University of Virginia Library

IV

I should not wish to deny that significant changes occurred in printing and publishing between the years 1500 and 1800; but on two counts I wish to offer some resistance to the evasive tactics of those who would for their part deny the relevance of conditions in any one period to those in another. Of course 1586 is not 1623, nor 1683, 1695, 1701, 1731, nor 1790. Yet just as Greg has argued that bibliography, as the study of the transmission of literary texts, comprehends manuscripts as well as printed books, so I wish to argue that the integrity of the subject can best be preserved and a sound methodology evolved only if we stress the similarity of conditions in all periods. Then fine distinctions may be entertained, not as period differences but as the inevitable result of variables which will differ from day to day and house to house. My second reason for resisting the too ready rejection of analogy is that very little fundamental research has been done on the history of printing. History is never so gross as when it's being formulated to serve a theory; and bibliographers with their eyes closest to the internal physical evidence have, on the whole, seen least of what lies beyond it.

The familiar picture of 'Elizabethan' printers, restricted in number, presses, edition quantities, and apprentices, and therefore constantly

under pressure, and operating an essentially uncomplicated, balanced production schedule, is attractive in its simplicity. But in its generalized form such a picture is also apt to be dangerously misleading. Simpson, discussing the limitation of presses, once wrote that "When a printer with at most two presses had a book on the stocks, he could do nothing else until he had printed it off."[87] Such a view, so stated, now seems extremely naive, although something like it is implied in many studies even today. The documentation that exists for a shop of comparable size in 1700, printing books in editions no larger than those permitted in 1587, makes it clear that productive conditions of enormous complexity involving as many as ten or a dozen jobs at any one time were normal in a small two-press house.

But even the size of 'Elizabethan' shops has perhaps been a little too readily set at one or two presses, and the 'strict limitation' on their numbers over-stressed. The evidence would appear to be straightforward, but is it? Were there really too few printers and presses for the work available, or too many? In 1582, at a time of complaints from journeymen about lack of work, Christopher Barker said that the number of printing houses then in London (22) could be more than halved and the needs of the whole kingdom still met.[88] In 1583 the complaint of the 'poor men' of the Company was that they had too little work, and Commissioners appointed to look into the trade recommended that some privileged books be released to the poor for printing, a practice continued by the several Stocks of the Stationers' Company throughout the 17th century to assist printers who were short of work (Greg, Companion, pp. 21, 128). In May 1583 there were 23 master printers, possessing in all 53 presses: Barker had 5, Wolf 5, Day and Denham 4 each, and six others 3 apiece.[89] Although the Commissioners of 1583 recommended that no more presses be set up without license, their recommendation in respect of the existing presses was simply

Could anything more permissive be desired? The Star Chamber decree of 1586 forbade the erection of new presses "tyll the excessive multytude of Prynters havinge presses already sett up, be abated" (Greg, Companion, p. 41). A statement of the position the following month shows that the number of printers had risen to 25 and that Barker had increased the number of his presses to 6 (Arber, Transcript, V, lii). Apart from isolated cases of surreptitious printing punished by seizure of equipment, and apart from the normal licensing of those who succeeded to the select company of master printers, there is nothing to show how this positive abatement in the number of presses was procured. For the next twenty-nine years, there is little primary evidence at all to show in what measure the conditions of 1586 had ceased to apply. Indeed, apart from the recurrent fuss over privileges, there is evidence of a general relaxation.

When in 1613-15 the unemployed journeymen again complained about their inability to set up presses, they saw that a necessary condition of such a freedom would be access to privileged copies — otherwise there would be little work.[90] The master printers for their part were worried, or made a pretence of being so, at the "multitude of Presses that are erected among them" and by a self-denying ordinance agreed that, the King's Printer apart, fourteen of them should have 2 presses each and five of them 1.[91] Since the number of printers was 20 in all, such a rule can only mean that many of them had retained from a much earlier period, or set up over the last few years, far more presses than the numbers now set down. And since the number of printers did remain fairly constant, the agreement can only have been designed to secure a slightly more equitable distribution of work among these very printers; it implied, therefore, considerable under-production in the smaller shops.

Are we to take it that this decision by the Court of Assistants was immediately enforced? There is no evidence of it. Eight years later, on 5 July 1623,

again it is set down down that, the King's Printer excluded, fourteen printers should have only 2 presses each and five of them 1. Augustine Matthews was one of these five, but it is clear from another entry that he had more than one press (Jackson, p. 159). By September the following year the order had still not been put into effect and an inspectorial party was authorized to dismantle any excess presses.[92] By 7 Feb. 1625 the Court was prepared to give up: In 1637, after being restricted to one press ever since 1586, the Cambridge printer was graciously allowed a second. When in 1632 Roger Daniel had moved in he took over:

The Star Chamber decree of 1637, reporting that of 1586 as defective in some particulars so that divers abuses had arisen to the prejudice of the public, attempted to keep the number of master printers down to 20 (there were 22), but the number of presses, always more difficult to restrict, was allowed to rise (Greg, Companion, p. 105). By 1649 there were apparently some 60 printers in London and by 1660 the number had increased to 70, though it is doubtful whether there were so many printing houses. The Licensing Act of 1662 provided that no more printers be licensed until the number had fallen again to 20, but nothing was done to enforce the ruling and for the next thirty years it was openly ignored.[93] In 1668, after the great fire, there were 65 presses in 26 houses, the King's Printer having 6, two others 5

each, another 4, seven had 3, nine had 2, and six had 1.[94] Negus in 1724 listed 75 London houses and 28 in the provinces. Mr Ellic Howe comments: "There was, therefore, no great expansion in the trade compared with its state seventy years previously" (London Compositor, p. 33). By 1785 there were 124 printers; in 1808 "not more than 130", although Stower in the same year listed 216; by 1818 the total in London was 233.[95]

All I wish to ask now is whether there is much conclusive evidence that 'Elizabethan' conditions in any one printing house were utterly distinctive from those common in the 18th century? Expansion of the trade there undoubtedly was but except in a very few cases (Watts in the 1720's, Bowyer, Richardson and Strahan mid-century — a half dozen at most out of upwards of a hundred?) what we get in the 18th century is proliferation, multiple establishments, not an exceptional growth in any one. The fundamental conditions of work in each remain unchanged. Or again, if it is urged that the multi-press shops of the 18th century have few parallels in the early 17th century, one is entitled to ask quite directly how Ackers' and the Bowyers' three-, four-, and five-press shops of the 1730's differ from those of Barker, Wolf, Day, Denham, all of whom had more than three presses, and the other six printers who in 1583 had three presses each. Or one might ask how significantly, in terms of size, either group differs from those listed in 1668 (eleven of whom had three or more presses). And even if it is conceded that none of the printers limited to two presses in 1615 and 1623 would have grossly exceeded this number, a certain scepticism is still permissible since there is no evidence at all that they conformed to the ruling and much that they refused to. Or take the question the other way round: grant for the moment that most Elizabethan shops were two-press or one-press houses; it may then be asked what the distribution of presses was within 18th-century houses. How many had two, how many had only one? In the second week of October 1732 even Bowyer had only two (See appendix II (f).). For the rest, no one knows, and even press figures may not tell us.

Is the problem any simpler if we look at edition quantities? It is true that these were limited by regulation in Elizabethan-Jacobean

times and not in the 18th century. Yet two points must be kept in mind. First, very few books printed in the 18th century, apart from some newspapers and periodicals about which some firm figures are at last available, ever in fact exceeded the limits for editions laid down in 1587 and liberalized in 1637. Neither the Cambridge, Bowyer, Woodfall, nor Strahan documents suggest that for any one edition, however many impressions it might comprehend, there is any very gross disparity between Elizabethan and 18th-century conditions in this matter. Out of some 514 books printed by Strahan between 1738 and 1785, only 43 were printed in 2000 copies or more, and of these only 15 were in editions of 3000 or more (Hernlund, "Strahan's Ledgers", p. 104). The edition quantities I cite for Dyche's Guide to the English Tongue may be more in keeping with some statements I have seen about expansion of the trade in the 18th century — and with others implying trade restriction and small editions in the 17th century. In any case it leads me to my second point: the prodigious numbers of certain books that were produced in the earlier period. Professor Todd once remarked that "a certain discretion common to most authorities, including bibliographers, moves us to view the unknown as unmentionable". And the loss of much ephemera of the 16th and 17th centuries (almanacks, school texts, and many other books required in multiple editions by the several Stocks of the Stationers' Company) has perhaps made us unmindful of the volume of such work. The late Cyprian Blagden's analysis of the distribution of almanacks in the second half of the 17th century, only one aspect of such printing, is a useful corrective.[96] For the earlier period odd cases reveal substantial printings: the 4000 copies of the Psalms in metre, for example, printed by Frank and Hill in 1585; the 10,000 copies of the ABC and Little Catechism printed the same year by Dunn and Robinson (Greg, Companion, p. 37). In three years, during the early 1630's the Cambridge printers provided for the London Company 18,000 Pueriles Sententiae, 12,000 Aesop's Fables, 6000 Pueriles Confabulationes, 6000 copies of Mantuan, and at least seven other books in 3000 copies or more (Roberts, p. 51). But the major evidence of large editions, far in excess presumably of the limits set, is the complaints from journeymen. The Company regulations of 1587, designed for the benefit of the journeymen, sought to provide further work by restricting the use of standing formes and by limiting impressions to 1500 copies of some books and 3000 of others (Greg, Companion, p. 43). These were of course Company regulations enforced, if at all, by those least likely to gain from them. The workmen are further complaining in 1614, and in 1635 an organized protest is made about the extraordinary number of books printed at one impression and the abuse of standing formes. The alleviation of the journeymen's distress may have been procured by the restriction of standing formes to the Psalter, Grammar and Accidence, Almanacks and Prognostications, but one doubts it.[97] The 1635 provision that no nonpareil books exceed 5000 copies, no brevier exceed 3000 (6000 in some cases), and that all others be kept to editions of 1500 or 2000 (3000 with permission), suggests that multiple impressions and large editions were hardly the prerogative of the 18th century (Greg, Companion, p. 95).

Professor Todd has probably done most to set the general attitude towards 18th-century printing and thereby also to imply that conditions in the earlier periods were considerably different. He writes:

And elsewhere: Professor Todd is undoubtedly right that some 18th-century books are the products of conditions of greater complexity: any increase in size will increase the number of variables. Undoubtedly too in the largest houses a good deal of type was kept standing, although it would be interesting to go into the economics of such a practice. For the rest, the case for any really radical difference between the centuries would seem to have been over-stated. Perhaps a fine historical exactitude will be possible when more primary documentation has been published and some serious thought given to its economic implications.