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2 results

  • 9 - A year’s work in the London printing house of the Bowyers

  • from PART III - THE TECHNOLOGIES AND AESTHETICS OF BOOK PRODUCTION
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 218-229

  • Summary

    The London printers William Bowyer, father and son, entered the year 1731 with justifiable confidence. The elder Bowyer had been in business since 1699, his skill and integrity securing valuable customers. Chief among these were the London booksellers, the wholesaling and retailing entrepreneurs who together virtually monopolized the British book trade. A closer sense of the resultant rhythms of work may be gained by surveying the year's work as a whole. There were twenty-five pay periods for the year, each ending on a Saturday. Seventeen covered the previous two weeks' work, the others either one or three weeks. The twenty-five works underline the printer's dependence on the London booksellers, especially when it is also noted that Bowyer had been given the printing of only part of seven works. Parliamentary work was thus all the more sought after, for it eventually yielded Bowyer (and his competitor Richardson) something like double the profit.

  • 26 - Printing and publishing 1557–1700: constraints on the London book trades

  • from THE BUSINESS OF PRINT AND THE SPACE OF READING
  • Edited by John Barnard, University of Leeds, D. F. McKenzie, University of Oxford
  • With Maureen Bell, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002, pp 553-567

  • Summary

    In London by the middle of the sixteenth century, the structure of labour in the book trades already had a long history. There is good evidence that in one form or another a mystery of stationers responsible for the commercial production of manuscripts had been formally constituted as a brotherhood by 1403. It is worth stressing that the labour records of the printing and bookselling trades from the mid-sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century probably represent the fullest account by far of any workforce in early modern England. A book printed for the author might run to 100 copies, probably the minimum for which it was worth going to a printer as distinct from a scribe. The effects of the Licensing Acts are only partly reflected in the imprimaturs and entries in the Stationersʾ Register. Only fifty-two books bear some form of licence.