Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Estates and gentry income/Publishing

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An essential distinction is to be made between publishing, which is “the action or business of preparing and issuing books, newspapers, etc., for public sale or distribution,” as opposed to printing which is “the transfer of characters or designs on to paper, etc., by a mechanical process.”[1] Although the two often went hand-in-hand, the purpose of this article is to explore publishing in Stuart England rather than printing.


Distribution of Ideas

The English book trade experienced major growth during the seventeenth century.[2] Publishing was an essential mechanism for the distribution not only of political ideas, but also for the dissemination of religious, scientific, and everyday knowledge. It has been argued that the increased output of available and useful knowledge during the Stuart period was one of the causes behind the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.[3] The popularity of books concerning the evolution of social life (such as religious texts), books concerned with critiquing or praising various institutions, or scientific texts, is evident by the fact that they were printed not once, but were edited many more times and then redistributed and met with at least as much popularity as had the first edition.[4]


Government Control and Censorship

In recent historiography, there has been a rejection of the idea of absolute government dominance over the publishing companies in Stuart England. Instead, recent literature has suggested that the government did not have the strength or the man-power to exercise such restrictions.[5] Publishing companies were relatively free to decide on their own what they would or would not publish. However, government control of many of these companies was not needed because many times these companies took strong preventative measures against material which they deemed offensive on moral, religious, or political grounds.[6] Of course, what each company defined as “offensive” differed according to their religious and political alliances. As such, these companies exerted a great deal of influence and control in their city.

As the years preceding the Civil War became more tense, censorship was used by the publishing companies as weapons to prevent their opponents’ works being published. They also wrote propaganda pieces intended to embarrass their opponents.[7] Companies controlled what was published through a system of compulsory pre-publication licensing and the entry of the work into the company’s registry.[8] Therefore, publishing companies were not solely commercial entities but they were also important to the life of a city. Oftentimes, companies would employ Justices of the Peace, who embodied significant legal and administrative power, in order to enforce the laws of the press.[9] Lawyers also were an important part of the book trade. They were provided with work through actions against those who had pirated books, consulted with Parliament concerning control of the press, and the creation of new by-laws.[10] Thus these publishing companies were intertwined with many other professions of the city.


Income and Expenditure

Publishing companies could earn a modest 4-5% on various investments it had, such as property, but, like any other commercial entity, it depended on the difference between the cost and the selling price of its goods.[11] The way a company was able to make a profit on the books it produced was because it had been granted letters patent which gave them the sole right of printing certain books, preferably popular ones.[12] Essentially it was a monopoly on the right to distribute certain titles or kinds of books within the city. Occasionally the publishing company granted some of its individual members the right to print and publish a certain number of books of which of the copyright belonged to the company in return for a payment.[13]Sales of books were responsible for making up the bulk of a company’s income.[14]For every ￡100 received from the sale of publications, about ￡38 covered what had been spent on preparing the publication for sale, which left ￡62 as the gross profit. About ￡23 of this profit was needed for overheads (expenses for the upkeep of the company).[15]

The London Stationers’ Company is an excellent example of the expenditures and incomes of a publishing company. In one of the quarterly accounts, the company received money from rents and the payments of outstanding accounts for books they had supplied to various individuals or companies. With this income, he paid back a borrowed amount of ￡238. 17s. 3d. to the Stock-keepers, ￡16 in taxes, ￡288. 17s. 2d. for printing, paper, engraving, binding, entertainment, legal fees, carriage and postage, and other miscellaneous expenses. One of the most accurate accounts that has survived shows that the Stationers’ Company paid a total of ￡4148. 7s. 9d. for all of their expenditures.[16]

See also Royalist Censorship


  1. ↑ Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed., s.v. "publishing" and "printing."
  2. ↑ Alan B. Farmer, "Cosmopolitanism and Foreign Books in Early Modern England," Shakespeare Studies 35 (2007): 58, http://web.ebscohost.com/ (accessed February 12, 2012).
  3. ↑ Joerg Baten and Jan Luiten van Zanden, "Book Production and the Onset of Modern Economic Growth," Journal of Economic Growth 13 (2008): 218, http://www.springerlink.com/ (accessed February 11, 2012).
  4. ↑ Ibid.
  5. ↑ Anthony Milton, "Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England," The Historical Journal 41, no. 3 (September 1998): 626, http://www.jstor.org/ (accessed February 9, 2012).
  6. ↑ Jason McElligott, "'A Couple of Hundred Squabbling Small Tradesmen'? Censorship, The Stationers' Company, and the State in Early Modern England," Media History 11, no. 1 (2005): 95, http://www.tandfonline.com/ (accessed February 11, 2012).
  7. ↑ Milton, "Licensing," 633.
  8. ↑ McElligott, "Censorship," 91.
  9. ↑ McElligott, "Censorship," 96.
  10. ↑ Cyprian Blagden, "The English Stock of the Stationers' Company in the Time of the Stuarts," The Library 3 (1957): 182, http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ (accessed February 11, 2012).
  11. ↑ Blagden, "English Stock," 183.
  12. ↑ Blagden, "English Stock," 167.
  13. ↑ Blagden, "English Stock," 179.
  14. ↑ Ibid.
  15. ↑ Blagden, "English Stock," 183.
  16. ↑ Blagden, "English Stock," 175-180.
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