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:
The Penman's Magazine: [black letter] / OR, A / NEW
COPY-BOOK, / OF THE / English, French and Italian / HANDS, / After
the Best MODE; / Adorn'd with about an hundred [black
letter] New and Open / FIGURES AND
FANCIES,
/ Never before Publish'd: / After the ORIGINALS of the Late /
Incomparable Mr. John Seddon. [rule] / Perform'd
by
George Shelley [black letter] WRITING-MASTER,
/ at the HAND and PEN in Warwick-Lane, London. / [rule]
/
Supervis'd and Publish'd by Thomas Read, [black letter]
CLERK of St. Giles's / in the Fields, formerly a Scholar to
the
said Mr. SEDDON. / [rule] / Ann. Dom.
MDCCV.
In this copy, which I shall call the first state, the dedication to the reader
(sig. [A] 2
r) 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. B1
r).
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:
Sold by R. Parker, under the Piazza
Royal-Exchange; J. Holland, at the Bible in Paul's-/
Alley, near St. Paul's Church; B.
Lintott, at
the Temple-Gate; J. Dewell, at the Globe/ near
the
New-Exchange, in the Strand. Ann. Dom.
MDCCV.
Price 5 s.
The epigraph below the dedication on sig. [A] 2
r 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:
The Copy-Book Sold by
G. Shelley Writing-Master, at
the
Hand and
Pen in
Warwick-Lane
/ and
T. Read, Clerk of St
Giles's in the Fields: As
also,
by
R. Parker, under the
Royal Ex- / change; J.
Holland, at the
Bible in
Paul's-Alley, near St.
Paul's Church;
B. Lintott, at the /
Temple Gate; J. Dewell, at
the
Globe near the
New-Exchange, in the
Strand,
London. 1705 / Price 5 s.
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