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Clay's stock
The shops at Daventry, Lutterworth and Rugby, were essentially similar in the range of goods stocked and sold. No inventory of stock is extant, but the
The figures for Daventry (Table I, column (a)) give the clearest and fullest picture of the business. Primarily, Clay was a stationer, dealing in paper and printed forms. The sale of books was the only other significant part of his trade. A more detailed analysis shows that the range of stock was comparatively wide. He sold paper of several sizes and varieties, such as 'Post' and 'Pott',[23] as well as notebooks of various kinds. He also stocked 'skins', that is sheets of vellum used for legal documents, including 'Text' skins which were blank forms of such documents. In addition, he sold various items of writing equipment, such as pens, pencils, rulers, and ink.
The books sold at Daventry were mainly schoolbooks in use at the Academy. It was the beginning of the school year, and, as a consequence, seven boys bought copies of Nathan Bailey's English and Latin exercises for schoolboys, first published in 1706 and reprinted many times. This was probably used for the first year of the classical course.[24] Another first year book was William Willymott's A select century of Corderius's Colloquies, and a third schoolbook of which multiple copies were sold was William Turner's Exercises to the accidence. Apart from the schoolbooks, the trade in books was small: a copy of Rowe's Poetical works; one of Joseph's Tripp's Praelectiones poeticae; a few chapbooks; a couple of magazines; and twelve Books of Common Prayer, presumably for Holy Cross.
A roughly comparable picture emerges from the analysis of a month's sales at Lutterworth ten years later. The figures in Table I, column (b), are distorted by an exceptional purchase. On 15 October 1778, the Churchwardens of Misterton, a village about 1 miles east of Lutterworth, bought new books for their church: a Bible (£3.10s.od.); a large Prayer Book for the reading desk (18s.od.); and a book of the occasional offices (2s.6d.). If we exclude this £4.10s.od., we arrive at a 'normal' month's sales. This adjustment is made in Table I, column (c). Again, the sale of stationery is preponderant, representing rather more than half of sales, with books contributing just under one-third. The stationery goods are much like those at Daventry ten years earlier, but the books are rather different. There are no academic books, and only one school book; most are part publications[25] and magazines.
The shop established at Warwick by Samuel Clay in 1770 was similarly stocked. Samuel's account book (N.R.O. D.2929) shows that he received the stock from his father; he did, however, pay for it, and the Warwick business
The goods received by Samuel from John on 17 August 1770 are a useful exemplar of the range of the stock:
| £ | s | d | |
| 6 Bottles of Elixer of Health | 6 | ||
| 1 Paper Book 6 q.rs Rul'd | 4 | 9 | |
| 1 D not Rul'd | 4 | 3 | |
| 1 D 5 q.rs Rul'd ruff Calf | 4 | 8 | |
| 12 Bottles Bostock's Elixer | 9 | ||
| 2 Highway Acts | 1 | 6 | |
| 2 Turnpike D | 1 | 6 | |
| 3 Forms of Proceedings | 1 | ||
| 2 Tutors for ye Flute | 1 | 6 | |
| 1 D Fife | 9 | ||
| 2 Pillman's Writing Illustrated | 2 | 6 | |
| -------- | |||
| 1 | 17 | 5 | |
| -------- |
One final aspect of the business deserves to be mentioned, that of bookbinding. The only records which date back to Smith's time relate to his activities as a bookbinder,[27] in which he did a substantial trade. He bought tools and materials in 1717-18, and in several years thereafter. A number of names appear, including those of John Cooke and David Rice; they may have been either the suppliers, or the employees who actually did the binding work. On 27 November 1717 Smith calculated his profits on binding since 11 June as £15.5s.3d., but the record of books bound stops in 1724, and does not resume until 1763. At that time, Clay bought materials, and there are records of books bound between 1763 and 1772. Possibly there was a lack of skilled labour, for if no binding was done after 1724 it may be that there was no-one to teach Clay this craft during his apprenticeship. When the binding records resume, they show that little work was done, and the figures in Table I may be taken as typical.
Overall, the business operated by Clay was that of a stationer who also sold books. Well over half of his income, and sometimes as much as three-quarters, came from the sale of stationery goods, of which he had a substantial and diverse stock. Bookselling, although of some cultural importance in these small market towns, was economically of far less importance. In other words, by the middle of the eighteenth century, these south midland towns could all sustain a well-established and profitable stationer's shop. The details of that sustenance, as shown by Clay's records of retail sales, will be discussed below. Before turning to that, however, we must deal with Clay's suppliers, on whom he depended for his stock-in-trade.
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