36 - British books abroad: the Continent

Summary

From an international perspective, the slow and problematic development of the book trade in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had serious consequences. First of all, it proved very difficult to sell books printed in Britain on the European Continent. One cause was that the quality of British printing up to the end of the seventeenth century remained low. Workmanship in typesetting, proof correction, and press work was often sloppy and the printing types used were either imported fonts or cast from self-made matrices of poor design. As those in the trade knew: in 1641 the Oxford printer Leonard Lichfield apologized to the young couple Mary Stuart and the future William II of Orange in the dedication to his [προτελεια] Anglo-Batava (1641): ‘Our Presse no Leiden Characters affords, / Looke then not on our Letters, but our Words.’

The English language constituted another obstacle for book exports. Whereas other modern languages – French, Italian, German, Dutch – were spoken well beyond their respective language barriers, English was hardly known on mainland Europe, with the exception of mercantile ports with direct trade relations with Britain. In 1665 Denis de Sallo, editor of the Journal des sçavants, informed his readers that he had not included resumés from the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, because it had been impossible to find a Parisian contributor capable of undertaking their translation.