Bookselling at Paul’s Churchyard Author Dominic Carlone Markup Editor Kate LeBere Data Manager Tye Landels Junior Programmer Joey Takeda Programmer Martin Holmes Associate Project Director Kim McLean-Fiander Project Director Janelle Jenstad The Map of Early Modern Londonhttp://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/includes.xmlVictoria, BC, Canada
Department of English P.O.Box 3070 STNC CSC University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada V8W 3W1
2016University of Victoria978-1-55058-519-3 Janelle Jenstad london@uvic.ca

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By 1597, St. Paul’s was used not only as a church; it was the chief centre of the book trade, not only for London, but for the whole country (Mumby 45). Booksellers on Paternoster Row became a source of competition in the latter half of the century, eventually winning the prominent position in London bookselling, but Paul’s maintained its supremacy well into the seventeenth century.

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 Updated legacy encoding. Standardized respStmts for JENS1, MCFI1, and HOLM3 and added TAKE1 as Junior Programmer. Added XInclude for listPrefixDef in the header. Added global publicationStmt through XInclude. Eliminated superfluous catRef elements from the header. Put change elements inside revisionDesc into the correct (latest first) order. Added profileDesc containing document type information expressed in catRef elements. Converted @rend to @style, through XSLT transformation. Transformed existing byline elements into a respStmt element in the header. Left byline elements in place for the moment. Added front element with docTitle as part of a normalization process. This will be used as the definitive page title on rendering. Created file, transfered content from original location in STPA2. Bookselling at Paul’s Churchyard

As the title page of the first Quarto of Richard III shows us, the printed version of Shakespeare’s play was sold by Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the Signe of the Angell, 1597. Viewing the title pages of many plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, one is likely to find similar inscriptions. By 1597, St. Paul’s was used not only as a church; in fact, one might say it was used not even primarily as a church. It had become the bookshop of London.

Parts of the cathedral and its surrounding areas had been used as markets since the fourteenth century. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, St. Paul’s Churchyard was the chief centre of the book trade, not only for London, but for the whole country (Mumby 45). Booksellers on Paternoster Row became a source of competition in the latter half of the century, eventually winning the prominent position in London bookselling, but Paul’s maintained its supremacy well into the seventeenth century.

The bookshops at Paul’s were populated largely by foreign booksellers in the sixteenth century. England did not have its own printing press until the 1490s, and in 1484 Richard III had passed an Act of exemption to foreign printers, encouraging them to bring their trade to London. The central settling point for these booksellers was Paul’s.

Foreign competition angered the members of the English printing organization, the Stationers’ Company, which did not obtain its charter until 1557 (Mumby 47). Through a series of government interventions, control was shifted from the foreign printers to the Stationers’ Company during the course of the century. By Shakespeare’s day, power was firmly within their hands. Before a Shakespeare play could appear in the shops at Paul’s, it had to be approved and registered in the Stationers’ Register.