Cover Page

The Book in Britain

A Historical Introduction

 

 

Edited by

Zachary Lesser

 

Written by

Daniel Allington
David A. Brewer
Stephen Colclough
Siân Echard
Zachary Lesser

 

 

 

 

logo.gif

This edition first published 2019
© 2019 John Wiley and Sons Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Zachary Lesser to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

Registered Offices
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Office
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication data applied for

Hardback ISBN: 9780470654934

Cover image: Items from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Photograph by Chris Lippa.
Cover design: Wiley

Editor's Note

In planning this book, I hoped to do something different from other introductions to the field of book history. There were already several excellent anthologies of classic essays and collections of new topical essays. What there was not yet, it seemed to me, was a clear, up‐to‐date narrative of the long history of the book in Britain. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for one scholar to tell that story in any real detail. The goal of The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction was to combine the benefits of a multiply authored volume – the expertise in each historical period that no single author could have – with the coherence and readability of a monograph. Although we have not sought to eliminate the distinctiveness of each author's approach, we have worked collaboratively throughout the planning, writing, and revising stages in order to create that narrative coherence. Our plan was for each of us to edit the entire manuscript and revise based on those suggestions.

Sadly, Stephen Colclough died suddenly in 2015. While he had already written his chapters, he was not able to revise as the other authors were. We therefore lightly edited his chapters to enhance their connections to the rest of the volume. These interventions were minor, with the exception of a few more substantial passages on the abolitionist use of print (which I wrote) and on lithography and hot‐metal composing machines (which Daniel wrote). We have largely let Stephen's excellent work stand as is, making only occasional revisions based on our reading of the entire manuscript, which Stephen was tragically unable to see.

— Zachary Lesser

A Note on Money

Until February 15, 1971 (known as Decimal Day), English currency was based on a non‐decimal system of pounds (£), shillings (s), and pence (d, from the Latin denarius). There were 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound. A penny therefore equaled 1/240 of a pound, as opposed to 1/100 of a pound after decimalization. Whenever monetary figures are mentioned in the pre‐decimal period, we have not converted their value into decimal currency. Over the centuries covered here, the value of money – what it could purchase – changed drastically. It is hard to compare these values across time, but one good way to do so is by reference to average wages. (The other main way is to compare the purchasing power of money over time, since core expenses like food, clothing, and shelter changed in price relative to earnings at different rates over time.) We need to bear in mind, however, that in earlier periods wages did not represent the full compensation a worker received, as employment could include meals and sometimes lodging, and not all people worked in the cash economy. The website MeasuringWorth.com offers reliable estimates of average annual earnings in the United Kingdom over the past several centuries, taking account of the various kinds of in‐kind compensation some workers received. We use their data as a rough guide to the historical value of money.

Around 1600, a journeyman might earn between £3 and £8 per year, depending on his trade, plus food and drink. The average annual total compensation for workers of £8 15s equates to between 6d and 7d per day. While a ballad could be had for a penny, one of Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto was usually 6d, the equivalent of a day's wage, which would have made it a substantial purchase. Longer bound volumes sold for considerably more: the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) retailed for around £1, and Holinshed's Chronicles (1587) around £2 10s. Both were obviously well out of reach for the typical worker.

In 1700, the same journeyman might earn £12 annually, or about 9d per day. A chapbook containing a brief tale in one or one‐and‐a‐half sheets of paper cost 2d, not something to be purchased unthinkingly but affordable if considered important. Meanwhile, the 1719 first edition of Robinson Crusoe cost 5s, or about a week's earnings: this publication was not aimed at most working people.

In 1800, a worker's annual earnings were now, on average, around £23 10s. Some cheap reprinted novels cost 6d, or about 5% of weekly compensation – certainly within reach, although not all of this compensation was in cash and hence available for use in buying a book. New novels of the time often appeared in three‐volume sets at 3s or 4s per volume, a much more considerable expenditure of an entire week's earnings or more. The rise of lending libraries suggests that plenty of readers were not purchasers.

By 1900, the annual earnings for a typical worker had risen to £68. A new novel by Thomas Hardy might retail for 6s, or a bit less than a quarter of weekly earnings, but plenty of cheaper editions could be found, including reprints of classics for a penny.

Compare that to today. In 2016, the average annual earnings in the United Kingdom was £26 200. A new paperback bestseller can be had from Amazon or at W.H. Smith for £5 or £6, less than 2% of weekly pay (before taxes). Certainly books have gotten cheaper over time relative to average earnings. But these very long‐term trends mask more local rises and falls in the standard of living of British men and women and in the relative prices of books, both new and old. They are intended simply to give readers a broad overview of the value of money at different moments in the history of the book in Britain.

List of Illustrations

Cover Items from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Photograph by Chris Lippa.

Figure 1.1 An eleventh‐century copy of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, in Latin, with Caedmon's Hymn added in Old English in the bottom margin.
Figure 1.2 England in the ninth century.
Figure 1.3 Ezra in his study, from the Codex Amiatinus.
Figure 1.4 A portrait of the scribe, from the twelfth‐century Eadwine Psalter.
Figure 1.5 The Seax of Beagnoþ, a tenth‐century knife inscribed in runic letters.
Figure 1.6 The Ruthwell Cross, showing one of the sections with part of The Dream of the Rood carved in runes.
Figure 1.7 A runic alphabet in the ninth‐century St. Dunstan's Classbook.
Figure 1.8 The opening of the Gospel of Matthew in the Book of Kells, starting with the words “Liber generationis.”
Figure 1.9 The Chi‐Rho (the monogram for Christ) page from the Lindisfarne Gospels.
Figure 1.10 A page from the St. Chad Gospels, including legal memoranda written in Old Welsh.
Figure 1.11 A page from the Eadwine Psalter, showing three versions of the Psalm in parallel columns, with interlinear translations in Anglo Norman and Old English.
Figure 2.1 Historiated initial from the Carrow Psalter, showing two episodes from the story of Jonah.
Figure 2.2 Agricultural figures in the bottom margin of a page from the Luttrell Psalter.
Figure 2.3 The annunciation to the shepherds, in the Holkham Bible, an illustrated Bible with captions in Anglo‐Norman French and Middle English.
Figure 2.4 The printer's device of Richard Grafton, showing a grafted tree growing out of a barrel (tun).
Figure 2.5 A page from William Caxton's 1476 printing of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, showing the beginning of The Merchant's Tale.
Figure 2.6 Woodcut illustrating the opening of Book II of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498.
Figure 2.7 An illustration of a print shop c. 1600 showing compositors picking type from cases; a forme being inked; a pressman working the press; and sheets being gathered up and set out to dry.
Figure 2.8 Type being arranged on a composing stick, illustrated in Joseph Moxon's Mechanick exercises: or, the doctrine of handy‐works. Applied to the art of printing (1683).
Figure 3.1 Title page of William Thynne's edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1550.
Figure 3.2 Title page of Thomas Speght's edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1598.
Figure 3.3 Title page of an almanac printed in London in 1565.
Figure 3.4 Frances Wolfreston's copy of the 1655 edition of Othello: “a sad one.”
Figure 3.5 The opening of Book I of The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser.
Figure 3.6 The martyrdom of William Tyndale, in a 1570 copy of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments.
Figure 3.7 Examples of black letter, Roman, italic, and Anglo‐Saxon typefaces.
Figure 3.8 The engraving of Stonehenge, from the 1610 edition of William Camden's Britannia.
Figure 3.9 Surrey, one of the engraved county maps in the 1610 edition of William Camden's Britannia.
Figure 3.10 Title page of the Matthew Bible, 1537.
Figure 3.11 Title page of the Coverdale Bible, 1535, showing Henry VIII handing a copy to a bishop.
Figure 3.12 Title page of the Great Bible, 1539, with the king in the center.
Figure 3.13 Title page of the King James Bible, 1611.
Figure 3.14 Opening of the First Folio of the works of Shakespeare, showing the engraving by Martin Droeshout, and the address to the reader by Ben Jonson.
Figure 3.15 Psalm 123 from the Bay Psalm Book.
Figure 4.1 A graph of the changing annual number of surviving titles, excluding periodicals, from 1600 to 1799.
Figure 4.2 An unremarkable‐looking, but politically incendiary petition to King Charles I.
Figure 4.3 The frontispiece to Eikon Basilike.
Figure 4.4 The title page of Eikonoklastes attempts to counter and overwhelm the title page of Eikon Basilike.
Figure 4.5 The spades in the Popish Plot playing cards.
Figure 4.6 The entirety of an early issue of the first newspaper in English.
Figure 4.7 The sophisticated layout of an almanac, the most ubiquitous kind of cheap print.
Figure 4.8 Frontispiece and title page of John Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea (1646).
Figure 5.1 The Gentleman's Magazine's attempt to demonstrate the variety and value‐for‐money that it offered.
Figure 5.2 The “neat rivulet of Text … murmur[ing] thro' a meadow of margin” characteristic of most first editions of eighteenth‐century poetry.
Figure 5.3 The subscriber list to James Thomson's The Seasons.
Figure 6.1 The Tom's Coffee‐House copy of Have at You All; or, The Drury‐Lane Journal.
Figure 6.2 The characteristic “half‐bound volumes, with marbled covers” that visually distinguished the holdings of an eighteenth‐century circulating library.
Figure 6.3 The “Dutch paper” binding used on many eighteenth‐century children's books.
Figure 6.4 Large print for readers who need “to think on the Subject of OLD‐AGE.”
Figure 7.1 Frontispiece and title page of a volume of Jonathan Swift's works reprinted in “The Poets of Great Britain” series (1778).
Figure 7.2 An alluring illustration in Charles Cooke's edition of Joseph Andrews, part of his “Select Novels” reprint series.
Figure 7.3 An image of a circulating library, showing the supposed preferences of female patrons.
Figure 7.4 The Juvenile Library, catering specifically to children.
Figure 7.5 Diagram of the slave ship Brooks.
Figure 7.6 Author portrait and title page of Olaudah Equiano'sInteresting Narrative (1789).
Figure 8.1 The annual gift book, The Forget Me Not, as a mass‐produced gift.
Figure 8.2 The headpiece of Casell's Illustrated Family Paper depicting an idealized Victorian scene of domestic reading.
Figure 8.3 The opening to Uncle Tom's Cabin as serialized in The London Journal (October 2, 1852).
Figure 8.4 A typical page opening from Household Words.
Figure 8.5 The front and inside rear covers of a wrapper for a novel published in parts.
Figure 8.6 An engraving of “JONES, … at his Club,” reading the first part of Vanity Fair that appeared in the first part of Vanity Fair.
Figure 8.7 Robert Seymour's satiric cartoon mocking a working‐class man for entering the “refined” space of a shop.
Figure 8.8 Orderly, yet inescapable advertising visually dominates the railway station, including a W.H. Smith bookstall.
Figure 8.9 Punch's depiction of the chaos of Victorian street advertising, from the May 29, 1847, issue.
Figure 9.1 The “clean” typography of the Doves Bible.
Figure 9.2 The “Everyman's Library” brought Art Nouveau to the masses with its bindings.
Figure 9.3 The dust jacket for Joseph Conrand's The Shadow Line (J.M. Dent, 1917).
Figure 9.4 The complex layout of an opening in Pearson's Magazine, enabled by mechanical typesetting.
Figure 10.1 Gollancz typographic dust jackets: Pigeon Irish by Francis Stuart (1932) and The Martyr by Liam O'Flaherty (1933).
Figure 10.2 Glory of Life by Llewelyn Powys (Golden Cockerel Press, 1934).
Figure 10.3 Two of the first 10 Penguins: Ariel by André Maurois and Gone to Earth by Mary Webb (1935).
Figure 10.4 Monotype keyboard, 1929.
Figure 10.5 Monotype typecaster, 1929.
Figure 10.6 Hague and Gill type specimen book.
Figure 10.7 The Times reports on its own new typeface (and some other significant news), October 3, 1932.
Figure 11.1 The area around St. Paul's Cathedral, historic heart of the British publishing industry, in 1945.
Figure 11.2 An early “mushroom” paperback in the gangster genre: When Dames Get Tough by Hank Janson (Ward and Hutchon, c. 1946).
Figure 11.3 Tschichold's grid layout for covers in the King Penguin series.
Figure 11.4 Cartoon panels from “Kitty Hawke and her All‐Girl Air Crew” (Girl November 16, 1951) and “Wendy and Jinx” (Girl November, 19 1952).
Figure 11.5 Hand‐drawn offset lithographic dust jackets: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (W.H. Allen, 1958) and The Foxglove Saga by Auberon Waugh (Chapman & Hall, 1960).
Figure 11.6 Setting “type” on the Linotype Linofilm phototypesetting system.
Figure 11.7 Inserting a glass font grid into the Linotype Linofilm photographic unit.
Figure 11.8 Double‐page spread from Mackean's Introduction to Biology (1969 edition).
Figure 11.9 Layout for the January 5, 1969, front page of the Sunday Times, to be realized in hot metal.
Figure 12.1 Two well‐read Virago Modern Classics: Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet (1991) and the very first in the series, Antonia White's Frost in May (1978).
Figure 12.2 A typical Waterstones storefront in 2017.
Figure 12.3 The book section of a branch of W.H. Smith in 2017.
Figure 12.4 Shiny metallic colors draw attention to this small selection of the works of “Daisy Meadows.”
Figure 12.5 The Xerox 914: the first commercially successful xerographic copier, manufactured from 1959 to 1976.
Figure 12.6 Un‐numbered double‐page spread from Sniffin' Glue, August–September 1977.
Figure 12.7 An early twenty‐first‐century issue of a church magazine from the south‐east of England.
Figure 12.8 Example page layout from Aldus Pagemaker 1.2, launched in 1986.
Figure 12.9 The Macintosh Plus, launched in 1986.
Figure 12.10 Micro‐publishing at the turn of the century: Cobralingus by Jeff Noon (Codex Books, 2001) and Punk Strips by Simon Gane (Slab‐o‐Concrete, 2000).
Figure 12.11 The first commercially successful e‐reader available in the United Kingdom, the Kindle 2.