ABSTRACT
Yet surprisingly little is known about the printers and the working practices that underpin these – and lesser – books and authors of the period in question. One of the earliest collections of printing house documentation to have survived is that of the Cambridge University press in the 1690s, but even then, the extent to which the workings of a large academic printing house can be used to augment our knowledge of smaller and earlier London businesses remains relatively untested.2 Nonetheless, even in the absence of documentation, some nearHerculean eorts have been made to shed light on the work of London printers: to cite three of them, Peter Blayney in 1982 produced volume one of textual scholarship that positioned the printing of the 1608 edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear in relation to the printer, Nicolas Okes, and Okes’s printing practices
and schedule.3 More recently, in 2009, Graham Rees and Maria Wakely published their archive-based research into King James I’s printers; and Lukas Erne in 2013 published various quantitative studies on Shakespeare and the book trade.4 But the majority of English printers and printing house production from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have not been investigated, despite what such studies can tell us: through textual research it is possible to edit the printed texts of More, Newton and Shakespeare (because the number and type of perceived textual deciencies made in a printed text can be traced); it is also possible to identify the printers for books where printers are unnamed; to identify the impact of a printing house on cultural practices and the public consumption of generic literature; and, as a concomitant of textual work, it is possible to contribute to discussions of printed morphological changes to the English language. In short, textual studies promote sixteenth-and seventeenthcentury printers in terms of their cultural and intellectual contributions and the collaborative enterprise of printing.
