This major, revisionist reference work explains for the first time how the Stationers' Company acquired both a charter and a nationwide monopoly of printing. In the most detailed and comprehensive investigation of the London book trade in any period, Peter Blayney systematically documents the story from 1501, when printing first established permanent roots inside the City boundaries, until the Stationers' Company was incorporated by royal charter in 1557. Having exhaustively re-examined original sources and scoured numerous archives unexplored by others in the field, Blayney radically revises accepted beliefs about such matters as the scale of native production versus importation, privileges and patents, and the regulation of printing by the Church, Crown and City. His persistent focus on individuals - most notably the families, rivals and successors of Richard Pynson, John Rastell and Robert Redman - keeps this study firmly grounded in the vivid lives and careers of early Tudor Londoners.

An exhaustively researched, radically revisionist account of how the Stationers' Company came to be incorporated and given a monopoly of printing.

Essential reading for print and book historians, this study of Tudor Londoners explains how the Stationers acquired both a charter and a nationwide monopoly of printing. Focusing on the lives and careers of individual book-traders, Blayney also rewrites the early history of book-privileges and press-control in England.

In Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640 Alexandra Hill uses modern digital approaches to bibliography to reveal and analyse the entries of lost books in the Stationers’ Company Register.

As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeare’s time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, of other forms of cultural activity. No account of early modern literary culture is complete without acknowledgment of these lacunae, and although lost drama has become a topic of increasing interest in Shakespeare studies, it is important to recognize that loss is not restricted to play-texts alone. Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time broadens the scope of the scholarly conversation about loss beyond drama and beyond London. It aims to develop further models and techniques for thinking about lost plays, but also of other kinds of lost early modern works, and even lost persons associated with literary and theatrical circles. Chapters examine textual corruption, oral preservation, quantitative analysis, translation, and experiments in “verbatim theater”, plus much more.

Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but many have disappeared altogether. Here leading specialists in the field explore different strategies for recovering this lost world of print.

There has been an explosion of interest in recent years regarding the origin and of intellectual property law. The study of copyright history, in particular, has grown remarkably in the last twenty years, with a flurry of activity in the last ten. Crucial to this activity has been a burgeoning focus on unpublished primary sources, enabling new and stimulating insights. This Handbook takes stock of the field of copyright history as it stands today, as well as examining potential developments in the future.