A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700

Book excerpt: The Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700 presents abstracts of documents relating to the book trade and book production between 1641 and 1700. It brings together in one sequence edited abstracts of entries referring to named books, printers, and booksellers selected from the manuscripts of the Stationers' Company Court Books; all references to printing, publishing, bookselling, and the book trade occurring in major historical printed sources (Calendar of State Papers Domestic; the Journals of the Houses of Lords and Commons; Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts) ; and entries for contemporary pamphlets. The labour records of the printing and bookselling trades probably represent the fullest account of any work force in early modern England and the printed products of the trade survive in such great numbers that they enable us to examine them for evidence not only of who made and sold them but also of how they were made. These volumes constitute a reference work of importance not only for literature specialists, bibliographers, and historians of book production but also for economic, social, and political historians. Not only do they bring together records from a variety of separate printed sources, thereby making explicit their interconnections, but also they make accessible some less well-known manuscript sources, notably from the Stationers' Company archives. Most importantly the Chronology and Calendar extends the earlier work of Arber, Greg, and Jackson on the earlier seventeenth century. As a chronological sequence the volumes meet the need for a preliminary narrative history of the trade in the later seventeenth century; and the provision of title, name, and topic indexes renders this an indispensable reference tool for research into the social, political, and economic contexts of the book trade, its personnel, and its printed output.