6 - The customs rolls as documents for the printed-book trade in England

Summary

Records, like the little children of long ago, only speak when they are spoken to, and they will not talk to strangers.

The earliest examples of European printing, the primitive Mainz editions of the Ars minor of Donatus – all fragmentary in their survival – may well have been produced for sale more or less within the region; the localizations and provenances of the bindings in which they were preserved as waste material suggests that this was the case. The Gutenberg Bible of 1454–5, however, was sold much more widely – to or through Erfurt, Leipzig and Brixen; Cologne, Bruges, London and Lübeck; and into Alsace, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Austria and Sweden. The names of Cologne, Bruges and Lübeck suggest that even in these primordial years of the new bookmaking technology, long-established Hanseatic trading routes played a significant role in the distribution of copies. Such long-distance distributions became a characteristic feature of European printing, and the development of major printing towns – Venice, Paris, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Cologne and others – was closely connected with their existing and growing dominant positions within the network of European trade.

England’s participation in this great movement was for long neglected. Only in relatively recent years has it become clear to a number of historians that the importation of early printed books into England was not an interesting sideline, but a primary factor in the history of the English book-trade. No quantitative estimates have as yet been made, but through the end of the fifteenth century, and well beyond, a printed book purchased in Britain would just as easily bear a continental imprint as a domestic one.