THE ENGLISH BOOK TRADE

TO 1800
Prepared for Dr. Ashley Bender
Bibliography and Research Methods
Overview
 Europe and England
 Printing Personnel
 Gild and Chapel
 Scale and Finance; Book Prices
 Publishing and Bookselling
 Authorship, Copyright, and Censorship
EUROPE & ENGLAND
 England’s book trade remained “small and
backward,” differing from the book trades of other
European countries such as France, Germany, and
Italy (172).
 Gaskell remarks that “[T]his change in the
eighteenth century” due to the expansion of a home
market, the loosening of political regulations on
printing, and “the development of native type-
founding and paper-making” (172).
Isaac, Peter. “BSA Annual Address: The English Provincial Book Trade: A Northern Mosaic.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol.
95, no. 4, 2001, pp. 410-441. [image from p. 410]
Printing Personnel
 Master-printer: owned the business, possibly in
partnership with others; in a few cases the master
was himself an employee of an institution such as a
university, a superior overseer (172).
 Senior employee: acted as the master’s deputy,
such as the overseer of a large shop who parceled
out the work amongst the journeymen and saw that
it was done properly. The senior employee might
also work as a corrector (173).
Printing Personnel [cont.]
 Correctors: Were not trained as printers, but were men
of education specially employed, sometimes on a part-
time basis… Time wages were probably normal in the
16th century, piecework rates thereafter.
 Journeymen and apprentices: The backbone of book
production, the ‘spine’ if you will. Journeymen printers
generally specialized as compositors or pressmen… In
employment, journeymen were entitled (if they took up
their freedom) to bind apprentices of their own…
(172). They were typically paid by the sheet (173).
Printing Personnel [cont.]
 Journeymen and apprentices: The Cambridge
University Press at the end of the 17th
century…employed a Dutch manager and a
majority of ‘alien’ compositors, while James Watson
of Edinburgh brought over Dutch pressmen in the
early 18th century in order to raise standards of
workmanship (174).
An Aside on Cambridge Press
 Founded by King Henry VIII of England
 Published Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1713)

Patent letter by King Henry VII

Printing Personnel [cont.]
 Boy: A boy or two might be employed, in addition
to any journeymen’s ‘devils,’ as messengers or
cleaners. Unskilled employees were not supposed to
do any printing, but this role was probably broken
from time-to-time (174).

The Industrial Revolution

was powered in-part
by child slave labor.
An Aside on Child Labor

Childs, Michael J. “Boy labour in late Victorian and Edwardian England and the remaking of the working class.” Journal of Social
History, vol. 23, no. 4, 1990, pp. 783-802. [image source: p. 792]
Gild and Chapel
 Gilds were federations of master tradesmen who…co-
operated with the government in its censorship of the
press (174-175).
 Example: The Stationers’ Company of London
 Controlled entry to the trade
 Regulated wages & conditions of employment

 Protected members’ copyrights;

 Operated copyright monopolies for benefit of senior

members;
 Limited the number of presses and their location(s). (175)
Scale and Finance
 Direct Costs of book production:
 Printingpaper (approx. 50% of 18th century costs);
 Wages (most of the rest);

 Supplies such as ink and candles.

 Rent, interest on capital, and replacement and

maintenance of plant also added to these costs, but
printers…were rarely skilled in cost accounting and
did not include accurate assessments of overhead.
(177)
Book Prices
 When the printer of a book was also its publisher…he
would fix a retail price that would cover production
costs, overheads and profit, the discounts he would
[allow], and risks such as slow turnover, loss in transit,
and bad debts.
 Books printed on the continent cost less.
 Production costs of English books in the early and
middle 18th century… were usually around 0.5d a sheet
including paper, varying in the range of 0.35d. – 0.65d
according to type size, quality, and run length. (178)
Book Prices [cont.]
 By the early 18th century, the English book trade
was sufficiently well organized to enabled
publishers and booksellers to advertise the prices of
their wares, sometimes on the title-pages; though
even then retailers would sometimes offer discounts,
or lower prices.
 Prices were still calculated by the sheet.
 It should be remembered that these prices were set
by the various publishers, not by the one printer.

(179)
Publishing and Bookselling
 The traders involved in the production and
distribution of a book have always been:
A publisher;
 A printer;

 A wholesale distributor;

 A number of retail booksellers. (179-180)

 Beginning in the late 17th century, publishers began

to specialize (180).
Partnership
 Partnership in publication is as old as printing…
Early partnerships appear to have been ad hoc
arrangements between brother tradesmen… From
the 1680s, however,… several large publishers
formed a more permanent association which came
to be known as the ‘conger’ (“to bring together).
(180)
Publication by Private Subscription
 This was essentially a method of persuading
customers to help with the cost of producing a book
by offering them a substantial discount if they
would agree to pay all or (more usually) part of
the price in advance. (181)
 This
still happens, particularly with periodicals and
academic/scholarly journals.
Serial Publication
 Serial publication was introduced in England in the
later seventeenth century… by Joseph Moxon for
the first appearance of his classic trade manual
Mechanick exercises, which came out in 38 monthly
parts at 6d. In the period 1678-1683. (181)
 Serial publication ensured that:
 Production costs were met;
 That the poorer purchaser could by installments of a
book which he could not (or would not) afford all at
once. (181-182)
Book Advertisement
 Books were advertised in the 15th and 16th century
by means of printed publishers’ lists…
 They were followed by book-fair catalogues…,

retailers’ catalogues, and collections of trade

announcements…
 The title-pages of Elizabethan and Jacobean books

were sometimes posted in the street as

advertisements.
(182-183)
Authorship, Copyright, and Censorship

 Authors’ copyright did not exist in practice before

1710.
 Once a book was out its copyright belonged to its
trade publisher...
 Publishers were supposed to enter their copies
before publication in the register of the Stationer’s
Company. (184)
 The new Licensing Act in 1710 ruled that copyright
in a new book belonged not to its publisher but to
its author (184).
Copyright [cont.]
 Publishers still hoped to establish monopolies in
individual books that were out of copyright, but this
was eventually banned by a ruling in 1774. After
that, only the Bible and the Prayer Book were
viewed as privileged texts, and they still are.
 From 1695 on, there was no organized general
censorship of books in England (185).
A Note on Method
The text of this presentation is a combination of
reflection on behalf of the compiler as well as word-
for-word extractions from the text written by Gaskell.

The compiler does not claim to have originally

composed the material herein, as they are for
educational purposes.

Compiled by: Cody Jackson (2/9/2018)