London and the provinces

The relationship between the London book trade and the provinces was for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conditioned by the power of members of the London Stationers’ trade in controlling printing and distribution. The relationship was, however, by no means one-way: London apprentices to the Company were, from the outset, predominantly drawn from outside the capital; bookbinders, booksellers and stationers in several towns and cities were already well established by 1600; and, although early attempts at printing outside London and the two university cities were minimal and exceptional, the end of the seventeenth century saw the beginnings of a provincial trade in printing which was to flourish in the eighteenth. Thus, though the dominance of the London book trade over the whole of England and Wales was formally established by the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, that dominance was never complete, was continually challenged, and by 1695 was being significantly modified.

The main role of the provincial book trade in England and Wales from 1557 to 1695 was the distribution of vernacular books printed and published in London (which had little or no market outside Britain) and the sale of school books in Latin, printed either in London or abroad. Small in scale compared to other trades in provincial towns, the book trade rarely gave rise to its own guild, though York bookbinders and stationers obtained a charter in 1554, and in Chester stationers formed a guild with painters, glaziers and embroiderers as early as 1534.