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Shared Printing
Shared printing—that is, simultaneous collaboration in producing a work by two or more printing houses—is one of the most puzzling and difficult problems facing any investigator. Many of these problems cannot be answered beyond speculation because of the lack of hard evidence and information. In recent decades, however, enough evidence has become available for us to realize that shared printing was quite common in English printing shops in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the printing ledgers indicate that the Bowyers, for instance, shared with various colleagues the printing of a total of 685 works between 1710 and 1777 (Maslen, 153). As one might suspect, it is much easier to share the printing of previously printed works rather than first printings which involve splitting up an author's manuscript, and the ledgers show that it is much more common. Nor is it always large or multi-volume works which get shared: Bowyer printed seven editions of John Brown's Estimate in 1757-58, printing all of the first, sixth, and seventh editions but no more than half of the fourteen sheets of the other four editions. Since such a practice obviously complicated the working life of printers, why did they do it? The reasons are varied and practical. Any well organized shop has its work scheduled as far ahead as possible, so depending upon the work load any new job order may be shared with other shops if it is to be finished in a reasonable time. Authors who are engaged in hot pamphlet warfare, for example, may demand that their pieces be printed immediately, and so the work is shared. Anyone paying the bills, author or publisher, can demand any printer or printers he chooses. Finally, many printers were members of the Company of Stationers and as such they regularly shared work with other members, especially in such jobs as printing almanacs.
With eighteenth-century books it is often difficult to see whether a work was produced by shared printing merely by examining the finished product. Therefore an investigator is always grateful for any external evidence which may prove relevant, and in the case of the second edition of Hurd's Horace in 1753 there is such evidence. Richard Hurd wrote a letter to William Bowyer dated Cambridge February 14, 1752, saying in part:
Clearly Bowyer did not intend to pay £40 for the right merely to print and sell one edition, so it is reasonable to suppose that Hurd finally sold his copyright to Thurlbourne for some smaller amount. When the new edition was printed and delivered late in March of 1753, William Bowyer— as noted above—was the printer of only the first volume, and Thurlbourne had the second volume printed at Cambridge University Press. As Bowyer wryly remarked on a later occasion, "Of two Volumes, the removing away one to another Printer is a crust I have been forced to devour all my life" (Literary Anecdotes, 2:388).
Besides our sympathizing with Bowyer in his dealings with an inexperienced and demanding young author, we are left bemused by the complexities of working out the shared printing of these two volumes. In the days before telephones and fax machines, who was responsible for coordinating the print-shops to use not merely paper of equivalent quality but the same paper for all small paper copies and the same paper for all large paper copies? Who determined the fonts of type, and who decided that no ornaments of any kind would be used? Who arranged such fine details of printing as the fact that all the Royal paper copies would be printed with vertical chain lines and the ordinary paper copies with horizontal chain lines? Why, we may ask, did not Thurlbourne merely turn over the entire project to Bowyer? We will probably not be able to answer these questions until we discover the correspondence between Thurlbourne and Bowyer, so we are left with the mere fact that at some time after February, 1752, it was considered necessary or desirable to share the printing of these volumes.
Note: John Nichols (1745-1826), Literary Anecdotes of the eighteenth-century . . ., 9 vols. (1812-16), 2:230-31—hereafter cited as "Literary Anecdotes." Hurd, of course, was overly optimistic about selling the remaining copies of the third edition of the Opinion; finally, in 1759 he ordered Bowyer to burn the remaining copies (Literary Anecdotes, 6:511 [misnumbered 611]). It was ungracious, to say the least, for Hurd to criticize Thurlbourne about the advertising for the Epistle to Augustus, since Hurd paid the bill for it and Bowyer's records show how many times it was advertised and in what newspapers. Perhaps he did not know that Bowyer kept such records.
More than sixty years ago the Bodleian Library bought Bowyer's Paper Stock Ledger, and most of the remaining Bowyer ledgers were uncovered at the Grolier Club thirty years ago; but it was not until 1991 that the scholarly efforts of Keith Maslen and John Lancaster were finally published. Their work in letterpress and microfiche makes the Bowyer ledgers fully accessible for the first time; and when Professor Patricia Hernlund finishes her work on the ledgers of William Strahan, we will have available the records of the two major printers in eighteenth-century England. All scholars in the field are truly grateful for such work, for it enables us to base our interpretations and speculations on their solidly grounded facts.
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