Virtual issue for 2021
Guest editor: Ralph Hanna
The essays here gathered from past issues of The Library address a variety of issues, largely economic ones, associated with the transmission of text to a public. Here, volumes already constructed meet the world of book-users, whether casual readers, owners assembling collections, or the builders of libraries for more general use. This selection deals with what one may identify as the ‘sociology of books’, a subdivision of a broader ‘history of the book’. As any selection does, this one severely truncates the treasures to be found in The Library, and I shall draw attention here to a number of essays I have considered but chosen not to nominate in my selection.
Most obviously, book-dissemination begins with professionals, book-trade individuals who can facilitate production, as well as offer some kind of stock for sale. My selection begins with what seems to me the most important contribution to medieval book history to have appeared in the journal, Graham Pollard’s historical presentation of the London book-trade (1). Beyond its outline of the shifting relations between diverse guilds, responsible for differing aspects and grades of production, the essay’s seminal contribution was its discussion of a ‘bespoke trade’ (and stationers’ concomitant reliance on sales of used books). The reach of this point appears later in my selection, Mooney and Matheson’s presentation of the first clearly discernible example of ‘on spec.’ production, at the very edge of the appearance of print (5). Pollard made other exemplary contributions, such as ‘Notes on the Size of the Sheet’, IV, 22 (1941), 105–37, and ‘The Construction of English Twelfth-Century Bindings’, V, 17 (1962), 1–22. Here, I have chosen also to include, for its wealth of evidence, his classic piece on the names of some English fifteenth-century binders (2). Esther Potter’s ‘Graham Pollard at Work’, VI, 11 (1989), 307–27 is an entertaining resumé with references to abundant unpublished treasures in the 160 shelf-feet of the Bodleian Library’s Pollard collection.
Pollard’s history of a trade-guild, largely an institutional survey, is given an excellent accompaniment by Malcolm Parkes (3). Parkes, author of the seminal study of the book trade around the University of Oxford in the standard institutional history, here analyses the surviving records concerning a single book-man, the Oxford stationer Thomas Hunt. This is an impressive reminder that books are not simply shelved tools for knowledge or entertainment, but commodities. Hunt’s activities were various, but all devoted to profit: stationer to the University, and thus involved in aiding the penurious through institutional loan-chests; a high-end binder for known clients; an entrepreneur underwriting print.
Eric Kwakkel’s discussion of a Bruges manuscript (4) exemplifies The Library’s longstanding commitment to groundbreaking studies of paper history. (Honourable mention must be made of Edward Heawood, ‘Sources of Early English Paper Supply’, IV, 10 (1929–30), 282–307, 427–54, and Allan Stevenson, ‘Paper as Bibliographical Evidence’, V, 17 (1962), 197–212.) While Kwakkel’s essay, although copiously documented for the Low Countries, scants insular evidence that would qualify some conclusions reached, it offers impressive economic and demographic arguments about the introduction of paper into the book trade. On the one hand, Kwakkel connects the coming of paper with a broadening of the book trade workforce to include part-timers, documentary scribes using vacant hours for profitable book-production. Simultaneously, this semi-professional engagement could not have occurred without some demand, a growing community of sub-aristocratic readers eager for the cheaper books that production on paper allowed.
I have already mentioned Mooney and Matheson’s essay (5) as a particularly important coda to Pollard’s outstanding contribution. Their demonstration of speculative London book-production, late in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, relies, in large measure, upon the identification of repeated hands across a range of books. All these contributors, engaged in collaborative production for an apparently pre-existing market, are companions of another individual identified by his script, ‘The Beryn Scribe’.
My other selections move toward books in their social interactions, as they pass hand to hand, engaging new communities of readers. One classic study from this journal, never bettered, but capable of considerable extension, is Bell’s discussion of the price of books (6). I accompany it with the only short note I have included, Roth’s discussion of a book-pledge (7). Unlike Parkes’s discussion of institutionalized Oxford loan-chests, this is a private transaction involving a Jewish lender—and the account written in Hebrew. The essay will serve as a reminder of a range of book activities that appear only peripherally in The Library. Book history is not simply monolingual (or London-centred), and this diversity, whether work in Anglo-Norman, or undertaken in Dublin, Edinburgh, or on the continent, will predictably challenge what one might think are givens of the enterprise.
The next essay turns to books disseminated socially. Virtually at its inception, this journal directed readers to an undiscovered trove of information on private book-ownership that might be extracted from testamentary bequests (H. R. Plommer, ‘Books Mentioned in Wills’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 7 (1902), 99–121). Jonathan Goldberg’s essay (8) takes a broader and more generally revelatory view, to examine what can be learned of private collectors. The essay centres on a survey of a single extensive probate archive, in the main unprinted, and offers a conspectus of what might be available to book-purchasers, whether commissioning new books or buying used ones, in the metropolis of the North. Further, Goldberg’s essay offers a hint of The Library’s long and distinguished series of local studies that investigate the sources and contents of late-medieval libraries both private and institutional.
One of the great foci of The Library has always been the transition from script to print. A steady source of interest has been the handling of medieval handwritten books put into wider book trade circulation through their use as printers’ copy. I illustrate this pursuit through a coordinated pair of essays (9, 10) dealing with a widely disseminated late-medieval vernacular religious text and its belated (partially post-Dissolution) appearance in London print. Herbert Schulz (who allowed me my first unfettered run at a manuscript collection fifty-odd years ago) recognized that he was surveying in Huntington Library, MS HM 130 a manuscript that had been printers’ copy, and that he could reconstruct, but not identify, the resulting printed book. Schulz’s successor as Huntington Curator of Manuscripts, Jean Preston, completed the demonstration forty-odd years on.
My selection concludes with a further study of the script-print interface. Mary Erler (11) reminds one that book production and the book trade do not conclude at the workshop or the seller’s table; she reveals a rich vein of self-supplemented books (a forecast of the Farrars at Little Gidding, books bought to be plundered for illustrative material?) in the period leading up to Reform—and the end of medieval book-production, if not book history.
I would offer one comment on this final essay’s rather strict demarcation between the two production media, script and print, and their very different marketing strategies. Schulz and Preston show a carryover of medieval interests at a point, the 1530s and 1540s, when they were actively discouraged by authority. However, Robert Wyer should not have printed The Prick of Conscience were he not certain there was an audience eager to hear about purgatory. For Wyer, print only stimulated wider circulation (and its economic benefits). There was no cataclysm, only the inception of a long transition. Similarly, illustration supplied from outside the text block has a very long (and largely unwritten) history, for example Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 100 (s. xiii1), with illumination done on separate sheets and pasted to the pages, or innumerable fifteenth-century Horae illuminated on folios extraneous to the text block but tipped in (a famous example of one such at Claremont CA, Honnold Library, where a reader tipped them out and made off with them). (See further Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 35 and 158 n. 12.) Print initially supplements, rather than replaces or innovates, longstanding book behaviours—and does so, not simply initially, but as Arthur Marotti and Harold Love have reminded us, for a long time thereafter.
Contents
- ‘The Company of Stationers before 1557’,
Graham Pollard,
IV, 18 (1937), 1–38 - ‘The Names of Some English Fifteenth-Century Binders’,
G. Pollard,
V, 25 (1970), 193–218 - ‘Thomas Hunt and the Oxford Book-Business in the Late Fifteenth Century’,
M. B. Parkes,
VII, 17 (2016), 28–39 - ‘A New Type of Book for a New Type of Reader: The Emergence of Paper in Vernacular Book Production’,
Erik Kwakkel,
VII, 4 (2003), 219–248 - ‘The Beryn Scribe and his Texts: Evidence for Multiple-Copy Production of Manuscripts in Fifteenth-Century England’,
Linne R. Mooney & Lister M. Matheson,
VII, 4 (2003), 347–370 - ‘The Price of Books in Medieval England’,
H. E. Bell,
IV, 17 (1936), 312–332 - ‘Pledging a Book in Medieval England’,
Cecil Roth,
V, 19 (1964), 196–200 - ‘Lay Book Ownership in Late Medieval York: The Evidence of Wills’,
P. J. P. Goldberg,
VI, 16 (1994), 181–189 - ‘Manuscript Printer’s Copy for a Lost Early English Book’,
H. C. Schulz,
IV, 22 (1941), 138–144 - ‘The Pricke of Conscience (Parts I–III) and its First Appearance in Print’,
Jean F. Preston,
VI, 7 (1985), 303–314 - ‘Pasted-In Embellishments in English Manuscripts and Printed Books c. 1480–1533’,
Mary C. Erler,
VI, 14 (1992), 185–206