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Thomas Carnan and the Almanack
Monopoly
by
Cyprian Blagden
[*]
It is well known that, in the 1770's, Thomas Carnan challenged the Stationer's Company's right—derived from grants by James I — to be the sole publishers of Almanacks,[1] and that he won resounding victories first in the Court of Common Pleas and then in the House of Commons. One story is told of his keeping a clean shirt in his pocket during November against his annual arrest at the suit of the Stationers' Company,[2] and another of his driving his 'lofty phaeton and pair' again and again through St Paul's Churchyard, down Paternoster Row and past the entrance to Stationers' Hall, after his first triumph.[3] I hope that the second story is true, for there is, I am sorry to say, no foundation for the first. Carnan was the kind of man about whom stories were told: what did 'this eccentric and singular character' achieve and how much did the Company suffer?
Thomas Carnan came to London from Reading in 1744 when his step-father, John Newbery, opened a shop in St Paul's Churchyard. Here he learned to distribute cheap publications and patent medicines, not only in the capital but throughout the provinces; and here he was very close to the warehouse of the English Stock at Stationers' Hall, from which nearly half a million Almanacks were sold during the last two months of each year. The English Stock was the name given to the trading organization which exploited James I's grants to the Company of the sole rights in certain classes of books. Before the end of the seventeenth century the most profitable of these monopolies was that for Almanacks and Prognostications, and in 1744, when Carnan began working in London, about 150 Liverymen (or their widows) were
'Tis Virtue's Work alone to stretch the span;
Learn to live well, that thou may'st die so too;
To live and die is all we have to do.
This business was tempting enough to encourage interlopers up and down the country; printers in London, and at York (as early as 1665), at Chester and Exeter, had pirated the Company's Almanacks. A standard warning was printed at the foot of the broadside which announced each year the titles for sale and their prices.[5] This asserted firstly that all Almanacks not printed for the Company of Stationers were counterfeit and secondly that several 'Sham Predictions and Prognostications' had been published 'to serve instead of Almanacks, whereby the People are greatly Imposed upon, the Company of Stationers much injured, and the fair Trader abused'. Rewards were offered for information about such shams and the prosecution of offenders promised.
The Company's monopoly in these cheap publications was obviously vulnerable and, as the warning shows, open to attack from two sides. One of the Almanacks might be reprinted exactly and copies distributed as if they had been received from the warehouse of the English Stock; James Leake of Bath was involved in such a transaction in 1724, and in 1757 there was a report that counterfeit copies of Poor Robin were circulating in Leeds. The other threat came from pocketbooks designed to 'serve instead of Almanacks' — what we call Diaries — which could be easily compiled and safely marketed. Parker's Emphemeris could be turned into a Diary only when it had been interleaved by the binder, and it then became somewhat bulky; the pocket-book designed from the beginning as a Diary would appeal to the man — or woman — who preferred space for entering engagements or for recording expenditure to prophesies about the weather, advice about the desirability of making a journey on a particular day, or even details of the geocentric motions of the Planets.
In the middle of the eighteenth century the demand for this second kind of annual publication — the Diary — was still, apparently, small, whereas the demand for the Almanack with information and guidance was enormous. But the survival chances of either of these kinds of ephemeral printing are minute; how many hundreds of the fifty million true Almanacks of the eighteenth century can one find today? One is therefore thrown back on advertisements, which may possibly give a false picture. In the first place, it was safe to draw public attention to a Diary and there was risk in announcing a clear infringement of the Stationers' Company's copyright. In the second place, it is not always
On 30 November 1748, four years after Carnan's arrival in London, Robert Dodsley published The New Memorandum Book, for the year 1749, in different bindings at 1s. and 1s. 6d. [6] This was almost certainly not the first of its kind but it is the first of which I know the title and the name of the bookseller behind it and of which I have seen an early example.[7] By the following year two other London booksellers had joined Dodsley in this field. On 29 November Richard Baldwin junior, of Paternoster Row, entered in the register at Stationers' Hall The Gentleman's and Tradesman's Daily Journal, and at about the same time Thomas Carnan published The Ladies Complete Pocket Book.[8] Both were for the year 1750. In a later advertisement[9] Dodsley describes not only the contents of The New Memorandum Book and by implication the contents of the others — but the irritation which the imitators — Baldwin, Carnan and the rest — were causing him. It is
In 1755 Carnan, armed with a formal resolution of the Court of Aldermen, applied for the freedom of the Stationers' Company by redemption; on 8 April the Court of Assistants voted against admitting him but recorded no reason. The warning about imitation Almanacks continued to appear each year, but it was not until the spring of 1772 — well over twenty years after Dodsley entered the field — that the Court was sufficiently worried to take counsel's opinion whether these annual publications, though called Pocket-Books or Journals, were really Almanacks. On the strength of the advice given, it was decided to warn publishers of such imitations that next time they would be prosecuted. Even so, no action was taken that year.
It was not until the following year, 1773, that the fun began. On 13 November Thomas Carnan published Reuben Burrow's A Diary for the Year of Our Lord 1774. Two days later William Strahan, the son of the Upper Warden, called on Carnan; there are two versions of what passed between them.[10] Carnan averred that Strahan brought an overture from the Company which he contemptuously refused; Strahan maintained, in evidence given two years later, that he could not exactly remember the conversation but he never had authority, from his father or anyone else, to say that the Stationers wished to come to terms. On 18 November the Company filed a bill in Chancery and asked for an injunction to prohibit the further sale of the Diary; on 25 November the injunction was served on Carnan, who continued to sell his other Almanacks and Diaries — Weston's Gardeners's and Planter's Calendar,
The timing of his answer (though Carnan had chafed — with some reason, I think, — at his lawyer's delay) could hardly have been better, for in the same month of February 1774[11] the House of Lords gave its famous judgment on copyright; it upheld Alexander Donaldson's appeal against the Lord Chancellor's injunction to restrain the sale of Thomson's Seasons, which Thomas Becket claimed as his property. The idea of perpetual copyright no longer had even a suggestion of legal support. On 1 March the Lord Chancellor, under the shadow of this decision, made two orders on the bill brought by the Stationers' Company: first, that Carnan be allowed to sell any Almanacks he had published provided only that he set apart, in a manner approved by the Accountant General, all profits until the suit was finally settled; and second, that the case of the monopoly should be argued in the Court of Common Pleas, where the Judges were to give answers to these two questions: (1) Did the grant of James I apply to all Almanacks or only to those approved either by the Archbishop of Canterbury or by the Bishop of London? (2) Has the Crown the power to grant to one party a right which excludes all other parties?
Nearly fifteen months passed before, on Monday 29 May 1775, the opinion of the Judges was made known. The answer to the first question was that the grant protected approved Almanacks only; the answer to the second was that the right could not be exclusive. On that same Monday, William Waller of Lincoln's Inn, Carnan's counsel, called on his client; of what passed between them — as of the conversation with Strahan in 1773 — there is more than one version. According to Carnan, Waller, 'to his very great surprise' and in the presence of George Robinson (whose participation I shall explain in a minute), offered £10,000 from the Company of Stationers if he would refrain from praying for the dissolution of the Chancery injunction. Carnan maintained also that, after Waller's departure with a blunt refusal, Robinson had argued in favour of acceptance and had repeated his arguments before witnesses at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street on the following Friday evening, 2 June. He later swore to the truth of these
It is difficult to be certain about the part played by George Robinson. He was not a freeman of the Stationers' Company but he built up a very successful wholesale business at 25 Paternoster Row. His name appears with Carnan's on the latter's Almanacks for 1776, and the advertisements of November 1775 (six months after the Common Pleas verdict) say that he and Carnan 'at their joint expense, dispossessed the Stationers' Company'. It is possible that the following publishing season with his headstrong partner was enough to convince him of the wisdom of his original advice. But whether or not he ever gave this advice, he and Carnan parted company and on 22 October 1776 he announced in the press[13] that he first had the idea of testing the legality of the Company's monopoly and that no offer which he could take seriously was ever made to him. It was this declaration by his old ally which led Carnan to make his deposition before the Lord Mayor on 26 October and to publish it in his advertisements. At the same time he admitted that Waller's little joke had been explained to him six days earlier, but he pointed out that 'the Sporting Counsellor' had offered to produce a draft for £10,000 on 29 May, the day of the interview — which to him 'did not seem very jocular' — and that the
Pretending that a rejected offer was never seriously intended is a manoeuvre which has often been employed; but though it relies on that most telling gambit — the suggestion that one's opponent has no sense of humour — it is seldom convincing. Carnan may have exaggerated the sum named[14] but he was right, I believe, in his assertion that the Company was eager to settle with him; it had been making such financial compromises with rivals for nearly 150 years and it was still paying the Universities £1,000 a year as compensation for not exercising their rights to print certain popular books — Almanacks amongst them. The wisdom of trying to buy out a rival after Donaldson's successful appeal to the Lords may seem doubtful; but I shall show that, in the conditions prevailing up to 1834, it was well worth while. In 1775, however, the attempt, if made, was unsuccessful; the injunction was duly dissolved on Friday 2 June, when Carnan returned to London and met Robinson — and others — at the Globe. In the year of Wilkes's Mayoralty Carnan may well have been a hero where book-sellers who were not partners in the English Stock were gathered together; and he may well have ordered round his 'lofty phaeton and pair'. But an injunction in Chancery was as near as he ever was to the necessity of carrying a clean shirt in his pocket against his expected arrest at the suit of the Stationers' Company.
The gloom at Stationers' Hall was not entirely unrelieved for the Company was able to win one immediate advantage — to the tune of £1,000 a year — from Carnan's success; it gave up the payments to keep the Universities[15] out of a market which was now, theoretically, free for all. Moreover, this freedom, being on a par with our freedom to use the Ritz Hotel, tended to favour the Company as the wealthiest operator. All Almanacks had to be printed on stamped paper. The Stamp Duty had been first imposed in 1711 and after the increase in 1742 a sheet Almanack had to carry a 'double 1d.' stamp and a book Almanack a 'double 2d.' stamp. The Company, in consequence, had to find £6,000 each summer for the stamps on the half million Almanacks
The only evidence for the quantities handled by Carnan comes from his answer to the Chancery bill of 1774 and from his printed petitions to the House of Commons in 1779 and 1781. The 2,500 of Burrow's Diary (which I have already mentioned) is unlikely to be an
For the reasons I have given, it is impossible to be certain how many other Almanacks and Diaries were being published in London or the provinces at this time. Only two were entered in the register: The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for 1779, by Thomas Baker (possibly the Southampton bookseller) on 27 November 1778; and Bell's Military Almanack by Robert Wilson on 20 November of the following year. London newspaper advertisements during the autumns of 1775 to 1777 offer eight for ladies[19] and half a dozen others, one of which was boldly called The Stationers Almanack.[20] Outside London there
What steps did the Stationers' Company take to repel this invasion of its territory by Carnan and the others when the reliable and often used Chancery injunction had failed? Little enough was done by press advertising. Less than £36 was spent in 1776 and Carnan claimed that the £400 he had expended up to 1778 was more than the Company had spent in 170 years. It had, however, persuaded the compiler of Poor Robin for 1774 to include a dedication to all the Almanack makers in 'the Empire of Great Britain' with a neat résumé of what each of the Company's authors set out to do. Andrews, for instance, 'gives Monthly Observations enough, and (sometimes) pretty good Weather;' 'Pearse affords some sublime Poetry'; 'and the best comes at the last, (viz) White's Coelestial Atlas, which is perhaps the most useful annual publication in all Europe,' — a generous tribute from the compiler of one publication to the compiler of another but probably not very effective as a piece of sales promotion.
Rather more was done to improve the contents of the Almanacks. On 5 October 1775 the Company made an agreement with Charles Hutton, Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, for checking the much criticized astronomical and meteorological data in the old Almanacks and for rewriting some of them. Special care was taken over obtaining licenses, at 2s. 6d. a time, from the chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. On 24 October seventeen[23] Almanacks were entered in the register to the Master, Wardens
These minor adjustments to well-established habits may have been sensible but they did little to exploit the Company's three major assets: goodwill, distribution machinery and capital. In the end it was the third of the three — and one piece of good fortune — which kept the monopoly alive, for Carnan's better standard of printing and more up-to-date approach to Almanack compilation soon began to eat into the Company's stock of goodwill, and George Robinson's network of provincial outlets, allied to the organization built up by John Newbery, successfully handled larger and larger numbers of books and sheets. It was, however, not immediately obvious how the financial reserves could best be employed. On 5 December 1775 Thomas Cadell, the treasurer of the Stationers' Fighting Fund, reported that nearly £1,500 had been spent on unsuccessful prosecutions for infringements of copyright and on unsuccessful approaches to Parliament. A year later £2,000 worth of Bank Stock, invested during the years of prosperity, was sold and, two years later, still a further £3,000 — with nothing to show for the expenditure. Even though the income of the English Stock from sources other than the trade in books and Almanacks — from house-property, from investments, from the Londonderry Estate, and from fines at elections to shares — was about £2,500 (enough to pay three quarters of the normal 12½% Dividend), the Company was worried.
The House of Lords reached its decision in the case of Donaldson v. Becket on 22 February 1774. On 28 February two of the members for the City of London successfully moved the House of Commons on behalf of the booksellers and the Stationers' Company. By 26 May, in spite of a petition against it from provincial booksellers, a bill to reestablish perpetual copyright on the basis of a King's Bench decision of 1766[25] had passed through all its stages in the Commons; but since it was designed to reverse the verdict of the Peers it never reached the Statute Book. The Company was forced to lay more careful plans and it induced the Universities, which had suffered financially from the breaking of the Almanack monopoly, to support a bill investing the sole right to print Almanacks in the three interested parties. On 10 May 1779 Lord North, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford, introduced such a bill in his capacity as Prime Minister. A petition from Carnan and the eloquence of Erskine are traditionally responsible for its defeat by 45 votes.
The Company thereupon resorted to a manoeuvre based on its ability to raise capital; supported once again by the Universities, it prayed for a further increase in the Stamp Duty. For years it had cherished the protection afforded by the Duty; the only action taken in 1757 over the pirated Poor Robin in Leeds was to refer the report to the Stamp Office. The argument with which Lord North was provided in April 1781, for use in the House of Commons, came ostensibly from the printers of book Almanacks; they complained that they were losing work, as the Revenue was losing income, from the growing practice of printing sheet Almanacks, which carried 2d. stamps, in such a way that they could be folded and bound as books, which ought to bear 4d. stamps. (Old Jenour, the printer, had deduced — from the preponderance of sheets which Carnan in his 1779 petition claimed to have printed — that Carnan was alive to this dodge.)[26] North quoted figures to show that, out of a total of 577,000 stamps purchased for 1780, 316,000 had been for sheets and that, out of a similar total for the following year, the number for sheets had increased by 32,000 — a potential loss of over £2,500. The Prime Minister proposed to make good the loss by doubling the duty on sheets and to devote £1,000 of the extra revenue to compensate the Universities for the annuities which the Stationers' Company no longer paid. On 21 April Carnan petitioned against the bill; he maintained, perhaps rightly, that the Company had been the first to make, and the most persistent in
For seven more years, however, the number of Almanacks distributed by the English Stock continued to fall annually by about 10,000 copies. Early in 1785 Richard Snagg, who ran from Paternoster Row a business similar to that of Carnan and Newbery, suggested to the Court of Assistants that, in view of the losses suffered by the Stock from the sale of Pocket Journals, the Company should either enter this market or persuade the Government to impose the same Duty on Diaries as book Almanacks were compelled to carry. The advice given by the Stockkeepers, to whom the suggestions were referred, is revealing.[27] In the first place, they pointed out that Diaries 'were originally set on foot by persons of reputation in the Trade [e.g. Robert Dodsley], whose representatives still continue to print them; [and that] however they may have been infringed upon by individuals [e.g. Thomas Carnan] the Stockkeepers apprehend it will be thought unbecoming the Company of Stationers to interfere with their inventions'. In the second place, they forsaw the risk that, if the Stamp Duty were extended, the publishers would include in Diaries the normal features of Almanacks and that any profit which the Company might gain from entering this market would be offset by the loss from the new competitors. In the third place, they were not convinced that the sales of Pocket Journals affected the sales of true Almanacks.
The figures support the Stock-keepers' arguments. For the year 1768 — that is, when the Diaries had been openly published for twenty years and before Carnan began his direct piracy — the Company had paper stamped for 576,000 Almanacks. For the years 1780 and 1781, when Carnan was well in the field, the number of all Almanacks bearing stamps was 577,000. The London wholesalers' market for true Almanacks was remarkably constant and had to be fought for amongst those who were in that business. In the main it was Carnan who was building up his sales at the expense of the Company's; if he could be removed — by another offer of compensation, for instance — all might
Thomas Carnan died on 29 July in Hornsey Lane on the outskirts of Highgate; and on 20 August the Company acquired from the administrators of his estate all his Almanack interests. For £1,500, paid to them on 1 November, Francis Newbery and Carnan's sister, Anna Maria Smart the widow of Christopher Smart, assigned[28] the copyrights in all publications which were chargeable with Stamp Duty as Almanacks and promised not only to give up the Almanack trade but to refer all their customers to the Treasurer of the English Stock. The Company also agreed to pay the outlay on stamps and authors for the coming year (1789) and a further £500 when the prices of Moore's Vox Stellarum and Wing's Sheet Almanack had for three (not necessarily consecutive) years been raised by ½d. The figures for 1789 and the following years are the outstanding proof of the success of Carnan's challenge — success, at least, as measured in terms of damage to the Company. It is unlikely that Carnan made much profit; he declared in his 1781 petition that, though he was making a little money on the County Almanacks before the Duty was increased, he had dropped two of the other kind and retained the large Sheet only 'to supply the Trade with Variety'. His chief satisfaction from dealing in Almanacks was, I imagine, his ability to say: 'I broke the monopoly'. I wish I knew more about the man himself.[29]
From the autumn after Carnan's death it is possible, owing to the survival of fuller records, to follow in detail the mounting prosperity of the Company's Almanack business for the next fourteen years. A comparison of the first and last years of this series[30] shows that all the expenses went up and that in 1794 a new liability was incurred; this was an over-riding discount of 2% to London wholesalers, who between them handled more than £15,000 worth of the business in the autumn of 1801. (The turnover was then £24,890.) The astonishing feature of the other side of the account is the dominance of Moore, Old Moore; whereas the total number of Almanacks sold during this period increased by only 2%, with the old favourites like Poor Robin
But, back in the 1790's the Assistants obviously regarded the overwhelming success of Moore as a healthy state of affairs for they altered the shareholding structure of the English Stock no fewer than five times between 1796 and 1805; they thereby increased the capital by £10,560 and the Dividend liability, which had been £3,200, by £1,320. Under the umbrella of the Stamp Duties the prosperity continued for nearly half a century and clearly showed that Carnan's breaking of the Almanack monopoly was immediately effective only for the fifteen
Thomas Carnan would, I think, have appreciated the twist by which his old rivals were partly responsible for this sensible move. In 1832 and 1833 deputations of Stationers waited upon the Commissioners of Stamps and upon Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to bring to their notice once again the sales of vast numbers of unstamped Almanacks, to plead for greater severity in dealing with those caught selling them and to demand increased inquisitorial powers for the Company in order to track down the real offenders. Charles Knight and Henry Mayhew[36] bear witness to the quantities of unstamped Almanacks sold openly up and down the country; both saw that the only way to stop this flagrant breaking of the law was to remove the cause of offence. The petitions for more power turned into further reasons for the abolition of the Stamp Duty in 1834. Even Carnan, for all the severity of his lesson, had not been able to teach the Stationers' Company that the good old days of the Stuart regime had come to an end before the death of Queen Anne.
| Year of A'ack | Paid for stamps | Numbers of Almanacks stamped | Gross profit | ||
| total | book | sheet | |||
| £ | £ | ||||
| 1768 | 6,563 | 576,000 | 230,000 | 346,000 | 1,314 |
| 1769 | 5,120 | 484,000 | 144,000 | 340,000 | 1,324 |
| 1770 | 6,146 | 547,000 | 205,000 | 342,000 | 1,237 |
| 1771 | 4,837 | 392,000 | 202,000 | 190,000 | 2,010 |
| 1772 | 6,044 | 520,000 | 224,000 | 296,000 | 1,521 |
| 1773 | 6,090 | 534,000 | 214,000 | 320,000 | 1,682 |
| 1774 | 5,965 | 524,000 | 208,000 | 316,000 | 2,043 |
| 1775 | 6,299 | 544,000 | 221,000 | 323,000 | -- |
| 1776 | 4,384 | 338,000 | 198,000 | 140,000 | -- |
| 1777 | 3,284 | 268,000 | 134,000 | 134,000 | -- |
| 1778 | 5,333 | 447,000 | 210,500 | 236,500 | -- |
| 1779 | 5,750 | 490,500 | 214,500 | 276,000 | -- |
| 1780 | 5,105 | 405,000 | 220,000 | 185,000 | -- |
| 1781 | 4,774 | 409,500 | 179,500 | 230,000 | -- |
| (a) | |||||
| 1782 | 6,622 | 416,500 | 185,500 | 231,000 | -- |
| 1783 | 6,513 | 388,000 | 195,000 | 193,000 | -- |
| 1784 | 6,208 | 380,000 | -- | -- | -- |
| 1785 | 5,841 | 357,500 | -- | -- | -- |
| 1786 | 6,040 | 369,750 | -- | -- | -- |
| 1787 | 5,716 | 350,000 | 185,000 | 165,000 | -- |
| 1788 | 5,503 | 348,600 | 192,600 | 156,000 | -- |
| (b) | |||||
| 1789 | 8,276 | 506,800 | 306,000 | 200,800 | 1,001 |
| 1790 | 8,209 | 502,600 | 282,600 | 220,000 | 1,091 |
| 1791 | 8,469 | 518,500 | 299,100 | 219,400 | 2,044 |
| 1792 | 8,229 | 501,700 | 319,600 | 182,100 | 2,125 |
| 1793 | 8,748 | 535,600 | 343,500 | 192,100 | 2,094 |
| 1794 | 8,958 | 548,500 | 404,000 | 144,500 | [2,200][*] |
| 1795 | 8,395 | 514,000 | 365,000 | 149,000 | [2,820][*] |
| 1796 | 8,631 | 528,400 | 381,500 | 146,900 | [2,600][*] |
| 1797 | 8,583 | 515,750 | 376,500 | 139,250 | [2,680][*] |
| (c) | |||||
| 1798 | 17,083 | 559,500 | -- | -- | 2,635 |
| 1799 | 15,043 | 474,250 | -- | -- | 2,997 |
| 1800 | 16,977 | 519,750 | -- | -- | 2,994 |
| 1801 | 17,314 | 530,000 | -- | -- | 2,552 |
| 1802 | 15,468 | 473,500 | -- | -- | 3,051 |
| --- |
| Dr. | Cr. | |||||||||
| To Loss on Wing's | £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | ||||
| Book (2,250)1 | 4 | 15 | 9 | By profit on | ||||||
| "Cheshire etc. (2,000)2 | 1 | 5 | 3½ | Gentleman's (5,500)1 | 3 | 6 | 7¼ | |||
| Authors | Ladies' (17,000)1 | 56 | 15 | 4¾ | ||||||
| Dr Hutton | 136 | 10 | 0 | Partridge's (4,500)1 | 10 | 10 | 7 | |||
| Mr Wildbore | 18 | 18 | 0 | Poor Robin (10,500)1 | 28 | 7 | 10 | |||
| Mr Northouk | 16 | 16 | 0 | Season's (4,250)1 | 7 | 4 | 0½ | |||
| Mr Andrews | 10 | 0 | 0 | White's (5,000)1 | 6 | 10 | 11½ | |||
| Mr Mason for correcting | Moore's (220,000)2 | 562 | 18 | 1¾ | ||||||
| Moore's | 5 | 5 | 0 | 187 | 9 | 0 | Rider's (16,000)3 | 94 | 7 | 9 |
| ------- | Goldsmith's (31,500)2 | 113 | 3 | 3 | ||||||
| Licensing | 17 | 6 | Freemason's (2,000)4 | 2 | 19 | 10 | ||||
| Advertisements | 54 | 15 | 2 | Wing's Sheet (130,000)5 | 182 | 6 | 6 | |||
| Dinners | Cambridge" (27,000)5 | 21 | 7 | 11 | ||||||
| Orders | 10 | 17 | 3 | Raven's London Sheet(29,500)2 | ||||||
| Customers | 21 | 17 | 0 | 133 | 13 | 0½ | ||||
| Presentation | 9 | 11 | 10 | 42 | 6 | 1 | ||||
| ------- | Rider's Sheet (7,000)2 | 20 | 3 | 2 | ||||||
| Binding & Clasping presents | 20 | 14 | 3 | New London" (4,000)6 | 23 | 15 | 8 | |||
| Drawing for Raven's | 2 | 2 | 0 | Counties 2 | ||||||
| 5 reams f'cap for lists | 3 | 12 | 6 | Middlesex etc. (8,500) | 31 | 4 | 5½ | |||
| Thos Greenhill, helping | Cornwall etc. (9,000) | 31 | 6 | 8 | ||||||
| Treasurer | 36 | 6 | 0 | Gloucestershire etc. (3,000) | ||||||
| M. Smith ditto | 7 | 7 | 0 | 5 | 11 | 4 | ||||
| Postage | 18 | 15 | 9 | Norfolk etc. (6,000) | 21 | 16 | 1¾ | |||
| Porterage | 17 | 16 | 1 | Warwickshire etc. (5,500) | 19 | 1 | 6 | |||
| Borthwicke | 2 | 2 | 0 | Wiltshire etc. (6,500) | 25 | 15 | 10½ | |||
| Candles | 2 | 12 | 0 | Yorkshire etc. (4,500) | 13 | 4 | 11 | |||
| Various small items | 11 | 7 | 2 | |||||||
| Total balance in favour of the Company | 1001 | 8 | 0½ | |||||||
| ---------- | ---------- | |||||||||
| 1,415 | 11 | 7 | 1,415 | 11 | 7 | |||||
| ---------- | ---------- |
| Dr. | Cr. | |||||||||
| To Loss on Wing's | £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | ||||
| Book (475) | 10 | 12 | 5 | By profit on | ||||||
| Discount allowed to Town | Gentleman's (2,850) | 3 | 11 | |||||||
| Trade | 307 | 14 | 7 | Ladies' (8,800) | 52 | 0 | 9 | |||
| Authors | Partridge's (2,925) | 8 | 7 | 0 | ||||||
| Dr Hutton | 189 | 0 | 0 | Poor Robin (4,075) | 7 | 2 | 2 | |||
| H. Andrews | 20 | 0 | 0 | Season's (2,050) | 2 | 11 | 0 | |||
| C. Wildbore | 18 | 18 | 0 | White's (3,900) | 60 | 14 | 0 | |||
| J. Pridden | 13 | 3 | 0 | 241 | 1 | 0 | Moore's (365,000) | 2,899 | 18 | 2 |
| ------- | Rider's (12,900) | 138 | 19 | 2 | ||||||
| Sundry Advertisements | 76 | 4 | 10 | Goldsmith's (27,800) | 282 | 10 | 4 | |||
| Insurance at Phoenix | Freemason's (1,350) | 2 | 14 | 4 | ||||||
| Office | 6 | 13 | 6 | Wing's Sheet (35,350) | 175 | 6 | 2 | |||
| John Leach for Dinners | 66 | 19 | 6 | Cambridge Sheet (2,375) | 1 | 3 | ||||
| Thomas Wills for binding | Raven's London" (15,175) | 116 | 17 | 1 | ||||||
| the presents | 22 | 2 | 9 | New London Sheet (725 | 4 | 4 | ||||
| Thomas Greenhill for | Counties | |||||||||
| stationery | 27 | 5 | 8 | Middlesex etc. (7,575) | 40 | 17 | 10 | |||
| Sundries, inc. postage, | Cornwall etc. (4,650) | 21 | 18 | 6 | ||||||
| cartage, cord, coffee | 125 | 15 | 9 | Gloucestershire etc. (2,450) | 10 | 3 | 5 | |||
| Nett Profit | 3,050 | 15 | 5 | Norfolk etc. (4,075) | 25 | 7 | 11 | |||
| Warwickshire etc. (4,075) | 25 | 7 | 11 | |||||||
| Cheshire etc. (1,925) | 7 | 13 | 7 | |||||||
| Wiltshire etc. (5,850) | 31 | 4 | 9 | |||||||
| Yorkshire etc. (4,425) | 24 | 13 | 6 | |||||||
| Shrewsbury [*] (500) | 8 | 4 | ||||||||
| ----------- | ----------- | |||||||||
| 3,935 | 5 | 5 | 3,935 | 5 | 5 | |||||
| ----------- | ----------- |
| Dr. | Cr. | ||||||
| £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | ||
| To paper, 1,320 reams &c.mmat; 9s. | 594 | 0 | 0 | By 220,000 delivered to Mr Horsfield &c.mmat; £24 per 1,000 | 5,280 | 0 | 0 |
| printing 3 sheets &c.mmat; 8s. and 4s. per ream | 458 | 8 | 0[*] | 10,400 returns from Stamp | |||
| stamps &c.mmat; £16 6s. 8d. per 1,000 | 3,593 | 6 | 8 | Office &c.mmat; £16 6s. 8d. per 1,000 | 169 | 17 | 4 |
| Mr Horsfield for 10,400 returns &c.mmat; £24 per 1,000 | 249 | 12 | 0 | 20 reams 16 qrs waste paper &c.mmat; 2s. 9d. | 2 | 17 | 2¼ |
| 30 presents | 14 | 6 | 41 reams 12 qrs ditto &c.mmat; 3s. | 6 | 4 | 9½ | |
| balance in favour of the Company | 562 | 18 | 1¾ | ||||
| --------- | ------ | ||||||
| 5.458 | 19 | 3¾ | 5,458 | 19 | 3¾ | ||
| ----------- | ----------- |
| £ | £ | ||||||
| For | 1790 | 217,640 | 616 | For | 1797 | 327,200 | 2,094 |
| 1791 | 217,430 | 1,175["] | 1798 | 273,150 | 2,294[""] | ||
| 1792 | 227,075 | 1,218 | 1799 | 313,000 | 2,607 | ||
| 1793 | 253,750 | 1,400 | 1800 | 339,750 | 2,810 | ||
| 1794 | 274,000 | 1,437 | 1801 | 362,500 | 2,596 | ||
| 1795 | 282,500 | 1,951[**] | 1802 | 365,000 | 2,900[***] | ||
| 1796 | 305,000 | 1,997 |
Notes
For the early history of this monopoly, see 'The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century', Studies in Bibliography, XI (1958), 107-116.
It is impossible to give exact figures for the profits before 1789 either on individual Almanacks or on the business as a whole. See below, p. 41 and 'The English Stock of the Stationers' Company', The Library, 5th ser., XII, (1957), 167-186. In the Stock Board Minute Book no, V (which has recently reappeared at Stationers' Hall) there are notes of the fixing of printing numbers on 25 April 1759 and on 14 May 1760 for the years following. It is interesting to compare these figures with those for 1789 given within brackets in Table II and to note that thirteen of the Almanacks are common to both lists; these are marked below with *.
| for 1760 | 1761 | |
| Andrew's | 2,500 | 2,500 |
| Coley's | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| Gadbury's | 2,500 | 2,500 |
| for 1760 | 1761 | |
| Gentleman's * | 5,000 | 5,000 |
| Ladies' * | 16,000 | 15,000 |
| Moore's * | 77,000 | 82,000 |
| Partridge's * | 8,500 | 8,000 |
| Parker's | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| Pearse's | 2,500 | 2,500 |
| Poor Robin * | 11,000 | 11,500 |
| Saunders's | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| Season's * | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| Wing's Book * | 8,000 | 7,000 |
| White's * | 2,000 | 2,000 |
| Rider's * | 23,000 | 24,000 |
| Goldsmith's * | 6,000 | 7,000 |
| reams | reams | |
| Wing's Sheet * | 440 | 450 |
| Cambridge Sheet * | 110 | 110 |
| Raven's London Sheet * | 50 | 50 |
| ------- | ------- | |
| Totals (reams as 500) | 476,000 | 486,000 |
There are odd copies of these broadsides at Stationers' Hall. Where, in the course of this article, the authority for a statement is obviously to be found among the Stationers' archives, I have not given a detailed reference.
Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley — Poet, Publisher & Playwright (1910), p. 336, where the advertisement quoted below is given in full.
Entered first on 16 Nov. 1770 by Carnan and Francis Newbery, and on 30 Oct. 1777 and 23 Oct. 1778 by these two with Stanley Crowder, Richard Baldwin and Benjamin Collins of Salisbury. Francis was the nephew, not the son, of John Newbery; he was the son of Francis, baker of Easthampsted, Berks, and was apprenticed to William Faden, printer of Wine Office Court, on 3 Aug. 1756 (no premium); he was free on 4 Sept. 1764 and was never called to the Livery.
The London Chronicle, 22-24 Nov. 1757. The Ladies' New Memorandum Book, 1s. neatly bound, contained 'Twenty-four Country Dances for the Year 1758. A Marketing Table . . . . Maxims for the Ladies concerning the Art of Pleasing. . . . Bills of Fare for every Month in the Year. Ready Messes for Supper. New Directions for playing at Piquet. Some general Things proper to be known and remembered! . . .'
The final decision was made known on 22 Feb., but individual answers to the questions put to the Lords were being given during the previous ten days.
John Sawbridge, Wilkes's successor, on 26 Oct. 1776. His declaration was published in, among other newspapers, The London Chronicle, 2-5 Nov. 1776 and reprinted as part of Carnan's petition to the House of Commons of 29 April 1779. Carnan had printed the story, unattested, as part of his advertising campaign in 1775—in The London Chronicle of 5-7 Dec., for instance. The advertisements of Carnan and the Company, appearing as they sometimes do one above the other, make engaging reading.
The London Evening Post, 19-22 Nov., 1776, where he advertised eight of the Almanacks which he and Carnan had published jointly the year before. The full text of his statement reads as follows: 'Mr. T. Carnan having asserted, in a circular letter, that he was the only person who prevented a compromise with the Stationers Company, it becomes necessary for me to declare, that the project of printing an almanack, and to try the legality of it, was originally mine; and that I admitted Mr. Carnan to be concerned with me, at his earnest request. With respect to the compromise, I can with great truth aver, that I never had the least intention to drop my scheme; and that no offer was ever made to me on the subject, which I could believe to be serious. The intelligent public will therefore judge what degree of credit is due to a man, who is capable of asserting whatever is likely to answer his self-interested purposes.' What is 'the intelligent public' to make of a statement by a man who admits, by implication, to degrees of truth?
It may be pure coincidence that in the winter of 1774-5 the Stock-keepers were flirting with the possibility of lending £10,000 at 4½% on the security of freeholds in Monmouthshire and Buckinghamshire.
On 26 Oct. 1775 it made the last payment to Messrs Wright & Gill, the farmers of the Oxford privilege, and on 28 June 1776 the last to the Vice Chancellor at Cambridge; the threat of legal action two years later was successfully met with a bland reply.
Mr. Graham Pollard has suggested to me that the advantage which the Stationers' Company may have had from its ability to raise capital was not as great as I have assumed, and that wholesale stationers were perhaps as ready to supply stamped paper on credit for the printing of Almanacks as they were to do this for the printing of newspapers. I have no evidence for or against this possibility; I can only say that stationers were, at this period, keener supporters of the Company than the booksellers, and more interested in becoming partners in the English Stock. See 'The Stationers' Company in the Eighteenth Century,' The Guildhall Miscellany, 10 (1959).
Vincent Wing's Sheet, 6d. A Cambridge Sheet, 6d. A New London Sheet, 6d. Reuben Burrow's Diary or Sheet, 6d. Francis Moore's Vox Stellarum, 9d. Poor Robin's Almanack, by Reuben Robin, 9d. Reuben Burrow's Lady's and Gentleman's Diary, 9d. Parker's Ephemeris, 9d. Rider's Almanack, 6d., entered 19 Nov. 1776 Rider's Sheet, 6d. Goldsmith's Almanack, 6d., entered 19 Nov. 1776 In 1776 (i.e. for 1777) Carnan published all these except Parker's and added A Companion to Goldsmith, 3d. and Henry Andrews's Royal Almanack, 1s., entered 17 Dec. 1776. Compare these titles with those in the Stationers' Company's list in f.n. 23 on p. 33.
The Ladies' Almanack, and Ænigmatical Diary, 1s. 3d. Printed for J. Wheble, no. 22 Fleet-street. 'For the Polite and Sentimental Part of the Female Sex.' Stevens's Ladies Annual Journal, only 1s. 'Printed for Ann Jefferies, successor to Mrs. Stevens, Stationers'-court, Ludgate-street; and I. Taylor, near the top of Chancery-lane, Holborn.' The Ladies Own Memorandum Book By a Lady 1s. 'Printed for G. Robinson, Paternoster-row; and T. Slack, Newcastle.' The Ladies Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book, 1s. 'Printed for J. Wheble, in Fleet-street.' The Ladies Pocket Journal, 1s. Obtainable from 'Fielding and Walker, Paternoster-row.' The British Ladies Pocket Memorandum Book, 1s. 'Printed for J. Harris, St. Paul's Churchyard.' The House Keeper's Account Book, 1s. 6d. in blue covers. 'Printed for R. Crutwell & W. Taylor in Bath; W. Crutwell in Sherborne; R. Baldwin, Paternoster Row; and F. Newbery, in St. Paul's Churchyard; & sold by all other booksellers.' Johnson's Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum Book for 1778, 1s., bound in red leather. 'Printed for J. Johnson, 72 St. Paul's Churchyard.'
The Stationers Almanack, Embellished with a most curious Headpiece. 'Printed and sold by John Ryland, Engraver and Printer, No. 67 Old Bailey,' Edward Ryland had first published this for 1746; see List of Books in The Gentleman's Magazine, Nov. 1745. William Wing's New London Almanack (with which the Court & City Calendar for 1777 is given gratis). 'Printed and stamped according to Act of Parliament, and sold by W. Cavell, near Gray's Inn, Holborn.' ('There being other Sheet Almanacks that have the name of Wing affixed to them. . . .') The New Daily Journal. Bound in red leather 20d. 'Printed for Fielding and Walker, Paternoster-row.' Kearsley's Pocket Ledger, 1s. 8d. Bound in red leather for either the Pocket or Desk. 'Printed for G. Kearsley, near Serjeant's-inn, Fleet-street; and sold by every Bookseller in England.' Harris's Pocket Journal for Town and Country, 1s. 8d. 'Printed for J. Harris, 70 St. Paul's Churchyard.' The Christian Memorandum Book 1s. bound in red leather; 8d. in stiff Dutch blue paper. 'Printed and sold by J. Wakelin and C. Hood, 8 Stationers' Alley.'
R. Welford, Early Newcastle Typography: 1639-1800 (Newcastle, 1907), pp. 73 and 76. An example from a few years later is The Bengal Calendar for 1789, printed in Calcutta and reprinted in London for John Stockdale and C. Forster. (The London Chronicle, 25-27 Nov., 1788)
Freemason's, Gentleman's, Ladies', Moore's, Partridge's, Parker's, Poor Robin, Saunders's Season's, White's, Wing's and Rider's, 9d. each stitched, and Goldsmith's, 8d. stitched; Wing's Sheet, Cambridge Sheet, Rider's and Raven's Sheets, 6d. each. Nine of these were first published 100 years or more earlier.
Carnan averred in his 1779 petition that this price cut had meant a loss of £3,000 to the Company at the previous rate of sale. This is plainly nonsense. The English Stock suffered a set-back of £2,000, from a profit of about £1,500 to a loss of over £400; some of this derived from the cut in prices, some from a drop in sales and some, perhaps, from an improvement in the terms offered to the trade as a reply to Carnan's boast in a 1775 advertisement that a 'greater Allowance will be made to the Dealers in Almanacks than ever was given before'. From 1784 the Company incurred a small additional expense by following the growing practice in the trade and instituting a Subscription Dinner at the beginning of November and a Customers' Dinner, later in the month, when stocks were delivered.
Document with receipt at Stationers' Hall. £6,000 3% Consols had to be sold in September for the additional expenses caused by this take-over. On 14 Jan. 1789 £357 14s. 3d. was paid to Newbery for Carnan's papers.
One of Carnan's ventures was much less successful than his attack on the Stationers' Company's monopoly. On 8 May 1781 Messrs Eyre & Strahan, His Majesty's Printers, obtained judgment against him in the Court of Exchequer for printing a Form of Prayer (Annual Register, xxiv, p. 177).
Calculated, not given. The gaps between the lines point to three occurrences which vitally affect these figures: (a) the doubling of the duty on sheet Almanacks, (b) the taking over of Carnan's business by the English Stock, after his death, and (c) the doubling of the duties on books and sheets.
This is the first year for which the details in this form are available, from a series of notebooks headed 'Statement of Almanacks for. . .' Wholesale prices:
- 1. £26 per 1,000
- 2. £24 "
- 3. £28 "
- 4. £36 "
- 5. £20 "
- 6. £32 "
From 1794 The figures in brackets in this Table show the numbers sold of each Almanack. The wholesale prices ranged from £42 to £62 per 1,000.
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