William Strahan's Ledgers: Standard Charges for
Printing,
1738-1785
by
Patricia
Hernlund
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]
The Ledgers
As Philip Gaskell commented in his article, "The Strahan Papers,"
the account books which Strahan kept for his business show part of the
reason for his success, for they are remarkably thorough and accurate
examples of bookkeeping.[3] Since the
beginning of this century, when Richard Austen-Leigh wrote the first full
book on Strahan, The Story of a Printing House,[4] these business records have been
known
generically as the "Ledgers" of William Strahan. And since 1950 and 1953,
when William B. Todd first obtained permission to microfilm the records,
the volumes have been designated in alphabetical sequence, which is less
awkward than the numbering subsequently affixed to them by the British
Museum.
These so-called "Ledgers" show that William Strahan was a trained
bookkeeper whose practices in double entry bookkeeping followed standard
procedure as put forth in contemporary textbooks. The businessman first
made out the "waste book" and put it in daily use. This waste book allowed
the merchant to record transactions immediately and fully, but it had the
defect of preventing the merchant's finding any particular transaction
quickly, because the book was not arranged by name but by date.
This defect had led merchants, at an earlier stage of bookkeeping, to
adopt the Italian practice of double entry, which is simply that for every
entry in the chronological waste book, there would be two entries, debit and
credit, in the final ledger. This division of entries could be incorporated
into the waste book if such was considered practical, but the task was
complex and would lead to error. Therefore, a third, intermediate, book
had come into use: the journal, which separated the debtors and creditors
before they were placed alphabetically in the final ledger. When the waste
book was "digested into form" and put in the journal, it was recommended
that the merchant put a check mark opposite the original entry when he had
finished dividing it, to prevent posting twice or omitting. Strahan's
procedure was an alternative method of putting a large X through the entire
entry, although he also used check marks at times.
It was recommended that a ledger be started by titling each set of
pages for the accounts, in roughly the same order as their first appearance
in the waste book, and then writing out an "alphabet" at the front of the
book for easy reference.
Because Strahan was actively engaged in daily business, he did not
follow current bookkeeping texts with slavish exactness; in fact, the
texts themselves frown on such an idea. Strahan's entries were quite
detailed by contemporary standards, and he followed the basic procedures
outlined above; but his personal additions to standard practice were that he
used the new idea of keeping several books of primary entry rather than
only one kind of waste book, that he balanced by yearly totals, that he used
self-balancing cash entries (in Ledgers H and I), and that he kept at least
one columnar cash book (Ledger P). In addition to these up-to-date
practices, he followed the relatively new practice of "journalizing," or
dividing entries by debit and credit while they were still in the single entry
format of a waste book (Ledgers B and C).
The "Ledgers" are tabulated below in bookkeeping terms. Four
volumes from the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia
have been added to the twelve in the British Museum so that the reader can
see the complete alphabetical listing: the extension of Todd's system to
include all separate volumes of Strahan's records which were written during
his lifetime.[5]
The sequence of derivation of these ledgers is quite plainly seen in
their overlapping entries. Ledger C, which was found tucked inside Ledger
B, is a waste book for B, which is itself an intermediate form of a partially
separated waste book. The entries in B were transferred to Ledgers A and
D, and to another ledger which has not survived. Thus the sequential
Ledgers A and D are augmented by B, which is partially derived from
C.
The sequential Ledgers D and F are augmented by information in G,
which is a journal for D, F, and a missing ledger called "my little quarto
book" by Strahan. Ledger F is duplicated for the first nine years by Ledger
E, which could therefore be called a journal or a ledger, but
is
useless for study because it is an exact duplicate of F as far
as
it goes.
Ledgers A, D and F, then, evidently do not show us all of Strahan's
business transactions even though they form an unbroken series of entries
from 1738 to 1790; it is obvious, however, that they record most of the
transactions in the private business, and that they are augmented by B, C
and G. Any generalizations about Strahan's printing practices must be based
on a study of at least Ledgers A, D, F, with the desirable addition of
control data from B.
In transferring entries from one book to another, Strahan was faced,
as are other bookkeepers, with the difficulty of making sure that all of the
entries were copied. In his method of double checking lies the reason for
the otherwise mysterious "misplacing" of dates in the ledgers. The second
time he went through a volume, Strahan would pick up overlooked entries
and post them out of chronological order at the foot of the
proper page in the new volume. As long as he got the entry on the correct
page for the account, Strahan was following a standard method of
procedure; therefore, a lack of chronological sequence on a page is not to
be considered a mistake. It follows from this information that a reader must
interpret the dates on any given page by referring to the context of the
entire page rather than a simple sequence of entries.
Strahan's method of writing down the day, month and year in the
entries must also be made clear if the reader wants reliable information. All
dating by Strahan is New Style and each entry is dated, but the exact day
or month is frequently "understood." Just as Strahan does not clutter the
page by repeating press runs if they are the same, entry after entry, so also
he dates in groups; therefore, any entry is to be considered
as
dated by the closest date above it if it is not specifically and separately
dated.
Dating was not so important to Strahan as it is to his
twentieth-century readers since he knew he would not be paid in a brief
time. It is a rare entry on the credit side of Strahan's ledgers which is not
at least six months later than the corresponding debit. There was no need
to bill a customer the instant his work was finished, nor was there any
reason to bill the customers separately for each job. In addition, because of
Strahan's billing method of including all extra charges, binding charges,
distribution and publishing charges in the final version of any given set of
entries, it is obvious that any given set was written into the final ledger as
a unit as soon after the entire job was completed as was
practical. On this series of inferences, I base my conclusion that the dating
of the ledgers should be considered as the times when one or a group of
jobs was billed to the customer after delivery: when the entries were
transferred to journals (or ledgers), the entire
information about extra charges was gathered and included, and the bills
were sent out, dated with the dates which have survived in the
ledgers.
Several of the ledgers were designed to be examined by the customers
involved in the accounts. We know that some customers came in to
Strahan's shop, looked over their accounts in the ledger, probably haggled
a bit, and then paid their debt, because these customers signed jointly with
Strahan directly on the page of the ledger. On some of these occasions
Strahan would lower the total bill by as much as a pound (rarely more).
The practice, which is still in operation today, was called "abating" by
Strahan when he noted it at the bottom of an account. There seem to have
been three reasons for "abating": to make an even pound for a customer
who brought cash, to give a rebate for prompt payment, or to forestall
argument by lowering the price a token amount for a disgruntled customer
as a sign of good faith.
Strahan conducted a successful business on the basis of the highly
codified entries in the ledgers. Once the consistency of the codification and
its strict reliance on conventional bookkeeping are understood, the reader
can see that the ledger entries are completely reliable even though they need
interpretation. We shall now turn to a discussion of the content of the
entries, to see what can be learned from them about the organization of
Strahan's printing house.
Establishment of the Unit Price: Entries before
1749
A few months after William Strahan's death in 1785, the London
compositors and Masters came to their first "union wage agreement" which
was binding for most (certainly the majority) of the printing
companies in the city and set the precedent for a later agreement on
pressmen's wages.
[6] The principal
grievance of the compositors was insecurity about their wages: not all
printers charged the same prices for the same work and therefore did not
give the same wages for the same work. Consequently, a compositor could
not leave one shop to go to another one with any ease, for he had no
assurance that the second shop would give the same wages he had been
getting. Further, in any one shop the compositors did not have any
assurance that the Master Printer would charge, or pay in wages, at the
same rate for two similar jobs. The demand of the compositors in 1785 was
that all prices and wages in all shops be the same for any given job. The
same demand is still being made today, in union and non-union printing
companies, for the problem of the standard scale of prices is persistent in
the printing industry. Even when a standard scale exists, it will be
imperfect as far as the employees are concerned, because a scale is fixed
whereas the material they work on will not be the same for any two
jobs.
In spite of the complaints of the eighteenth-century compositors, price
scales were being used long before 1785, and, specifically in the business
of William Strahan, the scale was consistent and practical but flexible. The
compositors could not have had as strong a grievance against Strahan as
they had against some small shops. Even though there is not enough
information available to prove whether Strahan's scale resulted in high or
in low wages, there is ample evidence to prove that Strahan's wages must
have been the same for two similar jobs and that they must have been
consistent. We can know this by extrapolating from the consistency of the
prices he charged his customers. I shall, therefore, examine the price scales
for standard work as it was charged to the customer at
Strahan's
private business.[7]
Discussion of Strahan's standard scale of prices for his customers can
be divided into three parts: the methods of entry in the ledgers, the unit
price for work, and the cost of paper. In addition to the standard scale,
Strahan maintained a separate, consistent scale for "extra" work. Since this
discussion will concentrate on the methods of
entry and the unit price for work, there will be no concentration on paper
or "extra" charges, which are separate studies in themselves.
Methods of Entry in the Ledgers
There are several kinds of entries for debit and credit in the ledgers,
but Strahan used only two kinds of standard debit entries for printing. The
first kind was used for "job work" or "jobbing," that is, for certain work
which varied in size from cards and announcements through titles and
broadsides of one page, to bills, acts, law cases, summonses, and
advertisements up to a size of approximately 2½ sheets maximum. "Job
work" of this sort is still used today — as it was in the eighteenth
century
— as a practical way to "fill unsold time" (the fallow periods
between
contracts for book work).
Although "jobbing" was generally applied to work of one page or
less, the true distinction lay in the kind of typesetting employed; if very
little setting was required, or if the job was "ganged" (one printing from
multiple typesetting to produce more than one copy from each sheet), the
work was called "jobbing." Strahan did not ordinarily print runs of fewer
than fifty copies in "job work"; his usual run was between 100 and 250
copies, and the highest run I found for "jobbing" was for 104,000 octavo
proposals for Rapin's History of England in numbers, run in
1758.[8] Generally, when the run
became very large, Strahan would change to a variant method of entry in
which he kept a record of the reams of paper used, but for most of the "job
work" he used a method of entry in which the entire "job" was the basic
unit for billing purposes. Roughly one-half of the printing entries in the
ledgers are of this sort; in addition, all of the entries for
"extra charges" also followed the format. Sometimes such pertinent
information as the run of copies or the size of sheet, the kind of paper or
occasionally the type face would be included, but Strahan did not consider
it necessary to itemize details of such simple work, nor did his customers
expect more information than the flat rate for the total job, since they had
contracted for the work on that basis.
Some customers required only "job work" (e.g., the New River
Company, the Scots Corporation, the Goldsmiths' Company, and many law
firms), but the method of entry was not restricted to such companies.
For example, below are eight "jobbing" entries chosen to show variety of
subject matter as well as the simplicity of the entry:
1741 |
|
|
£ |
s
|
d
|
Decr. |
17 |
To printing 1000 Bills for Sale of Waste Paper |
0. |
6. |
0 |
1743 |
Febry |
|
For printing three Reams of Prayers etc. in Welsh and
English |
1. |
10. |
0 |
1739 |
Decr. |
8 |
To printing one Quire of Summons for Merchant Taylors |
0. |
4. |
0 |
1742 |
Janry |
23 |
For printing the Case John Mackye Esqr. 850 copies |
4. |
4. |
0 |
1739 |
March |
27 |
For printing an Elegy 100 Copies |
0. |
10. |
6 |
1742 |
March |
27 |
For printing the Letter to Mr. Watts 10,000 Copies
[sic] |
4. |
0. |
0 |
1742 |
July |
4 |
For 2 Jobbs for Poulter's Company |
0. |
17. |
0 |
|
|
For 2 Lists for Oxfordshire and Hampshire |
0. |
8. |
6 |
1747 |
Oct. |
|
[For printing 13 Sheets of Hill's Fossils No. 700 Coarse & 50
Fine &c.mmat; 14d. pr. sh. |
9. |
2. |
0] |
|
|
For printing 1000 Quarto Proposals |
2. |
10. |
0 |
In the first seven examples above, the "jobbing" entry is used to show
an entire contract for work; in the last example, the entry is used in
connection with a larger unit of "book" work (in brackets). The "jobbing"
entry is thus used to show an entire contract in one simple entry, or it is the
format followed for "extra charges" involved in the printing of a larger
contract for "book" work.
The second method of entry for printing was used in roughly one-half
of the printing entries. This "book" entry was designed for book and
periodical printing and was much more detailed and flexible than the
"jobbing" entry. The basic pattern was the same throughout Strahan's
career. The details and ordering were as follows:
- a. "For Printing __________."
- b. "_____ vols." (frequently followed by the number of the
edition, where pertinent),
- c. "_____ sheets,"
- d. "No. _____" (number of copies in press run),
- e. "&c.mmat;£ _____ per Sheet,"
- f. The total price.
Items a and b were necessary for identification; items c through f were used
in various combinations for computation and billing. The unit price (e) and
the number of sheets (c) were the most important
items in any entry, for it was from multiplying these two that the total price
was determined.
During his first seven years in business, Strahan diligently recorded
all of the items above as well as, in many instances, the type face and sheet
size. Later, during the period from 1745 to 1749, his scale of prices for
each type face and sheet size was sufficiently well-established for him to
depend on it, and so he simply recorded the unit price (e) without the
addition of type face and sheet size. After 1749, Strahan saw a further
simplification and gradually began to follow it: since the unit price was so
well established, it was only necessary for him to record the number of
sheets and the total price in his ledger in order to compute, later, what the
unit price had been. In general, however, Strahan used a middle method,
neither extremely detailed nor extremely simplified. To illustrate, I have
randomly chosen one page of billing in order to reproduce all of the
printing entries for one page to indicate the method and the variations
Strahan used in simplifying. The
entries from Ledger A, folio 137 verso, happen to be for Andrew Millar,
but since he was Strahan's best customer, the choice does not militate
against random choice so much as it points out the fact that Millar
was Strahan's most frequent customer, until his successor
Thomas Cadell took over Millar's business.
Mr. Andrew Millar Dr. [debtor]
1767 |
|
£ |
s
|
d
|
Novr. |
Adventures of Joseph Andrews, 2 vol. 20 Sheets No. 1000
&c.mmat;£ 1:7:0 |
27 |
1768 |
Janry. |
Ball's Practise of Physick, 2 vol. 3d. Edit. 53 Sheets No. 750 &c.mmat;
19s |
50. |
7. |
0 |
|
Pringle's Diseases of the Army 33¼ Sheets, No. 1000,
&c.mmat;£ 1.4 |
39. |
18. |
0 |
|
Hume's Essays, 2 vol. 4 to 139½ Sheets No. 500 &c.mmat;
15s |
104. |
12. |
6 |
1767 |
April |
Sir James Stuart's Principles of Political Oeconomy, yr.
half |
101. |
14. |
9 |
In this example, the basic pattern is present in four out of five of the
entries. The fifth entry is an example of the first or "jobbing" method of
entry, used to keep track of Millar's share in a partnership venture ("yr.
half") which was recorded in detail elsewhere.
It can also be seen from the examples that excess information, such
as the words "for printing," was eliminated as the years went by. The
number of volumes was included only when it seemed pertinent to Strahan;
the number of the edition or the sheet size was sometimes
entered, sometimes not. These refinements were signals for Strahan to
return to his waste book if he needed more information; in most cases we
cannot check the accuracy of the signals because the waste books and most
of the journals have disappeared. But the variations serve to accentuate the
flexibility of the "book" method of debit entry for printing rather than to
obscure the method.
The Unit Charge
The nature of Strahan's standard scale of prices can be determined
from examination of entries from Ledger A, made during Strahan's early
years in business when he recorded more information than was really
necessary for bookkeeping and thereby left vital evidence for the
reconstruction of his scale of prices to the customer. In the reconstructed
scale which follows, the abbreviation "L.P." has been used for Long Primer
type face.
There are several gaps and some anomalies in this scale of prices, for
Strahan, of course, did not realize that his scale would some day be
reconstructed from the ledgers; he undoubtedly had it available for daily use
in written or printed form. However, it is apparent from the reconstruction
above that a regular scale was the standard method of fixing the unit charge
for any job. We see that the unit charge was a certain price for each sheet.
The price for this unit was determined by (1) the size of the sheet, (2) the
size of the type, and (3) the press run of copies.
The Size of the Sheet
The scale shows that octavo was the usual sheet size for English, Pica
and Small Pica type, but large octavo was also popular. Duodecimo was the
usual size for smaller type, especially Long Primer. The price did not
necessarily vary simply with the size of the sheet, but with the relationship
between the sheet and the type used.
The Size of the Type
On the one hand, if a small type were used for a large sheet, the
price was higher for any run of copies than if a large type were used: more
typesetting was involved in using small type. On the other hand, even if a
small type were used, the charge would depend on the exact relationship
between the type size and the sheet. For example, if a job were set in Small
Pica and run as octavo, it would involve less type-setting than if it were set
in Small Pica and run as a large octavo, because the line measure of large
octavo is longer than regular octavo if the margin of white space around the
type is not changed. This same Small Pica, if run in duodecimo, would
have less work than octavo sheets in some respects: the line measure would
be shorter and there would be fewer lines to the page; but, in other
respects, more furniture and spacing would have to be handled because
there would be eight more pages to set to complete the sheet than in octavo
even if the line measure were
shorter. Thence the price for a duodecimo in Small Pica could easily be
more than for a large octavo on one occasion and less on another occasion,
according to the Master Printer's opinion of the difficulty and quantity of
the typesetting, which would include his figuring ahead of time the line
measure and the number of lines per page — in other words, the unit
price would always depend on the results of "casting off copy" before the
job was begun. This practice resulted in Strahan's fixing more than one
price for a unit charge. For example, 1000 copies of Small Pica duodecimo
could cost as little as
£1.4.0 per sheet, or as much as £1.12.0, depending on the results
of the casting-off process.
Strahan's casting-off must have been standardized to conform to his
scale of prices with little deviation of line measure or margin, for the
anomalies in the scale above are few, once the relationship between the
kind of work, the type face, and the sheet size has been accepted as causing
slight fluctuations for any given run.
The Press Run of Copies
The information from the scale above, supplemented by other
information from later periods in Strahan's career, shows that from 1738
to 1785 the most frequently ordered press run was 500 copies, and that a
run of 1000 was second in frequency. Runs of 500 or 1000 copies account
for more than half of the press runs which I tabulated as typical of entries
in Ledgers A, B, D and F.
Copies
|
Instances
|
500 |
175 |
1000 |
139 |
750 |
77 |
1500 |
43 |
250 |
37 |
2000 |
28 |
3000 |
15 |
All of these most frequently requested runs were multiples of a "token"
(250 copies) rather than "bastard" runs of less than an even token, such as
400 or 800. It is notable that longer runs of 2000 and 3000 are much more
frequent than has generally been supposed true in eighteenth-century
printing.
It can be proved that the unit price for work increased in direct
proportion to the increase in the press run, by using the scale of unit prices
above and information from later periods in Strahan's career to reconstruct
a scale of unit prices charged for each of the seven most frequently used
press runs. These prices fall naturally into three ranges for each run; in the
scale below I have attributed these three price ranges to the use of specific
type faces and sheet sizes, but it should be remembered that my attribution
is hypothetical, since the exact relationship between the press run and the
type and sheet cannot be known with absolute certainty. The scale was
constructed from 406 instances of unit charges for press runs between 1738
and 1785 ("No.") and indicates the possibility of a higher top price in the
price ranges marked "+."
The scale shows that Strahan's customers where charged a unit price
in an ascending scale according to the press runs they ordered, as well as
according to the type face and sheet size. If the exact relationship of these
factors in the unit price were known, we could reconstruct the pressmen's
wage scale; but even with the simple scale above it is possible to infer,
from the regular patterns of increase, that the pressmen did have a regular
scale of wages throughout Strahan's career.
The longer runs cost proportionately much more than the shorter
runs, because type in the eighteenth century did not last as long as type
does today; consequently, a long run in Strahan's business could easily
mean that he would have to restock on the particular face because of wear.
Further, each additional token resulted in more pressmen's wages, more ink
and other material, more washing of the form (especially if the job ran to
a second day), and, of course, less flexibility for press scheduling of small
or "rush" jobs when one or more presses were occupied with long runs.
Today, long runs cost proportionately less than shorter runs, because of the
high speed of continuously operating electrical presses printing solidly cast
linotype or plates. Even today it is true, however, that hand-set type is
charged at a premium if it is ordered for a long run rather than being
plated; many shops refuse to use certain hand-set type for anything but
"reproduction proof."
Later Evidence of the Unit Price: Entries after
1749
Because of Strahan's simplification of the entries, there is less
information in the ledgers after 1745-49; but there is still enough to
corroborate the statement that Strahan's charges in later years followed the
unit charge for each sheet, and that the unit charge was always based on
type, the size of the sheet, and the number of copies run, as established
during Strahan's first years of business. It is notable that the unit price
increased very little over the years until some time during the Revolutionary
War. I cannot fix the gradations of this price increase beyond saying that
the unit price in 1785 showed a distinct increase for all categories over the
prices of 1776.
Type
From the scale of prices above, we see that before 1749, when almost
all entries included the type face used, the faces most frequently mentioned
were:
1. Pica ............................................... |
52 |
2. English ............................................ |
41 |
3. Small Pica ......................................... |
37 |
4. Long Primer ........................................ |
18 |
5. Great Primer ....................................... |
6 |
6. Brevier ............................................ |
5 |
7. Pica and Long Primer ............................... |
2 |
8. Long Primer and Brevier ............................ |
2 |
9. Double Pica ........................................ |
1 |
10. Pica and Small Pica ................................ |
1 |
11. Bourgeois .......................................... |
0 |
12. Small Letter ....................................... |
0 |
|
__ |
|
165 |
From this frequency list, we can arrive at the "standard" faces:
Appropriate for text or medium sheets:
English, Pica, Small Pica
Appropriate for notes or small sheets:
Long Primer and some Brevier
After 1749, when Strahan simplified his ledger entries, he eliminated
mention of any faces except those used in an unusual or "extra" manner.
This absence of mention provides us with one of the three kinds of evidence
about type after 1749. We would expect that the "standard" faces,
established above, would not appear often in the entries but that the smaller
faces might appear as "extra charges." Such is exactly the case. I could find
only forty-nine instances after 1749 in which type face was named, either
in the standard entries or in the
"extra charges." These show just the reversal of frequency which we would
expect:
-
Instances
- 1. English ............................................... 0
- 2. "Large Letter"
[Great Primer?] ...................................... 1
- 3. Pica and Small Pica ...................................
1
- 4. Small Pica with Brevier ...............................
1
- 5. "Large Pica" [Double Pica? or large
sheet of Pica?] ...................................... 2
- 6. Bourgeois .............................................
2
- 7. Small Pica ............................................
3
- 8. Pica .................................................. 5
- 9. Brevier ............................................... 6
- 10. Long Primer ...........................................
9
- 11. Small Letter ..........................................
19
It is apparent that if Strahan only mentioned type faces forty-nine times
after 1749, he must have been using his price scale (which has been
reconstructed above) to set each unit charge; using the scale would
eliminate the necessity for recording type faces in the ledgers. However,
"small letter" was still recorded with some frequency — in the
context
of notes, indexes and appendixes rather than of text or body work.
When frequency is correlated with price in the scale, we find that
Strahan's charges for standard and non-standard faces were completely
consistent with the size appropriate for body or text work and notes or
small work:
Cheapest: |
Double Pica |
|
Great Primer |
Intermediate: |
English |
|
Pica |
|
Small Pica |
Extra Charge: |
Bourgeois |
|
Long Primer |
|
Brevier |
High Extra Charge: |
Small Letter |
|
(Non Pareil or Pearl) |
The other two kinds of evidence about type after 1749 are found in
two ledgers which show (1) Strahan's purchases for the private business and
(2) type on hand at the law house.
Purchases of Type for the
Private Business
Five pages in Ledger B show forty-one purchases of type from the
firm of Alexander Wilson, typefounder in Glasgow, between 1754 and
1776, as well as four returns of unused or faulty type. Although these
records do not show all of Strahan's purchases of type, they do show how
much of each kind he purchased from one company over a period of
years.
Since we do not know what type Strahan already had on hand, the
only safe conclusion which can be drawn from this table is that he
purchased more English type than any other kind from Wilson between
1754 and 1776; we cannot conclude, of course, that Strahan did not use
Pica, etc., at all, for we know from the ledger entries that he did. Further,
it is notorious that Scottish type height has always been different from
London type height; some twentieth-century printing companies still keep
old Scottish type separately cased. Therefore, Strahan probably bought his
Pica, etc., from a Scottish founder rather than from his other regular
supplier, William Caslon, whose type was used in the law house.
Type on Hand at the Law House
The amounts of type used in the law house seem to correlate more
closely with the mention and lack of mention of type in the ledgers than do
the type purchases from Wilson shown above. The following table shows
the total poundage of old and new type on hand for the four presses of the
law house when it was inventoried at the expiration
of the Law Patent in 1789. The relative proportions of type faces are close
to the proportions one would expect to find in the private business except
that the law house had no Double Pica or Bourgeois in 1789 and that the
poundage is much less than would have been on hand at the private
business, which was easily three times the size of the law house.
Considerations Involved in Fixing the Unit
Price
Even though "standard" faces — English, Pica and Small Pica
—
were charged at a standard rate set in the scale of prices, it remained the
work of the Master or the Overseer to cast-off copy in such a way that he
not only conformed to the scale but also allowed a profit margin to take
care of the nature and condition of the copy: the number of "hard words,"
the complexity of the syntax, the handwriting of the copy. It is the state of
the copy which forces a modification of any scale of prices when unusual
work comes into the house and which makes customers today as well as in
the eighteenth century willing to accept a higher scale-rate rather than incur
"extra" charges because their copy is "dirty." Strahan's scale had to include
enough profits after wages to cover the variables which could not be
charged "extra" in the ordinary run of business. He was successful in
making his scale sufficient to cover most occasions, for the ledgers show
only fourteen instances out of 996
entries in which "extra" charges were made for original
composition. Of these fourteen, ten were divided among five publications:
one short-lived periodical, the East India Miscellany (three
instances), and three works in which Strahan was a partner and could
therefore charge "extra" for "dirty copy" without worrying about a
customer's reaction, Isaac Ware's Architecture (two
instances),
Sir John Hill's Herbal (two instances), and a Naval
History (three instances). It is
safe to say that Strahan consistently and constantly applied the scale to all
except a negligible number of jobs.
As can be seen from the scale of unit prices, Strahan's customers
were always charged at a higher rate for "mixed" sheets. To judge from the
entries for these sheets, two type faces could be mixed in one sheet up to
a fixed maximum without a higher charge, but beyond the maximum a
higher scale began which increased as the proportion of mixture increased.
Mixtures of two languages resulted in a higher rate immediately, but sheets
entirely in Latin did not necessarily have a higher rate. All languages which
used an alphabet other than the Roman (thus necessitating a different type
font whereas Latin did not) were, however, charged at a much higher rate.
When Strahan did not have the alphabet of a particular type face on hand,
he ordered the casting of fonts or sorts and charged the customer a
separate, "extra" fee for the casting as well as the higher rate for unfamiliar
setting.
Charges for half sheets were always one-half of the charge for full
sheets (I could find only one exception); but when the casting-off showed
that a quarter sheet would be needed (e.g., in a job of 10¾ or 5¼
sheets), Strahan followed one of three practices. Usually, he charged the
price for the exact one-quarter or three-quarter sheet, presumably absorbing
the cost of the extra work in his profit margin. Occasionally, he charged for
the next higher half sheet; since a quarter sheet, especially three-quarters,
is actually an unprintable unit except in unusual circumstances, this practice
was a perfectly proper business charge. It can be inferred that in these
instances Strahan was unwilling to absorb the extra cost of finding a small
press free and cutting paper to fit it; instead, he made an additional charge
to the customer, which may or may not have covered the cost to Strahan.
Rarely (in two instances) Strahan charged a rate between the
cost of the quarter
sheet and the cost of the next higher half sheet. Unless these two instances
are mistakes in arithmetic (which is extremely rare in the ledgers), it can
be inferred that these two customers were given a slight preferment in price
but not the lowest cost, presumably because they should have avoided the
extra quarter sheet.
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.
Notes