The Representative Nature of Strahan's
Methods
There is sufficient published evidence about other eighteenth-century
printers to confirm what logic dictates: that Strahan's highly codified
procedures discussed above were not his invention but were the procedures
of the large or moderately large London printing companies
during most of the century. Four examples of similarity of method will
serve to indicate the kind of evidence from which I infer the representative
nature of Strahan's ledgers as they reflected his business practices.
The practices of William Bowyer II can be partially reconstructed
from study of John Nichols' complicated but valuable Biographical
and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer, Printer, F.S.A. (1782);
Bowyer appears to have used much the same methods of working and of
recording his business that Strahan used.[9] Samuel Richardson's similar
printing
practices are detailed in William M. Sale Jr.'s Samuel Richardson:
Master Printer (1950) and in I. G. Philips' William
Blackstone
and the Reform of the Oxford University Press in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, New Series,
VII, 1957 for 1955) where are reproduced several documents Richardson
wrote about London printing scales and practices. We also have a good
sampling of the ledgers of Benjamin Collins of Salisbury, published in an
appendix to Charles Welsh's study of Newbery, A Bookseller of the
Last Century (1885).[10] A fourth source of evidence
is John Smith's The Printer's Grammar (1755), probably the
only eighteenth-century handbook for compositors. Smith's description of
procedures is remarkably like those Strahan must have followed in order to
have kept the ledgers as he did.
The methods and scales of Strahan's private business can, then, be
safely taken as the typical procedures of printing in London during the
eighteenth century — not "primitive" or "antique" but detailed and
necessary practices inherent in the mass production of literature and still
used today in a great many shops because they are the proper practices for
printing in quantity. From Strahan's ledgers we can gain information not
only about the thousands of books Strahan printed but about the production
of other books printed in London in the eighteenth century.
