Marketing English Books, 1476–1550: How Printers Changed Reading by Alexandra da Costa (review)

In the introduction to her new study of English printers and their cultural impact, Alexandra da Costa takes her reader on a lively tour around St. Paul's Churchyard and Paternoster Row in early modern London, "the centre of the book trade in England … where both wholesale and retail customers would go to make their purchases" (11). Carefully using contemporary accounts to reconstruct the experience of a potential customer browsing bookshops in the bustling district, with stall-board advertisements lining the streets outside and overflowing shelves inside, da Costa paints a picture of the book trade in action. Beyond the abstract marketplace of texts and ideas, London was home to a community of printers, binders, booksellers, and more who worked side by side and in conversation with each other to create a new market for printed books in the early days after William Caxton's first press was established in England.

Da Costa presents the early English printers following Caxton as more important figures in this period than is usually acknowledged. Far from being mere mechanical copyists or utilitarian protocapitalists, she argues, printers showed their agency in the decisions they made around the selection, production, and presentation of books in the market, which had a significant but often overlooked impact on the reading public and culture at large. They also had an impact on each other, observing and reacting to each other's successes and failures over time, and continually adjusted their products based on evolving market conditions. By focusing on this community of printers and their influence on the development of textual norms and genres over several decades, da Costa aims to fill a gap in the scholarship which undervalues the contributions of this neglected part of the cultural ecosystem.

Da Costa's well-researched and thorough account covers an earlier period of English print than previous influential studies, which have similarly argued for the impact of Shakespeare's printers and others during the later sixteenth century and following, from Zachary Lesser's Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (2004) to Kirk Melnikoff's recent Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (2018). Marketing English Books also builds on important work in the earlier period by scholars such as Lotte Hellinga and Alexandra Gillespie, which focused on better-known printers or canonical authors-inprint. Da Costa widens her scope to include multiple genres and follows their development over time through a close examination of paratexts, which allows for a more varied view of the market and reading in the period.

The chapters focus on vernacular printing for the English market, mainly in England but not exclusively by English printers, of "types of books that either emerged for the first time during this period … or underwent considerable changes in presentation" from previous manuscript traditions (2). In her analysis, da Costa makes sure to consider the wider European context when appropriate, keeping in mind that the print market was transnational from the beginning and English printers would be getting ideas for what texts to produce and how to present them from their continental counterparts as well as their local competitors.

The first two chapters focus on religious reading: chapter 1 on pre-Reformation vernacular books for the laity on "orthodox" spiritual topics, and chapter 2 on potentially controversial "evangelical" works. Wynkyn de Worde emerges as an especially active figure in the religious reading market who "recognized the spiritual ambitions of his contemporaries" and produced books that allowed them to develop their spiritual practice on their own time (62). Later printers, like Thomas Godfray, were able to use paratextual framing to get around censorship and also reader's anxieties about religiously controversial material. In both chapters, da Costa argues that the printers of these works were not merely following or responding to preexisting demand, but were in fact creating it through their marketing choices for texts that they were making available to readers, with a consequent effect on religious...