ABSTRACT
‘What Age ever brought forth more, or bought more Printed Waste Paper?’ 1 In 1681 the pamphleteer who posed this question was struck by the extraordinary success of the cheap print trade in Restoration England – and he was not alone. Historians have confirmed his perception that the years 1660–1700 saw a huge explosion in the levels of production, distribution and consumption of ballads, chapbooks, almanacs, pamphlets and other products of the rich and varied marketplace of cheap print. In the 1660s almanacs sold at an annual rate of between 300,000 and 400,000 copies and an estimated 90,000 chapbooks were purchased in 1664 alone. 2 This revolution in communications was characterized by the sheer volume, variety, distribution and affordability of print. The work of Bernard Capp, Mark Knights and Angela McShane Jones has done much to illuminate this watershed in the early modern print industry. From the 1660s onwards the marketplace of cheap print had never been more sophisticated or so accessible to so many people.
