Stationers Assignment

Overview

You have been assigned a single early modern London stationer (a printer, a publisher, or a printer-publisher). The majority of them are men, but a few are women. I will give you a photocopy or scan of the entry for that stationer in vol. 3 of The Short Title Catalogue. Each entry begins with the authority name for that printer or publisher. Next, we have a summary of the information that we know about the person. Finally, we have a chronological list of the extant editions printed or published by that person.

Using all the print and digital resources available to you, write a bio-bibliographical entry for your person. Your entry should be about 750 to 1000 words. More than four pages is too long for publication on MoEML. Fewer than three pages suggests that you haven’t done enough research.

Likely resources include: the Short Title Catalogue (in Special Collections), Early English Books Online, the English Short Title Catalogue, the MLA International Bibliography, The British Literary Book Trade, 1475-1700 (bundled with other digital reference works in the Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography), British Book Trade Index, Shakeosphere, Hamnet, English Broadside Ballad Archive, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, The Oxford Companion to the Book, LUNA, your TA, and your professor.

Note that Shakeosphere allows you to search the stationer’s name and generate a list of STC numbers. The results (which are dynamically generated from ESTC data) should be the same as the list in vol. 3 of the print STC. There isn’t yet a way to link directly to the search results in Shakeosphere (but I will ask the creators to add this feature!).

What to Address

Your entry should address the following questions:

• What names did your stationer use? Use the authority name for the stationer given in the Short Title Catalogue. Make a list of any variant spellings and forms of the name that appear in the imprint line.
• What was the stationer’s trade? Printer, publisher, and/or bookseller?
• At what London addresses did the stationer work? What was the sign of the shop? How do we know?
• If this information has survived, with whom did the stationer apprentice? When was he “freed” from apprenticeship? If applicable, whose stock and rights did he inherit or purchase? Did his stock and rights pass to someone else? (Give this information in list form. There’s no need to turn it into prose.)
• With which other stationers did your stationer regularly collaborate? (E.g., if you are working on a printer, for which publishers did he regularly print texts?)
• Are there patterns in the genres, topics, and physical formats represented in your stationer’s output? If yes, what are they? (E.g., Nicholas Okes rarely printed folios. He printed a number of playbooks and almost all of the mayoral shows.)
• Was your printer embroiled in any scandals? (E.g., Okes was involved in a short, acrimonious partnership with John Norton.)
• Did your stationer write any addresses to readers? Did any authors write addresses to your stationer? (E.g., Playwright Thomas Heywood dedicated An Apology for Actors to Nicholas Okes, praising his care and industry in printing.)
• Did your stationer hold any official position (such as Printer to the City of London)? Did he hold the rights to any “steady sellers” or do any printing for the Stationers’ Company?

What to Include

• Images: See below for suggestions.
• Embed a map of the stationer’s known addresses using the selection and downloading tools in MoEML.
• Support answer with evidence from imprint lines and/or colophons.
• Include STC numbers in your parenthetical citations.

Organization of your Entry

See a very rough sample entry for Nicholas Okes. Use these headings to organize your findings:

Biographical Information

London Locations and Shop Signs

Print Output

Networks

Scholarship

Sources

Images

Images enliven a web page greatly and provide ocular proof to support your claims. We cannot use images from EEBO. However, if your stationer is represented in the UVic collection, you are welcome to take a photograph of the title page, imprint line, or any other page/detail you want to showcase. Another great source for open-access images is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Image Collection (LUNA). Follow their instructions for acknowledging the Folger’s ownership of the image. (I suggest the following shortened text: Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.)

Sources

Working with early modern primary sources, citing from non-authorial paratexts (like title pages), and writing for the digital environment all challenge our traditional modes of citing our sources. The MLA Handbook provides no guidance on most of these challenges. MoEML has anticipated some of these challenges; however, in working with students on this assignment I am seeing places where even MoEML needs to come up with a new citation rule. In every case, therefore, come back to the Three Rules of Citation.