 | |  |
The Engravings
In the editions of 1749, 1753, and 1757, the first page of the Ars Poetica has an attractive engraving of two Muses, seated, with three satyrs playing and dancing in the background. The female figure on the viewer's left represents Thalia, the Muse of comedy and bucolic poetry. In her right hand she holds the smiling mask of comedy and in her left a flute. Next to her, holding a lyre, is Erato, the Muse who presided over lyric and amatory poetry (see Figure 1).
This plate was designed and drawn by Francis Hayman (?1708-76) and engraved by Charles Grignion (1721-1810). By the middle of the eighteenth century, these two men were perhaps the most popular artists producing copperplates for book illustrations in London. In the early 1740s Hayman relied upon Gravelot (1669-1773) as his engraver, but after Gravelot departed for
Who was responsible for hiring these artists for a book by an almost unknown writer? Hurd's only previous work was a pamphlet issued by Mary Cooper in 1746, so this was to be the first book by the young Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The imprint of this 1749 book is somewhat unusual, for it lists the names of the printer and booksellers but no publisher (see note 1). Fortunately, William Bowyer's ledger B487 shows that William Thurlbourne of Cambridge was responsible for ordering and paying for the entire work. It is logical that Hurd would have turned to Thurlbourne for advice, for by 1749 Thurlbourne had been a leading bookseller and publisher in Cambridge for twenty-five years. Why, then, did Thurlbourne not include his name on the imprint as publisher? Perhaps we may speculate that although Thurlbourne paid Bowyer the complete bill of £25:10: 3 (for paper, printing, binding the fine copies, advertising, and 3s. "for working the plate"), yet Thurlbourne may have been acting merely as an agent for Hurd, who was responsible for paying the bills. It was certainly not uncommon at that time for authors to have to pay for the production of their early books (see note 2). In this case Thurlbourne may have left his name off the imprint—and out of the newspaper advertisements—since, technically, he was not the publisher. Therefore, since William Bowyer was directly responsible for all aspects of producing the book, he may have hired Hayman and Grignion; or, as an old professional in the book trade, Thurlbourne may have requested those artists from Bowyer; or, since he may have been paying for it all, Hurd may have requested them on the advice of his good friend William Mason, whose Musaeus had been illustrated by Hayman and Grignion in 1747.
In the editions of 1751, 1753, and 1757, the first page of the Epistola ad Augustum contains a left-facing head of Augustus Caesar, surrounded by an inscription "DIVVS AVGVSTVS PATER" (see Figure 2). Under the plate are the initials "WS," but the identity of this engraver remains conjectural. Whoever he was, the center of his engraving—that is, everything inside the circle, including the lettering—is an extremely close copy of John Pine's engraving in his celebrated edition of Horace; see Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera (Londini: Aeneis Tabulis Incidit Johannes Pine, 1733), I, 21.
William Thurlbourne was clearly the publisher of the 1751 edition, yet some costs were still passed on to "Mr Hurd of Emanuel" according to William Bowyer's printing ledgers. On April 16 (and 20), 1751, there were charges of 3s. 6d. "for working at Rolling Press the Head of Horace [sic]" and 5s. "for advertising twice" (ledgers B487 and B544). From a financial point of view, the Ars Poetica of 1749 and the Epistola ad Augustum of 1751 are similar in many ways: both were printed by Bowyer for Thurlbourne, both have title pages printed in red and black, and both have only one copperplate engraving; yet the 1751 should have been the more expensive book to
Perhaps a more meaningful comparison, however, is in the prices Bowyer charged per sheet of printing. Of the 500 copies of the 1749 edition, there were "10 sheets & 1/4 with Title red equal to 11 Sheets at 24s. per Sheet" (B487). Of the 526 copies of the 1751 edition, there were "13 Sheets & 1/4 and Title red equal to 14 Sheets . . . at 24s. per sheet" (B544). Of the 750 copies of the 1753 edition, Bowyer printed "vol. I. 19 sheets . . . at 22s. per sheet" (B544); for Vol. II of this same edition, Thurlbourne was charged 20s. 9d. per sheet at Cambridge University Press (Minute Book Min. VI. 1*, p. 88). There are no price records for the later editions of Hurd's Horace, but surely the 1000 copies of the 52 1/2 sheets Bowyer printed for Millar for the 1766 edition would have been priced at a much lower rate. Examining other entries in the Bowyer ledgers at this period amply confirms the general maxim
There is no listing in these detailed ledgers of the expenses of buying the copperplates and having them engraved, so we will probably never learn the difference in cost between a plate done by Hayman and Grignion and one by the presumably less expensive WS. But regardless of the costs, who would normally have paid for the engravings in a book, and who owned them and controlled their use in later editions? In the case of Hurd's Horace, each plate was used in its first printing for 500 or so copies, a second printing in 1753 of 750 copies, and a third printing in 1757 of presumably 750 or more copies. Any copperplate may show signs of wear after 2000 or more impressions; and Thurlbourne, who presumably controlled all the editions through 1757, may well have scrapped the plates after the Cambridge edition of that year. In any case, when Andrew Millar had Bowyer print 1000 copies of the fourth edition in 1766, the plates were probably too worn to print that many more copies and Millar did not care to have new ones made, so no plates were used. When the fifth edition was published ten years later, Cadell also omitted any plates.
Notes: 1. In this context the term "publisher" means the person responsible for paying the costs of producing the book, and whose name in the imprint usually was preceded by "Printed for." One says "usually" because it was the normal practice among the major figures in the London book trade, but one excludes booksellers such as "the Coopers, who are recognized retailers with no likely financial share in many smaller works stated on the title-page to have been printed for them"; see Keith Maslen, An Early London Printing House at Work: Studies in the Bowyer Ledgers (New York: The Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 101—hereafter cited as "Maslen." One can only agree when Maslen argues that "imprints were not meant to reveal the background of a commercial transaction, and therefore may seriously mislead the modern scholar who reads them too literally" (p. 101); but, to paraphrase Pope, what can we reason but from what we see on the printed pages before us?
2. Regardless of their imprints, books printed for the author were common. The Bowyer ledgers indicate that "from 1710 to 1773 at least 315 separately published works large and small are charged to 160 or so gentlemen" (Maslen, 98). In this group, the largest number were clergymen, and one of the most common types of books they produced was editions of the classics (Maslen, 104). The young Reverend Mr. Hurd, with his editions of Horace, was a good example. After all—a bookseller might wonder—how many editions, translations, and imitations of Horace could the London public be expected to buy in any year? Hurd was the exception to such gloomy predictions, for his editions received critical acclaim and sold relatively well.
| | |