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  • 38 - The stationers and the printing acts at the end of the seventeenth century

  • from DISRUPTION AND RESTRUCTURING: THE LATE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BOOK TRADE
  • Edited by John Barnard, University of Leeds, D. F. McKenzie, University of Oxford
  • With Maureen Bell, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002, pp 755-776

  • Summary

    The immediate context of the Press Act was the wide-ranging legislative programme undertaken during the first session of the Cavalier Parliament from 8 May 1661 to 19 May 1662, a programme which a recent historian of that Parliament has characterized as 'the reconstruction of the old regime'. The three main concerns of the Act were with what may be called licensing, trade restrictions, and printing rights, which together represent the interests of the government and the Stationers' Company. The licensing provisions of the Printing Act were complex in practice, but simple in principle. There were long lists of specified licensers for various categories of books and elaborate rules on the number of manuscripts to be submitted. The Stationers' 'monopoly' was in fact the thing which most troubled opponents of the Act, though they were concerned, not so much with the Company's near-monopoly control over the working members of the trade.