The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London (1501–1557) by Peter W. M. Blayney (review)

Long-separated copies of books are brought together; a lioness puts in an appearance; plants in a garden are trampled and stolen; wormholes are analyzed; a chase with two pages of type locked up at one end of it is taken through the streets of London from one printer to another; paper shrinkage is explained; bearer type is examined; the packing of a wooden initial E to turn it into an F is exposed; standing type is discovered; a touching scene of handfasting and plighting troth is described. This is a book “about printed books, and the people who manufactured, distributed, and retailed them in London between 1 January 1501 and 4 May 1557.” The people were men and women making a living as stationers, booksellers, bookbinders, importers of books and of paper, and printers. They worked in London, especially in the City of London, but were often involved commercially and professionally with others in the book trade outside the capital and outside the country. Many were members of the trade organization, the Stationers’ Company, and the book’s chronological limits are defined by the start of the new century—within a decade of the death of William Caxton—and the company’s incorporation by charter in 1577 and its being granted a monopoly during the reign of Queen Mary.

After a “Historical and lexical introduction,” each of the book’s ten chapters covers a short number of years and is similarly structured: accounts of printers who began work in London during the period are followed by notices of new provincial printers and “new non-printing publishers”; there are then discursive sections on “noteworthy events in the lives or careers” of printers and publishers; references to printers and stationers in archival records are examined; finally, the regulation of the book trade by the Crown and ecclesiastical authorities is considered. A relatively brief conclusion is offered before a series of eleven appendices. The main part of the book fills just over nine hundred pages, to which the appendices and indexes each add another hundred pages—a steady stream of footnotes on the page offers material supplementary to the narrative; eighteen hundred or so endnotes are severely limited to documentary and secondary references. The two volumes are beautifully produced and carefully proofread. A sequel that will take the story down to 1616 is promised.

What is extraordinary about Peter Blayney’s work in the Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London is not just the breadth and depth of his knowledge and understanding of the subject and of the period but his ability to organize his materials into an entirely clear and comprehensible study. He is not the first person to have looked at those engaged in the native book trades during the first half of the sixteenth century, a time when the press and its agents played a particularly important role in national religious and political affairs, but he is the first to have looked at it steadily and seen it whole. Where historians—of the book, of politics and the monarchy, of the church and religion, of the city and the country—have trod with uncertain and wandering steps, Blayney brings an extraordinary mastery of a variety of skills to point out and to correct their errors. If he draws attention to the errors and misapprehensions of fellow scholars, he is just as severe with his own previous mistakes; exasperation with the need to explain things over and over again sometimes breaks through, but the tone of the book over so many hundreds of pages is unusually even and well modulated.

Besides his firsthand knowledge of the archives and close examination of the surviving books, Blayney demonstrates an astonishing understanding of different sorts of evidence and the limits of what they can reveal. In his study, he constantly observes types, initials, and woodcuts, London’s topography, and the significance and the identification...