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4. Conclusions

The snapshot of mid-Jacobean printing and publishing revealed above is just that—a single frame extracted from the larger movie that is early modern London. Within the five-year period of this study certain general

observations emerge: the most productive printing houses maintained their high levels of activity either through the acquisition of protected titles or by aggressively pursuing work as trade printers; religious works constituted the single most important area of publishing, and a large number of stationers were involved in producing the non-protected segment of the field, especially sermons and books of religious devotion and instruction; literary and informational titles were also an important segment of non-protected printing, with perhaps two-thirds of the stationers we can identify as publishers involved with this trade; other areas, such as history and works of religious commentary and controversy attracted relatively few stationers interested in publishing; different subjects bring with them certain expectations regarding format, especially volumes of history, law, and works of religious commentary and controversy.

The snapshot also prompts many questions. How does the Stansby house compare with other large printing offices from different periods? How did the King's Printing House change over time? What do the shifts in the kind and number of books being published tell us about the dynamics of early modern English culture? How do various stationers from different times negotiate the business continuum between trade-printing and self-publishing?How does the role of the printer within the trade change over the decades?In what ways do influential booksellers like Thomas Adams, Henry Fetherstone, and Thomas Man resemble or differ from earlier booksellers such as William Bonham, Richard Grafton, John Rastell, and Richard Tot tell?Such questions require further context; thus the next step in exploring the London book trade through quantitative analysis should involve expanding the chronological as well as evidentiary scope of the data collection. In practical terms this means adding typographical data (composition totals as well as face and body choices), design characteristics (headline structure, the presence of ruled compartments and marginal notes) and paratextual evidence (dedications, epistles, errata). As well some of the editorial features of the ETC (inherited by the ESC) need to be addressed, the most important being the decision by the original editors to blur the distinction between edition, state, issue, and variant. Some method of representing shared printing and publishing is needed, perhaps a standard authority table[51] through which we can cross-reference printer, publisher, and a numeric estimate of their proportional responsibility for each item. Finally this evidence must be compiled for the entire STC period.

One hundred years and more have passed since the British Museum published its General Catalogue of Printed Books, and in that time a number of union and short-title catalogues, biographical dictionaries, and documentary

transcription surrounding early printing and publishing have emerged. More recently projects such as the ESTC and EEBO as well as institutional OPACs have begun creating digital resources available across computer networks. I hope the preceding essay has demonstrated how these diverse materials can be synthesized in ways that reveal new insights into book history while avoiding most of the obvious phantoms, chimeras, and mirages of statistical misapplication and misinterpretation.