PETER W. M. BLAYNEY, The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London, 1501-1557, 2 vols.

Abstract

FOR quite a long time those who work in the Early Modern history of the book have told each other untruths or semi-truths, have relied on unverified or unverifiable records, and have created a story of the Stationers’ Company which is seriously inaccurate. A clue to the problem for English book history before Mary I’s granting the Stationers a charter of incorporation on 4 May 1557 can be seen in the title of the book under review: ‘the Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London’. That ‘and’ indicates how we have misunderstood things for quite a long time. Blayney’s two volumes are a masterful and detailed correction of many of the common and entrenched views. In the ‘Preface’ Blayney is at pains to state our current difficulties. He demonstrates the errors made by three giants in this field, H. R. Plomer, Cyprian Blagden, and W. W. Greg, and notes that their eminence will cause their errors to be repeated by others unless they are corrected, and so he has ‘chosen to take arms against a sea of muddles, and by exposing, mend them’ (xx). And his method is to actually go out and search the records, be they guild, civic, parish, or any other surviving records. Alas, the earliest records held by the Company date only from 1555 (membership records) and 1557 (legal and official records) and so Blayney must go further afield, much further afield, since the Company was first officially organized in 1403, and he is at some pains to determine the correct meaning for the title ‘stationer’ as it was in use from the beginning of the fifteenth century until incorporation. What Blayney does tell us is that at least until the introduction of printing in England those in the company were text writers, sellers of manuscript books, as well as some blank books and, in some amount, binders. In other words, they were in the book trade but they were not the book trade, and those scholars who have held that there was some sort of general and systematic growth of the trade and the company in tandem which made the charter of 1557 inevitable have simply been engaged in wishful thinking without recourse to real evidence.