Course Description
The Stationers’ Company, founded in 1403 and incorporated in 1557, dominated London’s trade in printed books during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following the loss of its monopoly over printing in 1695, its regulatory powers diminished, but it retained a vital role in the life of the London trade, not least through its lucrative joint-stock publishing venture, known as the “English Stock.” Among its members can be counted nearly all of London’s leading printers and publishers, and its roster also includes thousands of lesser-known men and women in the trade: typefounders, compositors, printers, publishers, booksellers, and bookbinders. The Company’s importance has long been acknowledged by scholars, but its activities and influence have often been misunderstood. This course will survey the shifting role and character of the Company up to the Carnan court case of 1775 and provide a practical guide to using the Company’s key records in their manuscript and edited forms; particular use will be made of Adam Matthew’s Literary Print Culture: The Stationers’ Company Archive 1554–2007, which provides direct access to nearly all the Company’s archive in digital form. Topics include: the Company’s structure, regulatory powers, and membership; the Stationers’ Register and other records; the “English Stock”; the Company’s relationship with authors; its relationship with other London companies as well as city and national authorities; and its corporate identity. The course will conclude with a “show and tell” session, which will provide an opportunity for students to focus on specific documents from the Company’s archives.Faculty
Ian Gadd
Ian Gadd is a professor in English literature at Bath Spa University, where he has two international-facing roles: Academic Director of the Global Academy of Liberal Arts, a network of universities …
Advance Reading List
Required Reading
Blagden’s history is still the only single-volume account of the history of the Stationers’ Company. It is dated, lacks detailed footnotes and is rather less informative than his various articles on the Company, but is nonetheless the best place to start. Reading at least one of the other three items listed here is also recommended.
Blagden, Cyprian. The Stationers’ Company: A History 1403–1959. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1960.
Blayney, Peter. The Stationers’ Company before the Charter, 1403–1557. London: Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, 2003.
Myers, Robin and Michael Harris, eds. The Stationers’ Company and the Book Trade 1550–1990. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1997.
Myers, Robin, ed. The Stationers’ Company: A History of the Later Years, 1800–2000. Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, 2001.
Further Reading
Records
Stationers’ Hall in London holds the Company’s extensive archive which dates back to the mid-sixteenth century. Nearly all the records prior to the twentieth-century have been microfilmed and were published in 1987. Robin Myers, the honorary Archivist of the Company, published a catalogue of the archives, keyed to the microfilm reels. A number of the early records of the Stationers’ Company have also been transcribed or indexed.
Literary Print Culture: The Stationers’ Company Archive 1554–2007. Marlborough, UK: Adam Matthew Digital, 2017. https://www.literaryprintculture.amdigital.co.uk/
Arber, Edward, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 1554–1640 AD. London & Birmingham, 1875–94. Five volumes.
Eyre, G. E. Briscoe, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers from 1640–1708 A.D. London, 1913–14. Three volumes.
Greg, W. W. A Companion to Arber. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
Greg, W. W. and E. Boswell, eds. Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1576 to 1602 from Register B. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1930.
Jackson, William A. Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1602 to 1640. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1957.
London Book Trades Database. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010. http://lbt.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
N.B. This service was withdrawn by the Bodleian Library in November 2024 due to concerns over cybersecurity. An incomplete (and slow) web-archive version is available via the above link.
McKenzie, D. F. and Maureen Bell. A Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade, 1641–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Three volumes.
McKenzie, D. F. Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1605–40. Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1961.
McKenzie, D. F. Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1641–1700. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1974.
McKenzie, D. F. Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1701–1800. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1978.
Myers, Robin. The Stationers’ Company Archive, 1554–1984. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990.
The Records of the Stationers’ Company, 1554–1920. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1987. 115 reels of microfilm.
Shell, Alison, and Alison Emblow, eds. Index to the Court Books of the Stationers’ Company 1679–1717. London: Bibliographical Society, 2007.
Stationers’ Register Online. Glasgow: CREATe, UK Copyright & Creative Economy Centre, 2022. https://stationersregister.online/
History
Bell, Maureen. “Women in the English Book Trades 1557-1700.” Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte 6 (1996): 13–45.
Blagden, Cyprian. “The English Stock of the Stationers’ Company.” The Library, 5th Series 10 (1955): 163–185.
Blagden, Cyprian. “Charter Trouble.” The Book Collector 6:4 (1957): 369–377.
Blagden, Cyprian. “The English Stock of the Stationers’ Company in the Time of the Stuarts.” The Library, 5th Series 12 (1957): 167–186.
Blagden, Cyprian. “The Stationers’ Company in the Civil War Period.” The Library, 5th Series 13 (1958): 1–17.
Blagden, Cyprian. “The Stationers’ Company in the Eighteenth Century.” Guildhall Miscellany (1959): 36–53.
Blayney, Peter W. M. The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990.
Blayney, Peter W. M. “The Publication of Playbooks.” In A New History of Early English Drama, edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, 383–422. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Blayney, Peter W. M. The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Two volumes.
Ferdinand, C. Y. “Towards a Demography of the Stationers’ Company, 1601–1700.” Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 21 (1992): 51–69.
Gadd, Ian. “A Companion to Blayney.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 111 (2017): 379-406.
Gadd, Ian. “The Press and the London Book Trade.” In The History of Oxford University Press. Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1780, edited by Ian Gadd, 568–599. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Gadd, Ian. “The Stationers’ Company, 1403–1775: London’s Book Trade Guild.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.262
Myers, Robin. “The Financial Records of the Stationers’ Company, 1605–1811.” In Economics of the British Booktrade 1605-1939, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris, 1–31. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1985.
Pollard, Graham. “The Company of Stationers Before 1557.” The Library, 4th Series 18:1 (1937): 1–38.
Pollard, Graham. “The Early Constitution of the Stationers’ Company.” The Library, 4th Series 18:3 (1937): 235–260.
Raven, James. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
Smith, Helen. Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Course Evaluations
Course History
- 2014–
Ian Gadd teaches this course as “The Stationers’ Company to 1775.”
- 2006–2007
Ian Gadd & Michael Turner co-teach this course as “The Stationers’ Company and the London Book Trade to 1830.”
- 1995–1996
Peter Blayney teaches a precursor course, “The Company of Stationers to 1637” (1995); “The Company of Stationers and the London Book Trade to 1637” (1996).