Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period

Alice Broad was York’s first female printer and, for a time, the only printer in York following the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1661. Very little is known about Broad, and this chapter draws on archival research from the holdings of York Minster Library, which houses eleven of her seventeen extant publications. Broad’s career also underwrites the later development of York’s print trades. Alice’s tools and presses went with Hannah Broad into her marriage with John White and became the foundation of his own extremely successful printing business. Alice Broad was among White’s first collaborators in York and both she and her daughter would have provided the future ‘printer to their Royal Majesties’ (William and Mary) with materials, expertise, and connections in the regional trade. The unique position of York forms an important backdrop to Broad’s career as a city that is both central and regional. This chapter is the first in-depth exploration of her career in the history of York’s print trades.

This chapter focuses on the historical and autobiographical writings of Thomas Gent (1693–1778), a prominent printer in eighteenth-century York. It considers several of his major works: his History of the Famous City of York (1730) and History of the Magnificent Great Eastern Window (1762), in dialogue with his autobiography, Life of Mr Thomas Gent, Printer, Of York (1746), and a pamphlet, The Contingencies, Vicissitudes or Changes of This Transitory Life (1761). In his historiography, Gent celebrates the grandeur and honour of his region: the historical city of York and the county of Yorkshire. His life writing, on the other hand, presents an acrimonious picture of his life in the city and his rivalries in the print trade. Where these may appear to be separate genres, the historiography is inescapably infused with the life writing. Gent’s works have barely been studied but this chapter positions him as a print trade author among other print trade professionals whose own writings typically intertwine the articulation of their professional identity with their cultural output.

This chapter surveys the various activities and outputs of a late eighteenth-century press managed by Joseph Gales out of Hartshead Square, Sheffield. Founded in 1787, the press is best remembered for producing two radical newspapers, The Sheffield Register, edited by Gales, and The Sheffield Iris, edited by Gales’ protégé, James Montgomery. These papers are well recognised as making a significant contribution to the development of regional news culture. They are less well known for functioning as part of a broader business model which saw Gales’ wife, Winifred, managing a bookshop in Hartshead Square whilst Gales also used his press to furnish the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information (SSCI) with books, pamphlets, appeals, and other items of political ephemera. In sourcing texts from London and reprinting or selling them in York, Gales actively shaped Sheffield’s literary and political culture. However, his output sees him perpetually obscuring his own agency, disguising a discrete strategy that prescribed as much as it described the character of his Sheffield readers.

Ann Fisher (1719–1778), author of bestselling grammatical textbooks, co-founded and co-edited with her husband, Thomas Slack, the Newcastle Chronicle. Though she worked alongside him, and sometimes independently, in their Newcastle print shops, Fisher’s work as a printer-publisher remains underexplored. This chapter demonstrates her role in printing and publishing John Cunningham’s Poems, Chiefly Pastoral (1766 and 1772) and her own Ladies’ Own Memorandum-Book (1764–1778), unique in being the only women’s pocket book produced by a woman in this period. Drawing upon manuscript archives of correspondence in the British Library, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, and the National Library of Scotland, this chapter provides a rare insight into the professional practice of a female printer and publisher within a family business.

Broadsides, chapbooks, and other small books carried across England and Scotland by itinerant pedlars were sold in the streets, at markets and fairs, and even door to door. They were also available from small retail premises or directly from printers. This chapter looks at one collection of 283 chapbooks made by Miss Elizabeth Davison in the Northumberland market town of Wooler during the early nineteenth century. These are predominantly song chapbooks, covering the full range of Napoleonic War songs, ‘Scotch songs’, alongside lyric, sentimental, and pastoral pieces, local and topical songs, folk songs and ballads, as well as other eighteenth-century narrative ballads. Their provenance shows that publications from Scottish printing centres outnumbered those from Newcastle and other English centres, indicating just how integrated was the cheap print trade in Scotland and the north-east of England. Davison’s collection, though empirically substantial, does not readily fit into a book trade model such as Robert Darnton’s ‘communications circuit’ because the cheap print trade seems to have been characterised as much by trial and error as by feedback mechanisms. The model put forward by Thomas Adams and Nicholas Barker, which concentrates on events in the life of a book, is more applicable.

In 1590 James VI granted the ‘priviledge’ of the office of Royal Printer to the exiled English stationer Robert Waldegrave. Until James’ removal to England in 1603, this decision defined the direction of the print trade in Edinburgh, resulting in the marginalisation of native printers, more widespread anglicisation of printed Scots works, and an overall decline in the Scottish print trade. This chapter will fundamentally reassess the role played by James VI within the Scottish print trade, and the impact his patronage and personal engagement with the press had on the print trade in Edinburgh between 1567 and 1603. It will explore how James’ involvement shaped the nature of the industry by examining the way in which the King’s interests reoriented aspects of the trade towards England rather than the continent, privileged ‘foreign’ stationers, and as a result left the industry in flux on his removal to England in 1603.

This chapter explores how parallel regional, civic, and commercial imperatives were manifested in two publishing ventures on either side of the Border in the late eighteenth century, qualifying recent histories of the British newspaper press that emphasise distinctive Scottish and English national press contexts in the period. The chapter maps how John Mennons and John Gore, the respective editor/publishers of the Glasgow Advertiser and Liverpool General Advertiser, used their newspapers as print vehicles for civic and regional economic development with an explicit focus on the material and commercial needs of the business communities in the expanding urban regions of Glasgow and Liverpool. These included a common concern for the modernisation of regional transportation infrastructure, the expansion of overseas trade, the development of civic-regional commercial improvement networks—the latter embodied in their publicity roles for the Glasgow and Liverpool Chambers of Commerce, founded in 1783 and 1774, respectively. The chapter concludes by highlighting how both newspapers were linked to supplementary publishing ventures anatomising the civic-commercial institutional cultures of Glasgow and Liverpool through a comparative assessment of Jones’s Directory (1787) and Glasgow Almanack for 1790, published by Mennons, and Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1781, 1790).

This chapter examines how and why foreign languages were manifested imperfectly, or not at all, in books printed in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It shows how the affordances of Latinate typographic technology did not accommodate other languages without concessions being made. The first half of the chapter identifies and characterises a trope in which printers explained, in paratexts written to the reader, that they lacked the correct fonts. Different solutions to this lack are then surveyed, showing that a reliance on mixing media and fonts led to the conspicuous othering of languages on the page. These improvisations are described as ‘kludging,’ and the second half of the chapter shows that kludges in English language texts can be read as a shibboleth of English identity in a Latinate context.

Towards the end of the letterpress era, jobbing printing across the Midlands was widespread. In the skilled hands of the provincial printer, sans serif printing types were composed into new forms of advertising, contributing to the education and societal orientation of the emergent middle and working classes. The nature of what they produced, and the design of what they printed, transformed how information and ideas were exchanged: the ephemera that have survived record these changes. A rising number of jobbing printers increasingly issued commercial and display work, rather than books or newspapers, and their products contributed to social, cultural, political, and economic life. This chapter focuses on the rise of jobbing printing in the nineteenth century, when sans serif display types were first produced. Using Birmingham as a case study, it considers the expansion of jobbing printing in relation to the population growth of the Midlands and investigates how sans serif typography contributed to the regional voice of the Midlands.

This essay situates the collection in the ongoing critique of the overly broad concept of ‘print culture’. It argues that print agency must be reconceived beyond the individual, within larger social, political, technological, and economic frameworks. Additionally, an examination of regional print reveals new figurations of ‘place’, grounded in the material facts of geography, but also a discursive construction. Understanding the regional as part of a network of places and ideas highlights how the smallest locale is implicated in global flows of power. Finally, the Afterword concludes with ideas for future study.