The two centers for the making and selling of books in London in the seventeenth century were the printing houses and bookshops. Both printers and booksellers worked in “houses,” often the same ones in which they lived. The family was the major unit of organization for the book trade—domestic rules applied to the printing house or bookshop just as they did in the attached household. In printing houses, the oldest man working was often called the “father.” It was important for a printer to maintain the domestic community in the printing house because reputation influenced the commercial value of the house’s products. The book trade encouraged the development of a community of workers and customers within the already bustling city of London; this community had a specialized set of rules of conduct and practices.

Practices surrounding print and the book trade in early modern England gave rise to numerous issues regarding authorship. The relationship between reader and text was filtered by not only the writer of the text but also the text’s compositors, printers, sellers, and pirates. The often nebulous distinction among these characters made it difficult to establish who was ultimately “responsible” for any given text. The persistence of piracy, for example, extended beyond the economic concerns of individual booksellers. Piracy served as a constant threat to experimental philosophers, whose knowledge and, indeed, very livelihood, insisted on verifiability and legitimacy of their singular authorship. On the other hand, piracy also marked the achievement of women writers whose work had become established enough that their names began to be appropriated for unauthorized books. The economic, political, and social reality of the world of the book trade meant that only a difficult and varied process of collaboration among printers, booksellers, and writers could result in a printed book that was also an “inscription of the author’s thought” (Johns 183).

Printing Houses

Whereas on the continent, booksellers and printers worked from the same space, London had a lot less room for such large-scale operations; therefore the printing houses and bookshops, although usually close to one another, were most often in separate buildings. A printing house usually had two or three presses, sometimes only one. The printing room had to be large enough to accommodate the workers and the printing press, a large and carefully crafted machine.

The compositors’ room should also be well chosen. It was the job of the compositors to layout the type; this required good lighting, a fire by which to dry type, and space in the room around the equipment. The compositor would draw from his cases the letters that he would then place into the “composing stick,” which held about eight or nine lines. Once the composing stick was full, he would place the lines into the “galley,” which was a wooden frame. The compositor would continue to fill the galley from the composing stick until the page was finished, and then he would move on to the next page. Once all of the pages for one sheet were finished, the compositor would place the “galleys into an iron frame called a chase, and fix them in position with wedges” the product of which was called the forme (87). Compositors were expected to set between one thousand and twelve hundred characters per hour. They had quite a bit of freedom in choosing how to set the type, and often made editorial corrections and adjustments as they went along.

The pressmen often worked in pairs because of the heavy-lifting involved in moving the forme. Once the compositor was finished, the pressmen would prepare the forme for printing. The ink was spread onto the forme by “two leather balls stuffed with wool,” a sheet of paper would be spread over the “tympan [a rectangular metal frame hinged to the press and] secured by the frisket,” and “the carriage—stone, forme, and paper—was then rolled under the main body of the press, to lie beneath the platen” (92). Two pulls of the handle were required to make the impression because the platen, which was a heavy flat plate that pressed the paper against the ink type, covered only half of the forme such that the forme needed to be repositioned.

Proofreaders were often employed to review the work of the compositors. These readers would look at the sheets as they were printing, making corrections as the printing went along. Very few copies of one book were exactly alike, as each copy may have had corrections made to it at different parts of the printing process.

Bookshops

The first consideration in the opening of a bookshop ideally would have been its location. It was common for a bookshop to be near a printing house, often right next door. We are not sure what the exact practice of customer service was in these bookshops—whether the customer requested to see items or could just browse as in modern bookstores. However, there were definitely some who were allowed to come in and browse: other members of the Stationers’ Company who were there to make sure that the booksellers were not selling anything seditious. It is for this reason that the bookshop owners found it advantageous to keep a firm boundary between their houses and their bookshops. Passing that boundary with customers might lead people to think that the bookshop is “private,” and thus illicit.

The Stationer

The title of “Stationer” refers to any man or woman involved in the book trade, especially printers and booksellers. The general character of the community of Stationers held significant consequence because “contemporaries were convinced that [their character] prevailed in determining what appeared in print”; in other words, it was perceived that what people could buy, sell and read was influenced on the whole by the climate of the Stationers (147). Similarly, the character of each individual bookseller held importance, in that the reputation of a Stationer would inform a potential reader of a book’s contents as much as the author’s reputation.

Among the conventional virtues expected of a Stationer were: “civility, ‘punctuality’ in affairs, honesty, religious devotion, and humility” (145). Rare, however, was the individual Stationer who was publicly acknowledged for meeting these criteria. While much of the seventeenth century discourse surrounding the character of the Stationer insisted on not just prudence in religious and business affairs, but also some hint of virtuosity, Stationers on the whole failed to meet the ideal and were consistently viewed as crude and mercenary or seditious and blasphemous.

Because the Stationer was held responsible for the texts he sold, Stationers began working collaboratively in increasing numbers, thus distributing the responsibility among several people so that no one Stationer could be “unambiguously responsible for the entire text” (150). By the end of the seventeenth century collaboration was a common practice and by 1710 “a system of whole-saling ‘congers’ was well established, protecting members’ copies and sharing large-scale publishing projects” (151). Placing culpability on the Stationer for material that was published gave the legal system a clear target when responsibility for a particular text needed to be established while simultaneously ideally serving to help eliminate piracy, or unauthorized printing. Hence, the Stationer was established as the proprietorial author.

Chapmen, Hawkers, and Mercuries

While the selling of printed materials was accomplished primarily by booksellers in bookshops, there existed in the early modern period several marginal types of sellers who, although not necessarily engaged in illicit trade (like pirates), did not serve as the same sort of exemplars of the book trade as Stationers. These sellers, including chapmen, hawkers, and mercuries, performed distributive and exchange work frequently in conjunction with the work of the more established Stationers. Chapmen, for instance, were essentially traveling salesmen who “circulated around the country on more or less regular routes” (153). Their stability readily contrasts with the less seemly hawkers who “cried” their printed wares “on the streets, appealing directly to reading customers” (153-4). Hawkers, it was alleged, especially sold piracies and were held in such low regard that after the Great Fire of 1660 the new squares were designed with the intention to exclude these uncouth characters.

Mercuries, although less common than hawkers or chapmen, played an important role not only in “print culture,” but also on a grander social, economic and political scale as informants. Mercuries, who were mostly women, “sold books wholesale from the press, carrying them ‘up and down’ London and distributing them from shop to shop” (154). By nature of their marginal position in society, these women, who were frequently the wives or widows of printers, made ideal informants, able to participate in a wide network of intelligence about the book trade and beyond (153).

Piracy

The inherent ambiguity of unauthorized printing made piracy hard to prove so that most accusations were highly contentious. However, debatable printing practices were a very real phenomenon before, during, and after the seventeenth century. Piracy played a profound role on all levels of the print trade. Pirates were no more necessarily outcasts, purveying only pamphlets or fringe literature, than they were necessarily insubordinate Stationers attempting to subvert the orthodoxy of the Stationers’ Company.

Since conviction of piracy did not deter advancement in the trade, at times the most upstanding or prominent members of the Stationers’ community were in fact pirates. Thus, pirates were “not a distinguishable social group,” since they existed at all levels of the community (167). Before and during the Civil War, piracy flourished, followed by the Protectorate and the Restoration, which produced the notorious “pirate kings” Henry Hills, John Field, and Henry Hills, Jr., on whom many ruined booksellers blamed their downfalls.

Beyond the individual level, the entire issue of foreign reprints of books was another crucial aspect of piracy. The foreign reprints were imported and sold at prices much cheaper than English trade could afford. Because there had been a thriving international book trade in Europe since the mid-sixteenth century, control over the book trade in any single country was increasingly difficult. Though not all international book trading in England was illicit, English printers and booksellers complained so frequently that the Stationers’ Company was able to produce sizeable evidence of contraband. Of this material, Parliament found most disconcerting the large number of political tracts that were imported under false merchandise labels (169).

Since piracy seemed virtually ubiquitous, “no individual was automatically immune from the label of pirate, and no book too grand to be called a piracy” (171). Consequently, an ardent concern over the validity and verification of all printed materials arose. Booksellers would seek evidence and testimony to verify their books and ensure their credibility. However, in keeping with the slipperiness of piracy in general, most attempts to circumvent piracy were unsuccessful; printers’ marks could be counterfeited, and special paper could be stolen, rebound, and resold. Parliament attempted to license the publication process, but, true to form, violators would simply forge the licenses. Piracy, and its resultant troubling of already pressing concerns surrounding the legitimacy of print, played a vital role in further troubling the dynamic and often hazy relationship between the early modern reader, writer, and printer or bookseller.

~ Kris McAbee and Jessica Murphy

Based on Adrian Johns. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. pp. 74-186.