Structures of Popularity in the Early Modern Book Trade

We are grateful to the editors of Shakespeare Quarterly for the opportunity to reply Briefly to Peter W. M. Blayney's response to our article, "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited," both of which appeared in the spring 2005 issue of this journal.¹ Many of Blayney's remarks concern differences between his preferred methods of counting and our own. Fortunately for readers not wishing to get bogged down in methodological detail, in every case of importance our respective analyses yield almost exactly the same results. Blayney calculates that 78.7 percent of all STC entries are for speculative books; our figure is 79.0 percent (± 1.4 percent).² Since our calculation is derived from a sample while Blayney's is based on an examination of every entry in the STC from 1583 to 1640, his figure is likely the more accurate (and therefore the one that we ourselves plan to use in future studies), although the difference is obviously negligible.³ Because our "speculative rates" match, so do our calculations of the market share of playbooks among all speculative books; as Blayney writes, he "cannot fault either the approach or the results."⁴ With reprint rates, too, our calculations track closely; as Blayney writes, "the overall picture . . . is much the same" in both our analysis and his.⁵ Given the difficulty of counting such large sample sizes repeatedly and in multiple ways, we were happy to see our own calculations independently confirmed.⁶

So the debate centers not on facts or figures but rather on a more fundamental issue: how to theorize the meaning of popularity in the book trade and, specifically, how to interpret the relationship between market share and reprint rates when assessing popularity. We developed the concept of structures of popularity because we believe that these two criteria should be considered in dynamic relation to each other, to total number of editions, and to profitability.⁷ Blayney, on the other hand, argues that the total number of editions (and thus the market share) of sermon-books "completely vitiates" the usefulness of playbook reprint rates as an index of popularity.⁸ In the 1997 article that inspired our own study, however, Blayney wrote that "there is more to the question of popularity than the annual number of new works in a genre, and we need also to look at the frequency of reprinting."⁹ We believe Blayney was correct in 1997: if we want to understand popularity in the book trade, we need to consider both total number of editions and frequency of reprinting, as well as market share and profitability. No single one of these four measurements by itself equates directly to popularity in the book trade; each addresses different questions about the market performance of books, and each points to a different aspect of both supply and demand.

Why do reprint rates matter? Because they provide the best available criterion for answering such questions as: How eager were customers to buy the playbooks that were for sale in bookshops? Was a playbook a good publishing investment? Did playbooks reliably turn a profit? These questions cannot be answered simply by looking at market share, which tells us how many editions overall were published for the speculative book trade but conveys less about the economic performance of those editions once they were on the market. Reprint rates, by contrast, provide a more direct measure of this sort of economic performance, because a reprint indicates that the previous edition had sold out (or was about to sell out) and that the publisher anticipated enough continuing demand to justify a further edition. The reprint rate for an entire class of books tells us how frequently a given title within that class achieved this type of economic success and, consequently, how often a publisher had the chance to enjoy the increased profits possible with reprint editions. Reprint rates, therefore, allow us to gauge both the demand among retail customers for certain classes of books and the investment risk faced by speculating publishers.

When we look at actual...