The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Early Modern Book in England 9780198846239, 0198846231

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

T H E H I STORY OF T H E B O OK I N E A R LY M ODE R N ENGLAND

The Oxford Handbook of

THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Edited by

ADAM SMYTH

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 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, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950145 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​884623–​9 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780198846239.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Figures  List of Contributors 

ix xvii

PA RT I   WAYS OF A P P ROAC H I N G T H E H I STORY OF T H E B O OK 1. An Introduction: Thinking about the History of the Book  Adam Smyth 2. The Handmaids’ Tale: Book History, Shakespeare, and Women’s Textual Labour  Claire M. L. Bourne

3

20

3. Cataloguing the Past: Periodization and the Historiography of Print  Megan Heffernan

47

4. The Scale of Book History: Data, Distance, Description  Jeffrey Todd Knight

66

5. ‘Inlaid with inkie spots of jet’: Early Modern Book History and Premodern Critical Race Studies  Brandi K. Adams

81

6. Religion and the History of the Book  Brian Cummings

100

7. Printing and Book History: Insights from Practice  Alexandra Franklin and Richard Lawrence

123

8. Monuments and Trifles: Which Books Do We Use to Tell the History of the Book?  Jason Scott-​Warren

140

vi   Contents

PA RT I I   M A K I N G B O OK S 9. What Was a Printing Shop, and What Happened There?  Paul W. Nash

157

10. Scribes, Compositors, Correctors  Tamara Atkin

176

11. Authors  Stephen B. Dobranski

195

12. Publishing Virginia (1608–​1615): Specialization, Commissioning, Networks  Kirk Melnikoff

211

13. Regional Book and Print Trades  Rachel Stenner

230

14. Representing the Labour of Printing in Image and Text  Katherine Hunt

247

15. Printing and the Universities  Jason Peacey

269

16. Illustrated Books  Michael Hunter

285

17. Typography  James Misson

310

18. Beyond the Book: Non-​Codex Texts  Harriet Phillips

328

19. Science and the Book in Early Modern England  Adrian Johns

347

20. Waste, Offcuts, Remains, Reuse: Or, What is the History of Books in Pieces?  Anna Reynolds

363

Contents   vii

PA RT I I I   M OV I N G B O OK S : SE L L I N G , C I RC U L AT I N G , B OR ROW I N G , I M AG I N I N G 21. ‘The Book-​sellars Shop’: Browsing, Reading, and Buying in Early Modern England  Ben Higgins 22. Internationalism and the English Book Trade  Hanna de Lange and Andrew Pettegree 23. ‘A Gifte of good Moment’: A New History of the Stationers’ Benevolence to the Bodleian Library, 1610 to 1616  Tara L. Lyons 24. Translingual and Multilingual Print  A. E. B. Coldiron

385 410

427 446

25. Contexts for Circulation: Universities, Inns of Court, Households and Professional Circles  Michelle O’Callaghan

474

26. From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman: Buying and Selling Old Books in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries  H. R. Woudhuysen

493

27. Conversations about Time and Space: Early Modern Books and Contemporary Artists’ Books  Sujata Iyengar

510

28. The Early Modern Book as Metaphor  Jeff Dolven

531

PA RT I V   U SI N G B O OK S : R E A DI N G A N D M A R K I N G , C OL L E C T I N G A N D P R E SE RV I N G 29. Past, Present, and Future: Early Modern Collections and the Work of a Curator  Caroline Duroselle-​Melish 30. Self-​Reading Books: Marginalia, Prosopopoeia, and Book History  Emma Smith

551 569

viii   Contents

31. Book Modification  Georgina Wilson

585

32. Early Modern Books and Phonography  Bruce R. Smith

609

33. Transience and Loss  Alexandra Hill

633

34. Owning, Preserving, and Transmitting the Text: Early Modern Libraries and Their Users  David Pearson

651

35. Provenance Narratives in the Twenty-​First Century  Kathryn James

669

36. Broken Books and Fragile Print: A Conservation Perspective  Nikki Tomkins

686

37. The History of the Early Modern Book in the Digital Age  Whitney Trettien

704

Index

727

Figures

2.1. A page from a 1496 edition of Terence published in Strasbourg used to illustrate woodcut illustration and different typefaces (GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 337, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

26

2.2. A page of Measure for Measure from a copy of the First Folio in Bartlett’s teaching collection (GEN MSS 336, Box 7, folder 339, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

27

2.3. Bartlett’s attempt to reverse-​engineer a quarto sheet (using sticky tape) as it would have come off the press from an edition of An Interpretation of the Number 666 published in the 1640s (GEN MSS 336, Box 6, folder 308, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

28

3.1. Reference for Margaret Coule reused as scratch paper by the bibliographer William Herbert. Loose in Andrew Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (1595), Rare Books 54169, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

57

5.1. The title page of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie (1615). Public domain.

85

6.1. Liber donorum, York Minster Library MS Inc 7-​12, fo. 1r. Copyright Chapter of York. Reproduced by permission.

103

6.2. The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the Neuu (London: Robert Barker, and by the assignes of John Bill, 1631), York Minster Library: shelf mark HOB XI.H.32, showing detail of Exodus 20. Copyright Chapter of York. Reproduced by permission.

114

14.1. Jan van der Straet, Nova Reperta, plate 18: ‘Sculptura in aes’, engraving. Image courtesy Newberry Library (Case Wing folio Z 412.85).

250

14.2. Jan van der Straet, Nova Reperta, plate 4: ‘Impressio librorum’, engraving. Image courtesy Newberry Library (Case Wing folio Z 412.85).

252

14.3. Abraham Bosse, ‘The Engraver and Etcher’, etching. British Museum, R,8.16. Image courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum.

253

14.4. Abraham Bosse, ‘The Intaglio Printers’, etching. British Museum, R,8.15. Image courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum.

254

x   Figures 14.5. From Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, or The doctrine of handy-​ works . . . (1677–​83), plate 24, engraving. Image courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call no. UTT144 M68).

260

16.1. Title page of Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1539). This title page was reused fifty-​five times between 1534 and 1624. 104.5 × 64.5 mm. (EPB/​A/​1999.) © Wellcome Library, London.

286

16.2. View of Stonehenge from the 1610 edition of William Camden’s Britain, 252. This is a reuse of a plate by William Rogers from the 1600 Latin edition of Camden’s much reprinted work, with the faint pagination ‘219’ and with an English translation of the commentary added. Plate area 175 × 120 mm.

287

16.3. The burning of Thomas Cranmer, from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563). 130 × 180 mm. (Sel. 2.15b.) © Cambridge University Library.

289

16.4. ‘The Martyrdome of a blinde man, and a lame man, at Stratford the Bowe’, from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1583 edn.). 107 × 70 mm. (SSS.9.2.) © Cambridge University Library.

290

16.5. A forced march, a typical scene from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577). 79 × 130 mm. (Peterborough D.11.5) © Cambridge University Library.

291

16.6. William Hole, engraved portrait of George Chapman, from The Whole Works of Homer Prince of Poets (1616). 230 × 152 mm. (Dyce S Fol. 4896) © Victoria and Albert Museum.

293

16.7. Willem or Magdalena van de Passe, Sir Nicholas Bacon, from Herωologia (1620). 162 × 123 mm.

294

16.8. Richard Gaywood, ‘The Lady Elinor Temple’, from Sir Peter Temple’s Mans Master-​piece (1658). 120 × 70 mm.

295

16.9. Nisus killing Volscens, from Ogilby’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1654), [446]. Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar after Francis Clein, dedicated to Thomas Hanson. 294 × 192 mm.

296

16.10. The choir of St Paul’s Cathedral, from Dugdale’s History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658). Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, dedicated to Elias Ashmole. 318 × 223 mm.

299

16.11. Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne, ‘Astrologia’, dedicated to Sir William Ducie (later Viscount Downe); plate for Richard Blome’s abortive work on the ‘Arts and Sciences’ (c.1665). 280 × 192 mm.

302

16.12. A typical opening from Blome’s edition of Nicholas Fontaine’s History of the Old Testament, Extracted out of Sacred Scripture and Writings of the Fathers (1690), showing how each section of text is accompanied by a facing plate, in this case of the Judgement of Solomon. Engraving by Jan Kip after G. Freman, dedicated to Sir John Maynard. Plate size 335 × 205 mm. (From Rel.bb.69.4.) © Cambridge University Library.

303

Figures   xi 17.1. Conradus de Alemania, Concordiantiae Bibliorum ([Strassburg: Johann Mentelin, before 1475]), ISTC ic00849000. The Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford, Auct 1Q 1.20, part 4, [4d]5r. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

312

17.2. Martin Marprelate, The Epistle ([East Molesey: Robert Waldegrave, 1588]), STC 17452. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce PP 244 fo. 1v. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

317

17.3. Martin Marprelate, The Epistle ([East Molesey: Robert Waldegrave, 1588]), STC 17452. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce PP 2444. CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

318

18.1. Anthony Wood’s copy of Monmouth Degraded (1685). Bodleian Library MS Wood 417(140).

331

18.2. The vale mans table (1589). © The Society of Antiquaries of London, Lemon 78.

334

20.1. Poor-​quality paper, possibly cording quires, in a copy of Urquhart’s Ekskybalauron (7–​8). The text is printed on top of the wrinkles: note the catchword ‘The’ on the left and ‘within’ at the bottom of right-​hand page. National Library of Scotland, L.C. 1457.

368

20.2. Leaves from Guillame Morel, Verborum cum Graecis Gallicisque conjunctorum (London: for Richard Hutton, [1583]), marked up by Thomas Thomas for his own dictionary and used as endleaves in Zacharias Ursinus, Explicationum catecheticarum (Cambridge: Thomas Thomas, 1587). Henry E. Huntington Library, 89966 PF.

371

20.3. A stab-​stitched, waste-​paper wrapper comprised of an unfolded and uncut sheet from Martin Finch, Animadversions Upon Sir Henry Vanes Book (London: for Joseph Barber, 1656). Thomas Plume Library, Plume Pamphlet 699.

374

20.4. The life cycle of the early modern book in pieces. A reconfigured version of Darnton’s communications circuit, highlighting the production, circulation, and use of waste paper at each stage in the life cycle of the book. 378 21.1. ‘The Book-​sellars Shop’ from Orbis sensualium pictus (1659). C5525, N8v. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-​ShareAlike 4.0 International License

386

21.2. No-​body, and some-​body (1606). STC 18597 Copy 2, A2r. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-​ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

388

21.3. Detail from Ralph Treswell’s survey of Cheapside, 1585. Object reference 1880,1113.3516. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

389

21.4. A bookshop with stall boards in Bologna, c.1640–​c.1660. Detail of RP-​P-​2001-​621, image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

391

xii   Figures 21.5. The frontage of a Bishopsgate bookshop from an engraving of 1736. Detail of Gough Maps volume 20, 29b. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

393

21.6. The interior of a Dutch bookshop, c.1607–​78, including a binder at work on the left. Detail of RP-​T-​1884-​A-​290, image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

398

21.7. Two street bookstalls in Whitehall, 1724, including one with a customer reading beneath the awning. Detail of Gough Maps 45, 92a. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

401

21.8. A bookstall in Stocks Market beside Cornhill, 1738. Detail of Gough Maps 19, 16a. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, used under Creative Commons licence CC-​BY-​NC 4.0.

402

22.1. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacræ (London: R.W. for Henry Mortlock, 1663), shelfmark 27, 28. 00069. Courtesy of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Denmark.

415

22.2. John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana (London: John Bill, 1629), shelfmark O 63-​3320. Courtesy of Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Constantijn Huygens wrote his name on the title page.

421

24.1. Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (London: John Wolfe, 1588), A2v–​3. STC 4781. Huntington Library 99009. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

449

24.2. Paruus Catho (Westminster: Caxton, 1483), A2v–​3. STC 4852. © British Library Board. Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

452

24.3. Elias Hutter, Sanctus Marcus (Nuremberg: s.n., 1600), A1v–​2. STC 2792.7 © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark: Asia, Pacific & Africa 01902.d.22.(2.) Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

454

24.4. Thomas More, Von der wunderbarlichen Jnnsel Vtopia (Basel: Bebel, 1524), A2. Source library: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 4 Pol.g. 162 d. Image published with the permission of the BSB (Daten für die Forschung). 455 24.5. Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham A Testimonie of Antiquitie (London: John Day, 1566), [B4v–​5]. STC 159.5. Huntington Library 12965. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

456

Figures   xiii 24.6. Archaionomia (Londini: ex officina Joannis Daii, 1568), [L3r]–​L.iiii. STC 15142. Huntington Library 62136. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

457

24.7. Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia (London: John Wolfe, 1588), Passion XXXVIII, [E3v]. STC 25118a. Huntington Library 79609. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

458

24.8. Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia (London: John Wolfe, 1588), Passions LXXXII and LXXXIII, [L1v-​L2]. STC 25118a. Huntington Library 79609. Image published with permission of The Huntington and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

459

24.9. Abraham Fraunce, Arcadian Rhetorike (London, Thomas Orwin, 1588), [I4v–​I5]. STC 11338. Bodleian Library, Mal. 514 (2). Image published with permission of the Bodleian for academic use and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

461

24.10. Théodore de Bèze, ‘Ad serenissimam Elizabetham . . .’ (London: Bishop and Newbery, 1588), s. sh. fol. (on vellum). STC 1999. © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark 74/​K.T.C.7.b.6. Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

466

24.11. John Walker, ‘In optatum reditum . . .’ (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1660), s. sh. fol. Wing 393. © British Library Board. BL Shelfmark C.20.f.5.(56). Image published with permission of the British Library and ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

467

27.1. Bindings, Deb Rindl, Area of a Triangle (1996), Times Square (2001), Counting Crows (2005).

514

27.2. ‘3000 Errors’, title page, Isaac Keay, The Practical Measurer (1724).

516

27.3. Unfolded folio leaf (fos. 16-​19), Samuel Moreland, Vade Mecum [‘Playford’s Almanac’] (1749).

517

27.4. Letter S, ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden, by Judy Fairclough Sgantas (Vermont: Janus Press, 2012), copy 39/​120, binding designed by Claire Van Vliet and executed by Audrey Holden. Reproduced with permission.

519

27.5. Pressed plant, between pp. 404 and 405, John Gerard, Herball (1636).

521

27.6. Annotated endpaper, John Evelyn, Sylva (1664).

522

27.7. Gathering 7, Casey Gardner, Matter, Antimatter, and So Forth (Berkeley, CA: Set in Motion Press, 2013). Reproduced with permission.

524

xiv   Figures 27.8. Volvelles, in Francesco Giuntini (trans.), La Sfera Del Mondo (Lyons, 1582), 74–​75.

526

31.1. John Milton, Paradise Lost: a poem in ten books (1669). By permission of Balliol College Library, Oxford (525 a 5).

589

31.2. John Milton, Paradise Lost: a poem in ten books (1669). By permission of Balliol College Library, Oxford (525 a 5).

590

31.3. Inserted and mended page in The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New (1578). By permission of the Bodleian Library, Vet A1.b.13.

592

31.4. Thomas Cromwell’s erased coat of arms. The Byble in Englysh (1541), Bodleian Library, Bib. Eng. 1541 b.2.

595

31.5. The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (1695). By permission of University College Library, Oxford (B.220.20 (2) ).

596

31.6. Elizabeth I’s copy of the Geneva–​Tomson New Testament (1578), Bod Arch. G e.48.

598

31.7 ‘Place these two one upon another upon that page 315’. M Blundevile His Exercises (1636), Huntington Library 708329.

600

31.8. Edmund Gunter, The description and vse of the sector (1624), Huntington Library 29076.

601

31.9. Contents page to multi-​text volume including works by John Webster, Edward Ravenscroft, Aphra Behn, and William Shakespeare. Balliol College Library, Oxford, 530 b 1.

602

31.10. Tab reading ‘epilogue’ in Aphra Behn’s The Young King shows where the edge of this Sammelband used to be. Balliol Library, 530 b 1.

604

32.1. Horn book, early seventeenth century (STC 13813.5). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

612

32.2. Detail of Pepys ballad i. 78–​79 as mounted in Pepys’s Volume I. By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

614

32.3. ‘It was a lover and his lass’, from Thomas Morley, The first booke of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole (STC 18115.5), sig. B4v–​C1. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

620

32.4. Chained folio book, Library of Merton College, Oxford. Photograph by J. W. Thomas. Reproduced by permission of Oxfordshire History Centre.

626

36.1. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 915 b 4 A. Pamphlet stitched with three holes. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

692

36.2. Diagram of a typical Nicholas Crouch tract volume, showing the cover decoration and chain staple holes.

693

Figures   xv 36.3. Image of the books displayed fore-​edge out. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

697

36.4. Example of a manuscript fore-​edge marker. Balliol College Library, shelfmark 905 f 2. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

698

36.5. ‘This leaf is turned the wrong way. By the ignorance of the binder.’ Balliol College Library, shelfmark 910 I 4 (9). Reproduced here by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford.

699

Contributors

Brandi K. Adams is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her research interests include the history of reading, the history of the book, premodern critical race theory of early modern England, as well as modern editorial practices of early modern English drama. She has begun working on her first monograph, tentatively titled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English Drama. Tamara Atkin is Professor Medieval and Early Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her last monograph, Reading Drama in Tudor England, was published by Routledge in 2018. She is currently working on early modern book reuse. Claire M. L. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020) and editor of Shakespeare /​ Text (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her research focuses primarily on early modern drama, book design, and textual editing. A. E. B. Coldiron (Krafft University Professor at Florida State University and Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews) is author of Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2015; repr. 2020) and other books and essays on early modern translation, book history, and poetry. Coldiron is coordinating a special topic issue of PMLA on translation (for 2023) and finishing an edition of five works by Christine de Pizan as translated in Tudor England (MHRA), as well as a monograph on them, Christine de Pizan in Early English Print: The ‘Mirreur and Maistresse’ of ‘Intelligence’ (University of Toronto Press). Brian Cummings FBA is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. He edited The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (repr. edn., Oxford World’s Classics, 2013), and is the author of Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford University Press, 2022). Stephen B. Dobranski is Distinguished University Professor of early modern literature and textual studies at Georgia State University. He is the editor of Milton Studies, and his books include Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (1999), Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (2005), The Cambridge Introduction to Milton (2012), and Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in ‘Paradise Lost’ (2015) all for Cambridge University Press. His most recent work is a new edition of Paradise Lost (Norton, 2022) and Reading John Milton: How to Persist in Troubled Times (Stanford University Press, 2022).

xviii   Contributors Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance, at Princeton University. He has written three books of criticism—​Scenes of Instruction (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Senses of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet, 2017)—​as well as essays on a variety of subjects. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the United States and the United Kingdom and in a volume, Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013). He is also an editor-​at-​large at Cabinet magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). Caroline Duroselle-​Melish is Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints, and Associate Librarian for Collection Care and Development, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. She has also held various positions in other academic and independent research libraries. Her publications reflect her research interests in the history of libraries, the Renaissance book trade, and the production and reception of early modern illustrated books. Alexandra Franklin is Co-​ordinator of the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book, based in the Department of Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania. In her library career she has catalogued and written about collections of broadside ballads, prints and printing surfaces, and the experience of practical printing for an understanding of printing history. Megan Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University and author of Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). She is at work on a new monograph on lyric form and the history of book conservation and care. Ben Higgins is Career Development Fellow in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, Its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford University Press, 2022) and has published widely on the textual history of Shakespeare’s writings and the early modern book trade. Alexandra Hill completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews and was a Research Assistant on the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project. After university she worked at Project Reveal, a collections digitization project at the National Trust for Scotland, before becoming the Librarian for Printed Rare Material at the Wellcome Collection in London. She has published articles on ballads and lost print as well as a monograph on Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557–​1640: An Analysis of the Stationers’ Company Register (Brill, 2018). Katherine Hunt is Lecturer in Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth-​Century Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her work is concerned with the relationship between writing and material culture in early modern England and Europe, and how these interactions affect us in the present. She is completing a monograph which asks how the technologies and processes of making in bronze and brass helped to shape writing in the early modern period. With Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado, Boulder) she organizes Literary

Contributors   xix Form After Matter, an ongoing series of events and publications that ask how we read early modern literature now. Michael Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Boyle: Between God and Science (Yale University Press, 2009) and principal editor of Boyle’s Works, Correspondence, and workdiaries (www.live​sand​lett​ers.ac.uk/​wd). His numerous other books include Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2020). Sujata Iyengar is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, where she teaches early modern British literature and Shakespearean adaptation. Her essays on Shakespeare in artists’ books, fine print editions, and as intermedia have appeared in Daniel Fischlin (ed.), OuterSpeares (University of Toronto Press, 2013); Shakespeare Quarterly (2016); Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Blackwell, 2016); The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Routledge, 2020) which she co-​edited with Christy Desmet and Miriam Jacobson; and Claire M. L. Bourne (ed.), Shakespeare /​Text (Bloomsbury, 2021). During 2014–​15 she was apprenticed to book artist Eileen Wallace at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia. Kathryn James is the Rare Book Librarian at the Yale Law Library. She is recently the author of English Paleography and Manuscript Culture, 1500–​1800 (Yale University Press, 2020) and co-​editor with Phil Withington of ‘Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization’, a special issue of Historical Journal (2022). Adrian Johns is Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book (University of Chicago Press, 1998), Piracy (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Death of a Pirate (Norton, 2010), and most recently The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2023), as well as numerous articles on the histories of science, information, and communications. He is currently co-​editing with James Evans a volume on the history and implications of algorithms and artificial intelligence. Jeffrey Todd Knight is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington and editor of MLQ: A Journal of Literary History. His books are Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and Shakespeare on the Page: Books, Texts, and Readers (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hanna de Lange is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, associated with the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) team. Her doctoral research is an investigation into the distribution of English books in the early modern Northern European book market. Richard Lawrence has an MA in Printing History from Reading University and has been a letterpress printer for more than forty years. He is a founding member of the

xx   Contributors Dürer Press Group which commissioned and maintains a reconstructed wooden press for teaching purposes, and teaches practical printing and printing history at the Bodleian Libraries Bibliographical Press. Tara L. Lyons is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University. Her scholarship on book history and early modern literature has been published or is forthcoming in ELR, PBSA, Philological Quarterly, and a number of edited collections. She has received grants from the Huntington, Folger, and Bodleian Libraries as well as the Bibliographical Society of America. Kirk Melnikoff is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Elizabethan Book Trade Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (University of Toronto Press) and has edited four essay collections, most recently (with Roslyn L. Knutson) Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge University Press). He has also published editions of both James IV and Selimus. He is currently finalizing (with Aaron Pratt and Breanne Weber) Playbook Wills, 1529–​1692 for the Revels Play Companion Library, editing Edward II for Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works, and completing a monograph on bookselling in early modern England. James Misson is a book historian interested in understanding print culture through computational methods. He recently finished a DPhil thesis on early English typography at the University of Oxford, and is Research Assistant in Digital Humanities at the University of Geneva. His forthcoming book is a data-​driven exploration of typographic variation and its meanings in the sixteenth century. Paul W. Nash is a bibliographer, librarian, and printing historian. He has worked with rare books in the Bodleian and RIBA libraries, and was superintendent of the Bibliography Room at the Bodleian between 2006 and 2015. He is currently editor of the Journal of the Printing Historical Society. Michelle O’Callaghan is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of The ‘shepheards nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and early Stuart political culture, 1612–​1625 (Oxford University Press, 2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and co-​editor with Alice Eardley of Verse Miscellanies Online: Printed Poetry Collections of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at UCL. He is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda in the Civil Wars and Interregnum (Ashgate, 2004), Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and The Madman and the Churchrobber: Law and Conflict in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2022). He also edited The Regicides and the Execution

Contributors   xxi of Charles I (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), The Print Culture of Parliament, 1600–​1800 (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and Making the British Empire, 1660–​ 1800 (Manchester University Press, 2020). With Chris R. Kyle he edited Parliament at Work (Boydell, 2002) and Connecting Centre and Locality: Political Communication in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2020). With Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber he edited Freedom of Speech, 1500–​1850 (Manchester University Press, 2020). He is currently working on Anglo-​Dutch relations in the seventeenth century. David Pearson retired in 2017 from a career managing libraries in London and elsewhere, to focus on his work as a book historian; he has written and lectured extensively on ways in which books have been owned, used, and bound, and his publications include Provenance Research in Book History (new edn., Bodleian Library, 2019), English Bookbinding Styles 1450–​1800 (British Library, 2005), Books as History (British Library, 2008), and Speaking Volumes: Books with Histories (Bodleian Library, 2022). His Lyell Lectures have been published as Book Ownership in Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 2021) and he will be Sandars Reader at Cambridge in 2023. He is a Past President of the Bibliographical Society and teaches regularly on the Rare Book Schools in London and Virginia. Andrew Pettegree, FBA is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including The Book in the Renaissance (2010) and The Bookshop of the World. Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (2019), both for Yale University Press. The Library: A Fragile History, co-​authored with Arthur der Weduwen, was published by Profile in 2021. Harriet Phillips is the author of Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–​ 1613 (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-​editor (with Claire Loffman) of A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts (Routledge, 2017). She has published essays on early modern print culture and the public sphere, and is co-​editing Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica for The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (Oxford University Press). Anna Reynolds is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. She works on the intersection of material practices and imaginative thought in early modern England and is currently completing her first monograph on waste paper in early modern England. Jason Scott-​Warren is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts. His most recent book, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (University of Pennsylvania Press), appeared in 2019. Bruce R. Smith is Dean’s Professor of English and Theatre at the University of Southern California, and is the author of seven books on Shakespeare, including The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 1999), The Key of Green

xxii   Contributors (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Shakespeare | Cut (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has chapters forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface (2022), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship (2022), and The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies (2023). Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. Her publications include Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers (Allen Lane, 2022). Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford University. His recent publications include Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and, with Dennis Duncan, Book Parts (Oxford University Press, 2019, paperback 2023). He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and is the co-​founder and co-​editor of Inscription: The Journal of Material Text—​Theory, Practice, History. Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in Literature 1350–​1660 at the University of Sussex. She has broad interests across the early modern and medieval periods, and her current research is about Tudor literature and print culture. She is writing a monograph about William Baldwin, and co-​editing his literary works. Her most recent book is a co-​edited collection of essays entitled Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Nikki Tomkins graduated from Camberwell Arts College in 2015 with an MA in the conservation of books. In 2016–​17 she was the project conservator for the Nicholas Crouch collection at Balliol College, Oxford. She currently works at the Oxford Conservation Consortium, who provide collection care for the historic library and archive collections of sixteen Oxford colleges. Whitney Trettien is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches book history and digital humanities. Her first book is Cut/​Copy/​ Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Georgina Wilson is Research Fellow in English Literature at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Her current book project, provisionally entited Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature, is on paper in the book trade and the early modern imagination; more broadly she works at the intersection of literary studies and material texts. Alongside her research, Georgina teaches Shakespeare, early modern literature, and material texts. H. R. Woudhuysen FBA is Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. He was co-​General Editor with Michael Suarez SJ of The Oxford Companion to the Book and was one of the General Editors of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series.

Pa rt I

WAYS OF A P P ROAC H I N G T H E H I STORY OF T H E B O OK

Chapter 1

An Introdu c t i on Thinking about the History of the Book Adam Smyth

There are different stories to be told about the books we study from the past: it is the task of this present volume to present some of the ways we have for accounting for, describing, analysing, and imagining the lives of books considered as physical objects. My aim in editing this collection is not to hand out a set of fixed procedures, but to convey a subject that is, in the best sense, in flux. In this opening chapter I want to take the example of one intensely popular seventeenth-​century printed book to suggest some of the different frames available for studying this bibliographical object. I want then, at the conclusion, to say something about the scope and ambition of the Handbook: to say what’s included, and what isn’t, and why this might be. The book we call Eikon Basilike, which was quickly known on publication as the ‘King’s Book’, was in fact titled Εἰκὼν Βασιλική, or the ‘Royal Portrait’, or, in its subtitle, The Pourtrature of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings. It was an international bestseller, and also a bibliographical problem: there are uncertainties and omissions in the history of this book. The date is probably best regarded as an attributable element (not all the imprints with 1649 or 1648 need have been printed that year), and not all editions with a London imprint were necessarily printed in London. Authorship, too, is infamously not what it seems in this book. The book offered itself as something like King Charles I’s spiritual (auto)biography, and claimed to have been written by the king some time before his execution outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London, on 30 January 1649. By the end of the seventeenth century, John Gauden, Bishop of Exeter, was considered the most likely author-​editor—​Gauden seems to have included documents written by the King along with his own plentiful additions—​and the attribution to him is generally accepted today. Libraries respond in different ways to the trickiness of these questions of attribution: the English Short Title

4   Adam Smyth Catalogue (ESTC, estc.bl.uk) and the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, www. ustc.ac.uk) attribute the work to Gauden; the Library of Congress (catalog.loc.gov) has Charles I as ‘supposed author’ and Gauden as ‘attributed author’; the Bodleian Library’s SOLO catalogue (solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk) assigns the book to Gauden, with Charles I noted as an ‘attributed name’. In a manner that might surprise us, print could be a rapid and nimble technology: copies of Eikon Basilike appeared by the day of the King’s execution, perhaps even before, and by the end of 1649, at least thirty-​five editions had been printed in England. That’s worth repeating: thirty-​five editions in less than a single year, creating, to put it mildly, a tension between the lonely monarch described in the text, ‘in his solitudes and sufferings’, and the wildly quick distribution of the book out to the public, across England and beyond. The rapid production and distribution of tens of thousands of copies (if not more) of the many editions of this book constituted a process of canon formation: in the words of Helmer J. Helmers, ‘the Eikon gained the status of an appendix to the Bible’, and soon became a central text for what is known as the Cult of Charles the Martyr—​the book seen as a relic of a martyr, alongside the handkerchiefs dipped in the King’s blood that were reported to have wrought miracles.1 What happens to a relic when everyone can get hold of a copy?2 The success of Eikon Basilike was also an international phenomenon. English-​ language editions were printed in England, Ireland, Holland, and France, and there were also translations. By early March—​less than five weeks after the regicide—​the first Dutch edition was published by Joost Hartgers in Amsterdam, titled Konincklick memoriael (‘Royal Memorial’); there were eight Dutch editions in 1649 alone, of which Hartgers published five.3 Editions appeared also quickly in French (the first printed for Jean Berthelin at Rouen), Danish (printed in Copenhagen), Latin (translated by Charles II’s tutor John Earle, and printed at The Hague by Samuel Browne), and German (translated from the Latin).4 An incomplete Welsh translation by the poet Rowland Vaughan survives in manuscript from about 1650.5 Thomas Wagstaffe, writing in defence of the King as the author of Eikon Basilike, caught this sense of a sudden, flaring popularity: The Book was no sooner publish’d, but it flew not only all over the Nation, but almost all over Europe, all Mens Mouths were full of it, and it was translated into several Languages, into Greek, Latin, French and Italian.6

A Greek and Italian translation looks like a rhetorical flourish: there is no further evidence of these. But Wagstaffe’s point about a book flying national boundaries, even as, in a stifling counter-​image, it stuffs up mouths, aptly captures the sense of a book in motion. Among its many significances, Eikon Basilike is a reminder for book historians to raise their eyes from the local, domestic, and national to take on the international, multilingual nature of print, even for a book so powerfully associated with the centripetal force of English monarchy.

An Introduction   5

Book-​Writing Perhaps the most obvious way to engage with Eikon Basilike is to recall the etymology of ‘bibliography’ (from the Greek, biblion (book) and graphos (drawn or written) ), and to describe the book. How can we convey Eikon Basilike in words? What do we include, and what do we exclude? What are the limits of our description? We can start with a bibliographical description in the most technical sense: the book described across a number of categories, in this case five, which answer these and other questions. Although the practice of bibliographical description varies, this might mean providing a quasi-​facsimile title-​page transcription, showing line breaks and typefaces; a format and collation formula; a note of signature positions, catchwords, type, paper, and plates; brief details of the book’s contents; and a list of individual copies examined and their location. This is a process of measuring, counting, listing—​although it’s worth noting that the sheer practical difficulty of parts of the process (how should one measure a deckle edge?) makes the task of objective description seem immediately elusive. Few books have been the recipient of the level of bibliographical description enjoyed, or endured, by Eikon Basilike, seen most vividly in Edward Almack’s A Bibliography of the King’s Book or Eikon Basilike (1896) and Francis F. Madan’s A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First, with a Note on the Authorship (1950).7 Crucially, a bibliographical description pins down not any individual copy, but an ideal copy, based on the consultation of as many copies as possible—​although in practice, and because in principle bibliographical descriptions should be derived from physical examination, this meant the consultation of copies in a relatively small number of prestigious libraries. The description of an ideal copy is a product of the conversion or accumulation of the features of individual copies into a generalized ideal that, in the uncharacteristically breezy words of Fredson Bowers, represents ‘the most perfect state of the book as the printer or publisher finally intended to issue it’. This bibliographical description of an ideal copy ‘aims to provide a standard against which individual copies can be measured’: a bibliographical description of an ideal copy is both an attempt to tell us something about what was intended in the printing house and a benchmark against which to measure (or identify) a copy. But because the ideal is often conjectural, it is frequently the case that no extant copies exactly match it.8 Our careful description of a book at rest before us has quickly become an imaginary object, or at least an object very close to, but not exactly the same as, the physical copies we might be able to consult; and the paradox of bibliographical description is that it is a minutely detailed description of a book that may not exist in this form. And while bibliographical description very usefully produces a way of talking about the concept of an edition, it is also ideological: it is a process of description that establishes a normative text which serves as a model against which other texts can be assessed, and found variously lacking, aberrant, or deficient. We see this registered in an often moralized language: bibliographical description, according to G. T. Tanselle, ‘rises above the limitations of a single copy by reporting what

6   Adam Smyth emerges as standard’. It is a form of book-​description in which ‘defects’, ‘deficiencies of individual copies’, and anything that is ‘abnormal or defective in a given copy’ ‘must be purged’.9 To focus briefly on one element of bibliographical description: the collation formula is a description of the structure of the book, recording the format, the ordering of gatherings, and the number of leaves, as they appear in the conjectural ideal of this book. For the first issue of the first edition, translating Eikon Basilike into a collation formula produces this: 8o: A4 [frontispiece after A4], B–​S8 [S8 blank] Like reading difficult Latin, we probably need to take things slowly to parse this strange piece of text. The formula conveys that the ideal copy of the first edition of Eikon Basilike—​from which extant copies might depart—​is octavo in format, and is composed of eighteen gatherings labelled A to S (J not being used), with a half-​sheet A gathering composed of four leaves, and gatherings B to S each of eight leaves. A separately printed frontispiece is tipped in between the A and B gatherings, and the final leaf is blank. By the time we get to the ideal copy of the tenth edition of Eikon Basilike, the collation formula looks like this: 12o: π2 [with frontispiece between the two leaves], [A]‌–​I12 [portrait between I4 and I5], K10 [K10 blank], L6 [L5 and L6 blank] To translate: this duodecimo (12o) book starts with two blank leaves (‘π2’), before nine gatherings of twelve leaves each, one of ten, and one of six. Collation formulae like these suggest the reassurances of scientific rigour, although through their relation to ideal copies, they work to a particular agenda. If this kind of bibliographical description—​we encounter it most frequently in catalogues such as the ESTC—​has been traditionally concerned with the establishment of edition-​level norms, more recent work within bibliographical studies has been preoccupied with the opposite: that is, with the copy-​specific. Copy-​specificity means thinking about books not at the level of the edition (where the useful fiction of a single ideal lets a whole edition run be conjured as one), but rather of the individual copy; it means attending to physical and textual features of particular copies, generally without the moralized language of defect or corruption. Indeed, the register of much recent work has been a delighted investment in granularity and difference and ‘the forever unfinished character of these books’10—​although, of course, a critique of the book as unitary and stable is itself an ideological position. A loud narrative within the history of the book for the last thirty years has emphasized that the printing press was an imperfect technology for duplication, and that earlier claims for the capacity of print to fix texts through the production of identical copies, a position often associated with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s formative

An Introduction   7 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979),11 need revision. This attention to the particular has grown in part because of an increasing interest over the last few decades in readers and, thus by extension, in their individual copies; and it’s been encouraged, too, by the capacity of social media, particularly Twitter, to rapidly and widely disseminate images of copy-​specific features found in libraries and archives to a liking audience. We can see this paradigm playing out in a number of exciting, and at the time of writing, contemporary, projects. Zachary Lesser’s work with Adam G. Hooks on The Shakespeare Census (www.shakes​pear​ecen​sus.org), inspired by the early twentieth-​ century labours of bibliographer Henrietta Bartlett (1873–​1963), is an attempt to identify and describe all existing copies of Shakespeare’s works up until 1700. An awareness of the potential for copies to vary within a single edition was always there in bibliographical description, but in resources like the Shakespeare Census there is a strong sense of the need to fully reckon with, rather than efface, the implications of these individual traits. Lesser’s book on the Pavier Quartos (1619)—​often seen as Thomas Pavier’s attempt at a one-​volume edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays, four years before the ‘First Folio’—​sustains this methodology. By examining ‘three bibliographic clues’—​faint ghost images carried from one page to an adjacent page; holes indicating prior stab-​stitching; and marks of post-​printing erasure—​Lesser finds, among other things, that copies of the third edition of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1617) were often included in, but were subsequently removed from, this ‘Shakespearean’ collection.12 As a result, Lesser is able to revise the traditional, edition-​ level story that has been told about this crucial collection, and, more fundamentally, to shift the scale of bibliographical analysis. This is close looking as much as close reading, and rather than read one copy, Lesser reads all 313 that he could find, often with visual enhancement technologies such as multispectral imaging not available to earlier bibliographers. This requires a certain kind of scholarship: for reasons of time, money, and carbon emissions, the future of this kind of work is surely collaborative, relying, in its maximal version, on thousands of volunteers with access to libraries and collections across the globe. Copy-​specific descriptions of Eikon Basilike are, compared to most volumes from the period, intensely detailed, and the care may be a version of the former Royalist reverence for a book that was also a relic (Almack, describing the bindings of Eikon Basilike, writes of volumes ‘to this moment wearing mourning for Charles the First’).13 Here, for instance, is the description of one copy held in the Royal Collection: Black goatskin binding; both boards and spine re-​backed onto a darker goatskin. Identical design on left and right boards. Gold-​tooled all over. Left and right boards contain a panel design, formed of an outer roll-​tooled border of semi-​circles and double fillet lines and an inner boarder of double fillet lines; central inner panel contains an additional diamond-​shaped dotted roll border, with large floral stamps on each of the points. Inner panel profusely decorated with floral, feather and swirling stamps. Spine re-​backed but contemporary with the right and left boards.

8   Adam Smyth Flat with no raised bands; outer roll-​tooled border of semi-​circles and double fillet lines identical to left and right boards. Diamond-​shaped floral stamps at the head and tail and centre of spine, and six horizonal stamps as if to give the impression of bands. Silk ties fixed to the boards through pairs of holes on either side. Inside of left and right boards contain modern (20th century?) pastedown and flyleaves, so that fixture of the ties on the inside of boards is not visible. 20.3 × 12.9 × 3.2.14

The book here is a site on which ornament plays out: the description is rather magnificently uninterested in the contents of the volume (W. W. Greg defined bibliography as ‘the study of books as material objects irrespective of their contents’15), and is instead shaped by the technical language of bookbinding: a vocabulary of tooling (the ornamentation of a leather book cover with designs impressed by heated tools); rolls (wheel-​ shaped tools with patterns engraved around the rim to create a continuous band of decoration); fillets (wheel-​tools for pressing lines rather than patterns in the leather); and bands (threads sewn around a strip of leather and attached to the text-​block at the top and bottom, providing strength and decoration). This genre of book-​writing is both highly specialized and, to most readers, fairly inaccessible, but it is also celebratory, both in the sheer fact of its sustained attention and in the meticulous enumeration of markers of expertise and worth (‘Gold-​tooled all over’). This register of restrained celebration speaks partly to the world of book auctions and buyers: an environment that since the seventeenth century has been crucial for the development of the way books are described, encouraging an attention to copy-​specificity, completeness, imperfection, uniqueness, rarity, and value.16 These descriptions are the product of a careful gaze that can appear myopic, but in these static portraits there is an expansive potential. Such descriptions can encourage us to understand a book not only in relation to other books, but also in relation to a broader non-​bibliographical material culture. The floral stamps pressed into the leather, for example, or the double fillet lines running round the edges of the covers, speak not to the insides of the book but rather to design conventions moving across Europe within crafts such as furniture design, metalwork, and architecture. The book is suddenly reframed, and might be placed in groups of different kinds of object. With a similar sense of expansion, the interlocking foliage or abstract designs of geometrical symmetry often found on oval or lozenge-​shaped centrepieces represent a so-​called ‘arabesque’ (or ‘moresque’) design which found its origins in Islamic bookbinding from the fourteenth century. That Islamic aesthetic spread across Europe from the fifteenth century via the Italian trading ports, flowing along the routes carved out by money and the movement of goods, before reaching the shores of England, as so often belatedly, around the time of Elizabeth I—​finding expression first in high-​ end workshops in London (the centre of the book trade), and then quickly filtering out more widely to Oxford and Cambridge, and beyond. The gold leaf used to produce the gilded tooling followed a similar trajectory: from the Arab world in the early thirteenth century, if not before, through Europe and then to England in the sixteenth century.17

An Introduction   9

Book People One way, then, to respond to Eikon Basilike is to describe it as an object, although, as I have tried to show, that process is not as simple as we might assume. Another is to give an account of the various agents of bookmaking. This means uncovering what D. F. McKenzie called the sociology of the book’s creation: ‘a sociology . . . directs us to consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption’.18 Here the author is only one origin point among many. Who made Eikon Basilike? What were they trying to do? How can we describe this community? Eikon Basilike presents a challenge on this front. Banned by Parliament, Eikon Basilike’s title page didn’t carry much of the detail we might normally expect: many editions feature the terse imprint ‘In R.M. Anno. Dom. 1648’ (‘In memory of the King, 1648/​1649’). Since title pages have long been used by bibliographers as a crucial site of information about book production—​New Bibliographical resources such as the Short Title Catalogue (STC) depended on title pages for their data, and newer digital resources in turn often rely on these underlying tools—​bibliographers have responded to this absence in part by studying the detail of type and decorative initials in order to discern the work of particular printers. The book’s first publisher was London Stationer Richard Royston, whose office in Ivy Lane was a well-​known focus of Royalist activity, and who was in frequent trouble with the Council of State. Royston wrote that on 23 December 1648 he received the manuscript of the text from the King’s chaplain, Edward Simmons, and had the printer John Grismond, with whom he regularly collaborated, produce an octavo, 269-​page first edition. Proof-​sheets were at Simmons’s house by early-​to-​mid-​January, but the process of book production was interrupted and slowed by Parliament’s raiding of Royston’s print shop and destruction of the books. Royston shifted his press outside the city and produced 2,000 copies, sold in the streets by itinerant hawkers whose names we no longer know. Demand was, in Madan’s words, ‘insatiable’. Royston was summoned before the Council of State in May and was banned from further publication of the book, but in 1650 he published four editions of the works of King Charles, including the text of Eikon Basilike. A second wave of Eikon Basilikes was published in March 1649 by Francis Eglesfield, printed by William Dugard, headmaster of the Merchant Taylors’ School who worked in his private house in Suffolk Street, next to the school buildings. Dugard employed one Dr Edward Hooker as corrector to his press. This edition included a number of new passages of text, including four prayers of the King. Dugard was arrested for printing this edition on 16 March, and was, in 1650, dismissed from his position at Merchant Taylors’ School and flung in prison. Stationer John Williams defied this climate of censorship around June 1649 by publishing a series of five miniature duodecimo editions, printed by William Bentley, which might be easily concealed: the average binding measurement of these is about 4 ⅛ inches (10.5 cm) × 2 ⅛ inches (5.4 cm). The

10   Adam Smyth famous engraved frontispiece to the first edition—​the kneeling martyr-​king in prayer, holding a crown of thorns before a richly allegorical landscape of palm trees weighted down and rocks buffeted by waves and windows—​is the work of William Marshall, probably working to a design by Gauden. Marshall would have carved the design onto a copperplate with a tool called a burin, and the plate would have been inked and passed through a rolling press. The image survives in at least seven subtly distinct states produced by Marshall for different editions, suggesting the image, in great demand, was worn down by frequent printing and re-​engraving. Versions based on Marshall’s original work were cut by engravers including Robert Vaughan, Thomas Rawlins, and Wenceslaus Hollar.19 In place of a singular author, however uncertain his identity, we have a community of bookmakers, and we can think about those makers both in terms of roles which require particular competencies (transcriber, compositor, pressman, illustrator, engraver, proofreader, corrector, binder, distributor, financier, seller), and in terms of the individuals who filled those positions, with all their talents, traits, flaws, and unknowable subjectivities: Richard Royston, Edward Simmons, John Gauden, John Grismond, Francis Eglesfield, William Dugard, Edward Hooker, John Williams, William Bentley, William Marshall, to name some, but not all. Such individuals need not always occupy the same role at all times: a printer could be a publisher could be a bookseller could be a bookbinder, and so on. Of course, the establishment of a group raises the question of its extent—​the exclusions and the inclusions—​particularly in the