During the Renaissance, printing was still a relatively ‘up and coming’ profession with the potential for enormous growth, provided you produced quality products and developed good relationships with influential booksellers.
In Europe, this meant regularly attending key events such as the Frankfurt Book Fair and networking with the various bookshop owners, writers and fellow printers who attended from all over the continent.
In England, printers organised themselves into early forms of trade unions as a way to ensure the continuation of quality practices, and help to protect the profession free from imposters. Indeed, from the 15th century onwards, English printers were considered to be master craftsman who studied via apprenticeships to learn their trade and were then granted a licence by a professional association. In England, this was done via the Company of Stationers, formed in 1403. This was one of over 100 livery companies operating in England, each representing a specific profession or trade.
Much like stonemasonry, this wasn’t initially the case. According to the Stationer’s Company:
600 years ago, most craftsmen in London were itinerant. However, the manuscript writers and illuminators decided to concentrate their efforts and set up stalls or ‘stations’ around St Paul’s Cathedral. Because of this, they were given the nickname ‘Stationers’ and this was the obvious choice of name for the guild they established in 1403.
When printing came to England in the late 15th century, the Stationers had the good sense to embrace it and we have continued to adapt to the many changes in the Communications and Content industries ever since.
Tradition & Heritage – A History of the Stationers’ Company
It’s fair to say that printing took a little longer to catch on in England than Europe. Separated from continental Europe by the English Channel, England’s book market was relatively small compared to those of markets like Paris, Strasbourg and Frankfurt. It was not until 1475 that William Caxton established the first printing office in the British Isles within the precinct of Westminster Abbey.
Originally a cloth merchant from Kent, Caxton acquired a press and learned the trade in Cologne before opening a printworks and bookshop in Bruges. He worked from Belgium until 1476, when he brought the printing press to England. Settling in Westminster outside of London, he began printing works in English by local authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and Thomas Malory.
Caxton’s influence on the English language, histories of reading, and the history of the book cannot be overstated. He is a particularly interesting figure for researchers studying the relationship between the illuminated manuscript culture of the medieval monasteries and the more commercial and mechanised print culture of fifteenth-century England.
HISTORY OF THE STATIONERS’ COMPANY
In 1403, the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London approved the formation of a fraternity or Guild of Stationers (booksellers who copied and sold manuscript books and writing materials and limners who decorated and illustrated them). By the early 16th century, printers had joined the Stationers’ Company and by the mid-century had more or less ousted the manuscript trade. In 1557, the Guild received its Royal Charter and they became a livery company, numbered 47 in precedence.
The Charter gave the Company the right to search for and seize illicit or pirated works. All new titles were entered into series of ‘entry books of copies’ which became known as the Stationers’ Company Registers. Company ordinances of 1562 provided that members had to both obtain from the Wardens a licence to print any work not protected by Royal Grant and enter that licence in the Company’s register. The Stationers’ Register became the written record to which disputes regarding the ownership of copy could be referred. Succeeding copyright legislation confirmed Stationers’ Hall as the place where the right to copy should be entered. Compulsory registration finally terminated in 1923.
History of the Stationer’s Company
This is important, because it enables us to trace some of the printed works as well as the individual printers responsible for these, which in turn, enables us to better understand the history of the various Green Man blocks, which were essentially, printer’s insignias or early trademarks.
PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS
It would be wrong to think of printer as working class tradesmen, however – not only were they master craftsmen, but many were also publishers and booksellers too, which meant that they had an enormous influence over which books and ideas were disseminated and also which writers gained additional credibility through being widely published.
In his 2022 book called Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade, Dr Ben Higgins challenges any preconceived ideas about how stationers shaped literary culture using the example of Shakespeare’s folios. In so doing, he outlines:
- How printers constructed versions of ‘literariness’ and textual authority;
- What the interpretive life of the minor Shakespearean bookseller might be;
- How the topography of publication could shape a book’s fate.
In Chapter 2: Prudentia – The Jaggard Publishing House, he looks specifically at the influence of William and his son, Isaac’s influence role in printing and publishing Shakespeare’s First Folio.
Chosen by the folio’s editors, John Heming and Henry Condell, William and Isaac Jaggard are well known as the printers of the First Folio. However, it is important to understand that they were also the book’s publishers, who had already built up a reputation for producing fine work of high quality books that were ‘encyclopaedic in scope and authoritative in content’ – books that readers would have assumed ‘were destined for libraries.’ This alone would have given the First Folios additional weight, and is probably one of the reasons that the Jaggard Publishing house was chosen, despite the fact that Jaggard had earlier produced pirated copies of Shakespeare’s works, and in some cases, had misattributed certain protestant and puritan-related works to the Bard such as the Passionate Pilgrime and the 1619 collection of ‘Jaggard Quartos.’
However, Higgins is at pains to highlight that the Jaggards were part of a ‘syndicate’ – a team of London stationers who worked together to produce what would become the First Folio of Collected Works which included:
- William and Isaac Jaggard (the former, by then deceased, and the latter identified on the colophon under the title of the printing house)
- Edward Blount
- John (Master) Smethwick, and
- William Aspley.
Much like the Huguenot printers of Geneva, it was thanks to collaborative networks within the book trade that many literary works not only enjoyed success, but also acquired what Higgins calls ‘textual authority’ – in other words, a certain literary weight they might not otherwise have had.
Higgins’ aim, ultimately, was to restore the important role that printers and publishers played in creating and marketing this landmark volume, partly because he felt that ‘the success of the First Folio has resulted in [the stationers’ contributions] being almost entirely effaced’ and that their contributions needed to be brought back into the light, so to speak.
Trail of the Green Man 