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This chapter considers the relationship between the London book trade and the university printers and the university press at Oxford. It pays particular attention to the Stationers' Company, the London-based organisation that dominated the book trade from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The chapter analyses how Joseph Barnes, appointed university printer in 1584, developed links with the London trade, and how he and later university printers gained access to the Stationers' Register. It traces the series of agreements negotiated between the University on the one hand and the Stationers' Company and other London booksellers on the other over the printing of ‘privileged’ books, including the bible, from 1637 onwards. Apart from a period of legal dispute in the later seventeenth century, these agreements provided increasingly significant income for the University, until they were rendered effectively void by the overturning of the Company's almanac monopoly in 1775.

Puts forward an account of the printing and publishing history of the second edition of Leviathan-an edition that has the same date as the first (1651), is known to be a later production, but has never hitherto been dated with any accuracy. With the help of bibliographical evidence and details drawn from the archives of the Stationers' Company, a fairly detailed account of the history of this edition can be constructed. What the evidence shows is that this so-called 'Bear' edition was first printed (in part) in 1670 in London; that the printing was partly confiscated by the Stationers' Company; and that the remaining sheets were then combined with sheets produced by a Dutch printer in the period 1675-8.

Chapter 1 discusses women printers, publishers, booksellers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and other material producers and distributors of printed texts. It provides an overview of their commercial activities and positions in the margins of the trade (or on its margins), discussing women workers ranging from the leading Quaker printer Tace Sowle, major trade publishers Ann Dodd and Elizabeth Nutt, and prolific printer-author Elinor James, to the destitute hawkers and ballad-singers who cried pamphlets and broadsides in London streets. This chapter outlines these women's crucial role in their family economies and in the still largely domestic economy of the print trades, before the capitalization and professionalization of the book trades diminished women's status by the mid eighteenth century. Above all, this chapter demonstrates that these women workers, though sometimes themselves illiterate, played a significant (and previously unrecognized) role in the production and dissemination of printed political literature in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period.

This chapter demonstrates how Edwards’s place as a lecturer in Christ Church, in the heart of revolutionary London, enabled him to produce Gangraena. His links with London Presbyterian clergy, with the Westminster Assembly, the London Common Council, and the Stationers’ Company brought him oral evidence, letters, and other manuscript sources. The accuracy of Edwards’s picture of religious divisions in London and in the provinces (particularly Kent and Essex), and his description of the New Model Army are assessed by comparing his version with that in other sources.

This chapter addresses the license, patents, and registration. It reports a labor dispute within the Stationers' Company arising in the late 1570s. In order to control competitive pressures within the printing industry, the Stationers' Company developed a system whereby individual members could secure an exclusive right to market a given text—to print it or to have it printed, to distribute the printed text, to sell it or to have it sold. There is the arc of John Wolfe's subsequent career as a professional stationer. Jonsonian authorship is in some ways a byproduct of Wolfe's reformation. Wolfe and his co-conspirators turn out to be the advance guard of a broad-based English movement against monopolistic competition. The entrance to Jacques le Moyne is that it suggests that stationer's copyright sheds in this instance its “internal” character, loses its status as expression of the stationers' corporate identity, and becomes transferable, itself a commodity.

This chapter examines the literary implications of the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557. The central argument here is that while incorporation conferred respectability on guild members, it lent urgency to the need for ‘professional’ writers—those hoping to gain financially from the press—to distinguish themselves from the Stationers at the very point when their commercial interests were converging. Letters of dedication were increasingly written with the ‘reader’ in view, authorial ‘gentility’ was insisted upon, and courtly patronage set the paradigm even for civic panegyric where genealogy of office frequently supplanted that of blood. Authorial copyright had not yet developed, but traffic with the printers promoted the insistence on creative agency that would eventually lead to Milton’s contract with Samuel Simmons and ultimately to the legislation of 1709.