The London Book‐Trade in 1600

Abstract

The London book-trade in 1600 was, at once, more sophisticated in the diversity of its products and much smaller than we might assume. It was neither entirely a trade in printed books, nor were the printed books always English in origin. This broader perspective is important, for narratives of the book-trade commonly privilege the trade in printed books over manuscripts and construct their histories within national boundaries. Yet, as Sir William Cornwallis was to observe in his Essayes: The Worlde is a booke: the words and actions of men Commentaries Vpon that Volume: The former lyke manuscriptes priuate: the latter common, lyke things printed.' The ambivalence that Cornwallis registers between words and actions, manuscript and print, the private and the public, is suggestive also of the way in which the book-trade in 1600 was poised between these competing interests. The books produced by London printing-houses catered to a large but specific segment of the overall market. Much material continued to circulate in manuscript, however, not only for religious and political reasons (and the two were often contiguous), but because the trade in printed books had yet to displace manuscripts as a primary source for the transmission of knowledge. Equally, the Latin trade (as it was called) in continental books catered for a learned clientele. This material, some of it eXtremely erudite and obscure, could be imported in limited quantities but provided far greater diversity in a bookseller's stock than it is now possible entirely to recover. For such publications the London book-trade rarely had either the resources or the necessary economies of scale to compete against the leading producers in Paris, Lyons, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Basle, Geneva, Venice and the other major centres of European book production. ApproXimately 80 per cent of the books that survive from the libraries of Ben Jonson and John Donne, for instance, were printed on the Continent. This is not untypical of the libraries of English intellectuals in the siXteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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