University of Virginia Library

1. Book Production in Mid-Jacobean London[6]

During the five-year period 1614-1618, London stationers produced an
average of 7616 edition sheets and 356 distinct editions each year,[7] and the

size of a typical book was slightly less than twenty-two edition sheets (see
table 1). A little over half of that output was religious material, with 15%

Table 1. London printing, 1614-1618

             

Year	Edition sheets	Editions[8]	Edition sheets/Edition
1614	7932	326	24.3
1615	8156	412	19.8
1616	7095	379	18.7
1617	7240	320	22.6
1618	7653	341	22.4
Average	7616	356	21.4

works of literature, 12% informational texts, 11% law and politics, 7%
history, and the remaining 2% ephemera and official documents (see table 2).
Of the religious materials, about two-thirds of the output consisted of devotional
or instructional volumes, learned commentary, controversial tracts,
and other such works, with 20% devoted to biblical texts, 14% to sermons,
and 4% to copies of the Book of Common Prayer (see table 3). It is useful to
recall at this point that these figures describe only the output of London
printers and do not reflect the larger bookselling market for which they
labored. For example, manuscripts still played an important role in the
production and circulation of certain types of works. Furthermore, London
presses produced mainly English-language volumes, while stationers imported
large numbers of Greek and Latin works from the continent that they
then retailed through bookstalls and to a broad clientele of aristocrats and
intellectuals.[9] Mark Bland estimates that "80 per cent of the books that survive
from the libraries of Ben Jonson and John Donne . . . were printed on
the Continent" (450), and Sir Edward Stanhope's book bequest to Trinity
College, Cambridge, in 1608 contained nearly 93% continental imprints.[10]
Each of these collections reflects its owner's interests; less scholarly personal
libraries contain more native printing, as is illustrated by an inventory of
Sir Roger Townsend's books around 1625 in which 60% of the titles are
English-language works printed in Britain.[11]

While the overall book trade increased, internal Company restrictions and
periodic Star Chamber decrees meant the number of master printers active in
London during the first forty years of the seventeenth century hovered around
twenty, and with a few exceptions those licensed printers were limited to
only one or two presses. Many London printers owned more than two presses
but used them for proofing and other purposes, interpreting the decrees to
mean one or two production presses. Compare this situation with that of
Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, who in the early 1570s had up to sixteen
active presses and employed in the neighborhood of fifty workers,[12] an order
issued by the Provost of Paris in 1618 decreeing that each master printer
have at least two working presses,[13] or with a 1644 Parisian inventory indicating
that one printing house had seven presses, five had five presses, eight
had four, eleven had three, thirty-five had two, and sixteen had one press.[14]
The reasons for this apparent imbalance are various—the lack of a significant
domestic supply of paper (the English wore mainly wool and thus lacked a
ready source of the linen rags from which paper was made), the minuscule
continental market for English-language books, the inability to achieve economies
of scale that continental printers enjoyed, the dominance of French
printing during the sixteenth century, and the obvious fact that Paris was
nearly twice as large as London and the population of France three times as
large as England—but the important point to bear in mind is that the London
printing trade was a relatively small industry serving a subset of a larger
market.

Although the domestic printing trade may have remained small relative to
the continental industry, it is clear that the overall circulation and sales of
books printed in England had been growing for some time. Veylit has compiled
figures for British publishing from 1475-1800, based upon individual
titles listed in the ESTC database. These indicate that the average number
of titles annually printed in the forty-year period between the death of Elizabeth
and the beginning of the English Civil War roughly doubled, from

about 250 per year to 500.[15] This expansion is part of a longer trend of steady
growth in common-press books that began when Caxton set up his office in
Westminster in 1475. Marjorie Plant has observed that "The prosperity of
any branch of economic activity is directly affected by the prevalence of war,
and this is surely nowhere more true than in the case of the book industry."[16]
Certainly the accession of Henry VII at the end of 100 years of civil strife and
the one and one-half centuries of relative domestic peace that followed played
a major role in the growth of the English market for books. Other larger factors
contributed as well: rising literacy, national population recovery from
the fourteenth-century plagues and accompanying economic development
(albeit usually slow and halting), the growing hegemony of London within
England, and a host of smaller influences all made for not just an expanding
market for books but also a diverse one.[17]

As far as the five-year period of this study is concerned, a number of localized
factors combined to make it an especially interesting one. Politically it
marked the center of James I's rule and the last years of an era of relative
calm that had begun with the Edict of Nantes in 1598 and peace with Spain
in 1604; by 1619 Ralegh had been executed, James's popularity at home had
evaporated, and turmoil in Bohemia had sparked the Thirty Years War.
England was experiencing sustained economic prosperity, marked by stable
prices, a series of good harvests, and a welcome lack of plague visitations.[18]
In 1616 the Stationers' Company renewed and enlarged its exclusive right to
print primers, Psalters, and almanacs, titles that formed the core of the
profitable English Stock. In the same year, an apparent optimistic moment,
the Company also struck a deal with Bonham Norton and formed the Latin
Stock, which was primarily concerned with importing books from the continent.
Two years later, in 1618, the Stationers formed the Irish Stock in a
bid to control the book trade in Ireland. Overall the middle years of James's
reign were marked by relative peace and prosperity, a business climate that
would have encouraged printers and publishers to produce at a fairly high
level.

The increasingly complex and active market is reflected in the varied
subjects of the works published, bought, and consumed in England. Different
genres of works brought with them assumptions about textual presentation,

and nowhere is this clearer than in the choice of format.[19] Full-sheet broadsides
were usually reserved for official proclamations or ballads, while the
smallest formats (16°-64°) were almost exclusively the domain of religious
publication. Overall, the bulk of the works from this period were printed
either in folio (36%) or quarto (41%) format, with 15% in octavo, 6% duodecimo,
and the remaining 2% in a collection of little-used formats (see
table 2).

Informational and literary publishing most closely mirrors the distribution
of formats seen in the overall trade, with slightly more quartos than
folios, and a significant percentage of octavo printing. Other genres show
much more striking preferences. Books of history, as well as works of law
and politics, are overwhelmingly printed in folio, a format perceived as carrying
a certain amount of weight and prestige, while religious works dominate
small-format publication. Ephemera were overwhelmingly published in
the more portable quarto and octavo formats, with official documents either
printed as full-sheet broadside proclamations or quarto pamphlets.

It is in the printing of religious materials that the greatest diversity of
formats is employed. Almost half of the religious works are imposed in a
quarto format, with a significant number of folio, octavo, and duodecimo
titles and a smattering of small-format printing. Two sub-categories of religious
publishing are worth touching on as well. Two-thirds of all sermons
are published in quarto format, although sermon compilations tend to appear
in octavo and duodecimo. The greatest range of format choices, however,
is in the printing of Bibles; there appears to have been a market for
Bibles, single-testament books and psalm translations in nearly every format
(see table 3).

Similar studies against which we might compare these data are hard to
come by and often detail the activities of a single house rather than the industry
as a whole. For example, Jan Materné's survey of the Officina Plantiniana's
practices during the Counter-Reformation shows that this Antwerp
enterprise favored smaller formats than did the London trade. The most
common format as measured by titles printed was octavo, followed by duodecimo,
quarto, 24mo, 32mo, and finally folio.[20] Counting titles, McKenzie
examined a trio of five-year periods in the sixteenth-century London trade
and revealed that religious works made up about half the total output and
that the most popular format was octavo (accounting for between fifty and
seventy percent of the total output in the late 1540s).[21] Yamada's study of
Creede's establishment 1593-1617 analyzed his output by genre and size but
not format, while Blayney's examination of Okes's house contains an appen-

Table 2. London printing by genre and format, 1614-1618 (in edition sheets)

                   

Genre	1°	2°	4°	8°	12°	16°	24°	32°	64°	Total	Proportion
Religion	4	5125	9475	3212	1799	125	85	28	5	19858	52%
Literature	12	2101	2360	1113	146	60	—	2	4	5798	15%
Information	7	1370	2073	813	126	—	—	—	—	4389	12%
Law/Politics	2	3095	710	470	32	—	—	—	—	4309	11%
History	—	2118	496	155	—	—	—	—	—	2769	7%
Ephemera	38	1	280	178	—	4	—	—	—	501	1%
Official Documents	232	59	148	8	5	—	—	—	—	452	1%
Total	295	13869	15542	5949	2108	189	85	30	9	38076
Proportion	1%	36%	41%	15%	6%	1%	—	—	—

Table 3. London religious printing by sub-genre and format, 1614-1618 (in edition sheets)

                       

Sub-Genre	1°	2°	4°	8°	12°	16°	24°	32°	64°	Total	Proportion
Commentary	—	2367	2165	298	26	—	—	—	—	4856	24%
Instructional	3	373	1678	810	529	—	—	—	—	3393	17%
Sermons	—	—	1930	732	66	3	—	—	—	2731	14%
Complete Bibles	—	934	1092	392	125	12	10	—	—	2565	13%
Controversial	—	765	1431	165	16	—	—	—	—	2377	12%
Devotional	1	—	436	320	997	32	—	2	—	1788	9%
Psalms	—	172	383	183	24	38	28	26	—	854	4%
Book of Common Prayer	—	268	360	41	16	—	15	—	3	703	4%
New Testament	—	246	—	271	—	40	32	—	2	591	3%
Total	4	5125	9475	3212	1799	125	85	28	5	19858
Proportion	—	26%	48%	16%	9%	1%	—	—	—

dix listing his production output 1604-1609 and including a bibliographical
description of each item but does not compile the data into a single chart. In
any case, a strong correlation between format and certain types of books
suggests presentational expectations among readers.