Script & Print 33:1–4 (2009) 45–60 © 2009 BSANZ [ISSN 1834-9013]

The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642

John Emmerson

The period 1640–42 has long been recognised as a watershed for English history and bibliography. Historically, it was the time when relations broke down betweenCharles I and his administration, on the one side, and Parliament, on the other, and a civil war, marked initially by lofty ideals on both sides, erupted. This confl ict produced a vast pamphlet literature of argument, justifi cation and news, and an urgent need amongst contemporaries for access to it. Bibliographically, one of the problems for later generations has been to bring some order and understanding to this pamphlet literature when examining it after two to three centuries have elapsed and when the urgency of debate and the need for news have abated.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bibliographers generally avoided the problem by leaving the study of English pamphlets produced between 1641 and 1660 alone. The British Museum’s catalogue of early “English” books was limited to books printed up to 1640.1 The same terminus ad quem was used by Edward Arber in his Transcript of the Register of the Stationers’ Company.2 Falconer Madan’s The Early Oxford Press 3 also concluded at 1640. Madan explained his decision to stop there as partly following the British Museum catalogue and Arber, “partly because the interest in the products of the press as such was found to be rapidly diminishing,and partly in consequence of the break-up of all quiet progress during the convulsions of the Rebellion, combined with the dismal prospect of that trackless wilderness—the literature of the Civil War.” 4

Similarly the original Short-Title Catalogue came to an end at 1640,5 and this led to the division between “STC books” (English books up to 1640) and “Wing Books” (English books 1641–1700).6 I remember Mr E. M. Dring of Quaritch telling mein the late 1960s that I would fi nd serious books in the STC but much less impor-tant ones in Wing.

1 Catalogue of Books in the Library of the British Museum Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, to the Year 1640 (London: British Museum, 1884).2 A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London … 1554–1640, ed. E. Arber, 5 vols. (London: privately printed, 1875–94).3 Falconer Madan, The Early Oxford Press: A Bibliography of Printing and Publishing at Oxford “1468”–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895).4 Ibid., p. vii. Madan later relented. He published two further volumes in 1912 and 1931 respectively, taking his bibliography up to 1680. 5 A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1926).6 Donald Wing, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 3 vols. (New York: Printed for the Index Society by Columbia University Press, 1945–51).

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Figure 1. Year book for Michaelmas Term in the fi rst year (1483) of the reign of Richard III. This page was printed in about 1559.

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Two principal reasons emerge for the reluctance of some bibliographers to apply the conventions they had developed for the study of English pamphlets printed up to 1640 to those printed after that year.

First, there was the sheer number of pamphlets published in the fi rst few years after 1640. The bibliographical techniques which had been workable when applied to pamphlets from the period up to 1640 became too cumbersome when dealing with the larger number printed after that date.

Second, the subject matter, often dealing with the increasingly complex and conceptually diffi cult disputes before and during the English Civil War, becamemuch less approachable. Thus the pamphlets produced were not only more numer-ous than the corresponding literature from an earlier period but also more diffi cult to relate to each other in a logically satisfying way. Of course, all these distinctions are those drawn retrospectively by later bibliographers. But the important question is whether there was anything which even in its own day could be seen to makethe pamphlet trade at the time of the Civil War different from the pamphlet trade of earlier periods.

In this paper I shall suggest that the English Civil War posed problems for the contemporary pamphlet trade and that these problems caused or contributed to changes in the trade itself.

It is convenient to begin with the start of that trade. Although much less well known than some of the more literary publications produced at the same time, a substantial number of pamphlets published in the very earliest days of English printing were legal year books. The name “year books” may suggest something that was published regularly in an ordered sequence with some offi cial status, but this was not the case. The text of the year books was derived from notes and comments relating to legal matters made unoffi cially by unidentifi ed writers and subsequently perpetuated and distributed in manuscript copies. The quality of the text, the detail of the facts and comments recorded and the amount of text produced per year all varied widely. Nor, when printing in England commenced, was there any attempt to publish year books in chronological order or to ensure that contemporary texts were printed rapidly. In many instances, the text was printed decades or even a century after it had fi rst been written. However, this relaxed schedule helped to make year books, considered as articles of commerce, relatively easy for the book trade to produce.

There were many year books, but for most years they were quite short. The text was readily available and could be printed and published as and when it was convenient to do so and in whatever order was convenient. There was a pre-existing, if rather small, group of potential purchasers. The purchasers presumably knew pretty well what they were buying, and it does not appear to have been necessary to make any special effort to promote any particular year books in the market place.

With short, pre-existing texts and no particular time constraints for production and sale, year books were an almost ideal makeweight to keep the presses busy when

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Figure 2. Pamphlet published in January 1641/2 following the unsuccessful attempt by the King to arrest some Parliamentary trouble makers for high treason.

The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642 49

there was a lull in the supply of more urgent or important copy. This is refl ect-ed in the year books themselves. Each book comprises a small number of sheets printed in folio without any title page, decoration or description beyond a caption title identifying the reign and the year and term to which the text relates and with a colophon identifying the printer. This format required essentially no new book-design work and no effort to produce an attractive layout to persuade customers to buy. Figure 1 shows the fi rst page of the year book for Michaelmas Term in the fi rst year (1483) of the reign of Richard III. The text had been copied by hand for several decades before it was printed. The page here reproduced was printed by Richard Tottel in a four-leaf pamphlet in about 1559.

This form of publication remained substantially unchanged for the many years during which year books were printed and published. It was presumably satisfactory and well adapted to its function. However, the business model (to use a modern expression) that worked for year books would not necessarily work for the printing and publication of other short texts. The reason was that in most cases the customer would need more information about the substance of the text before making a purchase. Further, as the number of publications increased, it became harder to dis-tinguish one from another for commercial display in the bookshop. As a result, the retail trade found it increasingly desirable to do more to differentiate one pamphlet from another and to attract the attention of potential purchasers.

The solution was to adopt a form of the pamphlet that had dominated the trade for a long period and that had become well established long before the 1640s. Such pamphlets were usually produced in a small-quarto format comprising one or a small number of sheets. The recto of the fi rst leaf was typically given over to information about the character and contents of the rest of the pamphlet and to encouraging the customer to buy. One or a small number of words were printed in a large fount or founts easily legible from a distance, somewhat in the manner of newspaper headlines at the present day. There was also typically some description of the contents of the rest of the pamphlet, usually printed in a smaller fount. In a few cases, there was an illustration, generally an unspecifi c one that could be used for more than one text (see Figure 2). Thus the format was adapted, fi rst, to attract the attention of potential purchasers and, second, to give them at least a general idea of the contents of the pamphlet.

In the years 1640–42 the circumstances of publication changed radically. This can be seen in the number of titles coming from the press. Over the period 1588 to about 1638 the output of the press had risen from about 260 publications per year to about 600.7 This increase in output occurred at a slow and relatively steady rate, and it is reasonable to assume that the book trade was able to adjust suffi ciently rapidly to cope with it. However, in the period immediately before the Civil War,

7 These numbers and the numbers of publications set out in the following two paragraphs come from Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163–65.

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Figure 3. The crowded title page of a pamphlet published on about 2 July 1642.

The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642 51

all this changed. Relations between the King and the Parliament broke down, offi cial control of the press became ineffective, and questions about the proper foundation of government in England were hotly debated. News and opinion about these matters were eagerly sought and apparently equally eagerly produced.

The result was a sudden and rapid increase in the number of publications. In 1640 the number was 848, in 1641 it was 2,042, and in 1642 it was 4,038. From 600 to 4,038 is a roughly sevenfold increase. From 848 to 4,038 is a roughly fi ve-fold increase. Then, equally abruptly, the number of publications dropped over the next year or two to about 2,500, a decrease of roughly 38 per cent. These changes related in part to circumstances external to the book trade itself, namely the devel-oping political and military confl icts.

When the fi gures are examined more closely, however, it is by no means clear that they can be explained simply on the basis of press reaction to the quantity of news and opinion available to be described and printed. In particular, why did byfar the largest press output take place in 1642, which included only the earliest stages of the Civil War, with a sharp fall to 1643 and the following years when the war was in progress and there were many battles and further political developments to be reported and discussed? If the fi gures gave a true measure of the importance of what was going on militarily and politically, a more likely outcome would be a sharp rise to 1642 followed by a further increase in 1643 or, at the least, a similar output in 1642 and 1643. This analysis suggests that other factors may have been at work and, in particular, that one should examine the book trade itself to see how constrained it was in its reaction to external events.

First consider the composing and printing of type. The amount of labour re-quired would be roughly proportional to the length of the text and the number of sheets printed. If the increase in the number of publications referred to above were matched by an increase in the throughput (number of pages set and printed) of the printing houses, this could place severe strains on the trade. For the skilled and labour-intensive tasks of composing and printing, it is by no means clear that the throughput could have readily increased roughly fi vefold in the course of two or three years. However, the number of titles composed and printed could have increased by this amount provided that the pamphlets concerned were on average shorter in the same proportion. Thus there could be, for example, a fi vefold increase in the number of pamphlets printed by a press provided that each pamphlet was itself only one-fi fth as long as its predecessors and so required only one-fi fth of the labour to compose and print. Without knowing precise fi gures, I suggest that a large part of the increase in the numbers of titles produced in the early 1640s may have been achieved without increasing the throughput of the printing houses and that this could be done by greatly increasing the proportion of short pamphlets produced.

Support for the view that a great many of the titles that appeared in the 1640s and 1650s are slim pamphlets can be found by examining volumes from the period

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Figure 4. First number of Certaine Informations, published on 23 January 1643.

The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642 53

and, in particular, the Thomason collection, which includes a high proportion of the titles produced in these years. The collection comprises 22,255 pieces bound in 2,008 volumes, or about 11 pieces per volume. Many of these pieces are very slim. There may be even more pieces per volume for the year 1642. For this reason, I do not think that the great increase in the number of titles produced by the press in London in the early 1640s requires us to conclude that there was a corresponding increase in the throughput of the printing houses during that period.

However, the methods for distribution and sale would have required more sub-stantial changes. If pamphlets were sold by displaying them in shops, then a fi vefold increase in the number of pamphlets sold would presumably mean a fi vefold increase in the number of pamphlets on display. Five times as many title pages would have to be designed to distinguish each pamphlet from the others, and the purchaser would have to choose from a much larger range on offer. If the same amount of text is dis-persed through fi ve times as many pamphlets, fi ve times as many choices must be made and fi ve times as many pamphlets purchased. Alternatively (and more likely) the purchaser would simply buy a smaller proportion of the total output. From the commercial point of view, trade would become less effective. Looking at it another way, in order to buy one copy of all 4,038 pamphlets published in 1642 would re-quire about eleven transactions per day for every day of the year. This suggests that it is not only bibliographers who faced what Madan described as “the dismal prospect of that trackless wilderness—the literature of the Civil War.”

The problem for the stationer in using the fi rst pages of pamphlets to distinguish one pamphlet from the others would be compounded even further if he tried to deal with several different topics in a single pamphlet. For example, Figure 3 shows the title page of a pamphlet published in July 1642. The main text is only about fi ve pages in length. However, the title page, printed for the most part in smaller type than the main text, identifi es about six different topics. This suggests that the printing-house practice which led to as much information as possible being put on the title page had seriously miscarried if its purpose was to encourage the purchaser to distinguish and buy.

We can see with the benefi t of hindsight that something had to be done to im-prove the distribution and sale of pamphlets in 1642. In fact, whether consciously or not, something was done, and it was done most strikingly in about the fi rst half of 1643—that is, immediately after the sharp rise in the annual number of titles printed that occurred in the previous year. Not surprisingly, the change was an improvement in the method of distribution and sale. Instead of each pamphlet taking a form that had to be assessed individually by a potential purchaser, more use was made of a technique that had already been in existence but had not been very widely used in this context, namely publication in serial form. The advantages of this technique can be illustrated by an example. In January 1643, weekly publication started of a four-leaf periodical with the caption title Certaine Informations From severall parts of the Kingdome, for the better satisfaction of all such who desire to be truly Informed (see

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Figure 5. First number of Mercurius Civicus, published on 11 May 1643 and showing a title page crowded somewhat in the manner of some separately issued pamphlets of the time.

The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642 55

Figure 4). The title is, no doubt, cumbersome, but it takes up less than half of the fi rst page of a four-leaf publication, leaving the rest to be tightly packed with text. The pamphlet was distinguished from other pamphlets in the same series by its number, prominently printed in the top right-hand corner of the fi rst page. The period to which it relates was also described, but in smaller type. The design was well adapted to the market place, with the caption title being all that was necessary to recognise the pamphlet on the book stall. Successive numbers were distinguished clearly, and maximum space was available for the main text. Furthermore, the pamphlets in the series were published weekly on a fi xed day. Thus the customer who wished to purchase later numbers knew when and where to do so. He was encouraged to buy and preserve the whole series by the use of sequential numbering of pamphlets, sequential pagination and sequential signatures.

The text of Certaine Informations consists of reports from various parts of the country, with about two pages devoted to Monday and about one page per day to Tuesday to Saturday inclusive. There were 57 numbers (450 pages) in all, issued between January 1643 and February 1644. The whole can be bound in a volume about three centimetres in thickness. Production of this series required predictable and relatively small amounts of work in composing and printing. Further, once cus-tomers became established there was minimum work (and minimum use of space on the fi rst page) required to achieve further sales.

Certaine Informations is a well-disciplined work, and the author remains notably self-effacing. His reports typically include the words “it is informed that” or “they write that.” His tone is initially mildly anti-Cavalier, but, like much writing during this period, becomes more strident with time. By July 1643, he is referring to the “Cavaliers’ new blasphemies” and by October he is suggesting that the Cavaliers have been drinking a health to the devil. Most stridently of all, he attacks “Mercurius Aulicus,” the ostensible author of one of the principal rival news pamphlet series.

Mercurius Aulicus started publication in January 1643, the same month as Certaine Informations, and continued weekly publication until September 1645. It claimed to be a response to a “weekly cheat” already in publication. The tone is much more conversational than that of Certaine Informations (“we must tell the reader …,” and “we must begin this week with a correction …”). It is more conservative in tonebut more lively, and typographically it is more extravagantly produced than Certaine Informations. Each number may comprise one, one and a half or two sheets, and some pages are blank or partly so. Like Certaine Informations, it uses sequential num-bering of pamphlets, sequential pagination and sequential signatures.

In May 1643, about four months after publication of the fi rst numbers of Cer-taine Informations and Mercurius Aulicus, another weekly news sheet was started with similar ostensible aims. This was Mercurius Civicus, sub-titled Londons Intelligencer: or, Truth really imparted from thence to the whole Kingdome, to prevent misinformation. The opening passage of the text explains the need for a continuation of weekly in-telligence and adds that it will occasionally “refute the presumptuous untruths …

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Figure 6. Second number of Mercurius Civicus, published on 18 May 1643 and showing a caption title of a form that became common for Civil War news periodicals.

The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642 57

of Mercurius Aulicus.” Again it is a weekly publication, but limited to one sheet and published on Thursdays.

The fi rst few numbers of Mercurius Civicus show an evolving title page. The fi rst title page (Figure 5) is crammed with information but has the words “LONDONS INTELLIGENCER” set out prominently in large capitals. The second number (Figure 6) makes much more effi cient use of space and indeed is similar in layout to Certaine Informations and Mercurius Aulicus. It identifi es the number of the issue in the top right-hand corner and has a small headline in the top left-hand corner. Then come the name of the series and the dates of events described in the number. The remainder of the page (about two-thirds of the total) consists of text.

Over the next few numbers, the layout of the fi rst page was changed to accom-modate small woodcut portraits of the principal characters referred to in the text (Figure 7). These illustrations would have given the pamphlet a more attractive and unusual appearance when it was displayed in a shop, but they make it rather more extravagant in its use of space. The new arrangements allow only about one-fi fth of the fi rst page to be used for text. Like Certaine Informations and Mercurius Aulicus, Mercurius Civicus has sequential numbers, signatures and pagination to encourage purchasers to buy and preserve a complete set.

As a fi nal example of an early weekly Civil War news periodical I shall mention Parliament Scout, which was published weekly from June 1643 to January 1645. In sharp contrast with Certaine Informations, the Parliament Scout is given an active (if largely fi ctitious) persona. The fi rst number explains that the Parliament Scout has been solicited by friends to give a weekly account of some of the daily occurrences. Much of what he reports purports to be fi rst hand. Sometimes he is a single scout, sometimes one of many. Sometimes he encounters much action, sometimes verylittle, and sometimes he arrives too late at the scene to be able to report what hap-pened. He meets with various military commanders but is sometimes much dis-couraged that he cannot speak the truth without being suspected of bias. But he is tenacious. Once, being at a loss to know where Prince Rupert is, he sets out like a good scout to fi nd him and report what he fi nds.

The periodicals mentioned above are only some of the longer-lasting ones beginning publication in the fi rst half of 1643. The selection is limited to those that continued publication for at least one year. Many others were started in the 1640s, but most lasted for a notably shorter time. For example, Figure 8 shows the title page of the fourth and last number of Mercurius Morbicus, or, Newes from Westminster and other Parts. It is another single-sheet publication with an issue number in the top right-hand corner and a small headline in the top left-hand corner, followed by the title and a statement of the period to which the number relates. However, the weakness of Mercurius Morbicus lies in its subject matter, which is mainly devoted to attacking a rival, Mercurius Melancholicus. In retrospect it is not surprising that it was short-lived.

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Figure 7. Eighth number of Mercurius Civicus, published on 20 July 1643 and showingthe rather more attractive layout adopted for the balance of the series.

The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642 59

Figure 8. The fourth and last number of Mercurius Morbicus, published on 27 September 1647.

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It will be seen that the single- or double-sheet small-quarto Civil War news periodical was suffi ciently fl exible, when used in a disciplined way, to occupy much of the commercial ground previously occupied by many independent pamphlets. Clearly it could not, and did not, take over the whole of this ground. But the circumstances of the Civil War made the news periodical attractive to purchasers, and there were good commercial reasons why it was in some respects a better way to distribute news and opinions. A measure of its success is that single pamphlets (not parts of a series) did not return to their 1642 numbers during the seventeenth century, whereas, by contrast, news periodicals have fl ourished to the present day.

For these reasons, I suggest that the following inferences may be drawn, at least tentatively. In the years leading up to 1642, and in particular in 1642 itself, the English book trade in pamphlets was placed under considerable strain by a rapid rise in the number of news and opinion pamphlets. This growth did not necessarily increase the amount of work required for composing and printing; however, it did greatly increase the amount of work required for effi cient distribution and sale of pamphlets.

In 1643, the number of single news pamphlets produced by the press in England decreased substantially. However, several reasonably long-lived news periodicals started at the same time. This change in emphasis from single pamphlets to news periodicals did not necessarily reduce the work required for composing and printing the text, but it did provide a greatly improved method for distribution and sale. The legacy of these changes continued at least to the end of the seventeenth century.

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