University of Virginia Library

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

drawing a 12½% Dividend on their investments in the English Stock. More than half the Almanacks sold were in the form of sheets to hang on the wall and were not unlike the modern Oxford Almanack; the Stationers' Company offered three varieties at 6d. each. The other kind, of which Old Moore's is the best known of the twenty then available and of which Whitaker's is the modern descendent, were in the form of little books, of 3 or 3½ sheets, to sell at 8d. or 9d. stitched. All had calendars for the year and some information — astrological, meteorological, historical, topographical, horticultural, agricultural, medical, social — of varying value. Parker's for instance — one of the more respectable — gave the Law Terms, Saints' Days, the times of moon-rise and the daily motions of the Planets, details of eclipses, tables of the English sovereigns since the Conquest and of the Lord Mayors and Sheriffs of London since the Restoration, lists of active Bishops and Judges and Aldermen of London, rates of hackney-coaches and hackney-chairs and watermen, and a 'Table of the Planets' Essential Dignities'. Improving verses were thrown in for good measure: is set at the foot of the page for November and December 1753. Parker's was first published for 1690 and after 50 years was selling at the rate of 3000 copies a year. But the turnover on all Almanacks distributed from Stationers' Hall was about £10,000 and the gross profit sometimes £2000 a year.[4]

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

easy, from the wording of an advertisement, to distinguish today between an Almanack and a Diary. I suspect that the confusion was, in part, deliberately created in an attempt to encroach on the Company's market, without actually infringing its copyright and without the necessity of paying the Stamp Duty which true Almanacks had to carry. On the basis, however, of evidence which I realize may be proved to be shaky, I believe that, while there was a certain amount of surreptitious piracy of Almanacks — mostly in the provinces — reputable London booksellers were exploring the market for Diaries; and that only when the Company grew anxious and threatened action against the publishers of the latter, was a full attack, headed by Carnan, launched on the Almanack monopoly.

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 addition, there are an alphabetical list of Peers, a list of Parliamentary constituencies and the names of the sitting members, an account of the main roads, with distances between towns; and all At the same time he announced a similar book for the ladies.

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,

for instance, which he had entered on 20 July, and The Ladies Complete Pocket Book. In his answer to the bill, which is dated 4 February 1774, he admitted the printing of 2,500 copies of the Diary and the sale of 1,900; but he boldly asserted that James I had no power to grant a perpetual monopoly in Almanacks.

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

statements in the presence of the Lord Mayor.[12] Robinson averred that no offer was made which he could have taken in earnest. Waller admitted that 'in Sport & upon Mr Carnan's Boasts about Bribery' he had offered sums up to £10,000 and then £10,000 a year for life, and that, even if Carnan had not at the time seen a joke which was quite clear to Robinson, it had been explained to him later.

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

promise of further approaches from the Company had driven him out of town until the Chancery injunction should be dissolved.

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

which it published in November.[16] Unless a man were prepared to risk cheating the Revenue (as provincial printers no doubt did) he had to have considerable capital to be a dangerous competitor to the Company, even after 1774; and, though the duty was passed on to the customer, the return on the outlay, of which the cost of paper and print might be not more than a fifth, was bound to be less than normal.[17] But Carnan, with the assistance at first of George Robinson, was able to raise the capital and considered the enterprise well worth while. By the autumn of 1775 he was publishing eleven jointly with Robinson;[18] nine of these, all stamped, were improved versions of the Company's Almanacks — a powerful invasion of the monopoly. In addition, he published the Lady's Complete Pocket-Book, at 1s. bound, jointly with his partner Francis Newbery, with Stanley Crowder and Richard Baldwin in Paternoster Row, and with Benjamin Collins of Salisbury. According to his advertisements, he also supplied Baldwin's Daily Journal, at 1s. bound in red with pockets for letters. By the autumn of 1777 he had increased the number of his Almanacks to thirty-one, twenty-five of which he entered in the register. (The number is not really as impressive as it sounds, because twenty were modifications of a single pattern to suit different parts of the kingdom — a tactic employed in the past by the Company.)

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

exaggeration; 3,000 is the figure given for his large sheet Almanack. Carnan asserted that, up to and including the Almanacks for 1779, he had printed a total of 96,000 books and 220,000 sheets, and that the numbers of books for the two succeeding years were 36,000 and 47,000. Since these claims, so publicly made, could be checked at the Stamp Office and since there was a comparable falling off in the sales of Almanacks from Stationers' Hall in these years, I am inclined to accept Carnan's claim that by 1781 he was distributing, almost single-handed, well over 100,000 Almanacks a year.

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

were almost certainly others besides The Newcastle Memorandum Book, which had been first published in 1755.[21] It is quite impossible even to guess at the numbers of these printed and sold; all that can be said is that the autumn of 1776 was the English Stock's worst publishing season in the eighteenth century and its sales of Almanacks fell below 300,000; that this was followed by a recovery during the next five years as individual interlopers found the competition or the Stamp Duty too fierce a deterrent; and that this recovery was then gradually whittled away largely by the enterprise of Carnan alone, until in 1787 the sales were well under 350,000.[22]

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

and proprietors of the English Stock — an attempt to establish copyright in the separate publications after the removal of the all-embracing protection. For 1777 and the two following years the prices of most book Almanacks were reduced from 9d. to 8d., and of the sheets from 6d. to 5d. [24] 'with what noble Design', as Carnan said in one of his advertisements, 'is submitted to the Consideration of the Public'. This is the normal tactics of the big firm prepared to lose money for a year or two in order to drive a rival from the field and the tactics used by the Bible monopolists in the seventeenth century. A loss of over £400 was achieved without appreciable effect on the sales; since the public was aware of the 4d. stamp on each book, any greater reduction was probably not wise.

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

making, a sheet serve as a book, and that the Universities had been paid to keep out of markets which were much more profitable than that for Almanacks; he produced figures to show that he had increased his purchases of 4d. stamps and that he would be hard hit because he was making his sheet Almanacks pay. For once he was not successful; the House of Commons approved North's two proposals and initiated the practice of steady increases in Stamp Duties over the next forty years — a policy which was to suit the Stationers' Company well.

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

yet be well for the old monopolists. In 1788 he was removed — by death.

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

and Raven's falling back and the new County Almanacks, taken over from Carnan, doing rather better than holding their own, Moore came right away from the rest of the field and provided nearly 97% of the profit.[31] Of Moore alone the sales for 1802 were 365,000. 'There was scarcely a house in Southern England,' wrote Charles Knight[32] 'in which this two shilling's worth of imposture was not to be found. There was scarcely a farmer who would cut his grass if the Almanack predicted rain. No cattle-doctor would give a drench to a cow unless he consulted the table in the Almanack showing what sign the moon is in, and what part of the body it governs.' But the profit was nearly £3,000 and the Company — 'the only Company who give bread to conjurors'[33] — was interested in making profits for the shareholders in the English Stock; it was no use giving their readers what they would not read — or, worse still, what they would not buy. A contributor to The Gentleman's Magazine in 1804[34] bewailed the decline in the certainties of the prognostications. 'What, in the name of wonder,' he asks, 'have prognosticators to do with hopes and fears?' But a writer thirty-five years later[35] tells of an experiment by the Company (which I am unable to corroborate) of 'partially reconciling Francis Moore and common sense by no greater step than omitting the column of the moon's influence on the parts of the human body'. The experiment was not repeated; farmers would not buy a Bowdlerized version and many thousands of unsold copies were returned. 'The company,' he concludes, 'appear to have acted from a simple desire to give people that which would sell,' — just like any successful modern publisher. It was not until 1927 that Old Moore with its sales down to 15,000 copies, was assigned to a modern publisher because, in the words of a member of the Stock Board, 'it does not enhance the reputation or dignity of the Company.'

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

years during which he lived to enjoy his triumph. His much advertized benefit to the public did not begin to be felt until the Almanack Duty was swept away in 1834.

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.

Table I Almanacks printed and profits made, 1768-1802

                                                                                   

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
---

Table II The General State of the Almanack Acct with the Nett Balance of profit for the Year 1789[*]

                                                                   

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
				----------		----------

Table III General Statement of Expenses and Profit on Almanacks 1802

                                                           

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
				-----------		-----------

Table IV Francis Moore's Vox Stellarum, 1789 to 1802 Statement for 1789

                     

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
	-----------		-----------

Sales and Balances in favour of the Company

               

			£				£
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