Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England by James Raven

Abstract

Reviewed by: Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England by James Raven James E. May James Raven. Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England. People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History, 3. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 334. $29.95 (paper). The title of Mr. Raven’s most recent book on printing and publishing employs “Publishing” as a gerund and “Business” as its object; thus, with its temporal focus in the title, it might seem to have a narrower scope than his longer, occasionally overlapping study The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (2007). Of the many reiterations of its theme early and late, the best may be “the role of the printer in providing material items that served and affected the conduct of trade and finance,” transforming “English commercial and financial practice between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.” More inclusively, the book examines “printing for the commercial world and printing about the commercial world.” Although the latter topic is often the focus of the final chapters, the book’s best contribution to studies of printing and commerce involves the former, and specifically, “jobbing printing,” a term Mr. Raven finds used as early as 1782, and derived from “job” (i.e., a work under a sheet in length). The scholarly neglect of jobbing, the printer’s bread-and-butter, is evident in its absence in my 225-page BibSite bibliography of studies of eighteenth-century journalism 1985–2016. More broadly, Mr. Raven fills the gap in his and others’ studies by showing, with many examples, how the print trade “supplied the means to reshape social and cultural practices and the direction of the economy.” Publishing Business involved a considerable transformation of his 1986 submission (“Print and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Britain”) for a University of Cambridge dissertation competition. Without having examined the original dissertation, I presume much updating and transforming occurs, particularly in the first chapter’s profitable overview, where the footnote references are mostly to post–1986 publications. The second chapter provides the socioeconomic context for discussing the expanding role of print, covering demographics and geography (London vs. the provinces with their expanding cities), the blessings of trade, the creation of the Bank of England and the better directing of wealth to growth industries, transportation, and the like. The third chapter sketches what is known of the printing trade while adding often neglected points about the importance of jobbing, how it provided the bulk of the work and maintained the cash flow for most printshops. Chapters 4 and 5 tackle specific jobbing products and their producers and consumers. Provincial printers and stationers are one focus, covering paper products, including blank or ruled notebooks, ledgers and partly printed forms, tickets, lading bills, posters, subpoenas, warrants, and time-tables, and also non-paper items, quills, ink, frames, and even medicine. Diverse commercial practices, including [End Page 75] many related to the shops’ centrality in distribution circuits, are also discussed; e.g., selling tickets, handling mail, and serving as brokers for employment and real estate. A second focus is the London trade, covering legal and financial instruments like insurance, loan, and excise duty forms, vouchers, lottery tickets, bonds and stock shares, and secure banknotes (involving special papers and other anti-counterfeit measures), and other diverse printed and partly printed materials requiring regularity, authority, and security. Chapters 6 and 7 concern the growth of advertising, particularly in newspapers, describing costs (including stamp taxes), contents, design, and illustration, with subtopics including the impact on newspapers of stamp tax laws in 1712 and 1725 (lengthening newspapers and decreasing advertising font size); the contending roles of the post office and coffeehouses as nodes of communication (putting to good use The Case of the Coffee-Men, 1728); the establishment of provincial and circulation of London newspapers; and the placement of ads from London and from the provinces in each other’s spheres. Chapter 8, “Intelligence,” rather weakly unified, takes up print products related to finance and trade, including commodity price indexes and bills of entry, commercial coverage by newspapers, and printed support of civic construction projects and charitable causes. It notes that commercial journalism reached the provinces...