is lifted and the inked type is shown to have transferred words to the paper, as it has done for over five hundred years. Every practical printer quickly learns why Gutenberg printed indulgences.64 A workshop, even one operating non-​profit within a university, thrives on the ‘little jobs’, on taking advantage of current events and being ready for new audiences. Ambitious programmes of classes, exhibitions, and projects with the public, mixing old and new books, are undertaken in workshops which have connections with fine art and book arts programmes such as the Iowa Center for the Book. The Thin Ice Press in York has staged a Frost Fair to commemorate the early modern practice of printing on frozen rivers during the Little Ice Age. The Bodleian Libraries, like other university libraries, has placed a working printing press in a publicly accessible area. In 2016 the Bodleian issued an open invitation to anyone with a press to print a collective edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. These arrived from around the world in numerous formats, to be displayed and included in the collection.65 While an approach to book history through practical printing might be expected to focus exclusively on the tangible at the expense of the historical and the literary, we have begun with the personal accounts of two printer-​authors in order to illuminate connections between a book history which is concerned with textual meaning and a history of the book which focuses on the technical factors influencing the look and feel of material objects.66 The basic insight is that a compositor was not an automaton; there are thinking and feeling (and fallible) people behind the printed text of an early modern book. Another insight, more reflexive in relation to the field, is that book historians never have been, nor need to be, limited to a single craft, reading, which is both their object and their method of study. Development of another skill in common with early modern compositors and printers diversifies an approach to the object in the same way that critical rereadings offer us new perspectives on texts. There is a paradox in using the written word to describe, and even more to advocate, a practical pursuit. Experience in a printing workshop offers possibilities for engagement with the early modern book that complement the examination of library and online collections. For those who aspire to teach or to engage the public with early modern English books, this chapter has summarized the basic materials of a hand-​press workshop, and several exercises are suggested as a guide. But the most urgent message is this: put down this book, now, and do it yourself.

136    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence

Notes 1. Anais Nin, ‘The Story of My Printing Press’, The North, 7 (1989), online edition published August 2003 by poetrymagazines.org.uk http://​poet​ryma​gazi​nes.org.uk/​magaz​ine/​rec​ ordf​6d7-​2.html?id=​2242. 2. Virginia Woolf to Margaret Llewellyn Davies, 2 May 1917, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), ii. 151. 3. David McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 72–​93. 4. McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies, 79. 5. McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies, 93. 6. Philip Gaskell, ‘The Bibliographical Press Movement’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 1 (1965), 1–​13. 7. G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6–​30. 8. Robert B. McKerrow, ‘Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors of English Works of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, The Library, Volume TBS-​ 12, Issue 1, (1913), 211–​318. 9. Katherine McCanless Ruffin, ‘Carl Purington Rollins and the Bibliographical Press at Yale University’, PhD dissertation, Simmons College School of Library and Information Science, 2015, 30. 10. L. W. Hanson, ‘Bibliography in the New Bodleian’, The Times Literary Supplement, Friday, 4 Jan. 1952, 16. 11. Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 46; William H. Sherman, ‘The Social Life of Books’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 164–​171. 12. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books 1450–​1800: A Practical Guide (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019). 13. Lisa Maruca, The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660–​1760 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 28–​38. 14. Anthony Grafton, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 15. Gaskell, ‘The Bibliographical Press Movement’, 7. 16. D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 50, 87. 17. Joseph Corn, ‘Object Lessons/​Object Myth?’, in W. David Kingery, Learning from Things (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 46. 18. Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 7. 19. Per Henningsgaard, Kristen Colgin, and Clyde Veleker, ‘A Pedagogical Tool for Studying the History of the Book: Thirty-​Five Years of Bibliographical Presses in Australia and New Zealand, 1977–​2012’, Script and Print, 38/​1 (Feb. 2014), 5–​25. 20. Terry Belanger has written a lively history of bibliographical teaching from material objects (‘stuff ’) in the twentieth century, which includes many references to past and present bibliographical presses and casts light on the historical context of the movement.

Printing and Book History    137 Grateful thanks are given to Professor Belanger for sharing this account in advance of publication. 21. David Sayers, ‘On the “Maker Turn” in the Humanities’, in Jentery Sayers (ed.), Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 32–​41. 22. Letterpress Printing Past, Present, and Future: an AHRC network (2017–​18) https://​lett​ erpr​ess.leeds.ac.uk/​. 23. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Department of English and BookLab, University of Maryland (personal communication). 24. Hanson, ‘Bibliography in the New Bodleian’, 16. 25. Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Allen Lane, 2016), p. [iv]. 26. Claire M. Bolton, The Fifteenth-​Century Printing Practices of Johann Zainer, Ulm, 1473–​ 1478 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society; London: Printing Historical Society, 2016) 27. Stephen Pratt, ‘The Myth of Identical Types: A Study of Printing Variations from Handcast Gutenberg Type’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 6 (2003), 7–​17. 28. Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching 1400–​2000: A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (London: Archetype Publications; Houten, Netherlands: in association with HES and DE GRAAF Publishers, 2012). 29. Paul Needham, ‘Further Corrective Notes on the Date of the Catholicon Press’, Gutenberg-​ Jahrbuch (1991), 101–​126. 30. Paul W. Nash, personal communication, publication anticipated in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society. 31. See https://​www.roger​gask​ell.com/​print​ing-​hist​ory-​home/​. 32. Sarah Fiddyment and Matthew Collins, ‘From Field to Frame: The Contribution of Bioarchaeological Methods to Understanding Parchment Production’, Gazette du livre médiéval, 63/​1 (2017), 55–​63; Kathryn James, ‘Skin’, Inscription, 1 (2020), 27-​35. 33. Timothy D. Barret, European Hand Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques (Ann Arbor: Legacy Press, 2018), ch. 1 and afterword. 34. Philip Gaskell, Giles Barber, and Georgina Warrilow, ‘An Annotated List of Printers’ Manuals to 1850’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 4 (1968), 11–​32. 35. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 79–​108; Maruca, The Work of Print, 28–​59. 36. Maruca, The Work of Print, 35. 37. Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 128. 38. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick exercises, or the doctrine of handy-​works, 2 vols. (London, printed for Joseph Moxon, 1683), vol. i, preface. 39. Joseph Dane, ‘An Early Red-​Printed Correction Sheet in the Huntington Library’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 110/​2 (2016), 227–​236. 40. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, ii. 328. 41. Martin-​Dominique Fertel, La Science Pratique de l’Imprimerie (1723). 42. Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses: A History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of the Officina Plantiniana at Antwerp (Amsterdam: Van Gent; New York: Abner Schram, 1969–​72), ii. 94. 43. Frans A. Janssen, Zetten En Drukken in De Achttiende Eeuw: David Wardenaar’s Beschrijving Der Boekdrukkunst (1801; Haarlem: Joh. Enschedé en zonden, 1986).

138    Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence 44. Alan May, ‘The One-​Pull Press’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 11 (2008), 65–​89. 45. The website of the Association of European Printing Museums presents a ‘museum finder’ map and articles about the contents of printing museums worldwide: https://​www.aepm. eu/​mus​eum-​fin​der/​. 46. Roderick Cave, The Private Press (New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1983), 240. 47. Sarah de Leeuuw and Briar Craig, ‘Mapping Justice with Letter Press Printing: The Bold Type Work of Amos Kennedy’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16/​1 (2017), 138–​148. 48. J. H. P. Pafford, Modern Language Review, 59/​4 (Oct. 1964), 628–​630. 49. A. H. Smith, A description of the Hand-​Press in the Department of English, at University College, London (Privately Printed in the Department of English at University College, London, 1933). 50. Gaskell, ‘The Bibliographical Press Movement’, 1. 51. McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies, 93. 52. Association of European Printing Museums: www.aepm.eu. 53. Briar Press, www.bri​arpr​ess.org. 54. Shakespeare in Sheets, Illinois State University https://​about.illino​isst​ate.edu/​shak​espe​ arei​nshe​ets/​. 55. William H. Sherman, ‘Early Modern Punctuation and Modern Editions: Shakespeare’s Serial Colon’, in Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser (eds.), The Book in History, the Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text; Essays in honor of David Scott Kastan (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2016), 302–​323. 56. D. F. McKenzie, Cambridge University Press, 1696–​ 1712: A Bibliographical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 57. Roger Gaskell, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration’, Book Collector, 53/​2 (2004), 213–​251; and ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop Part II’, Book Collector, 67/​4 (2018), 788–​797 58. http://​www.rareb​ookr​oom.org/​Tit​les/​inde​x32.html. 59. D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and other essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 87; Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘Quadrat Demonstrandum’, Proceedings of the Bibliographical Society of America, 111/​1 (2017), 61–​101. 60. Neil Harris, ‘The Blind Impressions in the Aldine Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)’, Gutenberg-​Jahrbuch (2004), 93–​146. 61. Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘A Dry Discourse on Wet Paper (and Ink)’, The Library, 7th ser., 18/​4 (Dec. 2017), 387–​404. 62. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 27. 63. Seth Lerer, ‘Caxton in the Nineteenth Century’, in William Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 64. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Little Jobs: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press in association with The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2007), 315–​341. 65. Alexandra Franklin, ‘Sonnets 2016’, Bodleian Library Record (forthcoming). 66. James Raven, What Is the History of the Book? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 8.

Printing and Book History    139

Select Bibliography Barrett, Timothy, European Hand Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques (Ann Arbor: Legacy Press, 2018). Blayney, Peter W. M., ‘A Dry Discourse on Wet Paper (and Ink)’, The Library, 7th ser., 18/​4 (Dec. 2017), 387–​404. Bolton, Claire M., The Fifteenth-​Century Printing Practices of Johann Zainer, Ulm, 1473–​1478 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society; London: Printing Historical Society, 2016). Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Gaskell, Roger, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration’, Book Collector, 53/​2 (2004), 213–​251. Heritage, Barbara and Ruth-​Ellen St. Onge, Building the Book from the Ancient World to the Present Day: How Manuscript, Printed, and Digital Texts Are Made (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Legacy Press, 2022). McKenzie, D. F., Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). McKerrow, Ronald B., ‘Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors of English Works of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, The Library, TBS-​12/​1 (1913), 213–​318. McKitterick, David, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Maravelas, Paul, Letterpress Printing, a Manual for Modern Fine Press Printers (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2010). Moxon, Joseph, Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (1683–​4), ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (New York: Dover, 1962). Rummonds, Richard-​Gabriel, Printing on the Iron Handpress (London: British Library, 1998). Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Little Jobs: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press in association with The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2007), 315–​341. Straznicky, Marta (ed.), Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Tanselle, G. Thomas, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Werner, Sarah, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–​ 1800: A Practical Guide (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019).

Chapter 8

Monum ents a nd T ri fl e s Which Books Do We Use to Tell the History of the Book? Jason Scott-​Warren

In the history of the book, size has always mattered, and (as the Oxford Handbook series itself suggests) it continues to matter. Size connotes the magisterial, the complete, the significant as it registers on the body. It is possible to imagine a heavy volume that is completely lacking in substance, but it is also easy to assume that big books will be ‘weighty’. This holds true whether you are a medieval monk transcribing the collected works of a revered author or a modern academic struggling to make your mark. The academic apprenticeship consists of writing a single big book—​the doctoral thesis, a labour of love composed over a span of three or four years, which is intended to represent both in its form and content a new brick in the wall of human knowledge. While the Research Excellence Framework which governs the lives of UK academics claims that a couple of 7,000-​word articles might count for as much as a 70,000-​word book, the ‘monograph’ has remained stubbornly in place as a key criterion for employment and promotion. In the United States, the ‘tenure book’ continues to play a similar role. And given that few people (including tenured academics) have time to read the vast numbers of new publications to which these systems give rise, the assessors of these ‘outputs’ may well base much of their judgement on ‘metrics’—​including not just reviews and citations, but also the primal metric of the book’s weight in the hand, or the number of words or pages it contains. The predecessors of today’s massive and authoritative scholarly monographs were the Opera Omnia (Complete Works) of ancient authors that lined the shelves of early modern libraries. The large-​format, often multi-​volume books—​known as ‘folios’, from the Latin word for ‘leaf ’, indicating that it was made by folding each sheet of paper just once—​ became the visible sign of authority and canonicity.1 Folio volumes came first in the library catalogues of the period, with theological folios heading the list. Many classical authors, including Homer, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, and Seneca, were distributed in folio

Monuments and Trifles    141 format, their writings often surrounded and bulked out with substantial commentaries. Folios would seem to be made for the posthumous gathering of extensive masterpieces, or for a lifetime’s accumulation of smaller works: this was the ideal retrospective monument, a kind of textual mausoleum that would treasure up an author’s writings for eternity. Perhaps inevitably, it also became a mark for living authors to aim at. So it is that Shakespeare’s Armado, finding himself in love and set to ‘turn sonnet’, whips himself into a creative outpouring—​‘Devise wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio’—​despite the unlikelihood of a sonnet sequence ever growing long enough to fill a large volume, let alone ‘volumes’.2 If the authorial labour required to justify publication in folio format was daunting, the financial and practical exigences of producing such a book in the hand-​press era were comparably off-​putting. Nonetheless, large books continued to roll off the presses in great numbers, so much so that one might describe the period in terms of its landmark publications. Schedel’s history of the world, the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), Vesalius’s anatomical treatise De humani corporis fabrica (1543), Copernicus’s exposition of the heliocentric system, De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium (1543), the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1569–​72), Ortelius’s world maps, the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), the city-​ maps of Braun and Hogenberg, the Civitates orbis terrarum (1572–​1617), the King James Bible (1611), the Jonson and Shakespeare folios (1616, 1623), Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), and the works of Margaret Cavendish (1653–​68): these are just a few of the outsized volumes that defined the period. Historical works such as the Magdeburg Centuries (1559–​74), Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563–​83) and Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577–​ 87), together with anthologies of travel narratives by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (Delle navigationi e viaggi, 1550–​1606), Richard Hakluyt (Principal Navigations, 1589–​1600) and Samuel Purchas (Pilgrimes, 1625–​6) used large format to open out enormous historical and geographical vistas, for those who had the time and money to appreciate them. At the same time, print created a new world of small-​format and single-​sheet publishing that transformed the experience of time and space, especially in the towns and cities where presses proliferated. The pamphlet—​a few printed sheets, folded and crudely stab-​stitched for immediate consumption and rapid disposal—​came into its own as a medium for the circulation of news, religious controversy, political argument, and catchpenny entertainment. Almanacs, ballads and broadsides, and small godly books became ubiquitous adjuncts to daily life.3 To be a bureaucrat was to be busied with getting ink impressed on paper; civic life was choreographed through plague bills, rules for markets and handbooks of civic ritual, proclamations, and injunctions.4 One of the familiar outputs of the press was the printed form, designed not for reading but for rote writing and the expression of ‘compulsory literacy’. Just as type was locked in place in the press, so too was the human subject held in place by mass-​produced rules and ordinances. The market also supplied the parodies and spoofs that made this situation more tolerable. In negotiating this bifurcated universe of print, early modern book historians have drawn attention to the interdependence of the mighty leviathans and the small fry. Speculative printing was a costly operation involving substantial upfront costs, with

142   Jason Scott-Warren no guarantee of an immediate return. Sales could be painfully slow; Aldus Manutius’s edition of Aristotle, published in five monumental volumes between 1495 and 1498, was reputedly still for sale—​new—​half a century later, in 1547.5 In these circumstances, more nimble, short-​term publications could be a way of keeping oneself afloat, but more desirable still was a regular supply of ‘job printing’, commissions, usually for institutional clients, which would be paid for upfront. To draw attention to the significance of job printing is immediately to unsettle a model of print based on the stimulation of desire for reading matter, and to recall that much printed material is not desired but is instead foisted upon us, and is not read so much as taken-​as-​read, or taken as a pretext for writing.6 Peter Stallybrass has argued that ‘the single most important form of printing in the first seventy years of printing’ was the mass-​produced blank indulgence, a printed declaration which left the date of issue and the name of the sinner to be filled in by hand by the issuing authority. These ‘millions of blank indulgences . . ., while only a small portion of the total number of sheets being printed, had a disproportionate impact upon the whole of Europe, becoming a central means of raising money to wage war against the Ottoman Empire and to subsidize the papacy’.7 As well as providing an immediate spur to the Reformation, printed indulgences provided a model for the first tax forms, dating in England from early in the reign of Henry VIII, and for all of the subsequent bureaucratic instruments of the modern nation-​state. Along with risk-​free job printing, the early modern print ‘marketplace’ also subsisted on a complex and to some extent invisible world of patronage connections, which occasionally flamed into view in the provision of patents, the exclusive rights granted to some publishers to produce particular kinds of texts. The printer Richard Tottel had a patent to print books of English common law, granted under Edward VI in 1553, renewed for life by Elizabeth I, and subsequently transferred to Nicasius Yetsweirt and his son Charles.8 In 1575, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis acquired a twenty-​one-​year patent to print music and ruled music paper; the monopoly passed after its expiry to Thomas Morley, who assigned it to the printer Thomas East.9 John Day built up a formidable array of lucrative patents, including the right to print the English catechism, the metrical psalms, and the catechism and psalms in Dutch (for the use of the Dutch Church in London).10 The case of Day is particularly instructive here. He probably acquired his patents through his long-​fostered relationship with Elizabeth’s chief adviser, William Cecil, and it was the right to reproduce these steady sellers that gave him the financial independence he needed to work on a gargantuan project such as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, familiarly known as the ‘Book of Martyrs’. In addition to using patronage and patenting to offset the costs of producing Foxe’s martyrology, Day also anticipated a substantial role for non-​market forces in its sale and circulation. The controversial prefatory ‘calendar of martyrs’, imitating the calendars of saints’ days issued by the Catholic Church, has usually been attributed to Foxe, but recently it has been suggested that the addition was made by Day. In making the Actes look more like a liturgical book, the publisher increased the likelihood that it would be singled out by the authorities for purchase by every parish church in the land, thereby reducing the risk that the publication would lead him to bankruptcy.11 And at a later point in his career, in 1577, Day presented

Monuments and Trifles    143 deluxe editions of the Actes to people in power as part of a successful campaign to have his book-​trade patents renewed.12 The Actes and Monuments thus affords a valuable insight into the interrelationship between big, technically demanding books and smaller steady sellers in this period.13 It also reminds us to guard against our tendency to equate ‘print’ with ‘the market’. While early modern publishers undoubtedly learned how to stimulate demand for their products, they also relied on networks of patronage and privilege, and a dense web of interpersonal connections, to stay afloat. As well as being mutually supportive on a behind-​the-​scenes financial level, books large and small were also closely related in material terms. Early modern book culture was, as Alexandra Gillespie and Jeffrey Todd Knight have pointed out, still a culture of compilation, inheriting from the Middle Ages a notion of authorship as less an act of original creation than of the gathering and recombination of existing textual materials.14 The earliest print publishers took their cue from a thriving late medieval culture of the booklet, in which bound volumes were made from agglomerations of fascicles. In England, early editions of Chaucer established a model for pick-​and-​mix bookselling, with publishers inviting readers to assemble collections in any order they pleased. Subsequent authorial collections—​including a monumental folio such as the 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer—​may not have preserved the possibility of pick-​and-​ mix purchasing, but they did retain the look of the resultant volumes, with separate title pages for each work. Such volumes were also notable for their regular inclusion of materials by other writers, such as the ‘dyuers workes’ not by Chaucer that were gathered up in the 1532 collection.15 Some volumes of collected works continued to be compiled by their purchasers into the seventeenth century. The works of Samuel Daniel and Edmund Spenser present particularly complex bibliographical puzzles: each surviving volume offers a different combination of elements, printed at different times and bound together in an unpredictable order. For the publisher, releasing an edition in this way allowed older unsold materials to be bound up with newly printed books, so that production could be adjusted to demand across a period of some years.16 The relative porosity of the concept of authorship in these compilations is matched by the bagginess of most large-​scale publishing projects in the period. Volumes such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, and Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations were vast accumulations of texts and documents penned by many hands, often thrown together in a hurry and with editorial standards that appear ramshackle to the modern eye.17 Many such works contain clear evidence of the haste with which they were composed. William Harrison, compiling the Description of England for the 1577 edition of Holinshed, complained that ‘such was my shortnesse of time allowed in the writing, & so great the speede made in the Printing, that I could seldome with any deliberation peruse, or almost with any judgement deliberate exactly upon such notes as were to be inserted’; he looked forward to a second edition when a ‘more perfite order’ might be attained. Other members of the editorial team made comparable complaints.18 But things did not improve with the second, greatly expanded edition, published in 1587; one of the contributors, Francis Thynne, complained that the histories of Scotland and England were already ‘halfe printed’ before he could begin his work of augmenting

144   Jason Scott-Warren them. Felicity Heal and Henry Summerson, analysing the development of the two editions, find that ‘there is less evidence of . . . pressure and rush than there had been in 1577, but the occasional apology concerning information that should have been inserted earlier in the text suggests that there were limits to what could be achieved’.19 Comparably, in Actes and Monuments, John Foxe commented on the process of composition as it was unfolding around him; at one point he omitted materials because ‘I see thys volume swelleth already with aboundance of other matter’, while elsewhere he was happy to add material in the wrong place, after the relevant section had been printed, writing ‘better I judge it out of order than out of the book’.20 The 1623 Shakespeare Folio survives in three states, because the rights to reproduce Troilus and Cressida were only secured after some copies had gone on sale without that play. These Troilus-​free copies are the first state. A second state contains Troilus, with the play beginning over the leaf from a duplicated and cancelled page of Romeo and Juliet, a visible printing error. The third state removes the error by replacing the cancelled duplicate page with the prologue to Troilus.21 These examples remind us that large volumes were stitched together out of small materials in a kind of race against time, reminiscent of the scenario familiar from animated cartoons in which a character races to build a railway line as the train draws ever closer. A number of large-​scale projects have sprung up in recent years to make sense of the outsized volumes that punctuated the early modern publishing landscape. The John Foxe project, based at the University of Sheffield, published a facsimile of the 1583 edition of Actes and Monuments on CD-​ROM in 2001, and followed this up in 2011 with an online edition of the four versions of the text that appeared in Foxe’s lifetime.22 The Holinshed Project, based at the University of Oxford, created an online edition of the 1577 and 1587 texts, and a handbook offering a comprehensive analysis of the Chronicles from many different angles.23 A new edition of Hakluyt, in fourteen volumes accompanied by a volume of essays, is currently in preparation with Oxford University Press.24 The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, published in print and online in 2012, offered comprehensive reappraisals of the 1616 Folio and of subsequent Jonsonian editions, while the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016 offered plentiful opportunities for reassessment of the First Folio, probably the most thoroughly investigated book of the era.25 These and many kindred projects have brought prodigious scholarly energy to the job of reinterpreting the monumental edifices of sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century print culture, bringing intimidatingly large volumes within the pale of comprehension—​at least for those with sufficient energy to attend to the analyses, which frequently swell to something approaching the scale of the original works. But, while recent scholarly generations have certainly not been deterred by the mountain peaks of print, it would be hard to deny that much of the energy of book history in the twenty-​first century has been disintegrative. Recent work on the early modern book has been fascinated by various forms of ‘the book unbound’. Much attention has been lavished on pamphlets and newsbooks, publications which—​in an era in which the vast majority of books were sold in sheets—​were perhaps destined never to be bound, never

Monuments and Trifles    145 really to count as ‘books’.26 While some early modern readers did register the value of pamphlets, and bound them up in composite volumes or Sammelbände, thus giving them a chance of surviving to posterity, the situation of such publications was clearly parlous; the testimony of William Cornwallis, who admitted to reading ‘Pamphlets, and lying Stories, and News, and two penny Poets’ in his privy, before using them as toilet paper, is often cited.27 In the eyes of contemporaries, writes Joad Raymond, ‘pamphlets were small, insignificant, ephemeral, disposable, untrustworthy, unruly, noisy, deceitful, poorly printed, addictive, [and] a waste of time’. They have thus come to serve as important sources for historians and literary scholars seeking to understand the workings of early modern print culture, and the birth of phenomena (such as news and public political debate) that are seen as key to the modern world.28 At the same time we have come to see how far manuscripts continued to figure in early modern book culture, usually through the ‘separates’ that served as handwritten equivalents of the printed pamphlet, and which were designed for rapid distribution through surreptitious or coterie channels of communication.29 Interest in these fleeting publications has burgeoned at the same time as we have become fascinated with the wider world of cheap printed ephemera. Adam Smyth has reconsidered the almanac as a site of autobiography, thinking about how it structured the experience of time, space, and the body, and about its place in the culture of documentary transfer, as a site for the first draft of the history of the self.30 Tiffany Stern has reconstructed the lost world of the early modern playbill, set on walls and posts ‘in sondry places of the cittie’ to advertise forthcoming theatrical performances.31 A number of scholars, Patricia Fumerton and Angela McShane prominent among them, have been rethinking the broadside ballad, a genre that Fumerton describes as ‘an everywhere protean creature, seemingly impossible to pin down because its making is always in process, its component fragments always interchangeable, and the resultant product always multifariously on the move’.32 This project has been accompanied by new digital resources aimed at making fragile and widely dispersed primary sources more accessible, and at finding new ways of presenting their visual and auditory content.33 These studies are partly driven by a sense of the recalcitrance of the materials, both in physical terms—​they often survive in tiny numbers, despite the fact that they were originally mass-​produced in their thousands or tens of thousands—​and intellectual: how do we account for the strangeness and illegibility of once ubiquitous cultural artefacts? Beyond that, however, there is also often a nervous kind of cross-​temporal comparison in play, as we seek analogues for the fragmented and discontinuous reading that has been forced upon us by the digital revolution. By comparison with tweeting and experimental keyword searching, literary texts from the past seem to hold out an impossible promise of richness, plentitude, and tightly woven continuity, creating a sense of nostalgia for the world we have lost in the transition to online media. Scholars have responded by pointing out that the ‘replete’ texts for which we yearn were often considered to be the corrupting distractions of their day, and by exploring media and forms of engagement that cut across seemingly immersive literary experiences.34 Our interest in ephemera thus borders on our interest in cut-​and-​paste textuality, practices of reading for

146   Jason Scott-Warren commonplaces and sententiae, binding fragments, and bits of text that escape into the wider world in the form of graffiti.35 If the ‘New Textualism’ that has emerged in recent years relishes the challenge of reading beyond a traditional literary canon made up of poems, plays, and works of prose fiction, a particular flashpoint has arisen when it has tried to take stock of more canonical fare.36 The argument over the status of early printed drama was initiated when the bibliographer Peter Blayney suggested that, contrary to the assumptions of literary scholars, playbooks were only a tiny part of the output of the London presses, and often not a very profitable one at that.37 His argument was compounded by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, who observed that playbooks circulated as stab-​stitched pamphlets rather than bound books, and so would have been treated as ephemera, with few aspirations to literary immortality, by their early readers.38 This view was countered by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, in a series of articles on the popularity of playbooks, which came up with rather rosier statistics for sales, in part by excluding non-​speculative and patented printing from consideration.39 ‘In peak years,’ they concluded, ‘about one in every eleven editions in this market was a professional play’; what is more, no less a figure than Shakespeare was vital to establishing the market for printed drama.40 In the course of their efforts to rebut Blayney et al., Farmer and Lesser have turned their attention to the different kinds of popularity in early modern print; to Shakespeare as reviser of his works in print; and to the nature of ephemerality.41 In the process, Farmer has demonstrated that most speculative publications in this period were short books: ‘the median length of all extant speculative publications from 1580 to 1640 is nine sheets . . . Stationers, as a group, were not routinely producing long folios, fat quartos, and thick octavos.’42 This means that the alleged distinction between books and pamphlets begins to break down, a process that has been catalysed by Aaron Pratt’s work showing that stab-​stitching was in fact the norm for all sorts of short books, and so cannot be read as a sign of ephemerality or low status. According to Pratt, who surveyed the evidence of 1,800 quarto volumes, ‘evidence of stab-​stitching does not correlate with anything other than length’ and so ‘the distinction between bound books and stab-​ stitched ones was not a culturally loaded one in the way many scholars have suggested’.43 At the end of this scholarly avenue, we would appear to be back where we started, with the material evidence offering no secure guide to the situation of a genre that was more or less as popular as we have traditionally taken it to be. As Pratt also points out, however, there is no straightforward opposition between stab-​stitching and binding; a considerable number of hybrid books survive, in which the text-​block is stab-​stitched onto a paper or vellum wrapper, or in which thongs have been added to attach a stab-​stitched text-​block to parchment covers.44 The key point that Pratt distils from this is that ‘bookbinding, as a trade, was driven by an imperative of economy, by consumer demand for copies that were about as cheap as possible’.45 This is certainly the impression that one gets from the surviving books of some early modern collectors. The books of Francis Meres, author of Palladis Tamia, insofar as they survive in Cambridge University Library, are either bound books bought second-​hand, or they are in the cheapest bindings imaginable: ill-​fitting bits of recycled sheepskin

Monuments and Trifles    147 that were crudely stab-​stitched onto the text-​block, possibly by Meres himself. Having entered Pembroke College as a sizar, the poorest grade of scholar, Meres was presumably trying to buy the largest number of books with the smallest possible outlay; among the books in very crude bindings are a treatise on the Church, an exposition of ‘many execrable heresies’, and an account of the Gunpowder Plot.46 The bookbuying of Richard Stonley, a Teller of the Exchequer under Mary I and Elizabeth I, was less constrained by money (he was eventually imprisoned for embezzlement on a vast scale). But it was nonetheless driven by a desire for regular, cheap purchases; his acquisition of Venus and Adonis on its appearance on 12 June 1593, the earliest recorded purchase of a printed book by Shakespeare, was the tip of an iceberg. The inventory of his goods, made when he was imprisoned for debt in 1597, lists five ‘bundells of Pamphlets in quarto’ and eleven ‘Bundles in viijo’, along with numerous small books of literature, law, and devotion (the last including ‘vij Sobbs of a sorrofull soule’, ‘A goulden Chaine out of the psalmes’, and ‘septem psalme penitentiali cum aliis’).47 His surviving account books show him buying newsbooks, books and ballads relating to Thomas Campion’s trial and execution, catchpenny pamphlets (such as Bacchus Bountie, a celebration of alcohol allegedly written by ‘Philip Foulface of Ale-​foord, student in good felloship’), and a proclamation.48 Stonley was certainly no stranger to large and lavish books; he owned folios of Holinshed, Foxe, and Schedel, along with the city views of Braun and Hogenberg, Saxton’s maps of England, and a volume of engravings by Tortorel and Perrissin of scenes and battles from the French Wars of Religion.49 Nor was he averse to spending money on bindings for Bibles and devotional books.50 An engagement with the upper reaches of the market did not preclude a desire to explore the new world of cheap print, with all that it promised in the way of news, entertainment, and edification. Early modern readers were amphibians, moving with ease between weighty tomes, mid-​length pocketbooks, and the pleasures of cheap print. Talk of amphibians brings us round to a writer, not a reader, who cannot be left out of the story this chapter has been telling. John Taylor, the Water Poet, was a Thames boatman who became a prodigious writer of pamphlets, many of which were linked to particular stunts such as his attempt, in 1618, to walk to Scotland without any money (immortalized in The Pennyles Pilgrimage), or his effort a year later to sail down the Thames in a brown paper boat (written up in The Praise of Hemp-​Seed).51 As a writer who combined relentless innovation with shameless imitation, Taylor also had fully sixty-​three of his pamphlets gathered together in a folio volume of All the Workes, with his portrait on the engraved title page—​an act described by Bernard Capp as ‘an extraordinary decision for a popular rhymer who was placing himself in the company of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Daniel’.52 Yet the act was entirely appropriate for someone who was fascinated by the way that small things—​such as hempseed—​could give birth to whole worlds, and who from early in his career delighted in exploring the intersection between books large and small, as in the versified summary of scripture that he published in ‘thumb-​bible’ 64mo format in 1614, or the abridgement of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments that appeared in the same format in 1616.53 Susan Stewart sees the miniature books of the period as a reflection on the general ‘inside-​outness’ of the book and of

148   Jason Scott-Warren writing: that sense that the microcosm might exceed the macrocosm, with small objects in the world encapsulating the world. That explains why it is the Bible, ‘as the book of greatest significance, the book holding the world both past and future’, that is the prime candidate for miniaturization.54 The magic of books is, ultimately, a question of volume—​a word meaning ‘a particular bulk, mass, or quantity as an attribute of a thing’ which developed from book culture. A volumen was a roll or scroll, from the Latin verb volvere, to roll, but from its earliest appearance in English, ‘volume’ appears to have denoted a codex just as readily as a scroll. Originally, as the OED’s citations suggest, the volume had to have a certain scale: Higden’s translation of Trevisa’s Polychronicon talks of ‘[th]e grete volyms and large, [th]at bee[th] of stories i-​write’, and Fabyan’s 1513 Cronycles mention ‘a great volume’. To tell of the riches of South America would, says Pietro Martire d’Anghiera in the translation of Richard Eden, ‘requyre rather a hole volume then a booke’.55 But a few years later, a volume could just as well be an octavo as a folio. The poet Richard Crashaw, sending a prayer book to ‘Mrs. M. R.’, proclaims ‘Loe here a little volume but large booke’, promising that the gift was ‘Much larger in it selfe then in its looke’. Still, the friend who wrote the ‘Preface to the Reader’ in Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple assumed that the word implied size: ‘Enough Reader, I intend not a volume of praises, larger then his booke.’56 Meanwhile the word was also beginning to denote ‘size, bulk, or dimensions’, not just of a book, but of anything. The OED dates the shift to the early seventeenth century, though the first unequivocal citation it offers is from 1670.57 Thenceforth, one could encounter ‘a great volume’ of pictures or ‘Volumes of Votes’, although, true to its Latin roots, the word was often used to refer to things that might be said to roll, such as serpents, streams, torrents, and clouds.58 The combination of enclosure and unfolding in ‘volume’ captures something of the strangeness of the book, which is at once codex and scroll, immersive and fragmentary, fixed in place and endlessly mobile.59 Turn sonnet, and you might just produce whole volumes in folio.

Notes 1. On the etymology of the term, see Francis X. Connor, Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 4–​6. 2. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. G. R. Hibbard (i. ii. 174–​5). Petrarch’s sonnets were, however, sold in folio formats, with or without commentaries: see e.g. Canzoniere e Trionfi (Milan: Antonius Zarotus, 1473), USTC 992213. 3. Joad Raymond (ed.), Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the role of size and format in religious publishing, see Margaret Aston, ‘Lap Books and Lectern Books: The Revelatory Book in the Reformation’, Studies in Church History, 38 (2004), 163–​189. 4. Mark Jenner, ‘London’, in Raymond (ed.), Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i. 294–​307. 5. Martin Davies, Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (London: British Library, 1995), 20–​26.

Monuments and Trifles    149 6. This has been most powerfully explored for a later period by Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 139–​174. 7. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Printing and the Manuscript Revolution’, in Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Explorations in Communication and History (London: Routledge, 2008), 111–​118, at 113. 8. Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 141. 9. Iain Fenlon and John Milsom, ‘ “Ruled Paper Imprinted”: Music Paper and Patents in Sixteenth-​Century England’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 37 (1984), 139–​163. 10. Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 47–​55. 11. Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 126–​127. 12. Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book, 224. 13. Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book, 314. 14. Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–​ 1700, 16 (2011), 1–​ 29; Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 15. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532); Knight, Bound to Read, 159–​166. 16. Knight, Bound to Read, 166–​177. 17. For Hakluyt’s work as a compiler, see Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 183–​194. 18. Felicity Heal and Henry Summerson, ‘The Genesis of the Two Editions’, in Heal, Ian W. Archer, and Paulina Kewes (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–​21, at 7, 11. 19. Heal and Summerson, ‘The Genesis of the Two Editions’, 18. For Holinshed’s role as compiler, and the clash of narrative voices in the Chronicles, see Matthew Woodcock, ‘Narrative Voice and Influencing the Reader’, in Heal, Archer, and Kewes (eds.), Oxford Handbook, 339–​355. 20. Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book, 165, 174. 21. B. D. R. Higgins, ‘Printing the First Folio’, in Emma Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 30–​47, at 44. 22. https://​www.dhi.ac.uk/​foxe/​. 23. http://​engl​ish.nsms.ox.ac.uk/​holins​hed/​; Heal, Archer, and Kewes (eds.), Oxford Handbook. 24. https://​www.hakl​uyt.org/​. 25. https://​uni​vers​ityp​ubli​shin​gonl​ine.org/​cambri​dge/​benjon​son/​; for David Gants’s essay on 1616, see https://​uni​vers​ityp​ubli​shin​gonl​ine.org/​cambri​dge/​benjon​son/​k/​ess​ays/​ F1_​te​xtua​l_​es​say/​. See e.g. these books by Emma Smith: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015). 26. Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Joad Raymond,

150   Jason Scott-Warren Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England 1640–​1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Anna Bayman, Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 27. William Cornwallis, Essayes (London: Edmund Mattes, 1600), fo. I7r. 28. Raymond, Pamphlets, 10; Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–​1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Joad Raymond (ed.), News Networks in Seventeenth-​Century Britain and Europe (London: Routledge, 2006); Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-​Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 29. See e.g. Gabriel Heaton, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments: From George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 3; Daniel Starza Smith, John Donne and the Conway Papers: Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 30. Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–​56. 31. Tiffany Stern, ‘ “On each Wall and Corner Poast”: Playbills, Title-​Pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London’, English Literary Renaissance, 36 (2006), 57–​89, at 69; see also Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Tiffany Stern (ed.), Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2019). 32. Patricia Fumerton, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 34. See also Patricia Fumerton, Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012); Patricia Fumerton et al. (eds.), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–​1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Angela McShane, Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-​Century England: A Critical Bibliography (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011); Angela McShane, ‘Political Street Songs and Singers in Seventeenth-​Century England’, Renaissance Studies, 33 (2019), 94–​118. 33. For the English Broadside Ballad Archive, hosted at the University of California at Santa Barbara, see http://​ebba.engl​ish.ucsb.edu/​ 34. Leah Price, What We Talk about When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 1–​15; Fumerton, Broadside Ballad, 66-​70. 35. Juliet Fleming, William Sherman, and Adam Smyth (eds.), ‘The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45 (2015); Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Laura Estill, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-​Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015); Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001).

Monuments and Trifles    151 36. For the ‘New Textualism’, see Fumerton, Broadside Ballad, 6–​8, citing Jürgen Meyer, ‘Editing Textual Synergies: New Historicism and “New Textualism” ’, Poetics Today, 35 (2014), 591–​613. 37. Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–​422. 38. Peter Stallybrass and Roger Charter, ‘Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–​1619’, in Andrew Murphy (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 35–​56. See further Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare between Pamphlet and Book, 1608–​1619’, in Margaret J. Kidnie and Sonia Massai (eds.), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 105–​133. A precursor to this argument was made by T. A. Birrell, ‘The Influence of Seventeenth-​ Century Publishers on the Presentation of English Literature’, in Mary-​Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes (eds.), Historical & Editorial Studies in Medieval & Early Modern English for Joan Gerritsen (Groningen: Wolters-​Noordhoff, 1985), 163–​173. 39. Zachary Lesser and Alan B. Farmer, ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005), 1–​32. 40. Lesser and Farmer, ‘Popularity’, 11–​18, at 18. 41. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘What is Print Popularity? A Map of the Elizabethan Book Trade’, in Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (eds.), The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 19–​54; Alan B. Farmer, ‘Shakespeare as Leading Playwright in Print, 1598–​1608/​9’, in Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (eds.), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 87–​ 104; Alan B. Farmer, ‘Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality’, in Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser (eds.), The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text (New Haven: Beinecke, 2016), 87–​125. See also Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 42. Farmer, ‘Playbooks’, 113. 43. Aaron T. Pratt, ‘Stab-​Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature’, The Library, 7th ser., 16 (2015), 304–​328, at 314. 44. Pratt, ‘Stab-​Stitching’, 317–​321. 45. Pratt, ‘Stab-​Stitching’, 321. 46. Jason Scott-​Warren, ‘Commonplacing and Originality: Reading Francis Meres’, Review of English Studies, 68 (2017), 902–​923, at 910. 47. Jason Scott-​Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Pennsylvania: University of Philadelphia Press, 2019), 86–​91. On the materiality of small devotional books, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, Studies in Church History, 38 (2004), 123–​142; on their place in the market, see Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For Italian devotional literature in this period, see Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven, The Sacred Home in Renaissance Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chs. 5 and 7. 48. Scott-​Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader, 46–​47, 103–​104; Philip Foulface, Bacchus Bountie Describing the Debonaire Dietie of his Bountifull Godhead (London: Henry Kyrkham, 1593).

152   Jason Scott-Warren 49. Scott-​Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader, 85–​89. 50. Scott-​Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader, 115–​117. 51. John Taylor, The Pennyles Pilgrimage (London: John Taylor, 1618); John Taylor, The Praise of Hemp-​Seed (London: Henry Gosson, 1620). 52. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘John Taylor [called the Water Poet] (1578–​1653)’; John Taylor, All the Workes of John Taylor the Water-​Poet (London: John Beale et al., 1630). 53. John Taylor, Verbum Sempiternae (London: John Hamman, 1614); The Booke of Martyrs (London: John Hamman, 1616). 54. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 40. 55. OED, ‘volume, n.’, 1a, 2a; Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, The Decades of the Newe Worlde, trans. Richard Eden (London: Edwarde Sutton, 1555), 3Q1r. 56. Richard Crashaw, Steps to the Temple (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646), E1v, A5r. 57. OED, ‘volume, n.’, 5, 6a. 58. OED, ‘volume, n’, 6–​8. 59. For a pioneering rumination on some of these categories, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–​79.

Select Bibliography Aston, Margaret, ‘Lap Books and Lectern Books: The Revelatory Book in the Reformation’, Studies in Church History, 38 (2004), 163–​189. Blayney, Peter W. M., ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–​422. Connor, Francis X., Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014). Erne, Lukas, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Fleming, Juliet, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001). Fleming, Juliet, Sherman, William, and Smyth, Adam (eds.), ‘The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading’, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45 (2015). Fumerton, Patricia, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Higgins, B. D. R., ‘Printing the First Folio’, in Emma Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 30–​47. Knight, Jeffrey Todd, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Millstone, Noah, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Pratt, Aaron T., ‘Stab-​Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature’, The Library, 7th ser., 16 (2015), 304–​328.

Monuments and Trifles    153 Scott-​Warren, Jason, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Pennsylvania: University of Philadelphia Press, 2019). Smith, Helen, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Pa rt I I

M A K I N G B O OK S

Chapter 9

What Was a Pri nt i ng Shop, and W hat Happened T h e re ? Paul W. Nash

A printing shop, or printing office, was neither a shop nor an office. It was closer to a small factory, an establishment where printed matter was replicated and manufactured in quantity by a semi-​industrial process. Each printing shop was, however, a ‘shop’ in the sense that it was driven by commerce, printing usually being commissioned at a rate that could keep the master printer and his men in business but was unlikely to make any of them rich. The work of an English printing shop in the early modern period may be reconstructed from a number of sources—​the surviving records of the great university presses of Oxford and Cambridge, and scattered archives and correspondence relating to smaller presses, as well as the contemporary records and pictorial representations of Continental printing shops, from which a certain amount can be inferred about the workings of their English equivalents. The greatest source for our knowledge is, however, Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick exercises . . . applied to the art of printing (originally issued in monthly parts during 1683 and 1684). It was the first English printers’ manual, indeed the first detailed and comprehensive book of instructions for the printer in any language.1 However, the evidence from all these sources must be viewed with caution. The university presses were relatively large concerns and in this, and other ways, atypical of English printing shops; the same is true of the Plantin office in Antwerp, whose extensive surviving records and stock of type, punches, matrices, and printing equipment can tell us much about a large printing works and type-​foundry, but rather less about the workings of small printing businesses. Images of printing shops were often drawn by artists more interested in making a good composition than in accurately recording what they saw; and Moxon’s work is most unreliable in two obvious senses—​he knew well the business of a printing shop and paper-​warehouse, from the perspective of a manager or master printer, but had an imperfect understanding of the practicalities, and he was

158   Paul W. Nash a great censor, describing how things ought to be done rather than reporting how they were actually done.2

The Buildings and Working Conditions of a Printing Shop The great majority of English printing shops were small or middle-​sized business.3 Type and presses were sometimes set up in an author’s or publisher’s home for the purposes of producing a particular book or series of works.4 But most printing establishments were in small commercial premises, in large towns and cities, usually in the form of a workshop-​cum-​dwelling.5 At this period the term ‘printing house’ was common, and is not inappropriate.6 The workshop usually had at least two rooms, the printing and composition generally being kept separate. Paper storage (which was a major consumer of space) might be in a third room, or in a separate warehouse, or sometimes merely in corners of the press-​and composing-​rooms. Both composition and presses were ideally situated on the ground floor. In the case of composition, this was due to the weight of the metal, while presses were not so much heavy as awkward to transport and needed to be firmly braced against floor, ceiling, and walls to prevent their wooden members moving or distorting under the pressure of repeated use. Many printing shops were fitted in where available premises allowed, however, so that rooms above the ground floor, and in basements, were far from uncommon. It was rare indeed for a printing shop to be purpose-​built.7 The working conditions in most printing offices were cramped, the atmosphere was unhealthy, and the hours were by modern standards long; during periods of activity, pressmen and compositors were usually expected to work a twelve-​hour day, six or six-​ and-​a-​half days per week. Piecework was common, however, and dictated by the flow of work through the printing shop, which suffered fallow as well as over-​busy periods. Moxon advises choosing a ‘well-​lighted’ building, not overshadowed, with tall windows, but not so large as to admit cold in winter.8 It was necessary to heat the shop in winter not primarily for the benefit of the men, but in order to keep the ink from becoming too stiff, and the paper in warm and stable conditions for storage and drying. The shop had thus to be enclosed during the winter months, and the atmosphere within must have been warm, humid, and malodourous (from the sweat of labour, the boiling of lye, and the urine that was stored and used there).9 Bernardino Ramazzini, writing in Padua in the early eighteenth century of industrial diseases, complained of the dangers to the health of printers of this warm winter workplace. He noted that pressmen tended to suffer damage to their joints and compositors to their eyesight, adding: Præter hosce oculorum morbos aliæ quoque iis calamitates superveniunt, uti [fe]bres continuae pleuritides peripneumoniae, & alii pectoris morbi; cum

What Was a Printing Shop?    159 enim Typographis necesse sit hyemali tempore tota[m]‌die in locis benè clausis, & in һуроcaustis degere, si operari velint, & chartas impræssas exsiccare; ubi postea ab hisce locis tepentibus ad aerem externum frigidum exeant, facili negotio iis contingunt cutis constipationes, & improvisa perspiratus laesio unde praesto sunt supra memorati affećtus. Maximè verò hisce morbis obnoxii funt, qui ad torcular exercentur cum enim ad opus hujusmodi magno brachiorum, & totius corporis molimine opus sit, isti non rarò sudore aliquo perfusi, è Typographiâ pedem emittunt, sicque morbis obviam procedunt. (In addition to these eye ailments, other maladies strike them, such as constant fevers, pleurisy, pneumonia, and other chest conditions; for when it is winter-​time the printers must pass the whole day in totally enclosed spaces, indeed in hothouses, so that they can do their work and dry the printed sheets; when later they pass out of this hot environment into the cold air outside, it is all too easy for them to develop congestions of the skin, and sudden breathing difficulties, whence come the afflictions mentioned above. In fact these diseases chiefly afflict those who strive at the press, for work of this sort requires great exertion of the arms, and their whole bodies are bent to the labour, so that it is not unusual for them to be steeped in a little sweat and, when they step out of the printing house, they thus go to meet these diseases).10

Heat in the summer was also a potential hazard, and Moxon advises that presses be positioned to avoid ‘the heat of the sun’.11 The windows in printing shops were usually of oiled paper rather than glass. This was chiefly because paper was cheap and easily replaced, but preventing the bright sunlight that might have been admitted by glass from falling on damped and/​or printed paper may also have been a consideration.12 Window-​ papers were traditionally replaced every year in late summer (around St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August os, according to Moxon), at which time the master printer would throw his workmen a wayzgoose (a dinner or later an outing and/​or party) to mark the beginning of the period of winter-​working. Candles would be used throughout the year when natural light was not sufficient to work by, and became the main light source during the winter period.

Tools and Equipment The master printer would furnish the tools necessary for composition and presswork. The composing-​room would be fitted out with frames to bear the type-​cases at which the compositors would work, as well as cabinets or racks (what Moxon calls ‘Nest-​Frames’) for storing type in cases while it was not in use.13 There would be at least one imposing-​ stone (a table with a flat stone or iron surface) in some central spot, and racks for galleys, the wooden trays on which lines of composed type were placed, stored, and transported. Further racks would be used to store completed formes, either ready for the press or having been printed and awaiting dismantling. A number of letter boards—​smooth,

160   Paul W. Nash sturdy boards used to support formes during cleaning, transportation, and storage—​ would also be provided. The room included two troughs or tubs, one lined with lead and used for cleaning the ink from formes with a hot solution of caustic lye (sodium hydroxide), and the other for rinsing formes with water when they were ready for dismantling. For the cleaning with lye, stiff brushes were also required, and a kettle or chafing-​dish for heating the solution over a fire. The composition itself required, in addition to type (discussed below), a supply of wooden furniture, side-​and foot-​sticks, and scaleboard (thin lath-​like strips of wood)14 in various standard widths and lengths, as well as a range of chases (iron frames), for constructing printing formes around pages of type and blocks. Each compositor had access to a set of setting-​rules and a composing-​stick, the last being perhaps his most important tool and one which was often personal to him.15 It consisted originally of a small wooden tray, open at the top and usually with one adjustable end, which could be held in the hand and used to assemble types; by Moxon’s time composing sticks were made of iron or occasionally brass or some other copper-​alloy.16 Quoins in the form of wooden wedges were needed for locking up formes, and these would be knocked firmly into place with a mallet and shooting stick, the last being a wooden or metal tool with a cleft at one end to engage with the quoin. A planer (called by Moxon a ‘Dressing-​Block’) was used to press against the face of the forme, to make sure the type was all standing flush. Any individual types (or ‘sorts’) which needed knocking down could be tapped with the wooden handle of a bodkin, the steel point of which was used for removing damaged types, by spearing the face and drawing the type out (a process which would naturally ruin the sort so that it was fit only for the hell box, where useless type-​matter was amassed for later melting-​down). A visorum, a small wooden frame for holding copy, was often used, and was attached to a type-​case or frame when in use. The press-​ room was dominated by the presses themselves, and the tools and equipment necessary to work and maintain them. Most printing shops would have at least two presses (one sometimes being reserved for proofing), the average being perhaps three or four. This is very hard to judge, however, since records are patchy and legal control of the numbers of presses owned at different periods both waxed and waned, and was observed or ignored irregularly.17 The largest English printing shops may have had nine or more presses.18 This compares a little unfavourably with figures from the Continent; the Plantin house at Antwerp, for example, is believed to have had at least twenty-​two presses in the early 1570s.19 Presses were relatively simple machines, made of wood with some iron components.20 Each could be manufactured and maintained by a competent carpenter or joiner, especially if he had a model to copy; the metal parts could be manufactured by a smith. Moxon included illustrated instructions on press-​building in his Mechanick exercises, albeit with some omissions.21 The pressman would have to hand three common tools—​a pair of dividers for positioning formes and checking margins, a brush for use with paste to make up tympans and friskets and attach packing, and a pair of shears. These last had many uses for cutting paper, including to make underlay and overlay (to improve the impression

What Was a Printing Shop?    161 where parts of the forme or blocks were not printing well or evenly) and duck-​bills (grippers to hold sheets in place). Shears were also used by compositors to cut brass rule and scaleboard to length, although the latter was often torn, roughly, by lazy compositors.22 These tools were conventionally depicted in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century images of the printing press, along with another which appears in the earliest and has caused some mystification. It is a Y-​shaped tool, sometimes shown with balls or eyes at the ends of two of its limbs. James Moran suggested that it was a form of bodkin,23 but it more closely resembles the triple drill-​augur shown among the carpenter’s tools drawn by Martin Löffelholtz in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.24 It may have been used for boring holes in wooden chases, or in furniture within formes, to accommodate press-​points or pins for positioning sheets of paper. Whatever its purpose, this tool had disappeared from the workshop before Moxon’s period (when chases were of metal and had slits in the cross-​pieces to accommodate points). Inking was accomplished with ink-​balls, each consisting of a wooden stock or handle to which a pelt of untanned leather—​stuffed with horsehair, sheep’s wool, or some similar material—​was nailed. The leather was usually sheepskin, but any soft and untreated hide could be used. From the late eighteenth century, French printers’ manuals record that dogskin was sometimes used, as it made the best balls although it was difficult to prepare;25 there is, however, no evidence of dogskin being used in England. The pelts were regularly removed from the balls, to be soaked in urine overnight or sometimes during meal-​breaks, in order to keep the surface from hardening; a special tool, a kind of claw-​hammer known as a ‘sheep’s foot’, was used for prising out and hammering in the nails which held the pelts in place. This tool had other uses in the press room, including for hammering in press-​points or tapping shooting-​sticks or planers, and as a light crowbar for raising the edges of formes. Printers’ ink (the manufacture of which is discussed in the section ‘Paper, Ink, and Type’) was stored in barrels, and a tool called a ‘slice’, like a small spade with a crossbar to prevent the handle touching the inside of the barrel, was used to transfer lumps or ‘pads’ of it to an inking-​table or block, often attached to the nearside of the press. Each pad was then broken up using a brayer, a tool like a pestle made of wood (or later, rather unexpectedly, of glass), so that it could be beaten into a heavy paste using the ink-​balls.26 When in use, piles of paper would stand on paperboards (similar to the letter boards described above, but not requiring such perfect smoothness) set upon benches or ‘horses’ beside the presses. Sheets would be damped using a shallow tray, and some early images of printing shops show ewers standing near the presses which were presumably used for bringing water into the printing house for this purpose (rather than containing, as some have supposed, the printers’ beer). Once perfected (printed on both sides), sheets of paper would be hung up to dry in small batches, using a peel, a long-​handled wooden paddle similar in appearance to the baker’s tool of the same name.27 Drying racks were set up wherever they could be fitted into the printing house—​in the press room, in the composing-​room (often above the heads of the compositors), in the attics, or in the warehouse (if there was one)—​and were usually made from wooden battens over which the sheets could be draped. During the manufacturing process, paper was

162   Paul W. Nash hung to dry over taught ropes, and these may also have been used in some printing shops, instead of battens, as being cheaper and easier to erect and dismantle.

Paper, Ink, and Type Paper represented the greatest day-​to-​day expense for the printer.28 There was native production in England throughout the hand-​press period, but this paper was for many years of a low quality, due to a paucity of clean linen rags and pure water for production. Almost all printing paper was imported from the Continent until the end of the seventeenth century, when domestic production of ‘white’ paper began in earnest and was protected by the imposition of an additional tax on imported sheets.29 Although books were generally printed on French, Dutch, and Italian papers, it is likely that the poorer domestic product was used for a good deal of quotidian printing—​of chapbooks, advertisements, bags, wrappers, and other ephemera—​much of which has not survived. Paper was supplied in reams of 480 or 500 sheets, each folded once so that each sheet had a straight ‘back’ (the fold); within each ream, quires of twenty-​four or twenty-​five sheets would be placed alternately with their backs to left and right, and the first and last quires were of second-​quality paper, nominally to protect the ream (though many of these sheets were used in printing, insinuated into the stock towards the middle of a run).30 Printers were loath to discard paper and (although there was evidently a trade in waste paper at this period) reused any damaged sheets they could, for such purposes as proofing, wrapping, packing the tympan, covering windows, and as draw sheets. The master allowed very little wastage in each job. Moxon describes how the warehouse-​ keeper (a role we must assume existed only in larger printing shops) should provide the press-​crews with enough paper to print as many copies as required, plus around 5 per cent for all other purposes, including proofing, trial impressions, aligning two-​colour printing, and wastage. For this reason a good many badly-​printed sheets, which might have been discarded had the economics of the press room allowed it, are to be found in finished books of our period. Unlike paper, which was always bought in from a manufacturer or merchant, ink could be made by printers in-​house and often was, although by the seventeenth century many shops preferred to buy from an independent ink-​maker. Moxon complained of the poor quality of much commercially-​available ink, while accepting that many preferred to avoid the difficulty, noxiousness, and fire risk of the manufacturing process.31 Good quality ink was rare in England until after 1750, and the best inks were probably those made by Caxton and the few other printers active before 1500, who no doubt gave more care to, and lavished more money upon, their preparation. To make printers’ ink, a quantity of vegetable oil—​usually linseed oil in England—​ was boiled for several hours until it became a thick varnish, at which point it was mixed with a colouring agent, some form of finely ground carbon being used for black.32 A little resin, usually turpentine (the earliest printers used more expensive resins, including

What Was a Printing Shop?    163 amber), was added to the oil during the rendering process. Ink made with too little resin, or none, dried more slowly and the oil component tended to leach through the damp paper (forming ‘haloes’ around characters). Too much resin, however, made the ink too thick and inclined to clog the type, and to dry too quickly and render formes more difficult to wash. More turpentine added to the boiling oil reduced the length of time necessary for the rendering, and this is probably the reason many English printers (according to Moxon) added too much of it to their recipes.33 Other materials were often added, the most common being dryers, chemicals which would speed the drying process without affecting the consistency; Moxon notes the addition of a quarter of an ounce of ‘Letharge of Silver’ (lead oxide) to each gallon of varnish, which served this purpose (although Moxon thought it was ‘to Clarifie it’).34 Many recipes for ink note that bread and/​or onions should be added to the boiling oil; it was believed that this reduced the greasiness of the varnish, which was absorbed by these foodstuffs—​which were then removed and sometimes eaten, being, if they were not completely carbonized, deep-​fried.35 The rendering of oil was a noxious process, producing foul gases both from the fire and the oil itself. There was a serious risk of fire, from the wood or charcoal used to heat the cauldron and from the vapours emitted by the boiling oil, which were inflammable. The oil itself could catch fire too, especially if it boiled over into the fire beneath; indeed it was common practice to set fire to the oil intentionally at regular intervals during the rendering, to speed the thickening process.36 For these reasons, it was often recommended that the oil was boiled outdoors and at some distance from the printing shop.37 Type represented the greatest investment for a printer at the beginning of his career, and needed to be renewed (recast or bought afresh) at regular intervals. There were several routes by which a printer could acquire type, which was cast in England from the 1470s, using matrices imported from elsewhere in Europe, or struck from imported punches, or from punches made by Continental punch-​cutters working in the Kingdom38 or cut by native craftsmen. In the early modern period the Stationers’ Company controlled the business of type-​founding, and from 1637 only four individuals were permitted to carry on the trade in London. However, there must have been a good deal of discrete type-​founding by others. We are only beginning to understand the degree to which Continental types were traded by printers who also acted as type-​founders, and it is probable that a similar trade was carried on in England.39 Thus, the most likely way for a printer to acquire type in the early modern period was for him simply to buy it, either from one of the authorized founders, or from another printer who was casting type for his own use and was prepared to sell founts. Casting required a hand-​mould, which could be borrowed, hired, bought, or manufactured by any printer who wished to cast his own type, while matrices or strikes (unfinished matrices) could be hired or bought directly from punch-​cutters or from other printers who cast rather than bought their type. Those printers who were also punch-​cutters—​and these were few, albeit not perhaps so few as the official record shows—​could obviously supply their own needs, as well as trading in matrices, strikes, or type. Joseph Moxon was just such a printer/​ punch-​cutter, despite not being one of those approved for the trade by the Stationers.

164   Paul W. Nash He describes how he taught himself to cut punches, to make hand-​moulds, and to cast and dress type, which was used in his own books and makes occasional appearances elsewhere;40 his protracted instructions were clearly intended to be followed by others who wished to carry on the trade, although they have—​like his directions for making presses—​proved troublesome to interpret in practice.41 Another way in which a printer could acquire type was for him to buy a second-​hand fount, usually from the stock-​in-​trade of a retiring or deceased printer. This would probably be the cheapest method, used by some printers at the outset of their careers, but would inevitably give poor results, as used type would not print as well as new. Indeed, if in constant use, each fount of type would become too worn to print well in the space of a few years, and would be fit only for melting down, when the process of acquiring a new fount would be undertaken, by one of the means described above or by melting down the old fount and using the original matrices to cast it afresh. The quality of type used in England before 1700 was variable and depended on a combination of the punches and matrices available (whether these derived from the Continent or from immigrant craftsmen, who generally produced finer work than English punch-​cutters), the quality of the metal used (which was dependent upon the availability and relative costs of lead, tin and antimony),42 and on the skills of the caster in wielding the hand-​mould. The legal constraints on type-​founding in England were lifted in 1695 with the lapsing of the ‘Licensing Acts’ so that it was only after the early modern period that English type-​founding developed into a large-​scale industry, notably with the establishment in the 1720s of the foundry of William Caslon, arguably the first native punch-​cutter with an original talent.

Ornaments and Woodcuts Decorative and illustrative elements were present in most English printing. Smaller typographical ornaments (‘flowers’ or ‘fleurons’) were cast in the same manner as type, and Continental designs were available from at least the middle of the sixteenth century.43 There may have been some native cutting of punches for type-​ornaments too, but no record of such work survives.44 Fleurons were used, chiefly before the middle of the seventeenth century, to make up decorative head-​and tail-​pieces, borders, and factotums. These functions were also fulfilled by woodcuts (and occasionally metal-​ cuts), and the same medium was used for decorated or historiated initials, and for printers’ devices. Here too the design and style of ornamentation was largely copied from Continental models, but often by English craftsmen; some of the work was fine, some crude, and a printer’s wealth and status was to some degree reflected in his stock of ornaments and devices. Such judgements are very hard to make, however, especially as woodcuts were available from the earliest period in the form of stereotypes, cast in metal using matrices of sand, plaster, clay, or type-​metal.45 The impressions made by such casts are impossible to distinguish from those of wooden blocks, except in cases of damage

What Was a Printing Shop?    165 (metal blocks tend to bend rather than break) or where nail heads rise, catch ink, and so become visible.46 It is believed that some of these cast ornaments were made on the continent and imported to England.47 The illustration (as distinct from the decoration) of books was also commonly achieved in England with woodcuts of rather variable quality. The majority were cut by English craftsmen (about whom almost nothing is known and whose relationships with printers and publishers are generally obscure),48 and there was no great artistic movement in the production of woodcuts in Britain as there was in the Netherlands, France, and Italy during the early modern period. Sometimes, for popular books, illustrative woodcuts would be stereotyped, just as ornaments were. Woodcuts and stereotypes were simple to print, and could be included in the same formes as the text they were to accompany. This was not true of intaglio illustrations—​etchings and engravings—​which were printed on ‘rolling’ presses, quite different in structure and operation from the ‘common’ presses used to print typographical formes. The illustration of books with intaglio plates was not especially common in England, and when it did occur the printing of the etchings or engravings was usually carried out in a different workshop; very few letterpress printing shops had a rolling press or employed workmen capable of using one.49

The Workforce and Working Procedures Most English printing shops were small—​ often family—​ businesses, owned and operated by a master printer.50 Each would employ workmen, usually different hands for composition and presswork. There was a great ebb and flow of printing work in England, and only the largest printing shops had anything like a permanent staff. Some printers were itinerant and moved from town to town, or around large cities, following the available work, and it was not uncommon for workmen to be nominally employed at one shop (but actually idle) while undertaking paid work at another.51 Most masters would also bind at least one apprentice boy, either as a compositor or a pressman, occasionally as both. (Although girls could not be apprenticed, there must have been times, especially in small family businesses, when female members of the household undertook work in the printing shop, perhaps even working at case or press, albeit in secrecy.) The master was obliged to house and clothe the apprentice, and to pay him a small wage (little more than pocket money), but would expect to get seven years’ hard work out of the young man while nominally training him for the profession. Apprentices would be freed in their early twenties, when they became journeymen printers.52 In addition, boys who were not apprentices would sometimes be employed in printing shops to undertake simple tasks, fetching and carrying, cleaning and removing printed sheets from the press during a run. There is a long tradition, perpetuated by Moxon, that the boys of a

166   Paul W. Nash printing house were known as ‘devils’ because they ‘commonly black and Dawb themselves’ with ink but also, no doubt, for the devilry they wrought.53 Each printing job would begin with ‘copy’. Even the simplest work would have copy of some sort, be it a few lines of scribbled manuscript for a bill-​heading or label. Every book would have a manuscript, fair or foul, unless it was a new edition, in which case a copy of the previous edition would usually be used as copy. The quality of the copy made a great deal of difference to the ease of the compositor’s work, and Moxon records that ‘a Printed Copy, or a fair Written Hand . . . is by Compositers call’d Good Copy, Light, Easie Work’.54 If the copy was complex it might be marked up beforehand, by the author, an editor, or the master printer, with instructions for the compositor, but it was more usual for the compositor to be expected to make sense of the manuscript and to impose a conventional style upon the text. With longer works it was usual for the copy to be divided between two or more compositors (occasionally between two printing shops). This might have required the ‘casting-​off ’ of the copy, to calculate how many pages it would occupy when set in the chosen size of type and to the selected measure (line-​length), so that the points where each compositor should begin work could be estimated. Casting-​off was necessary when a work was to be imposed and printed by formes, rather than seriatim (all the pages being set sequentially), as each forme contained only half of the pages necessary to print the sheet. With complex works, especially those in which sheets were to be ‘nested’ to make gatherings, casting-​off could be very difficult and the calculations were often imperfect, so that some form of ‘copy-​fitting’ was called for, to ‘drive out’ a text that was too short to fill the page (usually with extra space being inserted within, or between, the lines), or to compress a text that was too long (usually by increasing the number of lines to the page or the length of the lines).55 Adjusting spelling and abbreviation or contraction could also be used as tools in copy-​fitting, though this was more common at the beginning of our period than at the end. Once the copy was ready, the compositor would set to work, standing56 at a pair of type-​cases with his composing-​stick in his left hand and the copy before him, usually on a visorum. Into his stick he would place a brass setting-​rule, not so much to check that the measure was right as to form a solid surface on which to set his first line. Moxon gives almost absurdly detailed instructions to the compositor but, as with many of his directions, they are unlikely to have been followed precisely by the majority of workmen.57 The type was placed in the stick in the correct sequence, left to right, but upside down so that when inverted it would show the mirror image necessary to print correctly. Once the first line of type—​spaced so as to fit the stick tightly, with the last word hyphenated if necessary—​was complete, the compositor would draw the setting-​ rule out from beneath the line and place it on top, to form a foundation for the next line. English composing-​sticks were large enough to hold between four and eight lines (with commonly used type-​sizes), and when the stick was full these lines would be transferred to a galley, which would usually be placed on the right-​hand side of the upper case, where less commonly used characters were stored. In this way each compositor would slowly fill his galley. The speed of this work varied greatly, but a typical octavo page of prose would take between one and two hours to set.58 Thus a single octavo forme (eight

What Was a Printing Shop?    167 pages) could be completed in a day. Compositors were not normally paid by the hour, however, but by the quantity of type they set. They were expected to make corrections without further payment, so that their best earning strategy was to compose with a judicious balance of speed and accuracy.59 When the type for a forme had been set, it was the compositor’s job to impose that forme, to lay out the pages in the correct positions and orientation on the imposing-​ stone, and to surround them with appropriate furniture, quoins, and a chase. Any necessary headlines or direction-​lines (what we would call today ‘footers’, containing the catchwords, signatures, and press-​figures) would also be inserted in their correct positions, and the whole locked up by tapping home the quoins with the shooting-​stick; once reasonably firm, the printing surface would be planed with a planer and mallet, to make sure all the type and blocks were sitting flat on their feet, and not projecting. Then the forme would be locked tight and transferred to a press for proofing (usually called ‘proving’ in the early modern period). The proof impression would usually be pulled by a pressman, before the forme and proof were returned to the compositor. Moxon described the proofreading process in detail. First the proof was examined by a learned ‘corrector’ (employed for their linguistic and pedantic skills and accommodated in ‘some little Closet adjoyning to the Composing-​room’),60 to whom the copy was read by an appointed ‘reader’, while the corrector listened and read the proof, marking any errors with a pen and ink; then a second proof (and, if necessary, a third), called a ‘revise’, was read against the first proof, and again annotated as necessary.61 Corrections to the forme would be made by the same compositor who set the type, removing and replacing individual sorts, words, lines, or—​occasionally—​substantial blocks of text. If an author or editor wished to read proofs, they would generally have to attend the printing shop and do the work there (the convention of sending proofs to an author’s house did not develop until the eighteenth century). Finally, a ‘press proof ’ would be made to check that the forme was ready to print. In some cases, ‘stop-​press’ corrections were undertaken during printing, either when an error was noticed by a pressman examining a sheet for quality of impression (such an error, especially if it was caused by the loss of characters, might have been introduced during inking) or by a formal process of proofreading after printing had begun.62 It is unlikely that this careful and long-​winded process of proofreading and correction was undertaken for the great majority of printing jobs. In most shops there was no corrector, and this function was served by the master or by one of the compositors, and it is unlikely that more than one proof was taken in many cases. With some cheap, quick, or expedient work the proofing was cursory or non-​existent. Authors and editors rarely attended the press to correct proofs, and a more usual procedure was for them to be sent a set of sheets of the main text once printing was complete, and they would then supply a list of important errata which could be printed in a preliminary or final gathering of the book, sometimes with an apologia.63 The multiple stages, and care, described by Moxon could hardly have resulted in the great many typographical errors of all kinds which appear in English books of the hand-​press period, including Moxon’s own.

168   Paul W. Nash The printing itself was usually the work of two men, a ‘puller’ who handled the paper and press (and kept his hands clean), and a ‘beater’ who beat the ink to keep it fluid, applied it to the forme and checked the quality of each impression. Sometimes, as mentioned, a boy would be employed to remove printed sheets from the press. A pile of damped, unfolded sheets of paper was placed on a paperboard on the horse. The puller would take one and apply it to the tympan, a sheet of damped parchment held in a double frame and packed with woollen cloth. This was hinged to one end of the press and served both to position and fix the sheet, and to form a cushion between the platen and paper. Each sheet would normally be held in place by ‘points’,64 pins which pricked through the sheet making holes which were invisible when the sheet was ultimately folded.65 Some jobs, especially broadsheets and those using partial sheets of paper, were held in place with duck-​bills rather than points. Once the sheet was in position, the puller folded down the frisket, a second frame covered with parchment (usually pasted to a sheet of paper) and hinged to the tympan, with rectangular holes cut into it to correspond with the pages in the forme (eight for an octavo forme, four for quarto, and so on). While this work was under way, the beater applied ink to the forme with his balls.66 The puller would then fold the frisket and tympan down onto the forme, holding them together with the paper sandwiched between; if the press was correctly set up, the paper was not allowed to touch the forme at this point, but was held a few millimetres above it. The puller then turned the rounce-​handle anticlockwise, which operated the windlass that drew the carriage (bearing the bed and forme) under the platen, then pulled upon the bar to operate the screw; this caused the platen to descend and press the paper against half of the forme, the pressure being applied through the damp, spongy tympan. A good puller was tall and strong, and would lean back with his right hand upon the bar and one foot upon the footstep beneath the press, in order to apply the necessary force (Moxon says that his left hand would remain upon the rounce-​handle).67 He would allow a moment of ‘dwell’, when the pressure was at its greatest, then let the bar move back again, controlling it to prevent its natural spring from causing a collision with the cheek of the press. The puller then turned the rounce again, to bring the other half of the forme under the platen, and pulled again upon the bar, printing the other half of the sheet and this time returning the bar to rest on its catch. This two-​pull process was necessary because a wooden press could not deliver sufficient pressure to print the whole forme in a single pull, and the platen was consequently large enough to cover only half the forme.68 When both pulls had been made, the rounce was turned clockwise to return the carriage to its original position, the tympan and frisket were folded up, away from the forme, and the printed sheet was removed, either by the puller or fly-​boy, and laid upon a second paperboard on the bank, beside the unprinted sheets. The beater was expected to inspect the sheet at this point, to check that his inking was complete and allow him to rectify any inadequacies in his work, but it is likely that he often gave the sheet no more than a glance, or ignored it altogether and began beating the forme again without pause.

What Was a Printing Shop?    169 Moxon mentions another duty of the puller, ‘picking’ the forme, examining it for any types which had become clogged with ink and picking out that ink with a needle.69 This would seem more logically to be a job for the beater, but the appearance of much English printing of the period suggests that the job was seldom if ever undertaken by either pressman. The printing process was repeated until a token of 250 sheets had been struck off, this being conventionally the work of one hour.70 The pay of pressmen was not always calculated in the same way. They were sometimes paid by the token, sometimes by the hour, and sometimes with a weekly wage.71 The time allowed to print a token, and the wages the pressmen could expect, varied according to the difficulty of the work; the size of the type and forme; the number of ornaments, rules, and blocks; and the quality expected (and paid for by the publisher). When a predetermined number of tokens had been finished, the beater and puller would usually swap roles, in order to vary the work and share the physical labour equably, until the required number of copies of the sheet had been printed. Then the pile of sheets would be turned over, ready to print the reiteration or ‘backing up’. This would normally be done by repeating the process of proofing and setting up the second forme on the same press; sometimes, a second press was used, so that the two formes could be printed in parallel (this allowed faster printing, but was obviously more labour-​intensive). If the press-​points and second forme had been properly placed, the sheets could be applied to the tympan in perfect position by pushing the points back through the holes made during the first impression; this sometimes failed, however, and the reiteration could thus be misaligned (‘out of register’) or the sheet might need to be pierced afresh, giving rise to two sets of point-​holes. Once all the impressions of a sheet had been perfected, they were hung up in batches on drying racks, using the peel to lift them into position. The following day the sheets would be dry and were taken down, again using the peel, and passed to the warehouse-​man or whoever handled their storage until the job was complete.72 Setting-​off73 was a potential problem, both from one printed sheet to the next in the growing pile, and from the printed side of a sheet onto the tympan when the reiteration was printed (which was usually accomplished quickly after the first forme had been struck off). Moxon warns the beater not to sit on a pile of printed sheets when preparing his balls, for fear of causing set-​off, showing both that he had no expectation of interleaving the printed sheets with scrap paper, nor that set-​off would occur under the weight of the pile alone.74 This was true, up to a point, as the pressure of printing caused the ink to sit in depressions in the paper, which would hold it away from the surface of the next sheet. Set-​off on the tympan was countered by inserting a draw sheet of waste paper over the tympan-​sheet, and replacing it when it became soiled. However, a good deal of both sorts of set-​off can be observed in English printing throughout the early modern period, showing that these methods of prevention were only partly successful. Once a forme had been printed it was washed (this appears to have been the duty of the beater) and returned to the composing-​room, where it was stripped, not always at once,

170   Paul W. Nash but as the flow of labour or the needs of the shop dictated. The quoins were loosened and the furniture and type-​pages removed, the pages being sometimes wrapped up in paper packages if distribution (‘dissing’) of the type back into the cases was not to be immediate. If this was not the last the forme of the job, then the ‘skeleton’ of the forme—​ the chase, furniture, quoins, and headlines—​was carefully preserved so that it could be reused for the next forme, thus making it easier to assemble in uniformity with its predecessor. Type was usually dissed quickly, as most printers had relatively small stocks and needed to return each forme to the cases before setting could continue. Dissing was rather easier and quicker than setting, and was often achieved after damping the pages of type, which allowed lines to be picked up and held in the left hand without falling apart; once so-​held, the type was extracted, a word or syllable at a time, with the fingers of the right hand and returned ‘nimbly’ to the compartments of the type-​case.75 With book-​printing, the final gatherings to be set and printed were usually the preliminaries, and it was here that an author or editor might add their errata and apologia to the reader, along with any foreword, dedication, or invocation. Once this work was complete, the printer’s final task was to check the sheets of the book, fold and gather them together into complete copies, and package them ready for the publisher (who might also have been the printer) to begin the tasks of dissemination and sale.

Notes 1. For a bibliography of printers’ manuals, see Philip Gaskell, Giles Barber, and Georgina Warrilow, ‘An Annotated List of Printers’ Manuals to 1850’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 4 (1968), 11–​31; 7 (1971), 65–​66. 2. This is not wholly fair to Moxon, who does sometimes report contemporary practices in order to criticize them, which can be most informative. 3. This includes a good deal of English clandestine printing, the location of which is often, by its nature, hard to establish and was mostly carried on with single presses in secret locations, operated by amateurs or by professional pressmen in clandestine employment. Moxon mentions the subject (see Mechanick exercises, 380); see also Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 128–​136. (In these notes, the 1683–​4 edition of Moxon is referred to as Moxon, Mechanick exercises; the annotated new edition as Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon.) 4. Randle Holme’s The academy of armory, or, a storehouse of armory and blazon (Chester: Printed for the author, 1688; ESTC R21065), the first English encyclopaedia to include a glossary of printing terms (on pp. 113–​127 of Book III, largely extracted from Moxon), is believed to have been printed on a press set up in the author’s house in Chester. The book is incomplete, printing having been abandoned at the end of Book III due to lack of support from subscribers (on the final page Holme complains bitterly of the high cost of producing the work, the paucity of subscriptions, and the meanness of the upper classes). 5. An Act of January 1653 dictated that each master printer and his apprentices should carry out their craft ‘in his and their respective Dwelling Houses, and not elsewhere’, thus obliging both printers to live at their places of work, and their apprentices to ‘live in’ (see C. H. Firth

What Was a Printing Shop?    171 and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 3 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911), ii. 698). It is likely that this law was observed only up to a point. 6. See Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 9–​10, where he explains the term ‘Printing-​House’, noting that it means not only the establishment, but also the collected tools of the printer’s trade and, by inference, the concept of that trade. 7. In England, only the Cambridge and Oxford university presses, and the King’s Printer, are believed to have had such premises, erected from 1655, in 1709–​18, and in 1671 respectively (see David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, 3 vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 1993–​2004), i. 358–​60; Simon Eliot (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press, 4 vols. (Oxford: University Press, 2013–​ 17), i. 199–​ 202; Martyn Ould, Printing at the University Press, Oxford, 1660–​1780, 3 vols. (Seaton: Old School Press, 2015–​19), i. 34–​53; Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 167; and Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 15–​16, noting Plantin’s erection of a purpose-​built workshop in Antwerp in 1579). 8. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 10, 11. 9. The printing shop would have been still more unpleasant an environment if type were being cast or ink manufactured within its walls. Philippe Minard, Typographes des Lumières (Ceyzérieu: Éditions Champ Vallon, 1989), 70, describes the noisy, filthy, and chaotic interior of a French printing shop of the eighteenth century. While a little purple, his description is no doubt largely accurate. 10. Bernardino Ramazzini, De morbis artificium . . . diatribus (Patavii: Per Jo: Baptistam Conzattum, 1713), 376–​ 377; my translation. For an annotated modern edition see Bernardino Ramazzini, Diseases of Workers, revised, with translation and notes, by Wilmer Cave Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940). 11. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 11. 12. See Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 10–​11, citing Fertel, Science pratique, 231. 13. The ‘divided lay’, of an upper-​case containing majuscules, numerals, and other less common characters and a lower-​case containing miniscules, spacing, and punctuation, was used throughout much of the period, but early English type-​cases probably followed the Continental practice of containing all the sorts within a single, large case. 14. See Paul W. Nash, ‘Scaleboard: The Material of Interlinear Spacing before “Leading” ’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 25 (Winter 2016), 71–​83. 15. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 32; Martin K. Speckter, Disquisition on the Composing Stick (New York: Typophiles, 1980), 38, 99–​103. 16. See Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 40–​42; Speckter, Disquisition. 17. See e.g. David L. Gants, ‘A Quantitative Analysis of the London Book Trade 1614–​1618’, Studies in Bibliography, 55 (2002), 185–​213; see also McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, i. 356–​357. 18. Oxford University Press had between five and nine presses in operation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Eliot (ed.), Oxford University Press, i. 228; Martyn Ould, ‘Printing at the Bible Press, Oxford, 1769–​1772: Further Analysis’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 31 (2019), 33–​63); the latter source suggests that nine presses were active at Oxford’s Bible Press alone around 1770). Cambridge had slightly fewer presses than Oxford in the seventeenth century (see McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, i. 357), and the King’s Printer had between six and eight in the same period (see Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of

172   Paul W. Nash James I and VI (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 2009), 139). There were presumably still more presses in operation at the ‘Eliot’s Court Press’, a cooperative venture which thrived between around 1585 and 1640, but no records survive. 19. See Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (repr. with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 164–​165. 20. See James Moran, The Printing Press: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (London: Faber and Faber; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), [17]–​37. 21. Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 45–​ 81; Frans Janssens, ‘Reconstructions of the Common Press: Aims and Results’, Quaerendo, 32/​3–​4 (Jan. 2002), 175–​198, esp. 189–​190; A. H. Smith, A Description of the Hand-​press in the Department of English at University College (London: Privately Printed in the Department, 1934). 22. See Nash, ‘Scaleboard’, 82. 23. Moran, Printing Presses, [24]. 24. Martin Löffelholtz (c.1490?–​1533), ‘Löffelholz-​Kodex’ [MS showing tools and designs, dated ‘1505’] (Krakow, Jagiellonian Library, Berol. mgq 132). 25. See e.g. Antoine François Momoro, Traité élémentaire de l’imprimerie (Paris: Chez A. F. Momoro, 1793), 128. 26. John Southward, Practical Printing, 4th edn. by Arthur Powell (London: ‘Printer’s Register’ Office, 1892), 370. The term ‘brayer’ was later misapplied in America to mean a roller (which inking-​device was not introduced until the early nineteenth century). 27. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, pp. 345–​347, pls. 31, 32. 28. Parchment was also used as a substrate in England at this period, albeit rarely. 29. See Gaskell, New Introduction, 60; and Alfred H. Shorter, Paper Mills and Paper Makers in England 1495–​ 1800 (Monumenta chartae papyraceae historiam illustrantia, 6; Hilversum: Paper Publications Society, 1957). 30. As described by Moxon (see Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 320–​322). 31. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 75–​76. He describes the method of making ink in the Netherlands, which he says is superior to that employed in England, which uses too much cheap oil (including ‘Trane-​Oyl’, a whale-​oil), too much resin, too short a cooking time, and too little carbon. 32. The length of time for the boiling is rarely stated in early recipes, only an indication is given of how to judge when the rendering has gone far enough; a French recipe published in 1723 refers to a period of five hours, two of boiling and three of simmering, while later prescriptions suggest shorter periods (Colin Bloy, A History of Printing Ink, Balls and Rollers 1440–​1850 (London: Wynkyn de Worde Society, 1967), 103, 108–​111). 33. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 76–​77. 34. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 79; Bloy, History, 16. 35. Bloy, History, 13, 16–​17, 102. 36. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 79; Bloy, History, 16. 37. Some sources note laws forbidding the making of ink within the city limits in certain European cities, but no such laws seem to have been enacted in England. 38. The work of Peter de Walpergen to cut punches for a new range of types for John Fell at Oxford University Press is a famous example, albeit, like so much in the history of the university presses, hardly typical of the industry at the period. See Ould, Oxford University Press, ii. 66–​82; and Eliot (ed.), Oxford University Press, i. 217–​220, 515, 533–​534.

What Was a Printing Shop?    173 39. See e.g. Riccardo Olocco, ‘The Jenson Roman: Its Mutations and Spread in Fifteenth-​ Century Italy’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 29 (Winter 2018), 125–​156. 40. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 81–​196; Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 87–​190, 357–​370. The types included in Moxon’s specimen of 1669 (ESTC R232851) are, Davis and Carter suggest, largely cast in matrices struck from punches cut in the Netherlands; only the two largest types shown are thought derive from Moxon’s own punches. 41. See Alan May, ‘Making Moxon’s Type-​Mould’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 22 (Spring 2015), 5–​12. 42. Recipes varied a great deal at this period; some are based on tin, some on lead; other metals are sometimes also included. Moxon (Mechanick exercises, 164–​175) gives a detailed and practical account of the production of a lead-​based type-​metal, while misunderstanding the metallurgy of the process. 43. See e.g. H. D. L. Vervliet, ‘The Combinable Type-​Ornaments of Robert Granjon 1564–​ 1578’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 12 (Spring 2015), 25–​61. Vervliet records Granjon ornaments in the stock of several London and Oxford printers from at least 1566, including John Day, who was a commercial type-​founder in London at this period and may have acquired matrices and been casting these ornaments for others in England. For a database of, mostly later, printers’ ornaments, see https://​com​posi​tor.bham.ac.uk/​. 44. Moxon’s type-​specimen of 1669 (ESTC R232851) bears two fleurons which may be derived from punches cut by him. If so, however, they are typical of English ornaments as they are close copies of Dutch designs attributed to Christoffel van Dyck (whom Moxon met in Amsterdam in the early 1650s). 45. Moxon refers to ‘Capitals Cast in Mettal’, interpreted by Davis and Carter as referring to sand-​cast initials (see Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 26, 371). For the casting of duplicate blocks in type-​metal by the ‘dabbing’ process, see James Mosley, ‘Dabbing, Abklatschen, Clichage . . .’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 23 (Autumn 2015), 73–​5. A few eighteenth-​century examples of metal casts of woodcut ornaments, once used by Cambridge printers working for the University, are to be found in the collection of blocks at Cambridge University Library. 46. A ‘woodcut’ border used for a device of the London printer Richard Pynson from at least 1497 (see ESTC S108378) clearly had a metal surface, at least by 1499, when the border had suffered an accident, the lower edge was bent, and a nail head was visible top right; by 1513, the lower damage had been cut away altogether, but the nail-​mark was still visible. This block may perhaps have been a metal-​cut, but is more likely to have been a cast. 47. A number of casts of the same ‘I’ used by the London printer Adam Islip between 1585 and 1636 are also among the ornament stock of the Amsterdam cartographer and printer Willem Janszoon Blaeu, to whom Moxon attributes the introduction of the iron-​hose printing press (see Carter and Davis (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 45, 48, 373–​374). 48. A few scattered examples of payments by printers to named individuals for the cutting of woodblocks are recorded, for example in the archives of Oxford University Press (see Ould, Oxford University Press, iii. 97–​99). 49. See Roger Gaskell, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration’, Book Collector, 53/​2 (2004), 213–​251. 50. Gaskell, New Introduction, 171–​179. 51. Moxon describes this phenomenon, which he calls ‘smouting’, and characterizes it as a fault of the workman, who is fined by his fellows if his disloyalty is detected (see Moxon,

174   Paul W. Nash Mechanick exercises, 360, 390). The term ‘smouting’ or ‘smooting’ was also used more loosely to mean any casual employment in the printing industry (see Oxford English dictionary, www.oed.com, under ‘smoot’). 52. For the complex history of apprenticeship in printing, see Richard Staines, ‘ “A superabundance of hands”: The Printing Industry’s Perennial “Apprentice Problem” ’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 30 (Summer 2019), 33–​65. 53. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 373. The boys who removed sheets from the press were later known as ‘fly-​boys’. 54. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 211. 55. The pioneering work of Charlton Hinman on the First Folio of Shakespeare (1623) showed that the gatherings, each generally consisting of ten folio leaves, five sheets, had been composed from the middle sheet outwards; while this must have required careful consideration, such a text (verse drama) was, compared to conventional prose, easier both to cast off and to copy-​fit if necessary. See Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-​reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 56. Most sources describe composition as a standing job, and surviving type-​frames of the period are clearly designed to suit a man standing (the frames which survive from among those made for the Oxford University Press in the 1660s have been built up by an additional 12 cm or so, presumably to reflect the increase in average height of a workman in the nineteenth or early twentieth century). A standing position facilitated moving between cases, when necessary, and the free movement of the arms and shoulders as the hands followed the type around the case. But there was no real need to stand when setting type, and most early images of European printing shops depict compositors seated on benches or stools to do their work. This was no doubt true in England too, both in the early days of printing and in later years, when it is hard to believe that weary comps would not have brought suitable stools into the composing room when they had the chance. 57. See Moxon’s chapter ‘The compositer’s trade’ (in Mechanick exercises, 197–​264). 58. Gaskell, New Introduction, 54–​56. 59. For the qualities of a good compositor, see Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 197–​198. 60. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 261; for the processes and philosophy of correction in Europe, see Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011). 61. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 260–​264. The prescribed textual and marginal marks are also reproduced here by Moxon. 62. Gaskell (New Introduction, 115) notes this process of taking press-​proofs during, rather than before, printing, but it is unlikely to have been a common practice. 63. See Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 382–​383, where an example of errata and apology from 1657 is reprinted. 64. Moxon (Mechanick exercises, 285–​381) describes in detail the process of preparing the tympan, including placing the points. 65. This sometimes failed, and point-​holes can be seen in the gutter-​margins of some hand-​ press period books. 66. There is much childish delight to be had from the ambiguity of such terms, and it is likely that English pressmen were ready with many a ball-​joke. Printers themselves seem usually to have used this term (‘balls’), while it is largely academics who refer to them as ‘ink-​balls’ or ‘dabbers’. 67. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 323.

What Was a Printing Shop?    175 68. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that modified wooden and cast-​iron presses were introduced, which could print a whole forme with a single pull. See Moran, Printing Presses, 39–​57. 69. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 320, 387. 70. Sometimes a press was operated by one man working ‘at half press’, serving as both puller and beater, thus working at about half the speed of a two-​man team. 71. Davis and Carter (eds.), Mechanick exercises by Moxon, 484–​486. 72. This is an outline of the process of printing in black only. Sometimes printing in two colours, almost invariably red and black, was undertaken, which usually involved two separate press-​runs, one for each colour. For Moxon’s instructions, see Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 328–​330; see also Elizabeth Savage, ‘New Evidence of Erhard Ratdolt’s Working Practices . . .’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 22 (2015), 81–​97, esp. 84–​6, describing the historical methods of printing in red and black. 73. Also called ‘offsetting’; some writers prefer to use ‘offset’ only to refer to the later technology of offset lithography, which is founded on the principle of setting-​off. 74. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 307. 75. Moxon refers to many operations in the printing shop as being performed ‘nimbly’, especially in composition.

Select Bibliography Bigmore, F. C., and Wyman, C. W. H., A Bibliography of Printing, with Notes and Illustrations, 2 vols. (London: Quaritch, 1880–​6); repr. in facsimile (1969, 1974). Bloy, Colin, A History of Printing Ink, Balls and Rollers 1440–​1850 (London: Wynkyn de Worde Society, 1967). Davis, Herbert, and Carter, Harry (eds.), Mechanick Exercises on the whole Art of Printing by Joseph Moxon, 1683–​1684 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958; 2nd edn. 1962). See also Moxon. Eliot, Simon (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press, 4 vols. (Oxford: University Press, 2013–​17). Fertel, Martin Dominique, La science pratique de l’imprimerie (St Omer: Par Martin Dominique Fertel, 1723). Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (repr. with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). McKenzie, D. F., The Cambridge University Press 1696–​1712, 2 vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 1966). McKitterick, David, A History of Cambridge University Press, 3 vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 1993–​2004). Moran, James, The Printing Press: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (London: Faber and Faber; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973). Moxon, Joseph, Mechanick exercises: or, the doctrine of handy-​works. Applied to the art of printing. The second volumne [sic] (London: Printed for Joseph Moxon . . ., 1683–​[1684]; ESTC R17720). See also Davis and Carter (eds.). Ould, Martyn, Printing at the University Press, Oxford, 1660–​1780, 3 vols. (Seaton: Old School Press, 2015–​19).

CHAPTER 10

Scribes, C om p o si tors , C orrec tors Tamara Atkin

In The Nice Valour; or, the Passionate Madman, first published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647, Wing B1581), but now situated within the Middleton canon, the would-​ be author Lepet (i.e. ‘the fart’) is twice seen correcting printed proofs for his catalogue of blows, The Uprising of the Kick And the Downfall of the Duello. In marking up the first proofs, he bids his printer to ‘put all the thumps in pica roman’ and the kicks and ‘backward blows | All in italica’ (IV. i. 237, 240–​1), while complaining about the quality of the paper used (‘He prints my blows upon pot-​paper too, the rogue’, IV. i. 245).1 Later, on receiving the ‘last [i.e. final] proof ’ he remains unhappy with the accuracy of the text (IV. i. 307): Lepet  But why a pilcrow here? Clown          I told ’im so, sir:   A scare-​crow had been better. Lepet          How, slave? Look you, sir,   Did not I say, this wherret and this bob   Should be both pica roman? Clown        So said I, sir,   Both pickèd Romans, and he has made ’em Welsh bills;   Indeed I know not what to make on ’em. Lepet  Hey-​day! A souse, Italica? Clown          Yes, that may hold, sir. Souse is a bona roba; so is Flops too.                    (IV. i. 311–​ 18)

The humour in this passage may be crude, but it implies an audience familiar with the technical language of the print shop. By the late sixteenth century, as James Misson explores in this volume, roman had replaced black letter as the standard typeface for English books, and pica was the most widely used size; italic, in which letters slant upwards to the right, was typically used in print to differentiate between speakers or

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    177 sections and was often ‘linked with humanist concerns’; and pilcrows, which had long been used by scribes to mark the beginning of new sections of text had by the mid-​1480s ‘become a mainstay in non-​dramatic typography’.2 Only an audience with a sound understanding of these terms would fully appreciate the way the passage exploits the proximity of the ‘blows’ that are the subject of the text to the ‘marks’ used to render it legible in ways that ultimately suggest sexual deviancy.3 In The Nice Valour, the movement of The Uprising of the Kick through the printing house is only rendered visible as a consequence of Lepet’s account of the printer’s errors. This chapter adopts a similar approach. While some early modern stationers went to amazing lengths to produce accurate and virtuosic books, the contemporary accounts of printing recorded in dedications, addresses to the reader, and other prefaces from across the Short Title Catalogue (STC) period (1475–​1640) considered in this chapter, describe it as a process marred by the errors of various print-​agents. One further example will illustrate my method more clearly. In his reply to James Calfhill’s Aunswere to the Treatise of the crosse (1566, STC 4368), the recusant cleric John Martiall suggests that Calfhill will seek to avoid blame for the errors in his Aunswere by saying ‘his secretary wrote euill, and the compositour sette worse, and the ouerseer or Correctour did ouersee it worst of all’.4 These then are the stages at which error might creep into a printed book: in producing copy, setting type, and in correcting proofs. In ventriloquizing Calfhill’s excuses, Martiall turns the agents responsible for these aspects of bookmaking into operatives guilty of their undoing. His job may have been to produce a fair copy, but the scribe (‘secretary’) has made an illegible manuscript; setting type from this evilly written draft, the compositor has introduced further mistakes; worse still, the corrector has compounded the problem by failing to correct these errors at proof stage. While book production in the hand-​press era—​from the handling of copy to the storage of gathered sheets—​ clearly involved other stages, in this chapter I focus primarily on the roles of scribes, compositors, and correctors, as it is their handiwork that is most frequently discussed in the prefaces and other preliminary materials produced by authors and publishers across the STC period. Taking each of these roles in turn, I seek to show how the records of mistakes made by these agents can correct the ideal but unrealistic accounts of the process of print production in sources such as Moxon’s Mechanick exercises (1683, Wing M3014) and in so doing emphasize the inconstant, highly variable nature of the printed book. Far from offering what Elizabeth Eisenstein famously described as ‘typographical fixity’, printed books often draw attention to their typographical instability in ways that somehow also recuperate the ‘work’, the immaterial text, from the messy and unavoidably material work of bringing it into print.5

Scribes All type was set up from copy, and unless for a new edition, copy tended to be manuscript. Philip Gaskell explains that manuscript copy ‘might be an ill-​written author’s

178   Tamara Atkin draft much blotted and much corrected, but it seems that a good many manuscripts intended for the printer were fair-​copied either by the author or by a professional scribe’.6 This variance in the quality of copy is highlighted by Hieronymous Hornschuch in his Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608). Copy might be ‘so carelessly produced, with such monstrously bad writing, that frequently . . . they [i.e. the compositors] can guess very little, if anything, of what the author means’, but ideally should be ‘re-​written as neatly as possible either by [the author] or his amanuensis, on firm, non-​absorbent paper, and checked again with the utmost care’.7 So much for ideals; the references to copy found in the prefaces to English books inevitably emphasize their defects. In his preface to the 1568 Cologne edition of his father’s Herbal (STC 24367), Peter Turner justifies the extensive errata list, explaining that ‘the Scribe that copied the booke out for the Printer’ is to blame for the book’s typographical errors.8 He goes on: I haue taken some paynes, and haue pervsed and red ouer this booke as my Father beganne, and haue conferred it with his owne hande copie, and haue so corrected it and amended it . . . But peraduenture some will saye, if I had minded to pleasure my Countriemen, I might haue done better if I had called in or stayed this print, and caused the booke to haue bene printed here anew again. In dede if I had done so, I should haue eased the reader of this labour of correcting. But I should haue done against Charitie to haue caused the Printer by that meanes to lese all his labor and cost which he hath bestowed in printing hereof. Wherfore gentle Reader beare a little with the Printer that neuer was much accustomed to the printing of Englishe, and afore thou reade ouer this booke, correct it as I haue appointed, and then the profite thereof will aboundantly recompence thy paynes.9

Peter Turner’s account implies the copy used for this edition was not the earlier printed editions of Part 1 (1551, STC 24365) or Part 2 (1562, STC 24366), but rather a professionally produced manuscript that also included Part 3, completed by William Turner just a few months before his death in 1568.10 In correcting the errors introduced by the scribe, Turner explains that he has collated his father’s ‘hande copie’ or autograph manuscript with the text as printed to produce a list of ‘Faultes to be Corrected’ that the reader is then entrusted to emend in her own copy. In preferring this method to more costly and time-​consuming stop-​press corrections, Turner is not unique; errata lists begin to appear in English books early in the sixteenth century and are found in a huge variety of books across the STC period.11 But Turner is remarkable for explaining his reasons for adopting this approach: he is keen to protect the publisher’s investment (‘all his labor and cost’), which would be impossible if the printer was required to reprint ‘anew again’. Refusing to stop the press, Turner yokes the reader to the many other agents who have contributed to the making of the 1568 edition of his father’s book; his list of errors ensures that A New Herball ‘is always a work in progress and in process, a text intruded upon for emendation, a text that invites the correction of the reader’.12 However, despite this concern to avoid the labour and costs associated with cancellantia—​corrected, replacement leaves—​STC 24367 is striking for the existence of its preliminaries in a number of variant states. The copy that is now preserved in the Huntington Library contains Peter

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    179 Turner’s address to the reader with errata for the preliminaries and Part 1 at sigs. a1r–​2v and errata for Part 3 at sigs. *1r–​v. It also retains at sigs. Gg1r–​2r the errata for Part 2 originally produced for STC 24366. However, while the errata for Part 2 routinely appear in other extant copies, Peter’s Turner’s corrections to Parts 1 and 3 are very rare, and when they do occur—​as in a copy auctioned by Christie’s in June 2013—​they typically appear in an earlier state, without Turner’s address.13 Peter Turner may not have caused the book to have been printed anew, but the existence of the preliminaries in at least three states reveals a desire to perfect the text that is also an admission of the failure to do so. While not technically cancellantia, the twice-​revised errata, which improve rather than replace the earlier preliminaries, highlight Turner’s project to recuperate his father’s text, his ‘owne hande copie’, even as they expose the susceptibility of any author’s ‘work’ to being overtaken or replaced. The 1568 edition of William Turner’s Herbal was printed in Cologne by the heirs of Arnold Birckmann. The Birckmann family had earlier printed The seconde part of Turner’s Herbal in 1562, and in 1561 they had published an English translation of Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Apoteck für den gemainen Man (STC 13433) with which Turner’s Herbal is often bound. Though no longer in exile on the Continent, William Turner remained something of a religious controversialist even after Elizabeth’s accession, and this may explain in part the decision to publish his Herbal in Cologne.14 In doing so, he no doubt availed of relationships made and developed in Germany during the previous decade, perhaps taking advantage of his son’s relative proximity as a student at Heidelberg to oversee the publication process. But there was a further reason to prefer Continental publication: his publisher had access to the woodcuts used in Leonhart Fuch’s influential 1542 De historia stirpium and ‘of the 516 employed by Fuchs more than 400 were used’ in the 1568 complete edition of the Herbal.15 The corollary to this decision to publish abroad is that Turner’s Herbal is very likely to have been subject to practices of correction more rigorous—​and to some extent, more standardized—​than those observed in London print shops. Yet, if the aim of such practices was to eradicate mistakes, it is striking that Peter Turner’s contributions to his father’s text emphasize error as both the hallmark of his care and ‘one of print’s signature traits’.16 As David McKitterick has suggested, ‘the process of printing, from author’s, scribe’s, or printed copy-​text to printer’s reader . . . insisted on, and was defined by, a series of texts none of which could be regarded as stable’.17 It is perhaps in this context that Peter Turner draws attention not only to the failings of the copy-​text and the scribe who copied it, but also to those of the printer, who as a foreigner ‘neuer was much accustomed to the printing of Englishe’. As Adam Smyth has noted, ‘complaints about compositors lacking language skills, and print shops lacking the correct type, particularly for foreign language publications, are common’.18 For instance, in John Day’s 1570 edition of Euclid’s Elements (STC 10560), the translator Henry Billingsley explains that when printers work without the necessary linguistic and scientific expertise, a certain degree of fault is inevitable. Because Euclid’s treatise is ‘straunge to our Printers here in England’ and because they have not been ‘accustomed to Print many, or rather any books contayning such matter’, they are poorly

180   Tamara Atkin placed to appoint ‘a corrector skilfull in that art’.19 Error in this text, Billingsley suggests, is a consequence of compositors and correctors with small Greek and less geometry. Peter Turner’s remarks are striking, however, for asking forgiveness on behalf of the press (‘beare a little with the Printer’); it is not that the scribe, compositor, or corrector are insufficiently learned, but rather that they lack familiarity with English, which in 1568 was little more than a small, parochial language, one that learned Continental press agents had little business knowing. If linguistic difference offers one explanation for the compositorial misinterpretation of scribal copy, then the illegibility of the text is another. On this point, Hornschuch is quick to shield the compositor from blame. ‘Faults that remain as a result of incorrect, unintelligible, badly produced manuscripts should not be considered typographical errors, but should be attributed to the authors of the books themselves.’20 A number of English printers adopt a similar rhetorical position. In ‘An aduertisement to the Reader’ prepended to Robert Harrison’s translation of Ludwig Lavater’s treatise on ghosts (1572, STC 15320), the publisher Richard Watkyns entreats the reader to forgive the printer ‘certayne faultes scaped in the printing’: For thow knowest: Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus [Even good Homer nods sometimes]. Although some of our Printers be not Homers, neyther seene in Greeke nor Latine, nor sometimes exactly in Englishe, yet they can nod and take a nap, as well as any Homer. Howebeit in deede they are herein pardonable, bycause the Copie was somewhat obscurely written, as being the first originall.21

Humorously compounding the sense that English printers—​ particularly when compared to their Continental counterparts—​were not especially learned, Watkyns nonetheless attempts to shift responsibility for any mistakes to the author (or his amanuensis) for producing copy (‘the first originall’) too difficult to read (‘obscurely written’). The obscurity of the copy-​text is also blamed for the errors in Thomas Wilson’s Jacobs ladder (1611, STC 25795). As the publisher Nathaniel Butters explains, although some faults ‘escaped at the press’, others—​indeed, ‘the most materiall’—​‘were committed through default of the copie’.22 But who was responsible for this faulty copy? On this point, Butters is himself obscure: ‘partlie by his failing, that copied out part of it, partlie also by some mistaking in it, afterward it came from the author, and afore it came vnto our hands, as by comparing with the copie we haue seene’.23 Butters begins by suggesting the errors are the fault of the scribe who produced the copy-​text. But by comparing this manuscript with another (by inference, authorial) copy come to his hands too late to affect the print run (alas!), he ultimately indicates that the scribe is only partially to blame since he was himself working from a deficient copy. The recurrence of the pronoun it in Butters’s account is revealing. It is both subject (‘afore it came vnto our hands’) and object (‘some mistaking in it’); stands for both scribal copy (‘his failing, that copied out part of it’) and author’s manuscript (‘it came from the author’); it even implies both the immaterial text and one or more of its material iterations. Playing many parts, this little word consequently emphasizes the inherent instability of each and every stage of

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    181 the printing process by briefly drawing back the curtain to expose the ‘slippery manufacture’ of the final published text.24 As Watkyns’s account makes clear, printers did not always work from fair copy, and on occasion compositors were required to set type from an author’s working manuscript. Even where copy seems to have been produced with publication in mind, it too could be affected by the poor quality of an earlier draft, as Butters suggests. What did poor copy look like? As Henry Woudhuysen has noted, ‘interlining was a relatively frequent problem’.25 In 1598 Adam Islip published an English translation of Louis Leroy’s French translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (STC 760). In the preface ‘To the courteous Reader’, the translator, one ‘I.D.’, complains that the compositor has been ‘deceiued’ by the ‘oft & thick enterlining of the copie’.26 The point is emphasized on the book’s final page, where a short list of ‘Certaine extraordinary escapes touching the sence, happening through the oft and thicke enterlining of the Copie’ is provided.27 In his discussion of errata lists, Smyth has suggested that ‘conventional errata lists of substitutions are straightforward—​instead of this, read that—​but they are also not straightforward: they are inherently literary, in that they are acts of metaphor (one thing read as another)’.28 In requiring the reader to substitute one word for another, all errata lists invoke the figurative comparison of mistakes and corrections. But the ‘escapes’ in this list are indeed ‘extraordinary’ since they function to invert the meaning printed in the central text. Asked to substitute the word ‘wholly’ with ‘not at all’, for instance, the reader is required to redirect meaning from everything to nothing. If the errata in this book are (to connect momentarily with Jeff Dolven’s chapter in this volume) acts of metaphor, they are distinctly non-​Aristotelian; deploying vehicles that are unlike the tenors to which they have been yoked, the ‘extraordinary escapes’ in STC 760 suggest new meanings that are often the opposite of those originally printed.29 Poor copy provides one explanation for faults that occur in the printed text (as well as any post hoc attempts to correct them). But what part did compositors and other pressmen contribute to the production of error? In the next section I turn to examine the work of compositors and consider how the types of mistake attributed to this office in contemporary prefaces and other preliminaries can piece out a better understanding of it.

Compositors Elsewhere in this volume, Paul Nash describes the handling of copy within the shop from its preparation and use by compositors to its reading against proofs. Copy, he explains, was important at each stage of the printing process. For compositors, copy was chiefly used for casting off and setting type, which in England for much of the STC period was often—​though not always—​done ‘by formes’.30 Doing so allowed for a limited stock of type to go further; as Gaskell notes, ‘some of the London printers who set by formes around 1600 were chronically short of type’.31 But an obvious consequence was that

182   Tamara Atkin individual compositors frequently set at least whole formes and often concentrated on particular books.32 Certainly, in the rhetoric of early modern prefaces, when compositors are blamed for error they are typically singled out as individuals: Gentle Reader, for such faultes which haue escaped the Authours naughty pen, the Compositors wauering hande, the Correctors daseling eyè, and the Printers presse, we desire thee courtously to amend: for surely the Authour writes scarse good English, and a ragged hand withal, and the Compositor vnderstandes no Italian. Wherfore, standing at thy courtesie, we are perswaded thou wilt lightly pardon vs both. Farewel.33

Here, writing in the third person, John Florio accounts for the faults that occur in His firste fruites (1578, STC 11096), a parallel text edition in Italian and English of Merie prouerves, wittie sentences, and golden sayings. His poor penmanship, he suggests, is at least partially to blame, but so too is the compositor’s hand, which Florio here classifies as tottering, shaking, faltering, or perhaps undecided or inconstant; a characterization that is hardly surprising given the compositor ‘vnderstandes no Italian’. But it is not just the author and compositor who are fault. Florio also apportions blame to the corrector and the printer. In his treatment of this passage, Smyth has argued that in mapping relations in this way, ‘the category of the author’ emerges in fine ‘distinction from other agents of book making’.34 But while Florio lists the unique ways that different press agents might introduce error, his concluding hope that the reader ‘pardon vs’ highlights the deeply miscible nature of presswork. As Mark Bland has noted, ‘with print, type erases the visual distinctions and the activity of different workmen is particularly difficult to separate’.35 To whom precisely should the reader attribute the unspecified errors for which Florio begs forgiveness? How should the reader discern the faults admitted by the author’s naughty pen from those attributable to the compositor’s wavering hand? In fact, there is bibliographic evidence to suggest that some of the mistakes in STC 11096 can be traced to the compositor. Once a compositor had set enough type to fill a forme, their next job was to arrange it for printing. To do this, they would take the composed pages and lay them out on an imposing stone in the correct position. Surrounding them in a wooden frame, they would then wedge them in place using blocks of wood, thereby readying them for print.36 As Louis Leroy explains in his brief technical account of printing, ‘the Compositors (hauing layd before them the writing which they are to imprint) do take them one by one, & dispose them by pages and formes, which they put again into other chasies or frames of yron, with one or two crosses, locked or shut fast with furnitures of wood’.37 For a book in quarto like Florio’s firste fruites, the outer forme, which was usually printed first, should contain the recto side of the first leaf, as well as 2v, 3r, and 4v of any given gathering; the inner forme, usually printed second, should then contain 1v, 2r, 3v, and 4r. However, when quire A of STC 11096 was imposed, the pages were arranged incorrectly in the outer forme: A2v was placed beside rather than opposite A1r, and A4v was positioned beside rather than opposite A3r. To compensate, the inner forme was then wrongly imposed

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    183 to match. The resulting sheet consequently only yields the pages in the correct order if folded first along the long cross; when folded correctly the pages run A1, A4, A3, A2. While some extant copies, like the one in the Huntington Library, have been folded to correct the mistake in imposition, others reveal the compositor’s error: in both of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies, for instance, gathering A runs 1, 4, 3, 2, and closer inspection reveals further compositional errors in gatherings AA and SS.38 According to Gaskell, ‘errors in imposition—​pages printed in wrong positions in the forme—​were rare; they were immediately obvious in proof, and indeed it is in surviving proof sheets that most known mistakes of this kind are found’.39 Consequently, the failure to catch the compositional mistakes in STC 11096 suggests that if the sheets in question were proofread, the corrector was indeed dazzled, confused, or stupefied.40 Error in this book should be recognized as a collaborative enterprise. The sense that error is at once the fault of an individual and a shared responsibility is also evident in Part 2 of Pierre de la Primaudaye’s moral treatise Academie Françoise, which was translated by Thomas Bowes and published by Ralph Newbery in 1594 (STC 15238). In a chapter on the order and offices of the natural powers of the soul, he uses the working relationships between the various agents of the press as an analogy to describe the cooperation required for the body to function effectively: For if the Compositor faile in the setting of his letters, the Printer that putteth ynke vpon the fourmes, doeth not correct the faultes of the Compositor. And if the Printer doeth not distribute his ynke well, hee that draweth the sheetes from the presse correcteth not his fault. For euery one hath his office apart, with which onely hee medleth.41

Each press agent has their own tasks: the compositor sets type; the beater inks the forme; and the puller works the press, laying each newly printed sheet on the horse at the end of the unprinted sheet.42 Attending to these duties, each agent works independently and avoids interfering with the tasks assigned to someone else. But while ‘euery one hath his office apart’, the final output is shared, its quality inevitably a reflection of the care with which each individual has completed the tasks associated with their role. Indeed, it is the perceived collective responsibility of the agents of the press in producing the finished book, that causes Thomas Bell, the Roman Catholic priest turned Protestant polemicist, to hold the compositor, the pressmen, and the corrector jointly at fault for misquoting a source in one of his earlier tracts. ‘True it is,’ he writes, ‘that through the negligence of the Printer, Compositor, or Corrector, (whom in this kind of businesse, I repute as one man,) the place out of Biel is quoted amisse.’43 In the business of bookmaking, the errors of one are the errors of all. Writing about the evangelical use of errata notices, Alexandra da Costa has suggested that Protestant writers had begun to harness the rhetorical potential of errata lists as early as the 1520s, employing them to signal the importance of a text, its worthiness to be corrected. She has argued that it is no surprise that ‘it was exiled evangelical writers who saw the potential of errata notices, since the circumstances in which

184   Tamara Atkin they published their work made error a more pressing concern than for those with easy access to English presses and English markets’.44 Sometimes issues could arise when an English compositor set a foreign-​language text, as witnessed in Florio’s plea for leniency on the part of a compositor required to set from a text at least partially in Italian. But like William Turner, there were many English authors whose work was published abroad by printers with little or no familiarity with English. Indeed, signposting the ‘difficulties of printing, where straungers are the workers’ had become so much a commonplace by the end of the sixteenth century that the trope was deployed at least once to help falsify the origins of a controversial publication.45 When Richard Bristow’s A reply to Fulke (STC 3802) was secretly printed by Richard Brinkley at Greenstreet House in East Ham, it was given a false imprint: ‘Louaine: by Iohn Lion, anno dom. 1580’. The fiction was further embellished by the note from ‘The Printer to the Reader’ appended to the text: In two thinges I am to desire thée . . . to extend thy accustomed gentlenes . . . One is, that thou wilt friendly correct with thy penne these faults, and what others els thou shalt therin espie committed in the Printing: for although I haue had great care and bene very diligent in the correcting thereof, yet because my Compositor was a straunger and ignorant in our Englishe tongue and Orthographie, some faultes are passed vnamended of me. The other, that thou wilte not like the worse of this learned worke, because it hath not the varietie of letters which is requisite in such a booke, and as the Printers in England do customably vse, my abilitie was not otherwise to do it, and hauing these Characters out of England, I could not ioyne them together with any others, and so was forst to vse one Character both for the words of Fulke, and for all Allegations.46

Apologizing for the mistakes caused by printing in an unfamiliar language, ‘Iohn Lion’ here deploys the well-​worn excuse of publishers and authors frequently adopted for English-​language books printed on the Continent: not only is the compositor foreign and consequently unfamiliar with English, but contrary to standard English practice he does not have sufficient stock of type to distinguish between Fulke’s arguments and Bristow’s replies.47 In fact, in spite of these professed difficulties, the book, as Richard Southern has suggested, is ‘one of the most correctly printed of all the Catholic Recusant works’.48 ‘The Printer to Reader’ in other words, is as much a fiction as the Louvain imprint; its function, like the false imprint, is to help obscure the origins of Bristow’s controversial work. When compositors set from copy, they could introduce new typographical errors or replicate those in their copy-​text, and when they arranged the text in the forme they might admit impositional errors. As we have seen, typographical errors detected too late for correction were often entered on errata sheets ‘and left for the overburdened reader to fill-​in’, but what about errors of imposition?49 While undoubtedly less common, such errors do not seem to have been routinely advertised. However, at least one printer did attempt such a move. In addition to an extremely cursory list of ‘Faults of the Press’, ‘A

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    185 necessarie Aduertisement from the Printer’ is prepended to Samuel Ward’s A coal from the altar (1610, STC 25039), which explains: [O]‌ne of the written sheets of this Sermon, coming to our hands, both misplac’t, and without any directory either word, or Folio, to the next ensuing; the Compositor could not but set it in the same order (or rather, manner) wherein hee receiued it: whereas we vnderstand since, it was meant, that all the matter between the sixteenth line of the 51. page and the second line of the 61. page, should haue followed in the beginning of the 43. page, immediately after these words, will not so moue as the meanest Orator. Which I wish thee to note with thy penne.50

Functioning for this error of imposition as errata lists do for typographical mistakes—​ by requiring the reader to ‘note with thy penne’—​this note also borrows the rhetorical tactic of making the copy rather than the compositor ultimately responsible for the blunder. Because the sheets of the copy-​text were in the wrong order and lacked catchwords or page numbers, the compositor could not but replicate the order in which they were received. But if the compositor cannot help reproducing the deficiencies of the copy-​text, how might a text ever be perfected? Errata sheets and other printed notices offer one attempt to correct a text, but since they were typically produced after the whole text had been printed, they also serve to highlight the failure to perfect the text at an earlier stage. What other opportunities for correction did the printing process offer? I now turn to consider the duties of the corrector.

Correctors In his account of printing, Leroy suggests that a fully functioning printing house could print between 1,250 and 1,300 sheets a day. ‘But before they do this, they make two or three proofes, which are reuiewed: and on this correction continew the rest.’51 The job of reviewing these proofs fell to the corrector, but who exactly undertook this office? Both Hornschuch and Moxon describe the role of the ideal corrector as learned proofreader employed by the press as a professional overseer.52 But at some famous presses the role was evidently more broadly defined; as David McKitterick has said of the Officina Plantiniana in Antwerp, the corrector’s job might include ‘correction of authors’ texts (grammar, punctuation, accents, etc: the equivalent of the modern copy-​editor’s job), compilation of indexes, translation, revision of older works, or even the compilation of dictionaries’.53 In England, where no house could rival the resources available to the larger Continental presses, correction was clearly a more ad hoc exercise and was typically carried out by the master printer, a senior journeyman, or by the author or one of his representatives rather than by someone employed specifically for the job.54 Nonetheless, no matter who undertook the role, or how broadly it was defined, it does seem to have involved more than just proofreading. As Anthony Grafton has noted,

186   Tamara Atkin correctors ‘worked at the front as well as the rear of the printing process’, and in addition to reading proofs they were often also involved in the preparation of the copy before the compositors began work.55 In his influential account of Proof Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries, Percy Simpson argued that the practice of authors attending the press or expecting the printer to send out proofs became customary in the sixteenth century.56 To support his case, he offered numerous examples of prefaces and corrigenda notices that characterize error as a consequence of the author’s inability to check the proofs.57 However, in calling on the ubiquitously Gentle Reader to correct the mistakes caused by the author’s absence from the press at the time of correction due to illness, inconvenience, or business concerns, the uniformity of such statements perhaps suggests a rhetorical strategy rather than a true account of the author’s circumstances. Moreover, while there are many prefaces that imply ‘proof-​reading by authors was a common practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, others suggest the involvement of a separate individual to undertake such work.58 For English works published abroad, the use of freelance scholars employed by the press seems to have been fairly routine. As Edward Malone has shown, while expensive, this approach had several advantages: ‘it alleviated the printer’s absolute dependence on the author for press correction by transferring that responsibility to a qualified employee directly under the printer’s authority’, ‘enhanced the printer’s reputation and a publication’s appeal by publicly showing concern for accuracy’, and could even provide ‘the printer with a buffer—​a learned man whose education could at times insulate the printer against the hubris of an author’.59 But clearly this tactic did not always work. When John Bale singles out the ‘cruell enemyes’ responsible for falsifying his Image of bothe churches (STC 1296.5), which was printed in Antwerp in 1545, he does not blame the ‘ii lerned correctours which toke all paynes possible’, but rather ‘the printers . . . whose headye hast, neglygence, and couetousnesse commonly corrupteth all bokes’.60 In contrast, in his Refutation of sundry reprehensions (STC 20632), published in Paris in 1583, William Rainolds holds the compositors and correctors jointly responsible for any errors: Some other faultes there are of like qualitie, especially of one letter for an other, as s for f, and r for t, and in one place of some copies, is vvhich for vvhich is, al which, considering the ordinarie difficulties of printing, where straungers are the workers, compositors, & correctors, (besides other extraordinarie mishaps) I trust the Reader of his curtesie wil easely pardon.61

The typographical errors here described accord with those illustrated by Moxon as the fault of the compositor.62 The first—​substituting one letter for another—​was a common consequence of unpicked type being returned to the wrong compartment; the second—​ transposing whole words—​is more likely to be the result of eye-​skip when setting from copy. But here, the cause of these flaws is ascribed a different origin: the workers’ unfamiliarity with English. For while Hornschuch suggests the ideal corrector should be

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    187 fluent in Latin and Greek, proficiency in English was not regarded as a necessary qualification for the correctors employed by Continental presses.63 That the employment by the press of learned correctors to check proofs seems to have been the Continental gold standard throughout the STC period, is also made evident in Simon Birckbek’s The Protestants evidence (1634, STC 3082). In an imagined dialogue between a Papist and a Protestant, the Protestant describes the publication of the works of St Ambrose: Francis Iunius reports, that hee comming (in the yeare 1559) to a familiar friend of his, named Lewis Savarius, Corrector of a Print at Leyden, found him over-​looking Saint Ambrose Workes, which Frellonius was printing; whereof when Iunius commended the elegancie of the Letter and Edition, the Corrector told him secretly, it was of all Editions the worst; and drawing out many sheets of now waste paper from under the table, told him, they had printed those sheetes according to the ancient and authenticke Copies: but two Franciscan Fryers had by their authoritie cancelled and rejected them . . . to the great losse of the Printer, and wonder of the Corrector.64

Franciscus Junius explains that in 1559 he went to visit his friend Ludovico Saurius—​ here erroneously described as ‘Corrector of a Print at Leyden’ (he lived and worked in Lyons)—​and found him correcting Jean Frellon’s edition of Ambrose. When he complimented Saurius on the edition, the corrector demurred and explained how the proofs has been altered by the publisher at the behest of two Franciscan friars. For this corrector, clearly far more is at stake than the simple correction of errors; explaining how true copy could be rendered waste, Saurius sheds light on the perfidy of Catholic censorship. But it is also clear that unlike the correctors described by Bale and Turner, Saurius worked independently in what Grafton has described as a ‘sort of atelier’: he ‘paid for the tranquillity of his working life by giving up control over what happened when the compositors processed his corrections’.65 On the Continent then, even though the employment of one or more correctors seems to have been the norm, there was certainly variety of practice; from staff correctors working in a designated correctors’ room to independent scholars employed on an ad hoc basis, working either at the press or from home, the efforts taken to correct a text could take many different forms. In England where stationers generally lacked the resources for the routine employment of specialist correctors, correction was often undertaken by the printer or one of his staff.66 Indeed, one ‘preacher turned surreptitious printer’ undertook not only ‘to presse’ and ‘to correcte’ but also ‘to sette’.67 When Thomas Cartwright published his reply to a tract by John Whitgift (1573, STC 4711), he employed the services of John Stroud, who, with only extremely limited prior experience, was operating a press at Hemel Hempstead.68 In a preface ‘to the Reader’, Stroud complains that part of his difficulty in printing the text stems from a lack of multiple typefaces, which has compelled him, like a poor man who uses one instrument for many purposes, ‘to vse one letter for three or four tongues’. But his main trouble concerns correction:

188   Tamara Atkin And being wante of long training vp in thys mysterie . . . hathe bene not onely that I was sometimes for wante of healpe driuen bothe to worke at the presse to sette and to correcte: but also that I wanted the commoditie that other Prynters commonly haue of beinge neare eyther vnto the author or to some that is made priuie vnto hys booke. Whych maye the better appeare for that after the author came vnto me whych was when the halfe of the booke was Printed and the faultes neither are so many nor so greate as before.69

Lacking sufficient help, Stroud is forced to undertake three distinct roles: composing, printing, and correcting. Moreover, as Grace Egan and Colin Johnston have noted, ‘the slight disjunction in Stroud’s description between the implied pair in “bothe to”, and the three infinitive verb forms (work, sette, correcte) tells us that correcting was a distinct activity’.70 Characterizing correction this way, Stroud’s preface suggests that, even though English printers were often unable to employ someone especially, correcting and particularly proofreading were recognized as a distinct stage in the printing process. Stroud also makes clear that the involvement of the author or someone ‘that is made priuie vnto hys booke’ was common, remarking that the accuracy of his own work improved once Cartwright attended the press. The make-​up of the book indicates this was more than a rhetorical posture: as Simpson notes, ‘by the time he reached sheet M the printer had procured some roman type, which he then begins to use for Greek and Latin quotations’.71 Clearly, the author’s interventions had a material effect on the final printed product. While it seems to have been something of a commonplace for the writers of prefaces to attribute error to authorial absence, perversely such statements often indicate a high level of care taken over correction. In his ‘Conclusion’ to The anatomy of melancholy (1621, STC 4159), Robert Burton explains that he ‘could not alwaye be there my selfe’ for the checking of proofs, but even if he had, ‘Non omnem molitor quae fluit vnda videt [the miller does not see all the water that flows past his mill]’.72 But, as William Poole as shown in his analysis of extant proof-​sheets in New College, Oxford, Burton was evidently a frequent and careful attendant at the press.73 Likewise, in his account of the printing of his book, A defence of the gouernment (1587, STC 3734), John Bridges acknowledges that the complexity of his manuscript has caused various problems for both ‘the composer’ and ‘corrector’, resulting in errors that remain uncorrected because he was ‘not alwayes present at reuising the prooues’.74 A defence of the gouernment led to the first Marprelate attack and was printed by the London printer John Windet; Bridges’s comments are significant, as Mark Bland has shown, because they ‘affirm that the collaborative relationship was between the author and printer rather than the publisher (in this case, Thomas Chard)’.75 They also imply that Windet contracted the services of a corrector, who worked independently of the author. Despite the protestations, this is clearly a book over which some care has been taken. Bridges concludes his preface by imploring that ‘the residue, I pray the reader vouchsafe to amend with his penne, sith I cannot do it with mine in all the copies’.76 While there is nothing extraordinary about the invitation to the reader to further correct the text, Bridges’s language is revealing.

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    189 His words show how the process of print has rendered his singular work into something material and multiple, making it subject to the kinds of error over which he, the author, has little control. In a sense, his remarks lay bare the ‘rationale of the copy-​text’, where the editor—​here imagined as the reader—​is tasked with reinstating ‘what the author wrote’, undertaking the kind of intellectual labour that is the precise opposite of the physical labour of printing the text.77 By restoring the readings intended by the author, the reader reasserts the authority of the author’s immaterial, unspoilt work. While ideas about correction seem to have coalesced around a shared ideal, in practice printers adopted a variety of different approaches with varying results. In considering references to correction in early modern prefaces, I have drawn attention to texts which highlight a stage in the printing process that would not otherwise be visible. For countless other books, this stage remains invisible. And yet, as Markman Ellis has suggested, ‘despite this absence, the corrector has left an impression on the text (the corrections have been made) that is not noticeable (the corrections have been made). Indeed, the better the correcting, the less the reader will be reminded of the office of the corrector.’78 It is only in error that correction comes into view. *** In this chapter, I have examined materials across the STC period for evidence of contemporary accounts by authors and printers of three stages of the printing process that are not easily seen: the transcribing of copy; the setting of text; and the correcting of proofs. In concluding this chapter, I want to consider one final example that brings together many of the tropes and rhetorical strategies already discussed: the absence of the author at the time of printing; the introduction of certain kinds of error by the printer; and the invitation to the reader to serve as corrector. In a note to the reader appended to The rule of reason (1551, STC 25809), Thomas Wilson explains that he ‘wrote this boke in suche a tyme, as when I had not so conuenient leasour for the good placing and true examinyng therof ’; he apologizes for ‘certyn sentences’ that ‘are passed muche sleyghter, then with aduisement, wither they should, or that I would haue suffered’; and he entreats the reader ‘where cause of imperfection is found, to set to thy amending hande’.79 Like many such accounts, Wilson’s ‘admonition to the reader’ functions as a kind of modesty topos—​laying bare the various difficulties that have beset the printing process, his words serve to highlight the care that has in fact been taken. But he also shows keen awareness of the ways extensive revision could affect already tight profit margins, noting ‘that whatsoeuer is not made perfite before it cometh to the prynte, cannot without the great losse and hynderaunce of the Prynter, bee then altered or amended’.80 In fact, as King’s Printer, Richard Grafton, who printed The rule of reason, held a lucrative monopoly on all service books from 1542 throughout the reign of Edward VI, and was consequently less likely to feel the pinch of a slow or costly publication; Wilson’s words underline the fact that wealthier, more established presses were in a position to take greater pains over each stage of the printing process than smaller, less well-​resourced print shops. But by inviting readerly correction, acknowledging ‘that no one thyng that euer was wrought by man, was made perfight at the first’, his ‘admonition’ reveals a tension implicit to both

190   Tamara Atkin the early modern technology of print and modern critical accounts of it.81 For while print cannot be altered or amended without great difficulty, the early modern book is always a work in progress. Wilson’s words seem both to support the various arguments for ‘the apparent finality of print’—​Eisenstein’s ‘typographical fixity’—​and the idea that printed books are unstable, subject to change at each stage in their production, as they pass through the hands of the author, scribe, compositor, corrector, to the readers who make them their own.82

Notes 1. ‘Pot-​paper’, so named for its pot watermarks, was cheaper and smaller than the fine white paper used for longer works. In the seventeenth century it was often used for printing broadside ballads, with the result that the ink was often blotchy and smeared. See Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 75. All references to The Nice Valour are to Gary Taylor’s edition in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor, John Lavagnino, and John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1679–​1713. 2. Mark Bland, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’, Text, 11 (1998), 91–​ 154, at 97; Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Dramatic Pilcrows’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 108/​4 (2014), 413–​452, at 417. 3. ‘Italica’—​the Italian typeface—​is described as fitting for a ‘souse’ or a heavy blow or thump, because ‘Souse’ and ‘Flops’ (which can also mean a bump of thud) are here imagined as two prostitutes. Middleton frequently associates Italy and the Italians with sexual deviancy, here employing an Italian term (‘bona-​roba’) to mean prostitute. A little earlier in the scene Lapet suggests ‘All in italica—​your backward blows’, invoking a supposed Italian proclivity for anal sex. See The Nice Valour, IV. i. 240. 4. John Martiall, A replie to M. Calfhills blasphemous answer made against the Treatise of the crosse (London, 1566), sig. S1r. 5. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), i. 116–​120. 6. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 40. 7. Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, ed. and trans. Patricia Bradford and Philip Gaskell (Cambridge: University Library, 1972), 29, 30. 8. ‘Peter Turner to the Reader’, in William Turner, The first and seconde partes of the herbal (Cologne, 1568), sig. A1r. 9. ‘Peter Turner to the Reader’, sig. A1r. 10. STC 24367 is printed in four parts. Part 1 is a reprint of STC 24365; Part 2 is a reissue with new prelims of STC 24366 (pt. 1); Part 3 is completely new; and Part 4 is a reissue with new prelims of STC 24366 (pt. 2). 11. On errata, see Ann Blair, ‘Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 21–​41; Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 1; David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. ch. 4; and Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    191 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), esp. ch. 3. That said, despite this variety, they are most commonly appended to texts concerning law, theology, ethics, or grammar. On this point, see Alexandra da Costa, ‘Negligence and Virtue: Errata Notices and Their Evangelical Use’, The Library, 7th ser., 19/​2 (2018), 159–​173. 12. Lerer, Error, 18. 13. Formerly the possession of the Holden Arboretum, Lot 82 was sold at Christie’s New York for $6,250 on 21 June 2013. It contains two leaves signed ¶ which contain errata for the preface and Parts 1 and 3, but not the address that appears in the Huntington copy. See , accessed 11 Aug. 2020. 14. Prior to 1553, Turner had been dean of Wells, but was in exile for the duration of the reign of Mary I in Cologne, Worms, and Weissenburg. He was eventually restored to the deanery, though not until 1560, and his ongoing involvement in controversial matters eventually led to his suspension for Nonconformity in 1564. 15. J. M. Barlow, ‘Old English Herbals’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 6 (1913), 108–​149, at 133. 16. Smyth, Material Texts, 86–​7. 17. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 118. 18. Smyth, Material Texts, 89. 19. ‘Faultes escaped’, in Euclid, The elements of geometrie, trans. Henry Billingsley (London, 1570), sig. EEE2v. This, and a number of other examples discussed in this chapter appear in Percy Simpson, Proof Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), though the treatment is typically cursory. For this example, see 121–​2. 20. Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, 9. 21. ‘An aduertisement to the Reader’, in Ludwig Lavater, Of ghostes and spirites (London, 1572), sig. C2r. See also Simpson, Proof Reading, 34. 22. Thomas Wilson, Jacobs ladder (London, 1611), sig. ¶3v. See also Simpson, Proof Reading, 35. 23. Wilson, Jacobs ladder , sig. ¶3v. 24. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 118. 25. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 111. 26. ‘To the courteous Reader’, Aristotles politiques (London, 1598), sig. A4v. See also Simpson, Proof Reading, 33. ‘I.D.’ has been variously identified as John Dee and John Dickenson. See Gavin Alexander, ‘Dickenson, John (c. 1570–​1635/​6)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn., Jan. 2008 , accessed 24 Aug. 2020. 27. ‘To the courteous Reader’, sig. NN6v. 28. Smyth, Material Texts, 83. 29. Metaphors, according to Aristotle, are elliptical similes, i.e. predicated on explicit similarities. See De Oratore 3. 38. 156–​7. 30. Among the most famous examples of books composed this way is Shakespeare’s First Folio. See Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-​Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). The other main method for setting type was seriatim, or in reading order, which involved proceeding through copy line by line, typesetting each page in turn. Among the more famous examples of books set ad seriatim is the 1608 King Lear Quarto. See Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

192   Tamara Atkin 31. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 42. 32. While shared setting either by forme or by halves (e.g. with one compositor setting the first half of a sheet and another the second half) was far from standard practice in English print shops of the seventeenth century, neither was it uncommon. Such work could be undertaken consecutively or simultaneously, in one print shop or in two or more printing houses. On shared setting, see Charlton Hinman, ‘Principles Governing the Use of Variant Spellings as Evidence of Alternate Setting by Two Compositors’, The Library, 4th ser., 21 (1941), 78–​94. On the practice of shared printing, see Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Prevalence of Shared Printing in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 67 (1973), 437–​442. 33. Florio his firste fruites (London, 1578), sig. ***4v. 34. Smyth, Material Texts, 93. 35. Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013) 36. For a more detailed account of this process, see Moxon, Mechanick exercises (London, 1683), 232–​242; and Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 78–​117. On the relationship between format and imposition, see G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘The Concept of Format’, Studies in Bibliography, 53 (2000), 67–​115. 37. Louis Leroy, Of the interchangeable course, trans. Robert Ashley (London, 1594), STC 15488, sig. E4r. Leroy’s encyclopedic survey was first published in Paris in 1575 as De la vicissitude ou variete de choses. 38. See San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, 60820; Washington D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 11096 copy 1 and STC 11096 copy 2. 39. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 108. 40. Florio’s description of the corrector’s dazzling eye may be intended to suggest a proclivity for drink. Hornschuch warns, ‘the corrector too should shun assiduously the vice of drink, lest he should see nothing at all or more than is actually there’. Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, 9. 41. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The second part of the French academie, trans. Thomas Bowes (London, 1594), sig. Y1r–​v. 42. For a more detailed account of pulling and beating see Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 317–​ 328; Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 129–​131. 43. Thomas Bell, The Catholique triumph (London, 1610), STC 1815, sig. YY2r. 44. da Costa, ‘Negligence and Virtue’, 164. 45. William Rainolds, A refutation of sundry reprehensions, cauils, and false sleightes (Paris, 1583), STC 20632, sig. PP2r. 46. ‘The Printer to the Reader’, in Richard Bristow, A reply to Fulke (East Ham, 1580), sig. EEE4v. 47. In the many animadversions published across the STC period, it was common practice to use two or more typefaces to distinguish between different authors and their texts. 48. Richard Southern, English Recusant Prose 1558–​1582 (London: Sands, 1950), 358. 49. Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011), 108. 50. ‘A necessarie Aduertisement from the Printer’, in Samuel Ward, A coal from the altar (London, 1615), sig. A1r. 51. Leroy, Of the interchangeable course, sig. E4r. As Anthony Grafton has noted, ‘over at least two hundred years, descriptions of proof-​reading coincided on one vital point’: three as the customary number of proofs to be produced. See Grafton, Culture of Correction, 100.

Scribes, Compositors, Correctors    193 52. Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, 8–​10, 26–​31; Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 260–​264. 53. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 118. 54. See Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 111. Exceptions include the presses at Oxford and Cambridge, where there was a ready supply of qualified and inexpensive scholars, and the King’s Printing House, which in 1634 had no fewer than four correctors in its employ. See James P. Hammersmith, ‘Frivolous Trifles and Weighty Tomes: Early Proof-​Reading at London, Oxford, and Cambridge’, Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), 236–​251. 55. Grafton, Culture of Correction, 13. On the diversity of the corrector’s tasks, see also his Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 34–​39. 56. However, as McKerrow noted in his review of Proof Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries, ‘he appears to include in this term not only what are usually known as proofs, namely, prints taken from the type before the working of the particular sheet begins, but also advance sheets of the book sent to an author from time to time as the working of the several sheets was completed’. See The Library, 4th ser., 16/​3 (1935), 347–​352, at 347. 57. See Simpson, Proof Reading, 1–​45. 58. Simpson, Proof Reading, 49. 59. Edward A. Malone, ‘Learned Correctors as Technical Editors: Specialization and Collaboration in Early Modern European Printing Houses’, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 20/​4 (2006), 389–​424, at 410. 60. ‘A small preface vnto the Christen reader’, in John Bale, The image of bothe churches (Antwerp, 1545), sig. A3v. See also Simpson, Proof Reading, 2. 61. Rainolds, A refutation, sig. PP2r. 62. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, 261–​263. 63. Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, 8. 64. Simon Birckbek, The Protestants evidence (London, 1632), Sig. A7r. 65. Grafton, Culture of Correction, 106. 66. But see Simpson, Proof Reading, 1–​45. 67. Adrian Weiss, ‘Casting Compositors, Foul Cases, and Skeletons: Printing in Middleton’s Age’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 196–​ 225, at 201; ‘The Printer to the Reader’, Thomas Cartwright, A replye to an ansvvere made of M. Doctor VVhitgifte (Hemel Hempstead, 1573), sig. ¶1v. See also Simpson, Proof Reading, 122. 68. Other books issued from this illegal press are STC 10847 (and its variant STC 10848) and STC 10850. On Stroud and his press, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 51–​54. 69. ‘The Printer to the Reader’, sig. ¶1v. 70. Grace Egan and Colin Johnston, ‘ “Serving the turn”: Collaboration and Proof in Illegal Hand-​Press Period Books’, Ilha Desterro, 71/​2 (2018), 129–​152. 71. Simpson, Proof Reading, 122. 72. ‘The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader’, in Robert Burton, The anatomy of melancholy (Oxford, 1621), sig. DDD3r. 73. William Poole, ‘Robert Burton and His Anatomy of Melancholy: Some New College Musings’ , accessed 5 Sept. 2020.

194   Tamara Atkin 74. ‘The Preface to the Christian Reader’, in John Bridges, A defence of the gouernment (London, 1587), sig. ¶¶1r–​v. 75. Mark Bland, ‘John Windet and the Transformation of the Book Trade, 1584–​1610’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 107/​2 (2013), 151–​192, at 156. 76. ‘The Preface to the Christian Reader’, sig. ¶¶1v. 77. W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-​Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950), 19–​36, at 29. 78. Markman Ellis, ‘ “Pray send back this foul proof ”: Thomas Birch and the Correction of Elizabeth Carter’s Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies (1739)’, Eighteenth-​ Century Studies, 55/​3 (2022), 277–​98, at 98. 79. ‘An admonition to the reader for faultes escaped in the Printyng’, in Thomas Wilson, The rule of reason (London, 1551), sigs. X6v–​7r. 80. ‘An admonition to the reader’, sig. X6v. 81. ‘An admonition to the reader’, sig. X7r 82. E. A. J. Honigmann, The Texts of Othello and Shakespearian Revision (London: Routledge, 1996), 146; Eisenstein, The Printing Press, i. 116–​120.

Select Bibliography Blair, Ann, ‘Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 21–​41. da Costa, Alexandra, ‘Negligence and Virtue: Errata Notices and Their Evangelical Use’, The Library, 7th ser., 19/​2 (2018), 159–​173. Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Grafton, Anthony, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011). Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, ed. and trans. Patricia Bradford and Philip Gaskell (Cambridge: University Library, 1972). McKitterick, David, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Simpson, Percy, Proof Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935). Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Weiss, Adrian, ‘Casting Compositors, Foul Cases, and Skeletons: Printing in Middleton’s Age’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 196–​225.

Chapter 11

Au thors Stephen B. Dobranski

When in 2011 nature photographer David John Slater travelled to Indonesia and placed his camera on a tripod to capture images of the crested macaque, one monkey figured out how to use the device and snapped several pictures of itself. In a long, strange legal battle over copyright that followed between Slater, the animal-​rights organization PETA, and the online site Wikimedia, a United States District Court ultimately ruled that Slater was the owner of the monkey’s photographs, even though Slater had only set up the equipment.1 It was the monkey himself, a 7-​year-​old named Naruto, who had pushed the camera’s button and created the valuable pictures. In the early modern period in England, authors were the monkey. They were essential for the creation of printed texts, but they had limited authority, both legally and economically, and they were generally considered secondary to material agents of textual production—​printers, publishers, and booksellers. Yet the story of the selfie taken by the resourceful macaque is helpful for understanding seventeenth-​century authorship because it also corresponds to a change in the nature of early printed books. Although more than half of all texts published in the 1600s were still anonymous, more and more books began to foreground the visible identities of their authors.2 Poetic texts in particular emphasized a writer’s presence as a way of compensating for the potentially depersonalizing effect of print. By the late 1600s, authors collaborated with Stationers as they began to perceive—​and, gradually, to exploit—​the material text’s significance in shaping both the meaning of a literary work and the endurance of their reputations.3 One long-​standing misconception about the early modern book trade is that authors with literary aspirations refused to sully their hands with ink. Scholars have traditionally posited a ‘stigma of print’ that would have dissuaded serious writers from stepping into a printing house.4 According to this theory, writers felt anxious about the new technology, perhaps because they were concerned about losing control over their own words or about having their heartfelt sentiments contaminated by the trade’s profit motive. Dramatists in general, although not immune to commercial considerations, have typically been treated as denizens of the theatre, indifferent to and unaffected by the burgeoning book trade. Playbooks were often printed in quarto, but they were thought

196   Stephen B. Dobranski to have been mere ephemera—​‘riff raff Books’, in the words of the seventeenth-​century librarian Thomas Bodley5—​not serious literature that writers might hope would preserve their work for future generations. Reports of authors’ anxiety about the book trade have been greatly exaggerated, however. Julie Stone Peters has shown how writers of plays, both in England and on the Continent, embraced print publication, and Lukas Erne has demonstrated that Shakespeare in particular was vested in the popularity of his works and his reputation in print. Some more complex versions of Shakespeare’s plays appear to have been composed specifically with the abilities and interests of a reading audience in mind.6 When John Milton in 1632 concluded his encomium ‘On Shakespeare’ by announcing ‘That kings for such a tomb would wish to die’ (lines 15‒16), he was celebrating not Shakespeare’s plays onstage but the author’s posthumous folio, what Milton calls ‘thy unvalued book’ (line 11), meaning a volume beyond value but also hinting that Shakespeare’s book was not yet as highly regarded as Milton thought it should be.7 Milton was also right, literally: even kings in the early modern period began to turn to print to circulate their works and preserve their identities. Already during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, aristocratic authors such as Thomas More (1478–​ 1535) and Thomas Sackville (1536–​1608) published a wide range of writing in print, and in the ensuing decades, as the trade continued to expand, monarchs themselves began to recognize the potential of the relatively new technology.8 James I published various tracts, including treatises on witchcraft (1597) and tobacco (1604), as well as three omnibus editions, Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesia (1584); His Majesties Poeticall Exercises (1591); and the King’s collected Workes (1616). James’s son and successor, Charles I, had his father’s translations of the Psalms published posthumously (1631), and during the Civil War, Charles’s own supporters decided that print was the best way to memorialize their beleaguered monarch. Charles’s private meditations and prayers as he awaited execution for treason were published in 1649 as Eikon Basilike, a book which saw more than thirty-​five editions in London in just its first year.9 Still, some early modern writers eschewed print and continued to pursue a courtly model of authorship. Poets such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell, for example, seem to have conceived of many of their works as manuscripts and preferred to distribute handwritten copies, perhaps to control who their readers were. Certainly, Marvell would have wanted to choose who read his political satires, and Donne was similarly guarded about his poetry, especially some of his explicit elegies. In a letter to one of his friends at court, Sir Robert Ker, Donne also tried to control who might see Biathanatos, his treatise on suicide, clearly his most controversial work—​or, as he called it, his most ‘misinterpretable’ piece. Donne in his letter asks Ker to take great care with the manuscript and explains that he himself gave it ‘only to some particular friends’ and permitted ‘no hand . . . to copy it’.10 Circulating such works by hand also may have implied a courtly sense of privilege and intimacy: readers whom an author personally chose could take greater pleasure from a text if they thought it was being shared with only a few select friends, like a secret.

Authors   197 Even early works that were printed often bore traces of manuscript practices associated with aristocratic coteries. As Wendy Wall has demonstrated, authors and printers sometimes attempted to sanction the new category of the printed author through the appropriation of Petrarchan rhetoric and courtly gender politics.11 In particular, as print became in Arthur Marotti’s words the ‘normal and preferred’ means of transmission, a book’s prefatory matter continued to recognize the ongoing relevance of scribal conventions.12 Dedicatory epistles at the start of printed texts might imply that a book was intended for a coterie readership; the publisher or author would appeal to a member of the aristocracy to endorse or protect their efforts. We cannot know, of course, whether all of the aristocrats or high-​ranking officials to whom early modern books are dedicated approved of or even had advance notice of a book’s publication. But the rhetorical effect of such letters and prefaces was to evoke the world of courtly privilege in which scribal publication was common and to imply that the book’s purchasers were being granted a kind of exclusive access. Some writers and publishers also used the front matter in their books to express, directly or indirectly, concern about a loss of control that would come with a wider publication. Here is where the perception of a so-​called ‘stigma of print’ might have been born. As books began to reach a larger, anonymous audience, who was to say how readers would understand a text? Often authors or publishers tried to predetermine or at least gently guide their audience’s reactions. Prefatory appeals wishfully invoke an ideal response, openly addressing, for example, ‘the courteous Reader’, ‘the Impartial Reader’, or ‘the knowing Reader’.13 Thus Amelia Lanyer prefaces her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) with an address ‘To the Vertuous Reader’, in which she appeals especially to ‘all good Christian and honourable minded men’ and ‘all virtuous and good women’ to bestow on her book ‘their fauourable and beste interpretations, [rather] than quench it by wrong constructions’.14 Henry Vaugham similarly begins his Poems (1646) by singling out ‘Ingenious Lovers of Poesie’ and flattering them that ‘To you alone, whose more refined Spirits out-​wing these dull Times, and soare above the drudgerie of durty Intelligence, Have I made sacred these Fancies’.15 Other early books ask their unseen audiences not to rush to judgement but instead to inspect their works carefully. The bookseller Humphrey Moseley invites ‘Eagle-​eied’ readers to give Milton’s Poems (1645) ‘thy exactest perusal’; Thomas Nabbes concludes his ‘Proeme to the Reader’ in The Unfortunate Mother (1640) with a direct request, ‘Read it with observation then, and be | My Judge from reason; not from tyranny’; and Shakespeare’s fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, encourage readers at the start of the dramatist’s First Folio (1623) to ‘Reade him . . . and againe, and againe’.16 Ben Jonson in his 1616 Workes begins his Epigrams more succinctly, with a single couplet addressed ‘To the Reader’ in which he asks the book’s purchasers to ‘Pray thee take care, that taks’t my book in hand, | TO read it well: that is, to understand’.17 Jonson’s brief but more literary form of expression, like Nabbes’s ‘Proeme to the Reader’, might signal a more subtle or complex expression of an author’s attitude towards a text than what was gradually becoming a standard appeal for careful reading in early prose prefaces.18 In the case of Jonson’s pithy two lines, his use of ‘understand’ refers

198   Stephen B. Dobranski to knowledge or comprehension. But, as Jonson’s folio turns from his plays to his lyric poetry, ‘understand’ might also have been a furtive attempt to siphon off some of the popularity that he enjoyed in the theatre: an ‘understander’ during the seventeenth century was a playgoer who literally stood on the ground, presumably just the type of humble reader whom Jonson would have been seeking as he begins in Epigrams to survey the court’s moral fortitude and failures. Other, complementary rhetorical signposts in Jonson’s folio underscore how much he wanted his book’s unknown audience to take his writings seriously: the epigrams have a separate title page and dedication (Sss5r, Sss6), as do each of the volume’s nine plays (A1r–​Sss4v), and some of the masques in the book’s final section have their own title pages and Jonson’s marginal notations (Bbbb1r–​Qqqq4r). Jonson’s is the voice in all of these paratexts, framing his works and emphasizing his own presence; readers are repeatedly reminded that these are the works of a great writer. Just the volume’s heft—​it comprises 1,015 pages—​helps to establish Jonson’s elevated standing, as does the choice of a folio format. In part because folios required more paper and greater workmanship than was needed for books printed in smaller formats, they were usually reserved for the period’s most serious and important publications.19 Jonson’s prestige begins with the book’s elaborately engraved title page, which features images of pastoral and classical statuary (¶1r). The epigraph here reads ‘neque, me vt miretur turba laboro: Contentus paucis lectoribus’ (‘I do not labour so that the crowd might admire me, being content with few readers’). Jonson is saying upfront that he wishes to reach only discerning readers and does not care about popularity or profit, although the frequency of such assertions in other books—​a similar disclaimer appears, for example, on the title page of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593, 1620)—​might paradoxically undercut Jonson’s attempt to distance himself at the start from the potentially distasteful commercialism of print. Robert Herrick, one of Jonson’s most avid acolytes, begins and ends his collection of lyric poems, Hesperides (1648), with an even more elaborate series of gestures that seem intended to counteract the impersonality of print. The book contains more than fifty-​five separate verses in which Herrick addresses himself, his book, or his readers. Unlike Jonson, though, Herrick repeatedly presents himself with humour, cloaking any genuine concern he might have felt about his book’s reception behind a jocular tone and sly self-​consciousness. Thus, he opens the collection by describing ‘When he would have his verses read’ and beseeching readers in another poem to be ‘generous’ in their evaluations: he asks his audience to ‘Wink at small faults, the greater . . . | Hide’.20 Yet another verse tells ‘the soure Reader’ what to do ‘If thou dislik’st the Piece thou light’st on first’ (B2r), and on the same page as the errata, the author playfully instructs readers that if they were to find any mistakes in the collection—​any ‘Tares’ (meaning, weeds) or ‘Transgressions’—​they should ‘Condemne the Printer . . . and not me’ (A4r). In all of these verses, Herrick is implying his lack of control over his book’s creation and reception—​ and then humorously attempting to write his way out of it. Herrick’s ironic relation to his printed volume is encapsulated in its frontispiece portrait. Hesperides begins with an engraved image of the poet that seems to establish

Authors   199 Herrick’s identity as the collection’s overarching organizing principle. As Roger Chartier has observed, such introductory portraits reinforce ‘the notion that the writing is the expression of an individuality that gives authenticity to the work’.21 Yet Herrick is simultaneously present and absent here: the frontispiece may contain a portrait of the artist, but it is an image of an image, depicting not the author but his bust, as if he were already deceased, and the figure’s exaggerated Roman nose—​perhaps a punning allusion to Publius Ovidius Naso—​smacks of caricature; it does not seem a flattering or even sincere memorial.22 Readers are thus invited both to see Hesperides as the work of a great author and to doubt the poet’s direct involvement. Ultimately, in the collection’s penultimate verse, Herrick suggests that he needs no portrait or marble memorial because his printed poetry will be his monument. It is an echo of Milton’s description of Shakespeare’s posthumous folio, but now in Hesperides the author speaks for himself. ‘Tho Kingdoms fal’, Herrick anticipates, he will survive through his printed poems, a pillar of fame to ‘stand for ever by his owne | Firme and well fixt foundation’ (Cc7v). Both Jonson’s and Herrick’s collections are useful for understanding early modern authorship not only because the two books illustrate the emphasis that some printed texts put on their authors’ identities, but also because the two volumes suggest the different practical relationships that writers had with the business of printing. Both poets are visibly present in their books, but Jonson alone appears to have actively collaborated in his text’s production. As various scholars have shown, Jonson revised many of his plays and some of his masques and poems for inclusion in his Workes, and he carefully dictated how he wished the annotations in his masques to be printed.23 In contrast, Herrick seems to have handed over his manuscript of Hesperides, then stepped away. There is no evidence that he attempted to oversee his book’s publication: the errata and surviving variants correct only slight errors that could have been fixed by a member of the printing house, and inconsistencies in the book’s catchwords suggest that a compositor, for whatever reason, may have changed some of the collection’s organization during the printing.24 Between these two poles—​ an author’s active participation and the author in absentia—​can be charted most writerly practices from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How much control did authors have over the material process of textual production? In most cases, we might suppose, not a great deal. The person who put up the capital for a book—​typically, a printer or bookseller—​should have chosen the format, determined the layout, and designed the title page, all elements that potentially influenced the work’s meaning. As the seventeenth-​century printer Joseph Moxon explained, a writer was generally expected to ‘deliver his Copy perfect’ and should ‘by no means . . . hope to mend it in the Proof, the Compositor not being obliged to it’.25 Moxon describes how a seventeenth-​century compositor ‘is strictly to follow his Copy’ but also may incorporate his own changes according to ‘a Custom, which among them is look’d upon as a task and duty incumbent on the Compositer, viz. to discern and amend the bad Spelling and Pointing of his Copy, if it be English’.26 But while Moxon’s account of this ‘Custom’ would appear to indicate printers’ considerable practical authority in the early modern book trade, his broader exhortation

200   Stephen B. Dobranski that the compositor ‘is strictly to follow his Copy’ points up that printers were expected to hold a writer’s work in high regard. Perhaps, then, authors did not always need to be present when their books were printed because they could assume that their copies were sufficient to see that their wills would be done. Surviving authorial manuscripts from the early modern period show many writers who paid close attention to their works’ design, typography, and illustration.27 Was such the case with Herrick’s manuscript for Hesperides, now lost? Did he expect material agents to execute faithfully his vision of the book, including his whimsical frontispiece portrait, even if he did not personally supervise the printing?28 As Moxon goes on to explain, compositors were permitted to make changes in a manuscript—​amending the punctuation, say, or inserting italic case—​but only if these alterations were to ‘render the Sence of the Author more intelligent to the Reader’.29 This stipulation further suggests the value of the author’s copy and, by extension, it hints at the gradual increase in the author’s stature during the early modern period. Members of a printing house were to pursue a writer’s intentions, even if doing so paradoxically required them to make changes, like a modern textual editor chasing an ideal copy-​text. Moxon also acknowledges that writers could collaborate directly in their books’ printing. He writes that it cannot reasonably be expected he [the compositor] should be so good Natured to take so much pains to mend such Alterations as the second Dictates of an Author may make, unless he be very well paid for it over and above what he agreed for with the Master Printer.30

Once again, Moxon’s description emphasizes authors’ dependence on members of the book trade, but he is also suggesting greater authorial involvement in early modern printing than is sometimes acknowledged. Although mundane considerations such as the expense of revisions or an author’s proximity to a printing house would have surely restricted some writers from supervising their books’ production, the implication is that writers with money were not unwelcome collaborators. Jonson, for example, may have been well positioned to oversee so many details in his 1616 Workes because he could afford to pay for alterations. By the time that his folio was in press, Jonson already received an annual pension of more than £66, in addition to the money he earned from the theatre.31 By comparison, Herrick in 1648 had recently been expelled from his vicarage in Devonshire and probably did not have sufficient funds to request late changes and make certain that a compositor was ‘very well paid’.32 Other well-​established authors who were, like Jonson, concerned about the printed form of their works could try to finance their books’ publication themselves or try to negotiate with specific printers or booksellers who might be more enthusiastic about forging a collaborative relationship. Thomas Middleton in 1618, for example, was granted a patent to choose his own printer for The Peacemaker; or, Great Britain’s Blessing, and some writers of religious and scholarly works obtained royal patents from

Authors   201 the government to create and thus profit from individual types of publications for designated periods of time.33 I do not mean to overstate the practical power of writers, however. A range of relationships persisted between authors and printers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even as some authors were granted—​or actively sought—​ ways to help shape the printed form of their published works, the trade’s legal and economic structure continued to favour Stationers. Printers may have considered an author’s copy sacrosanct, but authors themselves seem to have gained respect only by fits and starts. The Stationers’ Company, the guild first chartered in 1557 to oversee the English book trade, focused almost exclusively on the rights of its members, and the laws that grew up around the company primarily served the interests of printers and booksellers. A Stationer could establish legal possession of a manuscript without an author’s consent, simply by publishing the work in print or having it officially entered under the owner’s names in the Stationers’ Register. As one seventeenth-​century lawyer complained, only members of the Stationers’ Company, according to ‘their ancient, and lawfull birthright’, were entitled to the ‘benefite arising from the sale of books’.34 Still, a few entries in the Stationers’ Register recognize the rights of authors. On 11 March 1607, for example, the entry for John Browne and his ‘book called musicke of sundry Kyndes’ reads in part ‘that this copye shall never hereafter be printed agayne without the consent of master fford the Aucthour’.35 Long before the first copyright law of 1710, which formally recognized authorial rights, it became common practice for members of the company or their widows, when they were no longer interested in publishing a book, to transfer the manuscript to its author. More formally, a government order from 1587 stipulated that, if a text were out of print for six months, the owner would be asked to maintain possession by reprinting it, but only if ‘the author of any such copy be no hindrance thereunto’. Although the order fails to require an author’s outright approval for a new edition, it seems to acknowledge a writer’s ongoing connection to a text.36 Subsequent government ordinances held authors accountable for publications that were deemed scandalous or were not officially licensed; writers were named as possible defendants along with printers and ‘other persons whatsoever’ who participated in the creation and distribution of an unlawful text.37 Financially, it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the value of an author’s copy was transferred more fully to the author, and writers began to reap significant rewards for their labour. The example most often cited is John Dryden, who in 1697 earned a large sum for his translation of Virgil, earning apparently between £910 and £1,075 as well as receiving gifts from patrons.38 Mostly, though, authors during the preceding decades, when they were compensated, were given complimentary copies, not cash, and they were typically paid only if their books were expected to sell well.39 Thus, William Prynne was paid for the publication of Histrio-​mastix (1633) with thirty-​five or thirty-​six copies, while Henry More received twenty-​five copies of his folio Opera Theologica (1675) with the option of purchasing a hundred additional copies at the publisher’s price of 15 shillings apiece or buying fewer copies at the bookseller’s price of 16 shillings.40

202   Stephen B. Dobranski The contract for the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667—​the earliest surviving formal agreement of its kind in England—​helps to illustrate authors’ growing authority.41 The Stationer Samuel Simmons agreed to pay Milton £5 for the right to publish his epic and stipulated that, if the book were reprinted, he would pay the author another £5 at the end of the first, second, and third impressions. These sums clearly seem modest when compared to Dryden’s ample profits thirty years later, but the contract for Milton’s epic outlines a mutually advantageous arrangement. Simmons was agreeing to pay for three editions of Paradise Lost and not assuming that he had the perpetual right to publish it. Also, because the contract limits each impression to 1,500 copies, it guaranteed that, if Paradise Lost proved vendible, Milton would receive his subsequent payments.42 The contract further specifies that Milton could request ‘from time to time’ an accounting of the book’s ‘Disposing & selling’; if Simmons did not provide this information, he had to pay Milton £5 for the complete impression. The terms of the few other financial agreements that survive from the late seventeenth century suggest that Stationers—​whether motivated by profits, goodwill, or a desire to avoid conflict—​mostly cooperated with writers and treated them fairly.43 Given that printers and authors were engaged in the same business and working towards the same goals, it is understandable that so many of them became friends and formed productive, collaborative alliances. If we linger on Paradise Lost, the terms of Milton’s contract may have been influenced by his close relationship with the Simmons family. The printer Matthew Simmons was a lifelong friend of Milton and had published several of the author’s prose works in the 1640s; later, when Milton was appointed Latin Secretary during the Interregnum, Simmons also began working for the new government and became an official printer for the Council of State.44 We should not be surprised, then, that Matthew’s son, Samuel Simmons, would later collaborate with Milton and set out such equitable terms for publishing Milton’s heroic poem. A reissue of Paradise Lost shows Samuel Simmons and Milton fully cooperating with each other. Simmons and Milton together added a defence of the verse and the arguments that summarize each book, all apparently at Simmons’s initiative. As the printer explains in a note that he appended in the new book’s front matter, There was no Argument at first intended to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procur’d it, and withal a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes not.45

For the epic’s second edition, Simmons was again willing to incur additional expenses of both materials and labour so that Milton could realize what seems to have been his final vision of the poem. Simmons allowed the author to restructure the epic from ten to twelve books, add eight lines (viii. 1–​3; xii. 1–​5), revise one line (viii. 4), and insert at least four other substantive revisions (i. 504–​5; v. 636–​41; xi. 485, 551).46 According to the terms of the original contract, Simmons did not need to show such leeway and could have published a second edition simply by paying Milton another £5.

Authors   203 Of course, not all early modern Stationers were as flexible and fair-​minded as Simmons. Dryden disparaged the bookseller Jacob Tonson as a ‘sharper’, despite the generous terms that the author enjoyed for his translation of Virgil, and the poet and pamphlet-​writer George Wither launched a more caustic broadside against the whole Company of Stationers. Furious that members opposed his fifty-​one-​year patent for publishing his Hymns and Songs of the Church, Wither lashed out at Stationers for their ‘peremptery claime to all Authors labors’.47 Yet, complaints about unscrupulous or inattentive printers in early printed books may have contained more smoke than fire. Like Herrick’s playful jibe about the ‘Tares’ and ‘Transgressions’ that were sown in Hesperides, claims in a book’s front matter of poor workmanship were in part rhetorical, designed to excuse inevitable printing errors and to encourage readers’ attentiveness. The preacher Henry Jeanes in The Works of Heaven upon Earth (1649), for example, echoes Hesperides’s similarly placed warning about the book’s ‘Tares’ by also deferring responsibility for his book’s mistakes. He asks the ‘Gentle Reader . . . to amend with thy pen, these grossest escapes of the Printer: for they are such as spoyle the sense’.48 Another preacher, Robert Harris, includes an appeal to the printer as a preface to the second impression of Two Sermons (1630). Harris makes a show of beseeching the printer to proceed with care ‘in observing stops, interrogations and distinctions, which neglected, the sense become sometimes darke, sometimes imperfect and none at all’.49 Harris implies here that the printer is to blame for any ambiguities or imperfections in the text, and by having the printer himself then set the type for this prefatory note, Harris was forcing his collaborators to hold themselves accountable. In still other cases, claims about a defective printing were used to justify the publication of a new edition of an old text. Thus, Samuel Daniel in Delia (1592) claims that he ‘was betraide by the indiscretion of a greedie Printer’ who published an inaccurate edition of Daniel’s early sonnets: ‘I . . . had some of my secrets bewraide to the world, uncorrected’. Daniel consequently felt ‘forced’ to do ‘that which I never ment’ and had the complete sonnet sequence published.50 Thomas Lodge similarly went to press with a corrected and annotated version of one of his masques, The Vision of the 12 Goddesses (1604), only because, he alleged, ‘the unmannerly presumption of an indiscreet Printer . . . without warrant hath divulged the late shewe’ and ‘verie disorderly set [it] forth’.51 In all such instances, the new editions make claims of greater authenticity by highlighting—​usually in a preface or dedicatory epistle—​the previous printers’ malfeasance and, as a solution, the writers’ direct involvement. This idea of authorial authenticity—​perhaps a hold-​over from the more personal experience of reading a scribal text in the author’s hand—​preceded and may have helped to promote the greater economic and legal authority that writers achieved by the beginning of the eighteenth century. As in Jonson’s and Herrick’s volumes, the value of a work became predicated on the existence of a visible writer whose intentions seem to be carried out in the printed text, regardless of whether the author, in fact, collaborated in the book’s production. Title pages, for example, remained the primary means of advertising books in the early modern book trade; readers could peruse these pages at a bookseller’s stall or would see them tacked around the city on Saturday nights—​on

204   Stephen B. Dobranski doors, posts, and windows—​for books that were to go on sale in the coming week.52 While the title page typically included the name of the Stationer and the shop where a text was to be sold, it also began to highlight the author’s name as a primary reason for buying a book, such as ‘LUCASTA. Posthume POEMS of Richard Lovelace Esq’ (1659); or ‘CCXI SOCIABLE LETTERS, WRITTEN BY THE Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent PRINCESS, The Lady MARCHIONESS OF NEWCASTLE’ (1664). Some title pages include biographical blurbs to entice readers and establish an author’s ethos: Richard Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple (1646) provides a thumbnail sketch of his academic stature, ‘By Richard Chrashaw, sometimes of Pembroke Hall, and late Fellow of S. Peters Coll. in Cambridge’; while The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621) goes on at greater length about its author’s noble and celebrated ancestry: ‘Written by the right honorable the Lady Mary Wroath. Daughter to the right noble Robert Earle of Leicester. And neece to the ever famous, and renowned Sr. Phillips Sidney knight. And to ye most exele[n]‌t Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased’. Frontispiece portraits, like the one in Herrick’s Hesperides, also clearly reinforce the author’s presence in printed texts. In most seventeenth-​century books, these images served as memorials of deceased authors—​notably the portrait of Shakespeare opposite the title page of his First Folio (1623) or the engraving of Abraham Cowley as a precocious schoolboy opposite the title pages of both his Poetical Blossomes (1633) and Love’s Riddle, A Pastorall Comedie (1638). In a few cases, portraits were also included in works by living writers, most often but not exclusively in folio editions, such as James I’s Workes (1616) and Michael Drayton’s Poems (1619).53 Aside from such gestures of name recognition, some books made an even plainer claim for their authenticity. Whereas title pages of dramatic works regularly point back to a specific, theatrical origin—​Thomas Dekker and John Ford’s The Sun’s-​Darling (1656), to choose a representative example, reads, ‘As it hath been often presented at Whitehall, by their Majesties Servants’54—​so poetic texts began to point back to their creation in the author’s study. A bookseller would use the title page not just to spotlight a writer’s name but also to advertise that the book was created from the ‘author’s own copy’, perhaps another acknowledgement of the ongoing relevance of scribal publication. These pages implied that readers were being granted access to something close to an original holograph. Edmund Waller’s Poems (1645), for example, states at the start that the collection contains his verses ‘in their pure originals and true genuine colours’; John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea (1646) declares that all of the volume’s individual pieces are ‘Printed by his owne Copies’; and John Cleveland’s collected works (1677) announces upfront that the volume is ‘Published according to the Author’s own Copies’ and contains his ‘Genuine Poems, Orations, Epistles, &c. Purged from the many False & Spurious Ones Which had usurped his Name’.55 Katherine Philips’s Poems (1667) tells a more elaborate story of its authenticity. The collection begins with both a portrait of the author and a title page declaring her authority, ‘By the most deservedly Admired Mrs. KATHERINE PHILIPS The Matchless ORINDA’. Including this final sobriquet, ‘Orinda’, implicitly invites readers to see the collection as part of the courtly world where Philips first shared her work. Members

Authors   205 of the Society of Friendship adopted these pseudonyms from pastoral romances; the printed collection thus seems to be initiating readers into that private circle. Yet Philips’s book also situates her writing within the book trade. The collection highlights her presence in part through a preface in which she directly addresses readers and explains that three years earlier a corrupt version of her poetry had been published without ‘any manner of [her] knowledge, much less connivance’. She is now attempting to correct this earlier ‘false’ text, to take control of her writing, and to restore her poems to ‘their native Shape and Beauty’.56 All of the features of early printed books highlighting the author’s presence and the work’s authenticity would have both contributed to and been confirmed by the growing interest in poets’ biographies during the seventeenth century.57 Such accounts superseded the medieval tradition of writing saints’ lives, and because they frequently appeared as part of the prefatory matter in omnibus editions, they encouraged would-​ be readers to accept a text’s value based on the author. In the 1500s, the biography of Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the first accounts to appear in a printed collection. It was followed by a series of other literary biographies—​Izaak Walton’s life of Donne, printed in the folio edition of Donne’s sermons in 1640; Fulke Greville’s life of Philip Sidney, included as a preface to the Arcadia in 1652; and Thomas Sprat’s life of Abraham Cowley, added to a folio edition of Cowley’s works in 1668.58 Not yet embracing the emerging interest in the author as a unique individual, these accounts instead follow long-​standing hagiographical traditions. Thus, Sprat in his life of Cowley, idealizes the author’s poetry and politics, from his precocious childhood (‘having got the Greek and Roman Languages . . . [on] his own’), to his brave service to the King during the Civil War (‘being made a Prisoner, he was often examined’ and ‘committed to a severe restraint’), to his equally tireless devotion to his studies after the Restoration (‘dedicated . . . to the service of his Maker, to describe the great images of Religion and Virtue’).59 In other texts, writers spoke up for themselves, and strong authorial voices such as Jonson’s and Herrick’s must have helped to enhance the writers’ status in print. Each time that these authors address readers directly or comment on their own writing, they encourage their books’ audience to see all of the surrounding works in a printed collection as created by the same controlling consciousness. A few early modern writers attempted to create distinct authorial personae within their writings—​to ‘maintain an ethically normative and unchanging self ’, as Richard Helgerson put it—​a strategy that reinforced the design of printed texts that emphasized authorial presence. Helgerson described this impulse as characteristic of a generation of Renaissance writers and traced its origin to the Italian model of the laureate poet as well as to religious reform and a nascent nationalism.60 Today, readers of early modern authors should also aspire to be readers of early modern books. The assumption is not that any given writer controlled the design or layout of a printed text but that authors, directly and indirectly, often played a crucial role in their books’ creation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Herrick’s ‘Pillar of Fame’ and the monument of Jonson’s Workes are fundamentally printed texts that establish their claims for longevity through their material existence.

206   Stephen B. Dobranski The metonymy of using author for books (as in, ‘I enjoy reading Aphra Behn’) was already an accepted way of thinking in the early modern period. Robert Burton took comfort that his library contained ‘so many good Authors and dead Masters’, while John Donne affectionately referred to his ‘poor Library, where to cast mine eye upon good Authors kindles or refreshes sometimes meditations not unfit to communicate to near friends’.61 As Donne allies the company of ‘good Authors’ and ‘near friends’, he suggests how engaging with printed texts could be tantamount to holding a personal conversation. The ideal being held out in all such expressions is not just that early modern books were thought to be alive but also that writers could continue to live through their printed texts. This notion of immortality through writing extends back at least to 480 bce and the Greek poet Simonides, who is traditionally credited with authoring an epitaph that memorialized the Spartan soldiers who died at the Battle of Thermopylae. But in the early modern period, English writers began to appreciate the unique life-​saving power of print. John Milton, for example, objected to prepublication censorship in Areopagitica (1644) in part because, he argued, books are the ‘living labours of publick men’ and contain the ‘pretious life-​blood of a master spirit’.62 As printers, writers, and readers came to appreciate this potency, we find an increasing authorial presence in early printed texts and the emergence of modern, proprietary authorship.

Notes 1. Jason Slotkin, ‘ “Monkey Selfie” Lawsuit Ends with Settlement’, NPR: The Two-​Way (12 Sept. 2017), www.npr.org/​secti​ons/​the​two-​way/​2017/​09/​12/​550417​823. 2. On seventeenth-​century anonymous publications, see D. F. McKenzie, ‘The London Book Trade in 1644’, in John Horden (ed.), Bibliographia: Lectures 1975‒1988 by Recipients of the Marc Fitch Prize for Bibliography (Oxford: Leopard’s Head, 1992), 131–​151. 3. Here and throughout this chapter, I use Stationers (with an upper-​case S) to signify members of the royally-​chartered Company of Stationers. 4. On the so-​called stigma, see Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (2nd edn.), rev. J. W. Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 162; and J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge, 1964), 56–​58, 90. 5. Bodley, Reliquiae Bodleianae (London, 1703), 82. As Bodley further explained, ‘Haply some plays may be worthy the Keeping: But hardly one in Forty’ (278). See also Charles Dickens, ‘Bodley and the Bodleian’, All the Year Round, ns 710 (8 July 1882), 497. 6. See Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480–​1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 7. ‘Unvalued’, adj., defs. 1a and 2, OED (3rd edn.). Milton’s poem was first published in 1632 as one of seven encomiastic verses at the start of Shakespeare’s second folio. Milton was also apparently an attentive reader of the First Folio: in 2019, Jason Scott-​Warren first proposed that the detailed manuscript notes in a copy held in the Free Library of Philadelphia were made by Milton, an opinion that has met with enthusiastic support from other scholars. See Scott-​Warren, ‘Milton’s Shakespeare’, Sept. 2019, www.engl​ish.cam.ac.uk/​cmt/​?page​_​ id=​574. Quotations from Milton, ‘On Shakespeare’, are taken from William Kerrigan, John

Authors   207 Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (eds.), The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (New York: Modern Library, 2007). 8. See Steven W. May, ‘Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print” ’, in A. Leigh DeNeef and M. Thomas Hester (eds.), Renaissance Papers 1980 (Durham, NC: Southern Renaissance Conference, 1981), 11–​18. 9. See Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–​82), iii. 150. In 1662, the Bishop of Exeter, John Gauden, claimed that the book was a forgery and that he had ghost-​written Eikon Basilike on behalf of Charles I. 10. John Donne, ‘Letter to Sir Robert Ker’, in John Carey (ed.), John Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 283. 11. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). In this and the next paragraph, I am drawing on my discussion of authorial practices in ‘Renaissance Authorship: Practice versus Attribution’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2018), 115–​127. 12. Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 211. 13. These introductory appeals appear, among other places, in the following works: ‘courteous’ in John Cotgrave, The English Treasury of Wit and Language (London, 1655), π2r–​ π3v; ‘impartial’ in Thomas Durfey, Butler’s Ghost (London, 1682), π3r–​π4r; and ‘knowing’ in Robert Davenport, King John and Matilda, A Tragedy (London, 1655), π2r. 14. Amelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (London, 1611), fo. 3v. For the ways that prefaces specifically enabled works by women authors, see Julie A. Eckerle, ‘Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Eckerle (eds.), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 97–​113. 15. Henry Vaughan, Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal (London, 1646), §3r. 16. Milton, Poems (London, 1645), a4v; Thomas Nabbes, The Unfortunate Mother (London, 1640), A3r, lines 25–​6; and Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), A3r. 17. Ben Jonson, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616), Ttt1r. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically by signature in the text. 18. On the normalizing of prefaces over the first 150 years of printing, see Meaghan J. Brown, ‘Addresses to the Reader’, in Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (eds.), Book Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 83–​93. 19. George Chapman’s translations of the Odyssey and Iliad, for example, were published in folios during the first half of the seventeenth century, as were collections by the three writers then considered England’s most distinguished poets—​ Chaucer, Sidney, and Spenser. 20. Robert Herrick, Hesperides: Or, The Works Both Humane & Divine of Robert Herrick Esq. (London, 1648), B2r, C8v. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically by signature in the text. 21. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 52. 22. Other frontispieces also depict a statue of the author: see e.g. Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), π1v; and Katherine Philips, Poems (London, 1667), π1v.

208   Stephen B. Dobranski 23. See e.g. David L. Gants, ‘The Printing, Proofing and Press-​Correction of Jonson’s Folio Workes’, in Martin Butler (ed.), Re-​Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 39–​58; and Kevin J. Donovan, ‘Jonson’s Texts in the First Folio’, in Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (eds.), Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 23–​37. See also Works of Benjamin Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–​52), viii. 7–​10, ix. 13–​84. 24. For a detailed discussion of the textual evidence that Herrick had a limited role in the production of his book, see Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 150–​163. 25. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises of the Whole Art of Printing (1683–​1684), ed. Herbert Davies and Harry Carter (2nd edn., London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 192. 26. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 192. 27. See David Gants, ‘MDCXVI’, Ben Jonson Journal, 25/​1 (2018), 4–​18, at 7. 28. See John L. Kimmey, ‘Order and Form in Herrick’s Hesperides’, JEGP (Journal of English and Germanic Philology) 70 (1971), 255–​268. 29. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 193. 30. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 250–​251. 31. See David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 220; and Gants, ‘MDCXVI’, 6. 32. It is not clear whether Herrick was even residing in London in 1647 when his book first went to press. Anthony á Wood wrote that Herrick spent at least part of the Commonwealth period in ‘S. Ann’s Parish in Westminster’, but no London parish by that name existed during the seventeenth century. George Walton Scott has proposed that Wood meant St Anne’s Street in St Margaret’s parish. See Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4 vols. (1813; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1967), iii. 250–​252; and Scott, Robert Herrick, 1591–​1674 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1974), 94, 185. On the likely date of the Hesperides’s publication, see Thomas N. Corns, Appendix A, in Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 307–​308. 33. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to ‘The Collected Works’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 648–​666; and Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, 77. 34. See George Wither, The Schollers Purgatory (London, 1624), B6r. 35. Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–​1660, 5 vols. (London, 1877), iii. 344. 36. W. W. Greg, Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing Between 1550 and 1650 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 16. 37. . C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–​1660, 3 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911), i. 185; and see Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–​1730 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 25–​62. 38. John Barnard, ‘Dryden, Tonson, and Subscriptions for the 1697 Virgil’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 57 (1963), 129‒151; and see Stephen B. Dobranski, ‘Authorship in the Seventeenth Century’, in Colin Burrow (ed.), Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), http://​bit.ly/​1njA​Pn5. 39. Stephen B. Dobranski, ‘Renaissance Authorship: Practice versus Attribution’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2018), 115–​127.

Authors   209 40. R. B. McKerrow, ‘A Publishing Agreement of the Late Seventeenth Century’, The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1932), 184‒187. 41. The contract survives in the British Library, Add. MS 188661. See J. Milton French (ed.), The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1956), iv. 429‒431. I am drawing in this paragraph on my discussion of Milton’s contract in, for example, ‘The Book Trade’, in Stephen B. Dobranski (ed.), Milton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 226–​236. 42. In referring to Samuel Simmons as the epic’s ‘publisher’, I mean that he financed its production. Mostly, he worked as a printer; Paradise Lost was the first book entered in the Stationers’ Register as his own copy. 43. See Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Authors and Publishers in the Late Seventeenth Century: New Evidence on their Relations’, The Library, 17/​3 (1995), 250–​269; and Leo Kirschbaum, ‘Author’s Copyright in England before 1640’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 40/​1 (1946), 43–​80, at 52. 44. See Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade, 105–​106. 45. Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1667), A2r. 46. R. G. Moyles, The Text of ‘Paradise Lost’: A Study in Editorial Procedure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 21–​28. Another approximately thirty-​seven comparatively minor changes made between the first and second editions may or may not be authorial. 47. Wither, The Schollers Purgatory, *2v. 48. Henry Jeanes, The Works of Heaven upon Earth (London, 1649), A2v. 49. Robert Harris, Two Sermons (London, 1630), A2. 50. Samuel Daniel, Delia (London, 1592), A2r. In this paragraph, I am drawing on Dobranski, ‘Renaissance Authorship: Practice versus Attribution’, 119. 51. Thomas Lodge, The Vision of the 12 Goddesses (London, 1604), A3r. 52. See Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 13; and Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (2nd edn., London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), 248–​249. 53. The earliest portrait of an author that I have found is of John Heywood in The Spider and the Flie (1556). 54. Thomas Dekker and John Ford, The Sun’s-​Darling (London, 1656), A1r. 55. Edmund Waller, Poems (London, 1645), A4r; John Suckling, Fragmenta Aurea (London, 1646), A1r; and John Cleveland, Clievelandi Vindiciae (London, 1677), A2r. 56. Philips, Poems, A1r, A2r, a2v. I also discuss the convention of justifying new editions in Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England, 6–​8. 57. See Sharon Selig, ‘Writing the Self ’, in Stephen B. Dobranski (ed.), Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 13–​ 28; Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Alan Pritchard, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 58. Pritchard, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century (129) also notes that a biography of John Hall of Durham appeared as a preface in Hall’s English translation of Heirocles’ commentary on Pythagoras’ Golden Verses (1657). 59. Thomas Sprat, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham Cowley’, in The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, 1668), A1r–​e2v, at A2r, a1, b1r. 60. Richard Helgerson, Self-​Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 9.

210   Stephen B. Dobranski 61. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-​ Smith (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1955), 457; and Donne, Selected Prose, ed. Evelyn Simpson, Helen Gardner, and Timothy Healy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 127. 62. Milton, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–​82), ii. 493.

Select Bibliography Barnard, John, ‘Dryden, Tonson, and Subscriptions for the 1697 Virgil’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 57 (1963), 129‒151. Brown, Meaghan J., ‘Addresses to the Reader’, in Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (eds.), Book Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 83–​93. Dobranski, Stephen B., Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Dobranski, Stephen B., ‘Renaissance Authorship: Practice versus Attribution’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2018), 115–​127. Donovan, Kevin J., ‘Jonson’s Texts in the First Folio’, in Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (eds.), Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 23–​37. Eckerle, Julie A., ‘Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (eds.), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 97–​113. Gants, David L., ‘MDCXVI’, Ben Jonson Journal, 25/​1 (2018), 4–​18. Gants, David L., ‘The Printing, Proofing and Press-​ Correction of Jonson’s Folio Workes’, in Martin Butler (ed.), Re-​Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 39–​58. Greene, Jody, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–​1730 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Kirschbaum, Leo, ‘Author’s Copyright in England before 1640’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 40/​1 (1946), 43–​80. Peters, Julie Stone, Theatre of the Book, 1480–​1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Scott-​Warren, Jason ‘Milton’s Shakespeare’, Sept. 2019, www.engl​ish.cam.ac.uk/​cmt/​?page​_​ id=​574. Selig, Sharon, ‘Writing the Self ’, in Stephen B. Dobranski (ed.), Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–​ 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 13–​28. Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

CHAPTER 12

Pu blishing V i rg i nia ( 16 08–​1 615 ) Specialization, Commissioning, Networks Kirk Melnikoff

In 1609, two years after establishing the Jamestown colony, the Virginia Company finalized its second charter, James I signing it on 23 May.1 Though in many respects a carryover of the 1606 first charter, the patent expanded the area under the company’s jurisdiction, created a colony governor and company treasurer, and vested authority in a privately appointed council.2 It also listed over one hundred individual guildsmen by trade and close to sixty corporate subscribers. Among the thirty-​two Grocers, twenty-​ two Clothworkers, eighteen merchants, five Ironmongers, and five Fishmongers were three Stationers: William Welby, George Swinhowe, and Edward Bishop. Listed as well was ‘the companie of stacioners’.3 Such book-​trade investment in England’s first sustained colonization efforts in the Americas would prove only a small incipient part of what quickly became a strong and mutually beneficial connection between the Virginia Company and London’s Stationers—​members and company alike—​in the colony’s early years. The publishers involved with the financing, processing, and distribution of print material having to do with England’s colonization of Virginia played a significant role in establishing and sustaining this connection.4 Over the past four decades, attention has been increasingly paid to the English book trade agents who financed the thousands upon thousands of titles retailed across early modern England.5 Inspired by D. F. McKenzie’s sociology of the text, Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, and Peter W. M. Blayney’s essential ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, researchers have come to see publishing as essential to the transformation and expansion of knowledge and culture in England after Caxton. They have demonstrated too that each publishing operation—​operating out of a printing house or a bookshop—​followed its own distinctive set of practices. A desire for profit, of course, drove the vast majority of England’s early print publication projects, but it is now understood that other motives (having to do, for example, with a religious,

212   Kirk Melnikoff political, or personal agenda) were often in the mix. Even more than printing, early modern publishing was a collaborative endeavour. At every stage, from acquisition to licensing to wholesaling, publishers routinely worked with other stationers as well as with patrons, associates, and family members to identify, manage, and disseminate promising titles. Moreover, the businesses that undertook much of the publishing in this period were usually cooperative enterprises, populated by husbands, wives, widows, sons, daughters, journeymen, and apprentices. Faced with news of the Virginia colony’s impending failure in the wake of almost every early Jamestown resupply mission, book-​trade publishers did much to counter mounting doubts in London by helping to reimagine the Virginia project along moral and religious lines. They also helped systematize the company’s ever-​developing administrative efforts. All their businesses, at addresses that included the Fox, the Greyhound, and the Crane in St Paul’s Churchyard, were bookselling operations, and this reflected a larger shift in book financing from printers to booksellers in the second half of the sixteenth century.6 In many ways, though, the practices of these bookselling publishers—​ specializing in sets of related titles, taking on commissioned work, and relying upon networks of family members, company peers, and writers—​were identical to those in the Stationers’ Company’s earliest days. Indeed, these would continue to define publishing in England for decades to come.

Specialization Among those that published texts connected with Jamestown and the Virginia Company after the colony was founded in 1607 were businesses that did so as part of a larger publishing speciality. Specialization was sometimes driven by the personal penchants of bookmen and bookwomen but much more often by speculation in the face of an ever-​burgeoning and -​diversifying consumer society. A publisher who specialized in a distinctive species of titles put herself into a better position to capitalize on her investments. Booksellers, looking to stock their shops with her speciality, could more readily predict where it might be acquired. Authors, translators, editors, or compilers, looking for a book-​trade agent to purchase and disseminate their work, could more readily identify her as a potential investor.7 And book buyers, looking to buy a particular title, could, if the publisher were a bookseller, more confidently assume that they would not be disappointed after a trip to her shop. The demand that motivated the publishing endeavours of the Tapp bookselling business at Tower Hill was directed towards titles having to do with maritime travel and navigation. Even before being freed by the Drapers’ Company in early 1597, John Tapp had become something of an expert on the ins and outs of sea navigation.8 In the mid-​ 1590s, his Draper master Hugh Astley had directed him to edit Richard Eden’s popular translation of Martin Cortes’s Breve compendio de la sphera y de la arte de navegar.9 In his revised Art of Navigation, Tapp corrected ‘faultes’ in Eden’s version while at the same

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    213 time adding a ‘Kalendar’, a declination chart, an almanack, and an astrological table.10 He also excised prefatory material by both Cortes and Eden, replacing these with a reader’s epistle of his own addressed to ‘Seafaring men’. With this editing work, Astley may also have involved Tapp in the publication of the hydrographer Robert Norman’s The New Attractive in 1596, a troubleshooting manual on correct compass usage that concludes with rules for oceanic navigation. Tapp would secure his first bookshop at Tower Hill around 1600, and over the next decade he worked to build a catalogue of nautical publications. These consisted of a ‘maryners book . . . [of] godlye prayers hymnes and songes’ (1600),11 Richard Polter’s Pathway to Perfect Sailing (1605), John Searles’s An Ephemeris for Nine Years (1609), and a new edition of his revised Art of Navigation (1609). In the months following his acquisition of his Tower Hill shop, Tapp also compiled and published The Seaman’s Calendar, a bestseller that would reach a twelfth edition in 1631. In the eleven-​sheet quarto, Tapp explains that he had undertaken the project because he knew, after ‘many times [having been] conuersant with Seamen and Mariners’, that it was ‘what they (I meane the commen and plainer sort of them) chiefly desired’.12 His practical handbook contains a glossary of nautical terms, a ‘tide table’, a chart of longitudes and latitudes for different ‘places’, and a calendar akin to the one he added to the Art of Navigation. Tapp’s early specialization in maritime manuals and familiarity with ‘Seamen and Mariners’ made his business an obvious outlet for the first account of Jamestown to be published since the colony’s founding in 1607, John Smith’s A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of that Colony. Reaching London in July 1608 with Captain Francis Nelson and the Phoenix, Smith’s manuscript appears to have been circulated among Virginia Company members before making its way in some form to City of God translator John Healey. After editing it, Healey then may have brought the text to Tower Hill. In mid-​August, Tapp entered the title in the Stationers’ Register with the bookseller William Welby, and the two then brought the edited manuscript to the printer Edward Aldee.13 Moving too hastily to disseminate the title, Tapp and Welby ended up having to reissue the quarto three times before the end of the year, each time correcting a title-​page misstep. The quarto was first unascribed, then ascribed to ‘Th. Watson Gent. one of the said collony’, to ‘Captaine Smith Coronell of the said collony’, and finally to ‘Captaine Smith one of the said collony’. Confessing in the title’s third reissue that he had only recently ‘learned’ of the true author, Healey explains that he had ‘happen[ed] vpon this relation by chance (as I take it, at the second or third hand)’ but ‘was induced . . . by diuers well wishers of the action’ (¶1r) to bring it to press. The farce-​like scrambling at the Aldee printing house confirms Healey’s explanation for the text’s transmission, but the officious ending—​the fourth reissue demoting Smith from ‘Coronell’ to ‘one of the said collony’—​may have been the result of a Virginia Company intervention as Smith’s rise to Jamestown leadership had not been sanctioned by London’s Virginia Counsel.14 Smith’s account helped trigger what would be a volley of Virginia Company promotional literature in London’s bookstalls starting in 1609. Months before the publishing of A True Relation, Christopher Newport not only confirmed fears about a dearth of

214   Kirk Melnikoff Virginia mineral riches but also squashed hopes of quickly identifying an inland water passage to China. News of the difficult conditions at Jamestown was also making its way back to London via correspondence.15 Even more worrying, a number of frustrated adventurers returned from Jamestown with Newport in the first weeks of 1609, and these men quickly began airing grievances. At a Virginia Company shareholders’ meeting around this time, it was argued that ‘some forme of writinge in way of Iustification of our plantation might be conceiued, and pass, . . . into many handes’ to reassure current shareholders and attract new adventurers.16 Even while fears of Spanish ‘rage’ at news of English progress in Virginia and of a pamphlet war (driven by ‘pen-​adversaries’) appear to have carried the day, company reluctance to promote the Jamestown project would not last long.17 What quickly followed was a company-​led sermonizing campaign that would run for almost a year, from the spring of 1609 to the winter of 1610.18 Such an operation complemented the company’s energetic fundraising efforts at the time even as it broadcasted a series of decidedly Protestant rationales for the Jamestown project. These arguments for the expansion of England as God’s chosen kingdom and for the saving of the souls of Virginia’s heathen inhabitants had up until this time been muted at best. Matthew Law’s bookselling business at the sign of the Fox in St Paul’s Churchyard was one of the first to capitalize on this wave of sermons prompted by the Virginia Company. Law had originally been trained as a draper, but in 1600 he, like Tapp, elected to be transferred to the Stationers’ Company.19 By the time that Tapp and Welby had acquired what would be the first printed Jamestown title in 1608, Law had oriented the bulk of his publishing endeavours around public sermons.20 Before he died in 1629, he would publish well over fifty of these, by churchmen like William Barlow, Thomas Playfere, Richard Kilby, and Samuel Smith. Marketed in part as souvenirs, Law’s sermons routinely trumpet the original time and place of their delivery in title-​page blurbs. Indeed, over a dozen are advertised as being originally delivered at the Paul’s Cross pulpit in St Paul’s Churchyard, only yards away from the Fox bookshop. Along with memorability, authenticity is also emphasized by these pamphlets. According to an unidentified ‘Preachers friend’ who addresses readers in one of Law’s 1606 Barlow publications, the ‘censorious reader’ desires only unalloyed artefacts: How gratefull, or distastefull it was to the Auditorie, the present Hearers can best report: but whether to the censorious reader (who vseth to examine euery Periode & sentence with a curious touch in an exact ballance) it will be either currant or refuse, is a question, which none but he, which bringes the assay and scales can assoile.21

Law distributed his tenth sermon publication in the weeks following approval of the Virginia Company’s second charter on 23 May 1609. Chaplain to Prince Henry, Daniel Price had originally delivered what would be titled Saul’s Prohibition Stayed at Paul’s Cross on 28 May. Investigating the theological implications of Saul’s persecution of Christians before his conversion, Price’s sermon turns to Virginia in its second half, asking first for leave to refute the ‘lying speeches that haue iniuriously vilified’ the project.22 According to Price, Jamestown’s detractors are like Saul in that they

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    215 are all persecutors of God. Considering then the many merits of the settlement, he promises that whosoeuer hath a hand in this businesse, shall receiue an vnspeakeable blessing, for they that turne manie to righteousnesse, shall shine as the starres for euer and euer: you will . . . obtaine their best commodities . . . enlarge the boundes of this Kingdome, nay the bounds of heauen, & all the Angels that behold this, if they reioyce so much at the conuersion of one Sinner, O what will their ioy be at the conuersion of so many. (F3r)

Like many of these Jamestown sermons, evangelism (‘righteousnesse’, ‘conuersion of so many’) is unapologetically coupled with capitalism (‘best commodities’). Hyperbolic as it is, Price’s defence of the Virginia project only amounts to three of the printed sermon’s forty pages, and as such it reads like an afterthought. Indeed, Law advertises it on his title page in diminutive type as an appended ‘reproofe of those that traduce the honourable plantation of Virginia’.

Commissioning Before and after the Virginia Company was granted its first charter in 1606, publishing by commission played a significant role in the ever-​expanding print trade. From the first half of the sixteenth century, it was standard practice for the Crown to commission publication of official documents like statutes, ordinances, and proclamations with the King’s (or Queen’s) Printer, and it was also a common occurrence for the Privy Council to assign the publishing of State-​authorized mainstays like the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer to this office.23 By the final decades of the sixteenth century, the City of London was also routinely using print to publicize its own activity, commissioning the publication of Acts of Common Council, mayoral proclamations, constables’ oaths, and the like with its official printer.24 At the same time, authors, translators, editors, or compilers—​or their friends, acquaintances, and family members—​would also sometimes finance print publication at their own expense.25 These agents would turn to a bookseller or printer to authorize, license, print, and, in some cases, distribute a title that they had either produced or acquired by themselves.26 In this period before authorial copyright, the right-​to-​copy was held by the Stationer who licensed the title, but under-​the-​table ownership agreements were made both before and after incorporation. Unfortunately, we know very little about the financial arrangements underpinning commissioned publishing in this period. In some cases, publishers were paid upfront for their endeavours. Once printed, copies were returned to the original investor for distribution. In other cases, publishers were reimbursed through some combination of down-​ payment and share of copies.27 In all likelihood, other kinds of financial arrangements between copy-​text providers and publishers were negotiated as well.

216   Kirk Melnikoff The Virginia Company’s outreach efforts that commenced in 1609 enlisted the Stationers’ Company in a variety of ways. In anticipation of its second charter and in response to the setbacks in Jamestown, the company had at the beginning of the year begun an aggressive campaign to raise capital, offering for the first time individual shares to the public for £12. 10s.28 Around this time, the Virginia Company also sent a formal invitation for investment to the various London livery companies.29 In response, at the end of April, Stationers’ Company Wardens sent £125 to Sir Thomas Smith, the funds invested by close to three-​dozen company members.30 At the end of 1609, the Stationers’ Company then entered into what appears to have been an arrangement with the Virginia Company having to do with the authorization of copies.31 For five years, from the end of 1609 until the autumn of 1614, eleven entries having to do with Virginia were authorized by Smith.32 During this time, the only Virginia entry not to be authorized by a Virginia Company official was for the now-​lost ballad ‘The laste newes from Virginia, beinge an encouragmente to all others to followe that noble enterprise’ entered in the summer of 1611.33 Months after Smith signed off on Baron De la Warr’s Relation [to the Council of Virginia] in July 1611, the Virginia Company launched its second fundraising campaign, this time a series of lotteries between 1612 and 1621.34 In May 1612, the Stationers’ Company ventured £20 in the first of these lotteries.35 Anxious about waning interest and complaints about malfeasance in lottery administration, the Virginia Company sent letters of endorsement to the livery companies from Sir Thomas Smith, the Lord Mayor, and the Privy Council for its third lottery. In response in June 1614, the Stationers’ Company ventured £45.36 As part of their fundraising and propaganda activities starting in 1609, the Virginia Company also established sustained working relationships with stationer businesses. Of these, the earliest and most significant was with the Welby bookshop.37 As we have seen, in 1609 Welby was listed with Swinhowe and Bishop as an individual subscriber in the Virginia Company’s second charter.38 Welby’s interest in the Jamestown venture was likely piqued by the Greyhound’s involvement with A True Relation the year before and solidified by his financial stake in the Virginia Company that would end up amounting to seven shares or the not insignificant sum of £87. 10s.39 It was also sustained by what would be a regular diet of Virginia Company publishing work for the coming years. Indeed, before his death in 1617 or 1618, Welby’s businesses at the Greyhound and then the Swan would become by far the most prolific publishers of Virginia titles.40 Welby’s shares may have been a partial payment for these efforts, one share per year from 1609 to 1615.41 Welby’s business appears to have begun its work for the Virginia Company by helping to usher its sermon campaign into print. In the late spring of 1609, it published A Good Speed to Virginia. In the sermon, the London rector Robert Gray presents a series of biblical precedents for England’s continued colonization of Virginia. The printed sermon bears signs of being a commissioned work, Gray dedicating the sermon to ‘Aduenturers for the plantation of Virginea’ as well as referring at its close to the ‘the godly care of the counsell and Aduenturers of Virginia’.42 Signed by Gray ‘From mine house at the Northend of Sithes lane London, April 28. Anno 1609’ (A4r) and then entered by Welby

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    217 in the Stationers’ Register on 3 May,43 the sermon appears to have been intended for print publication from the start. Around this time, the Greyhound would become involved with another Virginia sermon, this one delivered in late April by the Anglican minister William Symonds in London at Whitechapel. Co-​published with Eleazar Edgar’s bookselling business at the Windmill, Virginia is advertised as ‘Published for the benefit and vse of the colony, planted, and to bee planted there, and for the aduancement of their Christian purpose’ (title page) and includes a dedicatory epistle from Symonds to the ‘Aduenturers for the Plantation of VIRGINIA’.44 In March 1610 after moving his bookshop to the Swan, Welby was back at Stationers’ Hall. This time he brought a sermon that the Anglican preacher and bibliophile William Crashaw delivered to Virginia Company officials the preceding February. Like the Gray and Symonds sermons, A Sermon Preached in London was, as it advertises on its title page, ‘published by direction’. Virginia Company propaganda would continue to be commissioned with the Welby business over the next five years. First came Richard Rich’s News from Virginia in 1610, a short announcement in verse detailing Sir Thomas Gates’s miraculous arrival at Jamestown close to a year after wrecking the Sea Venture and being marooned in Bermuda.45 There followed six Virginia project titles: Thomas de la Warr’s The Relation of the Right Honorable the Lord De La Warre . . . of the Colony Planted in Virginia (‘Published by authority of the [Virginia] Counsell’ [title page], 1611); Robert Johnson’s The New Life of Virginia (‘Published by the authoritie of his Maiesties Counsell of Virginea’ [title page], 1612); Silvester Jourdain’s A Plain Description of the Bermudas Now Called Somers Islands (dedicated to Sir Thomas Smith, 1613); Alexander Whitaker’s Good News from Virginia (‘Perused and published by direction from that [Virginia] Counsell’ [title page], 1613); Ralph Hamor’s A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (dedicated to Sir Thomas Smith, 1615); and Lewes Hughes, A Letter Sent into England from the Somers Islands (1615).46 Each of these was overseen through the printing process by Welby and wholesaled at the Swan. Virginia Company publishing at the Swan during these years was not confined to sermons, pamphlets, and books. Around the time that it was first wholesaling Crashaw’s A Sermon Preached in London, the Swan began being employed to oversee the printing and dissemination of a variety of print ephemera. In recent years, job printing (the printing of short documents like receipt templates, bills, tickets, warrants, indenture forms, and taxation slips) has been recognized as an essential part of printing-​house work.47 Under-​recognized is the extent to which such jobs were first commissioned out to bookseller publishers and thus could constitute a significant proportion of their financing endeavours. The Welby shop’s first efforts along these lines were called upon after news first reached England in November 1609 of the Sea Venture. In early 1610, it published a broadside announcement of the shipwreck that included an extensive advertisement for ‘sufficient, honest and good artificers’ (smiths, carpenters, coopers, bakers, brewers, and so on) to undertake a resupply mission to Jamestown under the leadership of Baron De la Warre.48 Along with colony announcements and advertisements also came requests for administrative documents.49 After the Virginia Company’s second

218   Kirk Melnikoff charter was approved, the Welby business was tasked with producing printed bills of adventure for new investors as well as a series of lottery announcements.50

Networks Collaboration was ubiquitous in the early modern English book trade. Printers lent out type, ornaments, and woodcuts to one another and worked together on jobs; booksellers shared retail and stockroom space; and bookselling wholesalers exchanged copies to diversify their warehouses and stalls.51 The bookmen and bookwomen responsible for financing the lion’s share of the period’s print titles also routinely relied upon a network of peers to help them with investment opportunities. Within these webs of association, promising titles were identified by a trusted acquisition agent; copy was taken to a reliable trade printer; and inked quires were stored and wholesaled at a familiar warehouse operated by a known peer.52 Moreover, as we saw with Tapp and Welby’s financing of A True Relation, publication projects were commonly underwritten and managed by steadfast sets of Stationer peers. Most importantly, such partnerships allowed publishers to share financial outlay, thereby reducing individual risk.53 Book-​trade publishers also regularly turned to family members and/​or to circles of authors, translators, editors, and/​or compilers for assistance. Connections like these could contribute to acquisition efforts, and they could exert a significant influence over the final contours of printed titles. When Welby’s Greyhound business first stocked copies of Smith’s True Relation in 1608, it was also distributing two titles by the puritan clergyman John Downame: his Four Treatises and Lectures. According to Downame, it was pressure from Welby that helped push the two-​part Lectures forward. ‘I began to resolue . . . not to diuulge any part’, he confesses, ‘till the whole were finished. But he who is at the charge of printing this booke, herein ouerruled me, perswading me to publish my readings vpon these Chapters first, for a taste of the rest.’54 Undeterred by his publisher’s chutzpah and haste, Downame would continue to work with Welby in the coming years, not only expanding and correcting his popular Christian Warfare for a third edition in 1612 but penning the title’s second sequel Consolations for the Afflicted (which Welby would publish in 1613) around the same time.55 At the end of 1604, Welby’s Greyhound operation began what would prove a long-​ term relationship with the Temple church preacher Crashaw. From Crashaw came a series of edited texts by Protestant theologian William Perkins. Such was the close relationship between the Temple divine and the Welby business at the Greyhound that in their first Perkins publication were promises of three forthcoming texts ‘found in the studie of the deceased’ and of a dozen more ‘workes, taken from his mouth, with [Crashaw’s] owne hand’.56 Crashaw, it turns out, also had had a relationship with True Relation editor Healey. In the second English edition of St Augustine’s City of God (1620), Crashaw reveals that it was because of him that Healey originally translated the text.

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    219 ‘This worke of the Citie of God’, he writes, ‘was long ago translated into French. I saw not therefore any reason why it should be denied to our English people so many desiring it as did daily: Wherefore I set one about it, Who if he had time enough (for he is now with God) wanted not I am sure, neither will nor skill to doe it well.’57 The title was originally entered in the Stationers’ Register on 3 May 1608,58 months before Healey began editing Smith’s account. It is not inconceivable, in other words, that Healey, rather than first seeking out the Tapp business at Tower Hill that August, was directed by Crashaw to the Greyhound. For the next five years, Crashaw would continue to contribute regularly to the Welby business. In December 1608 he delivered an edited version of John Redman’s The Complaint of Grace, and, as we have already seen, his February 1609 Virginia sermon was published at the bookshop the following year. Crashaw also appears to have brought Whitaker’s Good News from Virginia and Jourdain’s A Plain Description of the Bermudas to Welby’s new shop at the Swan in 1612 or 1613. To each, he appended an extensive dedicatory epistle. As mentioned above, the Anglican clergyman Symonds offered his own pulpit endorsement of the Virginia project in late April 1609, a month before Price delivered the sermon that would be published as Saul’s Prohibition Stayed by Law’s bookselling business at the Fox. Delivered at Whitechapel Church in east London to an audience of Virginia Company planters and adventurers, Symonds’s sermon may very well have been the first in the Virginia Company’s 1609 sermon campaign. Symonds himself had only relocated to London from Lincolnshire a few years earlier, accepting lectureships at Christ Church (opposite St Paul’s) in 1606 and at St Saviour’s Southwark in 1607.59 At some point before addressing members of the Virginia Company, he was recruited for the Virginia Anglican ministry, this likely the result of his close connections both with Robert Bertie, Lord Willoughby (patron of John Smith), and Crashaw.60 Throughout his presentation, Symonds conjures the precedent of God’s call to Abraham in Genesis to go forth and multiply, to honour God’s creation, and to spread the good news of his works among the heathens. Symonds’s sermon is marked by its moment. Even while its biblical injunction to ‘Get thee out of thy Countrey’ was immediately delivered to what likely was a receptive Whitechapel audience, it at the same time repeatedly gestures towards a larger multitude of vocal detractors. Of these ‘cursers’ who in 1609 were aggressively questioning the legality, security, and purpose of the Virginia venture, Symonds promises that ‘it is Gods ordinance to bring a curse vpon them, and to kill them: as the children of Israel did Balam’ (G2r). As we have seen, Symonds’s sermon quickly found its way to the print trade. In the second week of May the bookseller Edgar entered what would be printed as Virginia. A Sermon Preached at Whitechapel in the Stationers’ Register.61 Symonds’s Virginia was in fact a collaborative venture, undertaken both by Edgar’s St Paul’s churchyard business at the Windmill and Welby’s at the Greyhound.62 The printed sermon’s title page would advertise that the whole was ‘PVBLISHED FOR THE BENEFIT AND VSE OF THE COLONY, PLANTED, And to bee Planted there’, suggesting Virginia Company involvement in the text’s transmission to Edgar and Welby.63 Symonds, though, probably took the lead in this transmission, contributing a dedicatory epistle to ‘the Aduenturers for

220   Kirk Melnikoff the Plantation of VIRGINIA’ (A2r) to the print quarto. It was likely Edgar who brought the title to John Windet’s Cross Keys printing house at Paul’s Wharf. Edgar had taken two titles to Windet in 1606 and in 1608, and he would bring two more titles to the printer in the later months of 1609. After Windet passed away at the end of 1610, this Cross Keys–​Windmill arrangement would continue, Edgar bringing all of his copy to Windet’s apprentice and partner William Stansby who had taken over Windet’s printing operations in 1611.64 Virginia. A Sermon would prove to be the only title that Edgar would co-​publish with Welby in the sixteen years that he worked in the London book trade after being freed of the Stationers’ Company in 1597.65 Even so, Edgar and Welby were part of a larger publishing network anchored by the extensive bookselling business run by Cuthbert Burby and his wife Elizabeth.66 From the year of his freedom in 1592 until his death in 1607, Cuthbert Burby was able to establish one of the more successful retail book businesses in London. Not only did he and his wife come to operate multiple shops and finance a large number of titles, but they also relied upon a network of writers like Sir John Hayward and Christopher Sutton; acquisition agents like Thomas Gosson and John Barnes; printers like Windet, Thomas Scarlet, and Adam Islip; and publishers like John Wolfe, Edmund Weaver, and William Leake to help them conduct their business. Edgar and Welby’s mutual connection to the Burbys may account for their collaboration on Symonds’s sermon. Edgar probably first encountered the Burbys while working as an apprentice and then as a journeyman bookseller for Raphe Jackson at the Swan bookshop. When the Burbys acquired the Swan after Jackson’s death in 1601, Edgar may have continued working as a journeyman there. Before Cuthbert Burby’s death in 1607, Edgar co-​published an extensive treatise on preaching by William Perkins with the Burbys,67 wholesaled three titles at the Swan warehouse, and co-​published titles with two of the Burbys’s former apprentices, first with Robert Jackson in the later months of 160768 and then with Ambrose Garbrand in 1610 and 1611. An August memorandum to Cuthbert Burby’s will names Edgar as a witness, and the December 1607 inventory of the Burby estate lists a debt of £5 owed by Cuthbert Burby to Edgar. Welby’s association with the Burby business did not formally begin until 16 October 1609 when he was granted the Burbys’ rights (full and partial) to over three-​dozen copies.69 By the early months of 1610, Welby had also moved his bookselling business to the Swan. Negotiations for both of these arrangements with Elizabeth Burby may have begun earlier in the year, around the time that Welby and Edgar pursued their only collaborative project.70 Around the time of Welby’s Burby acquisition in October, news had reached London that Jamestown’s new Governor Sir Thomas Gates was feared dead in a wreck of the flagship Sea Venture. Along with this report, Captain Samuel Argall brought word of difficult conditions at Jamestown, famine and dissension severely undermining colony morale. It was at this point that the Virginia Company had become even more aggressive in controlling information about Virginia, negotiating an arrangement with the Stationers’ Company to authorize all Virginia titles and regularizing its connection with publishers like Welby and Kingston. Sometime before 14 December, Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Waller Coxe gave John Stepneth authorization to publish A True and Sincere

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    221 Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia.71 Endorsed by and likely composed at the direction of the Virginia Company, A True and Sincere Declaration opens with a candid explanation of its intent, which is to redeeme . . . so Noble an action, from the imputations and aspertions, with which ignorant rumor, virulent enuy, or impious subtilty, daily callumniateth our industries, and the successe of it: wherein we doubt not . . . but to excite and kindle the affections of the Incredulous, and lazy; and to coole and asswage the curiosity of the iealous, and suspitious; & to temper and conuince, the malignity of the false, and treacherous.72

In its following pages, the pamphlet addresses the rumours set off by Argall’s return while at the same time attempting to set the record straight about the colony’s past, present, and future. According to Symonds, these were times strictly dedicated to God, country, and profit, in that order. A True and Sincere Declaration was the first title that Stepneth would enter in the Stationers’ Register since he was freed by the Stationers’ Company in 1602.73 Like Edgar, Stepneth had not immediately opened his own bookshop; instead had most likely been labouring as a journeyman bookseller. In 1609, he may have been working for Walter and Margaret Burre as A True and Sincere Declaration’s imprint lists their bookshop at the Crane in St Paul’s Churchyard as its wholesale location. Stepneth would work again with the Burres on Jonson’s Alchemist, wholesaling copies from his new shop at the opposite west end of St Paul’s Churchyard in 1612. Stepneth’s dealings with the Crane bookselling business involved him in a publishing network that not only had links to the trade printer George Eld and to the playwright Ben Jonson74 but also boasted strong ties to the Chester Middletons, a family heavily invested in the maritime ventures of the East India Company. Margaret Burre was the sister of ship captains Sir Henry Middleton, David Middleton, and John Middleton, and she received substantial legacies from each in their wills.75 On two occasions before 1610, the Burre business published accounts that it likely acquired through the Middleton captains. In 1600, it published a short report and a ballad recounting a naval battle between English merchants and the Spanish navy in the Strait of Gibraltar.76 Six years later in 1606, it published two separate accounts of the East India Company’s expedition to establish a trading post at Bantam from 1601 to 1605: The Last East-​Indian Voyage and merchant Edmund Scott’s An Exact Discourse of the Subtleties, Fashions, Policies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians.77 All three Middleton brothers helped lead this expedition, and The Last East-​Indian Voyage may have been completed by Henry Middleton shortly after he and David Middleton made their way back from Bantam in 1606. In a short prefatory epistle, Burre assures his readers that the ‘beginner of this relation following, would no doubt if he had liued haue himselfe set it out to thy good liking: but this I assure thee, that both his & this continuation of it is set forth with as much faithfulnes as could be gathered out of the best obseruations of them that are come home’.78 Burre also advertises An Exact Discourse in this epistle, telling his readers

222   Kirk Melnikoff to ‘looke shortly for an exact and large discourse written by Maister Scot chiefe factor at Bantam, euer since the first voyage’. Scott returned with the Middletons in 1606, and it stands to reason that it was through their efforts that his account ended up at the Crane at the same time as The Last East-​Indian Voyage.79 While it is conceivable that Stepneth published A True and Sincere Declaration entirely on his own, the Burre business’s familial connection to the Middleton captains suggests that it likely played some role in the pamphlet’s acquisition. When Stepneth entered the title in the Stationers’ Register in December 1609, Sir Henry Middleton was in London, awaiting a commission from the East India Company that would come in the early months of 1610.80 Though neither Sir Henry nor David Middleton were Virginia Company investors, both had significant personal connections to the company. The two brothers were closely acquainted with East India Company Governor and Virginia Company Treasurer Sir Thomas Smith, so much so that each left Smith a £5 legacy to buy a mourning ring to wear as a remembrance token.81 They also shared an intimate connection with the prominent Virginia Company investor Robert Middleton, describing him in their wills as a ‘Cozen’ as well as a ‘good friend’ and making him an overseer.82 Along with singling him out as an overseer, Sir Henry also left a £20 legacy and a mourning ring to his ‘good friend’ Sir Thomas Middleton. Like Robert Middleton, Sir Thomas invested more than £30 in the Virginia Company and was listed as an adventurer in its second charter. Against all odds, Sir Thomas Gates and the crew of the ill-​fated Sea Venture would eventually make it to Jamestown in May 1610 after wintering in Bermuda.83 What Gates found at his arrival was a colony in a state of disorder, anxiety, and famine (in the midst of ‘the starving time’, as it is now commonly called). In response, an elaborate system of martial law was implemented. Gates would return to England towards the end of the year, leaving Jamestown in the hands of his recently dispatched replacement, Thomas West, Baron de La Warr. Back in England, Gates was able to convince company officials, against a burgeoning movement to abandon the enterprise, to invest more men and money in Virginia. Two supply missions would be sent in the first six months of 1611, the second with Gates who was again making the transatlantic voyage as Jamestown’s next Governor. It was at the end of this year that the Virginia Company would again sponsor a publication project, this time a collection of its colony’s newly minted laws along with sets of instructions for company officials, from the Governor to the common soldier. The volume was compiled by William Strachey, a survivor of the Sea Venture misfortune who had been named Secretary to the Jamestown Colony during his time in Bermuda.84 For the Colony in Virginia Brittania: Laws Divine, Moral and Martial was entered for publication in mid-​December 161185 and published by the Burres at the Crane the following year. Stepneth, at this point, had secured his own bookshop at the west end of St Paul’s and would not again be linked to a Virginia Company title. Like many of Welby’s publications after 1609, For the Colony in Virginia was a commissioned publication intended primarily for the use of the Virginia Company. As Strachey acknowledges in his dedicatory epistle to the friends and assistants of the Virginia Council, it was

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    223 ‘to be deliuered in particular to officers and priuate Souldiers for their better instruction’.86 The pamphlet was also sold at the Crane and other bookshops as propaganda, intended to ‘chicke, [those] who malitiously and desperately heretoforè haue censured of [the Virginia project], and by examining of which they may be right sorie so to haue defaulked from vs as if we liued there lawlesse, without obedience to our Countrey, or obseruancie of Religion to God’ (A2v). When Walter Burre entered For the Colony in Virginia for publication, his brother-​in-​law Sir Henry Middleton was still away leading an East India Company expedition. His brother-​in-​law David Middleton, however, had been in London since the summer after returning from Bantam with a significant cargo of nutmeg and mace.87 Once again, it may have been through the intervention of family members that a title had been taken to the Crane. Like other important episodes in early modern England’s history, the colonization of Virginia was energized, enabled by the book trade. Distributed across the country by booksellers of all sorts, first-​hand accounts piqued interest, pamphlet edicts flouted apprehensions, and printed sermons recast the endeavour along religious and nationalist lines. At the same time, printed ephemera such as bills of adventure, lottery receipts, and position advertisements streamlined the Virginia Company’s administrative work and fundraising efforts. As this chapter has demonstrated, the process by which this material was acquired, printed, and disseminated was in almost every case collaborative, and it was prompted as much by writers, compilers, and translators as by book-​trade publishers. In some cases, the publishing penchants of a bookseller directly led to a Virginia title being brought to press. In others, established familial, intellectual, and/​or professional networks had much to do with its publication. In still others, financial investment in the Virginia Company was the essential motivating factor. However they came to be published, collusion between the Virginia Company and the Stationers’ Company ensured that these early broadsides, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos all championed what would be England’s first sustained annexation of the Americas.

Notes 1. The first charter was finalized three years earlier on 10 April 1606. 2. See Samuel M. Bemiss, The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London With Seven Related Documents; 1606–​1621 (Williamsburg: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957), 27–​54. 3. The second charter mistakenly has ‘John’ Swinhowe. 4. For the print dissemination of the Jamestown project, see Jay Stubblefield, ‘ “very worthely sett in printe”: Writing the Virginia Company of London’, Renaissance Papers (2003), 167–​ 184; Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave, 2000); and Frederick W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 5. For publishing in early modern England, see the various articles by Gerald D. Johnson along with Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia

224   Kirk Melnikoff University Press, 1997), 383–​422; Zachary Lesser, Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 6. For more on the bookshops of the period, see Ben Higgins’s chapter in this volume. 7. Lesser, Politics, 43–​49. 8. At some point, Tapp married, and he and his wife Elizabeth ran his bookselling business until his death in 1631. From the 1620s (or possibly even earlier), Tapp worked for the East India Company, publishing bonds and other printed material. In his short will, Tapp not only makes Elizabeth his executrix but also asks the bookseller John Clarke—​his ‘good friend’—​to help her set in order his ‘Shopp wares and Coppies’ (The National Archives, Kew (TNA), PROB 11/​159/​749). 9. The printer Richard Jugge first published Eden’s translation in 1561; it reached a sixth edition in 1589. After unsuccessfully attempting to secure rights to the title in 1596, Astley entered the title in the Stationers’ Register in October 1600, shortly after he and Tapp were translated into the Stationers’ Company. See Edward Arber (ed.), Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–​1640 A.D., 5 vols. (London: 1875–​94), iii. 60, 175; ii. 725. For the many reasons motivating such a transfer, see Gerald D. Johnson, ‘The Stationers versus the Drapers: Control of the Press in the late Sixteenth Century’, The Library, 6th ser., 10/​1 (1988), 1–​17. 10. Martin Cortés, The arte of navigation (London: Hugh Astley, 1596), A3r–​v. 11. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 173. 12. John Tapp, The seamans kalender, or An ephemerides of the sun, moone, and certaine of the most notable fixed starres (London: John Tapp, 1602), A2v. 13. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 388. For Healey as the editor of A True Relation, see Philip L. Barbour, The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606–​ 1609, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), i. 168 n. 1. Of his editing, Healey explains in his reader’s epistle ‘that somewhat more was by [Smith] written, which being as I thought (fit to be priuate) I would not aduenture to make it publicke’ (John Smith, A true relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that collony (London: John Tapp and William Welby, 1608), p. 1v). Imprints of the first edition advertise that copies of the title were to be distributed from the Greyhound. 14. At some point around this time, Tapp had become a familiar of the Virginia Company Treasurer Sir Thomas Smith. In dedicating a 1613 publication to Smith, Tapp thanked him for having hosted a long series of lectures on navigation and mathmatics at his London house. Tapp bewails these events’ low attendance, suggesting that he was a frequent auditor (even, possibly, a speaker). 15. For an account of the negative rumours circulating in London at the time, see Philip L. Barbour (ed.), The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1. 16. Susan Myra Kingsbury (ed.), The Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), iii. 1. 17. Kingsbury (ed.), Records, iii. 2. See Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Civic Solution to the Crisis of English Colonization, 1609–​1625’, Historical Journal, 42/​1 (1999), 33–​34. 18. For overviews of these sermons, see Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in the English Expansion 1558–​1625 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943); Francisco J. Borge, ‘Prayers for Purses: The Rhetoric of

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    225 Compensation in the Virginia Company Sermons’, Prose Studies, 32/​3 (2010), 205–​207; and John Parker, ‘Religion and the Virginia Company 1609–​1610’ in K. R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480–​1650 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 245–​270. The ambassador Zúñiga, in a letter to Phillip III dated 12 April, reported that the Virginia Company ‘has seen to it that the ministers, in their sermons, stress the importance of filling the world with their religion, and of everyone exerting themselves to give what they have to so great an undertaking’ (Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, ii. 259). 19. Arber (ed.), Registers, ii. 725. As he was for Tapp’s master Astley, Law’s Draper master was Abraham Veale. Law and Astley both worked for Veale in the early 1580s. In his 1596 will, Veale left both Astley and Law a black mourning cloak. 20. Law also published much professional drama; he acquired the rights to three Shakespeare titles from Andrew Wise in 1603 (Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 239). 21. William Barlow, The sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of November, being the next Sunday after the discoverie of this late horrible treason (London: Matthew Law: 1606), A3v. 22. Daniel Price, Sauls prohibition staide. Or The apprehension, and examination of Saule. And the inditement of all that persecute Christ, with a reproofe of those that traduce the honourable plantation of Virginia (London: Matthew Law, 1609), F2r. 23. For King’s Printer Thomas Berthelet’s publishing efforts on behalf of the Crown in the early 1540s, see Arber (ed.), Registers, ii. 50–​60. For commissioning of The Book of Common Prayer in the late 1550s, see Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘Thomas Marshe Invents the Press Figure’, The Library, 7th ser., 19/​4 (2018), 464–​465. 24. For the City of London’s print commissions, see Mark Jenner, ‘London’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 294–​307. 25. In this period, there were numerous examples of publications financed in this way (e.g. by John Biddle in the 1610s, Francis Quarles in the 1630s, John Taylor in the 1640s, William Dugdale in the 1650s, and Margaret Cavendish in the 1660s). 26. As part of incorporation, the Stationers’ Company restricted ownership of print titles to company members through licensing. 27. Publishing by subscription, one version of upfront reimbursement, emerged in the 1620s. See Graham Perry, ‘Patronage and the Printing of Learned Works for the Author’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​ 1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 183–​188. 28. The Spanish Ambassador Pedro de Zúñiga wrote to Phillip III on 15 March that ‘they have collected in 20 days an amount of money . . . that frightens me. Between fourteen of them, the earls and barons have given 40,000 ducats; the merchants give much more; and there is no fellow or woman who does not go offering [something] for this enterprise’ (Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, ii. 256). 29. Terence H. O’Brien, ‘The London Livery Companies and the Virginia Company’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 68/​2 (1960), 137–​155. 30. William A. Jackson (ed.), Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957), 342–​344. One of these investors was Law. Saul’s Prohibition Stayed, then, was a venture with the potential to be doubly advantagious for Law’s Fox business.

226   Kirk Melnikoff 31. All texts were supposed to be approved by a Church or State authority before being printed. For authorization as it differed from licence and entry, see Blayney, ‘Publication’, 396-​405. 32. One further Virginia entry was solely authorized by Sir Edward Cecil, a prominent Virginia Company investor (Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 473). 33. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 463. Like most of these broadsheets, the ballad was licensed by the Stationers’ Company but not authorized. Given the ballad’s endorsement of the Virginia project, the bookseller Wright may have been allowed to publish it at his own risk. See Blayney, ‘Publication’, 398. 34. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 461. See Robert C. Johnson, ‘The Lotteries of the Virginia Company, 1612–​1621’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 74/​3 (1966), 259–​292; Robert C. Johnson, ‘The “Running Lotteries” of the Virginia Company’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 68/​2 (1960), 156–​165; and O’Brien, ‘London Livery Companies’, 149–​155. 35. Jackson (ed.), Records, 53. 36. Jackson (ed.), Records, 346–​347. 37. After the death of Welby, the Virginia Company established similar working relationships with the Kingston printing house at the Gilded Cock in Paternoster Row, with the Snodham printing house near Aldersgate, and with the Budge bookshop at the Green Dragon. For Kingston and Snodham, see D. F. McKenzie, ‘Two Bills for Printing’, The Library, 5th ser., 15 (1960), 129–​132. 38. In his 1638 will, Swinhowe would bequeath two shares in the Bermuda Company along with 50 acres (202,342 m2) of Bermuda land (TNA, PROB 11/​178/​574). Bishop’s will was witnessed in April 1619 (TNA, PROB 11/​134/​50). 39. Kingsbury (ed.), Records, iii. 90. 40. Welby apprenticed with the Draper Richard Bankworth and was made free of the Drapers’ Company in 1604. In March 1618, possibly after his death, Welby’s rights to copy (forty-​ three titles in all) were assigned to the printer Thomas Snodham (Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 620–​621). 41. Wright points to a similar practice of the Virginia Company paying preachers with shares (Religion and Empire, 87). 42. Robert Gray, A good speed to Virginia (London: William Welby, 1609), A3r, D4r. 43. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 408. 44. William Symonds, Virginia. A sermon preached at VVhite-​Chappel (London: Eleazar Edgar and William Welby, 1609), A2r. 45. Although Welby is not listed in the pamphlet’s imprint, he assigned this title over to the bookseller Michael Baker in October (Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 444). 46. After expanding its jurisdiction to Bermuda in its 1612 third charter, the Virginia Company sold its controlling interest in the island to the Somers Isle Company in 1615. Welby was also listed as an adventurer in the Somers Isle Company’s first royal charter that same year. 47. Keith Maslen, An Early London Printing House at Work: Studies in the Bowyer Ledgers (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993) and James Raven, ‘Jobbing Printing in Late Early Modern London: Questions of Variety, Stability and Regularity’, in Benedict Miyamoto and Louisiane Ferlier (eds.), Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688–​1832 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 27–​49 48. A publication by the counsell of Virginea, touching the plantation there (London: William Welby, 1610).

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    227 49. Much of this material, like most early modern print ephemera, is now lost, but some isolated examples along with Welby’s many Stationers’ Register entries (e.g. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 457, 478, and 527) give us a rough sense of the extent to which he was asked to oversee such job printing. 50. For examples of Welby’s bills of adventure and lottery announcements, see STC 24830.6 and STC 24833.4 respectively. Although no example or record of these now exists, it stands to reason that Welby also delivered lottery books to the Virginia Company. 51. Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Prevalence of Shared Printing in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 67 (1973), 437–​442. 52. The bookseller John Trundle worked as an acquisition agent for a number of publishers in the early seventeenth century. See Gerald D. Johnson, ‘John Trundle and the Book Trade, 1603–​1626’, Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 177–​199. 53. It could take years for outlay in a publication project to be recouped, even longer for a significant profit to be realized. See Blayney, ‘Publication’, 405–​410. 54. John Downame, Lectures vpon the foure first chapters of the prophecie of Hosea (London: William Welby, 1608), A5v. 55. Consolations for the Afflicted includes an errata page (¶¶¶¶2r) which suggests that Welby showed Downame a copy of the title before he began wholesaling it at the Greyhound. 56. William Perkins, M. Perkins, his Exhortation to repentance, out of Zephaniah (London: William Welby, 1605), *5v, *6r. Welby would go on to publish only one of the titles that Crashaw lists. 57. St Augustine, Saint Augustine, Of the citie of God (London: George Eld and Miles Flesher, 1620), 3r. Crashaw’s relationship with Healey may have gone as far back as the mid-​1590s when the divine began his association with the Yorkshire baron Edmund Sheffield. Sheffield’s servant at the time was Richard Healey, John’s father. See John Considine, ‘Healey, John (b. in or after 1585?, d. in or before 1616), translator’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 58. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 377. 59. Stephen Wright, ‘Symonds, William (b. 1556, d. in or after 1616), Church of England clergyman and headmaster’, ODNB. 60. In his dedicatory epistle to the adventurers of the Virginia Company in the printed version of his sermon, Symonds laments that ‘I could not satisfie their request that would haue me goe’ (A3v–​A4r). 61. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 408. 62. Virginia. A Sermon was advertised for wholesale at Edgar’s Windmill warehouse. 63. It is also possible that Edgar himself originally acquired the sermon as he at this time was a frequent collaborator with the Machams, the publishers of Robert Johnson’s Nova Britannia (1609). 64. Edgar appears to have ended his bookselling business in April 1613 when he transferred most if not all of his rights to copy to the Hodgets’ bookselling business at the King’s Arms. Windet would be buried on 18 December at St Mary Magdalene church in Old Fish Street. In his 21 November 1610 will, Windet dictates that his printing materials, rights to copy, and books should be equally divided between Stansby and Windet’s two sisters, and that Stansby should then have the right to purchase these from Windet’s sisters at a price determined by his executors (TNA, PROB 11/​117/​12). 65. Arber (ed.), Registers, ii. 718. Edgar began his apprenticeship with the bookseller Raphe Jackson in September 1589 (Arber (ed.), Registers, ii. 163).

228   Kirk Melnikoff 66. Gerald D. Johnson, ‘Succeeding as an Elizabethan Publisher: The Example of Cuthbert Burby’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 21 (1992), 71–​78. 67. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 34. 68. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 349. 69. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 420. 70. Elizabeth Burby’s last Stationers’ Register copy entrance is dated 10 December 1608 (Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 398); she married the gentleman Humfrey Turner a year later on 17 October 1609, one day after her transfer to Welby. 71. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 425. 72. A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia (London: John Stepneth, 1610), A3v. 73. Arber (ed.), Registers, ii. 732. 74. For more on the Burre bookselling business’s connection to Jonson, see Zachary Lesser, ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, English Literary Renaissance, 29/​1 (1999), 22–​43. 75. John, who died on the first expedition of the East India Company (1601–​3) as captain of the Hector, left his sister £40 (TNA, PROB 11/​102/​452). David, who died at sea off the coast of Africa on the Samaritan in 1615, left her 20 nobles (TNA, PROB 11/​131/​400). Henry, who died in Sumatra in 1613, left her £250 along with a portion of his estate. He also left £20 to the Burres’ daughter Johane who was his goddaughter (TNA, PROB 11/​123/​696). 76. Both titles were entered by Walter Burre in the Stationers’ Register in mid-​July (Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 167). The report was published in 1600 as A True and Credible Report of a . . . Dangerous Fight at Sea; copies of the ballad no longer exist. Two of the English ships involved in this fray, the Ascension and the Susan, would be enlisted in the East India Company’s first expedition. 77. For more on Scott’s account, see Michael Neill, ‘Putting History to the Question: An Episode of Torture at Bantam, in 1604’, English Literary Renaissance, 25/​1 (1995), 45–​75. 78. The last East-​Indian voyage (London: Walter Burre, 1606), n.p. 79. In his will, David Middleton left Scott 40 shillings so that he could purchase a mourning ring (TNA, PROB 11/​131/​400). 80. Margaret Makepeace, ‘Middleton, Sir Henry (d. 1613)’, ODNB. 81. Henry’s will was witnessed 20 March 1610, three months after Stepneth entered A True and Sincere Declaration in the Stationers’ Register (TNA, PROB 11/​123/​696). David’s will was first dated 24 March 1613 with an appendix added on 20 April 1614 (TNA, PROB 11/​131/​ 400). 82. John Middleton gave ‘his good friend’ Robert Middleton a £10 legacy and made him an overseer of his will (TNA, PROB 11/​102/​452). 83. Since the nineteenth century, it has been thought that Shakespeare’s romance The Tempest was inspired and in part based on the story of the Sea Venture’s wreck at Bermuda. 84. Strachey had originally invested £25 in the company before leaving for Jamestown in 1609. At Jamestown, Strachey wrote his own account of his experiences in Bermuda and Virginia, and this would be published in 1625 as part of Purchas His Pilgrims after apparently being suppressed by the Virginia Company in 1610. 85. Arber (ed.), Registers, iii. 473. 86. William Strachey, For the colony in Virginea Britannia. Lavves diuine, morall and martiall, &c (London: Walter Burre, 1612), A2v.

Publishing Virginia (1608–1615)    229 87. An acquaintance with Middleton might explain why Strachey, in his dedicatory epistle, alludes to ‘those not many yeeres since in Magnuza [Malacca] who haue restored . . . after so great a floud and rage of abused goodness, all Lawes, literature and Vertue againe’ (A3r).

Select Bibliography Arber, Edward (ed.), Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–​1640 A.D., 5 vols. (London: 1875–​94). Blayney, Peter W. M., ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–​422. Blayney, Peter W. M., The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–​1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Darnton, Robert, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111/​3 (1982), 65–​83. Johnson, Gerald D., ‘Succeeding as an Elizabethan Publisher: The Example of Cuthbert Burby’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 21 (1992), 71–​78. Lesser, Zachary, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). McKenzie, D. F., Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986). Melnikoff, Kirk, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Smith, Helen, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Straznicky, Marta (ed.), Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Pres, 2012). Wayne, Valerie (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

CHAPTER 13

Regional B o ok a nd Print T ra de s Rachel Stenner

A remarkable book by William London, bookseller of Newcastle (fl. 1643–​60), unremarkably opens with a dedicatory epistle addressed ‘To the Gentry, Ministers of the Gospel and Others’.1 This Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (1657), which lists around 4,500 titles, goes on, however, to describe itself as ‘of a Peculiar Choice to the Wise, Learned and Studious in the Northern Counties of Northumberland, . . . of Durham, Westmerland and Cumberland’.2 London is particularly (but not exclusively) aiming the book at a regional Northern audience of the gentry, clerical, and ‘other’ readers—​despite the ironic centripetal pull of his own name. He confesses that his designs are ‘intended, for the generall good of these parts’, meaning the North.3 His work will be beneficial to the region itself. The Catalogue may elevate seventeenth-​ century Northern writers and publishers but, in London’s representation, the North needs improvement: ‘these Counties recorded for Honour, have not been yet worthy to be branded with any thing, that could truly stick to them so much, as the present want of Studious Gentlemen’.4 Calling on the ‘Chronicles’ for evidence, he articulates the hope that ‘these Counties will call back the Ancient daies, when by their valour and noblenesse, they seemed to attract the Estimation of all the rest to themselves’.5 London’s reference to the ‘Chronicles’ invokes Tudor historiographers such as Edward Hall and Raphael Hollinshed. Playwrights including William Shakespeare had used Hollinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577) as sources for dramatic writing. In The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of Henry Sirnamed Hot-​Spvrre (as the 1623 First Folio titles it), the stage exploits of Harry Hotspur, heir of the Earl of Northumberland, glorify the North as fierce, hardy, and resistant to centralizing monarchical rule. London’s audience is invited to imagine, and implicitly aspire to, this legendary Northern past (even though it pertains to those of veritably noble rank). But true nobility, the letter posits, lies not in blood nor title but in learning. The bookseller’s humanism makes itself felt here; alongside subjects including mathematics, law, and divinity, he recommends works in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. By reading the works

Regional Book and Print Trades    231 London promotes, and cultivating studiousness rather than dissolute pursuits, the Northern gentry will become better leaders. This text, one of the first attempts to catalogue all English-​language books, has been recognized for its contribution to Shakespeare’s canonization, its attempt to educate its readership, and its status as an early bibliography aiming to digest an overwhelming volume of contemporary printed material.6 It exemplifies several features of the early modern (capaciously defined here) regional book and print trades: sophisticated literary qualities; the cultivation of a regional intellectual culture; an account of regional activity; an address to regional readers alongside national ones; awareness of its own geographical reach; the necessity to print a book in the capital, even when published locally. Scholars typically refer to these trades as ‘provincial’, but this chapter first proposes ‘regional’ as a more productive approach. The chapter then reviews the key scholarship in this area, and constructs a narrative overview of the legislative and historical factors determining the regional trades, with a particular focus on newspaper publishing. In demonstration of the varied ways that regional trades developed, the final sections offer three case studies: Oxford, York, and Newcastle. Oxford, with Cambridge, is the oldest established regional printing centre in the country, with a trade closely allied to the University.7 York, an ecclesiastical and administrative hub since the Middle Ages, earned a unique right to print in the mid-​seventeenth century when it hosted the King’s Printer in the Civil War era. Newcastle, also temporarily home to the King’s Printer in the same period, possessed unrivalled commercial and geographical advantages that oriented it towards London in the South, and Edinburgh in the North. Yet all these regional developments occurred within a centralized national, legislative, and institutional framework.8

Provinces, Regions, Networks In the context of English book history—​a concept with limited applicability given the riotous transnationalism of the early modern book trade—​the hegemony of London has perpetuated a centre–​periphery model. This structure of territorial, political, and cultural evaluation is in turn haunted by the racial formation of the civilized–​barbarian dyad.9 Book history is now firmly established as both a methodology and a subject but, in the English scene, it needs to turn its attention to its blind spots. The increased focus on women in the book trades, and on global scripts in typographic studies, are steps in the right direction.10 Yet, the field still awaits analysis of ethnicity in early modern English book history. Surprisingly, the spatial turn in the humanities, and the geopolitical, and topographic thinking behind the growth in postcolonial, indigenous, and transnational book histories have failed to attract attention to the regions within England.11 This is despite the significance of location in canonical book historical accounts including Lucien Febvre and Henri-​ Jean Martin’s The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–​1800 (1958; 1976) and Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998).

232   Rachel Stenner This is not to say there is no scholarship on this topic. John Hinks suggests that the unique conditions shaping the London trade (discussed below) have fostered the predominance of studies on London, but other reasons are afoot.12 John Feather’s The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-​Century England (1985) is the essential starting point. Though its titular ‘provincial’ activates a spatial frame, ‘relating to an English county’, it also embeds the centre–​periphery model, in a manner unfavourable to its topic.13 Since the early eighteenth century, ‘provincial’ has implied ‘parochial or narrow-​ minded; lacking in education, culture, or sophistication’, with Samuel Johnson defining it in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as ‘rude, unpolished’.14 As Feather himself notes, the terminology has ‘bedevilled’ this area of study.15 Hence this chapter proposes ‘regional’ as an alternative descriptor for the trades outside London, intending to describe printing in the regions rather than necessarily representative of a region. Regionalism operates simultaneously as a reaction to globalization and homogenization (so, to the dominance of the ‘centre’), and as a flexible spatial approach to geographical and cultural clusters. As Louise Fawcett describes it, at a global level a region can be likened to a nation ‘in the sense of an imagined community: states or peoples held together by common experience and identity, custom and practice’.16 Suspending the complications of Fawcett’s allusion to Benedict Anderson’s view of ‘imagined communities’, the point to note is that regionalism denotes a shared, but limited, commonality of experience and practice.17 But regions, as Fawcett continues, ‘do not need to conform to state boundaries. They may comprise substate as well as suprastate and trans-​state units, offering different modalities of organization and collaboration.’18 Regions in England are ‘substate’ units and though, in the early modern period not formally described, for the purposes of book and print trade history they can be defined as follows: a loose area of networked settlements, of varying size and population density, over which an urban centre or centres exerts a varying degree of influence. The extent of this influence is an important distinction between regions. This will become clear in the case studies that follow, the Oxford trade, for example, being decidedly focused on the town itself (though also serving areas to the West), whereas Newcastle possessed a tentacular Northern reach.19 Another reason for the preponderance of studies on the London trades is archival. While W. H. Allnutt’s observation in 1879 that the history of the regional press had ‘been almost entirely neglected by local historians’ may no longer be true, much of the painstaking research that those local historians have conducted is tucked away in local publications (ironically) and local archives.20 Over 120 years after Allnutt, Peter Isaac could still complain that while scholars in the field were slowly disassembling the ‘unspoken belief that everything memorable in the book trade happens in the “golden triangle” of London, Oxford, and Cambridge’, their sources were ‘commonly less accessible’, and they depended ‘on luck, serendipity, and, especially, good friends’.21 This is still the case. Despite monumental efforts by the British Book Trade Index, and the now defunct History of the Book Trade in the North group, the history of regional printing in England remains, as F. W. Ratcliffe stated over thirty years ago, marginal to the current flow.22 The University of York’s Thin Ice Press, which focuses on historical

Regional Book and Print Trades    233 printing in that city, and projects by the Centre for Printing History and Culture, offer signs of redress. However, this situation will only be rectified when serious efforts at fully cataloguing previous scholarship on the regional trades have been undertaken, along with extensive digitization.23 The existing research falls into three main groups: statistical analyses such as David Stoker’s study of provincial imprints in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC); monographs and pamphlets on particular figures or regions, such as William and Margaret Sessions on York; broader synchronous or diachronous studies that begin to theorize.24 The most significant of the last group is Feather’s The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-​Century England. Feather argues that, for most of the period, the organizational structure of the trade ‘put the provincial booksellers into an essentially dependent relationship with the London trade’.25 However, by the late eighteenth century, the relationship transformed into one of interdependence, because ‘the growth of the provincial market for books meant that an ever-​increasing percentage of a publisher’s profit was derived from country sales’.26 It is fair to say that most of the scholarship fleshes out Feather’s picture of regional subservience to London, Paul Morgan for example stressing London’s dominance throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.27 Recent assessments, though, have uncovered a continual process of negotiation, with the effect, as John Barnard and Maureen Bell write, that ‘dominance was never complete, was continually challenged, and by 1695 was being significantly modified’.28 Barnard and Bell take apprenticeship to demonstrate this point: as D. F. McKenzie evidences, between 1562 and 1640 only 18 per cent of those apprenticed to the London trade came from the city itself.29 Barbara Crosbie, by contrast, strengthens Feather’s suggestion of interdependence by concluding that, far from the London publishers hindering the local printing industry, ‘it was the London trade that fostered a market for books in the north-​eastern counties, making it viable to publish locally’.30 Dispensing with the problem of subservience, Hinks makes a welcome, but isolated, attempt to theorize the regional structure of the early modern book trades, engaging the sociological work of Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz to do so.31 Network theory, which Hinks proposes as an alternative to the centre–​periphery model, views social structures as a series of networks punctuated by nodes and, crucially, attempts to understand the relationship between the nodes. By considering material products alongside networks, Hinks argues, scholars can reconstruct a snapshot of the book trade.32 Although the mention of material items in the same breath as ‘network theory’ may be resonant of Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), the two should not be confused. In ANT, society is not reliant on human actors. Non-​human entities (like books) can be actants. Therefore material objects (things) and social formations (people) do not exist in a hierarchy, with lowly stuff in the subservient position, and humans privileged. Rather they arrange and rearrange themselves in multidirectional webs or mesh-​like arrays.33 For Hinks, very clearly, books are the ‘products of the trade’.34 The value of the network approach, though, is that it enables the direction and nature of the relationships within the trade to be mapped, as will become evident in

234   Rachel Stenner more detail through the case studies below. In order to understand them, however, the national picture must be perceived.

The National Picture For England, the period this essay covers held some convulsive events, amongst which printing itself is often listed: the Reformation; the English Revolution and the Republic; the country’s rise as a colonial power; the entry of the English into the Americas; the growth of the transatlantic slave trade; the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; the Revolutionary Wars. Though these phenomena contribute to an increasingly shaky grand narrative of a period beset with modernity-​forming ruptures, they were continuous with their immediate historical surroundings. Similarly, it would be a mistake to think that the regional book trade began with the cataclysmic arrival of printing in any one area. Book production in England has a long history. Prior to the Norman Conquest, Winchester was the cultural and political capital of the country, and a considerable quantity of medieval book production was undertaken by employees of religious communities or lay houses. From the mid-​twelfth century there are signs of professionalization in book production with, by the mid-​thirteenth century, clerks being located in the vicinity of most villages who could make books and documents, materials permitting.35 As is well known, printing in England started relatively late; it was not until 1476 that William Caxton arrived in London from Bruges and set up shop in Westminster. His new products entered a lively manuscript market, with the country itself operating on the fringes of a flourishing and multifaceted European book trade. Thanks to the protectionist policies of the Stationers’ Company, the trade in the regions was mainly distributive, though by 1600 it was well established in several places: Oxford, Cambridge, York, Newcastle, Norwich, Exeter, Ipswich, and Chester.36 Vendors, who included chapmen and pedlars visiting markets, transported publications from London and continental Europe to a local readership, with the extent of local literacy largely determining demand.37 In the seventeenth century at least, most local booksellers catered mainly for clergy and schoolmasters, and Bibles comprised a large proportion of the regional trade. In the immediate decades after Caxton’s arrival, printing presses had been established, but not sustained, in several parts of the country: Oxford, St Albans, Tavistock, York, Cambridge, Abingdon, Ipswich, Worcester, Canterbury, Norwich. Their cessation was partly because of the prohibitive cost of transporting raw materials and the finished product to a bigger market; printing paper, for example, was only imported into London. And, as Andrew Pettegree points out, even though there may have been well-​ established manuscript production and selling systems in a given area, the same area could not necessarily effect and absorb the distribution of larger quantities of rapidly-​ produced printed books.38 Pettegree notes a similar pattern of early expansion followed by contraction in continental Europe in the incunabula period, but it is only in England

Regional Book and Print Trades    235 that the contraction phase involved the complete dying-​out of regional printing, and the subsequent domination of the market by one place.39 There was, then, little printing in the regions prior to the Stationers’ Company receiving its charter in 1557—​a moment that marks the beginning of a highly restrictive sequence of legislation for the regional trades. The Stationers’ Charter effectively located in London control of the printing trade. This was because, after 1557, members had to secure a licence to print any book from the Wardens of the Company. Further articles in 1559 extended the Stationers’ control over booksellers too. A 1566 Star Chamber decree then gave the Wardens of the Company unlimited power to search premises, meaning that unlicensed printing could easily be rooted out. These de facto constraints became explicit in 1586 when the Star Chamber issued a further decree to protect the interests of the Stationers’ Company. This made two key demands. Printing presses, up to a maximum of twenty printing houses in London, should be registered with the Wardens of the Company. Secondly, printing outside London was explicitly banned, except in the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge. The potential for regional printing was forthwith stifled. In addition to legislation, the Stationers’ Company evolved trade practices that were well entrenched by the late seventeenth century. The so-​called ‘conger system’ restricted the wholesale of popular books to an exclusive London group, while the trade sale was an invitation-​only copyright auction.40 Combined, the effect of legislation and trade practices was an intense concentration on London unique in Europe. In the seventeenth century, an Act passed in 1662, ‘For Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses’, also known as the Printing, or Licensing Act, had some very significant consequences. The Act sanctioned printing in York, meaning that this area could begin to develop a print trade alongside its bookselling. It also prohibited publication without licence, with the effect again of confining commercial printing in the rest of the country to London.41 However, the decisive moment for the regional trades came in 1695 when the Licensing Act of 1662 was not renewed, obviating restrictions on the location of the press. This lapse created the conditions for the printing trade to thoroughly reorganize itself.

Newspapers Despite the decisive breach of 1695, and Henry Plomer’s oft-​cited remark that ‘by 1725 all the important towns in the kingdom had their own printers’, a regional print trade did not suddenly explode.42 Plomer continues, ‘almost the first thing these printers did, was to establish a local newspaper’.43 The rise of the regional newspaper proprietor is a crucial element in the development of regional printing trades. By the late seventeenth century, it was publishers and booksellers, rather than printers, wielding the financial and social power in the trade—​with the exception of a few high-​profile men such as Jacob Tonson (1655–​1736). In the regions, bookselling was rarely a main occupation and often combined with others, particularly (in the eighteenth century) the vending

236   Rachel Stenner of patent medicines. Booksellers and printers were typically men (and, increasingly, women) from the middling rank. They were local residents who gained prominence, significance, and often wealth, by their occupation and their role as ‘communications brokers’, that is, traders in information.44 Some held public office, like John White senior of York (1626–​1716) who was elected City Chamberlain, and many, like the King’s Printer Stephen Bulkley (fl. 1631–​80), were politically or ideologically active via their publications. They also operated within the closely knit interpersonal relations of a local community, in which, as Victoria Gardner points out, ‘trust in the printer and printing house was a critical element of trust in print’ (something Adrian Johns argues for the trade at large).45 The development of the regional newspaper press, for which the eighteenth century is the key period, was intertwined with the growth of the regional print trade generally until the early nineteenth century. In 1702, the first provincial newspaper was issued, either the Bristol Boy or Norwich Post. By 1723 there were twenty-​four regional newspapers; in 1805 over a hundred.46 Feather, not only pointing out that ‘newspaper printing in the first half of the century is the only aspect of the whole provincial trade which has been properly researched and analysed’, goes so far as to argue that ‘the whole provincial trade came to revolve around the newspapers and their distribution’.47 As with the rest of the regional book trade, involvement in news began with distribution, by providing networks for London newsbooks from 1642.48 This particular form of information brokerage, Joad Raymond teaches, ‘has direct bearings on issues of provincialism and neutralism. Information crossed the boundaries of the local communities, and turned the provinces into parts of the nations.’49 However, if, for the nineteenth century, the contribution of newspapers to the formation of regional identities is widely acknowledged—​Baner ac Amserau Cymru (The Banner and Times of Wales), for example, addressing its readers in Welsh—​for the eighteenth and earlier, the point is moot.50 Raymond describes a one-​ way relationship for the 1640s, finding that newsbooks educated a provincial gentry ignorant of the King’s policies, but, working with a more complex newspaper scene in the eighteenth century, Gardner finds that the regional press ‘distilled national and global worldviews into distinctly local perspectives’.51 One distinctly local feature of the regional press was advertising, the nature of which signalled the tastes and wealth of readers. Local advertising was used to bolster the size of editions, and blended with news copied from London papers to create a mixed flavour. Thus, the twelve-​page Newcastle Courant of Saturday, 1 August 1724 opens with national news from the 23 July edition of the London Evening Post, reporting the King’s planned move from Chantilly to Versailles. The final three pages, by contrast, are intensely regional. This section is devoted to advertisements, mostly for livestock and property, but also including one for ‘Mr William Armstrong’s, Shop on the Side, Newcastle’ where ‘all sorts of coffee and tea’—​the advertisement enumerates seven separate types—​are for sale.52 The regional press was, then, built on local links. Eventually, the proprietors would connect in a national network. As Gardner details, over the course of the eighteenth century, the regional press became a cooperative body that forged a hefty niche in the nation, was more powerful than the London press, and was able to flex its muscles

Regional Book and Print Trades    237 in Parliament owing to its fiscal contribution to the national coffers, and its power in local politics.53 With this broad view in mind, regional detail can now be approached by considering Oxford, York, and Newcastle. These three cities came to prominence in the regional trades owing to different advantages: for Oxford, the University; for York, ecclesiastical, legal, and royal privileges; for Newcastle, commerce and geography.

Oxford Printing in Oxford, which is far more local than regional, developed in a manner comparable only to Cambridge, owing to the presence of the University and the protection that institution gave the printers. In this town, a particular relationship with the Stationers’ Company was enforced that could be collaborative, but was often antagonistic. There are records of illuminators, scribes, and parchment makers in Oxford from the late twelfth century (at the beginnings of the University), with Stationarius recorded there from 1262 (meaning a licensed shopkeeper dealing in old and new books).54 Printing arrived in Oxford early, in 1478, and around a dozen academic works were published there before 1486. There was then a hiatus until 1517 when another flurry of academic works were printed in a two-​year period, before Oxford printing fell dormant. In 1586, the University received permission to print from the Star Chamber (against the Stationers’ London privilege), Cambridge having recently revived its much older privilege, which was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. At this point the University was seeking ‘a new way forward, politically and educationally’, and found that a local market and links with London now made for financial viability.55 The new press was founded by Thomas Thomas (1553–​88), a former university teacher turned private businessman. Thomas owned his equipment, and made the decisions about what was printed and with whom to work, though licensed and legally protected by the University. In a situation that was financially disadvantageous to the printer, the University determined the price of books. Consequently, Thomas, and his immediate successor Joseph Barnes (1550–​1618), sought collaborations with London stationers to sell their books to a bigger market. One motive behind the Oxford press was, indeed, to prevent books written in Oxford being printed elsewhere. This naturally threatened the Stationers’ Company, creating a tension that would persist throughout the seventeenth century, only occasionally modified by ‘treaties of convenience’.56 In these disputes, the University increasingly protected the press against London with the eventual result that a supervisory Faculty committee was established. This process was consolidated in 1630, when Archbishop William Laud (1573–​1645) was elected chancellor of the University and the learned press was created, fired by his determined efforts. In 1634, Laud appointed an Architypographus, a specialist to run the press, with manual, literary, philological, and typographic knowledge. Another structural change was the fact that the types now purchased for the learned press (in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic scripts) would be owned

238   Rachel Stenner by the University and not the printer. Laud did not live to see his ambitions for the press fulfilled, as he was executed in 1645, but the task of turning the press into an internationally recognized institution was taken up by John Fell (1625–​86), Dean of Christ Church. This was gradual work, but by the turn of the seventeenth century, Oxford could ‘boast’ of its learned press, ‘under its own control, run by professional printers’ and with its future existence protected.57 Notwithstanding this eventual success, the middle decades of the century were fraught for Oxford printers, partially, as for everyone else, because of the national situation, and partially owing to their business dealings. In 1632, Laud had acquired a privilege for Oxford to print the King James Bible. Wanting to bide its time, and seeing a more financially rewarding prospect, the press leased the privilege to the King’s Printer and the Stationers’ Company. This meant that the University would suspend its right to print Bibles. However, it was not always paid, especially in the Civil War years, when the Stationers’ Company was subject to the financial constraints of Parliament for the war effort.58 During the 1670s, the University began to lease the privilege, more profitably, to independent printers, with the ultimate result that in the 1670s a separate Bible Press was established. Also during the Civil War era, the landmark Royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus appeared in Oxford in 1643. Edited by John Birkenhead (c.1617–​79), a fellow of All Souls College, this was one of the earliest periodicals. It cultivated an emotive prose style that drew, in response, satire, sarcasm, and scatology from its Parliamentarian London rivals.59 Early modern printing in Oxford, then, whilst it sheltered under the protective wing of the University, is a story of constant rivalry and negotiation with London. Established institutions of a different nature, and a similar limited autonomy, characterize a parallel history in York.

York Where printing in Oxford, and bookselling before it, were nurtured by the University, York printing developed after the King’s Printer’s peripatetic press arrived in 1642.60 York was already a powerful place. Possessed of an ecclesiastical court, and the archdiocese, the city was the seat of the King’s Council in the Northern parts from the reign of Henry VIII until 1641. As John K. Walton writes, York was the ‘nearest approximation to a regional political capital’ that the country had, uniting ‘ecclesiastical and governing bodies which oversaw half the kingdom’.61 One effect of these institutions was that there were always many visitors. Though the resident population doubled to 28,000 between the late seventeenth century and 1841, York fell out of step with other Northern towns (such as Leeds and Liverpool) that came to dominate the region in the Industrial Revolution.62 Yet York was not isolated, P. J. Wallis finding persuasive evidence in subscription lists of ‘cross-​regional networks’; the printer Thomas Gent, for example, had business connections in Newcastle, Scarborough, Halifax, Hull, Sunderland, and Stockton.63

Regional Book and Print Trades    239 The earliest records of the book trades in the city appear in the 1270s, with ‘stationer’ recorded in 1319. In the thirteenth century, when the liturgical Use of York became widely adopted, the copying and updating of service books could sustain a York book trade, to the extent that the scriveners (and other trades) formed a guild by 1377.64 York’s first printer arrived in 1498, a Dutchman named Frederick Freez (fl. 1495–​1515), but his tenure (like the other early regional printers) was short-​lived, and none of his work survives. There were several early booksellers, and after James I and VI visited York in 1603, ‘stationers were permitted to trade’ there.65 Already the institutions and privileges associated with the city put it on an advantageous footing. It was in the 1640s, with the turbulence of the Civil War raging, that York’s printing trade took flight. In 1642, Charles I moved the court to the city, with the King’s Printer in tow. Approaching the first skirmish of the war in September, the King lived inside the city walls. He was in close contact with his printer, John Legate II (1600–​58), who was using the imprint of the incarcerated King’s Printer, Robert Barker. This was a tense time, and thirty-​nine publications issued from the Royal Press, those authored by the King characteristic for their black letter. The press departed in September, by which time Stephen Bulkley, a master printer from London, had arrived to contribute Royalist publications, ‘by special command’, to the cause.66 When York was taken by the Parliamentarians in 1644 after the Battle of Marston Moor, Bulkley was forced to desist, yet he was soon summoned to Newcastle by the King, at which point he started calling himself ‘Printer to the King’s Majesty’. Following these events, a 1649 Act ‘for better regulating the Press’, stipulated that York, Oxford, and Cambridge were now all permitted to print; York’s permission was reiterated in 1662.67 Benefiting from not only legal privileges, but also the earlier command of the King, in the second half of the seventeenth century York played host to a significant network of printing families: the Broads, Whites, and finally the Gents. Their histories demonstrate the ways that familial connections, and local rivalries, shaped the regional trades. Despite the halt of the Royalist press under the military governorship of General Lord Fairfax, the puritan Thomas Broad had started producing sermons and political tracts in York in 1644; the name of his widow, Alice Broad, also appears on a series of booklets from 1661.68 The Broads ran the first established printing business in the city. Their daughter, Hannah, would marry a printer from London, John White senior, who arrived in 1680; Hannah was the conduit to his possession of the Broads’ business. He assumed control at the former Broad premises, and employed an assistant named Thomas Gent. In 1688, White senior took the highly risky course of printing the manifesto of William of Orange (against the strict decree of James II and VII). When William arrived with his army in Devon, this was the Glorious Revolution, the deposition of James, and the return of his Protestant daughter, Mary. In this situation, White senior was imprisoned in Hull Castle, but later rewarded by William and Mary when they appointed him ‘Their Majesties’ Printer for the City of York and the Five Northern Counties’.69 It was under William that the 1662 Licensing Act was allowed to lapse in 1695. John and Alice White had a son, John White junior (fl. 1711–​69), who became a successful printer in Newcastle (and is discussed below). When Alice died, John White

240   Rachel Stenner senior married a woman named Grace, leaving her his equipment when he died. It was Grace who took the foundational step of opening the first newspaper in the city, the York Mercury, in February 1719. Sessions and Sessions postulate that she was inspired by her stepson, John White junior, who by now had started the Newcastle Courant. When Grace died, the full estate was inherited by Charles Bourne (the grandson of her deceased husband), who came to an untimely end, but not until after he had married Alice Guy, a servant in the printing house. This is when York’s most well-​known printer, the aforementioned Thomas Gent, properly enters the story. Sessions and Sessions describe this man in memorable terms: ‘the unruly character of Thomas Gent, a run-​away Dublin apprentice; prolific printer, writer, publisher, “artist” and writer of doggerel; restless in youth, argumentative in his middle years and pathetic in the poverty of his old age’.70 Many details of Gent’s life are known from a singular text that now resides in the York Minster Library: his manuscript autobiography. This was published in 1832 as The Life of Mr Thomas Gent: Printer, of York, and is a vivid narrative of rags to riches to rages. Having spent a short time in York in his youth working for John White senior, Gent returned to London, where he ran his own press. As he describes it, upon the death of Charles Bourne, he was informed by an acquaintance that he must go to York: ‘without it’s your own fault; for your first sweetheart is now at liberty and left in good circumstances by her dear spouse’.71 The sweetheart was the recently widowed Alice Guy, newly independent inheritrix of the Broad–​White business in Coffee Yard, now with its established newspaper. The pair were married, despite the resistance of Alice’s uncle, John White junior of Newcastle—​a man Gent describes as ‘obnoxious’, wretched, and malicious.72 Keen to make his mark, Gent renamed Grace White’s the York Mercury as the Original York Journal or Weekly Courant. He paints an acrimonious picture of his professional relations with White junior, reporting that the latter (upset by the business leaving the family) built not only a York branch of his own business, but a rival paper, the York Courant: ‘they published a newspaper, which whilst they cried up, almost in the same breath they ran down mine with that eager bitterness of spirit which they had instilled into them’.73 Despite these and other obstacles, Gent’s press ran for forty years, and he personally wrote histories of York, Ripon, and Hull. During this time he enjoyed periods of success, but he died in poverty. Printing in York, then, comparably to Oxford, flourished as a result of its particular institutional setting, but also because of an intertwined network of regional, and personal connections. The trade in Newcastle similarly benefited from the mid-​ seventeenth-​century arrival of the King, but instead of institutional prerogatives, this city possessed impressive commercial fortitude.

Newcastle By the mid-​sixteenth century, Newcastle—​the eye, and later the great emporium, of the North—​was the largest town in the region, and the third largest in England.74

Regional Book and Print Trades    241 A prosperous port centre, it had had a monopoly on coal export in the region since 1530, combined with a strategic river position, and a prominent role in border warfare.75 By 1597 there was a library; booksellers were admitted into a guild in 1675, and the city became renowned as a major production centre for chapbooks. Prior to 1695, the book trades supplied mainly the clergy and lawyers of Durham Cathedral and the Palatinate Court respectively, but Newcastle also housed a growing middling rank of professional people. There was a strong regional culture, and an especially large book trade developed.76 The close of the eighteenth century saw Newcastle become the largest printing centre in England outside London, perhaps because of its very remoteness and surely also because it was oriented not only south but north towards Scotland.77 Isaac cites the example of Charles Elliot, the Edinburgh publisher and bookseller, who ‘corresponded with some 155 members of the English provincial trade; of these forty-​ eight were in the North . . . with sixteen in Newcastle alone’.78 There was no printing in the city until 1639 when Charles I, during the First Bishops’ War, brought with him Legatt and the Royal Press, as he would to York some three years later. Legatt produced propagandistic proclamations, tracts, and one sermon printed at the King’s request.79 But only after 1695, with the lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act, did printing in Newcastle expand: within a century there were twenty printers, twelve booksellers and stationers, thirteen bookbinders, and three engraving shops. As Gardner notes, the city’s connectedness with different regions, over both land and water, fuelled its growth. Other sectors of the economy simultaneously thrived, including glass-​making, pottery, and the coastal trade; this produced a complementary demand for printed materials and stationery.80 Moreover, paper mills had now opened in the region, meaning that supplies were convenient. Like York in the White and Gent era, Newcastle’s regional success as a printing centre was largely due to its newspaper proprietors. Especially important was Gent’s rival, John White junior himself, founder of the Newcastle Courant in 1711. The Courant, in print until 1910, engaged a distribution network covering the Northern counties from the Scottish borders to Lancashire and Yorkshire. Its distribution methods included booksellers, grocers, postal, and carrier systems. White junior thus had significant reach, and was even able to reprint some of his titles in London. As Gent’s anecdotes from York suggest, the Northern newspaper market was competitive and defensive, but White junior, Gent also reports, ‘heaped up riches in abundance’.81 Having moved to Newcastle at the age of 19, White junior was the city’s trailblazing printer. It is possible, but undetermined, that he undertook his apprenticeship with his father John White senior. Crosbie depicts the son as a politically astute High Church conservative, of a provocative bent, sometimes given to Jacobitism.82 Through his general publishing, and the Courant, he actively encouraged the region’s intellectual life. Alongside the sermons, broadside ballads, chapbooks, and local histories that issued from the press, the Courant, as Helen Berry argues, ‘functioned as a communication link between authors and the reading public in the North East’.83 One of the ways it did this was to encourage readers’ own endeavours. An advertisement from an early issue informs ‘all Gentlemen and Lovers of Learning, who are willing to Publish any Book in the Northern parts, that

242   Rachel Stenner John White, Printer (Living in the Close) in Newcastle upon Tine, is furnish’d with a great variety of Letters and Presses and will be ready to Print the same upon reasonable Terms’.84 As his fellow Newcastle bookseller, William London, had attempted half a century earlier, White junior took an active role in shaping the minds of readers close to home and elevating the cultural production of his region. In the process, he benefited from the growing economic success of his city. The connections between the print personnel of Newcastle and York, and Newcastle and Scotland, demonstrate the fact that the regional trades could be oriented in other directions than towards London. It is true to say that England was unique in Europe for the powerful influence its capital exerted over the regions. However, whilst London governed the legislative and, certainly until 1695, commercial structure of the book and print trades, this was neither a rigid nor unilateral situation—​as the tension between Oxford and London witnesses. Key regional centres followed their own trajectories, nurtured by varying institutional privileges and local advantages. Crucial in the development of the regional trades were two things. Firstly, the role of the newspaper as a form of, and forum for, the exchange of information. Secondly, the significance of skilled and savvy book and print trade personnel, whose influence occasionally extended well beyond their immediate surroundings. It is through these forces that the early modern regional print trades shaped cultural production and contributed to the economic, social, and political life of their communities and beyond.

Notes 1. William London, A Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (London: s.n., 1657), Wing—​L2849, A3r. 2. London, Catalogue, A3r. 3. London, Catalogue, Br. 4. London, Catalogue, Br–​v. 5. London, Catalogue, Br–​v. 6. See Margaret Schotte, ‘ “Books for the Use of the Learned and Studious”: William London’s Catalogue of Most Vendible Books’, Book History, 11 (2008), 33–​57. 7. For more extensive discussion of this, see Jason Peacey’s chapter in this volume. 8. This chapter does not treat the other nations of the United Kingdom, nor the incipient American market. For a starting point with these areas see the chapters by Hugh Amory, Jonquil Bevan, Philip Jones, and Robert Welch in John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 744–​754, 687–​700, 701–​7 18, and 718–​734 respectively. 9. See Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), esp. 5–​7. 10. See e.g. the Women in Book History project (www.womens​book​hist​ory.org) initiated by Cait Coker and Kate Ozment, and two recent articles in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 29 (2018): Vaibhav Singh, ‘The First Indian-​script Typeface on the

Regional Book and Print Trades    243 Monotype: A Missing Chapter in the History of Mechanical Typesetting’, 37–​70, and Borna Izadpanah, ‘Early Persian Printing and Typefounding in Europe’, 87–​124. 11. Though see (with an eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century focus), John Hinks and Caroline Archer-​Parré (eds.), ‘Printing and Print Culture in the Midlands’, special issue, Midland History, 45/​2 (2020). 12. John Hinks, ‘The History of Printing and Print Culture: Contexts and Controversies’, Midland History, 45/​2 (2020), 134–​144. 13. ‘provincial, adj. and n.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 2.a. 14. OED Online, 6. 15. John Feather, ‘The Commerce of Letters: The Study of the Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 4 (1984), 405–​424 (405). 16. Louise Fawcett, ‘Exploring Regional Domains: A Comparative History of Regionalism’, International Affairs, 80/​3 (2004), 429–​446, at 432. 17. Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Version, 1983); for a critique of Anderson’s yoking of print capitalism and the nation, see Trish Loughran, ‘Books in the Nation’, in Leslie Howsam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36–​52. 18. Fawcett, ‘Exploring Regional Domains’, 432. 19. Cf. Rachel Stenner, Kaley Kramer, and Adam James Smith (eds.), Print Culture, Agency, and Regional Identity in the Hand Press Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). 20. W. H. Allnutt, Notes on Printers and Printing in the Provincial Towns of England and Wales (London: Chiswick Press, 1879), 3. 21. Peter Isaac, ‘BSA Annual Address: The English Provincial Book Trade; A Northern Mosaic’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 95/​4 (2001), 410–​441, at 440. 22. F. W. Ratcliffe, ‘The Contribution of Book-​trade Studies to Scholarship’, in Peter Isaac (ed.), Six Centuries of the Provincial Book Trade in Britain (London: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), 1–​11, at 8. 23. Two sources have still-​valid statements of key research directions: John Feather, ‘A History of the English Provincial Book Trade: A Research Agenda’, in Barry McKay, John Hinks, and Maureen Bell (eds.), Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac (London: British Library, 2004), 1–​12; John Hinks and Maureen Bell, ‘The Book Trade in English Provincial Towns, 1700–​1849: An Evaluation of Evidence from the British Book Trade Index’, Publishing History, 57 (2005), 53–​112, at 63–​64. 24. David Stoker, ‘The Eighteenth-​Century Short Title Catalogue and Provincial Imprints’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 24 (1985), 9–​35; William K. Sessions and E. Margaret Sessions, Printing in York from the 1490s to the Present Day (York: William Sessions, 1976). 25. John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4. 26. Feather, Provincial Book Trade, 10. 27. Paul Morgan, ‘The Provincial Trade and the End of the Licensing Act’, in Isaac (ed.), Six Centuries, 31–​9, at 31. 28. John Barnard and Maureen Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, in Barnard, McKenzie, and Bell (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, iv. 665–​686, at 665. 29. Barnard and Bell, ‘English Provinces’, 666.

244   Rachel Stenner 30. Barbara Crosbie, ‘Provincial Purveyors of Culture: the Print Trade in Eighteenth-​Century Newcastle upon Tyne’, in Crosbie and Adrian Green (eds.), Economy and Culture in North-​ East England, 1500–​1800 (Martlesham: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 205–​229, at 229. 31. John Hinks, ‘The Book Trade in Early Modern Britain: Centres, Peripheries and Networks’, in Benito Rial Costas (ed.), Print Culture and Peripheries in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the History of Printing and the Book Trade in Small, European and Spanish Cities (Leiden: Brill: 2012), 101–​126. 32. Cf. Andrew Pettegree, ‘Centre and Periphery in the European Book World’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 18 (2008), 101–​128. Pettegree formulates the continental European trade as a ‘series of concentric circles’ (105). 33. Helen Smith is one early modern book historian who has effectively engaged ANT. See ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9–​11. 34. Hinks, ‘Book Trade’, 126. 35. A. I. Doyle, ‘The English Provincial Book Trade Before Printing’, in Isaac (ed.), Six Centuries, 13–​29, at 23. For more on medieval English book production, see Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (eds.), The Production of Books in England: 1350–​1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 36. Barnard and Bell, ‘English Provinces’, 667. 37. Hinks, ‘Book Trade’, 104. 38. Pettegree, ‘Centre and Periphery’, 103. 39. Pettegree, ‘Centre and Periphery’, 114. 40. Feather, Provincial Book Trade, 2–​3. 41. Feather, Provincial Book Trade, 1. 42. Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland 1668–​1725 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), p. vii. 43. Plomer, Dictionary, p. vii. 44. Victoria Gardner, The Business of News in England, 1760–​1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5. 45. Gardner, Business, 12; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 46. Jeremy Black, ‘ “Calculated Upon a Very Extensive and Useful Plan”—​ the English Provincial Press in the Eighteenth Century’, in Isaac (ed.), Six Centuries, 61–​72, at 63. 47. Feather, Provincial Book Trade, 17. 48. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–​ 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9. 49. Raymond, Invention, 15–​16. 50. On the nineteenth century, see Andrew Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–​1900 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018), 10. 51. Raymond, Invention, 16; Gardner, Business, 1. 52. ‘Advertisements and Notices’, Newcastle Courant, 1 August 1724, Seventeenth-​and Eighteenth-​ Century Burney Newspapers Collection, https://​link.gale.com/​apps/​doc/​ Z200​0987​366/​BBCN?u=​sus​sex&sid=​BBCN&xid=​e58f2​f16, accessed 3 Apr. 2023. 53. Gardner, Business, 45–​46. 54. Doyle, ‘English Provincial Book Trade’, 16–​17.

Regional Book and Print Trades    245 55. David McKitterick, ‘University Printing at Oxford and Cambridge’, in Barnard, McKenzie, and Bell (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, iv. 189–​205, at 191. This section throughout is indebted to McKitterick. 56. McKitterick, ‘University Printing’, 192. 57. McKitterick, ‘University Printing’, 204. 58. Ian Gadd, ‘The Press and the London Book Trade’, in Gadd (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press, i: Beginnings to 1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 569–​600, at 582–​583. 59. Raymond, Invention, 149–​150. 60. Sessions and Sessions, Printing in York, p. viii. 61. John K. Walton, ‘North’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ii: 1540–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 111–​131, at 120. 62. Walton, ‘North’, 119–​122. 63. P. J. Wallis, ‘Cross-​Regional Connexions’, in Isaac (ed.), Six Centuries, 87–​100, at 87–​91. 64. Doyle, ‘English Provincial Book Trade’, 16–​19. 65. Sessions and Sessions, Printing in York, 16; my account of seventeenth-​century York is heavily reliant on this book: 16–​19, 22–​25. 66. Sessions and Sessions, Printing in York, 19. 67. Sessions and Sessions, Printing in York, 19. 68. Sessions and Sessions, Printing in York, 22. 69. Sessions and Sessions, Printing in York, 25. 70. Sessions and Session, Printing in York, 30. 71. Thomas Gent, The Life of Mr Thomas Gent: Printer, of York (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1832), 147. 72. Gent, Life, 154. 73. Gent, Life, 163. 74. Joyce Ellis, ‘Regional and County Centres 1700–​1840’, in Clark (ed.), Cambridge Urban History 1540–​1840, 673–​704, at 675. 75. Walton, ‘North’, 120–​121. 76. Victoria Gardner, ‘The Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade in Region and Nation: Newcastle and the North-​East’, in Gardner and John Hinks (eds.), The Book Trade in Early Modern England: Practices, Perceptions, Connections (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2014), 229–​256, at 255. The account in this section draws heavily on Gardner’s chapter. 77. Gardner, ‘Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade’, 230. 78. Isaac, ‘‘BSA Annual Address: A Northern Mosaic’, 439–​440. 79. John Philipson, ‘The King’s Printer in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1639’, The Library 11/​1 (1989), 1–​9, at 2. 80. Gardner, ‘Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade’, 230–​233. 81. Gent, Life, 154. 82. Crosbie, ‘Provincial Purveyors’, 212. 83. Helen Berry, ‘Promoting Taste in the Provincial Press: National and Local Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Newcastle upon Tyne’, British Journal For Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 25 (2002), 1–​17, at 10. 84. Cited in Berry, ‘Promoting Taste’, 10.

246   Rachel Stenner

Select Bibliography Crosbie, Barbara, ‘Provincial Purveyors of Culture: The Print Trade in Eighteenth-​Century Newcastle upon Tyne’, in Barbara Crosbie and Adrian Green (eds.), Economy and Culture in North-​East England, 1500–​1800 (Martlesham: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 205–​229. Barnard, John, and Bell, Maureen, ‘The English Provinces’, in John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 665–​686. Day, J. C., and Watson, W. M., ‘History of the Book Trade in the North: The First Twenty-​five Years’, in Peter Isaac (ed.), Six Centuries of the Provincial Book Trade in Britain (London: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), 187–​197. Feather, John, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Hinks, John, ‘The Book Trade in Early Modern Britain: Centres, Peripheries and Networks’, in Benito Rial Costas (ed.), Print Culture and Peripheries in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the History of Printing and the Book Trade in Small, European and Spanish Cities (Brill: Leiden, 2012), 101–​126. Isaac, Peter, ‘BSA Annual Address: The English Provincial Book Trade: A Northern Mosaic’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 95/​4 (2001), 410–​441. Isaac, Peter (ed.), Six Centuries of the Provincial Book Trade in Britain (London: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990). Isaac, Peter, et al., British Book Trade Index, http://​bbti.bodle​ian.ox.ac.uk Gardner, Victoria, ‘The Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade in Region and Nation: Newcastle and the North-​east’, in Gardner and John Hinks (eds.), The Book Trade in Early Modern England: Practices, Perceptions, Connections (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2014), 229–​256. Sessions, William K., and Sessions, E. Margaret, Printing in York from the 1490s to the Present Day (York: William Sessions, 1976).

CHAPTER 14

Re presenting th e L a b ou r of Printing i n I mag e and Text Katherine Hunt

Printing depends on touch. The meeting of ink on paper creates letters and lines, but this encounter is always hidden from the human eye. Printing is acheiropoietic: it happens in the moment of pressure, inside the press where no eyes or hands can reach.1 At the same time, printing is an activity that involves skill and effort and the work of trained, capable hands to do all the work leading up to that unseen moment of contact. This chapter investigates the ways in which these two aspects of printing—​hidden, and hard work—​are presented in images of the book trade. Over the course of our period, trades were opened up in print in new ways. The trend for printed instructional literature, covering topics from chess-​playing to hunting to husbandry, was expanded to cover more codified artisanal, skilled labour too—​including the printing of both text and image. I focus in this chapter on images of the labour of printing, and on printed texts that aimed to describe and explain this labour. I start by examining some sixteenth-​ century European images of printers at work, and finish by exploring instructional texts from mid-​to-​late seventeenth-​century England and France which aimed to open up the work of printing both letterpress and copperplates, at the common and the rolling press. In these works by Abraham Bosse, William Faithorne, and Joseph Moxon, and in a newly rediscovered georgic poem of 1732 by a rolling-​press printer, the labour of printing books and images is laid bare for the reader in new ways. Both text and image work to make visible the labour of printing and, by codifying it, aim to set this work within a structure of trades which was at once more open, more respectable, and more strongly tied to the global. In the texts and images about the book trade I discuss here, printing both word and image also becomes aligned with national culture and processes of racial formation. The printing house is no longer just a scene to be observed, but a site of action in which the reader is, ostensibly at least, invited to participate.

248   Katherine Hunt

What We Know about Printing Images Images of the book trade tended to themselves be in printed form, usually etchings and/​ or engravings. The processes for printing these images differ from the printing of text that has been discussed in much of this volume. Woodcuts, which are printed in relief, can be set with the type and printed at the common press: the surface of both type and woodcut are inked up, and the pressure of the press transfers the ink to the paper. But etching and engraving are intaglio processes—​that is, printing in which the ink sits within incised lines below, not on, the printing surface (the copperplate). These require a different set of techniques, a different press, and different workers to do the printing. We know a lot about printing early modern text, about printers and publishers, compositors and correctors, and the other workers of the print house—​the essays in the present collection attest to this, although of course there is much that remains unknown. The practice of making printed images in early modern England is, comparatively, much more obscure. In recent years Roger Gaskell has done much important work to remedy this gap, but he acknowledges, and explains, that the records are simply lacking.2 There are a number of reasons for this lack, or loss. Letterpress printers were frequently (though not always) members of the Stationers’ Company, with all the record-​keeping that that entailed, but there was no equivalent for printers of images. The costs of setting up as a letterpress printer were higher than for rolling-​press printers; the workers in the latter were paid less so that, as with much low-​paid labour, the surviving records are very limited.3 These problems seem particularly pronounced when we compare England to other printing centres, notably Antwerp, which had a more developed sense of the value placed on visual culture, where the links between printers of image and text were stronger, and where surviving records are more plentiful.4 The labour of printing images in early modern England—​less prized, and less well renumerated—​has been largely lost to us.5 The paucity of knowledge about printed images is particularly pronounced in the case of English book illustrations, which have often fallen through the gaps between the literary and the art-​historical (both broadly defined).6 Many engravers and etchers of illustrations in early modern English books remain anonymous: even the printmakers of such famous images as those in Hooke’s Micrographia.7 Single-​sheet prints made in Britain have received thorough attention by historians of art and design, connoisseurs, curators, and other specialists in the printed image.8 Here, too, European print culture (and the study of it) has led the way; indeed, many of the influential printmakers in early modern England—​including the de Passe family and Wenceslaus Hollar—​were immigrants from continental Europe, and English printmaking was deeply indebted to their work. Although English printmakers developed their proficiency over the course of the seventeenth century, the perception that England was an artistic backwater persisted. Meanwhile printmaking itself—​in Europe as well as England—​struggled in this period to be recognized as an artistic, rather than mechanical, pursuit.

Representing the Labour of Printing    249 If we want to understand the English book trade, it is important that we take proper account of images: to give them the same level of attention that we give to printed text. We also need to look to continental sources to supplement the paucity of records on printed images from England. This chapter focuses on text and image, copperplate and letterpress: the two processes and types of print must be understood together. We should consider these images not (or not only) as illustrations that can help us understand more about printed text. They were part of the book trade in a more integrated way than that: a parallel stream of the culture of print, which reflected the concerns of contemporary culture just as the book did. These are images of the book trade, then, in which that ‘of ’ reflects not only possession but also inclusion, and we should take these images seriously as part of the wider culture of early modern print.

Images of Printing The Nova Reperta (New Inventions of Modern Times, c.1590/​1) is a justifiably famous set of prints which gives an insight into the printing of both image and text, and a keen sense of the technological and colonial priorities of late sixteenth-​century Europe. The subjects depicted—​which include sugar cane, clocks, and medicine against venereal disease, as well as both kinds of printing—​aimed to show the great discoveries of the age. There is a focus on the Americas: America itself is the subject of one of the prints, proposing not only settler-​colonialism but the continent itself as an early modern European invention.9 The Nova Reperta provides a useful case study which illuminates the stages in making, and many producers of, printed images. The set of twenty prints (a title page, and nineteen single sheets) was designed by Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet), who was born in Bruges and worked for much of his life in Florence, including at the Medici court. The whole set of the Nova Reperta was commissioned by, and probably informed by discussions with, the Florentine humanist Luigi Alamanni. Stradanus was a versatile artist who designed prints as well as pottery, tapestries, and altarpieces; he also worked in oils and fresco. In the scope of both his geographical travels and his work across media he encapsulates the international style of European Mannerism. Stradanus’s designs for the Nova Reperta, like his many other designs for print, were done in pen and ink, but with an eye to their future conversion into line-​based engravings.10 Some artists both designed and engraved an image, but in this case Stradanus’s designs were engraved on copperplates by other artists: Theodoor Galle and Hans (or Jan) Collaert II were each responsible for ten. These engravers transformed Stradanus’s pen-​and-​ink images to a pattern of lines on the metal surface, ready to operate as the matrix of reproduction. The set was published by Philips Galle (father of Theodoor). Galle was himself an experienced engraver who had a successful printing and publishing house in Antwerp, where these images were produced. The prints (Figs. 14.1 and 14.2) name only the first and last of these producers: along the bottom edge in both reproduced here we see ‘Joan

250   Katherine Hunt

Fig. 14.1  Jan van der Straet, Nova Reperta, plate 18: ‘Sculptura in aes’, engraving. Image courtesy Newberry Library (Case Wing folio Z 412.85).

Stradanus inuent.’ and ‘Phls Galle excud.’: attributions which prioritize the originator of the image, and its publisher. This roll-​call shows the layers of work and workers required for prints like these, but there were of course others whose names are missed out from the list: the labourers in the print-​room who performed the final stages, transferring the ink from engraved plate to paper to make the print. The Nova Reperta print titled ‘Sculptura in aes’ (Fig. 14.1) shows us the labour of these workers at the rolling press (just as ‘Impressio librorum’, to which I turn in a moment, shows their equivalents who printed text). There is a reason why these images are often used to explain the processes of early modern printing: they make visible those artisans who are not named on the finished print. In his reading of this print, Ad Stijnman gives a comprehensive assessment of how realistically this image portrays a sixteenth-​century intaglio print shop, and compares it to other printed images that show the processes and the tools of intaglio printing; I draw on his expertise in this brief summary.11 Engraving involves making lines onto a copperplate: first using a precise dry-​point to trace the image, then another sharp carving tool called a burin to cut lines into the metal. The burrs of copper which this action pushes upwards at the sides of the line can be smoothed away. A printer forces

Representing the Labour of Printing    251 ink into the lines, then the flat surface of the plate is cleaned. The plate can then be run through the press. Intaglio images are printed on a rolling press. The plate is set, face up, on the bed of the press; the paper is laid carefully over it. Blankets are laid over the top, to keep the paper clean and in place. A printer pushes the star wheel without hesitation, which moves the roller in a line of pressure evenly across the bed of the press. The pressure given by this operation is much greater than that in the common press. Relief printing is a relatively straightforward affair: ink applied to the raised type or image is transferred to the paper by a flat bed which presses down on it. But in intaglio printing, the ink has to be picked up from within the (sometimes hair-​thin) furrows that are the lines of the plate. The paper is dampened to make it more flexible and more able to squeeze into these lines. The ink is thick, tacky, and oily, which makes it responsive to the pulpy paper; it can be embraced by the paper without running, so that the printed ink retains exactly the shape which the engraved or etched line has made for it. Intaglio printing is a sculptural process in which the page takes on, in reversed form like an object made in a mould, the delicate topography of the plate. This is not to say that letterpress printing is a simple and flat affair: once you’ve read enough printed books from the hand-​press era, you come to recognize the familiar bumps and peaks and troughs that remain long after type has hit paper. But intaglio printing involves yet more intimacy between ink and page. On the right-​hand side of this print, an engraver wearing glasses incises lines into a plate; he has a number of burins on the table in front of him. In the back of the image, in the recessed room, the worker in the foreground uses a roll of cloth to rub ink evenly into all of the many fine lines of the engraving. At the centre front of the image a figure whose body twists around, with sleeves rolled up, heats up the plate over a small, wide, open fire. His colleague behind him is cleaning a plate, so that ink sits within the lines but nowhere else: this is a complex operation to make sure that there is neither too much, nor too little, ink remaining. Children are dotted around the scene, who seem to be learning the ropes: this is not only a scene of production but also one of instruction, which we are invited to join. On the left-​hand side of the image, young men operate the rolling press. One stands at the far end, holding paper which has been dampened in preparation for receiving the image. Another at the near end checks a newly printed sheet. A final figure, in a twisted Mannerist posture, looks away from the press itself as he pulls down on one arm of the star wheel’s cross: this action moves the roller evenly across the bed of the press, transferring the image from plate to paper. ‘Sculptura in aes’ is the final print in the series; ‘Impressio librorum’ (Fig. 14.2), showing the common press, is the fourth. Here, too, a number of figures show the many activities and pieces of equipment involved in printing. On the left-​hand side, figures select and arrange type from compositors’ boxes; a standing figure wearing glasses checks a printed page. Towards the back of the image, in the centre, a figure applies ink to the type using two ink-​balls. To his right a figure operates the press: like his counterpart at the rolling press, he looks upwards and away from his work, providing a visual link between the two images and emphasizing, in that look away, the unseen moment of

252   Katherine Hunt

Fig. 14.2  Jan van der Straet, Nova Reperta, plate 4: ‘Impressio librorum’, engraving. Image courtesy Newberry Library (Case Wing folio Z 412.85).

contact in the press.12 At the right-​hand side stands a man, perhaps the master printer, observing the scene. The images in the Nova Reperta may not be realistic: they are likely to display together processes that might have in reality occurred in different spaces; there may have been more, or fewer, or different bodies in the print shop than those we see here. These inconsistencies notwithstanding, these images are trying to show us something, and to inform us about these activities. We can compare the Nova Reperta image of ‘Sculptura in aes’ to a later pair of etchings by Abraham Bosse, which provide what Carl Goldstein calls ‘a kind of overview of life in the print professions’.13 Bosse (c.1604–​76), a French Protestant, was an important and prolific printmaker; he also wrote two treatises about the practice and theory of printmaking, which I discuss later in this essay. Unlike Stradanus, Bosse separates out the activities of printmaking so that making lines on copper and printing the image are two different activities which happen in two different spaces. In ‘The Engraver and Etcher’ (1643; Fig. 14.3), Bosse shows the activity of creating an image on a copperplate. The etcher sits on the left-​hand side of the print, just beginning to work on the varnished plate in front of him. He uses not the burin of the engraver but a sharp needle. Engraving involves incising lines straight into the copperplate, but etching requires different processes.14 The plate is covered with a protective coating of wax or

Representing the Labour of Printing    253

Fig. 14.3  Abraham Bosse, ‘The Engraver and Etcher’, etching. British Museum, R,8.16. Image courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum.

varnish, known as a ground; the etcher scratches the lines of the images into the ground, using the needle, and then the plate is given an acid bath. Where lines have been made into the ground with the needle, the acid bites into the exposed copper; the protective covering leaves the rest of the plate untouched. The protective layer is removed, leaving a clean plate with etched lines delineating the image, ready to have ink worked into them. Etching can produce finer, more sensitive lines than engraving, because drawing a needle over the ground is easier work than making a mark directly onto the copperplate. In Bosse’s print, some other tools for etching sit around this figure, including bottles of acid and a funnel on the high shelf to his right. On the other side of the image we see an engraver, burin in hand, at work on an image of the Virgin. He grips his plate as he holds it up to the light from the window and looks at it with eyes wide open. Engraving was a more physically demanding process than etching, and this figure seems tenser than the etcher. Bosse, principally an etcher himself, depicts here both kinds of printmaking: the figures have their backs to one another, but are mirrored within the composition, in a way that visually suggests a kind of balance between the two methods. In addition to the process of inscribing lines on plates we also see, at the back of the room, some finished single-​sheet prints. Mounted on the wall are portrait prints,

254   Katherine Hunt landscapes, and many religious scenes; a well-​dressed man and two monks browse, perhaps preparing to buy. The man with cloak and sword stands at the very centre of the image, its perspective drawing our attention to him. It is very unlikely that these activities—​making and shopping—​would have happened in the same space, and Bosse is telescoping together different aspects of the print trade. There are no noble visitors in this print’s companion image, ‘The Intaglio Printers’ (1642; Fig. 14.4), and no etchers or engravers either. Although this predates the first, it shows a later part of the printmaking process: the rolling-​press printers at work. At the left, a figure holding a rag prepares to clean a plate; behind him, another labourer works ink into engraved or etched lines. On the right-​hand side, a figure full of life presses down on two arms of the star wheel to turn the roller and press the print. The two left-​ hand figures, the arms of the third, and the north-​west/​south-​east axis of the star wheel are all in parallel: the effect is of an organism with many parts working as one. All four images seem to be showing us a transparent window into early modern practice, then, but they are all—​and in different ways—​also complicated by their contexts. These images are tantalizing glimpses into the work of printing, and have been used again and again to illustrate the practice of the common and the rolling press: I’ve

Fig. 14.4  Abraham Bosse, ‘The Intaglio Printers’, etching. British Museum, R,8.15. Image courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum.

Representing the Labour of Printing    255 done so here. To be sure, painstaking analyses like Stijnman’s are extremely valuable to the project of recovering historical labour. But these are images that do not only (or perhaps do not, period) operate as accurate representations of the processes they depict. Their informational application—​that is, as images that show, or seem to show, this labour—​is overdetermined. The images themselves seem to point us to their own informational status. Look at the pointing fingers in the two Nova Reperta images: those of the man standing by the ladder on the left, and the master printer at the right, of ‘Impressio librorum; and of the glasses-​wearing engraver in ‘Sculptura in aes’. These are images that want to tell their viewer about, want to point towards, the manual labour that is being done here: they invite us in as visitors and audience, even if the scene they show us is not one that—​if we are only looking for historical accuracy—​we can fully trust.

Manuals for Engraving and Etching If these images are self-​consciously informational, I turn now to some that are instructional. By this I mean that if the images by Stradanus and Bosse claim to offer a bystander’s view on to the practice of printmaking, the next ones seem to show the viewer exactly how to do it. These images accompany two important manuals for engraving and etching: Abraham Bosse’s Traité des manières de graver (1645) and its modified English translation, William Faithorne’s The Art of Graveing and Etching (1662; 2nd edn. 1702). Bosse’s Traité conveys important information about printmaking, and he doesn’t shy away from going into details about the hard, dirty labour of this work. However, Bosse is also keen to establish engraving and etching (both covered by the ‘graver’ of his title) as an intellectual art form, on a par with painting and sculpture. This is even more the case in his follow-​up, Sentimens sur la distinction des diverses manières (1649). As part of its efforts to elevate printmaking to the status of a fine art, this latter text established a canon of engravers, a taxonomy of its techniques, and an affirmation of its main purpose: to ‘articulate form’.15 Here Bosse was expressly concerned with establishing not only the value of printmaking but also its theory. This is not to say that the Traité was unconcerned with establishing a theory and a genealogy of printmaking. Its frontispiece shows a figure in classically draped dress, using the tools of the engraver on a plate which bears the title of the work. On the lower part of the plate (partly obscured) are naked figures, which Carl Goldstein suggests might be representing the ‘discovery’ of engraving as in similar examples of the discovery of painting, although their precise purpose is unclear.16 Certainly Bosse is concerned with establishing the antiquity of the art and its development from engraved letters and images on other materials like stone, glass, and wood—​most importantly, in the Old Testament. Bosse also included an engraved page with which to begin his epistle to the reader, this time in the form of a stone pedestal adorned with swags, and cherubs bearing arrows and a caduceus, with the start of his address written as if engraved in the

256   Katherine Hunt stone. Engraving and etching, then, are proposed in image and in text in the Traité as being both ancient and elevated.17 Bosse is keen to describe and praise a recent innovation: the new method of etching developed by his contemporary, Jacques Callot. Callot covered the copperplate in a varnish commonly used for lutes, more robust than the waxes and resins that etchers tended to use. By using a strong tool to etch on to it, it was possible to approximate the forceful lines of engraving with much less effort than burin on copper. Printmaking was criticized for its sweaty laboriousness, but this innovation turns the process of engraving and etching into easier work. The hand of the master can pass across the plate much like Stradanus’s pen passed over paper, so that the etcher’s work is more like drawing, and their actions much closer to disegno than to manual labour. (Compare the etcher’s relaxed mark-​making on the left-​hand side of Bosse’s engraving of 1643 (Fig. 14.3) to the harder work of the engraver on the other side of the print.) Bosse describes Callot’s invention in 1645 and then lauds it again in 1649, listing Callot among the past and present masters of the art. Bosse’s Sentimens specifically attempts to elevate intaglio printmaking to the pantheon of the high arts, alongside painting and sculpture. Callot’s innovation, in its ability to allow both the spontaneity of drawing and the reliable reproducibility of engraving, helps etching and engraving to achieve a higher status in the new paragone that Bosse sets out. The question of artisanal labour and its relationship to the republic of letters was a keen current of seventeenth-​century thought. Bosse puts these ideas to the fore, while consciously trying to elevate his craft to the status of other visual arts.18 In The Art of Graveing and Etching William Faithorne translates and edits Bosse’s Traité, adding his own experience of engraving and printmaking more generally. His tract is notably shorter than Bosse’s, and he makes no attempt to translate the more theoretical parts of the Traité, let alone any of the Sentimens. He also omits Bosse’s final section, on constructing the press and doing the printing, though a translation of this does appear in the second, posthumous, edition of 1702. Nevertheless, the translation shows not only the significance of Bosse’s important work and its aim to elevate the art of printmaking, but also an increasing awareness among British printmakers of the importance of making printed images, and explaining how they were made.19 Faithorne describes the processes of etching and engraving, following Bosse’s order: first Callot’s innovation, then regular etching, and then finally engraving with the burin. The process of etching, in which the aqua fortis will ‘eat in’ to the parts of the plate that have been exposed, is itself described in terms of the processes and products of food preparation. Vinegar, salt, and bay salt go in to the aqua fortis;20 stale bread helps to clean any blemishes from the plate, leaving it smooth and ready for etching. Faithorne has some lovely turns of phrase: when making the hard varnish, for example, it will be ready when ‘it will rope . . . like a glewy Syrup’ (1): the verb form of ‘rope’ was in use to describe the ways in which liquid behaves when it gets more viscous, but here Faithorne returns us to the culinary language—​‘Syrup’—​that runs through the text.21 There are also some place-​specific directions, which deliberately distinguish this translation from Bosse’s original: ‘Here in England’, for example, ‘you must buy your Copper [for your plates] ready forged from the Brasiers’ (4). As in much other instructional literature Faithorne

Representing the Labour of Printing    257 switches from a removed third-​person to a direct second-​person address (‘you may judge’, 2), with occasional first-​person interjections (‘I preferre’, 43). Faithorne’s translation gives the impression of a knowledgeable teacher who speaks directly to you, the reader, keen to learn. Faithorne copies faithfully the illustrations from Bosse’s treatise. Reversals are at the heart of printmaking, because the printed image will always be the reverse of the plate. Faithorne’s prints are copies (not reversals) of Bosse’s, meaning that the Faithorne’s plates did not look like Bosse’s images—​this would have produced images that were the mirror image of the originals. Instead, Faithorne (or whoever made these images—​the engraver is not named) copied Bosse’s prints in reverse, making the final images on paper look just like the ones in the Traité.22 Faithorne actually describes the various methods of how to copy an existing print at the end of his treatise (41–​43). Our sense of original vs copy, obverse vs reverse, becomes complicated when we consider both sets together. These sets of images show us carefully how a print is made. They begin as quite straightforwardly informational images, showing a plate in the early stages of being varnished, for example; or a boy with a candle, making the varnished plate sooty and black, ready for etching.23 These are illustrations which show us, as observers, how the craft is done. The images get increasingly close to the action of the craft, and they become more self-​reflexive too. A pile of etching needles, stuck into wooden rods in the manner Callot proposed, sit at the front of the image, the perspective almost making them seem as though they are being offered to us through the frame of the picture. In the following image, we see the effects of these tools: in a series of individual lines, some sets of parallel lines, and areas of cross-​hatching, we see the printed results of marks made by these very tools. These include the swelling lines that were made possible by the échoppe, the etching needle devised by Callot.24 Shortly afterwards, these two images are combined: we see close-​ups of the ends of the oval points of the tool, and also two hands with (different) lacy sleeves, each holding the tool, making just the kinds of lines we saw in the previous image; the text describes the two different ways of holding the tool that are depicted in the image. The images start to collapse in on one another as the series progresses. The printed lines on the page are a sign that point directly to the mark that was made on the copperplate. Images show the hands at work: the image in this case refers not to the line itself, but to the action of making that line. The first illustrations in the series give us a window into printmaking practice, then, but in the later ones we are invited first to see the very lines whose creation are described, and then a kind of in-​ process image of their inscription. All the time we are reminded of the careful hands that did this work. The disembodied hand would have been familiar from letter-​writing manuals, as well as the pointing manicules in both manuscript and print: these are instances in which the working or pointing hand can usefully be severed from a body in the service of working with text. Its recurrence here reminds the reader that this is sensitive, even intellectual, work, on a par with beautiful or learned writing: indeed, one way of holding the etching tool is ‘much after the manner of holding a pen’ (14). The hands in the images are elegant, white, clean, and bear no stains from ink or dirt (this is more obvious in Bosse’s more

258   Katherine Hunt subtle etchings, which also show the hands with white and unmarked tied sleeves at the wrist). This might be manual labour but, in these images, it is handwork that cleaves more closely to the study than the forge. This image of pristine thinker’s hands contrasts markedly from the ways in which hands are described in the text itself. Much of Faithorne’s (and Bosse’s) discussion of etching using Callot’s method, as well as other techniques of etching and engraving, centres around how to use one’s hands but in ways that suggest that they would be dirty, sticky, and impossible to get clean. Before using hard varnish the plate must be perfectly cleaned and not greasy. You apply the hard varnish using your fingers: first by tapping it on gently then, ensuring that your hand isn’t sweaty, as this will create bubbles, ‘slid[ing] your hand upon the Varnish, to make it more smooth, and equal’ (7). Once this is done, you must not let your dirtied hands touch the plate again. The plate needs to be kept pristine, because any scratches on the varnish will be eaten into by the acid, when it bites. As you work on the plate, you must keep two sheets of paper over the sections on which you’re not currently working. In Bosse’s image of the etcher (Fig. 14.3) he grips the edge of the plate with his fingers, in order to avoid damaging the surface. Engraving and etching both depend on the precision of the lines on the plate. Bosse is concerned with the quality of the line—​especially the more sensitive kinds of line that Callot’s innovation allows—​and the line is important for Bosse because it can be the bearer of form.25 For Faithorne, the line has a closer relationship not to an idealized notion of visual form but rather to lines of text. He is more inclined to liken engraving and etching to writing and, throughout his translation of Bosse’s treatise, text is the implied comparison to the image-​based work of printmaking. In his dedicatory poem to The Art of Graveing, Thomas Flatman adopts the Horatian language of poetic immortality for his encomium on Faithorne’s engravings: his skill ‘protracts the date | Of frail Mortalitie, and baffles Fate | With Brass and Steel’. Printmaking outdoes even verse, that other art form which is composed of lines, as ‘One Line [of Faithorne’s] speaks purelier Thee, than my best strain.’26 Faithorne himself shows a tendency for text: he eschews Bosse’s figurative and classicizing frontispieces (the figure in drapery, and the stone pedestal), choosing instead to include as his title page lines of engraved writing, in roman and italic. He includes the imprint in this title page, and makes it appear as though it is in a wooden frame. (This is a nod to a third engraved title page in the Traité, made to look like print in a frame, but whereas Bosse’s frame was elaborate and verdant, Faithorne’s is more straightforward.) He even describes his translation of Bosse as a kind of image-​ making: ‘I have not traced him so closely as to make it a meer Translation’, he explains in his epistle to the ‘Lovers of this Art’ (A2r). Whereas Bosse was eager to align printmaking with other visual arts, Faithorne aims to show that engraving and writing cleave closely together. In these books Bosse and Faithorne deploy both word and image, working in concert, in order to describe to an interested observer how to make a printed image. I turn now to a similarly hybrid set of words and images which aim to show the work of printing not images but text.

Representing the Labour of Printing    259

A Manual for Printing Text The title of Joseph Moxon’s work on printing, Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-​Works. Applied to the Art of Printing (1683–​4), immediately ties this project to the work of hands. Moxon was a printer, maker of globes and mathematical instruments, and hydrographer to Charles II.27 He was also a prolific author and, in the series of Mechanick Exercises of which this forms a part, Moxon attempted to open up a number of trades and crafts to the layman. This project was of interest to the Royal Society, who had made him a fellow in 1678, and whose plans for a written History of Trades had been in development for some time, although never realized.28 Moxon’s work on printing in the Mechanick Exercises differs somewhat from the other trades he covers. Unlike smithing, or joinery, or turning, the pages represented in this part of the text are indexical: they show the actual result of the trade described.29 However, it seems unlikely that the Mechanick Exercises were intended (or used) as a true how-​to. Moxon’s work, then, sometimes seems to be an instructional manual, but may be closer to an informational text. Moxon’s images take a variety of viewpoints on the trade he describes. They range from bird’s-​eye assemblages of pieces with which to make the press, to diagrams of a type mould, to a full-​length figure of a worker shown hanging up printed pages to dry. I focus here on Moxon’s visual and verbal descriptions of the compositor’s trade. It is in this section that his attention to the work of hands, in both word and image, is at its most precise. The images in this section zoom in on the hands at work in a way that recalls the illustrations to Bosse and Faithorne, and emphasizes the ‘Handy-​Works’ that the Exercises aimed to reveal.30 Moxon’s text is detailed, loving, and extensive. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, Moxon’s twentieth-​century editors, note his ‘exact instructions’, suggesting that ‘no writer, surely, has ever gone into such detail over the precise positions for the workman’s fingers and thumbs (or the feet . . .)’.31 This is particularly evident in the section on composing type. Take Moxon’s instructions for how to hold the composing stick: When he Composes the Letters he holds the Composing-​stick in his Left Hand, placing the Second Joynt of his Thumb over the moving Cheek of the Stick, and the end of the Ball of his Thumb reaches down to the bottom of the Cheek and Stick; so that with the end of the Ball of his Thumb he gently presses the Letter close to the Cheek, and keeps the Letters tight and square together, as he places them in the Stick successively.32

Moxon uses the third person to observe the compositor. He explains in intricate detail—​ the second joint of the thumb; the ball of the thumb—​the actions of the labourer’s hand. We see these hands in the illustration, plate 24 (Fig. 14.5), where the joints and balls of the thumb are indeed placed in these positions. The image below on the same plate shows a later stage of the process, when the compositor has filled up the stick with lines

260   Katherine Hunt

Fig. 14.5  From Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, or The doctrine of handy-​works . . . (1677–​ 83), plate 24, engraving. Image courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call no. UTT144 M68).

and uses both hands (also described precisely in the text) to empty out the ‘Stick of Letter’, as it is described in the text on the plate. Hands are the most important part of the worker’s body: the only part shown here, but shown in several different positions, doing different parts of the job. In her important work on the Mechanick Exercises, Lisa Maruca has shown us how profoundly Moxon’s text is bound up with the language of the body: how the body parts of labourers work on, and sometimes are conflated with, the parts of printing equipment. The name for a whole set of type was, after all, a body; the press, the type,

Representing the Labour of Printing    261 and the equipment have parts that Moxon calls, among other things, heads, hinds, faces, feet, ears, ribs, toes, joints, necks, ribs, and shanks. Maruca reminds us that the elements of printing, and especially type, ‘evidently have a sex, and indeed, are made to have sex . . . their mechanistic heterosexual coupling is an essential part of the creation of words’.33 This is an activity in which human and non-​human body parts combine in series of brief but intimate encounters. We see this in the description of composing discussed above, in which the letters the hands of the worker, the joints of his thumb, gently press against the cheek of the composing stick. The equipment of the press is emblazoned, in parts: and in the accompanying image the human body is too, so that the compositor is just a hand, or hands.34 In its depiction of skilful but disembodied hands, the Mechanick Exercises certainly shares characteristics with Faithorne’s translation of Bosse, and it’s tempting to think that Moxon might have seen Faithorne’s Art. We know that Faithorne and Moxon knew one another; the former, jointly with Moxon’s engraver son James, provided the illustrations for Moxon’s Practical Perspective (1670).35 James was a very accomplished map-​maker and engraver, and illustrated many books in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. His father was a less proficient printmaker, and we know of only one image that was signed by Joseph: the title page to Barozzi’s Vignola, or the Compleat Architect.36 Davis and Carter are convinced that the images of printing in the Mechanick Exercises are by Moxon senior, and they cite as evidence the similarities between this title page and the ‘naïve, untutored and yet informative quality which is so evident in the illustrations to this volume’.37 As is the case for so many book illustrations in this period, we don’t know for sure—​but it is certainly possible that Joseph Moxon worked with his own hands on the illustrations to this part of the Mechanick Exercises which was so close to his own work and practice. Like Bosse and Faithorne, Moxon’s carefully imagined images aim to show the precise, skilful, and well-​accustomed actions that made up the practice they describe. We have come quite a long way from the Nova Reperta scenes, which show a crowded, busy space. Now, in images that anticipate the sparse, informational images that illustrated Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Moxon wants to show us hands, just hands, which work in ways that are knowledgeable and practised.

The Labour of Printing Images We know that we can’t wholly trust Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing in all respects, but it is nevertheless a crucial resource for understanding the early modern common press. With the exception of the short part at the end of Bosse’s Traité and the 1702 edition of Faithorne’s Art, we don’t have a comparable text that explains intaglio printing. However, the recently rediscovered verse treatise on the rolling press, J. (perhaps Johann) Hanckwitz’s An Essay on Engraving and Copper-​Plate

262   Katherine Hunt Printing, or the Professors of the Black Art, A Vision (1732), begins to offer us some more insight into this work. The Essay, mentioned in the late nineteenth century but after that assumed lost, came to light very recently when a single copy was located at the Institut de France in Paris.38 Roger Gaskell’s comprehensive article on the text, which also transcribes it in full, suggests its likely author to be Johann Andreas Hanckwitz, younger brother of the German-​born, London-​based chemist and phosphorous manufacturer Ambrosius Gottfried Hanckwitz (also known as Ambrose Godfrey). There is no printer or publisher given for the treatise, but Gaskell has deduced from ornaments that it may have been John Tilly, publisher of Pope’s Essay on Man, among other things.39 Gaskell illuminates what insights Hanckwitz’s Essay can give us into the practice of the rolling press in the early eighteenth century: it is the earliest, and one of the few, such descriptions in English. The Essay is in verse, on the model of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, from which Hanckwitz takes his epigraph. It is composed of three parts: an introduction, in pentameter couplets; ‘An Essay on Engraving and Copper-​Plate Printing, &c’, in the same form; and the final part, listed on the title page as ‘A Vision’, titled ‘ALBUMAZAR; or, the Professors of the Black Art, &c’, which switches to tetrameter couplets.40 An Essay should rightly join the many British and colonial georgics of the eighteenth century, which covered subjects from cider, to agricultural labour, to the work on plantations of sugarcane in the Caribbean. Like the work of the labouring poet Stephen Duck and his respondent, Mary Collier, both publishing during the 1730s, An Essay is written in the voice of (and was probably actually by) an author who did the work described.41 Hanckwitz begins the introduction to his Essay using conventions that will be familiar to readers of these other georgics. The poet calls on ‘A young unskilful Muse’ who ‘Takes short low Flights, and in low Numbers sings’: this is not a soaring epic, but takes flight in a modest middle ground which aims to ‘encourage useful Arts’ (ll. 3, 6, 19). The pentameter rhyme shows Hanckwitz’s debt to Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics in heroic couplets which, following Dryden, was the most common poetic form for the eighteenth-​century georgic. Hanckwitz even offers a little dig at the blank verse efforts of poets following Milton: the ‘pompous Language’ of ‘Fine modern Bards’, which avoid rhyme in order to avoid mauling by critics (ll. 11, 12). The first part is a call for Britain to recognize ‘Sculpture’ (that is, engraving) as an art form capable of both creating and bolstering a sense of national identity (l. 30), and calls for the introduction of ‘useful Academies’ of drawing, on the French model (l. 113). The Essay shares with Bosse’s work an impulse to assert this art form as a virtuous one. But, by working in the georgic mode, Hanckwitz also introduces that tension against which Bosse pushed, too: the suggestion that printmaking was hard and dirty work. In his two prints, Bosse separates out the work of creating and printing the plates. Hanckwitz does something similar and in the second part of the Essay, distinguished formally by quatrameter, turns his attention from the practice of ‘Sculpture’ to the labour at the rolling press. This part relates a dream in which the speaker, a printer, along with his colleagues Black Tom and the unfortunately named Smutty Dick, receive a

Representing the Labour of Printing    263 miraculous visitor in the print shop: the astrologer Albumazar. The printers first debate and then attack the intruder, eventually beating him so much that Lucifer himself comes to take him away and neatly proves his evil nature. The poem ends with the speaker awaking from his dream at daybreak, hastily putting on ‘my tatter’d dress | To Labour at the Rolling Press’ (ll. 350–​1). Albumazar was the westernized name of Abu Ma’shar, a Persian astrologer of the ninth century and perhaps the most important astrologer of the Muslim world, who had been based at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. He was the subject of Albumazar (1615), a university play by Thomas Tomkis. This play was revived in the Restoration with a prologue written by Dryden; several later rewritings appeared too, including one by and starring David Garrick. In England the figure of Albumazar became, through these plays and right up until the end of the eighteenth century, a kind of shorthand for a Muslim astrologer. When the rolling-​press printers debate Albumazar, then, they are pitting the practical knowledge of the English labourer against the esoteric learning of the Islamic world. Throughout the poem, Albumazar points to the black skin and black hands of the printers to show their devilry: ‘You Sable Scare-​crows not on Earth, | But in th’ infernal Shades had Birth’ (ll. 260–​1). They must profess the ‘Black Art’, he claims, or why else would they have ‘these most h—​llish grimy Faces’ (ll. 275, 277)? Albumazar shows himself to be a bad reader of the printers’ black faces and hands: not surprising, perhaps, since he admits his own readings of astrological ‘Scrawls and Lines’ are themselves just ‘Cant’ (ll. 229, 220). The speaker of the poem, like its readers, can see that this ink is just a consequence of the printers’ labour. Indeed, the speaker describes in his opening lines how he will sing ‘Tales of dismal smutty Printers, | With Hands and Faces black as Tinkers’ (ll. 171–​2). These lines adopt a classicism that is located in the underworld, not the sky-​flight of the georgic muse: the printer calls on Pluto to inspire his poem. The purpose of this is not to show these labourers in Hell, though, but rather to ‘sing their Fates, | Who mundify the Copper-​Plates, | That I may trace each quaint Perfection, | Of such as are of thy Complexion’ (ll. 176–​9). Echoing in the background of this poem is the phrase, familiar from Aesop and Jeremiah (13:23), that one cannot wash the Ethiop white—​a phrase in common use in the early modern period. The implication here is that, if the printers ever had enough time off from their hard labour, they would be able to wash the ink from their skin, just as they painstakingly mundify (clean) the plates before printing. They seem black but only appear to be so—​unlike Albumazar, whose dark skin, in the logic of the poem, reflects his evil nature. The printers trust in God, and ‘good strong Beer’ (l. 247); they first shout abuse at Albumazar but then use their ink-​stained hands to pull him by the nose, hit, and punch him, until he is taken away by the devil to Hell. The Essay is remarkable not only for the insight it gives into the processes of copperplate printing, then, but also for what it tells us about literary genre; and about the relationship between the labour of printing and the early modern construction of race. Recent work by scholars including Miles Grier and Brandi K. Adams—​including Adams’s chapter in the present volume—​has shown us that the printing house was not

264   Katherine Hunt a neutral space, but rather a place in which the period’s concerns with race and gender are created, and play out. Grier has coined the term ‘inkface’ to show how the blackface commonly used by early modern performers to signify race was frequently compared to ink.42 In Moxon’s embodied descriptions of the press ink itself, if left to dry, might develop ‘a Film or Skin’.43 Hanckwitz’s Essay shows starkly how these practices refer not only to the ink used at the common press but to the printing of images, too. In its depiction of printers with hands and faces black with ink, this treatise also forces us to look again at the white hands in early-​modern images of printing. This poem demonstrates that the printing of copperplates was mobilized to reflect and create a sense of racial hierarchy and difference, then, in ways which speak back directly to the images of printers at work. The Nova Reperta established the printing of image and text as products and engines of the modern age. Bosse, Faithorne, Moxon, and Hanckwitz all aimed to open up these practices: to show both the intellectual labour and the hard graft that went into pressing letters or lines on to paper. At the same time, these authors aimed to impress upon the reader their own views and ideas about how best to do or organize these practices. Image and text work in concert, showing the role of these linked trades—​and the book trade as a whole—​in the global, colonial early modern.

Conclusion We have seen how the early modern book was the work of many skilled hands. The digitized images of these early modern books on which so many scholars depend to do their work—​and never more so than in the pandemic years of 2020–​1, when I was writing this essay—​seem to appear from nowhere, but they also were not created hands-​ free. Click through enough pages of a digitized book and you will see real digits: the partial hand or blurred finger of the person who scanned the page that you are reading, perhaps coloured bright fuchsia with the finger-​glove used by many of these workers. Unlike the disembodied hands in the works by Bosse, Faithorne, or Moxon, the images of these fingers on the page are accidents, or mistakes. We are not supposed to see these hands at work. The pink-​purple obscures the fact that most of these hands belong to women of colour, employed by Google to perform the essential labour of scanning historic texts, but who are not given the same conditions and perks as other employees of the corporation. In his ongoing artwork ScanOps (2012–​  ), Andrew Norman Wilson collects these images, glitches which show the real human labour behind what purports to be frictionless automation.44 If the images of the Nova Reperta and the manuals of printing present an idealized, pristine vision of this work, now the ideal image is one which reveals no labour at all. What all the early modern texts and images discussed in this chapter share is an impulse to open up, to describe, to reveal something about the labour and the practice of making early modern print. We have seen how images which seem to be

Representing the Labour of Printing    265 straightforwardly informational might in fact show us an impossible view; we know that poems and instructions try to push the reader in some directions, and away from others. We must take seriously that early modern impulse to explain and instruct, even if we remain sceptical of the veracity of all the descriptions of once-​hidden practices these cultural objects claim to reveal. All the way through, text and image have worked in partnership, even if not always in the same way. We need to read text in order to understand images of the book trade; we must also, in our work, take images seriously if we are fully to understand the varied cultures of early modern print.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the librarians and library assistants at the University of York Library and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Without their help in 2020–​1, sending books and scanning articles, I would not have been able to write this chapter. Thanks also to Ben Higgins, Kevin Killeen, Jane Raisch, and Helen Smith for their helpful comments.

Notes 1. Jennifer Roberts’s Mellon lectures, ‘Contact: Art and the Pull of Print’, include a fascinating discussion of these ideas: www.nga.gov/​resea​rch/​casva/​meeti​ngs/​mel​lon-​lectu​res-​in-​the-​ fine-​arts/​robe​rts-​2021.html 2. Roger Gaskell, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration’, Book Collector, 53 (2004), 213–​254, at 218. See also Roger Gaskell, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop, part II’, Book Collector, 67 (2018), 788–​797. This chapter is profoundly indebted to Gaskell’s research. 3. Gaskell, ‘Printing House’, 792. 4. See e.g. Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-​Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 5. This problem becomes particularly evident when we attempt to locate women printmakers of the period. The producer index of the British Printed Images Project (bpi1700.org.uk/​) lists only one woman, Magdalena de Passe (one of the influential de Passe family). On the culture of the printed image in early modern England, see Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 6. For more on book illustrations, see Michael Hunter’s chapter in this volume; in her chapter on Edward Benlowes’s intermedia assemblages, Whitney Trettien offers us a new way to think about illustrations: Cut/​Copy/​Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). 7. See Meghan C. Doherty, ‘Discovering the “True Form”: Hooke’s Micrographia and the Visual Vocabulary of Engraved Portraits’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 66/​3 (2012), 211–​234. Some exciting projects are revealing the importance of drawing and printmaking (including book illustrations) to early modern natural philosophy. For an overview, see the special issue of Perspectives on Science, 27/​3 (2019), ed. Sachiko Kusakuwa, based on the project she led on ‘Making Visible: The Visual and Graphic Practices of the Early Royal Society’ (University of Cambridge, 2015–​19).

266   Katherine Hunt 8. See, for example, Anthony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–​1698 (London: British Museum, 1998) and Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), both of which give an account of the scholarship on English prints. Ad Stijnman’s Engraving and Etching 1400–​2000: A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (London: Archetype, 2012)gives a comprehensive overview of the technical aspects of intaglio printing across the European tradition. 9. New Hollstein 322.IV. On the Nova Reperta, see Lia Markey (ed.), Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s ‘Nova Reperta’ (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2020). 10. A number of preparatory drawings survive, including Stradanus, ‘Invention of Book Printing’, design (drawing) for ‘Impressio librorum’; Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York City, 1901-​39-​301. 11. Ad Stijnman, ‘Stradanus’s Print Shop’, Print Quarterly, 27/​1 (Mar. 2010), 11–​29. 12. See Paul W. Nash’s chapter in this volume for a full account of the activities of the print house. 13. Carl Goldstein, ‘Printmaking and Theory’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 71 (2008), 373–​ 388, at 374; see also Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 14. Anthony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking (London: British Museum, 1996), 56–​7 1, gives a full a description of the technique. 15. Goldstein, ‘Printmaking’, 385. 16. Goldstein, ‘Printmaking’, 380 17. Goldstein, ‘Printmaking’, 382 18. Recall that Bosse’s image of the engraver and etcher at work showed them next to customers browsing prints for sale. Bosse made a series of such prints, illustrating painters and sculptors in their studios, and this scene seems deliberately to align printmakers with these other artists. He separates these artisans from the labouring printers, who appear in a different image, of the rolling press: the latter do the dirty work of printmaking. Bosse does cover the rolling press in the Traité, but it is relegated to the final section. 19. This was the impulse behind John Evelyn’s Sculptura, or, The history and art of chalcography and engraving in copper (London: G. Beedle and T. Collins, 1662) too, which included the first description of the technique of mezzotint. Evelyn had intended his translation of part of Bosse’s Traité to form part of this treatise, but deferred to Faithorne when he discovered that they had both attempted this work. 20. William Faithorne’s The Art of Graveing and Etching (London: W. Faithorne, 1662), 3. Further page references will be given in the text. 21. OED, ‘rope’, v.2, 2a. 22. The question of replicating printed images, themselves an inherently replicating medium, was much discussed in early writing on the practice. Bosse described the processes, and the potential problems, in copying printed images in his Sentimens. Goldstein, ‘Printmaking’, 385–​386. 23. Faithorne, Art, fig. 1, opp. 7. 24. On the échoppe [échoppe in italics] see Ad Stijnman, ‘Experiment and Trial: Technical Developments in 17th Century Intaglio Printmaking. An Overview’. Monte Artium: Journal of the Royal Society of Belgium, 3 (2010), 115–​126, at 116. 25. Goldstein, ‘Printmaking’, 385. 26. Flatman ‘To my ingenious Friend . . .’, in Faithorne, Art, A3r. Italics in original. 27. On Moxon, see Graham Jagger, ‘Joseph Moxon, F.R.S., and the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 49/​2 (1995), 193–​208

Representing the Labour of Printing    267 28. Moxon was, in 1678, the first tradesman to be admitted to the Royal Society. See Walter E. Houghton, ‘The History of Trades: Its Relation to Seventeenth-​Century Thought: As Seen In Bacon, Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), 33–​60; Lisa Maruca, ‘Bodies of Type: The Work of Textual Production in English Printers’ Manuals’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 36/​3 (2003), 321–​343, at 326. 29. Maruca warns against assuming too much of the ‘essentialism’ that this kind of thinking can provoke (‘Bodies’, 323). See also Adrian Johns on Moxon’s background and extensive printing experience, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 79. 30. On the relationship between practice and knowledge in Moxon, see Helen Smith, ‘The Book’, in John Lee (ed.), A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies (Newark, DE: John Wiley and Sons, 2017), 396–​410. 31. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, ‘Introduction’ to Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (2nd edn., New York: Dover, 1962), p. lii. 32. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 205. 33. Maruca, ‘Bodies’, 328. 34. In another image, plate 25 (p. 222), we see two disembodied hands doing successive parts of the task described. 35. The antiquary and topographer Thomas Kirke describes meeting Faithorne through Moxon, and an exchange between the two. See Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Thomas Kirke’s Copy of Philosophical Transactions’, Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, 6/​1 (2012) 8–​14, at 10-​11. 36. Joseph Moxon printed this edition in 1657. Davis and Carter are convinced, on the basis of visual similarity, that Moxon was also responsible for the title page to Edward Wright, Certain Errors in Navigation (3rd edn., London: printed by Moxon, 1657). See Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 424–​425. 37. Davis and Carter, ‘Introduction’ to Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, p. xliv. 38. Roger Gaskell, ‘Hanckwitz’s Essay on Engraving and Copper-​Plate Printing Rediscovered’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 30 (2019), 7–​31 39. Gaskell, ‘Hanckwitz’s Essay’, 30. 40. Gaskell has given through line numbers for the three sections, and for ease of reference I have followed his convention here, with line numbers in parentheses. However, particularly given the change from pentameter to tetrameter between the two longer pieces, they should be lineated as three separate poems. 41. Hanckwitz’s ‘Essay’ was published two years after Duck’s extremely popular The Thresher’s Labour (1730), and before Collier’s 1739 response, The Woman’s Labour. 42. See Miles Grier, ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’, in Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), Scripturalizing the Human (New York: Routledge 2015), 193–​ 220, and Miles P. Grier, ‘Black /​White’, and B. K. Adams, ‘Fair /​Foul’, in Claire Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 319–​342 and 29–​49 respectively. 43. Moxon, Mechanick Essays, 287. 44. www.and​rewn​orma​nwil​son.com/​Scan​Ops.html

Select Bibliography Adams, Brandi K., ‘Fair /​Foul’, in Claire M. L. Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2021), 29–​49. Bowen, Karen L., and Imhof, Dirk, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-​Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

268   Katherine Hunt Gaskell, Roger, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration’, Book Collector, 53 (2004), 213–​254. Gaskell, Roger, ‘Hanckwitz’s Essay on Engraving and Copper-​Plate Printing Rediscovered’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns 30 (2019), 7–​31. Goldstein, Carl, Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Grier, Miles, ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’, in Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), Scripturalizing the Human (New York: Routledge 2015), 193–​220. Griffiths, Anthony, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–​1698 (London: British Museum, 1998). Maruca, Lisa, ‘Bodies of Type: The Work of Textual Production in English Printers’ Manuals’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 36/​3 (2003), 321–​343. Stijnman, Ad, Engraving and Etching 1400–​2000: A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (London: Archetype, 2012).

Chapter 15

Printing a nd t h e Universi t i e s Jason Peacey

In 1691, an Oxford printer completed an edition of a medieval Greek chronicle, covering the history of the world from Adam until 1000 ce, based upon an imperfect Bodleian manuscript. The venture was supported by the ‘Delegates’, a committee of university scholars who oversaw local printing, and it signalled the existence of something resembling a ‘university press’, an operation maintained by an academic institution for the production and sale of books to advance knowledge and serve educational needs, above the fray of polemic and ‘cheap print’. What makes it interesting is the saga surrounding the completion of such a challenging task. It had been chosen for printing in 1633, following the acquisition of Greek type, only for the printer to renege upon his side of an agreement, despite being authorized to print more profitable books in order to generate the necessary funds. In 1660, the university pursued a different strategy, providing £40 as well as supplies of paper, only to encounter difficulties in finding someone to complete the editing, thereby ensuring that the project was delayed for a further three decades.1 The story of the Malalas chronicle highlights the ambitions and challenges with which this chapter is concerned, in terms of the development of ‘learned’ printing at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This is crucial to any meaningful history of the book, because these were the only towns outside London where publishing was permitted and practised consistently before the early eighteenth century (although printing certainly took place in York, Newcastle, and St Albans, as Rachel Stenner explores in this volume), and because such printing was crucial to the transformation of the English book trade from a European backwater into a centre of scholarly excellence. This chapter narrates the story of printing in Oxford and Cambridge, as revealed by published works and archival evidence. This manifestly involved towering achievements, from the Cambridge folio Bible of 1629 to editions of Bede, Euripides, and St Cyprian, as well as the massive Synodikon (1672). By 1700 it was possible to print in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, as well as Anglo-​Saxon, Runic, Welsh, and Coptic, on

270   Jason Peacey the finest paper and with exquisite engravings, like those produced for Robert Morison’s Plantarum (1672). Titles ranged across the disciplines—​encompassing divinity, history, and law, as well as classics, music, natural history, and medicine—​including editions of priceless manuscripts, and their production illuminates financial, logistical, and administrative dimensions of early modern printing. Wills and inventories permit glimpses inside print shops, in terms of equipment and stock. In 1588, Thomas Thomas’s Cambridge premises contained ‘letters’ alongside cases, chases, and stools, as well as a press and a washing trough, gallies, frames, and factotums, ‘blank’ printers’ ornaments into which letters could be inserted. In 1668, John Field’s Cambridge ‘printing house’ contained ‘letters . . . of all sorts’, weighing 14,236 lb and valued at 5d. per pound, as well as 324 reams of the Bible in quarto (£291. 12s.), and 132 reams of Lily’s grammar (10s. per ream). His ‘warehouse’ contained dictionaries, Bibles, psalms, liturgies, and Aesop’s fables, alongside supplies of ‘crown paper’, both ‘fine’ and ‘coarse’.2 University archives document the patents granted to specific printers, as well as business correspondence, legal wranglings, and disputes over prices and trading practices. They reveal dealings with suppliers, distributors, and booksellers, as well as the costs involved in producing specific books, the prices at which they were marketed, and the levels of stock that went unsold. Such evidence indicates that the early modern period witnessed not only novel ideas about how to foster learned printing, and decisive steps towards realizing such goals, but also experimentation and slow progress, as scholars and printers confronted the financial, logistical, and political constraints under which their universities operated. Indeed, since university printing can only be understood within the wider political and economic context, this chapter suggests that its history is integral—​rather than peripheral—​to the history of the book in early modern England. It demonstrates how different branches of the book trade interacted, and how circumstances sometimes incentivized the allocation of resources to topical, polemical, and marketable material, at the expense of scholarly endeavours. Finally, in a context where many aspects of the print trade remain shrouded in mystery, the extraordinary archives of Oxford and Cambridge repeatedly shed vital light upon the mechanics of printing and publishing, bringing the operational dimensions of print shops sharply into focus.

I For much of the early modern period scholars had only a limited role in managing the work of printers who were attached to their institutions. These men and women were privileged tradesmen rather than employees; their presses were private businesses, in which the universities had no financial stake, and contemporaries made only gradual steps towards conceptualizing a ‘learned press’, with meaningful oversight and printers who were incentivized to venture beyond marketable texts, produced by negotiation with individual authors. In Oxford, where printing first began in the late 1470s, the idea

Printing and the Universities    271 of privileged printing emerged in the 1510s, although publishing only began in earnest when Joseph Barnes became printer to the university in the 1580s. In Cambridge, loans were made to John Siberch in the 1520s, and by 1534 the university possessed a charter sanctioning the production of ‘omnimodos libros’. However, while Remigius Guidon arrived from Strasbourg to establish a press in the 1550s, there too printing only became established in the 1580s.3 Indeed, even when the 1586 Star Chamber decree entitled each university to operate a single press, doubts remained about the legality of scholarly involvement. Working through these issues, and developing more meaningful visions of what a ‘learned press’ might look like, took the next fifty years. In Cambridge, the slow pace of change highlighted the risk of privileged printers clashing with both the government and the Stationers’ Company, the privileges of which made scholars wary. Thomas Thomas (d. 1588) was left to pursue his own publishing instincts, as well as profit, but his business model—​printing in English for non-​scholarly audiences—​provoked the Stationers to seize his equipment in 1583, while Bishop Aylmer grumbled about him being ‘ignorant’ about ‘the excessive number of printing presses’ and about the risk that operators in ‘secret corners’ would produce ‘things forbidden’. The university, which considered him to be ‘godly’ and ‘honest’, complained about his treatment, worried about the ‘utter overthrow’ of printing in Cambridge, and insisted that he would not be allowed to print ‘things prohibited’. However, while invoking its institutional privileges for ‘the setting forth of many good and profitable books’, it ducked the issue of how these related to the Stationers’ privileges. Meanwhile, Thomas’s inclination towards puritanism provoked Archbishop Whitgift to complain about ‘factious’ books, and here too there was a lack of clarity over whether authority to supervise his work lay with the episcopal or university authorities.4 An agreement was struck with Thomas in 1586, to prevent seditious printing and control prices, but while the university recognized the need for oversight, it took no financial responsibility. This lack of legal and regulatory clarity was addressed only gradually. Thomas’s successors continued to focus upon marketable—​ and controversial—​ texts, and agreements with the Stationers’ Company were imperilled by John Legate, who challenged their monopolies regarding Bibles, psalters, and school grammars. However, the fact that Legate was backed by the Vice Chancellor indicates developing support for university printing. Cambridge breached regulations by appointing a second printer (1606); Legate was given first refusal on books by local authors (1622); and copyright was decreed to reside with his office rather than his private business. Moreover, Legate’s successor, Thomas Buck, was a scholar who became a university official, and this institutionalization of printing was probably crucial as matters came to a head politically. Legal wrangling over the printing of schoolbooks ended in defeat, and in 1623 a Privy Council ruling produced an uneasy compromise—​involving the ‘comprinting’ of privileged books—​that was honoured in the breach. However, this dispute was bankrolled by the university, with backing from the Chancellor, the Duke of Buckingham, whose support signalled official recognition. In 1625, royal protection was offered against the sale of pirated editions from the Continent, and in 1629 Cambridge was granted qualified permission to print certain privileged texts.5

272   Jason Peacey Nevertheless, progress remained slow. Subsequent years witnessed greater coordination between the university’s two main printers, Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, the latter of whom was convinced that scholarly printing would bring honour to the university. Building upon notable successes—​like Bishop Davenant’s commentary on Colossians (1627)—​efforts were made to print in Hebrew and Greek, to obtain printable manuscripts, and to acquire Oriental type. By the 1630s the university printers had no fewer than six presses, which were capable of producing books like Thomas Fuller’s Historie of the Holy Warre (1639), and the New Testament in Greek and Latin (1642). Nevertheless, it is hard to discern a meaningful ‘vision’ regarding learned printing. The lack of type stymied plans for an Anglo-​Saxon edition of the psalms, and some scholarly printing—​like Nathaniel Carpenter’s Geography Delineated (1625)—​was organized privately. Printers also remained preoccupied by popular (and privileged) works, and during the 1630s Buck effectively became a trade printer for a London bookseller, Edmund Weaver, and while this involved Ovid, Virgil, and Cicero, it more obviously meant thousands of almanacs. By comparison, Oxford demonstrated clearer ambitions regarding learned printing, which eventually crystallized into the Laudian project. Lacking a formal charter, a request—​the ‘supplicatio’—​was made to establish ‘a printing office’ (1584), citing the existence of continental university presses, the presence of men skilled in ‘languages and liberal arts’, and manuscripts ‘hidden away’, ‘foully beset by dust and rubbish’. The aim was for Joseph Barnes to print texts ‘not now covered by privileges’, as recommended by ‘men of learning’, and to ensure that even remote corners of Britain were ‘watered’ with ‘pure streams of improved literature’, rather than with ‘frivolous trifles written in English’.6 At this stage, however, the reality was more prosaic. The university envisaged getting privileges for specific books, rather than a more general patent, and restricted its financial commitment to a loan of £100. Barnes and his successors certainly printed scholarly works, from editions in Greek and Latin to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Heylyn’s Microcosmus (both 1621). John Lichfield became a university official. Nevertheless, such men remained private traders, ‘printers to the famous university’, and as Barnes struggled to make a profit it was recognized that he would need to publish ‘saleable’ books if he was to ‘enterprise’ scholarly printing. Inauspiciously, the relationship between two of his successors—​Lichfield and William Turner—​broke down irrevocably in the 1620s.7 Progress became more rapid following the appointment of William Laud as chancellor (1630). A general patent—​for three printers, each with two presses—​was awarded in 1632, protecting Oxford editions for up to twenty-​one years, and the new university charter envisaged printers having access to the market for privileged books. Laud hoped that one of these men would be competent in Greek, that ‘excellent manuscripts’ might be published ‘in time’, and that steps would to be taken against ‘grasping’ and ‘mechanical artificers’, who were ‘concerned . . . with their own profit to the detriment of quality in their work’. He appointed ‘delegates’ to oversee the press, and envisaged creating a university post of architypographus—​a scholar-​cum-​press manager—​who would be ‘well-​ instructed in Greek and Latin literature and expert in matters philological’, and who

Printing and the Universities    273 would ‘supervise printing operations’ and ensure that printing equipment was ‘most choice’.8 Laud also recognized that a learned press would need money, and hypothecated surplus funds from the building of the ‘schools’ quadrangle, while also nurturing plans to utilize Greek type that had been donated by Sir Henry Savile in 1619, and which lay idle until being loaned to Cambridge in 1629. He also acquired Hebrew and Arabic type from Leiden (1637). Thus, while Laud remained cautious—​advising the university to let its privileges ‘gather strength quietly’, and to avoid antagonizing the Stationers’ Company—​his plans were far-​sighted.9 Unfortunately, Laud’s project could not feasibly come to fruition before the Civil War. The delegates were inactive, funds failed to materialize, and the opportunity did not arise to appoint an architypographus, even if someone could have been found with the requisite learning and technical prowess. The Laudian era certainly witnessed notable triumphs, such as the epistles of Clement I in Greek and Latin (1633), but it proved hard to break away from controversial literature. Laud reacted badly to the idea of reprinting works by Calvinist theologians like William Ames and Festus Hommius, but effected the publication of William Page’s Treatise or Justification of Bowing (1631), against the wishes of Archbishop Abbot. Moreover, William Turner’s failure to produce his folio edition of Malalas—​using ‘good sufficient paper’ and ‘the great primer Greek letter’, to be sold at prices set by the university—​exposed the weakness of the business model. Turner was incentivized by being allowed to print three almanacs per year for seven years, but was also expected to provide any ‘new letter to supply that which is worn deficient’, and to supply Arabic type. Turner’s non-​performance provoked accusations of ‘peevishness’ and ‘sottishness’, but it probably involved a hard-​headed calculation about the economic risk and the danger of enraging the Stationers’ Company.10

II Historians continue to debate whether Laud, in claiming that Oxford was ‘upon a very good way towards the setting up of a learned press’, exaggerated his achievements, but the arrested development of university printing can by demonstrated by examining the limited ways in which meaningful influence was exerted over privileged printers. Here, of course, it is impossible to ignore the disruptive effect of the Civil War and revolution, although paradoxically it might also be true that the mid-​seventeenth century was a period of progress, rather than of stagnation.11 First, university engagement with printers tended to be restricted to non-​scholarly activities, albeit in ways that shed valuable light upon the wider history of print culture, not least in terms of bread-​and-​butter business that kept presses going. Considerable evidence survives regarding job printing, and the everyday business of producing administrative texts, from library labels and bookplates to quaestiones for scholarly disputations, as well as alehouse licences and vagrancy orders, and notices that were ‘stuck up in all refectories’ and ‘on every corner and every inn door’.12 Here, university

274   Jason Peacey accounts reveal the economics of ephemera, as well as of the petitioning and lobbying undertaken by Oxford in the late 1640s. In 1647, Leonard Lichfield received £14. 14s. for producing 1,000 copies of the Reasons issued by the university (rejecting demands that scholars should accept recent church reform), and in 1649 Henry Hall was paid £3. 12s. 6d. for 250 copies of the Answer of the Chancellor to a petition by Oxford’s civic authorities, for distribution amongst MPs.13 Equally instructive are the collections of verses with which scholars marked notable royal occasions, where evidence abounds about printing costs and publication processes. With Horti Carolini—​Oxford’s effort to mark the birth of Prince Henry in 1640—​Leonard Lichfield received £5. 10s. to print fifty copies on large Dutch paper and 128 ‘ordinary’ copies. Particularly intriguing, however, is evidence about the mechanics and costs of presentation copies, since university verses were invariably ‘delivered at court’. With Horti Carolini, thirty-​eight copies were bound—​thirty in vellum, six in satin, and two in velvet—​at a cost of £4. 6s., not including the cost of ribbon and satin (£2. 16s.), and when 176 copies were sent to Lambeth the man who carried them incurred expenses of £4. 18s. Elsewhere, payments were recorded to printers, binders, and correctors, to Mrs More of Cambridge ‘for working the strings for the book which was given to the king’ (6s. 8d.), and to ‘two maids that sat up one night to help her to work’ (2s.). Occasionally, expenses were recorded for ‘pins to pin up the verses’, and even for ‘perfuming’ certain copies.14 Such activities reflected awareness that, rather than merely promoting scholarship, universities needed to engage with political elites and local communities, and to deal with extraordinary as well as everyday affairs. The danger, of course, was that learned printing was eclipsed, most obviously during the Civil War. In Cambridge, Roger Daniel began printing Royalist texts ‘by His Majesties special command’, not least Henry Ferne’s Resolving of Conscience, despite pressure—​and occasional imprisonment—​by Parliament, which suspected the complicity of the Vice Chancellor, Richard Holdsworth. On one occasion, Oliver Cromwell seized copies of a tract by Lionel Gatford as they were being printed. Subsequently, Daniel’s presses were co-​opted by Parliamentarian commanders like the Earl of Manchester and Sir Thomas Fairfax, and it is noteworthy that in the 1650s the university appointed a printer—​John Field—​ closely associated with Parliamentarian and Interregnum regimes, and with propaganda. To the extent that Field printed other material—​notably Bibles—​he followed commercial imperatives, and courted controversy with inferior quality workmanship. Political pressures were even more acute in Oxford, and the university received repeated commands to ‘publish’ and ‘disperse’ proclamations and declarations from the King’s ‘paper war’ with Parliament, even before the town became the King’s headquarters. However, while Royalists bankrolled vast quantities of polemic, popular verse, and political news, issued orders regarding specific tracts, and nominated a new printer (Henry Hall), some propaganda was also funded by the university. Leonard Lichfield sometimes styled himself ‘printer to the university’ on Royalist texts, and during the period when Hall was paid £28 for ‘printing books for the university’ (1642–​3) he worked exclusively on propaganda, including Mercurius Aulicus and tracts by the ‘water poet’, John Taylor.15

Printing and the Universities    275 However, tempting as it might be to conclude that learned printing was abandoned during the revolutionary decades, other evidence points towards greater scholarly activity. In part, this involved attempts to ensure effective licensing, an area where oversight may have been patchy in earlier years. In Cambridge, the authorities searched for particularly offensive texts, like a quasi-​republican tract by David Paraeus, and then licensed David Owen’s Anti-​Paraeus (1622). In Oxford, authors occasionally sought an imprimatur from the Vice Chancellor, who probably relied upon advice from other scholars, although both the university and national officials worried that printers like Turner were producing unauthorized puritan pamphlets. However, while Laudian injunctions—​as well as the 1637 Star Chamber decree—​strove to impose order, licensing in Oxford may only have been tightened after 1644, when the professors of divinity, medicine, and civil law were ordered to join the Vice Chancellor in scrutinizing new books, and after printers were subjected to the authority of the Parliamentarian visitation of the university (October 1646). Licensing then became more regular—​or more visible—​following the appointment of a new delegacy (1653), and although at least some decisions were taken by Oliver Cromwell and the Council of State, the university certainly suppressed atheistical books like Francis Osborne’s Advice to a Son (1656). This trend was also evident in Cambridge, where the later 1650s witnessed an attempt to create a register of approved works. Enhanced regulation, combined with official pressure to move away from polemic, helped to ensure the publication of more learned works, and while some of this was organized privately—​William Somner’s Anglo-​Saxon Dictionarum was printed for the author by subscription (1659)—​both universities became more active in supporting scholarship. Cambridge printers produced works like Arthur Jackson’s three-​volume biblical commentary, and a folio Bible authorized by the Vice Chancellor, John Worthington (1658). In Oxford, the fire of October 1644 meant that some projects—​ like Archbishop Ussher’s Epistles—​needed to be redone, but it did little to prevent the appearance of works in Greek and Latin (including Longinus in 1644), technically demanding mathematical works by John Wallis, and Edward Pococke’s Hebrew and Arabic editions, including Porta Mosis by Maimonides (1655). Some such projects—​ the annals of Eutychius, and an Arabic edition of Grotius’s De Veritate Religionis—​were financed by benefactors, like John Selden and Robert Boyle, but also reflected the zeal of Gerard Langbaine, keeper of the university archives, who oversaw the acquisition of Hebrew, Arabic, and Anglo-​Saxon type, liaised with donors, and monitored formal agreements with scholars and printers.

III If Langbaine demonstrates how learned printing moved from being a ‘project’ to a reality, then the second half of the seventeenth century indicates that this process involved considerable experimentation, as officials grappled with challenges regarding facilities, processes, and finances, the latter of which proved to be particularly intractable.

276   Jason Peacey The most visible but least significant sign of change involved the development of centralized facilities, where both universities appeared to make considerable progress. Cambridge developed a new printing house near St Catharine’s College, with six presses, while in Oxford the old congregation house became the ‘domus typographica’—​a store for university-​owned type (1652). Eventually, the university built the Sheldonian Theatre, the basement of which was used for printing from 1669 onwards, after £600 was spent on new facilities. The theatre came to symbolize Oxford printing, its image appearing prominently on numerous title pages, although in truth the premises were not fit for purpose. Such facilities, moreover, were only as impressive as the uses to which they were put. Key here was a financial conundrum: scholarly printing was expensive, and learned works had a limited audience, and yet they were difficult to subsidize with the proceeds from more profitable texts, because the Stationers’ Company (and its ‘English Stock’ company) held cherished privileges. Thus, in the absence of university funds the solution that emerged in the 1630s—​as university privileges became established—​involved ‘covenants of forbearance’, whereby university printers refrained from printing privileged texts (Bibles, prayer books, psalters, grammars and schoolbooks, as well as almanacs) in return for £200 per annum. Such agreements, negotiated individually by both universities, represented a pragmatic solution, to avoid expensive litigation, the seizure of books and equipment, and piracy, and they generated revenue with which to fund learned printing. As Laud noted, ‘it will be more beneficial to the university for the advance of a learned press to receive £200 a year, than to print grammars and almanacs’.16 Like any pragmatic solution, covenants were suboptimal. As independent traders, printers in Oxford and Cambridge did not welcome restrictions upon their activities, and in the late 1650s Leonard Lichfield junior argued that such deals hampered printing that might bring ‘honour and credit’ to his university.17 More troubling was the fact that payments dried up in the 1640s; Samuel Fell (Dean of Christ Church) recognized that ‘the Stationers will evade, if possibly they can’, and by the early 1650s Oxford claimed to be owed £1,600. Legal action was considered, and Langbaine worked hard to secure the arrears, which could ‘bear the charges of publishing very many ancient classical authors in most of the learned tongues’. Ultimately, Oxford retaliated by permitting its printers to produce Bibles, grammars, and almanacs—​‘at their own cost and . . . for their own profit’—​until matters were resolved.18 Eventually, new agreements were struck by both universities in the late 1650s, and fairly traditional covenants were reintroduced in the early 1660s. That said, the incompatibility between the privileges of the universities and the Stationers, not to mention the King’s Printer’s, generated different strategies in Oxford and Cambridge. In Cambridge, John Field and his most prominent successor, John Hayes, were tied to the London book trade, and focused upon non-​scholarly printing; both became well known for Bibles, schoolbooks, and—​more obviously—​almanacs, where production increased from 15,000 to 100,000 copies a year by the late 1680s. This generated revenue, but at the expense of scholarly printing, and their under-​utilized

Printing and the Universities    277 presses effectively became owned and controlled by the Stationers’ Company. This suggests that the development of learned printing was dependent upon local circumstances and practices as much as upon formal and institutional arrangements. As such, a more useful way of comparing developments in the two universities—​and of demonstrating that learned printing became more sophisticated in Oxford—​involves evidence about organization, decision-​making, and procedures. In Oxford, processual arrangements involved the Delegates appointed in 1662, and the architypographus, finally appointed in 1658. Samuel Clarke proved to be learned—​a scholar of Arabic and Hebrew—​and energetic, and he ensured that the ‘schools surplus’ began to be spent on works like Edward Pococke’s Latin and Arabic edition of the Historia Compendiosa by Gregorius (1663), as evident from his correspondence and invaluable accounts (1658–​ 69). Clarke purchased new equipment, provided financial and logistical support, and dealt with complaints about poor type and sloppy printing, but he also identified worthy projects. From the late 1660s the Delegates also commissioned new type, and provided funds to support scholarly activity. This was partly a matter of Bodleian catalogues. In 1620 the university had paid £112 to print a new edition, hoping to recoup its outlay by making all library users purchase a copy (2s.), and in 1672 the librarian Thomas Hyde was paid £160 for editing a third version, 1,000 copies of which were printed at the university’s expense (£725). Beyond this, the delegates assisted scholars who were transcribing manuscripts for publication, and paid to acquire the ‘copy’ of works like Anthony Wood’s history of the university. More generally, however, financial assistance was restricted to loans, which somehow needed to be repaid. This was the model used to publish Charles Estienne’s Dictionarium Historicum (1670), and later Robert Morison’s Plantarum, where £200 was advanced to buy paper.19 This clearly represented progress, along lines envisaged by Laud, although the number of publications remained small and the system fragile. This is clear from William Beveridge’s Synodikon, the canons of the Eastern Church in Greek and Latin, the first project recorded by the Delegates in the minute book they instigated in 1668. Notable here is that the task needed to be given to a London printer, Robert Scott (the university’s agent in London), and that the process was fraught. The job was admittedly massive—​two folio volumes, 1,588 pages—​and complex, with each sheet costing £1. 18s. to prepare. However, while some type was loaned, Scott bore ‘all other charges about the impression . . . in such manner as shall be for the honour of the university’, for additional type (400 lb of Greek letters and 500 lb of Roman and Italic, as well as Syriac letters), for paper, and for a compositor recruited from France. It proved to be a ‘tedious business’, which Scott could not complete; the edition finally appeared in 1672, but Scott was still struggling to repay his £200 loan in 1675.20 Clarke’s appointment was important but not transformational, and the final decades of the seventeenth century witnessed further experimentation. This partly reflected his unusual skill-​set; it proved difficult to find an adequate replacement, and his successor, Christopher Wase, was said to be ‘crazed in the head’ and ‘void’ of all skill.21 However, it also reflected the importance of John Fell, a dominant and single-​minded delegate, who was impatient to develop learning printing, and who recognized that this

278   Jason Peacey could only be sustained with a different business model. Abandoning the idea of an architypographus—​the post became a sinecure—​Fell opted for a press guided by scholars like himself, assisted by a warehouse keeper, William Hall. Tellingly, Fell referred in 1669 to ‘our new trade of printing’, which would ‘prove useful to us poor scholars’ and provide ‘advantage to the public’.22 Fell’s ambitions are evident from successive prospectuses for the ‘advancement of learning’, which referred to planned editions of ‘the Greek and Latin fathers, and other classical books, in history, philology, mathematics etc. . . . to serve the public’, and to the need for ‘a very considerable sum of money . . . to set us on working’.23 Fell understood that a scholarly press was impossible ‘without a public assistance’, and that ‘useful and necessary books’ were ‘lost to the world’ because ‘men of trade, only intent upon their gain, will not be at the expense and hazard of such impressions’. Recognizing that a lack of capital had been the ‘fatal mishap’ hitherto, he encouraged ‘voluntary benefactions’ and loans (both ‘gratis’ and ‘upon interest’), while also promoting subscription publication, not least for pet projects like the annotated Bible, with promises that subscribers could determine paper type, format, and price.24 He also made a concerted push to improve stores of type, by donation (Anglo-​Saxon, Gothic, and Runic) as well as purchase, from the United Provinces and foundries in London, where Joseph Leigh and Nicholas Nicholls made Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew letters, at a cost of £365. Fell also hired a corrector of the press, spent £104 on ‘the new print house under the east wall of the theatre’, and acquired a new press (£28), as well as a rolling press for engravings (£5). Ultimately, Fell sought to make the press independent of such supply chains, which were badly disrupted by the Third Anglo-​Dutch War; he established a foundry in Oxford, and began acquiring paper from the nearby Wolvercote mill.25 Key to Fell’s ambitions, however, were a new management structure and a novel attitude towards the Stationers’ Company. In 1671, Fell and his partners—​Leoline Jenkins, Thomas Yate, and Joseph Williamson—​took control of operations, as lessees who were answerable to, but effectively independent from, the university, in return for £200 per annum. As Fell explained, ‘while the charge of the press lies . . . in the hands of the university, it can never be . . . managed to advantage’; as such, these ‘undertakers for the press’ would ‘undergo a hazard and expense in the management thereof ’, ‘freed from mercenary artificers’, and able to ‘further the interests and convenience of scholars’ rather than ‘make profits for the booksellers’. Crucially, this ‘private company’ envisaged ‘exploiting the privilege granted by its charters instead of forbearing to do so in return for a rent’. Fell thus rejected the pragmatism of previous decades, explaining that by printing ‘gainful privileged books’—​at lower prices, and as ‘benefactors to the nation’—​he could subsidize ‘the edition of those other authors which afford no pecuniary advantage’.26 This was a bold move, which provoked ‘howling and desponding’ amongst London stationers, and the way forward was far from smooth. Hoping to ‘push forward . . . as fast as we can’, Fell grumbled of his workmen that ‘to make them always attend their work is . . . beyond any skills, having a peculiar obligation to be idle’. He clearly disapproved of printers having paid holidays, but also encountered poor workmanship on the quarto edition of the Bible, where William Foster submitted a bill for correcting misprints in

Printing and the Universities    279 4,500 copies by hand (£2. 9s.).27 Fell was also forced to revise upwards—​from 300 to 500—​the number of subscribers necessary to make projects viable, and although he remained confident that these could be found amongst ‘the nobility, gentry, lawyers, physicians, and clergy’, considerable sums clearly came from the partners’ own pockets.28 More importantly, taking on the Stationers proved to be unrealistic. Massive editions of the Oxford almanac—​20,000 books and 15,000 sheets, costing £32 and £17 respectively—​were bought up by the Stationers, presumably to be pulped, and although Fell remained hopeful that ‘we may in time . . . do something considerable’, fears were expressed that the Stationers would ‘break us’.29 In 1675 the partners were forced to accept a new covenant of forbearance, which limited the press to low-​circulation almanacs and prevented it from producing schoolbooks and psalters, while permitting the publication of Bibles. Fell thus reverted to a pragmatic approach, accepting that ‘avoiding trouble’ was ‘a valuable consideration’.30 The difference on this occasion was that he ‘sub-​let’ the profitable parts of the business—​what became known as the ‘Bible press’, based in the Sheldonian—​to a group of ‘interlopers’ (Moses Pitt, Peter Parker, Thomas Guy, and William Leake), in return for £200 per annum (1678).31

IV Fell’s ‘learned press’ was a considerable achievement, the rich archive of which is immensely valuable for book historians, although in the end the complex relationship between it, the ‘Bible press’, and the Stationers’ Company was probably unsustainable. Undeniable is that the ‘undertakers’ oversaw publishing triumphs. These included Fell’s Greek testament (1675), Humphrey Prideaux’s edition of the Arundel Marbles (1676), and Obadiah Walker’s Paraphrase of St Paul’s Epistles (1675–​8). Not every project was easy or successful, and while the delegates purchased the ‘copy’ for Edward Bernard’s edition of Josephus, which had ‘begun to be printed’ in 1672, completion proved difficult. A truncated edition appeared in 1687, the university having contributed £244 as well as £189 for paper, although this was certainly not the end of the story.32 Nevertheless, Fell could certainly claim to have fulfilled promises made in his first prospectus, and even the Malalas chronicle finally appeared in print. For historians, moreover, the learned press—​with its correspondence, bills, and receipts, as well as its accounts—​sheds remarkable light upon the mechanics of the book trade. Such evidence reveals Fell’s interventionist editorial style (as suffered by Anthony Wood), Yate’s business trips to London, and the process of getting books advertised in the Gazette, as well as the cost of certain engravings. It also illuminates the process of acquiring and transporting paper and other necessaries, from suppliers like William Carbonnel, Thomas Papillon, and Alexander Merreall. One inventory itemized myriad kinds of paper, by size, quality, and price, which ranged from 2s. 8d. (Morlaix paper) to £2. 16s. (Merreall Super Royal) per ream.33 Most enlightening of all are the itemized

280   Jason Peacey accounts, which describe dealings with booksellers in Oxford, London, and the provinces, as well as on the Continent, and provide evidence about the distribution of subscribers’ books and presentation copies, and also break down the cost of composing, printing, and binding specific books. For example, the press produced 1,000 copies of Obadiah Walker’s Of Education (1673), using Great Pica and Lumbard paper, the twenty-​ six reams of which cost £10. For each sheet, composition cost 9s., presswork 4s. 10d., and correction 2s., giving a total cost—​for paper and work ‘at case’ and ‘at press’—​of £21. 11s. 3d. The books sold at 16d. each (unbound). In 1680, it was estimated that pressmen would be paid 2s. 8d. to print 1,000 sheets on both sides, while compositors were paid 2s. 6d. per day. The cost of printing 3,000 copies of a single sheet was £1. 5s., including 2s. to the corrector and 10s. for ink, and for using the university’s type.34 What also emerges, however, is that scholarly progress risked being undermined by conflict between the ‘Bible press’ and the Stationers’ Company. Although the Privy Council defended the interlopers, a fierce price war threatened to drive them out of business, provoking them to enter the more lucrative sections of the Bible market, with massive print runs of smaller-​format editions. As tensions worsened, suits were brought against the Oxford printers in Chancery and King’s Bench, resulting in an unsatisfactory and unstable compromise (1685), and eventually Quo Warranto proceedings. This was a highly politicized affair, driven by James II’s government and a powerful but controversial Catholic printer, Henry Hills, and it involved suggestions that Oxford’s Anglican press was sponsoring ‘scandalous and seditious books’ (1688). Moreover, while this challenge was halted by the Glorious Revolution, underlying problems remained. In 1691, the Vice Chancellor accused the remaining interlopers of printing ‘on paper worse than ever, and on letters so far worn out’, and of breeding up ‘mercenary’ tradesmen of ‘the basest and meanest condition’. Their profit brought ‘disgrace’ to the university, and they were forcibly removed.35 This presaged a new agreement with the Stationers, which brought the university £200 per annum for assigning away its rights to specific titles, while allowing its new partners to produce Bibles as ‘university printers’, whose activities were closely monitored.

V Such developments indicate that even in Oxford operations remained uncertain and experimental, and yet what is striking is how quickly both universities made the final steps towards establishing meaningful university presses. Outlining such changes permits a final assessment about how much had changed in little over a century, as well as about the stage that had been reached by 1700. In Oxford, the crucial decision was made in 1690 by Fell’s executors, who surrendered operations to the university, thereby instigating direct institutional responsibility for the finances and fortunes of the learned press. This then inspired Cambridge to follow suit, and in 1696 Oxford watched warily as reports emerged about a new scholarly press,

Printing and the Universities    281 managed by delegates and backed by the Vice Chancellor and Archbishop Tenison, to the tune of £300. Although some onlookers were sceptical—​suggesting that Cambridge scholars were ‘afraid the dust of their manuscripts should spoil their gowns’—​others feared that they would ‘break their sister if they can’. Such plans originated with Richard Bentley, scholar, librarian, and royal chaplain, whose ‘short and imperfect scheme’ was backed by the Chancellor, the Duke of Somerset, with a telling observation about the opportunity to ‘have a press once more erected at Cambridge’. Although Bentley envisaged that an architypographus would have ‘constant inspection of the press’, real power was to lie with a small group of ‘curators’, who would ‘govern the press’ by choosing and licensing texts, setting prices, and providing ‘such sums as they shall judge necessary’. Bentley was quickly authorized to purchase type, and by 1698 the university had appointed curators, an architypographus (John Laughton, librarian of Trinity College), and a printer, Cornelius Crownfield.36 Assessing the significance of such developments—​involving institutional control of learned printing—​involves recognizing that, even at this point in the story, continuity is as evident as change. Serious challenges remained, in terms of ensuring that printed books were not left languishing in warehouses; that ‘mechanic’ booksellers would ‘live in dependence upon scholars, by whose labour and industry they gain their wealth’; and that a balance was struck between ‘vendible’ and ‘useful’ books.37 In Oxford, ‘Delegates’ books’, overseen by the university, remained rare, perhaps one or two per year, and challenges remained in terms of exerting control over ‘authors’ books’, although licensing was retained even after the lapse of censorship legislation in 1695, not least to prevent embarrassing episodes like the printing of Arthur Bury’s heretical Naked Gospel (1690). Tensions also persisted with the Stationers’ Company, which was ‘mortified’ by recent developments, and which was thought likely to respond ‘fiercely’, causing concerns that university presses would be ‘overcome’.38 As such, it would be easy to monitor the highs and lows of university printing—​ including the ‘lazy obscurity’ into which Oxford’s press apparently sank—​into the eighteenth century.39 However, enough has hopefully been done to explain the faltering development of learning printing in England, at both a theoretical and a practical level. With scholarly books unlikely to be profitable, and with financial resources scarce, difficult decisions arose about whether and how far to move away from a business model in which printers operated as privileged traders rather than university employees. Decision-​making was also constrained by wider economic and political structures, which made it necessary to navigate carefully around government policies and the privileges of the Stationers’ Company and the royal printers. In this conjuncture, change came about as a result of pragmatic experimentation rather than just visionary thinking, and as tension between the universities and the Stationers incentivized new approaches, and eventually the institutionalization of scholarly printing. This process was certainly incomplete by 1700, and challenges remained in terms of how best to subsidize and support scholarly activities. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny the significance of the changes that had occurred. They highlight the possibilities that emerged for high-​quality learned printing with meaningful institutional support; provide new

282   Jason Peacey perspectives regarding government policies and the London book trade; and reveal the broader value of surviving archival evidence, bringing into focus an otherwise hazy picture of the mechanics of early modern book production and distribution.

Notes 1. Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 30, 32, 43, 51, 85, 226–​227. 2. George J. Gray and William Mortlock Palmer, Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Printers (London: Bibliographical Society, 1915), 64–​7 1; David McKitterick, ‘John Field in 1668: The Affairs of a University Printer’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 9/​5 (1990), 497–​516, at 509–​511. 3. Benjamin Pohl and Leah Tether, ‘Remigius Guidon, Cambridge’s Old Paper Mill and the Beginnings of the Cambridge University Press, c.1550–​1559’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 15/​2 (2013), 177–​217. 4. John Morris, ‘Restrictive Practices in the Elizabethan Book Trade’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 4/​4 (1967), 276–​290, at 278, 281–​282, 284, 288. 5. William M. Baillie, ‘The Printing of Privileged Books at Cambridge, 1631–​ 1634’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 5/​3 (1971), 155–​166. 6. Carter, History, 19–​20. 7. John Johnson and Strickland Gibson, Print and Privilege at Oxford to the Year 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 8. 8. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 10–​11; Andrew Hegarty, ‘The University and the Press, 1584–​1780’, in Ian Gadd (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press, i: Beginnings to 1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 158–​190, at 167–​168; Carter, History, 31. 9. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 12. 10. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 13–​14. 11. Falconer Madan, Oxford Books, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895–​1931), iii. 456. 12. Martyn Ould, ‘Ephemera and Frequently Reprinted Works’, in Gadd (ed.), History, i. 293–​ 307, at 295. 13. Madan, Oxford Books, ii. 481–​2, iii. 463. 14. Madan, Oxford Books, ii. 144, iii. 457; J. C. T. Oates, ‘Cambridge Books of Congratulatory Verses 1603–​1640 and Their Binders’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1/​5 (1953), 395–​421. 15. Madan, Oxford Books, ii. 293, 362, 371. 16. Ian Gadd, ‘The Press and the London Book Trade’, in Gadd (ed.), History, i. 569–​599, at 582. 17. Jason Peacey, ‘Printers to the University, 1584–​1658’, in Gadd (ed.), History, i. 51–​77, at 76. 18. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 25, 30; Peacey, ‘Printers’, 73. 19. Strickland Gibson and John Johnson (eds.), The First Minute Book of the Delegates of Oxford University Press, 1668–​1756 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1943), 6–​12; Madan, Oxford Books, ii. 482, iii. 247. 20. Gibson and Johnson (eds.), First Minute Book, 3–​5, 7; Madan, Oxford Books, iii. 262. 21. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 49–​50. 22. Vivienne Larminie, ‘The Fell Era, 1658–​1686’, in Gadd (ed.), History, i. 79–​105, at 86. 23. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 53, 85.

Printing and the Universities    283 24. An Advertisement (Oxford, 1680); Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 53, 61–​62; Madan, Oxford Books, iii. 411–​414. 25. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 41; Carter, History, 66, 122–​126. 26. Carter, History, 51, 61; Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 46–​47, 54, 162–​164. 27. Madan, Oxford Books, vol. iii, pp. xxxix, 325. 28. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 85. 29. Madan, Oxford Books, vol. iii, pp. xliii, 275–​276. 30. Carter, History, 68. 31. Madan, Oxford Books, iii. 418–​421. 32. Carter, History, 76–​78, 81–​89; Gibson and Johnson, First Minute Book, 5, 7. 33. R. W. Chapman, ‘An Inventory of Paper, 1674’, The Library, 7/​4 (1927), 402–​407. 34. F. Madan, ‘Oxford Oddments’, The Library, 9/​4 (1928), 341–​356; Madan, Oxford Books, iii. 287, 365–​366. 35. Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 126. See also the forthcoming book on Henry Hills by Michael Durrant. 36. D. F. McKenzie, ‘The Genesis of the Cambridge University Press, 1695–​1696’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 5/​1 (1969), 79–​80; D. F. McKenzie, ‘Richard Bentley’s Design for the Cambridge University Press, c.1696’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6/​5 (1976), 322–​327. 37. McKenzie, ‘Genesis’, 79; Carter, History, 162. 38. McKenzie, ‘Genesis’, 79; Johnson and Gibson, Print and Privilege, 55. 39. Madan, Oxford Books, vol. iii, p. xxiii.

Select Bibliography Baillie, William M., ‘The Printing of Privileged Books at Cambridge, 1631–​1634’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 5/​3 (1971), 155–​166. Barnes, F., and Dickinson, J. C., ‘A Seventeenth-​Century Cambridge Book at Its Cost’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 2/​5 (1958), 376–​381. Carter, Harry, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Gadd, Ian (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press, i: Beginnings to 1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Johnson, John, and Gibson, Strickland, Print and Privilege at Oxford to the Year 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). Leedham-​Green, Elizabeth, ‘University Press Records in the University Archives: An Account and a Check List’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8/​4 (1984), 398–​418. McKenzie, D. F., ‘Notes on Printing at Cambridge, c.1590’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 3/​1 (1959), 96–​103. McKenzie, D. F., ‘Richard Bentley’s Design for the Cambridge University Press, c.1696’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6/​5 (1976), 322–​327. McKitterick, David, A History of Cambridge University Press, i: Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534–​1698 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). McKitterick, David, ‘University Printing at Oxford and Cambridge’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 189–​205.

284   Jason Peacey McMullin, B. J., ‘The 1629 Cambridge Bible’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8/​4 (1984), 381–​397. Madan, Falconer, Oxford Books, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895–​1931). Mandelbrote, Scott, ‘The Publication and Illustration of Robert Morison’s Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 78/​2 (2015), 349–​379. Morris, John, ‘Restrictive Practices in the Elizabethan Book Trade’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 4/​4 (1967), 276–​290. Oates, J. C. T., ‘Cambridge Books of Congratulatory Verses 1603–​1640 and Their Binders’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1/​5 (1953), 395–​421. Pohl, Benjamin, and Tether, Leah, ‘Remigius Guidon, Cambridge’s Old Paper Mill and the Beginnings of the Cambridge University Press, c.1550–​1559’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 15/​2 (2013), 177–​217.

Chapter 16

Illustrated B o ok s Michael Hunter

‘The use of the picture is evident,’ wrote Sir John Harington in the illustrated edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso that he published in 1591: ‘which is, that (having read over the booke) you may reade it (as it were againe) in the very picture.’1 The implication is that the pictorial element of a book encapsulated its message, providing a complement to the text that was at once meaningful and distinctive. Certainly, many books of the period were provided with illustrations—​despite the increased cost that resulted from the involvement of artists and craftsmen in their production, and the added complexities that stemmed from their inclusion. Yet (with a few exceptions, perhaps notably ‘Foxe studies’) such images are often neglected, a state of affairs that this essay will attempt to rectify. After a basic typology of common types of book illustration, it will go on to itemize some notable examples of the genre, which often give us a vivid, tactile view of the period that can never be achieved by texts alone. Overall, the objective is to provide an overview which it is hoped will stimulate greater attention to this key aspect of early modern book production. The illustrations with which books were furnished could, in fact, be purely ornamental. A classic case is provided by the decorative title pages with which, from soon after 1500 onwards, books were often provided. These stand in contrast to the elaborate title pages illustrating themes specific to the work that they preceded that flourished from the mid-​Tudor period onwards, a genre that has received extensive attention.2 Instead, these simpler designs seem to have been intended as visual embellishments with no specific significance—​as witness the extent to which the same designs were reused in books with highly contrasting subject-​matter. For instance, a title page with a cherub head at the top and the date ‘1534’ in the sill (see Fig. 16.1) was used between 1534 and 1624 for no fewer than fifty-​five different titles, including various books by Sir Thomas Elyot along with translations from the Psalms and from Xenophon, Erasmus, Agrippa and Marcus Aurelius, and other still more miscellaneous works.3 Of other types of illustration, perhaps the most numerous were religious ones, not least in the early part of the period. William Caxton and other early printers produced many simple yet effective images that may well have been put to devotional use.4 There

286   Michael hunter

Fig. 16.1  Title page of Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1539). This title page was reused fifty-​ five times between 1534 and 1624. 104.5 × 64.5 mm. (EPB/​A/​1999.) © Wellcome Library, London.

were then innumerable illustrations to the Bible and other religious texts, from Miles Coverdale’s Bible of 1535 onwards.5 Indeed, apart from pictures actually included in the text in editions of the Bible, there was also a genre of separate sets of biblical illustrations, of which a late example, dating from 1690, is illustrated below (Fig. 12). These were intended to circumvent the monopolies in Bible printing that were granted by the government to certain printers from the Tudor period onwards and that were often strictly enforced.6 In addition, there was a large category of what one might call ‘informational’ illustrations. Here, an example is provided by the delineation of Stonehenge included in William Camden’s popular work Britannia (1586 and subsequent editions) (Fig. 16.2). Such images were particularly important in ‘how-​to’ books like Sir Hugh Plat’s Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594), which gave instructions for everything from cooking fowl to syphoning water, and in which detailed and accurate pictures were crucial.7 Another notable example was John Gerard’s Herbal, full of intricate depictions of plants, which was initially published in 1597 and of which a greatly enlarged edition appeared in 1633. In addition, there were entire genres of illustrated books on such topics as surgery, horsemanship, distilling, or surveying.8 A particularly significant subclass of such illustrations comprised maps, another genre that was established relatively early and that thrived throughout the period. Here the key figure was Christopher Saxton, who, encouraged by Lord Burghley and others, between 1574 and 1579 produced an outstanding atlas of county maps, a distinctive

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Fig. 16.2  View of Stonehenge from the 1610 edition of William Camden’s Britain, 252. This is a reuse of a plate by William Rogers from the 1600 Latin edition of Camden’s much reprinted work, with the faint pagination ‘219’ and with an English translation of the commentary added. Plate area 175 × 120 mm.

cartographic form unparalleled elsewhere in Europe.9 Saxton seems to have conducted his topographical survey by an elaborate system of triangulation, but what is significant about his maps is the way in which the delineation of each county was reduced to a uniform format to fit a copperplate measuring about 38 × 51 cm: within this, the exact boundaries and distinctive features of each shire were depicted in a manner calculated to give rise to a sense of identity and local pride.10 Saxton’s maps were succeeded by those in John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–​12), which added an equally

288   Michael hunter notable series of town plans and other illustrations, and which proved highly popular in succeeding years.11 In this, the work reflected Speed’s penchant for providing data in a visually accessible form, seen also in his much-​reprinted Genealogies Recorded in the Sacred Scriptures (1611).12 Maps apart, however, it might be felt that book illustration really came into its own with the great narrative projects of the early Elizabethan period, particularly Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, commonly known as the Book of Martyrs, and Holinshed’s Chronicles, the former first published in 1563, the latter in 1577. Whereas the second, 1587 edition of Holinshed was unillustrated, Foxe’s lavishly illustrated work was much reprinted: there was an extended two-​volume second edition in 1570; a cut-​price edition in 1576; a de luxe edition in 1583; and a reprint of this in 1596–​7. The book therefore deserves detailed attention here. It is in folio format, in double columns throughout, printed mainly in black letter, though interspersed by sections in roman type, and it is vast—​1,800 pages in length in the first edition, nearly 2,400 in that of 1570, containing 105 woodcuts, which amount, with repeats, to 149 illustrations. It was all made possible because of John Day’s publishing monopolies, which enabled him to invest the huge amount of capital involved in producing the book: later editions had to be published by a consortium of Stationers.13 Foxe’s rather prolix account of the history of the Church and its persecutions comes to a climax with the reign of Mary Tudor. Within it, the images are quite widely scattered, after the striking decorative title page, which juxtaposes a series of images of ‘the persecuted Church’ and ‘the persecutyng Church’. The main group of illustrations comprise woodcuts that take up the full width of the page, occupying approximately a third of the page in height. These are almost all of martyrdoms or related scenes of people in prison and the like. They are bold and dramatic, dominated by scenes of suffering martyrs, often with banderoles issuing from their mouths with words like ‘Lord receive my spirit’; these are surrounded by rather elegantly dressed men in doublet and hose, or clerics in gowns, looking nonchalantly on, and crowds of onlookers (Fig. 16.3). There are some forty-​five of these, almost all of which appear in the first edition of 1563 and are reprinted in each subsequent one.14 There are two further sets of pictures in the 1563 edition. First, there are a couple of anti-​papal images early in the book, showing emperors being humiliated by popes, one based on a design in a Lutheran book by Robert Barnes published in 1545: these are more than a column in width and are pasted in, as if they had not really been anticipated when the sheet in question was set in type. More striking is a large woodcut, of the size of a whole page, which had to be separately inserted: this graphically depicts six scenes relating to the poisoning of King John by a monk in 1216.15 A second group comprises single-​column images of individual martyrs who are not identified, their naked bodies surrounded by flames and with captions like ‘O Lord receive my soule’: almost all of these appear relatively early in the book.16 The 1570 edition makes some major additions. By this time Queen Elizabeth had been excommunicated by Pope Pius V in his bull Regnans in Excelsis, and the anti-​Catholic theme is ramped up, particularly by the inclusion at the end of what now became the first

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Fig. 16.3  The burning of Thomas Cranmer, from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563). 130 × 180 mm. (Sel. 2.15b.) © Cambridge University Library.

volume of a two-​volume work of a series of twelve images on successive pages depicting ‘The proud primacie of Popes’—​mainly woodcuts of the humiliation of emperors at the hands of popes.17 There is also a three-​page fold-​out ‘Table of the X. first Persecutions of the Primitive Church’ with further graphic depictions of assorted tortures and the like from the Early Christian era.18 Equally significant is the proliferation of single-​column images of individual martyrs or groups of martyrs at the stake, some of them replacing the images of martyrs early in the 1563 edition, which increase in number in the later pages of the work—​dealing with the reign of Mary—​presenting a relentless stress on persecution and martyrdom which is truly effective, despite some degree of repetition.19 Within the last hundred pages of the main text of the book there are no fewer than twenty such illustrations (Fig. 16.4). Then there are what Foxe scholars call ‘marker cuts’, which demarcate the major sections of the book.20 Right at the start there is an elaborate capital ‘C’, which appears in the 1563 edition and depicts Elizabeth I in full regalia, while an image of Henry VIII appears at the start of Volume II of the 1570 and subsequent editions.21 In addition, from 1570 onwards, the section devoted to the reign of Edward VI was introduced by an image showing various scenes relating to that king’s piety and iconoclasm, while at the very

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Fig. 16.4  ‘The Martyrdome of a blinde man, and a lame man, at Stratford the Bowe’, from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1583 edn.). 107 × 70 mm. (SSS.9.2.) © Cambridge University Library.

end of both volumes in the 1576 and later editions was included an anti-​papal allegory of ‘Justice weighing the Word’ that had originally appeared in the Whole Workes of William Tyndale, John Frith, and Robert Barnes in 1573.22 In all, the images are effective because of their relentless stress on suffering on the part of the godly, and of complacency, coupled with sadism, on the part of the Catholic authorities. They show a vividness and directness which well brings out the sheer horror of the scenes that they so graphically depict. The technique of the woodcut—​carved in relief, with its simplicity, boldness, and emphasis on line—​is peculiarly well suited to depicting the gestures and attitudes of those suffering, against a background of faggots and flames. The anti-​Catholic images are equally crude but effective, relishing details of papal indolence and disdain. Meanwhile, the captions and inscriptions strengthen the link of the images to the accompanying text. The artists are unknown: it seems likely that

Illustrated Books   291 they are from the Netherlands, but nothing is well documented.23 In all, however, Foxe’s work represents an unprecedentedly powerful visual achievement. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577) is a kind of secular equivalent to the Book of Martyrs, comprising two great folio volumes in black-​ letter type. Originating as a planned ‘universal cosmographie’ by the printer, Reyner Wolfe, it was brought to fruition after his death by Henry Bynneman and it contains various components including William Harrison’s ‘Description of England’ (though this is unillustrated). It was originally going to be illustrated by Saxton’s maps of England, but this failed to materialize. What it does contain are a series of busts of religious and secular rulers, many of which had originated as illustrations to texts produced under the auspices of Archbishop Matthew Parker, together with a series of narrative scenes, especially of battles; these are then repeated so that 211 woodcuts stretch to over 1,000 occurrences in the text of the work (Fig. 16.5).24 These images are particularly lively. In addition to battles, a wide range of other types of event are depicted—​from processions to hunting scenes—​and Edward Hodnett has suggested that the bulk of them can be attributed to the Flemish artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (c.1520–​90?). This is not wholly implausible: Gheeraerts had earlier been responsible for producing a striking edition of Aesop and he is known to have come to England at the end of the 1560s, where he produced a nine-​sheet depiction of the Procession of the Knights of the Garter in 1576. Though the attribution unfortunately remains speculative, it is nevertheless worth quoting Hodnett’s evaluation of the images themselves:

Fig. 16.5  A forced march, a typical scene from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577). 79 × 130 mm. (Peterborough D.11.5) © Cambridge University Library.

292   Michael hunter Except for the series made for Foxe’s Actes and Monuments and for Derricke’s Image of Irelande [another striking series of images published by John Day in 1581, of which only a handful of copies survive], no woodcuts designed for an English book have been so complex in composition, acute in representing emotional situations, well drawn, and well cut . . . they are the forerunners of the naturalistic, particularized, expressive English illustration of the following centuries.25

Holinshed’s book undoubtedly deserves such praise. We now move to the reign of James I. Apart from a proliferation at this time of the emblematic title pages that have already been referred to, particular attention is required to two books of portraits, Basiliωlogia (1618) and the accompanying Herωologia (1620). These introduce us to the genre of portraits as book illustrations, which dominates much of the seventeenth century. By comparison, portraits of known individuals are perhaps surprisingly rare in sixteenth-​century British books.26 For a precursor, we might look to the category of ‘cuts of rulers in the chronicles’, as seen in the rather crude head-​and-​shoulders images that appear in Holinshed and comparable sources.27 Then we have A Booke, containing the True Portraiture . . . of the Kings of England by T.T., probably Thomas Talbot, of 1597, which has a comparable series of woodcut images with a brief explanatory text, and which looks forward to A Briefe Remembrance of All the English Monarchs (1618) by John Taylor the water poet, in which similarly basic images are accompanied by commemorative verses.28 But Basiliωlogia marks a real change. In part, this is because the images were now engraved rather than cut in wood, a major shift to which we will come shortly. But Renold Elstrack’s slightly stylized portraits, each in an oval surround, were equally significant for the wide circulation that they achieved. This was due largely to their being reprinted in William Martyn’s History and Lives of the Kings of England, which had initially been published unillustrated in 1615 but the second edition of 1628 and the third of 1638 were furnished with Elstrack’s prints.29 Like Taylor’s Briefe Remembrance, Martyn’s History was a fairly superficial work, generally treated with disdain by those writing about historical thought in the period.30 But, not least through their illustrations, such works clearly satisfied a significant and growing market. As far as Basiliωlogia is concerned, the work was important not least for its use of engraved rather than woodcut images, reflecting an increasing preference for ‘intaglio’ (literally, incised) images over relief ones, in Britain as elsewhere in Europe. Though woodcuts continued to be used for cheap print products such as ballads, broadsheets, and the like, they were increasingly disdained by the cognoscenti.31 The reason for this was evidently the engraver’s ability, through the delicate use of a burin (a square or lozenge-​sectioned steel tool) on a copperplate, to convey a much greater sense of light and shadow, of bulk and texture. By deploying fine hatching or a more or less dense pattern of lines, justice could be done to the ‘naturall shadowes’ of a person’s countenance—​‘the cast and forme of the eye, the touch of the mouth, the true fall, turning and curling of the hair’, in the words of a contemporary, Henry Peacham.32 This is borne out by such classic examples of Jacobean printed portraiture as Francis Delaram’s

Illustrated Books   293 extraordinary life-​size bust of James I, with its strange intensity, or William Hole’s equally remarkable close-​up image of George Chapman (Fig. 16.6).33 Yet to include such pictures in books complicated the production process, since they had to be printed separately. With a woodcut, the image stood out from the block on which it was cut and could be printed alongside the type that surrounded it on a standard letter press. With an engraving, on the other hand, the surface of the plate had to be wiped clean of ink prior to printing, the image being produced by pressing the paper into the incisions on the plate using a rolling press, a completely different machine through which much greater pressure was applied and which was generally in different hands under different management.34 Willem and Magdalena de Passe’s bust-​length portraits in Herωologia have a verisimilitude that well reflects the novel standards that engraving now made possible (Fig. 16.7). The book was also significant for providing for the first time in a British context an

Fig. 16.6  William Hole, engraved portrait of George Chapman, from The Whole Works of Homer Prince of Poets (1616). 230 × 152 mm. (Dyce S Fol. 4896) © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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Fig. 16.7  Willem or Magdalena van de Passe, Sir Nicholas Bacon, from Herωologia (1620). 162 × 123 mm.

array of portraits not only of monarchs but also of a range of statesmen, clerics, and naval and other celebrities of the sixteenth century, its profuse images being accompanied by a substantial descriptive text by Henry Holland.35 Moreover, seventeenth-​century England saw a plethora of engraved portraits, illustrating a wide range of books. No edition of an author’s writings seemed complete without his ‘true portraiture’, and numerous frontispieces survive embellished with delicate depictions of the figures involved, by such engravers as Thomas Cross, George Glover, William Marshall, John Payne, or Robert Vaughan. The Civil War had the effect of stimulating a great deal of interest in the portraiture of the leading figures on both sides in the conflict, while a similar impulse accounts for the telling portrait of Eleanor Temple by Richard Gaywood that was included in the 1658 devotional work, Mans Master-​piece, by her husband Sir Peter Temple (Fig. 16.8). Such depictions could be replicated almost indefinitely. The 1650s saw major developments in book illustration, thanks particularly to two men, John Ogilby and Sir William Dugdale, each of whom effectively invented a new genre—​in one case, folio editions of classical texts with lavish full-​page illustrations, and in the other, extensively illustrated antiquarian and topographical works. Both of them, however, were dependent on the same novel source of funding, namely of seeking individual subscribers for each of the plates that their books contained, a

Illustrated Books   295

Fig. 16.8  Richard Gaywood, ‘The Lady Elinor Temple’, from Sir Peter Temple’s Mans Master-​ piece (1658). 120 × 70 mm.

practice that seems in fact to have originated with Thomas Fuller’s A Pisgah-​Sight of Palestine (1650).36 Dealing first with the strange and mercurial figure of John Ogilby, by turns a dancer, entrepreneur, and translator and publisher, it is the last role which concerns us here.37 This emerged in the 1650s with his publication of a lavish English translation of Virgil, followed by an equally sumptuous Latin version of his works. There were then no less grandiose editions of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, dating respectively from 1660 and 1665. All these works are astonishing productions. The 1654 edition of Virgil is illustrated by no fewer than 101 full-​page depictions of scenes from the poems, after designs by the peripatetic artist Francis Clein, and executed by a consortium of craftsmen including Wenceslaus Hollar, Pierre Lombart, and William Faithorne (Fig. 16.9); the Iliad edition has fifty-​one illustrations, after Clein or Abraham van Diepenbeeck, again variously executed; the Odyssey twenty-​five.38 All of them show heroic baroque figures engaged in complicated and vivid scenes of combat, intrigue, or romance.

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Fig. 16.9  Nisus killing Volscens, from Ogilby’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1654), [446]. Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar after Francis Clein, dedicated to Thomas Hanson. 294 × 192 mm.

Illustrated Books   297 Equally important is the fact that beneath each of the plates appears a dedication to the subscriber who paid for it, together with an engraving of their coat of arms, so that the book could be seen as ‘Triumphing with the affixt Emblazons, Names, and Titles of a hundred Patrons, all bold Assertors in Vindication of the Work’, in Ogilby’s own words.39 Moreover these dedicatees (who included women as well as men) had to be constantly updated: although the plates in the 1658 Latin Virgil repeat those in the 1654 English version, a quarter of them were reworked to replace the names that originally appeared on them by others, and even between different issues of the 1654 edition various subscribers’ names were obliterated and replaced, thus giving a sense of the size and complexity of the logistical operation that the collecting of subscriptions must have entailed. Moreover, the editions were thereafter reprinted, The Works of Virgil in 1668 and the Iliad and Odyssey in 1669, thus greatly extending the number of copies of the works in question that were in circulation. By this time Ogilby had come up with the stratagem of using lotteries to subsidize the publication of his books: in return for buying a modestly priced ticket, customers gained the chance to win one or more expensive volumes.40 It was apparently thus that Ogilby was enabled to publish two further folio works with lavish illustrations but without subscribers, his Aesop (1665) and Aesopics (1668); in these, the delicate and often enigmatic plates were etched, principally by Hollar.41 Etching was a variant intaglio technique in which Hollar specialized: rather than being directly incised on the copperplate, the design was drawn with a needle through an acid-​resistant ground, after which the plate was corroded with acid. The etching needle was much easier and less laborious to operate than the engraver’s burin, and the result was a plethora of illustrations of outstanding finesse. There had, of course, been more limited precedents for such illustrated editions of literary texts, notably George Sandys’s and Wye Saltonstall’s translations of Ovid (1632, 1637), or Sir John Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591): the latter made a virtue of offering engraved plates based on Italian exemplars that had originally been cut in wood (it is also worth mentioning Ogilby’s own octavo edition of Virgil of 1649 and quarto edition of Aesop of 1651, the former unillustrated, the latter with plates by Clein).42 It has been noted that Ogilby may have found his inspiration in the illustrated edition of Virgil produced in Paris in 1649 by Michel de Marolles.43 But none of these precedents match the scale and density of Ogilby’s folio productions—​his edition of the Aeneid has no fewer than seventy-​one illustrations, compared to Marolles’s twelve—​ and Ogilby deserves more credit as a pioneer in this field than he has often been given. In the case of his 1658 Latin edition of Virgil, its sheer grandeur was enhanced by the fact that the plates were almost invariably printed on single-​sided sheets, rather than on pages with text on the verso. Not only did this ease the process of combining the separate products of the rolling press used for the illustrations and the letter press used for the text; it also made the resulting product more impressive. Through such publications, Ogilby started a tradition of similarly illustrated editions that continued for the rest of the century, for instance in Sir Robert Stapylton’s translation of Juvenal’s Satires (1660), or Thomas Ross’s translation of Silius Italicus’ Second Punic War (1661), or John Dryden’s Works of Virgil (1697), in which Ogilby’s plates were actually reused. Meanwhile, Ogilby’s

298   Michael hunter Aesop was followed by the equally striking version illustrated by Francis Barlow (1666; enlarged edition, 1687): though beautifully observed in detail, this was rather different in style, with the images surrounded by letterpress in a manner which bore more similarity to the earlier effort of Gheeraerts that has already been noted.44 Sir William Dugdale similarly transformed the nature and scale of antiquarian illustration, using the subscription method to achieve this in parallel with Ogilby. In Dugdale’s case, he acknowledged a precedent in the form of the work Flandria Illustrata (1641–​4) by Antonius Sanderus, who, as Dugdale pointed out in the preface to his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), ‘hath most exquisitely represented, by curious Cuts, the Cities, Towns, Monasteries, Colledges, and Gentlemens Houses of note, in those parts, for the better ornament of his Storie’.45 In Warwickshire, Dugdale followed suit, embellishing his text with a great variety of illustrations: plans of towns, prospects of towns, country houses and tombs, and more miscellaneous items like a view of the combats of Sir John Astley taken from a sixteenth-​century picture.46 Moreover, whereas Sanderus’s illustrations sometimes bore dedications to the owners or custodians of the buildings depicted, in Dugdale’s case (as with Ogilby’s Virgil, published just two years earlier), the plates are frequently accompanied by a dedication to the person who had paid for the plate, along with his coat of arms. A similar practice was pursued in Dugdale’s great Monasticon Anglicanum, a survey of the religious foundations throughout England, which, in collaboration with Roger Dodworth, he had begun in parallel with his work on Warwickshire; the first volume of this appeared in 1655 (the year after Dodworth’s death), with subsequent ones appearing in 1661 and 1673. The text mainly comprises transcripts of the charters of foundation and of privileges granted to monastic establishments in England, but the work was lavishly illustrated with meticulous views both of the abbeys in question and of the great cathedrals of the nation, paid for by subscribers for whom dedications and coats of arms were once again included. Some of these plates were etched by Wenceslaus Hollar, who had been largely responsible for the illustrations to The Antiquities of Warwickshire, but many of the prospects were by a more minor artist, Daniel King, who also issued a separate edition of a selection of the plates to the first volume in 1656.47 Dugdale’s third great illustrated antiquarian compilation was his History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658). This included a magnificent series of views of both the exterior and interior of the cathedral, which was to be destroyed a few years later in the Great Fire of London, thus making these records particularly precious (Fig. 16.10). Also included were depictions of numerous tombs and other features of the great church, and once again the plates were paid for by subscribers, whose names and the amounts they paid were recorded by Dugdale; they are also listed at the end of the book.48 Both the History of St Paul’s and the Monasticon represented conscious acts of nostalgia, looking back to an era preceding the disruptions of the Civil War and its aftermath, as the inscriptions to the plates often explicitly recorded, and Hollar’s exquisite work made the memorial all the more evocative.49 These books were to have a significant legacy in terms of illustrated works of topography and antiquarianism published after the Restoration. Among these were the

Illustrated Books   299

Fig. 16.10  The choir of St Paul’s Cathedral, from Dugdale’s History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658). Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, dedicated to Elias Ashmole. 318 × 223 mm.

300   Michael hunter familiar but striking sets of images of the colleges of the ancient universities drawn and engraved by David Loggan as Oxonia Illustrata (1675) and Cantabrigia Illustrata (1690), as also Elias Ashmole’s lavish Institution, Laws & Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (1672)—​the last again illustrated by Hollar. Further examples include Robert Thoroton’s Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (1677), also with plates by Hollar, his last such work; or Sir Henry Chauncy’s Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire (1700); or, going into the eighteenth century, Sir Robert Atkyns’s Ancient and Present State of Glostershire (1712), or John Harris’s History of Kent (1719). An equally striking impulse of a similar kind is to be seen in the grandiose Theatrum Scotiae (1693) by John Slezer, a magnificent series of topographical engravings accompanied by descriptions by Sir Robert Sibbald; the English equivalent to this is perhaps to be seen in the lavish series of views of country houses by Leonard Knyff and Jan Kip issued as Britannia Illustrata (1707).50 A related series of publications were associated with the burgeoning ‘new science’ of the period. Some of these took up the explicitly Baconian theme of a natural history, as in the classic Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677) by Robert Plot, with a fine sequence of plates of fossils, antiquities, and other curiosities by Michael Burghers, and its 1686 sequel devoted to Staffordshire; later examples included Charles Leigh’s Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the Peak, in Derbyshire (1700) and John Morton’s Natural History of Northampton-​shire (1712). Illustrated scientific books were also often subsidized by the soliciting of subscriptions, as was the case, among others, with Nehemiah Grew’s catalogue of the ‘repository’ of the Royal Society, Musæum Regalis Societatis (1681), or his Anatomy of Plants (1682), while the practice of having subscribers pay for individual plates is to be found in Francis Willughby’s Historia Piscium, posthumously published by the Royal Society in 1686.51 The society’s equally striking earlier publication, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), on the other hand, was published without subscribers, and the financing of the book remains something of a mystery, as do other aspects of its production, including the identity of the engravers responsible for its lavish plates.52 Returning to Ogilby, by this time he had branched out in other directions. Apart from producing a lavish ‘festival book’ celebrating the coronation of Charles II (thus looking back to Stephen Harrison’s comparable celebration of James I in his Archs of Triumph of 1604 and forward to later publications by Francis Sandford),53 from 1669 onwards he began to publish a series of ‘atlases’, books which provided information about exotic parts of the world. These volumes, which were largely based on Dutch sources, included his Embassy from the East-​India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperour of China (1669), Africa (1670), Atlas Japannensis (1670), America (1671), Atlas Chinensis (1671), and Asia, The First Part (1673); all of them provided a detailed and profusely illustrated account of the countries involved.54 In this, Ogilby could be seen as following in the footsteps of earlier travel books which provided information about exotic lands, often with more or less extensive illustrations, including Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589), Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), Coryats Crudities (1611), Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625–​6), or, to take a Continental example, Theodor de Bry’s Collectiones Peregrinationum in Indiam Orientalem et Occidentalem (1590–​1634): in particular, it is worth drawing attention to two books illustrated with rather telling engravings based on drawings by their authors, George

Illustrated Books   301 Sandys’s Relation of a Journey begun A.D. 1610 (1615) and Sir Thomas Herbert’s Relation of Some Yeares Travels into Africa and Asia (1638).55 Almost as a climax to his efforts, Ogilby also produced Britannia (1675), a lavish volume comprising a series of route maps within England and Wales which was extensively copied and plagiarized.56 In such activity, he had a rival in the person of Richard Blome, an intriguing figure whose role as a publisher has been little explored.57 Blome came from a heraldic background, and some of his most successful publications were heraldic in nature, particularly a much-​ reprinted edition of John Guillim’s Display of Heraldry, produced from 1660 onwards from an original of 1610, and a more basic essay of his own on the same topic, first published in 1684.58 But, like Ogilby, Blome also spotted the potential for geographical works, producing in 1670 an English translation of the survey of the world by Nicolas Sanson, profusely illustrated by maps, to be followed in 1682 by the first vernacular version of the classic account of cosmography by Bernhard Varenius. Blome also pre-​empted Ogilby’s Britannia by producing a volume of his own with the same title, published in 1673.59 However, Blome had even grander plans, for surveys of the whole of knowledge, and these repay attention. In about 1665 he produced a prospectus for a two-​volume folio work on ‘the Arts and Sciences’, accompanied by the names of putative subscribers (a typical, novel feature of Blome’s prospectuses for his books).60 However, nothing came of this until two decades later, by which time the project had been transmogrified into The Gentlemans Recreation (1686), a single substantial volume which combined an ‘Encyclopedy of the Arts and Sciences’ with profuse descriptions of field sports and other country activities. This was lavishly adorned with illustrations paid for by subscribers from the aristocracy and gentry, whose coats of arms were not only attached to the plates for which they had paid but were also separately depicted over several pages at the start of the volume. The plates include a number of attractive scenes of hunting, hawking, and other pursuits, many of them based on designs by Francis Barlow. This was followed in 1694 by an equally ambitious work, An Entire Body of Philosophy, According to the Principles of the Famous Renate Des Cartes, the text of which was derived from the epitome of Descartes’s writings produced by the Jesuit Antoine Le Grand. This was no less lavishly produced, with extensive plates dedicated to individual grandees whose names and coats of arms were also given at the front of the volume; the illustrations comprise rather prolix allegorical expositions of the different sciences, as was explained in an eight-​page ‘Explanation of the Sculptures in this Work’ at the outset.61 In parallel with this, Blome also produced an edition of an epitome of the Bible (1688–​90), replete with equally profuse engraved plates by the same suite of artists, many of them jobbing practitioners, often of Dutch origin, such as Jan Kip, Frederick van Hove, or Michael Vandergucht (it is perhaps worth observing how, late in the period as earlier, there was a heavy dependence on immigrant craftsmen). Blome’s publications are undoubtedly impressive in their way, but it could be argued that they tended to be slightly misconceived in their aspirations. The work of c.1665 which failed to come to fruition was to have been illustrated by a series of personifications of each of the sciences represented in it, and drawings and engravings of these survive by the Dutch artist Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne (Fig. 16.11).62 Yet the idea of presenting personifications of the arts was a Renaissance phenomenon that was somewhat old-​fashioned by this time, and the remnant of this aspect of the putative

302   Michael hunter

Fig. 16.11  Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne, ‘Astrologia’, dedicated to Sir William Ducie (later Viscount Downe); plate for Richard Blome’s abortive work on the ‘Arts and Sciences’ (c.1665). 280 × 192 mm.

Illustrated Books   303 work that appeared in the published Gentlemans Recreation was vestigial. Equally noteworthy was Blome’s constant deference to French exemplars, as if these were axiomatically better than their English equivalents. It was only to be expected that he should use Sanson for his geography, also following François Fortin’s Les ruses innocentes (1660) for the Gentlemans Recreation; it was perhaps equally pardonable that An Entire Body was based on the work of Descartes, ‘The New and general Received Philosophy’, as Blome put it:63 how was he to know of the subsequent triumph of Newtonianism? More problematic, however, was the fact that the Gentlemans Recreation was illustrated by a series of elaborate charts delineating the scope of each of the sciences that it described, based on a set of diagrams of unmistakably Ramist derivation produced by Christofle de Savigny a century earlier.64 One has the feeling that Blome was slightly out of his depth. Yet none of this seems to have worried the wealthy contributors who put up the money to support Blome’s ventures, whose coats of arms were more lavishly displayed in his publications than in any previous such enterprise. Moreover, this arguably paid off in what may be seen as Blome’s most successful illustrated work, his History of the Old and New Testament, once again based on a French exemplar, by Nicolas Fontaine, which is neatly organized so that each of the biblical stories to which it is devoted takes up a single page and is matched by a facing plate (Fig. 16.12).65 It almost represents the logical culmination of illustrated volumes of this kind and was accordingly popular.

Fig. 16.12  A typical opening from Blome’s edition of Nicholas Fontaine’s History of the Old Testament, Extracted out of Sacred Scripture and Writings of the Fathers (1690), showing how each section of text is accompanied by a facing plate, in this case of the Judgement of Solomon. Engraving by Jan Kip after G. Freman, dedicated to Sir John Maynard. Plate size 335 × 205 mm. (From Rel.bb.69.4.) © Cambridge University Library.

304   Michael hunter Of course, there were other types of illustrated books in the period that there has not been room to cover in this brief survey, some of which have been the subject of substantial attention. Thus we have the pictorial title pages referred to at the start of this essay; the entire genre of emblem books;66 and scientific and medical publications, apart from the few examples already mentioned.67 There is also a famous example of an illustrated work of literature in the form of the 1688 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, published by Jacob Tonson and ‘adorn’d with sculptures’ after Sir John Baptist Medina and Henry Aldrich, which provide vivid evocations of the Fall of Man and the diabolical realm.68 In conclusion, what difference did illustrations make to books? What did contemporaries perceive as the ‘added value’ of highly illustrated volumes? Above all, there was the ‘Magnificence and Splendor’ and ‘new, and taking Beauty’ of which John Ogilby rightly boasted concerning his pioneering Virgil of 1654, ‘the fairest that till then the English Press ever boasted’.69 On the other hand, one might feel that earlier books like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or Holinshed’s Chronicles had been hardly less effective, with their relentless iteration of slightly repetitive yet powerful images, albeit in woodcut form. Some attention has been paid to reader responses in relation to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—​it has even been suggested that the openings on which illustrations appear are more heavily used than other parts of the book70—​while a later vignette of the power of images is provided by the testimony of the poet Alexander Pope, who recounted the impact that Ogilby’s edition of Homer’s Iliad had on him as a child. Joseph Spence explained in his Anecdotes how that ‘great edition with pictures’ was ‘one of the first large poems that ever Mr Pope read’, and how Pope ‘still spoke of the pleasure it then gave him, with a sort of rapture only on reflecting on it’; the youthful Pope even put on a play based on the work, with all the actors ‘dressed after the pictures in his favourite Ogilby’.71 No less effective was the plethora of authorial portraits that adorned so many volumes. Indeed, so prevalent did these become that by 1705 the bookseller John Dunton felt the need in his Life and Errors to apologize for the non-​appearance of his printed likeness at the start of the volume.72 The tradition of topographical illustration was by then equally established, thanks to the work of the redoubtable Hollar and others, so that pictures had become almost the sine qua non of such books. In all, illustration was by this time integral to book production, and, if we ignore it, we are in danger of impoverishing our understanding of the early modern book as a whole.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the following for their comments on a draft of this essay: Stephen Brogan, Nathan Flis, Roger Gaskell, Margaret Lock, Scott Mandelbrote, Adam Morton, Adam Smyth, and Simon Turner.

Illustrated Books   305

Notes 1. Harington, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (London, 1591), sig. A1. 2. See Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-​page in England 1550–​1660 (London: Routledge, 1979); Alastair Fowler, The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title Pages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and A. F. Johnson, A Catalogue of Engraved and Etched English Title-​pages down to the Death of William Faithorne, 1691 (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1934). 3. R. B. McKerrow and F. S. Ferguson, Title-​page Borders used in England & Scotland 1485–​ 1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1932), pp. xxviii, 27–​30 (no. 30), and passim. 4. See Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts 1480–​1535 (rev. edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), passim. 5. R. S. Luborsky and E. M. Ingram, A Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536–​1603, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), esp. i. 83 ff. 6. G. E. Bentley, jr., ‘Images of the Word: Separately Published English Bible Illustrations 1539–​1830’, Studies in Bibliography, 47 (1994), 103–​128. On monopolies, see Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade (2nd edn., London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), 100 ff. See also George Henderson, ‘Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1982), 173–​216. 7. Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 632–​633. For a commentary, see Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 8. A. M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952–​64), i. 268, 273–​275; iii. 3, 23 and passim; Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 271, 393–​394, and passim. 9. See R. A. Skelton, County Atlases of the British Isles 1579–​1703 (London: Carta Press, 1970), p. v and passim. See also William Ravenhill (ed.), Christopher Saxton’s Sixteenth-​Century Maps: The Counties of England & Wales (Shrewsbury: Chatsworth Library, 1992); Sarah Tyacke and John Huddy, Christopher Saxton and Tudor Map-​making (London: British Library, 1980); Hind, Engraving in England, i. 85 ff. 10. See Victor Morgan, ‘The Cartographic Image of “The Country” in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 29 (1979), 129–​154. 11. Skelton, County Atlases, 30 ff.; Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 67 ff. 12. See Lori Anne Ferrell, ‘Page Techne: Interpreting Diagrams in Early Modern English “How-​to” Books’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 113–​126, at 116–​118. 13. The best account of the production of the work is Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); see 205 for the number of illustrations (the figure given in the text is for the 1570 edn.). 14. There is a complete listing in Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 365 ff. Just one is taken from an earlier book, the burning of Anne Askew and others, which derives from Robert Crowley’s Confutation of Thirteen Articles (1548): see John N. King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 169–​170, 176–​177. But this is not very typical of the images as a whole, which tend to be more graphic and close-​up.

306   Michael hunter 15. Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book, 115–​116, 192; King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, 186 ff. 16. See Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 367. 17. All reproduced in John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 139 ff. 18. See Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, ‘The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 66–​142, at 101, 104–​105, 140–​142. 19. See Ruth S. Luborsky, ‘The Illustrations: Their Pattern and Plan’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 67–​84. 20. Aston and Ingram, ‘Iconography’, 125 ff. 21. Initially, this was an image of the King in Parliament taken from Edward Halle’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), but later in the 1570 edition a more graphic image of the King trampling on the Pope was also included, and in the 1583 and subsequent editions this was elevated to this more prominent position and the image from Halle dropped: King, Tudor Royal Iconography, 157 ff. 22. King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, 164–​166; Aston and Ingram, ‘Iconography’, 130 ff. A handful of other double-​column images first appear in the 1570 and later editions: see Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book, 207; Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 375–​376, 381–​382. 23. Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book, 198; King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, 169. 24. For a helpful account, see James A. Knapp, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), ch. 5. For a list of the illustrations see Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 452 ff. 25. Edward Hodnett, Five Centuries of English Book Illustration (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), 37, 38. 26. See the listing in Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, ii. 156. 27. Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 621–​622. 28. Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 699–​701, and Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 140–​144. For a further precedent, John Jonston’s Inscriptiones Historicae Regum Scotorum (1602), see Luborsky and Ingram, Guide to English Illustrated Books, i. 486–​487, and Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 49–​51. 29. For details, see Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 115 ff. 30. See e.g. F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967), 211, 272–​273. 31. For background see Roger Gaskell, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration’, Book Collector, 53 (2004), 213–​251. For the Continental context, see esp. Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-​Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 32. Quoted in Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 7. 33. For the Delaram print, see Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 224, pl. 126, and Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–​1689 (London: British Museum, 1998), 55. 34. See Gaskell, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop’, 216. 35. See Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 145 ff. For Continental precursors, see Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ch. 2, and C. H. Clough, ‘Italian Renaissance Portraiture and Printed

Illustrated Books   307 Portrait-​Books’, in D. V. Reidy (ed.), The Italian Book 1465–​1800 (London: British Library, 1993), 183–​223. 36. See Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 184. 37. For secondary literature, the slightly staid Katherine S. Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone: Dawson, 1976) is to be preferred to the highly fanciful Alan Ereira, The Nine Lives of John Ogilby: Britain’s Master Map Maker and His Secrets (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2016). 38. For documentation of the points in this and the next paragraph, see Margret Schuchard, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works of John Ogilby and William Morgan (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1975), passim. 39. Ogilby, Africa (London, 1670), sig. c1. I am sceptical of the ‘Royalist’ conspiracy hypothesis concerning the 1654 Virgil espoused by Ereira (rather compromised by the fact that he withdraws it in relation to that of 1658): Nine Lives, 121 ff., 130–​131. 40. The inspiration for this was evidently Dutch: see Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 374 ff. 41. I am doubtful whether there was ever any intention to add subscribers’ names to the Aesop plates, as suggested in Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 188. For Hollar, see esp. Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar 1607–​1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 42. For Sandys and Saltonstall, see Hind, Engraving in England, iii. 221, 244–​245, and Edward Hodnett, Francis Barlow: First Master of English Book Illustration (Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1978), 74; for Harington, see Knapp, Illustrating the Past, 43–​44; for Ogilby’s earlier ventures see Schuchard, Descriptive Bibliography, 34–​36. 43. See Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 184, 186. 44. See Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, ch. 7. For a lucid account of Barlow’s Aesop and its context (including Gheeraerts’s edition, mentioned above) see Hodnett, Francis Barlow. 45. Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire (London, 1656), sig [b1]. 46. For a helpful account, see Marion Roberts, Dugdale and Hollar: History Illustrated (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002). 47. Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 189–​191; Roberts, Dugdale and Hollar, 54–​55, 113–​117. 48. Dugdale, History of St Paul’s (London, 1658), 299; William Hamper (ed.), The Life, Diary, and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, Knight (London, 1827), 488–​489. 49. See Jan Broadway, ‘ “The honour of this Nation”: William Dugdale and the History of St Paul’s (1658)’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 194–​213; Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “Like Fragments of a Shipwreck”: Printed Images and Religious Antiquarianism in Early Modern England’, in Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, 87–​109. See also Graham Parry and Michiyo Takano, ‘The Illustrations to Dugdale’s History of St Paul’s Cathedral: Subscribers and Their Sentiments’, Seventeenth Century, 35 (2020), 473–​ 495, though this fails to cite either Broadway or Walsham. 50. See Keith Cavers, A Vision of Scotland: The Nation Observed by John Slezer 1671–​1717 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1993); John Harris and Gervase Jackson-​Stops (eds.), Britannia Illustrata: Knyff & Kip (Bungay: Paradigm Pess, 1984). 51. See Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 69; Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘The Historia Piscium (1686)’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 54 (2000), 179–​197.

308   Michael hunter 52. See e.g. Meghan C. Doherty, ‘Discovering the “True Form”: Hooke’s Micrographia and the Visual Vocabulary of Engraved Portraits’, Notes & Records, 66 (2012), 211–​234. 53. See Ronald Knowles (ed.), The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II . . . by John Ogilby, London 1662 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 43, 1988); see also Hind, Engraving in England, ii. 17–​29; Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 44–​45, 203–​204. 54. For a full account of the Dutch context to these publications, see Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). See also Van Eerde, John Ogilby, ch. 6. 55. See Hind, Engraving in England, i. 124–​125; ii. 36–​38, 238–​241, 328–​329, 387–​389; iii. 161–​164. 56. On this, the accounts in Van Eerde, Ogilby, ch. 7, and Schuchard, Descriptive Bibliography, 80 ff., are to be preferred to that in Ereira, Nine Lives. 57. For virtually the only extant study, see Sarah L. C. Clapp, ‘The Subscription Enterprises of John Ogilby and Richard Blome’, Modern Philology, 30 (1933), 365–​379. 58. For the latter, see Blome, An Essay to Heraldry (1684). Blome also produced a pack of heraldic playing cards and a broadsheet, Heraldry Royall, which is linked to the Gentlemans Recreation by its use of a diagram based on Savigny: see below. 59. See Skelton, County Atlases, 139 ff. 60. The prospectus of c.1665 is entitled Propositions concerning the Printing of a Book which is to contain these Arts and Sciences. Subsequent proposals show the work being transformed into The Gentlemans Recreation, with its emphasis on country activities. In particular, two slightly different sets of Proposals containing the putative publication date of Michaelmas Term 1681 preserved in the Cumbria Archive Centre at Kendal, WDRY 4/​8/​3/​5, emphasize this aspect of the work and make no mention of the ‘Encyclopedy of the Arts and Sciences’ at all, in contrast to the set of Proposals in British Library, Harleian 5946, fos. 195–​196, with a putative publication date of Easter Term 1683, which not only makes a feature of this but also divulges the idea of using plates from Savigny. 61. For a brief account, see Michael Hunter, ‘The Crown, the Public and the New Science, 1689–​1702’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 43 (1989), 99–​116; repr. in Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 151–​166, at 107–​110 and 159–​163. 62. See A. M. Hind, Catalogue of Drawings by Dutch and Flemish Artists . . . in the British Museum, 4 vols. (London: British Museum, 1915–​31), iv. 91–​94. 63. Blome, Gentlemans Recreation (London, 1686), 43 (and sig. b1 for the reference to Fortin). 64. See Christofle de Savigny, Tableaux accomplis de tous les arts libéraux (Paris, 1587). For a brief account, see Henri-​Jean Martin, ‘Classements et conjonctures’, in H.-​J. Martin, Roger Chartier, and J.-​P. Vivet (eds.), Histoire de l’édition française, 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1982–​ 6), i. 428 ff. 65. See Bentley, ‘Images of the Word’, 108–​109. 66. The classic study by Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948) may be supplemented, e.g., by Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994). 67. For recent work, see Felicity Henderson, Sachiko Kusukawa, and Alexander Marr (eds.), ‘Curiously Drawn: Early Modern Science as a Visual Pursuit’, special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, 78/​2 (2015), and Sachiko Kusukawa (ed.), ‘Making Visible: The Visual

Illustrated Books   309 and Graphic Practices of the Early Royal Society’, special issue of Perspectives on Science, 27/​3 (2019). 68. See Marcia R. Pointon, Milton and English Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970) and e.g. Estella Schoenberg, ‘Picturing Satan for the 1688 Paradise Lost’, and Ernest W. Sullivan II, ‘Illustration as Interpretation: Paradise Lost from 1688 to 1807’, in Albert C. Labriola and Edward Sichi (eds.), Milton’s Legacy in the Arts (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 1–​20, 59–​92. 69. Ogilby, Africa, sig. c1. 70. King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, 232–​3 and 230 ff. passim. 71. Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1966), i, 14–​15; see also Van Eerde, John Ogilby, 149. 72. ‘The Author’s Speaking Picture, Drawn by Himself ’, in Dunton, Life and Errors (London, 1705), sig. A1.

Select Bibliography Clapp, Sarah L.C., ‘The Subscription Enterprises of John Ogilby and Richard Blome’, Modern Philology, 30 (1933), 365–​379. Corbett, Margery, and Lightbown, Ronald, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-​page in England 1550–​1660 (London: Routledge, 1979). Evenden, Elizabeth, and Freeman, Thomas S., Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Fowler, Alastair, The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title Pages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Gaskell, Roger, ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration’, Book Collector, 53 (2004), 213–​251. Griffiths, Antony, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–​1689 (London: British Museum, 1998). Hind, A. M., Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952–​64). Hodnett, Edward, Francis Barlow: First Master of English Book Illustration (Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1978). Hunter, Michael (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Knapp, James A., Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Luborsky, R. S., and Ingram, E. M., A Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536–​1603, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998). Orgel, Stephen, ‘Textual Icons: Reading Early Modern Illustrations’, in Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000), 59–​94. Roberts, Marion, Dugdale and Hollar: History Illustrated (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002). Van Eerde, Katherine S., John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone: Dawson, 1976).

CHAPTER 17

T y p o gr a ph y James Misson

The authorities are at the door. They’ve come to confiscate your property. Quick: what’s the first thing you hide? For the printer Robert Waldegrave, it was some ‘lettres in a boxe’—​not letters of correspondence, but letters of the alphabet, equipment used to print illegal pamphlets (hence the raid). Waldegrave knew that these letters—​expensive, difficult to manufacture, and essential to his livelihood—​were his most precious asset, so when the authorities raided his home in 1588 he smuggled the box to safety beneath his cloak.1 Sharing his rationale, the raiders likewise sought Waldegrave’s letters, and seized those which the cloak could not conceal: the report reproduced in the Registers of the Company of Stationers tells us that ‘twoo paire of Cases’ were taken, containing ‘Certen pica Romane & pica Italian [i.e. italic] letters’. These fonts were to be ‘defaced and made vnservicable’, thereby silencing Waldegrave’s press.2 That was the plan, at least. Undeterred by his long record of arrests, Waldegrave went on to use his rescued letters to secretly print four of the most incendiary texts of the sixteenth century—​four of the seven (and a half) tracts printed between October 1588 and September 1589 that claimed ‘Martin Marprelate’ as their author. These tracts boisterously argue for a Presbyterian reform of the Church, denouncing the government of churches by bishops and advocating the kind of puritanism that John Whitgift had vehemently tried to stamp out since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1583. This Marprelate was in all likelihood the fictional creation of Job Throkmorton and John Penry, supported by a network of printers and distributors, but their invention was not merely a pseudonym: Marprelate had a life of his own on the page, and it wasn’t Marprelate’s arguments that were so groundbreaking, but his style. Joseph Black attributes the tracts’ notoriety and influence to Marprelate’s ‘wittily irreverent and conversational prose, ironic modes of argument, fluid shifts among narrative voices, swashbuckling persona, playful experiments with the conventions of print controversy, and willingness to name names and tell unflattering stories’.3 The Martinist style would prompt responses and imitators that made an indelible mark on the style of English literature.

Typography   311 While the stylistic and ideological unorthodoxy of Marprelate’s books is well known, Martinist typography has rarely been discussed beyond description. And yet, this series of pamphlets contains not only an instructive range of typographic styles, but also some of the weirdest typography of the sixteenth century. What’s more, the meticulous records made by Marprelate’s pursuers afford rare insight into the physical materials behind this typography. Members of the Marprelate team were rounded up after the project was forced to an end, and their depositions often bear witness to the equipment they used, including the bane of their lives: fonts. In this chapter, I therefore use this episode in the history of the book to demonstrate some key characteristics of early modern English typographic culture. By doing so, we’ll see how the cultural and social circumstances of textual production are made legible in the typography of a text. In Marprelate’s case the circumstances were dire, with the reactionary furore prompting the pursuit of a full printing press and its fonts, hauled around England with varying degrees of stealth: from Surrey, the press moved four times in its one short year, traversing the Midlands before it was finally caught in the North West.4 Typography has an array of definitions relevant to the early modern period. At its broadest, the word refers to anything to do with printing—​the ars typographica as it was sometimes known. Recent work is more specific than this, and early modernists now train the term towards mise-​en-​page and other general aspects of book design—​ an approach popularized by D. F. McKenzie’s reading of the ‘disposition of space’,5 and advanced recently by Claire M. L. Bourne and Laurie Maguire.6 Bourne calls this attention to the arrangement of printed matter the ‘capacious sense’ of typography, contrasted to a narrower sense that concerns typefaces and their variation. It is this latter sense in which I’m interested here—​the shapes of the letters themselves, rather than their arrangement. In 1932, the typographer Beatrice Warde coined a now famous metaphor for the ideal relationship between type and text: typography should be to text what a crystal goblet is to a fine wine, ‘calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain’.7 In Warde’s model, the best typography is invisible, deferring attention to the text, a philosophy shared by Robert Bringhurst: ‘Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency.’8 Today, many typographers consider the ideal crystal goblet a myth. There is no such thing as a totally transparent medium, and to believe so is akin to thinking that some people speak without an accent. But we can adapt Warde’s prescriptivist simile to the descriptive and interpretative roles of the book historian: why is this wine in a crystal goblet and not, say, a mug? Does drinking hot chocolate from a goblet change its taste? Likewise, the texts I discuss in this chapter have contrasting typographic forms that invite questions of why the text looked this way, and how its meaning was thereby augmented. In a culture in which black-​letter, roman, and italic type all had currency, typography was never invisible, and meaning was inevitably generated out of contrast. Many of these meanings fall under the broad themes of time and place, which inform the latter two sections of this chapter, but they do so because typography was fundamentally bound to a material context. We begin,

312   James Misson then, with the principle that there was no printed text without a typeface, and no typeface without a solid metal font.

Fonts ‘Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.’9 The axiom coined by Harry Carter reminds us that the letter we see printed on the page is a two-​dimensional slice of a three-​dimensional object—​something easily forgotten now that fonts are weightless software. A single piece of type was a small block of metal between 24 and 27.5 mm long, the letter protruding from its tip. The consistency of this measurement, the height-​to-​paper, was critical: all the type had to stand to the same height if it was to make an even impression on the paper. A kind of printing error known as fallen type affords a rare glimpse into this third dimension. Occasionally, a piece of type would become dislodged from its place while it was being inked; falling sideways across the face of the typeset forme when the press is pulled, the type-​body makes an impression on the page, interrupting the text with a black bar (Fig. 17.1)—​a glitch that Claire Bolton has exploited to reconstruct the physical properties of early fonts.10

Fig. 17.1  Conradus de Alemania, Concordiantiae Bibliorum ([Strassburg: Johann Mentelin, before 1475]), ISTC ic00849000. The Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford, Auct 1Q 1.20, part 4, [4d]5r. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

Typography   313 If type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand, a lot of type is something you can drop. The fugitive Marprelate team discovered this while moving the press yet again to Warrington in the north-​west of England. Unloading a case from their cart, it slipped from their hands, spilling type over the road. As recounted in the criminal examination of the printer’s assistants, bystanders who witnessed their accident ‘marvelled’ at the scattered metal, and, keen not to blow their cover, the printer John Hodgkins explained that the pieces were ‘shott’—​that is, ammunition for a gun.11 If Hodgkins’s bluff had worked, we might infer from this episode that the inner workings of the printing process were not common knowledge among the uninitiated. It seems, however, that one of the witnesses—​or at least someone they told—​recognized the type for what it was, as within ten days word had got out, allowing Marprelate’s pursuers to trace the group to Warrington and seize their equipment before their penultimate pamphlet was finished. The spilt type may have spelt the beginning of the end for the Marprelate project, but we can hardly blame Hodgkins: fonts weren’t designed to be itinerant, and even a small one was unwieldy, with about 27 kg of metal in a pair of cases (an upper case for majuscules and a lower case for minuscules) measuring around 84 × 41 × 3 cm each. Philip Gaskell calculated that a larger font, used to print a book like Shakespeare’s First Folio, would have required around 90 kg of type, distributed over several cases.12 So, fonts were unstealthy. Something therefore doesn’t add up in the report of the raid on Waldegrave’s house: the box of ‘lettres’ that he saved has sometimes been interpreted as a font, but even with an extra large cloak Waldegrave would have struggled to smuggle something so cumbersome. W. Craig Ferguson sensibly suggests that what Waldegrave saved was not in fact a case of type, but a box of matrices.13 A matrix was the key component of the mould in which a single piece of type was cast—​a bar of copper with the design of the letter impressed into it. To create a piece of type, the matrix was slotted into a wooden mould, into which the type-​founder poured a molten alloy of lead, antimony, and tin. The casting process could be reversed too, and this was the fate suffered by the two pairs of cases confiscated from Waldegrave, which were ordered to be ‘defaced and made vnservicable’: we read in the first Marprelate pamphlet that the type was melted—​ solid symbols reduced to a meaningless metal soup.14 When the raiders came, Waldegrave probably knew that his roman and italic fonts were a lost cause. Instead, he cannily went for the means by which he could create more. We can tell by his subsequent books that this is exactly what he went on to do, as later that year the roman and italic that were melted appear resurrected in the first pamphlets printed on the Marprelate press, recast with his rescued matrices. Had the raiders found his matrices, they may have had some luck in silencing Waldegrave, as manufacturing these was much more difficult. It required a punch—​a stamp of brass or steel, the letter engraved in its tip—​which was struck into the blank copper of the matrix to make an impression. Punches were designed and carved by punch-​cutters, whose skills were exceedingly rare, and it is perhaps this—​as well as the trade secrecy with which they conducted their craft—​that makes early punch-​cutting one of the most obscured and least understood stages of the early modern book industry.

314   James Misson When we see a letter on an early modern page, we are therefore seeing a print of a cast of an impression of an engraving—​an image three times removed from its first incarnation. Though Waldegrave is an example of a printer with their own matrices, each stage of this manufacturing process was not necessarily part of the same operation, with fonts being sold by type-​founders to printers, or matrices being sold to type-​founders by punch-​cutters. With each step in the sequence, the letter form multiplies: many matrices could be made from a single punch, and many pieces of type made from a single matrix. An individual punch-​cutter could thereby have an inordinate influence on the design of early modern texts, their typeface rippling across Europe as the matrices and fonts derived from their punches changed hands. What little evidence there is suggests that, for most of the sixteenth century, England’s type industry was underdeveloped at best. While printers were able to source enough type and matrices from the Continent to accommodate English texts, the limits of domestic skills become apparent in printers’ inability to introduce new forms into this typographic milieu. John Hart, the English spelling reformer, encountered these limits and the cost of breaching them when he made enquiries about printing his invented phonetic alphabet—​an eccentric adaptation of English orthography that he believed would more accurately transcribe a standardized form. An unpublished manuscript shows that Hart was planning the alphabet as early as 1551, but had been warned of the prohibitive cost of creating punches: Mani wil say that it were impossible to frame our commune writen hand . . . in souch a iust uniformite, as it mought be easili prynted . . . The cause of theis fayned impossibilities, is . . . (for the making of new puncheons [i.e. punches]) the lak of the first disbursing of (at most) one hundred pounds.15

It’s hard to know if Hart is exaggerating: by some calculations, one hundred pounds could have bought him eighty cows,16 which seems a lot, but regardless of whether the figure is accurate or rhetorical, it shows that for the English, punch-​cutting came at a premium. Elsewhere in this volume, A. E. B. Coldiron discusses an English edition of Thomas More’s Utopia printed by Richard Tottel. Tottel encountered a similar problem to Hart’s, apologizing in a paratextual note from ‘The Printer to the Reader’ for the absence of the ‘Utopian alphabet’—​the constructed alphabet, designed by More as the writing system of his fictional island society. This alphabet has minimal geometric letter-​forms unlike those of any organic language, and was displayed in full in the work’s first editions, printed in Louvain (1516) and Basel (1519). Those earliest editions used type to print the Utopian alphabet—​manufactured especially (and, presumably, only) for Utopia—​but when Tottel came to print the English translation, he sought the reader’s pardon for not having this equipment: ‘The Utopian Alphabete, good Reader, which in the aboue written Epistle is promised, herunto I haue not now adioyned, because I haue not as yet the true characters or fourmes of the Utopiane letters.’17 So, it is not only the lack of a font, the ‘true characters’, that is to blame for the absence of

Typography   315 the Utopian alphabet, but also Tottel’s lack of matrices—​the ‘fourmes’—​with which he could have cast one. Surprisingly, Tottel’s note is conventional, participating in a trope of ‘lack of letters’ apologia found in many English books that likewise failed to render non-​Latin typography. Across the sixteenth century we find printers explaining why their books do not contain Arabic, Greek, or Hebrew text, always citing the same material exigency: no type. Tottel’s paratext is therefore an inventive piece of world-​building that plays along with the conceit of its text, feigning that Utopia is a real place whose foreign culture is likewise incompatible with the typographic hardware of England. The alphabet’s absence, Tottel writes, is ‘no marueill: seyng it is a tongue to us muche straunger than the Indian, the Persian, the Syria[n]‌, the Arabicke, the Egyptian, the Macedonian, the Sclauonian, the cipria[n], the Scythia[n] [et]c. Which to[n]gues though they be nothing so straunge among us, as the Utopian is, yet their characters [i.e. fonts] we haue not.’18 Printers sometimes found solutions to this problem by resorting to another medium—​either manuscript (filling in the gaps by hand) or wood. The latter was used by Wynkyn de Worde for his early experiments in Arabic and Greek printing, for instance.19 But wood type was used to render not only different alphabets but also typefaces of different designs when they were unavailable in metal. From around 1517, the great printer of humanist works Johannes Froben began using a large roman capital font in Basel. The typeface, based on classical Roman inscriptions, was probably designed and cut by Peter Schoeffer the Younger, and was applied by Froben to humanist works. These ‘Basel capitals’, as they are now known, went on to be widely imitated across Europe, including by Richard Pynson, who sought to evoke the humanist aesthetic on the title page of his 1521 book, Antibossicon.20 In the absence of any matrices or punches, however, Pynson had to resort to wood to approximate the popular Continental typeface and, in comparison to the regularity and finesse of professionally designed metal type, this rendition has exaggerated serifs, some with unidiomatic curls that suggest it was cut by an amateur. The title page demonstrates that English printers desired to imitate the typography of books imported from the Continent, but were hampered by less sophisticated typographic skills. Sometime in the mid-​1560s, typography in England took a giant leap forward. Between 1566 and 1569, proof of new punches is found in several new typographic forms: the Old English alphabet, Irish Gaelic, and (finally, eighteen years after he first proposed it) John Hart’s phonetic alphabet.21 That these fonts were all designed for uniquely English concerns is evidence that these were not imports,22 and that commissioning new punches had suddenly become feasible for English authors and printers. It is probable that this leap forward was enabled by the immigration of a group of punch-​cutters: though we know little of their activities in England, denization documents tell us that it was during this decade that Antonius D’Anvilliar, Jerome Haultin, François Guyot and his son Gabriel arrived in London, bringing with them their highly specialized skills.23 Material type could be held, dropped, cast, melted, or altogether absent. We’ve seen that the typographical appearance of a book is first dependent on what fonts were

316   James Misson available to whom, and when. Typographic choice, then, becomes secondary to circumstance, and we must be mindful of this when interpreting early modern books: intentionality can only be ascribed to typography if it can be shown that the printer had a selection of fonts from which to choose. But a lack of intention doesn’t mean typography couldn’t be meaningful. As the following sections show, even the most inevitable typography was evocative of a text’s context, and readers found meaning in the conventions that were the consequences of material circumstance: hard to move, harder to make, type anchors text in time and place.

Fonts in Time At the highest level of typeface classification, we talk about roman, italic, and black-​letter type—​a serviceable trinity for most scenarios, but one which an early modern typographer would not recognize. The records of the raid on Waldegrave’s house show that people in 1589 were as familiar with ‘roman’ and ‘italic’ as we are,24 but ‘black letter’ (and its increasingly occasional synonym ‘Gothic’) is a later coinage, used to assert a family resemblance between several related types, three of which were used in England.25 In their first 120 years, English printed books were predominantly set in textura, though before the sixteenth century printers also used bastarda or rotunda, and thereafter only in very rare cases. Textura’s appearance is defined by a strong vertical stress, with thick minims (vertical strokes) contrasting against hairline oblique strokes. Its terminals—​the ends of its strokes—​are generally a lozenge shape like those at the bottom of an ‘m’. When Waldegrave came to print the first two Marprelate pamphlets, he used only textura for their title pages, despite his fresh supply of recast roman type (Fig. 17.2). This was unusual: in that year, 0.9 per cent of books used only textura on their title page—​just two books, both of them Marprelate tracts—​so Waldegrave was actively shirking the eye-​catching mix of roman, italic, and black letter that had become the norm among his contemporaries.26 He did so to archaize the books. As Harriet Phillips illustrates, part of what makes Martin Marprelate’s voice distinctive are the old-​fashioned words peppered throughout the texts, which aligned him with the great reformers of the first half of the century: ‘Martin’s linguistic fidelity to the godly rhetoric of the 1530s–​1550s evoked not timeless tradition’, Phillips writes, ‘but a specific, time-​bound archaism.’27 This stylistic choice of lexis is complemented and amplified by Waldegrave’s choice of typography, and so the design of the first tracts harks back to a generation of printers long passed: the last time the majority of books contained only black-​letter type was in 1538. Marprelate’s archaic typographical voice continues inside the first four books through Waldegrave’s bastarda, used alongside the textura for headings, marginalia, and a preface. Looking closely at Fig. 17.3, we can see how bastarda differs from textura, most distinctively in its ‘one-​storeyed’ ‘a’ (as opposed to textura’s ‘two-​storeyed’ ‘a’). Nor does it have the unyielding vertical stress of textura—​its aspect (that is, its general appearance) is much rounder, owing to its curved minims. Waldegrave’s bastarda would have struck readers as unusual: English hadn’t been seen in this type since 1553, and even then it was

Typography   317

Fig. 17.2  Martin Marprelate, The Epistle ([East Molesey: Robert Waldegrave, 1588]), STC 17452. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce PP 244 fo. 1v. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

used by the printer William Copland to historicize, imitating the appearance of William Caxton’s books from the fifteenth century. Copland’s book was a reprint of the first book printed in English, The recuile of the histories of Troie, replete with a typographic pastiche of Caxton’s bastarda on its title page.28 Both Copland and Waldegrave’s choice

318   James Misson

Fig. 17.3  Martin Marprelate, The Epistle ([East Molesey: Robert Waldegrave, 1588]), STC 17452. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce PP 2444. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

of an old-​fashioned typeface probably came at the expense of readability for many readers: the antiquarian William Thynne, a contemporary of Marprelate’s, described this kind of type as a ‘ragged’ letter—​a description usually reserved for the scruffiest of manuscripts.29 Sometime in the summer of 1589, after three pamphlets and one broadside printed using these textura and bastarda fonts, the Marprelate project began to take its toll on Waldegrave. He decided to quit, citing harsh working conditions (no doubt exacerbated by the weight of secrecy), and we learn from the deposition of Marprelate’s bookbinder that when Waldegrave left, his black-​letter fonts went with him.30 Marprelate was thereby divested of the archaism that had been cultivated through typography. It seems that Hodgkins, who took over from Waldegrave, didn’t have the means to continue the distinctive brand, so in the next two pamphlets he used a more conventional mix of roman and italic instead. The Marprelate team worked around this setback, accompanying the expedient shift in typographic style with a corresponding shift in rhetorical style: these pamphlets are not in the direct voice of Martin Marprelate, but couched in editorial apparatus supplied by two new characters in the Marprelate universe, Martin’s sons. The first purports to be based on one of the father’s unfinished manuscripts, discovered ‘among his vnperfect papers’ by his son Martin Junior, ‘published and set foorth as an after-​birth of the noble Gentleman himselfe, by a prety stripling of his’31—​an immediate juxtaposition between the black-​letter tracts of the ‘old man’32 and the roman tracts of the sons. This rhetorical change from black letter to roman across a generation of fictional Marprelates is representative of a very real shift to roman type that was simultaneously changing the face of English books. The precise details of this shift have long been subject to speculation. Though roman type was first used in England in 1509,33

Typography   319 Adrian Weiss says it wasn’t until around 1640 that all books were using it for their main text.34 The tipping point—​that is, when the majority of books used roman instead of black letter—​has been placed in the early 1590s (for playbooks, at least)35 and 1592 (for books in general).36 Mark Bland has suggested three causes for this: a rise in the popularity of Italianate fashions in the decades preceding the 1590s; the deaths of several printers between 1583 and 1590 allowing a new generation to take over, whose new type was afforded by a large increase in average income in the 1590s; and, finally, the popularity of Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, both printed in roman in 1590.37 Though any of these events no doubt played their part, the use of roman type had been steadily rising in English books since 1565—​from around the same time as those innovative typographic forms described above. It’s probable, then, that the immigrant type-​manufacturers enabled this shift to roman by furnishing England with new fonts of a Continental style as well as those more specialized alphabets, thereby leaving their enduring mark on the appearance of everyday English. Certain types of books, however, were impervious to the roman trend. There is a long-​standing practice among book historians of associating types with genres; most of these associations derive from the retention of textura as everything else tended towards roman. In this period of flux, resisting typographic change was as significant as yielding to it, and so the persistent textura of legal texts, ballads, culinary books, and almanacs into the seventeenth century stands out. Often, this was a conservatism born out of the convenience of using a previous edition’s design as the basis for the next—​a phenomenon described as ‘typographic inevitability’ by Zachary Lesser.38 Institutionalized legal texts like Littleton’s Tenures were magnets for typographic inevitability because they were in regular demand, and this text remained in textura from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, despite being reprinted at least once a decade. The law’s retention of black letter carried over to proclamations too, though these were new texts—​an application so conventional that a large textura was sometimes called ‘proclamation print’, a term used by Thomas Nashe to illustrate the size of a kitchen, ‘about the compasse of a Parenthesis in Proclamation print’.39 The narrative retold above describes typography’s development through the binary embodied by Marprelate and his sons: the old-​fashioned black letter giving way to the modern roman. This shift has traditionally been couched in adversarial discourse, triumphantly proclaiming the ‘victory’ of roman over black letter,40 the latter even occasionally portrayed as some sort of medieval oppressor.41 That narrative is reductive, encouraged by a presentist desire to understand the typographic idiom of today’s roman books. Instead, it’s more useful to think of the development of English typography in terms of the multigraphy that came to be its defining characteristic. Multigraphy is the ‘use of different scripts, alphabets, or writing systems in the same time and place’42—​in our case, the array of textura, bastarda, rotunda, roman, and italic that early modern English readers found in their books, making typographical meaning inevitable through contrast. In this context, the early 1590s seem less like a ‘victory’ of roman over black letter, and more like a point of equilibrium, or the height of roman–​black-​letter

320   James Misson multigraphism, which peaks in 1591 when 50.93 per cent of books printed used roman for their main text, and 48.6 per cent of books used black letter for their main text. Multigraphy existed between books, as in the contrast between the old man Marprelate and his striplings, but it also existed within books—​another aspect that the Whiggish ‘roman versus black letter’ narrative fails to capture. From 1538, almost all books contained a mixture of roman and textura types. Part of what makes the title page of Marprelate’s first tract archaic, therefore, is not just its use of textura, but its use of only textura, referencing the monography of the first four decades of the sixteenth century. Multigraphy was exploited on the page as a way of efficiently discerning between different kinds of text: until the exponential rise of roman begins in the mid-​ 1560s, it is usually limited to paratextual and decorative purposes, owing to the short supply of roman type. Running headings can thereby be differentiated from a black-​ letter text, for instance, or quotations made salient within the main text, obviating the need for quotation marks or verbal cues. Besides the sometimes subtle differences between letter forms, our immediate recognition of multigraphy relies on the contrast in colour between the typefaces—​a typographic term that refers to the density of darkness on the page. Roman, with its thinner strokes and proportionally larger counters (the space enclosed within the shape of the letter), allows more paper to be seen between the ink than black letter, and therefore has a lighter colour. Colour contrast was a widely used technique to make a reference book more searchable: if a proper noun is set in contrasting type in a block of prose, as they were in many chronicles for instance, topics may be easily found at a glance. Though we retain a vestige of multigraphism in our use of italics, modern typographic practice generally discourages multigraphy, and we’ve therefore lost many of the affordances of multigraphic typography enjoyed by early modern printers and readers.

Fonts in Place Typefaces could have many meanings. While one reader may have seen an evocation of a time in Marprelate’s black letter, another may have seen an evocation of a place. Waldegrave’s prosecutors were such readers, noticing that the first four Marprelate texts were all ‘printed in a Dutch letter’.43 It’s possible that this term referred to the tiny bastarda type Waldegrave used for Marprelate’s paratexts, as such fonts were still used for printing Germanic languages in northern Europe, but it might equally refer to Waldegrave’s textura. Looking closely at its long ‘s’ and ‘f ’, we see that this type is not a pure textura, and where we would normally expect blunt terminals, we instead find the spiked descenders of bastarda—​it’s a hybrid. So, Waldegrave was not only archaizing Marprelate’s books, but foreignizing them too, invoking a similar ‘transnational heuristic’ that Coldiron has identified in the typography of multilingual books.44 By using a ‘Dutch letter’, his typography told the same lie as the books’ imprints: ‘Printed ouersea in Europe’45—​nowhere specific, but a general

Typography   321 elsewhere. Matching a foreign typeface with this false claim of a foreign provenance could have been intended as a decoy, used by the Marprelate team to avoid detection in England; it was also another technique to associate Marprelate with past generations of reformers. When William Tyndale left England in 1524 to work on his illegally English Bible, his books were therefore printed with Continental fonts, made conspicuous when they were smuggled back to England. One of the few other uses of the term ‘Dutch letter’ from this period demonstrates the link, saying that Tyndale’s Practice of Prelates, printed in Antwerp in 1530, was ‘first printed in octauo in a Dutch letter’—​a bastarda type similar to Waldegrave’s.46 We therefore see in Tyndale’s typography the principle that where a book was printed affected how it looked: if an author is forced abroad because of the illegality of their text, their text will look strange because of its mediation through foreign fonts. Whereas Tyndale was forced to use a foreign font, Waldegrave actively cultivated this appearance. His typography therefore not only provided a cover for his location, but also ventriloquized the voice of exile, portraying the text as one too radical for English soil. Books printed in England were no exception to this principle. It’s an oft-​cited truism that black letter was associated with the English language: as Stephen K. Galbraith has highlighted, the common idiom of English texts in the sixteenth century was also known as ‘English letter’. It was certainly the norm to print English in black letter during this time—​between 1509 and 1592, 89 per cent of books in English used black letter for their main text—​but to say that black letter signified English neglects the fact that the French, Latin, and Welsh printed in England frequently appeared in black letter too: in the same period, 84 per cent of French, 45 per cent of Latin, and 70 per cent of Welsh books also used ‘English letter’. Any Englishness of black letter is therefore not a correlation of typography and language, but a correlation of typography and place; not English, but England. Probably due to the same lack of manufacturing expertise discussed above, roman and italic fonts were in short supply in England for most of the century, and so printers depended on old black-​letter fonts and matrices long after their Continental counterparts had abandoned them.47 So it was that when Archbishop Matthew Parker wanted to print his book in italic type, he found the printers of England underequipped. As he recounts in a letter written in the late 1560s, he therefore commissioned one of the recently arrived type-​founders to create new italic letters, ‘because they will not heare be offered, and for that Bookes printed in England, be in suspition abroade’.48 Parker’s comment is a telling insight into the international reputation of England’s typography until the arrival of these type-​founders—​monographic enough to cast ‘suspition’ back across the English Channel. As it happens, England was also the main source of English texts, so a typeface of England is easily conflated with a typeface of English. With few Continental printers publishing in English, the demand for such books was met almost entirely by a domestic supply, thereby mediating these texts through printers who mostly owned black-​letter fonts. But the long-​standing conflation of an English-​language typeface and a typeface of England can be disentangled by seeing how English appeared on the rare occasions it was mediated abroad. Though some English passages first appeared in roman type

322   James Misson in 1519,49 English had to breach its borders before a full English book was printed in roman: the first was another of Tyndale’s exiled texts—​his translation of the book of Deuteronomy, printed in Antwerp in 1530.50 The text’s strange typography is a direct consequence of the author’s exile, and so the unorthodoxy of the book’s content is made legible in its very appearance. The same can be said of the first English book in italic type, A Supplicacyon for the beggers—​a pamphlet demanding radical church reform with a playfully invective tone not unlike Martin Marprelate’s, printed in Antwerp in 1539.51 The same dynamic occurred on a larger scale in Geneva in the 1550s—​a period which saw a sudden spike in roman English text that represents the first programmatic application of that typeface to English. The accession of Queen Mary I in 1553 suddenly installed an anti-​Protestant regime in England, resulting in many Protestants fleeing the country to avoid persecution or, in the most extreme cases, execution. A group of them found refuge in Geneva, where they met Continental printers similarly exiled from their native countries. These transnational communities shared churches, but they also shared fonts, channelling their vernacular Bible translations through the same medium—​in particular, a set of roman typefaces designed by the genius punch-​cutter Pierre Haultin, uncle to the Jerome Haultin who we found in London in the 1560s.52 The sixteen books that English and Scottish exiles printed in Geneva were thereby characterized by a Continental appearance, destined to stand out when they were smuggled back to Britain. Part of what made Haultin’s designs revolutionary was their scalability: twenty lines of text in his smallest typeface took up just 42 mm (the equivalent of today’s 6pt)—​a style that English readers found so remarkable that the association between type and location was ingrained in the language even into the seventeenth century. We find writers using Geneva print to refer to tiny roman type—​almost always with a negative association of eye strain. Dudley North, for instance, claimed that ‘A Geneva print weakens the sight’, comparing the effort of focusing on it to ‘hold[ing] your bow ever bent, or your horse streight rained’.53 The examples given here demonstrate that some readers associated a text’s appearance with a place—​either the book’s actual provenance, or a deliberate evocation of elsewhere. Besides this general attribution of location, fonts also revealed their precise location in the printing shops of individuals, as the physical properties of each font gave it a unique signature. While a single set of punches could in theory lead to many identical fonts, in reality the chain of transmission from punch to print introduced variation that ensured that no two fonts were the same. Two fonts cast from the same set of matrices will have the same letter forms, for instance, but might have different amounts of space around the letter forms if they were cast on a different body size.54 Fonts or matrix sets may be mixed and matched, and this can happen deliberately (like in Waldegrave’s textura–​ bastarda hybrid) or accidentally, as when a piece of type is mistakenly sorted back into the wrong font (a scenario sometimes known as a foul case). Finally, if a font is in use for a long time, everyday wear and tear can alter the letter forms in distinctive ways, making the font idiosyncratic. So, early modern fonts were unique renditions of a typeface. Because of this, it’s possible to identify the printer of a text by its appearance—​a skill that is still increasing our

Typography   323 knowledge of book history. A team led by Christopher Warren, for instance, has recently identified the anonymous printers of Milton’s Areopagitica as Matthew Simmons and Thomas Paine by the slight dents and knocks that made their type unique.55 Claire McGann has likewise identified Thomas Cottrell as the likely printer of Anna Trapnel’s prophetic verse by his unique combination of letter forms and ornaments.56 There remains plenty of work to be done on identifying the sources of unattributed books by their typography, and developments in computer vision promise to make our methods faster and scalable.57 Unfortunately for clandestine printers of illegal texts, this sort of forensic typographology was also practised in the early modern period, when it was used for the sake of incrimination rather than historical knowledge. As reported to Lord Burghley, the letter forms of the Marprelate tracts were ‘knowen by printers to be Walde-​graues’,58 and so his identity was ultimately betrayed by his fonts. But they were too late: Waldegrave had already fled to Edinburgh, where he printed with impunity, becoming the most prolific printer in Scotland until his death in 1603.

Conclusion Despite their dwindling numbers and the seizure of their equipment, the remainder of the Marprelate team somehow sourced a font to print what would turn out to be Marprelate’s final word. Black suggests that it was Throkmorton and Penry themselves who typeset the book’s first few pages:59 perhaps the short-​handed team needed the extra labour, or perhaps Marprelate’s authors were practicing the ars typographica so that they could one day become self-​reliant. Either way, their inexperience is inscribed in this book, which might be the worst piece of English typesetting that survives from the sixteenth century. Spacing is scattered erratically, disrupting the even colour of the page; letter ‘n’s and ‘u’s are interchanged or flipped, ‘r’s mistaken for ‘t’s, and the undulating lines suggest a forme that is barely holding together. Most strikingly, the length of the lines steadily increases, making the text appear to keel over into the book’s gutter.60 But for us, unusual typography is good evidence—​ a final testament that the circumstances of a text’s production determined its appearance. In this chapter we’ve seen this demonstrated by the most extreme examples: Hart’s eccentric alphabet, Marprelate’s covert texts, the exiled texts of Tyndale and the Geneva community. The principle also applies, however, to those books at the opposite end of the legitimacy spectrum—​those authorized texts, licensed both legally and socially, whose production was therefore untroubled, and whose typography was therefore conventional. Today we think of graphic design and product design as two different things—​one abstract, the other material—​but for the early modern book, graphic design was material. As those materials depended on circumstance, circumstance was in turn made legible on the page. Early modern typography was therefore not just a way of making a text look old, new, salient, or beautiful; it was also an index of the social, historical, and geographical life of a text—​a visible union of content and context.

324   James Misson

Notes 1. ‘When his other letters and presse were defaced about Easter was twelve moneth [7 April 1588], he saved these lettres in a boxe vnder his Cloke.’ ‘Secret Report to Lord Burghley of the Authors of the Martin Marprelate Tracts’, in Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, ii (London: Stationers Company, 1875), 816. 2. ‘Secret Report’, 816. 3. Joseph Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. xvi. 4. The full story is told in Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts, pp. xlvi–​lvi. 5. Donald F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, in Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 198–​236, at 226. 6. Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Laurie Maguire, The Rhetoric of the Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 7. Beatrice Warde, ‘The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible’, in The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography (London: Sylvan Press, 1955), 11–​17, at 11. 8. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, 2005), 17 9. Harry Carter, A View of Early Typography up to about 1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 5. 10. Claire M. Bolton, The Fifteenth-​Century Printing Practices of Johann Zainer, Ulm, 1473–​ 1478 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2016), 83–​90. 11. Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts, p. lv. 12. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 38. 13. W. Craig Ferguson, Pica Roman Type in Elizabethan England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), 12. 14. Marprelate, The Epistle, 23. 15. The opening of the unreasonable writing of our inglish toung, London, British Library, MS Royal 17.C.vii, cited in Peter J. Lucas, ‘Sixteenth-​Century English Spelling Reform and the Printers in Continental Perspective: Sir Thomas Smith and John Hart’, The Library, 1 (2000), 3–​21, at 7. 16. https://​www.natio​nala​rchi​ves.gov.uk/​curre​ncy-​conver​ter, accessed 2 Mar. 2021. 17. Richard Tottel, ‘The Printer to the Reader’, in Thomas More, A frutefull pleasaunt, [and] wittie worke, of the beste state of a publique weale, and of the newe yle, called Vtopia, trans. Ralph Robertson (London: Richard Tottel for Abraham Vele, 1556), STC 18095, fo. S.viiir. 18. Tottel, ‘The Printer to the Reader’, fo. S.viiir. 19. Robert Wakefield, Oratio de laudibus & utilitate trium linguarum (London: Wyknyn de Worde, [1528?]), STC 24944; Robert Whittington, Syntaxis (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1517), fo. 25v. For more examples of typography augmented with manuscript, see Maguire, The Rhetoric of the Page, 28–​31. 20. William Lily and William Horman, Antibossicon (London: Richard Pynson, 1521), STC 15606.

Typography   325 21. For Old English, see Richard W. Clement, ‘The Beginnings of Printing in Anglo-​Saxon, 1565–​1630’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 91 (1997), 192–​244; for Irish, see Bruce Dickins, ‘The Irish Broadside of 1571 and Queen Elizabeth’s Types’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1 (1949), 48–​60. 22. Though it never came to fruition, Queen Elizabeth had, in 1567, paid for ‘the making of Carecter to print the New Testament in Irish’—​the font was therefore an apparatus of the colonial presence of the English in Ireland. Dickins, ‘The Irish Broadside of 1571 and Queen Elizabeth’s Types’, 49. 23. See Ernest J. Worman, Alien Members of the Book-​ Trade during the Tudor Period (London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society, by Blades, East & Blades, 1906); Oastler notes Worman’s omissions, amending them via the Huguenot Society of London’s publication ‘Returns of Aliens’, and giving a useful summary of the known type-​founders’ movements. Christopher L. Oastler, John Day, the Elizabethan Printer (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, Bodleian Library, 1975) 33–​39. 24. Useful descriptions and histories of these types can be found in Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 20–​30. 25. For a critique of black letter as a modern classification, see Joseph Dane, ‘Paleography Versus Typography’, in Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 11–​36. 26. The figures used in this chapter are drawn from my survey of books on Early English Books Online printed between 1509 and 1592, representing 82 per cent of extant books. James Misson, ‘ “See This Book and Read It”: Reading the Typography of English’, DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2020. 27. Harriet Phillips, Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–​ 1613: Merry Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 112–​113. 28. The recuile of the histories of Troie (London: William Copland [1553]), STC 15378, fo. 1r. 29. Francis Thynne, Animadversions Uppon the Annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer’s workes (sett downe before tyme, and nowe reprinted in the yere of our lorde 1598), ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, 9 (London: N. Trübner & Co, 1865), 71. For more recriminations of ‘ragged hands’, see Henry R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 112. 30. Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts, p. liii. 31. Theses Martinianae ([Wolston, Warks.]: Printed [by John Hodgkins] by the assignes of Martin Iunior, without any priuiledge of the Catercaps, [22 July 1589]), fo. 1r. 32. Theses Martinianae, fo. 1v. 33. Girolamo Savonarola, Sermo Fratris Hieronymi de Ferraria in vigilia Natiuitatis domini (London: Richard Pynson, 1509), STC 21800. 34. Adrian Weiss, ‘Casting Compositors Foul Cases, and Skeletons: Printing in Middleton’s Age’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 195–​225. 35. Mark Bland, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’, Text, 11 (1998), 105. 36. Steven K. Galbraith, ‘ “English” Black-​Letter Type and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 13–​40, at 37. 37. Bland, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’. 38. Zachary Lesser, ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, English Literary Renaissance, 29 (1999), 22–​43, at 31.

326   James Misson 39. See Rachel Stenner, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature (London: Routledge, 2019), 183. 40. Sigfrid H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 1996), 9. 41. Warren Chappell spoke of roman’s ‘release from the thraldom of the black letter’. Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972), 74. 42. Peter A. Stokes, ‘Scribal Attribution across Multiple Scripts: A Digitally Aided Approach’, Speculum, 92/​S1 (2017), S65–​S85, at S66. 43. ‘Secret Report’, 816. 44. A. E. B. Coldiron, Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 160–​198. 45. Marprelate, Epistle, fo. 1r. 46. Richard Cosin, An apologie for svndrie proceedings by iurisdiction ecclesiasticall (London: Christopher Barker, 1593), STC 5821, 176. The edition referred to is William Tyndale, The practyse of prelates [Antwerp: Marten de Keyser?, 1530], STC 24465. 47. Alfred W. Pollard hypothesized that English fonts lasted longer than usual because the proximity of Cornish mines made tin cheap in England, and so ‘English type-​metal stood wear and tear more persistently than that used on the Continent’. Alfred W. Pollard, ‘Introduction’, in Franks S. Isaac, English & Scottish Printing Types, 1501–​1558* 1508–​1558 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. ii. 48. British Library, MS Lansdowne 15, fo. 99r, cited in John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 86. 49. William Horman, Vulgaria uiri doctissimi Guil. Hormani Cæsariburgensis (London: Richard Pynson, 1519), STC 13811. 50. [The Pentateuch], trans. William Tyndale ([Antwerp]: Hans Luft [i.e. Johan Hoochstraten], 1530), STC 2350. 51. Simon Fish, A supplicacyon for the beggers ([Antwerp?: J. Grapheus?, ?]), STC 10883. 52. Hendrik Vervliet, Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance, (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 257. 53. Dudley North, A forest of varieties (London: Richard Cotes, 1645), Wing N1283, 5. 54. The early roman types of Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde, for instance, were probably derived from the same punches or matrices, but cast on different body sizes (‘roman 80’ and ‘roman 81’ in Isaac, English & Scottish Printing Types. The number in Isaac’s classifications indicates the height in mm of twenty lines). 55. Christopher N. Warren et al., ‘Damaged Type and Areopagitica’s Clandestine Printers’, Milton Studies, 62/​1 (2020), 1–​47. 56. Claire McGann, ‘ “To print her discourses & hymmes”: The Typographic Features of Anna Trapnel’s Prophecies’, Seventeenth Century, 36/​2 (2021), 233–​252. 57. Kartik Goyal et al., ‘A Probabilistic Generative Model for Typographical Analysis of Early Modern Printing’, 4 May 2020 58. ‘Secret Report’, 816. 59. Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts, p. lv. 60. Martin Marprelate, The protestation of Martin Marprelat ([Wolston, Warks.?, 1589], STC 17459.

Select Bibliography Arber, Edward (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, vol. ii (London: Stationers Company, 1875).

Typography   327 Black, Joseph (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Bland, Mark, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’, Text, 11 (1998), 91–​154. Bourne, Claire M. L., Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Carter, Harry, A View of Early Typography up to about 1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Dane, Joseph, Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Ferguson, W. Craig, Pica Roman Type in Elizabethan England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989). Galbraith, Steven K., ‘ “English” Black-​Letter Type and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 13–​40. Isaac, Frank S., English & Scottish Printing Types, 1501–​1558* 1508–​1558 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). McKenzie, Donald F., ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, in Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 198–​236. Misson, James, ‘ “See This Book and Read It”: Reading the Typography of English’, DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2020. Oastler, Christopher L., John Day, the Elizabethan Printer (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, Bodleian Library, 1975). Stenner, Rachel, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature (London: Routledge, 2019). Vervliet, Hendrik, Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Weiss, Adrian, ‘Casting Compositors Foul Cases, and Skeletons: Printing in Middleton’s Age’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 195–​225.

CHAPTER 18

Beyond th e B o ok Non-​Codex Texts Harriet Phillips

To write the history of ‘the book’ is to scratch the surface of textual encounter in early modern England. Legible surfaces were everywhere, and ‘reading’ only a fraction of text–​human interface in the period. Words were painted or printed and pasted to walls, embroidered or woven into cloth, and incised into glass, clay, and skin.1 Text was seen, heard, touched, and remade. Printed paper, for example single-​sheet ephemera, was part of the fabric of everyday life in matter as well as form, although the vast majority of this material has now vanished almost without trace. This essay focuses on the broadside, a single sheet printed on one or both sides, as a site of textual experience in early modern England, for three reasons. First, broadsides were produced in vast numbers. Single-​sheet printing was crucial to the early modern print economy, for both publishers and vendors, and was omnipresent in contemporary urban life.2 Estimates of total sheets produced are difficult given low survival rates, but are thought to be substantial. Thousands and thousands of prayers and indulgences were produced from the fifteenth century on, while conservative estimates suggest more than three thousand broadside ballads—​editions, not copies—​had been printed in England by around 1600. This volume was matched by accessibility. Much of this print was cheap (one penny or less the usual price for ballads) or free, meaning that for many people broadsides were their first, main, and perhaps only experience of print.3 Second, broadsides were also accessible in ways books were not. As a single sheet outside the structure of the codex, they were heir to all the affordances of paper: pliable, portable, and potentially also personal, broadsides facilitated text–​human interfaces beyond the range of the book. Finally, this flexibility also made broadsides fragile, since book form constrains but also protects. Most early modern broadsides that survive are now housed in codex form, whether purposefully collected and bound by contemporaries, or preserved unread in printers’ stock accidentally and then deliberately as their value rose. Collecting and binding promoted physical preservation, but also scholarly recognition. Broadsides otherwise often figure only in the anonymous aggregate, if at all,

Beyond the Book    329 in contemporary probate and sales inventories, and often continued to be imperfectly catalogued in the present.4 These archival lacunae hide a hard-​to-​read story of human–​ book relations, while highlighting the problems involved in reconstructing the mundane past. For all these reasons broadsides encapsulate the central problems of studying popular culture, of undocumented experience and unrecorded reading. This chapter proposes instead to consider other kinds of user experience, suggesting that in moving beyond the book we should also move away from reading. Writing of the growth of the book trade in Europe, James Raven cautions that we ‘consider demand for print not as demand for reading but demand for objects viewed as worthy of possession’.5 Seeing broadsides as things as well as texts, mediated by desires to see, touch, manipulate, to keep and to give away, opens up the history of reading into a broader, if archivally challenging, terrain of text-​adjacent desire, intention, and accident. This approach is predicated on the idea that, given the extreme fragility of the unhoused broadside, survival is itself significant: if not individually, then en masse. While many broadsides survived unread among the papers of printers, it is striking that different genres of broadside—​to take two, fictional ballads versus epitaphs—​survive at differential rates. Early moderns responded to these kinds of object differently, with lasting effects, so that the shape of the archive is a history of use and intention. Most sixteenth-​century English broadsides survive in two collections, split over three locations. George Daniel’s collection, mostly ballads, originated in the library of the Tollemache family at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk: Daniel acquired and then almost immediately divided it around 1830, and it is now in the British Library (as the Huth broadsides) and the Henry E. Huntington Library (as the Britwell ballads). The second, a mixture of ballads and prose ephemera, is held at the Society of Antiquaries in London: bringing together a number of successive acquisitions, it was assembled and catalogued in the 1850s. There is no reliable provenance information for most of these holdings before the nineteenth century. By contrast 83 per cent of extant broadside ballads are from the seventeenth century, many in excellent condition and preserved in dedicated collections made by contemporaries.6 The status of the broadside between 1500 and 1700 had changed significantly, a shift reflected in the increasingly purposive conditions of its preservation. The bibliographical term ‘broadside’ dates from the end of this period (the OED quotes the collector Anthony Wood in 1691), registering growing scholarly recognition of the broadside as a distinct form. While the phenomenon of virtuoso collection was a highly and purposefully legible material practice, other kinds of use also left physical traces. Take folding. Typically, seventeenth-​century broadsides in contemporary collections are either folded in order to facilitate their binding as a group or not folded at all, reflecting the fact that they were often purchased in order to be preserved and sometimes directly from the publisher. Similarly, some of the most pristine (as well as the most fragmentary) sixteenth-​century broadsides survived as printer’s waste: generated as part of the printing process, but not intended for sale. Several surviving broadsides were proof-​sheets, for example, and are unfolded because unused. Folding on an earlier broadside, although hard to date

330   Harriet Phillips reliably, can suggest a life outside the print shop. Of 295 pre-​1600 broadsides for which information is available, around 55 per cent are folded. Where this can be dated, for example by annotation, it suggests an interest in preservation or transmission or both. A handful survive addressed to someone: an encomium to the Mayor of London from 1675 is folded in fours and labelled ‘Samuell’ on the verso (British Library 82.l.8(31) ), while Anthony Wood’s copy of Monmouth Degraded (1685) is addressed ‘For Mr Coleby Fellow of Merton College in Oxford’ (Fig. 18.1). This practice was presumably widespread, since later publishers began to reproduce it in Parliamentary broadsides, printing a title on the verso in a position that assumes horizontal folding in fours.7 Like survival figures, folding is also differentiated by category: fiction is folded more often (81 per cent), prayers less often (16 per cent). While the numbers involved are small, and the circumstances of any given paper crease are almost always unknowable, these figures do suggest patterns of agency, especially when practices such as folding and labelling migrate from user to printer over time.

Consuming Since the vast majority of early modern broadsides have vanished, what survives is by definition untypical. Loss and destruction were the fates of the vast majority of early modern books, although survival rates for even more ‘ephemeral’ print are exceptionally poor.8 It is possible to reconstruct partially the shape of these vast absences, however, through the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, in which all printers were required to enter their publications. They are a flawed but useful tool for this task. Compliance was variable and the Registers themselves are incomplete, with ballads in particular often recorded in bulk (‘serten ballets’) rather than individually. Bearing these caveats in mind, comparing extant ballads with the Registers suggests that around 50–​60 per cent of ballads were registered.9 This figure is useful because it allows us to see what is missing. Take secular fiction: based on the nineteen ballads of this kind which can confidently be placed before 1600, secular fiction was registered about half of the time. It represents, however, only around 10 per cent of survivals. This disparity has been explained by these fictional ballads having been ‘read to bits’,10 and those that survive do in fact bear traces of vigorous handling: 81 per cent are folded, for example. Others have significant holes or stains: for example, The Lamentable fall of Queen Elenor (1600?) and Good Fellowes must goe learne to daunce (1569). As striking are the number of cases in which broadsides survived by piggybacking on another apparently more valuable text. Some broadsides did this by serving as bindings: A mery dema[nde and answere therunto] betwene Vu[lcan and Venus], probably c.1562–​3, and the fragmentary text known as Malmerophus and Sillera (1582).11 Others are printed on the back of other ballads, with cropping that cannot be dated but nonetheless consistently privileges the other text. Some of these were probably test

Beyond the Book    331

Fig. 18.1  Anthony Wood’s copy of Monmouth Degraded (1685). Bodleian Library MS Wood 417(140).

sheets: A merry new song, wherein is shewed the cudgelling of the cobbler of Colchester (1589) is printed on the back of a heavily corrected A spectaclc [sic] fo[r]‌pe[r]iu[r]e[r]s and trimmed to match. A pleasant new Ballad of the mery Miller of Mansfield is doubled with William Elderton’s moral A Lamentation of Follie (c.1588?) which is trimmed

332   Harriet Phillips around its decorative border, cropping the title and line ends of the Miller. A very proper dittie, to the tune of lightie loue is printed on the reverse of An Epitaph on the death of the vertuous Matrone, the Ladie Maioresse (1570), again trimmed to the borders of the Epitaph and cropping the longer [D]ittie. Taken together these indications do suggest something about the kinds of value placed on fictional broadside ballads by their pre-​1600 readers and printers. They were often not—​at least relative to other kinds of broadsides—​preserved in their own right, but as an adjunct to other texts and apparently for the sake of their paper rather than their content. Contemporary accounts of ballad consumption emphasize performance, communal sociability, and pleasure.12 As an experience it tended to be content-​and not object-​driven, and consequently left few material traces. The kind of consumption, which might come closest to ‘reading’ as understood in ordinary language, is archivally perceptible only through its absence.

Recycling One reason that printed broadsides have vanished is that they were typically reused after reading. This second life of sheets was proverbial, and although often satirically designated as ‘bum fodder’, broadsides were probably redeployed for a range of domestic and personal uses (on which, see Anna Reynolds’s chapter in this volume): lighting pipes and fires, wrapping soap, spices, and other consumer goods, lining pie dishes; and as a component ingredient in other objects. One of the most important places where broadsides were repurposed, but also paradoxically the one in which they were most likely to survive long term, was the printing house. Printer’s stock included finished products, waste paper, and sheets in various states of newness and correctness that moved along the spectrum between them. Making new books consumed a significant amount of old print, and many broadsides are known only fragmentarily from bindings or book parts.13 One, unusually, survives as a price label: A prayer sayd in the kinges chappell in the tyme of hys graces sicknes (1553) is inscribed on the verso ‘the pryse of the book =​xvjs’, presumably denoting a more expensive book the seller was unwilling to annotate.14 Other printing-​house survivals were by-​products of the printing process itself. Several broadsides survive apparently only as proof-​sheets: for example, A godly ballad declaring by the Scriptures the plagues that haue insued whordome (1566), printed on the back of an almanac for 1567 (STC 401.3). Many of the existing corrected proofs are for layouts which were complex or challenging in some way. A spectaclc [sic] fo[r]‌pe[r] iu[r]e[r]s (1589), which reports the false testimony of a John Jones, is topped with an eye-​catching woodcut of a pair of spectacles in which the space for the eyes is filled by the legend ‘Deus videt’. The vale mans table (1589) offers a variety of information, from the ‘Computation of yeares, from William the Conqueror’ and a guide to the use of the

Beyond the Book    333 compass, to instructions for draining bogs and measuring ‘without an instrument any roufe grounde, woode, or water that you cannot come into’ (Fig. 18.2). Divided into sections, generously illustrated with diagrams, and partly coloured, this text was clearly a technically complex production which received careful proofreading: a note along the bottom reads ‘fawltes escaped. for deposed read died, but after kinge Edward the 2. kinge Richard the 2. and king henrie the 6, read deposed. In stead of the prynter inquire to John harrysons at the signe of the greyhound in powles churchyarde’. John Harrison at the White Greyhound in Paul’s is best known for publishing Shakespeare’s long poems in the early 1590s in partnership with Richard Field, and it’s probable that Harrison or more plausibly Field was the author of this note. Another glimpse of the printer in action is revealed by the two surviving copies of the same epitaph, A moorning diti upon the deceas of the high and mighti prins Henry Earl of Arundel (1580). Although now separated, both originate in the collection acquired by George Daniel around 1830 and may record successive stages in the proofing process. Andrew Pettegree notes that ‘to find more than two copies of a sixteenth-​century broadsheet . . . is already unusual’, with large numbers usually representing unsold stock preserved as printers’ waste, which may explain the two states of Arundel’s A moorning diti.15 The copy in the Society of Antiquaries Library (Lemon 73) contains a manuscript correction of the title, with ‘high and miti’ crossed out and replaced by ‘most nobl’ as well as a line in what looks like the same ink dividing the two columns. Tantalizingly, there are some lines in secretary hand on the verso just visible through the print but cropped along the edge, of which ‘The deathe’ are the only words legible: whether notes made by the printer, or a subsequent reader, it is impossible to tell. In the other copy (Huntington Library 18300), the original ‘high and miti’ is still smudgily legible under ‘most nobl’ in what looks like print and surely represents a stop-​press correction after proofing had notionally been completed. What is striking about these printing-​house survivals is that for the most part, with the exception of the binding fragments, they are in unusually excellent condition. There are no stains or tears and they are minimally creased even when folded. This emphasizes the preservative powers of the printing house for early broadsides. Those which, atypically, stayed within printer’s stock moved around less, were subject to much less handling, and lasted longer.

Remembering Because single-​sheet printing was portable, it could also be personal. The growth of printing across Europe was propelled by the trade in indulgences, single sheets to be filled in by the purchaser.16 After the decline of indulgences in England from around 1530, broadside epitaphs offered a parallel individualized form of print: for the subject, and also for the reader.

334   Harriet Phillips

Fig. 18.2  The vale mans table (1589). © The Society of Antiquaries of London, Lemon 78.

Beyond the Book    335 The earliest surviving broadside ballad is probably an epitaph for Henry VII. Eleven per cent of pre-​1600 broadside ballads are epitaphs and if we include eve-​of-​execution confessions—​another death-​focused memorial genre—​the figure rises to 15 per cent.17 They proliferated in post-​Reformation English culture, filling a gap left by the disappearance of other memorial practices. Their locative force (‘Here lies . . .’) translated well to the page, and a range of typographic conventions—​black borders, tombstone-​ like mise-​en-​page—​emerged in memorial print.18 This was particularly true for single-​ sheet printing, which allowed for a cheaper form of spectacle than masonry. Broadside epitaphs are often visually elaborate, technically complex productions, often illustrated or densely ornamented. Several are printed in landscape form, an otherwise unusual format except in the case of large images. A number of epitaphs from the early 1570s have what looks like a house style, a landscape sheet printed in two ornamented columns. On 2 October 1571 the printer Richard Jones was selling epitaphs for John Juell (d. 22 September) and William Garrat (d. 27 September), in which the body text had changed but the ornamental frame and the first words of the title remained in place.19 Two days later he sold another epitaph for Garrat, with a longer text for which the ornamental borders had to be reduced but which otherwise closely resembles the others in layout and remaining ornament.20 These were at least in part commercial productions, intended as their colophon says ‘to be sould’, written by named authors and often produced to a visual formula.21 Others are more individual. An Epitaph of Maister Frauncis Benison, Citizene and Marchant of London, and of the Haberdashers Company (1570) is bordered and divided into two columns with ornaments and features a woodcut of death surrounded by an admonitory poem (‘I Deathe this coffin beare, | For you that lyvyng are:’) and an elaborate initial capital for the epitaph proper. An epitaph for Maister Benedict Spinola, Merchaunt of Genoa, and free Denizon of England (1580), similarly ornamentally bordered, devotes the bottom third of the sheet to a woodcut of Spinola’s shrouded and coffined corpse surrounded by bones and tombs. It is plausible that these were commissioned by the estates or families of the deceased as a public memorial. There is some later evidence that print epitaphs could be paid for by mourners: An elegy on the much lamented death of His Grace the Duke of Argyle and Greenwich (1743) in the British Library (112.f.44(42) ) is annotated ‘By Subscription No. 1000’, and it is possible that some sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century epitaphs were similarly funded by well-​ wishers. Alan Stewart makes a convincing case for William Lambe’s involvement in commissioning and providing biographical material for his own broadside epitaph, as part of a strategy encompassing a number of print venues along with a tomb and various charitable bequests and public works.22 A living remembrance of Master Robert Rogers, Marchant adventurer & Leatherseller of London (1601) devotes half of the sheet to a list of ‘Leagacies bequeathed to charitable uses’, again part of a tranche of memorial activities including an annual commemorative sermon and a funerary monument. Even if epitaphs were not funded by the dead person’s family, social relationships could play an important role in preservation. An Epitaph upon the death of Richard Price, Esquier, printed by John Charlewood in 1586, has ornamented borders and a large

336   Harriet Phillips woodcut of an entombed skeleton, which while funerarily appropriate is in fact an emblem first used by John Day in 1559 and extensively thereafter.23 Richard Price, who held a number of offices in Brecon in the 1570s and 1580s, was a minor public figure and it is impossible to know the origin of his epitaph, which has no sale information and is discreetly signed ‘R.D.’. Whether or not it was private print at the outset, however, it certainly became so. Folded and labelled on the verso ‘Epitaph of my Unckle and godfather Mr Richard Price’, it is one of the very few early broadsides with unambiguous evidence of intentional contemporary preservation. The survival of Price’s epitaph in this way is unusual. A 1576 epitaph for Edward Saunders, while also annotated, has been treated much less reverentially and appears to have spent time in an alehouse.24 Most epitaphs from the period are not annotated at all, are in good condition, and were probably part of printer’s stock, as in the epitaph for Fraunics [sic] Russell (d. 1585) on the verso of The Lamentable Burning of the Citty of Corke (1622) in the Pepys ballad collection.25 While broadside epitaphs facilitated passive memorialization through ownership and/​or preservation, they should also be seen as prompts for action. As Lambe’s and Rogers’s epitaphs make clear, single-​sheet print was not just a record but a component of active remembrance, most often through prayer. There are a significant number of early survivals that reflect this impulse, including a dated prayer for Edward VI (‘to be used of all the kinges trew subjects’, 19 June 1553) and for Accession Day 1577, giving instructions both for communal singing (‘as the foure score and one Psalme . . . Then shall wee sing with joyfull hearts’), and also for private reflection (‘Rejoyce ever. Praye continually’).26 These civic and charitable elements are combined with the memorial in the psalms sung annually from at least 1610 by orphans of Christ’s Hospital at the Easter Monday Spital Sermon. Typically they include song texts and musical notation alongside a record of the orphans housed and patients cured at the other royal hospitals, Bridewell, St Thomas’s, and St Bartholomew’s.27 These broadsides script and preserve this music, bringing together a record of the specific event together with the other charitable activities of the foundation (‘These two lines are to be sung by one or two of the Children . . . Children kept in Christes Hospitall at this present 630’, 1610) and which the performance also commemorates. The Spital sermon was itself a charitable event intended to promote and attract donations to the London Spital hospital. The sermon was a major public event, attended by the Mayor and other London Corporation officials in livery. The printed copies of the Easter Psalm seem designed to extend and redirect some of this goodwill towards the Royal Hospitals, both implicitly and increasingly explicitly: the 1687 psalm closes with a large ornamented injunction to ‘Pray remember the poore’.28 The broadside might in and of itself have been a money-​making venture: the owner of the 1687 version noted that they received their copy ‘gratis’, potentially implying that they were usually sold (although the income split is unclear and presumably at least some of it defrayed the cost of printing). All these texts are keyed to a specific, dated, moment or public event, of which they serve as both script and souvenir. In addition to providing for action in the named present, whether private prayer, communal performance, or charitable giving, they also allow participation at a distance. This distance might be spatial, as in the prayers for

Beyond the Book    337 Edward VI on what turned out to be his deathbed, or temporal, allowing a Spital sermon attendee to repeat or return to the event in memory. That they could work in just this way is suggested by the annotation on the 1687 Easter Psalm giving the date (‘28 March 1687’), in what is surely a companionate impulse to that experienced by Richard Price’s nephew inscribing his uncle’s epitaph.

Knowing The capacity of cheap print to respond to, embody, or record a specific moment in time was key to its contemporary function, and the corresponding readerly impulse to treat it as a souvenir has often been a major factor in its survival. As Pettegree notes, much cheap print was not in fact conceived by its makers as necessarily ephemeral.29 Paradoxically, however, this kind of material often survives accidentally; explicitly topical print, by contrast, has often invited preservation. While information was the major component of the broadside press, the broadsides that survive are more often keyed to a specific political or historical moment-​in-​time: for example, a broadside recording the death totals from successive waves of the plague in London between 1592 and 1665 has a space allowing running death totals to be recorded, an opportunity which at least one reader took and which surely played a role in its preservation.30 News is the single largest surviving category of cheap print. Accumulations of broadsides reliably track significant public events, most recognizable during the English Civil War and the Titus Oates conspiracy of 1678–​81, but apparent as early as the multiple crises in British politics during 1567–​72. Of 328 broadsheets printed before 1600, fifty-​ two of them are from 1570: when the surrounding years of disquiet are added, almost a third (105) of surviving sixteenth-​century broadsides are from those years, covering the abdication of Mary I, Queen of Scots (1567) and the subsequent civil war in Scotland (1568–​73), the Northern Rising in England (1569–​70), and the Pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570). We can see this pattern in terms of both demand and supply. Printed news was a saleable commodity, and political crises generated more of it. In Britain as elsewhere in Europe government was a major customer of the broadside press, and during these crises played a significant role in producing topical print.31 There are demonstrable links between the Privy Council and pro-​government broadsides during the Northern Rising, and between the King’s Party and Robert Sempill’s anti-​Mary I ballads during the Marian civil war.32 Government could also play a role in preservation: the Sempill ballads were routinely sent to William Cecil and a significant number survive in State Papers with his annotations.33 In fact, the Sempill ballads survive in multiple copies outside The National Archives, split between collections in the British Library and the Society of Antiquaries. None are in Scotland, so rather than surviving as printer’s waste they proliferated widely beyond (and presumably within) Scotland’s borders and were retained, therefore, by

338   Harriet Phillips more-​or-​less private individuals with an interest in current affairs. Similarly, at least ten ballads survive chronicling the unfolding of the Northern Rising, the papal bull, and the subsequent round of executions survive, split between two collections (the Daniel and the Antiquaries’ collections). This kind of newsy collection is known elsewhere in contemporary Europe, in the collections of Johann Wick in Zurich (c.1559–​80) and Pierre de l’Estoile in Paris (1589–​98), and the survival and distribution patterns of political broadsides around 1570 suggest that it was also happening in England at this time.34 The value of news broadsides to these collectors was precisely their ephemerality, both in embodying the tone of the moment and in the fact of their own existence, as an intervention in the public sphere. John Selden (1584–​1654), one of the earliest known ballad collectors, said that ‘More solid things do not shew the Complexion of the times so well, as Ballads and Libels’.35 For Cecil and no doubt for others, broadsides were important political data points: not just or even mostly of fact, but of atmosphere, too. It is tempting to read a similar impulse into two other topical sequences bearing on the ‘Complexion of the times’ preserved in the Antiquaries’ collection, a pair of apparently almost complete satirical exchanges between Thomas Smyth and William Gray (1540) and Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Camell (c.1552). The Churchyard/​Camell sequence cannot be confidently placed together before the mid-​nineteenth-​century rebinding, and at least one item previously formed part of another collection.36 Nonetheless, the existence of a 1560 collected edition (The Contention betwyxte Churchyeard and Camell) strongly suggests that at least some contemporaries considered the controversy worth preserving as a unit, reflecting not just an imagined audience but probably also existing contemporary practice.

Collecting This is plausible because we know that the Smyth/​Gray sequence was in fact collected by a near-​contemporary, the notary Humfrey Dyson (1582–​1633). Dyson is hugely important to the early modern history of the book, both in the sense that his vast collections provide a significant volume of its materials—​for example, many Tudor proclamations and broadsides exist in large numbers because of Dyson—​and in the development of book collection as a contemporary practice.37 Alan Nelson’s research has revealed the extent and significance of Dyson’s collections: for example, sixty-​two of the 108 Antiquaries’ Elizabethan broadsides belonged to Dyson.38 Dyson also heralds a new era, in which collecting cheap print becomes an increasingly established and legible activity. It is possible to detect the outline features of later collections in what remains of Dyson’s now mostly dispersed collections, or as he called them, ‘memorable matters’. His interests were primarily in the ‘Complexion of the times’, whether already or soon-​ to-​be historical. His collection preserved in the earliest Antiquaries volume is mostly ballads and broadsides marking past events (An Aue Maria, in commendation of our

Beyond the Book    339 Most vertuous Queene, 1553); civic print (The prices of fares and passages to be paide unto watermen from London to Grauesende, c.1555), and printed images (Stonhing, 1575). Later volumes, covering 1602–​49, are even more Dyson-​heavy and suggest more-​or-​less contemporaneous acquisition of print charting significant events (An elegie vpon the most deplorable death of Prince Henry, 1629). Some of the older pieces have been annotated with explanatory dates (‘Ao I et I P & M’, i.e. the first regnal years of Philip and Mary I of England; ‘Anno 38: Eliza’, or the thirty-​eighth year of Elizabeth I’s reign), or with notes: a copy of the last words of Charles Stourton is glossed with the date and further details of his execution for murder in 1557.39 Dyson’s sense of the ‘memorable’ included not just major life events of the royal family, but also the trivia of everyday urban life, past and present: fares for water boatmen in 1555 (Lemon 49); an advert for a mathematics tutor and records of a partnership agreement in 1590 (Lemon 102); a blank alehouse licence from 1615 (Lemon 241). These disparate items function as a record of London through the traces of its commercial activity, as pursued and/​or documented through particular bibliographic forms. The historicity of form is key to Dyson’s project, reflected in his interest in the physical and visual appearance of the broadsides he collected, which are often workaday and not evidently conceived of by their makers as aesthetic objects. This is evidenced by Dyson’s distinctive habit of red-​ruling his broadsides, marking out titles, subtitles, manuscript additions, and the visual architecture of the page. Red-​ruling is a feature of manuscript and early incunabula, in which they provide guidelines, and reappears in some eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century books as a decorative feature evoking the earlier technique.40 As David McKitterick points out, while red-​ruling was an intermittent feature of sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century book culture, examples are almost exclusively found in Bibles and in liturgical printing.41 Dyson’s use of red-​ruling is highly idiosyncratic, transposing a decorative practice associated with the high-​status and the sacred to texts more often seen by contemporaries as printed effluvia (Fig. 18.2). It registers an aesthetic response, and seeks to promote visual appreciation, of the broadside’s material affect. Three features of Dyson’s broadsides would become characteristic of seventeenth-​ century ballad collections more generally: an organizing theme, oriented towards everyday life; a textual apparatus; and increasingly, an interest in visual presentation. While not all of these behaviours were individually new (topic-​themed assemblages, visual curiosity), they began to occur in combination, more regularly, and on a larger scale. These collections are also distinctive because, like Dyson’s later materials, they were mostly acquired in real time, and often directly and sometimes in bulk from printers. These transactions are sometimes recorded but also physically legible in the collected ballads, which are often folded differently and for display (once along a central fold) rather than for personal transportation (in squares or multiple horizontal folds), or not folded at all. Their acquisition by collectors represented not the accumulation of established treasures, but was itself the act that bestowed new value on these texts, moving them from the unstarry everyday world of disposable print into the rarified space of the collection—​and, often, the codex.

340   Harriet Phillips The majority of surviving seventeenth-​century ballads are factual and/​or topical, paralleling the importance of ‘news’ in early modern cheap print collections more generally. From the mid-​seventeenth century, news collection became established as a scholarly practice, strongly supported by the book trade.42 Major collections by Narcissus Luttrell (c.1660–​88), Elias Ashmole (mostly 1670s–​80s), Anthony Wood (1640s–​95), and John Egerton (mostly 1670s–​80s) are strongly focused on politics and current affairs. Collections like these played an important part in an emerging historical culture, in which early moderns increasingly sought to order, orient, and narrate events in chronological time.43 These ‘memorials’, as Francis Bacon put it, were ‘the first, or rough draughts of Historie’, and they were organized accordingly.44 Usually containing a mixture of formats (broadside/​pamphlet) and forms (prose/​ verse), the presentation of broadside collections is geared not towards material preservation but to ordering information and making it accessible. Collections deployed techniques of arranging and finding drawn from a growing scholarly toolkit of knowledge management, incorporating a range of techniques for disaggregating, assembling, recombining, identifying, and classifying printed material for an individual reader.45 They are typically ordered chronologically, in whole or in part (Wood, Ashmole, Luttrell), and sometimes also thematically (Bridgewater). The collector often supplied dates of publication, or the date bought (‘Bought at Oxon for a new Ballad 14 Feb 1688’), and sometimes the price paid (‘1d 30 March 1681’).46 Other annotations aim at bibliographic precision, whether contextual (‘This was soon after it came out fully answer’d’) or personal (‘The last of these I have already’).47 Collectors reliably tried to identify hidden identities, whether authorial or obscured for satirical reasons.48 Sometimes their commentary went further. Narcissus Luttrell perhaps unnecessarily glossed The true Presbyterian without disguise (1681, Bindley HEH 135780) as ‘Against them’, while Anthony Wood labelled The Pedigree of Popery (‘latter end of Nov.’ 1688, Wood 417(157) ) as ‘a silly thing’. Both he and John Egerton provided their collections with contents lists and, like other collectors, numbered items individually and bound them together. Where the original codex form survives (Wood, Ashmole), the broadsides have usually been folded and sewn together along the edge or fold. On opening the book, only the versos are visible, and they must be unfolded to be read and then refolded afterwards. They were content-​not object-​driven. In this respect, such collections differ from Samuel Pepys’s, which is defined by its material form on its title page: My Collection of Ballads Vol I. Begun by Mr Selden; Improv’d by th’ addition of many Pieces elder thereto in Time; and the whole continued to the year 1700. When the Form, till then peculiar thereto, vizt. of the Black Letter with Picturs, seems (for cheapness sake) wholly laid aside, for that of the White Letter without Pictures.

The collection is unusual in focusing on broadside ballads specifically, and within that mostly on secular fiction, which by the early decades of the seventeenth century had acquired the distinctive and standardized textual ‘Form’ described. Pepys’s

Beyond the Book    341 visual interests are reflected in both the construction and the presentation of the collection. The first volume, of mostly earlier ballads, includes five manuscript copies of early Tudor broadsides, transcribed with ‘Exactnes’ and attention to ‘the old English Letter’: in the words of the copyist, ‘I have spelt it and pointed it, just as it is printed’ (fo. 25). Throughout, the collection is organized to foreground optical display. The ballads, which are never annotated and usually pristine, are trimmed and halved from their landscape format to fit a portrait-​oriented sheet of backing paper, on which they are mounted facing out and then bound together. Pepys’s bibliographic ‘nerdery’ was enabled and perhaps partially driven by the bookseller John Bagford, who played a significant role in supplying Pepys with ballads as well as assembling collections for Robert Harley and for himself. Bagford did much to promote the notion of printed ephemera as collectible, a strategy designed to further his business and social capital.49 It also recalls Dyson’s rubrication of items in his collection, registering an attentiveness to the materiality as well as the historicity of the broadside as artefact. Like other contemporary collections, Pepys’s collection repackages the materials of everyday life as fit objects of scholarly scrutiny. Like them it deploys the tools of seventeenth-​century information culture on their findings, through binding, classification, numbering, contents lists, and other forms of scholarly apparatus. For Pepys, this apparatus works to establish the broadside ballad as a distinctive physical object with a ‘Form’ that could be identified, imitated, and historicized. The history represented by the Pepys and Bagford collections included not just the events of the past, as in other contemporary, content-​driven collections, but also its materials, physical processes, and (especially for Bagford) labour. This move was consequential, for both ‘history’ and ‘books’. Together with Humphrey Wanley, another Pepys collaborator, Bagford helped refound the Society of Antiquaries in 1718. For these antiquarians, the study of the past was about things as well as books, nor were the two easily separable. Bagford’s collections of ephemera were designed to support a history of printing as a technology, partly published as an ‘Historical Account . . . of Typography’ published in Philosophical Transactions in 1707. It was part of a wider contemporary interest in opening matter up for scrutiny, reflected in the personnel overlap between the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries (Martin Folkes, James West, John Pringle, Joseph Banks): as late as 1751, a merger was in contention.50 Pepys’s collection was used heavily by Thomas Percy in constructing the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the central text of the ‘Ballad Revival’ credited with engendering bookish concepts such as ‘canon’, ‘lyric’, ‘literature’, and ‘orality’,51 and by Francis Child in his Popular Ballads of England and Scotland (1882–​98), whose appointment to the first professorship of English (formerly Rhetoric) at Harvard was a defining moment of disciplinary identity. Recognizing the place of single-​sheet printing in the history of the book as a discipline points to the importance to the broadside’s history as an object. In transferring workaday ephemera from streets and kitchens to the dedicated space of the collection, men like Dyson, Wood, Pepys, and Bagford invested it with a value at once intellectual and material. At the same time, they made illegible the spaces, places, and relationships

342   Harriet Phillips through which the vast majority of broadsides moved; a zone of action and affect which constituted a substantial volume of human–​text interaction in early modern England. This revaluation was accompanied via the medium of the codex, together with the growing array of information-​finding tools that derived from it. This manoeuvre had lasting implications, both for what survived and for how we understand those survivals in the present. In weighting the archive towards the atypical and unread, it occluded more normative but less legible relationships. Considering broadsides through their properties as usable objects brings us closer to the way that they were conceived by their many handlers. It reintegrates early modern collectors into a deeper and broader history of broadside use, and situates their material practices within it. It helps us see beyond the book and out into the world, where most of early modern textual encounters took place, but also back into the book, as a place where meaning was and continues to be made.

Notes 1. See e.g. Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-​Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 106–​108; Claire Canavan, ‘Reading Materials: Textile Surfaces and Early Modern Books’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 8 (2017), www.nort​hern​rena​issa​nce.org/​read​ing-​materi​als-​text​ile-​surfa​ces-​and-​early-​ mod​ern-​books; Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Arts of Writing in Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001) 2. Peter Stallybrass, ‘ “Little Jobs”: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution’, in Sabrina Baron Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 315–​341; Andrew Pettegree, ‘Single Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print: Typology and Typography’, in Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets: Single Sheet Printing in the First Age of Print (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 3–​32, at 17–​22. 3. Pettegree, ‘Single Sheet Publishing’, 13–​15; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–​ 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11–​12. 4. Flavia Bruni, ‘Early Modern Broadsheets Between Archives and Libraries: A Possible Integration’, in Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets, 33–​56, at 46–​49. This situation for ballads is beginning to change, with excellent online collections at the English Broadside Ballad Archive (https://​ebba.engl​ish.ucsb.edu) and Broadside Ballads Online (http://​ .ball​ads.bodle​ian. ox.ac.uk). The British Library’s extensive holdings are now helpfully enumerated at www. bl.uk/​col​lect​ion-​gui​des/​ball​ads. 5. James Raven, ‘Selling Books Across Europe, c. 1450-​1800: An Overview’, Publishing History, 34 (1993), 5–​19, at 15. 6. Alexandra Hill, ‘The Lamentable Tale of Lost Ballads in England, 1557–​1640’, in Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets, 442–​458, at 448. 7. See e.g. An Answer to the Objections against covering the Dome of St Pauls with English Copper (1710), The case of the proprietors of the army and transport debentures (1711), and Observations on a paragraph deliver’d out by the traders in tobacco of Glasgow (1723), in Chetham Library H.P.355, H.P.359, H.P.372.

Beyond the Book    343 8. Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Legion of the Lost: Recovering the Lost Books of Early Modern Europe’, in Flavia Bruni and Andrew Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books: Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-​Industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1–​27. 9. Hyder E. Rollins, ‘The Black Letter Broadside Ballad’, PMLA 34 (1919), 258–​339, at 281; Carol R. Livingston, British Broadside Ballads of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1991), 38; Watt, Cheap Print, 42–​46; Hill, ‘Lamentable Tale’, 447. 10. Livingston, British Broadside Ballads, 818. 11. STC 6572.3, cf. https://​sta​tion​ersr​egis​ter.onl​ine/​entry/​SRO​371 Livingston, British Broadside Ballads, 252–​253; STC 17212, Douce fragm. d.8. 12. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London, 1595), F1r; Samuel Pepys, Diary, e.g. 2 January 1665, 15 May 1668. 13. Now she that I louyd trewly beryth a full fayre face hath chosen her (c.1525), STC 2070.3; [God hath given our kynge the victory] (c.1549), STC 6795, Bodleian Library, Don. d.80, discussed in Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 152; [whyppet you preestes and tourne you], STC 25351.5 and [O Lord thy word is our sure touch stone], STC 14554.5 both from the same binding, at Henry E. Huntington Library, 131401a and b. Two further broadside fragments owned by Francis Douce almost certainly originated in bindings: T. Thacame, [An exhortation to despise the gifts] whych we receaue by faylynge Fortune (1552?), STC 23925, Bodleian Douce fragm. d.12(9), and STC 1325 (1580?), Douce fragm. e.45. 14. STC 7508; cf. Carole R. Livingston, ‘The Provenance of Three Early Broadsides’, The Library, 6th ser., 2 (1980), 53–​60, at 59. 15. Pettegree, ‘Single Sheet Publishing’, 4–​5. 16. Stallybrass, ‘ “Little Jobs” , 315–​318. 17. STC 13075 (1509), and STC 13075.5 (1509); cf. epitaphs for Henry VIII (STC 13089), Edward VI (STC 5229), Mary I (STC 17559), Elizabeth I (STC 5256, 7589). 18. Scott Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 19. Nicholas Bourman, An Epytaphe upon the Death of the Right Reverend Father in God J. Juell (1571), STC 3414 and An Epytaphe upon the Death of the Right Worshipfull, Sir William Garrat Knight (1571), STC 3413; cf. An Epitaph upon the death of the right honorable Edward Earle of Darby (1572). 20. John Philip, An Epytaphe, or a lamentable Discourse: wherein is bewayled the death of the Right worshipfull Knight, Sir William Garrat (1571), STC 19869. 21. Cf. e.g. Abraham Fleming, An Epitaph, or funerall inscription, upon the godlie life and death of the Right worshipfull Maister William Lambe Esquire (1580), which is printed ‘by Henrie Denham, for Thomas Turner, and to be solde at his shop at Guild-​hall gate’; cf. An Epitaph . . . for the Lord Fraunics [sic] Russell (1585), ‘printed for Henrie Car, and are to be sould in Paules Church-​yard’. 22. Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life-​ Writing: Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 97–​114. 23. Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities, rev. ed. William Herbert, 3 vols. (London, 1785), i. 631. 24. STC 16620 and see Livingston, ‘Provenance’, 57–​59. 25. Pepys Ballads, i. 68–​69. Price’s epitaph does not come from the Tollemache collection but arrived in the Britwell ballads (HEH 18287) at some point between 1832 and 1872: see

344   Harriet Phillips Alphabetical list of black letter ballads and broadsides known as the Heber collection, in the possession of Christie S. Miller (London, 1872) 26. STC 7508 and STC 19969.2. 27. See e.g. STC 5208 (before 1609?), STC 5208.5 (1610), STC 5208.7 (1628); STC 5209 (1634); STC 5209.3 (1636); Wing P4138 (1641); Wing P4139 (1643); cf. A hymn to be sung at the anniversary-​meeting of the charity schools (1711) and A hymn to be sung by the charity children at St Bride’s Church (1712), H.P.111–​112. 28. A psalm of thanksgiving, to be sung by the children of Christs-​Hospital (1687), Wing P4144. 29. Pettegree, ‘Single Sheet Publishing’, 3. 30. Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, successive editions throughout 1665–​6: this copy is from June 1665 (British Library 82.l.8.(7) ). Two copies of an earlier 1637 edition survive with running totals updated in MS: see BL 1870.d.1.(13.) and Bodleian Wood 416(3). 31. Pettegree, ‘Single Sheet Printing’, 17–​22. 32. Edward Wilson-​Lee, ‘ “The Bull and the Moon”: Broadside Ballads and the Public Sphere at the Time of the Northern Rising’, Review of English Studies, 63 (2012), 225–​242; Tricia A. McElroy, ‘Imagining the “Scottis Natioun”: Populism and Propaganda in Scottish Satirical Broadsides’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 49 (2007), 319–​339, at 324–​325. 33. STC 22192 S.P. 52/​14 (613); STC 22196, S.P. 52/​13 (507); STC 22917, S.P. 52/​13 (520); STC 22206, S.P. 52/​17 (65); STC 22191, S.P. 52/​17 (202); STC 22189, S.P. 52/​13 (508); STC 22192a.3, S.P. 52/​17 (107); STC 22193, S.P. 52/​17 (108); STC 22187a.5, S.P. 52/​17 (140); STC 22195, S.P. 52/​ 17 (141); STC 22211, S.P. 52/​18 (59). 34. Franz Mauelshagen, Wunderkammer auf Papier: die ‘Wickiana’ zwischen Reformation und Volksglaube (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica, 2011); Tom Hamilton, ‘Recording the Wars of Religion: The “Drolleries of the League” from Ephemeral Print to Scrapbook History’, Past & Present, 230 (2016), 288–​310. 35. Table-​talk being the discourses of John Selden, Esq. (London, 1589), 31. 36. The Surreioindre unto Camells reioindre, currently Lemon 25 but ‘48’ in a previous numbering now partially cropped. 37. William A. Jackson, ‘Humphrey Dyson’s Library, or, Some Observations on the Survival of Books’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 43 (1949), 279–​287. 38. I am very grateful to Alan Nelson for sharing his expertise and research materials with me. Some of his work can be seen at http://​www.lea​dbet​ter.cc/​nel​son/​, and his forthcoming The Library of Humphrey Dyson (Oxford Bibliographical Society). 39. Lemon 39 (STC 13090.5), Lemon 94 (STC 9976.5), also dated are Lemon 17, 40, 41, 55; Lemon 41 (STC 23318.3). 40. Joseph Dane, Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 150; David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 182–​183. 41. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–​ 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37 42. Michael Mendle, ‘Preserving the Ephemeral: Reading, Collecting, and the Pamphlet Culture of Seventeenth-​century England’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 201–​216; Noah Millstone, ‘Designed for Collection: Early Modern News and the Production of History’, Media History, 23 (2017), 177–​198.

Beyond the Book    345 43. Millstone, ‘Designed for Collection’, 190–​191; Tim Somers, ‘The “Impartiality” of Narcissus Luttrell’s Reading Practices and Historical Writing, 1679-​1710’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019), 921–​941, at 922–​925. 44. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London, 1605), 2C2v. 45. See e.g. Ann Blair, Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); John Considine, ‘Cutting and Pasting Slips: Early Modern Compilation and Knowledge Management’, in Juliet Fleming, William Sherman, and Adam Smyth (eds.), The Renaissance Collage: Towards a New History of Reading, special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45 (2015), 487–​504; Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (ed.), Book Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 46. Bodleian Wood 417(178), Bindley HEH 135779; see also Wood E.25(10), (58), (60), (83), (109); Bindley HEH 135919, 135798. 47. Chetham Library, Halliwell-​Phillips Broadsides 503, cf. 507; Bridgewater, HEH 13328. 48. Bindley, HEH 135875; Bodleian Ashmole G.16(1); Wood 417(5); Halliwell-​Phillips 161, 173; Bridgewater, HEH 133335; Bindley, HEH 135833. 49. Tim Somers, ‘Tradesmen in Virtuoso Culture: “Honest” John Bagford and his Collecting Network, 1683–​1716’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81 (2018), 359–​386. 50. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812), ii. 271. 51. Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Select Bibliography Fleming, Juliet, Graffiti and the Arts of Writing in Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001). Livingston, Carol R., British Broadside Ballads of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1991). Loveman, Kate, Samuel Pepys and His Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Mendle, Michael, ‘Preserving the Ephemeral: Reading, Collecting, and the Pamphlet Culture of Seventeenth-​century England’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 201–​216. Pettegree, Andrew (ed.), Broadsheets: Single Sheet Printing in the First Age of Print (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Salzberg, Rosa, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2016). Somers, Tim, ‘Tradesmen in Virtuoso Culture: “Honest” John Bagford and his Collecting Network, 1683–​1716’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81 (2018), 359–​386. Stallybrass, Peter, ‘ “Little Jobs”: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution’, in Sabrina Baron Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture

346   Harriet Phillips Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 315–​341. Stewart, Susan, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

CHAPTER 19

Science and th e B o ok i n Early Modern E ng l a nd Adrian Johns

For anyone interested in the cultural history of the book in the early modern period, a consideration of the sciences is unusually rewarding. We find ourselves dealing with an array of practices that extended from the lowest ranks of society to the highest, that covered a vast range of experiences, and that were often of immediate and urgent practical consequence. If we take the term ‘sciences’ in its broad sense, to include medicine, natural history, natural magic, and the various practical enterprises from metallurgy to distillation that fell under the rubric of ‘mechanic arts’, then it is not an exaggeration to say that every single person in early modern London had to deal with the opportunities and risks that print presented in this sphere. Huge numbers of people bought and used almanacks, for example, and everyday life turned on their astrological recommendations. Countless Londoners imbibed medicines, the concoction of which was supposedly subject to printed recipes. And the trade of the nation depended on navigational tools and techniques debated in print. It would be hard to find a Londoner untouched by such matters. Moreover, at the same time these branches of knowledge were themselves in a state of extraordinary ferment. This was the period of disarray and transformation that in later centuries would become known as the ‘Scientific Revolution’.1 The state of natural knowledge at every level, from everyday medicine to mathematical astronomy, was in a profound and ineluctable state of flux. So Londoners were acutely conscious not only that any given printed claim was liable to be contested, but also that whole systems of thought—​Aristotelianism, for example, chemical medicine, or the many ‘new sciences’ of the age—​hung in the balance. And these struggles were being fought out not only in universities, but also in the streets, workshops, households, and (after 1652) coffee-​ houses of the city. One aspect of this was that readers and writers in this broad area seem to have attended to contingencies of print that in more stable circumstances are liable to be occluded. In a context of radical epistemic instability, readers of, say, a report about a monstrous birth or an account about a magical cure might think not only

348   Adrian Johns about the evidential logic of the presentation, but also about who had printed this piece, why, under what circumstances, and for what backers. And they might also wonder how other readers were putting it to use. To that extent, the problems of science and the problems of print fused into one another.2 But there is even more to it than that. To talk of ‘print’ is to risk hypostasizing something that not merely exhibited a great deal of variety in itself, but only existed at all by virtue of constant interactions across different communicative and preservative modes. Orality, script, and print all inflected each other, at all times, and none of them had an autonomous existence. Indeed, the scholarly identification of a discrete world of ‘the oral’ in the latter part of our period depended on uses of script and print, as Paula McDowell has shown. In an artisanal world, every element of ‘print’ down to individual pages and even characters emerged from talk, writing, and handiwork. And again this was unusually consequential in the sciences. Think, for example, of how difficult it was in an artisanal world—​how much close attention it required, sometimes for years at a time—​for a mathematician to see a table of logarithms printed accurately, or for an astronomer to produce a star catalogue. In such cases, every single character mattered—​ which is why, 150 years later, Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer with a printer to produce them. The skills required to issue even what we too readily think of as ‘raw data’ in print were not easily acquired. Face-​to-​face conversations, correspondence, semi-​public circulations of manuscripts, and published books all had to be managed simultaneously, with extraordinary care. And it is striking how often figures who ended up obscure or ostracized did so because of a failure to gain those skills, while those who started out obscure and gained renown did so by learning well. That could be said even of the greatest, like Isaac Newton. By the same token, we can think of the collective institutions of the new science that survived beyond the end of the century—​the Royal Society, the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the College of Physicians, and the coffee-​ houses where lecturing occurred—​as the locations where this combination of experimental, oral, script, and print practices came to be successfully managed.3 This discussion will therefore trace some of the ways in which early modern Londoners put print to use alongside orality and script in order to make, challenge, and exploit knowledge about the natural world. The case it makes is that in this period four pivotally important practices—​reading, authorship, experiment, and observation—​had to be retooled at once. To understand what happened in the Scientific Revolution—​and what happened in the world of the printed book, too—​we need to grapple with these changes in their simultaneity.

Magic, Medicine, and Mathematics The history of the scientific book in this period is not reducible to the story of a handful of particular titles—​those of Bacon, Harvey, Hooke, and Newton, say. Indeed, it is not reducible to books at all. As Andrew Pettegree has forcefully argued, the mainstay of print

Science and the Book    349 in this period was not the book, let alone such unique volumes as Newton’s Principia, but humbler, more ephemeral objects: pamphlets, bills, and charts, which hardly ever endured but pervaded the culture at the time.4 The complaints that a Jacobean privilege on all single-​sheet publications aroused reveal how much science, medicine, and technical crafts depended on this form of print: the patent included ‘Billes for teaching of Schollers’, ‘Bills concerning Physitians, Chyrurgions, or others’, ‘Billes of Sicknes’, unbound maps, all materials to do with patents, and all images not contained in books.5 And we should add to the list paper instruments—​volvelle devices, rules, compass roses, and the like. These were of far greater importance, ubiquity, and utility than has been appreciated.6 That said, the striking thing about natural knowledge in sixteenth-​century London was how plentiful, diverse, and variegated it was. Deborah Harkness’s The Jewel House has reconstructed in fine detail the ultra-​local settings in which Tudor and early Stuart Londoners, and a surprising array of transients too, worked to make and remake their understandings of alchemical, mechanical, and other phenomena.7 The book after which Harkness’s account is named may be taken as a representative object of this lively culture. Written by a horticulturalist and advocate of experimentation named Hugh Plat, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594) described itself as containing ‘divers rare and profitable Inventions, together with sundry new experimentes in the Art of Husbandry, Distillation, and Moulding’. These it declared to have been ‘Faithfully and familiarly set downe, according to the Authors owne experience’. In fact, the book ranged widely across the practical arts that a curious gentleman like Plat might encounter in Elizabethan London, from ways to preserve fruit to techniques for secret writing, with promises of more secrets to come. Not every technical or scientific art of the capital was represented—​there was nothing on navigation, or for that matter printing—​but many were.8 And it was not hard to find similarly cornucopian books throughout the period. The proximate template for them was Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magic (itself translated and published in London in 1658). As products of the London book trade, they exemplified both a vibrant investigative culture and a vision of the place of such a culture in the commonwealth. Books like these were artisanal creations. They were produced in relatively small quantities (with a few exceptions, almanacks being one) and they bore the marks of their makers. The number of printers in London was never particularly high—​a few dozen at most—​and the trade’s members knew each other well. Some were jacks of all trades, but others specialized in particular areas or genres. In such cases their names might well become popularly associated with their chosen foci, as was the case for William Cooper, known in the Restoration for works of ‘chymistry’, and Peter Cole, identified with vernacular medical works produced in the teeth of the College of Physicians’ opposition. Joseph Moxon, likewise, was well known for globes and instruments as well as for his printed works in the mathematical sciences (and, perhaps, for championing a revived Society of Astrologers in 1682). In fact, much of what we know about London printing houses in the period derives from Moxon’s curious mixture of talents. The account in his Mechanick Exercises, a partbook that exemplifies the experimentation

350   Adrian Johns with genres that printers and scientific leaders alike were pursuing, was the first to be published in English. The details of the printing house and bookshop that we owe to Moxon are beyond the scope of this chapter. But it should always be remembered that artisan-​produced books carried signs of which individuals and partnerships had made them, who had sold them, and where. Skilled readers could read those signs.9 There were at least three reasons why this mattered. One was that knowing the right printer or bookseller to approach for a technical subject like mathematics or pharmacy could be all-​important. The second was that these figures could be strong-​willed—​or so scholars liked to complain—​and getting one’s work into print in good order required tactful negotiation with them. And the third was that this kind of ‘person-​knowledge’ provided a way to police and suppress controversial, dangerous, or illicit works—​pirated almanacks, say (which imperilled the book trade itself), or books touting heterodox principles like materialism (which implied that the soul was not immortal). To indicate the scope and scale of these issues, it is helpful to survey three domains in which print was central to Londoners’ everyday lives: astrology, medicine, and the array of practical arts, from navigation to surveying, known as ‘the mathematicalls’. If measured in terms of their quantity and their economic impact, the most important printed books concerned with natural knowledge in early modern London were almanacks. These short works were produced in vast numbers every year—​hundreds of thousands per annum in the Restoration period, plus substantial but unknowable numbers of counterfeits and piracies. Their users treated them as everyday companions. The monopoly on their production was given to the Stationers’ Company, which parcelled out the work to poor printers across the capital in a bid to keep them employed and prevent idle hands from tempting the devil. Every year, a set of ‘blanks’—​standing forms—​were distributed to favoured printing houses, and these became the central elements in the coming year’s almanacks. This privilege lasted well into the eighteenth century. The economic stability of the entire London book trade therefore rested, to an extent, on astrology.10 We know that almanacks were produced in such large numbers because of accounts kept by the Stationers’ Company. Were it not for these accounts, however, we would be reduced to inferring their quantities indirectly, because their survival rates have been very low. As Pettegree has remarked, today’s libraries misrepresent the social reality of early modern print, because the books they preserve are largely those that were not read. Almanacks, on the other hand, were read to bits, and only a tiny proportion have survived into the present. The first reason for this is that they were genuinely useful. They contained not only prognostications of meteorological and astronomical phenomena, but also tables of tides, calendars of festivals, tables of weights and measures, and medical advice about when to bleed or purge a patient. The first notice of the Copernican theory arrived for English readers in an almanack, in the form of a notice in a 1557 edition by the mathematician John Dee. Authoritative mathematicians and astronomers like John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal (and no friend to astrology), provided numbers for almanacks, and they bought and used them in their own practice. The second reason almanacks have rarely survived is that they had a short shelf life. After a year their tables

Science and the Book    351 lost all utility. Yet one should also remember the unprinted portions of an almanack’s pages, because these served as spaces in which to write memoranda, notes, and the like. It was thanks to these spaces, too, that almanacks became essential vade-​mecums.11 A second domain in which print affected virtually all Londoners was that of medicine. In theory, the urban medical community was divided in a tripartite fashion between the College of Physicians (chartered in 1518), the barber-​surgeons, and the apothecaries. The Physicians were Latinate and learned, and traditionally pursued a Galenic practice, the barber-​surgeons handled manipulations of the body itself, such as bone-​setting and wound treatment—​much in demand in a world of religious warfare—​and the apothecaries compounded medicines to the physicians’ prescriptions. But in practice this neat hierarchy was subverted on an everyday basis. There were far too few physicians to meet the needs of a burgeoning city, and the vast majority of citizens (including elites) got their medical advice from a range of different practitioners, including a dizzying array of what Margaret Pelling calls ‘irregulars’, ranging from clerics to cunning men. Printed materials were weapons in the incessant struggles that took place within and between these groups. A perennial concern was therefore the maintenance of prerogatives.12 As early as 1566, a Salisbury physician warned that ‘if Englyshs bookes could make men cunnying physitions, then pouchemakers, threshers, ploughmen and coblers mought be physitions’.13 Each camp used print to uphold its distinction as best it could against all-​comers, giving the genre of printed medical books a pervasively polemical and alarmist quality. And Paracelsian medicine exacerbated these tensions. Paracelsians insisted that medical knowledge was something to be gathered empirically, by experience, rather than from books. It was local and artisanal as a matter of epistemology.14 For this movement, then, it was critical that medical claims be sourced from the populace as well as received by them, and that it should be circulated in the vernacular. Medical tracts therefore flew quick and fast, many of them devoted to annihilating each other’s claims. The result, paradoxical as it is to modern eyes, was that print generated uncertainty. A lay reader could be forgiven for doubting that anything a medical author said was firmly established. Uncertainty about the composition of drugs proliferated, for example, with physicians charging that apothecaries routinely adulterated their medicines. It was for this reason that the College of Physicians embarked on a project to use print to discipline practices and stabilize pharmaceuticals. After decades of internal wrangling, in 1618 it finally managed to produce its Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, properly licensed and privileged, and paired with a rigorous inspection regime under the college’s censors.15 What happened next, however, was a salutary lesson. Scarcely had the book appeared when an embarrassed college had to call it in, declaring that the printers had issued it without having the text approved. Furthermore, the Apothecaries, by now incorporated themselves, declared that they would not be restricted only to the substances in the book, adding that the Physicians themselves routinely used unlisted medicines. As time went on, the censors found that pharmacopoeia entries were subjected to readings by inexpert (or differently expert) readers, who produced unpredictable medicaments—​some of which they declared to be positively lethal. And finally, in the heady days of the Interregnum a Leveller-​leaning Paracelsian apothecary,

352   Adrian Johns Nicholas Culpeper, teamed up with notorious Stationer Peter Cole to translate the book into English and publish it, adding for good measure a preface attacking the college’s monopolist tendencies. A book decades in the making, intended to reduce the chaos of medicaments to order, had ended up achieving almost the opposite. The point was that print was an early modern craft, as much as drug-​making was. Using the one to discipline the other depended on acknowledging this and embracing its implications. The fate of the effort may be taken as emblematic of the difficulties that print in practice posed for natural knowledge.16 The third widely influential domain of popular printed science was the cluster of practical and instrumental techniques known at the time as ‘the mathematicalls’. These were skilled practices that involved the use of numbers to understand and master natural powers. They ranged from navigational techniques—​much-​needed by the navy and the growing merchant fleet—​to surveying, accounting, drainage, and architecture. In conventional Aristotelian terms, these ‘mixed sciences’ were chimeras, because they used mathematics to tackle phenomena that were natural rather than inherently mathematical. Apart from a few technical areas like planetary astronomy, they were not conventionally academic enterprises. Yet they promised real, practical results, and in the entrepôt of London they were much in demand.17 Nautical writers like Robert Recorde (whose Ground of Artes, 1543, is accounted the first English-​language work on algebra) and Robert Norman (who announced the discovery of the dip of the magnetic needle) competed to offer secrets of oceanic navigation. The dominant ‘new science’ of the early seventeenth century—​the ‘magnetic philosophy’ associated with physician William Gilbert—​was substantially a product of this community. The technical sections of Gilbert’s De Magnete were in fact partly by Edward Wright, a surveyor, cartographer, navigator, and general expert in the mathematicalls. For such practitioners, moreover, a book was often not a stand-​alone object. It might be an adjunct to a device, such as a quadrant or a calculating tool—​as was the case for Wright. Or it might be meant to attract potential clients for a tutor.18 Tudor statesmen sought to bolster the commonwealth by encouraging all these kinds of arts and sciences, and more. They did so principally by means of patronage and patents (‘privileges’). Privileges could be obtained for books as well as devices. The almanack monopoly of the Stationers’ Company derived from one, and the foremost work of English Protestantism before the King James Bible, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, was published thanks to a patent that the printer John Day enjoyed on William Cunningham’s Cosmographicall Glasse, an early work of the mathematicalls (thanks to loose wording, it extended monopoly protection to any new work printed at Day’s expense). That kind of thing made them intensely controversial, however. In the end, Parliament tried to put a stop to them with its ‘Monopolies Act’ of 1624. But the Act permitted them to continue if applied to new inventions—​which is why it is conventionally regarded as the origin of all intellectual-​property legislation in Anglo-​America—​ and in practice privileges underwent a resurgence under Charles I.19 Printed science was thus an extraordinarily diverse and fragmented thing in Tudor and Stuart London. Trying to keep tabs on it all was a regulatory regime shared

Science and the Book    353 between the Stationers’ Company and a variety of licensers (including, later in the period, licensers in the College of Physicians and the Royal Society). The regime was riddled with holes, and in any case was lax compared to those in Catholic countries. London never saw anything like an ‘index’ of prohibited books, nor any attempt to license readers, as happened in Italy. For most scientific authors the risk of a clash with the authorities was small: they were much too busy worrying about sedition and blasphemy. And yet, small is not the same as non-​existent. Scientific works did remain subject to the system, and they were legally required to carry imprimaturs. Licensers could decline to issue these—​or, almost as bad, they could delay making a decision at all—​and authors and Stationers learned to negotiate personally with them. And works in certain scientific and medical fields could indeed be risky, because they might make dangerous prognostications or incorporate heterodox doctrines like materialism, which implied denying the soul’s immortality. Moreover, scientific books were also subsumed in the book trade’s registration and privilege systems, which in practice always interlaced with systems of policing. When the Privy Council pursued imports of Mercator’s Atlas in the 1630s, for example, it was concerned both about scandalous passages and about press-​piracy. There were certainly examples, then, of works in natural philosophy falling afoul of the licensing/​registration system considered as a conjoint regime, as Sir Kenelm Digby’s Two Treatises did in 1644–​5. But these were exceptions, and the most famous evocation of a clash between science and censorship did not concern an English example at all. This was John Milton’s portrayal of Galileo, ‘grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought’. No English mathematician suffered the fate of Galileo, but the story nonetheless had enough purchase to create a myth of science suppressed by religion that would echo for centuries.20

The Invention of Baconianism Francis Bacon was the greatest of the commonwealth statesmen, as well as the most profound and influential author of the age on matters of experiment and the renewal of natural knowledge. He made a point of recommending the ateliers of London’s artisans as sources for new insights into nature and its processes. In light of the contemporary culture of print, however, there is something very odd about Bacon’s project: its lack of any strategy to engage with print. For a highly experienced author, lawyer, and philosopher—​ one whose ambitions to reshape natural philosophy extended from the methodical logic of the Novum Organum to the amassed particulars of the Sylva Sylvarum and the social imagination of the New Atlantis—​not to address the management of the press was a remarkable omission. But this was no mere oversight. Solomon’s House, the scientific institution at the heart of New Atlantis, possesses a number of offices devoted to textual management within the institution, but an utter lack of them devoted to the management of printing and publishing. Bacon’s model for communication in Bensalem looks

354   Adrian Johns entirely idiosyncratic, then. It was based not on the book trade at all, but on English judges’ practice of riding around the country on circuits. Moreover, convinced as he was of the need to circulate applications as broadly as possible, Bacon remained devoted to the principle that science—​the philosophical knowledge of causes—​was a royal property and should be kept secret. In Solomon’s House, only a handful of elite royal officials hold such knowledge, and they do not publish it. The transformation of Bacon’s isolated writings—​many unpublished in his lifetime, and most unfinished—​into a collective enterprise, Baconianism, consequently took place a generation later and under a very different kind of management. For some two decades, Samuel Hartlib, a Polish émigré resident in London in the Civil War, acted as ‘intelligencer’ for an emergent community dedicated to all kinds of scientific and practical projects. Hartlib cajoled his correspondents into writing texts that he could help navigate through the printing houses of London and into the Republic of Letters. Their projects extended from state alchemical laboratories to trade policies, and from theories of aerial nitre to plans for the national cultivation of cider apples. Although many failed, some did succeed, most notably Benjamin Worsley’s trade policy, which arguably laid the foundations for the eighteenth-​century empire. In all cases, Hartlib and his correspondents were convinced that their ventures represented the spirit of Bacon’s philosophy. In fact they tapped into the same urban ferment that he had sought to exploit, but with a new recognition of the need for active engagement with the crafts of print.21 Bacon had laid down general principles for the new science, William Petty remarked, so what remained was to tackle ‘where our owne shoe pincheth us’. Where it pinched tightest was in matters of printing and the book.22 The Hartlib circle therefore devoted major time and resources to handling not only the production of books, but their reading too. Hence Hartlib’s careful cultivation of printers and booksellers, but also his repeated calls for the establishment of a general informational clearing-​house for the city. This ‘Office of Address’ would be staffed with knowledgeable officers and contain catalogues of published books, as well as constantly updated sets of ‘registers’ in which matters of different subjects—​the locations of libraries and bookshops, for example—​ would be recorded. (Interestingly, the most detailed of these registers were to be kept secret.)23 The principal initial task was to examine the books that had already been published, so as to select what was truly known and obviate repetitious labour. Gabriel Plattes, for example, in his Caveat for Alchymists, highlighted a scheme ‘to shew which are false books, and which are true ones’, and urged that anyone wishing to master the alchemical art must begin by composing a ‘Concordance’ from the latter. Otherwise it would be all too easy to fall victim to works like one that defended a deceptively plausible claim ‘by 32 Arguments, and many experiments, which are all false’.24 Going further, Petty envisaged a systematic, collective effort centering on the appointment of ‘able Readers’ to peruse ‘al Books’ for inventions and experiments. Each book must be read by two such readers, Petty cautioned, and the results compiled into ‘one Booke . . . though consisting of many Volumes’, with ‘the most Artificiall Indices Tables or other Helps for the ready finding, remembring, and well understanding all things contained’. This effort

Science and the Book    355 would be a necessary part of the project for a ‘college’ devoted to furthering Baconian reforms of knowledge. Petty even recommended the establishment of ‘Literary work-​ houses’ for poor children, from which would emerge a class of workers equipped to do this kind of sieving.25 Baconianism as it emerged in this period was a creature as much of this Hartlibian ‘intelligencing’ effort—​and after that of the efforts of the Royal Society—​as it was of Bacon himself. Indeed, as in the case of the Pharmacopoeia, his own writings illustrated what was liable to happen to a grand scientific project that did not take account of the need to manage textual preservation and transmission.26 After Bacon’s death, most of them passed to his chaplain William Rawley, who guarded them and saw many through the press. Even so, his works became a salutary example of the dangers of print. ‘Surreptitious Copies’ were made, Rawley reported, which gave rise to ‘Corrupt, and Mangled, Editions’. Nobody knew who was responsible for this ‘Spurious, and Adulterine Brood’. Rawley raged that ‘the Publishers, and Printers, of them, deserve to have an Action, of Defamation, brought against them, by the State of Learning, for Disgracing, and Personating, his Lordships Works’. The future Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Tenison likewise recited a long and detailed tale lasting some four decades, during which Bacon’s legacy was consumed by a welter of poor translations, ransacked juvenilia, weirdly retitled editions, and outright impostors. One Frankfurt version, for example, was ‘most falsly Printed’, to the extent that the only way to obliterate its mistakes would be to make an inkblot of the whole thing. This was likely to befall any author of reputation, with Sir Thomas Browne being a case in point. In Browne’s case a ‘dull and worthless Book stollen, for the most part, out of the Physic’s of Magirus, by a very ignorant Person’ had been attributed to him. On Bacon and Browne alike had been ‘fathered, sometimes Spurious Treatises; sometimes most Corrupt Copies of good Originals’. Thanks to the realities of the book trade, Rawley warned, ‘Nothing hath been more difficult, than to find the Lord Saint Alban, in the Lord Saint Alban.’27 This epistemic humiliation explained why Rawley felt himself honour-​bound to issue true texts, ‘to prevent the like Invasions, for the time to come’. He grudgingly conceded the ironic point that but for ‘Surreptitious Copies’ he would not have been prodded into printing accurate versions, and ‘we had wanted divers Papers which the World now enjoys’. His dedication to the task consumed his later years, and after his death the loyal Stationer William Lee continued the work. The very existence of an accurate Bacon oeuvre, Tenison concluded, was due to Lee’s ‘great diligence and industry’. But there was another, even more ironic problem: in a context of such notorious unreliability, readers would surely ‘suspect the faithfulness’ of the true edition, assuming it to be ‘adulterate Ware’. All that an editor could do was urge readers to do what patients did with a suspicious drug: ‘first make trial, and then pass Sentence’. If readers suspected that his own edition was spurious, Rawley said, the text could ‘verifie it self ’. Only the genuine article would convey the ‘Spirit, of Perspicuity, and Aptnesse, and Concisenesse, which . . . is ever an Annex, of his Lordships Penne’.28 A striking example of how Bacon’s reputation could be remade in this context is furnished by the story of one of his own erstwhile servants: a hermit, engineer, and

356   Adrian Johns projector of mining ventures named Thomas Bushell. Bushell published his own version of Bacon’s ‘Mineral Conceptions’, as he called them, in the 1650s, along with a reprint of the New Atlantis. He did so as part of a bid for a privilege on flooded and abandoned mines, proposing ‘to try, if that Lord’s Philosophical Theory can give life to their dead condition’.29 For twenty years he produced a long series of tracts on this theme, making his case by returning to the question of why Bacon himself had done so little to put his grand plans into effect. Bushell’s answer to that question was that Bacon had meant to do more, and had intended to fund his new science by the revenue from mines. James I had promised him a privilege, he claimed, and although his old master had died before he could capitalize on the pledge, he had vouchsafed to his servant his secret knowledge of subterranean metals. On the strength of this story Bushell acquired an impressive list of supporters, and in fact he could point to real practical successes; but he also spent time in debtors’ prison, and it was from there that he issued his longest manifesto, entitled Mr Bushell’s Abridgment of the Lord Chancellor Bacon’s Philosophical Theory in Mineral Prosecutions. He here proposed nothing less than the long-​delayed erection of ‘SOLOMONS House in all its dimensions’. Bushell undertook that in the cathedral town of Wells he would furnish ‘a certain convenient Place, and skilfull Artists’ who would be dedicated to ‘the tryal and perfecting of all such Natural Experiments, as have been imparted to him by his said honoured Lord and Master’. And then everyone would be invited to bring new discoveries there, to be ‘assayed and tried’ at his own expense. In short, he proposed to create a ‘select Society’ of natural philosophers who would dedicate themselves to the pursuits of a virtuoso. As historians like Steven Shapin have pointed out, experimental science is in general attended by a problem of testimony akin to that of early modern print: whom should one believe, and why? In this period the gentleman was conventionally reckoned to be the most trustworthy interlocutor, because he was not subject to the will of others. But in proposing to build Solomon’s House for real, Bushell advanced a different, ingeniously devious answer to the question. He suggested recruiting his scientific team from the ranks of convicts who had been sentenced to death. These men faced either the gallows or transportation: legally dead, they must surely be disinterested. ‘The dead in Law’, as he recalled Bacon saying, were ‘fittest to recover the dead in Opinion’. When they flourished, as they surely would, these dead men walking would be transfigured into model ‘experimenting Philosophers’.30

Experimenting, Reading, and Printing Bushell’s vision for Solomon’s House never came to fruition, of course. But about a year later a much more successful project did get under way. In any account of the history of science in seventeenth-​century London, the Royal Society will always loom large. The society was founded in 1660 and chartered in 1662, and it is remembered today as the oldest continuously existing scientific institution. Its meeting room in Gresham College

Science and the Book    357 became the home of ‘experimental philosophy’—​a practice, controversial at the time, to subject nature to routine, regular, practical interrogation, using instruments and before respectable witnesses, with the experiences being recorded and circulated by correspondence and print. Understandably, it saw itself as the realization of Bacon’s ideal. The society is important for this chapter not only because of that, but also because it intervened successfully in a culture of print that was both promising and risky. This certainly involved managing publication, but it also meant establishing conventions for editing, circulation, and reading. Success came from working simultaneously at all those levels at once. In the first place, the society acquired the right to license its own books. It is not entirely clear why the fellows wanted this power, because contemporary testimony about it is scarce to non-​existent. But it seems likely that leading figures preferred not to have to negotiate the intricacies of a system that could be time-​consuming and capricious. Moreover, the ability to issue imprimaturs imparted a public veneer of authority. And it seems to have reassured some contributors worried about the social implications of authorship, because it helped deflect any insinuation that they were being presumptuous. Such anxieties were real, even though they can seem to us formulaic. Newton himself decided against publishing an introduction to algebra because ‘I might thereby gain that esteeme of one ambitious among the croud to have my scribbles printed’.31 If a piece were licensed for publication by the society, then a writer could point to that fact as a mandate. Works including Newton’s own Principia thus appeared over the affirmation. Licensing aside, the society’s principal interventions concerned reading and editing.32 These activities were central to its everyday life. Experimental philosophy was a ‘busines’, as Robert Hooke said, in which the reading of books, papers, and letters occurred alongside the performance of experiments, and each activity informed the other. A critically important aspect, for example, was the ability of the society to circulate printed and written reports of its and its correspondents’ deeds, and to receive more such reports in return. The defining element of experimental philosophy was not the doing of experiments per se, but the creation of this predictable, regular circulation of reports about them. When the circulation dried up, as it sometimes did, the society itself teetered on the verge of collapse. The society developed a set of conventions for handling these texts. It involved four stages. A work would first be presented at one of its regular weekly meetings, which often led to the initiating of a correspondence, or the offer of a fellowship. It would then be perused by one or two fellows (Hooke was often one), who took it away for a week or two and created a report. (This means that when virtuosi spoke of a work being ‘read’ by the society, that reading was generally a delegated one.) Experiments within the society itself might well be inspired by these reports. Many texts were then also registered, being transcribed into a book kept by the secretary, both to secure priority for authors and to create a growing catalogue of accomplishments to satisfy critics. And, finally, some works were recommended to the society’s printer for publication. The society did appoint its own printers (John Martyn and James Allestry were the first), but that did not mean that they were mere lackeys. It could not compel its printers

358   Adrian Johns to take on a work, nor, for that matter, forbid them from handling books of which it disapproved. Moreover, the society itself was sometimes riven, and its printer could align himself with one or other faction. The most notorious instance occurred when Martyn took Hooke’s side in a bitter feud with Oldenburg, appending a scandalous attack on the secretary to a tract after the society had licensed it. The move replicated a technique used by radical political printers, and it led to a crisis in the printer’s position itself.33 Not everything that the society published was published as a book, however. This was thanks to Oldenburg, who cannily saw an opportunity to co-​opt for science the most characteristic new genre of the age: the newsbook.34 He projected something like a newsbook for Baconianism, with a longer periodicity (a month instead of a week) and two versions, one in English and the other in Latin. The first issue of the Philosophical Transactions appeared in January 1665, with Oldenburg hopeful that it would supply a livelihood for him. The Transactions is generally hailed as the first and longest-​lived scientific journal of all, and its advent is regarded as a key moment in the rise of modern science. The real story is a little more complex, of course. Today’s journals derive more directly from a clutch of commercial periodicals launched in around 1800 that permitted researchers to publish more quickly than they could in the prestigious but slow quartos of learned societies.35 But Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions was nevertheless a real departure. Although its periodicity was often aspirational rather than achieved, and the Latin version never appeared at all, it created a sense of the experimental philosophy as a continuing, collaborative, and competitive enterprise, which accumulated results. Fellows described it as the public counterpart of the society’s register—​something with no counterpart in Bacon’s Solomon’s House.36 It then changed in the mid-​eighteenth century, when it was taken under direct society control for the first time, grew in size, and took on a more monumental quality. The Transactions of around 1790 was consequently a different thing from that of 1690, and it was this that gave the commercial publishers their opportunity. The line of descent from 1665 to the modern scientific journal is not as easily drawn as we used to think, then, but it remains the case that the Transactions was a historic innovation, of huge significance then and since.

Conclusions The story of science and the book in this period was one of both failures and successes, where the failures were never total and the successes never absolute. Under this rubric we can chart a series of initiatives at various scales, from Sir Francis Bacon’s odd failure to promote a print programme of any kind, through the ventures of Samuel Hartlib and his group, to the more lasting initiatives of Henry Oldenburg and the Royal Society. All of these took place in a London that was fizzing with experiments and awash in print about natural powers of all kinds. In that environment, efforts to shape the practice of reading were as important as those to manage printing itself. Here the trajectory runs from relatively

Science and the Book    359 disparate (but not necessarily anarchic) practices, often associated with genteel, scholarly, or craft identities, to the emergence of disciplined, collective intellectual reading practices at sites like the Royal Society toward the end of the period. The coordination of reading practices did not eliminate disagreements, of course—​it was never intended to—​but it did help render those disagreements productive. Above all, it channelled divergent readings into the creation of more texts. The innovation that was the Philosophical Transactions was largely responsible for that, if not in itself then by virtue of the many journals that arose in emulation of it. In the early eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution would be fuelled by commercial lecturers who capitalized on such ventures to sell science in the intellectual marketplace of England’s capital city and beyond.

Notes 1. The literature on this subject is large and disputatious; a recent, authoritative account broadly in tune with the views presented here is David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2015); see esp. 301–​309 for remarks on the role of printing. 2. For a fuller argument along these lines, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 3. Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 27–​60. An example of a logarithmic work requiring this kind of attention is Nathaniel Roe and Edmund Wingate, Tabulae Logarithmicae (London: by M. Flesher for P. Stephens and C. Meredith, 1633). For Newton, see Rob Iliffe, ‘Butter for Parsnips: Authorship, Audience, and the Incomprehensibility of the Principia’, in Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (eds.), Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science (New York: Routledge, 2003), 33–​65. The saga of the production of John Flamsteed’s star catalogue is recounted in Johns, Nature of the Book, ch. 8. 4. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 14–​17. Pettegree’s The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)is by far the best single-​volume account of the printing revolution. 5. Walter W. Greg, A Companion to Arber (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 164–​75, esp. 170–​ 171, 173. 6. For these devices in general, see Suzanne K. Schmidt, ‘Georg Hartmann and the Development of Printed Instruments in Nuremberg’, in Susan Dackerman (ed.), Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2011), 268–​315. 7. Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–​14. 8. Hugh Plat, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London: printed by P. Short, sold by W. Ponsonby, 1594), 1, 13; Harkness, Jewel House, 216–​241. 9. Johns, Nature of the Book, 145, 153, 218, 228. 10. Cyprian Blagden, ‘The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Studies in Bibliography, 2 (1958), 107–​116.

360   Adrian Johns 11. Bernard S. Capp, English Almanacs 1500–​1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 205. 12. Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–​1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 83–​108. 13. Quoted in Elizabeth L. Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 37. 14. Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 15. Greg, Companion to Arber, 162–​163. 16. Bernard Wolley, Heal Thyself: Nicholas Culpeper and the Seventeenth-​Century Struggle to Bring Medicine to the People (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Mary R. McCarl, ‘Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper, Astrological Herbalist and Translator of Latin Medical Works in Seventeenth-​Century London’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 13 (1996), 225–​276. For pharmacopoeias in general, see Matthew J. Crawford and Joseph M. Gabriel (eds.), Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). 17. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32–​62; Stephen Johnston, ‘Mathematical Practitioners and Instruments in Elizabethan England’, Annals of Science, 48 (1991), 319–​344. 18. Stephen Pumfrey, Latitude and the Magnetic Earth: The True Story of Queen Elizabeth’s Most Distinguished Man of Science (London: Icon, 2003), ch. 5. Compare the correspondence over Richard Delamaine’s ‘mathematical ring’ in 1629–​33: Greg, Companion to Arber, 250–​253. 19. Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 59–​61, 179. 20. Greg, Companion to Arber, 314–​318; Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Johns, Nature of the Book, 236–​239; John Milton, Areopagitica (London: n.pub., 1644), 24. 21. Rob Iliffe, ‘Hartlib’s World’, in Matthew Davies and James A. Galloway (eds.), London and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Derek Keene (London: University of London Press, 2012), 103–​122; Vera Keller, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–​1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 167–​ 198; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–​1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975); Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 98–​116. For a written agreement of 1638 between Hartlib and a London Stationer for a multi-​year sequence of projects, see Hartlib Papers, Sheffield University, 7/​13/​1A-​4B. 22. William P[etty], The Advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib (London: n.pub., 1647), 1. 23. [Samuel Hartlib], A further Discoverie of The Office of Publick Addresse for Accommodations (London: n.pub., 1648), 16, 28. 24. Gabriel Plattes, ‘A Caveat for Alchymists’, in Samuel Hartlib (ed.), Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses (London: by G. Dawson for G. Calvert, 1655), 49–​88, esp. 60.

Science and the Book    361 25. P[etty], Advice, 2–​4. 26. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London: printed by J.H. for W. Lee, 1628), sig. A2r. 27. Baconiana Politico-​Moralia: Remains of the Lord Bacon, Civil and Moral (London: printed for Richard Chiswel, 1679), 74–​77; ‘Thomas Browne’, Nature’s Cabinet Unlock’d (London: for E. Farnham, 1657 [dated by Thomason to January 1658]). Interestingly, Farnham inserted a note at the end of this book recommending a new edition of Della Porta’s Natural Magic, ‘Enlarged by the Author himself, and cleared from divers errors, wherewith the former Editions were tainted’ (p. 332); Della Porta had by this point been dead for forty years. There was indeed an edition in 1658. 28. William Rawley, Resuscitatio, Or, Bringing into Publick Light Severall Pieces, of the Works . . . of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon (London: printed by S. Griffin, for W. Lee, 1657), ‘To the Reader’; Baconiana, 22, 77–​79, 81–​82. 29. Thomas Bushell, Mr Bushell’s Abridgment of the Lord Chancellor Bacon’s Philosophical Theory in Mineral Prosecutions (London: n.pub., n.d. [1659]). For the role of print in creating and destroying the credit of projects, see David Alff, The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660–​ 1730 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 59–​89. 30. Bushell, Mr Bushell’s Abridgment, sig. A4r–​v, 8–​9, 11; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Science and Civility in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 64–​125. For Bushell’s life, see John W. Gough, The Superlative Prodigall: A Life of Thomas Bushell (Bristol: University of Bristol, 1932). 31. Quoted in Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 124. For general comments, see Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: NYRB, 2001), 294 (pt 1, sect. 2, memb. 3, subsect. 14). 32. Adrian Johns, ‘Reading and Experiment in the Early Royal Society’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 244–​271. 33. Johns, Nature of the Book, 530–​531. 34. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–​ 1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), ch. 4; Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), e.g. 36–​38, 114–​122; Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 251–​268. 35. Alex Csiszar, The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 25–​66. 36. Adrian Johns, ‘Miscellaneous Methods: Authors, Societies and Journals in Early Modern England’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), 159–​186.

Select Bibliography Blair, A., Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Csiszar, A., The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Eisenstein, E. L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-​Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

362   Adrian Johns Furdell, E. L. Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002). Greengrass, M., Leslie, M., and Raylor, T. (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Harkness, D., The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Iliffe, R., ‘Hartlib’s World’, in M. Davies and J. A. Galloway (eds.), London and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Derek Keene (London: University of London Press, 2012), 103–​122. Johns, A., The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Johns, A., Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Keller, V., Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–​1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Kusukawa, S., Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text and Argument in Sixteenth-​Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Marcus, H., Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) Ogilvie, B. W., The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Wootton, D., The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2015).

CHAPTER 20

Waste, Offcu ts , Re ma i ns , Reu se Or, What is the History of Books in Pieces? Anna Reynolds

In his influential 1982 essay, Robert Darnton asks, ‘What is the History of Books?’1 Absent from his answer is any mention of waste, offcuts, remains, and reuse. This is not surprising. His essay is at once broad—​bringing together ‘disparate segments [ . . . ] within a single conceptual scheme’,2 and narrow, focusing on a single Montpellier bookseller. Waste remains at the peripheries of all but specialist bibliographical studies: until recently, repurposed texts were only of interest to those studying the intricacies of the earliest print shops, the reuse of medieval manuscripts, and the make-​up of more modest bookbindings.3 With the flourishing of interest in material culture and the everyday, literary scholars have begun to attend to extant waste and its presence in early modern literature.4 What is still absent, though, is an appreciation of the extent to which waste pervaded the sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century environment, as well as the way in which it emerged at every stage in the life cycle of a text. Existing terminology relating to waste is unsatisfactory, focusing too narrowly on printed books and grounded in an oversimplified understanding of how texts travelled from the print shop to the reader’s hands.5 Using Darnton’s influential communications circuit as its framework, this chapter tells the history of the early modern book in pieces: it outlines how waste was produced and used in the print shop, bookshop, and bindery, as well as more generally in the urban and domestic environment. It uses one specific early modern text as its case study—​ Thomas Urquhart’s Ekskybalauron (1652), a peculiar work composed when Urquhart, a Scottish Royalist, was imprisoned in London after the Civil War.6 Written partly as a bid for the return of its author’s liberty and lands, Ekskybalauron also narrates its own material history. By attending to Urquhart’s textual genealogy and the waste that we encounter, if we look for it, in Darnton’s circuit, we uncover additional dimensions in the history of the book. Building on recent scholarship on the mutability of early modern

364   Anna Reynolds texts, we find a messy, multi-​temporal, and non-​linear history of loose sheets, bound books, and fragments.7 These books, book parts, and offshoots of books, it will become apparent, are central to both the material and imaginative lives of texts, and so shaped the literary culture of the period.

The Author We begin our story in the city of Worcester on 3 September 1651. Urquhart claims, in the opening pages of Ekskybalauron, to have had in his possession at this time a tremendous mass of ‘Manuscripts in folio’, ‘to the quantity of sixscore & eight quires and a half, divided into Six hundred fourty and two Quinternions and upwards’ (2)—​a total of more than 3,210 folio pages. In addition to matters ‘Metaphysical, Mathematical, Moral, Mythological, Epigrammatical, Dialectical, and Chronological’, these included ‘the Grammar and Lexicon of an Universal Language’ (5). Urquhart carried these papers as he moved with the Royalist army, intending to keep them safe and to have ‘them printed at London’. He claims to have already ‘put’ the manuscripts ‘into a garb befitting either the Stationer or Printer’s acceptance’, with ‘periodical couching of the discourse, marginal figures, and breaks here and there, according to the variety of the Subject’ (4). Urquhart does not describe any of these works as books, at this stage. Instead, they are ‘Manuscripts’ and ‘Papers’, categorized and divided according to their material format (by quire or quinternion) rather than their textual content (their ‘matter’). Urquhart does not provide any information as to how these manuscripts were stored: he describes them as ‘bundles’, and it isn’t clear if they were stitched, pinned, slipped into wrappers, or simply folded into their carefully counted units. It is the looseness of these manuscripts that proves their undoing. The city of Worcester on 3 September 1651 was not a safe location for a Royalist and his belongings: it was the final battle of the Civil War, and Urquhart was on the losing side. The opening pages of Ekskybalauron make no mention of Urquhart’s own fate at this battle, though we can assume that this was when he was taken prisoner. He dedicates several pages, though, to the fate of his ‘above three thousand sheets of . . . Paper’ (4). The victorious Parliamentarian soldiers set to looting and initially passed over the papers, ‘which they then threw down on the floor, as unfit for their use’ (2). He goes on to claim that the looters had a sudden change of heart, ‘assaulted’ by their apprehension of ‘how useful the paper might be unto them’ (3). Turning back, they gathered up the sheets they had cast down, in order to distribute them amongst their comrades. They do so for ‘packeting up of Raisins, Figs, Dates, Almonds, Caraway, and other such-​like dry Confections and other ware’, to ‘kindle pipes of Tobacco’, and for ‘inferiour employments, and posteriour uses’, or for use as toilet paper (3). The remainder are thrown into the streets, ‘dispersedly-​rejected’, to be ‘gathered up’ a second time. Now, ‘Grocers, Druggists, Chandlers, Pie-​makers, or such as stood in need of any cartapaciatory utensil [or scrap paper]’ (3) pick up the scraps, like carrion on the battlefield. Urquhart’s account largely

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    365 bypasses the violence, gore, and human cost of the battle. The only loss the reader is privy to is intellectual, and the only violence described is the ripping, burning, and casting-​ down of sheets of paper. A solitary surviving quinternion, we are told, stuck ‘fast to the ground’ in the gutter, lying alongside the corpses of ‘seven and twenty dead men’ that remain otherwise peripheral to Urquhart’s narrative. The textual remnants can, unlike these ‘dead men’, be restored to life: the survivors rescued from the gutter are the preface of Urquhart’s ‘Universal Language’, ‘taken up’ by the servant of ‘one Master Braughton’, a hero otherwise unmentioned in the text, and ‘cleansed . . . from the mire and mud of the kennel’ (4). Braughton, Urquhart claims, recognized the pages as printer’s copy, preserved them, and somehow, rather miraculously, returned them to their author. They go on to provide, Urquhart’s preface tells us, ‘the Cream, the Marrow, and most especial part of ’ Ekskybalauron (A3r). It’s perhaps an understatement to suggest that Urquhart’s account might not be wholly reliable; 3,210 does sound an absurdly large figure for pages of manuscript carried on one’s person at one time, and one suspiciously similar to the ‘three thousand pounds English’ in ‘Suits of Law, & bonds’ (2) mentioned in the same breath.8 The account of papers lost, repurposed, and found has something of a Rabelaisian flavour, which shouldn’t be overlooked in a text written by the first translator of the French writer into English. Gargantua and Pantagruel brims with comically large and precise numbers, such as the ‘two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen [men], besides women and little children’ drowned in Gargantua’s urine, and its preface, like Eksykybalauron’s, claims that the text was found miraculously and in a less-​than perfect state.9 Gargantua’s ‘genealogy’ was dug up in a meadow, ‘a big, fat, great, gray, pretty, small, mouldy, little pamphlet’, written on elm-​bark, and ‘so worn with the long tract of time, that hardly could three letters together be there perfectly discerned’ (11). Urquhart’s found quinternion is certainly less fantastical than Rabelais’s, and this relative credibility perhaps serves the Scottish writer’s more serious purpose: his bid for freedom and the restoration of his lands. But Rabelais’s grubby, impossible pamphlet, found alongside another which ‘rats and mothes . . . had nibled off the beginning’ (12), does more than suggest how a text might be lost and found: it also provides Urquhart with a model of fragmentariness. Unfortunately, Urquhart informs his reader, he is unable to publish the entirety of his extremely useful Universal Language because it has been lost. It can only be completed when he has his liberty and his lands. In the meantime, the reader will have to make do with the preface that promises the brilliance of what is to follow, but that provides no specific details. What has survived bears marks of its ‘nibled’, or ‘dispersed’, past: a lacuna is marked by the line ‘¶ Here is the number of twelve Articles wanting’ (21). Why, then, if his story is either fantastical or grossly exaggerated, am I using Urquhart’s lost manuscripts and found quinternion as the case study for this chapter? I am doing so because, whether or not the events described in Ekskybalauron actually took place, they provide a wealth of information about the material make-​up of manuscripts and printer’s copy, as well as the ways in which loose sheets might be repurposed in the period. At first glance, Urquhart’s claim that the Parliamentarian soldiers paused to

366   Anna Reynolds collect manuscript sheets, pocketing them in order to later wrap dried fruit and wipe their arses, might seem, again, plucked straight from the pages of Rabelais.10 But waste paper, both printed and manuscript, was everyday stuff in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a scene in which countless sheets make their way into a multitude of shops, households, and privies encapsulates the environment that we will meet at each stage of our circuit. Books, Urquhart makes clear, are fragile and unstable things, susceptible to transformation into waste from the earliest stage of their life cycle. Early modern authors composed their works on sheets of paper, often loose or folded into packets and bundles, and these manuscripts were situated precariously alongside waste fragments and wrappers, as well as other manuscripts and printed books, in the environment in which the author worked and lived. Extant literary manuscripts used as waste, though rare, reveal the everyday practices behind Urquhart’s account: a single sheet of a Jacobean tragedy survives having wrapped a packet of letters, and a handwritten fragment of a play containing a tavern scene survives as end-​leaves in a late sixteenth-​or early seventeenth-​century binding.11 We cannot be certain how and why these play-​texts ended up as waste, and where they fit within the hotly debated taxonomy of foul and fair papers: are they rough drafts, rewritten and so superseded; were they used for performance and later cast aside; or were they intended as printer’s copy, for plays that haven’t survived?12 What is certain is that, at some stage in their biography, a user decided that they were more valuable as wrappers than as text, and so laid them aside in a stack of waste paper in a household or bindery. We will now move forward in time with Urquhart and his quinternion of a Universal Language, making our way to the spring or summer of 1652 in the printing house of James Cottrel on the Old Bailey, London.13 These sheets, according to Urquhart’s genealogy, are at once foul and fair: they have been marked up for use as copy for the print shop, but they are now incomplete and besmeared with ‘the mire and mud of the kennel’ (4). As we will go on to see, these sheets are no safer from disintegration and dispersal in the printing house than they were amongst Worcester’s soldiers and shopkeepers.

The Printer The source for this stage in the biography of Urquhart’s Ekskybalauron is its ‘Epistle Liminary’. Whereas the story of the Battle of Worcester and the dispersal of Urquhart’s 3,000 manuscript pages can be found at the beginning of the main body of the text (from page 1, on sig. B), the story of the eighteen printed sheets that make up Ekskybalauron itself is narrated in its preliminary ‘porch’ (A3v). The signatures reveal that the compositor began with the sheet labelled B, continuing through to the end of the text, before setting the preface. One sheet was set aside for the ‘Epistle Liminary’: Urquhart complains of the constraints of this space, stating with evident disappointment that he ‘must confine [him]self to so much bounds (without more) as barely may suffice to excuse the superficial errata’s both of pen and press’ (A5v), longing instead for ‘the leisure

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    367 to bestow a whole sheet by it self ’ (A5r) on the corruptions of the Scottish Covenanters. These preliminaries do, however, break the bounds of the allocated sheet, spilling over to a second whose signature is a lower-​case ‘a’, interrupting the alphabetical sequence and so revealing that the preface was set after the main body of the text. Urquhart’s ‘Epistle Liminary’ gives a partial but detailed account of how he continued to write in the print shop; how his manuscript moved through Cottrel’s shop; and how it was transformed from handwritten fragments, to metal type, to a stack of eighteen printed sheets. As we have already seen, the surviving quinternion of Urquhart’s Universal Language form the ‘most especial part of the [printed] book’, though ‘they extend not in bulk to above two sheets and a quarter’ of it (a2v–​a3r). Apparently, Urquhart writes, Ekskybalauron was originally intended to be a very little book: he had ‘designed for the Press at first, but 5 sheets’. He had therefore set aside a fortnight to spend in the printing house, perhaps in order to correct the proofs as they came off the press.14 Urquhart’s plans changed ‘on a sudden’, however, when news reached him of the Scottish Covenanters’ most recent ‘irrational proceedings’ (A6v–​A7r). This prompted him to write an additional eleven sheets with the purpose of ‘undeceiving of honest men, and the imbuing of their minds with a better opinion of Scottish spirits’ (A7r). Ekskybalauron was transformed at this stage into a ‘heterogenous’ treatise (214), expanding from an intended 80 to 288 pages. The title page announces this ‘compositive’ nature (A2v): in addition to Ekskybalauron, Greek for ‘gold from dung’ and referring to the ‘most exquisite Jewel [or quinternion] found in the kennel of Worcester-​streets’, we are presented with ‘a Vindication of the honour of Scotland’. Urquhart claims to have composed these additional eleven sheets in the print shop. We aren’t told whether he made a fair copy of his originary fragment, or if he simply handed it to the compositor, cleansed of the mud and mire, before supplying the additional sheets. Everything else, the preface tells us, was written ‘betwixt the case and the printing press’, ‘upon the loose sheets of cording-​quires’, in the space of a fortnight (A8r). At once printer’s copy, author’s draft, foul papers, and fair copy, Urquhart’s loose sheets reveal the messy, material practices behind printed books, and the complexity of the terminology developed by bibliographers seeking ‘original’ or ‘authorial’ early modern texts.15 Cording quires, Joseph Moxon explains, are the two outer quires of a ream of paper that protected the rest of the sheets from damage during the journey from mill to print shop.16 The paper maker would have chosen flawed—​what Moxon calls ‘torn, wrinkled, stained, and otherwise naughty’—​sheets to serve this purpose, and the warehouse-​keeper would have combed through these outer quires to determine whether any might serve as printing paper. Urquhart was either permitted to use these middling-​quality sheets as writing paper, or plucked up rejected sheets that were circulating loose in the print shop, intended for use as waste.17 The pages of one extant copy of Ekskybalauron might bear out Urquhart’s claim: one leaf is especially stained and wrinkled, and the text has been printed on top of its creases (see Fig. 20.1). Perhaps this is a sheet from the passable pile of cording quires, put to one side by the warehouse-​keeper and used by the pressman, from which Urquhart also took his writing paper.

368   Anna Reynolds (a)

(b)

Fig. 20.1  Poor-​quality paper, possibly cording quires, in a copy of Urquhart’s Ekskybalauron (7–​8). The text is printed on top of the wrinkles: note the catchword ‘The’ on the left and ‘within’ at the bottom of right-​hand page. National Library of Scotland, L.C. 1457.

What follows is a passage, rich in rhythmic and tactile detail, outlining the collaboration of author and compositor in the creation of a text: what Urquhart describes as the ‘joint emulation betwixt the theoretick and practical part’ (a1v). In a rare example of a writer praising a compositor, Urquhart explains that because the ‘setter’ was ‘so nimble a workman’, he struggled to keep pace (A8r).18 The process becomes a contest, with both ‘striving . . . who should compose fastest’ and the pair moving in unison, ‘almost every foot so jump[ing] together in this joynt expedition’ (A8r). In a characteristic moment of hyperbole, Urquhart claims he had to take drastic action to prevent the compositor from ‘overtak[ing]’ him: he is ‘glad to tear off parcels of ten or twelve lines apiece, and give him them, till more were ready’ (a1r).19 The cording quires, already damaged, become even more tattered, ‘looking like pieces of waste paper, troublesome to get rallyed, after such dispersive scattredness’. It might have been the events that allegedly took place at Worcester that brought waste paper to Urquhart’s mind in this moment, as his manuscripts were, again, unceremoniously mangled. We should remain wary of taking Urquhart too readily at his word: this passage concludes with a version of a modesty trope, in which Urquhart explains how these material conditions prevented him from reading through his composition until

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    369 the proofs were ready, ‘and sometimes to a full revise’ (a1r–​v). ‘Gross faults’ (a2r) are, then, elaborately excused. The description of authorship is, however, so thick with intricate and experiential detail of the compositor’s work and material environment, that I am inclined to take Urquhart at his word: Ekskybalauron, I believe, was at least partly composed in Cottrel’s shop, and so Urquhart’s ‘theoretick’ labour is framed, both literally and metaphorically, by the sensory and haptic workings of the printing house. This passage might, then, suggest a normative practice that went unmentioned in most early modern texts. We know that a not insignificant number of early modern writers were involved in the nitty-​gritty of the print shop, whether as compositors, apprentices, or, most often, as correctors.20 Ekskybalauron suggests that authorship may have been a semi-​regular occurrence ‘betwixt the case and the printing press’ (A8r), particularly in the instance of topical treatises hastily written in the middle of the seventeenth century. Whether rare or regular, Urquhart’s account prompts us to reassess our understanding of the material environment of the print shop: much scholarship on early modern print emphasizes its inkiness, and the ‘inky fingers’ of those authors who get up close and personal with the press.21 Urquhart’s description is, however, a profoundly papery one, and the only ink mentioned is the scarcely dry, handwritten text on his loose cording quires (a1r). The transformation of manuscript into print (‘three full sheets of [his] writing’ into a single printed one (A8r) ) is rendered as the chaotic, ‘dispersive scattredness’ of countless slips and scraps of torn, poor-​quality paper, ‘suddenly’ and rapidly confined into a neat ‘order’ of metal type in the composing stick, galley, and forme (A8v–​a1r). We can almost hear the paper rip and the metal type clang against the wooden galley as the compositor and author ‘jump’ together in their work. Once pressed, the text as we know it emerges, although it doesn’t yet resemble the book as we typically conceive of it. Its disorderly prehistory as manuscripts stolen and used as waste, and as fragments scattered across the print shop, has been erased: it is only Urquhart’s narration of its genealogy that makes the reader attend to its pre-​life, aware that the biography of a manuscript and a mass of loose sheets is integral to the composition—​both theoretical and practical—​of the printed book. Urquhart ends his biography of Ekskybalauron at the moment when papery slips and scraps are set as type and locked into the forme. It cannot extend to the ‘last motion of the press’ (a1v) because this would have taken place after Urquhart had stopped producing his ever-​expanding copy. The moment of orderliness that Urquhart’s textual genealogy ends with, then, is a pause rather than a full stop in its biography. The orderliness of metal type, fixed in place, is momentary: the text will soon become, once again, a bundle of vulnerable paper sheets. This is prefigured in Urquhart’s account by the comparison of his mangled, manuscript scraps to ‘pieces of waste paper’ (a1r). I have already suggested that the story of the Battle of Worcester prompted this simile as Urquhart wrote in the print shop. Urquhart would, though, have encountered waste paper frequently as he composed Ekskybalauron: the compositor, according to Moxon, would have layered the case for his type with ‘scantlins’ of ‘good strong wast-​paper’ (199), as well as ‘papering up’ each page of set type, most likely in waste (231), as he moved on to set the next one. Since Urquhart was in between the press and the compositor’s case,

370   Anna Reynolds he was also likely to have seen the tympan and frisket lined with waste, ‘if Blackt from former Work’ (300) and ‘to strengthen as to thicken it’ (302–​303).22 Quires of both plain and printed pages most likely moved about the print shop in waste-​paper wrappers (347): the cording quires, when culled by the warehouse keeper, were laid between sheets of waste, and so Urquhart may have plucked his writing materials from between pages of rejected printed text (354). Similarly, when the printed sheets were collated to form the ‘Gathered book’, or book in sheets, and laid in piles so many books high, they would have been placed on top of waste paper to keep them clean (352). Then, these piles would have been pressed into a large stack ready for transportation, framed by waste paper, which served as both label and protective wrapper (353). Urquhart’s manuscript would have entered into this waste ecology, perhaps even serving as ‘scantlins’ for the compositor’s case and so fuelling, in another way, the workman’s ‘practical’ labours (a1v).23 Printer’s copy was, it seems, prone to becoming waste after it had served its purpose.24 Because of its heavy use in the print shop, this sort of waste is unlikely to survive, but some printer’s copy did make its way into bookbindings: a leaf of a 1583 dictionary, cannibalized and annotated with additions for a new 1587 dictionary by another printer, Thomas Thomas, has been used as an end-​leaf in a book that emerged from Thomas’s print shop (see Fig. 20.2).25 Some of Urquhart’s printed, as well as manuscript, pages were likely to have been added to the print shop’s waste pile. Significant quantities of waste paper were a by-​product of the printing process, and so are termed ‘printer’s waste’ by bibliographers: there were always likely to be misprints, cancellations, and sheets surplus to requirement, as well as trials and proof sheets that couldn’t be included in the completed volume. A print shop’s waste ecology was, in part, a self-​enclosed one, with the press’s surplus and spoiled paper fulfilling the needs of the shop. Some printer’s waste did, though, like the copy in Fig. 20.2, make its way out of the print shop and into a bindery, and this is especially likely to have occurred when the printer or publisher owned a bindery, as Thomas Thomas did. Printer’s waste is often easily identified, bearing clear errors, corrections, or printed only on one side. Surplus sheets, though, are difficult to distinguish from sheets turned to waste at a later stage in their life cycle. It is important to note that all printer’s waste occupies a peculiar space and moment in the biography of a book: these sheets were never part of the completed volume, though they may be identical to parts of it. Instead, they are offshoots, strange growths that are cannibalized in the making of other books, either in the print shop or in binderies. These subsidiary streams, or divergent branches of the book, reveal the complexities of its production.26 The impact of these waste sheets on the imagination of an author, particularly one working in the print shop, should not be underestimated, as the peculiar genealogy within Urquhart’s Ekskybalauron illustrates. Here we have to depart from the biography told in the pages of Ekskybalauron, though we are able to continue along its life story in a more hypothetical fashion, using what we know of the history of early printed books more broadly. We now leave Cottrel’s printing house on the Old Bailey, making our way the short distance to the bookshop of the publisher-​bookseller Richard Baddeley in Middle Temple Gate, just off Fleet Street. We

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    371 (a)

Fig. 20.2 Leaves from Guillame Morel, Verborum cum Graecis Gallicisque conjunctorum (London: for Richard Hutton, [1583]), marked up by Thomas Thomas for his own dictionary and used as endleaves in Zacharias Ursinus, Explicationum catecheticarum (Cambridge: Thomas Thomas, 1587). Henry E. Huntington Library, 89966 PF.

372   Anna Reynolds (b)

Fig. 20.2 Continued

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    373 accompany stacks of Ekskybalauron, in the form of reams of books in sheets, transported between waste-​paper covers.

The Bookseller Baddeley’s rightful place in Darnton’s communication circuit is in prime place, alongside the author, since it is the publisher who negotiates the production of the copy and who supplies the press with paper for the print run. Baddeley is, though, a shadowy figure in Urquhart’s text, only visible on the title page and of much less interest to the author than the ‘nimble’, though unnamed, compositor. Baddeley’s shop at Middle Temple Gate seems to have been short-​lived: it only appears on colophons in 1650–​3. His partnership with Urquhart, though brief, was a fruitful one: in addition to Ekskybalauron and the related pamphlet Pantochronochanon (1652), Baddeley published the first two books of Urquhart’s translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the only volumes printed in Urquhart’s lifetime. What prompted the professional partnership between the two may have been shared political sentiment: Richard Baddeley was likely from Durham, and a decade later a man named Richard Baddeley was serving as secretary to the Royalist Bishop Thomas Morton.27 On arrival in Baddeley’s shop, a small number of copies of Ekskybalauron would have been folded, cut, and sewn for marketing and display.28 As it wasn’t a steady seller, it was unlikely that it would have been bound before sale, though display copies may have been sewn into temporary wrappers.29 The majority of the copies of Ekskybalauron would have been stored in sheets, remaining in the same condition in which they arrived at Baddeley’s shop. Some copies would also have been sold wholesale to other booksellers, as well as to itinerant hawkers, peddlers, and chapmen. We don’t know how many copies of Ekskybalauron were printed, and it is similarly difficult to establish its popularity. At least twenty-​five copies of Ekskybalauron survive, but even if we knew what proportion of its print run this represented, we would be able to make contradictory arguments as to what this meant for its popularity: was it much beloved and so read to death, or so unpopular as to have gone almost entirely unsold?30 It is certainly likely, though, that some of Urquhart’s books went unsold, and so would have been recategorized as waste once the bookseller deemed them out of date. At this stage in its life cycle, the book—​most likely still in sheets—​would have been placed in the service of Baddeley’s in-​house binder, or sold in bulk to external binders’ shops.31 It might also have been sold to one of a wide array of other traders who required a cheap source of wrapping and lining material. We already met many of these traders in the streets of Worcester—​the grocers, apothecaries, box-​makers, chandlers, and pie-​makers who gathered up Urquhart’s dispersed manuscripts. William Noblett has uncovered cases, in the eighteenth century, of books stolen from warehouses and sold to shopkeepers willing to look the other way.32 Sources for the earlier period, and for the licit, commonplace transactions between booksellers, binders, and other traders are scarce, primarily

374   Anna Reynolds because only small amounts of money would have changed hands, if any at all:33 binders who acquired unsold books would likely have done so as part of more general business arrangements with nearby booksellers. The absence of evidence, in the form of historical records or extant wrappers, makes it all too easy to overlook the widespread use of waste paper beyond the spaces we conceive of as relating to the book trade. When we reconfigure our history of the book to encompass the book in pieces, we have to go beyond printer’s, bookseller’s, and binder’s shops to those that sold medicines, spices, pies, soap, gloves, and boxes, wrapped, lined, and in twists of waste paper. Waste paper, and therefore books, moved in and out of almost every domestic and urban space in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: its movements were not delineated by our disciplinary boundaries. Extant bookbindings offer the best source of evidence for the quantities of unsold books that ended up as waste in the period: a significant proportion of printed binding waste from the seventeenth century bears no evidence of ever having been folded or cut, and so was categorized as waste in either the printer’s or bookseller’s shop (see Fig. 20.3).34 Because unsold waste predominantly sat in sheets, it is impossible to distinguish

Fig. 20.3  A stab-​stitched, waste-​paper wrapper comprised of an unfolded and uncut sheet from Martin Finch, Animadversions Upon Sir Henry Vanes Book (London: for Joseph Barber, 1656). Thomas Plume Library, Plume Pamphlet 699.

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    375 from printer’s surplus. A printer would, though, have kept the number of surplus sheets to an absolute minimum, whereas vast quantities of sheets would have gone unsold in booksellers’ shops every year. Waste-​paper tropes provide further evidence for the widespread use of unsold books as waste: sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century writers refer frequently to books ‘ly[ing] in the Stationers hand as waste paper’, ‘dead and never selling’, and ‘solde for wast leaues to Apothecaries, to Glouers, Cookes, and Bakers’.35 These references often serve to insult a textual opponent, or to lament the poor taste of the reading public; they were, though, not wholly rhetorical, but grounded in a pervasive and persistent element of the book trade. Writers were evidently sensitive to the potential waste fate of their books if they proved unpopular, and throughout the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a far-​reaching sense of living in a ‘scribling age’, with masses of badly written books spewing from pens and presses to be found, in Robert Burton’s words, in ‘every close-​stoole and jakes . . . under pies, to lappe in spice, and keepe rostemeat from burning’.36 We know that certain sorts of books, such as almanacs, were more likely to go unsold than others, and extant bookbindings reveal that it was in fact texts printed in the largest quantities (such as almanacs, Bibles, and Books of Common Prayer) that made up a significant proportion of waste paper.37 Despite this, use as waste was understood as a marker of literary failure, and it seems likely that, at any given moment, an early modern reader could decipher which texts had gone unsold by glancing over the waste wrappers in use by the city’s grocers, apothecaries, and bookbinders. John Donne gestures towards this fragmentary mode of reading when, in his prefatory poem to Coryats Crudities, he suggests that the book will end up as waste, a ‘Booke in peeces’, used in a multitude of ways.38 Donne writes how, amongst a multitude of other waste functions, ‘Some leau’s may paste strings there in other books’, or be used as binding waste, ‘And so one may, which on another looks, | Pilfer, alas, a little wit from you, | But hardly much’.39 Most writers who mention the fate of unsold books focus on the period in which they are recategorized as waste, describing how they ‘lie’, static, in the bookshop; they are ‘dead’, lifeless through lack of reading, and so perish prematurely before they have begun to circulate in the form of a folded, cut, sewn, and bound book.40 Donne, though, traces the afterlife of Coryate’s sheets in their transformed, quasi-​bookish, and persistently textual form: waste circulates and can be read, though only in ‘peeces’, scattered and partial like the leaves of the ‘Sybil[line]’ oracle.41 The playful attention Donne pays to bitty encounters with fragments of books demonstrates that unsold sheets did not slip out of sight. Instead, they were an ‘omnipregnant’ (to borrow again from Donne) dimension of early modern textual culture,42 haunting the imaginations of writers and readers alike and offering textual snippets, readily legible, alongside foods, fabrics, and other books. Some of Urquhart’s books, we know, did sell, and we will now enter a buyer’s hands with one of them. At this moment, the buyer is faced with several choices: they could have Ekskybalauron bound simply by the in-​house binder; they could take it to a binder’s shop and have it bound in any way they pleased, for a higher price; or they could keep it as it came—​simply stitched or sewn, perhaps in a waste wrapper. Thomas Plume, for instance, chose to keep many of his pamphlets and smaller books in such ostensibly

376   Anna Reynolds temporary wrappers (see Fig. 20.3), whereas other buyers had their pamphlets bound, often into Sammelbände, at a later date.43 Our imagined buyer chooses an in-​house binding, and so we will remain a little longer in Baddeley’s bookshop.

The Binder Despite the breadth of scholarship on early modern bookbindings, relatively little is known about the craftspeople who produced them.44 Binders were among the poorer members of the Stationers’ Company, and the journeymen who worked on booksellers’ premises would have received some of the lowest wages. There were, though, binders who had their own premises in areas such as St Paul’s and Fleet Street, where customers could commission bindings ranging between the simplest and most luxurious designs. Waste paper was frequently used as paste-​downs, end-​leaves, guards, and wrappers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often alongside waste parchment guards, spine supports, and limp-​bindings. Binders evidently had a large supply of waste in their shop or by their bench. Once supplies of medieval manuscript waste began to dwindle in the last decade of the sixteenth century, binders turned to legal institutions to serve their need for scrap parchment, purchasing recently outdated deeds, leases, wills, and indentures. If they were working for a bookseller, their supply of waste paper would have been made up primarily of the bookshop’s unsold stock. Binders working independently would have sourced their waste paper from nearby booksellers, as well as acquiring handwritten waste from a range of other nearby shops: draft accounts and inventories on paper can be found in a number of mid-​seventeenth-​century bindings. They would also have frequented probate sales, purchasing quantities of ‘old broken bokes’ and ‘bookes for wast paper’.45 Waste paper recovered from bound books was not as useful for bindings or as wrapping paper as waste from books in sheets: an uncut sheet provides a large surface for use as end-​leaves, paste-​downs, or wrappers. A folio page, once cut, can still be used to bind smaller-​format books, but cut sheets become progressively less useful the smaller the book’s format. Henry Fitzgeffrey alludes to this in the ‘Post-​Script to his Book-​binder’, asking not to be bound ‘in the Folio: or the Quarto cut’, but rather of ‘the Smallest size’, lest the book be ‘eaten vnder Pippin-​pyes | Or in th’ Apothicaryes shop be seene | To wrapp Drugg’s: or to drye Tobacco in’.46 The book’s format is of course up to the printer, not the binder, but Fitzgeffrey pointedly addresses the craftsperson responsible for cutting and trimming the book’s pages, and who used such waste in their own work. Pages recovered from smaller books and other slips and scraps were useful to a certain category of binder: those who manufactured pulp boards in their shop.47 Pulp boards were used in the majority of English bindings from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, and were made from coarsely pulped paper fragments.48 This is why, in his 1644 husbandry treatise, Gabriel Plattes advises householders to ‘reserve’ their ‘white, or brown, or written, or printed’ waste paper as it ‘will make good passe-​board’

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    377 and so ‘in some houses . . . is of very considerable value’.49 Most scraps for pulping would have been produced within the process of binding itself, when the binder trimmed the rough edges of the book-​block to make them neat and uniform. It was in the economic interests of the binder, then, to trim as much of the margin of the book as possible, maximizing the volume of offcuts then available for use as waste.50 Our—​now imagined—​copy of Ekskybalauron is bound in a cheap and simple fashion:51 within pulp boards, made from the binder’s offcuts, covered in affordable, plain calfskin, and sewn between waste-​paper end-​leaves. These end-​leaves are from a book that sat unsold in Baddeley’s shop the previous year. It is only at this point that Urquhart’s book conforms to what we, today, expect a book to be: it has been folded, sewn, cut, and bound within relatively sturdy covers. Its trajectory to this point, as we have seen, has been far from linear and straightforward: it has been transformed from foul papers, torn and scattered across the city of Worcester and a London print shop, to pages of set type, to stacks of books in sheets that move from printer’s to bookseller’s shop, and into the hands of the binder. At each of these stages, elements and offshoots of the book become waste—​because, as printer’s copy, they are no longer required; because they are trial runs, or proofs; because they contain errors or were surplus to requirement; or because they were also-​rans—​going unsold in the bookshop. Copies that are sold and bound might contain material portents of future transformation, in the form of binding waste and boards flecked with pulped snippets of text: these waste remnants suggest how the book might return to the binder’s shop, either after its owner’s death at a probate sale or, when no longer wanted, with a thrifty householder’s scrap paper. Urquhart’s book might, again, be torn up, ‘troublesome to get rallyed’ (a1r), used in the reader’s household or pulped by the binder. Early modern writers often characterized the use of a book ‘about refusely occasions’, or what Urquhart calls ‘posteriour uses’ (3), as the end-​point in the life cycle of a book.52 Like references to books going unsold, these are rhetorical gestures grounded in everyday material practice, though here indicative of virulent readerly rejection rather than apathy. Although we lack material evidence for the use of waste in kitchens and privies, it is highly likely that unwanted pages were used in the place of brown paper in early modern households.53 We can’t be certain that Urquhart saw these Ghosts of Waste Future as he composed Ekskybalauron, along with the Ghosts of Waste Past in the streets of Worcester and Waste Present in Cottrel’s print shop. We do know, though, that waste paper framed the composition, circulation, and consumption of Urquhart’s text, and so too the composition, circulation, and consumption of a significant proportion of early modern literature. Whereas Urquhart attends primarily to the ‘dispersive scattredness’ that characterizes the pre-​life of a text (a1r), other writers, like Burton, Donne, and Fitzgeffrey, vividly imagine the potential afterlife of unwanted and unsold books. Scholars of early modern book history should attend to this literary play alongside extant waste paper, and so broaden their understanding of how books were encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in addition to circulating in sturdy bindings, temporary wrappers, and loosely stitched booklets, books might be handled and read as loose sheets, wrappers,

378   Anna Reynolds and fragments. These books ‘in peeces’ (Donne, D3v) convey, for their users, the precarious and messy history of books. Emerging as offshoots from every stage in the life cycle of a book, these fragments sit alongside other matter—​other books, food, and fabric—​ and tell multi-​temporal stories of what has happened and what might happen to any other text. Darnton’s communications circuit highlights the intersection of economic and social conditions, and the intellectual influence of the book trade on the composition of texts. Waste paper is a key example of a thrifty, economically driven practice that pervaded every element of the book trade, and that shaped ‘theoretick’ as well as ‘practical’ textual production (Urquhart, a1v). It might be useful, as we begin to pay more attention to the fragmentary offshoots of the book, to reconfigure some of Darnton’s central assumptions and questions. Our reworked communications circuit (see Fig. 20.4) might help us to ‘understand’, not ‘how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind’,54 but how ideas were transmitted in, alongside, as, and as soon-​to-​be waste. How, then, did the pervasiveness of waste, rather than ‘the invention of movable type[,]‌transform man’s [sic] mental universe’, and the attempts, of early moderns, ‘to make sense of the human condition’?55 As we continue to expand our understanding of early modern textual culture beyond the binary of print and manuscript, we should begin to consider how the common condition of books—​dispersedly rejected, in pieces, alongside all sorts of matter—​might have shaped the way that early moderns thought about and encountered both books and their environment more broadly. Author:

Produces manuscript copy

Publisher: Often bookseller, esp. in 17C

Printers:

Binder:

Acquires waste for binding and pulping from booksellers, probate sales, shops, and individuals, and as offcuts from trimming pages

Readers:

Buys books and other goods in waste; uses waste in household; sells waste to binder

Intellectual influence

Material and imaginative conjuncture

Craft practice and economics of trade

Compositors Pressmen Warehouseman Produces printer’s waste and book in sheets; use of waste in printshop

Suppliers:

Supplies printing paper and cording quires

Shippers:

Transports stacks of book-in-sheets in wastepaper wrappers

Booksellers:

Other shopkeepers:

Grocers Apothecaries Box-makers etc. Uses waste from bookshop to wrap goods; sells draft accounts to binder

Wholesaler Retailer Peddler Binder (in-house) Stores and sells books bound and in sheets, and quantities of unsold books as waste

Fig. 20.4  The life cycle of the early modern book in pieces. A reconfigured version of Darnton’s communications circuit, highlighting the production, circulation, and use of waste paper at each stage in the life cycle of the book.

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    379

Notes 1. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111/​3 (1982), 65–​83. 2. Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, 75. 3. See Lotte Hellinga, Incunabula in Transit: People and Trade (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 208–​221; N. R. Ker, Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings: With a Survey of Oxford Binding, c.1515–​1620 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1954; repr. 2004); David Pearson, Oxford Bookbinding 1500–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2000), 139–​141. 4. The most extended studies to date are Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 137–​174 and Emily Butterworth, ‘Apothecaries’ Cornets: Books as Waste Paper in the Renaissance’, MLN 133/​4 (2018), 891–​913. 5. See Joseph Dane, The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003), 61–​62 and Anna Reynolds, ‘ “Worthy to be Reserved”: Bookbindings and the Waste Paper Trade in Early Modern England and Scotland’, in Daniel Bellingradt and Anna Reynolds (eds.), The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 342-​368. 6. Thomas Urquhart, Ekskybalauron (London: Richard Baddeley, 1652). Further references will be given in the text. 7. See esp. Smyth, Material Texts, and Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 8. In Urquhart’s defence, his numbers are consistent throughout Ekskybalauron. He also complains of the poor standard of printing in Scotland, suggesting his motivation for travelling to London with such a large stock of manuscripts (217). 9. François Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel, Book 1–​2, trans. Thomas Urquhart (London: R. Bishop, 1664), 77. 10. See e.g. the passage in which Gargantua seeks the best ‘torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, . . . and wipe-​breeches’ (Gargantua et Pantagruel, i. 61–​7) and the recommendation to use Rabelais’s book as a compress to cure toothache (ii. B2r–​v). 11. ‘Play about the Duke of Florence’ and ‘Play of Thieves and a Gullible Tapster’, Lost Plays Database, https://​lostpl​ays.fol​ger.edu. 12. On foul papers and fair copy, see Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 13. Henry Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907), 54. 14. See a1r–​v. On the presence of authors in the print shop, most commonly correcting their own proofs, see Smyth, Material Texts, 75–​136. 15. For a discussion of the history and application of these terms, see Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts, 160. 16. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises (London: for Moxon, 1677), 353. 17. Moxon describes how the warehouse-​ keeper gathered the poor-​ quality sheets into new quires, and how these were sold, presumably by the publisher-​bookseller who had

380   Anna Reynolds provided the printer with the paper. It seems likely, though, that some quires would have remained in the print shop (Mechanick Exercises, 354–​356). 18. On complaints about compositors in early modern texts, see Tamara Atkins in this volume. 19. This series of events, if true, means that Ekskybalauron was set seriatim rather than by forme. Setting by forme—​or each side of the sheet at a time—​was standard practice in the period. Setting seriatim—​or sequentially, in textual order—​removed the need for casting off but was slower and used more type. Compositors set seriatim when manuscripts were especially difficult and when only one compositor was working on the text. Urquhart’s copy conforms to this description. This is also in keeping with what we know of Cottrel’s shop: the 1668 survey of the press indicates it was a small one, with only two presses, two compositors, and no apprentices (Plomer, A Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 54). See Peter Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 90, 184. 20. See Smyth, Material Texts, 101–​102. 21. See e.g. Anthony Grafton, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020) and Smyth, Material Texts, 92. 22. Some frisket sheets that have been reused a second time, as binding waste, survive. See Elizabeth Savage, ‘Early Modern Frisket Sheets: A Periodically Updated Census, v4’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (April 2017), 1–​63. 23. Small slips and scraps would not have been so useful in the print shop as large sheets of waste. Fragments may, though, have been gathered for the production of pulp board (see p. 378), as well as serving as ‘scantlins’ for the compositor. 24. In 1651, the printer John Harris described how the copy for ‘pamphlets’ were usually ‘thrown about for waste paper’. See 22 February 1651, D. F. McKenzie and Maureen Bell (eds.), A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade, 1641–​ 1700, vol. iii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 25. See Allan Stevenson, ‘Thomas Thomas Makes a Dictionary’, The Library, ser. 5, 13/​4 (1958), 234–​246. 26. See e.g. Lotte Hellinga’s research into early printing practices using the evidence of binding fragments: Incunabula in Transit, 208–​221. 27. Plomer, A Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 10. 28. The Stationers’ Company limited stab-​stitching to octavos of twelve sheets or less in order to protect the bookbinders’ trade, and Ekskybalauron was made up of eighteen sheets. See David Foxon, ‘Stitched Books’, Book Collector, 24 (1975), 111. On the cutting of books for display, see Philip Tromas, ‘The Business of Browsing in Early Modern English Bookshops’, in Shanti Graheli (ed.), Buying and Selling: The Business of Books in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 111–​135. 29. See Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 413. There is much debate as to when books were bound in the seventeenth century: see Nicholas Pickwoad and David Pearson for two contrasting opinions (Pickwoad, ‘Onward and Downward: How Binders Coped with the Printing Press before 1800’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), A Millenium of the Book: Production, Design and Illustration in Manuscript and Print, 900–​1900 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994), 63–​ 64 and Pearson, Oxford Bookbinding, 123). Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass have argued, convincingly, that books were warehoused in sheets and then typically bound at the point of sale, rather than before or after it: see their ‘Shakespeare Between Pamphlet

Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse    381 and Book’, in Margaret Kidnie and Sonia Massai (eds.), Shakespeare and Textual Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 127. 30. See Adam Smyth, ‘Almanacs and Ideas of Popularity’, in Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (eds.), The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Ashgate: Farnham, 2013), 125–​34. 31. Baddeley’s shop was located near Fleet Street, where there were many binders’ shops. See James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 162. 32. William Noblett, ‘Cheese, Stolen Paper, and the London Book Trade, 1750–​ 1799’, Eighteenth-​Century Life, 38/​3 (2014), 100–​110. See also Geoffrey Day and Amélie Junqua, ‘A la recherche du papier perdu—​Some Possible Circulations of Waste Paper in Eighteenth-​ Century England’, in Peter Wagner and Frédéric Ogée (eds.), Intermediality and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2019), 203–​218. 33. Elsewhere, I have estimated that a quire of waste paper cost between 1d. and 1 ½d. This means a ream of waste paper would have cost between 20d. and 25d., or around 1s. See Waste Paper in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024). On the little we know of the relations between booksellers and binders, see Raven, The Business of Books, 139. 34. I have outlined how to decipher the pre-​life of waste from material evidence in ‘ “Worthy to be Reserved” ’, 348–​355. 35. Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-​Wealth (London: John Newbery, 1603), O4v; Thomas Nashe, Haue With You to Saffron-​Walden (London: John Danter, 1596), T3v; William Vaughan, The Arraignment of Slander (London: Francis Constable, 1623), *2r. 36. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1621), 8. Burton likely saw pages from his voluminous text repurposed in these, and other, ways: a significant quantity of proof sheets from The Anatomy, corrected in Burton’s own hand, survive in half-​a-​dozen Oxford bindings. See William Poole, ‘Robert Burton and His Anatomy of Melancholy’, New College Notes, 6 (2015): www.new.ox.ac.uk. My thanks to Adam Smyth for bringing this to my attention. 37. See e.g. the case of Francis Mawborne, who infringed on the Stationers’ Company’s patent for almanacs and caused thousands of licensed copies to be turned to ‘wast paper’: 7 August 1666, in McKenzie and Bell (eds.), A Chronology and Calendar of Documents. 38. ‘Incipit Joannes Donne’, in Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London: [for the author], 1611), D3v–​4r. 39. ‘Incipit Joannes Donne’, D4r. 40. See n. 35. 41. ‘Incipit Joannes Donne’, D3v–​4r. 42. ‘Incipit Joannes Donne’, D3v. 43. On the compilatory nature of many early modern bindings, see Knight, Bound to Read. 44. David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles 1450–​1800 (London: British Library, 2005), 164–​176. 45. E. S. Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-​lists from Vice-​Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, ii: Catalogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 816–​817, at 820. 46. Henry Fitzgeffrey, Satyres (London: Miles Patrich, 1617), G4r. 47. See ‘pulp board’ in Ligatus’s ‘Language of Bindings’, https://​www.liga​tus.org.uk/​lob.

382   Anna Reynolds 48. In the earlier sixteenth century, cheap boards were made of laminated, often waste, sheets of paper. These were replaced by pulp boards in the late sixteenth century, but by the late seventeenth century boards made from paper layered straight from the paper maker’s vat became the norm: see ‘paste-​laminate board’ and ‘couched-​laminate boards’ in Ligatus’s ‘Language of Bindings’, www.liga​tus.org.uk/​lob. These serve to clarify the misused terms ‘pasteboard’ and ‘millboard’ respectively. 49. Gabriel Plattes, The Profitable Intelligencer ([London?]: T.U., [1644]), A4r. 50. William Blades complains of careless and greedy binders in The Enemies of Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 105–​111. 51. Imagined because most extant copies of Ekskybalauron have been rebound in either the eighteenth century or more recently. 52. Samuel Fisher, Rusticus ad academicos (London: Robert Wison, 1661), 135. See also William Cornwallis, Essayes ([London]: Edmund Mattes, 1600–​1), I7r and Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (London: John Busbie, 1592), E1v. 53. For the use of brown paper, see Helen Smith, ‘ “A unique instance of art”: The Proliferating Surfaces of Early Modern Paper’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 8 (2017): http://​nort​hern​rena​issa​nce.org and Elaine Leong, ‘Papering the Household: Paper, Recipes, and Everyday Technologies in Early Modern England’, in Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong, and Christine Von Oertzen (eds.), Working With Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 32–​45. 54. Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, 65; my emphasis. 55. Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, 80.

Select Bibliography Blayney, Peter, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–​422. Butterworth, Emily, ‘Apothecaries’ Cornets: Books as Waste Paper in the Renaissance’, MLN 133/​4 (2018), 891–​913. Dane, Joseph, The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003). Darnton, Robert, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111/​3 (1982), 65–​83. Knight, Jeffrey Todd, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Lesser, Zachary, and Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Shakespeare Between Pamphlet and Book’, in Margaret Kidnie and Sonia Massai (eds.), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 105–​133. Moxon, Joseph, Mechanick Exercises (London: for Moxon, 1677). Reynolds, Anna, ‘ “Worthy to be Reserved”: Bookbindings and the Waste Paper Trade in Early Modern England and Scotland’, in Daniel Bellingradt and Anna Reynolds (eds.), The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 342-​368. Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Urquhart, Thomas, Ekskybalauron (London: Richard Baddeley, 1652).

Pa rt I I I

M OV I N G B O OK S Selling, Circulating, Borrowing, Imagining

CHAPTER 21

‘T he B o ok-​s ell a rs Sh op’ Browsing, Reading, and Buying in Early Modern England Ben Higgins The Book-​sellars Shop. The Book-​seller 1. selleth Books in a Booksellers-​shop, 2 of which he writeth a Catalogue. 3. The Books are placed on Shelves, 4. and are laid open for use upon a Desk 5. A multitude of Books is called a Library. 6.1

Johann Comenius gives a basic definition of a seventeenth-​century bookshop in his Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1659). The numbers in his text correspond to six features of the illustrative woodcut (Fig. 21.1): first is the bookseller himself, stooped over his counter beside an inkpot; then the space of his shop; a catalogue of wares; shelves of stock; two desks; and a library of bound volumes. Some of this description could apply to a modern bookshop, but the definition and woodcut also invite questions. To what ‘use’ were the books put if that use was not simply browsing? At what point does a bookshop become a library? Why are there desks in the room? And what else might be found in the deep-​ looking drawers and shelves that line the walls and fill the bookseller’s counter? Early modern bookshops, this chapter will show, are both recognizable and remarkable when compared to their modern counterparts. In these vital forums of literate culture, the basic central activity of buying and selling printed texts happened alongside a strikingly wide array of goods, services, and socio-​cultural functions. In what follows I explore early modern bookshops from four different perspectives. ‘Outside’ imagines what a reader might notice about a typical bookshop from the street before ‘Inside’ crosses over the threshold to explore various commodities and strategies found within. In the two final and shorter sections of this chapter, ‘Around’ explores connections between the more established and permanent forms of bookshop and other kinds of bookish retail such as sheds, pedlars and chapmen, before ‘Beyond’ briefly looks away from London and towards regional bookshops. Running through each of these sections is the chapter’s main argument: that the place at which an early modern reader encountered a text could contribute meaning to the way that text was read. The circumstances of this first point of contact between a reader and a book established a horizon of expectations for the reader and could determine

386   Ben Higgins

Fig. 21.1  ‘The Book-​sellars Shop’ from Orbis sensualium pictus (1659). C5525, N8v. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-​ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

some of the interpretative strategies to which the book was subjected. A bookshop was, in this way of thinking, not only a physical place made of bricks and timber; it was also an environment that organized and regulated much of the contact between readers and new books. We could think of bookshops as another kind of ‘paratext’, to use Genette’s term: a place that offered readers ‘the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back’ from the reading experience.2 But while the influence of printed paratext was typically limited to the edition it framed, to step inside a bookshop was to participate in a larger culture of literacy. We are yet to think in much detail about the conceptual work bookshops effected in the early modern imagination, both for the writers who generated their wares and the readers who selected books to buy. This chapter moves between two ways of thinking about bookshops: it introduces them as both physical places of retail, replete with the material bricolage of writing and literacy, and conceptual ‘spaces’ that could influence the books that they housed and the way in which those books were read.

Outside What did a typical bookshop look like from the street? One of its most visible external features would have been the signboard that hung over the frontage and identified the

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    387 shop. Bookshops were not alone in using visual signs. Before street numbers arrived in the eighteenth century, many shops, houses, and taverns used signs to advertise their presence. Crowns, Daggers, and Snails jutted into the street, imposing themselves into the ‘early modern visual-​verbal imagination’.3 Bookshop signs survive in textual form in the imprints found at the bottom of early modern title pages and they also surface elsewhere: signs were a common design feature of booksellers’ trade cards (earlier versions of the modern business card) that survive in increasing numbers from the mid-​ seventeenth century.4 If the stationer who ran a bookshop was also a publisher, they might brand their books with a woodblock print version of the sign above their shop. The sign of a well-​known bookshop could stand in for its owner through metonymy. This was the case for the bookseller John Trundle (fl. 1603–​26), whose business was found in Barbican beneath the sign of Nobody. The poet John Taylor used this sign to reference Trundle in his Pennyles pilgrimage (1618), a poem that lists the various personalities Taylor met on his Ben Jonson-​like walk to Scotland. Good Reader thinke not strange, what I compile, For No-​body was with me all this while. And No-​body did drinke, and winke, and scinke, And on occasion freely spend his Chinke. If any one desire to know the man, Walke, stumble, Trundle, but in Barbican. Ther’s as good Beere and Ale as euer twang’d, And in that street kinde No-​body is hang’d[.]‌5

In case we miss that it was Trundle who joined this merry sociality (to ‘scinke’ is to serve or pour out alcohol), Taylor or his printer opted for an italic fount that links the bookseller’s name with his sign and address. The lines finally send us to the bookshop itself ‘in Barbican’, where ‘kinde No-​body is hang’d’, imbuing the swinging signboard with the hospitality of its owner and touting the bookshop as the source of a possible drinking companion rather than for its reading matter. What could a sign of ‘No-​body’ look like? Probably very much like the illustration Trundle printed on his edition of the anonymous play No-​body, and some-​body (1606), sold from his bookshop ‘at the signe of No-​body’.6 Trundle added the woodcut illustration of Nobody to the book’s title page (Fig. 21.2), which thus depicts one of the play’s central characters and probably also the symbol of the bookseller’s shop. To read this unusual title page involves confronting multiple referents of ‘Nobody’—​ as character, as costume, as title, as bookshop, as bookseller—​in a way that loosens the word’s meaning and blurs the distinction between factual information and fictive world. In that sense, the title page enacts one of the play’s main jokes, which is the pun on Nobody’s name (‘Man And who hath layne with you to night? Wife Lye with mee, why Nobody’). Trundle’s bookshop and its sign are folded into the wordplay of this text, so that the book seems to drag its environment of sale into its literary operations. When the play’s epilogue concludes by reminding readers that ‘if no-​body haue offended you cannot blame No-​body for it’, for example, the identity of Trundle and his bookshop

388   Ben Higgins

Fig. 21.2  No-​body, and some-​body (1606). STC 18597 Copy 2, A2r. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-​ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

enrich the possible ways to read this line.7 Read in one way, this epilogue records a conventional plea for favour at the end of the play’s performance and so it reminds us of the theatre. But given that the title page has already established Nobody as a bookshop, these final lines leave us wondering who may have offended through the sale of this book, and who is being excused.

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    389 Beneath its sign, the frontage of a bookshop looked like many other shops from this period. An open shopfront allowed in light and helped to display wares while a ‘stall’ (a wooden board, usually hinged) jutted out into the street and was used to show off the latest titles. One of the earlier images of shops of this kind was made by the painter-​ stainer Ralph Treswell in the late sixteenth century (see Fig. 21.3). Treswell’s plan of the area around Cheapside (1585) includes several shops at the east end of Paternoster Row, a major site of book trade activity. None of Treswell’s shops are labelled, but his plan shows an area that is tantalizingly close to the centre of the English bookselling trade throughout this period. The archway at the bottom of his plan marks the north-​east corner of Paul’s Cross Churchyard, home to a profusion of bookshops of varying sizes. The definitive account of the bookshops found in this area is that of Peter W. M. Blayney, whose study recovers strikingly precise details about their construction and layout. Blayney shows us that the bookshop found on the south side of Treswell’s archway was occupied in 1585 by the bookseller Richard Watkins; it was around 15 feet (4.5 m) deep and roughly 22 feet (6.7 m) long. Blayney discovered who Watkins’s bookshop neighbours were and traced the long histories of many of these shops through their successive owners across the seventeenth century.8 Treswell’s plan shows that shops like this were typically on the ground floor of larger buildings. Below a bookshop there was often a cellar while there might be two or three floors above, sometimes used by the bookseller who owned or rented the premises.

Fig. 21.3  Detail from Ralph Treswell’s survey of Cheapside, 1585. Object reference 1880,1113.3516. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

390   Ben Higgins The cellar was an obvious place for storage. Thus when appraisers assessed the estate of the London stationer Nathaniel Hooke (d. 1673), they found around eight thousand books beneath his shop, arranged by format and sat beside some lumber.9 At times the boundary between commercial space and private dwelling in buildings that contained bookshops is difficult to make out in inventories, if it existed at all in a recognizably modern sense. The bookseller Charles Tias, who lived above his shop on London Bridge and who died in 1664, kept bundles of stock all over his property. Either because the ground floor could not contain his wares or perhaps because the ‘shop’ was not securely limited to one room on the ground floor, Tias kept reams of small books and ballads ‘Over ye Staires’, dictionaries in quires in ‘ye Chamber wthin ye hall’, Bibles and 335 small octavos in the hall itself, a stack of prayer books in the chamber ‘over ye Kitchen’, and reams of waste paper in ‘ye Garrett’.10 To read Tias’s inventory is to experience the house itself as a kind of catalogue of various forms and genres of print. And if the profuse commodities of a bookshop could encroach on spaces we usually associate with privacy and domesticity, then the reverse also appears to be true. The inventory of another London bookseller, Ralph Delves (d. 1675), includes the following intriguing entry amid its fascinating list of things found ‘In the shop’: Item 2 Compters shelves boxes stooles and other wooden things bedd & bowlster and matt pillow rugg[.]‌11

The entry begins with conventional bookshop furniture: Delves kept a ‘compter’, or counter, in his shop beside shelves, stools, and various other ‘wooden things’. But if this list records the features of the room, then what are we to make of the fact that by turning away from the counter, shelves, and stools we end up staring at a bed, bolster, and pillow? The stationer Samuel Gellibrand (d. 1676) was another whose inventory records that he kept a ‘feather bed and bolster’ together with a bedstead, valance, and ‘Blankett Curtains’ in ‘the back shopp’. The inventory of Fincham Gardner (d. 1684), a bookseller of St Martin, Ludgate, also lists a bedstead in his bookshop alongside ‘a Counter shelves and shutters’.12 These examples suggest the blurring together of domestic and commercial experience and may also show that some London bookshops operated as boarding houses, with an area towards the back of the shop, separated in unclear ways, that was able to accommodate apprentices or other lodgers. A similar use of the spacious affordances of these larger bookshops was suggested by a traveller who passed through Paul’s Churchyard in 1601 and recorded that he was able to ‘sup and lye’ in the shop—​or at least, somewhere in the building that housed the bookshop—​of the stationer Edward Blount, just as modern travellers (or ‘tumbleweeds’) can stay in Shakespeare and Company in Paris.13 Bookshops relied on textual encounters that began outside their walls. From the street, the stall board would be loaded with the latest titles to tempt passers-​by. These stall boards were primarily material features and it is their solidity that is emphasized by the domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1592). In a scene that takes place in Paul’s Churchyard, a bookseller’s apprentice inadvertently foils a murder attempt by collapsing

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    391 the boards at the front of his master’s shop, not realizing that the murderer, Black Will, is lurking beneath. ‘Tis very late,’ Prentice says, ‘I were best shute up my stall,’ before a stage direction explains what follows: ‘Then lettes he downe his window, and it breaks Black Wils head’.14 The hinged stall clatters down onto Black Will while Arden, the would-​be victim, is able to escape. An illustration of an Italian bookshop from around 1640 (Fig. 21.4) shows a frontage with two stall boards: an upper board that hinged upwards to act as an awning, and a lower board that folded down and on which books are displayed. Black Will seems to have been struck by Prentice collapsing the ‘window’ or upper board. As well as securing the shop, these stall boards could do other work. For one thing, as Prentice suggests, the raising or lowering of the boards would signal the bookshop’s opening hours, so that from the street the stall could determine the way that a customer looked at a bookshop: either as a shuttered realm or an alluring space to spend time and money. If laid open, the stall board of a bookshop was also the site of a giddy miniature economy of display and interest. Writing throughout this period positions the stall board as the front

Fig. 21.4  A bookshop with stall boards in Bologna, c.1640–​c.1660. Detail of RP-​P-​2001-​621, image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

392   Ben Higgins line of a bookshop’s sales display, associated with the most vendible titles. Ben Jonson’s third epigram hopes that his book will ‘lye vpon thy stall, till it be sought’; a translation of Horace’s Epistle 20 published in 1666 supplies a similar refrain: ‘Well Book,’ it begins, ‘thou on the Stationers stall wilt lie, | Bound neatly to allure the gazers eye.’ The book that successfully allured could probably be bought without entering the shop by passing money through the window to the bookseller or his apprentice (‘1574. Maij 7. bowght uppon a stall in London’, wrote John Dee on one of his books, though he may have meant one of the outlying ‘stalls’ described below).15 With Horace in mind, we could think of a bookshop’s stall board as a primitive technology of discrimination. Simply placing a title on a stall board was thus a claim for its significance—​something like an early version of a coveted place on the modern three-​ for-​two table—​even if the actual contents of stall boards no doubt varied a great deal. In the author John Stephens’s 1615 account of a ‘bookesellers shoppe on Bartholomew day at London’, Stephens described a bookshop, ‘the stalls of which are so adornd with bibles and prayer-​bookes, that almost nothing is left within, but heathen knowledge’. His point is that the religious festivities have propelled the newly relevant Bibles and prayer books forwards, leaving the secular titles of ‘heathen knowledge’ to linger within, waiting for their day in the sun. The preacher Bartholomew Lane also suggested that stall boards typically showcased books that were either excellent or in some other way relevant to the moment when in 1683 he described an outstanding lecture as ‘deserving the chiefest place of a Booksellers stall among the dayly croud of Wedding, Funeral, Sunday Sermons’.16 We should be cautious about interpreting these fictive stall boards as accurate representations of bookshop frontages, but the idea or trope of the stall board nevertheless recurs frequently in writings from this period. It is almost always a locus of anxiety, presumably because it gave material shape to writerly fears about the reception of their work. The poet Thomas Churchyard fretted in 1580 that his ‘barrain bookes’ would ‘remaine vnred, or misliked, and so lye on the Stationers stall, as a sillie signe of a newe nothyng’. Disregarded in a place that was reserved for the eye-​catching, Churchyard’s book becomes ridiculous, a ‘sillie signe’ that is out of place. Thomas Dekker echoed Churchyard in 1603 when he pointed out that bad books were damned ‘perpetually to lye on a Stationers stall’.17 A few years later the poet Richard West personified one such rejected volume: ‘I feare more harme will me befall,’ West wrote, ‘If I long lye vpon the Stationers stall.’ Henry Parrot, writing in 1613, was another who worried that his epigrams would ‘on Stationers stal’s regardles lye’.18 The books in these examples crave engagement and attention; they need to be handled, regarded, and ideally bought. The painful circumstance that each writer envisages is that their book may be offered for sale in the most public part of a bookshop and then summarily ignored, leaving it vulnerable to darker fates. The stall board here is both a condition of popular success and a public platform for failure. For other authors, the stall board’s preoccupation with novelty and popular appeal marked it as vulgar. The ‘Stationers-​stall is no such throne of Honour’, scorned Richard Parr in 1658, offering a sentiment that was repeated a little later by Nathaniel Johnston, who felt that it was the ‘vain and light Airy headed Persons’ who

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    393 ‘traffique most at the Booksellers Stall’, hunting out ‘Lampoons, Libels, and Pamphlets’. Such customers, according to Johnston, ‘desire no acquaintance with the seriouser Books of his Shop’.19 So in Johnston’s mind the bookshop was organized front-​to-​back around a scale of ‘seriousness’ and these different spaces attracted different kinds of reader: the ‘seriouser’ customer within and the ‘Airy headed’ traffic outside. The environment of the early modern bookshop—​its physical spaces and protrusions—​shaped the way in which writers conceived of their success, just as these same spaces could make different claims on a customer’s attention. Bookshops generated textual encounters outside their walls in other ways, too. By 1682, it was ‘usual and long-​accustomed’ for bookshop apprentices to venture out on ‘Saturday-​nights, to Post up the Titles of such Books’ that were ‘to be Publisht in the beginning of the Week following’.20 This posting of title pages, referred to by many earlier sources, was one of the main ways that booksellers marketed new wares. Pages might be glued up on posts around the city, or pinned outside a bookshop, as Fig. 21.5 shows. The London bookshop in this engraving is from a little beyond this period (1736), but the image neatly illustrates the key points covered here: the bookshop’s sign; the floors piled above; and the striking work done by its front stall board and pinned-​up title pages to lure customers in from the street.

Fig. 21.5  The frontage of a Bishopsgate bookshop from an engraving of 1736. Detail of Gough Maps volume 20, 29b. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

394   Ben Higgins

Inside On arriving at a bookshop, recalled François Citois in 1603, he ‘was presented at my very entrance with a litle book’, probably by an apprentice, whose job it would be to discover and meet the customer’s needs. In Citois’s case the apprentice chose well: noting the author with appreciation, Citois sat down and ‘read it very seriouslie from one end to the other’.21 This sounds like successful customer service until we realize that Citois only describes reading the book, not buying it—​and if we take him at his word then he read the entire thing. Booksellers seem to have tolerated such thrifty customers, even if they must also have harboured concerns about the figure who ‘reades awhile, but nothing buyes at all’, to quote Thomas Churchyard’s arch observation about these cautious readers.22 The furniture and layout of some bookshops seems to have encouraged such settled activity. On arrival you might ‘call for a stoole and a cushion’, according to Thomas Dekker. Once installed, it was possible to spend ‘a whole afternoon sometimes, in a book-​sellers shop, reading’, as a character in one of Ben Jonson’s plays explains. ‘Haue you not some pretie little booke to read in the chimnie corner?’ asks another customer of a bookseller in 1593, in a question that is careless of the actual title as long as the prime reading spot in this bookshop is secured.23 The fact that reading took place within bookshops (and at the outlying bookselling sheds I discuss below, as Fig. 21.7 shows) should change how we think of the history of reading. For one thing, as Philip Tromans has recently shown, this mode of reading influenced the material form of the book: writers increasingly added paratextual material that was designed to be read in shops and to solicit a purchase.24 Reading a book that had not yet been bought also required its own tactics and strategies, including quieter versions of activities we have come to think of as common to Renaissance reading but which also—​bookshops make us realize—​relied on ownership: bookshop readers might score the margin with a fingernail rather than a pen, as the example below describes. Retail spaces presumably also fostered a particular mood of reading, one shaped by the constant question of whether or not to buy the volume at hand, and which served as a condition of possibility for later and more leisurely scrutiny. Not everyone in a bookshop was as immersed as they might first appear. In the anonymous academic drama The returne from Parnassus (1606), the character Page pours scorn on his master Amoretto, who arrives in a Paul’s Churchyard bookshop and asks for ‘bookes in spanish and Italian’ before revealing his ignorance of these languages by turning ‘the wrong ende of the booke vpward’ when he pretends to read. Amoretto will, Page gleefully reports, first looke on the title and wrinckle his brow, next make as though he read the first page and bites a lip, then with his naile score the margent as though there were some notable conceit, and lastly when he thinkes hee hath gulld the standers by sufficiently, throwes the booke away in a rage, swearing that he could neuer finde bookes of a true printe since he was last in Ioadna, enquire after the next marte, and so departs.25

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    395 Was Amoretto ever going to buy this book that he marks and throws around? Or does his freedom to use the titles in this way depend on a looser, credit-​based social contract? Either way, his performance of cultural fluency falls apart at its climax. Tossing away his book ‘in a rage’, Amoretto criticizes the poor quality of English books and compares them to those of a ‘true printe’ sold in ‘Ioadna’. He affects the disparagement of someone used to a higher standard of Continental printing but mistakes the name of the city: by ‘Ioadna’ he probably means Padua, a well-​known centre of the European book trade. Several similar vignettes of readers from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries satirize the pretentious bookshop customer. But it was not only foolish readers who lingered in bookshops. Samuel Pepys, for one, could quite happily ‘sit two or three hours’ in a bookshop, ‘calling for twenty books’ and leafing through his choices. ‘I could not tell’, Pepys wrote on this occasion, ‘whether to lay out my money for books of pleasure, as plays’, or opt for something more substantial. Unlike Amoretto, Pepys eventually bought something: a copy of Thomas Fuller’s huge biographical dictionary, The history of the worthies of England (1662).26 Customers came to read but they also came to talk. Bookshops were popular social forums that were used for catching up on news and gossip. Having ‘spyed a friend in a Stationer’s Shop’ as he ‘passed by Pauls Churchyard’, one anonymous author of 1647 decided to venture in to hear ‘some briefe discourse of the times’ and catch up on the ‘late newes out of Italy’. Pepys frequently met friends at the shops of his various London booksellers, where he also occasionally had less welcome encounters. It was ‘at my bookseller’s in Paul’s Church-​yard’ on Christmas Eve 1662 that Pepys bumped into a professional rival with whom he had quarrelled: ‘I must confess,’ reflected Pepys later that evening, ‘I did not do altogether like a friend.’ Neither was the use of bookshops as social spaces limited to London. In John Aubrey’s recollection of early seventeenth-​ century Oxford, it was the fashion ‘to goe every satterday night’ to ‘Joseph Barnes shop the bookeseller’, where ‘the Newes was brought from London etc’.27 In Aubrey’s telling, the evening conversation of the bookshop crowd was the undoing of ‘one Slymaker’, a fellow of Trinity College, a constant irritant because of his habit of ‘hearkning to peoples whisperings and overlooking their letters’. Aware of this, one group of customers planted a false rumour to ridicule Slymaker when he inevitably collected and then later preached the absurd story in public. Slymaker could peer at other people’s letters because bookshops were sometimes used as collection points for post. ‘If you write,’ instructed the letter-​writer John Chamberlain in 1602, ‘direct your letters to Nortons’ (where Norton was the Paul’s Churchyard bookseller John Norton 1). The addresses found on early modern letters quite commonly include a bookseller as well as the letter’s actual recipient: ‘Leave this wth mr Sheldon at mr Prices shop at ye golden kay in St Paules church yard’, for example, or ‘for mr John Covel at mr James Cook at the Seven Starres in St pauls’.28 In such superscriptions bookshops like the Seven Stars or the Golden Key are transformed into waypoints, somewhere that post riders could easily find (and perhaps stay in, bearing in mind the beds discussed above), implicating bookshops in networks of exchange and correspondence. The stationers who ran bookshops most properly belonged to the merchant class, which helps to

396   Ben Higgins explain why they trafficked not only in letters but also in other kinds of commodities: in 1614 Chamberlain gratefully acknowledged the ‘boxe of seeds and plomstones’ sent from a friend in Venice to ‘Master Blunt in Pouleschurchyard’. The bookseller Edward Blount then arranged for a sailor to deliver the box to Chamberlain’s brother; the sailor who carried the package ‘would not be persuaded’, Chamberlain noted with amusement, ‘but there was matter of great value in yt, as pearles or diamonds at least’.29 Bookshops were also a natural home for conversation about texts. It is partly for this reason that Gary Taylor describes the Elizabethan and Jacobean bookshop as a forerunner of the coffee shop and of Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the ‘public sphere’: for Taylor, ‘unregulated literary and political criticism’ began in Paul’s Churchyard. Dekker wrote in 1606 of readers who ‘stand somtimes at a Stationers stal’, peering at new titles and ‘mewing away’ with sour faces like ‘Mules champing vpon Thistles’ as they offered a grudging critique of the books they held. Thomas Lodge mocked the man who ‘sits dailie’ in the bookshop, ‘Iibing and flearing ouer euery pamphlet’ (to ‘fleer’ is to offer a sneering kind of criticism).30 The Shakespearean comic actor and author Robert Armin recognized the value of bookshop opinion in 1600 when he imagined himself walking ‘from Stationers shop to Stationers shop, to see what entertainement my Booke hath’. The uniquely crowded urban environment of Paul’s Churchyard allowed Armin to do something that was impossible outside of London: by asking after his work in many different bookshops he could gather a wider view of his book’s reception. The author Robert Croft similarly saw bookshops as a forum of public opinion when in 1663 he noted that ‘great Endeavours are Used, to Blast and Discredit’ a recent political pamphlet: ‘Every Stationer’s Shop being Buzz’d with Arguments against the Thing’.31 In Croft’s telling, this tide of critique was orchestrated ‘out of Project, and Designe’ by those who wanted to suppress the pamphlet and who used bookshops as a propaganda base for malicious rumours. To push this idea of bookshop as crucible for debate and literary criticism a little further, we could think of the shop itself—​its layout and spaces—​as another participant in such conversation. Just as we think of layout, or mise-​en-​page, as a meaningful variable in how we read print, so too was the bookshop shaped by a kind of mise-​en-​scène that influenced how a book was encountered. If the stall board and the front of the shop were associated with novelty and with a book’s vendible appeal, then titles that had lost their lustre were destined for spaces that were not so prominent. The interior arrangement of bookshops no doubt varied a great deal, but many had both a front area and a region towards the back. The bookshop run by the London stationer William Norton (d. 1593) included the shop proper, with a bookcase ‘in the entrye’ to showcase ‘bounde bookes’, but also a ‘Darke parlor behinde the shoppe’. Samuel Gellibrand (d. 1676) had both a ‘fore-​shopp’ and a ‘back shoppe’; Edward Thomas (d. 1682), who ran a bookshop in Little Britain, was another stationer whose space was organized into a ‘fore shop’ and a ‘Back shopp’.32 The inventory of Thomas’s shop notes that books were kept in both the front and back areas, but whereas the front section included ever-​reliable sellers like Bibles and prayers books as well as ‘several folio books quartos and octavos’, the back part’s contents were listed as ‘several bundles of old books some bound and some

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    397 not’. Perhaps this suggests that the ‘Back shop’ was primarily a stockroom, rather than a space that was open to customers, but the casual tone of that latter entry, which neglects format but emphasizes the age of the books, invites us to wonder if these books, tidied away into the ‘Back shopp’, were somehow of less interest or value. In other words, simply moving a title around a bookshop may have informed the way the book was encountered. The excitement of the stall board solicited a different kind of engagement than the muted ‘Back shopp’; stepping through the door of Norton’s bookshop and noticing one of the ‘bounde bookes’ displayed on the bookcase ‘in the entrye’ seems a different thing from a book that was ‘casuallie happened vpon’ as Richard Cosins put it in 1593, when ‘rifeling amongst other olde bookes’ that had been ‘cast aside in some Stationers shoppe’. It was while rummaging in a similar abandoned corner of ‘a Booksellers shop’ that the author William Vaughan found, to his surprise, ‘the Writings of the learned [Heinrich] Bullinger, one of the chiefe Pillars of our Reformed Religion’ being ‘sold for wast Paper, euen for two pence a quire’.33 But the darker corners of a bookshop were not only reserved for old books. In a 1664 trial over the sale of a printed libel, the judge knew that some bookshops used their more private spaces for contentious works: ‘Where was this Book kept?’, asked the judge of a bookshop’s apprentice, ‘Publickly, as other Books, or in other Roomes?’ The apprentice replied that copies of the book had been displayed ‘In the Shop’; that they were ‘Not so Publick as other Books, but publick enough’. Had copies been allowed to ‘lie open upon your Stalls’, the judge asked? ‘No, my Lord,’ the apprentice replied, explaining there had been ‘some Direction to that end’ from the bookseller.34 If the different spaces of a bookshop could make different claims on a customer’s attention, then the person in control of this environment was the bookseller. Recent work has sought to rebalance our sense that this presiding figure—​and more broadly the bookshop environment—​was uniquely male. Alan B. Farmer lists thirty-​one female booksellers who worked in the Stationers’ Company between 1540 and 1640 (not to mention the women Farmer classifies as printers or publishers).35 And other sources record the presence of women in bookshops in different ways. ‘Be thou my books intelligencer’, urged Ben Jonson to his bookseller, asking him to listen to the conversation of customers and to ‘note | What each man sayes of it, and of what coat | His judgement is’.36 At the same time, the bookseller’s wife is also implicated in the sociality and commerce of this bookshop. Jonson divides the customers into different types: those who are ‘wise, and praise’ the book; those who are foolish and ‘can give no Bayes’, (meaning they are unable to recognize poetic merit or award a figurative laurel wreath); and finally those whose wit reaches ‘no higher, but to spring | Thy Wife a fit of laughter’. Depending on how we read this poem, we might think it displays a kind of misogynistic scorn towards bookwomen here, because socializing or flirting with the bookseller’s wife seems to be what the witless customer does (the poem ends by inviting the bookseller to ‘let them kisse thy Wife’). But perhaps the wife deserves admiration for tolerating the most tedious of all the bookshop’s clientele: the buyer who may not even be interested in books but needs someone to laugh at his jokes. In Jonson’s telling, the day-​to-​day labour of bookshop customer service is shared between the bookseller and his wife.

398   Ben Higgins

Fig. 21.6  The interior of a Dutch bookshop, c.1607–​78, including a binder at work on the left. Detail of RP-​T-​1884-​A-​290, image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

To buy a book was also to complete its making. Customers could individuate the books they bought in various ways, paying for a title to be coloured, for example, or asking for a large-​paper copy if one was available. And books were often sold in the form of loose printed sheets, or ‘quires’, meaning that customers could choose their binding (Fig. 21.6 shows a binder at work inside a Dutch bookshop from the mid-​seventeenth century). Flimsier texts were typically bound swiftly and cheaply by being wrapped in a paper or vellum cover and stab-​stitched with thread along the spine; for longer books, readers could opt for something more substantial in sheep or calf leather and boards, perhaps with decoration. Bookshops also kept ready-​bound stock alongside books in quires, but the common practice of readers arranging their own bindings has interpretative implications. Readers could, and for reasons of cost frequently did, bind several titles together to create Sammelbände (volumes that contained multiple titles), creating unique contexts of meaning. Books were clearly the main commodity of the bookshop, and in some cases they could be loaned as well as bought. The compiler of an Oxford verse miscellany now in the Houghton Library noted the source of his text on one page: ‘Thease verses I borroed to write out of John Sherly a booke seller in litle Brittaine. 28th March 1633.’37 But books were by no means the only things on sale. Manuscripts and other scribal services were sometimes offered, and the non-​bookish ‘wares in the Shopp’ of the London bookseller Edward Greene (d. 1669) included playing cards, pasteboard, quills, ‘pewter and leaden standishes [stands for ink and pens]’, wax, vellum, parchment, and ink.38 The range of stock held in the bookshop of Ralph Delves in St Dunstan-​in-​the-​West (d. 1675) would

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    399 rival the lengthy list of merchandise offered two hundred years later by Mr Snagsby, the ghoulish law-​stationer of Bleak House. Delves sold ready-​printed indentures (both ‘text and untext’, probably meaning some had spaces for names to be supplied), books of blank paper (‘ruled and unruled’), ‘patent cases’, ‘black & white boxes’, ‘sandboxes and barrells’, ‘soft and hard wax wafers’, inkhorns, pencils, pens, penknives, glue, packthread (a strong twine), rulers, money bags, and blank bonds. One bookseller’s bill from 1641 (probably not representative, in that it lists books and stationery bought for the young princes, the future Charles II and James II) catalogues sleeve silk, perfumed wax, and ebony rulers alongside books by Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, all of which were supplied from the London bookshop of Henry Seile.39 Authors sometimes used bookshops to offer services related to their work. So in 1614 the shipbuilder Tobias Gentleman could be consulted for ‘directions, and plaine proiections, and Geometricall demonstrations’ at the bookshop of his publisher: ‘M. Nathaniell Butters, a Stationers Shop’ in Paul’s Churchyard. The recipe writer Hannah Woolley gives us valuable evidence of women readers visiting bookshops in her book The Ladies Directory (1662), which includes a preface to ‘all LADIES & GENTLEWOMEN’ that invites readers to consult Woolley herself ‘where you find these Books are to be sold’. The author of a book of musical instruction could ‘bee spoken with’ in 1661 ‘(for Satisfaction or Instruction) vpon Tuesdays and Thursdaies’, between 10am and 12noon, in the Paul’s Churchyard bookshop of Joseph Cranford.40 By offering encounters that connected readers with authors, the bookshop could bridge the worlds of reception and production. This two-​way flow of information could be valuable for authors, as well as readers: Peter Lindenbaum suggests that it was customer feedback to the bookseller Samuel Simmons that prompted John Milton to reshape Paradise Lost in 1668, adding arguments and a statement about the verse.41 Bookshops also advertised a surprising array of goods that were less clearly linked to the technologies of writing. As far back as 1563, the London bookseller James Rowbothum can be found advertising the board (‘as it were two chessebordes ioyned together’) and forty-​eight pieces needed to play the ‘Philosophers game’. To the book that explained how the game worked was added a short poem: All things belonging to this game for reason you may bye: At the booke shop vnder Bochurch, in Chepesyde redilye.42

The brief verse urges the reader to buy the materials on which the book relies. Upselling notes like this were not particularly rare. Thus John Blagrave’s Astrolabium Uranicum Generale (1596), a guide on how to use an astrolabe, advertised that ‘these Instruments and their supplements’ could be bought from the bookshop of its publisher: ‘William Matts Stationer, at the signe of the Plough’. Amid the preliminary leaves of John Murrell’s Daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen (1621), a duodecimo cookery book packed with recipes, one page is given over to an advert stating that those ‘desirous of any of

400   Ben Higgins the Moulds mentioned in the Booke’ could find them at the bookshop of ‘Thomas Dewe in St Dunstons Church-​yarde’. A little later, John Woodall’s brief pamphlet The Cure of the Plague (1640) advertised an antidote to plague that also cured fevers and any general ague. Doses of the medicine were ‘made ready in a Box’ and ‘sold at the Shop of Nicholas Bourne, Stationer, at the South Entrance of the Royal Exchange’.43 Cures for rickets, scurvy, stomach ache, and shortness of breath were all touted for sale from bookshops with increasing frequency over the seventeenth century, usually advertised by the pamphlet that championed the cure.44 Examples like those given here form what we could think of as a particular category of book: one in which the text itself was only half the product, where reading was only part of the means of consumption, and where the bookshop was only partly a bookshop. What do we gain by realizing that early modern print sat comfortably alongside—​ at times even relied upon—​other forms of material culture? Perhaps such titles remind us that at times the printed book was a looser entity than we might think; a book that is fulfilled through its relationship with an entirely different category of thing seems only precariously itself, and asks us to develop a practice of reading that cuts across the categories of conventional literary study. To lift such a book out of its material context and read it on its own terms is something of a challenge: we are asking it to be interesting without the apparatus on which it relied. And what became of books like this for early modern readers once the board game had been learned or the remedy bought? Hollowed out of purpose, such books take on a new and perhaps already-​archival status. Text, too, emerges as a more slippery or fungible commodity than we might assume. Not confined to the page, text in a bookshop was also found on globes, on engraved instruments and pen cases. What Tiffany Stern has diagnosed as a rift in our cataloguing practices and also our habits of thought between text that is on paper and ‘text that is on, or that is, a thing’, is exposed by revisiting the appealingly cluttered environment of the bookshop (see Fig. 21.6).45

Around This chapter has focused on perhaps the most prominent kind of early modern bookshop: a permanent and substantial structure given over to retail. But ranged around these shops was an array of other forms of retail that, if not bookshops, were still places from which books were sold. In Paul’s Churchyard and beyond, stationers built smaller booths or sheds onto supporting walls and wedged them into gaps and crevices in the urban landscape. Books were also sold from trestle tables in open air forums like Moorfields and at markets, fairs, and pageants, both in London and elsewhere. Slighter still than such booths or shop boards were the various itinerant figures who sold printed matter of many different kinds and whose numbers grew at different rates over this period: the chapmen and pedlars; the ballad-​women and colporteurs; the ‘trotting Mercuries, and bawling Hawkers’ who moved through the city and carried books out into the provinces (Figs. 21.7 and 21.8).46

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    401

Fig. 21.7  Two street bookstalls in Whitehall, 1724, including one with a customer reading beneath the awning. Detail of Gough Maps 45, 92a. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

These alternative elements of book retail extended the distribution networks of the book trade in vital ways. All these figures relied on publishers and on bookshops for their stock, though only in rare cases is there evidence that tells us how bookshops and their booksellers related to fairs or pedlars. For some authors, the prospect of their book escaping the bookshop proper and being sold instead at a fair or by a hawker represented a kind of failure. In Henry Parrot’s poem ‘Ad Bibliopolam’ (‘To the Bookseller’, 1615), the writer hopes to save his book from various different sales tactics. In desperation he asks that his book not be with your Ballads mixt, Next, not at Play-​houses, mongst Pippins solde: Then that on Pasts, by th’ Eares it stand not fixt, For euery dull-​Mechanicke to beholde. Last, that it come not brought in Pedlers packs, To common Fayres, of Countrey, Towne, or Cittie: Solde at a Booth mongst Pinnes and Almanacks; Yet on thy hands to lye, thoult’ say tw’er pittie; Let it be rather for Tobacco rent[.]‌47

Driving Parrot’s concerns in these lines is a kind of status anxiety about the fate of his book. The various places from which his book may be sold—​and the things it may be

402   Ben Higgins

Fig. 21.8  A probable bookstall in Stocks Market beside Cornhill, 1738. Detail of Gough Maps 19, 16a. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

sold alongside—​give shape to his fears and allow him both to conjure and recoil from the imagined audiences that he associates with those increasingly outlying places and things. He hopes first that the book will not be shuffled in with ballads that might mark his own publication as similarly cheap, low-​status, and ephemeral; then he worries that his book might escape the shop itself and be sold from a booth or by a playhouse hawker ‘mongst Pippins’ (a pippin is an apple, or sometimes a seed or grape). He hopes, like Ben Jonson, that his book will not be posted up for all to see; and finally he pleads for his book not to be given to a pedlar, in which case it may end up being sold at ‘common Fayres’, or in a booth ‘mongst Pinnes and Almanacks’. What does this poem tell us about bookshops? The shop is both central, through the presiding figure of the bookseller to whom the poem is addressed, and marginal, in that the poem looks out into the city and beyond. Parrot seems to understand these alternative points of sale through their difference to and distance from the bookshop. The reason for this imaginary medley of possible sales techniques, Parrot tells us, is the bookseller’s concern that the book may ‘lye’ on his hands without selling; it is to prevent this ‘pittie’ that various other forms of retail are employed. In other words, for Parrot, the more vigorously a book was pushed out of the bookshop and into the playhouse or the pedlar’s pack, the less desirable or appealing it becomes; the velocity of its departure becomes a record of its failure. In that sense the lines contain a conventional writerly

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    403 disdain for overt sales techniques, but the crucial point is that the dispersed topography of book retail supplies the imaginative landscape through which Parrot realizes his disdain. As he shudders through this repertoire of alternative bookselling practices, Parrot gives us a kind of gloomy psychogeography of retail, one in which the book that did not immediately ‘allure’ when placed at the front of the bookshop on the stationer’s stall board seems to spiral downwards towards the pedlar’s pack, jettisoning status and interest as it merges with an increasingly miscellaneous jumble of material goods. Parrot’s poem thus suggests the centrality of the bookshop as an idealized retail space for some authors, and drives home the idea that the where of bookselling influenced the writerly imagination. The reality of how books arrived at different points of sale, and what this might say about their age and status, was far more complicated and idiosyncratic than Parrot’s poem would suggest. Nevertheless, like the stall board, the trope of the pedlar’s pack became a powerful focus for writerly fears. In wondering whether he should send his pamphlet ‘to the Printer or to the pedler’, John Lyly felt in 1578 that his writing was ‘to good for the packe’; taking the opposite view, Robert Greene argued in 1583 that some books are ‘more meete for the Pedler then the Printer’.48 The important point for this chapter is that, just as the stall board of a bookshop came to embody certain ideas about the status and relevancy of the titles it displayed, so too could these alternative distribution points or contact zones between readers and books convey their own cultural associations. The lively mobility of early modern print—​the fact that books travelled between these various different points of sale—​means that the same title could be encountered in a variety of commercial contexts, each of which could begin to calibrate a reader’s expectations about the book they found.

Beyond This chapter ends with a brief glance at bookshops beyond London. Some of the earliest and most detailed evidence for the sale of printed books relates to regional shops. The ledger or daybook of the Oxford bookseller John Thorne survives in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Thorne lists the title and price of each book that he sold from his shop opposite the university church on High Street throughout 1520. The book shows how many sales Thorne made each day and reveals the range of titles read by customers at this time: entries for ballads and almanacs appear regularly alongside more learned books suited to the university curriculum. Scraps of a similar ledger kept by the Cambridge bookseller Garret Godfrey between 1527 and 1533 were found in the late twentieth century and its patchier entries record the names of Godfrey’s customers together with the titles they bought.49 The rich account these daybooks provide of bookshop traffic is not representative of our wider knowledge about the regional trade. In general, evidence about these bookshops—​which were rare throughout this period—​is difficult to find. Perhaps the

404   Ben Higgins most helpful resources are the stocklists that occasionally survive in probate records from this period. These lists supply focused snapshots of bookshops in Hull, Norwich, Exeter, and Shrewsbury among other towns, and if one of their limitations is that they only record unsold books (perhaps giving us a confused sense of what was popular in these shops), they nevertheless offer compelling insight into what could be found on the shelves of these shops at one moment in time. The bookshop run by Neville Mores in York in the early sixteenth century, for example, contained seventy-​one different titles when it was catalogued in 1538, most of which were represented by just a single copy. Religion, law, and schoolbooks dominated this shop: most of the books were in Latin, and most were imported from the Continent. Mores’s bookshop probably relied on York Minster for much of its custom and his inventory shows that he kept binding equipment and a few prints but little else other than printed books. A different kind of ‘bookshop’ was that run by the tradesman James Backhouse in the small Cumbrian market town of Kirkby Lonsdale till 1578. Here just twenty-​seven different titles—​mostly schoolbooks—​were stocked alongside a range of other material goods such as thread and fabrics, suggesting that in some regions the book was less a distinct category of thing than one of a diffuse class of useful commodities found in the general stores of merchants like Backhouse. A similar kind of shop was kept by Roger Sankey in a Lancashire market town till 1613; Sankey stocked fabrics, buttons, and gunpowder alongside a small selection of twelve different titles, again mostly schoolbooks.50 At the other end of the scale was the bookshop kept by the bookseller John Foster in York till 1616. Slightly more than 1,000 titles were stocked in Foster’s shop, around half of which were English (the rest being Latin, Greek, French, and Hebrew). Again, schoolbooks, Bibles, and prayer books account for most of Foster’s stock, though he also sold some titles of poetry, music, and drama. And if the evidence from many regional bookshops suggests they only rarely stocked new titles, preferring instead to keep reliable sellers that were often at least a few years old, Foster’s inventory supplies a counter-​example: he had a copy of Ben Jonson’s Workes for sale in the same year the volume was published.51 It is difficult to get a precise sense of how common these bookshops were across England. Beyond the capital it was probably only in Oxford and Cambridge—​where books were sold ‘on a larger scale than anywhere else outside London’—​that customers could browse between several different shops, though there were important book-​ trade outposts in York (from the late fifteenth century), Norwich, Exeter, and Chester (from the mid-​sixteenth).52 Using the British Book Trade Index to search for booksellers at work in England but outside London between 1550 and 1600 returns the following results by region:

Oxford: Cambridge: Norwich: Leicester: York:

32 25 13 8 7

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    405

Exeter: Ipswich: Shrewsbury: Chester: Ludlow: Newcastle:

4 3 3 2 2 2

Astbury, Berwick-​ upon-​ Tweed, Canterbury, Hereford, Lichfield, Northampton, Salisbury, and Taunton all had one active bookseller during this period.53 The patchy map of booksellers emerging from this data is unlikely to reflect the actual numbers of bookshops in these towns, but it offers one summary of what we currently know of how one category of book retail was dispersed in the later sixteenth century. The growth of the book trade over the seventeenth century, and particularly after the Restoration, no doubt brought more bookshops to regional towns, but even by the end of the period covered here such bookshops were probably still uncommon. In James Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, the biographer describes provincial bookshops as being ‘very rare’ at the start of the eighteenth century: ‘there was not one even in Birmingham’, Boswell wrote, where Johnson’s father, the bookseller Michael Johnson, ‘used to open a shop every market-​day’.54 How might relying on a regional bookshop have shaped reading habits? For one thing, choice was severely limited. Most regional bookshops throughout this period stocked books that catered specifically for the clergy or for local schoolmasters; they seem only rarely to have stocked a wider range. Those who lived far from a bookshop were even more limited: ‘we in the Country’, wrote John Hinckley in a letter to an Oxford friend in 1680, ‘are forc’t to take up with Pamphlets in our Mother-​tongue; such as the Pedlars furnish us with, at our Doors.’55 When weightier books were available, either ‘want of Money’ or ‘want of Skill to understand them’ still presented problems. Marooned away from one of the bookshops that Comenius described, with its catalogue, shelves, desk, and ‘multitude of Books’, Hinckley was stuck with what English pamphlets the pedlar could carry. Just occasionally, though, regional bookshops may have been ahead of their London counterparts for reasons explained by the censor Sir Roger L’Estrange in 1682. ‘I am more and more confirmed’, wrote L’Estrange, that the ‘certain way of detecting and tracing’ printed libels ‘must begin from the country’. When a controversial pamphlet was printed, L’Estrange pointed out, London stationers would at least by the end of the seventeenth century ‘furnish the Kingdom up and down with an impression or two’ before they offered any for sale in the capital.56 For readers, then, perhaps regional bookshops offered an experience of print culture that veered between extremes: at one end might be the occasional incendiary title that was too dangerous to be offered for open sale in London; at the other was the staidly familiar, the textbooks and prayer books. It seems likely that regional readers missed out on much of the textual traffic that fell between these two loose poles, together with a great deal of the conversation, debate, and intrigue that characterized the bookshops Comenius had in mind.

406   Ben Higgins

Acknowledgements Thanks to Adam Smyth, Alice Leonard, and Kirk Melnikoff for their helpful comments on drafts.

Notes 1. Johann Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1659, Wing C5523), O1r. This chapter focuses on some typical features of English bookshops that remained relatively stable from c.1550 to 1700 but does not offer a chronological survey. Kirk Melnikoff ’s forthcoming project Bookselling in Early Modern England will form an important new intervention in this field. 2. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. 3. Andrew Gordon, ‘ “If my sign could speak”: The Signboard and the Visual Culture of Early Modern London’, Early Theatre, 8/​1 (2005), 35–​51, at 35. 4. Ambrose Heal, ‘17th-​Century Booksellers’ and Stationers’ Trade-​Cards’, Alphabet and Image, 8 (1948), 51–​62. 5. John Taylor, The pennyles pilgrimage (1618, STC 23784), B1r–​v. 6. No-​body, and some-​body (1606, STC 18597), A2r. 7. No-​body, and some-​body, C2r, I3r. 8. Peter Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990), 39–​45. 9. The National Archives, Kew (TNA), PROB 4/​12006. 10. TNA PROB 4/​8224. See also Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-​Century England (London: Methuen, 1981), 92–​101. 11. TNA PROB 4/​8319. 12. TNA PROB 4/​9152; PROB 4/​529. 13. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V. b. 187, 5v. 14. The lamentable and true tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent (1592, STC 733), D1v. 15. ‘To My Booke-​seller’, in The workes of Beniamin Ionson (1616, STC 14752), 3Tv; The Poems of Horace (1666, Wing H2781), 2A3r; John Dee’s Library Catalogue, ed. Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990), 113 (M10). 16. John Stephens, Essayes and characters (1615, STC 23250), Q1v; Bartholomew Lane, A modest vindication of the hermite (1683, Wing L329), D2r. 17. Thomas Churchyard, A Light Bondell (1580, STC 5240), *3r; Thomas Dekker, 1603. The Wonderfull Yeare (1603, STC 6535), A3v. 18. Richard West, Wits A.B.C. (1608, STC 25262), A4r; Henry Parrot, Laquei ridiculosi: or Springes for vvoodcocks (1613, STC 19332), F4v. 19. Richard Parr, The judges charge (1658, Wing P547), A3v; Nathaniel Johnston, The excellency of monarchical government (1686, Wing J877), 3H1v. 20. The Impartial Protestant Mercury, 75 (10 Jan. 1682). See also Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 50–​62. 21. François Citois, A true and admirable historie (1603, STC 5326), G3r. 22. Thomas Churchyard, The mirror of man, and manners of men (1594, STC 5242), A2v.

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    407 23. Thomas Dekker, The pleasant comodie of patient Grisill (1603, STC 6518), C1r; Ben Jonson, The comical satyre of every man out of his humor (1600, STC 14768), H1r; John Eliot, Ortho-​ epia Gallica (1593, STC 7574), I3r. 24. Philip Tromans, ‘The Business of Browsing in Early Modern English Bookshops’, in Shanti Graheli (ed.), Buying and Selling: The Business of Books in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 111–​135. 25. The returne from Pernassus (1606, STC 19310), E4r, quoted in Tromans, ‘The Business of Browsing’, 113–​114. 26. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (London: HarperCollins, 1971), iv: 1663, 410. 27. Anon., Looke About You (1647, Wing L3008) B2r; Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, iii: 1662, 291; John Aubrey, Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers, ed. Kate Bennett, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), i. 182. 28. John Chamberlain, Letters Written by John Chamberlain During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Sarah Williams (London: Camden Society, 1861), 147 (see also 113); BL Lansdowne MS 841, 14v, 26v. 29. John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols, ed. Norman McClure (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939), i. 544. 30. Gary Taylor, ‘Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds.), From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 55–​72, at 57; Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes (1606, STC 6522), [π]1r; Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie (1596, STC 16677), C1r. 31. Robert Armin, Quips vpon questions (1600, STC 22573), A2v; Robert Croft, The Plea . . . (1663, Wing C6980), B1r–​v. 32. John Barnard, ‘The Inventory of William Norton (1527–​1593), Master of The Stationers’ Company’, The Library, 7th ser., 16/​2 (2015), 179–​194, at 193 and 190; TNA Prob 4/​9152; Giles Mandelbrote, ‘Workplaces and Living Spaces: London Book Trade Inventories of the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century (London: British Library, 2003), 21–​44 at 29. 33. Richard Cosin, An apologie for svndrie proceedings (1593, STC 5822), 2O3r; William Vaughan, The golden fleece (1626, STC 24609), C3v–​4r. 34. An exact narrative of the tryal (1664, Wing E3668), G1r. 35. Alan B. Farmer, ‘Widow Publishers in London, 1540–​1640’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 47–​73. 36. Ben Jonson, ‘Epigram, to my Book-​seller’, from Underwood, in The workes of Benjamin Jonson (1640 [i.e. 1641], STC 14754), 2H1v. 37. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng 686, 90r. 38. TNA PROB 4/​1291. 39. TNA PROB 4/​8319; Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d.95. 40. Tobias Gentleman, Englands way to win wealth (1614, STC 11745), G3v; Hannah Woolley, The Ladies Directory (1662, Wing W3281), A3v–​4r (thanks to Adam Smyth for this reference); The Hartlib Papers, www.dhi.ac.uk/​hart​lib, 8/​66A. 41. Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Rematerializing Milton’, Publishing History, 41 (1997), 5–​22, at 14. 42. Ralph Lever, The most noble, auncient, and learned playe (1563, STC 15542a), A2r, A7v.

408   Ben Higgins 43. John Blagrave, Astrolabium (1596, STC 3117), A3r; John Murrell, A delightfull daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen (1621, STC 18302), A7r; John Woodall, The cure of the plague (1640, STC 25961), A2r. 44. John Alden, ‘Pills and Publishing: Some Notes on the English Book Trade, 1660–​1715’, The Library, 5th ser., 7/​1 (1952), 21–​30. 45. Tiffany Stern, ‘Trencher Poetry: Non-​Paper Literature, How it Means, and Why it’s Lost’, English Literary Renaissance, 50/​1 (2020), 153–​160 at 159. 46. The downefall of temporizing poets (1641, Wing D2088), A1r. On itinerant book retail see Spufford, Small Books, 111–​228; Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 135–​173. 47. Henry Parrot, The Mastive (1615, STC 19333), A4v. 48. John Lyly, Euphues (1578, STC 17051), A4r; Robert Greene, Mamillia (1583, STC 12269), A3r. 49. Falconer Madan, ‘The Daily Ledger of John Dorne, 1520’, Collectanea, 1st ser. (1885), 71–​ 177; Elizabeth Leedham-​Green, D. E. Rhodes, and F. H. Stubbings (eds.), Garrett Godfrey’s Accounts: c. 1527–​1533 (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1992). See also Rachel Stenner’s chapter in this volume. 50. Jennifer Winters, ‘The English Provincial Book Trade: Bookseller Stock-​Lists, c.1520–​ 1640’, 2 vols., doctoral thesis, University of St Andrews, 2012, 28–​83. 51. John Barnard and Maureen Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), with Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​ 1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 665–​686, 678. 52. Barnard and Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, 668. For case studies of the book trade in Oxford, York, and Newcastle, see Rachel Stenner in this volume. 53. British Book Trade Index: http://​bbti.bodle​ian.ox.ac.uk/​. Eighteen duplicate records returned by this search have been removed. 54. James Boswell, The life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1791), 8. 55. John Hinckley, Fasciculus literarum (1680, Wing H2046), 2B7r. 56. Barnard and Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, 682.

Select Bibliography Blayney, Peter, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990). Hentschell, Roze, St Paul’s Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Spatial Practices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Mandelbrote, Giles, ‘From the Warehouse to the Counting-​House: Booksellers and Bookshops in Late 17th-​Century London’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the 16th to the 20th Century (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1995), 49–​84. Mandelbrote, Giles, ‘Workplaces and Living Spaces: London Book Trade Inventories of the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century (London: The British Library, 2003), 21–​44. Melnikoff, Kirk, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

‘The Book-sellars Shop’    409 Pettegree, Andrew, and Weduwen, Arthur der, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Smith, Helen, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Taylor, Gary, ‘Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds.), From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 55–​72. Tromans, Philip, ‘The Business of Browsing in Early Modern English Bookshops’, in Shanti Graheli (ed.), Buying and Selling: The Business of Books in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 111–​135. Wayne, Valerie (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

CHAPTER 22

Internationa l i sm a nd t he English B o ok T ra de Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree

The invention of printing impacted on the constituent parts of the European book world in very different ways. The core of production of the new printed books could be found in the densely populated lands of Germany, the Low Countries, and northern France, crossing the Alps to embrace the rich states of northern Italy. Together these four markets were responsible for almost 90 per cent of the books published in the first fifty years of print. Altogether, more than two hundred locations would experience the novelty of a local printing press before 1500, though in fact few of these would be sustained for more than a few years. Market saturation and problems in distribution dictated a concentration of production in the major commercial centres. Twelve cities between them were responsible for more than two-​thirds of the books issued in the incunabula age.1 Beyond this central core was an inner periphery comprising Spain and Portugal, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, Denmark and England. All of these places generated a considerable market directed mostly towards domestic consumption. Most of the books published in these countries were in vernacular languages; they played little role in supplying the international Latin trade. That is not to say that printers established in these countries could not make a good living, not least supplying their own dependent markets. Denmark, though of limited importance in the central European market, was the gateway to the Baltic. Spain had its captive market in its developing colonial Empire of the Americas. London flourished by supplying the English provincial trade, Scotland, Ireland, and ultimately Britain’s own American colonies. For the first 150 years of print, however, the London print industry remained small, largely through its own choice. By subcontracting control of the industry to a business cartel, the Stationers’ Company of London, the English Crown had chanced upon a regulatory solution that, though unique in Europe, satisfied all parties. The Crown found a compliant partner; the stationers, meanwhile, saw their own interests well served by colluding in a strict restriction in the number of presses permitted. This limited though

Internationalism and the English Book Trade    411 lucrative work could, without cut-​throat competition, provide a prosperous living for those charged with publishing the Crown’s proclamations, church orders, catechisms and prayer books, and an expanding inventory of devotional texts, sermons and religious polemic, as well as schoolbooks. Nor did booksellers have much cause for complaint. Already well networked to the major centres of book production from the manuscript age, booksellers naturally looked abroad for the supply of serious books of law and medicine required by their professional clients, as well as the standard works of Latin theology whose size would have taxed the print-​shop capacities and credit of London businesses. These were books that were generally only profitable if they were sold to customers throughout Europe. The free-​flowing trade between Paris and Augsburg, Venice and Antwerp, centred on the twice-​yearly Frankfurt Fair, and could easily be expanded to encompass sales to Spain (largely through Lyon) or from Antwerp and Paris to London, and thence to Oxford and Cambridge. Thus it was by no means unusual to find an English doctor or lawyer assembling a substantial professional library, in which almost every book would have been published abroad.2 In this respect, the English book trade was internationalized from the dawn of print, or before, since English collectors of the manuscript age also looked to Paris, Bruges, or Florence for their treasures. London and Oxford booksellers could carry an impressive stock of imported books: so much so, that when Fernand Colon, a collector with money to burn, visited London as the emissary of Emperor Charles V, he scooped up eighty books, only eight of which were published in London.3 Pastors and theologians, another crucial component of the market for books, also enhanced their collections with standard editions published in Paris, Basel, Geneva, and Wittenberg. What follows from this is that for at least the first 150 years of print, the internationalization of the British book trade was very much one-​way traffic. It was only occasionally that a text that originated in England found a widespread European audience (and then largely through Continental reprints). Two of these rare exceptions were the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (1521), published against the heresies of Martin Luther in the name of Henry VIII, and Bishop John Fisher’s influential text in the same cause.4 These texts were, of course, both in Latin, the international language of scholarship. There was, at this point, little international interest in collecting books in the English language. Those who were aware of English printing were also not overmuch impressed by the quality of the workmanship. It is notable that when the English scholarly world’s most distinguished visitor, Erasmus, had a text to put to the market, he endured the perils and discomfort of a Channel crossing to have it published in Paris, rather than entrust it to a London shop.5 These bleak circumstances bear recapitulation, if only to understand the extent of the transformation that occurred in the two centuries that followed, as Britain first established a foothold in the Continental market and then, in the eighteenth century, became one of the leading forces in the global book trade. This extraordinary efflorescence of British print and ideas can be traced to a series of linked transformations. The first of these was the emergence of England as a first-​rank European power. The Armada of 1588

412    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree was Spain’s tribute to England’s growing threat to its plans for European hegemony. Had it ended differently, England’s future would have been bleak; but with Spanish galleons littering the coast of Scotland and Ireland, England was a force to be reckoned with. From thenceforth England was a permanent presence in the political calculations of Continental states and Europe’s leading Protestant power (though its intermittent reluctance to lead would be a constant frustration to confessional allies). For this reason alone, English politics, England’s history and its print culture became more interesting to diplomats and scholars throughout Europe. A trickle of English books began to make its way into European libraries. Leading the way were books of Protestant theology. In the fifty years after the Armada, English divines would build a substantial following in other Protestant lands, especially in the collections of the other major new Protestant power, the Dutch Republic. English writers, led by William Perkins, Lewis Bayly, and William Ames, were valued abroad both in their original English editions and in a wave of Dutch translations, many the work of Dutch divines who had spent time ministering to Dutch exile communities in England.6 This respect for English theology and leadership, epitomized by the role accorded to James VI and I at the Synod of Dort of 1618, was the first time London publishers became truly aware of the wider potential of the European market. The second, related development, was the transformation of the book trade that resulted from the English Civil War. When Charles I left his capital in January 1642, he ceded to his opponents almost total control of the English publishing industry (Charles had been, rather against his interest, a stout upholder of the London Stationers’ monopoly). The events of the constitutional crisis led to a huge surge in published polemics, accounts of the proceedings of Parliament, serial news publications, and yet more polemic. The impact of this contentious domestic politics, fought out in the print shops of London and, rather belatedly, the Royalist print operations now sanctioned in Oxford and elsewhere, can be followed in the statistics of publication. We know of a mere 648 surviving editions printed in the British Isles in the incunabula age, against 8,419 publications in the Holy Roman Empire and 9,082 books from the Italian peninsula. This expanded to 4,630 editions by 1550 and a total of 15,453 editions by the end of the sixteenth century.7 This number almost quadrupled in the ensuing fifty years to 54,590 surviving editions by 1650. We see a similar rapid growth in other lands of the European periphery, the Iberian Peninsula, eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, mostly fuelled by domestic consumption, at a time when the traditional printing strongholds of Italy and Germany show a slackening in growth.8 Recent studies also take into account the number of printed sheets and formats next to the number of editions. They add to our knowledge and nuance the dimension of the printing industry by demonstrating the connection between the print output and political crisis.9 The events of the Civil War, especially the deposition of the King and the establishment of a British republic, were followed with close attention in continental Europe. The Royal and Parliamentarian causes were presented to European audiences in reprints and translations; the execution of the King provoked a horrified fascination throughout the Continent. Even in the Dutch Republic, where confessional solidarity might have

Internationalism and the English Book Trade    413 been expected to incline opinion-​formers to the Parliamentarian side, the King’s fate attracted considerable sympathy.10 This helps explain the somewhat techy relationship between Cromwell and the Dutch which led to the First Anglo-​Dutch War (1652–​4). Meanwhile, the London print industry continued to enjoy buoyant growth. Both Cromwell and subsequently the restored Charles II attempted to rein in this efflorescence of print, but with little success. This had much to do with one other fundamental transformation, the rise of London as a vast global marketplace. The increasing wealth brought by colonial and European trade had a profound impact on the book trade. A more robust English market allowed English publishers to take on larger and more ambitious projects. English traders began to think of the Continent as an export market rather than simply the source of superior books. Towns and cities throughout the British Isles developed their own book markets, together with their own printing presses—​a necessity as the ubiquitous newspapers became established beyond London. And London became an innovator, together with the Dutch Republic, in new business practices that would revolutionize the market. Chief amongst these were the use of newspapers for the advertisements of new titles, and the introduction of auctions for the sale of second-​hand and antiquarian books (for which, see H. R. Woudhuysen’s chapter in this volume).11 These virtuous innovations greatly increased the range of titles available to those hoping to build a book collection and acted as essential industry vehicles in helping publishers and booksellers follow the market. They also provide much of the evidence of interest in British books abroad, as British books moved from being occasional curiosities in Continental collections to something much more important. It is impossible in a piece of this length to chart the flow of English books to all of the European markets, so we concentrate here on two exemplary cases: the Dutch Republic, in the seventeenth century the established centre of the international trade, and the fast-​ growing Danish market, impelled by the new importance of Scandinavia and the Baltic region in European politics since the spectacular Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War. The final, and essential, step in this internationalization of the British book trade, was a new-​found respect for English scholarship. Following in the footsteps of English divines, we see a steep growth in interest in English philosophy (Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke), medical discovery (William Harvey), and natural science (Robert Boyle). In this respect the foundation of the Royal Society, and the international esteem for its proceedings, was a major milestone, but it also involved a new-​found respect for English typography.12 Many of these works were known from international reprints, often in Amsterdam, but London imprints also found a home in distinguished collections. We can follow this turbulent journey to typographic respectability in a trio of texts now in European collections, as the proverbial poor printing that the English themselves complained of gradually improved. Archeologus. In modum Glossarii (part 1), by Henry Spelman, printed in London by John Beale in 1626, of which we can find a copy in the Special Collections of the Library of the University of Amsterdam, contains numerous faults. The text is printed askew, the pagination is a mess, the paper is

414    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree very thin, and the ink unevenly distributed. It all looks a bit clumsy. Despite its flaws, the work can be found in four Dutch and six Danish private libraries of the seventeenth century.13 In 1663, the printer Henry Mortlock delivered another work which typographically fails to live up to its arresting title: Origines sacræ, or a national Account of the Grounds of Christian Faiths, as to the Truth and divine Authority of the Scriptures and the matters therein contained. Again, the quality of the paper is poor, the printing is askew, there are hardly any decorations, and a printer’s device is missing. Even the dedication to ‘Sr. Roger Burgoine, knight and baronet’ is clumsily executed. The final line reads ‘Your most hmmble and affectionate servant’, dated 5 June 1662 (Fig. 22.1).14 Inspired by competitors from abroad and the availability of better printing types, English printers began to pay more attention to the quality of their work. Improved financing and a reliance on talented typographers and illustrators contributed also to the quality of English printing. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia from 1665 shows some of these features. The printers, Martyn and Allestry, were granted a privilege by the Royal Society, which they displayed prominently in the preliminaries. With their names in red ink on the title page, they had the means and the skills to do a competent job. The text is printed accurately within wide margins. It has a frontispiece portrait of the author, the society’s emblem, dedications to both the King and to the society, a preface, decorative borders and capitals, leaves of plates throughout the work, and a table in the back to guide the reader.15 This was a work that was fit for any European scholarly library; it could rival the finest products of the presses of Paris, Frankfurt, or even Amsterdam. The printers of London were at the forefront of England’s rising reputation. Judging by the character of English books that entered Continental collections in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there were still relatively few books printed at the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge (see Jason Peacey in this volume). Consider the library of Benjamin Furly, an Englishman living in the Dutch Republic, which was auctioned in Rotterdam in 1714. In his collection of 4,500 books, 1,467 were printed in the British Isles and 993 in the Low Countries (141 in the southern Netherlands and 852 in the Dutch Republic). Most of the English books were printed in London and most of the Dutch ones in Amsterdam, but here the similarity ends. Oxford (32) and Cambridge (17) come second and third as English places of publication, but at a huge distance after London (1,404). The gap between Amsterdam (438) and other leading centres of Dutch typography, Rotterdam (120) and Leiden (75), is much smaller. Even The Hague (54) and Utrecht (31) are better represented in Furly’s collection than Oxford and Cambridge.16 London would continue to play a dominant role in the domestic industry, as well as in bringing English books to Continental buyers.

English Books in Collections Abroad The catalogue of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, first published in 1605, sparked the interest of many on the Continent. Apart from their interest in an institution that was

Internationalism and the English Book Trade    415

Fig. 22.1 Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacræ (London: R.W. for Henry Mortlock, 1663), shelfmark 27, 28. 00069. Courtesy of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Denmark.

fast emerging as one of Europe’s finest university libraries, owners could use the catalogue as a model to shape their own collecting. This was all the more the case with the famous Bodleian catalogue of 1674, some copies of which were issued with interleaved blank pages so that librarians could note books in their collection which did not form part of the Bodleian’s stock.17 Not since the days of great collections at Lindisfarne and

416    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree Yarrow had Continental collectors looked for advice on book collecting to the shores of England. The Bodleian catalogues were present in at least forty-​eight contemporary Dutch and Danish catalogues, and some collectors owned several editions. The Danish professor of Hebrew, Christen Steenbuch, owned both the 1620 catalogue and the 1635 appendix, as did the principal of the Illustrious School in Breda, André Rivet. This combination could also be found in the possession of Aarhus minister Hans Enevoldsen Brochmand. Other owners lived long enough to purchase the 1674 edition next to their 1620 copy, like the Dutch minister Bernard Somer and coin collector Cornelis Nicolai.18 English collectors also availed themselves of the rush of catalogues, printed and manuscript, of the large personal collections being assembled on the Continent: the personal catalogue of books collected by statesman Peder Scavenius for the Royal Danish Collection can be found in the British Library. And after the books of grand pensionary Gaspar Fagel and professor of theology Stephane le Moyne were sold at auction in 1689 in The Hague and Leiden respectively, the catalogue for a London auction that took place four months later, in 1690, proudly stated it contained works that had belonged to these two men.19 These claims should probably be treated with a degree of scepticism: it was not unusual to decorate diverse stock sold at auction with the lustre of a famous collector. Serious English buyers would in any case have followed the original auctions: Dutch book auction catalogues were especially widely disseminated. To obtain English books, European collectors had several options. They could turn to local bookshops, but according to the contents of the stock catalogues of Continental booksellers the percentage of books printed in England which they offered was small. If they had books from England in their stock, they tended to be in Latin. Of the books printed on the British Isles Continental stock catalogues offered ten times as many in Latin as in English. In the 1634 stock list of Johannes Janssonius not even 1 per cent of the books originated from England. Out of a total of 8,116 books, sixty were printed in England and none of these were in English. In 1674, the customer looking for English books in Daniel Elzevier’s famous collection was only slightly better off: Elzevier had 316 books from Britain on offer in his vast stock catalogue of 18,247 titles. Only eighteen of these were in English. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the supply seemed to improve. Hendrik Wetstein, who was an apprentice of Daniel Elzevier, offered 529 English books for sale out of a total of 9,329 works. Of these, sixty were in English and 394 in Latin.20 But not being listed in stock catalogues did not necessarily mean booksellers could not acquire English books for those collectors who desired them. Foreign collectors may well have ordered the English books they wanted. Going by their copy of the Bodleian catalogue, or, as the Danish professor and Royal archivist Thomas Bartholin jr. did, the Mercurius Librarius, they must have had a good idea of what was available.21 Evidence of the activity of booksellers with strong international connections can be found in correspondence. In a letter from The Hague to Peder Griffenfeld, the influential chancellor of the Danish king, dated 21 March 1672, the book agent Gabriel Milan added a list of debts he had to pay in the coming six weeks on behalf of the Danish resident

Internationalism and the English Book Trade    417 in England, Marcus Gjøe Falksen. Among the creditors listed are two booksellers.22 Diplomats and others in high offices asked their agents abroad to watch out for the titles on their wish lists. The English Secretary of State, William Blathwayt, had easy access to transportation. In his correspondence he often referred to the ‘English pacquet’(-​ boat) and he complained about lost and delayed letters and packages sent by him. Relatives and friends went abroad to obtain books for book collectors or brought them back home as presents. This is exactly what John Locke did for Benjamin Furly, buying and collecting for him in England, before despatching the books to Rotterdam. Elias Ashmole proposed a fair exchange: he would send the second edition of his own book about the Order of the Garter to the Danish king if Peder Griffenfeld provided him with more information about the Danish Order of the Elephant.23 All the goods that went from England to the Dutch Republic or vice versa had to be shipped across the North Sea. Contemporary sources mention correspondence that was carried in post or package boats that made the crossing on a regular schedule. There is plentiful evidence that books were transported among other cargo. This could have been grain that at the start of the seventeenth century was bought by Dutch traders, usually from Poland, for re-​export. From the second half of the century, England became a grain-​exporting country itself. On these ships there must have been room for crates and barrels of books.24 An advertisement in a 1667 Dutch newspaper bears witness to the import of books among a range of other products: The council of the Admiralty of Amsterdam gives notice that it means to sell around 28 pipes of wine, 24 pipes of vinegar, 77 anchors of brandy, 22 barrels of oil, 600 to 700 pieces of linen, a load of fine white knitting yarn, a load of sailcloth yarn, a load of black and grey Spanish vellum, 429 staves of iron, 5 barrels of steel, 2 balls of steel, 81 barrels of Harpuys, a load of ash wood, some keys, pickaxes, nails and other iron goods, 2 barrels of copper, 3 bales of wool, some woollen blankets, some black hats, a load of Loock, 4 barrels of ship’s bread, some rapiers, and other wares, including a load of English books and Bibles. The abovementioned goods can be found in a warehouse on the Oude Schans, under the sign of the ‘Swaen’ (Swan). The sale will take place on Monday 19 December, at 3 p.m., at the house of Jan Karstemans, inn-​ keeper in the Nieuwe Heeren Logement.25

These were prize goods, taken from a captured English ship. On other occasions, most notably during the Anglo-​Dutch Wars, the authorities actively prevented the shipping of goods between the two countries. In the Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant of 21 March 1673, the States of Holland revoked a licence granted to ‘pacquet-​booten’ (barges carrying parcels) to carry letters and passengers across to England.26 English print production was traditionally focused on publishing works in the vernacular. A critical problem was that outside the British Isles, English was not at all well known. Jan Caegman, a Dutch schoolmaster in Hoorn, once placed an advertisement in a newspaper to notify parents that his wife had the special ability to teach English, a most unusual talent.27 To access a European market, English scholars necessarily published in Latin as well as in English. If we look at Continental collectors who owned

418    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree books printed on the British Isles, it becomes clear that most owned more Latin than English titles. This was true for the Dutchmen Reinoldus Alberda (who owned eight English books and sixty-​nine in Latin); the professor of medicine, history, and Greek Theodorus Janssonius ab Almeloveen (one in English, 111 in Latin); the professor of history and eloquence Johannes Mensinga (none in English, fifty-​two in Latin); and the jurist Abraham Pietersz van der Meer (none in English, thirty-​six in Latin). The bookseller Arnold Leers was one of those who helped supply this market: his stock catalogue had seventy-​nine British books in Latin, and none in English. But some Dutch collectors did own a surprising number of English books: in the case of Theodoor Graswinckel, 181 in English, and forty-​four British books in Latin. Graswinckel was a jurist and poet. Not only did he own historical and juridical works, but also five works by Shakespeare. Johannes de Laet owned 135 works in English versus sixty-​eight British books in Latin. He was a geographer, polyglot, and one of the founders of the Dutch West Indian Company, who lived in London for a couple of years. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of books printed in Britain owned by Benjamin Furly, who was originally from England himself, were also in English. Danish collectors often owned more British books in English than in Latin, but interestingly, book collectors in the Holy Roman Empire hardly collected any works in English. The absence of works in English did not mean that Continental readers did not consume books written by English authors. Consider the popularity of The history of the present state of the Ottoman Empire, by the author and diplomat Paul Rycaut (1628–​ 1700). The first edition was published in London in 1667 and it soon became a bestseller. No fewer than seven editions were to follow, some marketed as being corrected and enlarged by the author himself. The last London edition was published one year after Rycaut died, in 1701. In his diary entry of 3 May 1667, Samuel Pepys mentions having finished the book, which he thought was very good.28 Some English editions have been found in Dutch and Danish collections: an early edition from 1668 belonged to the books of Johan de Witt jr, and was sold at auction in 1701 in Dordrecht; the German-​ born Danish chancellor Peder Griffenfeld owned a 1670 third edition, and the professor of history and royal archivist Thomas Bartholin jr. possessed a 1675 London edition. Other English copies ended up in libraries and archives in Germany and France. Yet far more instrumental for Rycaut’s Continental popularity were translated editions. In 1670, Abraham Wolfgang published a Dutch translation by Jan Hendrik Glazemaker, entitled Verhaal van de tegenwoordige staat van het Turckse Kaizerryk. A French translation by Pierre Briot appeared simultaneously in Amsterdam and in Paris: Histoire de l’état present de l’Empire ottoman. The work remained popular, as evidenced by a translation published in 1696.29 Another English diplomat and writer, Sir William Temple (1628–​99), enjoyed a high reputation at home as well as abroad. Within five years of its first publication in 1673, Temple’s Observations upon the United Provinces had been translated into Dutch, French, German, and Italian. Dutch and French editions of Temple’s works, including his memoirs and essays, were staples of Continental libraries. By the end of the eighteenth century, Temple had even been printed in a Russian edition in St Petersburg.30

Internationalism and the English Book Trade    419 English writers whose works appealed to a broad public, like Temple, ultimately faced few obstacles to the European dissemination of their works.

Collecting Tastes There are some clearly defined fields of interest that we can see in the contents of libraries on the European mainland. Seventeenth-​century book owners overwhelmingly collected devotional works.31 Book auction catalogues invariably start with a section on religion, which usually takes up more than a third of all the books in the collections; the catalogues also demonstrate that a book collector did not have to be a theologian to own many theological works. Those collectors who owned English Bibles also possessed Bibles in many other languages. Bibles were often expensive and could be classified as valuable collector’s items. It is not surprising to see these in collections of royal bibliophiles, wealthy scholars, and statesmen. England’s most famous contribution to the genre of theology was the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta, edited by Brian Walton. It was a huge six-​volume work, written in nine languages, published between 1654 and 1657.32 Customers could subscribe to buy the consecutive volumes. The work was no doubt based on the Polyglot Bible by Plantin in Antwerp, but the famous Plantin Bible, printed 1568–​72, was already an old work by the 1630s.33 The ambitious English equivalent appeared approximately eighty years later and was extremely popular. Owning such a work indicated that the owner was an accomplished scholar and a man of the world. It found its way to large libraries all over Europe. Yet, to obtain the volumes demanded money and patience. This was a work sold by subscription and it took three years for the entire six volumes to be published, and even then the costs of binding still had to be considered. In the Dutch Republic, Benjamin Furly’s copy was sold at auction in 1714 for 61 guilders (around £4. 15s), while nine years later a different set was sold at auction for 101 guilders (£7. 12s).34 Critici Sacri, a multi-​volume publication edited by John Pearson that appeared in 1660, takes its inspiration from the Biblia Polyglotta, though with its nine volumes it was even more ambitious. The printing was undertaken by no fewer than six printers: four from London and one each from Oxford and Cambridge. The work with commentaries on the Bible was dedicated to Charles II, who in return granted the chief printer Cornelius Bee a privilege for fourteen years.35 Whether it was this privilege that kept piracy from Dutch printers at bay, or the sheer size of the project, it was not until 1698 that an Amsterdam consortium, reinforced by a colleague from Utrecht, took on the challenge.36 European scholars took a keen interest in English scientific authors and their works. On Sunday, 2 June 1667 Samuel Pepys recorded reading Robert Boyle’s book of colours. We may presume he read it in English, though he still found it very difficult to understand: ‘[it] is so chymical, that I can understand but little of it.’ What was difficult for Pepys reading in his native language, must have been even more complex for people less

420    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree familiar with English.37 Nevertheless, we find works by Boyle in different Continental collections, both in Latin and in English. Histories of England, or those works commenting on the geography, inhabitants, landmarks, and language of England, were often found in collections abroad. Some collectors had clearly spent at least some time in England during their trips through Europe. It was a sign of the times that whereas France and Italy had previously been the heart of the Grand Tour, in the seventeenth century England became a far more notable cultural attraction. After visiting France, the Dutch brothers Cornelis and Johan de Witt took the boat to Dover to spend the last six weeks of their educational journey in England. One of their destinations was Stonehenge. The monument was the subject of several publications. The Danish professor Thomas Bartholin jr. owned A Vindication of Stoneheng restored, by John Webb and Chorea Gigangum, vulgarly called Stone-​heng by Walter Charleton, whereas in the collection of the Dutch Constantijn Huygens Jr. The most notable antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-​heng on Salisbury plain, by Inigo Jones, was to be found.38 A Relation of three Embassies to the Great Duke of Muscovie, The King of Sweden and the King of Denmark, describing diplomatic missions undertaken by the Earl of Carlisle in Russia, Denmark, and Sweden, did not escape the attention of some Danish collectors.39 Works in which English travellers, explorers, or conquerors described foreign and exotic places were another favourite, like The Voyage of Italy, by Richard Lassels (1670).40 Hardly any literature or poetry from the British Isles is to be found in private collections abroad. This is not surprising, because reading and enjoying literature demands a more sophisticated level of knowledge of the language in question. It makes sense that this became more common in the eighteenth century when people became more familiar with the English language. Before then, Continental readers of English literature were restricted to linguistic virtuosos like Constantijn Huygens (1596–​1687), who had many English connections. He travelled and worked in England extensively and his collection of English books must have been large, although his library was never auctioned, as it was divided among his children, who were avid collectors themselves. Their belongings were in turn sold at auction, some mixed with books of others, some partly in catalogues of booksellers who tried to attract customers by putting a famous name on the title page. Constantijn Huygens translated poetry written by John Donne, whom he admired. And he wrote his name, ‘Constant’, on the title page of his copy of John Selden’s Marmora Arundelliana (London, 1629) (Fig. 22.2).41

Conclusion Speaking of the English publishing industry, we often think of printing for the domestic market and importing foreign books. But it is important to keep in mind how English domestic production was shaped by foreign influences. In his diary entry of 9 June 1667, Samuel Pepys mentioned reading a translation of a Spanish work, a ‘merry

(a)

(b)

Fig. 22.2  John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana (London: John Bill, 1629), shelfmark O 63-​3320. Courtesy of Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Constantijn Huygens wrote his name on the title page.

422    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree satire’ in his words. It was ‘done in English’ by Robert l’Estrange, who translated it from the original Sueños, y visitas de Torres by Don Francisco de Quevedo. This author was immensely popular in England, judging by the works that were published in London over time. But for most Englishmen, reading Spanish was out of reach, just as it was impossible for many Europeans on the continent to read English. Quevedo’s work was translated as The Visions; similarly, the French had their own translations published in Paris, Caen, and Lyons named Les Visions. In the Dutch Republic it was translated by Haring van Harinxma as Seven wonderlijcke gesichten.42 This practice of selecting good foreign works and translating them for the domestic market was not new. A good deal of the contents of an English book from 1575 on falconry was ‘collected out of the best aucthors, as well Italians as Frenchman’. And the latest knowledge in a 1596 work about gardening and grafting was ‘Gathered from the Dutch and French’.43 With works like this, the English market had gradually become fully integrated with the broader tradition of European letters. As English readers feasted on the best of European literature, its own works of science, theology, and philosophy had won an impressive audience abroad. By the end of the seventeenth century, English books had earned themselves a respectable place on the bookshelves of a scholar or erudite collectors in many European nations. This was only the beginning. In the eighteenth century the English book trade went from strength to strength, bolstered by a new clientele in the American colonies, a market damaged surprisingly little by the events of the American Revolution. The growth of empire added new markets in the Caribbean, India, Australia and New Zealand, sustained not least by the worldwide appeal of British fiction. In French and German circulating libraries, Walter Scott duelled with Alexandre Dumas for supremacy; catalogues contained separate sections for the adventures of exotic travel described collectively as ‘Robinsons’, after Robinson Crusoe. Dickens was a sensation in America, although the lack of respect for international copyright deflated his royalties, to his frustration.44 The global power of the British book trade was sustained to the middle of the twentieth century, and beyond. When the Oxford bookseller Basil Blackwell examined his receipts in 1940, he discovered to his surprise that 46 per cent of his sales came from the export trade. At this point 80 per cent of the books sold in Australia were of British origin. The years following the Second World War proved to be a golden autumn for the book trade, despite dark apprehensions of the infiltration of American publishers into what had previously been closed colonial markets.45 All of this prosperity, and an enduring legacy of cultural diplomacy through the efforts of the British Council and London publishers, can be traced back to these first tentative beginning in the seventeenth century. When sophisticated Continental collectors were first persuaded that good books, good science, and interesting ideas, could be found across the Channel, Britain could take its full part in the internationalization of the book trade, which it latterly came to dominate.

Internationalism and the English Book Trade    423

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Arthur der Weduwen for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. These and other figures in this chapter are drawn from the Universal Short Title Catalogue: ustc.ac.uk. 2. R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-​Green, Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-​Lists (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), iii. 36–​44; E. S. Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book Lists from Vice-​Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), i. 492–​508, ii. 839–​842. 3. Dennis E. Rhodes, ‘Don Fernando Colón and His London Book Purchases, June 1522’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 52 (1958), 231–​248. 4. Richard Rex, ‘The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 39 (1989), 85–​106; M. A. Schaaber, Check-​list of British Authors Printed Abroad in Languages Other than English to 1641 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1975), F 41–​103; USTC 835632 and 501665. 5. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 83–​84. 6. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), esp. ch. 5. 7. ustc.ac.uk, search Britain. 8. Based on data taken from the USTC. 9. See Austen Saunders and Tom Boardman, ‘Was There an Explosion of Print in the 1640s?’, TheSeventeenth Century 37:2 (2021), 177-​199. ;; based on data taken from the ESTC and USTC respectively. 10. Helmer Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Anglo-​ Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 11. Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree, The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising (Leiden: Brill, 2020); Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree, News, Business and Public Information: Advertisements and Announcements in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers, 1620–​1675 (Leiden: Brill, 2020); Arthur der Weduwen, Andrew Pettegree, and Graeme Kemp (eds.), Book Trade Catalogues in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2021). 12. Ian Maclean, ‘Publishers, Book Fairs, Academies, Journals: The Dissemination of English Medicine and Natural Philosophy in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, in Maclean, Episodes in the Life of the Early Modern Learned Book (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 212–​246. 13. Henry Spelman, Archeologus. In modum Glossarii (part 1) (London: Johannem Beale, 1626), USTC 3012559.

424    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree 14. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacræ, or a rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faiths, as to the Truth and divine Authority of the Scriptures and the matters therein contained (London: Henry Mortlock, 1663), USTC 3082562. 15. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses (London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), USTC 3082463. 16. Bibliotheca Furliana, Sive Catalogus Librorum . . . (Rotterdam: Fritsch and Bohm, 1714). 17. USTC 3002176 (1605), 3009219 (1620), and 3018174 (1635). 18. For the Dutch catalogues, see Book Sales Catalogues Online (BSCO). For the Danish catalogues, see Cataloger over bogauctioner, Royal Danish Library. 19. Oprechte Haerlemse Courant, 22 Oct. 1689 (Haarlem: Abraham Casteleyn, 1689); Catalogus librorum in omnigena literatura (London: s.n., 1690). 20. These figures were drawn from the catalogues of booksellers Johannes Janssonius, Amsterdam, auctioned in 1634; Daniel Elzevier, Amsterdam, 1674; and Hendrik Wetstein, Amsterdam, 1699. 21. The title Mercurius Librarius refers to lists compiled by London booksellers. They claimed to contain all books printed and published in London after the Great Fire.USTC 3086513ESTC P1609. 22. Gabriel Milan to Peder Griffenfeld. Copenhagen, Rigsarkivet, C4 Processor, Griffenfeld, breve fra forskellige, bestillingsnummer 787101. 23. In the 1714 auction catalogue of Benjamin Furly, the books his friend John Locke collected for him feature next to fourteen works written by Locke himself. William Blathwayt, engelsk statssekretær, to Peder Griffenfeld. Copenhagen, Rigsarkivet, State Papers Denmark, bestillingsnummer 792153; Elias Ashmole to Peder Griffenfeld, d.d. 18.09.1674. Copenhagen, Rigsarkivet, C4 Processor, Griffenfeld, breve fra forskellige, bestillingsnummer 787092; King Christian V of Denmark did indeed receive a copy of the reissued book, which is still in the Royal Library of Copenhagen today: Elias Ashmole, The institution, laws and ceremonies of the most noble Order of the Garter (London: J. Macock for Nathanael Brooke, 1672), USTC 3139635. 24. Milja van Tielhof, ‘The Mother of all Trades: The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 47. 25. Oprechte Haerlemse Courant, 15 and 17 Dec. 1667 (Haarlem: Abraham Casteleyn, 1667). Noord-​Hollands Archief, Haarlem, the Netherlands; translation by Arthur der Weduwen. Harpuys is a kind of resin, used for ship repair; Loock refers to garlic, often used for medicinal purposes. 26. Oprechte Haerlemse Courant, 21 Mar. 1673 (Haarlem: Abraham Casteleyn, 1673). 27. Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 51, 18 Dec. 1663 (Haarlem: Abraham Casteleyn, 1663). 28. Paul Rycaut, The present state of the Ottoman Empire (London: John Starkey and Henry Brome, 1667), USTC 3085829 and ESTC N473587 (1701); Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday, 3 May 1667, https://​www.pep​ysdi​ary.com/​diary/​1667/​05/​03/​ 29. See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Sir Paul Rycaut: https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​ ref:odnb/​24392; Jan Hendrik Glazemaker, Verhaal van de tegenwoordige staat van het Turckse Kaizerryk (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1670), USTC 1807350; Histoire de l’état present de l’Empire ottoman (Amsterdam: A. Wolfgank, 1670), USTC 1807096; Histoire de l’état présent de l’Empire ottoman (Paris: S. Mabre-​Cramoisy, 1670), BNF 31272638; Histoire de l’état present de l’Empire ottoman (Amsterdam: P. Mortier, 1696), USTC 1830360. . .

Internationalism and the English Book Trade    425 30. See the forthcoming work by Jacob Baxter, who is currently composing a bibliography of Temple’s publications: Jacob Baxter, Author and Ambassador: A Bibliography of Sir William Temple (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces (London: A. Maxwell for Sa. Gellibrand, 1673), USTC 3091692. 31. For private libraries in England, see David Pearson, Book Ownership in Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 32. Brian Walton (ed.), Biblia Sacra Polyglotta, 6 vols. (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1657), USTC 3071814. 33. See https://​museu​mpla​ntin​more​tus.be/​en/​page/​royal-​bible-​five-​langua​ges-​arias-​monta​nus 34. The entire set costed £10, upon subscription in England. £10 pounds was equivalent to c.145 Dutch guilders in 1660, 129 in 1714, and 133 guilders in 1723. The difference in price can in part also be attributed to the way the volumes were bound. In the 1723 Dalmannia catalogue the specifics and quality of bindings are often referred to. 35. John Pearson et al. (ed.), Critici Sacri, 9 vols. (London: Jacobus Flesher, etc., 1660), USTC 3078177. 36. Critici Sacri, 9 vols. (Amsterdam: Henricus & Vidua Theodori Boom, etc., 1698), USTC 1832564. 37. Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday, 2 June 1667. On Tuesday, 4 June 1667, he reads yet another book by Boyle on Hydrostatics. 38. The De Witt brothers had planned to go to Italy as well, but because of the plague that raged there, they changed their plans. See Janneke Groen, ‘De Grand Tour’, in Ineke Huysman and Roosje Peeters (eds.), Johan de Witt en Engeland (Soest: Catullus, 2019), 33; Inigo Jones, The most notable antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-​heng on Salisbury plain (London: James Flesher for Daniel Pakeman and Laurence Chapman, 1655), USTC 3070622; John Webb, A Vindication of Stoneheng restored (London:R. Davenport for Tho. Bassett, 1665), USTC 3084170 and Walter Charleton, Chorea Gigantum, vulgarly called Stone-​ heng (London: Henry Herringman, 1663), USTC 3082345. 39. Guy Miege, A Relation of three Embassies to the Great Duke of Muscovie, The King of Sweden, and the King of Denmark (London: John Starkey, 1669), USTC 3139634. 40. Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy (Paris [=​London]: John Starkey, 1670), USTC 3088888. According to the ESTC, this work was first printed in Paris. 41. John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana (London: John Bill, 1629); USTC 3014001. 42. Don Francisco de Quevedo, Sueños y discursos ([Barcelona], s.n., 1627); USTC 5016643 (spanish), 3021003 (english), 6005811 (french), and 1027804 (dutch). 43. George Turberville, The booke of faulconrie or hauking, for the onely delight and pleasure of all noblemen and gentlemen: collected out of the best aucthors (London: Christopher Barker, 1575); USTC 508116.   The Orchard, and the Garden: Containing certaine necessarie, secret, and ordinarie knowledges in Grafting and Gardening (London: Adam Islip, 1596); USTC 517412. 44. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Library: A Fragile History (London: Profile, 2021). John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 45. Valerie Holman, Print for Victory: Book Publishing in England, 1939–​1945 (London: British Library, 2008), 143, 240.

426    Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree

Select Bibliography Fehrenbach, Robert J., and Leedham-​Green, Elizabeth S., Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-​ Lists, vol. iii (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994). Helmers, Helmer, Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Anglo-​Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hench, John B., Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Holman, Valerie, Print for Victory: Book Publishing in England, 1939–​1945 (London: British Library, 2008). Leedham-​Green, Elizabeth S., Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book Lists from Vice-​Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. i. Pearson, David, Book Ownership in Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pettegree, Andrew, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Pettegree, Andrew, and Weduwen, Arthur der, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Pettegree, Andrew, and Weduwen, Arthur der, The Library: A Fragile History (London: Profile, 2021). Rex, Richard, ‘The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 39 (1989), 85–​106. Rhodes, Dennis E., ‘Don Fernando Colón and His London Book Purchases, June 1522’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 52 (1958), 231–​248. Schaaber, M. A., Check-​list of British Authors Printed Abroad in Languages other than English to 1641 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1975). Tielhof, Milja van, ‘The Mother of all Trades’: The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Weduwen, Arthur der, and Pettegree, Andrew, The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Weduwen, Arthur der, and Pettegree, Andrew, News, Business and Public Information. Advertisements and Announcements in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers, 1620–​ 1675 (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Weduwen, Arthur der, Pettegree, Andrew, and Kemp, Graeme (eds.), Book Trade Catalogues in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

CHAPTER 23

‘A Gifte of go od Mome nt ’ A New History of the Stationers’ Benevolence to the Bodleian Library, 1610 to 1616 Tara L. Lyons

The year 1616 was a difficult one for the London Stationer Henry Roberts and his wife. Henry, a pensioner and eight-​year recipient of charitable relief from the Stationers’ Company Poor Fund, passed away that summer. In September 1616, ‘Widow Roberts’ began accepting aid in his stead, the amount halved to 10 shillings per quarter.1 Given the Roberts’ economic precarity, it is worth noting that in June 1616, Henry or his widow sent a copy of one of their publications, Nathaniel Cannon’s The Cryer: A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse (1613), to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A simple quarto edition in quires, the Roberts’ gift was not recorded in the elegantly bound Benefactors’ Register established by Sir Thomas Bodley to record the munificence of the library’s donors.2 Rather, their contribution appears within a parchment-​bound library daybook in a handwritten table of ‘Books receaued from London from ye Stationers 8° Jun 1616’.3 This list of books, one of many in the daybook (LR e.9), is in the hand of Keeper of the Library, Dr Thomas James, who after Bodley’s death in January 1613 took on the daily management of the library. Ninety-​one recently printed English titles make up the bulk of the table, alongside the names (or initials) of fifty-​four English Stationers who sent their publications to the library that June.4 Here, some of the wealthier members of the Company of Stationers—​Thomas Adams and John Bill—​join the humbler sort like Henry Roberts and Leon Becket, another recipient of poor relief that year.5 By sending their books to the Bodleian, these booksellers were satisfying the terms of an 1610 agreement between the library and the Stationers’ Company wherein each member was expected to send a perfect copy of each newly printed book for the library’s collections. It is these men and women of the company and their benefactions that I seek to spotlight in this essay to offer a revisionist history of the Bodleian–​Stationers’ grant with further emphasis on the publishers who supported and maintained the institutional relationship through their gifts of books.

428   Tara L. Lyons The June 1616 list of Stationers’ donations sheds light on an area of book history that scholars rarely see: professionals in the book trade giving away their stock. Publishers, within and without the London Stationers’ Company, were the financial backbone of the trade. As the agents who ‘decided that making a particular text public was a worthwhile venture, and paid to have a large number of copies printed’, publishers’ livelihoods depended on their ability to speculate, produce, market, distribute and vend saleable books.6 As book historians know, extant records capture only fragments of London publishers’ trade activities and even fewer traces of their lives, families, and community networks. Confronted with these archival gaps, scholars attempting to reconstruct a publisher’s motives tend to fall back on what András Kiséry calls ‘commercial rationality’, the supposition that return on investment was the driving force in each transaction.7 Such critical emphasis on financial motives, however, risks eclipsing the variety and degree of stimuli prompting publishers’ choices, including marital status, gender, race, citizenship, class, as well as political and religious allegiances, patronage networks, environmental and geographical constraints, and social and personal commitments to family, parish, corporation, and nation. Without a broader picture of the conditions in which London publishers were living and working, we likewise risk acceding to a logic that books found their sole value for publishers through the commodity market rather than through a much more capacious and dynamic system that comprised various forms of exchange, including the gifting of books. The list of titles sent from the Stationers to the Bodleian Library in 1616 renders visible one under-​researched vein in the London–​Oxford arm of the English book trade. What we find there is evidence of gift-​exchange forming social bonds among individuals and institutions whose occupation was books.8 These gifts and their implications invite further evaluation of the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement and critical reflection on what status of persons—​wealthy knights like Sir Thomas Bodley or poor publishers like Henry Roberts—​have been granted the name of benefactor in our histories of the book.

‘The Stationers Gifte’ In scholarship on the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement, historians commonly refer to the books making their way from London to Oxford as ‘deposit books’, the phrase evoking later developments in copyright legislation when the Bodleian Library became a ‘depository’ of English print.9 Rather than the term ‘deposit books’ which tends to connote a sterile, one-​directional delivery of goods, the term used in the early seventeenth by Bodley and others was ‘gifts’. The discourse of gift-​exchange circulating within and around the 1610 deed beckons us to construct a more localized history of the agreement and to ponder in what ways the London books traversed systems of commodity and sale, gift and obligation, through the Bodleian–​Stationers’ arrangement. The official ‘Deed of Grant’ between the Bodleian Library and the London Stationers’ Company was signed on 12 December 1610 and confirmed in Convocation at Oxford on

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    429 27 February 1611. The document declared that the Stationers’ books were ‘freely given’, and that the company would donate out of their ‘zeale to the advancement of good learning’ and to ‘further a worcke of soe muche piety and benefit to the generall State of the Realme’.10 A gift of plate from Bodley to the company is traditionally said to have been offered to the Stationers at the time to commemorate the deed, a topic I return to in the essay’s final section ‘The Politics of Benefaction and Bodley’s Plate’. That Bodley was pleased with the agreement is evident in his private correspondence with his librarian, Thomas James: ‘For the stationers gifte, I am of your opinion, that it is to be accounted, a gifte of good moment.’11 A similar enthusiasm can be found on a flyleaf of the first book received under the indenture, Thomas Cartwright’s Christian Religion (1611). In this volume, Bodley recorded in his own hand: ‘The gifte of Jo. Man Master of ye co[m]‌panie of ye Stationers, & ye first yat was giuen, aftr their Inde[n]ture was sealed to ye Vniuʼsitie.’12 For Bodley, this volume commemorated the successful agreement between institutions, and by marking it with his own pen, he was inscribing the object with a record of not just the individual generosity of the Master but also of the whole corporation. Although the 1610 deed explicitly defined the London books as ‘freely given’, anthropological and cultural studies research, if not our own lived experiences, have taught us a hard reality: there really are no free or ‘pure’ gifts. Marcel Mauss promulgated this truism in his seminal study The Gift (1924) where he argued that while gifts might be offered without the appearance of self-​interest, gifts elicit reciprocity, animating cycles of giving, receiving, and repaying that are the foundation of social relations.13 For Maus, gift-​exchange was distinct from market-​exchange, the latter linked to assigning ownership rights of an object to another for financial gain. Modern scholars across fields seem to agree that such divisions between gift-​exchange and commodity-​exchange were overdrawn by Mauss, and that what makes a ‘thing’ a ‘gift’ depends on the understanding of the parties involved and the expectations of gift-​giving in that culture.14 Still, Mauss’s work continues to offer a heuristic for modern scholars thinking through the strata of exchange relations that early modern peoples negotiated and, for our purposes, that London publishers experienced in transacting books with Sir Thomas Bodley and the Bodleian Library. That both the Bodleian and the Stationers’ Company understood that the 1610 agreement was establishing a mutually beneficial bond can be seen in the language of the signed deed. The grant was unequivocal about what privileges the Stationers would gain by supplying free copies to the library. The library’s ‘owne guifte’, as it is described in the 1610 deed, included (1) access to the Bodleian wherein Stationers could copy and collate texts, (2) borrowing rights for books that Stationers contributed to the collections, and (3) storage for books that the library saw fit to preserve.15 That London publishers were being offered admission to the library is not surprising, as access had already been promised to donors ‘of whatever order and degree they may be’.16 Unlike other donors, however, the Stationers and their successors were allowed to take their books from the library with the expectation that the books would be returned undamaged after use.17 In other words, the Bodleian—​notorious for refusing borrowing privileges even to King

430   Tara L. Lyons Charles I—​promised London publishers the option to remove books from the library for the purposes of commercial republication.18 The Stationers were also encouraged to see the library as a trove of sources for new publications. The Bodleian’s collection of rare manuscripts and printed works, gathered from various corners of the world, may certainly have piqued the interests of an enterprising publisher looking for new saleable content. However, extant evidence of London publishers visiting the library to copy and collate texts is hard to find.19 Perhaps the documents that once recorded visits of publishers to the library have been lost to time. Another possibility is that the trip to Oxford was not worth the trouble for London-​ based tradespeople. Hired agents at the universities willing to sift, transcribe, and collate for pay may have been a more practical solution. As for the promise to store and preserve Stationers’ publications, it seems the offer may have been attractive to some members of the company at the time. As Ann Saunders reminds us, in 1610, the Stationers were in need of ‘solid buildings’ for storage of paper products, partly prompting their purchase of Abergevenny House in March 1611 where the company established their new Hall and warehouse.20 For London publishers, warehouse space was expensive and the Bodleian’s newly repaired roof, sturdy wall shelving, and locked cabinets would have offered assurance that at least single copies would survive if a natural disaster beset London. Still, the Bodleian’s offer did not extend to all publishers’ books, just those that will be ‘had in the Library’, or those that were deemed pertinent to the faculties at Oxford. As is well known, Bodley rejected a broad assortment of ‘idle bookes & riffe raffes’.21 At this moment, the Bodleian Library was not yet a depository for English books nor ‘de facto the British national library’, as some have implied.22 For the London Stationers, the Bodleian’s ‘guifte’ of services was designed to support publishers in their daily business (acquiring and preserving copies for print), but other intangible benefits were part of the deal as well. In the 1610 indenture, the Bodleian was constructed as a ‘worcke of soe muche piety and benefit to the generall State of the Realme’, and Bodley consistently presented the library, although located in Oxford and curated for scholarly research, as a ‘publike benefit’. In supporting the Bodleian’s initiatives, the Stationers were aligning themselves with an institution that was committed to the Protestant cause and actively training young minds to support James I’s Anglican Church. Indeed, the library was sanctioned by the King himself, and dozens of noble families and church authorities opened their pocketbooks to supply the library with books. Through the 1610 deed, the Stationers’ Company became donors of the library in all but name, and they seemingly sought the honour and respect that such a role proffered in return. As John Barnard explains, ‘The Stationers’ leading members had every reason to believe in the security of their standing in the country’s polity in the years between 1610 and 1612. As a corporate body . . . their support for Sir Thomas’s library reflected their national standing.’23 The mutually beneficial bond established between the Company of Stationers and the Bodleian Library in 1610 was not just a by-​ product of the deed but likely its goal from the beginning.

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    431

‘Norton will perfect all’ Bodley had a habit of calling on his ‘store of honourable friends’ when he needed help furnishing the library with books.24 What has often been forgotten or elided in histories of the library is that Bodley’s ‘honourable friends’ included publishers in the London book trade. Although defined in the 1610 deed as an institutional arrangement, the bond’s origins can be found in the commercial and personal transactions between Bodley and his shrewd, dependable Stationer, John Norton. For a decade before the indenture was signed, Bodley paid Norton for books as well as his labour and expertise as a stationer. When Bodley wanted certain titles, Norton or his associate and former apprentice, John Bill, acquired them, sometimes traipsing across Europe on the hunt for rare or prized copies. Norton was a wealthy man by the time he started assisting Bodley with building the Oxford library’s collections. Norton’s affluence was due, in part, to his impressive network of contacts in the European book trade and personal connections to King James.25 As the King’s Printer of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and the distributor of the King’s own scholarship abroad, Norton had his finger on the pulse of the European theological and scholarly book market. His broad textual knowledge and business acumen made him an indispensable figure in Bodley’s ambitious plans to establish a world-​renowned library in Oxford.26 As a man of the book trade, Norton was tasked with solving hundreds of problems concomitant with amassing and then cataloguing thousands of books across various languages in a relatively short frame of time for a demanding aristocratic client. ‘Norton will perfect all’, Bodley wrote to Thomas James when quires were found to be missing from Continental books, the verb ‘perfect’ used to signify the process of supplying parts of the book to make it whole.27 Making ‘perfect’ also encapsulates well what Bodley asked Norton to do for the new library. When Bodley needed a space for donors to deliver books and gifts of money for the library, he proposed they be conveyed to ‘Mr Jo. Norton my stationer’ where they will be ‘faithfully deliuered vnto me’.28 Norton even assisted in proofing the 1605 catalogue while it was in press, and he apparently knew the library collections so well that he spotted a number of omissions, which Thomas James was admonished for missing and immediately directed to correct.29 Bodley’s bookseller, in some cases, had more intimate knowledge of which editions were in the library than the overworked librarian who was charged with organizing, storing, and cataloguing them. As a publisher, John Norton was an official ‘benefactor’ of the library, his copy of Gerard’s Herball recorded in the Register in 1601.30 That Norton was a prime mover in the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement of 1610 seems likely, but his interventions in perfecting a 1612 supplemental ordinance are explicit. When Bodley brought ‘his suit’ to the London Stationers in December 1610, the idea originating from his librarian, Norton had already been elected to serve as Master of the Company for the following year.31 Within weeks of sealing the deed in 1610, there were ‘many rubbes & delaies’ in

432   Tara L. Lyons the delivery of the Stationers’ books.32 By July 1611, Bodley was vexed, reporting that ‘those of the companie haue taken hitherto no constant speedy order, for the gathering of them, & deliuerie vnto me: albeit they promise, & say they will doe it euery day’.33 By 20 December 1611, the company had sent books to Oxford, but Bodley deemed many of them to be worthless ‘baggage bookes’.34 It is in this same letter that Bodley tells James that he had sought Norton’s assistance, and on 1 January 1612, Bodley was more confident that help was coming: ‘As yet Mr Norton hath not taken any order, for the bringing in of their bookes by reason of the sicknes of their Bedel: but he hath promised faithfully, to doe it with speede.’35 On 18 January 1612, that ‘order’ was executed with a new set of bylaws that reinforced the company’s promises to the Bodleian Library and proffered further clarification on Stationers’ duties.36 Elected for another term as Master of the Company in 1612, Norton did what he could to ‘perfect’ the original indenture. As R. W. Barrington Partridge explains, the 1610 deed between the library and the Stationers was ‘an adroit piece of diplomacy’; without any penalties for violation, it resembled a private treaty more than an enforceable contract.37 In Norton’s new ‘order’ of 1612, Stationers who failed to send their copies would be fined three times the price of each book that went undelivered, a fee that would be paid to the company and then forwarded to the library. How the Stationers were to deliver their books, a topic that the 1610 grant overlooked, was also delineated in the new ordinance. Within ten days of a book’s impression, a publisher was expected to bring it to the Under Warden at Stationers’ Hall so it could be delivered to the library’s appointee, who at this time was Bodley himself. Furthermore, the ordinance expanded the kinds of books that the library expected to receive. Whereas the 1610 deed laid out that all Stationers were responsible for sending the first impression of each new book, the 1612 order mandated that books with new additions or enlargements also be given to the library. The new regulations were designed for the ‘better confirmation’ of the deed, but notably, no additional perks were offered to the Stationers. If members of the company found themselves with a little less ‘zeale’ for the library, it was because now their gifts were more akin to a compulsory tax. In her history of gift-​exchange in early modern England, Felicity Heal emphasizes that the gift ‘depended for its success on proper understanding between transacting parties’.38 The extent to which that ‘understanding’ was lacking or fracturing is apparent in the 1612 bylaws. For one, it seems unlikely that Norton consulted with the whole of the company’s membership before imposing the ordinance. We can infer, for instance, that some Stationers didn’t know about the original terms of the indenture. Their confusion—​or wilful ignorance—​may have derived from the informal, even private nature of the agreement. Alterations in rhetoric and content in the 1612 ordinance support this assessment. The new order directed that the company publicly read the grant to all members at least once per year so ‘that any of them shall not pretend ignorance thereof ’. To this same end, the 1612 ordinance was printed and presumably disseminated to all members of the company.39 Witnessing the new bylaws were fourteen executives of the Stationers’ Company—​the Master, Wardens, and Assistants—​and even the Clerk of the Company who was to record the new regulations in the company archives. The

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    433 signatures of individuals in positions of authority in the company would have proved to its members that this agreement was now openly acknowledged and sanctioned. To further enforce the agreement, Norton, probably at Bodley’s behest, ensured that the 1612 revisions were certified by an even higher authority. Appended to the order was a statement from the ‘King’s Ministers ecclesiastical’, that is, the Court of High Commission for Ecclesiastical Affairs. Signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and seventeen other members of the ecclesiastical court, the ordinance was presented alongside a ‘Commendation’ to the Stationers’ Company, publicly praising their benevolence to the Bodleian Library. Simultaneously, though, the statement threatened action by the members of the court if the Stationers shirked their duties. What Norton had delivered for Bodley in 1612 went far beyond the deed of 1610. This newly devised agreement was a formal, publicly recognized contract that would be overseen by an external court that was already consolidating power over aspects of printing and licensing in the London book trade.40 Nowhere in the ordinance of 1612 was the word ‘gift’ used in reference to the transaction of books. This is a notable omission, as the term was deployed in the accompanying High Commission’s Commendation. But, the new 1612 ordinance went to some lengths to ensure that the agreement not be construed as an expression of any Stationer’s voluntary or free benefice to Bodley or the library. In fact, the new decree introduced procedural distance between individual Stationers and the library, specifying that their books be handed over at Stationers’ Hall to be collected by the company, which would then, as a corporate entity, transfer the books to an agent of the library. All in all, the 1612 ordinance made it clear this was the company’s decision to establish an institutional partnership with the library, and individual members were expected to participate out of obedience to their own company’s regulations. The revisions to the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement seemed to chip away at the spirit of the publishers’ gifts, or what Mauss called ‘spirit of the thing given’. For Mauss, the gift ‘possesses something’ of the giver, so ‘to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself ’.41 This symbolic acceptance of the other’s self through receiving (and then reciprocating) was the foundation of the bonds of friendship and respect.42 Failure to acknowledge the spirit of the giver threatened the bond and interrupted the cycles of exchange. Although Mauss’s theories about what motivated gift economies apply in only limited ways to the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement, a lack of proper acknowledgement of the givers may have left the bond between parties vulnerable from the start. For instance, when the agreement was initially sealed, Bodley seemed keen to acknowledge and celebrate the gifts of publishers like Thomas Man, as the inscription in Cartwright’s Christian Religion attests, but cracks in that ‘bond’ are evident. Namely, Bodley mistook the Master’s first name (writing ‘Jo’ for John), a negligible mistake perhaps, except for the fact that the Stationer’s full name—​Thomas Man—​was printed in large, clear type on the book’s title page.43 Assumedly, for Bodley, documenting the act of benefice on behalf of the Stationers’ Company was more important than accurately recording the identity of its individual donor. Similar patterns crop up in Thomas James’s

434   Tara L. Lyons table of Stationers’ gifts from June 1616. Notably, in recording the names of individual publishers, James was extracting the data from imprints on title pages. For Stationers like Henry Roberts whose initials appeared in the imprint, James’s entry for the donor of The Cryer (1613) was ‘H.R.’. Ostensibly, James did not know the full name or identity of the publisher (or perhaps widow) who had sent the gift. An agreement between men like Norton and Bodley might end upon their own deaths; an enforceable contract between institutions might survive long after. Ensuring that the Bodleian Library lasted throughout the ages was one of Bodley’s highest priorities, and these intentions are apparent in the library’s negotiations with the Stationers’ Company. Perhaps sensing his own mortality, Bodley had begun to establish the terms of the library’s endowment as early as 1608.44 The dilapidated Duke Humfrey Library that Bodley had renovated to build his own was a stark reminder that great libraries required long-​term funding. Norton’s work on behalf of the Bodleian in 1612, especially calling on the High Commission to ensure the grant’s continuance, served these ends as well. The Stationers’ books were designed to be another form of endowment for the library—​and in perpetuity. For Bodley and Norton, the agreement’s longevity depended on the institutionalization of this corporate philanthropy. For the individual publisher sending copies, as I discuss below, a more symmetrical offering may have been expected. The Bodleian Library is clearly and rightfully understood to be the gift and legacy of its founder, Sir Thomas Bodley, but it is still worth considering that the library was part of Norton’s legacy too. As John Barnard reminds us, ‘Norton was motivated, at least in part, by idealism.’ Analysing Norton’s career, Barnard proffers that the publisher saw the Bodleian as an extension of his own political commitments, which involved expanding the reach of King James’s Church and State, ideologically and geographically, through reading and education. Although not recorded in any Benefactors’ Register and perhaps even erased by his own machinations, John Norton’s contributions to ‘perfecting’ the 1612 agreement, whether altruistic or not, prompt some consideration of alternative kinds of munificence that tradespeople provided to institutions of learning in early modern England.

Counter-​narratives With Norton’s assistance, the ‘gifte of good moment’ was primed to become a gift long into the future, but the deaths of John Norton in December 1612 and Sir Thomas Bodley in January 1613 put the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement to the test. It has become a critical commonplace to claim that the deed quickly became ineffective, as the Stationers evaded delivery of books, but a closer look at archival documents and brief qualitative studies of individual Stationers proffers more nuance about how, why, and in what capacity the deed was being observed and where the fault lines were manifesting. Evidence from Bodleian Library records reinforces that personal bonds between individual

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    435 Stationers and the library sustained the cycles of gifting alongside continued commodity exchange. Thomas James’s complaints against the Stationers in the years following Bodley’s death have led scholars to conclude that the company was not fulfilling the agreement. Bodleian historian Ian Philip even put some data behind this claim. In his oft-​cited study of the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement, Philip reports that less than 20 per cent of the Stationers’ books arrived in the Bodleian Library during the period from 1613 to 1616.45 He based this assessment on three lists of books, totalling 204 titles that were explicitly labelled in the daybook as Stationers’ books.46 Philip explains that his estimate is only accurate if the lists of books that he analysed ‘represent the annual intake . . . as they appear to’.47 Why Philip thought only these three lists represented the total intake of London books across four whole years is puzzling, as the daybook is filled with lists of books being processed by the library in these same years, and these lists include hundreds of new London titles.48 No payments are recorded for any purchases of new London books, and the frequency with which English books with recent imprint dates were being sent for binding for the Bodleian confirms that the Stationers’ books were arriving soon after printing. Ultimately, Philip’s presumption that his data set was complete prompted him to exaggerate the Stationers’ negligence and conclude that the ‘deposit system’, as he calls it, was ‘ineffective’. Some larger critical assumptions about the stability of gift agreements in the period, however, may lie at heart of the heart of these miscalculations. As much as the 1612 ordinance presented the transfer of books as requisite, parties privy to the agreement interpreted that obligation differently. If the London Stationers were defaulting in some capacity, the company did not record any fines for non-​compliance. This is worth noting, in part, because the company was disciplining its members for other infractions, such as for missing quarter-​day meetings, striking an apprentice, or ‘vsing vndecent speeches’ against other members.49 The system for enforcement was in place, but the will to do so was not. Evidence of interference by the High Commission is also scant. Two lists of books in the Bodleian daybook show that ‘Mr Mason’ assisted the Beadle of the Stationers’ Company, Thomas Bushell, in gathering ‘giftes’ from the Stationers in 1613 and 1614.50 Mr. Henry Mason served under John King, the Bishop of London, as a licensor for the press, but his name disappears from Bodleian accounts after 1614, and no other prelates or court members appear to have stepped into this role, even when the library’s curators issued a warning to the Stationers in November 1614 that their agreement was witnessed by ecclesiastic ministers .51 Their reluctance to assist the library is somewhat surprising because George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was named as an overseer of Bodley’s last will and testament, and John King, the Bishop of London, had helped secure Bodley’s endowment to the library in his previous role as Vice-​Chancellor of Oxford University.52Another member of the High Commission, Sir John Bennet, was Bodley’s close friend and executor of his estate.53 Abbot, King, and Bennet signed the 1612 Commendation as ‘ecclesiastical ministers’, but if they helped the library acquire the Stationers’ books, no evidence of their interventions are extant.

436   Tara L. Lyons What becomes apparent from evidence in library accounts is that the Bodleian expected the Stationers to follow the 1612 ordinance to the letter. But, the company’s leadership and presumably the High Commission granted the publishers more freedom to fulfil the indenture on their own terms, perhaps refusing to sacrifice the bonds that they (company and court) had already established with individual publishers. This less regulated approach may have exasperated the library, but since the grant was still generating a healthy number of donations, it may not have been worth the trouble for the company or the court to impose fines for lapses in generosity. In fact, the majority of Stationers publishing books in 1616 (54 out of roughly 95) sent books to the Bodleian that June, as James’s table demonstrates. And these gifts represent only what was offered in one month of that year; more 1616 London books continued to arrive in the library, as the daybook and the 1620 catalogue show. Throughout this period, James also continued to refer to the Stationers’ books as ‘gifts’ in his own administrative records, a small but significant detail that reinforces that the books were still partly recognized as products of the original bond.54 Certainly, Thomas James was justified in making complaints against the Stationers and demanding perfect compliance with the 1612 order. But the reluctance of the Stationers’ Company and High Commission to act and fine the defaulting publishers prompts a pressing question: if the deed was not being strictly enforced by authorities, what motivated the majority of London publishers to continue sending their books, at least in 1616? Mr. John Bill, a long-​standing purchaser of books for the Bodleian, provides a perfect starting point for analysing how ongoing personal and commercial relationships contributed to the maintenance of gifting. According to James’s list of Stationers’ books from 8 June 1616, Bill supplied more titles than any other publisher at that time.55 This is not a coincidence. Bill was John Norton’s former apprentice and business partner, and Bill’s affinity for travel was indispensable to Bodley and James when the library sought books from the Continent and beyond. In addition to sending his yearly donations under the grant and selling significant numbers of books to the library, Bill, like Norton, assumed the role of bibliographical fixer. In a list from 1614 of ‘Books vnperfect as they came fro[m]‌London wch Mr Bill is to make perfect’, James recorded a total of seventeen volumes and the exact pages or sheets that were wanting from each.56 Presumably, Bill had agreed to seek out the missing parts and supply them to the library so that the books could be bound and added to the collections. Another list of ‘vnperfect’ books from the Stationers from 1614 and 1615 appears on an adjacent page, and although it does not explicitly name Bill as the agent who would make these books whole, the list does identify which publisher should be contacted for the missing parts. That these volumes were repaired and sent for binding in 1616, a detail that Philip missed in his assessment when he proposed that the library had no way of ‘replacing imperfect books’,57 indicates that the publishers were rectifying errors to supply their ‘perfect’ copies to the library. John Bill is also unique in that his donations to the Bodleian are recorded separately from those of other publishers in the daybook. On 21 February 1614, James recorded an entry of four books that were ‘Receaved of mr Bill as his gift’.58 When the company sent the Stationers’ books to the library, each gift was not accorded its own dated entry nor

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    437 organized under its publisher-​benefactor. Even in James’s table of titles and publishers from 8 June 1616, books were not explicitly grouped by name. Interestingly, Bill’s February 1614 ‘gift’ resembles more closely the entries of books given to the Bodleian by a specific donor, some of which were first informally recorded in the daybook and subsequently in the Benefactors’ Register. That Bill’s donations were recorded in this manner may indicate some overlap in how the Bodleian conceptualized the Stationers’ requisite donations from booksellers they knew well. While Norton and Bodley attempted to shift the rhetoric in the 1612 ordinance so that books were conceptualized as donations from the company, Bill seems to have forged such a relationship with the library that he was acknowledged as a ‘giver’ on his own. For Bill, commodity exchange was coterminous with gift-​giving, a blurring of boundaries that may have reinvigorated the bond and stimulated further donation of books. Bill’s gifts from the February 1614 entry contained titles with imprint dates from 1614, but a closer look at the titles he contributed in June 1616 shows that even Bill was falling behind with some donations. He had missed sending a volume in 1613 and another from 1614.59 More generally, we can see from the June 1616 table that the Stationers were delinquent in some of their deliveries, as 19 per cent of titles (17/​91) bore imprint dates before 1615. Some Stationers, even ones with commercial ties to the library like Bill, were not delivering their books within ten days of impression. In fact, it may have been this particular issue that the library sought to remedy in 1614 through a ‘gratuity’ payment to the Beadle of the Company and later in 1616 with a payment ‘for removing and recovering books among the Stationers’.60 Nevertheless, it is important here to differentiate between publishers’ reluctance to deliver copies in a timely manner versus obstinate refusal on the part of the company and its members to donate, the latter of which does not seem to have been the case during this period. Other similar examples from the June 1616 table reveal publishers who were exceeding the original terms of the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement with their gifts. Among the June 1616 table, two books clearly stand out because of their early imprint dates—​Robert Dowland’s A Musicall Banquet (1610) and Varietie of Lute-​Lessons (1610).61 Thomas Adams was the publisher of the two elegant musical folios, and in 1616, he was serving as Upper Warden of the Company. Adams had signed the 1612 ordinance, and thus seemingly supported the implementation of the stricter bylaws. His other donations in June 1616 of two books dated 1615 suggest that he was making an effort to supply recent offerings to the library.62 But the two 1610 folios are an anomaly and prompt us to question whether the publisher had been delaying sending his more expensive stock. All signs indicate this was not the case. Because the deed with the Stationers did not go into effect until early 1611, Adams was not required under the grant to send the folios published in 1610. His decision to do so in June 1616 seems to have been voluntary. Adams didn’t just give what he was required, he offered more. His folios were sent for binding on 20 July 1616, and they still remain treasured items in the Bodleian’s collections today.63 A second ‘late’ arrival was Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World published by the London Stationer Walter Burre in March 1614. That this copy arrived at the Bodleian

438   Tara L. Lyons in June 1616 is surprising since the edition had been suppressed since December 1614 for offending King James. Archbishop Abbot ordered the Stationers’ Company to seize all copies from their booksellers and deliver them to him or the Bishop of London.64 As Mark Bland indicates, the suppression ‘must have cost Burre financially and probably deprived him of a substantial profit that he looked forward to’.65 But, Burre’s gift arrived in June 1616, just months after Raleigh was released from the Tower of London, and at a time when The History (1614) had not yet been released from seizure. How Burre found a way to transfer this important volume to the library is unknown, but it is interesting to note that in the June 1616 list, The History is not attributed to any author, thus detaching the volume from Raleigh’s authorship. Although The History is an extreme example, it reminds us of the many other factors that affected the ability of a publisher to make donations on time or at all. The 1616 table is one of the closest things we have to a publishers’ benefaction register, but it seems even the list was not designed to commemorate the Stationers’ munificence or to further the reputation of the Bodleian by publicizing its many donors. Indeed, it should be noted that the table from 1616 in Thomas James’s daybook may have functioned as a tool for surveillance for the future monitoring of publishers who were fulfilling the deed and, by their absence, those who were not. What the table of books provides and elides was bound up in the needs of the library, not the Stationers. Thus, both scarcity of records and the biases inherent in those that are extant have contributed to difficulties in recovering publishers’ perspectives and intentions in fulfilling the Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement.

The Politics of Benefaction and Bodley’s Plate Further complicating our understanding of the Bodleian–​Stationers’ deed and the role of books as gifts are the kinds of historical narratives that have circulated. For some time now, critics have related a long history of the ‘agreement’, covering events that exposed disagreement, opposition, and litigation between parties over hundreds of years. Within these retellings, early fractures in the exchange of books have been interpreted as signs that the agreement was doomed from the very start. Coupled with a scholarly tendency to repeat received wisdom, it is no accident that the history of ‘legal deposit’ in the early seventeenth century has become synonymous with a tale of Stationers’ neglect, rather than one that exposes the intricacies of early modern gift-​exchange when individuals and institutions were vying for status, honour, and material necessities, on behalf of themselves and/​or their corporate bodies. The politics of class have also shaped narratives of the indenture, including who best fits the role of gift-​giver. Hundreds of years of scholarship have contributed to scepticism of the Stationers’ good intentions upon entering the agreement with the Bodleian

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    439 Library in 1610. In this scholarship, any number of adjectives for the London Stationers’ crop up: averse, non-​compliant,66 negligent,67 recalcitrant.68 The Stationers are painted as a corporation of retrograde disrupters of educational progress, especially when juxtaposed with Bodley and Thomas James whose foresight and vision created a library that still exists today. Some suspicion of the Stationers probably originated from Bodley himself, explicitly his expressions of frustration with the company and implicitly from his distrust of those he considered his social inferiors, from Thomas James, his librarian, to the workers who were building his library whom he called ‘that idle rabble’.69 Anyone who did not advance the library’s reputation, in theory or in practice, was deemed a threat to Bodley and his legacy.70 One does not need to look any further than Sir Thomas’s autobiography, The Life of Sir Thomas Bodley (1647), to grasp how keenly he wished to control the narrative of his life after his death, centring on his role as benefactor.71 In the Life, Bodley related his many acts of service to his nation and the University of Oxford. Considering his extreme generosity, we should not be surprised that his acts of benefice have overshadowed those of the London Stationers. And yet, uninterrogated assumptions about the benefactor have produced distortions of evidence from the past, as a brief concluding case study involving a mysterious gift of silver plate demonstrates. Historical tradition that tells us that Bodley gave the Stationers’ Company a token of appreciation upon entering the agreement in 1610: a gift of plate. The origins of this story go back to at least 1695, when the Bodleian librarian, Thomas Hyde, was reviewing the history of the agreement with the London Stationers: ‘We have been told that Sir Thomas Bodley gave to the Company 50 pounds worth of plate when they entered into this Indenture. But its [sic] not mentioned in our counter-​part.’72 Without evidence of the gift, later critics took to creative speculation. In one version of events, the Stationers were thought to have been reluctant to agree to Bodley’s terms. Rather than letting the deed die, Bodley resorted to bribing the company with 50 pounds of plate, which apparently ‘settled their remaining scruples’.73 That this exchange was conceived of as a financial transaction, not as an act of donation, becomes apparent in other critical assessments that exaggerated the value of the plate, claiming that the deed with the Stationers was purchased or ‘gained by a judicious present of a hundred pounds worth of plate’.74 In current scholarship, Bodley’s gift has been mostly relegated to historical lore, as scholars have not been able to identify evidence of the gift in library records. And yet, a trace of Bodley’s plate, unknown to Hyde and others, has been all along tucked away in the Stationers’ Company Archive in Liber A.75 Sir Thomas Bodley’s plate—​one standing salt with a cover—​appears first in a list of thirteen items being pawned to the London Stationer John Bill in 1627. I transcribe just the first two entries from the list below: Imprimis one Salt wth a Cou’ Sr Tho: Bodley . . . . . . . . . 60-​0-​0 Item one salt with a Cou’ Mr Newton. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 42-​0-​1

440   Tara L. Lyons This full record shows that in exchange for the thirteen items, Bill gave to the Stationers’ Company £100, money that was required of the corporation for a £840 loan to Charles I.76 On 10 July 1629, when the loan was repaid, Bill sold the thirteen pieces of plate back to the Stationers’ Company for £112. Bodley’s plate had been used by the company as collateral. What also becomes obvious from the figures in the Stationers’ accounts is that Bodley’s gift to the company was rather slight. The ‘60’ recorded to the right of the entry refers not to pounds, but to (troy) ounces, a measurement for weighing precious metals. As the going rate for plated silver around 1627 was roughly 4–​5 shillings per ounce, Bodley’s 60-​ounce standing salt with cover was probably only worth between £12 and £15.77 Indeed, it took all thirteen pieces of plate to make up the £100 paid by Bill. More likely than not, the plate, if given in 1610, was a modest gesture of gratitude on behalf of Bodley to the company. Neither Norton nor any member of the company could have been ‘bought off ’ for such a trifling amount. How Bodley’s plate took on such character, growing from a gift to a bribe, from 50 to 100 pounds, from a token of appreciation to a financial motive, has everything to do with how the founder and the company have been represented across time. Bodley’s plate became yet another example of his largesse, his willingness to deliver up his own wealth to build a library that would serve students and scholars for generations. And within this version of events, the Stationers could not be imagined as willing collaborators or altruistic benefactors. Their primary motives were still considered to be economic, and their resistance to the agreement erased with a silver trinket. Paradoxically, the Stationers’ own benevolence was reduced to a transaction in a commodity exchange, their capacity for gift-​giving and philanthropy elided in and through misreadings of Bodley’s gift to them. What then would a more capacious history of the book-​as-​gift in the Bodleian Library look like if the focus was on benefactors like the London publishers, many of whom were of the middling sort and apparently some in the category of the working poor? To what extent is the Bodleian Library their legacy too? What other erasures have occurred in efforts to tell a history of Bodley’s gifts to the exclusion of others who had less to give? As historians of the gift acknowledge, preservation does not favour the more modest gift or the low-​status giver. To trace the book-​as-​gift across institutional and private contexts when the donor was not a subject of means and status, however, is not at all impossible—​ although the process might require turning to documents not traditionally understood as registers of benefaction.

Notes 1. W. Craig Ferguson, ‘The Stationers’ Company Poor Book, 1608–​1700’, The Library, 5th ser., 31/​1 (1976), 48. For the payment amounts, see ‘Liber Computi Pro Pauperibus: The Book of Accounts of Moneyes Received’, in Early Print Culture Database: The Stationers’ Company Archive, fols. 47r, 49v. On the bookseller Henry Roberts and questions surrounding

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    441 his identity, see Katharine F. Pantzer, ‘Index 1: Printers and Publishers’, in A Short-​Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–​1640, iii (London: Bibliographical Society, 1991), 145. 2. Registrum Benefactorum, Bodleian Library Records b. 903. On Bodley’s practices of thanking and documenting donors in the Register, see R. A. Beddard, ‘The Official Inauguration of the Bodleian Library on 8 November 1602’, The Library, 7th ser., 3/​3 (2002), 255–​283; Robyn Adams and Louisiane Ferlier, ‘Building a Library Without Walls: The Early Years of the Bodleian Library’, in Annika Bautz and James Gregory (eds.), Libraries, Books, and Collectors of Texts: 1600 to 1900 (London: Routledge, 2018), 11–​27; Alexander Marr, ‘Learned Benefaction: Science, Civility and Donations of Books and Instruments to the Bodleian Library before 1605’, in Malcolm Walsby and Natasha Constantinidou (eds.), Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 27–​50. See Jonathan B. Bengtson, ‘Benefaction Registers in Oxford Libraries’, Library History, 16 (2000), 143–​52. 3. Bodleian Library Records e.9, fos. 102r–​104r. For a fuller treatment of LR e.9 and its lists of books from the Stationers, see Tara L. Lyons, ‘The Bodleian Dayboook, 1613-​1621: Library Records and the Stationers of London’, Textual Cultures 16/​1 (2023), forthcoming. 4. A books published by Cambridge stationer Cantrell Legge was also among the mix. 5. Ferguson, ‘The Stationers’, 39. 6. Peter W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–​1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), i. 31–​38. On London publishers’ many activities, see Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of James I and VI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Marta Straznicki (ed.), Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 7. András Kiséry, ‘An Author and a Bookshop: Publishing Marlowe’s Remains at the Black Bear’, Philological Quarterly, 91/​3 (2012), 361–​392. 8. The arguments here are inspired by Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-​Century France (The Prothero Lecture)’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 33 (1983), 69–​88. 9. William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890); Robert C. Barrington Partridge, The History of the Legal Deposit of Books throughout the British Empire (London: The Library Association, 1938); Ian Philip, The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Ian Gadd (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press, i: Beginnings to 1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10. For a transcription of the agreement, see Partridge, The History, 289. The original is housed in Oxford University Archives, MS 1606–​1611, fos. 326–​7. 11. G. W. Wheeler (ed.), Letters of Thomas Bodley to the University of Oxford, 1598–​1611 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 206. 12. A facsimile of the inscription can be seen in David Rogers, The Bodleian Library and Its Treasures, 1320–​1770 (Henley-​on-​Thames: Aidan Ellis, 1991), 49. 13. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 1–​10.

442   Tara L. Lyons 14. Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-​ Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8–​10. Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 69–​77. 15. A few stipulations were included, including prohibitions from ‘transcribing of some certaine booke or bookes not fit to be divulged’. 16. Oxford University Statutes, i, trans. G. R. M. Ward (London: William Pickering, 1845), 254. 17. The Bodleian Library does preserve copies of books that were used for reprinting, like Sir John Cheke’s Hurt of Sedition (1567), 8° C 94 Th., which still bears the ‘Impress’ mark from the Chancellor of the University who authorized its use in 1640. But, even in this case, it was not a London Stationer, but the Oxford printer, Leonard Litchfield, who issued the second edition. Further research of Bodleian books known to be in the library collections in the seventeenth century might bear more fruit on this matter. 18. Macray, Annals, 99–​100. 19. For instance, no London Stationers appear in the early lists of recorded readers from 1610 to 1616. See Register of the University of Oxford, ed. Andrew Clark, ii/​1 (Oxford: Oxford University, 1887), 267–​280. 20. Ann Saunders, ‘The Stationers’ Hall’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), The Stationers’ Company and the Book Trade, 1550–​1990 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1997), 2. 21. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 219. 22. Elizabeth S. Leedham-​Green and David McKitterick, ‘Ownership: Private and Public Libraries’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), with Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 336. 23. John Barnard, ‘Politics, Profits, and Idealism: John Norton, the Stationers’ Company and Sir Thomas Bodley’, in Rae Earnshaw and John Vince London (eds.), Digital Convergence—​Libraries of the Future (London: Springer-​Verlag London Ltd, 2008), 327–​344. 24. Sir Thomas Bodley, Reliquiæ Bodleianæ: Or Some Genuine Remains of Sir Thomas Bodley. ed. Thomas Hearne (London, 1703), 14. 25. See Barnard, ‘Politics’, 333–​337. 26. Barnard, ‘Politics’, 338; Beddard, ‘The Official Inauguration’, 255–​283. 27. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 61. 28. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 32. 29. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 114. 30. See Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 84. For benefactions to the Bodleian from 1600 to 1604, see the printed copy, STC 19040. Norton’s gift appears on p. 36. 31. Barnard, ‘Politics’, 333–​337. 32. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 206. 33. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 217. 34. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 219. 35. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 219. 36. For a transcription of the 1612 ordinance and commendation, see Partridge, The History, 290–​291. 37. Partridge, The History, 19.

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    443 38. Heal, The Power of Gifts, 23. 39. Stationers’ Company, Vicesimo octavo Ianuarij, 1611 [S.l.: R. Barker?, 1612]. STC 16786.12. 40. Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51–​57. 41. Mauss, The Gift, 15. 42. Mauss, The Gift, 15. He explains that one ‘realizes that one must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his nature and substance’. 43. A facsimile of the inscription can be seen in Rogers, The Bodleian Library, 49. 44. See transcriptions of Bodley’s last will and testament with attached codicil and the 1609 endowment in Macray, Annals, 402–​418. 45. Philip, The Bodleian Library, 30. 46. The lists of Stationers’ books are recorded on 15 Nov. 1613 (41 titles), 28 June 1614 (72 titles), and 8 June 1616 (91 titles). 47. Philip, The Bodleian Library, 30. 48. For a transcription of a Sept. 1614 binding consignment with many more London books entering the library, see Tara L. Lyons, ‘New Evidence for Ben Jonson’s Epigrammes (ca. 1612) in Bodleian Library Records’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 114/​3 (2020), 343–​364. 49. See William A. Jackson, Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957), 438–​490. 50. LR e.9, 30v and 44r. 51. W. W. Greg, Licensers for the Press, &c. to 1640 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, 1962), 66. For the Library Curators orders from 19 Nov. 1614, see G. W. Wheeler, The Earliest Catalogues of the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), 89–​93. 52. Macray, Annals, 402–​418. 53. Macray, Annals, 46–​48. 54. LR. e.9, 30v. 55. STC 1704; STC 3613; STC 11945; STC 7174; STC 14368. 56. LR e.9, fo. 14r–​v. 57. Philip, The Bodleian Library, 28. 58. STC 4002; STC 3612; STC 3618; STC 14989.5 or 14990. 59. The 1613 volume does not actually have Bill’s name in the imprint, but instead that of his business partner, Bonham Norton, the nephew and heir of John Norton. 60. Gwen Hampshire, The Bodleian Library Account Book, 1613–​1646 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1983), 18. 61. LR e.9, 102r. STC 7099 & 7100. 62. STC 11938, STC 13779. 63. Bodleian Library, Arch. A.c.14. 64. Jackson, Records, 355–​356. 65. Bland, ‘William Stansby and the Production of The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, 1615–​1616’, The Library, 6th ser., 20/​1 (Mar. 1998), 14. 66. Partridge, The History, 21–​22. 67. Macray, Annals, 40. 68. I. G. Philip and Paul Morgan, ‘Libraries, Books, and Printing’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-​Century Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 664.

444   Tara L. Lyons 69. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 1. For more on Bodley’s elitism, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘ “Rowme” of Its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 113–​130. 70. See e.g. Wheeler (ed.), Letters, 221, 229. 71. For an account of the politics surrounding Bodley’s autobiography, see Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life-​Writing, ii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–​3. 72. Macray, Annals, 41. 73. Partridge, The History, 18. Falconer Madan, The Bodleian Library at Oxford (London: Duckworth & Co., 1919), 20. 74. ‘Bodley and the Bodleian Approaching Tercentenary’, The Connoisseur, 4 (Sept. 1902), 29. 75. Stationers’ Company Archive, Liber A, 108v. For a transcription, see Jackson, Records, 391. 76. Jackson, Records, 203 n. 2. Thanks for Ian Gadd for assistance with interpreting this entry. 77. On plated salts, troy ounce conversions, and estimates on plated silver values in the seventeenth century, see Wilfred Joseph Cripps, Old English Plate, Ecclesiastical, Decorative, Domestic (London: John Murray, 1878).

Select Bibliography Adams, Robyn, and Ferlier, Louisiane, ‘Building a Library Without Walls: The Early Years of the Bodleian Library’, in Annika Bautz and James Gregory (eds.), Libraries, Books, and Collectors of Texts: 1600 to 1900 (London: Routledge, 2018), 11–​27. Barnard, John, ‘Politics, Profits, and Idealism: John Norton, the Stationers’ Company and Sir Thomas Bodley’, in Rae Earnshaw and John Vince (eds.), Digital Convergence—​Libraries of the Future (London: Springer-​Verlag London Ltd, 2008). Blayney, Peter W. M., The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–​1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-​Century France (The Prothero Lecture)’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 33 (1983), 69–​88. Hampshire, Gwen, The Bodleian Library Account Book, 1613–​ 1646 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1983). Heal, Felicity, The Power of Gifts: Gift-​Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Jackson, William A., Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957). Macray, William Dunn, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890). Marr, Alexander, ‘Learned Benefaction: Science, Civility and Donations of Books and Instruments to the Bodleian Library before 1605’, in Malcolm Walsby and Natasha Constantinidou (eds.), Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 27–​50. Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (repr. London: Routledge Classics, 2002).

‘A Gifte of good Moment’    445 Partridge, Robert C. Barrington, The History of the Legal Deposit of Books throughout the British Empire (London: The Library Association, 1938). Philip, Ian, The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Wheeler, G. W. (ed.), Letters of Thomas Bodley to the University of Oxford, 1598–​1611 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927).

CHAPTER 24

Transling ua l a nd Mu ltilingua l Pri nt A. E. B. Coldiron

When in 1596 printer Richard Field issued El Testamento Nuevo de Nuestro Señor Jesu Christo, a 758-​page New Testament in Spanish, he styled himself in the imprint ‘Ricardo del Campo’. This name appeared on at least five of his title pages between 1596 and 1599.1 Like printer Arnold Hatfield’s self-​styling as ‘Arnoldo Hatfildo’, Field’s imprint may now have taken on a slightly comical effect, even as the Spanish ‘del Campo’ (of the field) appears to elevate his status. But his imprints varied: at least one Latin book has ‘Theophilum Pratum’, roughly ‘Theophilus Meadow’ or ‘God-​loving Field’.2 A book in Welsh retains his English name with ‘Richard Field aì printiodd yn Llunden’; his books in French, too, tend to use French phrasing around his English name and locations, for example ‘Par Richard Field Imprimeur demeurant au Blackfriars’ or ‘Imprimé par Richard Field demeurant à la rue de VVood-​street’. Coming from this important printer of Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, and Holinshed—​and of Chapman’s Homer, North’s Plutarch, and Harington’s Ariosto, among other English literary landmarks—​Field’s repeated self-​refashioning is telling, well beyond the question of his aim at international markets. In imitating a title-​page practice that was routine in Continental trans-​and multi-​lingual printing, the cross-​ culturally mutable imprint points to England’s pervasive foreign textual engagements. Like ‘Arnoldo Hatfildo’, ‘Giovanni Volfeo’ (or ‘Volfio’ or ‘Chez Jean Wolfe’), ‘Ioannes Daius’, and others, ‘Ricardo del Campo’ involves the printer’s brief imagination of a new, foreign self, an avatar under which he appears as a foreign producer to English readers and as a compatriot to foreign readers in foreign markets. This effect is especially striking in vernaculars. When printers Latinize their names, they stabilize and elevate them, reimagining themselves in an international timelessness that is often also theo-​ideological in nature; when they self-​Italianize or self-​Frenchify, however, they present themselves as cultural amphibians, relocating themselves to another place in their contemporary world. Like the radically cosmopolitan multilingual printers on the Continent (Aldus in Venice, Plantin in Antwerp, Jean de Tournes in Lyon, and many

Translingual and Multilingual Print    447 others), Field, despite printing landmark English books, aligned his imprint-​identity not with England, but with the language-​location of the text. As David Trotter notes, ‘[L]‌inguistic borders in the sixteenth century, like national identities themselves, were not impermeable’; ‘[T]he fundamental multilingualism [of certain texts] points to a much more flexible and fluid linguistic situation . . . and militates against any clear-​cut identification of nation-​states with national languages in this period’.3 Field’s flexible identity-​allegiances are finally textual. All polyglot books make visible the ‘co-​presence of cultures’ that Karlheinz Stierle finds the distinctive mark of the Renaissance, but the particular physical composition of any polyglot book establishes how those co-​presences are to be understood in relation to one another, always in terms of that book’s content and purpose. The visual and material features of multilingual books invite us to consider the physical text as a contact zone of sorts, encoding certain foreign encounters and relationships, and subtly shaping the reader’s experience of alterity. While translators create different versions of the work, it is the printers who create the physical text that brings them together to guide readers. The central choice in printing a polyglot book is where and how to place the different languages in relation to one another. The particular composition of a polyglot page may also imply the relationship among languages and literatures that the printer has imagined and wishes to represent. This is not to say that printers intend their polyglot layouts as precise spatial analogies to a geopolitical situation or to a conceptual hierarchy of nations, but it is to say that the respective status of languages or cultures that readers are to experience can sometimes be inferred by how texts are placed on a page. Furthermore, over time, each polyglot mise-​ en-​page strategy, much as each typeface does, and as many page elements and elements of apparatus do, develops its own protocols and implications, and even its own reading practices. Volume format, order, and arrangement, too, like the selection of such physical elements as paper, inks, or binding materials, can tell us a lot about how the foreign presences in a book participate in its meaning. All the considerations discussed here, additionally, harmonize with the haptic and spatial features of the textual format, whether codex, scroll, broadsheet, or digital screen, and if codex, with the book format; the different affordances of e.g. duodecimo and folio make different demands on producers and readers alike. But the printer’s decisions about polyglot mise-​en-​page most immediately orchestrate the reader’s encounter with a work’s alterity. Richard Field may have been more foreign-​focused than many Elizabethan and Jacobean printers, but English trans-​and multi-​lingual printing was important from the very start and was probably more important throughout the period than we yet realize. English tastes in printed books were calibrated early to foreign conventions. Indeed, English printing began with a translingual work in a polyglot context, the Recuyell of the Hystoryes of Troye ([Bruges] c.1473 or 1474), Caxton’s translation of the Receuil des Histoires de Troie, printed on the Continent before he brought a press to Westminster. Recent scholarship has been more attentive to the varied foreign engagements and presences in early modern English printing: books translated into English, foreign books imported into England or printed in England, and books containing multiple

448    A. E. B. Coldiron languages. Certain structural problems, however, whether institutional, epistemological, or simply pragmatic, still block a full knowledge and appreciation of trans-​and multi-​lingual print culture. Many accepted academic structures and practices actually obscure early modern trans-​and multi-​lingual materials. Institutions generally divide departments along language lines, and foreign-​language requirements have been eroded (most severely in the United States), thus reducing the number of scholars who can study translations and multilingual books well. Modern editions too often simply omit the foreign portions of polyglot books, aiming strictly at readers of English, or at best include only some foreign portions, and/​or do not convey the paratext, mise-​ en-​page, or typography which guided early modern readers’ navigation of foreign portions.4 In addition, fewer resources and less scholarship exist as yet on multilingual books and book production (as compared to translation per se, which enjoys a thriving scholarship). Indeed, even searching for multilingual books is often a painstaking, text-​by-​text process, because, as Belén Bistué noted, ‘there are few standard guidelines for . . . cataloguing multilingual texts. . . . Cataloguing matrices have not been designed with the possibility of text that combines multiple versions in mind.’5 The new EEBO (Early English Books Online) interface launched in 2019 finally offers ‘multiple languages’ as a search term, but once ticked, the ‘hits’ do not in any way register the actual results that a book-​by-​book search reveals. (At the time of writing, ten items turn up in a search for ‘multiple languages 1473–​1603’, when the actual number must be at least in the hundreds; I know of dozens.) Likewise, even in the enlightened, pro-​ polyglot USTC (Universal Short Title Catalogue), a search for ‘multilingual books’ reveals only eighteen editions originating in the British Isles, nearly all of them dictionaries, language-​learning books, and rhetorics. That search captures no multilingual incunables, for instance, such as Caxton’s mixed-​language books discussed below, nor the famous trilingual Courtier (London: John Wolfe, 1588), a landmark of English multilingual printing (Fig. 24.1). Nor are many multilingual books discoverable in most library catalogues by searching language-​field ‘mul’ or ‘multiple languages’. Despite the great usefulness of catalogues, of EEBO, and of the USTC—​all essential resources that save scholars prohibitive expense and effort—​we must still assume that many more early modern printed books than our current searches reveal do contain text in more than one language. Thus any conclusions about multilingual books must be tentative, because we still in 2020 do not have, as Bistué noted in 2013, the kinds of tools we need to map fully this rich territory. But, as the recent work of Joyce Boro, Sheldon Brammall, Peter Auger, Nigel Smith, and others is proving, this less-​charted territory was formative in English literary culture, and well worth the effort. Some initial definitions and exclusions are in order, because most English-​born books are transnational in one way or another. Alongside the many imported foreign books entering early modern England, all ‘Englished’ (i.e. translated) books, and many English-​printed books, bear foreign residues of style, emphasis, and design—​both page design and book design—​in addition to any translated content. This essay, however, mainly considers multilingual books printed in England. This category obviously includes a very wide range of genres, languages, and subject matter: language-​learning

Translingual and Multilingual Print    449

Fig. 24.1  Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (London: John Wolfe, 1588), A2v–​3. STC 4781. Huntington Library 99009. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

books and dictionaries, law books, religious books of several kinds, travel books, and romances, but by no means only those.6 Across all genres, one finds a varied weighting of the multilingual, with some books entirely multilingual, others partly so, and many others only lightly or incidentally so. The focus here is on more heavily multilingual books (whether or not they repeat parallel content in more than one language) and on the different design tactics printers used to present the multilingual material to English readers. But I largely exclude here (1) the international book trades and the foreign-​made, imported books that had always featured in the English book trades, and (2) translations, although both categories brought important foreign material to early modern England and set certain foreign-​based expectations among English readers. Both those topics, book trades and translation, are amply treated elsewhere. The design of a multilingual book can tell us a good deal about its producers and users. English printers’ choices in such matters as mise-​ en-​page, apparatus and paratext, ornaments, and typography usually reveal how printers imagined their readers and how they thought readers would or should use multilingual books. Often, design features also reveal how a multilingual book might have reshaped English readers’ encounters with foreign materials. Ann Blair wisely notes that ‘it is delicate

450    A. E. B. Coldiron to assess the impact on past readers of features of the printed page . . . especially given the absence of contemporary comment on layout’.7 Yet with care, we can productively read multilingual books in at least two inferential ways. First, thinking of book production, we can infer printers’ particular imagination of their readers’ needs, desires, and/​or attitudes with respect to the foreign; and if possible, we can compare design features across editions to observe that imagination change, as in some examples below. Second, thinking of book use, we can infer how English readers were encouraged to encounter the foreign, sometimes generally (i.e., how they were encouraged to imitate or eschew certain foreign ways or ideas), and sometimes more precisely (i.e. how an English reader’s eyes were encouraged to move across a page or an opening full of foreign words). Design features as specific as spacing or type style intervened in English literary cultural issues as broad as xenophilia/​xenophobia, transvaluation, imitatio, and literary repertoire. The present essay tries to fill a gap in current scholarship, first by surveying the earliest instances of trans-​and multi-​lingual printing in England—​Caxton’s—​and outlining some contexts for and consequences of Caxton’s foreign-​focused printing practices. Next, the essay treats design topics such as mise-​en-​page and typography. In a short final gallery, the essay samples the variety in sixteenth-​century English multilingual printing, and how the printers’ varied handling of design issues constructed different kinds of foreign encounter for English readers.

Early Translingual and Multilingual Printing: William Caxton Multilingual printing began earlier in England than is usually noted, and both the numbers and kinds of multilingual books printed in England are much greater than usually acknowledged. It is well known that the first book printed in English, The Recuyell of the Hystoryes of Troye . . . ([Bruges]: c.1473 or 1474), was Caxton’s own translation of Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes.8 Less well known is that Caxton’s Englished Recuyell included a Latin epilogue poem, ‘Pergama flere volo . . .’, a misogynist cento made from parts of the Carmina Burana, that comments, for a Latinate audience segment, on certain gender issues in the translated Troy stories.9 Likewise, it is better known that a majority of polyglot Caxton’s production was translation (much of it his own translation) than it is that Caxton printed multilingually in two senses: he printed books in French, Latin, and English (occasionally printing the same book in both French and English), and some of his books included text in more than one language. This is especially interesting in light of Caxton’s frequent paratextual declarations of nation-​ focused motives for printing translations. The first is in the Recuyell prologue, typical of others: ‘I thought in my self hit shold be a good besynes to translate hyt into oure englissh /​to thende that hyt myght be had as well in the royaume of Englond as in other landes’

Translingual and Multilingual Print    451 ([2v]). Commercial motives may go largely unstated, but apparently, a polyglot printing practice, not only translations into English, would satisfy English readers’ needs. Non-​English printing is involved in some seventy of Caxton’s roughly 107 items printed (as listed in the ISTC [Incunabula Short Title Catalogue], including those printed ‘for William Caxton’), covering a wide range of genres and topics. Much of this work Caxton translated himself from French, in addition to a translation from Dutch, Reynart the Foxe. He also printed numerous works in Latin, in French, or in more than one language. Some of the Latin-​derived works also relied on intermediating French versions.10 Caxton also printed numerous translations made by others (e.g. William Worcester and John Tiptoft), and early on he printed three translations from French by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, with whom he had a sustained and apparently friendly relationship.11 Among other serious translations he printed are Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae, Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Polycronicon, an anonymous translation of Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, as well as numerous religious translations.12 Henry VII commissioned Caxton’s own translation and printing of Christine de Pizan’s military manual, the 288-​page Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye (1489). Clearly, Caxton’s wide-​ranging French appropriations, including the popular translated romances Paris and Vienne (1485) and Blanchardyne and Eglantine (1489) and the early cosmography The Myrrour of the World (1481; 1489–​90) centrally fuelled his printing enterprise. A significantly translingual printer, Caxton was also, in varying degrees, a multilingual printer in the usual sense (though at the time of writing only one of the books discussed here is searchable in major catalogues as multilingual). In addition to printing his own and others’ translations into English, Caxton also printed works in languages other than English: at least four in French, and at least fifteen in Latin, not counting the indulgences.13 At small scale, as with the Latin cento ‘Pergama flere volo’ in the Recuyell, incidental or paratextual Latin tags are scattered through Caxton’s production, such as the ‘Supplico stet cedula’ on the advertisement for his Sarum Ordinal14 or several ‘Per Caxton’ tags. Caxton sometimes uses a suggestive Latin colophon phrase, ‘Caxton me fieri fecit’, i.e. ‘Caxton caused me to be made’, a foreign biblio-​ventriloquism and a final translingual metatextuality placed at a crucial liminal site.15 The phrase could simply be a truthful account of Caxton’s changing role, having others print or ‘make’ certain things for him, but the book explains itself in Latin. Sometimes final foreign phrases fleetingly connect an English book to a foreign literary tradition, for example joining the envoi or ‘va livre et dis’ traditions16 in which Caxton participates elsewhere, as in the important but as yet undigitized colophon poem to the Morale Prouerbes of Cristyne translation (1478). At a larger scale, taking a central rather than a paratextual place in the work, his Fifteen Oes (1491) contains Latin prayers, starting on Bir, in the same type as the English prayers. A new typographic plan in the bilingual Festial (also 1491) includes a typographic differentiation of languages that was not present in the edition of 1483: Latin and English passages are interspersed, but English appears in Caxton Type 6 and Latin in Type 8.17 Over the years, Caxton increasingly drew typographical distinctions among languages, and he began doing so very early in some instructive books.

452    A. E. B. Coldiron In the instructive-​book line, macaronic poetry is a key feature of the Paruus Catho (Westminster: Caxton, 1476; repr. 1477; re-​ed. 1483) and of a fascinating Latin–​English word-​acrostic poem, Lydgate’s ‘Salve Regina’, printed inside another Caxton schoolbook, the Stans Puer Ad Mensam (Westminster: Caxton, 1476; re-​ed. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1510).18 In both these early macaronic poems, the later editions introduce language distinctions. Caxton’s second edition of the Paruus Catho (1483; Fig. 24.2) visually differentiates the Latin first lines (set further left in a larger Type 319); the remaining English lines in each stanza are in smaller Caxton 2. The visual distinction of size and shape allows the initial Latin line to stand as a pithy, sententious reference point for the English stanza below that unpacks its content; typography here serves pedagogy, and translingual amplificatio. The printer clearly redesigned these schoolbook pages et prodesse, et delectare, even adding a woodcut instruction scene, so that the intended readership, schoolboys, would be both instructed and delighted. Such tactics no doubt supported memory, and they were not the only tactics used in early schoolbooks, but Caxton initiated these in England. In some bilingual Caxtons, however, typographic distinction also aims at the reading experience, though less aggressively perhaps than in the schoolbooks, with more of an apparatus-​function. The Englished Boecius de consolacione philosophie (1478), mostly

Fig. 24.2  Paruus Catho (Westminster: Caxton, 1483), A2v–​3. STC 4852. © British Library Board. Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Translingual and Multilingual Print    453 in Caxton 2 type, includes Latin explicits, Latin section titles with line space left around them, and a Latin epilogue poem by Stefano Surigone,20 who may have worked with Caxton on other books. The poem ‘Epitaphiu[m]‌Galfridi Chaucer . . .’21 refers to Caxton’s printing and asks to be included in the edition. The poem and section titles (but not the explicits) are in a larger Type 3, drawing the eye to linguistic difference and codex-​apparatus functions, effectively reaching both Latinate and non-​Latinate readers. Also relatively simple and functional is the mise-​en-​page of Caxton’s [Vocabulary in French and English] (1480). He created this first bilingual phrasebook printed in England from the Bruges phrasebook Le Liure des mestiers (the English is likely not Caxton’s). All in Type 4, the simple, left-​justified bicolumnar mise-​en-​page visually distinguishes the languages only with blank space. Running heads frequently indicate a polyglot book’s intended readership, as they do here: running heads in English (‘Frensshe’, ‘Englissh’) signal Caxton’s aim at English readers. Compare the running heads in, for instance, some Berlaimont polyglot dictionaries, where ‘Francois’, ‘Italien’, ‘Espagnol’, and ‘Anglois’ signal an intended French readership. Here one can clearly infer the printer’s intentions and assumptions about readers from the placement and functions of foreign text. These and other such books—​Caxton’s own translations, the translations of others, foreign-​language books, and books in more than one language—​remind us of Caxton’s essentially polyglot printing practice. From the very start, multilingual printing in England increasingly involved visual signalling, accomplished with typography and mise-​en-​page, designed to guide the reader in specific ways through the foreign parts of the texts. By consciously setting the English and the foreign in specific relations to one another, the Caxton corpus set initial assumptions for English multilingual printing, despite its relatively simple design tactics: simple, if compared to the complex, elaborate, multilingual books and pages produced on the Continent in Caxton’s day (Figs. 24.3 and 24.4), or to those printed later in the sixteenth century in England by such printers as John Day (Figs. 24.5 and 24.6), John Wolfe (Figs. 24.1, 24.7 and 24.8), Queen’s Printers Newbery and Bishop (Fig. 24.10) or Thomas Roycroft(Fig. 24.11). Contexts, consequences, continuations. Like Caxton, later English printers often published their own and others’ translations and printed polyglot books. This should not be surprising given the contexts. French books in manuscript (and later in print) had been perennially popular at the francophone and bilingual courts of Henry VI (1422–​61 and 1470–​1; disputed King of France, 1422–​53), Edward IV (1461–​70 and 1471–​ 83), Henry VII (1485–​1509), and after; indeed, French books were a dominant presence across Europe.22 The English book trades were heavily dependent on foreign workers, and many early printers and workers in England were bilingual or polyglot foreigners, among them many francophone printers. The Act of 1484 encouraged foreigners working in those trades, who established an essentially foreign-​staffed industry in England, firmly rooted and influential on praxis even after the Act of 1534 rescinded the protections of 1484. In 1538, as Peter Blayney explains in a comprehensive, important discussion of the complex regulatory issues, Henry VIII banned the importation of books in English and made sure that any printed translation into English would bear

454    A. E. B. Coldiron

Fig. 24.3  Elias Hutter, Sanctus Marcus (Nuremberg: s.n., 1600), [A1v]-​A2. © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark: Asia, Pacific & Africa 01902.d.22.(2.). Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

the name of the translator.23 Like the Crown and the Church, the Stationers’ Company formed an essential institutional context for all printers’ work, particularly after its royal charter in 1557. Like Caxton (Kent-​born but a cultural amphibian in several senses24), the next two generations of printers, whether English-​or foreign-​born—​such as Julien le Notaire, Guillaume or Willem de Mechlin, Robert Wyer, John Skot, John Rastell, Robert and then William Copland, and Henry VIII’s Normandy-​born King’s Printer Richard Pynson—​printed many translated books, often as translators of what they printed. Because of the foreign-​built English printing industry, English-​made books, whether trans-​and multi-​lingual or not, were also foreign in significant ways, from the substrates to the bindings. French paper predominated, and Continental techniques of type-​ founding, typesetting, mise-​en-​page, and bookbinding reveal that the many foreigners in the early book trades brought to England the habits, book design aesthetics, and tastes of (mostly) Burgundy, the Low Countries, and France, in every phase of book creation and production. The foundational foreignness of early printed books persisted long in what we should think of as a ‘Renaissance reprint culture’, where books were durable—​not disposable—​goods, redistributed further when reprinted. The predominance and high visibility of foreign elements in the earliest printers’ output surely gave later English readers across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a familiar—​ that is, a foreign—​context for reading. It should be no surprise that, for instance, an

Translingual and Multilingual Print    455

Fig. 24.4  Thomas More, Von der wunderbarlichen Jnnsel Vtopia (Basel: Bebel, 1524), A2. Source library: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 4 Pol.g. 162 d. Image published with the permission of the BSB (Daten für die Forschung).

‘English’ book, on French paper, with a Dutch-​born woodcut, made using Burgundian type, type-​founding, and printing techniques, in a French-​style binding, created by foreign apprentices and masters, might also contain foreign words in several languages. It sometimes does surprise modern readers, however, that these printers were not mere technicians, as they are too often regarded today, but rather were foreign-​engaged, creative agents of a developing ‘English’ literary culture. From the 1520s to the mid-​sixteenth century, among the most multilingually engaged printers in England were French and Dutch printers of English, Dutch, French, and Latin books and translations.25 At least 240 Dutch works were printed in London between 1525 and 1650 (USTC). The early period is especially rich and daring, beginning with printer Hans van Ruremund, and at mid-​century featuring printers Steven Mierdman and Nicolaes van den Berghe. In London, Mierdman printed at least one French work in 1547, an Italian book in 1553, seven editions in Dutch between 1551 and

456    A. E. B. Coldiron

Fig. 24.5  Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham. A Testimonie of Antiquitie (London: John Day, 1566), [B4v–​ 5]. STC 159.5. Huntington Library 12965. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

1553, and eleven in Latin between 1548 and 1553, as well as more than sixty books printed in English with which he was involved. At least one of those, the Tyndale New Testament in sexto-​ decimo, was actually printed in Antwerp (USTC 504120); like people, translingual books did not always confess their origins accurately. Such books set a technical standard, in a way, bringing the fruits of Dutch printers’ expertise and gear to readers in England (sometimes also bearing Reformation ideas), in several languages. Printing in French in England began earlier, but the USTC lists only 129 editions between 1489 and 1639, beginning with Le Passe temps d’oysiveté (London: Robert Gaguin, 1489). Francophone printers like Richard Pynson, Thomas Berthelet, Wynkyn de Worde, Robert Wyer, and Robert Copland, who were also important translators from French, dominated the scene before and around the mid-​sixteenth century. Others with French, French-​born, or French-​related output and connections included Robert Redman, William Copland, William Myddleton, John Roux, Henry Smith, Henry Pepwell, and Thomas Gaultier. Printers’ reputations have often been based on the genres in which they specialized, but it is useful to note their foreign-​language proclivities.

Translingual and Multilingual Print    457

Fig. 24.6  Archaionomia (Londini: ex officina Joannis Daii, 1568), [L3r]-​L.iiii. STC 15142. Huntington Library 62136. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

John Rastell, for instance, is perhaps best known as a Henrician law-​book printer, but his work includes non-​legal translation from French and multilingual printing as well. We can understand printers and their contexts better, that is, by examining not only the usual generic, regulatory, and historical frameworks but also their trans-​and multi-​ linguistic commitments and strategies. Better known now than most earlier printers are the Elizabethan printers of books in multiple languages and/​or of multilingual books, such as Edward Aggas, Thomas Vautrollier and his wife Jacqueline (both French immigrants), Dutchman Henry Bynneman (who became a Queen’s Printer), George Bishop and Ralph Newbery (both Queen’s Printers), and perhaps the most famous (or infamous) English multilingual printer of all, John Wolfe. Ian Gadd notes that, in an argument about some translation work, ‘queen’s printer [Barker] exclaimed “Wolfe, leave your Machevillian devices, and conceit of your forreine wit, which you have gained by gadding from countrey to countrey” ’ (and claimed Wolfe was hard to work with).26 The ‘forreine wit’ of the many less-​flamboyant Elizabethan multilingual printers enhanced English books with varied page formats, type distinctions and assignments, ornaments, paratext, and apparatus to guide the reader’s imaginative journeys into alterity. Their tactics facilitated what we might call the cosmpolitanization of the English reader.

458    A. E. B. Coldiron

Fig. 24.7  Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia (London: John Wolfe, 1588), Passion XXXVIII, [E3v]. STC 25118a. Huntington Library 79609. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Translingual and Multilingual Print    459

Fig. 24.8  Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia (London: John Wolfe, 1588), Passions LXXXII and LXXXIII, [L1v–​2]. STC 25118a. Huntington Library 79609. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Multilingual printing tactics and the imagined English reader. In examining multilingual books, an initial point to note is whether the languages are presented sequentially or in parallel. From the reader’s view, these tactics make different demands and present different affordances. Works in parallel facilitate language learning and comparatist reading; sequential works do not prohibit these uses, but they tend to assume code-​switching, polyglot readers, or perhaps those willing to skip ahead to their linguistic comfort-​zone. From the typographer’s view, however, parallel texts present an extra challenge. Typographer Alistair Crawford writes that ‘In combining any two languages into one typographic harmony, the designer will have to deal with copy of different length (representing the same message) differing in the size of the average words, sentence, and paragraph; and differing in the incidence of certain letters of the alphabet, characteristic of each language’.27 We see early modern printers address this challenge particularly in the careful line-​spaces left in long works such as dictionaries and multilingual romances, to synchronize the content across parallel columns (as in Fig. 24.1). Typography and mise-​en-​page depend on the languages to be set as well. Whether a language is to be read left to right, right to left, or vertically, page

460    A. E. B. Coldiron designers must assume first an order of reading for the language being printed, as well as current conventions for such things as columns, headers, marginalia, or catchwords. As Laurie Maguire demonstrates in The Rhetoric of the Page, ‘the early modern page is a visual unit as well as a textual unit’, with a productive relationship between layout and content, and ‘mise-​en-​page influences readers in the same way that rhetoric influences readers’.28 Dictionaries, romances, treatises, conversation manuals and other language-​learning books often deploy multilingual contents in parallel columns (as in Fig. 24.1) or in parallel facing pages (as in Fig. 24.6).29 Entry-​by-​entry dictionary or reference formats similarly repeat parallel semantic content but articulate it at smaller scale, often with type-​distinguished multilingual forms. William Patten’s The Calender of Scripture (London: Richard Jugge, 1575), for instance, alternates type for different languages, even when simply transliterating. The effect on readers is dilation on each entry, and an easier visual path than the repeated crossing of columns to compare versions of a single word. On the other hand, interlinear formats, often found in schoolbooks, allow reading across a set of (usually) parallel bilingual lines. But where one expects interlinear bilingual versions’ stable content to run in consistent parallel, early modern interlinear mise-​ en-​page presented considerable variety. In one of Nikolaus Henkel’s examples, the Latin school text is clearly not translated by the German lines above it; the German offers only lexical cribs. That is, one cannot read the German as a sentence; one can only receive semantic content for each Latin word. For syntax, you’re on your own, which was evidently the tough-​minded pedagogical point of this non-​parallel interlinear format.30 We can perhaps feel grateful for the more common, standardized facing-​column and facing-​page bi-​and multi-​lingual formats of most language-​learning books.31 Yet as Guyda Armstrong richly demonstrates, ‘although the parallel text format is so familiar as to be invisible to us . . . it is by no means the intellectually neutral exchange that it may first appear to be’.32 Early modern polyglot Bibles were certainly not intellectually neutral. I can find, however, nothing in English printing before the London polyglot Bible of 1657 to match the spectacular, type-​articulated, multicolumnar mise-​en-​page of the Complutensian polyglot Bibles, nor of Elias Hutter’s polyglot Nouum Testamentum (Nuremburg, 1599). That work is printed in three columns per page, two languages per column, so that each opening contains the same text in all twelve languages, complete with type-​ distinguished running heads, nor of his similarly organized dodecalingual Sanctus Marcus (Nuremburg, 1600; Fig. 24.3). Yet the English-​ printed octolingual and hexalingual political broadsheets treated below do elegantly compress versions onto one page (Figs. 24.10 and 24.11). Other kinds of English multilingual mise-​en-​page to follow include two sequential page formats with type-​distinction (Figs. 24.5, 24.9) and the remarkable polyglot and ‘orchematicall’ gamesmanship of the Hekatompathia (Figs. 24.7, 24.8). Mise-​en-​page and typography, like all material features of books, make their meaning together. At the typographic level, as Bonnie Mak argues,

Translingual and Multilingual Print    461

Fig. 24.9  Abraham Fraunce, Arcadian Rhetorike (London, Thomas Orwin, 1588), [I4v–​I5]. STC 11338. Bodleian Library, Mal. 514 (2). Image published with permission of the Bodleian for academic use and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

specific letter forms can infuse a text with social or political suggestions. . . . the shapes of letters may, for instance, exploit the authority of an established tradition or diverge self-​consciously from [convention]. Because the decisions surrounding the deployment of one style of script over another are influenced by social, political, and economic forces, letter forms can be considered part of a broader cultural discourse about the production and transmission of ideas. The disposition of letter shapes may thus be used as a way to explore reading and writing communities.33

The typography and arrangement of multilingual versions on the page may manifest certain imagined relationships among languages and cultures, especially by way of type distinction, type assignment, and type associations. Type distinction, or the use of different types for foreign words in a text, signals linguistic difference visually, just as the sound of a foreign language or accent signals difference in speech. Type distinction also signals a moment of potential code-​switching (if the reader has or is learning the other language); this is particularly significant in macaronic verse, changing the pace and often the metre, which is usually incommensurable between languages.34 Type

462    A. E. B. Coldiron distinction may also perform thematic functions, as Laurie Maguire demonstrates. Maguire presents striking examples of type distinction in printed plays to signify characters’ foreign accent or status, and in one case, incomprehensibility.35 Type assignment, on the other hand, is the dedicated use of a given type for a particular language throughout one work. A frequent early-​modern multilingual assignment is the one found in John Wolfe’s trilingual Courtier: English in black letter, French in roman, and Italian in italic throughout the work (Fig. 24.1). In that case, the English eye may stay at the margins of the opening to read only in black letter, but the left-​hand black-​ letter catchwords invite readers to travel across the opening and read comparatively, heading up towards the right-​outer column, but meeting the French at mid-​page in roman and crossing to the centre of the opening to read the originating Italian. Wolfe’s mise-​en-​page and typography coordinate to encourage that English reader’s imaginative international journey. Consistent, widespread type assignments may develop type associations, the longer-​ term cultural implications around a type that may develop over time. For example, the predominant use of Gothic types in Germanic-​language areas may have tended to shape readers’ expectations for that type over time. Likewise, the predominant use of black letter in England after about 1490 and its continued use in proclamations and some early Bibles (not to mention the nineteenth-​century antiquarian impulse to print revived Renaissance texts in nostalgic Gothic types) probably tended to fix, over the very long term, an association of black letter with Englishness, with venerability, and with authority. In fact, however, its predominance between 1490 and 1530 was largely due to a lack of available roman and italic type. Even so, there was much English presented in other early modern types, and plenty of Latin in black letter, French in italic, and so on, defying such associations. The association of black letter as a particularly English type has been both supported (Stephen Galbraith) and debated (Guyda Armstrong, Adrian Weiss, Mark Bland).36 What we can certainly know, however, is this: over time, types do take on associations for particular readerships, yet those associations will also change over time and among different communities of readers.37 Some questions to ask, then, when opening an early modern multilingual book: are the languages arranged in parallel or sequentially? How does the disposition of space and of text govern reading and eye movements, and does it suggest relationships among languages? How, and how much, does the mise-​en-​page promote comparative reading by encouraging the reader’s eye to move from one language to the other(s) and back? How are languages that are read left to right and those to be read right to left disposed together to guide reading? Is one language set as the ‘primary’ and one/​others as ‘secondary’ language(s), or does the mise-​en-​page imply a hierarchy of languages? Is type assignment consistent, and does the type assignment in any given book support, or break, contemporaneous conventions? What implications are created when readers associate a type over the long term with a particular language or languages? Such questions multiply almost to the number of editions, because one finds such a range of kinds and degrees of foreign-​language presences, such varied ways of handling the foreign-​language texts, and such a full spectrum of purposes, themes, and genres in

Translingual and Multilingual Print    463 multilingual books. But a broader set of questions unfolds from examining those details: what kinds of relations between or among the producing cultures and the translating cultures are implied in the physical arrangements of the book? Are those relationships vertical or horizontal, diachronic or synchronic in character? Do the spatial relations of the page-​opening imply anything about actual relations among literary cultures, and/​or are they more a matter of convenience, convention, or functionality? What follows here is a small, roughly chronological, annotated gallery with which to test such questions.

A Polyglot-​P rinting Gallery This little gallery offers examples of multilingual books at four major post-​Caxton moments in England: first, for contrast, a notable early failure of English trans-​and multi-​lingual printing (More’s Utopia); second, the mid-​century success of John Day’s printing in Anglo-​Saxon, focused on ancient letters that were at once foreign and deeply native for English readers. Then come two examples of literary-​focused multilingualism from late Elizabethans Abraham Fraunce and Thomas Watson, each of whom used multilingual printing to provide aspiring English poets with Continental models in their various languages of composition. Finally, two examples of polyglot poetic broadsheets show the value of multilingual printing in commemorating—​and asserting the ‘world’ importance of—​two English political triumphs, the Armada events of 1588 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. In each case, English printers deployed multilingual textual tactics to address national issues of concern. (1) Thomas More’s Utopia presents an intriguing case of multilingual paratextual material that is thematized, and thus essential to the work.38 The interlinear format invites readers to transliterate the foreign characters so as to begin learning this imaginary alphabet; to read the ‘Utopian’ poem made from those characters by reading the parallel version in German or Latin; and overall, to enter fully into the fiction that this place and its culture, complete with language and poetry, actually exists. At least five Continental editions present text in the Utopian language (Fig. 24.4).39 No extant early modern English edition, however, has this important bilingual paratext alongside the famous map, inviting us so playfully to suspend disbelief and enter the fictional world. Despite promising a sample in the prefatory epistle, the English ‘Printer to the Reader’ apologizes for failing to include it, because the printer could not obtain the characters; he hopes to try again in the next edition.40 No doubt this kind of practical problem limited the multilingual possibilities for many less-​successful printers who would have liked to present Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or other non-​Roman alphabets, but who could not obtain or create a set of foreign type.41 Granted, in the translingual Utopia, multilingual printing serves an unusually prominent metatextual and thematic role. Nevertheless, the readerly expectation of a polyglot page (and the English printer’s confessed inability to provide what the large printing enterprises of the Continent routinely provided)

464    A. E. B. Coldiron points to England’s lagging or uneven production of multilingual books, perhaps part of what Andrew Pettegree noted as the ‘English exception’.42 (2) Around mid-​century, multilingual printing seems to gather force, notably in the productions of John Day and William Seres. As Elizabeth Evenden writes, ‘Among the most important and technically difficult works commissioned from Day in this period were Ælfric’s A Testimonie of Antiquitie (1566?) and William Lambarde’s edition of the Archaionomia (1568)’.43 (See Figs. 24.5 and 24.6.) The former is a religious work and the latter is a treatise on English law; both use Anglo-​Saxon works as evidence of ancient verities, so Day’s use of actual Anglo-​Saxon characters is key to the works’ truth value. Evenden says of Day’s A Testimonie of Antiquitie, ‘[Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew] Parker was having Day print works of antiquity central to his mission: they proved the lineage of the Church in England as the True Church’, and his multilingual text restores some previous erasures. Evenden explains that ‘the erased text is presented in English, Latin and Anglo-​Saxon, with the marginal note “No transubstantiation” ’.44 The languages appear sequentially, not in parallel, so the reader is evidently assumed either to be able to code-​switch among them or to accept the English paraphrastic translations offered after each short foreign passage. The law book, on the other hand, is in a facing-​page arrangement, Anglo-​Saxon on the versos, Latin (in italic type) on the rectos (see Fig. 24.6), which, along with the prefatory table or chart providing a key to the Anglo-​Saxon letters, encourages comparatist reading and language learning. In A Testimonie, the Anglo-​Saxon type is larger than the Latin and English. Day made at least three sets of type, a Great Primer Anglo-​Saxon (15 point), a Pica Anglo-​Saxon (11 point), and later, a Pica Anglo-​Saxon (13 point), with at least twenty-​four special sorts. Evenden notes that Peter Lucas . . . persuasively suggests that this differentiation in size reflected ‘Parker’s conception of the authority that his Anglo-​Saxon types conferred on the matter enshrined in them.’ Clearly size mattered when it came to the commissioning of typefaces to be used by Day.45

Overall, Evenden concludes that ‘nothing on this scale with foreign characters had been previously attempted in English printing’.46 Elaborate, expensive typography here served ideology, as Evenden’s ­chapter 4 details, but it also created a nostalgic, fundamentalist encounter with an antiquity that was both foreign and domestic, both alien and deeply native. (3–​4) Late Elizabethan courtiers and other aspiring poets were served all kinds of advice and examples, but two works make explicit via multilingual printing the idea that English poets needed to take Continental and classical works as their models. Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia (London: John Wolfe 1581/​2) and Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (London: Thomas Orwin, 1588) aim their multilingual quotations and their multilingual printing tactics at the improvement of English literary culture (Figs. 24.7, 24.8 and 24.9). Each book features a cornucopia of foreign citations,

Translingual and Multilingual Print    465 quotations, and commentaries on them, often type-​distinguished and sometimes type-​assigned (but not in perfect consistency). Fig. 24.7 illustrates Watson’s use of several kinds of type distinction. Headnotes are typically in roman, with quotations, even if in English, in italic (Greek quotations are always in Greek type). Poems are in black letter, but proper and place names are often in contrastive roman (lines 17-​18), as are quotations; this draws attention to those elements. Within the aphorism quoted in roman (line 6), the proper name (‘Cupid’) is further distinguished in italic. Such frequent type distinction also invites attention to language and language difference, providing English authors with a toolkit that is explicitly multilingual. Mise-​en-​page in Watson’s work is another elaborate, consistent, and signifying feature of the text. The complex polyglot opening shown in Fig. 24.8 uses a English poems in black letter with type-​distinguished proper names and epithet (‘la nemica mia’) in roman, Latin vertical acrostics in roman on the verso, a French poem cited in the recto headnote in italic, and Greek marginal citations. This typographic cacophony and shaped verse on previous pages mark the Petrarchan structural turn in the lyric sequence between love and renunciation. The verso poem’s framing acrostic, a Latin motto made of the first and last letters of each English line, spells ‘amare est insanire’ (to love is to go mad); Wolfe might well have muttered ‘imprimere est insanire’ after completing this complex book, but he continued to print multilingual and foreign-​language books. In another mode, the Arcadian Rhetorike, also a literary compendium and toolkit, offers literary quotations from French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Greek, type-​ distinguished one from the next in size and kind, but not consistently assigned (except Greek, always in Greek type). In Fig. 24.9, for instance, roman of two sizes is used, respectively, for French and English (large italic is used for Spanish and smaller italic for Latin, and italics render certain paratexts and some proper names). Because the quotations and citations are not presented with consistent, language-​specific type assignment, no type associations can be formed of each literature as a unified tradition distinct from the others. Type distinction without consistent type assignment has the effect here of flattening differences. It suggests that one may simply ransack the polyglot Continental trove, without needing to identify or visually distinguish among traditions (except, as ever, Greek).47 (5) In another vein are two polyglot political broadsheets, each in the style of its day, celebrating a major event crucial to England’s long-​term history: one, the Armada events of 1588; the other, the restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660. The spectacular octolingual Armada broadsheet, one copy of which is on vellum, ‘Ad serenissimam Elizabetham . . .’ (London: Bishop and Newbery, 1588), offers the same epigram in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian (Fig. 24.10). The iterative force of reading the same short poem in all eight languages on one page suggests a universal celebration of English victory. From a literary rather than a political view, however, the English poem, ironically enough, gives a less impressive performance.48 Fig. 24.11 presents a multilingual single sheet of another kind; ‘In optatum reditum . . .’ (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1660), commemorating the return of Charles II in six languages: Chaldean, English (in italic), Greek, Hebrew, Latin (in roman), and

466    A. E. B. Coldiron

Fig. 24.10  Théodore de Bèze, ‘Ad serenissimam Elizabetham . . .’ (London: Bishop and Newbery, 1588), s. sh. fol. (on vellum). STC 1999. © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark 74/​K.T.C.7.b.6. Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Translingual and Multilingual Print    467

Fig. 24.11  John Walker, ‘In optatum reditum . . .’ (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1660), s. sh. fol. Wing 393. © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark C.20.f.5.(56). Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

468    A. E. B. Coldiron Syriac. This sheet prints Chaldean, Syriac, and Hebrew poems—​all languages read right to left—​in the upper part of the page, right-​justified. Below, the poems in languages normally read left to right are left-​justified. This careful arrangement, however, leads to odd orders of reading. A reading eye following the language protocols and right-​ aligned mise-​en-​page would begin at the top right, with Syriac (reading right to left), then Chaldean (still right to left), then Hebrew (right to left); individual poems are read smoothly in columns with this overall right-​to-​left movement across the upper row of poems. Then just down the page from the end of the Hebrew poem, one reads the left-​to-​ right poems in order, these poems also appearing in translatio order: Greek, Latin, and English. This language-​and-​alignment-​based order of reading, however preferable its visual ease, displaces Hebrew from its usual primacy and linguistic-​historical order. An alternative is to imagine a polyglot English reader ignoring the mise-​en-​page and simply following an overall left-​to-​right order. In this way, Hebrew’s primacy is preserved, but there is some visual zigzagging to be done: first Hebrew, read right to left, then a jump up and back over to Chaldean (also read right to left), and then another leap up and back to Syriac (again read right to left); from there at right page, the eye must travel down and left to begin the Greek. The reader unfamiliar with Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldean (probably a majority) might skip directly to the lower poems, noticing only illegible characters, the signs of transtemporal, universal celebration, venerability, and holiness from the ancient languages: evidently the main point. *** These and many other similar examples show how important multilingual printing was in England, though it has not yet received its full scholarly due. Multilingual books contain telling clues about England’s imagined (and actual) relations with the foreign. Printers, translators, and book producers were key agents in those relations, as their design decisions shaped the readerly encounter with foreign texts over the long term. Using mise-​en-​page, typography, paratext, and verbal translation, printers and translators in England brought a world of difference(s) to English readers. By making cross-​cultural contact a visible basis of early modern English literature, multilingual books and book producers effectively undid any isolating curse of Babel, at least on their polyglot pages.

Notes 1. Jean Calvin, Catecismo Que Significa Forma De Instrucion . . . (London: En casa de Ricardo del Campo, 1596); Jean Calvin, Institucion De La Religion Christiana Compuesta En Quatro Libros . . . (London: En casa de Ricardo del Campo, 1597; William Perkins, Catholico Reformado. O Una Declaracion . . . (London: En casa de Ricardo del campo, 1599; Cipriano de Valera, Aviso a Los De La Iglesia Romana Sobre La Indiccion Del Iubiléo . . . (London: En casa de Ricardo del Campo, 1600); Cipriano de Valera, Dos Tratados, El Primero Es Del Papa y De Su Autoridad . . . (London: En casa de Ricardo del Campo, 1599). 2. His Latin books sometimes bear ‘In Aedibus Richard Field’ or an ‘excudebat’ statement.

Translingual and Multilingual Print    469 3. David Trotter, ‘ “Si le français n’y peut aller”: Villers-​Cotterêts and Mixed-​Language Documents from the Pyrenees’, in David Cowling (ed.), Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 77–​97, at 77. 4. The Modern Humanities Research Association Tudor & Stuart Translations series, however, has made paratext-​sensitive editions of significant translations available and affordable; see http://​www.mhra.org.uk/​ser​ies/​TST. 5. Belén Bistué, Collaborative Translation and Multi-​Version Texts in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 14. 6. For an illustrated survey of the themes and genres treated in multilingual early modern English books, see my ‘Adventures in Early Modern Multilingualism: “Exceptional” England?’, in Peter Auger and Sheldon Brammall (eds.), Multilingual Texts and Practices in Early Modern Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), 147–​61. 7. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 152; see 152–​159 and passim. 8. Raoul Lefèvre, Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes ([Ghent?: David Aubert? for William Caxton, c.1474]), British Library shelfmark: IB.49410; second copy: IB.49411; on Aubert’s involvement, see Lotte Hellinga, ‘William Caxton, Colard Mansion, and the Printer in Type I’, Bulletin du bibliophile, 1 (2011), 86–​114. On Caxton as a translator, see Coldiron, ‘William Caxton, Multimediator’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 58/​4 (2022), 488–​96. 9. The Latin poem, in the misogynist line of Jerome, Theophrastus, and Mathéolus, is stitched from seven of the forty-​five distichs from Carmina Burana CI, selected and reordered, and was widely disseminated. See A. E. B. Coldiron, Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 55–​58 and 61 for further discussion. 10. The Eneydos, with its famous prefatory complaint about English dialects, was one; among others were the ars moriendi, the Governal of Health, the Game of Chesse, and Of Olde Age. For details about the translations, see the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue online. 11. Woodville translated, and Caxton printed, The Dictes and Seyinges of the Philosophres (1477 ff., with an additional, inflammatory ‘Socrates’ section translated by Caxton himself with commentary); Christine de Pizan’s Morale Prouerbes (1478); an eschatology, the Cordyale (1479); Woodville provided, but Caxton translated, an anti-​court work, Alain Chartier’s Curial (1484). 12. e.g. The Myrroure of the blessyd lyf of Jhesu Cryste, Nicholas Love’s translation of the pseudo-​Bonaventuran Meditationes (whose title is re-​ Latinized as Speculum Vitae Christi). 13. In French: the Receuil, the Histoire de Jason, the Septenuaire des pseaulmes de penitence, and Les quattres choses derrenieres. Many of his books in Latin are religious books, plus instructive and learned books of several kinds: a Nova rhetorica and an Epitome of it, the Paruus Cat[h]o (discussed below), and a Donatus grammar (1487). The picture continues to change as we learn more; a superior guide to the latest news is always Lotte Hellinga, from William Caxton and Early Printing in England (London: British Library, 2010) to her subsequent works. 14. If it plese ony man spirituel or temporel, 1477; STC 4980. 15. For a rich reading of the phrase ‘Caxton caused me to be made’, see Kathleen Tonry’s ‘Introduction’ to Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476–​1526 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), esp. 3 and 20. The phrase is most often found after 1487.

470    A. E. B. Coldiron 16. In the short finale to some medieval lyrics, such lines varied, including ‘go little book and say’ why you were made, or that the author loves the lady, or that we are loyal to the Prince. 17. For a convenient image, see the last facsimile in Seymour De Ricci, Census of Caxtons (Oxford: printed for the Bibliographical Society at Oxford University Press, 1909), p. [xxxv]. (De Ricci’s Census is also online via Hathi Trust.) 18. For full analysis of these poems, with images, see my ‘Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation’, in Karen Newman and Jane Tylus (eds.), Early Modern Cultures of Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 56–​75. 19. Some records report that the Latin is in Type 4*, but several features, such as the double horizontal marks on the upper-​case ‘I’ in the Latin as well as the minim shapes, resemble Type 3. Readers can easily judge by comparing De Ricci’s facsimile Type 3 from the Ordinale Seu Pica Sarum and his facsimile of Type 4* from the Life of Charles the Great, which is clearly not the same type as the Latin in Paruus Catho 1483. Nor is it Type 4, with the curving looped base of the upper-​case ‘I’. Lotte Hellinga explains the Continental origins of Caxton’s types in ‘Printing’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1440 to 1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65–​108, at 73–​5. 20. See Holly James-​Maddocks, ‘Stefano Surigone: The Integration of Alien and Native Book-​ Craftsmen in Fifteenth-​Century Oxford’, part of the AHRC project, England’s Immigrants 1330–​1550, at https://​www.eng​land​simm​igra​nts.com/​page/​ind​ivid​ual-​stud​ies/​stef​ano-​ surig​one 21. The full title continues, ‘per poetam laureatu[m]‌Stephauu[m] [sic] surigonu[m] Mediolanense[m] in decretis licenciatu[m]’, Leaf [M5r], or page [187]. The lines referring to Caxton are on [M5v] or [188]): ‘Post obitum Caxton voluit te viuere cura /​¶Willelmi. Chaucer clare poeta tuj /​Nam tua non solum compressit opuscula formis /​Has quo[que] [sed] laudes [iussit] hic esse tuas’, ‘It was the eager wish of your admirer William Caxton that you should live, illustrious poet Chaucer. For not only has he printed your works but he has also ordered this eulogy of you to be here’, trans. in Derek Brewer (ed.), Chaucer: The Critical Heritage 1385–​1837 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 78–​79. 22. Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby, and Alexander Wilkinson, French Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 23. Peter Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London 1501–​1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), vol. 1, p. 488. 24. Polyglot Caxton lived in English towns and cities, in Bruges as Governor of the English colony, and in Cologne (among other likely places), and he worked closely with labourers, tradesmen, merchants, courtiers, dukes, and monarchs. 25. See Anna E. C. Simoni, ‘Dutch Printing in London’, in Barry Taylor (ed.), Foreign Language Printing in England 1500–​1900 (London: British Library, 2002), 51–​69; Marjorie Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-​Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Nigel Smith’s work on Dutch and English transnationalism is forthcoming at this writing. 26. Gadd, ‘Wolfe, John (b. in or before 1548?, d. 1601), bookseller and printer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), 03 Jan. 2008. https://​www-​oxford​dnb-​com. proxy.lib.fsu.edu/​view/​10.1093/​ref:odnb/​978019​8614​128.001.0001/​odnb-​978019​8614​128-​ e-​29834. Accessed 20 Dec. 2020. 27. Alistair Crawford, ‘Bilingual Typography’, Visible Language, 21/​1 (1987), 42–​65, at 48.

Translingual and Multilingual Print    471 28. Laurie Maguire, The Rhetoric of The Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 13–​14. 29. An excellent guide is Pierre Delsaerdt, ‘Designing the Space of Linguistic Knowledge: A Typographic Analysis of Sixteenth Century Dictionaries’, Library Trends, 61/​2 (2012), 325–​346. 30. Nikolaus Henkel, ‘Printed School Texts: Types of Bilingual Presentation in Incunabula’, Renaissance Studies, 9/​2 (June 1995), 212–​217, at 214 and 217. 31. John Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. 55–​100. 32. Armstrong, ‘Coding Continental: Information Design in Sixteenth-​Century English Vernacular Language-​manuals and Translations’, Renaissance Studies, 29/​1 (2015), 78–​ 102, at 84. 33. Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 16. 34. For full discussion see e.g. my Printers without Borders: Renaissance Translation and Textuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; repr. 2020), chs. 5 and 6. 35. Maguire, Rhetoric of the Page, 243–​244; Maguire further demonstrates that mise-​en-​page in early modern printed plays did not work the same way it did in non-​dramatic texts. 36. Stephen Galbraith, ‘ “English” Black-​Letter Type and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 13–​40; Guyda Armstrong, ‘Coding Continental’, 88, 92–​93, 98, 101; Mark Bland, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’, Text, 11 (1998), 91–​154. Adrian Weiss, ‘Casting Compositors, Foul Cases, and Skeletons: Printing in Middleton’s Age’, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 195–​225, also refuting an older idea of black letter as ‘the commoner’s typeface’ (202–​203). 37. For a notable demonstration, see Carmen Peraita, ‘Typographical Translations: Spanish Refashioning of Lipsius’s Politicorum Libri Sex’, Renaissance Quarterly, 64/​4 (Dec. 2011), 1106–​1147, doi:10.1086/​664086. 38. See Barbara Fuchs and Philip S. Palmer, ‘A Lettered Utopia: Printed Alphabets and the Material Republic of Letters’, Renaissance Quarterly, 73/​ 4 (2020), 1235–​ 1276, doi:10.1017/​rqx.2020.218; and Terence Cave (ed.), Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 39. Thomas More, Libellus . . . de optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (Louvain: Thierry Martens, 1516); two editions in the same year, De optimo reip. statu, deque nova insula Utopia . . . (Basel: Froben, 1518); Von der Wunderbarlichen Innsel Utopia genant das ander Buch (Basel: Bebel, 1524); De optimo reipublicae statu, libellus verè aureus. Ordentliche vnd außführliche Beschreibung der Der überaus herrlichen und ganz wunderbarlichen (Leipzig: Henning Grosse, 1612). 40. More, A fruitfull pleasant, & wittie worke, of the best state of a publique weale, and of the new yle, called Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (London: By [Richard Tottell for] Abraham Veale, [1556]), sig. S8r. 41. See Nicholas Barker, ‘The Polyglot Bible’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), with Maureen Bell, Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 648–​651. On Greek printing in England, which began in 1521, see Chris Michaelides, ‘Greek Printing in England 1500–​1900’, in Barry Taylor (ed.), Foreign Language Printing in London 1500–​1900 (London: British Library, 2002), 203–​226. On Arabic printing, Nile Green says: ‘Although England was a relative latecomer to Arabic printing, in the second half of the seventeenth century there were no fewer than half a

472    A. E. B. Coldiron dozen Arabic presses in operation in England, a side-​effect of her rising prestige as a great Protestant nation’; ‘The Development of Arabic-​Script Typography in Georgian Britain’, Printing History, ns 5 (2009), 15–​30, at 16. See also Geoffrey Roper, ‘Arabic Printing and Publishing in England before 1820’, Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 12/​1 (1985); Rex Richard, ‘The Earliest Use of Hebrew in Books Printed in England: Dating Some Works of Richard Pace and Robert Wakefield’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 9/​5 (1990), 517–​525. 42. Andrew Pettegree, ‘Printing and the Reformation: The English Exception’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 157–​179. For direct application of Pettegree’s notion to English multilingualism, see my ‘Adventures in Early Modern Multilingualism’. 43. Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures, and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 87. See John Bromwich, ‘The First Book Printed in Anglo-​ Saxon Type’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 3 (1959–​63), 265–​291; and Peter Lucas, ‘Parker, Lambarde, and the Provision of Special Sorts for Printing Anglo-​ Saxon in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 28 (1999), 44–​45. 44. Evenden, Patents, Pictures, and Patronage, 88. 45. Evenden, Patents, Pictures, and Patronage, 103 n. 53, citing Peter J. Lucas, ‘From Politics to Practicalities: Printing Anglo-​Saxon in the Context of Seventeenth-​Century Scholarship’, The Library, 7th ser., 4 (2003), 31. Although the Anglo-​Saxon type in Archaionomia looks to me only very slightly larger than the larger of the italic types used for the Latin rectos, as on lower L.iiii (Fig. 24.6), I am unable to measure them in person at this time. 46. Evenden, Patents, Pictures, and Patronage, 89 and n. 52. 47. On Fraunce, see Alessandra Petrina, ‘Polyglottia and the Vindication of English Poetry: Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike’, Neophilologus, 83 (1999), 317–​329. 48. For details on ‘Ad Serenissimam’, see my Printers without Borders, 199–​254.

Select Bibliography Armstrong, Guyda, ‘Coding Continental: Information Design in Sixteenth-​Century English Vernacular Language-​Manuals and Translations’, Renaissance Studies, 29/​1 (2015), 78–​102. Barker, Nicholas, ‘The Polyglot Bible’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), with Maureen Bell, Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557 to 1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 648–​651. Blair, Ann, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Bland, Mark, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’, Text, 11 (1998), 91–​154. Blayney, Peter, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London 1501–​ 1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Bromwich, John, ‘The First Book Printed in Anglo-​Saxon Type’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 3 (1959–​63), 265–​291. Cave, Terence (ed.), Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Coldiron, A. E. B., Printers without Borders: Renaissance Translation and Textuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; repr. 2020). Crawford, Alistair, ‘Bilingual Typography’, Visible Language, 21/​1 (1987), 42–​65.

Translingual and Multilingual Print    473 Evenden, Elizabeth, Patents, Pictures, and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Fuchs, Barbara, and Palmer, Philip S., ‘A Lettered Utopia: Printed Alphabets and the Material Republic of Letters’, Renaissance Quarterly, 73/​4 (2020), 1235–​1276. Gadd, Ian, ‘Wolfe, John (b. in or before 1548?, d. 1601), bookseller and printer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), 23 Sept. 2004. www-​oxford​dnb-​com.proxy.lib. fsu.edu/​view/​10.1093/​ref:odnb/​978019​8614​128.001.0001/​odnb-​978019​8614​128-​e-​29834 Gallagher, John, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Hellinga, Lotte, ‘Printing’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1440 to 1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65–​108. Maguire, Laurie, The Rhetoric of the Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Mak, Bonnie, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Melnikoff, Kirk, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). Taylor, Barry (ed.), Foreign Language Printing in England 1500–​ 1900 (London: British Library, 2002).

CHAPTER 25

C ontexts for Circu l at i on Universities, Inns of Court, Households and Professional Circles Michelle O’Callaghan

The question of how the universities, Inns of Court, households, and professional circles acted as contexts for circulation provides an opportunity to think about the interactions between space, objects, people, and ideas. Early modern households and educational institutions, like the universities and Inns of Court, were locales within wider communities in which people lived and worked together over time, sharing resources, and forming social networks. We can understand these institutions in a simultaneously physical and ideational sense as practised spaces, organized by social and economic relationships, rituals, and traditions, which, in turn, influenced how and why books circulated. In these domains, books were produced and transmitted, used, read, heard, borrowed, and lent through material and textual exchanges that made up the physical and conceptual fabric of these places.1 The circulation of books therefore allows us to see how knowledge-​making was situated, practised, and represented within these locales and, relatedly, how the interactions of books, people, and places gave these institutions conceptual form. Once attention is turned to how objects interact with people and places in fashioning the corporate identity of institutions, then the connective properties of books, in interrelated material and conceptual senses, come into focus. As physical objects, books have a social life, and can be passed hand to hand, sent via others, and read and performed. Books bring people together within environments that both shape and are shaped by these social uses of the book. Attending to questions of circulation involves recognizing that books are not self-​contained textual objects; rather their meaning is distributed across time and space as they move through networks of transmission. Warren Boutcher, responding to the work of Alfred Gell, defines the book, and other

Contexts for Circulation    475 material texts, such as letters, as ‘distributed objects’, ‘congealed residues of performance and agency in object form’. A Gellian approach moves away from a model of transmission in which individual agency is firmly attached to producers of books and turns instead to a concept of social agency in which it is both dispersed and somehow adheres within the material and rhetorical forms of books through a ‘cognitive stickiness’. It provides a way of conceptualizing how books carry their social uses with them and so are always entangled in personal, institutional, and other material relations. Through transmission, books therefore extend ‘the agencies of minds and voices’ and bring ‘people and objects into distinctive social relations with each other’ within specific locations.2 Books were frequently anthropomorphized, imagined as possessing an agency that was somehow in surplus of that of their makers and readers. Metafictions, describing how books were made, kept, and used, often conceptualize books as social actors that connect people, places, and other objects.3 Dedicatory and commendatory epistles and verses, and certain genres, notably dialogues and occasional poems, set out stories in which textual transmission brings people and books together to form communities. These ‘connective’ forms of social verse promise to map the movement of texts between writers and readers within circuits of exchange and give the impression that they coincide with existing communities—​the Inns of Court, universities, and households. Within these environments, textual material was put to different uses in ways that have prompted a reconsideration of the media through which texts were transmitted. Books and ballads, for example, were given as gifts, read silently, performed aloud in company, and excerpted and recirculated in another format, be it a commonplace book or music book or a trencher. Texts therefore connected people and places through reading, performance, acts of making and remaking, and other intellectual, affective, and expressive activities. Attending to the ways in which texts moved not only by hand, but also through the voice, Jennifer Richards has argued that we must stop privileging the figure of the silent annotating reader, who has dominated earlier reception studies, and instead turn to the oral reader and take as our starting point ‘the human voice as the physiological technology of making meaning’. Bruce Smith (in his chapter in this volume, and elsewhere) has located the connective properties of texts within a sounded world in ways that have implications for comprehending transmission within the universities, Inns of Court, and the household. ‘As the inhabitants of a certain geographical space,’ Smith explains, ‘a speech community also constitutes an acoustic community.’ The identity of the latter is brought into being ‘not only by what its members say in common but what they hear in common’.4 The place of books and other textual material within these environments was not fixed, but on the move, and their variant trajectories through different media extended across time and space. As books passed from person to person, they accrued values and associations, carrying with them layers of significance, at the same time as other meanings were lost or distorted. Rather than understanding texts as projections of the intentions of their makers across time and space, the circulation of books and other textual material is a reminder of how the meaning of books and their uses are contingent upon historical circumstance.

476   Michelle O’Callaghan

Inns of Court and Universities The Inns of Court and the universities were enmeshed in the bookscapes of early modern London, Oxford, and Cambridge. James Raven adopted the term ‘bookscape’ to describe ‘the printing and publishing neighbourhoods of London’ in order to analyse the cultural geography of the book trade and to map the connections between space, people, objects, and practices. More recently, the editors of Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain, when adopting this term, have focused on its derivation from ‘landscape’ to bring into much sharper focus the cultural and imaginative properties of space. The study of bookscapes, they argue, should not confine itself to mapping social interactions within physical topographies of textual production and transmission, as was the case with earlier studies. Instead, the aim is to redirect attention to cultural forms of exchange, including the work of the imagination and memory in fashioning spaces and practices. Women’s bookscapes therefore describe a ‘configuration of mental mappings, a cultural topography of female reading, ownership, and circulation of books’.5 This cultural modelling of the bookscape turns critical attention to the ways in which the circulation of books creates meaning and takes part in the production and reproduction of wider ideological formations. The Inns of Court and universities shared their neighbourhoods with printing houses, bookshops, and bookbinders’ stalls. Cohabiting within the city facilitated working relationships between these institutions and the book trade. The early pre-​ Reformation print trade had serviced clerical communities; post-​Reformation, the Inns and universities continued to provide printers and booksellers with highly lucrative and highly literate markets. It should be said that the bookscapes of London and Oxford and Cambridge varied considerably. Oxford and Cambridge had only one press and the trade ‘was not properly established in either university until the 1580s’. In the following decades, both universities began to expand rapidly; so too did the output of these presses, with Thomas Thomas at Cambridge and Joseph Barnes at Oxford concentrating on publishing pedagogic books (see Jason Peacey’s chapter in this volume).6 Such symbiosis meant that the book trade was instrumental in fashioning the public identity of these institutions, through publishing not only pedagogical works but also types of corporate volumes, such as elegiac anthologies and other occasional works to mark public events, and even collections of epigrams. Shared domains fostered connectivity and generated practices and discourses of association. With university and Inns of Court men such reliable clients, publishers often turned printers’ epistles, and other elements of the paratext, over to fashioning these book .buyers as clientele, a class of consumers who frequented their bookshops, buying books for study and leisure. The production of law books had brought lawyers and printers into working relations from the early decades of print. John Rastell studied law at the Middle Temple in the early sixteenth century, and began printing and selling books, specializing in law manuals that he often compiled, while still practising law. His son, William Rastell, similarly

Contexts for Circulation    477 combined a legal and printing career. When Richard Tottel was awarded the patent for printing books of common law in 1553, which he held until 1593, he worked with William Rastell, printing his A Collection of All the Statutes (1557).7 If we examine Tottel’s career through the trope of the bookscape then the interconnectedness of the Inns of Court and print trade within neighbourhoods and through kinship ties comes into view. Tottel married Joan, daughter of Richard Grafton, a printer of law books, and their eldest son, William, was admitted to the Middle Temple. Tottel’s shops were meeting places in which lawyers and printers came together in book production and acted as vectors in the circulation of texts.8 Prefaces before the law books Tottel published often devote considerable energy to setting out the terms of the relationship between this printer and his customers, students of the common law. When advertising the advantages of Magna Charta cum Statutis quae antiquae vocantur (1556) compared to earlier lawbooks, Tottel was keen to emphasize how carefully he had considered the needs of his clientele both academically, given ‘How vnperfit the bokes of the lawes of England were before’, and economically, since the ‘price the scarceness [of law books] had raised’. Tottel pointed out the particular benefits offered by his method of printing, that ‘the print [is] much pleasanter to the eye in the bokes of yeres than any yt ye have ben yet served with, paper & margine as good & fayre as the best, but much better & fairer then the most’.9 In doing so, he demonstrated that this printer understood the methods employed by students when studying—​the need to scan the text and write notes in the margin—​and used these in the design of the book. In this way, the physical form of the book also trained student readers in reading practices, including note-​taking, illustrating how the pedagogical culture of the Inns both shaped and was shaped by the book trade. The Inns also utilized the press to publicize their own ambitions and to promote corporate identities. The highly celebrated Inner Temple revels of 1561/​2 have been much studied as an example of how the Inns presented themselves to Elizabeth, and to a wider public, as a conciliar body, capable of advising the monarch on affairs of state, in this case, the question of marriage.10 Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armoury, put out by Tottel in 1562, publishes an account of the 1561/​2 revels nested within a book of armoury dedicated to the Inns. Soon after the revels’ end, Legh had been granted special admission to the Inner Temple.11 There is a case to be made that the Inner Temple tacitly authorized Accedens and its idealized imagining of the Inns. Legh framed his description of the revels through a potent fiction that harmonizes the dual educational roles of the Inns in both providing training in the law for an expanding professional class of lawyers and as a humanist academy for educating the elite in the courtly arts. Alongside learning ‘to rule, and obay by law’ and to serve ‘prince & commonweale’, students are also educated in how to vse all other exercises of body & minde whereunto nature most aptli serueth, to adorne by speaking, countenance and gesture, & vse of apparel, ye person of a gentilman, . . . gentilman of all countres in ther yong yeres, norished together in one place, with such comely ordre, and dayly conference are knitt by continuall acquaintance in such vnitie of minds & maners, as lyghtly neuer after is seuerid.12

478   Michelle O’Callaghan With Accedens, Legh offered the Inns—​and the Inner Temple—​a highly polished mirror that reflected their ambitions to take responsibility for educating a governing class.13 Collections of social and occasional verse, both manuscript and print, illustrate how Inns of Court and university poets used these connective genres to represent themselves to each other and to a wider public. Barnaby Googe, George Turberville, and George Gascoigne favoured the answer poem in their collections published in the 1560s, turning it into a vehicle for setting out humanist doctrines of friendship and to portray the amicable conversations between educated men in line with Legh’s idealizing vision of the ‘vnity of minds and manners’ cultivated at the Inns. There are, however, social pressures that Jessica Winston has identified in these friendly poems, which ‘register the strained negotiation and even coercion in creating homogeneity in this community’.14 Other genres fashionable among university and Inns of Court men later in the 1590s were far more fractious. Many of the books of satires and epigrams prohibited by the 1599 Bishops’ Ban were engaged in a game of serial satire, running from 1597 to 1601, dominated by poets affiliated either with Cambridge or the Inns of Court, or both. There is a self-​consciousness about the medium of print in these paper wars which, in part, derives from how print and religious controversy intersected during the Reformation in the production of polemic, ‘a new form of writing’ that imagined print as ‘fractious and divisive’.15 Joseph Hall held a Cambridge lectureship in rhetoric when he published Virgidemiarum (1597). In its closing pages, Hall cast his book in controversial terms envisioning his martyrdom through the press: ‘I well forsee in the timely publication of these my concealed Satyres, I am set vpon the racke of many mercilesse and peremptorie censures.’ John Marston, a student at the Middle Temple, responded to Hall with his Certaine Satyres, published together with The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image in 1598. Hall, reputedly, counter-​attacked with an epigram and took the fight to the Cambridge bookshops. Marston added this epigram, supposedly penned by Hall, to the second 1599 edition of his The Scourge of Villanie, and claimed that its ‘Author . . . [had] caused it to bee pasted to the latter page of euery Pigmalion that came to the stacioners of Cambridge’.16 The author is located in the bookshop in a very physical and disruptive sense, surreptitiously pasting bits of paper, on which a poem has been copied, onto the sheets of Marston’s book stacked awaiting sale. What is conveyed here is not only the fractious and inventive physicality of these paper wars, but also the interconnectedness of the bookscapes of London and Cambridge through the movement of books between Stationers’ shops. Legh’s vision of young men ‘nourished together in one place, with such comely order, and daily conference’ and so ‘knit by continuall acquaintance’ is certainly idealizing. Even so, it does prompt us to think about how living in physical proximity within colleges and Inns fostered textual exchanges by providing the material, institutional, and interpersonal conditions for sharing space, belongings, and conversation. Teaching and studying at these institutions relied on communal oral reading and sharing books. From the schoolroom to the universities, methods for learning involved students listening to texts read by their master or tutor, and working through the text orally, meaning that ‘reading aloud and listening were integral to study’.17 Books were shared,

Contexts for Circulation    479 excerpted, both in oral and handwritten form, and so circulated within acoustic worlds and scribal networks. One reason for these modes of learning was that libraries at both the universities and Inns of Court in the sixteenth century were neither well furnished nor well secured. Sharing of books was commonplace among students because there were few institutional facilities for lending books at the Inns.18 At the start of the sixteenth century, it was recorded that students at the Middle Temple now have no library so that they cannot attaine to the knowledge of diverse learning but to their great charges by the buying of such bookes as they lust to study. They had a simple library in which were not many bookes besides the lawe; and that library by meanes that it stood alwayes open, & that the learners had not each of them a key to it, it was at the last robbed & spoiled of all the bookes in it.19

Law books were expensive in comparison to other works. Commonplace books may have been a humanist learning tool but they were also necessitated by the expense and scarcity of books, acting as substitutes for actual libraries—​‘libraries in miniature’.20 Simonds D’Ewes, when a student at the Middle Temple in the early 1620s, assiduously prepared ‘commonplace bookes for the law’, making ‘three to be portable bookes’, spending months working through first Littleton’s Tenures, then Coke’s Reports and Cowell’s Interpreter.21 Texts were shared and transmitted through pedagogical practices at the universities and Inns in ways that cannot be disentangled from living arrangements. At universities, students worked with tutors, while at the Inns of Court, on admission, students were bound with senior members. At the Middle Temple, John Hoskins was bound with a series of younger gentleman students, often from his home county, and took charge of their studies, even sharing chambers. His rhetorical handbook, ‘Directions for Speech and Style’, was compiled for teaching, for communal study and shared reading. Hoskins led his charges in reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia together, directing them to those passages he marked for their attention and for copying into their commonplace books.22 In this way, Hoskins was talking his students through this book and advertising the value of shared reading practices to a wider clientele of students at the Inns and universities. Communal reading practices at the Inns of Court were necessitated, in large part, by the absence of set syllabus. ‘Students’, J. H. Baker points out, ‘had to learn their common law by self-​help.’ Students formed reading groups, often with chamber fellows, and studied textbooks together to assist each other in learning the law.23 D’Ewes complained bitterly that he ‘found the study of the law so difficult and unpleasant’ when he first came to London because his father insisted that he reside with him at the Six Clerks’ Office on Chancery Lane, ‘an inconvenient lodging’, where he ‘so much wanted the help of some other student to have read with me’. Once resident at the Middle Temple, D’Ewes profited from the company of his chamber fellow, ‘a gentleman religious and honest with whom I began to sett my selfe a corse, the only meanes which made us good students’. Through these ‘conferences’, D’Ewes was encouraged to begin reading Littleton’s Tenures again, which he had left off.24 The term ‘conferences’ encompasses both space and practice,

480   Michelle O’Callaghan referring to the event, to the meeting in their rooms, to their conversation, in which they take counsel from one another, while also carrying another meaning of comparing texts, collating extracts from textbooks in their commonplace books.25 The expense of books alongside communal reading practices meant that books were habitually shared across generations. Books passed between family members studying at the Inns and universities. When Augustine Baker was a student at the Inner Temple in the 1590s, his brother, now a barrister, helped him with his law French and lent him law books that he had used as a student; these may well have been passed on by other relatives who had studied at the Inns.26 Books moved with students across institutions. Many students in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, like Hoskins and D’Ewes, studied at either Oxford or Cambridge before entering the Inns, and their books travelled with them. Universities and Inns of Court were not closed institutions, but part of a wider web of relations that were intergenerational, geographical, and cross-​institutional. Books could have an incredibly long life through this mode of transmission, passing through many different hands and put to a range of uses, thus always in the process of moving through spaces with their networks of association. On the title page of a late medieval manuscript book of Petrarch’s Quatuor Invectivarum Libri, his letter to Boccaccio castigating doctors, Sampson Walker and Roger Martin practise their signatures—​the latter also copies verses onto its pages at various points in the book; a pattern of repeat reading suggesting it was in his possession for some time.27 Although not a text taught in the schoolroom, this late medieval Latin book was probably first purchased by a scholar, possibly as a rhetorical model for the letter of invective. At a later point in the book’s transmission history, Martin also copied into its margins a set of bawdy verses that can help to place this book’s ambit of circulation at a certain moment. One of these verses, the very popular burlesque poem, ‘O love whose force and might’, was regularly copied into university manuscript miscellanies, especially those associated with Christ Church, Oxford, compiled in the period from the 1620s to 1640s.28 Certain tutors, like George Morley at Christ Church, and Brian Duppa before him, as we have also seen in the case of Hoskins at the Middle Temple, acted as vectors in textual transmission, loaning books to students and other fellows. In his study of the cultural geography of humanist pedagogy, Warren Boutcher, tracing Hoskins’s career, has drawn attention to the pathways between local schools, like Winchester; colleges they endowed, in this case, New College; and the extension of these affiliations to the Inns in London resulting from family traditions of sending sons to certain Inns. A similar interplay of locality, lineage, and kinship linked Westminster School with Christ Church and was manifested in the mid-​seventeenth-​century manuscript miscellanies.29 It should be noted that the provenance of the late medieval book once in Roger Martin’s possession cannot be fully traced and paths of transmission therefore are often speculative. We do know, however, that at some point the book came into the possession of Henry Jones, who matriculated at Christ Church in 1668, taking up the living of Sunningwell in Berkshire. Soon after he died in 1707, this book then came to the Bodleian in 1708 as part of his bequest to this library.

Contexts for Circulation    481 We often think of libraries as confined to specific places. Libraries certainly occupied designated physical spaces and furniture, but they were made up of collections of books and so encapsulate both stasis and movement. The collecting and dispersal of libraries opened these sites to wider networks of curation and association. William Crashawe, the preacher at the Inner and Middle Temples from 1605 to 1613, probably began collecting books when he was at St John’s College, Cambridge, but it was during his time at the Temples that he amassed the bulk of his library. He had a ‘specially fitted library’ constructed in chambers adjoining the Temple Church, which meant there was now a purpose-​built space for housing books that could also function as a meeting-​place and point of exchange for borrowing and lending. His library was interconnected with others in London, including those of two fellow Templars, Robert Cotton and John Selden.30 Hugh Holland wrote effusively of Cotton’s library that it ‘was the Randevouse of all good and honeste spirite so as it seemed a kind of vniversitie’.31 Yet, even libraries in purpose-​ built spaces were subject to dispersal or damage, and their history of transmission is often not only one of consolidation but also of fragmentation. Once Crashawe lost his position as preacher at the Temples, he was faced with the problem of what to do with his library. He offered to sell his library to the Temples, but they refused to take on the expense. Part of his library was eventually housed at his old college, St John’s, after being stored at Southampton House in London, the home of his patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Other books had been given as gifts or sold, and Crashawe must have retained a number in his possession.32 During this period of dispersal among different sites in London, Crashawe’s books, probably kept at his house in Whitechapel, continued to draw visitors and to act as a hub for religious debate, especially during the politically heated early 1620s, often through networks of association maintained from his time at the Temples. In early October 1622, D’Ewes, not being able to make ‘any great progresse to my studyes’, visited his friend, Thomas Masters, the former preacher at the Middle Temple, ‘newlye come to towne’. Crashawe was with Masters, and together they discuss ‘some rare bookes, as Pruritanus, Proscenious, & Corona Regia or Manes Causoboni’. Many of these were illicit books. Crashawe also had in his possession a new poem, The Interpreter, which praised puritans as defenders of English liberties and had been published in Edinburgh in 1622 to avoid the current restrictions on the press. D’Ewes ‘tooke the paines wth mine owne penn to write out’, returning the next day to borrow The Interpreter to copy it in full. Crashawe’s books hold manifold delights, and in his ‘librarye I spent my time well & hee lent mee home a terrible booke called Pruritanus’.33 Prurit-​anus was a Latin book written by William Wright, a Jesuit, and his brother, that had been publicly burnt soon after it was published in 1609. When Prurit-​anus first appeared, Crashawe, then a preacher at the Temples, circulated a copy as part of his publishing campaign to reveal Catholic ‘errors’.34 Over a decade later, Crashawe is again circulating Prurit-​anus to stoke religious controversy—​an act that speaks simultaneously to the curation and disorder of books. Crashawe’s personal library was certainly not private in any restrictive sense. Instead, it was designed to act as a hub for intellectual exchange and religious debate and to interact with other sites of exchange within a wider urban terrain—​Cotton’s library, the

482   Michelle O’Callaghan London bookshops and printing houses, the Inns of Court, and Parliament. When we turn to professional circles, like the Society of Antiquaries, first formed late in Elizabeth’s reign, then mapping the cultural geography of association and textual exchange brings into sharp focus the interconnectedness of the Inns of Court, Parliament, households and their libraries through the movement of books and people. Over time, these configurations changed, as people moved, others returned, libraries were dispersed and reconstituted elsewhere. Cotton’s library is recognized as a nodal point in intellectual and political networks and foundational in development of antiquarianism.35 Cotton also moved house, from lodgings provided by one patron to residences supplied by another; those frequenting his household and library also changed. These movements were meaningful, registering and influencing the shifting political and intellectual climate across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Attending to contexts for textual circulation, whether at the Inns, universities, or in households, necessarily directs us to these points of interconnection, traffic, and flux.

Households and Professional Societies Early modern households were very different types of institutions to universities and Inns of Court; for one thing, the latter were predominantly all-​male societies. They did, however, share certain functions, such as schooling, and habits of studying together and sharing books interconnected households and educational establishments, bringing into view wider cultural geographies and kinship networks. Households, of course, were ubiquitous and diverse, making up neighbourhoods across the country and across the social spectrum. The households of the prosperous middling sort and above were socially mixed, incorporating servants and often apprentices alongside masters and mistresses. Functions of households varied, largely according to status and, relatedly, because of the types of business undertaken in these places. The early modern home was the basic economic unit of society and the centre of different types of work.36 Households of court officials, for example, included secretariats, which were key vectors in manuscript transmission in this period.37 Specialist households lower down the social scale were similarly instrumental in textual production and transmission. George Bishop, a prominent stationer, maintained William Fulke, and ‘two of his men with their horses’, in his household ‘for 3. quarters of a yeares’ to allow Fulke to consult Bishop’s stock of books when writing his Confutation of the Rhemish Testament (1588).38 Books moved around and between households, shaping and interconnecting these places in manifold ways. The architecture and furniture within the home conditioned textual circulation, from books kept in libraries to ballads pasted over chimneys. Manuals designed for household use were produced in increasing numbers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These books began from the premise that the household was a knowledge community, with specialized practices that masters, mistresses, and servants were required to learn and refine. The effectiveness of

Contexts for Circulation    483 this knowledge community relied on the transmission of these skills—​and hence these books—​between its members. Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first published by Tottel in 1557, also included a few points on ‘huswiferie’.39 These sections were much expanded in the 1570 edition, and in 1573 augmented further with Fiue Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie, which continued to be reissued until the late seventeenth century. The ‘hundreth good poyntes’ are numbered quatrains of rhyming verse that are designed to be committed to memory and are portable forms of knowledge to be extracted, taken away, and put to other uses. Included in the 1570 edition of A Hundreth Good Pointes are four sets of ‘posies’ or moralizing couplets advertised as suitable for certain rooms within the household—​the hall, the parlour, the guest’s room, and ‘thine owne bed chamber’. These couplets are prescriptive, acting to regulate behaviour in these spaces, for example, warning the guest dining in the parlour not to get drunk and brawl, because friendship can be easily lost, or when in the guest room, not to be slovenly and make the furnishings dirty with muddy boots and spurs. Presumably, these posies were designed for decorating the walls of these rooms, either through painting or embroidered into wall hangings. Prescriptive moralizing and devotional texts were thereby incorporated into the very fabric of the household to be read over time by those who passed through these rooms.40 Gervase Markham’s various books of domestic advice and husbandry manuals, like Tusser’s Pointes, had a very long life in print and in early modern households. A late seventeenth-​century inventory compiled for the wealthy Le Strange family of their library at Hunstanton, Norfolk, listed husbandry manuals, including those of Markham, which had been published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and were still present on the shelves many, many decades later after passing through the hands of several generations.41 The places and furniture in which books were kept in the house varied according to the social status and function of the household. As we have seen in the case of Crashawe, the collection of books on a large scale necessitated the construction of purpose-​ built spaces—​libraries. It should be said that libraries were unusual rather than typical in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries within gentry and aristocratic houses. Further, even when a house had a library, books were not confined there, but moved about the home, kept in chests, or other furniture, or loose in studies, closets, bedchambers, the parlour, and the kitchen. Margaret Spufford’s work on the ‘Libraries of the “common sort” ’ has unearthed evidence for where working men and women kept books within their homes and how books were shared within neighbourhoods. These were predominantly small, affordable books—​almanacs, manuals, bibles, devotional works, and small pamphlets of poems, songs, and stories—​and they were kept in chests or loose, within bedchambers or kitchens or even in a designated space for study within the house. Books were passed down through families, read by other members of the household, and aloud to neighbours who gathered in the household for this purpose.42 Small books were thus bequeathed and curated across generations not just within the elite in possession of purpose-​built libraries, but also in households much lower down the social scale. The library of Leonard Wheatcroft, a tailor then parish clerk of Ashover, Derbyshire, is a well-​studied example of non-​elite textual transmission, which

484   Michelle O’Callaghan encompassed the compilation of manuscript miscellanies, alongside the circulation of printed texts.43 So-​called ephemeral literature therefore could have a longevity and acquire cultural value through such processes of transmission. Books and other printed material migrated through the household. Recipe books, for example, might move from the study to the kitchen; bibles from the parlour to the bedchamber; and ballads and ‘small books’ could well have very wide circulation within the household, sung as well as read. Oral communal reading of books allowed for conversations between kin and those of different social status within the household. Lady Anne Clifford records numerous occasions in her diary when she was read to by her young kinswomen and others acting as waiting gentlewomen within her household: Mary Neville reads her Spenser’s The Fairie Queene and Kate Buxton reads her devotional works. Communal reading was not confined to women: her husband’s friend, George Rivers, and her family friend, Christopher Marsh, both read Montaigne’s Essais to her; another male servant, Wat Conniston, read devotional works with her. Acts of communal reading involved complex negotiations of status and authority within the household. All participants were not on an equal footing. Even in the case of waiting gentlewomen, their position in relation to the mistress of the household, Lady Anne, was provisional. Clifford sends Kate back to her father, Sir Edward Buxton, after a quarrel. Servants may share books with their mistress during communal reading, but their access to these books, control over reading, and experience of this activity, was mediated through her presence. In the case of male servants, this was more complicated since these men answered to her husband, Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who also controlled who Lady Anne read with. Over a few months, Mr Ran, Sackville’s chaplain, reads the Old Testament with Lady Anne; once Sackville discovers them reading together, he ends this situation because ‘it wou’d hind [Dr Ran’s] Study very much’, and she ‘must leave off reading the Old Testament till I can get somebody to read it with me’.44 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson make the point that books had no fixed place or readership within multi-​status households and moved between masters, mistresses, kin, and servants.45 Yet, this was not a utopian world of unfettered circulation and communication. Instead, who had access to books, where and how they enjoyed them, was mediated by complex and uneven combinations of status, gender, and other social factors, which also influenced how the movement of books was also conceptualized in literature of the period. The mobility of books within households and as they travelled through neighbourhoods across the country was a trope for the socially unsettling promiscuity of cheap print in social satire. When A.H. updated John Davies’s ‘Papers Complaint, compild in ruthfull Rimes Against the Paper-​spoylers of these Times’, first published in The Scourge of Folly (1611), in his own A Scourge for Paper-​ persecutors (1625), he added passages in which the dangerous democratization of print operates through the spaces and figures associated with the multi-​status household: To raile at all the merrie Wherrie-​Bookes, Which I haue found in Kitchen-​cobweb-​nookes: To reckon vp the verie Titles, which

Contexts for Circulation    485 Doe please new Prentices, the Maids, and rich Wealth witti’d Loobies

‘Kitchen-​cobweb-​nookes’ are crevices that signify both illicit, secret spaces and poor housekeeping, disruptions in the social fabric of the orderly household-​commonwealth. These household spaces bring together the forms of cheap print with undiscriminating and promiscuous readerships—​apprentices, maidservants, and gentlemen who declass themselves through their reading matter. The circulation of ballads within and across the working household of the country prompts a complaint against the dissolution of social and religious order: If o’re the Chymney they some Ballads haue Of Chevy-​Chase, or of some branded slaue Hang’d at Tyborne, they their Mattins make it, And Vespers too, and for the Bible take it.46

A site of disorderly gatherings for A.H., the chimney was the social and cultural place within the household most associated with working women and men. Ballads and chapbooks are constant reminders that print cultures were not confined to London, instead printed material travelled up and down the country through trade routes and through households within neighbourhoods. The ballad over the chimney is a figure for communal and performative reading practices that create non-​elite acoustic fields which incorporate the non-​literate alongside the literate within literary cultures. Recent scholarship on book ownership amongst the non-​elite and women has populated this field with figures other than the nobleman and gentleman—​and the exceptional aristocratic woman, like Anne Clifford. Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain gathers essays that identify many of the women, elite and non-​elite, who collected books and established libraries. Exceptional, prodigy libraries continue to attract considerable interest, partly because their scale offers enhanced opportunities for mapping the movement of books. One example is that of Staffordshire gentlewoman Frances Wolfreston, who assembled a substantial library over many decades largely for purposes of household recreation. She may have bought books with her to her new marital home from her parents’ house that she had used in the schoolroom or were gifts. Marriage provided funds and space to expand her collection substantially. Books could be bought on trips to London she took when settling her sons at university or from booksellers who had established themselves in the major provincial towns, like Coventry and Lichfield, near to Statfold Hall, in Staffordshire.47 Given that Wolfreston owned ballads and chapbooks, those ‘merrie Wherrie-​Bookes’ A.H. complains of, she may have also purchased these books from travelling chapmen and pedlars.48 The wealthy Le Strange family used agents in London as well as relatives to make household purchases, including books.49 John Ramsey consulted catalogues of books in London ‘In blacke fryars’ and expected William Ponsonby, his bookbinder, to keep him informed through a ‘yearly note’ ‘of all ye newe bookes newlye imprinted’ presumably by letter.50

486   Michelle O’Callaghan Households were one of the primary vectors through which printed and scribal material moved within neighbourhoods and through the country. Books were given as gifts to neighbours and kin creating interconnections and networks of obligation. The Le Strange family gave duplicate copies of books as gifts to the local clergy; a practice that may have also extended to friends and kin.51 Frances Wolfreston lent and borrowed and gave and received books as gifts from her sisters and other family members, including more distant kin within her neighbourhood. In this way, Lori Humphrey Newcombe explains, ‘the bequest of an apparently personal library sits within a larger web of collection, curation and borrowing among her contemporaries and descendants’.52 The multifunctional nature of the household shapes the uses and movement of books. One of their key roles was the education of children. Ann Bowyer’s commonplace book, compiled along with two of her siblings, provides evidence for how, as in other educational institutions, books were shared through communal reading and writing practices and children engaged in cultures of textual transmission. Books moved between siblings within the household schoolroom. Ann practised handwriting exercises in the book, as did one of her sisters, who appropriately appears to have been tasked with copying out and composing a letter to her sister.53 Bowyer and her siblings came from the middling classes; some family members were on the cusp of the gentry, others part of the citizenry—​Ann’s father was a Coventry draper and she would marry a saddler. The printed books from which Ann Bowyer excerpted passages were themselves compilations, dictionaries of poetic quotations that provided lessons in compiling a commonplace book, and so were designed to be on the move, to be excerpted and reconstituted alongside textual matter coming from other places. Victoria Burke has carefully traced extracts from Bowyer’s commonplace book to two main sources: Englands Parnassus (1600) and Palladis Tamia (1598).54 John Brinsley, in his Ludus Literarius (1612), advocated the use of printed commonplace books to train students in rhetoric and in composition in the schoolroom. Students were instructed to copy apt ‘Poetical phrases’ into their commonplace books which would then provide a storehouse on which they could draw when composing their own poems. When Frances moves on to copying passages from Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, she makes alterations, turning them to proverbial uses and into her own compositions.55 Depending on family circumstances and paternal willingness to invest in female education, some women could receive training in humanist practices of textual transmission. The commonplace book of this non-​elite woman has been preserved because her son was the famous antiquarian Elias Ashmole, who curated his family history and bequeathed his library to the Bodleian. The reason why her book survives is a reminder of how archives are not neutral windows onto the past but have their own histories of curation determined by economics and circumstance—​books owned by the elite, with libraries and country estates, are more likely to be preserved than those of the non-​elite. Evidence provided by books is also typically fragmentary. Interfamilial and cross-​generational transmission of books often leaves traces that are more difficult to place without the type of provenance and contextualizing family history provided by Ashmole. On the title page of a copy of the 1565 edition of Songes and Sonettes, Susanne,

Contexts for Circulation    487 Elizabeth, and George Bowes wrote their names. Elizabeth Bowes was the mother-​in-​ law and correspondent of John Knox; she also had a brother George and a sister, Anne, whose formal name may have been Susanne. The dates, however, are a little too early, given that Elizabeth died in her late sixties around 1572. Her children, however, were named George, Elizabeth, and Anne.56 Do these signatures belong to this branch of the Bowes family? Without firm identification of hands or other provenance, we can only speculate who might own these signatures. What we can say is that female and male members of the Bowes family, who could be siblings or from different generations, passed this book between them over time. The shared family name across these signatures enacts the family connections of this book, locating its transmission within a kinship network. Early modern households were places of work across the social spectrum. Printing houses were houses in which master printers and their families, and often their apprentices, lived in rooms above the workshop.57 Stationers, perhaps more unusually, also boarded authors in their households, as we have seen in the case of George Bishop—​ an example that epitomizes the cultural role of the printing house as a domain for textual production and transmission. The employment of secretaries within elite households turned these houses into specialized sites for textual exchange. Secretariats were staffed by gentlemen, as Henry Woudhuysen explains, who ‘made their living by copying’.58 Verse copied into the manuscript book compiled by Richard Roberts, a secretary in the service of Ludovic Stuart, Earl of Lennox, a leading courtier under James I, illustrates how the court, Inns of Court, and Parliament were interconnected through these quasi-​ professional scribal networks. Roberts’s position within Lennox’s official household brought him into contact with other secretariats, including that of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. It is probably through these connections that he was able to access some of the very rare poems he copied into his book, including a ‘secrett’ poem composed by Cecil in 1602.59 Households fostered the emergence of other professions. They were one of the main early modern employers of musicians, alongside the Church, court, and increasingly the theatres. Thomas Whythorne, who received his music education at Magdalen School, Oxford, was then placed in the household of John Heywood in the early 1540s, ‘to be both his servant and scholar’, where he was trained in hand-​copying and in music over three years. After leaving Heywood, he was employed in aristocratic and gentry households as a musician, a music tutor, and often as a serving-​man. Whythorne’s autobiography, in which he reflects on his position in households and, relatedly, on his profession, registers musicians’ uncertain status in this period. Chafing at his treatment in households, he insisted on the difference between musicians and other servants—​he was a gentleman and educated, they were not, and so music tutors ‘may esteem so much of themselves as to be free and not bound, much less to be made slave-​like’. Whythorne produced a treatise on music whose aim was to define it as an elite profession, ‘one of the trades . . . allowed for such gentlemen to live by’, and so sets out ‘distinctions of degrees and sorts’ of musicians, denigrating those ‘pettifoggers of music . . . schoolmasters, singmen, and minstrels’, who ‘after they have learned a little to sing pricksong’, ‘do live

488   Michelle O’Callaghan by music and yet are no musicians at all’. His account of the music profession wants to establish a knowledge community of those ‘that love the furtherance of the estimation of music’ and excludes the ‘meanest sort’.60 One of the mechanisms through which the music profession took shape in this period was the production and circulation of printed songbooks. Whythorne may have intended to have his music treatise printed—​he compiled two music books for publication, Songs for Three, Four, and Five Voices, printed by John Day in 1571, and Duos, or Songes for Two Voyces, put out by Thomas East in 1590. Nicholas Yonge, a vicar choral of St Paul’s Cathedral, in the preface to his Musica Transalpina (1588), describes an urban environment in which his profession can flourish: since I first began to keepe house in this Citie, it hath been no small comfort vnto mee, that a great number of Gentlemen and Merchants of good accompt (as well of this realme as of forreine nations) haue taken in good part such entertainment of pleasure, as my poore abilitie was able to afford them, both by the exercise of Musicke daily vsed in my house, and by furnishing them with Bookes of that kinde yeerly sent me out of Italy and other places (Aiir).

Yonge’s vision of his household’s place within the City returns us to the concept of the bookscape introduced at the start of this chapter and the meaningful circulation of books. The interconnectedness of the City enables his house to act as a type of humanist academy, drawing gentlemen from England and abroad to practise music, and fostered by its connections with the music community at St Paul’s. His representation of his household music academy recalls the civic idealism of Legh’s vision of the Inns of Court. The presence of merchants posits an alliance in which professional musicians, like Yonge, are incorporated in the City of London alongside other worthy and profitable trades. Gentlemen musicians employed within London were typically members of livery companies, such as the Grocers and Drapers.61 His house is a music school, a specialized acoustic community, in which books are voiced, heard, and exchanged. It is also a library or perhaps, more properly, bookshop. Yonge is keen to advertise that he is importing music books from Europe to supply a domestic market. Yonge’s envisioning of his ‘house in this Citie’ neatly encapsulates how the material and interpersonal interactions of books, people, and places give meaning to contexts for circulation.

Notes 1. For key studies of textual transmission at these locales, see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 177–​230; Arthur Marotti, ‘ “Rolling Archetypes”: Christ Church, Oxford Poetry Collections, and the Proliferation of Manuscript Verse Anthologies in Caroline England’, English Literary Renaissance, 44 (2014), 486–​523; Marotti, ‘The Circulation of Verse at the Inns of Court and in London in Early Stuart England’, in Will Bowers and Hannah Leah (eds.), Re-​evaluating the Literary Coterie, 1580–​1830: From Sidney to Blackwoods (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 53–​73;

Contexts for Circulation    489 Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-​Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1992); Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jessica Winston, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–​1581 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. Warren Boutcher, ‘Literary Art and Agency? Gell and the Magic of the Early Modern Book’, in Liana Chua and Mark Elliott (eds.), Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 155–​158. 3. Lindsay Ann Reid coins the term ‘bibliofiction’ to describe this phenomenon in Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book: Metamorphosing Classical Heroines in Late Medieval and Renaissance England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 3–​8. 4. Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1; Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-​Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 46. 5. James Raven, Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (London: British Library, 2014), 5; Leah Knight and Micheline White, ‘The Bookscape’, in Knight, White, and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, and Circulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 5–​6; on the London book trade as a cultural domain, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 58–​67. 6. David McKitterick, ‘University Printing at Oxford and Cambridge’, in John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, with Maureen Bell (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2002), iv. 190, 191–​192. 7. J. H. Baker, ‘English Law Books and Legal Publishing’, in Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 479. 8. J. Christopher Warner, The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557: Songs and Sonnets in the Summer of the Martyrs’ Fires (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 14–​24. 9. Magna Charta cum Statutis quae Antiquae Vocantur (1556), ¶iir. 10. See e.g. Winston, Lawyers at Play, 173–​192. 11. D. S. Bland, ‘Arthur Broke, Gerard Legh, and the Inner Temple’, Notes & Queries, 214 (1969), 453–​455. 12. Gerard Legh, Accedens of Armory (1562), 205r–​v. 13. O’Callaghan, English Wits, 12–​13; see also O’Callaghan, ‘ “Jests Stolen from the Temples Revels”: The Inns of Court Revels and Early Modern Drama’, SPELL: Swiss Papers in Language and Literature, 31 (2015), 233–​234. 14. Winston, Lawyers at Play, 89. 15. Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1, 6. 16. Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum (1597), 102; John Marston, The scourge of villanie, Corrected (1599), H1v. 17. Richards, Voices and Books, 79. 18. John Baker, ‘Common Lawyers and the Inns of Court’, in Elisabeth Leedham-​Green and T. Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), i. 448–​460. 19. BL MS Cotton Vitellius C IX, fo. 320a. I am grateful to the Middle Temple librarian, Renae Satterley, and archivist, Barnaby Bryan, for this reference. See also Renae Satterley, ‘The

490   Michelle O’Callaghan Libraries of the Inns of Court: An Examination of their Historical Influence’, Library History, 24 (2008), 208–​219. 20. Baker, ‘English Law Books’, 479; Elisabeth Leedham-​Green and David McKitterick, ‘Ownership: Private and Public Libraries’, in Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 322. 21. Gladys A. Harrison, ‘The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, deciphered, for the Period January 1622–​April 1624’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Minnesota, 1915, 167, 169. 22. Warren Boutcher, ‘Pilgrimage to Parnassus: Local Intellectual Traditions, Humanist Education and the Cultural Geography of Sixteenth-​Century England’, in Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone (eds.), Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135–​136. 23. John Baker, Legal Education in London, 1250–​1850 (London: Selden Society, 2007), 277; Wilfred Prest, Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and Early Stuarts (London: Longman, 1972), 140. 24. James Orchard Halliwell-​Phillipps (ed.), The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simond D’Ewes, Bart. (London: R. Bentley, 1845), i. 185, 193, 220; Harrison, ‘Diary’, 11, 194. 25. OED, 4 a–​c, 3. 26. J. McCann and H. Connelly (eds.), Memorials of Augustine Baker, Publications of the Catholic Record Society, 33 (London: Privately printed, 1933), 44–​45. 27. Petrarch, Quatuor Invectivarum libri (Bodleian MS Jones 28), fos. 27v, 30v, 41r, 42r. 28. On its transmission, see Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘The “Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes”: The Transmission of Female-​Voiced Burlesque Poetry in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (eds.), Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 99–​117. 29. Marotti, ‘ “Rolling Archetypes” ’, 486–​523; Boutcher, ‘Pilgrimage’, 110–​147; Prest, Inns of Court, 32–​40. 30. R. M. Fisher, ‘William Crashawe’s Library at the Temple, 1605–​1615’, The Library, 30 (1975), 117–​121; P. J. Wallis, ‘The Library of William Crashawe’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 2 (1956), 214, 218, 222. 31. British Library, Cotton MS Julius CIII, fo. 200r. 32. Fisher, ‘William Crashawe’s Library’, 117–​118, 122–​123; Wallis, ‘Library’, 222–​228. 33. Harrison, ‘Diary’, 87, 88. 34. Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor–​ Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 24. 35. See Kevin Sharpe’s seminal study, Sir Robert Cotton 1586–​1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 196–​221. 36. Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth-​ Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7; Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–​1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 7–​8. 37. Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1559–​1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 66–​87. 38. Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 146 39. Thomas Tusser, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (c.1557), C1v. 40. See Jessica Rosenberg’s discussion of the conceptual and material functions of these points in her ‘The Point of the Couplet: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Tusser’s A Hundreth Good

Contexts for Circulation    491 Pointes of Husbandrie’, English Literary History, 53 (2016), 1–​21. Tusser, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1570), 39v–​40v; Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home, 47. 41. Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and Gender, 37–​40, 196–​197. 42. Margaret Spufford, ‘Libraries of the “common sort” ’, in Leedham-​Green and Webber (eds.), Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i. 520–​5. 43. Margaret Bell, ‘Reading in Seventeenth-​Century Derbyshire: The Wheatcrofts and Their Books’, in Peter Isaac and Barrie McKay (eds.), The Moving Market: Continuity and Change in the Book Trade (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001), 161–​168; Cedric Brown, ‘The Black Poet of Ashover, Leonard Wheatcroft’, English Manuscript Studies, 11 (2002), 181–​202. 44. Katherine Acheson (ed.), The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–​1629: A Critical Edition (New York: Routledge 1995), 59, 65, 69, 72–​4, 76, 79, 90, 100, 102–​103, 113, 116–​117, 119–​120. 45. Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home, 195. 46. A.H. [Abraham Holland?], A scourge for paper-​persecutors (London, 1625), 4. 47. Paul Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-​Century Woman Book-​Collector’, The Library, 11 (1989), 208–​210. 48. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s Annotations as Labours of Love’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020), 257–​258. 49. Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and Gender, 61. 50. Bodleian, Douce MS 280, fos. 117v–​118r. 51. Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and Gender, 198 52. Newcomb, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s Annotations’, 249. 53. Bodleian Ashmole MS 52, 17v rev. 54. Victoria E. Burke, ‘Ann Bowyer’s Commonplace Book (Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 51): Reading and Writing Among the “Middling Sort” ’, EMLS (Early Modern Literary Studies) 6/​3 (2001), 1. 10, 8, 13. 55. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius (1612), 193–​196; Burke, ‘Ann Bowyer’s Commonplace Book’, 1. 18. 56. Christine Newman, ‘The Bowes of Streatlam, County Durham: A Study of the Politics and Religion of a Sixteenth-​Century Northern Gentry Family’, PhD thesis, University of York, 1991, 327–​329 57. Johns, Nature of Print, 74–​76. 58. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 66. 59. Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Collecting Verse: “Significant Shape” and the Paper Book in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 80 (2017), 311–​316. 60. Thomas Whythorne, The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne: A Modern Spelling Edition, ed. James Osborne (Oxford, 1962), 46, 203–​206. On the instability of the concept of a music profession in this period, see Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 72. 61. John Harley, The World of William Byrd: Musicians, Merchants and Magnates (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) 63–​64.

Select Bibliography Boutcher, Warren, ‘Pilgrimage to Parnassus: Local Intellectual Traditions, Humanist Education and the Cultural Geography of Sixteenth-​ Century England’, in Yun Lee

492   Michelle O’Callaghan Too and Niall Livingstone (eds.) Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 000–​00. Hamling, Tara, and Richardson, Catherine, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–​1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Knight, Leah, White, Micheline, and Sauer, Elizabeth (eds.), Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, and Circulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Marotti, Arthur, ‘The Circulation of Verse at the Inns of Court and in London in Early Stuart England’, in Will Bowers and Hannah Leah (eds.), Re-​evaluating the Literary Coterie, 1580–​ 1830: From Sidney to Blackwoods (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 53–​73. Marotti, Arthur, ‘ “Rolling Archetypes”: Christ Church, Oxford Poetry Collections, and the Proliferation of Manuscript Verse Anthologies in Caroline England’, English Literary Renaissance, 44 (2014), 486–​523. O’Callaghan, Michelle, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Raven, James, Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (London: British Library, 2014). Winston, Jessica, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–​1581 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

CHAPTER 26

F rom Duck L a ne to L az arus Se a ma n Buying and Selling Old Books in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries H. R. Woudhuysen

The subject of the second-​hand book trade in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is marked, above all, by the simultaneous absence and abundant, indeed overwhelming, supply of evidence. There is no single source that provides a comprehensive account of the subject. Instead, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of instances of specific books that bear prices on their title pages or endpapers, thousands of medieval manuscripts whose provenance can be reconstructed, hundreds of lists in which old books appear with their estimated value, and untold correspondence about the book trade. Despite this, it is the relative absence of evidence concerning the trade that is striking. There is no immediate explanation as to why this should be so. The subject is curiously unexplored; this essay is only a preliminary sketch of it.1 *** From the fifteenth century, printed books were the first mechanically mass-​produced items in Western Europe, their two main physical constituents, type and paper, capable of being recycled over and over again. Manuscripts and printed books were, of course, not the only items of value for which a resale market existed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as before and afterwards, objects of beauty or of usefulness were sold and resold, some for less than their original price, some for much more. Books need to be considered in the context of such other items. They are, however, unusual because they tend to be ideal places in which to record their own histories. A piece of silver may have hallmarks that show where, when, and by whom it was made; pictures tend, especially in this period, to be less forthcoming, telling little about the artist, the subject, the date or place of composition. Books usually identify their author, subject matter, printer,

494   H. R. Woudhuysen place, and date, leaving plenty of convenient space in which to record who bought them and for how much. Their histories are written in and on them.2 How though can the history of an item of seventeenth-​century clothing be written? Second-​hand clothes and shoes seem usually to have gone down in value, just as everyday furniture, tableware, or arms and armour did. More expensive examples of such items might become more valuable if made of suitably costly materials or exquisitely decorated. Similarly, silver and gold goods, cutlery, plate, ornaments, and jewellery sometimes became more valuable over time, not just because the value of silver or gold had risen, but because their antiquity and their craftsmanship were more highly regarded. The same might apply to specialized items such as musical, medical, or scientific instruments. Books and manuscripts are probably best compared to the fine arts. Paintings, miniatures, drawings, sculptures, bronzes, tapestries, and so on were keenly sought after by collectors eager to show off their good taste and wealth. By the early seventeenth century in England, there was evidently a market for antiquities, Roman statuary and inscriptions, silver and gold coins, medals and rings,3 but also for items made of base metal illustrating the history of previous ages. Old things, especially those with religious, occult, or magical associations, were to be preserved and revered. Religious, nationalist, or family piety encouraged those with money to spend it on antique or antiquarian objects, including books. For the Tudors, the best way into the international art market was to be found through Antwerp. Yet noble collectors favoured modern art—​the best pictures by the most esteemed living artists—​not the old-​fashioned pictures of the past. The emphasis in this sixteenth-​century art collecting was on the contemporary. Tastes changed, and the search for the work of the best new artists was gradually complemented by a similar quest for works by the great artists of the past. New generations of noble and royal collectors wanted old works. By the 1620s, there was a sophisticated market for works of art from the last two centuries and for Roman antiquities, and the English nobility had bought heavily into it. Before the end of the century, the diarist John Evelyn had begun referring to craftsmen in the past with excellent reputations—​in this case, German workmen making lutes—​as old masters; a few years later, he could call the pictures and drawings shown to him by the Earl of Pembroke as works by ‘very many of the old & best Masters, especially . . . M: Angelo’.4 Works by the old masters were not usually referred to as second-​hand pictures; books may have been a different matter. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for someone buying books ‘at second hand’ is from the Bodleian’s accounts for 1613.5 Visiting France in the mid-​1620s, Peter Heylyn described the University of Orléans’s Faculty of Law as having an old ruinous chamber. They call it their Library; for my part, I should have thought it to have been the warehouse of some second hand Bookseller. Those few books which were there, were as old as Printing; and could hardly make amongst them one cover, to resist the violence of a Rat.6

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    495 Heylyn can describe a second-​hand bookseller’s warehouse and expect his audience to picture what he is saying. The sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century language for such bookish activity is limited, yet there was a whole vocabulary for dealers in goods lower down the market, such as ‘higglers’, ‘hagglers’, and ‘cadgers’, generally itinerant sellers, people who engaged in ‘chaffer’ or the buying and selling of foodstuffs. A more familiar term for dealers in second-​hand goods was a broker, as at the bottom of the market a pawnbroker, or rather higher up a stockbroker. ‘I pray you that if you chance to walke vppe into London amongest the brokers,’ Robert Burton, wrote to his brother William in 1605, ‘you wolde see if you can meete with Seneca the philosophers workes at seconde hande, and sende me the loest price etc, or if you cannenot meete with them so, tell me howe they be solde newe theire in one volume .8uo./​’.7 A few years later, in Lording Barry’s comedy Ram-​Alley, or Merry Tricks, the lawyer Throat calls Frances, his wife, and servants to him: Heere take this money: goe borrow Iewels Of the next Gold-​smith: Beard take thou these bookes, Goe both to the Broakers in Fetter lane, Lay them in pawne for a Veluet Ierken And a double Ruffe . . .

The play was probably written in 1608 and was printed in 1611; jewels are borrowed, books are pawned in exchange for clothes.8 The brokers of Fetter Lane sold their second-​ hand books from shops or stalls. They might have gone to a ‘mart’ or ‘market’ to buy books, but these were international fairs mainly for new books, like the one held at Frankfurt. The language for the trade in second-​hand books in England at this time has yet to be recovered. *** Two national events, two convulsions a century or so apart, give particular insights into the market for second-​hand books in England. First, between 1536 and 1540, Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries released large numbers of old ‘popish’ books and manuscripts from institutional libraries and private collections. Then in the 1640s, the Parliamentary government impounded book collections chiefly from those who supported or were thought to support the Royalist cause. These two sets of events might usefully act as a pair of bookends for the history of the subject as a whole.9 The fates of manuscripts and books after the closure of religious institutions tell two quite different stories. In the 1530s, Henry VIII eagerly had libraries at his palaces of Greenwich, Hampton Court, and Westminster refurbished to receive books from failing and dissolved monasteries. In this work, the King seems to have been assisted by the antiquary John Leland, who managed to keep some of these books for himself. There were rich pickings for other English and Continental buyers; according to a letter Anthony Wood saw in the State Papers, Leland wrote to Thomas Cromwell in July 1536 complaining that ‘the Germanes perceiving our desidiousness and negligence,

496   H. R. Woudhuysen do send dayly young Scholars hither’ and they are taking the books from English monastic libraries, ‘putting them abroad as Monuments of their own Country’.10 Besides Leland, the early antiquaries Sir John Prise, Robert Talbot, and Nicholas Brigham all came to own manuscripts from monastic sources.11 Thomas Cranmer benefited from the Dissolution of the Monasteries to build up his own considerable collections.12 In Yorkshire, Henry Savile (d. 1607) or his father acquired many monastic manuscripts.13 Those who came later to the feast, such as Matthew Parker (who undertook most of his collecting in the 1550s and 1560s), John Dee (who bought six manuscripts from Leland’s collection at London in May 1556),14 and the antiquary William Lambarde, still found many books from the religious houses to satisfy their appetites. Such people wanted to own and preserve what was old and valuable because it was just that—​old and intellectually and perhaps financially valuable.15 Little is known about how books and manuscripts left the monasteries and religious houses and entered other collections; the middlemen involved are largely unnamed.16 The wilful destruction of books began with the fire and embraced their dismemberment or recycling for use by different trades. This caused lovers of antiquity, such as John Aubrey, much grief. From his childhood, Aubrey valued old things; in the 1630s he recorded that ‘In my grandfathers dayes, the Manuscripts flew about like Butterflies: All Musick bookes, Account bookes, Copie bookes &c. were covered with old Manuscripts’; glovers wrapped their goods in them.17 The destruction was terrible, but not absolute and there was, presumably, money to be made by buying up old books and selling them on to historically minded buyers, as well as by turning them into patterns, wrappings, and pie-​linings. Even in the 1530s, let alone the 1630s, these old books were in every sense relics of a previous age. Just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, there are glimpses of the trade in second-​hand books in the accounts of stationers at the two universities. The Oxford one, the German Hans Dorn’s (John Thorne) daybook, is the earlier and fuller. During 1520, Thorne recorded just over 1,850 transactions at his shop in the High Street just opposite the University church of St Mary’s. Many of the books (‘breviaries, ballads, prognostications, grammars . . . scholarly works in theology’) he sold were clearly quite old by 1520, a few perhaps half a century old; he identified some forty-​four of the transactions as involving books described as ‘antiquus’ in some way. Just over half of those transactions involved bound old books, suggesting that they were definitely second-​hand books, rather than the sheets of unsold books.18 At Cambridge, Garrett Godfrey’s accounts cover a period from about 1527 to 1533 and record around 1,100 transactions. Godfrey was a bookbinder and bookseller, especially of the contemporary textbooks needed in a university city. Only three of Godfrey’s transactions name books described as ‘de antiquis’ or ‘antiq’—​the first two consisting of multiple copies of Erasmus’s Colloquies. On the other hand, eleven of his entries concern books described in some way as ‘new’.19 When so many of his transactions involved books that were in print, why some books were singled out as ‘new’ is unclear. Of the earlier trade in London, a few witnesses survive. Columbus’s son was able to purchase eighty books there in June 1522; around half were incunabula, and so very probably second-​hand.20

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    497 John Dee acquired a few manuscripts, one in 1574 ‘bowght uppon a stall in London’ and another in February 1581.21 John Proctor, a book dealer on Holborn Bridge, sold the Arundel or Eadui Psalter to Lord William Howard in 1589.22 It seems likely that until the later emergence of booksellers who dealt mainly or exclusively in second-​hand books, most bookshops and stalls promiscuously mixed new and second-​hand books. For some book buyers, including the Bodleian Library with its sale of the First Folio and acquisition of the Third, only ‘the last and best Edition’ would do.23 Old books often had the disadvantage of being unreadable or hard to read. Justifying the sale of the Pirckheimer Library to the Earl of Arundel in the 1630s, Hans Imhoff commented that the library ‘was very old, many of the books, especially the manuscripts, illegible and that such books were available either in new editions or in better ones, much easier to read than the uncomfortable old books and of far greater contemporary use’, sentiments with which many seventeenth-​century book buyers would have concurred.24 Scholars such as Kristian Jensen and David McKitterick have traced the ways in which, from the eighteenth century, old books increasingly became rare books, suitable for collecting, preserving, and studying.25 Contemporary references to the particular value of old books tend to concentrate on their usefulness rather than on their antiquity. There are some exceptions to this; William Crashaw, for example, when making his will in 1621, left to St John’s College, Cambridge, a ‘Missale Romanū printed more than a hundred yeares agoe . . . a Booke very rare & hard to be gott’.26 Among buyers, an interest in medieval books for their contents and as works of art seems to have developed earlier, within two or three generations of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. From the 1580s, such books were evidently in demand and were being sought out.27 *** Although second-​hand books were traded in the two university towns and some cities, such as York, London was, as ever, the centre of the trade.28 Barry’s Ram Alley refers to the pawnbrokers in Fetter Lane running between Fleet Street and Holborn. The surviving evidence indicates that the concentration of second-​hand book dealers lay north of this. In September 1628, a list of dealers in old libraries and old and mart books was submitted to the Privy Council. The dealers were charged with bringing in a catalogue of books they bought and telling ‘your Lordship’ of those they sold.29 Thirty-​eight dealers are named and are arranged topographically. Quite a few are in Chancery Lane and Fleet Street, but most are in the north-​west of the City, close to Smithfield Market, in Duck Lane and Little Britain, streets that lead into each other. None of these dealers’ businesses was in or even close to St Paul’s Churchyard, the centre for new books; in other words, by 1628, there were distinct districts for the buying of old books.30 A few of these dealers are relatively well known; some were related to each other by birth or marriage. In 1610, Stephen Potts, for example, ‘bibliopola Londinensis’, gave an early fifteenth-​century Sarum Breviary to St John’s College, Oxford, and in 1626 sold a manuscript of the Golden Legend to Sir Roger Twysden.31 Laurence Sadler and his publishing partner Cornelius Bee supplied manuscripts to William Laud, Sir Roger

498   H. R. Woudhuysen Twysden, and Sir Simonds D’Ewes. Bee probably came into the trade shortly after 1628 and was established in Little Britain by 1634. On 14 June 1655, Arthur Trevor told Secretary Thurloe that seventy-​two manuscripts and printed books had arrived at Bee’s shop, at the King’s Arms, from the collection of Sir George Carew (d. 1629), Earl of Totnes, sold by his widow Lady Killigrew. Trevor added that ‘Some care would [i.e. should] be taken before the notice of them come abroad’.32 A year later, Bee bought the library of John Hales (1584–​1656) for £700.33 Thomas Bourne guaranteed a Venice 1544 copy of Castiglione’s Il cortegiano was complete and sold it for 1s. 3d.34 Other London dealers in old books can be found outside the 1628 list. Launcelot Toppyn of Little Britain sold Scipio Le Squyer manuscripts from Exeter and, like other members of the second-​ hand trade, sold books with guarantees written in them to buy them back.35 In 1620, Laud bought manuscripts from George Loftus and later in that decade and the next, Lord William Howard bought books from Humphrey Robinson at the Three Pigeons in St Paul’s Churchyard.36 People went to these locations in search of second-​hand books. In 1628, the year that the list of booksellers was drawn up, the herald Randle Holme the younger recorded that he had paid the large amount of 13s. 4d. ‘in duck lane’ for a copy of de Worde’s 1495 edition of Ranulph Higden’s Polycronicon.37 A few years earlier, one John Piper wrote to Thomas Huggins saying that copies of ‘mountaignes Essaies, and Tacitus ar exceeding scarse’, adding that ‘it may be duck lane will afford one of a sort reasonable for you against next weeke’. In a subsequent note, Piper reported that ‘Sutton on ye Sacraments is not to be gotten old or new’.38 The frustration of being unable to buy old books in or around Duck Lane was eclipsed by finding one’s own books there. This happened in about 1618 to William Crashaw, who had lent James Ussher a copy of John Josseline’s 1574 account of the lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. Ussher had lent the folio volume to a friend, who had recently died, and now I find my Book at Mr. Edwards his Shop, near Duke-​Lane, and he saith he bought it with Dr. Mocket’s Library, but I cannot have it. Happily you might by your Testimony prevail to get it me, for I charged him not to sell it: I pray think of it, as you go that way.39

Crashaw was not pleased to find it on sale. Duck Lane was still a good place to buy old books in 1683, when William Dugdale told Anthony Wood he had found a copy of ‘that excellent philosophicall and Divine poem’, Sir John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum ‘wch in some time, amongst the old Bookes in Duck lane, I obtained, and do much value’.40 If John Edwards was one of the earliest identifiable second-​hand book dealers in London, in the early 1630s and for the following three decades, Laurence Sadler at the sign of the Golden Lion became a prominent figure in the trade as a bookseller and publisher. In 1638, he was described as ‘the pre-​eminent man among those selling old books in the area called Little Britain’.41 Sadler’s dominance of the second-​hand market was evidently continued through his servant Robert Littlebury. In a set of ‘Directions for my Executors’, expanding on his 1649 will, Richard Holdsworth appointed Littlebury

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    499 and Robert Beaumont to ‘draw up a perfect Catalogue’ of his books: ‘Those two persons are trusty & know most of my Bookes already, & are able to set a price & estimate upon them.’42 A little later, it was Robert Scott at the Prince’s Arms in Little Britain (fl. 1661–​ 87/​91), who dominated the field. Scott was the Bodleian’s principal London agent, purchasing the Hatton manuscripts for £156 for the library in 1671.43 Well connected to the European book trade, with warehouses in Paris and Frankfurt, in 1677 Scott issued what is taken to be the ‘first general antiquarian catalogue’ of books, consisting of the library of Henry Henchman, Bishop of London.44 In the same year, Scott offered to sell Sancroft manuscripts, probably those of Jacobus Golius, and the next year, he sought to buy de Thou’s library; about seven years earlier he bought most of the French historians from M. ‘Monsr Montmores Library in Paris’ and sold them to the King. He issued auction catalogues and held fixed-​price sales; the Bodleian spent £134 on books from one catalogue in 1687.45 He was a witness in the case of Sancroft versus Sheldon; at Lambeth Palace, ‘Noticing the shelves left empty, Scott had observed archly that “they gap’d to have their mouths filled”.’46 No descriptions or pictures of the bookshops in Duck Lane, Little Britain, and elsewhere survive, but something of their appearance might be suggested by similar shops in London. A rather schematic view of Cheapside, the home of the jewellers, can be seen in a 1585 survey of the area by Ralph Treswell. The houses have three floors and an attic; on the ground floor, each has an opening, on either side of which there are wooden stalls—​a support, with a board on top of it. These stalls could be used to display goods and the boards could double as shutters for the windows.47 The arrangement is not unlike the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine in Paris or in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road in London. Outside London, the best evidence for the second-​hand trade comes from the two university towns. Academics needed books, and since they were forbidden to marry, on their deaths—​unless they left their books to their college or the university library, to friends or relations—​the books would be sold. At Oxford, the university had the sole right to determine who could sell and bind books, but the trade, at least in Elizabethan times, cannot have been very profitable. In 1574, the Chancellor recommended that Christopher Cavey should have a monopoly of second-​hand books in Oxford ‘since he was in difficulties through sickness and the pressure of competition’.48 Robert Burton was able to buy nearly fifty second-​hand books from John Crosley in the High Street in October 1609. These had belonged to the recently deceased Robert Brissenden, a Fellow of Merton College. Burton had a bargain: he paid 12s. 6d. for the whole lot that included one fifteenth-​century book and several volumes printed in the first half of the sixteenth century.49 In 1617, Oxford’s booksellers were ordered not to buy second-​hand books from ‘younge vnthriftie, and suspicious Scholares, and other parsons, bookes and other thinges at secunde hande’ and were ordered to find out from the students’ colleges whether those books were lawfully come by.50 At Cambridge, John Denys, a bookbinder, dealt in second-​hand books; a 1578 inventory of his stock contains numerous volumes labelled ‘vetus’ or ‘old’, as well as such rather unhelpful descriptions as ‘an old wrytten booke in french’.51 In 1591, a probate inventory

500   H. R. Woudhuysen was taken of the books left by Reignold Bridges, a bookseller who stocked university textbooks; a good part of his stock is labelled (in Latin) ‘old’, ‘old edition’, or ‘very old edition’.52 Twenty years later in September 1611, Laud bought a manuscript (Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 568) from John Sampson, a Cambridge stationer.53 It is hard to generalize about how expensive old or second-​hand books were in comparison to new ones.54 The evidence from inventories and from book bills, such as Burton’s bargain haul, is that books not sold as job lots were frequently individually valued and priced. Booksellers recorded what they had paid or how much they were asking for a book by using codes, usually consisting of upper-​or lower-​case letters or numbers, sometimes on the same line and sometimes looking like fractions, with or without a series of points around them. These may appear on a book’s title page or on its endpapers, in its simplest form as a =​1, b =​2, and so on; this could be varied, and common sense has to be used in working out a price.55 *** Some of these themes can be drawn together. Old books and manuscripts had always been tradable commodities. Early in the sixteenth century—​at least at Oxford and Cambridge—​they were being sold by booksellers. The Dissolution of the Monasteries released a large amount of material on the market; much of it was destroyed, but some entered private libraries. The market in medieval manuscripts may well have developed before one in antiquarian printed books, but certainly by the early seventeenth century, perhaps before, a well-​developed trade in second-​hand books can be observed, with identifiable dealers, specializing in these items, occupying shops in different parts of London and in the university towns.56 Even so, it seems more likely that the trade combined old and new books rather than that there were dealers who stocked nothing but second-​hand books. If this summary is right, the arc of growing interest in old books, as bearers of meaning beyond their printed words, is not unlike the developing trade in old pictures and works of art. The next observable development is that libraries, rather than individually priced books, began to appear on the market and to be sold through dealers and not privately. The manuscripts of the herald Nicholas Charles (1582–​1613) were sold, after his death, to William Camden for £90, but it seems this was by private arrangement. Ten years later, library sales were news. In a letter of bibliophilic gossip written from London in November 1624, Henry Bourchier told James Ussher, ‘Here will be very shortly some good Libraries to be had; as Dr. Dee’s, which hath been long litigious, and by that means unsold.’57 Dee had died in 1609, having given his extraordinary collection of books and manuscripts to the merchant John Pontois (1565–​1624); when Pontois died, his heirs decided to sell the library amid, as Bourchier indicated, some excitement.58 A few years later in 1627, another of Ussher’s informants, Samuel Ward, told him that ‘Dr. White, now Bishop of Carlisle, hath sold all his Books to Hills the Broker’. Francis White had recently been consecrated as bishop of Carlisle and did not want the annoyance and cost of moving them from Sion College in London to Cumberland. Ward continued: ‘His Pretence is the charge of Carriage so far by Land, and the danger

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    501 by Water. Some think he paid for his place.’59 Hills may be Francis Hill in Little Britain. Other collections of books appeared, or it was hoped would appear, on the market, such as the library of the dying Earl of Totnes in 1629 (‘I will strain myself to buy it wholly,’ Ussher wrote, ‘for it is a very select one. But howsoever, I will not miss (God willing) his Irish Books and Papers’60). This wholesale buying of libraries and books is apparent in the 1628 list, which is headed those that ‘deale in old libraries’. It can also be seen at a more personal level. In September 1625, the Kentish antiquary Edward Dering spent £18 on heraldry books from the library of Ralph Brooke, York Herald, though he thought they ‘were not worth aboue 20 mark’ (that is £13. 6s. 8d.)—​Brooke died on 15 October 1625, so Dering was getting in early.61 John Donne died on 31 March 1631; at least one of his books—​ Paracelsus, Chirurgia magna (Strasbourg, 1573)—​appeared on the market shortly after his death: G.P. recorded that he bought it in Duck Lane on 13 December 1633 for 7s. 6d.62 Within months of Ben Jonson’s death in mid-​August 1637, John Morris bought a volume of three works of neo-​Latin poetry published at Venice in 1553 that had belonged to Jonson.63 Only a few years later, Elias Ashmole took to the acquisition of collections ‘en bloc’.64 Provincial sales of libraries began to be recorded. In 1631, the Oxford don Thomas Crosfield recorded in his diary, ‘I travelled to Childrey with Mr Webb & Nicholas Fisher to viewe Mr Membries bookes which Mr Webb bought for 300li.’ That was a huge amount of money to spend on books, but the Oxford bookseller William Webb evidently thought that the library of Christopher Membry of Corpus Christi College was worth the cost.65 Death is a great spur for book buyers. The astrologer William Lilly bought books from the recently deceased Cambridge Arabic scholar William Bedwell in 1632. In the same way, John Aubrey gleefully noted of the poet and playwright William Cartwright who died in 1643, ‘When I was of Trin. Coll. [Oxford] there was a sale of Mr. Wm. Cartwright’s bookes, many whereof I had.’66 From the later 1620s there is a further development. Writing from Dublin to William Herbert in January 1629, Ussher reported with some excitement that That famous Library of Giacono Barocci, a Gentleman of Venice, consisting of 242 Greek Manuscript Volumes, is now brought into England by Mr. Fetherstone the stationer. Great pity it were, that such a Treasure should be dissipated, and [the] Books dispersed into private hands.

Ussher hoped that Charles I might buy them along with ‘that rare Collection, of Arabick Manuscripts, which my Lord Duke of Buckingham purchased’ from the heirs of the Dutch scholar Erpenius for the royal library. In the end, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke and Chancellor of Oxford University, paid £700 for Barocci’s collection and, at Archbishop Laud’s prompting, gave the books to the Bodleian, where by June of the same year they were described as being ‘now Prisoners in our publick Library’.67 This is one of the earliest indications of English dealers as distinct from private buyers playing a part in the international market in rare books and manuscripts.68 ‘Mr. Fetherstone’ was

502   H. R. Woudhuysen Henry Featherstone, a bookseller, who traded between 1608 and 1647. He had alerted Ussher to the sale in April 1628; the Barocci manuscripts were part of what he described as ‘an extraordinary large furnature from Venice’. Featherstone’s agent ‘doth not only ransack Venice, but also Padua, Bononia [Bologna], Florence, and Rome itselfe, and intends to visite Naples in going up one way, and returning another’.69 Featherstone began in publishing, but he essentially stopped that in about 1626, moved his business from St Paul’s Churchyard to Blackfriars, and started dealing in old books, especially Continental ones. In the year he wrote to Ussher, he issued a printed catalogue of books, Catalogus librorum in diversis locis Italiæ emptorum, bought in Italy, grandly saying they would be sold ‘in officina Fetherstoniana’. There are forty-​six pages of books, arranged in sections covering theology, oriental languages, Greek liturgies (ending with an advertisement for the Barocci collection), politics, history, geography, and philosophy (all in one group), medicine and surgery, then mathematics, law, and finally Spanish and Italian books. The oriental books are arranged by size, but the others have no apparent order; the books are not numbered nor are they priced, and are listed by author name, title, format, place, and date of publication. Robert Martin, Featherstone’s former apprentice, followed his master’s example and between about 1633 and 1650 issued a series of catalogues, arranged alphabetically by author, from his shops in St Paul’s Churchyard and later at the sign of Venice in Old Bailey.70 Most of his books came from Italy, where he also acquired manuscripts, but some were bought from France and elsewhere. Selden bought books from Featherstone’s and Martin’s catalogues.71 From Italy also came the collection of Hebrew books that George Thomason advertised in a catalogue of 1647; it was bought by Parliament and presented to Cambridge University.72 *** The selling of whole libraries took a distinctive turn in the early 1640s, when Parliament’s Sequestration Committee began to confiscate and sell the libraries of Royalists and other opponents. How this process actually worked deserves further investigation, but it is possible to reconstruct some of what happened.73 At its simplest, the Commissioners for Sequestrations took the books of a Royalist delinquent and passed them on to a Parliamentarian; in this way, Laud’s books were reassigned to the Independent minister Hugh Peters and to Sion College. It was decided that other collections were to be valued and sold. Two major book buyers, Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and James Ussher, were threatened with the sale of their libraries in August 1644. Rather than lose his books, Herbert decided to surrender Montgomery Castle. The threat to James Ussher’s books was not lifted until June 1656.74 Their books and those of many others whose libraries were sequestered were never sold, but others’ were; there was a mechanism for disposing of them. Between 1643 and 1645, the committee sequestered around thirty libraries, took them to their headquarters at Camden House in Maiden Lane, catalogued them, and then they were valued or ‘appreased by 2. Stationers appointed for the appreasinge of all sequestered books’, according to the demands of the Act of Parliament. The surviving documentary

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    503 evidence indicates that the committee sequestered around thirty libraries containing about 10,000 books and sold them for about £1,000. The largest library they took was that of Edward Conway, second Viscount Conway, consisting of 5,000 or 6,000 books, valued at £200. They also went for much smaller fry; Sir Thomas Bludder’s books, for which an inventory survives, were valued at £23. 10s. 4d. and Sir Henry Compton’s books were thought to be worth no more than £2.75 The identities of the two stationers paid to value the books are not certain, but one of them was probably Robert Bostock, a Paul’s Churchyard bookseller from about 1626 until 1656, who was appointed the committee’s treasurer.76 If they followed the correct procedure, days were appointed at which the goods were ‘to be sold by the Candle as Marchants vse to doe to those that will giue most, & to begin not with too lowe a rate’.77 This sounds remarkably like an auction, in which the last bid made before a small candle went out won the item being sold.78 This anticipates by more than thirty years the first known public sale of books in England by auction. The library of Lazarus Seaman was sold on 31 October 1676 at his house in Warwick Lane; the auctioneer was William Cooper. He modelled this sale, and more than twenty others that he held before his death in 1689, on how such events were conducted at Leiden from the 1590s and at Amsterdam early in the next century. Cooper advertised it as a new way of selling books in England. He is not known to have travelled to the Low Countries, but one of Seaman’s executors, the Presbyterian minister Joseph Hill, had twice lived there for reasonably long spells; the auction seems to have been his idea. During the next twenty years, hundreds of private libraries were sold in this way. Within a few years of the Seaman sale in London, auction sales were regularly being held in the provinces.79 Auctioneers began to charge for their catalogues (usually 6d.) and the sales were advertised in the press.80 They became social events, attracting notable figures in person or bidding through agents. At the Richard Smith sale on 15 May 1682, for example, the purchasers included Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Isaac Vossius, Henry More, Hans Sloane, John Locke, Edward Tyson, Francis Lodwick, Richard Baxter, and John Bagford.81 Foreign auctions also began to attract the attention of scholars and buyers. In July 1683, Evelyn visited ‘Mr. Frazier, a learned Scots Gent: . . . he had now ben in Holland, at the sale of the learned Heinsius’s Library, & shewed me divers very rare & curious bookes, & some Manuscripts he had purchas’d to good value’. The auction had been held in 1682.82 By the end of the century, the modern bookseller’s catalogue had emerged: in August 1697, John Hartley issued a catalogue, explaining that ‘Any Gentleman may take what he pleases at the Price set upon the first Blank Leaf of every Book’.83 It is as though after the Great Fire of London, the modern world of second-​hand and antiquarian books suddenly took off. Booksellers began to advertise their willingness to buy books. In 1669, Samuel Speed assured his clientele that ‘whosoever hath any Study, or Library of Books, or Copies, either in Manuscript, or such as have been already Printed, to dispose of, shall receive from him the full value thereof ’.84 Such touting for business was not confined to the capital. Five years earlier, William Thorp in Chester had produced a handsomely engraved trade-​card advertising his printing, bookselling, and

504   H. R. Woudhuysen bookbinding business, adding that at his shop ‘Books both new & Old are to bee bound and sold’.85 Twenty years after Samuel Speed’s advertisement, in 1689, a young Christ Church don, George Smalridge, published a Latin poem celebrating the auction sale on 25 June 1688 of the stock of the Oxford bookseller Richard Davis who had run into financial problems.86 The speed with which the auction sale as a means of disposing of books was adopted is extraordinary, and in the poem it becomes an object of learned jokiness. The publisher of Smalridge’s poem was Jacob Tonson, the man who, with his descendants, for nearly a century, was going to dominate publishing and, in a sense, to invent English literature.

Notes 1. In addition to some older sources and the items listed in the Select Bibliography, the subject is touched on most usefully by Richard Ovenden, ‘The Libraries of the Antiquaries (c.1580–​1640) and the Idea of a National Collection’, in Elisabeth Leedham-​Green and Teresa Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i: To 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 527–​561, esp. 538–​540; David Pearson, ‘The English Private Library in the Seventeenth Century’, The Library, 7th ser., 13/​4 (Dec. 2012), 379–​399, esp. 384–​385. 2. David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (new edn., Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019). 3. Catharine MacLeod, The Lost Prince (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2012), nos. 54, 55. 4. Cited by OED, old master n. 2a (c.1684) and 2b (1696). 5. 1613 Bodleian Day-​Book (MS), fo. 18r: ‘A note of such Books as were bought at London of Jhon Edwards at second hand’; cf. ‘Item for books bowght at second hand in London’ (20 July 1613); Gwen Hampshire (ed.), The Bodleian Library Account Book, 1613–​1646, Oxford Bibliographical Society, ns 21 (Oxford, 1983), 157. 6. Peter Heylyn, A survey of the estate of France (London: Henry Seile, 1656), sig. U2v. 7. Richard L. Nochimson, ‘Robert Burton’s Authorship of Alba: A Lost Letter Recovered’, Review of English Studies, ns 21/​3 (Aug. 1970), 325–​331, at 327. 8. Lording Barry, Ram-​Alley: or merrie-​trickes (London: Robert Wilson, 1611), sig. F2r. 9. For the earlier period, see e.g. C. Paul Christianson, ‘The Rise of London’s Book-​trade’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1400–​1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 128–​147. 10. James P. Carley, ‘Leland, John (c.1503–​1552)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). 11. James P. Carley, ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries and the Salvaging of the Spoils’, in Leedham-​Green and Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i. 265–​291, at 274 n. 36. 12. David G. Selwyn, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Dispersal of Medieval Libraries’, in James P. Carley and Colin G. C. Tite (eds.), Books and Collectors 1200–​1700 (London: British Library, 1997), 281–​294. 13. F. J. Levy, ‘Savile, Henry, of Banke (1568–​1617)’, ODNB. 14. Carley, ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries’, 278 and n. 58.

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    505 15. For a contrary view, describing the destruction of books and libraries, see e.g. Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 16. For example, the identity of the person who sold about 150 manuscripts from Bury (now in the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge) to William Smart’s father is not known; see Carley, ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries’, 289. Similarly, it is not known who negotiated the 1572 sale of John Jewel’s library to Magdalen College, Oxford, for £120; see N. R. Ker, ‘The Provision of Books’, in The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica (Oxford, 1986), 441–​477, at 451–​452. 17. Elizabeth Yale, ‘With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive’, Book History, 12/​1 (Jan. 2009), 1–​36, at 1–​2. 18. F. Madan, ‘The Daily Ledger of John Dorne, 1520’, in Collectanea I, ed. C. R. L. Fletcher, Oxford Historical Society, 1st ser., 5 (Oxford: printed at the Clarendon Press, 1885), 71–​177; F. Madan, ‘Supplementary Notes to Collectanea I, Part III, Day-​Book of John Dorne’, in Collectanea II, ed. Montagu Burrows, Oxford Historical Society, 1st ser., 16 (Oxford: printed at the Clarendon Press, 1890), 453–​478; John L. Flood, ‘Thorne [Dorne], John (d. 1548?)’, ODNB. 19. Elisabeth Leedham-​Green, D. E. Rhodes, and F. H. Stubbings, Garrett Godfrey’s Accounts, c.1527–​1533, Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Monograph 12 (Cambridge: printed at Cambridge University Library, 1992), pp. xviii, xx. 20. Dennis E. Rhodes, ‘Don Fernando Colón and His London Book Purchases, June 1522’, Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, 51/​4 (1958), 231–​248, at 232. 21. Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (eds.), John Dee’s Library Catalogue (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990), 17, M10 (113), M56–​7 (117). 22. Ovenden, ‘The Libraries of the Antiquaries’, 539. 23. For the phrase, see, Peter Beal, ‘ “My books are the great joy of my life”: Sir William Boothby, Seventeenth-​Century Bibliophile’, Book Collector, 46/​3 (Autumn 1997), 350–​378, at 360 (of an edition of Josephus, requested on 6 Nov. 1683). 24. Linda Levy Peck, ‘Uncovering the Arundel Library at the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 52/​1 (Jan. 1998), 3–​24, at 6. 25. Kristian Jensen, Revolution and the Antiquarian Book: Reshaping the Past, 1780–​1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 26. P. J. Wallis, ‘The Library of William Crashawe’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 2/​3 (1956), 213–​228, at 217. 27. Ovenden, ‘The Libraries of the Antiquaries’, 538–​540. 28. For York, see D. M. Palliser and D. G. Selwyn, ‘The Stock of a York Stationer, 1538’, The Library, 5th ser., 27/​3 (Sept. 1972), 207–​219, John Barnard and Maureen Bell, The Early Seventeenth-​Century York Book Trade and John Foster’s Inventory of 1616 (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1994), esp. 18–​19. 29. This may have been Laud, from July 1628 bishop of London; see Julian Roberts, ‘The Latin Trade’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), with the assistance of Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141–​173. Roberts observes (147) that the 1628 list followed the winding-​up of the Latin Stock. 30. That is not to say old books were never sold in and around St Paul’s; a copy of Thynne’s 1561 edition of Chaucer (STC 5076), UCL, Ogden A 269, is inscribed (fo. 210v) ‘Paul

506   H. R. Woudhuysen Hardes, 24 May 1577’ and bears a note that it was bought at St Paul’s Churchyard, 20 Dec. 1574. For Little Britain and the book trade, see James Raven, Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London Before 1800 (London: British Library, 2014), 72–​7 7, 152–​159. Moorfields as an open-​air site for the cheaper part of the second-​hand trade was certainly established by the 1680s; see James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 106, and 112 for books there ‘on the railes’, horizontal bars for hanging things on; Giles Mandelbrote, ‘From the Warehouse to the Counting-​House: Booksellers and Bookshops in Late 17th-​century London’, in Robin Myers and Michael H. Harris (eds.), A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the 16th to the 20th Century (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995), 49–​84, at 53–​54; William Poole, ‘Francis Lodwick, Hans Sloane, and the Bodleian Library’, The Library, 7th ser., 7/​4 (Dec. 2006), 377–​4 18, at 379, for books ‘placed by dealers on the Moorfields balustrades’. 31. Ovenden, ‘The Libraries of the Antiquaries’, 538–​539. 32. M. R. James, ‘The Carew Manuscripts’, English Historical Review, 42/​2 (Apr. 1927), 261–​267, at 263–​264. 33. Basil Greenslade, ‘Hales, John (1584–​1656)’, ODNB. 34. T. A. Birrell, The Library of John Morris: The Reconstruction of a Seventeenth-​Century Collection (London: British Library, 1976), no. 331. 35. Richard Ovenden, ‘Scipio Le Squyer and the Fate of Monastic Cartularies in the Early Seventeenth Centuries’, The Library, 6th ser., 13/​4 (Dec. 1991), 323–​337, at 325 n. 14. The guarantee is in Peter Martyr, In epistolas S. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos commentarij (Basel, 1568), Durham UL Bamb. A.3.35. 36. Ovenden, ‘The Libraries of the Antiquaries’, 539–​540. 37. Victor Scholderer, Hand-​List of Incunabula in the National Library of Wales, National Library of Wales Journal supplement ser. 1, issue 1 (1940), no. 117. 38. John Pyper to Thomas Huggins, 23 Mar. 1621, in a copy of Gervase Babington, The works (1637, STC 1080), Huntington 28116. 39. The Correspondence of James Ussher 1600–​ 1656, ed. Elizabethanne Boran, 3 vols. (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2015), iii. 1158. 40. Alan Pritchard, ‘According to Wood: Sources of Anthony Wood’s Lives of Poets and Dramatists’, Review of English Studies, ns 28/​3 (Aug. 1977), 268–​289, at 280. 41. ‘is praecipuus est eorum qui veteribus libris venendis in vico Little Britaine dicto’, in Correspondence of John Morris with Johannes de Laet (1634–​1649), ed. J. A. F. Bekkers (Assen: Van Gorcum and Comp. N.V., 1970), 24. 42. J. C. T. Oates, Cambridge University Library: A History; From the Beginnings to the Copyright Act of Queen Anne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 309; Julian Roberts, ‘Extending the Frontiers: Scholar Collectors’, in Leedham-​Green and Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i. 292–​321, at 314; McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books, 116. For Beaumont’s offer to sell books Sancroft had bought from him, see Helen Carron, ‘William Sancroft (1617–​1693): A Seventeenth-​Century Collector and His Library’, The Library, 7th ser., 1/​3 (Sept. 2000), 290–​307, at 294. 43. Ian Philip, The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 56; Mark Purcell, ‘ “Useful Weapons for the Defence of That Cause”: Richard Allestree, John Fell and the Foundation of the Allestree Library’, The Library, 6th ser., 21/​2 (June 1999), 124–​147, at 138. For Roger North’s account of Little

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    507 Britain’s bookshops in the later seventeenth century, see McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books, 117–​118, 154. 44. David McKitterick, ‘Bibliography, Bibliophily, and the Organization of Knowledge’, in David Vaisey and David McKitterick, The Foundations of Scholarship: Libraries and Collecting, 1650–​1750 (Los Angeles, CA: Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1992), 35, 49; McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books, 113–​117. 45. Carron, ‘William Sancroft’, 301–​302; Montmor was presumably Henri-​Louis Habert de Montmor (c.1600–​79), Councillor and Master of Requests to the French king; Philip, The Bodleian Library, 59. 46. Richard Palmer, ‘Sancroft Versus Sheldon: A Case of Books’, The Library, 7th ser., 18/​3 (Sept. 2017), 271–​291, at 284. 47. Hazel Forsyth, The Cheapside Hoard: London’s Lost Jewels (London: Museum of London, 2013), 28–​29. See also Mandelbrote, ‘From the Warehouse to the Counting-​House’, 55–​61, 69–​73. 48. Register of the University of Oxford, ii: (1571–​1622), pt. 1, ed. Andrew Clark, Oxford Historical Society, 10 (Oxford, 1887), 321 n. 2; Ker, ‘The Provision of Books’, 444; Julian Roberts, ‘Importing Books for Oxford, 1500–​1640’, in Carley and Tite (eds.), Books and Collectors, 317–​333, at 322. 49. Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton, Oxford Bibliographical Society, ns 22 (Oxford, 1988), pp. xiv, xxix, 333–​334; Crosley had been admitted by the university to be a bookseller in March 1599, Register, ed. Clark, 321, and see Strickland Gibson, Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Binders, Printers, and Stationers of Oxford, from 1493 to 1638 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907), 24–​26. 50. Gibson, Abstracts from the Wills, 37–​39; Register, ed. Clark, 321. 51. Elisabeth Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-​ Lists from Vice-​ Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols. (Cambridge: , 1989), vol. i, no. 142, item 37. 52. Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories, vol. i. no. 167. 53. H. O. Coxe, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues, ii: Laudian Manuscripts, rev. R. W. Hunt (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1973), p. xvi. 54. Cf. Barker, ‘Notes on the Origins of the Second-​Hand Book Trade’, 361–​362, 364–​365. 55. John Glenn with David Walsh, Catalogue of the Francis Trigge Chained Library, St. Wulfram’s Church, Grantham (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), 81–​82; John Blatchly, The Town Library of Ipswich, Provided for the Use of the Town Preachers in 1599: A History and Catalogue (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 16–​17, 24. See also Pearson, Provenance Research, 58–​61. 56. Cf. Raven, The Business of Books, 106: ‘the number of London booksellers who dealt in “old libraries” increased three-​fold by the end of the seventeenth century’. 57. The Correspondence of James Ussher, i. 288. 58. Roberts, ‘Extending the Frontiers’, 301–​302. Dee’s books may have been sold by John White in Little Britain; see Roberts and Watson (eds.), John Dee’s Library, 64–​65. 59. The Correspondence of James Ussher, i. 390. Cf. David Pearson, ‘The Libraries of English Bishops, 1600–​1640’, The Library, 6th ser., 14/​3 (Sept. 1992), 221–​257, at 255: the last remark may be ‘malicious gossip’. 60. The Correspondence of James Ussher, ii. 449, 451. 61. R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-​Green (eds.), Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Early Stuart Book-​Lists, Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies 87, vol. 1, PLRE 1–​4 (1992), 144, item 4.581.

508   H. R. Woudhuysen 62. Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of John Donne (4th edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), item L135. 63. Birrell, The Library of John Morris, p. xix, nos. 69, 280, 1089 and pl. vii. 64. Pearson, Book Owners Online, www.boo​kown​ers.onl​ine/​Elias_​Ashm​ole. 65. Frederick S. Boas (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Crosfield (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 52, 126. For Webb, see Gibson, Abstracts from the Wills, 52. 66. Katharine M. Briggs (ed.), The Last of the Astrologers (London: Folklore Society, 1974), 22–​23. For Aubrey’s purchase, see BL Lansdowne MS 231, fo. 142r and Anecdotes and Traditions, Illustrative of Early English History and Literature, ed. William J. Thoms, Camden Society 5 (London, 1839), 103. 67. The Correspondence of James Ussher, ii. 444–​445, 452–​453, 464; Coxe, Laudian Manuscripts, p. xxxii. Buckingham bought Erpenius’s manuscripts at Leiden in 1625 and presented them to CUL in 1632. 68. See Dennis Rhodes, ‘Some Notes on the Import of Books from Italy into England, 1628–​ 1650’, in Studies in Early Italian Printing (London: Pindar, 1982), 319–​326. For Laud’s purchases of manuscripts from France, Germany, Italy, and perhaps Spain, see Coxe, Laudian Manuscripts, pp. xvi–​xvii ff. 69. The Correspondence of James Ussher, ii. 426. Featherstone’s ‘furnature’ means stock or provision, see OED furniture 3a. It is possible he bought Venetian manuscripts for Laud, see Coxe, Laudian Manuscripts, p. xxi. 70. One of his customers was Viscount Conway; see H. R. Plomer, ‘A Cavalier’s Library’, The Library, 2nd ser., 5/​2 (Apr. 1904), 158–​172, at 165. 71. Roberts, ‘Extending the Frontiers’, 318–​319. 72. Oates, Cambridge University Library, 231; Selden was clearly involved in this sale. 73. Ian Roy, ‘The Libraries of Edward, 2nd Viscount Conway, and Others: An Inventory and Valuation of 1643’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 4/​1 (May 1968), 35–​46. 74. D. F. McKenzie and Maureen Bell, A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade 1641–​1700, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), i. 121, 387. 75. For Bludder, see John L. Lievsay and Richard B. Davis, ‘A Cavalier Library—​1643’, Studies in Bibliography, 6 (1954), 141–​160. 76. The National Archives (TNA), Kew, SP 20/​7 (available through State Papers Online), image 120: account of books made between 18 Aug. 1643 and 28 Mar. 1645. Robert Bostock and the new Treasurers ‘are to answer the State for all bookes sould since that time’. 77. TNA, Kew, SP 20/​1 (available through State Papers Online), images 51–​52: instructions of 10 June 1643; Roy, ‘The Libraries of Edward, 2nd Viscount Conway’, 39. 78. OED candle n. 1c, citing Pepys in 1662 and P4 ‘to sell (also let) by the candle, by inch of candle’, with a first citation in 1680; OED auction n. 3, citing Marvell in 1673. 79. A. N. L. Munby and Lenore Coral, British Book Sale Catalogues 1676–​1800: A Union List (London: Mansell, 1977); R. C. Alston, Inventory of Sale Catalogues of Named and Attributed Owners of Books Sold by Retail or Auction 1676–​1800, 2 vols. (Yeadon: Privately Printed for the Author, 2010). See also McKitterick, ‘Bibliography, Bibliophily, and the Organization of Knowledge’, 33–​37. 80. Alston, Inventory, i. 44 records the first advertised sale in Feb. 1678; see Michael Harris, ‘Newspaper Advertising for Book Auctions before 1700’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), Under the Hammer: Book Auctions since the Seventeenth Century (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2001), 1–​14.

From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman    509 81. T.A. Birrell, ‘Books and Buyers in Seventeenth-​Century English Auction Sales’, in Myers et al. (eds.), Under the Hammer, 51–​64; Poole, ‘Francis Lodwick, Hans Sloane, and the Bodleian Library’, 378 n. 6. 82. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), iv. 330. 83. James Hartley, The library of a late eminent Sergeant of the Law (London: [James Hartley], 1697), sig. A1r. The passage implies that a prospective purchaser may choose to buy (or not) at the price marked in the book. 84. The Roman history of Lucius J. Florus made English (London: Samuel Speed, 1669), sig. S5v. McKenzie and Bell, A Chronology and Calendar, i. 621. 85. Christie’s, 29 May 2014, lot 156; a copy was sold by Sotheby’s, 2 Mar. 1937 (Col. W. E. Moss), lot 1379 with plate. 86. Richard Davis’s shop was in St Mary’s Lane, near Oriel College; see Andrew Clark (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Oxford Historical Society, 19, 21, 26, 30, 40 (Oxford: printed at the Clarendon Press, 1891–​1900), iii. 157, 302; v. 40; and Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Anthony Wood, Oxford Bibliographical Society, 3rd ser., 5 (Oxford, 2002), nos. 1492, 5918.

Select Bibliography Barker, Nicolas, ‘Notes on the Origins of the Second-​Hand Book Trade’, Book Collector, 52/​3 (Autumn 2003), 356–​370. Barnard, John, and McKenzie, D. F. (ed.), with the assistance of Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Glomski, Jacqueline, ‘Book Collecting and Bookselling in the Seventeenth Century: Notions of Rarity and Identification of Value’, Publishing History, 39/​1 (Jan. 1996), 5–​21. Hellinga, Lotte, and Trapp, J. B. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1400–​ 1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Leedham-​Green, Elisabeth, and Webber, Teresa (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i: To 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). McKitterick, David, The Invention of Rare Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Myers, Robin, Harris, Michael, and Mandelbrote, Giles (eds.), Under the Hammer: Book Auctions since the Seventeenth Century (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2001). Pearson, David, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (new edn., Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019). Pearson, David, Book Owners Online, www.boo​kown​ers.onl​ine, 2020. Pollard, Graham, and Ehrman, Albert, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to A.D. 1800: Based on Material in the Broxbourne Library (Cambridge: Roxburghe Club, 1965). Private Libraries in Renaissance England, https://​plre.fol​ger.edu/​.

Chapter 27

C onversati ons a b ou t Tim e and Spac e Early Modern Books and Contemporary Artists’ Books Sujata Iyengar

‘Bookness’ is a term I use to describe the phenomenology of books and booklike objects (codices, scrolls, leaves, even sculptures and screens) as they encounter human beings in three-​dimensional space.1 I synthesize my definition of bookness from scholars working within book history, textual studies, and even digital literacy. Bookness is what makes a book a book; it overlaps, but is not completely congruent with, Jessica Pressman’s recent term ‘bookishness’.2 Bookishness for the early moderns—​and up to the mid-​twentieth century—​connoted excessive, self-​indulgent, or pretentious studiousness and was often opposed to practical or worldly knowledge. But bookness for me connotes the ways in which books engage with us in the world, on the move, through time and space. A book is unified, even if (as on a website) such unity is purely conceptual or (as in a bound early modern miscellany) an artefact of ownership or (as we expect from present-​day codices) both. A book is navigable, incorporating implicit or explicit keys to that navigation such as directional markers, pages, chapter headings, even if users can choose to navigate the text ‘out-​of-​order’ (by reading the end of the book first or by going down the ‘rabbit hole’ of internet links).3 A book is recognizable as a text that calls for reading. A book is determined to conquer time and space in some way through its combination of hardiness and handiness (think of the longevity and obscurity of incunabula deposited in a rare books library and then consider the ephemerality and reach of a digital impression of text from those incunabula). Bookness confers authority on a text through its combination of authorship and craftedness, whether that craftedness comes from printer and binder or from lines of code. Part of a book’s call for interpretation and its unity comes from a related claim to immersiveness and privacy. A book can be a solitary world entire unto itself or a mechanism for reading into life a shared ‘imagined community’, to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase for how novel and

Conversations about Time and Space    511 newspaper contributed to the birth of nationalism by training readers to sympathize with individuals they knew only in print, not in person.4 At the same time, books are, and always have been, intermedia and multimodal objects, which is to say that even traditional-​seeming codices engage visual, auditory, haptic, and spatial circuits in the brain.5 In this essay I foreground the functions of bookness in space, both private and public, historically and in the present by comparing early modern, flexible uses of the codex form with contemporary artists’ books—​limited edition, artisanal or fine art print objects that, in Johanna Drucker’s phrase, consider the codex as ‘a form to interrogate’ rather than as ‘a vehicle for reproduction’.6 I contrast contemporary artists’ books and early modern books about counting, calculating, and identifying objects in the real world (field guides, including abecedaries), and imagining the universe (astronomical books). My case studies are idiosyncratic because of specific constraints on physical movement familiar to any Renaissance reader: the COVID-​19 pandemic prevented me from visiting well-​known early modern archives and restricted me to items at my home institution, the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Library, a collection rich in artists’ books and fine-​press editions but limited in its early modern holdings. Of those holdings, I have chosen early modern books that are instructional and paired them with artists’ books that self-​consciously challenge these generic distinctions by aestheticizing such forms. Some scholars exclude fine-​press or limited-​run editions from the category of artists’ books; many would exclude incunabula and early printed books, because traditionally art historians have distinguished between author/​artist and artisan (the artist or author conceives of the project; the artisan enacts the material processes to instantiate the artist’s vision, although there is much overlap). As I have argued elsewhere, however, I locate the quiddity of bookness . . . in a collaborative performance that can take place both during the crafting of the book through artisanal processes and during the experiential encounter with the book by a reader . . . For me, an artist’s book is a book made by an artist that pays attention to books as material objects with specific affordances or physical characteristics that interact with human readers, bodies, and senses, as well as with the text that makes up what we usually call the content of the book. By this logic, digital objects may potentially evoke a kinesthetic or haptic aspect of bookness and the space, in three dimensions, of the screen.7

Such interactions may also happen at different points in time. Put differently, if early modern and rare books were not created intentionally as artists’ books, history has made them so. I thus juxtapose the whimsical, miniature mathematical books of the contemporary artist Deb Rindl alongside a battered copy of Isaac Keay’s portable Practical Measurer (1724), and the seventeenth edition (1749) of a Vade Mecum, or ‘necessary pocket-​ companion’ (henceforth referenced as the Hargrett Playford).8 I contrast Judy Sgantas and Claire Van Vliet’s collaborative and Renaissance-​inspired ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden and Neal Bonham’s custom paper and watermarks in Leslie

512   Sujata Iyengar Norris’s A Tree Sequence (Sea Pen Press, 1984) with John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664; henceforth referenced as the Hargrett Sylva), the first book to have been published by the Royal Society and the first comprehensive guide to the trees of England, with appendices about the cultivation of apple trees and cider-​making, containing a user’s own notes, and a 1636 copy of John Gerard’s Herbal (1597; henceforth referenced as the Hargrett Gerard) in which a user has brought the field to the guide in the form of pressed plants.9 I compare the kinetic and mental work of three-​dimensional animation undertaken by a present-​day reader of Casey Gardner’s Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth with the actions performed by an imaginary Renaissance reader of Francesco Giuntini’s Italian translation of Johannes Sacrobosco’s famous account of the Ptolemaic universe De Sphaera Mundi (c.1230), La Sfera Del Mondo (1582; henceforth referenced as the Hargrett Guintini).10 I conclude by returning to themes that emerge in contemporary artists’ books across form and genre. The early modern field guide or herbal, the bestiary, the abecedary, the calculator, the astronomical treatise, and the mapping tool re-​emerge in postmodern artists’ books such as D. R. Wakefield’s beautiful, mournful Alphabet of Endangered Mammals (2010) or P. B. Zimmerman’s Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene (2017) to alert us to earthly spaces that are vanishing through climate change and habitat loss.11 The deliberately archaic form of the printed book and the arguably elitist and certainly rarefied commodity of the artists’ or fine-​press books I consider highlight the beauty, fragility, and human-​inflicted damage of the natural world.

Books in Space Recent studies, many originating in investigations of digital reading and of artists’ books in both print and digital form, demonstrate that the traditional book is a three-​ dimensional form that uses the haptic mode in both its senses, the tactile and the spatial, to help readers make and retrieve mental maps of language and concepts, and to envision physical spaces. Books activate readers’ retention, engagement, immersion, and memory through the texture and weight of paper and of book covers, our own kinetic and tactile mnemonic devices such as using an external bookmark, dog-​earing pages, or annotating pages with a pencil or pen; through the spatio-​temporal awareness of how many pages ‘into’ the book we have come; through the proprioceptive sense of how we hold and move the book and its pages relative to our own bodies; and through the subjective place-​memory surrounding where we are when we read the book the first, second, tenth, or nth time. Renaissance readers made full use of these visual, tactile, and spatial bookish affordances. Portable guides such as the vade-​mecum or pocket-​sized guidebook or how-​to book, the ready-​reckoner, or tables for calculation, and folding and foldable tables or maps within these books allowed readers not only to move through space and to bring necessary knowledge with them, to hand, as it were, but also to project

Conversations about Time and Space    513 the mental and physical space quite literally beyond the space of the book’s covers. Almanacs, guidebooks, and field guides incorporated space or ‘blanks’ for users’ own annotations, extending, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, the medium of the body through the medium of ‘the message’, in this case, the codex itself.12 Large choir books enabled groups of singers to stand together around a single volume and to mark musical space through the notes on a staff and used the location of the staves on each opening to indicate where each voice part should stand. Early modern astronomical treatises incorporated drawings that expected early modern readers to animate such figures in their minds, but also three-​dimensional, moveable figures such as volvelles, which trained users to open an ‘intelligent eye’ and imagine a multidimensional cosmos as they themselves manipulated these paper wheels through space and time.13 Scrolls and tablets (whether clay, stone, or wax) were, of course, portable: Hamlet keeps his tables handy. But book readers carried with them information far greater than previous generations could have imagined, as knowledge entered three dimensions rather than two (given that a codex is, at its simplest, a pile of two-​dimensional sheets fastened together at one side). The most famous example of how portability transformed early modern knowledge is probably that of the Geneva Bible, its octavo size permitting the Word of God to travel with the believer (and the believer to access that word whenever and wherever they wished) rather than (as with the ponderous Great or Bishops’ Bibles, literally chained to the pulpit) the worshipper waiting for place, time, and preacher to enable spiritual access. Thomas Cromwell’s Injunctions to the Clergy (1538) hints that preachers sometimes impeded this access: he warns them to be sure to place a volume ‘the largest size . . . in English’ in a ‘convenient’ spot in the church and, moreover, to ‘discourage no man privily or apertly from the reading or hearing of the said Bible’.14 Another advertisement for transport might be the prayer book possibly attached to the Princess Elizabeth’s girdle in a portrait she may have sent to her brother, the young King Edward VI.15 Whether or not the book is literally fastened to Elizabeth’s gown—​ and whether or not Edward was gifted this portrait—​the book has extended through days and miles as both medium and message: I embody my faith, my learning, and my royalty, the Princess seems to say, through her careful accoutrements and clothing, including the little book in her hand and at her waist.

Measuring Small, portable how-​to guides, termed ‘vade-​mecum’ (Latin for ‘go with me’) had been popular in Europe since the medieval era, first as almanacs and star charts for physicians, often in the wearable form of the girdle-​book. Such portable guides often used a ‘concertina’ or fold-​out form rather than a codex, in order to allow a dense amount of information to fit into a small space and to allow both recto and verso of sometimes only a single sheet to be used to its fullest extent. Contemporary book artist Deb Rindl alludes to this tradition in a series of bookish mathematical jokes (Fig. 27.1).

514   Sujata Iyengar

Fig. 27.1  Bindings, Deb Rindl, Area of a Triangle (1996), Times Square (2001), Counting Crows (2005).

Area of a Triangle (1996) folds a single stiffened piece of cream-​coloured rectangular card concertina-​style into a series of isosceles triangles; along the long side of the ‘inner forme’ is printed in blue ‘The area of a/​triangle//​/​half base/​times height’ and if you unfold the whole book you see printed in butter-​yellow across the top and bottom of the sheet ‘1/​2/​b//​x/​h’ and ‘A/​R/​E/​A’, with the ‘equal’ symbol cut out of the central triangle.16 The book encourages play: it’s a three-​dimensional version of the newspaper or online puzzles that ask the reader to count how many triangles appear within a larger one. Beyond the playfulness, we admire the technical achievement of printing along the folds using a hand press, which would require careful ‘registration’ (the printmaker’s term for lining up your text, image, or colour field accurately). Times Square (2001) is more mysterious.17 Another concertina-​folded book, this thick, cream-​coloured single sheet includes no words but the printed ‘Times Square’ printed in blue on a glued-​on cream square on the first page of the concertina and that is visible through a square cut-​out when you first encounter the book in its black slipcover. Each page contains tucked and glued strips of black paper in different thicknesses and number. Library notes indicate that the book is ‘based on the two times table’. Reading the book in codex form, recto to verso, the sequence goes: 1 thick strip running vertically /​1 thick strip crossed with a shorter strip horizontally /​2 thinner strips /​2 thinner strips crossed /​3 thinner strips etc. to the four thinnest strips, crossed with four others, on the final verso before the cover, so that the book indicates in spatial, tactile, and visual ways the function of doubling. It also indicates the beginning of the sequence of squares, 1, 4,

Conversations about Time and Space    515 9, if you read the white squares that appear as negative space between the woven black strips of paper. The third small book by Rindl in my mathematical series, Counting Crows (2005), is inkjet-​printed but ‘hand-​folded and finished’, according to the colophon.18 It is bulkier than the previous two and, although folded concertina-​style, each fold has been bound with brown twine to make a single leaf so that the book reads as a codex with double-​ folded pages whose blank innards are thus deliberately removed from meaning-​making. The book is covered in black card, with a downy striped brown, black, white, and blue feather glued to the front cover. The text whimsically counts up through types of birds using variations of the formula ‘One bird /​Two bird /​Any bird? /​Many bird’, using type of different sizes and colours, and a few illustrations, until the final bird—​the crow—​ appears. The book explains its concept in printed words on the final page before the colophon: whereas most birds count ‘One, Many’, ‘the crow is unique amongst birds in being able to count to three’, reportedly counting ‘One, Two, and Many’.19 The Hargrett has no medieval concertina-​folded girdle-​books, but in the early modern era more such books appeared as duodecimo or octavo printed and bound codices that functioned as field guides to practical calculation, music, travel, and many other specialized uses with fold-​out tables as inserts, and it includes a few of these ‘ready-​reckoners’. Many of the portable early modern books and medieval girdle-​books haven’t lasted because they were carried about and literally ‘read to pieces’, as Adam Smyth observes.20 The 1724 Practical Measurer: His Pocket Companion . . . for the speedy mensuration of timber, first drawn up by Isaac Keay, finds itself in this much-​loved state, its cover literally hanging by two threads, the lower half of its spine sadly unpeeled in the box that houses it, its leather eaten through to show the boards beneath. It is a small, long duodecimo, with front-​and end-​papers clumsily glued on and faded hand-​annotations in graphite and ink on any available blank versos, mostly of accounts. Where Rindl’s small and gamesome concertinas treat mathematics, and book-​ construction, as puzzles, The Practical Measurer presents itself as the solution to a real-​world problem. The very diction of the title page emphasizes pragmatism: the no-​nonsense title, ‘Practical Measurer’ (a nominalization that identifies the book with its user, the down-​to-​earth businessman measuring up a deal); its subtitle as ‘Pocket Companion’; and the long-​title phrases emphasizing the convenience and expediency of its affordances such as ‘tables ready cast up . . . for speedy mensuration . . . very useful to such as are necessarily employed’ (emphasis mine). This is a book to read not for pleasure but for practice. The volume also tracks the well-​documented rise of the editor in the eighteenth century. Edward Hatton’s ‘Editor’s Preface’ clarifies that ‘the Proprietors’ gave Hatton the book ‘to peruse and make fit for the Press’—​he is neither the author nor the owner, nor does he have any stake in being either. Hatton reassures readers that the editor has not only corrected ‘upwards of 3000 Errors’ in the tables but also indicated a new way of measuring timber that is based not abstract mathematical formulae but on an applied human methodology (Fig. 27.2). The tables permit complex calculation to be completed through simple addition, by ‘any Person who knows but Figures, and can add

516   Sujata Iyengar

Fig. 27.2  ‘3000 Errors’, title page, Isaac Keay, The Practical Measurer (1724).

two Numbers together’ (A2v), with no ‘Decimals, the reducing of which is not readily done, nor known to many’ (A2r). Moreover, Hatton argues, the appendix offers a solution to the fact that real trees are not abstract Pythagorean cylinders and thus their volume cannot be calculated as if they were so (for example, by measuring the area of a cross-​section of the log by its height). Such a formula ‘is a loss to the Buyer’, because logs taper towards the top, but the other popular solution, to imagine a ‘square within the circular base or End . . . takes away too much to the Loss of the Seller’ (A1v), because logs are circular cylinders, not square ones, and so much wood is left out of the calculation. Hatton’s new method is to ‘squar[e]‌a fourth of the Girt[h], being near a Medium between the . . . Extreams’ (A1v).21 Slightly larger than the Practical Measurer (an ‘account-​book’ or long-​pocket octavo, rather than a duodecimo) is the Hargrett Playford (1749). The volume has been re-​covered in a mid-​twentieth-​century binding (probably from around 1945–​60) and many leaves have been mounted, re-​margined, or even inlaid on paper that has itself become ‘foxed’ with age; we would not now so violate a book’s personal space. Several pages include, in a large, neat italic hand, the signature ‘John Wait’ (spelled ‘Waite’ elsewhere in the book). Like many almanacs, the Hargrett Playford proffers all kinds of useful information from its perpetual calendar; land measurements; fair dates; reigning years of every monarch of England; gardeners’ planting timetables; weights and measures; sizes of loaves of bread; calculators for currency exchange, mileage, ‘Nobles, Marks, and Guineas’, and for interest and annuities; postage rates; a census of nobility, gentry, and citizens in principal boroughs of Great Britain; and coach fares. The seventeenth edition adds a table

Conversations about Time and Space    517 of ‘Interest in Epitome . . . from 1 Pound to 10 Millions, at 3, 4, 5, and 6 per Cent’, and Playford’s handy fold-​out ‘Table for the ready finding what sign the moon is in, or shall be, for ever; and what part of Man’s body every sign doth govern’.22 The table includes instructions for use; to calculate the moon’s sign, users must flip back to the table of perpetual Primes and then the Dominical or ‘Sunday’ letter, so named because it is a letter of the alphabet given to the first Sunday in January, where A =​1, B =​2, up to G.23 The fold-​out sheet extends the book into physical space; to continue my string of modern parallels, it becomes a kind of augmented reality, since users could conceivably look at the moon, look at the chart, follow the columns and rows on the chart, and pause to consider their aches and pains in light of this new information (Fig. 27.3). Once familiar with the ancient concept of the Dominical letter (or ‘Domenical’, as Moreland has it), one could use this calendrical calculation to figure out any auspicious date in perpetuity. The book thus becomes its own pocket universe, of sorts. Why attend to such an ugly (and badly restored) little book? Its continuing popularity (seventeen editions!) and the insertion (‘in this’ edition) of Moreland’s table for calculating ‘the Moon’s place’, points to the well-​known paradox of the almanac as a

Fig. 27.3  Unfolded folio leaf (fos. 16–​19), Samuel Moreland, Vade Mecum [‘Playford’s Almanac’] (1749).

518   Sujata Iyengar genre: its most popular offerings—​the perpetual calendars and calculators—​point to a fantasy of permanent utility, yet new editions appear annually to offer even more knowledge, coded as ‘necessary’ (title page), even though the almanac’s users had survived happily without such information as lately as the previous year. Each new table presents as it were an ‘app’ or ‘application’ on a smartphone or tablet computer, and like each new app, the tables allow users to imagine themselves engaged in activities that they might never have done and might never do—​travel to county towns, visit fairs, change money, plant according to the season, and even treat their own ailments according to lunar astrology. The advertisements that appear (faintly, either because they were printed that way or because they have been pasted over during the barbarous restoration) on the verso of the title page hint at the kinds of readers who bought these almanacs for their imaginary future selves. ‘Just Publish’d’ is The Universal Library of Trade and Commerce, says the advertisement, with guides to penmanship, Italian-​style bookkeeping, warehouse and counting-​house inventory, weights and measures, and a glossary of merchants’ terms, aimed at (in the subtitle), ‘Gentlemen, Ladies, Merchants, Tradesmen, School-​Masters, and all who are any Ways concerned in Business, or the Education of Youth of either Sex, as well as for young Clerics, Apprentices, etc.’.24 Only the illiterate are invisibly excluded. At the same time, we dismiss these repeat purchasers as mere fantasists at our peril. The Continent switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, but England stubbornly maintained a calendrical Brexit by adhering to the Julian. Early moderns traveling to, trading with, or corresponding with Europe would have to navigate confusing dates and seasons, as well as currency. Having the dates of major festivals handy every year, along with a perpetual calendar, might have been indeed ‘necessary’. Today’s popular perpetual calendars use volvelles and algorithms based on the same mathematical principles as those used in early modern datebooks. A quick check revealed that Moreland’s ‘everlasting calendar’ would still work, had it not been for the final switch from Julian to Gregorian in England in 1752. I have not verified the accuracy of the moon signs.

Collecting Where the almanac and ready-​reckoner create a self-​enclosed reference system or pocket universe for trade and commerce, a bestiary or herbal attempts to enfold the natural world within the world of a book. Judy Sgantas’s exquisite, erudite, Renaissance-​ inspired ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden refers readers to ‘the 1463 manuscript by Felice Feliciano of Verona’ (currently held in the Vatican Library) as well as to other Renaissance typographical milestones such as Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione (1509) and Geoffroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529).25 The book uses a unique strip-​bound, fold-​out concertina format to create trifold pages that show on the far left a black-​and-​white inked letter form and insect of plant, drawn within a square pencil

Conversations about Time and Space    519 grid, and (when unfolded) on the far right a full-​colour pencil illustration of the letter and a plant or insect (sometimes both) on a square graphite grid. The centre of the trifold prints detailed entomological and botanical information about any plants and animals pictured, along with small arrows indicating whether the item appears on the left-​or right-​hand page. For example, the letter ‘S’ (Fig. 27.4) depicts on the far left a Spined Soldier Bug attacking a Fall Armyworm extending the bottom upward curve of the letter’s spine even beyond its geometrical square and forming a deep bowl, and on the far right the larva of the Redheaded Pine Sawfly crawling down the letter’s spine. In the background, sharing the negative space of the upper curve, floats the mature adult fly. Nestled in the lower curve of the letter’s spine rest a cluster or small stones or perhaps droppings. Both the crisp black-​and-​white and the full-​colour illustrations are rendered realistically and with great detail, but not as trompe l’œil; shading offers depth, but we are not meant to feel as if the plants are growing within the book or the insects crawling over the letters. Rather, the illustrations consciously evoke abecedaries, bestiaries, herbals, and, crucially, the early modern interest in typography that both draws from and extends beyond the sculpted letters of the classical Roman world. Leslie Norris’s A Tree Sequence prints the author’s poems, which take us through a walk in the woods during all four seasons, and Gretchen Daiber’s original woodcuts on ‘papers custom-​made by Neal Bonham with two watermarks for this edition’ and a paper

Fig. 27.4  Letter S, ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden, by Judy Fairclough Sgantas (Vermont: Janus Press, 2012), copy 39/​120, binding designed by Claire Van Vliet and executed by Audrey Holden. Reproduced with permission.

520   Sujata Iyengar design on the cover—​four pieces of unbleached paper in different shades of brown, torn in rough oblongs and glued on the cover to resemble trees—​in a ‘non-​traditional case binding using a single fold concertina to which the text was pamphlet stitched’ by Judith L. Johnson.26 The two watermarks appear in an inset folio at the very centre of the pamphlet, on white paper; the text before the inset, Six, describes the ‘Green winter sun’; the text after the watermarks, Seven, describes wintry trees ‘like rueful old men | their bare shanks thin’. The watermarks reveal the stark, mysterious, moonlit beauty of the bare-​branched woods; the trunks of the trees might be pulp-​painted very thinly with pulp of the same brilliant white, and the recto (the ‘outside’ of the fold) shows another watermark, a series of geometrical arrows and shapes. Two early modern books in our collection similarly attempt to enfold the natural environment within the pages of books, the bodies of letters, and the human world: the Hargrett Gerard and the Hargrett Sylva. In both instances, readers have customized and personalized these copies and brought the ‘field’ to the ‘field guide’. Where the herbal as a genre attempted to reproduce botanical forms in plant-​derived materials (ink from oak galls, paper and bookbinder’s thread from flax, woodcut illustrations, wooden boards for covers, and so on), the Hargrett Gerard is partly a herbarium: a collection of pressed plants within the pages of a book, often for consultation for future therapeutic use. And where Evelyn’s guide to forestry serves as a cultural landmark and extends across all of Britain, the Hargrett Sylva includes handwritten notes on the endpapers, by at least two different authors, carefully documenting the kinds of apples they planted in their orchards, where they planted them, and the acquaintances who helped them, making the book a kind of almanac. Brent Elliott points out that the herbal was supplanted in the later seventeenth century by the florilegium, descriptions of ornamental or garden flowers embellished with highly detailed images using the new illustration and printing techniques of engraving.27 Engravings were hard to place on the same page as text description, making such books less useful as true field guides and more useful as ‘botanical encyclopedias’.28 Not only that, Elliott observes, the necessarily stylized representation of plants and flowers within early modern herbal illustrations made them only marginally effective as true field guides to identifying plants.29 Our Hargrett reader has sought to remedy this weakness by placing examples of the plants next to their woodcuts and descriptions. The enthusiastic herbalist who kept these botanical samples could have pressed them at any time between the seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries; no marks on the text indicate a possible date. A partial list of the samples runs (I indicate by page number the opening where the plant is pressed): ‘Narrow leaued French or golden Lung wort’ (304–​305), sorrel (408–​409), ‘land plantain’ (418–​419), starwort (488–​489), basil (672–​673), ironwort (698–​699), scabious (718–​7 19), ‘Wilde blacke hellebore’ (976–​977), and greeny-​grey dusty leaf-​fragments in the gutters of pages describing ‘Hawke-​weed’ (296–​297). Regardless of the date collected, the samples are clearly in conversation with the woodcuts and the text; the collector has looked for an example of the plant that the text is describing and saved it within the book as close to its description as possible, including flowers in those instances where flowers are depicted in the woodcut. The

Conversations about Time and Space    521 most spectacular example preserves ‘One-​berry, or Herbe True-​loue, and Moone-​wort’ (404–​405), of which Gerard writes: Herbe Paris riseth vp with one small tender stalke two hands high, at the very top whereof come forth foure leaues directly set one against another in manner of a Burgundian Crosse or True-​loue knot: for which cause among the Antients it hath been called Herbe True-​loue. In the midst of the said leafe comes forth a starre-​like floure of an herby or grassie colour; out of the middest whereof there ariseth vp a blackish browne berry: the root is long and tender, creeping vnder the earth, and dispersing it selfe hither and thither. (404)

The pressed plant (Fig. 27.5) includes the four-​leaved ‘True-​loue knot’ as well as the ‘starre-​like floure’. The preserver attempted to collect more than one intact blossom, but the others have disintegrated—​an additional flower is visible under magnification, deep within the gutter. The Herb Paris or herb True-​Love sample, small as it is, is the ‘showiest’ flower in the book; the unimpressive appearance of most of the plants chosen, such as the ironwort (also known as ‘all-​heale’) and the sorrel, is to me the strongest evidence (in the absence of molecular testing) of an early reader rather than a nineteenth-​or twentieth-​century one, a reader who collected plants thought to be medicinally useful rather than one who cultivated a an ostentatious garden, a reader who spoke the folk language of herbalism rather than the elaborate floriography introduced into England by eighteenth-​century

Fig. 27.5  Pressed plant between pp. 404 and 405, John Gerard, Herball (1636).

522   Sujata Iyengar travellers from Ottoman Turkey such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that reached a frenzy in the nineteenth century. John Evelyn’s Sylva is ‘a reliable and comparatively taut handbook, one of the earliest serious reference books . . . which set the standard for later [ones]’, writes Guy de la Bédoyère.30 Beautifully and expensively printed, dedicated to King Charles II with judicious use of rubrication in the dedication, Sylva clearly means to demonstrate both the utility and the elegance of the Royal Society’s work. Evelyn’s ‘Letter to the Reader’ imagines the book as a ‘Wooden Edifice’ amid the forests of England, with a ‘Frontispiece’ that is (presumably) the title page and a ‘porch’ comprising the dedication. Evelyn exhorts the reader to remember the great work of the Royal Society, to whom, he argues, he owes ‘any Sap’ offered by ‘these dry sticks’ (the verbal descriptions of the trees within the book’s pages). His imagined readers are ‘Noble Persons and Gentlemen’ who are too ‘busie’ to ‘repair or improve’ their forests, and instead choose to ‘fell down and destroy’ them. As de la Bédoyère observes, the epistle to the reader is filled with apposite quotations drawn from classical and contemporary poetry to argue for the value of trees and forests and to communicate the importance of maintaining English woodlands. The Hargrett Sylva’s annotations appear on the flyleaf. At least two different hands have written in the book, including one who wrote the phrase ‘The stocking apple’ upside down and another who wrote in Latin a reference to making apple juice. Several other annotations (right-​side up, see Fig. 27.6) list the writer’s apple trees which he has ‘moved from Lemslow in Hertfordshire’ ‘with the help of Mr. John Shu[?t] of

Fig. 27.6  Annotated endpaper, John Evelyn, Sylva (1664).

Conversations about Time and Space    523 Cambridge’ and map in words where he has planted them, for example ‘three Graffes of the Redshoakes 2 parts graffed in my nursery and in the row nearest to the north end’. Many of the annotations detail how he should lay out his orchard and in which direction various kinds of apple tree should face, for example ‘Bloomsbury on the third row from the east’. To a certain extent the writer is laying out a verbal map of his orchard, and obviously envisioned the plot of his orchard in his head. He might have been using a separate map or diagram as well, or perhaps walking through his plantings, which would explain the illegibility of his handwriting. Another hand, one that to me looks like the most recent, has opined in disappointment, ‘Beniff wood (which they make spoons of at Windham) is not spoken of in this book’. This aside is the only annotation to mention the trees of Sylva rather than to comment on the apple-​growing and cider-​making tips of its appendices. Unfortunately the Hargrett’s records include no clues about provenance or who might have made any of these marks, whether satisfied or disgruntled.

Gazing Herbals, herbaria, and field guides grounded books in the earthy plant matter from which their pages and covers were made. Star maps, in contrast, used paper machines to extend human vision beyond the terrain where books were assembled and plants were grown. Visualizing outer space in astronomical books still challenges present-​ day readers, even those familiar with the notion of heavenly bodies moving in three-​ dimensional (or multidimensional) space; there’s a reason why NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), for example, uses computer-​generated imagery (CGI) to create animated videos to explain its work to lay audiences.31 Where Casey Gardner’s Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth whimsically uses unbound and stacked leaves, fold-​outs, and translucencies to mingle personal narrative, astronomical facts, and ‘Intergalactic Space Roving’, however, Francisco Giuntini’s translation of ‘the book everybody read’, Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera Mundi, uses two-​dimensional images to help readers envision three dimensions in space and paper cut-​outs and sewn volvelles to animate three dimensions in space into the fourth, the passage of time.32 Gardner’s Matter tricks first-​time readers into thinking they are encountering an idiosyncratic and highly personal science-​fiction fantasy, the story printed on the outer rectos of seven unbound but numbered sheets folded once and printed on all four sides (I’ll call these units gatherings). The book is beautifully printed with sky-​blue, maroon, yellow, orange, and lime-​green text and diagrams, a colour scheme carried over into the translucencies, which also use black or dark brown for outlining. Despite its eccentricity, however, the book uses double-​page diagrams within centrefolds 1–​5 to explain in simple language complex scientific facts about the universe and how stars form and reform matter. Each inner recto is overlaid with two translucent printed sheets that together help the reader understand the movement of earth, stars, and satellites in space,

524   Sujata Iyengar the persistence of matter, the structure of the atom and the nucleus, and the infinite expansion of time at matter’s collapse. The outer verso of each gathering simultaneously tabulates scientific truths (‘In space, time is a variable . . . ’, gathering 3, 2v), ‘Noted Anomalies’ that mix such data (‘Escape velocity’, gathering 4, 2v) and a ‘Lavish’ or ‘Understated’ ‘Interpretation of Phenomena’, ranging from an account of the Tower of Babel (gathering 3, 2v) to prose-​poem (‘Gravitational Waves ripple in shifting cosmic expansions’, gathering 2, 2v). Gatherings 6–​7 move to mythology (the Greek stories behind constellations’ names) and awe (‘When our senses are confounded, this is the beginning of new explorations in reality’, gathering 7, 2v). The final gathering (Fig. 27.7) reasserts the role of the reader’s hand in unfolding and opening this bookish universe; a reader’s hand touches the author’s and the narrator’s and (through visual allusion) the hand of Michelangelo’s Adam, and the hand of his God. Beneath the translucencies hides an icon that we have previously encountered in the book: a silhouetted female figure, wearing overalls, her hair bound with a scarf, holding a telescope, a version of the author, refracting inconceivable scientific facts into a personal philosophy of wonder. Wonder and curiosity drove late medieval and early modern interest in the Ptolemaic universe. La Sfera del Mondo is Francisco Giuntini’s translation of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera Mundi.33 Italian by birth, Giuntini (also known as Giuntius/​

Fig. 27.7  Gathering 7, Casey Gardner, Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth (Berkeley, CA: Set in Motion Press, 2013). Reproduced with permission.

Conversations about Time and Space    525 Justinus) became famous as an observer of the great comet of 1577 in Lyons, and as a teacher of Catherine de’ Medici. Johannes de Sacrobosco (also known as Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, John of Holywood, or John of Holybush), astronomer and teacher-​scholar at the University of Paris in around 1230, composed the most widely disseminated account of Hindu–​ Arabic numerals and, centuries before its implementation, recommended the uptake of the Gregorian calendar to remedy the faults of the Julian already evident to him. Sacrobosco’s text influenced not only early astronomy but also the history of print illustration and even early modern visual cognition. The Sphaera famously used its sequenced images to train the reader’s eye and mind to conceptualize animated, three-​ dimensional space and objects, such as heavenly bodies, moving within and around it. In an important article, Kathleen Crowther and Peter Barker suggest that so widespread and theoretically sound (according to early modern beliefs about sight and understanding) proved this technique that not only did later paradigm-​shifting astronomers such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo borrow this now-​traditional format to render their own theories about the universe more compelling and persuasive to early modern readers, but early modern printers also used editions of the Sphaera to essay new techniques.34 Isabel Pantin identifies Giuntini’s translation as ‘The Limits of the Tradition’, commenting that Giuntini’s textual innovations, namely the addition of ‘a series of tables (none of them original) . . . transformed the original textbook into an introduction to astronomical practice and calculation’.35 Following Aristotle, medieval and early modern astronomers assumed that in order to understand the universe, students needed to create an image in the mind.36 Theological concerns with ‘visual piety’ during the later Middle Ages emphasized vision even as new discoveries were made in astronomy, such as the rediscovery of the Ptolemaic cosmos.37 Crowther and Barker borrow from art historian David Summers a distinction between realism and naturalism,38 where ‘images in the Sphaera and Theorica texts . . . are realistic’—​they represent real objects in the world—​‘although they are not naturalistic’ (they follow neither the rules of perspective nor the rules of optics).39 Thus, Crowther and Barker argue, we need to re-​evaluate early astronomical texts not in terms of their accuracy to the real world but in terms of how effectively they helped early modern readers to create these mental images of the Ptolemaic universe. Maps and charts, including star charts that can be unfolded, and volvelles that readers can manipulate, assume that their early readers are actively animating the printed images in the mind’s eye as well as with their hands. Four volvelles were introduced to the Sphaera in the so-​called ‘Wittenberg’ edition of 1502.40 Here I’ll discuss two of the three fully working volvelles in the Hargrett Giuntini (Fig. 27.8), which explain how we know ‘That the earth is round’.41 The text explains that we can tell the earth is round because the stars and sun don’t rise and set at the same time for everyone but first in the east, because of the earth’s curvature; moreover, if a lunar eclipse appears ‘at the first hour’ in Europe, it will appear at the third in ‘the East’; tides also break at different times in different locations. Beneath the volvelle the text adds that it is obvious that the earth is curved all around and in both northern and southern hemispheres, because there are

526   Sujata Iyengar

Fig. 27.8  Volvelles, in Francesco Giuntini (trans.), La Sfera Del Mondo (Lyons, 1582), 74–​75.

some stars that appear only in the north, such as those closest to the North Pole, and others in the south that remain hidden.42 The first volvelle lets the reader move the sun around the earth so that we can see the moon’s shadow move across the globe. It also prepares the reader for the second volvelle, which, as Pantin describes, shows a graduated circle (a meridian), the axis of the world, the southern star Canopus, ‘Helice’ (that is Ursa Major), and the quasi-​parallel . . . spiral[s]‌. . . that describe the daily motion of the sun as it progresses along the zodiac, from one tropic to the other[,] circles . . . divided into equal portions by twelve numbered arcs ( . . . portions of meridians). . . . The movable part of the volvelle is a half-​disk, bearing the words ‘HORIZON’ and ‘NULLA DIES SINE LINEA’ (‘Not a day without writing a line’), a proverb taken from Pliny . . . an admonition against laziness. This half-​disk is meant to recover the part of the hemisphere under the horizon; a kind of paper alidade, showing the zenith, is attached to it.43

An ‘alidade’ (from the Arabic word for ‘ruler’ or for the radius of a circle) forms part of an astrolabe, sextant, theodolite, or a present-​day surveying instrument; at its simplest, it is a rule that includes telescopic sights so that users can see a distant object and calculate angles or create a plane table. The witty irony of the Pliny tag points to its own

Conversations about Time and Space    527 impossibility, since in this diagram the ‘day’ is endless: there’s no end to the writing we could complete if we could only manipulate the day as easily as we manipulate the volvelle.

Losing Books feel nourishing to literal and figurative ‘bookworms’, but can themselves be greedy; the sixteenth-​century publishing boom arguably inspired tomb-​raiders in Egypt to strip mummies of their rags, conveniently softened and worn down for reuse in paper. At the same time, books and plants are themselves consumed. Few volvelles survive intact; like almanacs, textbooks are meant for use, and frequent handling can tear paper or snap thread. Almanacs disintegrate and disappear just as the gardening calendars they include index the plants that vanish as our climate heats. In this way early modern books in space speak to P. B. Zimmerman’s miniature Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, which is both artists’ book and science-​fiction fantasy. Inspired by his son’s work on climate change and by projections of global sea-​level rise from US federal and international scientific agencies, Zimmerman overlays images of ‘water and waves’ over backgrounds of images from ‘scans of steel engravings from several 19th century books’ to create a ‘dystopian’ future in which scattered survivors ‘grow . . . food in vertical farms’, in towers, besieged by ‘[m]‌arauding remnants . . . in small groups’.44 The towers are adapted/​filtered photos of airport control towers, meant to connote ‘the modern version of towers on medieval castles’.45 Mysterious and unearthly phrases derive from the so-​called ‘Harvard sentences’ widely used for testing audio standards. A ‘deep blue Pantone color’ unifies the volume through printed pictures of the sea and the coastline from Google Earth satellites; maritime depth (from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) surveys) is indicated by silver numbers and contour lines.46 Nonetheless, the survival of consumable books such as almanacs, and of the raw plant materials within the text that discusses them, the Hargrett Herbal, within our library—​ despite the fragility of plant and paper—​can offer us some hope, even as it contrasts the ongoing challenge of documenting and preserving electronic knowledge in its various states. Just as we saw and experienced print and codex-​forms differently after our initial encounters with on-​screen scrolls in the early days of the internet, so a mature digitized material interface will provide the next challenge and potential for our encounters with books early modern and postmodern. Augmented reality perhaps offers another future for bookness, one that might integrate bodily knowledge and abstract information helpfully or perniciously, as Malka Older’s speculative future political science ‘Centenal Cycle’ imagines.47 As books and other forms of crafted and disseminated human knowledge continue to develop, so too will human beings make new sense—​and new senses—​ of these scraps, rags, and shared shards of time.

528   Sujata Iyengar

Notes 1. Sujata Iyengar, ‘Intermediating the Book Beautiful: Shakespeare at the Doves Press’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67/​4 (2016), 481–​502. 2. Jessica Pressman, Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (New York: Columbia, 2020). 3. On how readers found their way through books and how books themselves travelled, see Georgina Wilson, ‘Paperscapes: Navigating Books in Early Modern England’, PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 2020, cited with permission. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1993). 5. Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain (London: Penguin, 2010). I rehearse this argument at greater length in Iyengar, ‘Intermediating the Book Beautiful’. 6. Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (1995; New York: Granary, rev. edn. 2005), 9. 7. Sujata Iyengar, ‘Source/​Adaptation’, in Claire Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text, (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 182–​202. 8. Deb Rindl, Area of a Triangle ([London]: [Deb Rindl], 1996), copy 51/​100; Deb Rindl, Times Square ([London]: [Deb Rindl], 2001), copy 6/​18; Deb Rindl, Counting Crows ([London]: [Deb Rindl], 2005), copy 4/​14; Isaac Keay, The practical measurer, his pocket companion; containing tables ready cast up, for the speedy mensuration of timber, board &c. (3rd edn.), ed. Edward Hatton (London: Thomas Wood, 1724); Samuel Moreland, Vade Mecum, or the Necessary Pocket Companion [‘Playford’s Almanac’] (17th edn., London: R. Ware, 1749). Our library attributes this almanac to the original author of the perpetual calendar, ‘Sir Samuel Moreland’, but it is more usually called ‘Playford’s Almanac’; see e.g. Adam Smyth, ‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-​Writing in Early Modern England’, ELR 38/​ 2 (2008), 200–​244, at 201 n. 4 and Jane Desborough, The Changing Face of Early Modern Time (London: Springer, 2019), 169. 9. Judy Fairclough Sgantas, ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden (Newark, VT: Janus Press 2012), copy 39/​120; Leslie Norris, A Tree Sequence (Seattle: Sea Pen Press, 1984), copy number 5/​[not indicated]; J[ohn] E[velyn], Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-​Trees (London: The Royal Society, 1664); John Gerard, Herbal (1597; London: Adam Islip, Joyce Norton, and Richard Whitaker, 1636). 10. Casey Gardner, Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth (Berkeley, CA: Set in Motion Press, 2013); Francesco Giuntini (trans.), La Sfera Del Mondo (Lyons, 1582). 11. D. R. Wakefield, Alphabet of Endangered Mammals: A Collection of Etchings Depicting Animals Considered Extinct in the Wild 2050 (Goole, Yorkshire: The Chevington Press, 2010); P. B. Zimmerman, Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene (Tucson, AZ: Spaceheater Press, 2017). 12. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; New York: McGraw-​Hill, 2016), ch. 1 and passim. 13. Kathleen M. Crowther and Peter Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye: Understanding Illustrations in Early Modern Astronomy Texts’, Isis, 104 (2013), 429–​470. 14. Thomas Cromwell, Injunctions to the Clergy (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538), https://​ www.proqu​est.com/​books/​iniu​ncti​ons-​cle​rge-​exhib​ite-​blank-​die-​men​sis-​anno/​docv​ iew/​224​0934​437/​se-​2?accoun​tid=​14537, accessed 26 June 2021. 15. William Scrots (attrib.), ‘Elizabeth I When a Princess’, 1546–​7, Royal Collection (OM 46), https://​www.rct.uk/​col​lect​ion/​404​444/​elizab​eth-​i-​when-​a-​princ​ess, accessed 25 May 2021).

Conversations about Time and Space    529 16. Rindl, Area of a Triangle. 17. Rindl, Times Square. 18. Rindl, Counting Crows. 19. Rindl, Counting Crows, 49. 20. Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 56. 21. Keay, Practical measurer, Ar (the dedicatory epistle appearing before ‘The Editor’s Preface’ is signed Ar, but the signature A begins again on the first page of the text proper). 22. Moreland, Vade Mecum, title page; unnumbered folio leaf between fos. 16 and 19. 23. Moreland, Vade Mecum, 4–​5, B2v–​B3r. 24. Hargrett Playford, ‘Just Publish’d’, title page verso. 25. Sgantas, ABC, n.p.; binding ‘designed for this edition by Claire Van Vliet and executed by Audrey Holden’ (colophon). 26. Norris, Tree Sequence, ‘Colophon’ and ‘Errata’. 27. Brent Elliott, ‘The World of the Renaissance Herbal’, Renaissance Studies, 25/​1 (2011), 24–​ 41, esp. 34–​35. 28. Elliott, ‘The World of the Renaissance Herbal’, 39. 29. Elliott, ‘The World of the Renaissance Herbal’, 27–​29. 30. Guy de la Bédoyère (ed. and introd.), The Writings of John Evelyn (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 178. 31. United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ‘Earth: Solar System Exploration,’ NASA Science, https://​sola​rsys​tem.nasa.gov/​plan​ets/​earth/​overv​iew/​, last accessed 4 June 2021. 32. Kathleen Crowther et al., ‘The Book Everybody Read’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 46/​1 (2015), 4–​28. 33. Lynn Thorndike, The ‘Sphere’ of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Matteo Valleriani (ed.), De Sphaera of Johannes Sacrobosco in the Early Modern Period: The Authors of the Commentaries (Cham: Springer, 2020). 34. Crowther and Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye’, 430. 35. Isabelle Pantin, ‘Borrowers and Innovators in the History of Printing Sacrobosco: The Case of the In-​Octavo Tradition’, in Valleriani (ed.), De Sphaera, 265–​312, at 303. 36. Crowther and Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye’, 436. 37. Crowther and Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye’, 437. 38. David Summers, The Judgement of Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 3, quoted in Crowther and Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye’, 438. 39. Crowther and Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye’, 438. 40. Pantin, ‘Borrowers and Innovators’, 281. 41. Giuntini (trans.), La Sfera Del Mondo, E5r. 42. I am paraphrasing Thorndike’s translation of Sacrobosco, op. cit., 121. 43. Pantin, ‘Borrowers and Innovators’, 281. 44. Zimmerman, Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, Artists’ book Publication Information sheet, n.p. [2]‌. 45. Zimmerman, Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, n.p. [2]‌. 46. Zimmerman, Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, n.p. [5–​6]. 47. Malka Older, the Centenal Cycle: Infomocracy (New York: Tor, 2016); Null States (New York: Tor, 2017); State Tectonics (New York: Tor, 2018).

530   Sujata Iyengar

Select Bibliography Baron, Naomi, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Boeckeler, Erika, Playful Letters: A Guide to Early Modern Alphabetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017). Fleischer, Alette, ‘Leaves on the Loose: The Changing Nature of Archiving Plants and Botanical Knowledge’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 6/​1 (2017), 117–​135. Frost, Gary, ‘Reading by Hand: The Haptic Evolution of Artists’ Books’, The Bonefolder, 2/​1 (2005), 3–​6, http://​www. philobiblon.com/​bonefolder /​vobnoicontents.htm. Knight, Jeffrey Todd, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Knight, Leah, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). Mandell, Laura, Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). Mangen, Anne, ‘Digitization, Reading, and the Body: Handling Texts on Paper and Screen’, in Nancy K. Dess (ed.), A Multidisciplinary Approach to Embodiment: Understanding Human Being (New York: Routledge, 2021), 51–​55. Murray, Janet, Inventing the Medium (Boston: MIT Press, 2011). Price, Leah, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (New York: Basic, 2019). Reid, Pauline, Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the Early Modern Book (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). Sawday, Jonathan, and Rhodes, Neil (eds.), The Renaissance Computer (London: Routledge, 2000). Stewart, Garrett, Bookwork: Medium to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Smith, Margit, The Medieval Girdle-​Book (Delaware, NH: Oak Knoll Press, 2017). Wolf, Maryanne, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2008).

CHAPTER 28

T he Early Mode rn B o ok as Metaph or Jeff Dolven

A book has many affordances. It is a platform for printed words, for presenting them to the eye, and for navigating them in their given order, or strategically, or by chance. It is just as good at hiding them, revealing only a couple of pages at a time, and it is easy to hold private or to shut entirely. It can be ranked on a shelf in an authoritative row, or carried in a pocket, depending on its size and binding. It can wrap fish for carrying, or pastry for cooking. It burns easily. Affordances—​the word was made current by the design theorist James J. Gibson in 19791—​are the ways that an object, like a book, makes itself convenient to use, whether use planned or use improvised, in keeping with or athwart the intentions of an author, printer, seller, owner. The long historical run of the codex, well into its second millennium, testifies to just how much a book turns out to be good for. A book also has many affordances for the poet. As it offers itself to practical use, so it offers itself to metaphor. Its complex construction is a gift to figure, the frames and folds and hinges, the glue and stitches; any part of it can be turned to account, ink for blood, page for skin, spine for spine. The frontispiece can be a door or an arch, the index an orderly memory. The whole may trope keeping or carrying, dark matter or bright spirit, the long time of libraries or paper’s prompt tinder. It can stand in for its makers or its readers or the institutions that sponsor or house it. It can embody nation, faith, or God. All of its long history is ready to hand, too, for a book is the quintessential polytemporal object, a composite of technologies emergent over millennia, dressed in styles of binding and typography that can place and date it down to the shop and the day.2 If it gets used as a doorstop, its metaphorical affordances may recede. But if it is written down—​the book inscribed in a book, represented there—​it is as easy to quicken its significations as to open it. No object, save the human body itself, is as generous with figurative possibility. The medium is the message!—​so the triumphant media theorist might proclaim. Marshall McLuhan, author of that adage, argues that the code transmitted is less important than the means and terms of its transmission.3 The metaphorical book is the

532   Jeff Dolven code’s revenge, literary language defining the material vehicle that carries it—​for it is another affordance of the book that it can hold infinite other books (even itself), and do with them there what it likes. The writer still has to work, of course, with the book the culture offers. The early modern book in England is a complex object, complexly determined, and as the sixteenth century passes into the seventeenth it is changing in complex ways. But new techniques and formats and markets and legal circumstances only make for new affordances. What is more, the resulting metaphorical uses of the book—​the ordinary and extraordinary ways in which the artefact is made significant—​ feed back to affect its material production. What this essay will attempt is a rough taxonomy of these uses, some local kinds and concepts of book metaphor (and book metonymy) and some of their broader applications. It will also eavesdrop on a shift in ideas of authorship, the gradual passage from identification with a style to identification with the book as an object. Perhaps the book’s ultimate affordance is its likeness to its maker. Two writers will ground this account, Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson, with occasional assistance from their contemporaries. They have in common that both ask, or suffer, the question, what is a book? They differ in that The Faerie Queene is a book quite unlike any of the books it represents. Spenser is primarily a book fantasist. Jonson is a book realist: the books in his books are like the books they are in.

Prop, Blind, Body The fantastical book culture of Spenser’s supreme fiction is, like its diction, wilfully archaic and estranged. (‘Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language’, according to Jonson.4) He is himself, however, very much a print author.5 His well-​born contemporary Sir Philip Sidney saw no writing to the press, in the tradition of the courtier poets whose work was assembled, mostly posthumously, in William Tottel’s anthology Songes and Sonettes (1557). Spenser, by contrast, was a poor boy at the Merchant Taylors’ School and a sizar at Cambridge, and he made his way into a government career by climbing the ladder of humanist schooling. His teacher Richard Mulcaster got him into the print shop in his seventeenth year, when his unattributed translations of Jan van der Noot’s Dutch sonnets were published as A Theatre Wherein be Represented as Wel the Miseries & Calamities that Follow the Voluptuous Worldlings (1569). Ten years later, his anonymous Shepheardes Calender was printed by William Ponsonby and dedicated to Sidney: a notably bookish book, with its woodcuts and serio-​ludic scholarly apparatus, its debt to classical eclogue and vernacular almanac, its mixed italic and black-​letter text. It has been read both as a masterful hybrid and as an identity crisis.6 Its publication was followed by another quiet decade, a decade that saw Spenser enter secretarial service in Ireland, and then in 1590 The Faerie Queene appeared, in a folio designed after the works in Italian of Ariosto and Tasso.7 Finally, a book that knew its place, and bore its author’s name.

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    533 What place does The Faerie Queene make for books? The second time a book appears in the poem—​more later about the first—​it is carried by an evil enchanter, Archimago; carried, or rather, worn: At length they chaunst to meet upon the way An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad, His feet all bare, his beard all hoarie gray, And by his belt his booke he hanging had; Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad. (I. i. xxix)8

The Faerie Queene is hardly a realist fiction, but here is a telling detail that would not be out of place in Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’. It is obviously a prayer book, unless it is the book of spells Archimago will use to conjure spirits later in the canto. Who can tell from its sober cover? That mask is among the bound book’s affordances. We might call such usage the book as prop, a small piece of theatre, standing for piety or the pretence of piety.9 Such a prop appears again when Idleness rides by three cantos later, dressed as a monk with his popish breviary: ‘And in his hand his Portesse still he bare, | That much was worne, but therein little redd’ (I. iv. Xix). Worn, in the sense that it advertises use, but also worn as one wears a costume. Having named this first type of book as metaphor, it is worth pausing for a moment over the grammar of the idea. The phrase takes the book as a metaphor for x; to adopt I. A. Richards’s sturdy distinction, as a vehicle for a variety of possible tenors.10 The ‘book as prop’ compasses the ways in which a book prop (vehicle) might be used to figure piety, for example, or social position (tenor). What the book can be made to mean necessarily depends upon what it already means, and the term ‘metaphor’ as I use it here will have to be broad enough to include conventional, metonymic associations. Taking a book for a sign of learning depends upon the company books keep in ordinary experience, rather than discovering a novel relation across a gap of analogy.11 Within a system of such correspondences, the figure could also be classed as allegorical, and Spenser’s poem is nothing if not an ostentatious, if rickety, system of correspondences. Early modern rhetoric makes these distinctions—​metaphor, metonymy, allegory—​ but the basic operations fit well enough into the period’s understanding of metaphor itself, ‘a kind of wresting of a single word’, in George Puttenham’s account, ‘from his owne right signification, to another not so ountri, but yet of some affinitie or conveniencie with it’.12 Puttenham uses the word ‘transport’ for ‘metaphor’. Henry Peacham and Richard Sherry prefer ‘translation’. They all share a sense that meaning is carried over from the vehicle to the tenor by permission of some likeness between them: likeness is what the book’s metaphorical affordances afford. Peacham offers a convenient example in his Garden of Eloquence, analysing the phrase ‘Whose names are written in the book of life’. ‘Here the ount “written” and “booke” ’, he explains, ‘are Metaphors taken from the Registers of Judges, or Scribes, or Secretaries of Princes, who are wont to register and enroll the pardons of life.’13 The bookwork of high bureaucrats is carried over to

534   Jeff Dolven understand what is meant in Scripture by the fatal act of writing in the book of life. Misfit and excess of meaning across such transport were questions of keen interest to early modern theorists, how a metaphor might be stretched from the ‘nigh, and likely’ (the adjacency of a metonym) to the ‘farre fetched’ (the step-​too-​far of catachresis).14 The traffic was understood, however, to run one way, from vehicle to tenor. That makes early modern theorists less attentive to the ways that tenor might feed back to influence the conception, even construction, of the vehicle; the way a book might be changed by what it was made to mean. The ‘as’ of the book as metaphor can run both ways. Metaphor was understood to have a unique power to clarify, persuade, and vitalize: for Sherry in 1550, ‘None perswadeth more effecteouslye, none sheweth the ount before oure eyes more euidently’; for Sidney’s secretary Abraham Fraunce in 1588, ‘There is no trope more ountriesg than a Metaphore, especially if it be applied to the senses, & among the senses chiefly to the eie, which is the quickest.’15 In the difference between the two accounts—​one fully invested in persuasion, the second an ostensibly purposeless flourishing—​there is a glimpse of the gradual emergence of a discourse of poetics from the art of rhetoric, a poetics that places figuration in general, and metaphor in particular, at its heart. To that historical rise in metaphor’s fortunes this essay will return. But the early modern theorists also reckon with metaphor’s potential for obscurity, for ‘covert and dark terms’, as Puttenham puts it, which are as serviceable and as charismatic as any of its clarifications. Here we can rejoin what Spenser calls his own ‘continued Allegory, or darke conceit’.16 When at the end of Book III the enchanter Busyrane is surprised in his nefarious work, ‘His wicked ount in hast he overthrew’ (III. xii. Xxxii). Overthrew: do they land face down on the floor? They are only a conspicuous instance of the usual inaccessibility of books in the poem, inaccessibility to other characters or to the reader. Call this the book as blind, hidden knowledge and the power it confers, ‘blind’ in the sense of the vantage where a hunter waits, be they author or reader, illegible. Fidelia’s Bible in the House of Holiness is a specimen, ‘A booke that was both signd and seald with blood, | Wherein dark things were oun, hard to be understood’ (I. x. xiii). The Faerie Queene is apt to see the problem of the book’s hiddenness theologically, and the Elizabethan conflict over prophesying—​the lay interpretation of Scripture—​shades the lines. But the technology of the codex, in its foliated opacity, makes the problem possible. Shakespeare’s Hamlet must have a quarto held close to his chest when he enters ‘reading on a book’.17 What book? What is he reading, what is he thinking? Prop and blind conspire. The book is almost a metaphor for the darkness of metaphor. The Faerie Queene’s first books, however, are darker still: Her vomit full of ount and papers was, With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke, And creeping sought way in the weedy grass: Her filthie parbreake all the place defiled has. (I. i. xx)

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    535 This torrent issues from the monstrous half-​woman, half-​serpent Errour, strangled by Red Cross Knight only twenty stanzas into the poem. The book as prop and as blind depends on the book as a material object, something that has mass and blocks the light. The book as body, that is, material body—​not as self, nor, here, the body articulated into its limbs and outward flourishes, but the body as the stuff a self might be housed in, or cumbered by. Errour’s vomit is a parody of the prophetic bibliophagy in Ezekiel 3:1 (‘eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel’).18 More pointedly, it reverses the tropes of ingestion and digestion common in accounts of humanist pedagogy, disgorging what should be received ‘for inward digestion’, as Erasmus has it.19 The body of the book is the opposite of knowledge, the more so as it regresses towards pulp and slurry. Errour’s discharge is usually identified with a flood of Catholic propaganda; it might also be associated, more generally, with anxieties about mass print, the propagation of error, and the sheer, self-​defeating volume of learning and pseudo-​learning that early modern readers had to manage.20 Spenser, in his reliable perversity, recasts the nightmarish superflux in the next stanza as the ‘fertile slime’ (I. i. xxi) of the Nile’s annual flood. This fecundity of bookish error will fertilize the rest of the poem.

Memory, Chronicle, World, Prophecy The Faerie Queene’s most memorable books are elevated far above its labyrinthine flood plains. The Castle of Alma is an imposing allegory of the human body, which the knights Guyon and Arthur explore in cantos ix and x of Book II. Having passed through various interior spaces, including the digestive tract, they come at last to a high tower that divides the mental processes into three rooms. The first is for foresight and fantasy, and it is occupied by Phantastes, around whose head flies, bees, and visions swarm; the second, for present judgement, is overseen by an unnamed man ‘of ripe and perfect age’ (II. ix. liv). The rooms are painted with murals of dream and of counsel respectively. The third and hindmost chamber is a library, where old Eumnestes sits reading while his boy Anamnestes fetches records.21 He is of ‘infinite remembraunce’ (lvi), and can recall the infancies of the biblical Methuselah and the epic Nestor. His lifespan is coextensive with written history, and at first it seems as though everything that happens is safely stowed in his ‘immortal scrine’, or chest, ‘Where they for euer incorrupted dweld’ (lvi). Once Spenser turns to describing the contents of the room, however, the materials of its record-​keeping qualify the claims for perfect recall. His chamber all was hangd about with rolls, And old records from auncient times derived, Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolls, That were all worm-​eaten, and full of canker holes. (II. ix. Lvii)

536   Jeff Dolven Here is the book as memory. The allegorical organization of the tripartite tower has suggested something like the topics or topoi of a commonplace book, where plans, observations, and recollections might be set down in their places for ready recall. But the library has suffered time more than mastered it. It houses a mix of ancient and modern book technologies, scroll and codex, as though the records dated from the time of their events. Papyrus and paper alike are shot through with the blind incurious reading of bookworms, an anti-​didactic, anti-​prophetic bibliophagy. Meanwhile irritable, senescent Eumnestes sits ‘Tossing and turning’ (lviii) the pages in his readerly insomnia. The book stands in for this complex, conflicted management of mortal knowledge. Its mind cannot be divorced from its frail body. A mixed picture of memory results, and a mixed picture of books, too, seen under memory’s aspect, with all of its blind spots and vanities. Still, the activity of reading in the tower is of unusually focused intensity. Arthur and Guyon ‘chance’ on two books—​Arthur’s seems to rise almost magically to his hand—​ that turn out to be the chronicles, respectively, of Britain and Faerie Land. Both knights burn with ‘fervent fire | Their countreys auncestry to understand’ (II. ix. Lx). Antiquitee of Faery Lond is a swift mythic genealogy that begins with Prometheus’ creation of Elfe, progenitor of a line of Elfin kings, and carries down the line to Elfin, Elfinan, Elfiline, and so on, with the orderliness of a conjugated verb. It is preceded, however, by the much longer account of Briton Moniments, the book of Arthur’s lineage, Britain’s ‘old division into Regiments, | Till it reduced was to one mans gouvernements’ (lix). The ragged lineage, drawn from such chroniclers as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Raphael Holinshed, is three times interrupted by the absence of a male heir, a pointed contrast with the orderly elves. And yet the narrator frames these sixty-​three stanzas as though their story were continuous, justified, and justifying, all the way down to Elizabeth, whose ancestors’ noble deeds ‘Immortall fame for ever hath enrold; | As in that old mans booke they were in order told’ (II. x. iv). The word ‘enrold’ suggests a scroll, and its affordance is a single, unbroken page, a figure for the story told in order, the book as chronicle, how time might work if events would stay in a row. This continuity seems to account for how the two books absorb their readers. As William Sherman points out, recent scholarship has emphasized ‘book use’, a phrase he borrows from Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio: we moderns ‘have moved from a culture in which readers take hold of texts for specific purposes’, the early modern disposition, ‘to one in which texts generally take hold of readers’.22 Arthur and Guyon have their reasons for reading, but they are also taken hold of, and entranced: Beguyld thus with delight of nouelties, And ountri desire of ountries state, So long they redd in those antiquities, That how the time was fled, they quite forgate, Till gentle Alma seeing it so late, Perforce their studies broke, and them besought To thinke, how supper did them long awaite. (II. x. lxxvii)

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    537 The stanza is another of those peculiar irruptions of ordinary life into Spenser’s poem, the knights forgetting to eat, and called to table by a figure who might, for a moment, be mistaken for their indulgent mother. Desire of country’s state has detained them, but also delight in novelty; there is a suspension of the outside world in favour of the story, of outside time in favour of book time. Here is the book as world, a world of its own. One might think of Sir Thomas Wyatt at his desk in Kent, or of Shakespeare’s Brutus, on the eve of battle, searching for the page where he left off. These stoic humanists are studying, whether for action or to maintain their sense of self-​mastery under duress. Arthur and Guyon’s reading is closer to play, perhaps even as Spenser’s is when he looks back, five books later, at the variety and pleasure of the ‘waies through which my weary steps I guyde, | In this delightfull land of Faery’ (VI. Pr. 1), and gives thanks for the strength and cheer to be had wandering in the self-​made world of his own book. Just as something other than ‘chance’ brings the right books to the knights’ hands, however, the dinner bell’s breaking the spell is no accident. Both readers have arrived at the moment when their story intersects the poem’s present: Arthur at the birth of his father Uther, Guyon at the reign of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene. Guyon leaves off with a prayer, ‘Long mayst thou Glorian live, in glory and great powre’ (II. x. lxxvi). The end is more ambivalent for Arthur, an ‘untimely breach’, As if the rest some wicked hand did rend, Or th’Authour selfe could not at least attend To finish it (II. x. lxviii)

Is Briton Moniments a bound manuscript, in its author’s hand? It is a very material book, at all events, and in the tearing away of those pages a future is at once written and withdrawn. The book as prophecy is another common figure, a projection, perhaps, of every reader’s experience at the threshold of the first page. The idea is implicit in the sortes Virgilianae, the practice of fortune-​telling from arbitrarily chosen lines of the Aeneid.23 The prophetic books of the Bible, too, figure here, especially Revelation as it may stand for Scripture in summary apocalypse. (Mary Sidney adopts the vocabulary of the scroll when, in her Psalm translations, she describes how all time ‘in the book | Of thy foresight enrolled did lie’.24) Books of magic can foretell or shape the future. Busyrane’s is one; Marlowe’s Faustus has another (‘Hold, take this booke, peruse it thorowly, | The iterating of these lines brings golde’25). Spenser’s characters dream of reading past the back cover and into the time to come. Why might the book’s opacity not open to reveal what lies ahead? Though what lies ahead seems to be as vulnerable to material decay, or a hasty hand, as the recorded past. The book is still a book. Which is all to say that The Faerie Queene, in managing these books and their uses, particularly cherishes an ideal of reading that is also an ideal experience of time and history: linear and continuous, holding past and future together, with reading itself as the present that connects them. The scroll is the technology that most flatters this idea, but The Faerie Queene is no scroll. Spenser’s book is elaborately punctuated, into books,

538   Jeff Dolven cantos, stanzas, lines; the stanzas break unpredictably across the physical pages in all the early printings. So many of the books it represents are tattered or torn. Then of course there is the notoriously interlaced (not to say tattered) plot, which is playfully, anxiously, wickedly resistant to the possibility of consequential narrative. Kenneth Gross divides the poem’s books into sacred, magical, and historical.26 The Faerie Queene itself is all of them and none. When the poem figures itself, it is not as a book, but as a ship on a tempestuous voyage, or an intelligence, the narrator’s, wandering in a wood.27 Above all, it is chronically unfinished, incomplete, an endlessly unaccomplished work. I will offer just one more instance, or perhaps allegory, of the untimely breach Spenser makes between his book and the books inscribed inside it. The 1590 Faerie Queene was printed by William Ponsonby in roman type and a design that looked to the Italian editions of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; it was similar to the prestigious folio in which Ponsonby brought out Sidney’s Arcadia the same year. Scholars argue over whether Spenser was on hand to see it made. (Andrew Hadfield, his biographer, thinks not.28) From its first appearance, its peculiar interior organization attracted attention. It is accompanied by an unusual number of dedicatory sonnets and a letter to Walter Raleigh expounding the author’s ‘whole intention in the course of this worke’29—​both located not at the beginning of the book, but at the end. What is more, there is strong evidence that this back matter was moved from the front during printing, and a dedication to Elizabeth added (‘thrust, perhaps hastily and probably disrespectfully, into the only available space in the first gathering, the verso of the title page’, as Andrew Zurcher has it).30 Such excruciations of precedence are entirely native to the looping fiction in the middle. They suggest that Spenser had not yet decided, did not yet know, what a codex was, and how it worked, even as he, or his proxies, stood above the galleys making one.

Commodity, Food, Style Ben Jonson, by contrast, knew a book when he saw it, and that includes his 1617 edition of The Faerie Queene. His copy survives, with annotations that show him making full use of the readerly affordances of the codex. Handwritten allegorical glosses in the margins are common, as well as cross-​references within the poem and beyond it. Next to the narrator’s defence of female heroism, in the proem to Book III, he writes, ‘Women in former ages have excelld in bold deeds of armes. See. Sands Ovid.’31 He is likely referring to the description of Atalanta in George Sandys’s translation of the Metamorphoses (printed, with commentary, in 1532), and perhaps even to Sandys’s note citing Plato’s Republic on women warriors. A note, that is, to a note, connecting readers and writers, past and present, not just by shared texts but by specific editions. (He had a copy of Sandys on his shelf when he died, given him by his friend Kenelm Digby; so, connecting friends, too.)32 Jonson not only sought such connections in his reading, but also insisted on them in the books he made. The outstanding instance is his Roman play Sejanus

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    539 (1605), printed with running notes to classical sources, but all his career he sought to position his books in libraries both actual and virtual, a network of learning. Each such book is a node in a fantasy of omniscience: ‘Would you . . . force | All doores of arts, with the petarre, of your wit’, asks the airy spirit Johphiel in the masque for King James, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union, ‘Reade at one view all bookes? speake all the languages | Of severall creatures’ (v. 699)? But this scholarly fantasy was not the only network in which Jonson situated himself. He made a place in the book market, too. Like Spenser, he had no birth passport into the courtier poets’ manuscript culture. The stepson of a bricklayer, he apprenticed in the trade; his literary training came as a day boy at Westminster under the humanist scholar William Camden, to whom he expressed gratitude all his life. After Westminster, however, it was back to masonry, and university wits never let him forget the dust on his hands: ‘a bould whorson’, he is called in the Cambridge play The Returne from Parnassus (put on at St John’s over 1601–​2), ‘as confident now in making of a booke, as he was in times past in laying of a brick’.33 It was through plays—​not the university drama, but the public theatres—​that Jonson came to his bold bookmaking. From the first of his own plays to be printed, he took an active interest both in production and in the market. He was caustic about the posturing of readers who were not understanders, and buyers who were not readers: ‘A poxe on him,’ says Truewit in Epicoene, ‘a fellow that pretends onely to learning, buyes titles, and nothing else of bookes in him’ (iii. 402). Books as props (for would-​be pedants and profiteering charlatans) fill the plays. His character Face in The Alchemist cynically (or hopefully?) observes to his accomplice Subtle that ‘A Booke, but barely reckoning thy Impostures, | Shall prove a true Philosophers stone, to Printers’ (iii. 568). Here is the metonymy of the book as commodity, a node not in the cross-​ referenced scholarly plenum of all books, but in a commercial traffic involving authors, printers, and readers. It participates in a critique of market values that only sharpens as Jonson ages: ‘Thou, that mak’st gaine thy end, and wisely well, | Call’st a booke good, or bad, as it doth sell’ (v. 114). Against this traffic in the reified book, Jonson often revives the ancient metaphorics of the book as food. We have seen Spenser parody the idea as a broken promise of humanism. Jonson works hard to live up to it. His Discoveries famously praises the author that ‘hath a Stomacke to concoct, divide, and turne all into nourishment’ (vii. 583), and there is an especially complicated meditation on the trope in his poem, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’.       How so ere, my man Shall reade a piece of VIRGIL, TACITVS, LIVIE, or of some better booke to vs, Of which wee’ll speake our minds, amidst our meate; And Ile professe no verses to repeate: To this, if ought appeare, which I know not of, That will the pastrie, not my paper, show of. (v. 167–​8)

540   Jeff Dolven The idyll of free commensality elides the difference between authors and books (‘a piece of Virgil’) and lays minds and meat alike on the table. Jonson promises not to make that table a stage for reciting his own poems, but he allows that they might make an appearance all the same if the paper they were printed on has been used to wrap the pastry. This strange conceit of a second printing, the words transferred from page to crust, makes for a repast that transfers the text without risk of misunderstanding, an interpretative reassurance as immediate as crossing your hands over your belly. Unless, of course, this ‘untidy miracle of chemistry’, as Joseph Loewenstein calls it, is better read as a parody.34 Its accidental, mechanico-​culinary reproduction is comically different from the way that Jonson himself digested the poems of Martial, which his own lines imitate so closely. And indeed, especially early in his career, Jonson can be contemptuous of print, as a promiscuous, easily corrupted, easily misunderstood medium that afflicts the communication between poets as much as it enables it. What must be transmitted is not so much text, as style; not so much what was written, as a way of writing. As he says in his Discoveries, the poet’s work requires an exactnesse of Studie, and multiplicity of reading, which maketh a full man, not alone enabling him to know the History, or Argument of a Poeme, and to report it: but so to master the matter, and Stile, as to shew, hee knowes, how to handle, place, or dispose of either, with elegancie, when need shall bee. (vii. 583)

This multiplicity of reading feeds the mastery and disposition of both matter and style, and good digestion expresses itself in an acquired capacity. Good reading makes for good writing. How else would you recognize it? Style so understood is associated more with the capable body than with the perfected book, with the ‘full man’ in his fullness. It is the ‘writerly’ text as Roland Barthes would imagine it for the twentieth century: the text that lives not in printed monuments, but in the writing it provokes, ‘poetry without the poem . . . production without product, structuration without structure’.35 Barthes’s post-​structuralism overlaps with a fundamental humanist idea of authorship as the cultivation of a distinctive yet respectfully affiliated way of making. It is a question, however, whether that regime of implicit recognition is furthered, or betrayed, when a bookish ribbon of citations runs down the right margin. The book as style is not an entry into the present taxonomy; it is an interrupted analogy, even a category mistake, and over time, for Jonson, the two terms would come to mark poles of a problem.

Building, Self, Friend, Child Jonson’s plays and masques appeared regularly in quarto in the first decade of James’s reign, when he was supported both by royal patronage and by continued, if not unbroken, success in the public theatres. The masque Hymenaei (1606), written to

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    541 celebrate the marriage of the Earl of Essex and Lady Frances, was printed, like Sejanus, with learned marginal notes. It was his famous 1616 folio, however, that best expressed his innovating ambitions for the book as the form of authorship. The Workes of Benjamin Jonson is a monument to what Loewenstein calls ‘the bibliographic ego’, the author-​ editor-​owner of the book (and close supervisor of the printing) who exercised a new form of ‘possessive authorship’.36 The volume contains his plays as well as his epigrams, poems, and masques, all of them framed by an imposing architectural frontispiece, a classical arch, in the mode of the spectacles Inigo Jones constructed for their joint performances. The book as building is a familiar figure, whether the building is a public space (inviting, forbidding) or a private retreat (a study, a tower).37 For Jonson, the solidity of stone promised the disciplining of style, and a motto from Horace is engraved around the pediment: ‘SI[N]‌GULA QUAEQU[E] LOCVM TENEANT S[O]RTITA DECEN[T]ER’, ‘Let each style keep the appropriate place allotted to it’ (iv. 613). Style so regimented, according to the classical theory of its types, is not transmissible in the mysteriously contagious manner of a personal voice. Book architecture—​the frontispiece, and the table of contents that follows it—​confers a fixed and even memorial order on his diverse corpus. Jonson explores the same theme in a verse letter to Sir Edward Sackville, where he exhorts his friend not to rest in the labour of his self-​construction: Yet we must more then move still, or goe on, We must accomplish; ’Tis the last Key-​stone That makes the Arch, The rest that there were put Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut. (vii. 113)

We must aspire to a life made sure by the gravity of its last act; and then, by a complicated transfer, that act-​as-​stone binds the book and shuts it. The book as building is a particular type of the book as self, a self that is complete, sewn and bound, the discrete conclusion to the messy life of composition. That triumph is quite different from Milton’s famous claim, in Areopagitica, that ‘a good book is the precious life-​blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life’.38 Milton’s figure leaves the affordances of the material book behind, distilling the author as an essence, preserved in a casket or a vial, a new trope propitious for some future transfusion. The figures share a promise of immortality. Spenser’s anxieties about worms and canker are nowhere to be found. But Jonson’s book, unlike Milton’s, is still emphatically a book, even if you can almost imagine the one he recommends to Sackville as sewn shut on all sides. There is a durable association of the book with the self-​sufficiency of stoicism. A self alone with a book is truly self-​collected, self-​gathered; perhaps the self is a book, a book reading itself. But even the stoic has friends among fellow stoics, and may be kept company by a library, and by the authors treasured up in it. The figure of the book as friend has much comfort to offer. It also has vulnerabilities: as Jonson wrote to William

542   Jeff Dolven Browne, celebrating Browne’s new book of pastorals, ‘Some men, of Bookes or Friends not speaking right, | May hurt them more with praise, than Foes with spight’ (iv. 462). Praising wrong is always a danger for Jonson, for it seems to have been so terribly easy to transgress his decorums, as it often is for people whose idea of friendship depends on identification. What he wants from his friends is the constancy proper to a bound book. ‘And when you want those friends,’ he tells Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, ‘you make your bookes your friends, | And studie them unto the noblest ends’ (vii. 197). One wonders how much bookishness is transferred: is that what you do with a friend, to a friend, study them? Perhaps so, if they are an exemplar, a truly worthy object of praise, and if study is imitation, patterning yourself on a model. Books might have other identities too, as emissaries, or go-​betweens, or even children, the book as child. Which makes for yet another form of vulnerability: if others know you are my book, he says to his Epigrams, it will be thought that you are bold, licentious, full of gall, Wormewood, and sulphure, sharpe, and tooth’d withall; Become a petulant thing, hurle inke, and wit, As mad-​men stones: not caring whom they hit. Deceive their malice, who could wish it so. (v. 113)

Go little book! as Spenser, and Chaucer, had said before him. Jonson laments that it must be blamed in advance for its author’s sins, or tainted by his reputation; his advice is protective, urging the book somehow to slip its critics, and deceive their malice. (‘Deceive their malice’, a great phrase: it reserves the book’s right to cut its critics without their knowing it.) Should it pass safely into the world, the book will be good company for the understanding reader, however they find each other. Over time, books came to seem the only safety. King Charles never became the patron that James had been, and Jonson suffered some notable reversals in the public theatre, most famously the disastrous premier of The New Inn in 1629. The occasion was memorialized on the title page when the play was printed two years later: ‘As it was never acted, but most negligently play’d by some, the Kings Servants. And more squeamishly beheld, and censured by others, the Kings Subjects. Now, at last, set at liberty to the Readers’ (vi. 177). The audience had appeared dressed ‘in their Clothes of Credit’, ‘To see, and to be seen’ (vi. 179), a corrupt dialectic in which no term is held stable and all is fashion, the fallen form of style. There is no true liberty in the liberties taken by the audience when they interrupt the action or climb onto the stage. True liberty is reserved for the reader, to whom Jonson trusts ‘my self and my Book’, my self as my book, the reader who meets that book as an equal—​or perhaps, as a meal? ‘Fare thee well, and fall too. Read’ (vi. 180). There is a hint of desperation in the way Jonson synthesizes old metaphors of the book into a sympathetic cannibalism. But his excruciations would turn out to have an outsized role to play in the history of the book. Transformations of copyright, over time, made the book the property of the author. Under his hectic

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    543 revolutions of the old tropes, new forces are working. As Loewenstein puts it, ‘A literary culture committed to imitation is undergoing a transformation into a culture fervently committed to such novelty as could be the object of proprietary protections.’39 Style enjoys no such protection, then or now; it is a difficult thing to own for long. Jonson turns to the printed book to protect him from misprision, not from stylistic appropriation. But by that very insistence on the understanding, on the demanding, particular text as a figure for his demanding, particular self, he loosens another tie to a culture of imitation. He is not his style. He is his Workes. His conceptual dependence on the material book as a metaphor participates in these large transformations. If what literature (as we now call it) is no longer style, its identification with the perfected form of the book parallels its identification with figure—​with originalities of metaphor that, in their singularity, their unrepeatability, are friendly to a literary landscape where the author is the source and the source is the owner. Style is defined by its currency, and ratified by imitation; metaphor is defined by its rarity, and copying it is theft, or allusion. Such transformations are slow and ever incomplete and at all events stretch beyond the historical scope of this essay, unfolding over at least the next two hundred years in England. But early modern book-​metaphor gathers importance not only from changes in the book markets, and in the way the book meets its markets, but also from the motion of metaphor itself towards the middle of literary self-​consciousness.

The Book in the Book In the middle of the last century the philosopher Hans Blumenberg proposed terms for what he called a ‘metaphorology’, identifying the ‘absolute metaphors’ that are the ‘foundational elements of philosophical language’. His examples include the prison cell of the soul and the clockwork universe; together they are ‘the catalytic sphere from which the universe of concepts continually renews itself ’.40 Because they are material, made out of bars and gears, metaphors are more historical than concepts, providing the ground on which a history of concepts rests. Surely the book is one such metaphor. In the preceding pages I have barely gestured at one of its most ambitious figurations, the book of the world, not just an absorbing fiction, a second world, but a way of understanding how we bear ourselves towards reality—​as readers, whether of higher truths to which sermons in the stones direct us, or of the empirical mysteries of nature or society. ‘The world’s a book in folio,’ wrote Francis Quarles, early in the seventeenth century, making determined use of the book’s material affordances; ‘Each creature is a page; and each effect | A fair character, void of all defect.’41 Perhaps such projections of the legibility of the world are the summa of all of the lesser or partial figures I have traversed. The one thing the book of the world does not include, however, is the figure of the book as self. Perhaps one must choose between them; a book does not read a book, does it? Both grand tropes had long lives before 1616 and have enjoyed long lives after. But if history was moving, that year, in any general direction, it was towards Jonson’s

544   Jeff Dolven identification with his Workes. His volume, for all the conflictual variety of its contents, is a statement of the book as homo clausus, the man complete and closed, his own private property, the self as book shutting out a world that is other and unlettered and unbound.42 One way to be a writer, and it is a durable way, is to write towards such closure, towards the end of the sentence, or the paragraph, or the poem, the moment when the thought is declared complete. Not to write, that is, for fluency, towards the next letter or the next essay, but to write towards the book. For such a writer—​the writer of Barthes’s ‘classic’—​it is the text, word for word, that travels, in the age of its mechanical reproduction; style is fixed on the printed page.43 Closing the back cover of a book affords the most emphatic of punctuation marks, and the surest relief from the toils of life in the middle. The book as metaphor mostly operates in between the world’s totality and the closed self, across the terrain I have marked out by words like ‘prop’, ‘blind’, ‘food’, and ‘friend’. It will often cross there with metaphors for the book. ‘Book as metaphor’, again, works both ways. When Shakespeare’s Stephano plies Caliban with drink, urging him to ‘Kiss the book’, the book is a metaphor for the bottle, but there is as much to learn about the intoxications of doctrine as about devotion to liquor.44 What is required for such figurative traffic is an object that is both culturally significant and uneasy in its cultural position, that solicits not just definition or paraphrase but the mix of enlightenment and occlusion that is metaphor, metaphor as it answers to the needs of censorship, of sacredness, and of sheer ideological density. To this work the material book offers its infinite affordances. In return, its forms are shaped by the metaphorical work it is asked to do. If the book is taken for a building, the makers of frontispieces will respond with ever more elaborate architectural engravings, as the book strives to live up to or even literalize its changing meanings. The message is the medium. Within these large cultural loops are many smaller ones, peculiar to the places where a book finds its way into a book. They are moments of concentrated material interest for the book historian, often parsing the artefact and its specific affordances. There are things to learn there about the history of the book that need not have anything to do with the history of literature. Such moments are also particularly literary, on that account of literature, articulated by the moderns but so resonant among the early moderns, that emphasizes its reflexivity, how it arises out of the prosaic business of meaning-​making just where the text turns to reflect on itself. Looking into a book inside a book, you look into a mirror that reflects back on your own reading, or into a pool whose surface is partly reflective, partly transparent, playing your features across the features of the surface below the surface. To say as much is to inhabit an account of literature as figuration. For Spenser, such figurations will never satisfy. The Faerie Queene contains no book that can explain The Faerie Queene. For Jonson, the book looks squarely back at its maker, his better mirror, and better than a mirror for being fixed when the face, alas, must move. The early modern book is endlessly engaged in such projects of aspirational self-​recognition, and its metaphors—​what the book stands for, and what stands for the book—​are its way of asking what it is.

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    545

Notes 1. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 2015), 119–​136. 2. ‘Polytemporal’ is a term of art for Bruno Latour; see We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 74. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood develop a cognate concept of the multiple times occupied by a complex object in their Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7–​22. 4. Ben Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), vii. 559. Subsequent citations will be by volume and page number in parentheses in the text; however, I will use the original spelling as it is available in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, which is keyed to the printed edition. On Jonson’s attitude to Spenser, see also Anne Barton, ‘Ben Jonson’, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 411–​412. 5. Elizabeth Chaghafi, ‘Spenser and Book History’, in Paul J. Hecht and J. B. Lethbridge (eds.), Spenser in the Moment (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 67–​102. See also Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Textual History’, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 637–​664, for an account especially of the tradition of imitating Spenser, and Hazel Wilkinson, Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-​Century Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 6. Stephen Galbraith, ‘ “English” Black-​Letter Type and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 13–​40. 7. Stephen Galbraith discusses the debt to the Italian poems in his dissertation, ‘Edmund Spenser and the History of the Book, 1569–​1679’, Ohio State University, 2006, 115. 8. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 38. Subsequent citations by book, canto, and stanza in parentheses in the text. 9. James Kearney gives an account of these ‘girdle books’ as they were used in Protestant iconography to stand for Catholics’ ‘misplaced trust in props of piety’: see The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 100. A chapter on Marlowe treats books as props on stage (140–​141). 10. I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 96. 11. I am following Roman Jakobson’s account in ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 95–​114. See also Harry Berger, Figures of a Changing World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 12. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), V4v. 13. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593), D1v. 14. Peacham, Garden, C1r, D3v. 15. Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes [and] Tropes (London, 1550), C5r; Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London, 1588), B1v. 16. Puttenham, Arte, X4r; Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 714. 17. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 212. 18. Peter Stallybrass discusses the importance of these verses in Ezekiel, and the trope of eating books generally, in ‘Eating the Book, or Why We Need to Digest What We Read’, in Jason

546   Jeff Dolven Scott-​Warren and Andrew Zurcher (eds.), Text, Food, and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words (London: Routledge, 2019), 168–​184. See also Andrew Zurcher’s essay ‘Spenser’s Vomit’ in the same volume, 107–​125, and Kearney, The Incarnate Text, 94–​98. 19. ‘. . . so that becoming part of your own system,’ he continues, ‘it gives the impression . . . of something that springs from your own mental processes’. Erasmus, Ciceronianus, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–​), vi. 441. 20. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 58–​186, and Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 21. Jennifer Summit discusses the relation between memory, history, book, and library in her Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 121–​130. 22. William Sherman, Used Books: Making Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. xvi. 23. Penelope Meyers Usher discusses the relation between the sortes and readerly practices of annotation and commonplacing in ‘ “Pricking in Virgil”: Early Modern Prophetic Phronesis and the Sortes Virgilianae’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45/​3 (Sept. 2015), 557–​571. 24. Mary and Sir Philip Sidney, The Sidney Psalter, ed. Hannibal Hamlin et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 269. 25. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ii: Dr Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 20. 26. Kenneth Gross, ‘Books in the Faerie Queene’, in Hamilton (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia, 104. 27. Alberto Manguel surveys the tradition of writing as sailing in a study that traverses a wide expanse of book metaphor, in The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 32–​38. 28. Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 235. 29. Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 714. 30. Andrew Zurcher, ‘Printing The Faerie Queene in 1590’, Studies in Bibliography, 57/​1 (2005), 115–​150. Elizabeth Chaghafi summarizes the textual history and the history of scholarly argument in ‘Spenser and Book History’, 67–​99. 31. James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995), 81. 32. Ovid, Ouids Metamorphosis Englished, mythologiz’d, and represented in figures, trans. George Sandys (London, 1632), 2L2v. Riddell and Stewart identify and discuss the reference in Jonson’s Spenser, 83–​86. 33. D. H. Craig (ed.), Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1990), 69. 34. Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119. 35. Roland Barthes, S/​Z, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 5. My ellipses leave out Barthes’s claim that the writerly text is also ‘writing without style’; but style on his account is any preconception of how the text should move and sound, and it lacks the humanists’ governing interest in imitation. What he objects to in style is arguably closer to genre. 36. Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, 1.

The Early Modern Book as Metaphor    547 37. See Regis Debray’s excellent essay, ‘The Book as Symbolic Object’, in Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 139–​151. Alastair Fowler discusses Jonson’s frontispiece in detail in The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title Pages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 115–​126. He points out that while it evokes a triumphal arch, and has often been so described, it is ‘more like a pegme or pageant frame using architectural elements decoratively’ (116). 38. John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (New York: Modern Libarry, 2007), 930. 39. Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, 85–​86. 40. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 3, 4. 41. Quarles’s lines are quoted in Ernst Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 323. Curtius offers a substantial treatment of this absolute metaphor across its medieval origins and its gradual, but ever incomplete, secularization. 42. The notion of homo clausus, ‘the individual as . . . a little world in himself who ultimately exists quire independently of the greater world outside’, is Norbert Elias’s; see The Civilizing Process (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 472. What might Elias’s concept owe to the absolute metaphor (in Blumenberg’s phrase) of the closed book? 43. Richard C. Newton likens Ben Jonson to Barthes’s ‘classic’ author in a superb article, ‘Jonson and the (Re-​)Invention of the Book’, in Ted-​Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers (eds.), Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 31–​55. He also makes a telling comparison to Spenser: ‘Summarily, the reader Jonson has in mind is a philologist, not an allegorist’ (40). 44. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 149.

Select Bibliography Barthes, Roland, S/​Z, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Berger, Harry Jr., Figures of a Changing World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Blumenberg, Hans, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Debray, Regis, ‘The Book as Symbolic Object’, in Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 139–​151. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 2015). Jakobson, Roman, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Loewenstein, Joseph, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Manguel, Alberto, The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Pa rt I V

U SI N G B O OK S Reading and Marking, Collecting and Preserving

CHAPTER 29

Past, Present, a nd Fu t u re Early Modern Collections and the Work of a Curator Caroline Duroselle-​M elish

Libraries are often perceived as fixed and immutable places, but the reality could not be more different. Libraries are living organisms in constant evolution. Their physical spaces regularly change, their collections expand (or shrink), and their practices and services constantly grow. Far from being impervious to the wider world, libraries react and strive to adjust. They have to predict future user trends. Their work requires evaluation and agency. Such cultural institutions are currently going through transformations that are technical, structural, and societal in nature. Within this context, it is worth asking: what does it mean to develop and manage a collection, especially a collection of early modern books? What changes are happening in and around these libraries and how do they impact this work? Curators, traditionally, are those who oversee the development and care of collections: this chapter reflects on the nature of curatorial work in the early 2020s, the activities it entails, and how these activities are changing. The chapter is based on personal experience, that of a curator of early modern books and prints at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, who previously worked with modern and premodern collections in academic and independent research libraries. Although the chapter considers current trends within the profession (librarians have never been so connected and have never shared their experiences as much as they do today), its focus is on early printed books, produced in the West, within a North American context. Compared to many libraries, which are the sum of multiple collections with items from different time periods on specific themes, the scope of Folger Shakespeare Library’s collections shows a remarkable coherence. At its centre are materials from the 1500s to the early 1700s mostly produced in England but also on the Continent, and from the 1720s on, material related to Shakespeare’s works. They include a wide range of items beyond printed texts such as manuscripts, archival collections, graphic arts, photographs, artwork, and realia.

552   Caroline Duroselle-Melish

Collections and Library Staff A library collection does not take care of itself: it takes staff, time, and money. When it is not cared for, it is at risk of falling into oblivion, eventually to be dispersed through either sale or other means. Only collections that are nurtured flourish. Curators rely on different types of activities for such nurturing: the acquisitions of material, the support and promotion of use of the collection, and oversight of the items’ physical care. Curatorial activities vary depending on the institution, its mission, its financial situation, and its institutional setting. In libraries with large acquisitions budgets, curators spend a significant part of their time buying items for the collections. In others, they may devote more time to outreach and contextualizing their collections to the public. Not all institutions have a conservation department on-​site, many libraries share resources with other local collections. These different situations have an impact on how curators conceive of their work with collections. The history and role of cultural institutions also vary from one country to another, and this has an impact on how curatorial responsibilities are defined. Curators, whose training is increasingly diverse, bring different skills and knowledge to their job, but it would be wrong to think that they work single-​handedly. The care of a collection involves acquisitions librarians, cataloguers, reference librarians, conservators, photographers/​digitization specialists, and administrators. Through their work with all these different people, curators acquire a broad view of their collections. In the past, some curators carried out their tasks in splendid isolation, and made decisions with little explanation or documentation. Some institutions still live with the consequences of these practices, which are thankfully no longer viable, but this may partly explain why the curator’s role remains obscure to many.

Constantly in Flux: Past, Present, Future It is the fate of libraries to be in constant motion, surfing between the past, present, and future. One the greatest challenges when developing a collection is to remain aware of this, as the present, with its imperatives, tends to obscure concerns about both past and future. Yet libraries live with and must deal with the legacy of collections based on past priorities, and decisions made in the present shape the future of collections. While collections came to include a wide range of textual and visual items produced at different periods of times, hierarchies of format and text were established. Printed books often displaced to the periphery the many other types of materials included in the same space. This hierarchical framework has had wide-​ranging effects for the management

The Work of a Curator    553 of collections. For many decades, the early English pre-​1640 book collection at the Folger Library was highlighted as the most distinctive collection of the library. This resulted in its separate treatment from other collections and most noticeably in its early cataloguing. By contrast, the manuscripts and art collections started being catalogued only in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Much greater attention is being paid now to all material found in special collections libraries. The view of what is a printed item has also expanded to include pamphlets and ephemera so that they are no longer ruled out of curatorial decisions. Boundaries between formats are being revisited as well, for example, with the growing interest in hybrid volumes made of both printed and manuscript material.1 The Folger Library has established guidelines to describe equally all parts of these volumes.2 It is now understood that many of these items were physically separated by librarians, book collectors, or dealers. The Folger Library holds printed and manuscript pamphlets that were separated from their volumes by a Folger bookbinder in the 1950s.3 Hidden collections in libraries are the results of library decisions, which were far from neutral. While libraries try to correct past biases, they need to be aware of their own prejudices towards collection material, some of which will be found problematic by their successors.4

Acquisitions: Beyond the ‘Glamour’ Acquiring rare material for a collection is often perceived as a glamorous activity and is rarely understood. Much prestige, indeed, lies in a position with ‘purchasing power’. The reality, though, is less glamorous than it appears: buying books is a serious matter that has a major impact on a collection and its institution. Acquisitions nourish a collection by strengthening or expanding particular areas. In the process, they shed new light on extant collection items that may have gone unnoticed until then and forge links between existing holdings. The era of large acquisitions that marked the development of American libraries before and after the Second World War is over. There is little chance that the Folger Library will ever be able to acquire another collection the size of Sir Robert Leicester Harmsworth’s; it included over 10,000 English books printed between 1475 and 1640 including over sixty titles printed by Wynken de Worde.5 This acquisition, made in 1938, had a transforming impact on the library, which moved overnight from being centred on Shakespeare and Shakespeariana to becoming one of the major collections on early modern British culture. Later the scope of acquisitions was expanded to include English books up to 1750 and pre-​1700 material from the Continent. Today, there are still plenty of early modern materials available on the market, but these are mostly sold individually rather than in collections and they can command high prices. Even institutions with substantial acquisition budgets rarely acquire the quantities of early modern items their predecessors did.6

554   Caroline Duroselle-Melish Donations also play a significant role in the development of collections and building relationships with future donors is an important part of the curator’s job. Donations can both expand and develop collections. The Folger Library was thus able to take its large collection of early drama in a new direction with the gift of Armida Maria-​Theresa Colt’s collection of festival books in 1975.7 Later, in 1994, the collection of early modern herbals, both English and Continental, was developed thanks to the donation of Mary Massey’s collection.8 Whatever comes into the library is inevitably somewhat subjective, shaped by the selector’s knowledge and expertise, but acquisitions should be within the framework of a collection-​development policy. This is intended to be a road map, with the approval stamp of the institution, for those acquiring material and explaining to the interested public the reasons behind their selection. It needs to be regularly revisited as interests and priorities change. The collection-​development policy is also a document that aids future generations in understanding why and how previous choices have been made.

The Book Trade: Relationships, Prices, and Provenance Cultivating good relationships with book dealers is an important part of the acquisition process. It is, indeed, through the book trade (dealers and auction houses) that many acquisitions of early modern material are made.9 The job of booksellers is to find material, a time-​consuming task that requires sifting through many thousands of books every year to select perhaps only a few hundred to offer to collectors and librarians.10 As a result what they offer is preselected in line with the dealer’s reading of the current institutional and private market. Curators choose what they purchase only to a certain degree since they can only acquire what is offered. Some libraries maintain lists of desired books they wish to acquire but there is no guarantee they will ever be able to do so. Moreover, purchasing books that one has no prior knowledge of is often more valuable. Curators are also limited by their budgets, which are not always sufficiently competitive to purchase items at high prices. The market is demand-​led but private collectors lead the demand—​especially for high spots—​more often than institutional ones do. Book dealers now send advance copies of their catalogues to some of their customers. Some of them (mostly North American) also send individual quotes in addition to catalogues and lists. Curators, however, should not consider only ‘pre-​ packaged’ selections. They need to leave space for discovery through the browsing of catalogues. They also need to set their own standards for what they will or will not acquire. A much wider range of books is now available on services such as eBay and AbeBooks.com but the quality of what is on offer and the level and accuracy of description vary greatly: curators need to understand what they are looking at to be able to vet the books they order.

The Work of a Curator    555 Catalogues or lists from booksellers remain the standard source, although their format is changing as dealers publish fewer paper catalogues and more e-​lists. Some booksellers are also using social media to advertise their items. Likewise auction houses are increasingly moving to the online catalogues and auctions.11 Cataloguing standards in professional dealers’ catalogues have improved in recent decades. Their descriptions contain similar bibliographical information to cataloguing records but their ultimate goal is to sell books. It is therefore essential for curators to be able to decipher this information and understand why some descriptive points have been included and others have not. Having knowledge of bibliographical description and an understanding of book production is necessary for this evaluation. The greater use of images made possibly by online catalogues is a bonus but cannot displace understanding booksellers’ descriptions—​and using one’s knowledge and experience to read between the lines. More broadly, though, the process of reading dealers’ descriptions is a way to engage with and learn about books, and eventually better understand the collections one works with. Books are complex objects. Their content can be interpreted in multiple ways and their physical features can be misunderstood. Our understanding of their fabric, distribution, and reception keeps evolving, yet it is not unusual to run into ‘enigmatic marks, whose significance may not currently be recognized’.12 It is essential to not neglect these traces and to keep an open mind about them when noticing them in an item for sale. Book education is a never-​ending task. The examination of books in person is essential to understanding what one is about to purchase or has purchased. North American curators used to spend most of their acquisitions budget on buying trips to the British Isles and the Continent, visiting bricks-​and-​mortar bookshops. While most institutions regretfully no longer support such visits, curators still have a chance to look at items in person at book fairs or during dealers’ visits. The importance of the physical condition of a book can vary greatly. Purchasing an item in poor condition may require it to receive conservation treatment after its acquisition in order to be used and preserved. The cost of conservation work needs to be factored in when considering an item for purchase. There are numerous cases, though, when it is worthwhile to acquire an item despite its fragility. Its poor condition may even be desirable when it reveals material evidence otherwise hidden, such as a binding structure. It can also be valuable to acquire incomplete books or fragments when these are the sole remnants of a text or document the existence of a printed edition.13 What is perceived as poor condition is also positive when it means that evidence of ownership or use has not been lost in rebinding. Unfortunately, book dealers often prefer to offer tidy-​looking books and may employ binders who do not work to the same standards as library conservators. Curators therefore increasingly prefer books that have not been rebound or restored. Later bindings are part of the history of an item and can reveal collecting histories or changes in taste.14 Yet, they are the result of a destruction process and their existence indicates that part of the earlier life of a book has been erased. As Roger Stoddard has remarked, ‘rare is the binder who has deliberately preserved historical evidence’.15

556   Caroline Duroselle-Melish However, some items are difficult to find in their premodern condition and collections have to make do with later modifications. Pamphlets, for example, were commonly bound or rebound in the nineteenth century, and rarely appear in their original stab-​ stitched state.16 Furthermore, pamphlet volumes are still being broken by dealers, conscious that many library acquisitions policies prevent the acquisition of duplicates that purchasing the unbroken volume might entail. The rarity of a book is often presented as a selling point and can drive up the price. It is a value judgement, which commonly refers to the number of extant copies of a text, a particular feature of a book, and/​or its availability on the market.17 The number of surviving copies is therefore one of the factors determining what is called rare. Some books extant in hundreds of copies are considered rarer than items with only a few surviving copies. The First Folio, with its 235 extant copies recorded, is considered of greater rarity that many items with fewer than ten surviving copies. Clearly many factors account for the status of this book, which frequently reaches record sale prices.18 Electronic search engines now make it possible to check how many copies of a book can be found in library collections. Such tools are not entirely reliable since many printed items have never been accounted for and are not recorded in union catalogues or bibliographies.19 This is especially true of ephemera, which are rarely catalogued, or pamphlets in composite volumes, in which sometimes only the first title has been described. The ‘unique’ has an aura that the multiple has lost and can often help justify a purchase, especially at a time when the texts of many early modern books are available online. Not only manuscripts but also printed books can be unique. A book, indeed, can display unique features related to its printing (for example, a copy with a cancelled leaf not found in other copies, or an error in printing); or related to its history after it left the print shop (its binding, manuscript annotations, and provenance.) More common books and those without unique features should not be rejected. Their merit may be to place other books in a collection in context (for example, one may acquire a printed edition of a text, extant in multiple copies, and pair it with a unique manuscript version of it). Books which have survived in multiple editions tell us something about survival rate, print run, and the history of collecting. Likewise, it can be helpful to collect multiple copies of the same text to better understand the history of its printing, its distribution, and/​or its reception. Such collecting policy is especially desirable for certain types of books, for example writing manuals and pattern books, which often display significant variation in printing features and binding structures from one copy to another. Likewise multiple copies of illustrated books may include different impressions of an image and/​or different images printed or inserted in different places.20 In the 1950s and 1960s, when collections were growing at a fast speed, institutions exchanged or sold to each other duplicates, which were thought to take up unnecessary shelf space.21 Libraries are now much more circumspect with duplicate copies, closely examining them before parting with any. In the pioneering exhibition catalogue Marks in Books, Roger Stoddard inventoried a substantial number of traces left in books by their producers or users.22 Many of the

The Work of a Curator    557 artefactual features he underlined are now regularly included in dealers’ descriptions and contribute to the interest in and value of an item. While dealers have always recorded ownership names and marks by well-​known literary and historical figures, they are now also tracing the names and marks of less famous or even unknown owners or readers. Such inscriptions participate in revealing voices otherwise silent in the printed record, especially those of women. More attention should also be given to the recent provenance of newly acquired books, to record their modern history and help prevent the circulation of stolen or forged items.23 For this, the curator needs to ask the dealer from whom an item was purchased and ensure that its acquisition information is included in the catalogue record. Libraries need the collaboration of dealers in this endeavour. Some of them see requests about the provenance of their books as a threat to their business; all book dealers, though, should ensure that their records are preserved for future book-​ history research.

Reviewing Collections through a Social Justice Lens The current social justice movement has brought to the forefront the need to work more actively to uncover and highlight the presence of non-​elite people, women, and minoritized communities in collections. While books by or about women used to be actively sought out by only a few dealers, collectors, and libraries, they now regularly command special issues of catalogues.24 Much work has already unearthed a substantial number of documents on women and non-​elite people, but much remains to be done to bring to light the presence of minoritized communities in library collections.25 Some subjects involving multiple diverse actors—​such as food history—​may be especially helpful to do this.26 Acquiring early modern printed books in these fields will most likely represent an increasing part of acquisitions in many libraries. Different information, though, is recorded in manuscript sources: records of private lives, legal, and administrative decisions not intended for wide dissemination are much more likely to be found in manuscript documents than in printed ones. It will be essential to examine and acquire a multiplicity of documents in different formats to recover the histories of these communities. Curators may also be required to adopt a new approach to finding books and manuscripts of interest. This is, indeed, a collecting area where buying only what one is already familiar with will not help and taking a chance on something without the guarantee of discovery may be an important step towards this goal. Acquiring items with early modern artefactual authenticity may also be a means to recovering evidence about overlooked communities. Social bias is indeed inscribed in the materiality of books. Books bound to the tastes of wealthy nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century collectors may previously have been the property of much more modest owners. That is why poor or incomplete copies overlooked or rejected by

558   Caroline Duroselle-Melish collectors can be significant. Manuscript inscriptions in books may reveal a former woman owner. Ephemera—​such as games, broadsides, and ballads—​can shed light on socio-​cultural practices that are widely shared and otherwise invisible. These emerging acquisition priorities stress the importance of exploring existing collections. A recent example is the discovery of Mary Astell’s books with her annotations in the Old Library, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge.27 Uncovering the presence of non-​elite people, women, and minoritized communities in collections will also entail shifting cataloguing and conservation priorities to make these items more accessible to the public.

Outreach: Working with the Public Acquiring books is not the only way to develop a collection. Ensuring that it is used by a wide public greatly contributes to its enrichment too. Until a few decades ago, access to rare material was limited to a rigorously vetted group of academic researchers, graduate students, sometimes undergraduates, and a limited number of members of the general public. Many special collections libraries used to require that people had an advanced degree or a strong justification to use their collections.28 A dramatic shift has brought institutions to open their doors, physically and virtually, to an increasingly broad segment of the population. For many libraries, this sea change was due to the mounting administrative pressure requiring them to justify their existence at a time when their traditional readership was in decline. It is now commonly understood that the short-​ and long-​term futures of collections, and more broadly of the humanities, depend on reaching out to a more diverse public. This open-​access movement has been gradual. Libraries first directed their outreach toward college and pre-​college students, and their instructors. They are now reaching out to the public at large, until recently mostly ignored. This evolution is not over. It is likely that future audiences of special collections libraries will be increasingly diverse and evenly made up of professionals and non-​professionals using collections for work and for educational and recreational projects. Within this context, outreach has become a central part of curators’ and library staff ’s work. Some curators have seen their titles changed, for example to ‘Curator and Outreach Librarian’ or ‘Collections and Discovery Manager’, to reflect the centrality of these activities in their positions. Their role is to help contextualize collection material for various audiences and help ensure that early modern books are relevant to all. Retaining traditional users is as important as attracting new ones, especially at a time when researchers, who remain the ‘super-​users’ of rare material, are seeing their sources of funding to conduct research in libraries drying up. Library outreach can also broaden the identity of collections and highlight material overlooked in the past to help readers refine their own assessment of a library’s collections.29 The phrase ‘use of collections’ covers a wide range of interactions with

The Work of a Curator    559 early modern material, far from being limited to the consultation of books in a reading room. As a matter of fact, for most people, the first, and sometimes the only, encounter with collection items is virtual rather than in person. Promoting collections, therefore, includes reaching out to users in the digital environment via social media, blogs, digitization projects, and library catalogues. Curators and other library staff are increasingly active on social media and blogs to promote the collections they work with. These tools are an efficient way to reach out to a broad segment of the early modern book community and to publicize current library work or specific items. Curators are also involved in digitization projects; they can initiate them, participate in grant proposal writings, and select and interpret material for these programmes. Digitization projects range from the specific (sometimes a focus on a few books) with a scholarly apparatus to the general.30 Many increasingly call on the public’s participation and expertise, and, in the process, they are changing the nature of interaction with library users. With crowd-​sourcing projects, users participate in the workings of a library and contribute to making a collection more visible and accessible. The project Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) is a successful example of such community-​based work, including participants with diverse backgrounds who have transcribed thousands of early modern English manuscript pages.31 Other programmes transcribe printed texts such as broadsides and playbills.32 Yet, these projects also face major challenges in sustaining users’ interest and maintaining long-​term financial support. In the future, the participation of the public in library work will likely take on new forms. Audiences are already playing a significant role in promoting library collections through their own social media postings and digital humanities projects.33 Likewise some libraries, such as the Folger Library, are starting to include in their image database smartphone images of collection items taken by readers as a rapid alternative to more traditionally produced image collections.34 Digitization policies, like acquisition and cataloguing policies, also need to attempt not to re-​enact past biases and to be more concerned with the inclusion of documents on women, non-​elite people, and minoritized communities. A brief survey of texts written by early modern women such as Rachel Speght, Ester Sowerman, and Constantia Munda, for example, shows that their works are not as readily available digitally as the texts of their male critics. Users often gain an inaccurate picture of the bookscape through digitization rather than an accurate reflection of what was published or read. There is also a bias towards high spots and high-​end copies such as coloured copies of sixteenth-​century books, which in reality only represented a minority of books. So far, digitization has mostly focused on providing access to texts and has not always taken into account the artefactual nature of books: the post-​processing of many digital images too often decontextualizes the materiality of books. Numerous library imaging services still do not photograph the bindings and end-​leaves of books. Few systematically include a colour bar and a scale bar in their images. Folded plates are sometimes not opened or omitted altogether by photographers.35 Missing leaves are not readily indicated in the metadata. Digitization is often thought of in terms of assembly-​line

560   Caroline Duroselle-Melish production—​especially by commercial publishers—​and is rarely equipped to accommodate atypical items illustrating the interaction of readers with their books, such as inserted pieces of paper and pressed flowers.36 Many decisions about digitization are made on financial grounds (for example, colour bars are extremely expensive) but end up showing a bias against the materiality of the book. Clearly digital images cannot always be a substitute for in-​person consultation. Besides, although the number of digitized items is growing significantly, it remains a small portion of overall collections in most libraries. Digitization projects complement but do not supplant library catalogues, which remain the primary tool with which to explore a collection. Accessibility to books is partly determined by their description in library catalogues. What is included or omitted in catalogue records impacts their consultation and affects research more broadly. Collections that are not catalogued are not accessible. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges for library catalogues is the various levels of information they include: while some items have detailed catalogue records, others do not, and so are less likely to be accessed and/​or used in research. These differences are not necessarily intentional and reflect past prioritization decisions. The recent decision at the Folger Library to upload preliminary library catalogues with brief descriptions for some of these items acknowledges the fact that it will take years to fully catalogue them.37 This gradual upgrading also stresses the fact that library records are not fixed. Descriptions of early modern books, indeed, can evolve with our understanding of them and interest in copy-​specific information: provenance is recorded, former owners or book practitioners, previously unknown, are identified, a manuscript inscription is transcribed, images in different books are found to be connected, call numbers change, subject headings are added, some are replaced. These differences and changes can be misleading to readers who are not necessarily equipped to navigate the idiosyncrasies of library catalogues. They also have a real impact on the use of collections. Far from being mundane, training sessions by library staff on how to find items in a collection are a necessity. Discussions have recently emerged on the biases inherent in item descriptions.38 As with any type of library work, cataloguing is not a neutral activity. Although there are established practices to describe an early modern book, these leave much space for interpretation. This is clearly illustrated in the shared public catalogue Worldcat where one finds multiple records for the same book.39 Some subject headings have recently caught the attention of the public for being problematic, most famously the Library of Congress’s decision to replace the subject heading ‘illegal aliens’ with ‘undocumented immigrants’.40 The Folger Library and many other libraries now have a statement posted on their website acknowledging the fact that descriptions are not neutral and explaining how they describe documents that have potentially offensive content.41 Some of the methods used include specifying that the harmful language is from the creator or vendor of the document and not the library, using less offensive subject headings approved by the library profession today, and updating older descriptions when they incorporated problematic wording. Such debates underscore the importance of cataloguing descriptions and the role cataloguers play in making collections accessible.

The Work of a Curator    561 In some libraries, curators catalogue the collections they work with; in others, they have little contact with cataloguing departments and even work in separate buildings. Ideally, curators and cataloguers should be in regular communication. Curators have much to learn from the latter, who, through their work of description and interpretation, have an in-​depth knowledge of the items they catalogue. Similar to the necessity of understanding book dealers’ descriptions, curators need to understand cataloguing records and have a basic knowledge of the MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format as well as of cataloguing rules in addition to the principles of bibliographical description. Fully cataloguing an item entails creating a record with its in-​depth description and with access points that will multiply chances for it to be found by users. Communicating with cataloguers helps understand how time-​consuming such a task is, and how it should be factored into the total cost of acquiring and caring for an item.42 While some audiences only interact with early modern collections online, others get into contact with them through class presentations and in-​person tours. Curators, with their colleagues, regularly teach students and the general public. These programmes are an opportunity to demystify early modern items—​often perceived as intimidating due to their aura and/​or high monetary value—​by highlighting their materiality. In addition, they help the public understand that books are not simply virtual but are also actual objects that need to be preserved for future use. Finally, by moving away from the idea of library ‘treasures’, they can introduce audiences to a wide range of collection material including non-​canonical items, rich in meaning. Ideally in-​person presentations should entice audiences to make their own discoveries whether online or in the reading room and should help form the next generation of library users.43 Libraries are currently learning about patterns of use in the reading room. While they understand the impact that descriptions have on people’s ability to find items, they are still trying to assess which collections are used by readers and how. Recent research in the Folger collections indicates that even when a collection is well known and well described, only a portion of its items are accessed, and within this group, some books are requested multiple times while others are consulted only once or twice. The collection of pre-​1640 English books, which is fully catalogued, is one of the book collections most heavily used at the Folger Library.44 Yet only 3 per cent of the pre-​1640 English books accounted for over half of the use of this collection at the Folger Library over a two-​year period. Clearly not all items have the same status and get the same type of use. One explanation for this is the ‘star system’: some books are read and examined with much closer attention than others. It is worth asking, though, why 60 per cent of the pre-​1640 collection was not used during the same period. It is doubtful that this lack of consultation is the result of a thoughtful selection and elimination process. Much is at play in these various attitudes, including the lack of time to properly explore a collection, but our current understanding of books and what we consider of interest (such as the intense focus on first editions, and a lack of interest in later ones, although they constitute a significant portion of collection stacks) may also factor in. The changing focus in literary studies from authorship to readership should promote more interest in later editions, more accurately reflecting the actual audience for a text.

562   Caroline Duroselle-Melish Librarians’ outreach is supposed to shed light on as many items as possible, but librarians are also caught in the ‘star system’. The temptation looms large to display the same books over and over again, especially when there is little time for preparation. How can we decentralize our attention from a few items? How can we expand our accidental discovery process? Exhibition programmes are a way to interact visually with audiences and get them interested in collection materials. While they used to cater to a limited and socio-​ culturally homogeneous audience, they are now geared towards a diverse public with wide-​ranging interests and different levels of understanding of the early modern world. For many years, exhibition preparation was perceived as an auxiliary library activity. To this day, few institutions think of their exhibitions, no matter how sophisticated these are, as one of their core missions as museums do, and they rarely invest sufficient resources to support these programmes. But exhibitions are essential to the new focus on outreach, inclusion, and the reinterpretation of collections. Exhibitions need to be both informative and entertaining. They also need to place items in context so that all visitors can connect with what is on display. Content and display are crucial to achieve these goals. Finding an exhibition theme the public will engage with is necessary for the success of the event but selecting books that are fit for display is also important. As Roger Stoddard has written, ‘Some books speak for themselves, others need prompting, most must have their lines written for them.’45 Some of their characteristics (for example, their text written in a foreign language or in a hand difficult to read) may deter the public from them, while others (for example, images and artefactual features) may help make them more appealing. Unlike many museum objects, most books were never created to be on display other than closed upright or flat on a bookshelf. Although their shape is highly functional for the activity of reading, it provides little flexibility for exhibition and makes it difficult to show more than one opening at a time. More creative thinking needs to be invested into the display of books, which are rarely shown in an attractive and meaningful way. Their presentation, indeed, remains too often thought of only in relation to the function of turning pages, similar to their setting for consultation in the reading room, which obviously does not happen in an exhibition case. Likewise, more efforts need to be put into virtual library exhibitions, which often follow the same static template from one exhibition to another. Here again more support needs to be invested in such projects. The public will increasingly expect to be able to browse a virtual exhibition before committing to go and visit it in person. Some people’s only interaction with the exhibited items will be online.

Preservation and Access Libraries are cultural heritage institutions and have a responsibility to preserve the material that belongs to them. In the past, the physical care of collections was often associated with keeping books away from readers, who were perceived as posing

The Work of a Curator    563 potential danger to the items. But in fact collection items have more chance of being damaged in the stacks than in the reading room, from the result of poor environmental conditions, poor storage facilities, and invasive conservation treatment. Moreover, libraries have participated in the destruction of artefactual evidence of items by disbinding and rebinding books and manuscripts, separating plates from their books, varnishing bindings, and so on. Preservation studies demonstrate that a good environment is key for the long-​term care of collections.46 Inadequate temperature control, high levels of humidity, water damage, pests, and the wrong kind of light, among other things, can seriously damage collections. Regular cleaning, dusting, and proper shelving of books, far from being mundane, are necessary maintenance tasks. Poor storage conditions impact the accessibility of collections. As the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States has stated, ‘good stewardship of cultural resources requires equal attention to both preservation and access’.47 But while much effort and money have been invested in outreach programs, libraries are not always successful at obtaining robust funding for conservation and preservation projects. As mentioned earlier, not all institutions have their own conservation and preservation department, and many share resources with multiple libraries. Conservators, like cataloguers, are faced with long lists of items awaiting their attention. Curators participate in the selection of items to be treated and are regularly involved in discussing with conservators the potential treatments for these items. Use is the main principle of selection for immediate treatment whether it is for an exhibition, digitization, or consultation in the reading room. If not perfect, this criterion yet allows for a broad selection based on actual use instead of a presumed one. It also leaves conservators with little time to work on other parts of collections, which also require their attention although less immediately. In order to address these backlogs, conservators are changing their approach by prioritizing stabilization over full treatment, allowing for more items to be preserved. This approach may also better preserve access to binding structures and ephemeral evidence of use. Through discussion with conservators, curators learn a lot about collection items, including the importance of binding structures, which have a history, like the text-​block of a book. Knowing more about bindings can help curators better understand items’ production and circulation. Preserving any parts of their structure (threads, pieces of paper or leather, and so on) is as important as preserving other artefactual evidence for future research. Handling a book often has a small and, therefore, invisible impact on it. Although early modern books often have sturdier structures than modern ones, their current condition is the result of numerous factors including how old they are, the storage conditions in which they have lived, and the frequency with which they have been handled over the years. Early modern English books seem to have suffered from water damage as a result of the wet climate of the British Isles and of the leaking roofs under which they were stored more frequently than their southern Continental counterparts.

564   Caroline Duroselle-Melish Numerous library activities require a balance between accessibility and preservation that is sometimes difficult to reach. Such challenges occur with the consultation of items in the reading room, in group presentations, but also with items being digitized or placed on display. Although digitization is often thought of in conjunction with preservation, items can be damaged in this process. Likewise, displaying items may mean they are exposed to light for an extended period of time, which can have long-​term effects on their condition. Readers and library staff need to feel fully responsible for the care of the collections they work with. They also need regular training to help them be aware of the impact of their actions; in this way they can make better-​informed decisions and judgements. Preservation awareness will play a major role in the care of collections for future generations.

Past, Present, Future: Towards a More Holistic View of a Collection within Collections The number of activities sustaining the development of collections has increased in the past decades. The nature of this work has also changed. It now focuses as much on the collections as on those consulting them. The forms of consultation have themselves expanded and now happen both virtually and in person. Collections, which used to be consulted solely for work, are increasingly used for recreational and personal projects. The public is diversifying and growing. Providing collection accessibility to these wide-​ranging audiences in a variety of ways has become a central activity of curators and their colleagues. These changes are not over as users are increasingly becoming collaborators and are sharing their work and expertise to promote collections. The attention curators pay to the collections they work with gives them the opportunity to reflect on past decisions and their impact on the present condition of collections. Some of the decisions they are currently making consist in adjusting and correcting past trajectories. Likewise, they should be aware that their decisions—​based on current book knowledge, and institutional and societal needs—​impact the future of collections and may need some correcting and updating too. Their work on overlooked documents and communities will most likely grow in significance and will concern all areas of curatorial activities: acquisitions, accessibility (both virtual and physical), preservation and conservation. The constant development of our understanding of books will also have an impact on the future of the collections we work with. Regularly thinking about, and in a certain way predicting, future trends will help ensure the future development of collections. While effective collaboration is increasing among the different departments within individual libraries, much work needs to be done to improve collaboration between

The Work of a Curator    565 libraries which are facing similar challenges. Sharing resources and expertise between cultural institutions is most likely the only path forward at a time when their funding is not increasing at the same pace as their expenses.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Roger Gaskell for his valuable comments on early drafts of this chapter. This essay has also benefited from discussions with my colleagues at the Folger Shakespeare Library, especially Elizabeth DeBold, Renate Mesmer, Michael Witmore, and Heather Wolfe.

Notes 1. See David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–​ 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 21–​53. 2. ‘Hybrid Material’, Folgerpedia, last modified 6 Apr. 2020, https://​folg​erpe​dia.fol​ger.edu/​ Hybr​id_​m​ater​ial. 3. Caroline Duroselle-​Melish, ‘Anatomy of a Pamphlet Collection: From Disbinding to Reuniting’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society, 11/​2 (June 2017), 192. 4. See Marika Cifor on bias in archival practices, ‘Affecting Relations: Introducing Affect Theory to Archival Discourse’, Archival Science: International Journal on Recorded Information, 16 (Mar. 2016), 7–​31. 5. Duroselle-​Melish, ‘Anatomy’, 187–​189. 6. By contrast, institutions with modern material regularly acquire large collections of modern papers. 7. Laura Hull Cofield, The Festive Renaissance: Illustrated Books from the Colt Collection (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995). 8. Folger Shakespeare Library, The Grete herball: Books from the Collection of Mary P. Massey (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, [1988]). 9. Michele Kohler, ‘The British Trade and Institutional Libraries’, in Giles Mandelbrote (ed.), Out of Print & into Profit: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the Twentieth Century (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006), 177–​185. 10. Independent specialist booksellers offer about 250 books a year. My thanks to David Rueger and Roger Gaskell for this information. 11. Some auction houses, such as Sotheby’s, are now running sales entirely online similarly to eBay. 12. My thanks to Roger Gaskell for having shared with me the text of his unpublished paper ‘Why Collect Books in Original Condition and Contemporary Bindings?’ 13. See Kathryn James and Aaron Pratt, Collated and Perfect (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2019), 25–​45. 14. See e.g. Frank Mowery, ‘The Bindings of the Folger’s First Folios’, in Owen Williams (ed.), with Caryn Lazzuri, Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2011).

566   Caroline Duroselle-Melish 15. Roger Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1985), 2. 16. Duroselle-​Melish, ‘Anatomy’, 191. 17. For a definition of ‘rarity’, see John Carter, ABC for Book Collectors (6th edn.), rev. Nicolas Barker (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 1992), 170–​172. 18. On the most recent First Folio sale, see ‘The Greatest Work of the English Language’, Christie’s, accessed 31 May 2021, www.christ​ies.com/​featu​res/​Shak​espe​are-​First-​Folio-​ 10307-​7.aspx. See also David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 19. The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), for example, does not include playbills: ‘About the English Short Title Catalogue’, accessed 31 May 2021, http://​estc.bl.uk. 20. Ilaria Andreoli, Caroline Duroselle-​ Melish, and Roger Gaskell, ‘The Comedy of Errors: Misprinting Illustrated Books’, in Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet (eds.), Oxford Companion on Printing and Misprinting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). 21. In the 1950s, for example, the Folger Library exchanged with and sold books to the Huntington and the Clark libraries. See also Duroselle-​Melish, ‘Anatomy’, 193. 22. Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained. 23. I am grateful for Roger Gaskell sharing his thoughts on the subject in an email correspondence from June 2020. 24. On Lisa Baskin’s outstanding book collection on women now at Duke University, see Naomi L. Nelson, Lauren Reno, and Lisa Unger Baskin (eds.), Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection (New York: Grolier Club, 2019). See also Alex Erdmann, My Gracious Silence: Women in the Mirror of Sixteenth-​Century Printing in Western Europe (Lucerne: Gilhofer & Ranschburg, 1999). The latter collection is now at the Beinecke Library. 25. See Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–​1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 26. See e.g. the Folger exhibition organized in 2019, ‘First Chefs: Fame and Foodways from Britain to the Americas’, Folgerpedia, last revised 11 Jan. 2021, https://​folg​erpe​dia.fol​ger. edu/​Firs​t_​Ch​efs:_​Fame_​and_​Foodways_​f​rom_​Brit​ain_​to_​t​he_​A​meri​cas 27. ‘Ahead of Her Time’, University of Cambridge, accessed 31 May 2021, www.cam.ac.uk/​stor​ ies/​mary-​ast​ell-​col​lect​ion-​magdal​ene-​coll​ege 28. Until recently, the Folger Library had stringent admission requirements, ‘Applying for a Reader Card’, Folgerpedia, last updated 13 Apr. 2017, https://​folg​erpe​dia.fol​ger.edu/​App​ lyin​g_​fo​r_​a_​read​er_​c​ard 29. Outreach at the Folger Library, for example, includes highlighting the extensive collection of early modern Continental books overlooked in the past. 30. The Folger Library includes a range of digitization projects from those focusing on a few books, ‘DYI Quarto’, Folger Shakespeare Library, www.fol​ger.edu/​pub​lish​ing-​shak​espe​are/​ diy-​qua​rto, to the image database Luna, https://​luna.fol​ger.edu, both accessed 21 May 2021. 31. Whitney Sperrazza, ‘Early Modern Manuscripts Online’, Renaissance and Reformation /​ Renaissance et Réforme, 43/​2 (Spring 2020), 335–​338, https://​doi.org/​10.33137/​rr.v43i2.34826. 32. See e.g. ‘‘Philadelphia Playbills Project’, www.zoo​nive​rse.org/​proje​cts/​laur​aay/​phila​delp​ hia-​playbi​lls-​proj​ect and ‘Historic Philly Playbills Get Modern Day Crowdsourcing’,

The Work of a Curator    567 University of Pennsylvania, https://​pennto​day.upenn.edu/​news/​phi​lly-​playbi​lls , both accessed 21 May 2021. 33. See e.g. the collaborative blog ‘‘Early Modern Female Book Ownership, #HerBook’, accessed 31 May 2021, https://​ear​lymo​dern​fema​lebo​okow​ners​hip.wordpr​ess.com/​ cont​act/​ 34. Julie Swierczek, ‘Introducing the Folger Reference Image Collection’, 13 Oct. 2020, https://​ collat​ion.fol​ger.edu/​2020/​10/​refere​nce-​image-​col​lect​ion/​ 35. Julie Melby, ‘Unfolding Digital Images’, 28 May 2020, https://​grap​hica​rts.prince​ton.edu/​ 2020/​05/​28/​unfold​ing-​digi​tal-​ima​ges/​ 36. For an example of digitization of plant specimens originally pressed in a book, see https://​ luna.fol​ger.edu/​luna/​serv​let/​s/​54n​q0p. 37. Erin Blake, ‘24,000 “Preliminary” Catalog Records are Better than Nothing!’, 16 Feb. 2021, https://​collat​ion.fol​ger.edu/​2021/​02/​24000-​prel​imin​ary-​cata​log-​reco​rds/​ 38. Alexis A. Antracoli et al., Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia, Anti-​racist Description Resources, accessed 31 May 2021, https://​archiv​esfo​rbla​ckli​ves.files.wordpr​ess.com/​2019/​ 10/​ard​r_​fi​nal.pdf 39. Sixty Worldcat records, for example, are found when searching for John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum, limited to the publishing year of 1640 and the ‘book’ format. 40. The Library of Congress’s decision to remove the subject heading ‘illegal aliens’ was overturned by the Congress in 2016. Most libraries, though, no longer use it. My thanks to Julie Swierczek for having pointed out this case to me. ALA CD 44 Resolution on replacing the Library of Congress Subject Heading ‘Illegal aliens’ with ‘Undocumented immigrants’, American Library Association, accessed 31 May 2021, www.ala.org/​about​ala/​sites/​ala. org.about​ala/​files/​cont​ent/​ALA%20CD%2044%20Res​olut​ion%20on%20re​plac​ing%20 the%20Libr​ary%20of%20C​ongr​ess%20Subj​ect%20Head​ing%20Ille​gal%20ali​ens%20w​ ith%20U​ndoc​umen​ted%20i​mmig​rant​s_​0.pdf 41. See ‘Folger Shakespeare Library Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Collection Description’, last updated 15 Dec. 2020, https://​ham​net.fol​ger.edu/​other/​statem​ent.htm 42. Chela Scott Weber et al., Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections (Dublin, OH: OCLC Research 2021) https://​doi.org/​ 10.25333/​zbh0-​a044. 43. Leah Tether and Laura Chuhan Campbell, ‘Early Book Collections and Modern Audiences: Harnessing the Identity/​ies of Book Collections as Collective Resources’, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 21/​ 1 (Spring 2020), 37–​38. 44. Based on the Folger circulation database Aeon, 40 per cent of the STC books have been ‘checked out’ between Sept. 2017 and Dec. 2019. My thanks to Michele Silverman for this information. 45. Roger Stoddard, ‘The Challenge of Rare Books’, AB Bookman’s Weekly: for the Specialist Book World, 21 Apr. 1984, 6. 46. Anna E. Bülow, ‘Collection Management Using Preservation Risk Assessment’, Journal of the Institute of Conservation, 33/​1 (2010), 65–​78. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​194552​2090​ 3509​960 47. ‘Division of Preservation and Access’, National Endowment for the Humanities, accessed 31 May 2021, https://​www.neh.gov/​divisi​ons/​prese​rvat​ion

568   Caroline Duroselle-Melish

Select Bibliography Antracoli, Alexis A., Berdini, Annalise, Bolding, Kelly, Charlton, Faith, and Ferrara, Amanda, Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia, Anti-​racist Description Resources, accessed 31 May 2021, https://​archiv​esfo​rbla​ckli​ves.files.wordpr​ess.com/​2019/​10/​ard​r_​fi​nal.pdf. Association of College and Research Libraries. ACRL Code of Ethics for Special Collections Librarians, 2020, https://​rbms.info/​standa​rds/​cod​e_​of​_​eth​ics/​. Carter, John, ABC for Book Collectors (9th edn.), rev. Nicolas Barker and Simran Thadani (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2016). Habib, Imtiaz, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–​ 1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). James, Kathryn, and Pratt, Aaron, Collated and Perfect (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2019). Knight, Jeffrey Todd, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). McKitterick, David, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–​ 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). McKitterick, David, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Mandelbrote Giles (ed.), Out of Print & into Profit: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the Twentieth Century (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006). Nelson, Naomi L., Reno, Lauren, and Baskin, Lisa Unger (eds.), Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection (New York: The Grolier Club, 2019). Stoddard, Roger, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1985). Sperrazza, Whitney, ‘Early Modern Manuscripts Online’, Renaissance and Reformation /​ Renaissance et Réforme, 43/​2 (Spring 2020), 335–​338, https://​doi.org/​10.33137/​rr.v43i2.34826. Tether, Leah, and Campbell, Laura Chuhan, ‘Early Book Collections and Modern Audiences: Harnessing the Identity/​ies of Book Collections as Collective Resources’, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 21/​1 (Spring 2020): 37–​38. Weber, Chela Scott, Conway, Martha O’Hara, Martin, Nicholas, Stevens, Gioia, and Kamsler, Brigette, Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections (Dublin, OH: OCLC Research 2021) https://​doi.org/​10.25333/​zbh0-​Na044.

CHAPTER 30

Self-​R eading B o ok s Marginalia, Prosopopoeia, and Book History Emma Smith

The story of the recent transformation of bibliography is a familiar one. Crucial to the new book history is an intense interest in the reception and circulation of books. At first this was in marks of reading or provenance; latterly, categories of engagement have produced ‘use’ as a preferred term that can encompass epiphenomena such as pen trials, doodles, sums, and pressed flowers as well as underlinings, emendations, or commentary.1 No handbook to bibliography could now end with bookbinding and the book trade as the final stage in the book’s journey, as did standard texts by McKerrow (writing in 1927) and Gaskell (in 1972).2 McKerrow’s chapter heading ‘The Forms in which Books Have Been Issued to the Public’ is the nearest his account gets to the activity of readers, revealingly characterized as ‘the public’. Somehow his phrasing suggests that this circulation is, literally, a postscript, a mildly diverting side-​hustle from the true destiny of the bibliographic object: colophons, impositions, and compositor error.3 By contrast, the new book history has been preoccupied with use. As Stephen Orgel puts it, ‘habits of reading, manifested in various marks and marginalia, have become as central to the nature of the book as format and typography, watermarks and chain lines’.4 H. L. Jackson’s assertion in 2001 that ‘historians of the book . . . don’t like marginalia’ has been entirely disproved in influential studies by William Sherman, Heidi Brayman Hackel, and Orgel, among others.5 Everyone loves marginalia now. Drawing on larger cultural critical shifts from author to reader, and from production and intention to reception and appropriation, the interest in book use is critically topical. But there are other informing disciplinary and institutional tendencies, too. New technologies, including the digitization of special collections and possibilities of personal research photography in most rare-​book rooms, have made it easier to capture copy-​specific elements of printed books.6 Susan Sontag noted pointedly that photographs ‘help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure’, and her perception of tourists who ‘feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter’ seems as relevant to our digital work

570   Emma Smith in the special collections reading room as to the Niagara Falls.7 The particular citational grammar of standard scholarly tools encourages circulation of these photographic props as snippet examples. PowerPoint and Twitter have played a significant role in shaping book history practices by bringing particular and particularized examples to the scholarly fore. Just as the affordances of the book as material object shape certain kinds of reading, so too the affordances of our own communicative technologies shape the history of that reading.8 What used to be called descriptive bibliography has now given way to visual or representational bibliography: the analysis of books as pictorial rather than verbal data. Eschewing grand narratives in favour of the local, specific, and idiosyncratic has meant that the recent study of readers has tended to be empirical, bottom-​up, and driven by the model of the case study as microcosm or exemplar. Like the booksellers and collectors who originally constructed their object of study through catalogues and acquisitions, book historians tend to generate meaning from the amassing of examples. Often these examples themselves are so beguiling, so insistently and humanly idiosyncratic, that the larger picture recedes in importance. A more cynical reading of these disciplinary shifts might see the interest in the copy-​specific, rather than generic, book as a reinstatement of institutional academic hierarchies threatened by the wider availability of scanned early modern books on EEBO (Early English Books Online). The new readerly book history, under the patronage of big-​name research library fellowships, requires physical access to (or even ownership of) specific copies.9 It returns scholars to that supplicant role in the economy of rare book access that characterized the pre-​institutional period of private book ownership and the New Bibliography. It might be also criticized as fetishizing the lost aura of the original in the age of digital reproduction. Walter Benjamin’s shadow, and that of his lyrically unpacked library and its ecstatic recollection of how ‘the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object’, falls across the field.10 Book historians continue to insist on the fundamental irreproducibility of the book-​as-​object and the ontological insufficiency of digital surrogates, even as rare books collections make their libraries increasingly available online.11 The prominence of readers in this new view of book history apparently chimes with theoretical interest in the practices of engagement with the literary text explored by reader-​response critics. However, it actually tends to ignore this more conceptual work. Or rather, book history’s theoretical framework is so thoroughly materialist that, amid the ‘rich panoply of types of readers—​informed readers, ideal readers, implied readers, actual readers, virtual readers, super-​readers, and “literents” ’, the focus tends to be on resolutely actual ones.12 In book-​history terms the reader has tended to be a recoverable biographical or sociological subject, rather than a heuristic construct. Readers’ extrinsic social or educational or doctrinal positions are adduced from their reading, rather than, say, employing a method which conceives reading as a series of moves or responses generated or even ‘prestructured by the language of the text’ itself.13 These real readers seem tantalizing proximate, their marks on the page a version of time travel between the bookish across the centuries. We are not immune from fantasies of intimacy with

Self-Reading Books   571 lost humans via their reading habits. There is, as Georgianna Ziegler admits, ‘something personal about books that have been well-​handled’, as she argues that early modern women book-​owners ‘come alive if we try to read the stories beyond the text in the physical remains of books that are touched, inscribed and shared by so many women and their families’.14 Generating back from ink or pencil marks on the printed page can produce a reader who is unproblematically aligned with his or her marginalia, constructing these marks as ‘a way of putting intimate feelings on paper’.15 A recent collection on early modern marginalia starts with a lovely anecdote of a modern annotated book, where the marginal comments accurately reflect the reader ‘concerned with both verbal precision and gastrointestinal matters’. ‘My grandmother’s books are full of marginalia which are richly expressive of herself ’: the example with which the essays begin, therefore, foregrounds the personal, authentic, and loved presence of the author in her marginalia.16 This assumption is attractive, commonsensical, and widespread. The new book history’s stress on readers, after all, redirected what was previously a technical discipline into a humane one, and brought materiality into the literary-​historical scholarly mainstream. It reversed Walter Ong’s influential paradigm tracing the loss of the human in the shift from oral cultures to written, and from manuscript to print: Ong called the book ‘less of an utterance and more of a thing’, giving ‘a world of cold, non-​human facts’.17 Examples of personalities deduced from the marks left in early printed books are legion. One account imagines the agent of excision marks in a copy of Chapman’s Charles, Duke of Byron as ‘a man confident in cutting and skilful in making the most of the original lines . . . doubtless an ardent lover of drama’.18 Another traces annotations in a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene ‘in the margins of which one feels for a few pages an individual psychology at work’, and, noting the annotations’ ‘severe but excited moralisation’ about young women’s lust, feels confident about one aspect of its author: ‘(It seems to me extremely unlikely that, despite the italic hand, this was written by a woman.)’19 It’s striking that the one piece of material evidence from the annotations—​that italic, rather than secretary, script often characterized women’s handwriting—​is overruled because of a series of assumptions arising from its content: that the annotations represent the beliefs of their writer; that moralizing about women’s sexuality is restricted to men; therefore the writer of the annotations must be male. This method of constructing the reader from their writing apparently uncomplicated by theoretical concerns would seem woefully naïve were it applied to other forms of textual production: ‘it seems’, as Paul de Man wrote of autobiography ‘to belong to a simpler mode of referentiality, of representation, and of diegesis’.20 Perhaps we need to give readers—​identified by their marks of reading, and therefore also writers—​some of the creative credit we give to writers in other genres. The idea that readers’ marks are in some way authentic or true representations of their own responses or psychology, or that they offer this tantalizing transhistorical communion with earlier readers, might well have seemed ingenuous to early moderns themselves. That marginalia might be fictional, rhetorical, or prosopopeic was already playfully understood and enjoyed in the period. The term ‘prosopopeia’ signals the

572   Emma Smith rhetorical act of giving voice to or speaking as another person or inanimate object. Book use had quickly developed a recognizable verbal and design rhetoric available for parody. The printed commentary to Master Streamer’s prolix testimony in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat juxtaposes the apparently authoritative voice of the marginal gloss with comments of supreme irrelevance or sententious bathos. Such ‘wayward glosses’ seem satirically engaged with contemporary confessional biblical hermeneutics, but they also indicate that the marginal spaces of the text are a place for play and personation.21 The aspirational E.K.’s commentary to Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar offers a satiric example of the combination of self-​aggrandizement, pedantic learning, and social sycophancy that could characterize certain annotating discourses. His garrulous note to the January eclogue glosses the word ‘couthe’ as ‘commeth of the verbe Conne, that is, to know or to have skill. As well interpreteth the worthy Sir Tho. Smitth in his booke of goverment: wherof I have a perfect copie in wryting, lent me by his kinseman, and my verye singular good freend, M. Gabriel Harvey: as also of some other his most grave & excellent wrytings’. The note demonstrates how marginal commentary or annotation can be a highly self-​conscious presentational form.22 That reading and books might be instrumentalized to affirm—​or concoct—​networks of privilege is here clearly parodied. E.K.’s reference to Gabriel Harvey might even suggest that this exemplary early modern reader, discussed below, is already susceptible to ironic appropriation. There are lots of other examples. John Donne’s satirical library list known as ‘The Courtier’s Library’ advises the busily self-​fashioning courtier to distinguish his intellectual credentials not by recourse to the usual classical sources but by seeking out ‘books that are difficult for others to locate’, in order to seem ‘learned in a different way’. The attached reading list includes such wonderful nonce-​books as the clown Richard Tarlton’s ‘On the Privileges of Parliament’, the unmissable ‘Nothingness of a Fart’, and Martin Luther’s ‘On shortening the Lord’s Prayer’.23 Donne’s catalogue shows that book-​reading technologies are available tropes for ludic manipulation by contemporaries, and that they do rhetorical, rather than merely documentary, work. After decades of complicated critical explorations of the ways in which readers and texts interact, ink or pencil marks in the margins of printed books still offer the attractive and apparently transparent simplicity of individuals tracing their progress with marks, underlinings, doodles, and occasional sustained commentary. Frances Wolfrestoun’s inscription ‘a sad one’ next to her ownership mark on a 1655 quarto of Othello has become an exemplary instance, presenting a reader who can be constructed by scholarship as delightfully unsophisticated and declarative: a woman reads about an innocent murdered woman and empathizes, in a clear hand, without verbiage, showing off in Latin, or mansplaining.24 This charisma of the apparent availability of a real, human reader, encoded in marks on the printed page and amplified in the archives, has been irresistible for studies of early modern reading. Sometimes this reader is anonymous, but drawing on the origins of the modern idea of marginalia and Coleridge’s confident assertion that ‘you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic’,25 readers who are knowable beyond the evidence of their reading have been the most compelling. Henry Folger thought that his copy of the First Folio with an inscription

Self-Reading Books   573 from its printer William Jaggard was the most important in his extensive collection and gave it the catalogue number Folger 1.26 A century later, the most interesting copy of this much-​studied book is that held by the Free Library of Philadelphia and recently identified by Claire M. L. Bourne and Jason Scott-​Warren as recording the emendations and other marginalia of John Milton. As in other classic accounts of Renaissance readers such as William H. Sherman on John Dee or Heidi Brayman Hackel on Anne Clifford, the already knowable biography of the book’s active interlocutor has been crucial to the argument and the excitement it has rightly generated.27 The annotated Philadelphia Folio was less glamorous when, in Bourne’s detailed earlier research, the author of the notes was the anonymous ‘Reader A’.28 Uncovering marks of ownership with new technologies including image-​processing software that can find traces of washed or eroded signatures adds to the thrill of biographical detection.29 Pondering some biro annotations in an ‘unlovable and unsalable’ mass-​market contemporary paperback found on a bus, H. L. Jackson allows herself the thought experiment: what if the annotator ‘were a celebrity—​say, Madonna?’30 Jackson’s description of this modern book (with, alas, no links to Madonna) in terms of its market value shows how far bibliography, scholarly book history and the revaluation of provenance, and the rare book trade are mutually reinforcing. One corollary of the new book history is that the auction house description of books as ‘clean’ or unmarked is no longer shorthand for a high reserve price. Our interest in specific, knowable readers takes its methodological bearings from two important texts of the new book history. Works by Lisa Jardine and Antony Grafton, and by D. F. McKenzie, catalysed the subsequent focus on historic readers and have been deeply influential in the ways the field has developed. In particular, as we shall see, an unexpected biographical emphasis in both works has shaped the study of historical reading as a version of life-​writing. Typically, the book’s marks of use offer a template to reconstitute or amplify biographical subjects—​readers—​understood as pre-​existing them. In ‘Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Jardine and Grafton establish their case for humanist ‘goal-​orientated’ reading, which understood ‘reading as intended to give rise to something else’ (emphasis in original). The study is of the humanist Gabriel Harvey, who has two distinct roles in the argument.31 He is at once the ‘facilitator’ or exemplar for a class of scholarly readers, and a specific historical individual with a significant biography linking him to Cambridge, to Leicester’s circle including Philip Sidney, and to ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.32 Establishing Harvey’s reading of Livy within ‘some real-​life events’, and issuing him with the contemporary technology, a book-​wheel, for his studies, the account suggests that this exemplary reader is ‘employed in the activity of reading in such a way that his own selfhood as a reader is not at issue’.33 But Harvey’s reading is shown to be deeply connected to his own personal ambitions: in his understanding of Hannibal, for example, he ‘had to feel sympathy for the devil’ in order to align his reading of early Rome with the political needs of his own position. This particular, humanly intellectual response—​turning Hannibal, the authors suggest, from Fortinbras into Hamlet—​challenges the accompanying suggestion that Harvey’s tactics ‘yield us a general insight’ into late sixteenth-​century intellectual information

574   Emma Smith management.34 Harvey emerges from this much-​cited analysis as at once eccentric and exemplary: the biography, signalled by his name and the possessive in the article title, snags the more generalizing analytical impulse with its own personhood. The ultimate goal of this goal-​orientated reading is the revelation of the personal situatedness of the reader. The known historical subject—​Harvey—​constructed through scholarly biographies, via the energy of his feud with Nashe, and through the range of his marginalia, dominates. The ultimate answer to how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy is—​Gabriel Harveyishly. Harvey’s highly individual over-​ representation in the study of early modern reading has been further reified in a new digital project, the Archaeology of Reading.35 If biography works to particularize and thereby to compromise larger intellectual patterns in Jardine and Grafton’s study, the heuristic of life-​writing emerges differently in D. F. McKenzie’s foundational Panizzi Lectures, delivered at the British Library in 1985, on the topic of ‘Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts’. In his first lecture, McKenzie took up an epigraph from Congreve’s The Way of the World, used by Wimsatt and Beardsley as the epigraph to their influential 1946 work ‘The Intentional Fallacy’. Through demonstrating the ways in which Wimsatt and Beardsley’s chosen edition silently emended Congreve’s original text, McKenzie acknowledged that his ‘argument runs full circle from a defence of authorial meaning, on the grounds that it is in some measure recoverable, to a recognition that, for better or worse, readers inevitably make their own meanings’.36 This argumentative circle was based on a deep inter-​implication of bibliography and biography. McKenzie used bibliography to undermine the fundamental premise of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s salvo (‘it has not, I think, been observed before that, if we include its epigraph, this famous essay on the interpretation of literature opens with a misquotation in its very first line’).37 Crucial to his argument was that their emended epigraph misrepresented what Congreve intended, finding a ‘cruel irony in the fact that Congreve’s own text is reshaped and misread to support and argument against himself. Far from offering a licence for his audience and readers to discount the author’s meaning, Congreve is putting, with an exasperated irony, the case for the right of authors’.38 While acknowledging readerly autonomy, McKenzie (editor of a complete works of Congreve) spent his first lecture on bibliography arguing for an authorial intent recoverable from details of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization from the earliest printed text. His conclusion was that ‘bibliography as a sociology of texts has an unrivalled power to resurrect authors in their own time, and their readers at any time’.39 The declaration of the ‘sociology of texts’ was also a call to biography. McKenzie’s revivifying claim for bibliography was amplified in the Cambridge University Press edition of his lectures, published in 1999 with a cover illustration of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous painting often called The Librarian. It’s worth pausing on Arcimboldo for a moment, because the popularity of this image on scholarly and bookish books in the last two decades emblematizes this widespread critical consensus that the ultimate purpose of the book-​as-​object is to give shape to its readers. Arcimboldo is known for his Mannerist paintings executed under the patronage of the Habsburg emperors during the period from 1562 to 1588. His project for

Self-Reading Books   575 the court encompassed stained-​glass windows, tapestries, and costume designs, but his most instantly recognizable work is those surreal portraits composed of assemblages of fruit, flowers, or other natural objects. The Librarian depicts a humanoid figure from the waist up, constituted of stacks of books. The sheaf of open pages suggests a shock of white hair, book cabinet keys are his spectacles, a fur book duster his beard, and stacks of fore-​edge books the folds of his doublet. Recognizing its potentially satiric impulses as ‘a parody of librarianship and of intellectualism’, one recent critic notes that ‘contemporary librarians are reluctant to embrace this image’:40 the same is not true of scholars, academics, and publishers. The Librarian has appeared on a surprising range of recent book jackets, particularly in academic publishing. In addition to McKenzie’s lectures on bibliography, it has been used to cover works on book history, on literature, and on the literary life, including Chris Hopkins’s Thinking About Texts, Frederic Barbier’s Histoire du livre en Occident, Angela Carter’s Expletives Deleted, and Sarah Wall-​Randell’s The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England.41 Inevitably, Robin Fiddian’s collection Jorge Luis Borges in Context uses Arcimboldo: the picture seems like a visual representation of a Borges story. For Seth Lerer writing about the academic profession’s relationship with error, Arcimboldo’s image seems to stand in for the professoriat, past and present; for Francis Spufford’s memoir of a childhood shaped by reading, Arcimboldo presents less the professional reader or librarian and more an Everyman, capturing reading crucial to the maturation of human personality.42 Research on the history of emotions, on remediation, and on puns all mobilize the picture’s awkward toggle between subject and object, human and material.43 Perhaps most strikingly, a book on new quantitative approaches to early modern drama by Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-​Hirsch, uses the image to draw together the emotional disconnect between ideas of reading as deeply, ineluctably human, and the possibilities of new reading technologies44. Craig and Greatley-​Hirsch’s cover suggests the material alienation of the composite portrait, rather than its allegory of transformation. Arcimboldo’s image may indeed suggest, following Francis Spufford, that the human is built of books and that books form ‘the history of our self-​understanding. The stories that mean most to us join the process by which we come to be securely our own’.45 That’s a reading that prioritizes the reader as the target. In the formalist language of the simile, Arcimboldo’s human figure is the tenor and the books from which he is made the vehicle. Ultimately for these appropriations as part of works on the significance and importance of reading, what is important about the painting is that it depicts a person—​perhaps, as has been broadly accepted, a specific and recognizable individual, Wolfgang Lazius, the imperial librarian.46 But more recent interpretations of Arcimboldo’s painting tend towards the satiric, proposing that the figure composed of books is not a man of learning but rather an early iteration of a stereotype familiar from the later history of bibliophilia, a materialistic collector ‘more interested in acquiring books than reading them’.47 No author publishing under the cover of Arcimboldo engages with the possibility that the portrait is negative or satiric, except Jason Scott-​Warren. In Shakespeare’s First Reader, his reconstruction of the life of Richard Stonley ‘through his library’, Scott-​ Warren acknowledges that Arcimboldo’s image, even as ‘an icon of superficiality’, ‘has

576   Emma Smith accompanied me during the research for this book, as a stand-​in for my subject . . . the first person known to have bought a printed book written by William Shakespeare’.48 My suggestion is that we reverse the allegory conventionally applied to Arcimboldo’s grotesque portrait. Perhaps we should read the subject of Arcimboldo’s painting as books, piled up in human shapes, rather than imaginatively filling them out to produce their reader, collector, librarian, or other human agent. Books are not necessarily a proxy for the more vital human subject. The outline of a person gives life to the books, rather than vice versa: the picture is not primarily constitutive, showing a subject constructed out of things, but anthropomorphic, endowing objects with human characteristics. The human shape is a metaphor rather than a transformation. This kind of anthropomorphism helps us to imagine book history as a new kind of life-​writing that focuses its energies on the book as subject, rather than slipping onto the more familiar human territory of its readerly interlocutors. What might a biographical book history look like where the life to be written was the life of the book, rather than the life of its readers? Work on object biography in anthropology and archaeology has some fruitful insights. As Janet Hoskins surveys, ‘things can, in certain conditions, be or act like persons: they can be said to have a personality, to show volition, to accept certain locations and reject others, and thus to have agency’.49 Igor Kopytoff wrote that ‘in doing the biography of a thing, one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people . . . where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things?’50 Often, these attributes of agency are linked to the anthropomorphizing process by which things are said to have social lives like persons and thus to be appropriate subjects for biographies. But similarity has tended to shade into substitution, and to prioritize the narrative of human, rather than object, lives. Hoskins draws on the work of French sociologist Violette Morin, and her distinction between ‘a biographical object’ and ‘a protocol object’ or a standardized commodity. Printed books initially resemble—​although we know that books in the hand-​press period are not quite—​a standardized commodity. It is reading, then, that transforms that protocol object into a biographical object: ‘the relation that a person establishes with a biographical object gives it an identity that is localised, particular and individual, while those established with an object generated by an outside protocol are globalised, generalised and mechanically reproduced’:51 marks of use transform and individualize the book. Hoskins elaborates Morin’s categories in her own book on the culture of the Kodi people of the Malay Archipelago, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. She notes some of the particular anthropomorphized qualities of the biographical object: it ‘grows old, and may become old and tattered along the life span of its owner’, it ‘anchors the owner to a particular time and place’, and it ‘imposes itself as the witness of the functional unity of its user, his or her everyday experience made into a thing’.52 Hoskins’s fieldwork methodology ultimately sought to ‘use objects as metaphors to elicit an indirect account of personal experience’:53 that’s to say, the adjective ‘biographical’ in her title shifts between material object and human subject. Biographical

Self-Reading Books   577 objects are ultimately significant as explanatory props. Her aim is to understand human narratives and to account for them via a recognition of the interconnection of objects and lives. Nevertheless, object biography, and the ageing, anchoring, and witnessing book object might be one way to redirect questions of agency in book history, and to refocus questions of reading around the book as agent rather than as passive recipient. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio’s phrasing in the introduction to their work on engagements with the book fleetingly constructs the book as agent, asking ‘how early books enabled thinking by inviting a wide range of uses, by asking readers to move within them in particular ways, to write in them, manipulate them, apply them in worlds beyond the book’.54 But their title, Book Use, suggests that use is something outside the book itself, and enacted upon it. This sense of agency follows Kopytoff ’s definition of object biography as ‘the way they are culturally defined and put to use’55—​the object gains its meanings via human interaction. It is part of a dialogue angled towards the understanding of human culture and biography. Instead of this tendency to stress interactivity, thus prioritizing the ever-​fascinating human itineraries over the more reticent life stories of objects themselves, I’d like to shift the framework to think of things, like books, as biographical subjects—​and to hold that ontological slippage between subject and object as something to which I will return. Thinking about the book itself as a biographical subject rather than object, itself the centre of our attention rather than the means better to understand its human interlocutor, proposes ‘bio-​bibliography’ as a method for rethinking the conceptual status of annotations and reader’s marks.56 Archaeology’s interest in making ‘mute objects “speak” ’ can thus resonate with contemporary book history and with a more rigorous analytical sense of readers beyond the actual and biographical.57 Paul Ricoeur’s observation that ‘The illusion is endlessly reborn that the text is a structure in itself and for itself and that reading happens to the text as some extrinsic and contingent event’ figures the text as object, but some exemplars suggest that reading is intrinsic and self-​generated.58 Stephen Orgel notes some early modern ownership inscriptions that phrase the proprietary formula in the voice of the book itself: ‘Erasmus writes in his books not “Erasmus liber eius,” his book but “Sum Erasmi,” I am Erasmus’s . . . Ben Jonson’s books are inscribed “Sum Ben: Jonsonii”.’59 Orgel’s conclusion, that ‘the book is given a voice by these owners’, makes sense when thinking about Erasmus or Ben Jonson—​large, known personalities accustomed to speaking in the voice of other characters or imagined interlocutors. The magnetic pull of these celebrity readers makes it inevitable that priority is given to the charismatic agency of the reading subject outside the pages of the book. Elsewhere, however, such declarative marks of ownership might be read in ways which allow more agency to the book itself to name its own affiliations. Other books use a similar formula to name less illustrious owners: a 1636 Book of Common Prayer ‘sum e libris Richardi Pearce’; Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1617) marked ‘Sum Richardi Hebson price -​00-​10s-​ 6d’; ‘ego sum ex libris Cornicula Formosae Philo—​Tritis’ on a leaf in a copy of Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to practicall musicke (1597).60 Where these declarative marks of ownership cannot be immediately appropriated to the biography of a famous reader, they can speak more clearly as the voice of the book itself, naming its

578   Emma Smith affiliations and situating itself in time and space. Unlike the examples from the libraries of Erasmus or Jonson, here it is the book that is more materially present than its forgotten readers or owners. Rather than parsing these signatures as contributing to a life outside the work, perhaps we can engage through their subjective grammar with the book itself as a distinct, anthropomorphized biographical subject. One exemplary case of the famous book and the unknown reader allows us to explore some of the impulses towards object and subject biography that currently operate within studies of marginalia. The example is the annotated copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, held since 1980 at the Kodama Shakespeare library in Meisei University in Tokyo. This copy has sustained annotation throughout the volume. The reader has used the top, and sometimes the bottom, margin of each page, divided, like the text-​block, into two columns, to write a range of notes variously including plot summary, sententiae or commonplaces, and paraphrases of lines of speeches. In addition, lines of text are marked with dashes or ink slashes, perhaps to mark progress through the plays. As the only extant copy with sustained annotation apparently dating from the early decades of the book’s life, this copy of the First Folio has been extensively studied. So too has its elusive owner: the inscription ‘William Johnstoune his Booke’ is found in the top margin above the ornament on the page of the preliminaries that forms the dedication to William and Philip Herbert. Many scholars have consulted the annotations to the Meisei Folio both for their intrinsic interest and because Meisei and its former director Akihiro Yamada have made digital facsimiles and transcriptions available online. The resulting analyses often speculate about the personality of William Johnstoune as annotator. Jean-​Christophe Mayer notes that the tragedies carry the heaviest annotation, and suggests that their reader was ‘personally touched, intrigued and stimulated’ by this genre. Mayer sees the annotations on Timon of Athens as revealing that ‘he was sensitive to the pessimistic and tragic nature of mankind projected by it’.61 Stephen Orgel reads Johnstoune’s marginalia on the pages of Hamlet and concluded that he was using the play ‘as a guide to social advancement, and a mirror of his own world; and from the margins he saw himself in it’.62 Yamada himself uncovered the reader’s ‘strong ethical consciousness of righteousness and punishment’, and suggested that annotations to Henry V indicated the ‘reader’s strong interest in monarchy’ and offered ‘a glimpse of his political ideas’.63 Elsewhere Yamada is frustrated by the reader’s failure to acknowledge the ‘superb dramatic excellence’ of the works, and disappointed that the annotations to The Tempest ‘seem to me utterly irrelevant to the excellent dramatic beauty of this scene’.64 Reading these annotations for work on early readers of Shakespeare’s First Folio, I, too, was drawn to speculate about the (to me, deeply unattractive) personality of the reader behind the annotations, suggesting ‘he enjoys moral observation rather than comedy and is often censorious’, and in particular, that he tends to zoom in on wanton behaviour in women, expressing satisfaction at Katherine’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew and making it clear that Macbeth’s ‘hellish wife drives him to do it’.65 William Johnstoune emerged for me from these annotations as a somewhat stereotypically gloomy misogynist, reading relentlessly through all thirty-​six plays like an early modern Victor Meldrew.

Self-Reading Books   579 Our collective attempts to retro-​engineer Johnstoune from his annotations have their counterpart in archival efforts to discover more about him and his life. Paul Collins wanted Johnstoune to be the same man as a professor of mathematics at Aberdeen University during the 1620s and 1630s, although there was no supporting evidence.66 In my own earlier work on the Meisei book I attempted a semi-​systematic search of provenance and ownership inscriptions across rare book collections in the United Kingdom and the United States, on the basis that it was unlikely that Johnstoune’s exhaustive annotations were confined to this one book. My search for other books with a similar mark from this imaginary dispersed library turned up nothing. Only Akihiro Yamada has made any progress in identifying the book’s signatory. In an article published in 2018, Yamada presents another William Johnstoune signature, this time attached to a letter about coals from Leith dating from October 1699. He concludes: ‘I believe that one can positively assert that they are a match and written by the same person.’ Archival research into this William Johnstoune reveals no interest in books, and Yamada has to admit that it is ‘fruitless to speculate his interest in Shakespeare’s First Folio’.67 Further, the active dates of this corroborated signatory seem to divide the work’s apparent record of provenance from its heavily annotated pages. The secretary hand of the annotations is not immediately compatible with these late seventeenth-​century dates. Yamada concludes that Johnstoune is unlikely to have been the author of the annotations: rather, he put his name to a book that had already been annotated by an unknown hand. A biographical subject comes briefly into view—​Shakespeare’s First Folio, coal, Scottish port—​but blurs immediately into indistinctness. We know both more than we did before—​the identity of William Johnstoune beyond the pages of the book—​and less—​the annotations are now unattached to any named reader, severed from the one possibility of specific personhood. Johnstoune’s proprietorial claim on the book cannot be traced on its pages beyond his own ‘tag’. The ‘I, the act of naming on the early modern page’ is more fugitive now it is not concretized by the selective readerly intelligence and apparent personality on display in and through the copy’s annotations.68 The annotations to the Meisei First Folio have had considerable currency because of the cultural and scholarly value placed on this edition. But the recent evacuation of knowable biography from the annotations offers the conceptual opportunity to maximize the space left by William Johnstoune, now absolved of responsibility for the manuscript marginalia. Without a known author, these interventions seem of, rather than on, the book itself, offering another voice amid its formal heteroglossia. The book writes back to its text. Thinking of marginalia as prosopopoeia helps us attend more fully to its rhetorical complexity. It also gestures towards a history of reading that does not default to the history of human readers. Reading is done by the book itself rather than a recoverable historical human agent. Prosopopoeia is a rhetorical figure often described as ‘the speech of an imaginary person’, but in practice it can also itself convey personhood on inanimate objects: its etymology suggests ‘person making’.69 Heinrich Lausberg’s definition of ‘a figure which gives the ability to act and move to insensate things’ resonates with Renaissance definitions. For George Puttenham ‘counterfeit impersonation’ characterized acts of

580   Emma Smith rhetorical ventriloquism ‘if ye will attribute any human quality, as reason or speech, to dumb creatures or other insensible things, and do study (As one may say) to give them a human person, it is . . . prosopopeia’.70 Abraham Fraunce’s first examples in his Arcadian Rhetoric were of ‘the faynng of any person’, but he also allows that ‘by this figure wee sometimes make dumme and senceles things speake’.71 The echo of object biography’s task, to ‘make mute objects speak’, is evident. Prosopopoeia confers human characteristics. Paul de Man’s chain of prosopopoeic associations in his ‘Autobiography as De-​Facement’ threads from ‘voice’ to ‘mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poiein, to confer a mask or a face’.72 In de Man’s description, prosopopoeia is the rhetorical equivalent of Arcimboldo’s artfully arranged books and accessories in The Librarian. Both give life to apparently inanimate objects. One further echo in discussions of prosopopoeia identifies it as a figure in which the positions of subject and object are potentially exchangeable or chiastic: ‘either the subject will take over the object’, writes Michael Riffaterre, ‘or it will be penetrated by the object’.73 Iser’s suggestion about reading—​‘as text and reader thus merge into a single situation, the division between subject and object no longer applies’—​offers a point of critical contact between rhetorical concepts of prosopopoeia, contemporary theories about readers, and the anthropological work on biographical objects.74 All converge in the shifting position of the annotated book as subject, agent, or, in Bruno Latour’s term, ‘actant’: a term, he writes, ‘covering both humans and nonhumans’.75 If we use the figure of prosopopoeia to reattribute the annotations to the Meisei First Folio from the reader formerly known as William Johnstoune to the book itself, what difference does it make to our understanding? Three possible consequences present themselves. The first is a renewed sense that printed text and manuscript annotations are synchronous and equal aspects of the volume. The hierarchies of time, precedence, and authority often implicated in discussions of annotations and readers’ marks can be suspended. The second is the possibility of integrating the insights of reader-​response criticism into the material study of early printed books, so that it is the combination of the contents of the book, and the material affordances of that book, that produce, pre-​ structure, or demand the marks of reading. And the third, then, is a history of reading without readers, a phenomenology of the marked or annotated volume as speaking subject, rather than a putative biography of its human handlers.

Notes 1. William. H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 15–​18. 2. R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literature Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 3. McKerrow, Introduction, p. ix. 4. Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17.

Self-Reading Books   581 5. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 252. See Orgel, Reader in the Book; William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6. See e.g. the Folger Shakespeare Library digital image collection: https://​collat​ion.fol​ger. edu/​2020/​10/​refere​nce-​image-​col​lect​ion/​. 7. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 9–​10. 8. See Sjoerd Levelt, ‘Early Modern Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter’, in Katherine Acheson (ed.), Early Modern Marginalia (New York: Routledge, 2018), 234–​256. 9. Orgel, Reader in the Book, discusses several volumes from his own library. 10. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), 62. 11. For a balanced survey of the advantages and disadvantages of working with digital surrogates, see Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books 1450–​1800: A Practical Guide (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 139–​148. 12. Vincent B. Leitch, ‘Reader-​Response Criticism’, in Andrew Bennett (ed.), Readers and Reading (Harlow: Longman, 1995), 32–​65, at 34. Bennett lists a number of other models in his ‘Introduction’, 3. 13. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 21. 14. Georgianna Ziegler, ‘Patterns in Women’s Book Ownership, 1500–​1700’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020), 207–​223, at 220. 15. Jean-​Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 63. 16. Katherine Acheson, ‘Introduction: Marginalia, Reading, and Writing’, in Acheson (ed.), Early Modern Marginalia, 1–​12, at 1. 17. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2012), 120. 18. Akihiro Yamada, Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance: Readers and Audiences (London: Routledge, 2017), 143–​144. 19. Orgel, Reader in the Book, 109–​110. 20. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 68. 21. Jane Griffiths, Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 123. 22. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 33. 23. On the context and manuscript witnesses of the satirical catalogue, see Piers Brown ‘ “Hac Ex Consilio Meo via Progredieris”: Courtly Reading and Secretarial Mediation in Donne’s The Courtier’s Library’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61 (2008), 833–​866; Daniel Starza Smith, Matthew Payne, and Melanie Marshall, ‘Rediscovering John Donne’s Catalogus librorum satyricus’, Review of English Studies, 69 (2018), 455–​487. Quotations are taken from Piers Brown’s essay. 24. Wolfrestoun’s copy of Q3 of Othello (1655) is in the Furness Collection at the University of Pennsylvania (EC Sh155 622oc). See Sarah Lindenbaum, https://​collat​ion.fol​ger.edu/​2018/​ 06/​fran​ces-​wol​fres​ton-​revea​led/​ , and Sarah Werner, http://​sara​hwer​ner.net/​blog/​2009/​ 05/​is-​othe​llo-​a-​sad-​book/​, both accessed Nov. 2020.

582   Emma Smith 25. Quoted in Jackson, Marginalia, 7. 26. Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 56. 27. For a roundup of press coverage, see https://​www.ofp​ilcr​ows.com/​blog/​2019/​9/​18/​mil​ton-​ shak​espe​are-​media-​cover​age. Jason Scott-​Warren’s original blog tentatively identifying Milton is here: https://​www.engl​ish.cam.ac.uk/​cmt/​?p=​5751, accessed Nov. 2020. 28. Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-​Reading in the First Folio’, in Acheson (ed.), Early Modern Marginalia, 195–​233. 29. See https://​collat​ion.fol​ger.edu/​2018/​06/​fran​ces-​wol​fres​ton-​revea​led/​, accessed Nov. 2020. 30. Jackson, Marginalia, 1–​2. 31. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990), 30–​78, at 30. 32. Jardine and Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action” ’, 35–​36. 33. Jardine and Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action” ’, 39, 48. 34. Jardine and Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action” ’, 72, 77. 35. https://​archa​eolo​gyof​read​ing.org. 36. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19. 37. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 19. 38. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 23. 39. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 28–​29. As Zachary Lesser discusses in his Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), the New Bibliography was also preoccupied with authorial biography as an anchor for textual theories (28 ff.). 40. K.C. Elhard, ‘Reopening the Book on Alcimboldo’s “Librarian” ’, Libraries and Culture, 40 (2005), 115–​127, at 115. 41. Chris Hopkins, Thinking About Texts: An Introduction to English Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Frédéric Barbier’s Histoire du livre en Occident (Paris: Armand Collin, 2020); Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992); Sarah Wall-​Randall, The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 42. Robin W. Fiddian (ed.), Jorge Luis Borges in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built (London: Faber, 2002). 43. Katharine A Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Richard Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Walter Redfern, Puns: More Senses Than One (London: Penguin, 2000). 44. D. H. Craig and Brett Greatley-​Hirsch, Style, Computers and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 45. Spufford, The Child that Books Built, 9. 46. Sven Alfons, ‘The Museum as Image of the World’, in The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 67–​87. 47. Elhard, ‘Reopening the Book’, 116.

Self-Reading Books   583 48. Jason Scott-​Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), p. viii. 49. Janet Hoskins, ‘Agency, Biography and Objects’, in Christopher Tilley et al., Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 74–​84, at 81. 50. Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–​94, at 66. 51. Hoskins, ‘Agency’, 78. 52. Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (London: Routledge, 1998), 8. 53. Hoskins, Biographical Objects, 2. 54. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–​1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005), 5. 55. Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, 67. 56. The term is from Adam G. Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 12. 57. Hoskins, ‘Agency’, 78. 58. Paul Ricoeur, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Time and Narrative vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 164. 59. Orgel, Reader in the Book, 8. See also David McPherson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), 1–​106, and Robert Evans, ‘Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia: New Evidence from the Folger Collection’, Philological Quarterly, 66 (1987), 521–​528. 60. Folger STC 16408; Folger STC 13716 copy 1; Folger STC 18133 copy 1. 61. Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers, 184. 62. Orgel, Reader in the Book, 56. 63. Yamada, Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance, 174, 187. 64. Yamada, Experiencing Drama, 172–​173. 65. Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, 136. 66. Paul Collins, The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 00. 67. Akihiro Yamada, ‘William Johnstoune, Signatory in Shakespeare’s First Folio, and Its Owners’, Notes & Queries, 65/​4 (2018), 551–​556, at 552. 68. Jason Scott-​Warren, ‘Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), 363–​381, at 371. 69. Gavin Alexander, ‘Prosopopeia, the Speaking Figure’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97–​114, at 98. 70. Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 183. 71. Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London: 1588), sig. G2, G5. 72. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 76. 73. Michael Riffaterre, ‘Prosopopeia’, Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 107–​123, at 112. 74. Iser, The Act of Reading, 9–​10. 75. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 237.

584   Emma Smith

Select Bibliography Acheson, Katherine (ed.), Early Modern Marginalia (New York: Routledge, 2018). Cormack, Bradin, and Mazzio, Carla, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–​1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005). Hackel, Heidi Brayman, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hoskins, Janet, ‘Agency, Biography and Objects’, in Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (eds.), Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 74–​84. Jackson, H. J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Jardine, Lisa, and Grafton, Anthony, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990), 30–​78. Orgel, Stephen, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Scott-​Warren, Jason, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2019). Sherman, William H., Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

CHAPTER 31

B o ok Modifi c at i on Georgina Wilson

Readers who enter the Bodleian Library in Oxford are held accountable to a promise: ‘I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.’ This origins of this declaration date to 1412, when readers of the University Library swore to look at books ‘in a proper and gentle manner, causing damage to none of such books by ill-​treatment or the erasure or removal of quartos or folios’.1 Since then, the list of prohibited behaviours has grown to encompass the alarming number of ways, perceived to be neither proper nor gentle, in which readers might treat books. While the second half of today’s oath tries to extinguish one of the greatest risks to a library collection—​a fire—​the first half is preoccupied with the damaging and inconvenient presence of readers who, left to their own devices, ‘mark’, ‘deface’, or ‘injure’ the books in hand. All of these verbs foreground the negative impact of readers on books; the role of the oath is to rein in that impact. Libraries’ oaths such as the Bodleian’s capture an institutional hostility to the kinds of changes that readers, accidentally or otherwise, might impose on their books.2 And for good reason. The role of the library is to preserve the items in their collection as well as to make them available for future generations. The Bodleian, like all libraries, is left with the paradox of reconciling these two aims. If twenty-​first-​century readers ‘injure’ collections with coffee stains, scissors, ink pens, or over-​enthusiastic spine-​bending, then they alter these books irrevocably—​they leave traces of their own reading—​for those readers who come to study texts theoretically ‘of ’ (in our case) the early modern period: now bespattered with the less historically resonant marks of a leaking biro , or last week’s lunch. The horror of alterations and traces from prior readers is viewed from an alternative perspective in this chapter, which thinks through the generative and literary affordances of book modification. Books can be modified in a variety of ways: to modify a ‘book’ might be to modify a text, but it might also be to interact with the book’s physical form in a way which is seemingly disinterested in textual content: to change the binding, tear the pages, erase images. If we understand texts as material forms, which exist and signify

586   Georgina Wilson only in their variously embodied states, then these modes of modification are equally significant to us as literary scholars because they are intrinsically bound up with our encounter with ‘the text’ and thus necessarily alter our reading. Modifying takes place at various points in a book’s production. It happens in the print shop, as when printers hastily correct typographical errors in the middle of the print run, and in the hands of zealous or distracted readers through the centuries—​raising the question of when, if ever, a book is ‘finished’. Modification might occur in the decision to print a new edition (as when Hamlet becomes a much longer play between Q1 and Q2), or at the moment when a reader interacts with their individual copy. And, as this chapter makes clear, to perceive oneself or others as ‘modifying’ a book is to divide a prelapsarian ideal of the unmodified book from the modified result: a binary which is lost when we consider that the origins of a book’s textual and material state are located in an ever-​receding past. To think about the ways books are modified is to reconsider the value judgement inherent in Thomas Bodley’s 1602 oath designed to protect his library. To ‘modify’, as the OED reminds us, means both to ‘differentiate into a variety of forms’—​that is, to diversify—​and to tone down, limit, or restrain.3 Those two meanings sit together uneasily when it comes to rare books. The copies that have been most diversified—​the ones slashed across the page, pasted back together, or encased in elaborate embroidery—​ speak more loudly and clearly across the centuries for the very reason of their singularity. Books which have been ‘modified’ to show a reader’s ownership, or disagreement with the content, or the social status of the recipient of the book, are not so much hermeneutically restrained as they are exhibits of a rich potential of meaning-​making: modified books are often expansive whether in their materiality, in the opinions or ideologies which jostle for prominence therein, or in the timeline of reading to which they bear witness. These modified books take up the most room in library catalogues which include copy-​specific records; they are most likely to be wheeled out in seminars to demonstrate the variety of early modern textual encounters, and the most likely to imprint themselves on our memory. But for all their individuality, what can those books teach us about early modern book culture more generally? In studying early modern modified books, it’s important to keep in mind that back-​and-​forth between the unusual, or particular, and the representative. Book modification—​which in this chapter means doing things to books other than, or alongside, a narrow definition of ‘reading’ them—​is evidence of an early modern mode of reading which is different to our own. That mode is alert to the book as a material as well as a textual object, to the book as a site of physical contingency rather than fixity. Yet those claims about ‘early modern’ books and reading are rooted most legibly in the particular and the quirky, the unusual and the non-​ representative. Book history tends to be enamoured with the spectacular and eccentric, but there are limits to what can be done with individual cases which, whilst richly thought-​provoking, afford a limited set of conclusions to a broader history of books and of reading. Drawing connections between striking examples while being mindful of their differences, this chapter is made up of a corpus of modified books which together constitute a more coherent sense of the possibilities of reading, and of modification, located in the early modern book.

Book Modification   587 In contrast to Thomas Bodley’s nightmares about defacing, marking, and injuring, early modern printers and booksellers had their own more enticing language to describe changes to books over time. Title pages of sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century books are not infrequently dotted with descriptors like ‘perfect’, ‘enlarged’, or ‘corrected’. That language promotes the modifications that have taken place between editions, so as to encourage readers to pick up the latest version of a work. The 1604/​5 edition of Hamlet, known as Q2, describes itself as ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the True and Perfect Coppie’. That paradoxical idea of a ‘True’ . . . ‘Coppie’, hovering simultaneously in the realm of replica and original, is one to which we shall return. Firstly we can note those happy adjectives—​‘Newly imprinted’, ‘enlarged’—​which describe the update from Q1 (1603), with around 2,200 lines, to Q2 with 3,800 lines.4 This expansion, if the title is to be believed, is an improvement on the last Hamlet: Q2 is a modified version of Q1 such that it comes closer to the ‘True’ and ‘Perfect’ original. By creating an edition which is ‘Newly imprinted’, Q2 brings us paradoxically closer to the old ‘Coppie’. Purchasers of this book are both getting something ‘new’ and returning to a prior and ideal state. That tension is embodied in the word ‘Perfect’ which means both to finish or complete, as in Helkiah Crooke’s claim that ‘the Male [sex] is sooner perfected . . . in the womb’;5 and to bring something to its best possible manifestation: ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’, thunders the book of Matthew (5:48). New editions of texts juggle both meanings of perfection; the Q2 Hamlet kidnaps any claim of Q1 to be finished, or bounded, and grafts those claims onto itself.6 When early modern readers modify their texts, as Elizabeth I did to her New Testament, or an anonymous reader did to their Paradise Lost, they build on that open-​ended sense of the book. These readers are also making their book singular, and unique; their modifications remove a book further from the ‘true’ and ‘perfect’ copy imagined by Shakespeare’s publishers. That construction of the ‘perfect’ copy still takes place today, albeit in a different mode: many library catalogue records describe how their copies deviate from an ideal, complete state that may not actually exist.7 How did early modern books go about perfecting themselves, or how did they ask to be perfected by the reader? One answer is the errata list: the printed list of corrections usually found near the end or the beginning of many books printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The errata list—​which ranged from pages of detailed substitutions to a vague apology from the printer or author and a request that the reader amend any mistakes they find—​draws attention to the book as an imperfect object. Sociologist Bruno Latour observes that it is easy to overlook the ‘thing-​ness’ of things—​ the intricate digital mesh of your smartphone, in today’s currency—​until that thing stops working.8 When the screen smashes and the buttons jam, the phone is no longer a seamless source of communication and information, but a clumsy mishmash of glass and plastic. Errata lists in early modern books draw attention to the printed book as an object whose production frequently—​and unsurprisingly to the early modern reader—​ went awry. They raise questions about how books announce their credibility: ‘was a short errata list more or less of a signal of an accurate text? Did a long errata list suggest

588   Georgina Wilson print shop neglect or care?’9 A longer, or more precise, errata list invites book modification more insistently, whilst attempting to control that modification in turn. Errata lists are significant in our account of early modern book modification because they knowingly place the codex into a state of contingency. David McKitterick emphasizes that early modern readers had a different sense from our own to when a book was ready for sale, which did not assume or demand that a book was ‘finished’.10 Errata lists form a key part of this early modern attitude towards ongoing modification, by acknowledging that the printer, and sometimes the author, had made versions of a text that were open to improvement.11 Operating at the fringes of the text, errata lists were recognized by early modern readers as a definitive characteristic of the (inherently unfinished) form of the book. The errata list of the 1669 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (consisting of ten books rather than the later twelve) appears at the end of the prefatory material (see Fig. 31.1): after the summary arguments of all ten books, and the defence of rhyme. There are several things to note about this initially unappealing list. The errata list only looks forward: it only notices errata in Books I to X which it precedes, and not in the prefatory material. Secondly, the final line of text encourages the reader to correct ‘other literal faults’ (faults consigned to individual letters) which are not listed. This page draws attention to significant errors (‘for breath r. breathe’) but leaves the reader to correct less important ‘literal faults’. This seventeenth-​century distinction between semiotic and formal error lingered into twentieth-​century bibliography. Writing in the 1950s, W. W. Greg distinguished between ‘substantive’ variants (which affect the author’s meaning and the essence of his text) and ‘accidentals’ (which affect only the text’s formal presentation: spelling, punctuation, word division).12 Milton’s printer Samuel Simmons makes a distinction between these two modes of editorial error, upheld three hundred years later by Greg, which falters as it is cast. What is ‘breath’ for ‘breathe’ other than an easily understood spelling mistake—​a ‘literal’ fault if ever there was one? The errata list invites the reader to ‘correct’ these and other faults, but this instruction clashes with the logic of the list. Each substitution demands that we ‘read’ afresh: ‘for th’Eternal, read, Eternal’. Is reading, or rather rereading, a form of book modification? Is the instruction to ‘read’ here understood as a physical engagement with the book, a form of editing with a physical pen, or a cognitive activity alone? The high numbers of extant early modern books which include printed errata lists but lack manuscript corrections would suggest either that correction took place in readers’ minds or that readers passed over the errata list entirely. One copy of Milton’s 1669 Paradise Lost, now in Balliol College Library, is unusual because it bears testimony to a diligent reader marking up its corrections. ‘Sounder’ is divided by means of a vertical line to become ‘so|under’; the nonsensical ‘whoseop’ is amended to ‘whoseop top’. For this particular reader, using this particular copy, to ‘read’ in the context of the errata list was to take a pen to paper and to write. If the history of reading shows how interactions with books vary across time, then the careful editorial endeavours of this reader are testament to the presence of obedient and invited book modification.13

Book Modification   589

Fig. 31.1  John Milton, Paradise Lost: a poem in ten books (1669). By permission of Balliol College Library, Oxford (525 a 5).

What, as literary readers, do we do with these unwieldly technical pages? Errata lists and their resulting manuscript modifications (or lack of) both contribute to a broader understanding of the early modern book and at the same time demand a localized, copy-​specific reading of a text. Paradise Lost is a text with a particular awareness of and aversion to ‘mazie error’.14 In Book VIII Adam uses that term, ‘errour’, to refer to his apparently misguided adoration of Eve. Adam thinks Eve is invincible against evil, but

590   Georgina Wilson is proven wrong: ‘I rue | that errour now, which is become my crime’.15 To encounter an errata list in Paradise Lost is to experience the elasticity of ‘error’ from a technical mishap in the printing shop to a moral transgression against God.16 Reading Paradise Lost in a ‘flawed’ or unfinished book brings those two meanings of error closer together. Errors have irreversible consequences, as Adam finds to his dismay (see Fig. 31.2). Not all—​indeed not many—​copies of the 1669 Paradise Lost have been corrected like this one.17 The attempt to correct the error in this copy of Paradise Lost also draws attention to it: how many other scholars will have opened the book to the pages marked up with manuscript, and pored over the precise words that were intended to be erased? Errata lists embody a strange kind of paradox: the aspiration for perfection (or at least something closer to that state than the thing currently in front of us) and the simultaneous acknowledgement of the book’s distance from that state, its current imperfection. If the errata list aspires towards an ideal version of the text in which those mistakes are absent, the ‘correction’ of those errors takes this copy even further from that ideal. This errata list alerts us to the printing of ‘whoseop’ instead of ‘whose top’; now, even more messily, the reader’s modification produces ‘whoseop top’. This particular copy deviates further from its ‘perfect’, errorless form, and further from other copies of this edition which contain the printed errors but no corrections. That tension—​ between a stable, ‘perfect’ text, and the never-​ quite-​ finished intervening to restore the perfect state—​is visible in moments when readers attempt to mend or amend their books. Errata lists articulate precise instructions to amend the errors of the printing house, but having left the printing press books were susceptible to mishaps which readers haphazardly, and only partially successfully, attempt to bury. A copy of the Geneva Bible, printed in 1578 and now in the Bodleian Library, has a torn page which has been partially ‘mended’ by a reader. The Geneva Bible, first printed in 1560 in Geneva and in England from 1576, was one of the most frequently printed books in the English Renaissance, selling over half a million copies by 1600 and continuing to

Fig. 31.2  John Milton, Paradise Lost: a poem in ten books (1669). By permission of Balliol College Library, Oxford (525 a 5).

Book Modification   591 flourish even after the printing of the King James Bible in 1611.18 Over 150 editions were issued between 1560 and 1644, so many variant texts survive from that period which fall under the baggily welcoming title of ‘the Geneva Bible’. The Bodleian’s 1578 copy has a printed poem pasted onto the page numbered as ***1.19 The poem, enclosed in a printed border, is entitled Of the incomparable treasure of the Holy Scriptures with a prayer for the true use of the same—​but you would be forgiven for struggling to decipher that line on this particular copy where the page has been torn down the middle and patched back together. The description of ‘poem’ is perhaps generous for what is a series of jingling lines of roughly four iambs in an abcb rhyme scheme. The poem begins ‘Here is the Spring where Waters flow | to quench our heat of sin’, and offers advice on how to read the text it precedes, comparing that text to a stream, a tree, a judge, and a loaf of bread. Down the left-​hand side are a series of printed citations showing where, within the Bible, each of these metaphors comes from. So next to the four-​line unit, ‘Read not this Book in any case | But with a single Eye | Read not, but first desire God’s Grace | to understand thereby’, is printed ‘Math. 6.22’ and ‘Psal. 122. 27, 73’. These rhyming lines are paraphrases of the biblical verses, reworked into the scansion that the poem demands. In full, Matthew 6:22 reads; ‘The light of the body is the eye: if then thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be light.’ Preaching on this very verse, Church of England theologian William Perkins explained that ‘the single eye is the understanding mind, able to judge of good and evil, of things to be done and not to be done’.20 The ‘single eye’, then, is a kind of moral filter, ‘able to judge’ both on and off the page. This poem pulls apart and puts back together the Bible across the Old and New Testaments, drawing out moments of Scripture to imagine the model, ‘single-​eyed’ reader (see Fig. 31.3). Despite the exemplary Bible-​reader it describes, the poem as reading model per se is a strange one. The numerous citations down the left-​hand side enact a non-​linear mode of selecting and choosing from Scripture: less a sustained reflection on the Bible as a coherent whole than evidence of reading-​as-​cherry-​picking. Peter Stallybrass, reflecting on the historical shift from scrolls to the codex in religious texts, points out that the codex ‘not only allows for discontinuous reading; it encourages it’.21 Stallybrass finds plenty of evidence that early moderns read their Bible in this way: not from start to finish, but as a series of extractable units.22 In this poem, the citations from Matthew, the Psalms, and other biblical books not only provide theological instruction, but also advocate a specific mode of reading. Reading fragments no longer as fragments but as new wholes is the productive mode of reading on offer here.23 The Bodleian copy’s torn page asks us to reflect again on this fragmented form. The printed page has lost a section from the middle, so that one of the lines comes to read: ‘Read not this any case | But with a Eye | Read not, but fre God’s Grace | to understan’. The truncated lines have their own logic: we might reflect on the meaning of ‘case’ as the container of metal type, as well as the replication of the alphabet in upper and lower. The loss of letters from ‘but first desire God’s Grace’ creates an approximation of the equally readable ‘but for God’s Grace’. But one reader, or book user, or book modifier, attempted to do away with these new lines and restore them to their prior state. They

592   Georgina Wilson

Fig. 31.3  Inserted and mended page in The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New (1578). By permission of the Bodleian Library, Vet A1.b.13.

Book Modification   593 wrote the missing letters, in ink, to the right-​hand side of the verse. Read lineally from left to right, these printed lines with their adjacent modifications lead to such strange linguistic concoctions as ‘Read not this any case, Booke in | But with a Eye single | Read not, but fre God’s Grace, first desire | to understand thereby’. It might seem stubbornly literal-​minded to read horizontally across the page in this way: obviously, you might say, obviously we are supposed to perform some mental gymnastics and reinsert the manuscript additions into the middle of the print. But reading practices are far from inherent: they are shaped by and shape the page in front of us. And being called on to decode this page demands a version of the reading out-​of-​context that we find in the poem itself. To leap from the middle to the end of the line and back again is to be comfortable with divorcing units from their surroundings and rebuilding them into new wholes. The modifications to this page iterate the selective nature of these printed aphorisms—​ heightening that sense of the textual fragment even as they seek to restore the page to its prior, pre-​fragmented state. This is a strange and thought-​provoking page in this copy of the Geneva Bible. But it is strange and thought-​provoking precisely because of its deviation from its ‘perfect’ state (or from some version of this page without the tear or the additions). This copy shows a particular and non-​reiterable encounter with this page. Searching for the most dazzling forms of book modification as this chapter compels, we should keep in mind that texts lacking legible reading traces—​pages fully intact, devoid of manuscript marks, and errata lists silently passed over—​are the foil to their decorated, patched-​up, scribbled-​ over counterparts which take up space in our catalogues, exhibitions, and monographs. That said, Bibles provide a particularly fruitful source of book modification. One reason for this was the intellectual engagement that Bibles invited of their readers, which was often realized in material form. The printed apparatus of the Geneva Bible ‘fostered self-​conscious reading practices’, and so private Bible reading could be accompanied by ‘rigorous acts of writing’ which enacted readers digesting the text.24 Women as well as men owned Bibles and wrote their names to assert possession, perform theological literacy, and to make quasi-​public declarations in a world where women’s speech was severely constrained; book margins enabled women to enter otherwise forbidden spaces and ‘extend themselves within the world’.25 A second reason for the ubiquity of modified Bibles is their role as sites of theological conflict. Bibles in the sixteenth century were both a weapon and a battleground in the upheaval of the Reformation, and the ways readers engaged with their Bibles as material as well as textual forms contribute towards a theologically charged debate about the relationship between word and object. Over-​ reverential scholarship of material engagement is equally guilty of toppling into fetishization: reading Bibles as ‘material objects, circulated, created, and used by actual people in specific settings, for particular purposes’ risks collapsing into a modern-​day kind of object-​worship disputed so violently in the sixteenth century.26 At the same time, early modern Bibles show rich evidence of modification which draws attention to their non-​ textual characteristics: to overlook such readings is to suppress the evidence of early modern personal and political engagements with the Bible. The first English Bible was printed by Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch in 1537, a project spearheaded

594   Georgina Wilson by the clergyman Thomas Cranmer and endorsed by Thomas Cromwell. But in 1540 Cromwell, the one-​time political rising star, had fallen from grace, toppled by the King’s failed marriage to Anne of Cleaves as well as his evangelical religious agenda. That fall from grace is reflected in copies of the Byble in Englysh printed in 1541 from which Thomas Cromwell’s shield is erased (see Fig. 31.4). More precisely, the shield has been replaced by a blank circle which, like those textual corrections to Paradise Lost, draws attention to the absence of the thing it tries to negate. What kind of book modification is this? If up until now we have been dealing with individual readers correcting and amending their copies, the erasure of Thomas Cromwell’s shield is a modification to an edition rather than a single copy. Where correcting errata sets apart one copy of Paradise Lost from other, non-​corrected copies of this edition, the political decision to erase Cromwell’s shield affects multiple copies at once. The manuscript notes that amend the poem in the 1578 Bible attempt to undo the history of that book’s consumption; in contrast, the removal of Cromwell’s shield is an overt reference to that edition’s historic moment and the political circumstances in which it is intended to be read. If the careful transcriber of printed text in our previous example attempts to restore ‘incomparable treasure’ to a prior state, the printers who undertook to remove Cromwell’s shield are bringing a no-​longer-​serviceable edition forward into their current moment. Can we even use the same vocabulary of ‘book modification’ to refer to these two different phenomena which look in different chronological directions? That phrase—​book modification—​encompasses a variety of kinds of book use. By defining book modification we become alert to the capaciousness of what ‘modifying’ might mean (including erasing, correcting, amending) but at this point we are also compelled to think through what we mean by a book. This is a vast question tackled in this volume on various fronts, but noting that book modification includes both the changing of ‘breath’ to ‘breathe’ and the blanking-​out of a coloured image of Cromwell’s shield is also to note the dual nature of the book as both text and object. To modify a book, even to ‘rewrite’ a book, is not confined to alphabetic or linguistic alterations. Linguistic signs exist in material forms which extend beyond a narrow meaning of writing to encompass other forms of ink on paper (like images, but also decorative symbols or readers marks), as well as pasteboard, vellum, and metal. Noticing the erasure of a shield (produced by the replacing of part of the woodblock into which the image was cut) is to notice early moderns engaging with the book first and foremost as an object which, whilst embodying thorny theological debates born out in text, is also an intricate three-​dimensional form with surfaces and depth. Early moderns modified their books in a plethora of seemingly non-​textual ways including cutting, sticking, and sewing.27 Haptic, physical forms of engagement such as these resist the narrow definition of ‘text’ and rather attend to the physical embodied forms of the book—​while the possibilities of cutting and sticking and sewing jeopardize the integrity of the book as a stable form. Literary scholars have become increasingly interested in how interactions with the book qua object are not distinct from literary study but part of it. Those interactions expand and sharpen our sense of what it means to read: historically, as well as now. Juliet

Book Modification   595

Fig. 31.4  Thomas Cromwell’s erased coat of arms. The Byble in Englysh (1541), Bodleian Library, Bib. Eng. 1541 b.2.

Fleming, writing about the tendency of early modern readers to take scissors to their books, articulates the generative relationship between reading and cutting (‘readers cut as they read, and read by cutting’), and shows cutting to be a kind of repurposing and reforming.28 But some forms of cutting were more inherently destructive. Book

596   Georgina Wilson

Fig. 31.5  The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (1695). By permission of University College Library, Oxford (B.220.20 (2) ).

modification is not just reparative, or restorative, but might also be impulsive, accidental, or vindictive. Another copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, this one from 1695, bears the traces of a reader not so much repurposing as slashing the pages of their book (see Fig. 31.5).29 The image in question is one of the engravings by John Baptist Medina, one of the publisher Jacob Tonson’s great marketing ideas behind his new edition of the epic poem. This image shows Satan, not defeated by God and the angels after the battle of Book I, but undaunted and poised on the edge of his voyage to earth: ‘honour’d and applauded’ by his fellow fallen angels, as the argument to Book II tells us.30 This is a sticky moment for critical attempts to extract Satan from the position of tragic hero: William Blake famously called out Milton for being ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’.31 The cut through this page suggests a forceful end to that party. The cut reaches back through several leaves of Book I, beyond the engraving bearing Satan’s image. By folio 21, or sig. Er, the bold slice through Satan’s elf-​like ear, neck, and torso has been reduced to a small incision in the paper. Barely visible at three leaves removed, the cut nevertheless leads from the ‘d’ in ‘Worlds’ in line 650 to just above the ‘i’ of ‘choice’ in line 652. On

Book Modification   597 this page, the rousing words of Satan compel his followers to draw arms: ‘he spake: and to confirm his words out-​flew | Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs of mighty Cherebim’.32 There is some irony in the fact that taking a knife to Satan’s image, which we instinctively read as an act of violence against the semiotics of the page, enacts the drawing of swords of Satan’s own followers. More importantly, this mode of book modification is one of alteration rather than perfection or improvement. ‘Modified’ feels like the wrong word to describe a page on which anything but restraint has taken place. Slashing through Satan’s sword might be read as an attempt to tone down Satan’s power but it is also an acknowledgement of that power, of the visual and characterful force of Satan himself. The catalogue entry for this copy describes its state thus: ‘Note: The illustration of Satan facing Book II and of the serpent facing Book IX of “Paradise Lost” have been cut with a razor blade or similar.—​Imperfect: This copy imperfect, as follows: “Poems upon several occasions” (1695): [4]‌, 9, [2], 10–​11, [2], 12-​60 p.; “[Paradise lost]” (wanting title page): 7–​219, [1], 219–​343, [3] p., [12] leaves of plates.’ The copy is described as ‘Imperfect’ not because it has been cut with a razor blade, but because it is missing various pages: specifically, its title pages and pages 1–​6. This copy, then, is witness to two kinds of book modification: one deliberate—​that taking of a blade to Satan—​and the other the result of accidental damage or cumulative wear and tear. This catalogue reflects the technical term of ‘perfect’ used by bibliographers, which refers to whether or not a copy has all of its leaves, rather than that richer, theological sense of ‘perfect’ as both making whole and making ideal. Slashing this book with a razor blade is evidently to make it ‘imperfect’ in some senses: to make the page no-​longer-​whole. But it is also, perhaps, to do away with the ‘imperfection’ that is the charismatic presence of Satan himself and so, through damage, to bring the book closer to a ‘perfect’ state. We can’t know what this reader’s intentions were, or indeed whether the cutting of this page was intentional or the result of an accident. That is often the case in early modern collections, where books bear marks of readership but give up little evidence of their provenance, or previous ownership.33 The passivity of the copy note, ‘The illustration[s]‌. . . have been cut with a razor blade’, elides the agency of the absent reader. When we imagine readers of early modern books, it’s easy to default to imagining male readers: more men than women were able to write in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century England, and so men were more likely to write their name in books. This tug towards the masculine reader means that male-​owned books are seen as specimens of universally ‘early modern’ styles of reading, whereas books owned by women are more likely to be seen as evidence of specifically female bookish practices, told through the case study of an individual.34 The point is not to overlook the differences between the ways that early modern men and women were expected to, and probably did, use their books, but to acknowledge reading as a gendered activity in which ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ reading styles play equally into early modern ideas of the contingent and modifiable book.35 One book that we know was owned and modified by a woman (albeit a woman in an unusual position of power and privilege) is Queen Elizabeth I’s Geneva–​Tomson

598   Georgina Wilson Newe Testament (1580). This tiny sexto-​decimo book has an embroidered binding, with writing stitched in silver cord onto black velvet (see Fig. 31.6). The embroidered words run around the borders of the front and back of the binding. The text is a series of pious mottos in Latin, such as ‘Beatus qui divitias Scripturae legens verba vertit in Opera’ (Happy are those who, reading the riches of Scripture, put words into practice). This book bears an inscription of Elizabeth I, and it is likely that the embroidery work

Fig. 31.6  Elizabeth I’s copy of the Geneva–​Tomson New Testament (1578), Bod Arch. G e.48.

Book Modification   599 was done by her also.36 This extravagant exterior demonstrates the meanings a book can convey before it is even opened, and the relationship between a book’s interior and exterior. On the one hand this kind of careful, skilful book modification is an explicit endorsement of its textual content: the outside of the book promotes its innards as the ‘riches of Scripture’. At the same time, the embroidery transforms this book into an object whose ‘riches’ are of a more quantifiable kind than those metaphorical ones attached to the printed word. Textile bindings call into question our notions of surface and depth, ‘figuring the book’s meaning as something produced within an elaborate system of material surfaces, and interpretation as something practised outside as well as within a book’.37 This embroidery is highly specific to Elizabeth I (the letters E.C. may stand for ‘Elizabeth Captiva’: a legacy of the future Queen’s imprisonment at Woodstock) but it is also evidence of a broad spectrum of early modern modes of textual engagement which historicizes our notion of the book. If the book has ever been imagined as a fixed, stable form of paper surfaces, inscribed with printed texts, then that idea is challenged by the things that early modern readers did, and were invited to do, to their books. While embroidered bindings are in some ways a reaction or response to a book in its provisional state, other early modern books demand that their readers intervene before they begin to read. Errata lists are one type of instructed modification, but readers were asked to make non-​textual inventions too. This is often the case in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century texts on mathematics, or navigation, designed with paper instruments to illustrate their theories to readers. These paper instruments were highly fragile, and so it was left to the reader (rather than the printer or binder) to cut them out and paste them into the book as part of the learning process. A copy of Blundevile His Exercises includes a pasted-​in paper dial with the words ‘place these two one upon another upon that page 315’ (see Fig. 31.7); the presence of this page reveals that no reader took it upon themselves to complete this instruction for modification. Another book which professes the art of various navigational instruments has a large hole cut out beneath the words ‘this belongs to the Nocturnal’ (see Fig. 31.8): evidently this book has been modified in the way that its printer required. Both of these books announce themselves as unfinished even by the time they reach the hands of their reader. While the errata list which began this chapter invites the reader to make textual amendments to the book, these papery cut-​and-​pastes turn our attention towards the instability of the codex’s material form. In another copy of Blundevile’s Exercises, the paper dial has been dutifully cut out and later fell out of the book altogether; it is now preserved loose between the pages.38 Comparing copies of books side by side, when some are missing paper dials and other dials remain intact, foregrounds the contingency of the book: not only as a phenomenon of the early modern period but also as a characteristic of any book which bears the traces of its history. As Zachary Lesser reflects on comparing multiple copies of Shakespearean texts as part of the Shakespeare Census (a project which ‘attempts to locate and describe all extant copies of all editions of Shakespeare’s works through 1700, excluding the folios’), ‘copy specific attention makes visible multiple historical moments overlaid onto a single transhistorical object that is never truly “finished” ’.39

600   Georgina Wilson

Fig. 31.7  ‘Place these two one upon another upon that page 315’. M Blundevile His Exercises (1636), Huntington Library 708329.

Book modification is a continuous process, which means that a twenty-​first-​century encounter with a seventeenth-​century book also bears the traces of ownership, book use, or curatorial practice from the three centuries in between. In the nineteenth century, dealers and booksellers often replaced missing leaves from rare books with pages from other copies: a practice known as ‘sophistication’. The moral ambiguity of the term—​which suggests the adulterating of something ‘pure’, as well as its improvement or bettering—​reflects the historical shift in attitudes towards such modes of book use.40 Modifications which fall between our own period of research (from which evidence of readers can be compellingly alien) and the modern day (from which curatorial practices are easy to overlook as eminently functional) can be confusing or even frustrating. But few books give themselves up to our own sense of hermetically sealed periodization. One volume of plays now in Balliol College Library contains a handwritten contents page (see Fig. 31.9) whose titles include late seventeenth-​century works such as The Mourning Bride by William Congreve (1697), as well as ‘A most pleasant and excellent conceited comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the merry wives of Windsor—​by W Shakespeare’ and ‘The tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark by the same’. This contents page constructs a unique chronology: John Webster’s The White Devil, first printed in 1631 but here included in its 1672 edition, appears to be a later cultural artefact than Cowley’s The Cutter of Coleman Street (1663). Shakespeare sits at the end of a list of playwrights with whom he is less often grouped in literary studies: not Thomas Middleton or John

Book Modification   601

Fig. 31.8  Edmund Gunter, The description and vse of the sector (1624), Huntington Library 29076.

Fletcher, but Edward Ravenscroft (1654?–​1707) and Aphra Behn (1640?–​89). Our own fortresses of canonicity and periodization crumble under the structures of volumes which place works in unfamiliar dialogic juxtaposition. Jeffrey Todd Knight and others have shown that compositors, vendors, and editors are ‘important agents in

602   Georgina Wilson

Fig. 31.9 Contents page to multi-​text volume including works by John Webster, Edward Ravenscroft, Aphra Behn, and William Shakespeare. Balliol College Library, Oxford, 530 b 1.

meaning-​making’.41 Multi-​volume texts like this Sammelband ‘circumscribe interpretative possibilities within a recognizable, physical text . . . The resulting text does not transparently re-​present a literary work that exists, fully formed, in advance; it impresses into the historical substructure of that work the values, assumptions and biases of those

Book Modification   603 make it, at each stage of its construction.’42 Rather than searching for the irretrievable intentions, or ‘values, assumptions and biases’ of those agents, a more useful approach might be to take those texts on their own terms. Binding Hamlet to Congreve’s The Mourning Bride is to give both Shakespeare’s and Congreve’s tragedies a new lease of interpretative life. For one thing, Zara’s claim that ‘Heav’n has no rage . . . | No Hell a fury, like a woman scorned’ rings hollow in the face of Ophelia’s suicide: ‘incapable of her own distress’ after Hamlet’s scorning of her.43 The history of the book prompts us to become aware of our own place in book history, and our own ‘values, assumptions and biases’. There is a particular attraction to studying these denaturalized forms of canonical texts because their apparent familiarity generates a stronger desire to locate an ‘unmodified’ Hamlet or Merry Wives of Windsor. Modification is all the more striking when we think we know what a text is being modified towards or away from, but that idea of a non-​ mediated text is anachronistic, and misunderstands the mediated nature of all texts in their changing material form. This contents page is testimony to the contingency of texts’ material form: Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor were in circulation for the best part of a century before these copies were bound into this volume. And this volume was not the end of their modified states. This handwritten contents page no longer accurately reflects the contents of the Sammelband, because both Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor were removed in the nineteenth century and rebound into their own red goatskin bindings with gold-​ tooled titles. It looks likely, in fact, that the final five plays in the contents page were originally bound together in a slimmer volume. A tab marking the ‘Epilogue’ on the outer edge of Behn’s The Young King would have been visible when this volume was made up of pages which were narrower in width: the darker colouring around the edge is evidence of when this part of the page was exposed (see Fig. 31.10). The plays now numbered one to eleven were added onto the start to produce the state of the volume which generated the contents page, before the final two Shakespeare plays were removed in the nineteenth century. These two Shakespeare texts, then, went through at least three different binding structures which are still legible in the traces of this volume. Not only early modern readers, but later curatorial practices, shape our access to sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century texts. Rather than seeing these shifts as obstacles between ourselves and an ‘unadulterated’ early modern text, paying attention to the ongoing forms of curatorial practices which accumulate around these texts is a helpful reminder of the always-​modified, always-​historicized state of the archival artefact in our hands. The most recent modifications to early modern books are themselves still very much ongoing. The digitalization of books, primarily on Early English Books Online for early modern scholars of print, has radically changed the way that we access and read books. For one thing, the database erases evidence of those multi-​text volumes and presents all texts in discrete form. EEBO is a database of editions, not of copies—​which is to say that it distinguishes between versions of a book for which the type has been reset, but not between copies printed from the same typesetting (even if those copies differ wildly in other ways). EEBO makes it easy for the reader to compare linguistic variants between the Q1, Q2, and Q3 Hamlet without ever entering an archive. But if you wanted

604   Georgina Wilson

Fig. 31.10  Tab reading ‘epilogue’ in Aphra Behn’s The Young King . Balliol Library, 530 b 1.

to compare different copies of Q3—​between the Q3 Hamlet in Balliol Library, the one in Edinburgh, and the three in the Folger Library—​then EEBO is not only currently unable to express those differences, but also actually supresses their significance by foregrounding edition-​based, rather than copy-​specific, modification. EEBO is blind to

Book Modification   605 certain kinds of book modification, including binding practices; it also presents us with books that have themselves been silently modified. Books on EEBO are compressed or expanded into a uniform size; they appear in black and white; they appear without their blank end-​leaves. EEBO is one of the latest and largest surgeons at the operating table of book modification which, through its sheer mass of data and searchable text transcription, is able to correct certain of our assumptions about early modern texts. But EEBO also flattens our sense of the early modern book which, as this chapter has shown, invited and received physical readerly modification in ways which are rendered impossible by the unresisting state of our computer screens, and which show up more clearly in the embroidered Bibles and slashed Satans of the archives. A preliminary version of the Bodleian oath, written by Thomas Bodley in 1608, includes an expansive list of activities against which his readers were to be forewarned: ‘neither yourself in person, nor any other whosoever . . . shall either openly or underhand, by way of embezeling, changing, razing, defacing, tearing, cutting, noting, interlining, or by any voluntarie corrupting, blotting, slurring or any other maner of mangling, or misusing, any one or more of the said books, either wholy in part, make any alteration’.44 Bodley’s desire to constrain the use of his collection results in a rich sense of the modes of engagement that books afford. This chapter has offered models of reading modified books as sources not of lament but of meaning, which is contingently constructed by readers as they engage with books rather than lodged firmly in place for the reader to find. Taking an oath ‘not to remove . . . mark, deface, or injure in any way’ the contents of a collection is to create rules about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of book use. Yet, as this chapter shows, those rules—​which emerge from particular historical moments and within institutional and disciplinary settings—​are disrupted by early modern book-​users who engaged more happily with the book as an open-​ended form, and to whose engagement we are continually drawn.

Notes 1. William Clennell, ‘The Bodleian Declaration: A History’, Bodleian Library Record, 20 (2007), 47–​60, at 48. 2. For a history of similar oaths in other English University libraries see Clennell, ‘The Bodleian Declaration’, 48–​50. 3. OED, ‘diversify, v.’ 1, 4. 4. Q1 contains one additional scene, absent from Q2, in which Horatio informs the Queen that the King plans to kills Hamlet. This scene is generally regarded not to be authored by Shakespeare. 5. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia a description of the body of man (1615), sig. Aa5v. 6. Those claims are undermined once again by the appearance of Q3 in 1611, and the 1623 First Folio. 7. ‘If there are two surviving copies of a book, with copy 1 consisting of signatures A and B and copy 2 consisting of signatures B and C, the ideal of the copy of the book would be the

606   Georgina Wilson one that included signatures A, B and C.’ Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books 1450–​ 1800 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 87–​88. 8. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 304. 9. Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 85. 10. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003), 97–​165, esp. 151. 11. Stephen Dobranski suggests that Milton used the errata list to improve on his poems; Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161. 12. W. W. Greg, ‘The Rational of Copy-​Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950–​1), 19–​36, at 21. 13. For an expanded discussion of ‘book use’ as a more historically precise way of understanding early modern interaction with books, see Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory 1500–​1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005). 14. John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Ten Books (1669), sig. M2v, iv. 239. 15. Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Ten Books, sig. Ii4r, viii. 1180–​1. 16. On the literary productiveness of error as both editorial concept and material reality in the early modern period, see Alice Leonard, Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), esp. ch. 4. 17. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, 41. 18. William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 166. 19. This poem is regularly inserted from 1578 onwards: I have confirmed its presence in the copy in Keble College, Oxford (STC 2123), although it is missing from a copy in All Souls (p.8.3) and from Harris Manchester (F1578/​4). 20. A godly and learned exposition of Christs Sermon in the Mount (1604), sig. Z2r. 21. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in Jennifer Andersen, Elizabeth Sauer, and Stephen Orgel (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 42–​79, at 47. 22. See also Mary Thomas Crane, who argued that Renaissance students ‘were encouraged to view all literature as a system of interchangeable fragments, and to view the process of composition as centered on intertextuality rather than imitation in the usual sense’. Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-​century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 92. 23. Juliet Fleming theorizes for the book historian this relationship between wholes and fragments, suggesting that ‘we need to stop thinking in wholes’, ‘The Renaissance Collage: Signcutting and Signsewing’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45/​3 (2015), 443–​456, at 451. 24. Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 35. 25. Katherine Acheson, ‘The Occupations of the Margin: Writing, Space and Early Modern Women’, in Early Modern English Marginalia (New York: Routledge, 2018), 80. 26. Sherman, Used Books, 72. 27. See Juliet Fleming, William Sherman, and Adam Smyth (eds.), ‘The Renaissance Collage: Signcutting and Signsewing’, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45/​3 (2015).

Book Modification   607 28. Fleming, ‘The Renaissance Collage’, 445–​446. 29. The Poetical Works of John Milton (1695), University College, Oxford, B.220.20 (2). 30. The Poetical Works of Mr John Milton, sig. E4r. 31. William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965; rev. edn. 1982), 35. 32. The Poetical Works of Mr John Milton, sig. Er. 33. David Pearson’s Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (rev. edn., Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019)provides a thorough guide. 34. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–​78, is often cited as evidence of ‘early modern’ reading practices, rather than evidence of the practices of a university-​educated male lawyer. 35. On the elision of female reading and book practice from mainstream book history, see Kate Ozment, ‘Rationale for Feminist Bibliography’, Textual Cultures, 13/​1 (2020), 149–​178, esp. 154–​155. See also Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Arden, 2020). 36. Cyril Davenport, Royal English Bookbindings (London: Seeley, 1896), 39. Elizabeth also embroidered books for Katherine Parr, including The Glass of the Sinful Soul; see Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 30–​74. 37. Claire Canavan, ‘Reading Materials: Textile Surfaces and Early Modern Books’, Journal of Northern Renaissance, 8 (2017), 17, https://​www.nort​hern​rena​issa​nce.org/​read​ing-​materi​ als-​text​ile-​surfa​ces-​and-​early-​mod​ern-​books/​. See also Alexandra Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, Studies in Church History, 38 (2004), 123–​142. 38. Henry E. Huntington Library, 95582. 39. Zachary Lesser, ‘The Material Text between General and Particular, Edition and Copy’, English Literary Renaissance, 50/​1 (2020), 83–​92, at 85. For the Shakespeare Census project see https://​shakes​pear​ecen​sus.org. 40. On the ethics of this practice, see Nicholas Barker, ‘Sophistication’, The Bookseller, 55/​ 1 (2006), 11–​28. Other examples are Shakespeare’s folio 36 at the Folger Shakespeare Library which is made up of at least five different copies), and a copy of Diana of George of Montemayor: translated out of Spanish into English by Bartholomew Yong of the Middle Temple Gentleman (1598) at the Huntington Library (shelf mark 62717) whose title page, containing a (possibly forged) signature of Ben Jonson, is from another copy. 41. Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 56. 42. Knight, Bound to Read, 17. 43. 4.7.174, in the Arden edition ed Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (2006). 44. Trecentale Bodleianum: A Memorial Volume for the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Public Funeral of Sir Thomas Bodley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 51–​52.

Select Bibliography Acheson, Katherine, Early Modern English Marginalia (New York: Routledge, 2018).

608   Georgina Wilson Andersen, Jennifer, Sauer, Elizabeth, and Orgel, Stephen (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Barker, Nicholas, ‘Sophistication’, The Bookseller, 55/​1 (2006), 11–​28. Canavan, Claire, ‘Reading Materials: Textile Surfaces and Early Modern Books’, Journal of Northern Renaissance, 8 (2017), 1–​36, https://​www.nort​hern​rena​issa​nce.org/​read​ing-​materi​ als-​text​ile-​surfa​ces-​and-​early-​mod​ern-​books/​. Cormack, Bradin, and Mazzio, Carla, Book Use, Book Theory 1500–​1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005). Fleming, Juliet, Sherman, William, and Smyth, Adam (eds.), ‘The Renaissance Collage: Signcutting and Signsewing’, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45/​3 (2015). Knight, Jeffrey Todd, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Lesser, Zachary, ‘The Material Text between General and Particular, Edition and Copy’, English Literary Renaissance, 50/​1 (2020), 83–​92. McKitterick, David, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Molekamp, Femke, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Sherman, William, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Werner, Sarah, Studying Early Printed books 1450–​1800 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019).

CHAPTER 32

Early Modern B o oks a nd Phono gra ph y Bruce R. Smith

Duke Senior in As You Like It celebrates the quiet life he and his fellow exiles are enjoying in the Forest of Arden: ‘And this our life exempt from publike haunt, | Findes tongues in trees, bookes in the running brookes, | Sermons in stones, and good in euery thing.’1 For chattering courtiers the forest affords rustling leaves; for books, running brooks; for sermons heard in stone-​built churches, echoes from stones of the forest. Books in brooks? That feature of the Forest of Arden is harder to imagine than the other two, but running brooks make sounds no less than rustling leaves and echoing stones. A few lines later in As You Like It the First Lord gestures towards ‘the brook that brawls along this wood’ (II. i. 32). Still, Duke Senior’s comparison of books and brook seems far-​fetched, unless we consider that early modern books, like brooks, could make sound. In fact, early modern books could ‘speak’. The inverted commas did not apply when solitary readers spoke the words in a book to themselves or when social readers spoke the words aloud to other people. Jennifer Richards in Voices and Books in the English Renaissance has assembled evidence of just how common the practice of reading aloud was in early modern England and has studied the ways in which early modern books were designed to be read aloud.2 We have lost the knack of reading that way, Richards says, and her book is intended as a corrective. Reading practices like those Richardson describes could be called ‘sounding books’, taking inert objects of inked paper and turning those objects into aural events. Some types of print were not so inert: they positively demanded to be turned into sound. Books of musical notation are one example. The original manuscript of As You Like It is another. That manuscript, long since lost, was a master plan for an aural event. When the play was acted, a copy of the manuscript book was held by the ‘tirer man’ or ‘book-​ keeper’, who stood within the tiring house and coordinated players’ entrances, managed the movement of props on and off the stage, and cued sound effects like ‘flourish’ at the entrance of Duke Frederick and his courtiers for the wrestling match in Act I, scene ii. Even more ready to be sounded than the book of the play were the ‘sides’ that each

610   Bruce R. Smith player received for memorizing his speeches. These manuscript leaves included only the speeches for that particular player, each speech being cued by the last phrase of previous speaker’s lines.3 As both a manuscript book and a handful of sides, As You Like It in 1599/​ 1600 was a text designed to be sounded. It was a book for speaking, a ‘speaking book’. As printed in the First Folio, As You Like It became a book for reading, as indicated by John Heminge and Henry Condell’s prefatory epistle ‘To the great Variety of Readers’ (Shakespeare 1623, sig. A3). Early modern reading habits suggest that at least some of those readers—​perhaps most of them—​would be inclined to turn the dumb print back into a speaking book. With these dynamics in mind, we might consider the texts of early modern playbooks as examples of phonography, of ‘sound-​writing’. As Patrick Feaster points out in the chapter on ‘Phonography’ in Keywords in Sound, there are two aspects to phonography: encoding and decoding.4 First the sound has to be recorded in one or another medium, be it wax cylinder, electromagnetic tape, digital code—​or ink on paper. Then the recorded sound must be released from the medium and heard. Feaster in his explorations of sound-​writing before Thomas Edison and the modern technologies of recording has given the term ‘phonography’ the broader meaning I am deploying in this chapter. Feaster makes a crucial distinction between sound reproduction (‘producing again’ the sounds inscribed on the surface of cylinder or disk, as if the machine were the voice or the musical instrument) and sound representation (‘presenting again’, via some form of visual notation, a sound that is otherwise lost in the entropy of waves in the air). Alphabets are signal examples of visual notations for ‘presenting again’. A common term for phonemes in early modern English was ‘voices’. Ben Jonson in ­chapter 1 of The English Grammar (1641) sets straight the difference between ‘power’ in speech and ‘form’ in writing. Power—​‘the sound expressed by a character or symbol’5—​comes first: ‘A letter is an indivisible part of a syllabe, whose prosody, or right sounding, is perceived by the power; the orthography, or right writing, by the form.’6 The priority of sound over writing was a commonplace in early modern grammar and rhetoric. For some people that priority was cause for spelling reform. John Hart, the Chester Herald in the College of Arms and thus a stickler for getting representations right, entitled his 1569 book on phonetic spelling AN ORTHO-​graphie: conteyning the due order and reason, howe to write or paint thimage of mannes voice, most like to the life or nature.7 (All capital letters on the title pages of early modern books have generally been taken to be instances of typesetters’ whimsy or else visual ploys, but especially in cases like Hart’s they may function also as markers of vocal emphasis.) Both aspects of phonography—​ encoding and decoding—​ will be considered in this chapter. Phonography offers a more finely calibrated tool for analysing the role of voice in the written media of early modern England than the familiar dichotomy between ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’ proposed by Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). As Michelle Levy and Tom Mole point out in The Broadview Introduction to Book History, the very concept of ‘oral culture’ is a back-​ formation from ‘print culture’ and dates only from the eighteenth century, when literacy became a social norm.8 For Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf the relation of speech to

Early Modern Books and Phonography    611 writing is a matter of symbiosis: ‘It is less instructive to think in terms of inversely correspondent relationships between oral, scribal and print cultures, in which an advance in one must entail a consequent retreat in another, than to regard these three media as complementary and mutually sustaining.’9 Rather than orality giving way to print in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the two media participated within an ecological system in which each interacted with the other.10 To enter this ecological zone as outsiders, we should take stock of the variety of printed books that were available to users in early modern England and attune ourselves to the variety of ways in which these books encode sound and offer to be decoded in sound. Although it is tempting to include environmental sounds in sound-​writing—​ William Baldwin’s octavo Beware the Cat comes to mind—​I shall be limiting attention in this chapter to voiced speech. The result of my investigation is not a series of discrete genres, as conventional literary history would have it, but a continuum that stretches from ‘speaking books’ on the one hand to ‘textbooks’ on the other: ◄—​—​—​—​—​—​​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—▶ ​ speaking books ballads dialogues play-​scripts lyrics narratives speeches textbooks Moving from left to right along this continuum, the writing of sound becomes fainter and the invitation to readers to sound out that writing becomes less insistent. To provide some common reference points I shall take a cue from Duke Senior and choose as examples printed texts that have something to do with As You Like It.

Speaking Books At the left end of the continuum we find printed materials that function as adjuncts to some sort of aural event. Printed materials of this kind do not so much record sounds as provide cues for reproducing sounds. In the case of speech, those cues would be ‘voices’ in Ben Jonson’s sense of the word, printed so that readers can sound out those voices, phoneme by phoneme. Abcedaries, catechisms, and the Book of Common Prayer are examples. Elements of all three species of print are combined in the earliest surviving English book printed for children, The a b c with the Pater noster Aue /​Credo /​and.x. cōmaundementes in Englysshe newly translated and set forth at the kyng most gracyouse commaundement (London: Richard Lant, n.d. [1536 written on the title page in an old hand]). First comes a page of ABCs in both black letter and roman type, in both capital letters and lower case. A prayer at the end of these alphabets—​‘In the name of the father & son | & the holy ghost. Amē’—​seems to be a pious equivalent of ‘Oh, what a good boy am I’, to be said by students who have successfully recognized the letters and memorized the sounds.11 A tune may have helped the students’ memorization. The Richard Lant a, b, c—​a tiny duodecimo—​also finds room for the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, the Apostles’

612   Bruce R. Smith Creed, and the Ten Commandments as texts to be memorized and recited aloud. The ABCs and the Lord’s Prayer, without the other texts, were often printed on a single sheet of vellum or paper pasted on to a piece of wood or bone, to be taken in hand as a ‘horn-​ book’ (see Fig. 32.1). The small size and the portability of horn-​books indicate how print at the speaking-​books end of the continuum consists of modest objects. They take up

Fig. 32.1  Horn-​book, early seventeenth century (STC 13813.5). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Early Modern Books and Phonography    613 not much room in the larger acoustical space in which they function as accessories. If David Cressy’s statistics about literacy in sixteenth-​century England are accurate, we can assume that Audrey, Corin, and William in As You Like It never had occasion to use a horn-​book.12 Silvius and Phoebe are, linguistically speaking, sheep of a different colour. They speak, at length, in ornate verse that seems to come from Theocritus’ idylls, Virgil’s Eclogues, or Sidney’s Arcadia. With the exception of Gabriel’s salutation to the Virgin, the core texts of Protestant Christian faith printed in the 1536 a, b, c were enshrined in successive iterations of the Book of Common Prayer (1549 and after) for recitation ad litteratam in services of the Church of England. The preface to the 1549 version is adamant that the orders of service be spoken, in English, precisely as printed, ‘in suche a language and ordre, as is moste easy and plain for the understandyng, bothe of the readers and hearers.’ To officiants who may complain about having to stick to the book, the preface has this to say: If any would judge this waye more painfull, because that all thynges must be read upon the boke, whereas before, by the reason of so often repeticion, they could saye many thinges by heart: if those men will waye their labor, with the profite in knowlege, whiche dayely they shal obtein by readyng upon the boke, they will not refuse the payn, in consideracion of the greate profite that shall ensue therof.13

The letter-​by-​letter requirement is waived for private prayers, apart from cathedrals, churches, and chapels. Less restrictive uses for speaking books are set forth in foreign-​language guides like John Florio’s FLORIO His firste Fruites: which yeelde familiar speech, merie Prouerbes, wittie Sentences, and golden sayings. Also a perfect Induction to the Italian, and English tongues, as in the Table appeareth. The like heretofore, neuer by any man published (1578).14 The principle here remains the same as in other speaking books—​encodings of speech sounds intended to be decoded by readers—​but readers in this case have more freedom in how they put those sounds to personal use.

Ballads Like horn-​books, broadside ballads in early modern culture figured as small print amid huge sonic environments. Hawked in the streets by pedlars who sometimes sang their wares, affixed to the walls of noisy taverns, sung as entertainment at country fairs, a broadside ballad was a modest specimen of print consisting of a single folio sheet printed on only one side with a title, verses, some recycled woodcuts, and usually an indication of a tune to which the verses could be sung. The printed matter does not so much record aural events as give cues for producing aural events. Technically speaking,

614   Bruce R. Smith broadsides did not qualify as books until someone collected the single sheets and bound them together, as Samuel Pepys did in the 1680s and 1690s. Starting with a collection put together by John Selden, probably in the 1620s, Pepys ultimately collected 1,800 broadside ballads and pasted them into five folio-​size volumes. Fig. 32.2 shows a detail from a page in Pepys’s Volume I (‘History—​True and Ficticous’), on which is pasted ‘The famous Battell betweene Robin Hood and the Curtall Fryer’. Broadside ballads from the collections of Pepys, John Bagford, and others became full-​fledged books when nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century editors like William Chappell reprinted the texts, often leaving out any mention of tunes and omitting the woodcuts or else replacing them with finely recut images worthy of Thomas Bewick. These bookified ballads were returned to something like their original condition with the advent of the online database English Broadside Ballads Archive (EBBA), which provides not only facsimiles of the original printings but also audio files when named tunes can be matched with surviving notation elsewhere.15 Before Selden, Pepys, and other collectors snatched broadside ballads

Fig. 32.2  Detail of Pepys ballad i. 78–​79 as mounted in Pepys’s Volume I. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Early Modern Books and Phonography    615 out of their aural element, they moved fluidly back and forth between sound and print, as Patricia Fumerton demonstrates at large in The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics.16 ‘The famous Battell betweene Robin Hood and the Curtall Fryer’ in Pepys’s album has been dated to 1625, making it the oldest surviving Robin Hood broadside in EBBA. Manuscript evidence and the continuance of orally transmitted ballads about Robin Hood into the early twentieth century suggest a prehistory older than this chance survival from 1625.17 When Charles the Wrestler in As You Like It tells Oliver the whereabouts of the exiled Duke Senior, he gestures toward a sounded world that was just out of earshot for auditors at the Globe in 1599/​1600, when the play was likely in repertory. As for the exiled duke, says Charles, ‘They say hee is already in the Forrest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they liue like the old Robin Hood of England: they say many yong Gentlemen flocke to him euery day, and fleet the time carelesly as they did in the golden world’ (I. i. 87–​90). Charles’s Robin Hood allusion is called into aural presence in ‘The famous Battell betweene Robin Hood and the Curtall Fryer’ (Pepys, i. 78–​79, STC S126151, EBBA 20273). The printed text is mostly a series of fictional past-​tense speeches with cues for singing them in the here-​and-​now. In this case the words are to be sung ‘To a new Notherne tune’. Though the printed text seems to imply a single narrator/​singer, ‘The famous Battell’ shifts among the voices of multiple characters, Three woodcuts (see Fig. 32.2) provide visual reference points for the principal protagonists and, implicitly, vocal reference points for what they are cued to say: Robin Hood (probably on the left), Little John (probably on the right), and the armed ‘curtall friar’ in the middle (Friar Tuck with his short ‘curtailed’ gown). After a quick setting of scene in the narrator’s voice—​‘In Summer time when leaves grow [greene] | and flowers are fresh and gay, | Robin Hood and his merry men | Were disposed to play’—​the ballad shifts back and forth between the narrator’s voice and the voices of the three protagonists. ‘Which of you can a good bow draw, | a good archer for to be[?]‌’, asks Robin Hood. Just such a man, replies one of Robin’s men, is the curtal friar from Fountains Abbey. And off Robin and his men go to find out. The friar turns out to be more than they bargained for. When when his armour repels Robin’s arrows, the friar bellows, ‘Shoot on, shoot on, thou fine fellow, | . . . | thy marke I will not shun’. When the arrow-​shooting contest turns into a fight between the friar’s pack of fifty dogs and Robin Hood’s overmatched men, Little John’s voice saves the day: I am little John, Robin Hoods man, Fryer I will not lie, If thou take not up thy dogs soone, Ile take up them and thee.

The singer of ‘The famous Battell’, as he ventriloquizes one personage after another, hails his listeners by the ears into a series of subject positions.

616   Bruce R. Smith

Dialogues ‘And how like you this shepherds life Mr Touchstone?’, asks Corin in As You Like It, Act III, scene ii. Replies the court jester, ‘Truely Shepheard, in respect of it selfe, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepheards life, it is naught. . . . Has’t any Philosophie in thee shepheard?’ (III. ii. 11–​13, 18). So begins a comic dialogue about which life is better, the country life or the court life. Books of dialogues in early modern England all purported to be records of conversations like this one, but they also served as models for conversations yet to be. Erasmus’s Latin Colloquia or ‘Conversations’ (unauthorized edition 1518, twelve revised and expanded editions 1522–​33, first printing in England 1531) were devised to teach students to read and speak colloquial Latin. Modern discourse analysis recognizes such short back-​and-​forth exchanges as a ‘speech genre’.18 Beyond their function in humanist education, dialogues between two speakers avowing different viewpoints proved adaptable to addressing a variety of subjects, serious and ironic, in English publications, including religion (Randall Hurlestone’s translation of Newes from Rome concerning the blasphemous sacrifice of the papisticall Masse, 1538–​47?), archery (John Ascham’s Toxophilus, 1545), astronomy (Here be.vij. dialogues The fyrst is of the so[n]‌ne and of the moone . . ., c.1550), philosophy (Sir Thomas Eliot’s Of that knowlage, whiche maketh a wise man: A disputacion Platonike, c.1550), ethics (Robert Bieston’s Bayte [and] snare of fortune: Wherin may be seen that money is . . . a necessary mean to mayntayne a vertuous quiet lyfe. 1556), the learning of foreign languages (Robert Stepney’s The Spanish schoole-​maister: containing seuen dialogues according to euery day in the weeke, 1591), law (William Fulbeck’s Parallele or conference of the civill law, the canon law, and the common law of this realme of England, 1601), and medicine (John Deacon’s Tobacco tortured, or, The filthie fume of tobacco refined, 1616). Nearly 250 titles ranging in date from a compendiouse treetise dyalogue of diues [and] paup[er], that is to say, The riche [and] the pore (1493) to William King’s The transactioneer with some of his philosophical fancies: in two dialogues (1700) are included under the subject heading ‘Dialogues—​early works to 1800’in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Hamnet database (which includes Early English Books Online). With a few exceptions like Kenneth J. Wilson’s Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue,19 dialogues, as a category of early modern print, have received less critical attention than their sheer bulk merits. Not all of the dialogues printed in England are as overtly conversational as Erasmus’s models. There was always the temptation to endow one speaker (the Magister) with knowledge that could be played off against the other speaker (the Discipulus), who brought to the game curiosity and ignorance. Rough parity exists between the two old friends who speak in QVESTIONS OF PROFITABLE AND PLEASANT CONCERNINGS, TALked of by two olde Seniors, the one an ancient retired Gentleman, the other a midling or new vpstart frankeling, vnder an Oake in Kenelworth Parke (1594).

Early Modern Books and Phonography    617 Dunstable, the retired country gentleman, and Huddle, the upstart petty freeholder, just back from London, are discussing the news that the Earl of Essex (to whom the dialogue is dedicated) is planning to set up ‘a standing house’ or full-​time residence in the neighbourhood. Huddle gives voice—​at some length—​to the doubts some people have about the true benefits of the earl’s coming. At last Huddle stops, prompting this sarcastic reply from his friend Dunstable: Since it is your pleasure to stay your discourse with a desire to heare my plaine eloquence, I rather blame you for speaking too little against that which is so worthy reproofe, then otherwise thinke much or that you ouer said in the Earle his praise. To say truly, such are our grosse manners, not caring what we say so we say somwhat, and somwhat we must say, else could not the world take knowledge of our sufficiencies, which serue vs much better to finde wants in other men, where they are not, then to feele the burthen of our owne extremities, lying heauy vpon our shoulders, ready to breake our weake backs.

For his part, Dunstable is grateful that Essex is coming to live amongst them and hopes that his example will motivate other noblemen to bring back hospitality and obligations to the ‘countries’ or regions where they are lords of the land, A thing so much discontinued and so farre worne out of fashion, that vnlesse by some notable man it be reduced and set vp againe, the old ancient patterns lost and gone, I feare me, it will hardly or neuer catch the right shape againe, men haue swarued so much to the new cut, wearing all on London fashion, where they neuer thinke on their poore countries, saue on quarter rent daies only.20

Here Huddle and Dunstable enact the same sort of country-​versus-​court dialogue as Touchstone and Corin, albeit in their own distinctive voices. In his epistle to the reader, the dialogue’s author O.B. presents himself as a ‘reporter’ rather than a user of ‘painted guile or supportation of Arte’.21 Why printed dialogues proved so adaptable and so effective in dealing with such a variety of topics has much to do with sound-​writing. At the most fundamental level, recorded speech—​or what is ostensibly such—​is more vivid than impersonal exposition. Since dialogues usually take the form of an argument between opposing points of views, readers are invited to take sides. As with broadside ballads, dialogues offer a choice in subject positions, raising the possibility that the reader internalizes one voice against the other. The encoded sounds of speech can inspire extralinguistic sound-​ making on the reader’s part in the form of chuckles or exclamations of disagreement, inwardly or aloud. Finally, dialogues can model conversations that the reader might actually have with other people or give printed confirmation to opinions the reader already has taken in conversations. Unlike horn-​books and broadside ballads, books of dialogues are books, but their size relative to the social space they occupy is modest. Very often books of dialogues are printed in quarto, octavo, and duodecimo.

618   Bruce R. Smith

Play-​scripts Along the phonography continuum, early modern play-​ scripts fall towards the middle, between speaking books, ballads, and dialogues on the sound-​intensive end and lyrics, printed speeches, and textbooks on the progressively sound-​distant end. Thus positioned, play-​scripts can be regarded as a series of speech genres—​dialogues, orations, narratives, lyrics—​that are joined together in a dramatic fiction. The distinctiveness of speech genres is perhaps more apparent in plays not designed to be performed—​in what came to be called ‘closet drama’ in later times—​but the distinctions can also be found in As You Like It. As first printed in the 1623 First Folio, the text has a double purpose: it is a record of performances that happened twenty years in the past, and it is a text for reading in the present and future. If As You Like It had been printed in quarto shortly after its first performances, its documentary function would have been more apparent. The title page would probably have touted the text As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants, as with the 1600 quarto of The Chronicle History of Henry the fift, a play that was acted in the same years as As You Like It.22 In keeping with Heminge and Condell’s address ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, the texts of the plays in the First Folio are laid out visually with paratexts to aid readers’ eyes. The printed text is surrounded by rule-​lines and is divided up into acts and scenes, as they would be in scholarly editions of Terence and Seneca and in the humanist plays modelled on them. In the classical Latin plays the scene divisions are marked, not by changes in fictional place and time, but by the entrances or exits of speakers. If a new speaker joins two who are already present, a new scene is marked. The effect is to turn each ‘scene’ into a free-​standing dialogue, often between two speakers, sometimes among three or four. If we read As You Like It as a series of two-​person dialogues interspersed with other speech genres, we find something like this: Orlando and Oliver on the duties of first sons (I. i. 26–​80), Oliver and Charles on court intrigue versus forest exile (I. i. 84–​end), Rosalind and Celia on fortune (I. ii. 1–​41), etc. Each dialogue tends to focus on some sort of controversy, just as books of dialogues do. The second speech genre in As You Like It is the oration, in which I talk at length while you listen. In the case of soliloquies, the ‘you’ is not anyone on stage but the audience or the reader. In keeping perhaps with the social nature of romantic comedy, there are no soliloquies in As You Like It, but there is an abundance of orations, most of them spoken by the sardonic Jaques. His speeches are speeches, ‘set speeches’ in a term that was just coming into use for ‘public speech more or less elaborate; an oration, as distinguished from extemporaneous or informal utterances’ (OED, ‘set, adj.1’, 6d). Jaques’s five set speeches are like one-​man plays-​within-​the-​play. He performs five of them for a bemused onstage audience: ‘Poor deer, . . . thou maks’t a testament’ (quoted at second hand by the First Lord, II. i. 47 ff.), ‘A fool, a fool, I met a fool i’th’forest’ (II. vii. 12 ff.), ‘Why, who cries out on pride | That therein can tax any private party’ (II. vii. 70 ff.),

Early Modern Books and Phonography    619 ‘All the world’s a stage’ (II. vii. 188 ff.), ‘I have not the scholar’s melancholy’ (IV. i. 8 ff.). Each of these set speeches are about the same length: they run eighteen to twenty lines, with the exception of ‘All the world’s a stage’, which runs to twenty-​seven. The onstage audience hears these speeches as little orations. When Duke Senior gets word of Jaques’s lament over the wounded stag, he alludes to his penchant for extemporizing in perfectly turned phrases: ‘Did he not moralize this spectacle?’ ‘O yes,’ replies the First Lord, ‘into a thousand similes’ (II. i). In terms of the three branches of classical rhetoric—​legislative, forensic, and epideictic—​Jaques exercises himself in the third, in display, entertainment, ceremony. Beginning in the eighteenth century, speeches like ‘All the world’s a stage’ became detached from the plays in which they originally figured and began to be printed in collections like Thesaurus dramaticus. Containing all the celebrated passages, soliloquies, similies, descriptions, and other poetical beauties in the body of English plays, . . . digested under-​proper topics (1724, 1737, 1756, 1777). From there the ‘celebrated passages’ began to show up in books of monologues for use by acting students and actors.23 A third speech genre in As You Like It is lyrics. In addition to Orlando’s romantic effusions—​‘I pray you marre no more trees vvith Writing Loue-​songs in their barkes’ (III. ii. 223–​4), Jaques complains—​the play includes more full-​text songs than any other Shakespeare play. Words-​with-​music in Shakespeare’s plays come in two varieties: (1) songs with full printed texts like ‘Under the greenwood tree’ and (2) cues for snatches of songs (often ballads) that did not need to be printed in full because they were known already. Touchstone’s few lines of ‘O sweet Oliuer, O braue Oliuer leaue me not behind thee’ (III. iii. 74–​6) is one of these cues to songs outside the printed text.24 Kathryn Roberts Parker has connected the full-​text songs in As You Like It with Robin Hood balladry and May games, in which Robin Hood participates in mock combats, which are sometimes danced.25 In Roberts Parker’s account of the music in As You Like It, ‘Under the greenwood tree’, the first song in the play, establishes a community among Duke Senior and his fellow exiles in the Forest of Arden that enacts the community among Robin Hood and his merry men in Sherwood Forest. A cue to this sung community is the folio’s stage direction for the second verse: ‘Altogether heere’ (II. iv). If Roberts Parker is correct, that sense of musical community is extended to the entire audience in the singing of ‘What shall he have that kil’d the dear’, which exists elsewhere as a round or ‘catch’. The most famous song in the play today, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, published in 1600 (the very year the play was being acted) by Thomas Morley in his First Booke of Ayres, figures in Roberts Parker’s analysis as a turn towards a more courtly style of music in accord with the play’s final scenes. In Morley’s book ‘It was a lover and his lass’ becomes a free-​standing lyric apart from the play, just as Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ became a free-​standing speech in anthologies of quotations and monologues for actors. Each of the speech genres in the printed text of As You Like It asks to be read in a different way. Each prompts a different kind of sounding on the reader’s part. The dialogues are perhaps the most sound-​intensive, inviting the reader’s imaginative participation. Orations, as sound-​intensive as they may be in performance, veer towards silence when read in print. (More on this effect later.) Lyric texts offer two possibilities

620   Bruce R. Smith when read: sung to oneself or aloud if the tune is known or read silently or aloud as if the text occurred in a poetic anthology. A third possibility, perhaps then as well as now, is to skim the text of the lyric or skip over it entirely in order to get on with the story.

Lyrics ‘It was a lover and his lass’ as printed in Thomas Morley’s The First Booke of Ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole is quite literally a lyric: if not to Apollo’s lyre, then to a lute and bass viol, the text is presented as words to be sung (see Fig. 32.3). Notations on the right-​hand page specify pitches and rhythm for the singer along with finger positions for the lutenist (who might well be the singer), while notations on the right, printed in a 180-​degree different orientation, provide pitches and rhythm for the viol-​player. The printing arrangement allows all the performers to use the same music book. Not all books of lyrics in early modern England were designed to be sung. The first anthology of poetry printed in England, Richard Tottel’s Songes and

Fig. 32.3  ‘It was a lover and his lass’, from Thomas Morley, The first booke of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole (STC 18115.5), sig. B4v–​C1. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Early Modern Books and Phonography    621 Sonettes (1557), betrays a conflicted attitude towards sound. In his prefatory address ‘The Printer to the Reader’, Tottel says that the collection has been published ‘to ye honor of the english tong’, and he warns detractors, ‘If parhappes some mislike the statelinesse of stile remoued from the rude skil of cōmon earee: I aske help of the learned to defende their learned frendes, the authors of this woork.’26 The word sonnet, brought into Middle English from French, literally means ‘a little sound’. According to the OED, sonnet as ‘a song, tune, or ballad; (also) music’ was the only meaning of the word in English until the very years that Tottel’s collection made its debut (OED, ‘sonnet, n.’, 1.), when sonnet as a fourteen-​line poem with or without a tune began to overtake the earlier meaning. Among the three poems in Tottel that mention lutes, none to the best of my knowledge has been connected with a surviving musical setting. A setting of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s strophic ‘Blame not my lute’, a poem not in Tottel, has been traced to a manuscript dating from a few years after Tottel’s publication.27 Printed to be sung or printed to be read, first-​person verse shrinks the range of voices being represented to a single ‘I’, with drastically altered conditions for the writing of sound and the reading of sound. The illusion of an ‘I’ so viscerally present as to be almost audible, an ‘I’ who invites the reader to share the experience of the lyric, raises the question of just how readers of printed texts can hear a voice other than their own. Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More distinguishes six ‘dimensions’ that make individual speaking voices distinct: timbre, resonance, pitch, cadence, melody, and pronunciation.28 In printed texts the first three dimensions can only be described, but the other three dimensions of voice are implicit in a printed text in the form of syntax (lengths of clauses, characteristic interruptions), elisions (markers of speed and rhythm), and spelling (indicators of pronunciation). Thanks to the idiosyncracies of early modern spelling and punctuation, the challenge to hear a lyric poet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is not so hard as it might be in later periods. Lacking any direct record of timbre, resonance, and pitch, an early modern reader could not reconstitute the voice of a first-​person poet—​and perhaps did not even strive to. All this is not to suggest that printed lyric poetry was, for early modern readers, necessarily a silent experience. Readers might, so to speak, ‘hear the typeface’ within the pages’ airy blankness, according to their own predilections. If they copied out poems in their own handwriting, as Oxford students did with Shakespeare’s sonnets 1 and 2 from The Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare (1599), they might imbue the words with their own voices. The interpersonal dynamics of lyric verse in fact encourage this kind of voicing on the part of readers. Jonathan Cullen has charted in lyric poetry a triangulation whereby the ‘I’ becomes ‘we’. The speaking ‘I’ hails the reading ‘you’ into a ‘we’ via some third person or intermediate object to whom the reader or listener can relate.29 Culler’s subject is Romantic poetry, but his insight applies beautifully to early modern printed verse as well. The reader of ‘It was a lover and his lass’ in the 1623 printing of As You Like It or the singer of Morley’s setting in his First Booke of Ayres is neither the lover nor the lass, but certain aspects of the verse invite the reader or listener to join the implicit ‘I’ in projecting his high spirits and erotic desires onto the third-​person couple even as ‘I’ keeps his social

622   Bruce R. Smith distance from them. In Shakespeare, the couple are ‘pretty country folks’; in Morley, ‘prettie Country fooles’. The sounding ‘I’ and the reading or listening ‘you’ become ‘we’ in their mutual enjoyment of countryside, birdsong, and the erotic thought of the lass’s ‘ring’. (Recall here the last lines of The Merchant of Venice.) Morley’s First Booke of Ayres was published at the beginning of a flourish of songbooks in the 1590s and early seventeenth century, including famous examples by Thomas Campion and John Dowland. In these same years lyrics without music were also being printed in large quantities: Syr. P. S. His Astrophel and Stella. . . . To the end of which are added, sundry other rare Sonnets of diuers Noble men and Gentlemen (1591), AMORETTI AND Epithalamion. Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser (1595), SHAKE-​ SPEARES SONNETS. Neuer before Imprinted (1609), The Countesse of Mountgomeries URANIA. Written by the right honorable the Lady MARY WROATH (1621), and Poems by J.D. (1633). John Donne’s posthumously collected verse includes, for the first time in print, the ingenious and wittily contrived amorous verses that have come to be known—​ perhaps with a nod to Tottel—​as ‘songs and sonnets’. That phrase does not in fact appear in the 1633 volume. In As You Like It, as in early modern culture more generally, we thus confront two traditions of lyric poetry in print: verses written to be sung (Morley, Campion, Dowland) and verses to be read (Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wroth, Donne). The difference between the two lyric traditions of lute-​songs and first-​person poems is the in-​between position of lyric as a genre along the phonography continuum, just beyond the tipping point from sounding books on the left to sounding books on the right. Lyrics scored to be sung, no less than first-​person poems presented to be read, stand at a greater distance from any specific sound event than play-​scripts do.

Narratives By extending the ‘I’ of lyrics to include a wider cast of characters, prose and verse narratives might seem to offer increased opportunities for phonography. The more characters, we might assume, the more voices to be recorded. The more changes of scene, the more sounds to be noted. Paradoxically, more often than not, the effect proves to be just the opposite. Most of the the prose narratives that were popular enough to be reprinted—​John Lyly’s Euphues The anatomy of wit (1578, 1579, 1580, 1581, 1585, 1587, 1593, etc.),Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newberie (eight editions before 1619), Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588, 1607, and later as Dorastus and Fawnia), Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, or Euphues Golden Legancy (1590, 1592, 1596, etc.), and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton (two editions 1594)—​are dominated by the recorded sound of a single voice, either the narrator’s or the main protagonist’s. A notable exception is Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1589?, 1590, 1593, 1599, etc.), which began as a series of dispatches to his sister Mary Sidney Herbert for the enjoyment of herself and her friends, probably in the form of reading aloud and perhaps,

Early Modern Books and Phonography    623 in the case of the embedded lyrics, sung aloud.30 Since Deloney, Greene, and Lodge also wrote plays (and Deloney also ballads), we know that they could write in multiple voices, so there seems to be something about storytelling that brought out the narrating voice at the expense of the characters’ voices. We can hear this principle at work in Lodge’s Rosalynde, which provided Shakespeare the source for As You Like It. The source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde. Euphues golden Legacie (1590), moves in and out of reported speech, but it is the narrator’s voice that predominates. From the second leaf of the printed text, Lodge’s bold voice fairly jumps off the page—​a voice that continues to resound throughout the book. An epistle ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ establishes comradery between the narrator and his readers: ‘To be briefe Gentlemen, roome for a soudier, & a sailer . . .’.31 As the story unfolds, it is Lodge-​ the-​narrator who does most of the talking. He has access to the characters’ inner self-​ dialogues, which he reports as little orations, set off from the rest of the text and bearing their own titles. When, for example, Rosalynde falls in love with the Orlando-​figure, here named Rosader, Lodge reports her thoughts as a set speech, complete with its own title: Rosalynds passion. Infortunate ROSALYND, whose misfortunes are more than thy yeeres, and whose passions are greater than thy patience. The blossomes of thy youth, are mixt with the frostes of enuie, and the hope of thy ensuing frutes, perish in the bud. Thy father is by TORISMOND banisht from the crowne, & thou the vnhappie daughter of a King detained captiue, liuing as disquieted in thy thoughts, as thy father disconte[n]‌ted in his exile. Ah ROSALYND what cares wait vpo[n] a crown, what griefes are incident to dignitie? what sorrowes haunt royall Pallaces? The greatest seas haue the sorest stormes, the highest birth subiect to the most base, and of al trees the Cedars soonest shake with the winde: small Currents are euer calme, lowe valleyes not scorcht in any lightnings, nor base men tyed to anye balefull preiudice.32

And so on for another 467 words. Once Rosalynde has convinced herself to acknowledge her passion for Rosader, she takes up a lute that is lying by and sings a madrigal, the text of which is printed in italics as a specimen of lyric verse. In such lyric moments Rosalynde comes closest, perhaps, to gaining a voice of her own, a voice that Lodge’s readers might strain to hear.

Speeches Like narratives, printed sermons present a paradox. They purport to be records of sound events, but the degree to which they actually write sound and invite re-​sounding on the part of readers is not so strong as it might seem. Most printed speeches are in fact less sound-​intensive than dialogues, play-​scripts, lyrics, and narratives. Instead of the sound of the original event, it is the substance of what was said that is given to

624   Bruce R. Smith readers for decoding and digesting. Rhetorical texts like Cicero’s Orationum (1483, 1585–​7), the version of Queen Elizabeth’s speech to the troops at Tilbury in James Aske’s Elizabetha Triumphans (1588), the ‘memorable speech’ included in A Record of Some Worthy Proceedings: . . . in the Late Parliament (1611), pamphlets commemorating royal welcomes like The speeches and honorable entertainment giuen to the Queenes Maiestie in progresse, at Cowdrey in Sussex (1591): all purport to be transcripts of words that were sounded on a certain occasion. Between the speeches as spoken and the texts as printed, however, many filters intrude. The printed text might derive from a written text that the speaker read aloud, or from written notes the speaker used as cues, or from a written text that was intended to be spoken in its entirety but was cut short, or from a written text that was edited for print, or from reconstruction based on notes in shorthand made by one or more listeners. A particularly complicated case is presented by printed sermons. Sir Oliver Martext, the village vicar who marries Touchstone and Audrey in As You Like It, seems from his name to be maladroit at delivering sermons, much less at getting them into print. Printed sermons were even bigger business in early modern publishing than printed play-​scripts, and among the preachers whose sermons were reprinted Henry Smith, ‘Silver-​Tongued Smith’, ranks near the top. The most famous Puritan preacher in Elizabethan England, Smith regularly drew huge crowds to the church of St Clement Danes in the late 1580s.33 The Short Title Catalogue (STC) credits Henry Smith with no fewer than 149 editions of sermons printed between 1589 and 1640. The vast majority of these lack any kind of prefatory matter—​no dedications, no addresses to the reader—​and in this respect resemble quarto editions of theatrical scripts. As with quarto play-​scripts, which often claim to present the play ‘as it hath been acted’, printed sermons do usually specify where and when the sermon was preached. How printed sermons, like printed play-​scripts, were read by purchasers is an intriguing question. On the one hand are title pages and prefaces that present the sermon as a phonographic record of how the preacher sounded. Richard Wilkinson implies a lively social scenario by dedicating to the entire Mercers’ Company the printed edition of Gervase Babington’s A SERMON Preached at Paules Crosse the second Sunday in Mychaelmas tearme last. 1590 . . . Not printed before this 23. of August. 1591. In his dedicatory address Wilkinson describes his efforts to obtain from Babington ‘a Copie of him of his owne ha[n]‌d writing, which I haue caused to be Printed, not onely for the benefit of your worships, & this right worshipful Company, to whome being diligently read, & often meditated vpon, I doubt not but it will be fruitfull, but also to so many as shall read or heare the same’.34 Some printed sermons claim to embody traces of the preacher’s voice and manner of delivery. Nicholas Bownde’s 1594 collection of three sermons preached by John More, ‘The Apostle of Norwich’, in the 1570s and 1580s assures readers of the authenticity of the printed texts: ‘all that were acquainted with his preaching, might thereby as it were by the colour & lineaments of it, easily discerne that it is altogether his owne doing in deede: especially so many as then hearde him, might therby as it were by his footing, trase out the author himselfe’.35 On the other hand are prefaces that call for quiet, solitary, meditative reading. In his preface to the 1593 collected edition of his sermons, Smith seems to regard print as a poor

Early Modern Books and Phonography    625 substitute for the heard event: ‘I haue bin alway ashamed, that my writings shuld weigh lighter for want of paines, which is the bane of printing, and surfetteth the Reader. . . . Read, pray, and meditate: thy profit shall be little in any booke, vnlesse thou read alone, and vnles thou read all, and record after.’36 Sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century printings of sermons by the likes of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, who preached before monarchs, tend to be more booky than sermons by popular preachers like Henry Smith. Andrewes’s collected sermons were first published in 1629 by order of Charles I, who had heard Andrewes deliver some of them at his father’s court. ‘When the Author dyed,’ the sermon editor writes in his royal dedication of the volume, ‘Your Majesty thought it not fit his sermons should dye with him. And though they could not live with all that elegancie which they had upon his tongue, yet You were graciously pleased to thinke a paper-​life better then none.’37 Andrewes’s lasting fame was indeed secured by this publication. Five later editions followed from 1631 to 1661. Most of the sermons by Donne published in his own lifetime contain no prefatory remarks about reading versus hearing, but on at least one occasion Donne commends the printed text of a sermon to his readers, because it presents the full text and not the ‘briefe Paraphrasticall Explication of the Particulars that remained’ when Donne realized he was going on too long.38 Even in the seventeenth century sermons by Andrewes and Donne were on their way to the status they hold today in anthologies of British writing, far removed from the sounds of their original delivery.

Textbooks The term ‘text-​book’ for ‘a book used as a standard work for the study of a particular subject’ is a late eighteenth-​century coinage (OED, ‘textbook, n.’, 2), but certain books printed in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century England served this purpose for specific fields of knowledge, including history (Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577, 1587), religion (Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, 1594–​5, 1597, 1611, etc.), natural philosophy (Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning, 1605, 1629, 1633, 1640), physic (Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia: A description of the body of man, 1615, 1616, 1618, 1631), and law (Edward Coke’s The Institutes of the Lawes of England, 1628, 1630, 1642, etc.). The relatively late dates of first publication (1577 to 1628) suggest how each book is built on accumulated knowledge. With respect to print, these folio publications—​Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning in quarto is the one exception—​amalgamate, organize, expand, and critique knowledge that was first circulated in smaller formats. In these folio summae, subject matter sizes. In more ways than one, folio-​size books (see Fig. 32.4) are the opposite of horn-​books (see Fig. 32.1). For a start, folios are large and need to be held in two hands, while horn-​ books are small enough to fit a child’s right or left hand. Laterally, folios are on another scale entirely. The average surviving copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio has been calculated to weigh about 4 lb. 13 oz. (a little over 2 kg) and to measure laterally something like

626   Bruce R. Smith

Fig. 32.4  Chained folio book, Library of Merton College, Oxford. Photograph by J. W. Thomas. Reproduced by permission of Oxfordshire History Centre.

Early Modern Books and Phonography    627 13 by 8 inches (33 by 20 cm) and to be about 2 inches (5 cm) thick.39 (Copies fresh off the press, untrimmed, and newly bound would have been larger and heavier.) In short, folios are considerably less portable than quartos, octavos, and duodecimos. The folio shown in Fig. 32.4 from Duke Humphrey’s Library in the Bodleian is not portable at all: it is chained to the shelves on which it is stored along with other books of the same size. Inside the rooms of early modern England folio books were a presence. In most situations they could dominate the acoustic space as well. By their very bulk folio books encouraged solitary, silent reading. Current Bodleian Library rules update four centuries of custom: ‘Consider other readers and behave in a way that does not disturb them. Computers, mobile phones, pagers and other equipment must be on silent and headphones inaudible to other readers.’40 Finally, folio books in early modern England were apt to be less phonographic than smaller books. THE WORKES OF Beniamin Jonson (1616) and MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES (1623) might seem to be exceptions, but even here sound-​recording of plays appears to be much less important than readable visual texts printed ‘according to the true original copies’. In most cases, the earlier books on which knowledge-​in-​folio is erected prove to be much closer to the sounds of the human voice. Many of these earlier books are written in the form of dialogues. Take, for example, William Bullein’s A newe boke of phisicke called ye gouernment of health, wherin be vttred many notable rules for ma[n]‌s preseruacio[n], with sondry simples [et] other matters, no lesse fruitfull then profitable: collect out of many approued authours. Reduced into the forme of a dialogue, for the better vnderstanding of thunlearned (1558, 1559, 1595). The dialogue is between John, who is curious to learn, and Humphrey, who knows all about physic. Rosalind might have consulted Bullein for the cure she works on lovesick Orlando. John tells Humphrey about the advice he was given by a friend: ‘Once I fel into a great sicknes, and hitherto I am skant recouered of it, the surfit was so great, but counsell was giuen me, that I should not staie my selfe vpon the opinion of any one phisicion, but rather vpon three’. Three! John couldn’t afford that. His friend then said the physicians he had in mind were Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merriment. That gives Humphrey the cue for a speech on the importance of doctors’ counsel: ‘The sicknes of the body must haue medicine, the passions of the minde must haue good counsel. . . . Oh how many men haue béen cast away by thought, and most for losse of estimation, and some of other affections of the minde, as inordinate loue.’41 Before there was Edward Coke and his Institutes of the Laws of England, there was Christopher Saint German and his always-​in-​print Dyaloges in Englysshe bytwyxt a doctoure of dyvynyte and a student in the lawes of Englande (1530, 1531, 1532, 1533, 1535, 1543, 1554, 1556, 1569, 1575, 1580, 1593, 1598, 1604, 1613, etc. down to 1792). Included in the dialogue between the Student of Law (the expert in this case) and the Doctor of Divinity is this one with specific application to the case of Orlando who, against the wishes of his father’s will, gets no support from his elder brother Oliver. ‘Many of the customes & maximes of the lawes of Englande’, says the Student, ‘be knowen by the vse and the custome of the realme so apparantly that it nedeth nat to haue any law written therof |

628   Bruce R. Smith for what nedeth it to haue any law written that the eldest sone shall enherite his father.’ Later in the dialogue the Doctor of Divinity urges the necessity of equity to temper the law: ‘Equytie is a ryghtwystnes that considereth all the {per}ticuler circūstances of the dede | the whiche also is tempered wt the swetnes of mercy. And suche an equytie muste alway be obserued in euery lawe of man | and in euery generall rule therof | & that knewe he well that sayd thus. Lawes couet to be rewled by equytie.’42 Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning is recognized today as a landmark book that charted a clear way forward for what was known at the time as ‘natural philosophy’. Before Bacon, all branches of philosophy in England stayed true to ways of writing philosophy that went back to the beginnings of print. According to William Baldwin in A Treatise of Moral Philosophy (1547, 1550, 1552?, 1553?, c.1555. c.1556. 1557, 1564, 1567, 1571, 1575, 1579, 1584, 1587, 1591, 1596, 1600, 1605, 1610, c.1620, c.1635, 1640, 1651), ‘Al that haue written of morall Philosophye, haue for ye most part taught it, either by preceptes, counsell, and lawes, orels by prouerbes, parables, & semblables.’43 Baldwin’s treatise includes all three ways of writing philosophy, but his strong suit is proverbs. In this he follows the example of the oldest philosophy book printed in England, a book of the dyctes and notable wyse sayenges of the phylosophers (Caxton, 1477), a translation of a French text going back ultimately to Arabic originals. For every major topic in moral philosophy Baldwin assembles a series of quotations from famous philosophers arranged, not speaker by speaker, but topic by topic. The result reads like a dialogue, with the famous philosophers as speakers. What these philosophers have to say about ‘Loue, lust & lecherye’ can be applied, one by one, with the variety of lovers and lechers in As You Like It: Pytha[agoras]. COnstaunt Loue is a principall vertue. Plato. Without Loue, no vertue can be perfect. . . . Socra[tes]. This loue of a foole, is more noysome than pleasaunt. Loue can not be myngled with feare. Loue is the busynes of loyterers. Seneca. He that lacketh loue, oughte not to be regarded. Repentaunce is the ende of fylthy loue. There is nothynge so darcke, but that loue espyeth. Loue leaueth no daūger vnattempted. Plato. To muche selfe loue is cause of al euyl. Luste is a lordlye and disobedient thyng, Of all thynges the newest is the best, saue of loue and frendshyp: whiche the elder that it waxeth, is euer the better. Aristotl[e]‌. Dishonor, shame, yuel ende and damnacion, wayte vppon lecherye, and all other lyke vices.

Early Modern Books and Phonography    629 Seneca. Lykenes of maners, maketh loue stedfast and parfecte. It is not possible to do any thyng well without loue. It is not possible for that seruaunt to be diligent, that loueth not his mayster.44

Errata Don’t expect here a list of printer’s mistakes, as at the end of many early modern books. What I want to address in closing is our erring as early modern scholars in our reading habits. The continuum I have proposed here illustrates how phonography can be present in early modern books about very unlikely subjects (like medicine and law), just as phonography may be not so present in books that would seem to be full of sound (like prose narratives and printed speeches). We have erred, first, in assuming that only a narrow range of early modern books engage directly with sound-​writing. More seriously we have erred in not paying attention to our own inner voices as we read early modern books. Research presented by the psychologist and novelist Charles Fernhough demonstrates that most people today do hear voices in their heads as they read, even if they are not aware of the fact until asked.45 Applying modern scientific research to historical experience is always a tricky business, but Fernyhough’s study attends to differences in the genres of texts, in cultural conditioning, and in reading habits that vary from one individual to another. The evidence presented in this chapter demonstrates, I hope, that in early modern books—​to varying degrees according to subject and size—​sounds are there to be heard by a reader today. We just have to make the effort. To hear recorded sounds with an electronic device is a passive experience. To hear represented sounds in early modern books takes some effort. Above all, it requires an eye for the sound-​cues in printed texts and an ear open to the sound of one’s own inner voice.

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES. Published according to the True Originall Copies., ed. John Heminge and Henry Condell (London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623), sig. Q5v (II. i. 15–​17 in William Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://​www-​oxfo​rdsc​hola​rlye​diti​ons-​com). Further quotations from Shakespeare, though transcribed in original spelling and punctuation from the 1623 folio, are keyed to act, scene, and line numbers in the New Oxford edition rather than to signature numbers in the 1623 text. 2. Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 37–​75. 3. Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

630   Bruce R. Smith 4. Patrick Feaster, ‘Phonography’, in David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds.), Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 139–​150. 5. Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘power, n.’, I.4.b, obsolete. Further references to the OED are cited in the text. 6. Ben Jonson, THE ENGLISH GRAMMAR, MADE BY BEN,IOHNSON. For the Benefit of all Strangers, out of his observation of the English Language now spoken, and in use, ed. Derek Britton, in Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, https://​uni​vers​ ityp​ubli​shin​gonl​ine-​org./​cambri​dge/​benjon​son/​k/​works/​gram​mar/​. 7. John Hart, AN ORTHO-​graphie: conteyning the due order and reason, howe to write or paint thimage of mannes voice, most like to the life or nature (London: [Henry Denham? for] William Seres, 1569). 8. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2017), 105–​112. 9. Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–​1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 28. 10. Christine Nystrom, ‘What Is Media Ecology?’, Media Ecology Association, http://​www. media-​ecol​ogy.org/​media_​ecol​ogy/​, accessed 5 June 2020. 11. The abc with the Pater noster Aue, Credo, and.x. co[m]maundementes in Englysshe newly translated and set forth, at the kyngs most gracyouse commaundement (London: Richard Lant, 1545). 12. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 13. The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the Sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche after the use of the Churche of England (London: Edward Whitechurch, 1549), sig. A2v. 14. John Florio, FLORIO His firste Fruites: which yeelde familiar speech, merie Prouerbes, wittie Sentences, and golden sayings. Also a perfect Induction to the Italian, and English tongues, as in the Table appeareth. The like heretofore, neuer by any man published (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1578). 15. English Broadside Ballad Archive, University of California Santa Barbara, https://​ebba. engl​ish.ucsb.edu/​. 16. Patricia Fumerton, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 17. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883); written records, facsimiles from notebooks, cylinder sound recordings archived in the online Vaughn Williams Memorial Library, https://​ www.vwml.org.uk. 18. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–​102. 19. Kenneth J. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, c.1985). 20. O.B., QVESTIONS OF PROFITABLE AND PLEASANT CONCERNINGS, TALked of by two olde Seniors, the one an ancient retired Gentleman, the other a midling or new vpstart frankeling, vnder an Oake in Kenelworth Parke, where they were met by an accident to defend the partching heate of a hoate day, in grasse or Buck-​hunting time called by the reporter the Display of vaine life, together with a Panacea or suppling plaister to cure if it were possible,

Early Modern Books and Phonography    631 the principall diseases wherewith this present time is especially vexed (London: Richard Field, 1594), sigs. A4–​B1. 21. O.B., QVESTIONS, sig. A3v. 22. [William Shakespeare,] THE CRONICLE History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants (London: Thomas Creede, 1600), title page. 23. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare | Cut: Rethinking Cutwork in an Age of Distraction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 100–​143. 24. Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: Norton, 2004), 292. 25. Kathryn Roberts Parker, ‘Music and Festival Culture in Shakespearean Comedy’, dissertation, University of Sydney, 2020. 26. Richard Tottel (ed.), SONGES AND SONETTES, written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other (London: Richard Tottel, 1557), sig. A1v. 27. Ivy L. Mumford, ‘Musical Settings to the Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt’, Music & Letters, 47/​4 (1956), 315–​322. 28. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 22. 29. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 30. Scott Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 39–​52. 31. Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde. Euphues golden Legacie, found after his death in his Cellat Silexedra. BEQVEATHED TO PHILAVTVS Sonnes, noursed vp with their Father in England. Fetcht from the Canaries by T. L. Gent. (London: Abel Jeffes, 1592), sig. A3. 32. Lodge, Rosalynde, sig. C4. 33. Gary W. Jenkins, ‘Smith, Henry’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://​ www-​oxford​dnb-​com; Walter R. Davis, ‘Henry Smith: The Preacher as Poet’, English Literary Renaissance, 12/​1 (1982), 30–​52; John L. Lievsay, ‘ “Silver-​Tongued Smith”, Paragon of Elizabethan Preachers’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 11/​1 (1947), 13–​36. 34. Gervase Babington, A SERMON Preached at Paules Crosse the second Sunday in Mychaelmas tearme last. 1590 . . . Not printed before this 23. of August. 1591, ed. Richard Wilkinson (London: Thomas Este, [1591]), sig. A3v, emphasis added. 35. John More, THREE GODLY AND FRVITFVLL SERMONS, DECLARING, FIRST HOW WE MAY BE SAVED in the day of iudgement, and so come to life everlasting: secondly, how we ought to liue according to Gods will during our life: which are the two things that every one ought to he most carefull of as long as they liue. Preached and written by the reverend & godly learned M. IOHN MORE, late Preacher in the Citie of Norwitch., ed. Nicholas Bownde (Cambridge: John Legatt, 1594), sig. A2. 36. Henry Smith, THE SERMONS OF MAISTER HENRIE SMITH, GATHERED INTO ONE VOLVME. Printed according to his corrected Copies in his life time (London: Richard Field for Thomas Man, 1593), sig. A6v. 37. Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. SERMONS BY THE RIGHT HONORABLE AND REVEREND FATHER JN GOD, LANCELOT ANDREWES, late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His MAJESTIES speciall Command (London: George Miller for Richard Badger, 1629), sig. A2. 38. John Donne, A SVB-​POENA FROM THE STAR-​CHAMBER OF HEAVEN. A Sermon preached at Pauls Crosse the 4. of August. 1622. With some particular Enlargements which the limited time would not then allow (London: Augustine Mathewes for John Grismand, 1623), sig. A2.

632   Bruce R. Smith 39. ‘First Folio—​The Book by the Numbers’, https://​archi​ves.boi​sest​ate.edu/​shak​espe​are2​016/​ what-​is-​the-​first-​folio. 40. https://​www.bodle​ian.ox.ac.uk/​using/​rules. 41. William Bullein, The Gouernment of Health: A Treatise written by William Bullein, for the especiall good and healthfull preseruation of mans bodie from all noysome diseases, proceeding by the excesse of euill diet, and other infirmities of Nature: full of excellent medicines, and wise counsels, for conseruation of health, in men, women, and children. Both pleasant and profitable to the industrious Reader. (London: Valentine Sims, 1595), fos. 37v–​38v. 42. Gervase Saint German, the fyrste Dyaloge in Englysshe betwyxte a Doctour of Diuinite and a Studēt in the lawes of Englāde of the groundes of the sayde Lawes & of conseyence newly corrected: & eft sones Enprynted with new additions (London: Robert Redman, 1532), sigs. D3, D4. 43. William Baldwin, A treatise of Morall Phylosophie, contaynyng the sayinges of the wyse. Gathered and Englyshed by Wylm̄ Baldwyn (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1547), sig. A5v. 44. Baldwin, A treatise, sigs. O2v–​O3. 45. Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 75–​90.

Select Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M., ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–​102. Feaster, Daniel, ‘Phonography’, in David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds.), Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC: Duke Univcrsity Press, 2015), 139–​150. Fernyhough, Charles, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2016). Fox, Adam, and Woolf, Daniel, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–​ 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Fumerton, Patricia, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Levy, Michelle, and Mole, Tom, The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2017). Nystrom, Christine, ‘What Is Media Ecology?’, Media Ecology Association, www.media-​ecol​ ogy.org/​media_​ecol​ogy/​. Richards, Jennifer, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Rigney, James, ‘Sermons into Print’, in Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough, and Emma Rhatigan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 198–​212. Wilson, Kenneth J., Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, c.1985).

Chapter 33

T r ansience a nd L o s s Alexandra Hill

In A letter from a friend in London, to another in Salamanca (1681), the writer describes seeing a boy who had lost a petition: I confess I was struck with pity to see a little stapling the other day come Crying into a Tavern in Cheapside for his Petition . . . ; the Boy Roa’d out and said he was undone, his Master would beat him and turn him away for losing his Petition, but there was no Remedy for him, for as I understand the Cook stole it for the bottom of a Tart.1

We have all felt it. That disappointing moment when we realize something key has been lost—​a familiar feeling to all researchers of the early modern world. The key letter which reveals the true extent of a relationship between a king and a courtier, the contract which provides the missing link between two warring families. For the book world of early modern England, information is often missing when it concerns print runs, literacy rates, and the day-​to-​day business of a print workshop, never mind the loss of thousands—​potentially millions—​of copies of printed books. An immeasurable number of printed items will have spent their final moments at the bottom of a tart. But what does transience and loss mean for the history of the book in early modern England? These concepts have a very real impact on our understanding of the early modern book trade and too often researchers ignore the crucial role of survival and the way it can skew our understandings. Why one book survives for over 500 years but another does not is a fundamental question in the study of early modern print. Only once we have a better idea of transience and loss can we explore fully the impact this has on our understanding of the early modern world and attempt to fill the gaps in our knowledge. In a recent study on entries in the Stationers’ Company Register, a document in which members of the Stationers’ Company in London entered books to be printed, I suggested that almost half of the books registered between 1557 and 1640 could not be traced to a surviving copy.2 The survival rate for certain formats, subjects, and printers for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were even more stark. While emphasis will

634   Alexandra Hill be on the physical book and printing in London, transience and loss also has an impact on our knowledge of the printers, booksellers, collectors, and readers across Britain. Transience, loss, and survival cannot be viewed in isolation but instead need to be analysed together to create a better understanding of the book in early modern England.

Known Unknowns: Defining Transience and Loss Transience suggests something that only lasts for a short period of time: ‘Transient Tooles are all kind of Fewell, and Oare, which serve but once.’3 But how transient is the early modern book? A book occupies a space in both the material and the abstract world—​it is more than just some ink on a piece of paper. Books helped spread literacy and knowledge, providing the latest news and entertainment. Governments used print to proclaim new laws, preachers used it to spread the word of God, while others used seditious print to sow dissent. Printed indulgences could even impact a person’s eternal life, while the words and themes printed in William Shakespeare’s First Folio continue to resonate into the twenty-​first century. As a physical item, books were lost through flames (both deliberate and accidental), floods, pests, and use. A popular trope for authors was claiming or fearing that their book would not be sold and read but instead end up as waste paper: To whom shall I a Present make thee, Book? Speedily, for a Patron, round thee look; Least Cooks, as if waste-​Paper or astray, To wrap up Spices ravish thee away.4

Though the physical book may have been destroyed soon after production, the interplay between print, oral, and manuscript culture means that its contents could live on. Studies into nineteenth-​century English folk songs showed how tunes could be traced back to the early modern ballad trade.5 People transcribed printed news and medical receipts into manuscript commonplace books, preserving a text even though the printed item might no longer survive. There are also books surviving in modern-​day collections which are never requested and whose pages remain uncut. It could be argued that such books, though they have survived physically, have had only a transient impact on the world. Even if a single edition was not widely sold or read, the text, illustrations, or tunes lived on in other editions or in other forms of print. Print was a business and the reuse and reprinting of titles, type, and illustrations was an important way of keeping costs down.6 The same woodcut could grace multiple ballads while stock lists show the same titles being reprinted again and again across the decades. Multiple formats might prolong the lifespan of a text or a story. A sensational murder could be reported as a last

Transience and Loss    635 speech, a crime ballad, or as a larger volume decrying God’s providence. While the pamphlet or the ballad covering an event may not survive, the larger work might.7 It is difficult to quantify transience as, in some ways, awareness of a book’s physical fragility can lead to its survival. In his study of seventeenth-​century books listed on the Short Title Catalogue Flanders (STCV), Goran Proot calculated a direct relationship between the number of sheets per copy and the survival rates of books.8 Proot went on to show how three-​quarters of the copies compiled from one sheet or less had been bound together in a Sammelbände.9 Evidence of transience is therefore skewed by dedicated collectors binding pamphlets and single-​sheet items together within a larger volume, better protecting them from pests and use. A good example is the George Thomason collection of newsbooks and tracts of the mid-​sixteenth century. Both the pamphlet format and the topical nature of the news items suggest that these are highly transient works. However, thanks to the collecting practices of Thomason, over 20,000 items survive bound together in 2,000 volumes.10 An item which is transient by nature is likely to become rare and inherently more collectable. This is the case for sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century broadside ballads—​ single-​sheet items containing songs and tunes—​the majority of which survive in a dedicated number of collections (as discussed in Harriet Phillips’s chapter in this volume). The most well-​known are the collection of John Selden and Samuel Pepys, held at Cambridge University, and the Roxburghe collection at the British Library. These unique collections provide an invaluable insight into the culture of cheap print in early modern England. If the survival of these ‘transient’ items are based on the whims and sources of a small group of collectors, it raises the question of how representative they are of books being printed during the period as a whole. The majority of ballads, unless collected soon after printing, would be used and passed around until they fell apart. Only 10 per cent of the ballads listed in the Stationers’ Company Register between 1557 and 1640 can be traced to a surviving copy in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC).11 It is also clear that certain themes and subjects were better collected than others. Ballads focused on love and romance appear more prevalent in collections than those on the latest crimes and executions which appear in the Register.12 The well-​known ballad supplier John Bagford is also believed to have collected the items from the waste of booksellers, implying that the ballads which survived were not necessarily the ones which were being bought and read.13 Not all transient items have been collected in the same way. Jobbing print, such as bills and forms, was often the bedrock of a printing business but lack of survival obscures the scale of this type of printing. In England, a printed patent for a monopoly over single-​sheet printing from 1621 provides a comprehensive list of all the different types of jobbing print available.14 The list includes ‘all bondes and recognizances for victualers, alehouse-​keepers and others’, ‘all billes for playes, challenges, prizes, sportes, or shows whatsoever’, as well as ‘printed papers for silkes, fustians and other wares’.15 It is clear from extant books that some items on the patent were available in print pre-​1621. A blank form for an alehouse-​keeper licence in Essex survives from 1608.16 However, the

636   Alexandra Hill earliest surviving bill of lading, according to the ESTC, dates from 1637, almost twenty years after the patent.17 From such a list it is impossible to determine the full scale of jobbing print in England in the seventeenth century but it at least provides a hint as to what is missing. Transience links with the concept of ephemerality. Ephemeral items were generally only produced for a single occasion or were not intended to last long. Almanacs are an excellent example. These items provided dates of feast days and fairs throughout the year, as well as prophecies, and were designed to be used and thrown away at the end of the year: ‘Tho’ they are more like Almanacks of late; For in One Year, I think they’re out of Date.’18 Almanacs printed in the sixteenth century have a low rate of survival which masks their popularity.19 Only a third of almanacs entered in the Stationers’ Company Register between 1557 and 1571 can be traced to a surviving copy. This is in stark contrast to the seventeenth century for which entire series survive.20 The question has to be asked, if these items survive are they truly ephemeral or transient? Ephemera collections can contain hundreds of thousands of items including advertisements for new inventions, proclamations, and bills of mortality. Many items of ephemera, however, remain uncatalogued and there is much more exploration to be done in analysing their survival. Official print, for instance, tends to survive well. In a Catalogue of all the Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire in 1666, to the end of Michaelmas term, 1672, all 195 acts printed survive in at least one copy.21 The acts cover a range of administrative actions including ‘An Act for reforming of abuses committed in the weight and false packing of butter’ (1662) and ‘An act for making the river Avon navigable from Christ-​church to the city of New-​Sarum’ (1665).22 Only a small percentage of these 195 acts appear in the Thomason collection so this material must have been collected in other places. Printed single-​sheet items, particularly forms, are also more likely to be stored amongst archives and to be omitted from short title catalogues.23 Loss covers a range of possibilities in the world of early modern print. In a trade dominated largely by business concerns, loss of any book, whether accidental or not, could have a huge financial impact. The importance of a book to its seller plays out in contemporary works. For example, during The Extravagant Poet (1681) when the main protagonist is beaten to his lodging by his poet friend, the poet is described as quite out of Breath, and blowing as if he had been out of his Wits, puffing, and looking as if he had been a Book-​seller, that had lost his Book.24

Printing any large item was a risk requiring a high level of upfront investment—​a single edition could take weeks, months, or even years to print. It is for this reason that patents and privileges for certain books were so highly sought after as they guaranteed printing jobs and payment.25 There is an important difference between the loss of an individual copy and the loss of a whole edition but both can have an impact on the researcher of the early modern book. Losing a copy of a book is more than just losing a physical object; it is the loss of the history of the book itself and the impact it had in the world.26 Provenance documentation

Transience and Loss    637 in collections can only tell a historian so much and it is the clues left in and on the physical object which can be the most telling. Bookplates and inscriptions, for instance, can provide knowledge on former owners and help in the recreation of lost libraries. Unfortunately, even when the physical copy does remain, the desire for clean copies in the nineteenth century led to the loss of much of this information. Original binding was removed and thrown away, handwritten notes and inscriptions in the margins and on title pages were cut out or dissolved, and bookplates were ripped out and sold separately as collectables within their own right. Loss of a whole edition can skew the entire understanding of the history of a work, such as when a book was first published or translated, or even erase a work from history altogether.27 John Barnard’s analysis of the Stationers’ Stock of psalms, ABCs, psalters, and primers 1660–​1700 indicated that only one copy survived out of the tens of thousands of primers printed every year.28 When editions do not survive we also lose vital knowledge of the output of the early modern printing house and the relationships between the creators. While the earliest prognostication written by astrologer Francis Coxe and printed by John Allde survives from 1566, entries in the Stationers’ Company Register suggest that Allde had printed Coxe’s almanacs and prognostications since 1562.29 To truly understand loss we also need a better idea of what has survived. The study of printing in England is fortunate to have a wealth of bibliographies stretching over centuries—​namely Wing, Pollard, and Redgrave, and the Short Title Catalogue (STC, later ESTC). As of 2021, the ESTC listed almost half a million items published between 1473 and 1800.30 As many researchers, librarians, and collection managers know, however, there are always surprises in the stores and some ‘lost’ items may be sitting on a shelf somewhere. The more libraries and archives are able to carry out inventories and tackle their uncatalogued items, the more comprehensive our knowledge will become. For books held by private libraries and collectors, only auction catalogues can provide clues. While the meaning of transience and loss is not always clear, their impact cannot be ignored and researchers cannot rely on the vagaries of survival to present a true picture of the book in England. Instead it needs to be addressed by studying further how and why books are lost and in finding evidence of these lost items.

‘Ought Any Thing That Is So Precious Be Lost, When It May Be Recovered?’ One of the main ways to study loss is by calculating the number of lost books and recovering titles that cannot be traced to a surviving copy.31 Finding lost books relies heavily on the importance of probability and requires the researcher to make judgements based on the context and reliability of the data.32 When analysing the

638   Alexandra Hill book lists on the Private Libraries of Renaissance England (PLRE) database, 2,000 of the 19,000 entries do not contain an author, title, or imprint. One example includes the entry of ‘30 play books’ from the library of a ‘member of Parliament’ in 1628.33 While a fascinating resource, the nature of this evidence makes it almost impossible to identify and trace these entries to surviving editions. There comes a point when unidentified means lost and it can be frustrating knowing that there may be hundreds of lost books hiding in plain sight for which the original documentary evidence is simply not reliable enough. Quantifying transience is even trickier—​how can researchers measure the impact a book had or has, especially if only a limited number of copies survive? When studying lost books the biggest danger is ghosts—​both in their creation and the use of them as evidence of a lost item. By ghosts I mean books that never existed, created by the misreading of imprints or by inputting information incorrectly into a catalogue or bibliography.34 Ghosts can also be created from recording a book as lost when it may never have been printed. Reducing the presence of ghosts can be achieved from different angles—​by improving catalogue data, using multiple references for a work, or by using a numbering system to show the likelihood that a book is lost.35 One route to lost books is mathematical—​using quantitative data on surviving books to gain an idea of how many editions or copies were printed originally. Mathematical methods fit well into the interdisciplinary nature of book history, encouraging collaboration between historians and statisticians. Numbers and statistics play an important part in the study of lost books given that researchers are often dealing with a conceptual quantity rather than a tangible object. There are numerous tried-​and-​tested techniques from scoping out a single type of book to analysing an entire corpus of material. The use of zero graphing to estimate the number of editions surviving in ‘zero copies’ was first raised by Ernst Consentius in 1932 in relation to the number of lost editions of incunabula.36 The method was later used successfully by Neil Harris in his work on Italian chivalric romances.37 Zero graphing involves plotting the number of surviving copies for each edition and following the curve of the graph from the number of editions surviving in fifty copies or ten copies, down to one copy, and finally to the number ‘surviving’ in zero copies. Harris was able to show that, while 377 editions of Italian chivalric romances survive, the curve of the graph suggested that there were 600 lost editions.38 Variations on this method have revealed evidence of almost 14,000 lost incunabula, 59,000 lost French-​language books between 1470 and 1600, and 3,903 lost programmes of Jesuit plays printed in Flanders before 1773.39 Although the mathematical method can be used to discover a wide range of lost editions, there are important considerations to be made over how and when the technique should be deployed. The technique is dependent on having a reliable data set of the number of surviving copies, with the bias of catalogues and collecting meaning that it can be difficult to gain an accurate example of editions and copies from a single source.40 The context of loss also plays into the overall scope of the technique. Books are not lost in isolation and some studies have used negative binomial distribution to allow for correlated rather than independent data: that is, the loss of one book will inevitably

Transience and Loss    639 have an impact on the loss or survival of another.41 There is no one-​size-​fits-​all graph especially when the editions being studied cover different genres, formats, and uses, all of which can have a dramatic effect on survival.42 Another way to find lost books is by using documentary evidence where, in addition to the number of lost books, researchers end up with a list of titles. The most obvious places to look for evidence of lost books are through catalogues and advertisements but the amount of evidence and sources available depends on the century and geographic location. In his study of publishers’ and booksellers’ catalogues across Europe pre-​1600, Christian Cloppens traced around 270 catalogue editions.43 Unsurprisingly for this period, the majority of evidence came from Germany and Italy and there were none traced from England.44 The sixteenth century brought about the first attempt at a printed catalogue in England with Andrew Maunsell’s Catalogue of English Printed Books (1595) containing 1,832 editions of ‘Divinity’ and ‘Science’.45 The catalogue was also one of the first to be used in the study of lost books. Correlating entries with the STC, Franklin B. Williams Jr. was able to identify 251 lost books, mostly small devotional works and catechisms that would have been destroyed through use.46 The late seventeenth century saw a rise in the number of printed catalogues for auctions, publishers, printers, and booksellers across England as well as in the use of advertisements of ‘books lately printed’. Studies into the catalogues placed at the end of bookseller William Leake’s publications, the hundreds of books advertised in serials such as Mercurius Politicus, and the thousands of titles listed in Robert Clavel’s Mercurius Librarius (Term Catalogues) printed between 1668 and 1711 demonstrate the sheer number of sources out there to interrogate.47 By the eighteenth century there was also the addition of circulating library catalogues, with those of Thomas Lowndes (1766) and M. Heavisides (1790) found to contain sixty-​two titles which have not survived.48 Sometimes gaining sufficient evidence of a lost book requires working with multiple sources. One of the books for sale in the 1690 auction catalogue of William Annand, late Dean of Edinburgh, is ‘Bunworth’s new Discovery of the French disease’ printed in duodecimo in London in the 1650s.49 A quick look on ESTC postulates that only the second edition survives, printed for Henry Marsh in 1662.50 The Stationers’ Company Register, meanwhile, shows that printer William Godbid entered the title on 4 May 1657.51 Searching for the title in Early English Books Online (EEBO) also reveals an advertisement at the back of Mr. De Sargues universal way of dyaling for ‘A New discovery of the French Disease . . . by R. Runworths’, printed for Isaac Pridmore around 1659.52 Other contemporary advertisements and imprints show that various items were printed for Henry Marsh and Isaac Pridmore jointly in the 1650s.53 All these elements together point to a lost first edition printed in duodecimo by William Godbid for Isaac Pridmore at the end of the 1650s before the second edition came in 1662 when Marsh was working alone. All catalogues have strengths and weaknesses as sources of lost books based on how, why, and when the catalogues were created. A typical example is the Bibliotheca Novissima (1693), containing 176 titles printed around 1693.54 The books printed in England are separated out into subjects—​divinity, history, law, physick, mathematicks,

640   Alexandra Hill miscellanies, heraldry, poetry and plays, and reprinted—​with the majority containing an imprint and/​or format. The catalogue also includes a small selection of ‘books lately printed and printing beyond-​sea’ but, as is the issue with many catalogues, the list of printing overseas provides only limited evidence on the printer or place of publication to allow for matching.55 The anonymous writer hoped that the catalogue would provide an extensive list of all the books printed along with a description of each item. However, in the preface to the reader, it is clear that the writer was not as successful as first hoped: we cannot say it is here so well performed as we could wish, by reason of the short time and the little assistance the publishers have had, tho[ugh] they gave notice to all Book-​sellers. By what is done it may be judged what would have been, had a reasonable assistance been given, and what may be done hereafter.56

The lack of assistance suggests that the catalogue can only present a snapshot of what was being printed. Even so, the catalogue lists books from around eighty printers, publishers, and booksellers across London, Westminster, and Norwich. The writer also hoped that the catalogue would be published regularly with a surviving printed advertisement describing the work as Numb. 1.57 There is no evidence yet that any other editions were printed. The catalogue shows a strong rate of survival; 85 per cent of the titles can be traced to a surviving copy. An additional 5 per cent of the titles may be lost but can be linked to similar titles which have survived. As with so many catalogues, Bibliotheca Novissima does not list any pamphlets or single-​sheet items. Such items were the quickest and easiest way for printers to make money but were often deemed unworthy of inclusion in catalogues, or simply listed together as a ‘bundel of gazetts’ or ‘a bundle of tryals, with other single sheets’.58 Instead, the catalogue contains a high percentage of sermons which traditionally have a strong survival rate.59 There are also very few how-​to manuals in the catalogue, such as guides to accounting and cooking, which were often used to destruction or thrown away when they fell out of fashion. One example on handwriting from the 1693 catalogue called ‘Paul’s School Round-​hand in 2 Parts . . . Adorned with great variety of command of hand, by John Ayres at the Hand and Pen in St. Paul’s Church-​yard. Sold by Sam. Crouch at the end of Pope’s-​Head-​Alley in Cornhil’ can only be traced to an edition printed in 1700 and sold by the author.60 Catalogues and advertisements can be used to infer lost books through the survival of later editions.61 In Bibliotheca Novissima, ‘English examples; to be turned into Latin’ is listed as a tenth edition but only the first, second, fourth, seventh, eighth, twelfth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-​first edition can be traced to a surviving copy, meaning that half of the editions of this book printed between 1676 and 1734 are lost.62 Lost editions can also be assumed through the numbering systems used for serials.63 It is clear from the numbering and regularity of release that issue 372 of Mercurius Politicus from 9 July 1657 is lost as is issue 127 of the Publicke Intelligencer from 22 March 1658. These lost issues are also referenced in the Stationers’ Company Register.64

Transience and Loss    641 Once one starts looking, it is remarkable how many catalogues and advertisements are available in the search for lost editions, never mind the swathes of stock lists, inventories, and personal archives. These documents can provide both a quantitative and a qualitative understanding of lost editions and are particularly useful when analysing a specific title or work of an individual printer or writer. Unfortunately, many of these sources have the same limitations: there are very few which provide a picture of printing in England pre-​1650, they are often focused on the works of a single stationer, and they contain little evidence of cheap or jobbing print. To gain a broader understanding of loss in the earlier years of printing in England and how the survival rates fluctuated over the decades and across different subjects and print shops we need to turn to a particular source: the Stationers’ Company Register.

Making an Entrance One of the best sources for lost books printed in early modern England is the Stationers’ Company Register. During the early modern period the Worshipful Company of Stationers held a monopoly over printing in England. When a member of the company wanted to print an item, they were expected to enter a title into the Register and pay a fee, although historians have argued over the level of compliance.65 The fee went from sixpence for items with the lowest sheet count, up to seven shillings for the largest items. The Register is extensive and runs from July 1557 to July 1708, presenting an intriguing picture of the book trade in London. The Register provides a list not only of book titles but also of the names of the printers, publishers, and booksellers responsible for their creation. Unlike many other catalogues, the key strength of the Register is that it presents a view of printing across stationers and decades. For the period 1557–​1640 there are four entry Registers, although records for the years 1571–​6 are themselves lost. The main consideration is whether or not a book entered was likely to be printed. For some of the larger works it is possible a stationer entered a work to gain the right to a title before a rival but never completed the book.66 Here is where it is important to search for references in other contemporary works. For smaller formats, which are the ones less likely to survive, these were quick to print and it is unlikely that such works would be entered but never printed. Once again, it is down to probability and understanding the source. The Register includes a range of materials that do not usually appear in contemporary bibliographies or catalogues, particularly single-​sheet items. Cross-​referencing titles of ballads entered into the Register between 1557 and 1640 with titles on the ESTC reveals that, while 1,889 editions of ballads were entered, only 155 could be traced to a surviving copy.67 Titles of lost editions include ‘All you [that] lacke service or have any need to go carry thrones at Hampstede He[a]‌th’ entered in 1569/​70, ‘A ballad Rebukinge the licencious living of Diverse lewde personnes intitled the grinding in the myll’ from 1580, and ‘A Pleasant conceipt and meryly tried howe two fell in strife about a Yonge Bryde’

642   Alexandra Hill entered in 1597.68 For more seasonal works, such as the ten entries for Christmas Carols, none of the titles could be traced to surviving copies.69 The Registers, however, do exclude books printed under a patent or privilege, such as official print from the government, and, up till 1637, reprints. While the overall survival rate increases from the late sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century, analysing the Register shows this trend can be disrupted by factors such as format, subject, use, collecting, and—​of course—​chance.70 While 80 per cent of playbooks survive, only 66 per cent of smaller, often more interactive, interludes can be traced, and the Register is the only indication that single-​sheet playbills were printed at all from 1587.71 There is more work to be carried out on the later years of the Register. The dwindling dominance of the Stationers’ Company between 1641 and 1708 suggests that the Register may be less reliable in providing a wider picture of the printing industry of the period but it still has serious potential as a repository for lost items. For the period 1557 to 1640 there were over 15,000 entries, an average of 130 a year.72 A quick analysis of the year 1657/​8 alone shows almost 400 entries including copper-​engraved blank bond forms for payment of money, regular entries for newsbooks, and even entries for printing Acts of Parliament.73 Unlike earlier decades, only twenty-​two of the entries made in 1657/​8 are ballads, possibly because ballads and ballad sellers were banned between 1649 and 1655/​6.74 The entries are also nearly all entered by Francis Grove as other ballad printers appear to have been working together with stock titles. Only a quarter of these ballads can be traced to a surviving copy. This is an improvement on the survival rate of a hundred years earlier but still represents a significant loss. The loss of these ballads also masks the output and business of bookseller Francis Grove. Entries of ballads made by Grove which cannot yet be traced to a surviving copy include ‘Jenny’s lamentation with her berne at her back, &tc’, ‘Hey for the chirugion in the chequered apron’, and ‘The cittie gamball, or newes from Seacole lane’, all entered in 1657.75 Newsbooks show similar patterns. The story of the execution of Nathaniel Butler for the murder of his friend John Knight in August 1657 survives as a newsbook and was advertised in the back of issue 380 of the serial Mercurius Politicus.76 However, neither the ballad entry ‘The penitent sufferer, or the execucon of Nathaniell Butler, who killed his friend John Knight’ nor a single-​sheet item entitled ‘A true copie of the last speech of Nathaniell Butler at his execucon in Cheapside for the murder comitted on his friend John Knight’ can be traced to a surviving copy.77 Not only is this a loss of editions but also a loss of print reaction to events as these books would have sold for different prices and likely appealed to different audiences.78 In addition to ballads and news items, books from 1657/​8 which cannot be traced to a surviving copy include ‘A New Yeares Gift, or, a good pennyworth of householdstuffe’, ‘The English Cooke giving rules and direccons for the dressing all kinds of flesh and fish and rootes . . . ’, and ‘The maidens salute, or a compendious dialogue between Nanny and Betty’.79 All of these items sat on a printing press and were sold on a stall or by a pedlar, and all had an impact within early modern England—​whether it was buying the writer a

Transience and Loss    643 meal, keeping a printer in business, or teaching someone a new skill. While such works may have only had a transient existence, they should be recorded.

The Future of Transience and Loss The digital age has improved our ability to collect information while the digitization of library catalogues and online databases have revealed some of the gaps in our knowledge.80 Unfortunately, too much information can cause complications, with digital catalogues creating the potential of ghosts shared across different platforms. Too many databases can also produce conflicting information. In the world of incunabula, as Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW) includes lost books but Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) does not, GW contains an additional 6,000 entries.81 The rise in the transcription of digitized documents and the use of tools such as optical character recognition makes searches quicker and allows for more connections to be discovered. The transcription of half of the 146,000 texts on EEBO allows for the search for lost titles in advertisements and catalogues.82 The Stationers’ Register Online facilitates textual searches of the individual entries from the Register 1557 to 1640 rather than manually searching through hundreds of pages.83 The development of similar tools and databases will deliver new ways of visualizing data and provide clues as to the direction of more in-​depth qualitative research. Technology also has a large role to play in the future prevention of book transience and loss. While most books were lost soon after printing, destruction is not just an early modern problem.84 Wars in the twentieth century led to the destruction of millions of books and libraries. More recently, in 2009, the collapse of the archive building in Cologne led to an important collection of early modern printed ordinances ending up beneath the rubble.85 While nothing can replace the richness and feel of a physical book, a facsimile, microfilm, or digitized copy can at least provide evidence and knowledge that the book ever existed.86 Digitized copies can also help preserve rare materials, allowing researchers to assess their need to access the original text and reduce the dangers of handling and moving items. Wider access to materials through digitization also means that some books which, until now, may have led an invisible existence on a dark basement shelf can find a new global audience. A fundamental question over the impact of transience and loss is how evidence of transient and lost items is displayed and shared. Traditional forms of bibliography emphasize the importance of having the book in hand as evidence of an edition. Fredson Bowers describes ‘the basic function of a descriptive bibliography’ as presenting ‘all the evidence about a book which can be determined by analytical bibliography applied to a material object’.87 The idea of the book in hand has also found its way into digital bibliography such as with STCV where every edition and copy recorded has been checked in person.88 With lost books, there is no physical item to analyse, only references within

644   Alexandra Hill other documents. From the Bowers definition, evidence of lost books would be deemed as ‘collateral’ and supplementary to true bibliography.89 With such a strict definition of bibliography, some would argue that lists of lost and surviving items should be kept separate. However, a key part of rediscovering lost books is to provide a greater understanding of the books that have survived as well as creating a broader picture of print history and the role of the book. It is about providing all the evidence for researchers to make their own judgements. When exploring loss the importance of the find is not always immediately apparent. Seeing a lost title or an obscure printer’s name may mean nothing to one person but have a huge impact on someone else’s research. The key is finding the best way to share that knowledge in the age of information. As with finding lost books, when displaying them it is essential to decide how far a ‘recorded memory of an edition’ counts as reliable evidence and to include all the references of where the books have been cited.90 A related example is the Lost Plays Database which uses a wiki system to allow verified contributors to create and update the records of lost plays performed in England between 1570 and 1642.91 Each record contains evidence for possible creators and narratives from historical documents such as Henslowe’s diary, licences written by the Master of the Revels, the Stationers’ Company Register, court records, and even sermons.92 The more references that can be found for a lost work, the better evidence there is of it ever having existed. The challenge of displaying lost and surviving books side by side is ensuring that evidence for the lost book has enough ‘weight’ to match the record of a surviving work and that similar information can be searched and filtered. Recreating an imprint can be difficult if one only has a title, while discovering a format, subject, author, printer, publisher, or bookseller is even more problematic. Having an imprint is essential in identifying the work as a print rather than a manuscript and establishing that it is a separate edition from one recorded as surviving in a modern institution. John H. Astington in his chapter on lost plays suggested that there were two camps when it came to identifying lost items: lumpers and splitters. Lumpers are people who assume that any title links to a surviving work or can be merged with the title of an existing one, while splitters prefer to see distinct and potentially lost items.93 It is understandable why, in studying lost books, researchers often have to err on the side of caution but the more information is available, the more easily lost works can be identified. To provide a better context and understanding of the book in early modern England, evidence of lost and surviving editions needs to be displayed side by side. This is not a new or radical idea. GW refers to editions known to have been located at Berlin State Library but lost during the Second World War.94 The Material Evidence in Incunabula site lists ‘historical copies’ which are referred to in documents but are yet to be linked to a surviving copy.95 The Universal Short Catalogue project meanwhile has long advocated the study of lost books with the online database providing for the inclusion of editions with no surviving copies in any search.96 The number of lost editions will only grow as more work is done scouring sources, with the site looking to display almost 50,000 lost books.97 The addition of evidence from the Stationers’ Company Register alone will add a sixth to the overall corpus of books printed in England 1557 to 1640.98

Transience and Loss    645

Conclusion And then thy friends, when they shall heare And see thee thus reclaim’d, They’le then beleeve thou hast much lost, By which losse thou hast gain’d. W.B., The distressed merchant (1645)

At first glance, the study of transience and loss in the world of the early modern book in England seems to offer up more questions than answers. There is no physical item to dissect and explore in a library but an empty space offering a range of interpretations and explanations. It is down to the judgement, knowledge, and experience of the researcher to find and explore the evidence. There is no single way to approach and study transience and loss. It can be done through analysing individual editions or copies, investigating the output of a printer, writer, or entire company, or by focusing on a selection of documents or collections. A researcher can take a quantitative or qualitative approach and use a mixture of both statistical and textual analysis to interpret the evidence. As with so many aspects of book history, the hardest part is often knowing where to look and explaining clearly the strengths and weaknesses of the sources. The main question now is less about how we can study transience and loss but how we integrate this work into the study of book history in general. The study of lost books questions the reliability of survival and collecting as providing a representation of what was printed in early modern England. There therefore needs to be a more holistic approach to transience, loss, and survival with the ability to search evidence of lost editions alongside evidence of surviving ones. This will ensure that such evidence is more widely available to researchers. Transience and loss have had, and will continue to have, a huge impact on our past, present, and future understandings of the book in early modern England. Whether it is in our knowledge of the creators, readers, and collectors or on the history of an individual edition or copy, there will always be something missing. However, by studying transience and loss, we can get one step further in uncovering the books and worlds hitherto hidden by lack of survival.

Notes 1. Anon., A Letter from a Friend in London, to another at Salamanca (1681), 3–​4. 2. Alexandra Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557–​1640: An Analysis of the Stationers’ Company Register (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 170. 3. Thomas Brugis, The Discovery of a Proiector Shewing the Beginning, Progresse, and End of the Projector and His Projects (1641), 11. 4. Martial, Epigrams of Martial, Englished with some Other Pieces, Ancient and Modern (1695), 62.

646   Alexandra Hill 5. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–​1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 411. 6. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘Chapbooks’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 471–​490, at 474. 7. Alexandra Hill, ‘The Lamentable Tale of Lost Ballads in England, 1557–​1640’, in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets: Single-​Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 442–​458, at 442. 8. Goran Proot, ‘Survival Factors of Seventeenth-​Century Hand-​Press Books Published in the Southern Netherlands: The Importance of Sheet Counts, Sammelbände and the Role of Institutional Collections’, in Flavia Bruni and Andrew Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books: Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-​Industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 160–​ 201, at 181. 9. Proot, ‘Survival Factors’, 191. 10. British Library, Thomason Tracts, www.bl.uk/​col​lect​ion-​gui​des/​thoma​son-​tra​cts. 11. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 28. 12. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 64. 13. Theodor Harmsen, ‘Bagford, John (1650/​ 51–​ 1716)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). 14. James I, An Abstract of His Majesties letters patents graunted unto Roger Wood and Thomas Symcocke (1623). 15. James I, An Abstract; Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 147–​148. 16. ESTC S2659. 17. ESTC S476285. 18. William Congreve, The Mourning Bride a Tragedy: As it is Acted at the Theatre in Lincoln’s-​ Inn-​Fields by His Majesty’s Servants (1697), sig. A3v. 19. Adam Smyth, ‘Almanacs and Ideas of Popularity’, in Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (eds.), The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 125–​133, at 127. 20. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 143. 21. Anon., Bibliotheca Novissima, Or, A Catalogue of Books on Divers Subjects Containing, I. Books Lately Printed in England, II. Books Newly Reprinted, III. Books Now in the Press, with a Short Account of the Particular Design of several of them (1693). 22. Anon., Bibliotheca Novissima, 6–​12. 23. Flavia Bruni, ‘Early Modern Broadsheets between Archives and Libraries: Toward a Possible Integration’, in Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets, 33–​54, at 42. 24. César Oudin, The extravagant poet. A comical novel, wherein is described his many pleasant follies (1681), 13. 25. Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 36. 26. Anna Giulia Cavagna, ‘Loss and Meaning: Lost Books, Bibliographic Description and Significance in a Sixteenth-​Century Italian Private Library’, in Bruni and Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books, 347–​361, at 360. 27. Rosa Marisa Borraccini, ‘An Unknown Best-​seller: The Confessionario of Girolamo da Palermo’, in Bruni and Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books, 291–​309, at 294–​295. 28. J. Barnard, ‘The Survival and Loss Rates of Psalms, ABCs, Psalters and Primers from the Stationers’ Stock, 1660–​1700’, The Library, 21/​2 (1999), 148–​150, at 150.

Transience and Loss    647 29. ESTC S23; A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–​1640, ed. Edward Arber, vols. i–​iv (London: Privately printed, 1875–​7), i. 201. 30. ESTC, Homepage, http://​estc.bl.uk. 31. Charles Sorel, The extravagant shepherd, the anti-​romance, or, The history of the shepherd Lysis translated out of French (1653), 4. 32. Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Legion of the Lost’, in Bruni and Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books, 1–​ 27, at 26. 33. PLRE 4.538:1-​30. 34. Oliver M. Willard, ‘The Survival of English Books Printed Before 1640: A Theory and Some Illustrations’, The Library, 4/​23 (1942), 181–​190; Falk Eisermann, ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter: Lost Incunabula, and Ways to Retrieve Them’, in Bruni and Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books, 31–​54, at 39–​40; Donald Wing, A Gallery of Ghosts: Books Published Between 1641–​1700 Not Found in the Short-​Title Catalogue (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1967). 35. For the methodology, see Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 19–​22. 36. Ernst Consentius, ‘Die Typen und der Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. Eine Kritik’, Gutenberg-​Jahrbuch, 7 (1932), 55–​109, at 84. As referenced in Jonathan Green and Frank McIntyre, ‘Lost Incunable Editions: Closing in on an Estimate’, in Bruni and Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books, 55–​74, at 56. 37. Neil Harris, ‘The Italian Renaissance Book: Catalogues, Censuses and Survival’, in Malcolm Walsby and Graeme Kemp (eds.), The Book Triumphant: Print in Transition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 26–​56, at 52. 38. Harris, ‘The Italian Renaissance Book’, 55. 39. Green and McIntyre, ‘Lost Incunable Editions’, 61; Harris, ‘The Italian Renaissance Book’, 53; Goran Proot and Leo Egghe, ‘Estimating Editions on the Basis of Survivals: Printed Programmes of Jesuit Plays in the Provincia Flandro-​Belgica before 1773, with a note on the “Book Historical Law” ’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102 (2008), 149–​174, at 166. 40. Proot, ‘Survival Factors’, 166. 41. Jonathan Green, Frank McIntyre, and Paul Needham, ‘The Shape of Incunable Survival and Statistical Estimation of Lost Editions’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 105 (2011), 141–​175, at 153. 42. Green and McIntyre, ‘Lost Incunable Editions’, 62–​64. 43. Christian Coppens, ‘A Census of Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Catalogues up to 1600: Some Provisional Conclusions’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102/​4 (2008), 557–​565, at 558 and 563. 44. Coppens, ‘A Census of Publishers’, 563. 45. Andrew Maunsell: The Catalogue of English Printed Books (1595) (London: Gregg Press in association with the Archive Press, 1965); Franklin B. Williams Jr., ‘Lost Books of Tudor England’, The Library, 5/​1 (1978), 1–​14, at 3. 46. Williams Jr., ‘Lost Books of Tudor England’, 5. 47. Adam G. Hooks, ‘Booksellers’ Catalogues and the Classification of Printed Drama in Seventeenth-​Century England’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102/​4 (2008), 445–​464, Joshua J. McEvilla, ‘A Catalogue of Book Advertisements from English Serials: Printed Drama, 1646–​1668’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 107/​ 1 (2003), 10–​48; and The Term Catalogues, 1668–​1709, A.D.; with a number for Easter term, 1711 A.D.: A Contemporary Bibliography of English Literature in the Reigns of

648   Alexandra Hill Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Anne, ed. Edward Arber (London: Privately Printed, 1903). 48. Edward Jacobs and Antonia Forster, ‘ “Lost Books” and Publishing History: Two Annotated Lists of Imprints for the Fiction Titles Listed in the Circulating Library Catalogs of Thomas Lowndes (1766) and M. Heavisides (1790), of Which No Known Copies Survive’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 89/​3 (1995), 260–​297, at 271–​297. 49. Anon., A Catalogue of Excellent and Rare Books [to] be Sold by Way Auction the 25th. Day of February. [W]Hich was the Library of Mr. William Annand Late Dean of Edinburgh Deceased (1690), 20. 50. ESTC R29144. 51. A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London; From 1640–​1708 A.D., ii: 1655–​1675, ed. George Edward Briscoe Eyre (London: Privately Printed, 1913), 126. 52. Gé Desargues, Mr. De Sargues Universal Way of Dyaling, Or, Plain and Easie Directions for Placing the Axeltree and Marking the Hours in Sun-​Dyals, After the French, Italian, Babylonian, and Jewish Manner (1659), sig. A6v. 53. ESTC R207770. 54. Anon., Bibliotheca Novissima. 55. Anon., Bibliotheca Novissima, 27–​28. 56. Anon., Bibliotheca Novissima, sig. πv. 57. Randal Taylor, Advertisement to Booksellers. there is Now Published and Sold by Randal Taylor Near Stationers =​Hall, Bibliotheca Novissima, Numb. 1. Or, a Catalogue of Books on Divers Subjects (1693). 58. Mr. Wild, [Catalogue of a Collection of Books Sold at Auction] (1695), sig. H1v. 59. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 112. 60. ESTC R172622. Bibliotheca Novisima, 16–​17. 61. Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree, ‘Publicity and Its Uses: Lost Books as Revealed in Newspaper Advertisements in the Seventeenth-​Century Dutch Republic’, in Bruni and Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books, 202–​222, at 211–​212. 62. ESTC R22660, R41763, R230701, R42306, R222035, N505698, T219058, N505725, N505693, T222821. 63. Arthur Der Weduwen, ‘Lost and Found: On the Trail of the Forgotten Literature of the Dutch Golden Age’, Jaarboek Voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, 27 (2020), 45–​65, at 53. 64. Transcript of the Registers, ii. 1655–​1675, ed. Briscoe, 136 and 169. 65. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 10-​13. 66. Joad Raymond, ‘The Development of the Book Trade in Britain’, in Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i. 59–​75, at 70. 67. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 28. 68. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–​1640, ed. Arber, i. 411, ii. 382, and iii. 87. 69. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 112. 70. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 173. 71. Alexandra Hill, ‘Rediscovering Lost Literature in the Stationers’ Company Register’, in Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle (eds.), Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), 111–​127, at 117–​118. 72. Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 170. 73. Transcript of the Registers, ii: 1655–​1675, ed. Briscoe, 141, 178, and 162.

Transience and Loss    649 74. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 81. 75. Transcript of the Registers, ii: 1655–​1675, ed. Briscoe, 142, 143, and 149. 76. Transcript of the Registers, ii: 1655–​1675, ed. Briscoe, 146. Anon., Mercurius Politicus [Issue 380] (September 3 1657) (1650), 1616. 77. Transcript of the Registers, ii: 1655–​1675, ed. Briscoe, 144. 78. Hill, ‘The Lamentable Tale of Lost Ballads in England, 1557–​1640’, 442. 79. Transcript of the Registers, ii: 1655–​1675, ed. Briscoe, 137, 179, and 161. 80. Harris, ‘The Italian Renaissance Book’, 51. 81. Eisermann, ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter’, 33–​34. 82. EEBO, About Early European Books, https://​sea​rch.proqu​est.com/​eebo/​produc​tful​ldes​ cdet​ail? 83. My thanks to Giles Bergel and his team at Oxford University for providing me with early access to their transcribed data for my PhD. https://​sta​tion​ersr​egis​ter.onl​ine 84. Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack (London: John Murray, 2020). 85. Saskia Limbach, ‘Tracing Lost Broadsheet Ordinances Printed in Sixteenth-​Century Cologne’, in Bruni and Pettegree (eds.), Lost Books, 488–​503, at 493–​494. 86. Eisermann, ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter’, 36. 87. Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (Winchester: St Paul’s Press, 1994), 34. 88. STCV, The Procedure: ABC, https://​vlaa​mse-​erfg​oedb​ibli​othe​ken.be/​doss​ier/​short-​title-​ catalo​gus-​vla​ande​ren/​kwa​lite​itsg​aran​tie-​abc-​proced​ure. 89. Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, 34. 90. Cavagna, ‘Loss and Meaning’, 360. 91. Roslyn L. Knutson and David McInnis, ‘ “The Lost Plays Database”: A Wiki for Lost Plays’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 24 (2011), 46–​57, at 55–​56. 92. Lost Plays Database homepage https://​lostpl​ays.fol​ger.edu/​Main_​P​age. 93. John H. Astington, ‘Lumpers and Splitters’, in David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (eds.), Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 84–​102, at 84. 94. Eisermann, ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter’, 35. 95. MEI, Main Page, www.cerl.org/​resour​ces/​mei/​main. 96. My thanks to Andrew Pettegree, Graeme Kemp, and Arthur der Weduwen for sharing the ongoing work on lost books being carried out at the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project at University of St Andrews. 97. Andrew Pettegree, ‘Onward to 1700’, www.ustc.ac.uk/​news/​onw​ard-​to-​1700. 98. Der Weduwen, ‘Lost and Found’, 61–​62, 48.

Select Bibliography Barnard, J., ‘The Survival and Loss Rates of Psalms, ABCs, Psalters and Primers from the Stationers’ Stock, 1660–​1700’, The Library, 21/​2 (1999), 148–​150. Bruni, Flavia, and Pettegree, Andrew (eds.), Lost Books: Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-​ Industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Der Weduwen, Arthur, ‘Lost and Found: On the Trail of the Forgotten Literature of the Dutch Golden Age’, Jaarboek Voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, 27 (2020), 45–​65.

650   Alexandra Hill Fox, Adam, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–​1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Green, Jonathan, McIntyre, Frank, and Needham, Paul, ‘The Shape of Incunable Survival and Statistical Estimation of Lost Editions’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 105 (2011), 141–​175. Harris, Neil, ‘The Italian Renaissance Book: Catalogues, Censuses and Survival’, in Malcolm Walsby and Graeme Kemp (eds.), The Book Triumphant: Print in Transition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 26–​56. Hill, Alexandra, Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557–​1640: An Analysis of the Stationers’ Company Register (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Knutson, Roslyn L., McInnis, David, and Steggle, Matthew (eds.), Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). Proot, Goran, and Egghe, Leo, ‘Estimating Editions on the Basis of Survivals: Printed Programmes of Jesuit Plays in the Provincia Flandro-​Belgica before 1773, with a Note on the “Book Historical Law” ’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 102 (2008), 149–​174. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–​1640, ed. Edward Arber, vols. i–​iv (London: Privately printed, 1875–​7). A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London; From 1640–​1708 A.D., ii: 1655–​1675, ed. George Edward Briscoe Eyre (London: Privately Printed, 1913). Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Williams Jr., Franklin B., ‘Lost Books of Tudor England’, The Library, 5/​1 (1978), 1–​14.

Chapter 34

Owning, Preserv i ng , a nd Tr ansmit ting t h e T e xt Early Modern Libraries and Their Users David Pearson

This is the chapter of this book which is about book collecting. Or, rather, it’s the chapter which would have been perceived in those terms thirty, or a hundred, years ago, and which many people today may still see like that, but which is deliberately entitled ‘Owning’, not ‘Collecting’. One of the key points it will make is that while the ownership of books through the early modern period was widespread, and hugely important in laying the foundations of the libraries we rely on today, we should not think about, or judge, the private libraries of the past simplistically in twenty-​first-​century terms. Book collecting is a concept we are all familiar with; it was summarized by John Carter in his much-​read manual on the subject as ‘reverence for, and a desire to possess, the original or some other specifically admirable, curious or interesting edition of a book . . . [which] must be either in its original state or in some contemporary, associative or otherwise appropriate condition’.1 Some of this wording can be applied in an early modern context, when people did seek out editions that were valued, and did care about condition, but not in ways that chime with the concepts of connoisseurship that underpin Carter’s definition, and which remain commonly associated with the idea of book collecting today. ‘The name of Edward Gwynn . . . deserves to be rescued from oblivion as the owner of at least one volume of paramount importance: [a]‌bound volume of nine Shakespeare quartos.’2 Thus Seymour de Ricci, in another standard twentieth-​century reference work on English Collectors, dismissing the many hundreds of books which constituted the library of a mid-​seventeenth-​century London lawyer, which (were it not for those quartos) would not merit that rescue. This cherry-​picking of the highlights (as we see them) is another modern attitude which pervades our approach to libraries of the past, and which creates an impediment to understanding them in their contemporary terms. The majority of the books found on the shelves of early modern libraries are ones which few people want to read any more; early modern conceptions of which books were more

652   David Pearson important than others were different from ours. We need to recognize and adjust to that, and remove our Shakespeare-​tinted (or literature-​tinted, or Printing and the Mind of Man-​tinted) spectacles in looking at them. Books could be found in the homes of many people in early modern Britain, across most layers of society from tradesmen to aristocrats, increasing in spread and average quantity as time passed. The keyword to bear in mind, to understand their motivation, is utility; books were owned because they were useful, or necessary. Scholars, clergymen, and professionals needed books to access knowledge and ideas which would not otherwise be available, in a world without an infrastructure of publicly funded libraries. Everyone, in an age when personal salvation was an issue whose importance we find it hard to grasp today, needed guidance on God’s designs, as set out in the Bible and as interpreted by each generation’s divines. Books could be objects of luxury, with more money spent on them than was functionally necessary, but they were then useful as signifiers of wealth, taste, and social status. Large private libraries typically embraced a broad sweep of subjects, a snapshot of global knowledge, rather than focusing on one interest or specialism; clergymen owned books on geography and medicine, while physicians owned books on theology and history. The idea of collecting works by a particular author, or on a particular topic, in the way that someone today might collect books by or about Lord Byron, was alien to the early modern mind. Similarly, the fascination around early printing for its own sake, which developed during and after the eighteenth century, will not generally be found before then; sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century people bought incunabula, but they were interested in them as texts, not antique trophies. As mentioned already, we should recognize the important role which private ownership of books has played in shaping our documentary heritage, and in defining our cultural values around that legacy. Today, we look to the world’s research libraries as its primary custodians; in the world of Marlowe or Milton, when that network of public resources was either non-​existent or just evolving, large libraries were more likely to be privately owned. The movement of books from one to the other, by gift, bequest, or purchase, was a key factor in developing the public framework, at all levels, whether we think of the great seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century collections which built the foundations of our national libraries (Holdsworth, Selden, Moore, Sloane), or the countless clergy bookshelves which became town and parish libraries. Until the eighteenth century, and sometimes later, most institutional libraries relied more on donations than purchase for augmenting their holdings; an acquisitions budget, in a library, is a relatively modern concept. Consequently, the books which have come down to us are those which people chose to buy and keep. Those which were not thus owned and preserved are lost to that collective memory. We are indebted to Matthew Parker, who gathered up Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts in the sixteenth century, for our historical knowledge of that period, just as we appreciate the systematic collecting of 22,000 tracts of the 1640s and 1650s by George Thomason, for our record of the Civil War and Interregnum. Some items which could have been added to their libraries, but which for one reason or another eluded their reach, are now lost forever.

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    653

Methodologies How should we approach, and present, this topic? H. S. Bennett, in his three-​decker series on English Books and Readers between 1475 and 1640, saw it almost entirely in terms of a subject-​themed analysis of the output of English printers during the period, and for him ‘the centre of all the bookish activity [was] the stationers’ trade’.3 Although now a less regularly consulted reference source than it was fifty years ago, Bennett’s philosophy still runs through much of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Ian Green’s valuable study of the more-​and less-​read religious texts of this time relies on the numbers of editions published to make deductions about their consumption.4 Looking through the lens of what was available is obviously a relevant—​indeed, necessary—​approach, but this chapter is about ownership and we must start from that end to establish our evidence base and draw conclusions. There are various sources from which we can learn about private libraries of the past; some of them still survive more or less intact, having been absorbed and preserved by institutional libraries. Others, long since lost or dispersed, are recorded in lists and catalogues made because the books were being sold, or moved, or because the owner had died. Probate documents are an important quarry in this field, because people often included directions about books in their wills (which by their nature, or absence, can lead to deductions about the importance of books in their owners’ lives). Probate inventories, required by law from 1529, may include detailed lists of books for as long as the practice was diligently observed. Sale catalogues contain huge quantities of information on particular libraries, and about patterns of ownership more broadly, but in the British context they only began to be regularly printed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Before then, as Henry Woudhuysen in this volume observes, records with this kind of granularity are scarce. Beyond that, we have a huge diaspora of evidence in the footprints left in books by countless owners, in their inscriptions, annotations, bookplates, binding stamps, and other traces—​balanced by the negative impact of those equally countless numbers of people who preferred not to mark their books, and the fathomless void of books destroyed over the centuries by wear, disaster, unsaleability, and unwantedness. In a sentence, we could summarize the development of book ownership in Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by saying that throughout that period, it became more widespread across many sectors of society, as the numbers of available books grew, and that average library sizes got bigger. Unpicking that, we are likely to want to know what kinds of books people owned, where they came from, and what time-​related trends we detect there; we also need to think about different kinds of people. At any point during this time, we might find books in the home of a bishop, or a local squire, or a physician, or a baker, but they would have different characteristics and purposes. Trend analysis, by size or contents, needs to consider what is typical, or less so, according to background; a hundred books owned by a yeoman in the middle of

654   David Pearson the seventeenth century is noteworthy, while the same quantity owned by a clergyman is not. A lot of work in this field inevitably focuses on case studies of particular libraries. No two such libraries, even of the same kind of person at the same point in time, will ever be identical in their holdings, and assessments which distinguish the typical from the unusual need to be rooted in an evidence-​based overview of the many, not the one. One book found on someone’s bookshelf is a flimsy basis for generalization, but if that book is regularly found, or not found, across a whole generation of owners, we are on firmer ground. We all understand that a book owned is not necessarily a book read, but a book owned by lots of people was clearly thought to be more important than one which nobody bought. Similarly, there are many reasons why books which might be expected to be found on particular shelves are not recorded there: they may have been once, but lost, loaned, or removed; they may never have been acquired because opportunities did not arise; they may have been available, and read, elsewhere.

The Late Medieval Landscape If we began by surveying the landscape of book ownership across Britain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, we would find books in many places. Outside the universities, where the central libraries had several hundred volumes on their shelves, the major institutional collections were in religious houses, where the larger abbeys like Canterbury, Durham, or York might have as many as two thousand.5 There were plenty of books in private hands at this time, and the university and college libraries relied almost entirely on donations for their expansion. Throughout the early modern period, the leaders of the Church, who generally recognized the importance of the book learning that helped them to achieve their positions, provide an obvious place to look for the grandest libraries. It was Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York (1423–​1500) who gave Cambridge University Library its biggest pre-​Reformation augmentation, with around two hundred books given during his time as chancellor in the 1470s; when he died, he bequeathed a further hundred books to the college he founded in Rotherham.6 John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (c.1469–​1535) ‘had the notablest library of books in all England, two long galleries full. The books were sorted in stalls, and a regestre of the names of every book hung at the end of every stall.’7 Had Fisher not fallen foul of Henry VIII, these books would have gone to St John’s College, Cambridge, but they were sequestered and dispersed after his execution. Rotherham’s books were mostly manuscripts, but the advent of printing meant that libraries in three figures were more widely spread than would have been the case a century earlier. Martin Collins (d. 1509), a canon of York Minster, owned over 160 books, many of them printed.8 John Yotton (d. 1512), Master of Michaelhouse, Cambridge and Dean of Lichfield, gave around two hundred volumes to his college during his lifetime.9 These are also quite senior and wealthy people; the probate inventories of

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    655 Oxford University, which have been edited as part of the Private Libraries in Renaissance England series, record numerous lists of books left behind by scholars and fellows of colleges in the first few decades of the sixteenth century. These typically run to anything between half a dozen and twenty volumes, with occasionally larger libraries like that of John Morcote of Merton (d. 1508: seventy-​five books) or Edmund Burton of Balliol (d. 1529; forty-​two books).10 The rare survival of an Oxford bookseller’s ledger, recording the books which passed across John Dorne’s counter in 1520, is another insight into the active trade which was going on in a university town then; it lists around 1,800 transactions, many of them solidly bound books, with a little under half being cheaper items selling for sixpence or less. There was a ready sale for Duns Scotus, for educational textbooks, and for ballads and almanacs in early sixteenth-​century Oxford.11 Looking more broadly across the country, Arnold Hunt has suggested that book ownership, on the scale of only a handful of volumes, was widespread but not ubiquitous across the parish clergy in the early sixteenth century. There are numerous wills of this period which mention a few service or doctrinal books, and their absence from such documents is not necessarily a sign of zero ownership, as the spread of print made them commoner.12 The kinds of books these people owned were typically ones of obvious practical relevance to their ministry: liturgical and doctrinal texts, perhaps a Bible, a collection of sermons, a book on canon law. This is the motivation which runs repeatedly through the academic libraries of this time, when the books which will regularly be found in scholars’ rooms are standard ones supporting study, or defining doctrine, in theology, grammar, logic, languages, and law.13 The earliest mention of Luther in the Oxford lists is in 1529, when ‘a poynt boke owte of Luters workes’ was one of a group of books seized in a raid on a suspected heretic, and generally it is not until the 1560s and later that Luther regularly appears in Oxford inventories; in Cambridge, well known as a place more sympathetic to Reformation ideas, it is noticeably earlier, and Luther’s writings feature in many probate inventories there from the 1540s onwards, and sometimes earlier.14 Mark Purcell’s work on The Country House Library has opened up for us the extent to which the libraries in gentry and aristocratic houses, all across the country, constituted a significant part of our book landscape through the centuries. Although ‘we know less than we might do about books and libraries in magnate households between the Wars of the Roses and the Dissolution’, there are glimpses of what must have existed around that time.15 A 1531 list of the Earl of Kildare’s library at Maynooth Castle lists over a hundred books, in English, French, Latin, and Irish, encompassing history, chronicles, and literature as well as devotional and classical works.16 These will have been grander books, in every sense, than the Aristotles found in Oxford studies, like the ‘thirteen missals bound in crimson or purple velvet’ in the Duke of Norfolk’s chapel at Framlingham Castle in 1524; part of the utility of these kinds of books lies in projecting the wealth and social status of the owner.17 We also see here another theme, of books for recreation, as well as for education or devotion, or for what in the early twenty-​first century we might describe as well-​being—​several studies, or library rooms, in grand houses in the sixteenth century are described in contemporary documents as ‘paradises’.18 This side of books

656   David Pearson and their purposes is perhaps particularly evident from the wide-​ranging libraries of the upper echelons of society, but was not restricted to them; James Townley (d. 1543), a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge and one of those early stockists of works by Continental reformers like Bucer, Bullinger, and Zwingli, also had four ballad books in his inventory.19

The Common Man Paucity of evidence means that we know very little about the extent of book ownership across the less formally educated, sub-​professional, humbler sort, whatever we want to call them, at this time—​the yeomen, tradesmen, artisans, labourers, and others who did of course constitute the bulk of the population. These are people who did not leave wills and inventories, whose books (if they owned them) are more likely to have been read to pieces, or not thought worthy of preservation. There are numerous more detailed studies in this area, by scholars who have observed that huge quantities of cheap and ephemeral printing came from the presses in the sixteenth century, that literacy rates were steadily increasing, and that all those thousands of almanacs and popular devotional books must have gone somewhere.20 A copy of the Abridgement of the notable woorkes of Polidore Vergile (London, 1546) with an ownership note on its flyleaf by Robert Wyllyams, ‘keppynge shepe uppon Seynbury hill 1546’, adds that he ‘bout thys boke whe[n]‌the testament was obberagatyd that shepe herdys myght not red hit I prey god amende that blyndnes’; it is a rare example not only of the ownership of a more substantial book by a mid-​sixteenth-​century shepherd, but also of expressed views by someone like that on late Henrician policy on Bible reading.21 More extensive evidence survives from later in the century, when we have various probate lists which give us snapshots of a pattern which must have been widespread across the country. Volume VIII of Private Libraries in Renaissance England includes the inventories of Robert Dobbs, a Suffolk yeoman who died in 1587 with a Bible, a New Testament, a prayer book, Halle’s Chronicle, and ‘theother bookes’ to his name; of a Suffolk carpenter, Thomas Hallifax, who in 1589 left behind ‘twoe small English bybles, latimer sermons, an abridgement of the statutes and other small bookes of prayer’; and of a Norfolk blacksmith, Robert Hancock, who owned a homily book and a copy of Leonard Digges’s Prognositication of right good effect in 1590.22 The picture which emerges is one of ordinary, average households where there is enough literacy, and desire, to own a handful of books, which almost invariably include a Bible, some other devotional texts, and (if there is more) a history or chronicle, perhaps a compendium of the law or of medical remedies, all in English. The standard themes of utility and well-​being are evident again. These books might have been bought new, or acquired more opportunistically; Abigail Williams, writing about book ownership by the middling sort in the eighteenth century, envisages ‘tattered old books that had been knocking around in a whole village or family’, and that sort of thing was

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    657 surely happening earlier.23 There are common evidence patterns which we regularly see in books with these kinds of histories, usually much the worse for wear, with scribbles up and down their margins, stains, and missing leaves; they often started life in a more affluent household before ending up in a poorer one, and they often circulated in the same locality over several generations.24 I doubt that Thomas Hallifax, the Orford carpenter, bought his copy of Latimer’s sermons because that was his favourite author, but more probably because that book happened to be available one day in the right circumstances, and having one spiritual guide of the right kind of theological persuasion to support his Bible reading, he had what he and his family needed. By the end of the sixteenth century, we can see book ownership among all the groups described earlier having developed in line with that one-​sentence summary, that libraries get bigger as time passes. Thomas Cranmer (1489–​1556), the mid-​century Archbishop of Canterbury, had a library of over six hundred volumes, but by the end of the century his successor John Whitgift (1530?–​1604) had ten times as many, and the largest British private library of his generation.25 Academic bookshelves had similarly expanded, and lists of a hundred or more titles are not unusual in probate inventories of the 1590s.26 More senior figures in that world had considerably more; Thomas Lorkyn (c.1528–​91), Regius Professor of Physick at Cambridge, had around six hundred volumes, while Andrew Perne (1519?–​89), Master of Peterhouse, was able to bequeath about two and a half thousand to his college.27 Sir Henry Unton (c.1558–​96), a knight and a gentleman but not a peer, left ‘many books of diverse sortes, to the number of ccxx’ in a handsome study decorated with gilded hangings; Sir Thomas Knyvett of Ashwellthorpe in Norfolk (c.1539–​1618) spent many decades building up a library of about one and a half thousand volumes.28

The Impact of Monastic Dissolution The Dissolution of the Monasteries was a hugely disruptive event which had a significant impact on the story of book ownership in the sixteenth century, as on many other aspects of the social fabric. As noted already, at the beginning of the sixteenth century the holdings of the religious houses constituted, collectively, a major reservoir of books across the country as a whole. Many printed books associated with monasteries, representing their last decades of acquisition, have personal inscriptions of individual monks, and it is clear that they had funds or allowances to enable book purchase, particularly if they were assigned to university studies. In 1540 all that changed, and in most places the custodial legacy of centuries was dispersed in a matter of decades, in various ways and for various reasons. A systematic gleaning of monastic books for the royal library was in place during the 1530s, and many more found their way into the hands of interested people not long thereafter.29 Matthew Parker (1504–​75) is probably the best-​known name in this first generation of monastic salvagers, and his motives in systematically collecting early manuscripts to help to justify

658   David Pearson the Christian purity of the Elizabethan Anglican Church are well documented.30 He is one among numerous names of the middle and second half of the sixteenth century who became the first generation of gatherers of old books for antiquarian reasons—​people like William Lambarde (1536–​1601), Humphrey Llwyd (1527–​68), William Marshall (d. 1583), Sir John Prise (1501/​2–​55), and John Twyne (c.1505–​81), whose manuscripts went on to feed the greater libraries of the next generation, like those of Sir Walter Cope (1553?–​1614), Sir Robert Cotton (1571–​1631), Sir Edward Dering (1598–​1644), and Sir Simonds d’Ewes (1602–​50).31 What is the motive at work here—​is this the beginning of collecting in John Carter’s sense? I would say not, and stress the utility which these men saw in the books—​not as historical curiosities but as bulwarks of defence in political and theological positions. This applies to Cotton as well as to Parker; the early Stuart antiquaries studied history primarily for its use and application in contemporary affairs, rather than for the advancement of historical understanding in a more academic sense. A different motive which influenced the fate of some monastic books might be perceived as piety, or misplaced optimism. Many of the ejected monks, whose lifelong religious beliefs were not going to be changed by royal edicts or the turbulence of events, became secular clergy in parishes and newly created cathedrals. They were well placed to squirrel away books and other artefacts from their broken-​up homes, possibly as devotional aids or just as treasured relics, possibly in the hope of reconfiguring the libraries should the monasteries be restored. These books took a different course during the next century or so, often passing from the last-​generation monks into the hands of recusant families where they would be looked after with appropriate veneration until changed times meant loss, or institutional homes. Several case studies, particularly associated with the north of England, have found evidence of this kind of activity, which is perhaps closer to collecting as we might think of it.32

Size and Breadth Returning to the start of the seventeenth century, and the observation that by then people with the resources and the desire could accumulate numbers of books running into four figures, one feature that would be noticeable in all these libraries, regardless of the background of their owner, would be the range of subject coverage. The world’s knowledge, during the early modern period, could more easily be encompassed in a few thousand books than is the case today, and seventeenth-​century libraries of any size would usually touch on most of what there was to know. Proportions varied by profession—​clergymen typically owned more religious books than aristocrats, while lawyers and physicians owned more books directly relevant to their professions, but something of everything is a common pattern. Brian Cummings in this volume stresses the dominance of theology, in all its manifestations, in the outputs of the press, and this can be seen time and time again in early library catalogues. An academic or clerical library of this time would typically comprise anything between 50 to 70 per cent theology,

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    659 an aristocratic or professional one maybe half that, while the remainder would be a mixture of history, current affairs, literature, geography and travel, classics, medicine, mathematics, science, and law. ‘Theology’ has many subdivisions, including not only biblical texts and commentaries, but also patristics, liturgical, devotional, doctrinal, and controversial works (remembering that much of the kind of discourse which today we would classify as political took place in this sphere). The combined libraries of Richard Bancroft (1544–​1610) and George Abbot (1562–​ 1633), the two early seventeenth-​century Archbishops of Canterbury whose six thousand or so books (which included many of Whitgift’s) created the foundation of Lambeth Palace Library, have been analysed as comprising a little under 60 per cent theology, with 19 per cent history, 11 per cent law, and a miscellaneous and wide-​ranging remainder.33 Abbot was thoroughly versed in the writings of Luther, Calvin, and his own generation of argumentative divines, but he also owned works by Boccaccio, Drayton, Montaigne, Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser, and Tasso. A generation on, one of the largest British private libraries of the mid-​century was that of Richard Holdsworth (1590–​ 1649), a senior Cambridge academic and London clergyman, ten thousand volumes strong. A contemporary classified listing of his books counts 56 per cent as theological, with 13 per cent history, 9 per cent philology (a common catch-​all term at this time encompassing literature, classics, philosophy, and more), and smaller percentages of law, geography, medicine, and mathematics.34 Aristocratic and gentry libraries were often less dominated by religion, but their shelves held a lot more than plays and gardening books. Sir Thomas Knyvett’s library mentioned earlier, about one and a half thousand books, had 22 per cent of its contents classified as theological, and he had plenty of works by the Church Fathers as well as Calvin’s Institutes (in Latin) and Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. He had a lot of medical books (14 per cent), and a wide spread of other subjects and languages; he also had extensive holdings of French, Italian, and Spanish titles—​another common feature of these libraries of the upper echelons of society, whose education and travel took in a broad swathe of European culture. The mid-​century catalogue of the Earl of Leicester’s library at Penshurst records stronger coverage of Italian poetry and drama, in the original language, than of English literature. This library is noted, by its modern editors, for its breadth and eclecticism: ‘the Sidneys owned the most up-​to-​date books in several languages’.35 There were hundreds and hundreds of private libraries across Britain during the seventeenth century, some of them large for their time, many of them more average in size. They would be found in all the obvious places—​clergymen, academics, medical and legal professionals, schoolmasters, heralds, gentry, aristocracy—​while the kind of pattern described earlier for less affluent households, owning a handful or a couple of dozen books for spiritual welfare, household advice, or home education, would similarly be replicated up and down the country.36 By the end of the century, the emergence of printed sale catalogues provides granular testimony to the contents of many individual libraries, showing that by this time it was not unusual for a senior churchman, academic, or lawyer—​or for a country gentleman—​to own numbers of volumes running into four

660   David Pearson figures; at the top end of the scale, the largest personal library in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century belonged to John Moore (1646–​1714), Bishop of Ely, with around thirty thousand books which were purchased as a benefaction for Cambridge University Library by George I.37

Into the Eighteenth Century By the turn of the eighteenth century, different drivers around the ownership of books, and particularly of older books, begin to become visible. In Seymour de Ricci’s words, ‘it was about the year 1700 that several members of the British nobility became simultaneously seized by a violent desire to collect incunabula’.38 Before then, many people owned fifteenth-​century printed books for their texts, because they happened to be available or were the only way of accessing them, but not because they were historical curios. During the eighteenth century a combination of factors, including the stabilization of wealthy elites with disposable income, the publication of bibliographical scholarship to open up awareness, and the availability of books ejected from long-​established institutions through political change, created a climate for new ideas. Old books, selectively, became objects of taste and fashion, to be owned as trophies more than things to be read; collecting, in that Carterian sense, began to develop. Early English printing, alongside early editions of classical texts whose typography began to be appreciated for its aesthetic qualities, began to become expensive, and new owners interfered much more with the books, rebinding them and cleaning their pages. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore this further, but there are numerous places to turn for authoritative and more detailed accounts.39 The only point to add here is to stress that book ownership of the kind described thus far—​of people building libraries to support their work and life, of buying books to read and to quarry for information—​did of course continue through the eighteenth century and beyond. Clergymen, teachers in schools and universities, doctors, tradesmen, and farmers all carried on buying books in the more usual way. There were countless books passing through salesrooms and across booksellers’ counters of a kind which would not have excited the connoisseurs, whose newsworthy antics and good stories have perhaps skewed our perceptions of book ownership more broadly through the Hanoverian period and beyond.

Women and Books Every early book owner named thus far in this chapter has been a man. This gender bias reflects not historical reality, but the documentary record from a time when, legally, married women did not own anything; goods and property were vested in their husbands. This means that all the sale catalogues, probate inventories, and other kinds of evidence on which we rely have male names on them, and women rarely left wills

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    661 behind. The place to look for traces of women’s engagement with print is in the books themselves; any trawl through the shelves of a historic library, book by book, is likely to encounter the names of women, as well as men, written on flyleaves and margins. Recently, this topic has become much more systematically explored than was the case in the past, and there is a growing number of studies focused on women’s ownership and use of books in the early modern world.40 Archival documentation, where it exists, often relates to women from wealthier or aristocratic households. There are various sources which testify to Lady Margaret Beaufort’s ownership of, and engagement with, books (1443–​1509); John Fisher tells us that she had ‘dyuers bokes in Frensshe wherewith she wolde occupy herself whan she was wery of prayer’, and she owned English devotional books also.41 The Staffordshire gentlewoman Frances Wolfreston (1607–​77) has become particularly celebrated, and documented, as an early female book owner, with over two hundred books carrying her inscription tracked down.42 In the seventeenth century, by which time many larger houses had closets or studies in which the head of the household would keep his books, it was also common for his wife to have a similar closet of her own. The books to be found there would typically be devotional texts, alongside a mixture of other subjects which might include history, husbandry, medicine, or literature; they would usually all be in English. Several inventories of such closets survive, often dominated by the writings of the popular divines of succeeding generations who packaged the theological orthodoxy of their time in a vernacular which was accessible to readers like this.43 Wills—​of men, not women—​provide further evidence of this pattern. It is very common, at this time, to find English-​language books, particularly Bibles and works of spiritual guidance, bequeathed to wives and daughters, while sons and nephews were left the rest. Sometimes individual books were named, sometimes the female relatives were invited to select what they wanted or a specified number of volumes. It is clear that there was often a part of the book market which was framed with women in mind; in the first half of the seventeenth century, there was an organized industry in turning out small-​format Bibles and devotional books with embroidered needlework covers, and contemporary inscriptions in these are almost always female.44 Later in the century, their equivalent became Bibles and copies of The whole duty of man, The ladies calling and similar works in nicely gilded goatskin bindings, of the kind that upmarket London binderies produced in great quantities. We often find women’s inscriptions in books like this, sometimes gifted by mothers, cousins, or friends; passing from one female hand to another, down successive generations, is a common thread.

The Conventions and Uses of Ownership Markings There were several standard conventions for marking the ownership of books, regularly met with through the early modern period, although there were many people then (as now) who preferred not to mark them at all. Most obviously, people often wrote their

662   David Pearson names on title pages or flyleaves, sometimes with additional information about the place, price, or date of purchase; in books that have been in artisan, yeoman, and less formally educated households it is noticeably common to find inscriptions all through the books, up and down margins. Bookplates and book labels, separately printed and pasted in, began to be used in Germany around the end of the fifteenth century, but the practice spread only gradually across Europe; they were occasionally used in Britain until the end of the seventeenth century, when their popularity increased significantly. Ink stamps for marking ownership are only rarely found in Britain before the later eighteenth century, but stamping names, initials, or heraldic insignia on to binding covers began to happen around the middle of the sixteenth century, and grew increasingly common thereafter.45 Ownership markings have an obvious and essential value in reconstructing private libraries, and in observing the interfaces between books and their readers, but they can also be analysed in other ways. Books have uses beyond being read, and the role they have played in projecting social status deserves consideration. People were mocked for owning books for show in ancient times, and that tradition has continued ever since; more constructively, the study of luxury and consumption in material culture has enhanced our understanding of behaviour, power, and politics. Bookbindings, which determine the visual appearance of books both individually and collectively, were all unique handcrafted objects during this period, and people could choose to pay just what was necessary for a sturdy and functional volume, or more for something finer. There was a wide range of options between the modestly and extravagantly gilded. When people paid more than they needed to, in this sense, there are motives to explore: personal aesthetics, a liking for nice things, an opportunity to demonstrate taste and wealth, or a mixture of all these? Early bookplates, before the end of the eighteenth century, are almost invariably heraldic, and the growing popularity of armorial binding stamps manifested another opportunity to use books to demonstrate the family right to bear arms. The importance attached to heraldry in the early modern period, as a sign of status and a driver of much antiquarian research, is well known; Linda Peck, in her study of Consuming Splendor, noted that ‘identity began with a coat of arms’.46 Bookplates were made for people who were not, as far as we are able to tell, serious readers, and there are plentiful examples of armorial bookbindings with handsome outsides and remarkably clean pages. But that does not mean that a heraldically gilded though unread library was not useful to its owner (although that usefulness might be different from the kind perceived by the Oxford scholar sitting among his modest rows of dark brown leather).47

A Tale of Two Libraries This chapter concludes by comparing and contrasting two libraries which offer an opportunity to explore many of its themes. They were accumulated by two men who were

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    663 almost exact contemporaries, both keen on developing their libraries, and who had a passing acquaintance; Samuel Pepys, naval administrator (1633–​1703) heard Thomas Plume, vicar of Greenwich (1630–​1704) preach in September 1665, when he thought him ‘a very excellent scholler and preacher’.48 They each spent a lot of money on their libraries, and they may have patronized some of the same bookshops in London, where they sourced many of their books; they each bequeathed them to institutions where they are still preserved, more or less entire. One of them (Pepys) is very well known, arguably too much so; David McKitterick has rightly observed that he ‘has become the best remembered—​and most quoted—​bibliophile in seventeenth-​century London’, but we would do better to recognize him as one of many people buying books then (and having them nicely bound), not as somebody out of the ordinary.49 Pepys’s library, of about three thousand volumes, has its own building within Magdalene College, Cambridge; Plume’s, a bit more than twice the size (around eight thousand) also has its own building, in an old church adapted for the purpose in the 1690s, in his hometown of Maldon, Essex, to whom the library was given. At first glance, the libraries look quite different; Pepys had many of his books bound, or rebound, with nicely gilded spines according to standard designs of his time, while Plume wasted no money on unnecessary decoration. The only gold to be found on the backs of his books was already there, on ones bought second hand, or was paid for by authors presenting their works to him. Pepys’s library looks more accessible, or interesting, to modern eyes; his diary, detailing his life through the 1660s, gives him the marketing advantage of a slightly rakish reputation, a man of the world, while Plume is an obscure clergyman with a thin biography, who left no personal archive. The Pepys Library website stresses the holdings of books which we are expected to find appealing—​ ‘literature, history, science, music and the fine arts are strongly represented’—​with no mention of the dull stuff which Pepys would have thought just as important.50 Around a quarter of his library comprises theological material (the proportions can be variously estimated, depending on where we draw the line between controversial or doctrinal theology, and current affairs), and an analysis of his reading through the 1660s, as recorded in his diary, shows that as much time was spent on divinity as on arts and sciences, or news. This proportion may be understated, as ‘Bible-​reading was routine enough to be not worth noting’.51 The published catalogue of Pepys’s library has forty-​seven entries for different editions of the Bible or parts thereof, including versions in French, Greek, Latin, and Spanish.52 He owned many sermons and liturgical books, alongside standard devotional works (such as would be found in countless households of the time) like Richard Baxter’s Saints’ everlasting rest, and John Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed and The whole duty of man. All of this material, and more besides, will also be found in Plume’s library, where the theological content constitutes a higher proportion—​somewhere between a half and three-​quarters—​leaving room for thousands of books on a wide range of subjects. His interest in astronomy (for which he founded the Cambridge professorship) is reflected in over a hundred books on that topic, and he had extensive holdings of works on medicine and science. Like Pepys, he owned many of Robert Boyle’s publications. History,

664   David Pearson classics, and philosophy are areas covered by both men, and they each held works by Chaucer, Herbert, Jonson, Milton, Marvell, and Spenser (though only Pepys owned Shakespeare).53 Both these libraries conform to that standard pattern, in early modern libraries of any size, of a broad range of subject coverage, with particular proportions varying according to the owner’s background. Both men could have turned to their books and found something about just about everything in their world’s knowledge base. They both read their books; Pepys was not an annotator, Plume only occasionally so. They both began with libraries built up for personal use, then decided to benefit posterity by gifting them to places they cared about, and where they believed their books would be of ongoing value. Today, almost no one reads their books in the ways they envisaged, and while some of them continue to be read in other formats and other places, many of the texts they owned are today neglected, forgotten, and likely to remain so; a revival in reading Explicationes locorum Veteris et Novi Testamenti by the Hungarian Unitarian minister György Enyedi is not expected anytime soon. There is more in common, therefore, between these libraries than might at first appear. Where they do differ is in the interest each man showed in the look of the books; as already noted, most of Plume’s are functionally bound with minimal decoration, while Pepys is well known for his love of gilded spines (he even commissioned little wooden blocks, decorated to look like book spines, on which small books could be stood in order to achieve an even height in his bookcases). Plume occasionally inscribed his name in his books, but had no time for bookplates or armorial stamps, both of which Pepys used. We should not dismiss this aspect of their relationship with books as incidental to the real meat of textual content, but recognize it as a facet of the total picture of the use, or usefulness, of the libraries. Methodologically, we might develop a set of attributes which pertain to all book owners to varying degrees: reading and reference use; display for influencing others; and personal delight in the aesthetics of the books. The matrix of scores would help us to understand both the similarities and the differences between owners; Pepys and Plume would each score highly on the first, but divergently on the last two. However we formalize our assessments, we should leave behind our twenty-​ first-​century ideas about collecting and the assignment of relative values to books and libraries, if we want to understand the roles they played in early modern lives. We should broaden our approach beyond the author–​text interface as the only thing that mattered, and think more in terms of the history of the use of books, than the history of reading. Owners and users, rather than collectors and readers, are the key concepts on which to build.

Notes 1. John Carter, Taste and Technique in Book Collecting (London: Private Libraries Association, 1970), 9.

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    665 2. Seymour de Ricci, English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 28. 3. H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, i: 1475 to 1557; ii: 1558 to 1603; iii: 1603 to 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952, 1965, 1970); the quotation is from iii. 199. 4. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 5. David N. Bell, ‘Monastic Libraries 1400–​1557’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iii: 1400–​1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 241. 6. J. C. T. Oates, Cambridge University Library: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37. 7. J. Monti, The King’s Good Servant but God’s First (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 83. 8. Joann H. Moran, Education and Learning in the City of York, 1300–​1560 (York: Borthwick Institute, 1979), 29. 9. Peter D. Clarke, The University and College Libraries of Cambridge (Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 10; London: British Library, 2002), 752. 10. R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-​Green (eds.), Private Libraries in Renaissance England, ii (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993). 11. David Pearson, Oxford Bookbinding 1500–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2000), 12–​13. 12. Arnold Hunt, ‘Clerical and Parish Libraries’, in E. S. Leedham-​Green and T. Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 400–​419, at 402. 13. For fuller consideration of the kinds of books owned, see N. R. Ker, ‘The Provision of Books’, in James McConica (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iii: The Collegiate University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), ch. 7; and Kristian Jensen, ‘Text-​Books in the Universities’, in Hellinga and Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. iii, ch. 16. 14. For the Oxford lists, search for Luther among books in the online PLRE database: https://​ plre.fol​ger.edu/​books.php. For Cambridge, see E. S. Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories, ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 509–​513. 15. Mark Purcell, The Country House Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 47. 16. Aisling Byrne, ‘The Earls of Kildare and Their Books at the End of the Middle Ages’, The Library, 7th ser., 14 (2013), 129–​153. 17. Purcell, The Country House Library, 47. 18. Purcell, The Country House Library, 53–​54. 19. ‘iiij ballett bookes’, valued at eightpence; Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories, i. 28-​30. 20. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London: Methuen, 1981) is the well-​known pioneering work in this field; see also her essay on ‘Libraries of the Common Sort’, in Leedham-​Green and Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries, vol. i, ch. 22. See also Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 21. Bernard Quaritch Ltd, catalogue 680 (1950), item 431; the current location of this book is unknown.

666   David Pearson 22. R. J. Fehrenbach and Joseph L. Black (eds.), Private Libraries in Renaissance England, viii (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014), PLRE 169, 171, 173. 23. Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 5. 24. I have written more about this in David Pearson, Book Ownership in Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), ch. 4. 25. David Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1996); David Pearson, ‘The Libraries of English Bishops, 1600–​1640’, The Library, 6th ser., 14 (1992), 221–​257, at 256–​257. 26. For example, among the Cambridge lists: John Cocke, Fellow of Emmanuel, d. 1593, 96 items; Benedict Thorowgood, Fellow of Trinity Hall, d. 1596, 144 items; Stephen Thompson, Fellow of St John’s, d. 1599, 141 items: Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories, vol. i, nos. 173, 174, 176. 27. Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories, vol. i, nos. 164, 168; see also the references to these two men in Oates, Cambridge University Library. 28. Purcell, The Country House Library, 65; David McKitterick, The Library of Sir Thomas Knyvett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1978). 29. James Carley, ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries’, in Leedham-​Green and Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries, vol. i, ch. 10. 30. Timothy Graham, ‘Matthew Parker’s Manuscripts’, in Leedham-​Green and Webber (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries, vol. i, ch. 12. 31. May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), ch. 3; Richard Ovenden, ‘The Libraries of the Antiquaries’, in Leedham-​Green and Webber (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries, vol. i, ch. 23. 32. See e.g. Carley, ‘The Dispersal’, 283–​289; A. I. Doyle, ‘The Library of Sir Thomas Tempest’, in G. A. M. Janssens and D. G. A. M. Aarts (eds.), Studies in Seventeenth-​Century English Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 83–​94; Ralph Hanna, ‘The Thomas Mans, Their Books, and Jesus College Librarianship’, The Library, 7th ser., 21 (2020), 46–​73. 33. Ann Cox-​Johnson, ‘Lambeth Palace Library 1610–​1664’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 2 (1955), 105–​126. 34. Oates, Cambridge University Library, 304–​310. 35. Germaine Warkentin, Joseph L. Black, and William R. Bowen (eds.), The Library of the Sidneys of Penshurst Place (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 9. 36. My online directory of British book owners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which is under ongoing development, signposts further references on c.2,000 owners: https://​boo​kown​ers.onl​ine/​Main_​P​age. 37. David McKitterick, Cambridge University Library: A History, ii. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 47–​152. 38. de Ricci, English Collectors, 33. 39. Arnold Hunt, ‘Private Libraries in the Age of Bibliomania’, in Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (eds.), The Cambridge History of Llibraries in Britain and Ireland, ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 438–​458; Kristian Jensen, Revolution and the Antiquarian Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 40. Most recently, Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018),

Owning, Preserving, Transmitting Text    667 and Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Modern England (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020); see also https://​ear​lymo​dern​fema​lebo​okow​ners​ hip.wordpr​ess.com. 41. Purcell, The Country House Library, 48; S. Powell, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Books’, The Library, 6th ser., 20 (1998), 197–​240. 42. The most recent of the many studies of Wolfreston is Lori Newcomb, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s Annotations as Labours of Love’, in Wayne (ed), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book, 243–​266; see also https://​france​swol​fres​tonh​orbo​uks.com. 43. Pearson, Book Ownership in Stuart England, ch. 3. 44. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, in R. Swanson (ed), The Church and the Book (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 123–​142. 45. For fuller information on all these practices, and their evolution, see David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History (Oxford: Bodleian Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2019). 46. Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28. 47. The themes in these two paragraphs are explored more fully in Pearson, Book Ownership in Stuart England, ch. 6. 48. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, vi (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1972), 227. 49. McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books, 89. 50. https://​www.magd.cam.ac.uk/​pepys/​build​ing. 51. Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 42–​43. 52. N. A. Smith, Catalogue of the Pepys Library . . ., i: Printed Books (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer Ltd, 1978), 14–​17. 53. On Plume’s Library, see David Pearson, ‘Thomas Plume’s Library in Its Contemporary Context’, in Christopher Thornton and Tony Doe (eds.), Dr Thomas Plume 1630–​1704: His Life and Legacies (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2020), 155–​175.

Select Bibliography Boran, Elizabethanne (ed.), Book Collecting in Ireland and Britain 1650–​1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018). Cambers, Andrew, Godly Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Fehrenbach, R. J., et al. (eds.), Private Libraries in Renaissance England (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1992–​  ). Knight, Leah, White, Micheline, and Sauer, Elizabeth (eds.), Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). Leedham-​Green, E. S., Books in Cambridge Inventories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Loveman, Kate, Samuel Pepys and His Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). McKitterick, David, The Invention of Rare Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

668   David Pearson Pearson, David, Book Ownership in Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pearson, David, Provenance Research in Book History (Oxford: Bodleian Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2019). Purcell, Mark, The Country House Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Williams, Abigail, The Social Life of Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

Chapter 35

Provenance Na rrat i v e s in the T wen t y- ​F i rst Centu ry Kathryn James

Portion of this yew Is a man my grandsire knew, Bosomed here at its foot: This branch may be his wife, A ruddy human life Now turned to a green shoot. Thomas Hardy, ‘Transformations’

Each Christmas Eve, early in the twentieth century at King’s College, Cambridge, the medievalist Montague Rhodes James gathered his students to hear a new ghost story. These often centred on a familiar theme: a Cambridge don, or a figure very similar to James himself, discovers a book or manuscript, whether in a library or a bookseller’s catalogue or as a gift, perhaps from the strangely haunted sacristan of a church in the south of France.1 Whatever its origins, the book remains essentially unknown. Each story builds towards a moment of recognition, when the scholar—​through the instrument of his attention—​releases the object’s ghost. The provenance narrative acts as a form of mediation, a mechanism by which the text-​ object is framed as the object of study within a scholarly discipline. It is the ghost story of the text as object, the animating spirit attesting to the circumstances of the object’s life in the world. At its most successful, the provenance narrative tells its audience the story of an object’s origin, its history, its history of ownership; it allows its recipients to assess, for their own purposes, the object’s relative value and the questions presented by this statement of its past. Provenance is often understood as a straightforward form of evidence, and the provenance narrative as a form of empirical history, the biography of an object.2 And yet, the frequent use of descriptions such as ‘intact’ serves to highlight the

670   Kathryn James assumptions accompanying understandings of provenance, not least its association with patriarchal mechanisms of inheritance and the transmission of capital. The provenance narrative tells the history of an object to its later observers, to us here in the present. In doing, it so influences our understanding of the possibilities and boundaries of the object and its past as fields of study. This chapter takes as its case study one provenance narrative given from the sixteenth century onwards for the emergence of the history of the book in early modern England as a scholarly field. The Dissolution of the Monasteries became, for many later readers, the origin story for the study of the book in the early modern period and beyond. The chapter examines the long consequences of this for the field of English Studies and the categories by which that field was defined and understood by its practitioners from the sixteenth century to the present. The chapter begins with M. R. James and the role of the dissolution in the catalogues he published for the manuscript collections of many English institutional collections, before turning to the vision of English Studies framed by David Nichol Smith, Merton professor of English at Oxford, and the influence of this view on two American students, Cleanth Brooks and James Osborn. The role of tropes such as the fragment, the witness, and the ruin in the practice of early modern English book history reflects the consequences of the dissolution as origin story for the field and its methodologies.

‘Constant Partings’: The Dissolution as Provenance Narrative In 1895, the same year that he published the first five of his catalogues of the medieval manuscripts of English college collections, M. R. James undertook his first bicycling tour, at the height of the British cycling craze. James was no stranger to cycling: in his memoir, he describes having taken to the tandem tricycle with a colleague in 1884. Yet it was the introduction of the pneumatic tyre that made him a bicyclist, beginning the regular Easter and summer cycling tours through France and Denmark to visit the churches and cathedrals that the heroes of his mystery stories so often describe.3 In 1895, James was 33 years old, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had taken his undergraduate degree, and the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Cambridge he inhabited was soon to vote on whether to allow women to receive university degrees: in 1897, an effigy of a woman cyclist was pulled down in student protests against women’s degrees and destroyed, the remains pushed through the door of one of the women’s colleges.4 James cycled through this period up to 1914, by which time he was vice-​chancellor of the university. He describes the ‘constant partings with the young’ of that year, the fact that the students to whom he said goodbye often did not return.5 ‘Typical also the summer days’, he wrote in his memoir, ‘when, having bicycled out a few miles into the country you lay on the grass by the roadside and listened to the throb of the guns in France.’6

Provenance Narratives   671 It was in the period between 1895 and 1914 that James published the majority of his manuscript catalogues. James’s catalogues of English institutional manuscript collections represented a significant change within those institutions, altering the understanding of those collections and the terms by which they were understood by future scholars. James drew on previous catalogues of those collections, engaging with the work of his predecessors. Perhaps the clearest example can be found in James’s catalogue of the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College: James was deeply respectful of the 1777 catalogue by James Nasmith, incorporating these earlier descriptions in his catalogue alongside his own.7 As a cataloguer, as in his ghost stories, James worked with a living scholarly past, framing his description as contributions to an existing scholarly tradition. Nonetheless, as James knew, any catalogue represents an intervention in the life of an institutional collection. In some cases, James’s catalogues were the first published descriptions of an institution’s manuscript collections; in others, his were the first to be published in English rather than Latin, or the first to be published since the eighteenth century. Simply by the fact of their publication, James’s catalogues shaped the field of reference by which later scholars encountered the manuscript collections of the institutions he described. His work articulates an authoritative view of the shape and extent of a collection, its contents and highlights, its history and defining characteristics, to which later scholars were to respond. Like any catalogue, James’s descriptions also acted to exclude other potential categories of description. In the boundaries and absences of his catalogues, their inevitable moments of erasure, James framed the fields of reference by which those collections were made discernible to later readers.8 James wrote as an insider to the English institutions whose manuscript collections he catalogued. Years before he became provost of Eton College, he explored its manuscript collections while a student. Before he became vice-​chancellor of Cambridge University, he was first a student and then provost of King’s College. Both Eton and King’s were among the first collections he catalogued, in 1895. In more ways than one, James’s own provenance determined the scope and nature of his work in cataloguing. He was trusted by the institutions whose collections he catalogued; he is famously known to have been sent manuscripts to catalogue, receiving these at King’s or Eton to work on in his rooms.9 This allowed him to work with tremendous efficiency: in 1895 alone, he published catalogues of five collections, including those of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Jesus College, and Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, alongside those of Eton and King’s. James’s insider status is evident in his cataloguing. His background and position led him to focus on a particular type of collection, held by a genre of English institution with whose cultural norms and expectations he was deeply familiar. James situated his cataloguing within a canon of English historical scholarship, a history compiled by previous generations of antiquarians and scholars who could easily have been mistaken for his ideal readers.10 If James’s background led him to work with particular collections, it also led him to exclude other aspects of those collections from his observation. The most compelling example of this can be found in James’s relationship with the post-​medieval. To James,

672   Kathryn James the dispersal of the English monastic libraries was the defining circumstance of any manuscript collection, the end date of his field of interest. As a cataloguer, he was primarily focused on the medieval codex and the history of its survival up to the dissolution. James for the most part maintained a courteous disinterest in the early modern, except where completeness required that a later manuscript be included. ‘It was probably a stupid missal of Plantin’s printing, about 1580’, James has his protagonist think in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, in dissuading himself of a book’s potential interest.11 For James, cataloguing was ultimately a relational exercise. Like the protagonists in his stories, James entered into his relationship with an institution’s manuscript collections on the footing of an equal, assuming privileges of entry and intellectual ownership that would have been denied most others attempting the same. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes her protagonist remembering that ‘the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept’. Memorably, her character is barred at the door of the college library: for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.12

James wrote within the bounds of the institutions whose collections he catalogued. They were written for readers who also occupied those spaces: in his ‘The Mezzotint’, as in other stories, James situates his characters within a college, framing their actions within the spaces and practices through which particular types of scholarship were produced.13 In all these cases, provenance is an account told by a witness to a listener who often shares a common vocabulary of education and class, just as the readers of James’s catalogues would be presumed to be potential if not actual inhabitants of the college library. James’s catalogues, like his characters, render the manuscript collections visible as particular types of social and institutional capital. Provenance centres on a shared understanding of the importance of institutions, traditions of institutional custody, and the types of object that attract custodial attention. As the instrument of those institutions, the catalogue could not help but privilege the types of question by which the institutions defined themselves.

‘The Father of English Studies’: The Dissolution as Ghost Story The dissolution has in many ways itself acted as the ghost in the story of English Studies, those fields concerned with the history of the English language and its literatures. It is

Provenance Narratives   673 the figure, just beyond the ring of candlelight, whose hand rests beside the scholar’s on the manuscript page, a scene in James’s ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ which evokes both the charged relationship with the manuscript object and the delighted terror, still almost audible, that the scene provoked in the students gathered at Christmas to hear James read his story. James wrote as if his readers were or had been students of Eton or King’s College, Cambridge. The manuscripts and ghosts he imagines belong uniquely to the lives of those institutions and their collections. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, the destruction of their libraries, and the shadow this cast on English Studies, was a story of the failure of provenance, a breach of a custodial succession from which the profoundly institutional history of English literature never fully recovered. Provenance as radical disjuncture was a feature of the Oxford English curriculum in the 1930s, as taught by the Merton professor of English, David Nichol Smith. In his first lecture in October 1934, Nichol Smith began ‘The history of English Studies’ by situating the origins of that history in the dissolution and the responses to the destruction of the monastic libraries. ‘Where does this history of scholarship begin,’ he asked; ‘who began the sifting and rearranging process?’ Nichol Smith located the answer to that question in John Leland, the Tudor humanist scholar whose observations and catalogues of the monastic libraries were one of few witnesses to those collections at the point of their dispersal. ‘Know Leland from a sense of piety!’ Nichol Smith exhorted the students in attendance at his lecture.14 Leland—​Nichol Smith’s ‘Father of English Studies’—​represented a certain way of thinking about what had been lost in the English break with the Catholic Church. For Nichol Smith, Leland was a metaphor for loss and the fragmentation of England’s cultural heritage. Critical to this reading was Leland’s description of the destruction of the monastic collections, The Laboryouse Journey and search of Leland for England’s Antiquities, presented in manuscript by Leland to Henry VIII as a New Year’s Gift in 1546, but published only in 1549 by Leland’s friend, John Bale. The work begins with Leland’s famous description of his encouragement by the King to peruse and diligently to search all the libraries of monasteries and colleges of this your noble realm, to the intent that the monuments of ancient writers as well of other nations, as of this your own province might be brought out of deadly darkness to lively light.15

In his editorial introduction, Bale offered an influential description of the ruin of the monastic libraries: A much further plague hath fallen of late years I dolorously lament so great an oversight in the most lawful overthrow of the sodometrous Abbeys and Friaries, when the most worthy monuments of this realm, so miserably perished in the spoil, Oh, that men of learning and of perfect love to their nation, were not then appointed to the search of their libraries, for the conservation of those most noble antiquities.

674   Kathryn James In a letter to Matthew Parker in 1560, Bale further described the bibliographical chaos surrounding the dispersed collections, and the moments of transgression as the books were repurposed as material commodities: And as concerning books of antiquity, not printed: when I was in Ireland I had great plenty of them, whom I obtained in time of the lamentable spoil of the libraries of England, through much friendship, labor, and expenses. Some I found in stationers and book binders storehouses, some in grocers, soapsellers, tailors, and other occupiers shops, some in ships ready to be carried over the sea into Flanders to be sold—​for in those uncircumspect and careless days, there was no quicker merchandise than library books, and all to destruction of learning and knowledge of things necessary in this fall of antichrist to be known—​but the devil is a knave, they say—​ well, only conscience, with a fervent love to my country moved me to save that might be saved.16

Bale fixes this patriotic ‘love to my country’ in the English state’s peculiar need for its library collections: the intact collections were also those which might prove the similarly unimpeachable antiquity of the English Church. Bale’s dissolution is one in which the sanctity of more than the codex was violated, when books were broken up for scrap, bookbindings, wrapping paper, soap, and other material ends.17 It was this apocalyptic view of the dissolution that Nichol Smith put forward as the foundation of English Studies as a scholarly field. One of the students present for this lecture was James Marshall Osborn, an American graduate of Wesleyan University, embarking on the literary pilgrimage of a BLitt degree at Oxford. Osborn recorded Nichol Smith’s lecture in his notes, assiduously copying Nichol Smith’s assertion that Leland should be regarded as the ‘Father of English Studies’, and his argument that the field of study itself originated in that rupture with the past that the destruction of the monastic collections was taken to represent. ‘We regret the great loss of the monastic libraries,’ Nichol Smith said, and Osborn copied; ‘we cannot even estimate the size of the loss.’18 Cleanth Brooks also took notes in Nichol Smith’s lectures, studying for the BLitt as a Rhodes scholar a few years before Osborn’s arrival. His notes closely follow those by Osborn, save the variations in their doodles and annotations.19 Nichol Smith was his supervisor and mentor, as he was for Osborn a few years later; his influence, and particularly that of ‘The history of English Studies’ can be seen in both their subsequent careers. Osborn began to collect rare books and manuscripts while a student in Nichol Smith’s course. A friend described the early development of Osborn’s collection: [he] would disappear to London and emerge some days later with marvelous trophies from a sale-​room. He would go to auction and buy old libraries. It was marvelous to watch his library build up week by week, month by month, and to see on each visit to Shotover Cleve newly acquired copies of the works of all the principals in Nichol Smith’s course in the History of English Studies.20

Provenance Narratives   675 Nichol Smith exerted a powerful influence over the two scholars, one that framed the study of English literature as a response to the dissolution. Osborn left England in America in 1938, starting a career as collector and literary historian at Yale. Meanwhile, after leaving Oxford, Brooks had begun to work with John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, William K. Wimsatt, and other proponents of what was to become known as ‘New Criticism’, a method of literary criticism focusing explicitly on the text, to the exclusion of the study of the object, its broader contexts, or the text’s history of survival.21 For scholars like Brooks, trained in a tradition of English literary history, New Criticism acted as a response to a literary tradition informed by loss, an excerpting of the text from its dependence on the archival object. ‘If literary history has not been emphasized in the pages that follow,’ Brooks wrote in his textbook The Well-​Wrought Urn (1947), ‘it is not because I discount its importance, or because I have failed to take it into account. It is rather that I have been anxious to see what residuum, if any, is left after we have referred the poem to its cultural matrix.’22 For Brooks, text was what remained, the ‘residuum’ of the ‘cultural matrix’, not unlike the typographical sorts, cast from metal alloy into the forms of a typeface in the typefounder’s matrix.23

‘A Confus’d Indigested Heap’: Fragment and Whole Provenance narratives are an ontological mechanism: they frame the very categories and questions by which the textual object is understood. As an origin story for English Studies, the narrative of the dissolution had certain consequences: it cast the field as one of endless recovery, and prioritized particular ideals of textual integrity and format. For Leland, Bale, and—​later—​James, the codex was privileged as the primary form of textual transmission. It was the transgressive destruction of the codex, its dismembering for use in jakes and pie pans, that Bale documented in his letter to Matthew Parker. While the codex might have been the focus of concern for Leland, James, and others, most bibliographic work was of necessity engaged with the category of the fragmentary. The incoherent, the incomplete, the broken: these were the defining circumstances of textual survival, to which any narrative of intactness was the exception. Leland’s own legacy was a case in point: Leland had died without ever completing his ambitious project to compile his catalogues of Britain’s library collections and his topography of the realm. His papers remained incoherent up to the early eighteenth century: held by many different owners, consulted and transcribed by scholars, borrowed, lost, damaged by damp. In 1704, Thomas Hearne, assistant keeper at the Bodleian Library, described them to the librarian of the Cotton Library as a ‘confus’d indigested heap’. Hearne described his wish to transcribe and edit the papers, ‘for I am afraid otherwise they will soon be destroy’d, having formerly taken wet, & at present in very bad condition’.24

676   Kathryn James Hearne was an editor; he responded to his political circumstances through an ideologically charged project of editing British historical texts. Like many of his colleagues, Hearne was a Nonjuror, one of the Anglican clergy refusing to swear the Oath of Allegiance to William and Mary or their successors after 1688; his scholarship represented an explicitly political effort to document the history of the English Church. He worked at the heart of a network of English scholars, many of whom—​like Hearne—​ were custodians of manuscript and book collections. In an age where even ‘public’ collections, like the ‘public library’ of the University of Oxford, were closed to students and all but university fellows and visiting scholars and eminences, the ability to access collections was one of the governing criteria for scholarship. Another requirement, however, was the ability to work with fragmented and imperfect knowledge, to collate the pieces and hearsay by which a textual heritage was mapped.25 Hearne and his colleagues placed great value on Leland’s work, as one of few eyewitnesses to the state of the monastic library collections at the point of their destruction. It was Hearne’s edition of Leland’s Itinerary that brought Leland’s work to a broader readership. That edition was only superseded in 1907, with the publication of the first volume of Lucy Toulmin Smith’s five-​volume edition of the Itinerary.26 Hearne’s second and equally powerful later influence was through his diary, a private endeavour, intended only for his consumption, and a lifelong act of documenting the bits and pieces of detail that pieced together his understanding of the world. These two bodies of work reflect Hearne’s scholarly methodology: his editions preserved and disseminated a fragmented textual heritage. Hearne’s diary documents the locations and custodial histories of many of the books, manuscripts, collections, and institutions on which he worked, but perhaps more importantly frame the networks of relationships governing Hearne’s scholarly life. In this project of recovery, Hearne worked in an antiquarian tradition defined by scholars like William Camden, John Weever, and Anthony Wood.27 He also worked closely with his colleagues, particularly the bookseller John Bagford and Humfrey Wanley, who became the librarian for the Harley collection. Wanley, Hearne’s near-​ contemporary and rival at Oxford, was a talented palaeographer and manuscript scholar, intensely focused on the history of handwriting. Wanley kept a ‘Book of Specimens’, an album of manuscript transcriptions, which he holds open to a copy of the tenth-​century Covell Gospels in the portrait of him painted by Thomas Hill in 1711. Wanley’s ‘Book’ consisted of his copies, often elaborate and illustrated, of manuscript hands, which he approached as a form of historical evidence. Like John Weever, collecting epitaphs, Wanley gathered hands, as the evidentiary basis by which to frame an understanding of British history and its textual transmission.28 John Bagford, Hearne’s close friend and colleague, was a bookseller and assembler of fragmentary collections. Like Hearne, he worked to bring often imperfect and scattered textual remnants together into collections, often organized in albums. Bagford collected paper, title pages, ballads, handwriting specimens, and other forms of textual detritus, the scraps and fragments of a dismembered textual heritage. It is because of his attention to the scrap that many of these items survive, through the agency of Hans Sloane and

Provenance Narratives   677 other collectors who purchased Bagford’s ‘remains’ after his death.29 ‘Bagford’ has become a marker of provenance, just as Bagford the collector has assumed a charged identity as iconoclast, book-​breaker, or simply disorganized visionary, the shoemaker turned collector and bookseller.30 For Hearne and his colleagues, provenance drew an object in at least two competing directions: towards an imagined whole, to which it might only partially be related, and towards an imagined past, from which it might survive in fragmentary or adulterated state. From the mid-​sixteenth century, English scholars and collectors often took provenance as a measure of imperfection, a contemporary state always made relative to the imagined plenum of a pre-​dissolution world. Rather than adopting the fragment as the natural state, many English scholars responded to the idea of loss with a wish to unite or complete the object, to reconfigure the fragment in its prelapsarian state. This project of completion represented an intrinsically ahistorical understanding of the textual object, one in which loss was a failure of transmission, and in which to remain perfect was, in effect, not to change with age. One consequence for later scholars can be found in the relationship between the part and its imagined textual whole. For Hearne and his colleagues, textual studies involved a process of synecdoche, in which the fragmentary was understood as the degraded present, always in relation to an absent or prelapsarian whole. The English textual tradition was one in which the scholar-​collector was perpetually restoring and recovering, gathering pieces towards an always incomplete ideal, cataloguing and documenting any surviving traces. Hearne’s project of editing was one manifestation of this endeavour, as were Bagford’s work to collect and gather into albums (or sometimes simply piles) and Wanley’s commitment to the ideal of a universal history of British and European hands.

‘Band of brothers’: The Witness and Textual Lineage For Nichol-​Smith and the scholars he trained, English studies was the history of the eyewitness. John Leland, ‘Father of English Studies’, was the Adamic progenitor of the field precisely because of his itinerancy, his pilgrimage as witness to the monastic collections at the point of their dispersal. ‘Among all the nations in whom I have wandered, for the knowledge of things (most being sovereign),’ Leland wrote, ‘I have found none so negligent and untoward, as I have found England in the due search of their ancient histories, to the singular fame and beauty thereof.’ In his wandering, his ultimately ineffectual project to observe and catalogue the realm’s libraries, Leland acted as textual witness, observing the waste, incompleteness, and absence that were the remains of an always unknown whole.31 This act of witnessing remained central to English Studies as a discipline: the antiquarians and collectors who worked to document English collections were

678   Kathryn James themselves incorporated as witnesses into this textual heritage. In a curious fashion, the community of British scholars from the early modern period have themselves become a part of the provenance of early modern British book history as a field. One example of this can be found in the case study of Gerard Langbaine’s An account of the English dramatick poets (1691). A reader and collector of English plays, Langbaine wrote and published successive catalogues of English drama, of which the Account was the last and most extensive. The work was the most extensive survey in print—​yet, like Leland’s, Bale’s, and other works of English bibliography, was understood by its recipients to be incomplete. Scholars annotated their copies of Langbaine, correcting and adding to these entries. One of the most famous annotators was William Oldys, scholar and herald, who annotated a copy of Langbaine with his additions and corrections. When this copy was sold, while he was away from London, Oldys annotated a second copy of Langbaine. After his death, this copy was acquired by the scholar and historian Thomas Birch: the notes in the Oldys–​Birch copy were copied by Thomas Percy into his own copy; the Oldys–​Birch–​Percy notes were copied in turn by others, resulting in a stemma of annotations that included Birch, Percy, George Steevens, and Edmond Malone into the twentieth century. In the mid-​twentieth century, Osborn acquired a copy of Langbaine. This interleaved copy contains the notes of Oldys, Percy, and Steevens—​but, curiously, not those of Edmond Malone, bibliographer and Shakespeare scholar, and Osborn’s actual object of study. In his correspondence, Osborn notes the existence of another copy of Langbaine, annotated by Berger Evans, an American student at Oxford. That copy survives in the Folger collections. On page 170 of Volume V, Evans transcribes Malone’s final salutation: ‘Mem. I finished this Transcript March 30 1777. Edmond Malone. And I left Ireland May 1, 1777, and settled in London.’ Below this, in brackets, Evans ends his transcription of the Oldys–​Percy–​Steevens–​Malone copy of Langbaine by writing: ‘[& I finish’d it Aug. 30, 1932. & sailed for U.S.A. on the 31st. Berger Evans]’.32 To transcribe the layers of annotation in Langbaine’s An account of the English dramatick poets was also to bear witness to a lineage of textual witnesses. Langbaine, Oldys, Percy, Steevens, and Malone were simply among the more famous participants in a disciplinary tradition of textual pathos, of ‘wandering’ a ruined landscape, like Leland, ‘for the knowledge of things’. In assembling their archaeology of annotations, Berger and Leland were writing themselves into a genealogy that stretched back to Leland. Just as Osborn and Brooks absorbed Nichol Smith’s understanding of English Studies as a process of textual recovery, so they also adopted his implicit definition of the scholar as witness, participant in a self-​conscious lineage of white, male, usually Oxford-​or Cambridge-​educated scholars engaged in an act of recovery of England’s textual heritage. ‘This story shall the good man teach his son’, the King asserts in Shakespeare’s Henry V, And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world,

Provenance Narratives   679 But we in it shall be rememberèd—​ We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.33

To act as witness was also to become a textual witness, to be immortalized like Leland, Malone, and others through the archival remains of your learning.

‘This branch may be his wife’: Provenance and the Imagined Past ‘Portion of this yew | Is a man my grandsire knew,’ Thomas Hardy wrote of the graves beneath a churchyard yew, not unlike the yew under which his heart was buried in the churchyard of St Michael’s in Stinsford, Dorset. ‘Bosomed here at its foot,’ the observer continues, ‘This branch may be his wife, | A ruddy human life | Now turned to a green shoot.’34 Like Hardy, the poet Thomas Gray described the ‘mould’ring heap’ of ancestors buried beneath the ‘yew-​tree’s shade’ in his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-​ Yard’.35 Thomas Hearne also grew up in the presence of two of the ancient yew trees of Berkshire. The son of the parish clerk of White Waltham, Hearne’s patron, the Nonjuror Francis Cherry, paid for his schooling and brought him to live in nearby Shottesbrooke. The yew at the church of St Mary, White Waltham, is described in 1850 in Ecclesiastical Topography: ‘The tower is early N[orman], of flint and chalk, and has a small wooden spire; there is a fine and large yew-​tree in the north-​east corner of the churchyard.’36 The yew of the church of St John the Baptist, Shottesbrooke Park, was described in 1856 as some 20 feet (c.7 metres) in diameter, likely planted when the church was established, c.1337.37 The Gentleman’s Magazine (1858) states that ‘both parishes are remarkable for the immense size and great age of the yew-​trees in the churchyards’.38 Both yews are described in the same circle of antiquarian and literary historical periodical in which Hearne’s life and work were mentioned. Like the books described by Leland, Hearne, and others, the yew tree was an inhabitant of the post-​dissolution landscape. In England, the yew tree is most associated with churchyards, in which surviving trees have grown to be over a thousand years old. The Fortingall yew, in a churchyard in Perthshire, Scotland, is between two and three thousand years old.39 Like the monastic libraries, the yew was an indication of the sacral: it is thought that the trees were planted in saints’ or hermits’ cells, and surviving yew trees date to a sacral space predating the church whose churchyards they inhabit. Thomas Gray, Thomas Hardy, and others highlight the association of the churchyard yew with the grave, and the intersection of the body with the tree through decomposition, the mingling of provenance. The yew also acts as an antiquarian site: it anchors place in histories, entering into records of the landscape during the nineteenth century and the survey of English ecclesiastical architecture. Yews are often dated through their

680   Kathryn James presence in these and other records. Writing in his diary on 11 May 1742, the antiquarian William Stukeley observed: ‘At Totteridge, at the interment of Mrs. Buckeridg. The largest yew tree, at the W. end of the church, which I ever saw, whereunder the founder of the church was interred. It may be 1000 years old.’40 The churchyard yew is a specie of ruin, one whose history was also changed by the Dissolution of the Monasteries. An estimate of the age of churchyard yew trees indicates that they were planted with less frequency following the dissolution.41 Once planted as a sacral object, the English churchyard yew has in many cases outlasted several churches, its lifespan drawing it into a predominantly secular age, one in which its age itself has become for many audiences its defining characteristic. Like the monastic libraries, the churchyard yew was transformed by the dissolution into a different type of monument, one disaggregated from its original sacral purpose. Of course, the churchyard yew is always also a tree, just as the scrap, the fragment, the disbound book, the imperfect codex are always also text-​objects. Their identities are not contingent on their histories; they exist in themselves in the present, in their entirety, as we do. This identity might have accrued certain categories of data marker, might possess an evidentiary record of points of documentary or forensic observation. The Ecclesiastical Topography citation in 1850, the dendrochronological core sample, the diary entry by Thomas Hearne, the library catalogue entry, DNA analysis, multispectral image reading: these and other markers of provenance might attest to the text-​object’s existence, like that of the English churchyard yew, in a particular material form, with a temporal reach from a point in the past to our present. The tree might be sacral, the book might be waste, yet these interpretative histories possess a signifying power that extends beyond the bounds of evidence. The field of English Studies we have inherited, the early modern English history of the book, was configured by figures like James and Nichol Smith as a response to the dissolution. This provenance narrative and its consequences can be seen in the shape and mechanics of the field itself: the prominence of figures such as Leland, the nature and content of library collections, the value placed on ideals of recovery and survival. Yet, as James might argue, the remains are not themselves the ghost. The animating history of the provenance narrative lies in its power to demand meaning from the thing’s relationship not only to its past but also to ours.

Notes 1. Montague Rhodes James (1862–​1936) was a medievalist, author of ghost stories, and cataloguer; he was a fellow of King’s College Cambridge, later provost of that college, vice-​ chancellor of the university, and provost of Eton College, where he had been a student. On James and his influence, see Richard W. Pfaff, ‘James, Montague Rhodes’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). https://​www.oed.com/​view/​Entry/​153​408?red​ irec​tedF​rom=​pro​vena​nce#eid, accessed 5 Oct. 2020; Samuel Gurney Lubbock, A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939); Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Patrick J. Murphy,

Provenance Narratives   681 Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M. R. James (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017). See also James’s own memoir and writings on his cataloguing:M. R. James, Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial, 1875–​1925 (London: Williams & Norgate, 1926); James, The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1928); James, ‘Points to be Observed in the Description and Collation of Manuscripts, particularly Books of Hours’, in A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895). 2. See The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘provenance, n.’, usage 3: ‘The history of the ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality; a documented record of this.’ A related definition is offered for ‘provenanced, adj.’: ‘provided with a record of provenance; established as to origin’. 3. James discusses his cycling in Eton and King’s: on the tandem tricycle, 151; on his cycling trips to France and elsewhere, 152–​154. On cycling, see David Rubinstein, ‘Cycling in the 1890s’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1977), 47–​7 1. 4. Sheila Hanlon, ‘Lady Cyclist Effigy at the Cambridge University Protest, 1897’, 16 Apr. 2011; Sheila Hanlon, ‘Women’s Cycling’, www.sheil​ahan​lon.com. 5. James, Eton and King’s, 263. 6. James, Eton and King’s, 264. 7. James usually offered a history of the collection and its catalogues in his introduction. See e.g. his description of James Nasmith’s catalogue in James, ‘The Present Catalogue’, in A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), p. xxxi. 8. James published at least twenty-​eight catalogues of private and institutional collections, including A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), followed by catalogues for the manuscript collections of Eton College (1895) and many of the Cambridge colleges, including King’s (1895), Jesus (1895), Sidney Sussex (1895), Peterhouse (1899), the Parker Library at Corpus Christi (1899), Trinity (1900–​4), Emmanuel (1904), Pembroke (1905), Clare (1905), Christ’s (1905), Queens’ (1905), Gonville and Caius (1907–​8) and a supplement (1914), Trinity Hall (1907), Magdalene (1909), Corpus Christi (1912), St John’s (1913), the Samuel Pepys library (1923), St Catharine’s (1925); a portion of the manuscripts and early printed books of the Morgan Library (1906–​7); Westminster Abbey (1909); the collection of Henry Yates Thompson (1898–​1912); the Latin manuscripts of the John Rylands Library (1921); the Hereford Cathedral Library (1927); Lambeth Palace Library (1930–​2); and the University of Aberdeen (1932). 9. See Pfaff, ‘James, Montague Rhodes’, ODNB. 10. From his first catalogue, for the Fitzwilliam Museum, James engaged with approaches by previous cataloguers, drawing his reader into discussion of the advantages and limitations of his approach. See James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), p. xii. 11. James, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, originally published in 1904, and cited here from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: E. Arnold, 1913), 10. 12. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 8. 13. See e.g. the narrator’s description of the encounter with the mezzotint: ‘I suppose an hour or more to have been spent in what is called common-​room after dinner. Later in the evening some few retired to Williams’s room, and I have little doubt that whist was played and tobacco smoked. During a lull in these operations Williams picked up the mezzotint

682   Kathryn James from the table without looking at it, and handed it to a person mildly interested in art, telling him where it had come from, and the other particulars which we already know.’ James, ‘The Mezzotint’, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 59–​60. 14. David Nichol Smith’s influence on the English curriculum at Oxford has been traced by D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). See also Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: an Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For an introduction to ODNB: ‘John Leland’; John Bale; and the Dissolution; Trevor Ross, ‘Dissolution and the Making of the English Literary Canon: The Catalogues of John Leland and John Bale’, Renaissance and Reformation, 15/​1 (1991), 57a–​80. 15. John Leland, The laboryouse iourney [and] serche of Iohan Leylande, for Englandes antiquitees (London: by S. Mierdman for John Bale, 1549), 16. Letter from John Bale to Matthew Parker, Canterbury, 30 July 1560, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 7489. Ernst Gerhardt, ‘ “No quyckar merchaundyce than lybrary bokes”: John Bale’s Commodification of Manuscript Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60/​2 (2007), 408–​433. 17. For a related reading on the Parker Old English typeface, see Benedict Scott Robinson, ‘ “Darke Speech”: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29/​4 (1998), 1061–​1083. 18. James Marshall Osborn, undergraduate notes from David Nichol Smith, ‘History of English Studies’, 6 Oct. 1934, Unprocessed collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 19. Cleanth Brooks Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 30, Box 92. 20. David Daiches, ‘Jim Osborn: Some Personal Notes’, in René Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. xxi. 21. On Brooks and New Criticism, see Cleanth Brooks, ‘In Search of the New Criticism’, American Scholar, 53/​1 (1984), 41–​53; and his earlier version of this essay, ‘The New Criticism’, Sewanee Review, 87/​4 (1979), 592–​607; Mark Royden Winchell, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). 22. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-​Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1947), p. x. 23. Osborn, Brooks, William Wimsatt, René Wellek, and others were friends and colleagues at Yale. See Kathryn James, ‘How Cleanth Brooks read his Seventeenth Century News Letter’, Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 65 (2012), 35–​53 and Osborn’s correspondence archive, correspondence. OSB MSS 7, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 24. Hearne discusses both Thomas Tanner’s and his own plans to edit and publish sections of the Leland papers in the Bodleian in this letter: Thomas Hearne to Thomas Smith, Oxford, 13 Oct. 1704, Bodleian Rawlinson MS Lett. 37, fo. 32. On the history of Leland’s manuscripts, see Oliver Harris, ‘ “Motheaten, Mouldye, and Rotten”: The Early Custodial History and Dissemination of John Leland’s Manuscript Remains’, Bodleian Library Record, 18 (2005), 460–​501. 25. On Hearne, see Theodor Harmsen, ‘Hearne, Thomas’, ODNB; T. Harmsen, ‘Bodleian Imbroglios, Politics and Personalities, 1701–​1716: Thomas Hearne, Arthur Charlett, and

Provenance Narratives   683 John Hudson’, Neophilogus, 82 (1998), 149–​168, and his Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age: Thomas Hearne, 1678–​ 1735 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000). Hearne’s papers were acquired by his friend and mentor, the fellow Nonjuror Richard Rawlinson, and are held in the Rawlinson Papers in the Bodleian Library. His diaries and abridged correspondence were edited by C. E. Doble, Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, 11 vols. (Oxford: for the Oxford Historical Society at the Clarendon Press, 1885–​1921). As can be seen in the Remarks and Collections, Hearne is detailed in his diary and correspondence on the negotiations surrounding access to the university library during his period of employment. 26. Lucy Toulmin Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–​1543 (London: Bell, 1907–​1909), 5 vols. 27. On the early modern antiquarian engagement with the dissolution, see Brian Cummings et al. (eds.), Remembering the Reformation (New York: Routledge, 2020); Alexandra Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 28. On Wanley, see esp. Peter Heyworth, ‘Wanley, Humfrey’, ODNB; P. L. Heyworth (ed.), The Letters of Humfrey Wanley: Palaeographer, Anglo-​Saxonist, Librarian, 1672–​1726 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); C. E. Wright and Ruth C. Wright (eds.), The Diary of Humfrey Wanley 1715–​ 1726 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1966); Eileen A. Joy, ‘Thomas Smith, Humfrey Wanley, and the “Little-​Known Country” of the Cotton Library’, Electronic British Library Journal (2005), 1–​ 34; Deidre Jackson, ‘Humfrey Wanley and the Harley Collection’, Electronic British Library Journal (2011), 1–​20; Helmut Gneuss, ‘Humfrey Wanley Borrows Books in Cambridge’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 12/​2 (2001), 145–​160. The Thomas Hill portrait of Wanley is held by the Society of Antiquaries of London. 29. The provenance histories of Bagford’s papers, including his paper albums, collections of title pages, ballads, and other gatherings of material, can be seen in the varied collection names—​Sloane, Lansdowne, and Harley, among others—​for his holdings in the British Library collections. Thomas Hearne kept his correspondence with Bagford, which was then gathered with Hearne’s papers into the Rawlinson collection in the Bodleian Library. 30. On John Bagford, see Theodor Harmsen, ‘Bagford, John’, ODNB; Whitney Trettien, Cut/​Copy/​Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and ‘Creative Destruction and the Digital Humanities’, in Jennifer E. Boyle and Helen J. Burgee (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature (London: Routledge, 2017); Milton McC. Gatch, ‘John Bagford as a Collector and Disseminator of Manuscript Fragments’, The Library, 7/​2 (1985), 95–​114; Gatch, ‘John Bagford, Bookseller and Antiquary’, British Library Journal, 12/​2 (1986), 150–​171; T. Somers, ‘Tradesmen in Virtuoso Culture: “Honest” John Bagford and his Collecting Network, 1683–​1716’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 81/​3 (2018), 359–​386. 31. John Leland, The laboryouse iourney [and] serche of Iohan Leylande, for Englandes antiquitees (London: by S. Mierdman for John Bale, 1549), A2r. 32. Folger Shakespeare Library W.A. 298, vol. v, 170. On chains of provenance in annotated copies of Langbaine, see Ivan Lupiç, ‘Shakespeare, Cardenio, and the Vertue Manuscripts’, Ars & Humanitas, 5 (2010), 74–​92.

684   Kathryn James 33. William Shakespeare, Henry V, IV. iii. 56–​60. 34. Thomas Hardy, ‘Transformations’, in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (London: Macmillan, 1917), 89. On the circumstances of Hardy’s burials, see Michael Millgate, ‘Hardy, Thomas’, ODNB. 35. ‘Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-​tree’s shade, | Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap, | Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, | The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.’ Begun in 1742, the poem was first published in Thomas Gray, Elegy written in a country church-​yard (London: for R. Dodsley, and sold by M. Cooper, 1751). 36. Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Ecclesiastical and Architectural Topography of England, 1/​3 (1850), fo. [G2-​r]. 37. Samuel Carter Hall, The Old Mansions of England (London: Parry and Company, 1856), 2. Original citation from the website of the Ancient Yew Group, www.anci​ent-​yew.org/​userfi​ les/​file/​Shotte​sbro​oke%202​019.pdf. 38. Letters, ‘Rev. Richard Hoopek read a communication entitled “The Birth, place and Early Haunts of Thomas Hearne” ’, Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, 204 (1858), 186. 39. Kylie Harrison Mellor, ‘Ancient Yew Trees: the UK’s Oldest Yews’ (22 Jan. 2018), www. woodla​ndtr​ust.org.uk/​blog/​2018/​01/​anci​ent-​yew-​trees/​#:~:text=​For​ting​all%20yew,wit​ hin%20a%20chu​rchy​ard%20in%20Per​thsh​ire. 40. W. C. Lukis (ed.), The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, M.D., ii (London: Surtees Society, 1883), 211. 41. On the ruin, see Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973), 231–​255. On the age of churchyard yew trees: ‘It is also of interest that, assuming one metre of girth equates to around one hundred years of growth (Moir, in preparation), then the drop after the peak frequency of yew coincides with the dissolution of the monasteries at the end of the medieval period (c.1539)’. Andy Moir et al., ‘The Exceptional Yew Trees of England, Scotland and Wales’, Royal Forestry Society, Quarterly Journal of Forestry (2013), 189.

Select Bibliography Carley, James P. (ed.), The Libraries of Henry VIII (London: the British Library in association with the British Academy, 2000). Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–​1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). James, Montague Rhodes, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold, 1904). James, Montague Rhodes, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold, 1911). Keller, Vera, Roos, Anna Marie, and Yale, Elizabeth (eds.), Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-​Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Leedham-​Green, Elisabeth, and Webber, Teresa (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pearson, David, Provenance Research in Book History (new and rev. edn., London: Bodleian Library, 2019). Summit, Jennifer, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Provenance Narratives   685 Swann, Marjorie, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Trettien, Whitney, Cut/​Copy/​Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Walsham, Alexandra, Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Chapter 36

Broken B o oks a nd Fragile Pri nt A Conservation Perspective Nikki Tomkins

Introduction Approaching the book as an object of conservation requires a forensic understanding of its material structure in order to know how it is made and how it deteriorates, what is contemporary and what is new, what to change and what to keep. The early modern book will have endured many lives, its material form bearing the markers of how it has been read, kept, and repaired over the centuries. The book, as object, can be read as historical evidence, but it also performs a mechanical function in order to provide the reader with access to the text. Conservation has to balance this tension between the historical and functional, preserving as much of the material form while still enabling its use as a dynamic, movable object. This chapter will take the seventeenth-​century tract volume collection of Nicholas Crouch as its focus, a library of ephemeral pamphlets and tracts collected by Crouch and bound together by Oxford binders.1 Crouch was an Oxford academic who spent most of his life living and working at Balliol College, and upon his death in 1690 bequeathed the ‘choice of all his bookes’ to Balliol Library where they remain today.2 The volumes are composite, containing multiple tracts and pamphlets printed in different times and places, defying a singular point of origin. The bindings themselves are unassuming, built for a working library, economical in structure and materials. What sets the collection apart, however, are Crouch’s detailed handwritten contents pages in each volume that list the items contained, the prices paid, and in many cases the cost of the binding with a named binder and binding date. This provides a body of concrete provenance that, when combined with conservation documentation on binding material and structure, opens new perspectives on seventeenth-​century book production in Oxford.

Broken Books and Fragile Print    687 The first half of this chapter will explore different ways of approaching the study of book history, and what conservation brings to the conversation. I will discuss the form of a binding as a mechanical, composite object that is not situated in a specific time but rather bears markers of all its interactions over the centuries. This will be the theoretical framework to situate a close reading of the Crouch collection: deconstructing the bindings from a conservation perspective and discussing what they can tell us about damage as a sign of use, materials and technique as indicators of craft, and the ways that the collection has been reshaped and relocated over the centuries.

The Book as Historic Evidence The study of book history is increasingly turning to the material object as a body of evidence to root text to time and place. ‘Materiality matters’: it tethers an otherwise disembodied text.3 This is not merely a preoccupation with pure bibliography, or a descriptive history of a craft, but it is about the material object as a signifier of shifts in trade, in readership, in the relationship between owner and object, a ‘sociology of the text’.4 Discussion of the material book often draws on analogies of archaeology, viewing the book as an object that requires a kind of excavation in order to access the codes embedded in its physical form.5 This approach can be traced to the study of medieval manuscripts and codicology, where the close reading of structure and form directly informs our understanding of the codex as object.6 Traditional study of bookbinding history often finds its roots in the antiquarian book trade, an industry that prizes the highly decorated, the rare, and monetarily valuable.7 As a result bookbinding history is all too often focused on what is sometimes described as ‘fine bindings’, objects that usually feature highly decorated covers and are considered ‘presentation copies’ constructed for show. This same approach is usually preoccupied with identifying the binder behind the book, striving to link tools and designs to named individuals.8 Binders, however, remain obstinately anonymous, and even the date and location of printed content is rarely an indication of where and when the binding took place.9 Decorative tools were often shared between workshops, and designs repeated from place to place; a particular shape is more indicative of a specific decade’s style than of workshop location. All too often the study of bookbinding has ‘drawn conclusions from an insufficiently large sample’, and suffers from a lack of systematically collected data with concrete provenance.10 As Pearson points out, ‘all historians should be wary of the distinction between discovering meaning and imposing it’, and sometimes a false narrative of an object’s provenance can be more obstructive to its study than none at all.11 In order to build a more complete understanding of book production in the era of the hand press, recent literature has shifted towards the study of economical everyday bindings, trade bindings, and temporary bindings.12 In Bookbinders at Work, Mirjam Foot makes clear that she is focusing not on the ‘connoisseur collector who ordered his books to be bound’ but rather the ‘scholar, the professional, the buyer of books for

688   Nikki Tomkins their contents’.13 Nicholas Crouch, however, is exactly that: the scholar who ordered his books to be bound, not necessarily for show but for practical use. This assumption that commissioned bindings were the domain of the ‘connoisseur collector’ may be in part because the canon of book-​history literature focuses on the ‘serious book’, the singular text, and often overlooks the history of cheap, ephemeral material such as pamphlets and tracts.14

The Conservation Perspective Conservation is less preoccupied with the history of the text but focuses on the durability and preservation of the material form. Throughout the history of the book repairs have been made, whether in a bookbinder’s workshop during production or on a conservator’s bench 300 years later. Tears are patched, joints are fixed, and leather is treated, with a variety of techniques and methods that change throughout the centuries. Previous repair can be labelled as ‘historic’, a significant part of the object’s story; it can be also identified as problematic—​poor choice of materials and technique can result in further damage. The conservation object can be read as a kind of palimpsest: layers of bindings, repairs, and additions all seeking to overwrite, or in doing so striving for a kind of return to a previous state. Contemporary conservation sets itself apart from the practice of ‘repair’ and ‘restoration’ in that it focuses on preservation of the original materials and does not actively seek to return the object to a preconceived idea of an untouched ‘original state’. This difference between restoration and conservation is often traced back to the dialectic between Eugène Viollet-​le-​Duc and John Ruskin.15 Viollet-​le-​Duc argued that the most perfect state of the object is the ‘original state’, as conceived by the artist, and the role of the restorer is to return the object to this ‘condition of completeness’.16 On the other hand, Ruskin argues that the signs of history are the most valuable feature of an object, and that conservation should prioritize as little intervention with the original material as possible.17 It is clear that objects such as Crouch’s tract volumes, composite by nature, defy a definitive ‘original state’, and conservation practice has to hold its competing historical narratives in balance. Exactly how to ensure the conservation of an object that both preserves its original material and enables it to be handled and read is the subject of extensive conservation literature, which discusses to what extent and in what way an object should be changed as part of a treatment.18 ‘Conservation’ is defined by the International Council of Museums as ‘all measures and actions aimed at safeguarding tangible cultural heritage while ensuring its accessibility to present and future generations’.19 This is echoed by a number of different professional bodies, who focus on the conservation object as cultural heritage and the primary purpose of conservation work as preservation of this heritage. The establishment of guidelines and international ethical codes for the profession creates an explicit acknowledgement that the kind of intervention conservators enact consciously makes decisions about how an object is best preserved for future generations. Conservation

Broken Books and Fragile Print    689 decision-​making has material consequences, and ethical codes provide a theoretical framework that regulates the practice. Making these decisions is directed by research and understanding of the object, both of its material and its intangible properties. This is interdisciplinary in approach, and in the case of book conservation requires bibliographic, scientific, and historical knowledge that situates the object in time and place and directs treatment decisions.20 A conservator’s perspective is continually looking forward to how the object will change in the future, guided by principles of ‘retreatability’ and ‘minimal intervention’, although these terms too are the subject of debate.21 A conservation treatment is often described as intervention in an object as opposed to the passive engagement of a reader. However, interaction is intervention, and even untouched on a shelf the book is not static but is constantly responding to its surroundings—​be that environmental, biological, or even gravity pulling at the suspended text-​block sitting upright on the shelf. The conservator is located in a specific point of time in an object’s history and, alongside curators and custodians, will make decisions about how the object will be kept in the future. Documentation of the object underpins conservation practice, creating a body of data and tangible information on a collection that feeds into literary, historical, and scientific study. It serves as a record that situates an object in time, prior to treatment decisions that may intervene with the form. In the case of the Crouch collection, the conservation documentation was carried out alongside the cataloguing of each bibliographic item. Data was recorded detailing the material structure of the volume, its condition prior to treatment, and the conservation carried out. This kind of data on the details of a binding’s material structure, combined with bibliographic details on known dates and places, enables a mapping of the collection that acknowledges its multiplicity. Although narrow in its scope, it provided sufficient material to construct a picture of the collection as a collective whole, connecting binders with their bindings, and patterns of use from generations of readers. Material condition is also a key part of documentation. Conserving the Crouch collection required working with material that has begun to significantly deteriorate, while also recognizing those aspects of deterioration as signifiers of use. The split in the spine suggests that the volume was repeatedly opened at that point; the flaking leather surface may indicate storage conditions or likely a previous surface treatment. Decision-​making prioritized enabling access to the collection and its inherently ephemeral material for readers. With this in mind, treatment decisions primarily addressed the mechanical function of the volume, enabling the existing structure to continue to work while preserving as much of the material as possible.

The Book as Material Object Conservation of a book requires an understanding of a binding’s two central functions: that of motion and protection. First, the structure of a sewn codex is

690   Nikki Tomkins mechanical: it holds the text-​block together, while enabling the reader to navigate the pages. It must allow movement in the spine for the book to be opened and read, but there is also resistance and restriction as too much movement can cause damage to the spine and the sewing supports.22 Secondly, the structure of a book provides protection for the text: the sewn text-​block and cover keep the contents together, preventing loss and providing protection to the otherwise fragile pages. The ‘block’ form of the text-​ block, compressed between closed boards, prevents ingress from pollutants, water, light, and pests. The covering material provides outer protection to the text-​block and boards, and additional strength to the board attachment. Understanding these dual functions of motion and protection is central to understanding how and why a book deteriorates in the way that it does, what that tells us about how it has been used, and how conservation can help support the binding to perform these functions. The book, as object, is composite; and each material aspect of its binding tells a different story, from production, to purchase, to reception. In the early modern period every part of a book was made by hand: from producing the paper and printing the text to ‘forwarding’ (sewing and binding) the book and finally the ‘finishing’ (cover decoration).23 Whereas some of the materials may have been sourced local to the binding production, others such as the paper stock would almost certainly have come from abroad.24 Each component of a binding necessarily bears traces of the craftsperson behind its construction, flaws and variations that may reflect localized technique, availability of materials, or the margin of error as with all handcrafted objects. A collection of bindings may appear to be ostensibly identical but on closer inspection show a myriad of variations, each object unique from the next. Neither is a book a static object that exists only in one time. A text-​block printed in one place could—​and likely would—​later be bound in another; multiple publications can be subsequently sewn together, and bindings themselves are full of additions, repairs, and changes. The study of book history often separates the book as text from the material object, and the text is a mutable, malleable thing in a way that material form is not—​it is easily translated, digitized, and reworked; existing in multiple states of interpretation and reading simultaneously. However, a material reading of the text as a component of the physical whole locates it in time and place. Text as material object bears all traces of interaction and use, of damage and repairs. Annotations in the margins embellish content, a break in the spine at a specific point indicates a well-​read passage, a pin in the gutter acts as a physical reminder of the process of handcrafting a binding. Readers, collectors, and custodians all leave their marks through an active engagement with the book.

Nicholas Crouch Collection In July 2016 Balliol College embarked on a project to catalogue and conserve the Nicholas Crouch collection of tract volumes. Across the 213 volumes 3,620 individual

Broken Books and Fragile Print    691 bibliographic items were catalogued, details of which are all accessible through the Oxford University Libraries online catalogue.25 One hundred and thirty-​three volumes came to the conservation studio for treatment that ranged from repairing a tear in a page to reuniting two halves of a broken text-​block. The principal aims of conservation were to enable the volumes to be handled and read by researchers, preserving as much of the original material as possible while restoring the mechanical functionality of the volume. The structure of the project enabled both cataloguer and conservator to work closely together, combining their respective bibliographic and material knowledge to build up a broader understanding of the collection as a whole. Conservation treatment and binding descriptions are included in the catalogue data for each binding, and bibliographic data on the individual tracts was incorporated into conservation documentation. This descriptive data on both the bindings and their component parts enabled a mapping of the collection that connected named binders with the books they made and traced the patterns of ownership and use throughout the centuries both pre-​and post-​Crouch. In 1634, aged 16, Nicholas Crouch enrolled at Oxford University as a student of medicine and spent almost sixty years of his life at Balliol College, first as a student and then as a fellow until his death in July 1690. He took an active role in college life, and his hand is found throughout college documentation tracking the movement of books and calculating budgets.26 An obscure figure, most of what we know of him as a character comes from his manuscript notebooks detailing prescriptions and lists for remedies, and his personal diary that sheds some light on his movements in and out of Oxford, and the weather, but is otherwise sparsely populated.27 Nicholas Crouch was, by all accounts, not an exemplary individual, but a typical figure of seventeenth-​century Oxford college life: his community is literate, academic, and social; book collections are common among his peers.28 What sets Crouch apart from his contemporaries is that his collection has survived the centuries as a relatively cohesive unit, and with the collection are Crouch’s meticulous manuscript lists providing concrete provenance of the texts and their bindings. Crouch’s personal library included monographs as well as tract volumes, and in 1690 he bequeathed the ‘choice of all his bookes’ to Balliol College, of which 319 were selected and recorded in the donation register.29 The monographs and manuscripts, including Crouch’s personal diary, are scattered throughout Balliol College Library collections but the 213 tract volumes have remained together. Crouch collected over 1,600 pamphlets and tracts, and commissioned their bindings from Oxford bookbinders, with between two and seventy two bibliographic items bound together in each volume. Although medical texts are well represented, comprising around a third of the tract material, the subject matter of the collection is broad; ranging from theology to politics and geography. Some of the bindings appear to collate the items thematically, others contain a range of material; for example, a tract on the ‘Philosophical discourse of Earth’ can be found next to another on how to construct Latin verse without knowing any Latin.30 Although much of the material was printed during Crouch’s lifetime, there are also numerous texts printed before he was born,

692   Nikki Tomkins purchased second hand and still bearing previous owners’ inscriptions such as ‘Robert Hare’ or ‘John Lovell’.31 The seventeenth century saw a huge growth in demand for printed text, and with it the production and circulation of ephemeral material sold cheap, in simple bindings. Pamphlets would have been stitched rather than sewn, where the thread goes through the inner margin of the text-​block rather than through the spine fold with little more than a paper cover usually printed with the title page. This stitched structure leaves its mark, with small discernible holes visible in the gutters of the subsequently bound tract volume (see Fig. 36.1). Stitching was synonymous with

Fig. 36.1  Balliol College Library, shelfmark 915 b 4 A. Pamphlet stitched with three holes. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

Broken Books and Fragile Print    693 pamphlets in the seventeenth century, and there were rules delineating what could and what could not be stitched based on format and size; for example, a stitched book or pamphlet in quarto could be no more than twelve sheets (ninety-​six pages in length) although this was not necessarily strictly adhered to.32 Stitching is a quick way to hold a few pages together, but does not provide the durability or protection of an inboard binding. As a result, many of the items in the Crouch collection are the only surviving copies, testament to the role of the binding as protection for ephemeral material. The bindings Crouch commissioned are not presentation copies, objects meant for show, but rather objects of economy, showing evidence of techniques increasingly adopted in the seventeenth century to make binding quicker and easier.33 Neither are they ‘trade bindings’, stock books already bound for sale, usually associated with economical, uniform styles.34 Each binding has been commissioned by Crouch from specific named binders, for functional use as part of a working collection.35 They appear to follow a uniform structure and aesthetic (see Fig. 36.2), but this should be read as a product of the time’s fashion and the price paid rather than design of Crouch’s making.36 The volumes themselves are small in format—​ranging from quarto (4o) to octavo (8o) and duodecimo (12o), and the prices correlate with size, ranging from fivepence for a

Fo

re–

ed

ge

Text-block

Fig. 36.2  Diagram of a typical Nicholas Crouch tract volume, showing the cover decoration and chain staple holes.

694   Nikki Tomkins duodecimo to one shilling for a quarto, all of which tally with standard published price lists from the period.37 Conservation documentation was used as a means of building a body of data on the volumes, linking material structure and decorative features with named and dated binders, from the material of the sewing support to the combination of tools. Four principal binders are repeatedly referred to: ‘Ingram’, ‘Doe’, ‘Terril’, and ‘Dollive’. Where a binding date was not specifically recorded, the printing dates of the contents indicated the earliest possible date. Out of all the named binders, the strongest historical source is for ‘Ingram’, where one Bodleian record states that ‘William, son of Peter Ingram, was apprenticed to Roger Barnes and John, his son, bookbinders’.38 Ingram died before 8 June 1684, a date that tallies with Crouch’s data as he is linked with a number of bindings commissioned throughout the 1670s, but disappears from the records in the 1680s. It is ‘Doe’ whose name is linked to later bindings, right up until Crouch’s death. Although these binders would likely have all lived close by, with a movement of tools, materials, and techniques between workshops, close inspection identifies patterns of differences among the volumes from sewing support material to decorative tools used with specific, repeated combinations of edge-​rolls and fleurons.39

Sewing Structure and Board Attachment The text-​blocks, made up of multiple tracts and pamphlets, have been sewn using a multisection sewing technique which attaches two gatherings at a time with a single thread to the sewing supports.40 This technique, also known as ‘two on sewing’, is faster than sewing all along the centre fold, but compromises the durability of the structure.41 The text-​block is sewn on three to four raised single supports, which are then laced into the boards on either side. Almost 50 per cent of Crouch volumes used alum-​tawed leather as a sewing support material, followed then by cord (38 per cent) and a small number (20 per cent) using tanned leather. All the binders used alum-​tawed skin, except for Doe who appears to have used cord exclusively. The second half of the seventeenth century sees an increasing shift away from tanned leather supports to cord, also reflected in the fact that Doe bound most of the later volumes.42 Tanned leather is a weaker material than its alum-​tawed counterpart, typically breaking at the joints, resulting in detached boards, or splitting in the spine. In some cases both materials were combined in the same binding, suggesting a compromise between economy and durability on the part of the binder—​a strategy repeatedly linked to Ingram. A small number of the bindings (7 per cent) have recessed supports: a technique that is less commonly seen in the seventeenth century.43 This enabled sewing to be quicker, as the needle could follow a straight line through the cut sewing holes. However, the technique once again compromises the structural integrity of the volume: creating a weaker structure that is more susceptible to damage.

Broken Books and Fragile Print    695 The lacing of the sewing supports into the boards provides the primary method of attaching the text-​block to the boards. The boards themselves are couched-​ laminate, made by pressing or couching together sheets of freshly made and still damp paper, and the texture of the felts leaves a discernible impression on the board surface.44 The sewing structure and board attachment provide the central means of holding the binding together, enabling movement through the book and protecting the text-​ block with a board on either side. Splits in the spine where a volume has been repeatedly opened at one point, or detached boards where the sewing supports have failed, impact on the volume’s ability both to be read and to protect the fragile paper text-​ block. Conservation treatment prioritized working with the existing structure to enable it to once again function as a mechanical book, while preserving as much of the original material as possible. For example, in some cases splints of durable woven fabric were inserted along the spine edge underneath the original leather, in order to bridge a broken joint while remaining visually unobtrusive. In other cases, tabs of thinly pared parchment valued for their durability and strength were inserted and adhered along a split in the spine: reuniting a broken text-​block and concealed underneath the original spine covering. These approaches ensured that all the original leather covering material is retained in place, while structurally the boards were reattached and the text-​block once more held together.

End-​L eaves End-​leaves were added subsequently by the binder, as an additional protection to the text-​block. Usually they incorporated a paste-​down: conjugate with the end-​leaf construction; this leaf is adhered to the inner face of the board providing an additional structural attachment between the board and the text-​block but also concealing the exposed inner board, turn-​ins, and lacing holes. Many of the Crouch bindings do not have their paste-​downs adhered. Some have been used by Crouch for his manuscript lists, suggesting that they were never originally adhered; however, others bear evidence of flour paste or skinned paper on the board where it was damaged while being detached.45 End-​leaves were not the only additional material added by the binder—​ many of Crouch’s volumes incorporate blank sections in between printed items, suggesting that he planned to use them for additional manuscript notes. End-​leaves are frequently damaged in volumes, as the initial exposed components of a fragile text-​ block. Detached leaves, tears, and surface dirt are all typical forms of damage. Using lightweight papers with a high cellulose content and a water-​soluble starch-​based adhesive, tears in a page can be repaired and detached leaves hinged into place, working closely with the existing collation. However, areas of loss in the paper that are not at risk of causing further damage are not changed. They bear evidence to the wear and tear of the volume, and their repair would only be based on subjective aesthetic grounds rather than the structural integrity of the book.

696   Nikki Tomkins

Endbands Endbands are components of a binding located at the head and tail of a text-​block, that are either sewn or adhered and can be structural, decorative, or both. They are found on all the Crouch volumes and are sewn in a typical English style using white with either red or blue threads wrapped around a central core of rolled paper. Although many of the colours have faded, it is sometimes possible to discern the original colour from thread tie-​downs inside the gutters of the books. Bookbinders of the hand-​press period were consistently resourceful in recycling materials, and the endband cores are all made from rolled waste paper; fragments of printed text sometimes visible under magnification. With only two to three tie-​downs, these endbands provide little structural benefit to the text-​block; rather, they represent a visual expectation of what a binding of this standard should feature. Many of them are damaged or missing as a consequence of frequent poor handling over the centuries. Conservation treatments on the Crouch collection never replaced a missing endband as they were not structurally integral to the volume’s function, but damaged ones would be secured into place with small, toned threads adhered to the spine underneath the covering leather. This ensured no further loss of material, without actively seeking to recreate an element of the binding.

Covering The covering material used on almost all the volumes is thinly pared calfskin with roughly cut turn-​ins. The cover decoration of each volume follows a standard pattern, typical of the seventeenth century: tooled in blind, with a double fillet border on both boards, corner fleurons, and a decorative roll along the board edge.46 The lack of gold acts as a further indicator of economy. Some of the covers have been sprinkled with acid as a decorative feature on the surface. This has, in some cases, exacerbated leather deterioration where the acid has impacted on the skin. Condition of the covering material also acts as a signifier of use. Typical throughout the collection is a deteriorated leather surface, presenting a cracked and crazed appearance that is susceptible to flaking away when handled. This condition is indicative of surface treatments that have been applied to the leather, probably in the early twentieth century, and have, over time, caused damage.

Fore-​E dges One of the most striking features of the Crouch collection are the coloured fore-​edges of the bindings. These are used to demarcate the tracts, and were commissioned by Crouch

Broken Books and Fragile Print    697 from the binders—​there is even evidence in one note that he paid ‘Doe’ a penny for the edge colouring.47 The standard practice in the seventeenth century was to sprinkle the edges red, sometimes combined with blue. Ostensibly this was in order to help hide the dirt, but there is evidence that colouring tracts in order to help identification was a fairly common practice.48 Some of the volumes, mostly linked to Terril and Dollive, paint all three edges, with strokes that are rough and imprecise—​often appearing on the inside of the leaf. Both Doe and Ingram sprinkled the head and tail but painted the fore-​edge, a process that could be performed on multiple bindings simultaneously to save time. The majority of the bindings show that the text-​blocks were trimmed evenly post-​ sewing using a plough, and, once the endbands were sewn and boards laced on, then had their fore-​edges coloured—​evidenced by the flecks of paint caught on the endband threads and exposed board edges. Not all the volumes are uniformly trimmed—​some have uneven text-​blocks to accommodate a large tract or item; this may have been on direct instruction from Crouch. In one particular case, the protruding fore-​edge of a single text beyond the limits of the board’s protection has resulted in considerable damage to the paper edges. In this case, a specific box was constructed for the volume that prevents the extended edge from being crushed against the back of a shelf or other surface. I would invite you now to imagine how the collection looked in Crouch’s time: stored fore-​edge out, shelved upright (see Fig. 36.3). Evidence from manuscript notations inside the volume, paper labels adhering to the fore-​edge, and his own lending records suggested that Crouch had his own shelf-​marking system structured as follows: [format] [capital letter][number].49 In addition to the coloured fore-​edges, Crouch included numerous handwritten markers adhered to the fore-​edge of the page to identify specific tracts (see Fig. 36.4). Although most have not survived, the remaining paper stubs can sometimes be identified on the edge of a page. All these features of the collection

Fig. 36.3  Image of the books displayed fore-​edge out. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

698   Nikki Tomkins

Fig. 36.4  Example of a manuscript fore-​edge marker. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 905 f 2. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

demonstrate Crouch’s own awareness of the materiality of the book, organized by size and colour, and with physical manuscript markers. Many of the tracts show signs of previous use and storage prior to being bound together; for example, a tract with a significantly higher quantity of ingrained surface dirt and damage to the edges suggests this was a result of precious use and storage prior to being bound and protected inside the text-​block. Material evidence shows us that Crouch himself was reading and annotating prior to binding, as evidenced by manuscript annotations subsequently trimmed by the plough. Neither did he stop reading once the text was bound, as one note in particular points out that a page was incorrectly placed ‘by the ignorance of the binder’ (see Fig. 36.5).50 Once acquired by Balliol Library in 1690 the books were chained, and the majority of volumes bear evidence of the chain staple holes in the lower fore-​edge of the board—​a practice continued up to the middle of the eighteenth century.51 Therefore, the red goatskin spine labels that we see on the spines of the volumes would not have been added by Crouch himself, but at a later date after the mid-​eighteenth century where we see a change from storing books fore-​edge to spine-​edge out.52 The act of labelling the volumes is a process of reconstructing the collection: the way they are perceived as a collective whole shifts, they are no longer grouped by size but by the contents’ subject matter. The majority of the labels read simply ‘miscellaneous tracts’, consecrating hundreds of items to miscellany and obscuring an order or logic not otherwise visible. Something as seemingly small as reorienting a collection and attributing titles to a composite form, changes how the objects are interacted with. The labels are no less a part of the history of those volumes; rather, they root the object in another time frame. The

Broken Books and Fragile Print    699

Fig. 36.5  ‘This leaf is turned the wrong way. By the ignorance of the binder.’ Balliol College Library, shelfmark 910 I 4 (9). Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

book is both outside time, and yet can be rooted in it—​different components embodying different points of reference. Once conserved, the Crouch volumes will continue to look very much as they did before, and they will continue to be fragile objects that require care when handling. However, the board that was previously detached is now reattached, and the torn page has been repaired. The sewing support lacings are still visible on the inner face of the board, and close observation shows evidence of previously stitched holes in the gutter of the volume. A lifting spine piece has been readhered; however, the accompanying conservation documentation can provide information on exactly how the volume is sewn, and what was visible underneath. Conservation repairs are discreet, but documented, and now they too are a part of the object’s material history.

Conclusion The material form of the early modern book carries the impression of the craftspeople who constructed it, the owners who used it, the libraries who kept it, and the conservators who repaired it. Conservation strives to preserve this multiplicity in the material object: focusing on documenting construction and signs of use and preserving a book that is old and looks it without attempting to revert it to some previous state. The tract volumes of Nicholas Crouch are the embodiment of the book as composite object: made up of multiple items, bearing the marks of multiple readers and owners.

700   Nikki Tomkins They are commissioned bindings but also the scholar-​owned object for use rather than for show; they are built both for functional use and as protection for otherwise ephemeral material. They present themselves as complex objects that defy a single date or a cohesive narrative. In spite of this inherent multiplicity, they also provide the book historian with some of the most concrete evidence that roots their binding in time and place: lists of prices, lists of lending, and records of who bound what and when all recorded by Crouch in detailed contents pages and notebooks. Study of the material structure through conservation documentation enables a mapping of the collection and its competing narratives, tracing damage and difference as important signifiers of both a history of craft and a history of readership.

Notes 1. A volume that contains multiple printed works in the same binding is also sometimes referred to as a Sammelband; however, here I will use ‘tract volume’ for specificity. 2. Balliol College Archive, shelfmark MISC 30.13. 3. Jessica Brantley, ‘The Prehistory of the Book’, PMLA 124/​2 (2009), 632–​639, at 632. 4. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5. J. A. Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Albert Gruijs, ‘Codicology or the Archaeology of the Book? A False Dilemma’, Quaerendo, 2/​2 (1972), 87–​108; Brantley, ‘The Prehistory of the Book’. 6. Codex here is defined as a group of leaves that are gathered together and secured along one edge to allow the surface of each leaf to be seen when the leaves are opened from the opposite edge. ‘Codex-​Form Books | Language of Bindings’, www.liga​tus.org.uk/​lob/​conc​ept/​4886. 7. See e.g. B. H. Breslauer, The Uses of Bookbinding Literature (New York: Book Arts Press, School of Library Service, Columbia University, 1986); Anthony Hobson, The Literature of Bookbinding (London: Published for the National Book League by Cambridge University Press, 1954); David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​ 1800: A Handbook (London: British Library, 2005), 2–​3. 8. Howard M. Nixon, The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​1800, 4. 9. Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​1800, 2. 10. Mirjam Foot, ‘Bookbinding Research: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Needs’, in Foot (ed.), Eloquent Witnesses: Bookbindings and Their History: A Volume of Essays Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. Phiroze Randeria (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004), 13–​29, at 23. 11. Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​1800, 12 12. Stuart Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles, 1660–​1800 (London: British Library, 2004); Nicholas Pickwoad, ‘Onward and Downward: How Binders Coped with the Printing Press before 1800’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), A Millennium of the Book: Production, Design and Illustration in Manuscript and Print 900–​1900, Publishing Pathways 8 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994), 61–​106; Foot, Bookbinders at Work: Their Roles and Methods (London: British Library, 2006). 13. Foot, Bookbinders at Work, 40.

Broken Books and Fragile Print    701 14. Pascal Verhoest, ‘Pamphlets, Commodification, Media Market Regulation, and Hegemony: A Transnational Inquiry into the Seventeenth-​Century Print Industry in England, France, and the Netherlands’, Media Industries Journal, 3/​1 (2016), 41. 15. Salvador Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation (Amsterdam: Elsevier Butterworth-​Heinemann, 2005), 4–​5. 16. Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation, 4; Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-​le-​ Duc, On Restoration, by E. Viollet-​Le-​Duc [Tr. from an Article in His Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’architecture Française] and a Notice of His Works in Connection with the Historical Monuments of France, by C. Wethered. (London, 1875), 9. 17. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: George Allen, 1901). 18. For further discussion of conservation theory, see Alison Richmond, Alison Lee Bracker, and Victoria and Albert Museum, Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths (Oxford: Butterworth-​Heinemann in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum London, 2009); Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation. 19. ‘‘Terminology for Conservation—​ICOM-​CC’, www.icom-​cc.org/​242/​about/​term​inol​ogy-​ for-​conse​rvat​ion, accessed 24 Aug. 2020. 20. For the role of scientific research in the conservation profession, see Harold J. Plenderleith, ‘A History of Conservation’, Studies in Conservation, 43/​3 (1998), 129–​143; Miriam Clavir, ‘The Social and Historic Construction of Professional Values in Conservation’, Studies in Conservation, 43/​1 (1998), 1–​8. 21. Caroline Villers, ‘Post Minimal Intervention’, The Conservator, 28/​1 (2004), 3–​10; Salvador Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation (London: Routledge, 2011), 188–​191. 22. Tom Conroy, ‘The Movement of the Book Spine’, Book & Paper Group Annual, 6 (1987), 1–​30. 23. Bernard C. Middleton, A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique (London: Holland Press Limited, 1978); Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 147–​153. 24. Up until the late seventeenth century most of the white paper used by English printers was imported, usually from France. See Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 60. 25. James Howarth, Reconstructing Nicholas Crouch: Cataloguing and Conserving a Seventeenth-​Century Library (Oxford: Balliol College, 2018), 4; Search Oxford Libraries Online, www.solo.bodle​ian.ox.ac.uk 26. James Howarth, Reconstructing Nicholas Crouch: Cataloguing and Conserving a Seventeenth-​Century Library (Oxford: Balliol College, 2018), 25. 27. Balliol College Archive, shelfmark MS 355 and shelfmark MS 339. 28. David Pearson, Scholars and Bibliophiles: Book Collectors in Oxford, 1550–​1650 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1996). 29. Balliol College Archive, shelfmark MISC 30.13; Balliol College Archive, Donation Register (Oxford, 1690). 30. John Evelyn, A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Relating to the Culture and Improvement of It for Vegetation, and the Propagation of Plants, &c. as It Was Presented to the Royal Society, April 29. 167 (1676); John Peter, Artificial Versifying: A New Way to Make Latin Verses (1678); both items bound together in Balliol College Library, shelfmark 910 d 2. 31. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 300 c 1 (1) and (2); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 88.

702   Nikki Tomkins 32. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, 82; David Foxon, ‘Stitched Books’, Book Collector, 24 (1975): 111–​124, at 113. 33. Pickwoad, ‘Onward and Downward’. 34. Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles, 1660–​1800. 35. Howarth, Reconstructing Nicholas Crouch, 6. 36. Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​1800, 11. 37. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 106; For a published set of bookbinders’ price lists, see Mirjam Foot, Studies in the History of Bookbinding (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 15–​67. 38. Strickland Gibson, Early Oxford Bindings (Oxford: Printed for the Bibliographical Society at the Oxford University Press, 1903), 10. 39. William Page, ‘Industries’, in Page (ed.), A History of the County of Oxford (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), ii. 225–​ 277, www.brit​ ish-​ hist​ ory.ac.uk/​ vch/​ oxon/​vol2. 40. Middleton, A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique, 20. 41. Pickwoad, ‘Onward and Downward’. 42. Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​1800, 25. 43. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 152. 44. ‘Couched-​Laminate Board (Material) | Language of Bindings’, www.liga​tus.org.uk/​lob/​ conc​ept/​1264. 45. Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​1800, 32. 46. Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​1800. 47. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 910 e 10 (1). 48. Foot, Bookbinders at Work, 57; Pearson, Scholars and Bibliophiles, 9. 49. Howarth, Reconstructing Nicholas Crouch, 4. 50. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 910 i 4 (9). 51. ‘Library History | Balliol College, University of Oxford’, www.ball​iol.ox.ac.uk/​ball​iol-​libr​ ary/​libr​ary-​hist​ory. 52. Graham Pollard, ‘Changes in the Style of Bookbinding, 1550–​1830’, The Library, 5th ser., 11/​ 2 (June 1956), 71–​94, at 73.

Select Bibliography Foot, Mirjam, Bookbinders at Work: Their Roles and Methods (London: British Library, 2006). Foot, Mirjam, ‘Bookbinding Research: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Needs’, in Foot (ed.), Eloquent Witnesses: Bookbindings and Their History: A Volume of Essays Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. Phiroze Randeria (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004), 13–​29. Foot, Mirjam, Studies in the History of Bookbinding (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). Foxon, David, ‘Stitched Books’, Book Collector, 24 (1975), 111–​124. Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Gibson, Strickland, Early Oxford Bindings, Illustrated Monographs (Oxford: Printed for the Bibliographical Society at the Oxford University Press, 1903). Gruijs, Albert, ‘Codicology or the Archaeology of the Book? A False Dilemma’, Quaerendo, 2/​ 2 (1972), 87–​108. Howarth, James, Reconstructing Nicholas Crouch: Cataloguing and Conserving a Seventeenth-​ Century Library (Oxford: Balliol College, 2018).

Broken Books and Fragile Print    703 McKenzie, D. F., Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Middleton, Bernard C., A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique (London: Holland Press Limited, 1978). Muñoz Viñas, Salvador, Contemporary Theory of Conservation (London: Routledge, 2011). Pearson, David, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–​ 1800: A Handbook (London: British Library, 2005). Pearson, David, Scholars and Bibliophiles: Book Collectors in Oxford, 1550–​1650 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1996). Pickwoad, Nicholas, ‘Onward and Downward: How Binders Coped with the Printing Press before 1800’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), A Millennium of the Book: Production, Design and Illustration in Manuscript and Print 900–​ 1900, Publishing Pathways, 8 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994), 61–​106. Pollard, Graham, ‘Changes in the Style of Bookbinding, 1550–​1830’, The Library, 5th ser., 11/​2 (June 1956), 71–​94. Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Richmond, Alison, Bracker, Alison Lee, and Victoria and Albert Museum, Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths (Oxford: Butterworth-​ Heinemann in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum London, 2009).

Chapter 37

T he History of t h e E a rly Modern B o ok i n t h e Digita l Ag e Whitney Trettien

In the middle of the twentieth century, book history and humanities computing both emerged on the horizons of literary studies. Nudging them into view were newer, cheaper imaging technologies, the rise of standardized electronic formats, and increased access to historical data through catalogues and bibliographies. Together, these shifts made knowing the history of the early modern book in its totality seem more possible—​ and more overwhelming—​than ever. Elizabeth Eisenstein captured the dizzying complexity of the moment, writing: So much data was impinging on us from so many directions and with such speed that our capacity to provide order and coherence was being strained to the breaking point (or had it, perhaps, already snapped?). If there was a ‘run-​away’ technology which was leading to a sense of cultural crisis among historians, perhaps it had more to do with an increased rate of publication than with new audio-​visual media or even with the atom bomb?1

This question led her to popular media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which, unlike the work of more staid early modern historians, ‘takes mischievous pleasure in the loss of familiar historical perspectives’.2 McLuhan’s refreshingly playful, presentist approach to printing as a form of media, akin to television in its transformative effect on human relations, convinced Eisenstein that historians needed to wholly reassess the transition from manuscript to print, and she began a decades-​ long process of assembling data to back up McLuhan’s more ‘oracular pronouncements’.3 The result was her groundbreaking, two-​volume study of printing’s impact on early modern European culture and society, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). Sitting somewhere between history, media studies, and the style of quantitative bibliography pioneered in Henri-​Jean Martin and Lucien Febvre’s The Coming of the Book,

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    705 Eisenstein’s massive monograph serves as a harbinger of the interdisciplinary research that would, in the 1980s and 1990s, begin rewriting the history of early modern material cultures using electronic tools. Fast forward many decades later, and early modern book history, media studies, and what is now called digital humanities have become deeply entangled. Their intermingling has cultivated a host of new research methods for dealing with the kind of information overload that Eisenstein identified in 1979 as more early materials are digitized. It has also introduced an entirely new set of questions about how to organize, visualize, and theorize this mass of digital surrogates and metadata. Taking stock of both where what we might call digital book history has been and where it is going, this chapter identifies six research clusters that are currently transforming how early modernists study books as and with media technologies. The first three clusters—​forensics, computer vision, and facsimiles—​take up the issue of remediation, specifically new digital imaging technologies and attendant machine-​learning techniques. Many of these methods, like biocodicology—​the study of proteins and DNA in parchment, sizing, and other substrates—​involve collaboration with scientists and conservators; others, like the three-​dimensional reconstruction of severely damaged materials, depend upon advanced techniques in computer science. Beyond these necessary collaborations, though, there is a strand of fundamentally humanistic questions at the core of this work, namely: what is the relationship between a material object and its remediation? The last three clusters consider how digital technologies are changing the scale of analysis. Specifically, they turn to how databases are transforming cataloguing practices, what quantification means for studying literary style and printing, and the ways in which networks offer a new perspective on both the internal dynamics of texts and the external exchange of books and letters. Many of the tools and techniques discussed in this chapter offer more promise than pay-​off at this point, and the research they may yield in the near future will necessarily alter the direction that digital book history develops, shifting the alliances between these clusters. Yet the present constellation is also, as suggested throughout, rooted in many decades of technological change and conceptual labour. As we will see, digital book history’s origins stretch back to the moment so cogently identified by Eisenstein in 1979; before that, to the nineteenth century’s revolution in audiovisual and printing technologies; and even further back to the advent of print itself, which brought with it a similar sense of information overload and a flurry of new techniques for understanding the past.4 From then until now, the early modern book has, as this chapter shows, become a completely different kind of object.

Forensics Scientific methods of analysis and technical equipment have been used in bibliography since its modern origins at the end of the nineteenth century. As early as 1894, Persifor Frazer advocated the use of quantification, magnifiers, and chemical analysis

706   Whitney Trettien to help detect forgeries.5 Since then, forensic techniques have advanced to include many varieties of spectral imaging, capable of exposing obliterations or additions to a text, as well as new laboratory tests and scanners that can determine the composition of papers and inks.6 Recent developments in biocodicology—​including the genetic analysis of DNA and protein fragments gathered from parchment, leather bindings, and sizing—​hold out the potential to reveal even more granular provenance data.7 For instance, knowing the DNA profile of every leaf in a manuscript might enable a conservator to pinpoint a species and even reconstruct a specific herd within the book’s supply chain. These newer methods join a battery of low-​tech forensic equipment commonly found in rare-​book rooms, like loupes, collators, and micrometer calipers, to aid in authenticating materials, as well as identifying the date and place of their creation. They also help conservators determine a course of conservation, preservation, or restoration, and support textual scholarship, specifically the manual labour of transcribing and editing texts.8 Of course, none of these forensic techniques are necessarily digital. In fact, one of the earliest manuals on using scientific equipment to examine rare materials, R. B. Haselden’s Scientific Aids for the Study of Manuscripts, was published in 1935, before the invention of the earliest electromechanical computers, and the infrared and ultraviolet photography that scholar-​enthusiasts promoted in the 1960s and 1970s did not require the use of computation. Yet digital technologies have undeniably, and in some cases exponentially, enhanced these existing techniques, making possible research that Haselden could not have imagined in 1935. Consider, for instance, the impact of web-​ based databases, especially on long-​term collaborations between bibliographers and scientists. As Timothy Stinson has advocated, a genetic case study of a single piece of parchment, when stitched together with similar case studies from other libraries, might scale up to a more complete picture of where certain types of manuscripts were made, using what animals, and how they circulated through medieval and early modern Europe.9 Research by S. Blair Hedges has similarly shown how a database of wormhole measurements in prints, mapped to the place where the woodcut was made, may help biologists study the geographical distribution of insect species across time while also providing bibliographers with the data necessary to track the circulation of woodblocks among printers.10 If they are to be useful in discovering something new, such databases must be nearly comprehensive and thus built with a high degree of cooperation and coordination among libraries—​a task that seems nearly impossible at this point, since many libraries lack even robust conservation labs. They would also require more funding than is typically available for humanities projects. Still, the technology exists; what lacks is the money and infrastructure. In other emerging areas of research, digital technologies do not just have the potential to enhance existing forensic aids but are themselves taking on a role as critical interpreters of archival materials. This is especially the case with the use of machine learning to reconstruct severely damaged objects. Computer scientist W. Brent Seales and his team at the University of Kentucky have several times made headlines around

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    707 the world for their work digitally extracting text from ancient scrolls that are too deteriorated to handle—​first in 2016 when they virtually unrolled a charred scroll found at En-​Gedi, a town destroyed by fire around the year 600, and again in 2019 when they applied a similar technique to a papyrus fragment carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.11 Because the latter was not written in a metal-​based ink, X-​ray imaging could not reveal the text; so Seale’s team has turned to artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning. Partnering with papyrologists and classicists, they have trained an algorithm to notice subtle differences in the X-​ ray scans, like changes in the structure of papyrus fibres.12 These differences can then be used to distinguish inked from uninked spots in the manuscript. When taken as a whole, a map of regular variations may eventually lead to the identification of individual characters and therefore the text itself, even if it no longer exists as visible writing on the papyrus. More recently, similar imaging techniques have been used on a severely damaged fifth-​century Coptic manuscript to reveal not only obliterated text but also the structure of quires and hidden stitching in the binding, all without disbinding the object itself.13 Here, digital forensics are supplanting the need for material intervention. While most of the energy in the field of digital restoration has been directed towards ancient or classical materials, conservators have applied similar techniques to damaged books from the early modern period. The most prominent example is the project to restore the Great Parchment Book. Completed in 1639 as a survey of all the estates in Derry managed by the City of London, and thus an important source on the colonization of Ulster, the Great Parchment Book barely survived a fire in 1786, which shrank and distorted its 165 folios beyond legibility. In 2012, conservators began treating the manuscript to unfold its creases, after which digital imaging specialists took between fifty and sixty high-​resolution photographs of each page. Computer scientists at University College London then developed software to virtually flatten the text, rendering it readable again. A team of palaeographers transcribed and encoded the text using the Text Encoding Initiative standard for scholarly digital editions and made it available online alongside facsimile images.14 The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) has also used digital restoration techniques to virtually remove grime from and reconstruct fragments of early music reused as binding waste in the early modern period. They have also been able to erase acid burn from Tudor music written on acidic papers and recover music scraped away from parchment to make room for other texts.15 These techniques, which Julia Craig-​McFeely describes as ‘forensic reconstruction’, do not use more advanced digital technologies like machine learning, relying mostly on commercial imaging software.16 However, they do result in a legible digital version of a manuscript that does not, and cannot, exist in physical form. Just as earlier machines like mechanical collators helped bibliographers see print differently, digital forensic aids are now helping to build an electronic archive of otherwise invisible early materials: of hidden texts made legible by algorithms and deteroriated books that software has flattened into clean digital images.

708   Whitney Trettien

Computer Vision Large digital archives of images and machine learning have together resulted in an entirely new method of visual processing with deep relevance to early modern book history: computer vision at scale. By training an algorithm to recognize certain shapes in a database of images, computer scientists can automate a number of tasks useful to bibliography. For instance, an algorithm might be taught to extract all illustrations, headpieces, decorative initials, and devices from facsimiles of books, curating a digital collection of woodcuts or engravings. In 15cILLUSTRATION, a database of fifteenth-​ century printed illustrations built as part of the 15cBOOKTRADE project, this technology has been used to track the recurrence of cuts within a single edition or across different editions, with the aim of learning more about the working practices of early printers as they recycled visual material.17 Algorithms might also be taught to match patterns and thus build groups of related items, as the VGG (Visual Geometry Group) Image Search Engine (VISE) does. Open source software developed at the Visual Geometry Group based out of Oxford, and also used in the 15cBOOKTRADE project, VISE has been successfully implemented in the long-​running Bodleian Ballads project, a digital archive of broadside ballads first founded in 1999. Using the image search feature, researchers may query the project’s database for any woodcut illustration or decorative piece found in a digitized ballad and have returned all other instances of that image’s use across the digital collection. The results are the raw materials from which a more detailed close reading of a single image’s circulation through seventeenth-​century popular culture might be traced, as Giles Bergel and his collaborators show in their study of The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle.18 Such technologies are especially advantageous to research on early modern print, since they search and return specific patterns, rather than general classes: that is, they will return all instances of this specific woodcut of a dog, mechanically reproduced across a set of documents, rather than any image of a dog. To search categories requires a collection marked up using Iconclass, a much more laborious process typically done by hand. By identifying subtle variations at the level of the pixel, algorithms can also be trained to ‘see’ traces in digital photographs not easily detectable by humans. I have already noted how Seale’s team is using this type of machine learning to extract text from a charred papyrus scroll; when applied to early modern book history, similar techniques have proven particularly useful for watermark analysis. Watermarks in paper have long been the subject of printed catalogues and then digital databases, and for good reason: the more information there is available about when and where certain marks and countermarks were in use, the more useful they are as tools for identifying provenance. Yet it can be difficult to see a watermark on a printed page. Since the mid-​1960s, beta-​radiography has been used to generate a sharp, unobstructed impression, whether the sheet is printed or not, as have cheaper, faster methods like photosensitive DYLUX papers.19 More recently, near infrared imaging has effectively extracted watermarks

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    709 from sheets printed with inks that do not absorb infrared light, like certain chalks, while new hyperspectral cameras have been able to identify watermarks even on sheets printed with infrared-​absorbing carbon-​black ink.20 However, larger datasets and machine learning now make it possible for algorithms to match patterns in a photograph of even a fairly obscured watermark. For example, a team led by Xi Shen has shown that a dataset of roughly 6,000 images is large enough to utilize deep learning to automatically sort these photographs into different classes.21 As these datasets grow, the algorithm learns to better recognize finer detail in the images and its accuracy rate improves. At scale, this knowledge could be used to fill in the gaps in our current, and notoriously unreliable, watermark catalogues by narrowing down the range of dates for specific marks, which would in turn help bibliographers more accurately identify the provenance of materials. While early modern antiquarians, and later bibliographers, certainly desired the type of total knowledge that such tools hold out promise of, these widescale micro-​ and macroscopic methods of reading were impossible before digital technologies, and it remains to be seen what as-​yet-​unimagined insights they might yield. Other projects have used machine learning to automate the transcription of manuscripts. For instance, eScriptorium, developed by digital humanists working in the medieval period, helps palaeographers train a neural network to ‘read’ a particular hand, filling in easily recognizable characters while offering educated guesses for more difficult passages. When deployed across a large corpus, this network may also be able to identify the work of individual scribes or related styles of writing. The software Transkribus also uses artificial intelligence to identify the structure of a manuscript and transcribe handwritten text, a process known as handwritten text recognition (HTR).22 Like eScriptorium, Transkribus uses a page image of text, accompanied by its accurate transcription, to create the ‘ground truth’ of a particular hand. As Peter Stokes has pointed out, the quickest way to build this basis may be to manufacture a deepfake of found text—​that is, a text that looks as if it were written in the scribe’s handwriting, but which does not actually exist as a historical document—​since a faked image will ensure an accurate transcription.23 This ground truth forms the basis for training an HTR model that, once developed, can be applied to the rest of a corpus written in the same hand. This model then spits back a confidence matrix showing how likely it is that any given character in an alphabet could appear at any given spot on a line. Transkribus is currently being tested on or used to transcribe Foucault’s reading notes, Eugène Wilhelm’s personal diary written from 1885 to 1951, early modern German correspondence, Greek Byzantine literary texts, and Hans Sloane’s handwritten catalogues, but it remains underutilized as a tool for working with early modern English manuscripts.24 The potential pay-​off of computer vision and machine learning technologies for a certain type of early modern book history is enormous. By offering a bird’s-​eye perspective on the trade, pattern-​matching algorithms could open new pathways for research into the history of printing and papermaking, finally making it possible to ask—​and answer—​questions about the circulation of raw materials across Europe in the hand-​ press period. Similarly, HTR models could unlock vast archives of manuscripts for

710   Whitney Trettien digital search and data mining, much as the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) has done for Early English Books Online by providing full-​text transcriptions of early printed books. There are, however, major obstacles still preventing the broader adoption of these technologies. The first is, as always, funding, or the general lack thereof for humanities research. Artificial intelligences take time and large teams to develop, implement, and disseminate; most humanities grants provide minimal funding for a few years at most, leaving many promising projects to stall out after an initial round or two of support. The second is the siloing of digital archives across individual institutions’ websites. To develop their technologies, researchers like Xi Shen must build their own collections of images, often from dispersed libraries that do not allow experimental processing or in some cases even downloading of their photographs. Truly reaping the benefits of these technologies would require aggregating resources under a shared infrastructure, a problem that IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and initiatives like DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) are beginning to address.25 Finally, interest in bespoke books and unusual manuscripts has made technologies based on scale generally irrelevant to historians of the book in early modern England. For instance, the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective does not use HTR but instead prefers to crowdsource transcriptions of individual manuscripts, often as part of assigned work in undergraduate courses and through transcribathons. This preference reflects the highly irregular nature of many household books, containing uneven handwriting or multiple hands that change over time. It underscores how many early modernists use transcription as part of their pedagogy and as a research tool, too, since working closely with a manuscript is the best way to learn about material culture and come to know its contents. But the lack of interest in large-​scale computer vision among early modern book historians also points to the ways such technologies tend to generalize. That is, they excel at tracking trends across time and phenomena well represented in archives but miss the diverse array of marks, papers, or images found in early books.

Facsimiles The vast quantity of images available online has made computer vision and machine learning viable digital research methods; but it has also sparked new theoretical questions about the nature of the facsimile itself. For instance, how do digital surrogates and software (mis)represent early modern archival materials? What is lost through the process of digitization, and what gained? What new bibliographic methods are needed to read a digital facsimile? As with scientific tools, editors have long exploited technologies of reproduction to make early modern books more accessible. As early as 1690, Samuel Pepys ordered the printing of The Order of the hospitalls of K. Henry the viiith and K. Edward the vith—​ until then only available in manuscript—​as evidence in a dispute over which entity

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    711 had jurisdiction over the four Royal Hospitals. The book’s imprint cites the date of the original order, 1557, despite the fact that it was printed in 1690, and the text is set in a black-​letter typeface and style intended to imitate mid-​sixteenth-​century printing; thus it might be considered one of the first examples of period printing and very close to a type facsimile.26 Later type facsimiles looked so like the originals that they have fooled bibliographers and cataloguers, including W. W. Greg, who included Joseph Smeeton’s early nineteenth-​century facsimile of Solimon and Perseda (1599) in A List of English Plays Written before 1643 and Printed before 1700 (1900).27 Such methods of reproduction are crude, though, in comparison with those that came in the wake of photography’s invention in the nineteenth century. Photolithography, photozincography, and especially collotype, a photomechanical copying process, offered more accurate, indeed near exact, copies of page images, making possible for the first time reproductions that could reasonably substitute for the original. Microform in the 1940s—​especially the Early English Books series published by University Microfilms, Incorporated—​then photocopying in the 1950s and access to cheaper portable cameras in the 1970s and 1980s accelerated the spread of reproductions, to the extent that, as Alan Galey has argued, modern bibliography has become inextricable from the technologies of reproduction that support its work.28 With the proliferation of reproductions has come a new crop of questions about the status of the facsimile as a material document. In the library sciences, for instance, cataloguers have debated whether to treat each facsimile as a new item with a unique record or to list a reproduction under its original’s entry. Early standards like the A.L.A. Catalog Rules of 1941 promoted the former, while the latter system—​conflating an item and its reproduction—​became standard after the Anglo-​American Cataloging Rules of 1967, which more generally advocated that related works, including facsimiles, reprints, or new editions, be grouped together.29 Subsequent revisions to these rules and the introduction of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records in 1998 have allowed for more flexibility and nuance when describing different iterations of a work. However, the legacy of earlier standards persists in many databases and digital projects, which often link digital images to the original item’s descriptive metadata rather than treating them as separate materials with their own time of creation or place of publication. The primacy of the original artefact in library catalogues and databases has in turn encouraged imaging practices that attempt to replicate the physical codex, as Zachary Lesser and I show in a case study of a copy of William Lambarde and Laurence Nowell’s Archaionomia (1568) now at the Folger Shakespeare Library.30 While disbound, it was photographed in loose gatherings stacked to look like a bound book and attached to metadata that confusingly describe all seven copies of the 1568 Archaionomia at the Folger. The result is a digital facsimile that reproduces an imagined original that in fact does not exist as such. Thus the way in which a library catalogue conceptualizes the relationship between various forms of a text influences how early modern materials exist, are perceived, and circulate within digital spaces. Meanwhile, bibliographers have taken a different tack, arguing instead that—​as G. Thomas Tanselle put it in an influential essay of 1989—​‘every reproduction is a new

712   Whitney Trettien document, with characteristics of its own, and no artifact can be a substitute for another artifact’.31 This claim took root most recently in a cluster of articles that critically reflect upon the history of the field’s most important digital resource, Early English Books Online (EEBO).32 A ProQuest-​managed database of digitized microfilm surrogates based on the Early English Books project, which was itself originally based on the Short Title Catalogue (STC), EEBO offers access not to the printed books—​as the catalogue’s metadata implies—​but instead to heavily remediated facsimiles. Lacking colour and many blank pages, with page openings that present a book as unrealistically flattened, these reproductions should be treated as a kind of visual index to the STC, offering a distorted view on the original item.33 In some cases, these distortions occlude material facts, like the presence of rubrication; in other cases, they may bring into relief parts of the physical artefact that otherwise would go unnoticed in a rare-​book room, as Mary Learner has shown in a case study of early modern herbals and pattern books.34 In this way, going back to Tanselle’s earlier argument, EEBO’s facsimiles are born-​digital artefacts whose own unique material properties are just beginning to be understood as part of the long history of the printed book, which is itself already a type of reproduction. Because photographic facsimiles are now widely recognized by bibliographers as helpful aids but inadequate surrogates, a new generation of book historical research is beginning to imagine how books might be remediated differently. Here, Dot Porter’s work on digital manuscripts has been influential. Drawing on Masahiro Mori’s concept of the ‘uncanny valley’—​the idea that humans have a greater affinity for robots that more closely resemble actual humans until they suddenly do not, sparking feelings of revulsion—​Porter points out that systems for presenting digitized medieval manuscripts that attempt to imitate the physical reading experience actually offer a worse representation than those surrogates that imperfectly mediate the original.35 The British Library’s Turning the Pages application is a prime example: by animating each page turn as if the facsimile is a physical codex, this app attempts a realism that actually feels disturbingly unreal. As Porter and others have pointed out, a better solution to expanding access to items would be to embrace the mediated nature of all digital reproductions. For instance, colour bars and rulers should not be cropped out of high-​resolution photographs, nor should these images be automatically deskewed or filtered (with minimal exceptions). More, institutions might increase the formats of reproductions available to researchers. Thus in addition to photographs, digital libraries and archives might incorporate videos that show how a book sits and moves or visualizations of a book’s structure, as Porter has done at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and in the BiblioPhilly project. Or libraries could digitize their card catalogues and thus make public decades of handwritten notes about unique manuscripts, as the Boston Public Library recently did.36 They could also provide reference photos taken by staff, as the Folger Shakespeare Library did in October 2020 as a means of aiding researchers who had lacked access to libraries due to a global pandemic.37 In the next phase of platform development, institutions might begin allowing researchers, too, to upload their own photos directly to the catalogue. Doing so would enable a global reference library of digital images taken at different times, under different conditions—​a kind of visual index for the digital age.

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    713

Databases The widespread availability of facsimiles has given rise to a wholly new kind of resource: the digital library or collection. Sitting somewhere between a digital edition and a digital archive—​recognizing the slipperiness of that last term—​these extra-​ institutional resources curate some subset of early modern books or texts dispersed across a wide range of physical libraries and gather their surrogates on a single website. Exemplary of this kind of project and the impact it is having on the field is the UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), directed by Patricia Fumerton. Ephemeral specimens of early modern popular culture, broadside ballads largely exist in discrete collections organized by seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century antiquarians. These earlier collectors sometimes manipulated the originals, trimming and pasting them into albums. In an earlier time, before fast and relatively cheap international travel, these books might have served scholars locally as samples of early modern popular culture. Today, though, they inhibit research by locking away ephemera in dozens of different libraries. Taking this problem seriously, EBBA brings together digital facsimiles of nearly ten thousand of these scattered ballads along with, in many cases, facsimile transcriptions, text transcriptions, song recordings, and text and image mining tools. The entire archive is searchable and augmented with essays and visualizations that begin the process of interpreting this unprecedented resource. Recent single-​author digital projects, like the Pulter Project or Digital Cavendish, have taken a similar approach, offering something more like a curated library of resources than the scholarly editions of texts familiar from print. Even sites focused on more traditional methods of textual editing still tend to provide high-​resolution digital facsimiles with the text. As a result, these projects have spurred a renewed interest in materialist methods and bibliographic questions, ironically driving many scholars back into rare-​book rooms and physical archives. While facsimiles are helping some scholars reimagine digital archives and editions, databases hosted on the open web are galvanizing others to rethink cataloguing. Alan Farmer and Lesser, editors of the Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP), identify a distinction between a first and second generation of online catalogues. The first, which includes the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and EEBO, ‘aim for a comprehensive treatment of early modern print culture’, whereas second-​generation resources ‘aim for in-​depth coverage of one particular kind of text or document’.38 In the case of DEEP, this means building an architecture that provides information of interest to theatre and book historians, such as whether a specific theatre is named on a title page. It also means incorporating relevant distinctions into the metadata, such as the difference between a ‘modern attribution’—​the author as understood today—​and ‘playbook attribution’, the author named on the book.39 Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM) similarly adapts his four-​volume, print-​based catalogue for the digital environment by offering multiple views and search options on a greatly expanded database.

714   Whitney Trettien Still other born-​digital databases even more drastically shift the idea of a catalogue. For instance, emerging out of Laura Estill’s research on dramatic extracts in seventeenth-​ century manuscripts, DEx indexes not editions or individual copies of books but the snippets of play-​texts found in them, effectively inverting the typical book catalogue. Users can browse extracts by author, manuscript, character, or play and thus track how certain figures migrated through manuscripts as readers repurposed and recycled popular texts to suit new social or political contexts.40 The Digital Miscellanies Index similarly disarticulates individual books to record the contents of poetic miscellanies published between 1557 and 1800, allowing scholars to navigate the vast network of excerpted resources. The Lost Plays Database goes so far as to catalogue plays that exist today only as metadata. By shifting the foundational purpose and structure of catalogues, these projects are changing access to, and thus reimagining, earlier textual cultures. The stand-​alone, scholar-​driven nature of these databases can sometimes present a problem for sustainability and access. For instance, if the owning library does not link to a resource, the editing scholar moves institutions, or funding dries up, the project can become isolated and eventually go dormant. Such was the case of An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–​1682, a database of 4,639 poems found in forty-​one printed books. Edited by Adam Smyth as a companion to his 2004 book, today it is accessible only through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, although it remains functional—​ a testament to the value of using durable underlying technologies.41 To avoid a similar fate, the British Book Trade Index (BBTI), a biographical database of all who worked in the English and Welsh book trades up to 1851, has had to migrate to multiple institutions in its nearly forty years of existence. Founded in 1983 by Peter Isaac at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne as a pet project after his retirement from a career in public health engineering, it was later established as an open, web-​based resource at the University of Birmingham under the direction of Maureen Bell before moving to Oxford in 2015, where it is now hosted by the Centre for the Study of the Book.42 Such moves require commitment, supervision, and funding, often from competitive grants, and can easily soak up a scholar’s research time. Alternatively, projects may publish their data with a for-​profit academic press, as the Perdita Project has done. Begun in 1997 as an open access, scholar-​edited index of early modern manuscripts written by women, it is now available in two versions: the original frames-​based website still hosted by the University of Warwick, and an expanded subscription-​only database published by Adam Matthew Digital, an independent subsidiary of Sage Publications specializing in online resources for humanities research.43 Despite scholars’ justifiable trepidation about handing over their research data to for-​profit publishers, companies like Adam Matthew Digital at least have a financial incentive to maintain the project for its subscribing customers, as well as the time and resources to do so. In the next phase of digital humanities curation, scholars, librarians, and cataloguers must work together with invested institutional partners to build larger networked and interoperable databases. This requires early buy-​in from a resourced institution, dedicated and full-​time digital specialists, and collaborative teams of co-​directors

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    715 and trained support staff (rather than untrained graduate students who simply need funding, as is too often the case now) who can share responsibilities. To exploit the power of linked open data, these networked collections must be built in such a way that their records can be easily migrated to other platforms as the need inevitably arises. Ideally, they would also be capable of ingesting assets from other sites, so that currently siloed projects might be drawn into larger, more sustainable networks. Imagine, for instance, a version of EEBO that also includes the data from DEEP for playbooks and which links to entries in the BBTI from the ‘Imprint’ field. Or a version of the Folger’s new Early Modern Manuscripts Online website that incorporates CELM data for literary manuscripts, carefully curated descriptions of women’s manuscripts from Perdita, and digital editions made available through the sites like the Pulter Project. The technology to build these types of resources currently exists, in fact has existed for some time, as NINES has shown for nineteenth-​century scholarship. By bringing together different national bibliographical projects and linking each record to existing digital facsimiles, the in-​progress Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) aspires to be just such a resource for hand-​press period books printed in Europe. Yet real structural barriers continue to prevent broader cross-​linking across resources, including the lack of standard metadata schemas across projects, lack of institutional resources for long-​term maintenance, austerity measures that have transformed digital humanities projects into engines for funding PhDs in some countries, and the need for scholars to manage their own projects in order for them to count towards tenure and promotion.

Quantification Even with the current limitations, it is clear that early modernists have to hand a variety of relatively comprehensive corpora of texts and bibliographic metadata to work with, especially when compared with those for other periods. More, this data is typically not under any copyright restrictions, since the materials themselves are in the public domain. Thus unlike, say, twentieth-​century novels, early modern texts are available for digital mining, manipulation, and remix. One might reasonably expect, then, that early modernists would be ahead of scholars in other fields when it comes to quantitative analysis, topic modelling, and what Martin Mueller has described as ‘scalable reading’, especially since book history in many ways developed out of the urge to enumerate the print trade.44 Yet computational methods built on scale are not as well established in early modern book history as they are in other periods. Why? There are a few technical reasons for this.45 Printers in the hand-​press period were more likely to use multiple typefaces in a single book, and the text itself is less likely to be set with a straight baseline; as a result, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies used to extract text from an image do not work as well on early modern print as they do on more modern resources, especially when mediated through a grainy, digitized microfilm image, as on EEBO. Initiatives like the Early Modern OCR Project

716   Whitney Trettien (eMOP), spearheaded by Laura Mandell, have sought to correct this problem through innovations in OCR technology and crowdsourcing.46 Other projects, like Text Creation Partnership, have relied on low-​wage workers in East and South Asia to key in the texts by hand. While this solution results in a near-​perfect transcription of an EEBO facsimile, it also perpetuates colonial hierarchies by outsourcing manual labor to formerly occupied territories for the benefit of mostly Western scholars—​an ethically tenuous position upon which to build research platforms. More, even with a clean transcription, the use of non-​standard orthography in the period presents a problem to most scalable methods.47 Machines search for exact strings of characters; to match a pattern across a large corpus, that corpus must either be standardized with respect to spelling, using a tool like VARD 2 or MorphAdorner, or—​much more difficult—​the computer must be trained on the kind and degree of variation that should be swept into the results. Finally, TCP texts are not well marked up for bibliographic or literary analysis at scale. Early Print—​a project initiated by Martin Mueller and Joseph Lowenstein, and built in part upon the foundations created by the Shakespeare and His Contemporaries Project—​ is beginning to do some of this work by linguistically annotating TCP texts for deep searching; but it is of course an overwhelming task.48 Aside from these technical constraints, the nature of the early modern archive is itself limiting. In sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century England, genre categories were more fluid and existed across multiple media formats simultaneously. Poetry migrated from printed collections to manuscript miscellanies and back to print, long-​form sermons and essays might have been copied in shorthand and never printed, even pamphlets and newsbooks circulated as both handwritten and rapidly printed documents. Yet existing digital databases are strongly bifurcated between printed (EEBO) and manuscript (EMMO, CELM) sources, with many ephemera and mixed items slipping between the cracks or landing in separate databases like EBBA. Thus one cannot stage a quantitative argument about, for instance, gender and a genre like ‘lyric poetry’ using only TCP texts without severely distorting the sample and thereby misrepresenting the form in the period. Even were one to build a combined dataset of print and manuscript sources, this digital resource would dimly represent the messy intermediality of the period and, as mentioned above, would not capture enough bibliographic metadata to generate unique insights. Much additional archival work is needed to make any claims based on computational analysis right now. Finally, the corpus of available archival materials in general is smaller than for later periods, making it easier to curate bespoke datasets for any given task while diminishing the value of methods based on quantity. For these reasons, the computational tools more popularly championed by digital humanities scholars working primarily in the nineteenth century—​who might reasonably assume that a genre like ‘the novel’ was both relatively stable and circulating almost entirely in print—​ are not readily applicable to those working in the early modern period. At the same time, precisely because these limitations demand that scholars pay closer attention to the nature of textual circulation, reproduction, and remediation, what quantitative work there is tends to hew closer to book historical questions. A recent collaboration between literary historian Christopher Warren, data scientist Max G’sell,

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    717 and graduate students Pierce Wiliams and Shruti Rijhwani is exemplary in this respect. The team began with a bibliographic mystery: who printed John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644)? To answer this question, they used the OCR application Ocular to identify four pieces of damaged type in the pamphlet, thereby confirming it was the work of one printing house working with limited fonts. They then used statistical analysis to compare these damaged pieces to 10 million impressions of type extracted from 100 tracts digitized on EEBO that are known to have been printed by a likely candidate. The result is clear evidence that Matthew Simmons and Thomas Paine were responsible for printing Areopagitica, possibly with the help of Gregory Dexter.49 Analysing damaged type has been part of the bibliographer’s bag of tricks since Charleton Hinman’s pioneering study of Shakespeare’s First Folio, for which he relied on his opto-​mechanical collator and a set of handwritten index cards painstakingly compiled over eighteen months. However, as Warren and his collaborators point out, such methods were impractical for most projects until large corpora of digitized texts and applications in computer vision made it possible to sort, classify, and compare glyphs at scale. Other projects have found methods for negotiating the media milieu and non-​ standard records of early English texts. For instance, in a process they call ‘linked reading’, James Jaehoon Lee, Blaine Greteman, Jason Lee, and David Eichmann combine two resources: Global Renaissance, which provides topic models for texts in the TCP, showing terms and concepts that have a high likelihood of occurring together, with Shakeosphere, a network of ESTC-​derived bibliographic data showing who created and sold printed books. They do so to examine the question of race in Othello ‘from multiple perspectives and constantly shifting angles of vision, while leveraging the distinct strengths of each dataset and connecting them in ways that minimize their limitations’.50 The result of their linked readings show ‘that geographical, ecological, and humoral reading strategies . . . are equally important in defining the early modern discourse of race as the widely-​accepted readings that understand plays like Othello through the lens of skin color or religion’.51 Anupam Basu and Joseph Lowenstein have similarly developed new methods of analysis to determine whether the orthography of Edmund Spenser’s texts is distinctive and thus worth preserving in modern editions. Extracting letter n-​grams, or essentially sequences of letters, from EEBO-​TCP, Basu and Lowenstein used principal component analysis to build a model of orthographic change across the early modern period. This model provided the background against which they could compare the orthography in any of Spenser’s texts. In this way, they determined that Spenser’s print publications are not as idiosyncratic in their spelling, statistically speaking, as has been conventionally assumed through close reading alone.52 By treating orthographic variation not as a challenge to overcome but as a variable to measure, Basu and Lowenstein, like Lee and colleagues, leverage the potential of the existing digital corpus, and do so while attending to the material agency of authors, printers, and printed texts. There is one area of early modern studies, worth briefly mentioning, where computational text analysis has long flourished: stylistics. As early as the nineteenth century, the meterologist Thomas Corwin Mendenhall used frequency distribution to identify

718   Whitney Trettien the style of different authors, marking up texts individually by hand. This work gave rise to the field of stylometry, or the use of computational analysis to attribute authorship to anonymous, collaborative, or contested texts. Stylometry has been used as part of the broader editorial process to delimit an author’s canon and determine an authoritative scholarly text, especially in the case of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Most recently, it is being used by Mel Evans and Alan Hogarth to investigate authorship as part of the Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age (E-​ABIDA) project. Scholars have also used what is now often called computational stylistics to investigate patterns in the literature of the period more broadly, as Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-​Hirsch have shown in their recent book.53 While such work has relevance for early modern literary studies, it does not often engage with bibliography or book history beyond using a digitized corpus of printed texts and so falls outside the purview of the present chapter.

Networks If computational methods have not gained as much traction in early modern book history as in other historical fields, social network analysis (SNA) has. SNA is a means of visualizing a set of relations (‘edges’) between entities (‘nodes’), whether humans, texts, or other objects. Relations can be directional or show a node’s centrality, measuring the degree and strength of connections. Most popular applications for building social networks, like the open source software Gephi, also have a temporal dimension, making it possible to reveal shifts in a set of relations over time. Thus, to use a prominent example, the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon site—​an ambitious, well-​funded initiative to map every relationship between every known producer of early modern culture—​ displays the degree of separation between one person and another through the colour and size of each node, while the colour of the edges indicates whether a relationship has been statistically inferred or contributed by a knowledgeable scholar. Users can also view connections between categories of individuals, like all booksellers, along a timeline showing who was active when. Although Six Degrees is not a specifically book historical resource, it was built by automatically extracting names and relationships from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a process that suggests the productively parasitic relationship between established print reference works and digital projects at the present moment. And while SNA can yield novel results at this scale, its success as a method for inquiring into the past does not depend on big data; smaller, hand-​curated projects can be just as interesting, and in fact the networks on Six Degrees that a scholar contributed tend to be the most illuminating. In many ways, the same reasons why quantitative book-​historical work is difficult with the given resources explain why networks are attractive: they can help scholars to track the circulation of styles across a coterie, map spheres of influence, and visualize relations between writers and readers across genre, media, and format, and they can do so without relying on large, standardized corpora of early modern texts. The social

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    719 network as a model of relations also seems to capture something about the unique media ecology of early modern England, where letters to readers, dedicatory poems, and other preliminaries often defined the status and nature of a given book, in manuscript or print, even more than the text itself. Michael Gavin makes this point in an article on the sociology of early English literary criticism: Rather than an author/​public dyad, the social structure delineated by paratextual criticism bound poets within a web of others: not only other writers, but also politicians, stationers, and players, as well as writers from earlier eras and foreign places. Criticism was the metadiscourse of the literary marketplace. For this reason, changes in criticism can be tracked by examining changes in the relationships that criticism was employed to enact.54

To do this work, Gavin ‘experiment[s]‌with a method that transforms publication metadata and the results of analyses into network graphs’, producing what he calls historical text networks.55 In these networks, books are not containers for texts but ‘relational data’: ‘points of connection that bind together their various makers’.56 John R. Ladd has made a similar argument in his work constructing a social network of dedications extracted from printed books in EEBO-​TCP, as has Heidi Craig in her work on dramatic paratexts.57 By revealing how publishers leveraged the materiality of the printed artefact, these networks have the ability to offer a more nuanced portrait of the overlapping agencies at play in the marketplace and, in doing so, speak concretely to abstract concepts like influence, value, and prestige. While these networks rely on the interconnectedness of early modern texts, it is worth emphasizing that, at its best, SNA reveals relationships that otherwise remain latent but unacknowledged in the material archive. In other words, a network visualization is not just a means of displaying what is known but, like the hyperspectral imaging techniques described above, a technology for revealing what has hitherto remained hidden about the social life of a printed book or manuscript. For instance, in their analysis of the Devonshire Manuscript, Ray Siemens and his collaborators found that women’s importance to the coterie, and their confidence in sharing in displays of literary prowess, increased when examined as part of the social network threaded throughout the manuscript. As Siemens and his collaborators write, ‘many issues illuminated by these tools would be difficult to identify and examine when looking at the flat manuscript page: the centrality of Margaret Douglas’ interactions, for instance, or the emergence of certain words such as “women” and “foe”, which demonstrate the conspicuousness and importance of certain themes and how they relate to the social networks in specific sections of the manuscript’.58 In his analysis of the Hartlib papers, Evan Bourke has similarly shown that, while they were not sending and receiving as many letters as male members of the Hartlib circle, two women—​Dorothy Moore Dury and Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh—​nevertheless acted as crucial intermediaries, messengers, and distributors of material.59 More recently, Erin A. McCarthy has initiated STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1558-​1660, a project combining

720   Whitney Trettien quantiative methods, SNA, and graph theory to identify macroscale patterns in the circulation of poetry through manuscripts. Thus SNA can both counter existing biases that overemphasize the presence of certain (male) authors like Thomas Wyatt or Samuel Hartlib and extract new points of connection demanding further investigation. As material documents, letters especially lend themselves to SNA, since they are direct evidence of a connection between two individuals and a broader web of correspondence. Blaine Greteman, for instance, has used ‘weak ties’ in Milton’s letters to understand his ‘poetics of the present’.60 Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert have visualized a network of 289 letters written between Protestants in England during Mary I’s reign, as culled from John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, including other social links, like familial connections, in the data. Their analysis reveals that certain women, such as Joyce Hales and Margery Cooke, as well as letter carriers and those providing financial support were increasingly important to the network in the wake of a martyr’s death.61 In a slightly later period, Mapping the Republic of Letters has visualized the correspondence of prominent seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century philosophers and scientists, while Lindsay O’Neill has examined ‘individual and interlocking epistolary networks constructed by a disparate group of letter writers whose collective efforts illuminate the structure and workings of the British world socially, geographically, and communicatively at a time when the nation was becoming a dominant world power’.62 This research all tends to rely on relatively small datasets, the shape of which is determined by which letters survive in archives and which do not. However, similar methods for mapping correspondence are being tested at scale through Networking Archives, an AHRC-​funded research project to create a ‘meta-​archive’ of nearly 450,000 letter records gathered from Early Modern Letters Online, the Tudor State Papers 1509–​1603, and Stuart State Papers, 1603–​ 1714. Tudor Networks, a recent visualization of letters from and to the Tudor government mapped across time and place, shows the power of larger networks to capture the intricacies and intrigue of early modern governance.63 *** When Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote her two-​volume tome on printing history, there was nothing inherently digital about the technologies she used. Her book is an exercise in quantity that does not use quantitative methods, a product of information overload that does not condense but expands historical narrative. Eisenstein was explicitly inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s heady brand of presentist media history but nevertheless carefully avoids mentioning twentieth-​century technologies outside the preface. Yet the increasingly digital environment in which she was writing suffuses the project: it affects why she took up the topic of movable type in the first place, as well how she chose to analyse its impact on early modern European society and culture. Even in the form of a printed monograph, her project reads like a massive database of secondary sources loosely organized around a set of statements about printing technologies, and one could easily imagine that, were she a scholar with a different type of training, she might have undertaken the task using punched cards rather than pen and paper. In short, the book cannot escape the media ecology in which its author conceived it.

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    721 The same remains true of book historians and their research questions today. Steeped in social media, working with facsimiles and data across virtual spaces, we are writing the history of the early modern book in the digital age whether we use explicitly digital methods and techniques or not. Indeed, the range of topics addressed in this volume attest to the ways in which our changing research environment has shifted the grounds of book history. Thus even as the six clusters of digital scholarship addressed above are, as this chapter has argued, turning the early modern book into a completely different kind of object, this transition should be seen as part of a broader turn away from the fusty scientism of analytic bibliography and toward a much messier, more interdisciplinary field. The turn involves deepening collaborations between scholars, librarians, curators, technologists, scientists, and conservators, all of which demand new ways of working and credit. To fulfil their promise, these new methods will also require more funding than is now available for historical and humanities research. Yet even if the potential of, for instance, machine learning or textual analysis at scale remains merely potential well into the future, imagining new possibilities has already triggered a change in thinking about what early modern books are, what they were, and how they circulated.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. i, p. x. 2. Eisenstein, The Printing Press, vol. i, p. x. 3. Eisenstein, The Printing Press, vol. i, p. xi. 4. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 5. Persifor Frazer, A Manual of the Study of Documents to Establish the Individual Character of Handwriting and to Detect Fraud and Forgery Including Several New Methods of Research (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott Co., 1894). On this early history of forensic analysis, see Jeffrey Abt, ‘Objectifying the Book: The Impact of Science on Books and Manuscripts’, Library Trends, 36/​1 (Summer 1987), 23–​38. 6. Carolina S. Silva et al., ‘Near Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging for Forensic Analysis of Document Forgery’, Analyst, 139/​20 (2014), 5176–​5184; Andre Braz et al., ‘Raman Spectroscopy for Forensic Analysis of Inks in Questioned Documents’, Forensic Science International 232/​1–​3 (2013), 206–​212; Joe Nickell, Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), esp. chs. 6 and 7. 7. Sarah Fiddyment et al., ‘So You Want to Do Biocodicology? A Field Guide to the Biological Analysis of Parchment’, Heritage Science, 7 (2019), article no. 35. 8. Paul S. Koda, ‘Scientific Equipment for the Examination of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Documents’, Library Trends, 36/​1 (Summer 1987), 39–​51. 9. Timothy Stinson, ‘Knowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval Parchment’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA), 103/​4 (Dec. 2009), 435–​453.

722   Whitney Trettien 10. S. Blair Hedges, ‘Wormholes Record Species History in Space and Time’, Biology Letters, 9/​ 1 (Feb. 2013), 20120926. doi:10.1098/​rsbl.2012.0926. 11. William Brent Seales et al., ‘From Damage to Discovery via Virtual Unwrapping: Reading the Scroll from En-​Gedi’, Science Advances, 2/​9 (21 Sept. 2016), e1601247. 21 Sep. 2016, doi:10.1126/​sciadv.1601247. 12. Clifford Seth Parker et al., ‘From Invisibility to Readability: Recovering the Ink of the Herculaneum’, PLoS ONE, 14/​5 (8 May 2019). In March 2023, Seales’ team launched the Vesuvius Challenge, inviting researchers around the world to help build the systems of artificial intelligence that will decode more of the Herculaneum scrolls, with $500,000 in prizes attached. 13. Maria Fredericks, ‘Inside Story: Using X-​ray Microtomography to See Hidden Features of a Manuscript Codex’, Morgan Library and Museum, 1 Nov. 2020, www.themor​gan.org/​blog/​ ins​ide-​story-​using-​x-​ray-​micr​otom​ogra​phy-​see-​hid​den-​featu​res-​man​uscr​ipt-​codex. 14. Kazim Pal et al., ‘3D Reconstruction for Damaged Documents: Imaging of the Great Parchment Book’, HIP ‘13: Proceedings of the 23nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (Aug. 2013), 14–​ 21; Kazim Pal et al., ‘Digital Reconstructing the Great Parchment Book: 3D Recovery of Fire-​Damaged Historical Documents’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32/​4 (2017), 887–​917; Nicola Avery et al., ‘Great Parchment Book Project’, Journal of Digital Humanities, 3/​1 (Spring 2014), journalofdigitalhumanities.org/​3-​1/​great-​parchment-​book-​project. 15. ‘Digital Restoration’, DIAMM, www.diamm.ac.uk/​about/​techni​cal-​overv​iew/​digi​tal-​rest​ orat​ion. 16. Julia Craig-​McFeely, ‘Recovering Lost Texts: Rebuilding Lost Manuscripts’, Archive Journal (Sept. 2018), www.arc​hive​jour​nal.net/​ess​ays/​rec​over​ing-​lost-​texts-​reb​uild​ing-​lost-​manu​ scri​pts. 17. ‘Illustration’, 15cBOOKTRADE, University of Oxford, 15cbooktrade.ox.ac.uk/​illustration. 18. Giles Bergel et al., ‘Lines of Succession in an English Ballad Tradition: The Publishing History and Textual Descent of The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31/​3 (Sept. 2016), 540–​562. 19. Koda, ‘Scientific Equipment’, 45–​46. In the United States, the use of beta-​radiography requires clearance from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and so has only ever been available in very limited circumstances. 20. John K. Delaney and Murray Loew, ‘Use of Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging (960–​ 1680 nm) and Low Energy X-​Radiography to Visualize Watermarks’, 2018 52nd Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS), Princeton, NJ (2018), 1–​4. 21. Xi Shen et al., ‘Large-​Scale Historical Watermark Recognition: Dataset and a New Consistency-​ Based Approach’, arxiv.org/​ abs/​ 1908.10254. See also Vinaychandran Pondenkandath et al., ‘Cross-​Depicted Historical Motif Categorization and Retrieval with Deep Learning’, Journal of Imaging, 6/​7 1 (2020), 71; Oumayma Bounou et al., ‘A Web Application for Watermark Recognition’, Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (17 July 2020), jdmdh.episciences.org/​6570. 22. Günter Mühlberger et al, ‘Transforming Scholarship in the Archives through Handwritten Text Recognition: Transkribus as a Case Study’, Journal of Documentation, 75/​5 (Sept. 2019), 952–​976. 23. Peter Stokes, ‘Digital and Computational Palaeography: Some Promises and Problems’ (presentation, 13th Annual (Virtual) Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, 18 Nov. 2020).

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    723 24. Emilio Granall et al., ‘Transcription of Spanish Historical Handwritten Documents with Deep Neural Networks’, Journal of Imaging, 4/​1 (2018), 15; Régis Schlagdenhauffen, ‘Optical Recognition Assisted Transcription with Transkribus: The Experiment concerning Eugène Wilhelm’s Personal Diary (1885–​1951)’, Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (2020), jdmdh.episciences.org/​6736; Lazaros Tsochatzidis et al., ‘HTR for Greek Historical Handwritten Documents’, Journal of Imaging, 7/​12 (2021), https://​www. mdpi.com/​2313-​433X/​7/​12/​260; Marco Humbel and Julianna Nyhan, ‘The Application of HTR to Early-​Modern Museum Collections: A Case Study of Sir Hans Sloane’s Miscellanies Catalogue’, in Digital Humanities 2019 Conference (Utrecht: Association for Humanites Computing, 2019). 25. Emanuela Emanuela Boros et al., ‘Automatic Page Classification in a Large Collection of Manuscripts Based on the International Image Interoperability Framework’, 2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), Sydney, Australia (2019), 756–​762. 26. A. W. Pollard, ‘ “Facsimile” Reprints of Old Books’, The Library, 4th ser., 6/​4 (Mar. 1926), 308; David McKitterick, ‘Old Faces and New Acquaintances: Typography and the Association of Ideas’, PBSA 87/​2 (June 1993), 167; D’Arcy Power, ‘Notes on the Bibliography of Three Sixteenth-​Century English Books Connected With London Hospitals’, The Library, 4th ser., 2/​2 (Mar. 1921), 73–​94. 27. A. T. Hazen, ‘Type-​Facsimiles’, Modern Philology, 44/​4 (May 1947), 210. 28. Galey, The Shakespearean Archive. See also David McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation, and Transformation of Books Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 5. 29. For a more detailed overview of this history, see Steven A. Knowlton, ‘How the Current Draft of RDA Addresses the Cataloging of Reproductions, Facsimiles, and Microforms’, Library Resources & Technical Services, 53/​3 (July 2009), 159–​165. 30. Zachary Lesser and Whitney Trettien, ‘Material /​Digital’, in Claire Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text, ed. Claire Bourne (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 402–​423. 31. G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Reproductions and Scholarship’, repr. in Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1998), 70. 32. Diana Kichuk, ‘Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 22/​3 (2007), 291-​303; Shawn Martin, ‘EEBO, Microfilm, and Umberto Eco: Historical Lessons and Future Directions for Building Electronic Collections’, Microform and Imaging Review, 36/​2 (Fall 2007), 159–​164; Ian Gadd, ‘The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online’, Literature Compass, 6/​3 (2009), 680–​692; Bonnie Mak, ‘Archaeology of a Digitization’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65/​8 (2014), 1515–​1526; Michael Gavin, ‘How to Think about EEBO’, Textual Cultures, 11/​1–​2 (Winter 2017), 70–​105. 33. Gavin, ‘How to Think about EEBO’, 87. 34. Mary Learner, ‘Material and Digital Traces in Patterns of Nature: Early Modern Botany Books and Seventeenth-​Century Needlework’, in Intermediate Horizons: Book History and Digital Humanities, ed. by Mark Vareschi and Heather Wacha (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), 61-​87. 35. Dot Porter, ‘The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine: A Discussion of Analogies for Thinking about Digitized Medieval Manuscripts’, Dot Porter Digital, 31 Oct. 2018, www. dotpo​rter​digi​tal.org/​the-​unca​nny-​val​ley-​and-​the-​ghost-​in-​the-​mach​ine-​a-​dis​cuss​ion-​ of-​analog​ies-​for-​think​ing-​about-​digiti​zed-​medie​val-​manu​scri​pts.

724   Whitney Trettien 36. Jay Moschella, ‘BPL Manuscript Card Catalog Now Online’, 10 Feb. 2021, https://​www.bpl. org/​blogs/​post/​bpl-​man​uscr​ipt-​card-​cata​log-​now-​onl​ine/​ 37. Julie Swierczek, ‘Introducing the Folger Reference Image Collection’, The Collation, 13 Oct. 2020, https://​collat​ion.fol​ger.edu/​2020/​10/​refere​nce-​image-​col​lect​ion/​ 38. Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks’, Literature Compass, 5/​6 (2008), 1140. 39. Farmer and Lesser, ‘Early Modern Digital Scholarship’, 1147–​1148. 40. Laura Estill, ‘Introducing DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 13/​4 (2013), 128–​130. 41. Adam Smyth (ed.), An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–​1682, web.archive. org/​web/​20070224222324/​http://​www.adamsm​yth.clara.net. 42. ‘About’, British Book Trade Index, bbti.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/​about. 43. Rosalind Smith, ‘Perdita Project’, Early Modern Women, 11/​2 (Spring 2017), 145–​151. 44. Martin Mueller, ‘Scalable Reading’, scalablereading.northwestern.edu. 45. I am grateful to those who participated in a Twitter thread originating 9 Nov. 2020 for contributing to the ideas developed in the following two paragraphs; see it at: twitter. com/​whitneytrettien/​status/​1325887952338247681?s =​20. Michael Widner makes similar points with respect to quantitative analysis of medieval literature in ‘Toward Text-​Mining the Middle Ages’, in Jennifer Boyle and Helen Burgess (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature (London: Routledge, 2017), 131–​144. 46. ‘About’, eMOP, emop.tamu.edu/​about; Matthew Christy et al., ‘Mass Digitization of Early Modern Texts with Optical Character Recognition’, Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 11/​1 (Dec. 2017), Article 6. An active area of research is the use of neural networks to OCR early printed books; see e.g. Zahra Ziran et al., ‘Text Alignment in Early Printed Books Combining Deep Learning and Dynamic Programming’, Pattern Recognition Letters, 133 (May 2020), 109–​115. 47. Anupam Basu, ‘ “Ill shapen sounds, and false orthography”: A Computational Approach to Early English Orthographic Variation’, in Laure Estill, Diane K. Jakacki, and Michael Ullyot (eds.), Early Modern Studies After the Digital Turn (Tempe: Iter and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016), 169. 48. Martin Mueller, Philip R. Burns, and Craig A. Berry, ‘Collaborative Curation and Exploration of the EEBO-​TCP Corpus’, in Estill, Jakacki, and Ullyot (eds.), Early Modern Studies After the Digital Turn, 145–​165. 49. Christopher Warren et al., ‘Damaged Type and Areopagitica’s Clandestine Printers’, Milton Studies, 62/​1 (2020), 1–​47. 50. James Jaehoon Lee et al., ‘Linked Reading: Digital Historicism and Early Modern Discourses of Race around Shakespeare’s Othello’, Journal of Cultural Analytics (25 Jan. 2018), 4 51. Lee et al., ‘Linked Reading’, 3. 52. Anupam Basu and Joseph Lowenstein, ‘Spenser’s Spell: Archaism and Historical Stylometrics’, Spenser Studies, 33 (2019), 63–​102. 53. Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-​ Hirsch, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 54. Michael Gavin, ‘Historical Text Networks: The Sociology of Early English Criticism’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 50/​1 (Fall 2016), 53. 55. Gavin, ‘Historical Text Networks’, 53. 56. Gavin, ‘Historical Text Networks’, 59.

The Early Modern Book in the Digital Age    725 57. John R. Ladd, ‘Imaginative Networks: Tracing Connections Among Early Modern Book Dedications’, Journal of Cultural Analytics, 3 (30 Mar. 2021), 64–​101. 58. Ray Siemens et al., ‘Drawing Networks in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492): Toward Visualizing a Writing Community’s Shared Apprenticeship, Social Valuation, and Self-​Validation’, Digital Studies/​Le Champ numérique, 1/​1, www.dig​ital​stud​ ies.org/​artic​les/​10.16995/​dscn.142. 59. Evan Bourke, ‘Female Involvement, Membership, and Centrality: A Social Network Analysis of the Hartlib Circle’, Literature Compass, 14/​4 (2017). 60. Blaine Greteman, ‘Milton and the Early Modern Social Network: The Case of the Epitaphium Damonis’, Milton Quarterly, 49/​2 (2015), 79–​95. 61. Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, ‘Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach’, ELH 82/​1 (Spring 2015), 1–​33. 62. Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 2. 63. Tudor Networks, tudornetworks.net.

Select Bibliography Bourne, Claire M. L., Online Resources: Early Modern Plays on Stage & Page, www.ofp​ilcr​ows. com/​resour​ces-​early-​mod​ern-​plays-​page-​and-​stage. Debates in the Digital Humanities, book series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ongoing), dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/​. Earhart, Amy, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). The EMC Imprint, http://​emc​impr​int.engl​ish.ucsb.edu/​. Estill, Laura, Jakacki, Diane K., and Ullyot, Michael (eds.), Early Modern Studies After the Digital Turn (Tempe: Iter and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016). Galey, Alan, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). McKitterick, David, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Nelson, Brent, and Terras, Melissa (eds.), Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012).

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.  Figures are indicated by f following the page number  ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden (Sgantas and Van Vliet)  511–​12 academia  see scholarship Actes and Monuments  see Foxe, John almanacks  349–​51 alteration  Bible  588–​94 Bodleian Library oath  585, 586, 605 book and print trade vocabulary of  587 contents pages  603 continuous process, as  600–​3 current author’s approach to  585–​86 cutting  594–​97 digitalization  603–​5 embroidered binding  597–​99 errata lists  587–​91 libraries’ balancing of access and preservation 585 meaning of ‘modifying’  586, 594 mending of torn page  590–​93 non-​textual  599 politics of erasure  593–​94 pursuit of perfection results in greater imperfection  590–​94 reader, by  588–​94 before reading  599 replacement pages from other copies (‘sophistication’)  600–​3 single copy, of  588–​94 value judgements as to  586 variety of ways  585–​86 women, by  593–​94, 597–​99 America  see Virginia Ames, Joseph, Typographical Antiquities, being an Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Printing in Great Britain 54

see also Herbert, William  annotation  biographical research  573–​78 history of the book, and  569 identification of obscure and unknown readers  578–​79 New Bibliography  570 ownership indication and marks  661–​62 prosopopeia  571–​72, 579–​80 provenance narratives, and  677–​79 reader-​centred research  570–​74 technology-​based research  569–​70 types of book history approaches  569 antiquarian books  collecting and curating  657–​58 illustration  294–​95, 298–​300 reprints 462 second-​hand books  413, 494, 498–​ 99, 503–​4 typography  316–​18 antiquarian illustration  298–​300 antiquarianism  cataloguing function  55, 58–​59, 486–​ 87, 498–​99 development of  462 Dissolution of the Monasteries, and  657–​58 history of the book, and  671 importance  71–​72 research 662 Society of Antiquaries  341 tradition of  676 witness function  677–​78 yew trees and  679–​80 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, The Librarian (Painting)  574–​76 art and antiquities, circulation of  494

728   Index The Art of Graveing and Etching  see Faithorne, William ‘artisan’ and ‘author/​artist’ distinguished  511 artists’ books  ‘bookness’ concept  510–​11 category of  511 collections  518–​23 current author’s approach to  511–​12 distinction between author/​artist and artisan 511 looking at  523–​27 lost works  527 material, spatial and temporal dimensions in relation  510–​11 size and physical format  513–​18 spatial dimension  512–​13 atlases, illustrations  300–​3 auctions of second-​hand books  503 ‘author/​artist’ and ‘artisan’ distinguished  511 authors  attitudes to printing  195–​99 authorial authenticity  203–​6 authority, rights and status  195, 201–​6 complaints about printers  203 contracts 202 cooperation between authors  202 involvement with printing of their works  199–​201 remuneration 201 Stationers’ Company, and  201 Bacon, Francis  300, 340, 353–​56, 358–​59, 413–​ 14, 625, 628, 718 Bagford, John  676–​77 Bale, John  673–​74 Barker, Christopher  110–​14 Bartlett, Henrietta C.  23–​33 Ben Johnson  538–​43 Bible  alteration  588–​94 alterations to Geneva Bible copy  590–​94 Christopher Barker’s printings of the Geneva Bible  110–​14 early print, in  100–​1 miniaturization  147–​48 bibliographies, catalogues and databases  Anglo-​American Cataloguing Rules  711

computer-​based research methods  708–​10 digital facsimile-​based research methods  710–​12 early examples  639–​40 ephemera and transient works in  635 lost works  637–​38, 639–​41 provenance narratives, and  670–​72 surviving works  637, 639–​41 bibliography  bibliographical description as ‘assault’ on documents  20–​21 bibliographical presses  124–​27 critical race studies, and  88–​89 ‘handmaid of literature,’ as  20–​21 history of the book, and  5–​8 ‘New Bibliography’  124–​25 biographical research  573–​78 Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–​ 1677  see Habib, Imtiaz black people  see critical race studies blank space  134 Blome, Richard  301–​3 Bodleian Library  bequests of books to  427 Bodleian oath  585, 586, 605 Bodleian–​Stationers’ agreement (‘Deed of Grant’)  427, 428–​30, 431–​38 Bodley’s gift of plate to Stationers’ Company  438–​40 catalogue  414–​16 class politics as to Stationers’ Company donations  438–​40 effectiveness of Agreement  434–​38 examples of Stationers’ Company donations  427, 436–​38 ‘guifte’ of services to Stationers’ Company 430 John Norton and  431–​35 list of Stationers’ Company donations  428, 438 Thomas Bodley and  429, 431–​35 Bodley, Thomas  429, 431–​35, 586, 605 Bonham, Neal  511–​12, 519–​20 Book of Common Prayer  106–​8 Book of Martyrs  see Foxe, John book-​binding  board attachment  694–​95

Index   729 covers 696 endbands 696 end-​leaves  695 fore-​edges  696–​99 sewing  694–​95 see also conservation  ‘bookness’ concept  510–​11 booksellers  catalogues  53–​54, 230–​31, 503–​4 current author’s approach to  385–​86 definition of ‘book-​sellars shop’  385 exterior appearance  386–​93 historiography and  53–​54 interior layout  394–​400 other nearby retail outlets  400–​3 recycling of materials  373–​76 regional book and print trade  230–​31 regional book trade  403–​5 relationship with libraries  554–​57 second-​hand books  see second-​hand books Bosse, Abraham, Traité des manières de graver (1645)  252–​58, 261–​63 British Book Trade Index (BBTI)  714 broadsides  broadside ballads and epitaphs  333–​37 collections of  329–​30, 338–​42 ephemeral and transient nature of  328, 329 importance of  328–​29 phonography and broadside ballads  613–​15 possessions, as  329 recycling of  332–​33 survival of  330–​32 ubiquity of  328–​29 uses of  330–​32 Cambridge University  circulation and transmission of books  476, 478, 480–​81 second-​hand books  499–​500 Cambridge University Press  English Civil War, and  274–​75 post-​Civil War developments  276–​77 post-​Civil War regulation of  275 printers’ privileged status  271 University’s management of  271–​72 Carter, John  651

Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM)  713–​15 The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes  see Maunsell, Andrew catalogues  see bibliographies, catalogues and databases Caxton, William  450–​63 Charles I, King, Eikon Basilike  bibliographical description  5–​8 example of a study text for the history of the book, as  3–​4 persons involved in creation and transmission  9–​12 political and ideological work, as a  12–​14 Christianity  see religion Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande  see Holinshed, Raphael Church  see religion churches, yew trees  679–​80 circulation and transmission of books  commonplace books  486–​87 communities of circulation  475 connective properties of books  474–​75 households  482–​88 Inns of Court  476–​82 interactions between space, objects, people, and ideas  474 universities  476–​82 uses of textual material  475 women  485–​86 Civil War, university presses and  273–​75 class politics as to Bodleian Library/​Stationers’ Company Agreement  438–​40 classical texts, illustrated folio editions  294–​98 clothing, circulation of  494 collecting and curating  544 acquisition process  553–​54 artists’ books  518–​23 balancing of access and preservation  562–​64 broadsides  329–​30, 338–​42 collections within collections  564–​65 concept of collecting  651 curatorial activities  552 curators’ role  551

730   Index collecting and curating (cont.) current author’s approach to  551 digital libraries and collections  710–​15 English books in European collections  414–​19 ephemera and transient works  636 household libraries  483–​84 libraries as evolving organisms  551, 552–​53 monastery libraries  105 outreach and public participation  558–​62 parish church libraries  105 personal libraries, examples of  662–​64 prelates’ personal libraries  101–​2 rare and collectable works  635–​36 relationship with book trade  554–​57 second-​hand books  500–​4 social justice perspective  557–​58 transformations of libraries  551 see also Bodleian Library; ownership  commemorative books (‘festival books’), illustrations  300–​1 common people  see social classes compositors  177, 181–​85 computers and computing  see digital and electronic technology conservation  approach to study of  687 book as historic evidence  687–​88 book as object of  686, 689–​90 book-​binding methods  see book-​binding definition of  688–​89 digital and electronic methods  707 example of  686, 690–​94 role of  688–​89, 699–​700 correctors  177, 185–​90 costs  see finance critical race studies  absence of non-​white people in historical record  89–​90 beginnings of premodern critical race studies (PCRS)  81–​82 bibliography and  88–​89 black people in early modern print industry 82 black people working in print industry  92–​96 contribution to history of the book  83–​84, 88

current author’s approach to  82–​83, 92 evidence of blackness in history of the book  83–​84, 89–​92 examples of PCRS  84–​88, 90–​91 rediscovery of black persons’ histories  81, 91–​92 typography and  90–​91 visual representation of black people  84–​88 women’s studies and  89, 91–​92 Crouch, Nicholas  686–​88, 689, 690–​94, 699–​700 data, extent of 66  Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP)  713–​15 databases  see bibliographies, catalogues and databases digital and electronic technology  beginning of Digital Age  704 computer-​based research methods  708–​10 conservation and  718–​21 digital libraries and collections  710–​ 12, 713–​15 evidence of labour of digital scanning of images 264 facsimile-​based research methods  710–​12 forensic research methods  705–​7 linked readings research  717 network-​based research methods  718–​21 new methods of book history research  705 Optical Character Recognition (OCR)  715–​16 quantitative research methods  715–​18 reappraisal of history of the book  704–​5 social network analysis (SNA)  718–​20 stylometry  717–​18 technology-​based research on annotations and marginalia  569–​70 Dissolution of the Monasteries  English Studies, and  670, 672–​75, 680 ghost story, as  672–​75 ownership of books, and  657–​58 provenance narrative, as  670–​72 second-​hand books  495–​96, 500 Douce, Francis  59–​61 drama  see theatre Dugdale, William  298

Index   731 Dyson, Humfrey  338–​39 Early English Books Online (EEBO)  32, 448, 570, 603–​5, 639, 643, 711–​12, 713–​17, 719 economic aspects  see finance editors  see correctors eighteenth century, ownership of books  660 Eikon Basilike  see Charles I, King Eisenstein, Elizabeth  704–​5, 720 Ekskybalauron  see Urquhart, Thomas emblem books, illustrations  304 emotional experience of printing  134–​35 English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)  713 English Civil War  second-​hand books  502–​3 university presses and  273–​75 English Civil War, university presses and  273–​75 English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)  3–​4, 9, 32, 101, 177, 233, 624, 635, 637, 711–​ 12, 713–​14 English Studies  Dissolution of the Monasteries as origin story of  672–​75, 680 eye-​witnesses, importance of  677–​79 John Leland regarded as the father of  673 provenance narratives  670, 672–​75 engraving and etching, manuals of  255–​58 ephemera and transient works  broadsides  see broadsides collections of  636 see also broadsides  epitaphs and broadside ballads  333–​37 errors  133, 177 authors’ complaints about  203 reading practices, in  629 eScriptorium 709 An Essay on Engraving and Copper-​Plate Printing  see Hanckwitz, J Europe  see international book trade Evelyn, John, Sylva (1664)  511–​12, 520, 522–​23 exports  see international book trade facsimile-​based research methods  710–​12 Faithorne, William, The Art of Graveing and Etching (1662; 2nd edn. 1702)  255, 256–​ 58, 261–​62 Fell, John  237–​38, 277–​79, 280–​81

‘festival books,’ illustrations  300–​1 finance  authors’ contracts and remuneration  201 cost of second-​hand books  500 cost of type  310, 314 patronage and patents (‘privileges’)  142–​ 43, 352 subscription method of financing books  297, 298, 303 The first and seconde partes of the herbal  see Turner, Peter Fisher, John  654 folio editions of classical texts  294–​98 fonts  see typography foreign languages  see translingual and multilingual print forensic research methods  705–​7 Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) (1563)  288–​91 Gardner, Casey, Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth  511–​12, 523–​27 Gaskell, Philip  124–​27, 129, 177–​78, 313 Gavin, Michael  718–​19 Geneva Bible  110–​14, 590–​94 Gerard, John, Herbal (1597)  511–​12, 520–​22 Giuntini, Francesco, La Sfera Del Mondo (1582)  511–​12, 523 globalization of British book trade  422 Great Parchment Book (1639), digital restoration 707 Habib, Imtiaz, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–​1677: Imprints of the Invisible  81–​84, 96 Hanckwitz, J[ohann?], An Essay on Engraving and Copper-​Plate Printing, or the Professors of the Black Art, A Vision (1732)  261–​64 Hardy, Thomas  679 Hearne, Thomas  675–​77, 679 Herbal  see Gerard, John Herbert William, revision of Joseph Ames’s Typographical Antiquities, being an Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Printing in Great Britain (1749)  54–​56

732   Index Herrick, Robert  198–​99 historiography  bibliography and  56–​61 books as historiographical objects  47–​48 booksellers’ catalogues, and  53–​54 current author’s approach to  48 current theories of periodization  49–​51 examples of practice of  60–​61, 117–​18 Georgian era  59–​61 history and  48, 67 macro-​historical scale  67 micro-​historical scale  70 Tudor era  51–​56 history of the book  approaches to  3–​4 bibliographical approach to  5–​8 Charles I’s Eikon Basilike as example of a study text  3–​4, 5–​14 current author’s approach to  3 descriptive bibliographical approach  73–​75 historiographical approaches  47 large-​size books  140–​41 macro-​scale approach  66–​70 micro-​scale approach  70–​73 ‘New Textualism’  140 parallels between modern and historical technologies 67 political and ideological approaches to  12–​14 practical insights  see practice and process of printing scale of  66 selection of significant texts  140 significant (milestone) texts  140 size of books, importance of  140, 148 small-​size publications  141 sociological approach to  9–​12 types of book history approaches  569 Holinshed, Raphael Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577)  291–​92 households  manuals for household use  482–​83 professional persons within  487–​88 illustrated books  antiquarian illustration  298–​300 atlases  300–​3

commemorative books (‘festival books’)  300–​1 dedications to subscribers  297 effectiveness and impact  304 emblem books  304 folio editions of classical texts  294–​98 importance of illustrations  285 informational illustration  286 maps  286–​88 ornamental illustration  285 pictorial title pages  304 portrait books  292–​94 religious illustration  285–​86 religious texts  288–​91, 304 scientific books  300, 304 secular narrative texts  291–​92 subscription method of financing  297, 298, 303 images of the book trade  current author’s approach to  247 current knowledge about  248–​49 evidence of labour of digital scanning of images 264 hidden process of printing  247 images of printing  249–​55 importance of visual descriptions  264–​65 labour of printing images  261–​64 manuals for engraving and etching  255–​58 manuals for text printing  259–​61 imports  see international book trade indication and marking  see annotation informational illustration  286 Inns of Court, circulation and transmission of books  476–​82 intaglio method of printing  133 international book trade  English books in European collections  414–​19 English Civil War, and  412–​13 European book markets  410 European influence on English trade  420–​22 European respect for English scholarship  413–​14 export/​import flows between England and Europe 411 geography and history books  420

Index   733 globalization of British book trade  422 growth of London print industry  411–​14 improved quality of English printing  414 integration of English and European markets 422 literary texts  420 London book and print trades  410–​11 London book imports  411 reasons for English export growth  411–​14 religious texts  419 scientific books  419–​20 International Council of Museums  688–​89 James, Montague Rhodes  669, 670–​72, 673 Jonson, Ben  197–​99 Keay, Isaac, Practical Measurer (1724)  511–​ 12, 515–​16 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy: or Hieronomo is mad againe (1615)  84–​88 Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene  see Zimmerman, P. B. Langbaine, Gerard  677–​78 late medieval period, ownership  654–​56 Laud, William  108, 113–​14, 237–​38, 272–​74, 275, 276, 277, 497–​98, 499–​500, 501–​2 law books, circulation and transmission of  476–​82 Leland, John  495–​96, 673, 675, 676, 677–​ 79, 680 libraries  see collecting and curating literary texts from England in European collections 420 London  dominance over regional book and print trades  231–​33 growth and innovation in book and print trades  411–​14 international book trade, and  see international book trade second-​hand books trade  497–​99 lost works  artists’ books  527 bibliographies, catalogues and databases, in  635, 637–​38, 639–​41 definition of ‘loss’  634–​37

digital and electronic technology  643–​44 ephemera 636 experience of loss  633 history of the book, and  633, 637, 645 incidence of  633–​34 relationship between loss, transience and survival  633–​37, 641–​43, 644, 645 relationship with rarity and collectability 635 research methods  637–​41 Stationers’ Company Register, in  633–​34, 635, 637, 639, 640, 641–​43, 644 lower classes  see social classes lyrics, phonography and  620–​22 machine learning  see digital and electronic technology making of books  see practice and process of printing; printing Malone, Edmond  678 manuals of printing  engraving and etching  255–​58 text printing  127–​28, 259–​61 maps  286–​88 marginalia  see annotation marking  see annotation ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts  controversial subject matter  310 dating by type of font  316–​20 example of poor-​quality type  323 fonts  312–​14 printing of  310 Stationers’ Company and  310 typeface as evocation of a place  320–​21 typography 311 typography as evidence of circumstances of production 323 mathematical works (‘mathematicalls’)  352 Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth  see Gardner, Casey Maunsell, Andrew, The Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (1595)  25–​31 McLuhan, Marshall  67, 531–​32, 704–​5 Mechanick exercises … applied to the art of printing  see Moxon, Joseph medical works  351–​52

734   Index Milton, John, Paradise Lost (1667)  202, 588–​ 90, 594–​97 modification  see alteration monasteries  see Dissolution of the Monasteries Moxon, Joseph, Mechanick exercises … applied to the art of printing (1683-​84)  157–​60, 165–​69, 177, 186–​87, 198–​200, 247, 259–​ 62, 263–​64 multilingual print  see translingual and multilingual print network-​based research methods  718–​21 Newcastle, book and print trades in  240–​42 newspapers, regional printing and sales  235–​37 non-​codex texts  see broadsides; ephemera and transient works non-​white people  see critical race studies Norton, John  431–​35 Nova Reperta (New Inventions of Modern Times) ( c.1590/​ 1)  249–​52 old books  see second-​hand books Oldys, William  678 ontology, provenance narratives  675–​77 ornamental illustration  285 Osborn, James Marshall  674–​75, 678 ownership  early examples  651–​52, 662–​64 eighteenth century  660 extent, size and breadth  658–​60 history of the book, and  652 indication and marking  661–​62 late medieval period  654–​56 lower social classes, by  656–​57 methods  653–​54 preservation, and  652, 653, 656, 662–​63 reasons for  652 Reformation  657–​58 relationship with collecting  651 women  660–​61 Oxford regional book and print trade  237–​38 Oxford University  circulation and transmission of books  476, 480 second-​hand books  499

Oxford University Press  English Civil War, and  273–​74, 275 post-​Civil War developments  276–​82 post-​Civil War regulation of  275 printers’ privileged status  270–​7 1 Stationers’ Company and  278–​80 University’s management of  272–​73 see also Bodleian Library  paper  see practice and process of printing Paradise Lost  see Milton, John parts of books  see practice and process of printing patronage and patents (‘privileges’)  142–​ 43, 352 PCRS (premodern critical race studies)  see critical race studies Pepys, Samuel  335–​36, 340–​42, 395, 418, 419–​ 22, 613–​15, 635, 662–​64, 710–​11 periodization  see historiography personal libraries  see collecting and curating phonography  ballads  613–​15 continuum of types of books  611 current author’s approach to  610–​11 dialogues  616–​17 encoding and decoding  610–​11 errors in reading practices  629 interaction of orality and print  610–​11 lyrics  620–​22 narratives  622–​23 playbooks 610 play-​scripts  618–​20 reading aloud  609 sermons and speeches  623–​25 ‘sounding books’  609–​10 ‘sound-​writing’  610 speaking books  611–​13 textbooks  625–​29 pictures  see illustrated books plays  see theatre Plume, Thomas  662–​64 poetic metaphor, book as  affordances (uses) of the book  531 Ben Johnson  538–​43 book as a building  540–​41 book as blind (hidden knowledge)  534

Index   735 book as child  542 book as commodity  539 book as food  539 book as friend  541–​42 book as memory  536 book as prophecy  537 book as self  541 book as theatrical prop  533 the book in the book  543–​44 current author’s approach to  532 distinction between metaphor, metonymy and allegory  533–​34 Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 532–​ 38, 544 ‘metaphorology’ 543 poetic affordances of the book  531 relationship of content and medium  531–​32 poor people  see social classes poor relief  427 Porter, Dot  712 portrait books  292–​94 Practical Measurer  see Keay, Isaac practice and process of printing  application of pressure by printing press (acheiropoieta) 247 authors’ complaints  203 bibliographical presses  124–​27 blank space (white space) 134 current author’s approach to  124 decorations and illustrations  164–​65 dry and dampened paper  134 emotional experience of  134–​35 engraving and etching  255–​58 equipment for setting up bibliographical presses  129–​31 errors  133, 177 experimentation with Elizabethan methods  127–​29 intaglio method  133 manuals of printing  127–​28, 255–​61 materials at hand, use of  133 ornaments  164–​65 Philip Gaskell’s research  124 pictorial title pages  304 relief method  133 shape of book  132

specific aspects of print process  131–​35 transmission of text  132–​33 type  see typography woodcuts  164–​65 see also book-​binding; images of the book trade  premodern critical race studies (PCRS)  see critical race studies preservation, ownership, and  652, 653, 656, 662–​63 printing  book trade in America  see Virginia compilation of texts  143–​44 compositors  177, 181–​85 correctors  177, 185–​90 English print in Europe  see international book trade ephemera and transient works  144–​48 finance and patronage  142–​43 interdependence of large and small printers  141–​42 national developments in book trade  234–​35 revival of Elizabethan printing methods (‘typographical revivalism’)  123–​29 scribes  177–​81 see also images of the book trade; practice and process of printing; printing shops; publishers; regional book and print trades; university presses  printing shops  definition of  157 historical sources  157–​58 ink production and usage  162–​63 paper supply and usage  162 personnel  165–​66 premises 158 size 158 tools and equipment  159–​62 type manufacture and usage  163–​64 working conditions  158–​59 working procedures  165–​70 professional persons  circulation and transmission of books  487–​88 households’ employment of  487–​88 prosopopeia  571–​72, 579–​80

736   Index provenance narratives  annotation and  677–​79 catalogues and  670–​72 Dissolution of the Monasteries as  670–​72 Dissolution of the Monasteries as ghost story  672–​75 early examples  669 English Studies, and  670, 672–​75 function  669–​70 links to the past, as  679–​80 ontological function  675–​77 witness function  677–​79 publishers  developments circa 1600  211–​12 national developments in book trade  234–​35 publishing by commission  215–​18 publishing networks  218–​23 specialization and diversification  212–​15 see also regional book and print trades  quantitative research methods  715–​18 race  see critical race studies rare and collectable works, collections of  635–​36 reading aloud  see phonography reading practices, errors in  629 recovered works  see surviving works recycling of materials  art and antiquities  494 authors and  364–​66 bookbinders and  376–​78 ‘books in pieces’  363–​64 booksellers and  373–​76 broadsides  332–​33 clothing 494 current author’s approach to  363–​64 history of the book, and  363 life cycle of  378, 378f non-​book items  493–​94 printers and  366–​73 Thomas Urquhart’s Ekskybalauron (1652) as example  363–​64 see also second-​hand books  Reformation  ownership of books  657–​58

see also Dissolution of the Monasteries  regional book and print trades  booksellers’ catalogues  230–​31 existing research on  233–​34 features of  231 London book trades’ dominance  231–​33 national developments in book trade, and  234–​35 Newcastle  240–​42 newspapers  235–​37 Oxford  237–​38 reasons for lack of scholarship on  231–​33 second-​hand books  499–​500 York  238–​40 relief method of printing  133 religion  Bible in early print  100–​1, see also Bible Book of Common Prayer  106–​8 bookmaking, and  100 Christopher Barker’s printings of the Geneva Bible  110–​14 Church as market for books  105–​6 confessional differences within book trade 101 current author’s approach to  104 English religious texts in Europe  419 examples of prelates’ personal libraries  101–​2 history of the book, and  100–​1 illustrated books  285–​86, 288–​91, 304 monastery libraries  105 parish church libraries  105 politics and printing  104 pre-​and post-​Reformation religious book market  105–​7 printed sermons, phonography and  623–​25 publishers and printers of religious works 102 religious printing as a business  102–​4 remuneration  see finance research  digital and electronic methods  47 lost works  637–​41 restoration  see conservation rich people  see social classes Rindl, Deb  511–​12, 513–​15

Index   737 Rotherham, Thomas  654 Royal Society, scientific books and  356–​58 Ruskin, John  688 scholarship  European respect for English scholarship  413–​14 women’s bibliographical scholarship  23 see also Bodleian Library; Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; university presses  scientific books  almanacks  349–​51 Baconianism and  353–​56 current author’s approach to  348 diversity of  352–​53 English texts in Europe  419–​20 forms of scientific enquiry  348–​53 history of the book, and  347–​48, 358–​59 illustrations 300 mathematical works (‘mathematicalls’)  352 medical works  351–​52 patronage and patents (‘privileges’)  352 role of printing in scientific discovery and discourse 348 Royal Society and  356–​58 ‘Scientific Revolution’  347–​48 Stationers’ Company and  350–​51, 352 scientific books, illustrations  304 ‘Scientific Revolution’  347–​48 scribes  177–​81 Seales, W. Brent  706–​7 second-​hand books  antiquarian books  413, 494, 498–​99, 503–​4 auctions 503 bookseller’s catalogues  503–​4 brokers 495 Cambridge  499–​500 collective names for dealers of  495 cost of  500 Dissolution of the Monasteries  495–​96, 500 English Civil War  502–​3 history of the book, and  493 London book trade  497–​99 new books sold with  497 Oxford 499 pre-​Reformation  496–​97

recycling of materials  493–​94 regional book trades  499–​500 sales of libraries of  500–​4 tradability of  500 self-​reading books  see annotation Sgantas, Judy, ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden  511–​12, 518–​19 Shakespeare, William  alteration of books  587, 599–​603 author, as  196, 197, 198–​99, 204 collections of his works  551, 553 critical race studies, and  83–​84, 88–​ 89, 94–​95 European collections, in  417–​18 historical approach to reading his works 50 history of the book, and  140–​41, 143–​ 44, 146–​48 long poems, publication of  333 metaphor in his works  534, 537, 544 New Bibliography, and  58–​59 ownership and uses of his works  651–​ 52, 663–​64 phonography  609–​10, 616, 618–​20, 621–​ 23, 625–​27 printing, and  129, 132, 133, 135 regional book and print trades, and  230–​31 religion and  101, 102–​4, 105, 112–​13 scale of book history, and  66–​67, 70–​7 1, 72, 73, 74–​75 self-​reading books  575–​76, 578–​79 transient and lost works  634 typography, and  313 women’s textual labour, and  20 Shakespeare Census  7, 32–​33 shape of book  see practice and process of printing Smith, David Nichol  673, 674–​75 social classes, ownership of books by lower classes  656–​57 social justice approach by curators  557–​58 Society of Antiquaries  341 sound  see phonography The Spanish Tragedy  see Kyd, Thomas speaking books, phonography and  611–​13 Spenser, Edmund  532–​38, 544

738   Index Stationers’ Company  authors’ complaints about  203 donations to Bodleian Library  see Bodleian Library Poor Fund  427 regulatory role  428 role of  201 scientific books and  350–​51, 352 university presses and  270–​7 1, 276, 278–​80 Stationers’ Company Register  authors’ rights  201 lost works  633–​34, 635, 637, 639, 640, 641–​ 43, 644 registration of works  201 Stepneth, John  220–​23 study  see research subscription method of financing books  297, 298, 303 surviving works  history of the book, and  633 relationship between loss, transience and survival  633–​43, 644 survival rate  633–​34, 640, 642 Sylva  see Evelyn, John Tanselle, G. Thomas  711–​12 Tapp, John  212–​13, 214 textual labour  see women The Librarian (Painting)  see Arcimboldo, Giuseppe theatre  playbooks, phonography and  610 play-​scripts, phonography and  618–​20 printed drama, popularity of  146–​47 time  see historiography Tottel, Richard  55, 142–​43, 314–​15, 476–​77, 482–​83, 620–​21, 622 Traité des manières de graver  see Bosse, Abraham transient works  see ephemera and transient works Transkribus 709 translations  see translingual and multilingual print translingual and multilingual print  Caxton, by  450–​63

current author’s approach to  450 definition of  448–​49 design of  449–​50 Early English Books Online (EEBO)  448 extent of  448 importance of  447–​48 post-​Caxton  463–​68 printers’ imprints  446–​47 transmission of books  see circulation and transmission of books transmission of text, practice and process of printing  132–​33 Tudor period  ownership of books  657–​58 see also Reformation  Turner, Peter, ‘Peter Turner to the Reader,’ in William Turner, The first and seconde partes of the herbal (1598)  177–​80 typography  availability of  314–​15 cost of type  310, 314 critical race studies, and  90–​91 dating of works by type of font  316–​20 definition of  311 evidence of circumstances of a text’s production, as  323 example of poor-​quality  323 fonts  312–​16 ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts  310–​11 new forms of  315 relationship between type and text  311–​12 typeface as evocation of a place  320–​23 see also practice and process of printing  universities  circulation and transmission of books  476–​82 see also Cambridge University; Cambridge University Press; Oxford University; Oxford University Press  university presses  current author’s approach to  269–​70 English Civil War, and  273–​75 history of the book, and  269 post-​Civil War developments  275–​82 post-​Civil War regulation of  275

Index   739 printers’ privileged status  270–​7 1 sources of information  269–​70 Stationers’ Company and  270–​7 1, 276, 278 universities’ management of  270–​7 1 upper classes  see social classes Urquhart, Thomas, Ekskybalauron (1652) 363 using books  annotation 571  collecting and curating 553  conservation 686 digital and electronic technology  704 lost works  633 modification 587  ownership 651 phonography 611  preservation  see preservation provenance narratives  669 transmission  see transmission Vade Mecum (1749)  511–​12, 516–​18 Viollet-​le-​Duc, Eugène  688 Virginia  book trade specialization and diversification  212–​15 promotion of Virginia colony by English book trade  211–​12 publishing by commission  215–​18 publishing industry developments in England  211–​12 publishing networks  218–​23 Stationers 211 Virginia Company charters (1606 and 1609) 211

Vliet, Claire Van, ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden  511–​12 Waldegrave, Robert  310, 313–​14, 316–​ 18, 320–​21 see also ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts  Walker, Alice  33–​41 Wanley, Humfrey  676 waste materials  see recycling of materials Welby, William  213, 214, 216–​21 white space  134 women  alteration of books  593–​94, 597–​99 bibliographical scholarship by, examples of  23 circulation and transmission of books  485–​86 current author’s approach to  23 history of the book, within  10–​11, 14–​15, 21 non-​recognition of women’s ‘textual labour,’ examples of  21–​23 ownership and alteration of Bible  593–​94 ownership of books  660–​61 women’s studies, critical race studies, and  89, 91–​92 Woolf, Virginia  672 work, workers  see practice and process of printing; printing; printing shops writers  see authors yew trees  679–​80 York, book and print trades in  238–​40 Zimmerman, P. B., Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene 512