ABSTRACT
The Company is neither one of the oldest nor one of the wealthiest, and it has seldom been important in City politics. But its association with the printed word (particularly with that part which is now called English Literature) and its employment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the government's press watch-dog have given it an importance of a different kind; moreover, by the Act of I 710, registration at Stationers' Hall was a prerequisite in any attempt at the legal establishment of copyright. The statutory embodiment of a practice which printers and booksellers had invented more than 150 years earlier for their own purposes was one of the incentives for continuing adhesion among members of the book trade during the eighteenth century; but it was only one. We shall best get at the others through an analysis of the various groups which formed the Company of Stationers at different times during the century and through a study of the resolutions of the governing body, with an eye particularly to signs of a deliberate policy of "the Stationers' Company for members of the book trade".
