Clay's stock
The shops at Daventry, Lutterworth and Rugby, were essentially
similar in the range of goods stocked and sold. No inventory of stock is
extant, but the
records of sales can show the relative importance of the various classes of
goods on sale. To illustrate this, two typical months have been taken, one
for Daventry and one for Lutterworth (Table I).
The figures for Daventry (Table I, column (a)) give the clearest and
fullest picture of the business. Primarily, Clay was a stationer, dealing in
paper and printed forms. The sale of books was the only other significant
part of his trade. A more detailed analysis shows that the range of stock
was comparatively wide. He sold paper of several sizes and varieties, such
as 'Post' and 'Pott',[23] as well as
notebooks of various kinds. He also stocked 'skins', that is sheets of vellum
used for legal documents, including 'Text' skins which were blank forms
of such documents. In addition, he sold various items of writing equipment,
such as pens, pencils, rulers, and ink.
The books sold at Daventry were mainly schoolbooks in use at the
Academy. It was the beginning of the school year, and, as a consequence,
seven boys bought copies of Nathan Bailey's English and Latin
exercises for schoolboys, first published in 1706 and reprinted many
times. This was probably used for the first year of the classical
course.[24] Another first year book was
William Willymott's A select century of Corderius's
Colloquies,
and a third schoolbook of which multiple copies were sold was William
Turner's Exercises to the accidence. Apart from the
schoolbooks, the trade in books was small: a copy of Rowe's
Poetical
works; one of Joseph's Tripp's Praelectiones poeticae;
a
few chapbooks; a couple of magazines; and twelve Books of Common
Prayer, presumably for Holy Cross.
A roughly comparable picture emerges from the analysis of a month's
sales at Lutterworth ten years later. The figures in Table I, column (b), are
distorted by an exceptional purchase. On 15 October 1778, the
Churchwardens of Misterton, a village about 1 miles east of Lutterworth,
bought new books for their church: a Bible (£3.10s.od.); a large Prayer
Book for the reading desk (18s.od.); and a book of the occasional offices
(2s.6d.). If we exclude this £4.10s.od., we arrive at a 'normal' month's
sales. This adjustment is made in Table I, column (c). Again, the sale of
stationery is preponderant, representing rather more than half of sales, with
books contributing just under one-third. The stationery goods are much like
those at Daventry ten years earlier, but the books are rather different. There
are no academic books, and only one school book; most are part
publications[25] and magazines.
The shop established at Warwick by Samuel Clay in 1770 was
similarly stocked. Samuel's account book (N.R.O. D.2929) shows that he
received the stock from his father; he did, however, pay for it, and the
Warwick business
was clearly treated as a separate enterprise. Nevertheless, Clay gave his son
a good deal of help including, on 10 December 1770, a loan of
£20.
The goods received by Samuel from John on 17 August 1770 are a
useful exemplar of the range of the stock:
|
£ |
s |
d |
| 6 Bottles of Elixer of Health |
|
6 |
| 1 Paper Book 6 q.rs Rul'd |
|
4 |
9 |
| 1 D not Rul'd |
|
4 |
3 |
| 1 D 5 q.rs Rul'd ruff
Calf |
|
4 |
8 |
| 12 Bottles Bostock's Elixer |
|
9 |
| 2 Highway Acts |
|
1 |
6 |
| 2 Turnpike D
|
|
1 |
6 |
| 3 Forms of Proceedings |
|
1 |
| 2 Tutors for ye Flute |
|
1 |
6 |
| 1 D Fife |
|
|
9 |
| 2 Pillman's Writing Illustrated |
|
2 |
6 |
|
-------- |
|
1 |
17 |
5 |
|
-------- |
Again it is stationery and blank forms which are predominant, representing
14s.8d. . Books and pamphlets account for 7s.9d., and the remaining
15s.od. is an exceptionally large purchase of medicine. The sale of
medicine had long been associated with the book trade,
[26] but sales were slow (see Table I),
and
Samuel was clearly stocking-up. The music books are also interesting, since
they represent another of Samuel's sidelines, music and musical
instruments. A few days later he bought '½ Bundle 3.
d
Strings' for
violins, also supplied by his father.
One final aspect of the business deserves to be mentioned, that of
bookbinding. The only records which date back to Smith's time relate to his
activities as a bookbinder,[27] in which
he did a substantial trade. He bought tools and materials in 1717-18, and
in several years thereafter. A number of names appear, including those of
John Cooke and David Rice; they may have been either the suppliers, or
the employees who actually did the binding work. On 27 November 1717
Smith calculated his profits on binding since 11 June as £15.5s.3d., but
the record of books bound stops in 1724, and does not resume until 1763.
At that time, Clay bought materials, and there are records of books bound
between 1763 and 1772. Possibly there was a lack of skilled labour, for if
no binding was done after 1724 it may be that there was no-one to teach
Clay this craft during his apprenticeship. When the binding records resume,
they show that little work was done, and the
figures in Table I may be taken as typical.
Overall, the business operated by Clay was that of a stationer who
also sold books. Well over half of his income, and sometimes as much as
three-quarters, came from the sale of stationery goods, of which he had a
substantial and diverse stock. Bookselling, although of some cultural
importance in these small market towns, was economically of far less
importance. In other words, by the middle of the eighteenth century, these
south midland towns could all sustain a well-established and profitable
stationer's shop. The details of that sustenance, as shown by Clay's records
of retail sales, will be discussed below. Before turning to that, however, we
must deal with Clay's suppliers, on whom he depended for his
stock-in-trade.
