University of Virginia Library

The Laureate as Huckster: Nahum Tate and an Early Eighteenth Century Example of Publisher's Advertising
by
Stuart L. Astor

When John Seddon, an eminent calligrapher of the restoration, died in 1700, he left a number of unfinished designs in the hands of his friend and former pupil, Thomas Read. Read had not become a practising writing-master; he was instead clerk of St. Giles in the Fields. Nevertheless, some time after Seddon's death he decided to have his late friend's work completed and published, ostensibly so that the world might not lose examples of penmanship "both Useful and Delightful to the true Sons of Art." He approached George Shelley, another reputable calligrapher, and arranged to have Seddon's designs finished or, to use Read's word, "perfected." The volume which resulted was published in 1705 with the title, The Penman's Magazine: or, a New Copy-Book, of the English, French and Italian Hands, After the Best Mode; Adorn'd with about an hundred New and Open Figures and Fancies, Never before Publish'd: After the Originals of the Late Incomparable Mr. John Seddon.

The Penman's Magazine consists of thirty-two plates engraved by John Nutting and printed, two per leaf, on the rectos of sixteen folio leaves. In addition to the title page there are five pages of preliminaries: one is Thomas Read's dedication, "To the Reader"; the other four, sig. B, contain a 146 line poem, "Upon this Performance of Penmanship, A Poem," by Nahum Tate, "Poet-Laureate to her Majesty."

Like much of Tate's verse, this poem has little literary merit. Furthermore, while its occasional nature may shed some light on the private enterprise

of that poet-laureate who had already chosen to write other poems on subjects as diverse as syphilis and tea, its place in Tate's canon is relatively unimportant. "Upon this Performance of Penmanship" is, however, a bibliographical oddity and may be the earliest surviving example of publisher's advertising of the eighteenth century, for after The Penman's Magazine was printed Tate's poem, retitled but not reset, was issued separately with a colophon added to show where and at what price copies of the Magazine could be obtained.

The Penman's Magazine is not particularly rare. Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library, Yale University, and the British Museum, at least, own one or more copies in various collections. Among those I have seen I have found two variant states of a single issue. The earlier of these apparently went to subscribers and the later was sold to the public. I have found only one copy of the separately issued poem, however. This, which must be considered a second issue, is in the Plimpton collection of early textbooks at Columbia University and is called "On a New Copy-Book Entitl'd The Penman's Magazine, &c, A Poem." The following descriptions are limited to the title pages and preliminaries of the Magazine as well as the new issue of the poem. Discussion of the calligraphic engravings would not only be out of place here but inconclusive, since most of the extant volumes I have seen are incomplete.

The Wing Typographic Collection of the Newberry Library has two copies of The Penman's Magazine, one (Wing fZW 745.S547) in what appears to be its earliest state. Its title page, a transcription of which follows, bears no imprint, only the date of publication:

In this copy, which I shall call the first state, the dedication to the reader (sig. [A] 2r) is followed by an unidentified epigraphic quotation: "Flourish may take him who a Letter Flies, / And turn Delight into an Exercise." The first page of Tate's poem has a signature mark, B, and the pages are numbered in square brackets, [1] - [4]. The text of the poem has only one marginal gloss, a reference to another poem by Tate, appearing on page 1 (sig. B1r).

The other copy at the Newberry Library (Wing fZW 745.S548), as well as the other copies I have seen at Columbia, Yale, and the New York

Public Library, varies in several ways and may be called the second state. The title page has not been reset, but a full imprint replaces the simple date of the first state: The epigraph below the dedication on sig. [A] 2r has been eliminated. Much of the original setting of the poem is unchanged, but three marginal glosses have been added, two on page 2 and one on page 3. A catchword referring to the first plate has been added on page 4. Three spelling errors have been corrected, some punctuation has been changed and two words have been reset in italics. Most importantly, two whole lines and a word on page two have been changed substantially. Thus, "But still to Use and Imitation Lost," line 31 of the first state, becomes "But ah! almost to Use and Practice Lost," in the second; the first's line 40, "And, freed from Intricacy's cum-bring Chain," becomes the second's "Yet justly careful in the loosen'd Chain," and "a stronger champion," (first state, line 34) becomes "another Champion."[1]

The separate issue of Tate's poem, an item of ephemera in Columbia's Plimpton Collection, retains most of the features of the second state described above. The printer who eliminated the catchword on its final page even neglected to remove the signature letter "B" from page 1. Apart from the eliminated catch word and the addition of the word "Finis" between the last line of the poem and the new colophon, three variants deserve comment. The poem's title, changed from "Upon this performance of Penmanship. A Poem" to "On a New Copy-Book, Entitl'd The Penman's Magazine, &c. A Poem" appears to have been set wherever possible from the type used for the title pages of the earlier issue. Thus the black letter type of the words "The Penman's Magazine," and the large, bold letters of "New Copy-Book" were reimposed for the poem's title before the type was distributed.

Although the printer may have saved time and labor setting the poem's title, he did not simply reimpose the imprint of the second state's title page as the colophon of the separate poem. The colophon, in fact, is newly composed and carries more information than the earlier imprint. It follows in full:

A third and quite interesting variant occurs in one of the marginal glosses previously added to the second state and here expanded to triple its length. In the second state, lines 46-47, Tate writes "What Charming Wonder's That? * A Cloudness Moon/ Like Cynthia rais'd to her Nocturnal Noon;" and the gloss for those lines is cryptic enough to anyone who does not have the engravings at hand. It reads simply "* The C Copy." The equivalent gloss to the same line in the separate poem reads "* A Crescent or Half-Moon Curiously perform'd in the Letter C."

These then are the three forms in which Nahum Tate's poem first appeared. Their sequence is easily determined, but leads to some interesting conjectures. The first state lacks a full imprint probably because it was issued directly to subscribers by Read and Shelley. In this state the lack of the marginal glosses later added to the poem to clarify the association of Read and Shelley with John Seddon also argues that the purchasers of the first issue were more familiar than the general public with the circumstances of its production. Perhaps the original subscribers were Shelley's own pupils, since all the lines corrected in the text of the poem for the second issue serve in the first to praise Shelley above Seddon, the creator of the original calligraphic designs.

Harder to account for is the difference between the imprint of the second state and the colophon of the separately printed poem. The latter, in fact, is the only evidence that Read and Shelley themselves actually sold the Magazine, even though the title pages of both the first and second states identify Read as the work's publisher and Shelley as its performer. A likely explanation turns on the fact that The Penman's Magazine must have been a very expensive volume to produce. Even at five shillings per copy, a high price for the early eighteenth century, Read and Shelley probably had trouble clearing with the first issue what must have been a considerable investment in Nutting's engraved plates and the relatively high cost of printing them. Presumably the booksellers, Parker et al., agreed to defray some part of the production costs in return for being allowed to issue the Magazine in its second state for public sale after the subscription copies had been run off. The exact financial arrangements cannot be known, but normal practice for the time suggests two possible contingencies. Under the first, Read and Shelley themselves would have seen no return from the public sale of the second state until the booksellers had covered their own costs and made a profit. Under the second, Read and Shelley themselves would have been responsible for all production costs until the booksellers had sold a predetermined number of copies of the second state. In either case, the more copies sold to the public, the more profit (or, at least, the less risk) to Read and Shelley. If the second state was not selling well, both

the booksellers and the entrepreneurs would have benefited from the extra sales outlets at "the Hand and Pen" and St. Giles in the Fields.

Here the separate issue of Tate's poem becomes significant as an advertising device. When it appeared the full edition of the Magazine, both plates and preliminaries, must already have been printed, since the poem's title is partially set with the same type used for the title pages of the first and second states of the Magazine. Hence, any investment Read and Shelley or the booksellers may have made in publication costs had already been made. One might argue that some copies of the poem must have been run off for Tate's own use or even to be sold as literature (although there is absolutely no evidence that the poem was sold at all), but these purposes would not have justified the new title, nor would they account for the expanded gloss — clearly an attempt to interest the public in seeing the Magazine — or the colophon, which lists six places at which the copy-book could be bought, as well as its price per copy. Unquestionably the poem was used for advertising in the modern sense of the word. Even the evident cost of producing the poem — in addition to whatever Tate may have been paid for the work, each separate copy of the poem requires the apparently extravagant use of a full sheet of paper — suggests an analogy with modern advertising budgets. If, as has been proposed, the poem was issued to offset poor initial sales of the Magazine, the attempt must have been almost desperate.

If these conjectures seem to explain the differences between the Magazine's imprint and the poem's colophon, they raise another problem: to argue that the poem was issued to rescue a failing publishing venture is also to argue that the type for the preliminaries of the Magazine was left standing long enough for that venture to be evaluated. This in turn suggests either that the publishers were prepared to print another issue of the Magazine should the earlier ones have proved successful, or that they were aware that the copy-book might not sell well and were ready in advance to use Tate's poem as advertising. The first suggestion is the more likely, but the second cannot be overlooked.

In his recent study of commendatory verses as advertising devices, Franklin B. Williams, Jr. mentions none that were separately issued, but he proves that through the mid-seventeenth century at least, the presence of commendatory verses could affect sales. He goes on to say, however, that "by about 1700 the sophisticated literary world had assumed a condescending attitude [toward commendatory verses], and in the Eighteenth century the practice lapsed into unimportance."[2] No doubt this is true, and although

the public for Read's copy-book probably had little to do with the sophistocated literary world Tate's poem is nothing more than a bibliographical oddity. Nevertheless, "On a New Copy-Book, Entitl'd The Penman's Magazine, &c. A Poem" is a far more complex advertising device than the earlier verses surveyed by Williams. Furthermore, it uses far more sophisticated techniques than the "rubric on the walls,/ Or plaistered posts, with claps, in capitals," the advertising of books through publicly displayed title pages, of which Alexander Pope speaks in his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," published twenty-eight years later than The Penman's Magazine.

Notes