University of Virginia Library

V. A Note on English Copyright Records

England was the first country to institute statutory copyright, in the famous Statute of Anne of 4 April 1710 (8 Anne, ch. 19). Before that time the closest counterpart to copyright was the control which the Stationers' Company exercised over the printing of books by its members, but this regulation did not resemble the modern concept of copyright, since it was designed as protection for the printer rather than the author. Nevertheless, the requirement of entering titles in an official register maintained by the Stationers' Company has resulted in records of great bibliographical value similar to those which are produced by a system of copyright registration. The registers covering the years 1554 through 1708 were transcribed and published many years ago[41] and are well known to bibliographers, as are the published records of the Court of the Stationers' Company between 1576 and 1640.[42] The bibliographical importance of these materials has long been recognized, and extracts from them were published by J. P. Collier as early as 1853;[43] since that time several important bibliographical

publications relating to the period before 1710, by such scholars as Rollins, Greg, and McKenzie, have been based on records at Stationers' Hall.[44] Anyone interested in pursuing the complications of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English copyright should acquaint himself with the papers available in Stationers' Hall, as listed in the Library, 4th ser., VI (1925-26), 349-57,[45] as well as with certain basic work in this area: Harry Ransom has recounted, in historical terms, the operation of English copyright before the act of 1710;[46] Leo Kirschbaum has described "The Stationers' Company in Operation" and has helped to clarify the difficult relationship of registration to both license and copyright;[47] and W. W. Greg has taken up in detail the bibliographical implications of the records of the Stationers' Company.[48] Although problems remain to be solved, it is clear that the essential researches of these and a few other scholars[49] have provided a fuller treatment, from a bibliographical and literary point of view, of this period than of any other in Anglo-American copyright history.

The act of 1710 is the principal dividing line in the story of English copyright: it provided for a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable for 14 more (but not clearly established as author's, rather than printer's, copyright until 1769 in Millar v. Taylor); it made prepublication title entry in the register of the Stationers' Company a statutory requirement; and it stipulated that nine deposit copies be furnished upon demand (for the Royal Library [later the British Museum], the university libraries at Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews, the Library of the King's and Marischal Colleges Aberdeen, Sion College London, and the library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh). Although the force of the Stationers' Company declined after the lapsing of the Printing (or Licensing) Act in 1695,[50] the stationers continued, even after the 1710 act, to turn copyright to their own advantage, through trade boycotts and court injunctions. Their contention that common-law copyright still obtained for any work after the expiration of its term of statutory protection was finally invalidated in the case of Donaldson v. Becket (1774), and a stream of cheap reprints followed.[51] The upshot of this situation for bibliographers in search of records is that the "Entry Books of Copies" at Stationers' Hall for the eighteenth century[52] (with a printed index 1710-73, a manuscript index thereafter) are even less full than those for the earlier years: stationers before 1774 considered their copyrights perpetual by common law; after 1798 (Beckford v. Hood) they saw that failure to register prevented only suits for the statutory penalties, not the more important suits for damages; and, in addition, they felt that by not registering they were not obligated to provide copies for the depository libraries, even though the Universities Copyright Act of 1775 (15 Geo. III, ch. 53) emphasized the requirement of prepublication registration and deposit. The records at Stationers' Hall from 1814 through 1841 have a slightly different

significance for bibliographers: because the 1814 amendment to the copyright law (54 Geo. III, ch. 156) required that entry be made within one month after publication (rather than before publication), only works actually published are listed during this time.

The next major revision of the copyright law, the act of 1842 (5 & 6 Vict., ch. 45), made the copyright term 42 years (or the life of the author plus seven years, whichever was longer), and it reenforced the requirement of registration at Stationers' Hall. The copyright registers and related documents which accumulated in the administration of this act, covering the period 1842-1923, are now in the Public Record Office, not Stationers' Hall. The entries in them fall far short of constituting a national bibliography, for understandably many publishers still did not bother with registration; it was not a condition of copyright, and, in case of a suit for infringement, it need be performed only before the actual court proceedings. But the records are worth checking, for American as well as English books, if one keeps in mind the fact that the entry may occur long after the date of publication. Indexes exist for the entire period, in seven segments, giving the date of entry and the date of publication for each work registered. The first five volumes, covering 1842-1907, have been published as the Index of Entries (1896-1907) and are available in many reference libraries; the remaining years, 1907-23, are covered in six unpublished manuscript volumes in the Public Record Office. All eleven are listed here with the index numbers assigned them by the Public Record Office:

• 1842-1884 (literary): Ind 16908 (titles)
• 1842-1884 (commercial): Ind 16915 (titles)
• 1884-1897: Ind 16909 (titles, with author-publisher index)
• 1897-1902: Ind 16910 (titles, with author-publisher index)
• 1902-1907: Ind 16911 (titles, with author-publisher index)
• 1907-1911: Ind 16912 (titles), 16913 (authors), 16914 (publishers)
• 1911-1923: Ind 20293 (titles), 20294 (authors), 20295 (publishers)

These indexes furnish the same information that is available in the original registers; but if one wishes to check the original entries, the next step is to ask at the Assistant's desk in the Long Room for the typewritten Guide to the Records of the Copyright Office (classified as ff. 78), which indicates the dates covered by each of the registers (Ind 5791 through 5869).[53] It is also possible to send for the original copyright entry forms, stored at Ashridge (classified as Copyright 1/567 through 887, and designated by year in the Guide.) After 2 July 1883 copyright assignments are entered separately (Ind 5870-5872, indexed by Ind 6005-6007), as are certain foreign entries after 1854.[54] Other materials from this period in the Public Record Office, particularly papers relating to copyright suits, can furnish publication data of value to bibliographers. By checking the bills of complaint (in C.14) and the cause books (C.32) — as well as the depositions (C.24) and affidavits (C.31) at Ashridge — one can discover, for example, the publication dates of the Routledge piracies of Melville and Irving.

The act of 1911 (1 & 2 Geo. V, ch. 46), which made the term of copyright (for unpublished as well as published works) the lifetime of the author plus fifty years, abolished the statutory requirement for registration, although this requirement remained in force in some parts of the United Kingdom (e.g., Canada) through 1923. Voluntary registration was still possible, however, and entries made on this basis since 1 January 1924 are in registers at Stationers' Hall. But the new law retained a provision for deposit, emphasizing the split between registration and deposit which had prevailed throughout English copyright history. A sort of deposit system had existed as early as 1610 in an arrangement Thomas Bodley had made with the Stationers' Company, and the Printing Act of 1662 had required the deposit of three copies (for the Royal Library and the universities at Oxford and Cambridge). The list of nine copies established by the 1710 act was increased by two in 1801 (41 Geo. III, ch. 107), with the addition of Trinity College and the Society of the King's Inns, Dublin; then in 1836 (6 & 7 Will. IV, ch. 110) the four Scottish universities were removed from the list; and in 1842 (followed by the 1911 act) only six depository libraries were designated: the British Museum, Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin, the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh (after 1925 the National Library of Scotland), and the National Library of Wales. The number of places to look for deposit copies thus varies with the period and, in addition, with the requirements of particular libraries, since copies were to be deposited upon request by the libraries. The necessity of depositing on demand, however, was not limited to registered books; after 1812 the interpretation of the law was that the deposit provision applied to

all books published in England, whether or not they were entered at Stationers' Hall.[55] Libraries often mark the date of receipt in books; the British Museum began this practice in 1833 (the exact day from 1837 forward), stamping copyright deposit copies in blue and colonial copyright deposits in black.[56] Since dated deposit copies may exist for books which were never registered, both sources — official registers and depository libraries — should always be checked. English copyright records, at least after 1710, are not particularly complex and for much of the period are conveniently indexed in printed form; at the same time they are not especially full and represent an unpredictable sampling of the national literary output.