Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700

The Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700 presents abstracts of documents relating to the book trade and book production between 1641 and 1700. It brings together in one sequence edited abstracts of entries referring to named books, printers, and booksellers selected from the manuscripts of the Stationers' Company Court Books; all references to printing, publishing, bookselling, and the book trade occurring inmajor historical printed sources (Calendar of State Papers Domestic; the Journals of the Houses of Lords and Commons; Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts) ; and entries for contemporary pamphlets. The labour records of the printing and bookselling trades probably represent the fullest account of any work force in early modern England and the printed products of the trade survive in such great numbers that they enable us to examine them for evidence not only of who made and sold them but also of how they were made. These volumes constitute a reference work of importance not only for literature specialists, bibliographers, and historians of book production but also for economic, social,and political historians. Not only do they bring together records from a variety of separate printed sources, thereby making explicit their interconnections, but also they make accessible some less well-known manuscript sources, notably from the Stationers' Company archives. Most importantly theChronology and Calendar extends the earlier work of Arber, Greg, and Jackson on the earlier seventeenth century. As a chronological sequence the volumes meet the need for a preliminary narrative history of the trade in the later seventeenth century; and the provision of title, name, and topic indexes renders this an indispensable reference tool for research into the social, political, and economic contexts of the book trade, its personnel, and its printed output.

...we should celebrate the names of McKenzie and Bell for their Herculean endeavours in the service of bibliographical scholarship., It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this book; all of those involved in it, but particularly Maureen Bell who brought so great a project to completion, deserve our gratitude and our admiration., They are immensely practical, and attractively printed. The amount of labour they conceal is astonishing., No-one whose work involves books printed and published in Britain between 1640 and 1700 can afford to neglect these volumes., These three valuable volumes are a synthesis of projects independently conceived and undertaken by Maureen Bell and the late Don McKenzie between two and three decades ago, and now completed by Bell. They offer a digest of all the references to the book trade and its workers in some of the key printed records for seventeenth-century bibliographical history... They will certainly save researchers a great deal of time and open up new leads. Maureen Bell has done a tremendous public service in producing them.

D.F. McKenzie was the leading bibliographer of his generation, and his Panizzi Lectures on 'Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts' revolutionized Anglo-American approaches to bibliography and the history of the book. He was a most stimulating and influential teacher: at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he was Professor of English Language and Literature 1969-87, and in Oxford, as Lyell Reader in Bibliography and as Professor of Bibliography and TextualCriticism. He was the driving force in the planning of the multi-volume Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, in progress, and his major edition of Congreve, close to completion at his death, is being seen through its final stages by Christine Ferdinand (married to McKenzie in 1994) and isshortly to be published by Oxford University Press. The McKenzie Trust was established after his death to promote excellence in teaching and research and there is an annual McKenzie Lecture in Oxford in June.Maureen Bell was formerly a schoolteacher and librarian, and met McKenzie for the first time in 1987 when he acted as external examiner for her PhD thesis on women in the seventeenth-century book trade. As Leverhulme Fellow at the Institute of Bibliography, University of Leeds (1990-2) she worked on the quantification of English printing 1475-1700 and, with John Barnard, published The Early Seventeenth-century York Book Trade and John Foster's Inventory of 1616 (1994). She haspublished widely on women in the seventeenth-century book trade and was contributor and Assistant Editor to volume IV of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Director of the British Book Trade Index on the Web, funded by the AHRB. Currently Reader in English Literature and Head of the Department of Englishat the University of Birmingham.