A history of haste

Early modern literature shows evidence that writers of the period are perpetually short of time. In 1592 the poet Samuel Daniel can be heard accusing “a greedie Printer” of having snatched his sonnets from him, rushing them into print; and the same year the writer Thomas Nashe claimed he was worried that one of his popular narratives was “hasting to the second impression” without his having had the chance to make the final corrections. ¹ A century later, John Dryden claimed he was pressurized into releasing his translation of the Aeneid before it was ready. ² The history of print is a history of haste. As the author of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, once commented when I broached the issue of speed among a group of book historians, “concern about meeting deadlines was built into the early printer’s trade and into that of writers who collaborated with printers. Similarly, anxiety about keeping ‘up to date’ was increased by the printing of newsletters and periodicals.” ³ In the 1590s the London bookseller Andrew Maunsell remarked upon “the great increase” in printed material that he thought he could see almost daily, thus foreshadowing the enormous expansion of the book industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ⁴ Developments in the trade undoubtedly provided many sources of frustration for writers, such as increased demand and competition and more unauthorized manuscripts in circulation. Within the field of book history, much emphasis has been placed on writers’ lack of control when entering the commercial “communications circuit” of book production and distribution, and on their struggle to assert authority and gain copyright of their work. ⁵ A key insight in the bibliographical work of D. F. McKenzie and others has been that printed books, not least those produced in the hand press period (1500–1800), were the result of complex “working processes” involving many different crafts and interests besides those of the author. ⁶ As one can tell from the printing-house owner Joseph Moxon’s highly detailed description of every aspect of the production process in his Mechanick Exercises … Applied to the Art of Printing (1683–1684), the job had only just begun when the writer handed in the manuscript. ⁷ Whereas unforeseen complications and delays might cause frustration, writers were more often daunted by the speedy progress from printer to binder to bookseller, such as when the poet and musician Thomas Campion (1567–1620) marveled at how swiftly his “little booke” of songs (1601) would find its way to the bookstalls of St. Paul’s churchyard in London. ⁸