Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (review)

There have been a number of accounts of the life and career of John Day (c. 1522–84), perhaps best known for his printing of the first four editions of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (first publ. 1563), but this monograph provides much the most complete and up-to-date. The author, a lecturer in English literature at Brunel University who has a special interest in the development of printing and publishing in the second half of the sixteenth century, has managed to unearth new evidence on Day’s early life when, with the help of foreign workmen in London, he was in the vanguard of publishing the rapidly expanding number of evangelical works under King Edward VI, and also some on his later life when, financially protected by lucrative monopolies of staple items such as the ABC and catechisme and the metrical psalms, Day was able to experiment with larger works, including Foxe’s mammoth martyrology, and the use of different typefaces and layouts and better-quality illustrations than had appeared in previous works. There remains very little hard evidence of his personal piety or the exact nature of his commitment to Protestantism. Day was regularly perceived as a reliable printer and seller of Protestant works—a perception he may well have encouraged. But after publishing clandestine works under Queen Mary I in 1553–54, his spell in jail was short, and on his release he not only printed some Catholic works for John Wayland but also later would use conservative materials and images in the devotional works he produced under Queen Elizabeth I. What does come across in this and other accounts is Day’s assiduous pursuit of and cooperation with powerful patrons such as secretary William Cecil and Archbishop Matthew Parker, and his commercial ambition and ruthless opportunism, which provoked considerable hostility from fellow members of the print trade and led to the near collapse of his empire before his death.

Six of the eight chapters consist of analyses of groups of Day’s publications in chronological sequence, from which deductions are drawn about his intentions and conclusions on his achievements. These are almost entirely flattering to Day: the number and variety of his publications, the size of his business, and the enormous advances in typography and illustration he nurtured. However, to put Day on so high a pedestal as the leading printer of the English Protestant regime risks downgrading the contributions of Edward Whitchurch, Richard Grafton, William Seres, Reyner Wolfe, and Christopher Barker, who, with help in high places, published thousands of copies of different versions of the Bible (with lavish title pages) and the Book of Common Prayer, as well as repeated editions of works such as Desiderius Erasmus’s Paraphrases (1517–23), John Jewel’s Apologia (1562), and Alexander Nowell’s Catechism (1549). There were not many printers in England with the confidence and resources to take on substantial projects, but there were some, such as Thomas Vautrollier, a Huguenot refugee who built up a considerable reputation in London as an accomplished printer, and published a number of editions of Lutheran and Calvinist works in English or Latin, including John Calvin’s massive Institutes (1536). Moreover, the shortcomings of Day’s output, even in some editions of prestige projects such as the Acts and Monuments—the poor quality of the paper and sometimes illegible type, the sloppy cross-referencing, the repeated use of the same illustrations within the covers of one book—are explained away as due to circumstances beyond his control or the assistants he used, such as his son, Robert. This monograph offers a most useful and informative account of a pivotal figure in the Tudor book trade, but Day’s reputation might be served as well by acknowledging the blemishes on his record, and his achievement be put in sharper perspective by comparing it with that of...