I was rambling on my mind Monday when I asked myself, "when was the first font specimen anyway?" Searching found William Blades book on early specimens of England, which also has one possible answer to my original question, 1616. But as I read through Blades, I found the Star Chamber's law limiting the English type industry to, like 16 people and 4 foundries. Does anyone know what brought this on?
0
Comments
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/search.asp
K, I have not read the proceedings of the Star Chamber. I'm not sure they would uplift my spirits It's just one thing: what event, or series of events, made them try to, or think they could, stop the English from being type founders? It didn't work, obviously, only lasting four years, I think.
Limiting the number of suppliers of type strikes me a similar to efforts to control access to typewriters in 20th Century totalitarian regimes.
Further regulation by rulers was a way to manage (i.e. censor) the publication of dissent, as were newspaper taxes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areopagitica
Karl and James, Thanks those were great reads. John, that they had control over the publishing trade, you are right on, it being so small, and crappy, and through the Tudors, they didn't have many readers. But the control turned to oppression when foreign printers came and then the writers couldn't be controlled.
Underlying English law then, I did not know, is that groups of workers not functioning as part of a state-sanctioned company were a criminal conspiracy. And one could be punished for printing a business card much more severely than having your disk eaten by coke. The control of writers lasted until the civil war, with parliament no longer willing or able to control the opposition writers, as the monarchy had to, and the church relatively too fragmented to do more than control the more threatening fringes, like e.g. the Puritans, who eventual won out on the platform promising god on the side of all printers, even atheists, and government in the business of printing everything, with regulation of practically nothing.
If I got that seriously wrong just hit the disagree button and I'll keep trying. I got on to this, because one of those conferencing organizations called to ask if I had any ideas. I started talking about my experiences participating in the first wave of democratization in publishing as it ran through Spain, Central and South America and then Eastern Europe and Russia, followed by the wave of democratization in type development along a similar course. This got them very excited, but I realized I only have a vague notion of the details of what happened from Caxton to the Declaration of Independence, which I wouldn't want to miss.
But now my research has become much more interesting to me intellectually than any presentation I'm interested in giving.
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1164213/?site_locale=en_GB
At any rate, one of the most astonishing books I’ve ever read.
I was particularly impressed that his method of quantitative analysis offers a very different picture of literary culture than the traditional canon—which corresponds (albeit loosely) with my perspective on the canon of design history.
I recently read The Putney Debates of 1647: the army, the Levellers, and the English state, which includes an interesting account both of the sheer volume of pamphleteering and ephemeral printing during that period and what seems to have been an effective 'media blackout' with regard to the debates themselves. Like Areopagitica, the Putney debates are now considered to be hugely significant; at the time, very few people even knew that they had taken place.
____
On the subject of the Putney debates, here is an image of the painted inscription now in St Mary's church, where the debates took place.
"about the Puritan platform", I mean their eventual platform in America. The congregations had fled by the 1630's I thought, to the Netherlands and later New England. So before either Areopagitica or Putney, which I'm trying to read now, they had found relative freedom of the press for themselves.
[If the link doesn't work after a week, check the In Our Time archives.]
Evelyn Waugh's biography of St Edmund Campion has a fascinating section on the secret printing and distribution of Campion's Decem Rationes in 1581. The Jesuits had managed to set up a clandestine press at Henley, and conspired to have 400 copies of Campion's pamphlet left on the benches in St Mary's church, Oxford, on the day of the university Commencement service. Given the sensation this provoked, and the renewed government efforts to capture and execute Campion that it inspired, I suspect this kind of thing is directly associated with the Star Chamber efforts to control access to printing and typesetting technologies.
The 'Levellers' of the Civil War period produced pamphlets at an extraordinary, blog-like rate. I've got a collection of them published by Cambridge in 1998. They have magnificent titles—A remonstrance of many thousand citizens (Richard Overton, July 1646), An arrow against all tyrants (Richard Overton, October 1646), Gold tried in the fire (William Walwyn, June 1647), England's new chains discovered ('Freeborn John' Lilburne, February 1649)—and Overton penned what I think is the greatest address to members of parliament ever made: _____
The distribution of dissident publications is always fascinating, and often terrifying considering the penalties faced: from protestant martyrologists under Queen Mary and Catholic apologists under Elizabeth, to samizdat distribution in the Soviet Union. The opening fifteen minutes of Sophie Scholl: the final days captures it all brilliantly and tragically.
There were surely short, tract-like texts earlier, on religious and political subjects, likely emerging first from the universities and the network of humanist scholars, but I think you are right that printing gives birth to the pamphlet proper or, to put it another way, a pamphlet is in part defined by a significant number of cheaply produced copies.