University of Virginia Library

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:

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