The Press and the London Book Trade

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers the relationship between the London book trade and the university printers and the university press at Oxford. It pays particular attention to the Stationers' Company, the London-based organisation that dominated the book trade from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The chapter analyses how Joseph Barnes, appointed university printer in 1584, developed links with the London trade, and how he and later university printers gained access to the Stationers' Register. It traces the series of agreements negotiated between the University on the one hand and the Stationers' Company and other London booksellers on the other over the printing of ‘privileged’ books, including the bible, from 1637 onwards. Apart from a period of legal dispute in the later seventeenth century, these agreements provided increasingly significant income for the University, until they were rendered effectively void by the overturning of the Company's almanac monopoly in 1775.