4 - Commercial Production and the Implications of Periodicity

Summary

As we have seen, London publishers drove forward a period of rapid innovation that established periodical news production at a time when demand was so high that they could scarcely keep up with it. They went on during the 1620s and 1630s to embed the trade within the print industry and through news dissemination networks. Understanding their role involves looking at their reasons for collaboration and at how these related to capital investment, output and distribution. Initially, considerable known demand for news must have bolstered their determination to overcome obstacles. However, sustaining the periodical trade involved a number of new challenges that made it speculative and risky. For this enterprise to work, news supply mechanisms needed to be secure, production needed to be speedy and one issue had to be moved out of the publishers’ premises and sold before the next was available, usually within a week. These considerations created unique pressures in an industry where, hitherto, timeliness had not been a significant concern and where the means of supply and distribution needed to be adapted to the demands of regular news. Publishers selected the printers, supervised production and worked to expand sales through other booksellers, street vendors and carriers who took copies out beyond London. Understanding the constraints of the business can help us to assess the possible scale of production, while looking at costs, retail prices and wages helps us to assess how affordable newsbooks were and the potential for sales beyond the London market.

The publisher’s role in production

The publishers’ work involved business correspondence with contacts in Europe and England and careful accounting. As business records were destroyed in the Fire of London, often the closest evidence available is from the accounts and records of publishers in other cities, such as Paris. One consequence is that few historians have ventured into this area, though many have studied the printer’s business from a technical production perspective. More recently historians have taken an interest in the mechanisms of distribution, greatly expanding our understanding and appreciation of how potentially pervasive the print media had become by the early seventeenth century.