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Gadd, Ian --- "The Stationers’ Company in England before 1710" [2016] ELECD 463; in Alexander, Isabella; Gómez-Arostegui, Tomás H. (eds), "Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) 81

Book Title: Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law

Editor(s): Alexander, Isabella; Gómez-Arostegui, Tomás H.

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783472390

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: The Stationers’ Company in England before 1710

Author(s): Gadd, Ian

Number of pages: 15

Abstract/Description:

Among the provisions of the 1710 Statute of Anne was a requirement that ‘the Title to the Copy of such book or books hereafter published shall before such publication be entered in the Register Book of the Company of Stationers in such manner as hath been usual which Register Book shall at all times be kept at the Hall of the said Company’. Mention was also made of the Company’s ‘Clerk’ and ‘Warehouse Keeper’ and their duties under the Act. No further explanation was given about what the Company was or what it did, or indeed where its hall, let alone its clerk and warehouse keeper, were to be found. Yet its ‘Register Book’ was identified as the central, and only, record-keeping mechanism for the rights and activities enshrined by the Act. That the ‘Company of Stationers’ needed no glossing was hardly surprising for a trade and craft body whose membership comprised most, but not all, of London’s printers and booksellers; moreover, any member of the London book trade and many of those active outside London, knew exactly where to find the Company’s headquarters, and adjacent warehouses, just off Ludgate Hill, west of St Paul’s Cathedral. However, neither the Company’s size nor prominence fully explains its presence in this statute, because for all that the Statute of Anne may have appeared to be new, many of its provisions were shaped by how the Company and book trade had developed over the previous two centuries.