Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture by Kirk Melnikoff (review)

In Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture, Kirk Melnikoff counterbalances the lasting influence of the great enumerative bibliographers on whose work we continue to rely – R.G. McKerrow and A.W. Pollard – with the insistence of Jerome McGann and D.F. McKenzie that texts be considered in their social context, and, of course, Peter Blayney's application of that principal to the Elizabethan book trade. Acknowledging the patents, agreements, and disputes recorded in the Stationers' Register, and lamenting the loss of further documentation, Melnikoff brings to bear evidence of the complex relationships between authors, translators, printers, booksellers, and readers embedded in publishers' paratext – "title-page blurbs, dedicatory epistles, reader addresses, and commendatory poems." In four well-chosen case studies, he explores the emergence of publishing practices from the 1560s to the first decade of the sixteenth century: how publishers acquired, shaped, reshaped, and marketed books, how they negotiated partnerships with authors, translators, printers, and other publishers, how they created and responded to readerships, and how new literary genres emerged from commercial speculation.

The result is an insightful analysis of intersections between "practices and products" in the making and marketing of texts, with a particular emphasis on the role of the bookseller-publisher in shaping literary culture. As Peter Blayney pointed out in The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London 1501–1557 (2013), the assumption that all stationers (representing the "industrial" arm of the book trade) were publishers and vice versa is demonstrably flawed. Between 1575 and 1588, most master printers worked as "trade" printers, and, by 1599, 70 per cent of books were published by booksellers, many of whom were drapers or grocers rather than members of the Stations' Company. These publishers were businessmen who sold books alongside other commodities. Books were more often than not unbound stacks of volumes rather than prepackaged products, and canny booksellers offered their services as "mediators," packaging (and repackaging) the product in partnership with printers and presenting it to potential readers with overt instructions as to its aesthetic features and moral utility. Publishing was a speculative business, and specialization guaranteed readers a degree of product satisfaction.

The effects of these commercial strategies are illustrated by Melnikoff in four chronologically ordered case studies focused on bookseller-publishers with distinctly different specializations. Thomas Hacket's new world and travel narratives exploited the emergence of a new literary genre in the 1560s and 1570s and a new more general readership. Richard Smith built on the retail experience of consumers and the popularity of the literary miscellany in the creation of "browsable" volumes such as Robert Henryson's Scots translation of Aesop's Fables (1577), which he reorganized thematically, and, most outrageously, the first edition of George Gascoigne's collected works, presented as a multi-authored miscellany in A Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573). John Flasket and Paul Linley's somewhat risky foray into play books with Christopher Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage (1594) is entirely consistent with their publishing specialization in Ovidian narrative, and Nicholas Ling's speculative publication of the first two editions of Hamlet (1603), characterized by their typographical emphasis on Corambis's "wise sayings" is clarified in the context of his publishing specialization in collections of sententiae and republican texts with their emphasis on good counsel and service to the state rather than to the king.

Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture is meticulously researched and engagingly presented, and it provides an excellent model for future studies. Focusing on the intersections of publishers and printers with booksellers, authors, translators, and readers, Melnikoff compensates to a great degree for the missing evidence that we would wish to have – account books, contracts, letters, and diaries – to clarify these relationships. By concentrating on paratextual evidence of the machinations of the increasingly influential figure of the bookseller-publisher, with his unique experience of taste and trends, he directs attention to the "cultural work" of the Elizabethan book trade.