A Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the Book Trade, 1641–1700 (review)

A Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the Book Trade, 1641–1700 is the fruit of some forty-five years spent collecting data on the workings of the book trade, not as an end in itself but as provision for a closer reading of literary texts, in particular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama. In 1957, as a postgraduate student at Cambridge thinking to write a doctoral thesis on Elizabethan trade practices, McKenzie found his way to Stationers' Hall and started listing details of Stationers' Company apprentices. The thesis took a different direction, namely a bibliographical study of the Cambridge University Press from 1696 to 1712, published in 1966. But the apprentices were not forgotten and eventually resulted in three volumes of Stationers' Company Apprentices, 1603–1800, published between 1961 and 1978, perhaps the most frequently consulted reference tool in the field.

McKenzie established the practice of filing references and making excerpts wherever he found them, in various areas of the trade for the years 1641–1714. He trawled the Stationers' Company Court Books, the printed journals of the House of Commons and House of Lords, the printed calendars of State Papers (Domestic), the manuscripts in private hands listed in the long series of calendars of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and in contemporary pamphlets. Impetus was given to his collecting by preparation for his 1976 Sandars Lectures on The London Book Trade in the Later Seventeenth Century; in it he emphasized the importance of detailed reading of documentary evidence of trade practices. Realizing how useful his collection of references would be to others, he made them, with characteristic generosity, generally available by depositing copies in the Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian, the British Library, and the St Bride Institute.

Thus the Chronology evolved. If the Stationers' Company Apprentices represented the labour of many years, the Chronology was a Herculean task, begun in the days of manuscript transcription, filed in typescript, and eventually completed on screen. Maureen Bell, though of another generation, continued to put her trust in hard copy to the last. The two began collaborating in 1987 and a year later, with the support of the British Academy, Margaret Walker was employed to check McKenzie's extracts from the State Papers and parliamentary journals. There followed a hiatus when McKenzie turned his attention to the editing of Congreve, a labour of love which passed, at McKenzie's death, to Christine Ferdinand. In 1993, with the first third of the Chronology in draft, Maureen Bell undertook to bring it to completion by the year 2000. In the event it was only with heroic effort that it finally appeared in 2005.

McKenzie had originally envisaged the Chronology as a single sequence, as Bell explains in her introduction, 'extending the work of Arber, Greg and Jackson to provide a preliminary narrative to the history of the trade [. . .] and a source of reference for those researching the history of the book'. In its achievement, the Chronology invites comparison with Arber, Greg, and Shell and Emblow's Index to the Court Books, 1679–1717 (2007). The Chronology does for the late seventeenth what Arber does for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in the mass of supplementary documents to his Transcript of the Stationers' Company Registers to 1640; Greg's Companion to Arber (1967), a collection of material used for his Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, adds significantly. It is interesting to compare entries in Shell and Emblow, which cover the same period as the Chronology. One such is the account of the Company's attempt to negotiate a further renewal of the Printing Act and its eventual expiry in...