26 - Printing and publishing 1557–1700: constraints on the London book trades

Summary

There is still no satisfactory model of the economics of the London trade which usefully structures the dense and complex relationships between writers, printers, booksellers and readers during the hand-press period. At their simplest, the elements are three: the labour force; the materials, and the skills learnt to develop and use them productively; and the national and international distribution of their products. The manner in which all three were financed, the industry’s basic efficiency in selecting works, creating books and selling them, are clearly fundamental.

Yet books are different, not only from one another, but from most other manufactures. For they are, ineluctably, social products whose true value can rarely be stated only in monetary terms. They derive from an unparalleled diversity of human motives and competences, bounded only by what the mind can conceive; they deploy (despite the relatively uniform technologies of paper, type, presswork and binding) a diversity of expressive forms; and they address an exceptionally and reciprocally diversified market for which price is only a crude measure of value. The economics of choice and the applications of use, even in terms of the numbers printed and successive editions, leave us far short of that realm of intangible benefits, whether to author or reader, which any sophisticated economic model must encompass.