22a 
The History of the Book in Britain, c.1475–1800
22a ANDREW MURPHY
The history of the book in Britain begins, in fact, on the Continent. In 1471, the Kent-born merchant William Caxton travelled from Bruges to Cologne, where he formed a partnership with the printer and punchcutter Johannes Veldener. Having mastered the art of printing, Caxton returned to Bruges in the following year, probably accompanied by Veldener and by an assistant, Wynkyn de Worde. At Bruges, the merchant set up a press and issued the first English-language printed book, the Histories of Troy (1473/4), his own translation of Raoul Le Fèvre’s Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes. Caxton eventually returned to England (probably in 1476) and established a press in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, assisted again by de Worde. The first piece of printing to be completed at Caxton’s English press was an indulgence produced for the abbot of Abingdon—an early indication of how important jobbing printing would prove to be within the trade. In 1477, Caxton issued the first printed edition of The Canterbury Tales. In the same year, he published The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, an 11th century Arabic work by Mubashshir ibn Fatik, Abu al-Wafa, which had been translated (from a French-language version) by Earl Rivers, brother-in-law of Edward IV. Over the course of his career, Caxton published works by Boethius, Cato, Cicero, Higden, Lydgate, Virgil, and others.
On Caxton’s death in 1492, de Worde took over the business. A native of Alsace, he was typical of the printers who helped to expand the trade in its earliest decades. Government legislation in 1484, intended to restrict the conditions under which aliens could conduct business in England, specifically exempted printers and other members of the publishing trade from its terms in order to promote the growth and development of the industry at a time when few natives had the necessary training or equipment to set themselves up as printers. De Worde soon found himself competing for business against the Normans Richard Pynson and Guillaume Faques (who changed his name to William Fawkes and was appointed King’s Printer in 1503), along with the Belgian William de Machlinia and his partner Johannes Lettou, who may have been a Lithuanian. Gradually, more native printers entered the trade, and in 1534 the government repealed the exemption that foreign printers had enjoyed since the 1484 Act.
As the trade expanded, competition caused printers to move towards specialization. De Worde, one of the first to recognize the value of the textbook trade, aimed a substantial percentage of his output squarely at the grammar school market. Pynson (who succeeded Fawkes as King’s Printer in 1506) specialized in legal printing, producing volumes of statutes, law codes, and handbooks for lawyers. Other identifiable popular classes of books in the first century of printing included herbals and medical works, most notably Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth, issued in several editions from 1539; translations of the classics, such as Arthur Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (first four books, 1565; fifteen books, 1567); chronicles and histories (e.g. Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577) and ephemeral works of various kinds, including ballads, almanacs, and pamphlets purporting to provide the last words of executed criminals. Religious publishing was also particularly important in the period.
Over time, the publishing trade became more highly organized. A trade company for scribes, illuminators, and those involved in the binding and sale of MS books had existed in London since 1403. The earliest printers tended not to affiliate themselves with this company, largely because they were generally based in parts of the capital that lay beyond the City of London’s jurisdiction. This was Caxton’s situation, as his original base in Westminster was not within the City boundaries (and, in any case, having started life as a merchant, he was a long-standing member of the Mercers’ Company). As time went on and more printers began to locate themselves within the city (particularly in the area around St Paul’s), the Stationers’ Company gradually came to be the publishing trade’s representative organization. The Company’s importance was recognized in 1557, when Queen Mary granted it a charter establishing it as a fully fledged corporation. The charter decreed that printing was to be confined to those who were freemen of the Company, thus giving them, as Peter Blayney has put it, ‘a virtual monopoly of printing in England’ (Blayney, Stationers’ Company, 47). In return for the powers granted to it, the Stationers’ Company was expected to play a role in what amounted to government censorship. Company officers were empowered to search the premises of all printers and other members of the trade and to seize any seditious or heretical material. The Company regulated publishing and enforced an early system of copyright (though the word itself is an 18th-century coinage) by requiring that new titles be registered in advance of being printed.
By the close of the 16th century, the Stationers’ Company was beginning to lay the groundwork for consolidating the rights in certain standard works into a portfolio controlled by its most senior members. A royal grant by James I in 1603 added to this portfolio a further range of works, including books of private prayers, psalters, psalms, and almanacs. The ‘English Stock’, as it became known, confirmed the prosperity of the Company, although the running of the scheme also had the effect of alienating many among the most junior ranks of the profession, who felt excluded from the profits generated by the staple works that formed the core of the English Stock. Efforts in the early decades of the 17th century to create a Latin Stock and an Irish Stock proved unsuccessful.
At the same time as the Stationers’ Company was consolidating its power, the book trade itself was also undergoing a process of division and specialization. When Caxton printed a book, he bore the up-front costs—such as buying paper—himself (though he also relied on the frequent support of aristocratic patrons). He then printed the book using his own press and sold at least some copies directly to the buying public. As the 16th century progressed, these three aspects of the book trade—financing the production costs, producing the book, and selling it—gradually diverged into the distinctive roles of publisher, printer, and retailer. At the end of the century, there was still a high degree of overlap between the three, and it was not uncommon for individual members of the trade to serve, effectively, as publisher-printers: purchasing the rights to print a book, financing the costs, and then printing it themselves. Thus, the title-page for Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579) indicates that it was ‘Printed by Hugh Singleton, dwelling in Creede Lane neere vnto Ludgate at the signe of the gylden Tunne, and are there to be solde.’ Increasingly, however, title-pages came to bear a standard formula, which indicated that a book was printed ‘By X for Y.’ Thus, for example, when Thomas Middleton’s Micro-cynicon appeared in 1599, the title-page noted that it had been ‘Imprinted at London by Thomas Creede, for Thomas Bushell’ and that it was ‘to be sold’ at Bushell’s ‘shop at the North Doore of Paules Church’. Here Bushell was the publisher, employing Creede as his printer; by now, the publisher’s address was being provided largely for the benefit of those seeking to buy copies of the book wholesale (Blayney, ‘Publication’, 390).
Early in the 17th century, Thomas Bodley prevailed upon the Stationers’ Company to enter into an unusual agreement with Oxford University. He set himself the task of resuscitating the University’s library and oversaw the opening of a new building—named in his honour—in 1602. Bodley had considerable success in convincing antiquarians, scholars, and other benefactors to donate books and MSS to the library. He also persuaded the Stationers’ Company to arrange for the library to be provided with one free copy of every work registered at Stationers’ Hall. Although the library’s holdings increased considerably as a result of Bodley’s efforts, in truth the collection remained quite limited by modern standards. Almost half a century after it had opened its doors, the Bodleian held a mere 15,975 volumes (Benson, 113). The Oxford holdings were not, however, unusually small: all British universities had very limited collections at the time. Beyond the universities, libraries tended to be smaller still and were mostly confined to religious institutions of one sort or another. The high cost of books throughout this early period tended to restrict private ownership of significant numbers of books to those with substantial incomes.
The concentration of power in the hands of the Stationers’ Company had the effect of retarding the development of printing elsewhere in the country. Some printing had been carried out at the abbey of St Albans late in the 15th century, where the output of the Press at St Albans included the Book of Hawking (compiled 1486). There were also early attempts to establish publishing enterprises in the English university towns. Theodericus Rood began printing at Oxford in 1481 and Johann Siberch commenced work at Cambridge in 1519; neither venture was particularly successful. In the 1580s, Joseph Barnes and Thomas Thomas carried out some printing at, respectively, Oxford and Cambridge, but it was not until the late 17th century in Oxford and the very early 18th century in Cambridge that the university presses were established in something approximating their modern form. At Oxford, the key figure was the vice-chancellor John Fell, who put into practice the kind of ambitious scholarly publishing project that Archbishop Laud had originally envisaged earlier in the 17th century. At Cambridge, Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College, advanced the University Press as a serious business concern from the beginning of the 18th century. Notable volumes published by the Press at this time included Bent-ley’s own edition of Horace (1711) and the second edition of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1713). In 1662, York was also granted the right to have printers operate there.
The development of printing in other parts of Britain was similarly fitful. Wales lacked the concentrated population necessary to sustain a native industry. In the early modern period, the largest town in the principality was Carmarthen, with a population of just 2,000. A clandestine Catholic press operated fleetingly from a cave in Little Orme in 1587, but the first successful printing press in Wales was not established until 1718, when Isaac Carter set up a business in Trefhedyn in Cardiganshire. From the early 18th century onwards, a reasonably well-rooted print industry did take hold in the principality. Outside Wales, however, a relatively vigorous tradition of Welsh-language publishing had been established long before this period. In 1546, Edward Whitchurch published Yny Lhyvyr Hwnn y Traethir in London. Written by John Prise, secretary of the King’s Council in Wales and the Marches, the book was aimed partly at popularizing the basic tenets of the Christian faith; it included an alphabet, basic Welsh reading lessons, and a selection of prayers and other elementary religious texts. The Welsh scholar William Salesbury published a Welsh–English dictionary in the following year; he also wrote Protestant polemics in both languages. A Welsh New Testament was published in 1567 and a Welsh Bible in 1588. The success of the Reformation in Wales played a significant role in establishing a Welsh-language publishing tradition. Williams, for example, has observed that the widespread use of Welsh translations of the scriptures ‘enabled the Welsh, alone among the Celtic-speaking peoples, to move on—to some degree at least—from the oral and manuscript tradition of the Middle Ages to the printed-book culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (Williams, 49).
The first printer to operate in Scotland was Andrew Myllar, who seems to have been born in Fife and to have studied at the University of St Andrews (without completing his degree). Myllar learned the art of printing in Rouen, and on returning to Scotland entered into a partnership with Walter Chepman. Granted a printing patent by James IV in 1507, the two men set up a press in Edinburgh. Their publications included a Book of Good Counsel to the Scots King (1508), poems by Dunbar and Henryson and, perhaps most famously, the Breviarium Aberdonense (1509–10). Through the middle decades of the 16th century, Scottish imprints remained relatively uncommon, but, in the 1570s, Thomas Bassandyne and Alexander Arbuthnet collaborated in producing an English-language Bible that was widely used throughout Scotland. Like its southern neighbour, Scotland had its royal printers, with Robert Waldegrave, printer of the Martin Marprelate tracts, serving James VI in this capacity from 1590.
The first work printed in Scots Gaelic was the Foirm na nUrrnuidheadh, a translation by John Carswell of the Book of Common Order (generally known as ‘Knox’s Liturgy’), published by Robert Lekpreuik in 1567. The text has an interesting ‘archipelagic’ context, in that, as Mac Craith has noted, Carswell chose ‘classical common Gaelic as his medium, with relatively few concessions to Scotticisms’ (Mac Craith, 143), signalling that the book was intended for Irish speakers as well as speakers of Scots Gaelic.
Attempts to foster the Protestant Reformation in Ireland through publications in the Irish language were less than convincing and met with little success. Elizabeth I provided funding for the casting of a fount of Irish type in 1567, but the first Irish printed work did not appear until 1571, when a trial piece entitled Tuar Ferge Foighide (a religious ballad by Philip Ó hUiginn) was produced. Shortly afterwards, Seán Ó Cearnaigh (John Kearney) printed the Abidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma, a Protestant primer. These proselytizing efforts prompted a Catholic counter-move in which Irish Franciscan friars initiated a programme of Irish-language publishing from a base located first at Antwerp and, subsequently, at St Anthony’s College in Louvain. The Franciscans commissioned a fount that more closely matched the distinctive characteristics of the Irish alphabet.
In addition to continental printing ventures, the MS circulation of texts—particularly Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (1634/5)—also remained an important part of Irish-language textual culture until the end of the 18th century. The Irish tradition was not, however, exceptional in this, and, as Harold Love, Woudhuysen, and others have shown, MS circulation remained an important part of the textual scene in England as well (see 15). From the closing decades of the 16th century onwards, a dual culture developed whereby literary works, in particular, often circulated both to a coterie MS audience and to a broader and more anonymous print audience. Shakespeare’s sonnets may serve as an emblematic instance here. In his Palladis Tamia (1598), Francis Meres praised his contemporary for his work in the theatre, and commented favourably on Shakespeare’s ‘sugred sonnets’, then in circulation only among the poet’s ‘private friends’. These private texts became a public commodity a little more than a decade later when Thomas Thorpe—with or without the poet’s consent—published Shake-speares Sonnets (1609), thus circulating the poems to a wholly new audience. For some writers, MS circulation was the dominant mode of publication for much of their work. Indeed, although Donne’s poetry was well known within his own extended social network during his lifetime, a substantial collection of his poems was not issued in print until 1633, two years after his death.
The persistence of MS circulation also highlights the fact that many of the pieces now considered masterworks of the English Renaissance may not have had such elevated status (at least from a publishing point of view) in their own time. This is particularly true of Renaissance drama. In the early 20th century, some bibliographical scholars plotted scenarios in which unscrupulous publishers sought out bit-part actors and paid them to reconstruct the text of popular plays from memory so that they could rush them into print (as ‘bad’ quartos) and turn a quick profit. Blayney challenged this view in 1997, arguing that the publishing and reprint histories of Renaissance plays indicate that they were unlikely to have made any publisher’s fortune. Thus, Hamlet, which in its first 25 years appeared in no more than four editions (excluding the First Folio collection of 1623), might be contrasted with Arthur Dent’s Sermon of Repentance (first published in 1582), which achieved nineteen editions over an equivalent span of time (Blayney, ‘Publication’; Farmer and Lesser; Blayney ‘Alleged Popularity’).
Dent’s outselling of Shakespeare by a factor of almost five to one (not even taking into account that the press runs of the Sermon were probably larger than of Hamlet) draws attention to the central importance of religious material to the publishing trade in this period. The output of the majority of publishers in the first century or so of printing was heavily dominated by religious works of one sort or another. Indeed, in his influential study of English books and readers, Bennett estimated that, in this period, ‘printers, as a body, gave something like half their output to this side of their business’ (Bennett, 65). Once the Reformation—with its emphasis on reading scripture in the vernacular—firmly took hold in England, there was a high demand for English-language bibles, prayer books, and catechisms. In 1571, the Convocation of Canterbury ordered that a copy of the Bishops’ Bible (first published in 1568) should be placed in every cathedral and, if possible, in every church. It was subsequently issued in scores of editions. The Authorized Version of the Bible, first published in 1611 under the sponsorship of King James I, was one of the signal achievements of the early modern era.
If the state sponsorship of Protestantism helped to drive forward vernacular religious publishing, then the emergence towards the end of the 16th century of more radical types of Protestant belief, which were opposed to what they perceived as the compromising doctrines and policies of the state Church, had the effect of accelerating such publishing still further. The Marprelate tracts provide an early example of this process. The pseudonymous Martin Marprelate took ‘ecclesiological battle out of the study and into the street’ (ODNB). The Marprelate attacks on the episcopacy first began to appear in 1588, clandestinely printed by Waldegrave. The pamphlets’ wit and energy generated considerable public interest, as did the cat-and-mouse game that the producers of the tracts played with the authorities. The first pamphlet was printed at East Mole-sey, near Kingston-on-Thames. For the second, Waldegrave moved to Fawsley House in Northamptonshire, after which he moved again, this time to Coventry, where two further works were produced. Then, Waldegrave bowed out and John Hodgkins took over as printer, working at Wolston Priory. Hodgkins subsequently moved the operation to Newton Lane, near Manchester, but here he and his workmen were finally arrested by the earl of Derby’s men and taken to London to be tortured and imprisoned. (Nevertheless, one final tract was produced at Wolston Priory.) The anti-episcopal polemics prompted a number of replies and counter-attacks from the government side, indicating how printed matter tends to generate still more print.
The battles between the Puritans on one hand and the government and the state Church on the other did not come to an end with the silencing of the Martinists. Religion and politics became ever more closely entwined in the run-up to the Civil War, prompting further pamphlet exchanges that persisted throughout the War and Interregnum. This period witnessed an extraordinary efflorescence in the number of titles published, as indicated by the remarkable collection of some 22,000 printed items gathered together by the bookseller George Thomason between 1640 and 1661 (preserved in the British Library). As the Thomason collection’s large number of newsbooks indicate, the era has become closely associated with the emergence of the newspaper as a distinctive form in Britain.
The structures of authorization and control instituted by the government authorities and the Stationers’ Company in the mid-16th century fractured irretrievably in the face of the proliferation of publishing activity prompted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Throughout the Interregnum, Parliament struggled to reimpose some form of order and control on the publishing trade, but with steadily diminishing results over time. In the wake of the Restoration, an attempt was made to return to the status quo. An Act passed in 1662 sought to reinstate the old order, with one notable innovation: the appointment of an official surveyor and licenser of the press. This role was initially filled by Sir Roger L’Estrange, who claimed to have suppressed more than 600 publications during his licensing career. The 1662 legislation was renewed in 1664 and 1665, lapsed in 1679, was revived in 1685, and then finally lapsed again without any further renewal in 1695. Government authorities seem not to have been unduly troubled by the loss of the licensing provisions that had been included in the legislation. Treadwell has noted that, in 1693, the Jacobite printer William Anderton was tried and executed under the law of treason—suggesting that, in taking forward the case, the government was seeking to reassure itself that ‘there were other and more effective means than licensing to control the press’ (Treadwell, 776).
The lapsing of the 1662 legislation signalled the final shattering of the mid-16th century dispensation that had granted such a high degree of control over the publishing trade to the Stationers’ Company. With the geographical and other limitations on printing effectively withdrawn in 1695, the number of presses increased both in London and throughout the country. As Treadwell has noted, London had about 45 printing offices in 1695, but by 1705 that number had risen to close to 70. During that ten-year period, printers set up presses in numerous towns including Bristol (1695), Shrewsbury (1696), Exeter (1698), and Norwich (1701). The Stationers’ Company never really recovered from the loss of power that resulted from the lapse of the licensing Act, and it would never again be quite the same force in British publishing.
From the late 17th century onward, many leading publishers avoided relying on the Company to protect their interests; instead, they banded together into smaller-scale, semi-formal trade alliances. Thus, when Richard Royston—who had himself served as Warden and Master of the Company—drew up his will in 1682, he advised the beneficiaries that new editions of the works to which he held the rights should be undertaken by six or eight members of the trade (Blagden, Stationers’ Company, 174–5). The logic of his proposal implied that multiple investors would have the effect of spreading the risk of any new undertaking; such a plan would also help to draw in potential competitors and thereby guard against possible rival editions, at a time when the enforceability of ownership rights could not be legally guaranteed.
The kind of collaboration that Royston proposed became standard practice in the 18th century (extending even into the early decades of the 19th), and the groups of publishers which came together in such arrangements were known as ‘printing congers’. The title-page of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) indicates that it was printed for ‘J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley.’ Such ad hoc conglomerations were essentially joint-stock companies; each member bought shares in a book and divided the profits according to his initial investment. Such joint ventures spread the financial risk of publishing; for a large work such as the Dictionary in two substantial folio volumes, a considerable amount of capital was required. Another tactic adopted by publishers to minimize the investment risk involved in undertaking larger-scale projects was to seek out subscribers who paid (or sometimes part-paid) for their copy of a new work in advance, with their names then being included among the list of subscribers in the opening pages of the book. Lewis Theobald’s edition of Shakespeare’s Works (1733), issued in seven octavo volumes, included a subscription list running to just under 430 names, headed by the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal.
In the wake of the definitive lapse of the 1662 Act in 1695, the publishing trade persistently lobbied Parliament to pass some form of legislation that would afford legal protection of their interests. What emerged from this process was an Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies (8 Anne, c. 19), passed by Parliament in 1709 to take effect in 1710. Feather has observed that, to the trade, the legislation ‘represented a substantial victory, granting them the rights they sought while not reimposing the irksome requirements of pre-publication censorship’ (Feather, 5). The Act, however, contained a set of far-reaching provisions, whose implications seem not to have been fully registered by the publishing trade when it was passed. The legislation introduced a modern concept of copyright as being vested in the author and, crucially, restricted in duration. Copyright on works already in print was to be limited to 21 years; new works were to be protected for 14 years, renewable for a further 14 if the author were still alive. The copyright provisions of the Act were a radical departure from standard practice within the industry. Traditionally, authors sold their work outright to a publisher, who then owned the rights to reproduce the text in perpetuity. The ‘property’ of a book was, therefore, treated in much the same way as real property: publishers could buy and sell such rights and they could pass them on in their wills.
The London publishing trade largely ignored the time limitations introduced by the ‘Statute of Anne’, or ‘Copyright Act’, as it is commonly called, and proceeded as if copyright continued to be perpetual. Throughout the 18th century, trading in shares in the most lucrative titles continued, even beyond the point when the new legislation dictated that these shares had effectively been rendered worthless. Thus, for example, when the Tonson publishing firm—one of the foremost London houses of the 18th century—was wound up following the death of Jacob Tonson III in 1767, the rights held by the company were sold at auction for £9,550 19 s. 6d., despite the fact that the copyright on many of the 600 lots being offered for sale had expired. A notable example is the Tonson rights in Shakespeare, which fetched £1,200 at the trade sale, even though Shakespeare’s works had effectively been out of copyright for more than three decades (Belanger, 195; Blagden, ‘Trade Sales’, 250).
The London trade’s insistence that the 1710 Act had not changed the traditional practice of perpetual copyright did not go unchallenged over the course of the century, however. Some less well-established members of the trade in England did, from time to time, attempt to assert their entitlement to print works whose copyright had expired. In general the London publishing elite were able to counter such moves, either by exploiting the law courts’ uncertainty over the issue or by simply buying off the publishers concerned. A more determined challenge developed, however, from outside England. In the 18th century, Scottish and Irish publishing came into their own and the number of printers operating in both countries increased very considerably. Some, such as the Foulis brothers, who were based at the Glasgow University Printing Office, aimed at producing work of the very highest quality; others, such as Patrick Neill of Belfast, had rather more fleeting and less ambitious careers in the trade. The Scots and the Irish undercut their London rivals and often exported their wares into the English market. English publishers complained bitterly of piracies, with the novelist Samuel Richardson, himself a printer, railing against cut-price editions of his work, which arrived from Dublin virtually before he had finished printing them himself in London (Ward, 18–20).
However, the more significant battle to be fought in the 18th century was not over works such as Richardson’s, which were still in copyright, but rather over those works where copyright had lapsed, but which the London trade still treated as if they were private property. It was a Scottish publisher, Alexander Donaldson, who forced the issue of the unrestricted reprinting of these works, setting up a branch of his Edinburgh firm in London and challenging the established trade all the way to the House of Lords. In 1774, the Lords confirmed Donaldson’s assertion that the time limits placed on copyright by the 1710 Act effectively negated traditional practice. The 1774 ruling in Donaldson vs Becket had the result of dramatically opening up the publishing trade in Britain. As Mark Rose has observed, the ‘works of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, and others, all the perennials of the book trade that the booksellers had been accustomed to treat as if they were private landed estates, were suddenly declared open commons’ (Rose, 53). W. Forbes Gray has characterized the ruling as ‘the Magna Charta of literary property’, since it helped to establish the notion of a ‘public domain’ of works that were available to any publisher who wished to produce an edition at a competitive price (Gray, 197).
Among those who took immediate advantage of the new dispensation was John Bell, proprietor of the ‘British Library’ bookshop on the Strand in London. In 1776, Bell initiated his ‘Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill’, a series running to a total of 109 volumes, priced at 1s. 6d. each. He also launched ‘Bell’s British Theatre’ in 21 volumes, published in 6 d. weekly numbers, or parts (Altick, 54). These volumes were inexpensive by the standards of the 18th century, and Bell’s efforts prompted others, such as John Cooke and James Harrison, to enter the field with competitively priced series of their own. As a result books became cheaper, and a much wider range of works became available to the less well-off sectors of society (athough St Clair has argued that this range narrowed progressively as the limits on copyright were extended over time).
One other legacy of the 1710 Copyright Act was the formalization of the entitlement of certain libraries to receive copies of new publications without charge—and this was not altered by the 1774 Lords’ decision. Where Bodley, in a private arrangement, had persuaded the Stationers’ Company to supply his Oxford library with one copy of every book registered at Stationers’ Hall, in 1662 this agreement was extended by law to include Cambridge University Library and the Royal Library. The Act further extended and codified the arrangement, with the four Scottish universities, the library of Sion College in London, and the Faculty of Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh gaining legal deposit status. The range of institutions benefiting from this provision was narrowed early in the 18th century, but it is in the 1710 Act that the seeds of the great copyright deposit collections can be found. The British Museum was established in 1753; four years later, it took possession of the Royal Library collection, which served as the foundation of what has since become the British Library. The Faculty of Advocates’ Library formed the starting point of the National Library of Scotland collection.
Outside these great libraries, more modest institutions were slowly beginning to emerge, dedicated to serving the needs of the general reader. In 1725, Allan Ramsay opened the first British circulating library, in Edinburgh. Sixteen years later, the miners of Ramsay’s own birthplace, Leadhills, in Lanarkshire, came together to establish the Leadhills Reading Society, setting up a library and assembling a significant collection of books on a wide variety of topics. Local initiatives of this kind proliferated throughout Britain during the course of the 18th century, serving the needs of less well-off general readers until the institution of the public lending library system from the middle of the following century.
In the closing decades of the 15th century, Caxton offered his customers a luxury product, of interest largely to wealthy members of the aristocratic circles in which he moved. In the centuries that followed, books remained expensive commodities, with prices held artificially high, partly as a result of the restrictive practices employed by a London-based publishing elite. The 1774 Lords ruling was an early step towards making books less expensive and more readily available to a wider social spectrum. As the 18th century drew to a close, further steps in this direction were being taken.
If Caxton could have been plucked from his Westminster printing office and dropped into its late 18th-century equivalent, he would have been able to work as a compositor or printer with very little adjustment. The common presses being manufactured in the 18th century differed very little from the first press that Caxton had brought with him from the Continent in the mid-1470s (see 11). In the final years of the 18th century, however, printing technology began to change. In 1727, the Edinburgh goldsmith William Ged began experimenting with stereotype printing—taking impressions of the completed formes of type and using the moulds to produce metal plates that could be used repeatedly, without the need for recomposition. Ged never managed to make the process commercially viable (largely because of the resistance of typefounders and compositors who feared for their livelihood), but at the very end of the century, Charles Stanhope, earl Stanhope revived the technique, eventually making it a commercial success and opening the way for extended press runs and cheap reprints. The earl also, around 1800, introduced the iron Stanhope press, which significantly reduced the amount of labour involved in the printing process. If Caxton could have stood on the threshold of the 19th century and looked forward, he would have seen a future that would surely have astonished him: the hand-crafted printed book of his day gradually turning into a genuinely mass-produced object passing into the hands of even some of the poorer members of society.
Altick
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H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1475 to 1557, 2e (1969)
C. Benson, ‘Libraries in University Towns’, in CHLBI 2
C. Blagden, ‘Booksellers’ Trade Sales 1718–1768’, Library, 5/5 (1950–51), 243–57
——The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (1960)
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—— ‘The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks’, SQ 56 (2005), 33–50
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W. F. Gray, ‘Alexander Donaldson and His Fight for Cheap Books’, Judicial Review, 38 (1926), 180–202
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