It is now generally accepted that William Strahan's printing business
dominated English book production during the second half of the eighteenth
century. The recent biography by J. A. Cochrane[1] has simply made plain in detail
what
many students of the eighteenth century have recognized as probable since
the printer's bookkeeping records were found and placed in the British
Museum in 1956. Twelve of these 119 volumes were written during
Strahan's lifetime; they present the most complete picture now extant of
printing procedures in the eighteenth century, once they are deciphered. But
the very wealth of information, thousands of pages of bookkeeping entries
in holograph, has led most students of the period to seek individual entries
for specific books rather than to see the records as a whole, with a pattern
of organization. Yet Strahan's practices are typical of the other printers and
booksellers of the day even though his records surpass all others
in number and variety. It is the representative nature of the data, their
consistency and predictability, together with Strahan's known influence in
the literary world which combine to produce in the record of Strahan's
business an individual case which is characteristic of the prevailing pattern
of book production in his day. Thus, Strahan's ledgers yield a standard
reference for normal printing procedures not hitherto available. All that is
necessary is to understand the pattern inherent in these records of Strahan's
career.
I propose here to explain two parts of this pattern: the way in which
the ledgers fit into the history of bookkeeping as typical eighteenth-century
business records, and the pattern which Strahan followed in charging his
customers for printing.[2]
