ABSTRACT
To contemporary observers, as to many historians, the flood of small printed books and broadsides reporting, commenting upon, or even sometimes themselves constituting the news, was among the most extraordinary developments of the era of civil war, regicide, and interregnum. In their first appearance, in spring 1641, these unbound little books were a sign that the old regulatory apparatus of the courts and Stationers willing to assist the government to protect their monopoly had failed, essentially because it had lost its nerve.1 Much of the contents – texts of parliamentary speeches and satires – were familiar enough to those with access to manuscript political culture of the 1620s. By the end of 1641, printed relations of the week’s news – the newsbooks – added another genre to the list of materials crossing the social and cultural divide separating manuscript from print.2 The main novelty here was market availability: what had previously been restricted by cost and by cultural assumption to an elite was now instantly available to anybody with a few pennies to spend.
