The English Country Book Trades in 1784-5

David Stoker

Introduction

Writing thirty years ago, Roy Stokes pointed to a widely acknowledged geographical imbalance that required correction:

The history of printing in many countries all too readily becomes the history of printing in a limited number of major centres. Nowhere is this tendency more marked than in England. The book trade in England is largely the book trade in London. This, at least, is how it appears through the majority of general accounts. 1.

At this time there were in existence a few pioneering nineteenth century studies such as Henry Cotton’s Typographical Gazetteer, W.H Alnutt.2 Likewise E. Gordon Duff’s Sandars Lectures for 1911 covered the earliest provincial presses and the book trade prior to the accession of the first Queen Elizabeth,3 but coverage thereafter was extremely patchy. Little serious work was undertaken during the first half of this century, and interest in the study of provincial printing was not revived until 1959 with the publication of Paul Morgan’s brief account 4. In the same year Graham Pollard’s Sandars Lectures dealt with the ‘English market for books’ and gave much valuable information about provincial bookselling5.

Thus Roy Stokes’s assessment was largely accurate, and he went on to discuss how the situation might be remedied in future through the use of local records, and business archives:

A high percentage of such material must be related to ‘local’ as opposed to national activities… Our conspectus of the national book trade and the universal development of the book can then be revitalised by new attitudes based on newly discovered facts.

Stokes was showing a fair degree of prescience – for there has indeed been an enormous growth in scholarly interest in the provincial book trades since that time. The fact that his paper is being delivered during the sixteenth annual seminar devoted specifically to this purpose is itself is a testimony to the range of work now undertaken, and our growth in understanding of this previously neglected area of our cultural life. There is now a considerable body of published literature on all aspects of the book trades outside of London from the beginnings of provincial bookselling until the mid nineteenth century, and this may be an opportune time to take stock of what we have, and what remains to be done.

As predicted, much of the work undertaken in the last thirty years has been at the local level, providing a foundation upon which more analytic studies may be based. There are a growing number of detailed studies of the book trades in individual cities, towns, counties, and in a few cases accounts of whole regions. The last three decades have also seen the rescue from oblivion of several important provincial publishing houses or printing and bookselling dynasties during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet it is clear that a bias towards London and an under-representation of the role of the provinces in publishing history continues well into the twentieth century. Recent work by John Turner on the publishers Walter Scott of Newcastle and Arrowsmith of Bristol show they published works of lasting literary and cultural significance up to the First World War, yet neither firm featured in the standard histories of publishing which are so dominated by the London trade.6

Other work has focussed upon the detailed study of particular aspects of the trade outside London, such as Cranfield and Wiles’s two studies of early provincial newspaper presses.7 There has also been a lot of work undertaken with respect to the Welsh, Irish and Scottish trades and their relations not only with England, but also with the Colonies and indeed with one another. John Feather has also given the first significant attempt at studying the English provincial trade as an ‘economic entity’ during a discrete period – namely the eighteenth century.8 Yet there are still plenty of gaps remaining in the jigsaw, and it is only once these are filled that there can be any comprehensive account of the provincial trade, and assessment of its importance can be made.

An understanding of exactly who was at work in the provinces and where, at any given time is a crucial preliminary to such an understanding. The British Book Trade Index is gradually providing us with an useful overall index to the personnel trades during the period up to 1850, which is not limited to any area or sector, by collating local work and specialised studies. This will be particularly useful in tracking those printers and bookseller’s who moved around. For example, of the four printers known to be at work in Norwich in the spring of 1718 only two remained in the city in the face of competition. Benjamin Lyon turns up a decade later in Bath, and Robert Raikes moved on to St Ives, Northampton, and then to Gloucester.9 Likewise, when in 1735 the Reverend Francis Blomefield wanted to employ a journeyman printer for his private press, he chose a man from Bailey’s printing house in Bury St Edmunds. He chose Nicholas Hussey, who had previously been in business in Dublin.10 Hussey subsequently ran away from his master and I should love to know exactly where he went.

However, the most obvious gap is in the provision of comparative quantitative data giving an overall picture of the spread of trades such as printing or bookselling, and indicating the relative importance of different places at different times. This would come from a census of the book trades if there ever were such. Even the bald numbers of printing and bookselling businesses in operation in each town at one time would provide useful comparative data, but the numbers of workmen employed would be even better. Such figures would put one town into an overall context with others elsewhere in the country. For example, a study of the book trade in Norwich during the eighteenth century provides a picture of fairly steady and largely interrupted growth and development. This takes no account of the significant decline in the relative economic importance of this city vis a vis the emerging industrial centres in the north, ports such as Bristol or Liverpool which were prospering from the slave trade during the same period.

The objective of this paper therefore is to ask whether there is any reliable and comparable quantitative data that may be used as a framework within which other more detailed and often interesting sources can be used and interpreted. Detailed case studies based upon individual account books or surviving correspondence provide an important way of bringing the subject alive and introducing a human dimension. However there is also a need to put into an overall context.

The three fundamental sources for providing information about the names and addresses of provincial printers and booksellers for the whole country are:

·        Imprints of publications, which exist in fairly large numbers from the mid-17^th century.

·        Provincial newspaper advertisements, existing from the early 18^th centuries

·        Entries in local directories which date primarily from the last quarter of the 18^th century.

Each of these sources has been used extensively in studies at a local level, but it is only during the 1780s that there is sufficient evidence at a national level to paint a picture of the trade as a whole.
 

Pendred’s Directory

John Pendred’s The London and Country Printers, Booksellers and Stationers Vade Mecum was published in 1785 and provides entries for provincial and metropolitan letter-press and copper-plate printers, booksellers, stationers, binders, and also many other ancillary trades, such as Collectors of Stamp Duties, paper and parchment makers and fellmongers. The work has certain limitations of coverage, which were outlined in Graham Pollard’s introduction to the Bibliographical Society reprint of this work in 1955.11 As far as London is concerned the directory is fairly detailed, and as complete as any other source. At the other extreme, the coverage of Wales, Scotland and Ireland is very poor indeed. If one accepted Pendred neither Edinburgh nor Glasgow had any booksellers at work in 1785. As far as provincial England is concerned it is noticeable that the further away from London one travels the less complete is Pendred’s coverage. Many of these entries appear to have been compiled by copying them from William Bailey’s British Directory of 1784, supplemented by files of country newspapers maintained by his neighbour W. Taylor who operated as an advertising agent. Given the pedigree of many of the entries, it might be more accurate to extend the date range to 1784-5. Inevitably there are gaps, and errors in transcription, and by itself it would not provide sufficient data for any reliable comparison. Graham Pollard’s assessment was that:

Pendred’s aims were utilitarian: his sources such as came to hand: and his treatment of them was sometimes careless. Nevertheless he has preserved for us a substantial body of information about members of the book trade in 1785.12

Pendred’s directory does have two advantages not foreseen by Graham Pollard which now make it eminently useable for such a comparative exercise. The first of these is that it has been reprinted using a modern typeface thereby permitting the use of optical character recognition technology and so has been relatively easy to convert into a computer file. The second advantage is that the provincial entries generally follow a standardised pattern, giving the name of town, county, mileage from London, and market day; followed by a list of surnames and trades of those operating in the book trades. Therefore, it has been a relatively straightforward task to scan the work, and with a minimum of editing, load it directly into a simple flat-file database. This may then be searched or sorted by any of the above-mentioned elements. The results of this process after editing are displayed below. Using this database it would be possible, for example, to identify and calculate the numbers of printers or booksellers working within a fifty, one hundred or one hundred and fifty mile radius of London.

ALRESFORD, (Hants, 57 MD Th) Hart and Prangnall, Fellmongers. Upsdale, Bookseller, Stationer and Sub Distributor of Stamps.

Alton, (Hampshire, 47 MD Sat.) Bristow, Fellmonger. Roe, Bookseller.

Andover, (Hants, 65 MD Sat.) Maud, Bookseller. Pugh and Willis, Parchment-makers.

Appleby, (Westm. 268 MD Sat.) Wilkinson, Bookseller.

Arundel (Sussex, 56 MD Wedn. and Saturd.) Blanck, Stationer. White, Bookseller.

Atherstone, (Warwicksh. 103 MD Tuesd.) Parker, Bookseller

Aylesbury, (Bucks, 40 MD Sat.) Dagnall, Bookseller and Stationer. Nicholas, Printer. Wiltshire, Fellmonger.

Table 1. Entries from Pendred as digitised, and then transferred to a database table

There is not sufficient space to present all the possible results from this exercise, and so this paper will be restricted to coverage of letterpress printers, booksellers and stationers in the English provinces.

Beginning with the country printers; Pendred identifies approximately 201 printers in 113 English provincial towns compared with 135 businesses in London. The reason for the approximation in these figures lies in dealing with the inevitable anomalies – such as trying to identify exactly what constitutes a provincial town.13 It would appear from Pendred’s directory that the main centre for English provincial printing at this time was Bristol with nine printers, and four newspapers.

In the illustration above there is only one printer listed in a county town, but elsewhere Pendred gives many examples of printers working in market towns such as Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, Ilminster in Somerset or Leek in Staffordshire. Likewise there are printers in newly established resort towns such a Brighthelmstone (later Brighton), which was not yet the fashionable resort associated with the Prince Regent. There are also presses in new industrial towns such as Wigan or Burnley.

Pendred also provides lists of the country newspapers then in existence. By combining these figures with the number of printers, it is possible to draw up an approximate table showing the relevant importance of different centres of printing compared with their estimated populations.14

Table 2 The most significant centres of provincial printing according to Pendred

From this it appears that Bristol is still predominant as a printing centre followed by Liverpool and Birmingham. Traditional Cathedral cities such as Norwich and Exeter are beginning their gradual decline. There is no direct correlation between size of population and number of printers. At one extreme there is one printer per 3.3 thousand population in Bath compared with one printer per 9.1 thousand in Norwich. The two most populous provincial cities, Bristol and Liverpool both have approximately one printer 6.5 thousand people.

Every English county except Rutland has at least one printer, although Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire and Huntingdonshire each have one only. The counties with the most printers listed are Somersetshire (within which Pendred includes Bristol) with 23, Lancashire 19, Yorkshire, 13 and Warwickshire 11.

 
ESTC Entries

As mentioned, a second valuable source for the names and addresses of those employed in the book trades is the information given in the imprints of contemporary publications. These are listed in the ESTC database, which may be searched by year and country of publication. In so far as ESTC is listing publications rather than individual workmen, it may also be used to provide a fairly crude guide to the level of activity and comparative importance of towns and businesses. Of course only a proportion of publications have survived and only some of these have ESTC entries. Likewise all publications printers names are to be found on imprints. However in spite of these limitations this is undoubtedly the best single source of such information we have for the period and the CD-ROM version provides a great deal of material that could be used to supplement Pendred.

Extracting a list of all ESTC entries printed in England other than in London, for the two years 1784-5 is a relatively simple task. Out of 6446 entries for the British Isles, 5372 (83%) were published in England, and of these, 1267 (24%) originate in the English provinces. There is however a considerable degree of approximation in these figures due to incomplete and occasionally inaccurate entries, the problems of comparing multiple volume books which only have one entry with pamphlets and single sheet. Thus it would be most unwise to draw too many conclusions or suggest that in 1784/5 provincial printing represented one quarter of the whole volume of output.

One hundred and seventeen towns are represented in this list, compared with the 112 listed in Pendred. ESTC records the names of only 143 individual printers compared with 199 in Pendred – presumably those most active in local publishing, but there are thirty-seven names in ESTC, which are not in Pendred. The most significant difference between the two sources however lies in how they appear to rank centres of printing.

Table 3 The most significant centres of provincial printing according to ESTC

On the basis of the ESTC entries Salisbury, was by far the most significant centre of English provincial printing, and this was almost entirely due to the output of one man – John Fowler - who does not even feature in Pendred’s directory. The cities of Bristol, and Liverpool, which, according to Pendred, had the most printers at this time, would nevertheless be ranked eleventh and twentieth respectively in terms of the numbers of ESTC imprints. Likewise Oxford and Cambridge, which both feature high in the ESTC ranks largely due to the output of the University presses, would hardly have been recognised by Pendred.

Neither source is completely reliable however. Several of the ESTC entries have assigned places of publication, some of which are highly questionable; or else the imprint was deliberately left vague or intended to mislead. Likewise Pendred sometimes fails to identify that a bookseller was also a printer - such as in the case of John Ferraby of Hull, thereby leaving the town with no printer. There is also a sizeable discrepancy between the personnel listed, but less so in terms of the locations. Overall, the degree of overlap between these two sources may be represented diagrammatically as follows:

Overlap between ESTC and Pendred

Table 4 The extent of overlap between Pendred and ESTC 

By combining the two sources it is possible to create a composite database of about 236 named provincial printing businesses working in 125 English provincial towns during 1784/5. These figures can be compared with a similar exercise based on ESTC entries between 1701 and 1725, which identified only about 66 named provincial printers working in 31 towns, and therefore indicate the substantial growth in the provincial printing trade during the middle years of the century.15

To what extent do these two exercise provide a complete or reliable picture of the extent of provincial printing at this time. The only apparent means of verification was to cross-check the entries against specific local studies. For this purpose the two East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk were chosen, as the area known best to the author, the book trades of both of which have been covered in some detail.16 As far as printers are concerned the combination of ESTC entries and Pendred gives a fairly complete picture of the established printing trade in this region, and there appear to be no significant omissions in these two counties. There may have been some very short-lived businesses not noticed, and there may be more gaps in counties more distant from London.

Do these figures tell anything useful regarding the numbers of those employed in the provincial printing trade at this time? Perhaps a figure of 236 businesses indicates an overall workforce in excess of 1,000 individuals but this is merely a crude guess. Provincial presses could be extremely varied in size. This is well illustrated by considering two of the Norwich businesses listed by Pendred.

The firm of William Chase and Co. was the third generation of a highly prosperous printing and bookselling dynasty, which had been in business since about 1707. Various William Chase’s had printed and published the Norwich Mercury since 1715, and the firm had prosperous bookselling, auctioneering, and estate agency interests, and was the official stationer to Norwich Corporation. When William Chase II died in 1781 he left diamond rings to members of his family and directed that six journeyman printers should carry him to his grave.17

At the other extreme, there was the business of Stephen White, which was later to be engagingly described by his apprentice Luke Hansard.

The Printing office was in the Garret, and consisted of one Letter Press and one Copperplate Press, and of Types, but small quantities of few varieties; but with these Types and these presses, I did learn accordingly. - My Master was but very rarely in the office; he was either engraving, or painting, or woodcutting, or fishing, or pigeon and rabbit shooting, or boatbuilding and rowing and sailing; anything but in the office; yet I esteem him to have been a good printer. …. I was proud in being compositor & pressman, corrector and manager, copperplate printer and shopman, book keeper and accountant to this chequered business.18

Both of these examples were perhaps typical English provincial printing businesses of the period.

Booksellers

Pendred is not always clear or consistent between his designation or bookseller and stationer, and clearly entered them under whatever denomination he had found them listed or advertised. Indeed in most instances there was no clear difference between the trades outside the metropolis. Therefore the two terms have been taken to be synonymous for the purposes of this exercise.

Pendred lists approximately 300 booksellers and stationers working in 172 provincial cites and towns. Every English County is covered although Bedfordshire, Derbyshire, Herefordshire, Huntingdonshire and Rutland have one name only, which in most cases sounds suspiciously low. The provincial city with most booksellers is listed still Norwich, with ten businesses, followed by Manchester with 7, Bristol and Bath each with 6 and Liverpool with five. Thirty-two booksellers are listed in Yorkshire, thirty in Lancashire, 18 in Norfolk and 17 in Somersetshire (including Bristol). By comparison Pendred lists about two hundred booksellers and stationers in London.

The task of isolating a complete list of provincial booksellers from ESTC imprints is somewhat more difficult and time-consuming than for printers. There are a number of potential complications. Firstly there is no separate index of provincial towns within imprints, merely a keyword index to the imprint field. Secondly, although there will usually be only one printer named, there are frequently several booksellers listed on one imprint. Also, many of the required tradesmen will appear in the imprints of items published in London as well in the provinces, and indeed occasionally in Scotland. There are many individuals whose names appear in the imprints of publications but who were not part of the book trade. Thus it is not always easy to decide who was a regular bookseller and who just happened to be concerned with the distribution of a local tract. Finally there are many booksellers with names missing from the imprints given in early ESTC entries, in stead the formula ‘1 in Blackburn’ or ‘2 others in Bolton’ is used. However, only a small proportion of these incomplete entries relates to provincial imprints.
 

The only way to isolate only entries with provincial booksellers would be to work through the index of the ‘Imprint All’ fields looking for the names of towns, and then search for these terms. This would be a time consuming task and prone to error. In the event it proved easiest to identify and download all the ESTC imprints for works published in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland during 1784-5 into a single computer file. This file was then processed en-masse and broken down in such a way that the individual names could be isolated and inserted into a database. The table below shows the results of this process.

Table 5 ESTC imprints after processing

Of the 6,446 records downloaded for 1784-5, 2,149 had no names in the imprint, merely a place of publication. The remaining 4,297 records resulted in the creation of 8,946 database records (in other words 2.08 names per imprint – although there were 1139 potential records where all the names were not given by the ESTC cataloguers and so this figure would be more accurately expressed as 2.35 names per imprint.

Removing those that related only to printers (2262) which have already been dealt with then reduced the 8946 records. Those that related only to London, Scotland, Ireland or Wales (5203), those that only had very general imprints such as “sold by the bookseller in town and country” or non-book trade imprints such as ‘printed for the author’, (551). This left 803 records for named individuals who appeared to be English provincial booksellers. From this list of 803 records it was possible to identify 273 named individuals working in 130 towns.
 

The most prolific provincial booksellers in terms of the appearance on imprints were John and Joseph Merrill of Cambridge (50 imprints), Prince & Co. of Oxford (35 imprints) and Fletcher and Son of Oxford (33 imprints). However considering only truly provincial towns and cities the most prolific names would be.

Table 6 The major provincial publishers according to ESTC entries

It would not be difficult to identify the “key” members of the provincial trade, responsible for a large amount of book distribution in the provinces, merely by identifying all names that appear on more than five or six imprints during this two-year period.

By combining information from ESTC with Pendred, it is possible to identify in the region of 434 booksellers working in 219 provincial town and cities. However, in this instance the level of correspondence between the two sources is significantly lower than for the corresponding exercise with printers. In fact only about one half of the entries are to be found in both sources. A few of the discrepancies may be due to differences in spelling (for example: the Bristol bookseller Miles listed by Pendred is probably the same as Mills on many ESTC imprints), but there is nevertheless a high level of difference between the sources.

Overlap between ESTC and Pendred

Table 7 Overlap between Pendred and ESTC for provincial booksellers

Once again these results were compared with known information about bookselling in Norfolk and Suffolk, but on this occasion the resultant list is far from complete. The Norfolk market towns of Aylsham, Cromer, Downham Market and Harelston all appear to have had some bookselling business, but none of them are listed here. Likewise Bungay, Needham Market, Halesworth, Saxmundham, Debenham and Lavenham in Suffolk are missing. Important provincial booksellers such as Thomas Hunt of Harleston are not listed. The gaps do not merely apply to East Anglia. Booksellers were listed in from the 1680s for towns such as Ashby de la Zouche, Coggeshall, Uttoexeter, and Yeovil, yet none of these feature in this list one-century later. Thus the list of booksellers obtained is significantly less complete than that for printers.

Many of the bookseller’s names are identified by their appearance in only one or two ESTC imprints for these two years. Therefore, in order to compile a more comprehensive and reliable list, it may be necessary to throw the net a little wider and include five years, or perhaps a full decade. Nevertheless the exercise as it stands provides a significantly more detailed picture of the pattern, and extent of English provincial bookselling than any other source.

 
Conclusion

Taken together, the two lists described identify more than 600 printing and bookselling business throughout England outside London (some firms were of course both booksellers and printers). This may be a reasonable picture of the established book trade.

Yet the list takes no account of the hundred of shopkeepers, stall holder, chapmen and others who would have sold books at fares, in tiny market towns or villages, or even door to door. It also takes no account of the mobile presses which may have been taken by wagon to major events such as public executions, or which might have accompanied itinerant players. These men were also in their way a part of the English Country book trade, although they have left hardly any trace of their activities behind.

July 1998.

 
Notes

1.   Roy Stokes, The function of bibliography, (Grafton, 1969)., p.168

2.   Henry Cotton, The typographical gazetteer attempted, (Clarendon Press 1825). 2^nd series 1866, W.H. Alnutt Notes on printers and printing in the provincial towns of England and Wales, (Oxford, privately printed, 1878) and ‘Notes on the introduction of printing presses into the smaller towns of England and Wales, after 1750 to the end of the century’, The Library, 2^nd series 2 (1901), 242-259.

3.   E. Gordon Duff, The English provincial printers, stationer, and bookbinders to 1557, (Cambridge University Press, 1912).

4.   Paul Morgan, English provincial printing, (Birmingham, 1959).

5.   Graham Pollard, ‘The English market for printed books’, Publishing History 4 (1978) 7-48.

6.   John R. Turner, ‘Conditions for success as a provincial publisher in late nineteenth century England Publishing History, 41 (1997) 63-73.

7.   R. A Cranfield, The development of the English provincial newspaper 1700-1760, (Clarendon Press, 1962). R.M. Wiles, Freshest advices. Early printed newspapers in England and Wales, ( Ohio State University Press, 1965).

8.   John Feather, The provincial book trade in eighteenth-century England, (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

9.   David Stoker, ‘The Norwich book trades before 1800’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1981) 79-125.

10. Francis Blomefield, The correspondence of the reverend Francis Blomefield (1705-52), ed. D. Stoker, (Bibliographical Society, 1992).

11. The earliest directory of the book trade by John Pendred (1785), edited by Graham Pollard, (Bibliographical Society, 1955).

12. Pollard, xxiii.

13. Several of the provincal towns listed by Pendred would now be regarded as part of London, such as Deptford and Hammersmith. Likewise Berwick (but not Berwickshire) has been included, as has the Welsh language presses in Shrewsbury.

14. These are the author’s own estimates derived from the figures for 1775 and 1801 given in John West, Town records, (Phillimore, 1983) 310-331.

15. David Stoker, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, and provincial printing’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 24 (1995), 9-35.

16. Stoker, ‘The Norwich book trades before 1800’ and unpublished notes on the Norfolk trade. Tony Copsey, Book distribution and printing in Suffolk 1534-1850. (Ipswich Book Company, 1994).

17. David Stoker, 'Prosperity and success in the English provincial book trade during the eighteenth century', Publishing History, 30, (1991), 1-58.

18. Luke Hansard, The autobiography of Luke Hansard printer to the House 1752-1828, edited by Robin Myers, (Printing Historical Society, 1991), p.9.

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