A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade, 1641–1700 begins with an entry from the Commons Journal, 4 January 1641, ordering the appearance of Richard Overton on charges of false printing; it closes, 1,400 pages later, with a scattering of book news from December of 1700. Between lies a wealth of information about books and the book trade, about the sociality and economics of printing and selling, about the behavior of guilds and their members, and, among successive regimes, the widespread anxiety over the interrelations of print, persuasion, and public order. It is clear that the filter of officialdom—state papers, official orders, government declarations, trial transcripts, records of the Stationers’ Company, and correspondence between and among secretaries of state, the surveyor of the press, and officials of the universities and the church—determines what kinds of texts, persons, and events come into view in the Chronology. The filter selects on behalf of transgression: it highlights sedition, libel, and calumny, and brings to our attention searches and seizures, spying and scouting, the impounding of presses, the destruction of print, the burning of books, and all the furtive work of dissent. But even allowing for the evidentiary bias, it is hard to think that anyone interested in the period between the civil wars and the end of the seventeenth century would not find these volumes immensely useful. Print was at the heart of a good deal of public life in the later seventeenth century, and the Chronology gives us ways of exploring its workings that we have not previously had. Calendared by day, month, and year and equipped with indexes of persons, titles, and topics, the Chronology is remarkably companionable for this variety of work. It is true that most of the entries are drawn from printed sources, many of which have been available for a long time and some of which are well known to those working in the period, but by collecting, collating, calendaring, transcribing, and indexing these entries McKenzie and Bell have given us what is, in many ways, a new tool for understanding a remarkable period of political, social, intellectual, and literary history.

One of the central lessons of the Chronology is the potency of print. In the world that McKenzie and Bell reveal, authorship, print, and publication were understood as forms of political agency and not only in a symbolic sense. This lesson may have been obscured in recent years by work on the manuscript traditions and oral culture of early modernity, but the Chronology returns our attention to what can seem a nearly “epidemical fear” of typeface (1:353). Throughout these years, and under successive regimes, government officials displayed a profound sensitivity to the securing of privileged information and communication, and the Chronology documents the measures officialdom took to maintain secrecy, discover leaks, and effect the surveillance of the press. At every turn, and with an armory of papers and pamphlets, factious spirits were stirring rebellion and “poisoning the obedience” of subjects (1:33). Such fears were naturally highest in moments of political crisis, but the Chronology offers plenty of evidence of a nearly continuous official anxiety over many forms of print and of the sustained effort to regulate print by banning books, destroying presses, and humiliating, fining, and jailing printers, binders, sellers, and consumers. We have been told of the unevenness and ineffectuality of censorship in the early modern world, of the lack of a police force to give muscle to censorship, but the Chronology suggests a different story: not only of the deployment of justices of the peace, captains, officers, provost-marshals, constables, wardens, and messengers to effect and enforce regulation and censorship but also of a spectacular and steady stream of public burnings of books, often by the common hangman, and of the use of the pillory to intimidate printers and sellers. This seems a world less of mediation and modulation—of writing and reading between the lines—than of the massive proliferation of print, of the steady confrontation between officialdom and dissent, and of judicial violence.

Print was feared as an instrument of sedition, but it was also understood as an agent for asserting legitimacy, sustaining order, and forming what we have come to call public opinion. Early in the new republic, the Commons suppressed “all Primers, formerly used in the Time of Kingship in this Nation” (1:296), and ordered hundreds of copies of the Act prohibiting kingship and thousands of copies of narratives of the battle of Worcester dispersed into the counties (1:299). In the Restoration, official proclamations were widely distributed by the crown, sermons sanctioned by the king were ordered to be printed and published, and of course the work of the Poet Laureate was not only officially sanctioned and salaried (if intermittently), but on occasion fashioned at the suggestion of courtiers, and of the king himself. Just prior to the Glorious Revolution, pamphlets justifying the Prince of Orange's expedition were scattered in London, and news of William's deployment of a printing press at Exeter reached London on 20 November 1688 (3:47).

The Chronology gives us then a vast amount of information with which to think about the intersection of print and public affairs. It also allows us to gain a highly particularized sense of the operations of the press and of both the regulated and improvised ways in which print circulated through London—not only the trade's commercial mechanisms, but also the surreptitious scattering of dangerous and dissident matter. And the Chronology reveals other practicalities of the trade: the number of copies that likely made up an edition, the kinds of paper available to printers, the uses of ornament and design, the commissioning of notes and annotation, and the specialized knowledge of London agents and sellers about the market for books and the prices it sustained. We learn of hawkers, peddlers, criers, and mercuries; about the inventories of dealers, and, in general, about the great busy-ness of the press and the efforts of the Stationers’ Company to preserve its own rights and privileges, and to police its economic interests.

There is an abundance of detail in these volumes, but as important is the broader sense they offer of the book trade as a discursive field, one with a highly differentiated vocabulary for print and for its agents. Such a vocabulary not only reflects the significance of the subject but also the nuance and sophistication with which it was understood to operate. We ourselves talk of authors, publishers, and booksellers; in the seventeenth century those terms were used but also the lexicon of actors, framers, contrivers, dispensers, receivers, concealers, promoters, advisers, stationers, printers, peddlers, hawkers, vendors, and criers. In part such a vocabulary reflects the practices of early modern retailing, but it also reveals how differentiated was the marketplace of print and how complex a set of social hierarchies—as well as laws—governed its conduct.

Social hierarchy, of course, was the foundation of early modern patronage, and the Chronology provides fascinating detail about the ways in which patronage worked. What may surprise are the anecdotes that suggest how very speculative were gestures of clientage, how often works of learning or literary ambition were dedicated merely “in hope of advantage” (2:41), or somehow to attract attention, or simply to unload extra copies of books: “bread and encouragement” (1:602) were neither widely, nor evenly, nor predictably distributed. And while there is not much direct information in the Chronology about canonical texts and authors, it is wonderful to catch a glimpse of humanist practices in the reference to Heinsius “diligently search[ing] all the libraries in Italy to obtain the MSS. Codexes of Ovid” (1:383), and bracing to come across, in the same year (1656), the Lord Mayor of London's order that all copies of a new translation of Martial be seized and burned (1:385). The odd combination of scattered attention and occasional violence reminds us of literature's paradoxical position among the millions of printed sheets, pamphlets, and books published in this age: modest visibility but subject to striking acts of attention and destruction. And to read—in the context provided by the daily business of producing, selling, and regulating books—of the Commons’ request to the King in the summer of 1660 that John Milton's Pro populo Anglican defensio and Eikonoklastes be burned and that Milton be “sent for forthwith in custody by the Sergeant-at-Arms” (1:435) is to understand these events as less remarkable than biography or specialized study often suggest, more part of the ebb and flow of print, its networks of affiliation, and its fluctuating rules and personalities. It is also interesting to discover how large a role John Dryden's uncle, Sir Gilbert Pickering, played in the annals of print in the 1650s, when he was repeatedly involved in matters having to do with the book trade and with publishing, and hence a more likely avenue of Dryden's entry into the world of print than students of the poet have appreciated. And further, to review the flurry of print surrounding the rumors of Charles II's marriage to the Duke of Monmouth's mother, including the Black Box narratives, is newly to appreciate Dryden's strategic defense of profligacy in Absalom and Achitophel as well as his insistence—however regretful—that there was one and only one legal marriage within the royal household.

The Chronology and Calendar is remarkable for its anecdotes and information but as well for the way it collates and collects—and hence makes usable—so much primary material. These volumes, expertly and handsomely produced, are a tribute to the skill and dedication of D. F. McKenzie and Maureen Bell and to their publisher. It is unlikely that the Chronology will be left in coffeehouses or scattered in the streets, or even discovered at the bookseller’s, but it will circulate widely and enjoy many years of use.