Stephens was apprenticed to London Stationer and printer Thomas Ratcliffe on 5 April 1658. He completed his apprenticeship in 1666 and worked briefly as a journeyman printer. Stephens was elected to the Livery of the Stationers’ Company in 1682 to general outrage, in a move by the Stationers’ Company to manipulate Lord Mayor elections. He rose to notoriety as a 'Messenger of the Press', simultaneously serving the office of Secretary of State and enforcing the rights of the Stationers' Company to search and seizure. Midnight raids upon the premises of his colleagues, earned him the nickname of 'Robin Hog'. Stephens was known for his corruption, violence, and taking bribes. Stephens also served the Company as an all-round handyman. He was performing search and seizure duties from 1677, and first appeared with the title of Messenger in 1679. He was active as Messenger of the Press between 1679 and 1684, and again between 1689 and 1712.
In 1603, King James VI & I issued letters patent to the Stationers’ Company for printing and publishing almanacks, psalters, primers, and some schoolbooks. These works were in perpetual demand and so formed the lucrative basis for a joint stock company, known as the English Stock.
The formation of the stock had two nominal purposes: to provide work for printers ostracised by former divisive printing monopolies, and to provide pensions for the Company’s poor members. Members of the Company were entitled to purchase shares, the number and value of which depended upon their rank within the Company. With a near guaranteed return year on year and often large dividend percentages, competition for stock shares were fierce. The limited number of shares, only 105 on the creation of the stock, meant only a fraction of the Company was sharing in these profits. Over the centuries, there were various challenges to the stock’s monopoly, with one of the more notable cases recorded in the archive coming from printer Thomas Carnan.
The Stock was dissolved in 1961. Partner shares were replaced with life annuities.
The Rivington family was one of the most important book-trade dynasties in England from the early eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The Rivingtons' connection with the book trade begin on 7 June 1703, when Charles [i] Rivington (1688 – 1742) was apprenticed to London Stationer and bookbinder Emanuel Matthews. On 6 October 1707 he was turned over to the bookseller Awnsham Churchill. Charles was formally freed in 1710, and in 1711 bought the premises and business of the recently deceased Richard Chiswell, who had been at business at the Rose and Crown at St. Paul’s Churchyard. Charles married Eleanor Pease (d. 1753) and had 13 children, of whom only six outlived their father.
Charles Rivington became the leading theological publisher in London. After his death on 22 February in 1742, the publishing business went to John [i] Rivington (1720–1792) and his younger brother James Rivington (1724–1802). For several years Samuel Richardson guided John (who was simultaneously freed and elected to the livery of the Stationers' Company on 1 June 1742) as he carried on the business for his mother, James, and himself. In 1743, with Richardson's help, John married Elizabeth Miller Gosling (1723–1792), sister to Francis Gosling, bookseller, banker, and later lord mayor of London. James was freed and elected to the livery of the Stationers' Company on 3 December 1745, and the two brothers were then in partnership until 1756 as J. and J. Rivington. They held equal shares in such works as Richardson's Pamela and Miller's Gardeners' Dictionary.
James was elected a renter warden of the Stationers' Company in 1752 and on 6 June 1754 received a £40 share in the company's English stock. Following the dissolution of the brothers' partnership on 6 March 1756, he set up a new business with the Oxford bookseller James Fletcher junior, based at the sign of the Oxford Theatre in Paternoster Row, near Cheapside. Their most profitable undertaking was the publication of Tobias Smollett's Complete History of England. However, James was also pirating the works of several of his fellow Stationers. The injunctions they brought against him, combined with the losses he sustained in underselling his competitors and his own personal gambling debts, forced the Oxford Theatre partnership into bankruptcy on 3 January 1760. Later that year, James emigrated to New York with his wife and children. He continued to pursue quick profits and incur ruinous debts in a series of ill-fated exploits, and during the American War of Independence, he contrived to fall foul of both sides of the conflict. He remained in New York after the war, and died in poverty.
In London, John flourished, and brought into family business two of his sons: Francis [i] Rivington (1745–1822), his eldest, and Charles [iii] Rivington (1754–1831), the next eldest surviving. By 1778 no fewer than seven members of the Rivington family—John, James, their brother Charles [ii], and four of John's sons—could claim to be members of the livery of the Stationers' Company.
With the death of John [i] in 1792, the firm was restyled as F. and C. Rivington. Both Francis and Charles rose within the Stationers' Company ranks: Francis was elected to the court of assistants on 6 May 1800, ultimately serving as master of the company for 1805–6; Charles, for many years a stockkeeper of the English stock, entered the court on 7 April 1812, and became master for 1819–20. Francis was also a governor of Christ's Hospital and a director of the Union Fire Office.
In 1810 Francis and Charles brought in Francis's eldest son, John [iii] Rivington (1779–1841), publisher, and the firm became F., C., and J. Rivington. After Francis's death in 1822, the publishing firm was styled C. and J. Rivington until 1827, when the two eldest surviving sons of Charles joined the establishment: George Rivington (1801–1858) and Francis [ii] Rivington (1805–1885). In 1839 John [iv] Rivington became a partner in the firm, and on 17 November 1841 his father, John [iii] Rivington, died at Lewisham, London. In the following year George retired because of poor health.
Reduced in both professional expertise and fortunes, in 853 the family moved the business firm west from St Paul's Churchyard to the family residence at 3 Waterloo Place, keeping only some warehouses in Paternoster Row. George died in 1858, and in the following year Francis [ii] retired from the business. He was succeeded in the business from 1859 by his partner and cousin John [iv] Rivington, who remained with the firm until 1866, and by his own eldest son, Francis Hansard Rivington (1834–1913). In 1867, Francis was joined in the business by his brother Septimus Rivington (1846–1926). Francis Hansard and Septimus divided the business between them, with Francis Hansard taking care of theological publishing and Septimus developing a new area of publishing for the firm, educational books. However, differences between them led to Septimus dissolving the partnership in May 1889, and becoming a senior partner of the publishing firm Percival & Co. In June of the following year Francis Hansard sold the family business to Longmans. While the family name did re-emerge when Percival & Co. became first Rivington, Percival & Co. in 1893 and then Rivington & Co. from 1897, the sale in 1890 to Longmans marked the effective end of the Rivington family publishing business.
Charles [ii] Rivington (1731–1790), born on 19 June 1731, the youngest son of Charles [i] Rivington, was the first of the Rivington printers. He was bound to Samuel Richardson on 5 August 1746, turned over on 5 December 1749 to the printer Richard Reiley, and freed by Richardson on 4 September 1753. He was elected to the Stationers' Company livery on the same day. From 1753 he took over at least some of the printing that Richardson had been carrying on for the Rivington publishing firm. This began a collaboration between the printing and publishing branches of the Rivington family that continued for many years. Charles [ii] served as a renter warden in the Stationers' Company for 1760–61, and as under-warden for 1788–90. A member of the City's common council, Charles [ii] served briefly as the City printer for 1771–2; he was also printer to Christ's Hospital, printing music from 1787 to 1789.
Thomas Rivington (1752–1767), the son of Charles's brother John [i] Rivington, was bound as an apprentice to Charles [ii] in 1766 but died in Jamaica the following year. Thomas's brother John [ii] Rivington (1756–1785) was apprenticed to Charles [ii] on 6 March 1770 and freed on 26 March 1777. John [ii] thrived as a printer, and in 1781 his brother Charles [iii] helped him obtain the post of printer to the Society for Promotimg Christian Knowledge.
Upon John's death, his wife Anne Rivington (1756–1841) took over the business, until it was eventually turned over to John Marshall and Deodatus Bye. The business passed into the hands of the Gilbert family, who in 1830 brought in as partner William Rivington (1807–1888), the fifth and youngest son of Charles [iii] Rivington. The firm became Gilbert and Rivington, the name by which they were known until 1907. For most of this period, Gilbert & Rivington carried out all printing for the Rivington publishing firm. With Richard Gilbert's death in 1852, William continued alone until 1863 when he took into partnership his nephew Alexander Rivington (1837–1917), the fourth son of Francis [ii]. The last forty years of the printing firm's existence saw Alexander bring in William's elder son, William John Rivington (1845–1914), but when Ernald Mosley joined the firm in 1875, William John left to enter publishing, becoming a partner in the firm of Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington until 1891. Alexander himself retired in 1878. In 1881 Gilbert and Rivington became a limited liability company, and in 1907 the firm was sold to Clowes & Sons Ltd.
The Rivington family has had long associations with the Stationers’ Company. It provided four successive generations of Clerks to the Company between 1800 and 1957, and by 1983, twelve Rivingtons had served as Master of the Company. The Clerk of the Stationers' Company held an important legal and administrative position within the Company, and the Rivingtons who served as Clerks (Henry Rivington (1765–1829), Charles [iv] Rivington (1806–1876), Charles Robert Rivington (1846–1928) and Reginald Thurston Rivington (1881–1971)) were all practicing solicitors.
Danter’s reputation is stained to this day by his responsibility for the ‘bad’ quarto of Romeo and Juliet. His career in the book trade, however, had a promising start. He was bound to one of the most prestigious printers of the day, John Day, in 1682. Day, though, died only two years later and it took four long years for Danter to be turned over to a new master, Robert Robinson. In the intervening period, Danter with a group of other printers engaged in pirating two grammar books. They were caught and banned from ever becoming master printers. Fortunately for Danter, two years after being freed, the Stationers’ dismissed the restriction and he was allowed to set up in partnership William Hoskins and Henry Chettle in 1591. The partnership was short-lived and Danter ventured out as an independent printer, specialising in broadside ballads and helped by a close working relationship with satirist Thomas Nashe. In 1594, Danter entered the quarto edition of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in the Company Register. Yet without lucrative patents and struggling to find work, Danter resorted to piracy. In 1597, the same year that he printed the ‘bad' quarto of Romeo and Juliet, his premises were raided and his press seized and destroyed for printing the Jesus Psalter.
Carnan was born in Reading, son of the printer William Carnan. However, when his father died shortly after his birth, his mother married the journeyman John Newbery and the family moved to London in 1744. Carnan worked in his stepfather’s business with Newbery’s nephew, Francis. He was refused the freedom of the Stationers’ Company in 1755. Following Newbery’s death, Carnan and Francis entered a publishing partnership. They specialised in publishing hugely popular diaries, calendars, and pocket-books, which, in their contents, were remarkably similar to that of an almanac. The Stationers’ Company, feeling their monopoly over almanacs threatened, issued an injunction against Carnan to cease selling these works. Carnan answered them in court and in 1775, the case was found in his favour. However, he was not so successful in challenging the monopoly of the King’s Printers nor in preventing increased stamp duty on sheet almanacs. When Carnan died in 1788 and no doubt against the deceased’s wishes, the executors of his state sold his almanac interests to the Stationers’ Company.
Jacqueline and Thomas Vautrollier arrived in London as Huguenot refugees from France. They set up as printers in London in the 1560s. Jacqueline played an active role in the Vautrollier printing business. When her husband Thomas was working in Edinburgh, she ran their printing house back in London. Despite the Vautrolliers not being free of the Stationers’ Company through special permissions and patents, even after Thomas’s death, they maintained a steady flow of publications. In 1588, the widowed Jacqueline is reported to have printed a Greek New Testament and Martin Luther’s Commentarie on Galatians. In 1589, Vautrollier married her husband’s former apprentice, Richard Field. She was therefore likely involved in the impressive line of works known to be produced by Field at this time, including the poems of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.
Baskett was apprenticed to the stationer Edward Darrell from 1682 to 1690. As a young stationer, he secured various lucrative contracts to supply paper to the university press at Oxford as well as the Treasury and Customs House. Baskett’s career shifted dramatically after 1710 when the patent for King’s Printer expired. The former patentees owed Baskett over £8000 and he manipulated this debt to acquire a half-share in the King’s Printer patent. He built on this success to become Queen’s Printer in 1712 as well as securing more lucrative patents, including a share in the Queen’s Printer in Scotland patent and a share in the Oxford University printing monopoly. At the peak of his powers, Baskett served two terms as Master of the Stationers’ Company. He carefully guarded his privileges and brought nearly 40 cases against infringements. The patents did not come without any risks, however, and in 1729 Baskett was declared bankrupt. It took him seven careful years to regrow his finances. He died in 1742 and was able to leave substantial legacies and patent rights to his family.
Samuel Bentley was born on 10 May 1785. He was the eldest surviving son of Edward Bentley (b. 1753), publisher and principal of the accountant's office at the Bank of England, and his wife Anne Nichols, only sister of the printer and publisher John Nichols (1745-1826). Bentley was educated at St Paul's School, London alongside his nephew John Bentley. Upon leaving school on 4 June 1799, he was apprenticed at Stationer's Hall to his maternal uncle John Nichols. Nichols had been apprenticed at Stationers' Hall on 6 February 1759 under his Master William Bowyer (1699-1777) and after serving his apprenticeship, Nichols was taken into partnership with Bowyer in 1766. The Nichols family were printers and publishers. With Bentley's father Edward, John Nichols published the 'General Evening Post' and on his own he printed, published, edited, and contributed articles to the 'Gentleman's Magazine'. His firm printed the House of Lords Journals and were appointed printers of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society. He was one of the agents behind the first complete publication of the Domesday Book in 1783. John Nichols was active in the Worshipful Company of Stationer's throughout his career and he was made Master in 1804.
Bentley served his apprenticeship with Nichols and took on his younger brother Richard Bentley (1794-1871) as an apprentice at Stationer's Hall on 6 December 1808. Bentley entered into partnership in the firm of Nichols, Son, and Bentley in April 1812. In 1819 Bentley left the firm and joined his brother Richard Bentley in inaugurating the printing and publishing firm of S. and R. Bentley, located at 107 Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, London. This enterprise rapidly established itself as among the best printers in London. In 1829 Richard Bentley withdrew from the firm. Bentley took on his nephew John as junior partner and in later years the firm expanded to become Bentley, Wilson, and Fley, with larger quarters at Bangor House, Shoe Lane, London.
Bentley edited John Nichols' 'Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century' (1812-16) and Robert Surtees's 'History … of Durham' (1816-40). In 1816 Bentley edited and wrote Latin prefaces for 'Concio de puero Jesu', composed by Desiderius Erasmus and dedicated to the headmaster of St Paul's School, London. Bentley's major antiquarian work was the 'Excerpta Historica', a quarterly periodical reissued as a royal octavo in 1831. Bentley was assisted in this compilation by notable antiquaries: Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas (1799-1848); Sir Charles George Young (1795-1869), Garter king of arms; William Henry Black (1808-1872); and Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy (1804-1878), deputy keeper of the Public Record Office from 1861. Bentley helped Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas prepare for private publication the 'Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy' published in 1832. In 1836 Bentley printed for private circulation 'An abstract of charters and other documents contained in a cartulary of the abbey of St. Peter, Westminster, in the possession of S. Bentley'.
By April 1853 blindness compelled Bentley to abandon his business and discontinue the firm. He retired to Croydon with his wife Sarah Charlotte, whom he had married in 1825. He died at North End, Croydon, on 13 April 1868. He was survived by his wife but they had no children.
Field was born in Stratford upon Avon. He was apprenticed to George Bishop in 1579 but spent the majority of his apprenticeship serving the Huguenot printer, Thomas Vautrollier. Field was freed by Bishop in 1587. He hired the now deceased Vautrollier’s widow, Jacqueline to print his first publication. Field and Vautrollier soon wed and through this union Field inherited the substantial business of the Vautrolliers and its courtly contacts. Field printed the works of Sir John Harrington, Sir Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Edmund Spenser, and secured the rights to King James’s Poeticall Exercises. Yet the most famous author associated with Field is none other than William Shakespeare. Field published Shakespeare’s first printed work, Venus and Adonis (1593) and printed its following three editions as well as The Rape of Lucrece (1593). He was a respected member of the Stationers’ Company, elected first to the livery in 1598 and then the Court of Assistants in 1604. Field served as Upper-warden in 1613 and was elected Master twice, in 1619 and 1622. His former apprentice George Miller inherited the business after Field’s death.
Vautrollier arrived in London as one of the many Huguenot exiles fleeing France in the late sixteenth century. He received his letters of denization in 1562 and was later admitted to the Stationers’ Company in 1564 as a ‘brother’, rather than a freeman (reflecting his status as a foreigner). Vautrollier occupied a particular niche in the English book trade, offering translations of French books, and his printing exhibiting the sophisticated French style yet to reach England. His Protestant leanings were evident in his printing work, with publications including the writings of noted theologians such as Martin Luther and Edmund Bunny. Vautrollier secured patents in 1573 and 1574 for various Latin texts, including works by Cicero, Ovid, and Beza. He fled London for Scotland briefly in the 1580s, after printing the writings of Giordano Bruno induced the wrath of the Privy Council. Here, he supplied books to the young James VI. Vautrollier returned to London in 1585 and died in 1587, leaving the printing business to his wife Jacqueline, who had managed their printing affairs in London during Thomas’s time in Scotland.
Blount was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, giving him a knowledge of Latin, Italian, and literary quality. He was apprenticed to notable Elizabethan publisher, William Ponsonby, for ten years from 1578. Blount has been described as ‘the most important publisher of the early seventeenth century’. His keen interest in European scholarship and languages was reflected in his publications, which boasted translated works, European travel accounts, and John Florio’s dictionaries. Of course, Blount’s most famous publication remains the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Other significant Blount publications include works by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Samuel Daniel, John Lyly, and Thomas Hobbes. He was a respected member of the Stationers’ Company, elected liveryman in 1611 and to the Court of Assistants in 1625. After his death, Blount’s widow, Elizabeth, sold his copyrights to Andrew Crooke.
John Day was a leading member of the Elizabethan book trade. His early years remain obscure, but he was printing in London from 1546. Working in partnership with William Seres, Day seized upon the opportunities presented by the accession of Edward VI. With the regulations against Protestant and evangelical works removed, Day and Seres published authors including John Hooper, Hugh Latimer, and John Calvin. In 1550, Day dissolved his partnership with Seres and transferred from the Stringers’ Company to the Stationers’ Company. In 1553, he secured the patent to publish works by Thomas Becon and John Ponet. The reign of Mary proved challenging for the evangelical printer and he was briefly imprisoned in 1554, but Elizabeth’s accession saw him restored to prominence. Under Elizabeth, Day collected major printing patents so that he controlled the publication of some of the period’s most lucrative works, including the ABC with Little Catechism and English psalter. His most ambitious and significant publication was John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Day’s success and ever-growing monopolies of lucrative books did not make him a popular figure in the trade. In 1573, there was an attempt on his life and in 1584 he was forced to hand the rights to thirty books to the Stationers’ Company. He died whilst travelling to visit his wife’s family in Suffolk, leaving a hefty and complex inheritance for his son, Richard Day, who inherited his business.
Curtis served his apprenticeship to Thomas Matthews from 1659 to 1666. Less than a month after completing his apprenticeship, he married Jane Evans and together they set up as booksellers on Ludgate Hill near Fleet Bridge. Curtis first registered a copy with the Company Register on 16 February 1669, entitled The Quakers Spirituall Cort Proclaymed. He and his wife Jane were responsible for numerous scandalous and seditious works and consequently in near constant trouble with the authorities. The Curtis’ most incendiary works were carefully timed political commentaries, such as A Pacquet of Advice from Rome, a weekly sheet first released in 1678, coinciding with the frenzy of the Popish Plot; Scroggs upon Scroggs (1681) satirising Lord Chief Justice William Scroggs; and Lord Russell’s Ghost (1683) on the Whig martyr Lord William Russelll. It was publications like these, which has seen Curtis labelled a Whig publisher, further consolidated by his newspaper the True Protestant Mercury. Langley Curtis’s final imprint is dated 1690. He appears to have died in 1693 in Ireland.
Memorialised by John Dunton as ‘a True Assertor of English liberties’, John Darby’s printing career includes some of the key radical texts of the seventeenth century. Darby was born in Diseworth, Leicestershire. He was apprenticed to John Hyde in 1647, though later transferred to Peter Cole, and was freed in 1660. Darby can first be linked to radical printing through his early work as a journeyman for printers Simon and Joan Dover. The Dovers specialised in illicit printing of radical and non-conformist texts. In fact, Simon died whilst imprisoned for seditious printing in 1664. John married the widowed Joan and together they moved to new premises in Bartholomew Close and continued to be involved with illicit printing for the duration of their careers. Darby simultaneously engaged with an active, legitimate business printing scientific and navigational works, and the underground production of libels and radical tracts, most famously the prose writings of Andrew Marvell and Samuel Johnson. He was often subject to surveillance and investigations from Surveyor of the Press, Sir Roger L’Estrange. In his later years, Darby worked closely with John Toland to produce new editions of key Whig texts, such as the works of John Milton, Edmund Ludlow, and Algernon Sidney. Darby remained a respected member of the Stationers’ Company and was elevated to liveryman in 1689 and served as Renter-warden (1694-1695).
Crooke served his apprenticeship to bookseller Roger Potts from1622 to 1629. He thereafter set up shop at ‘the sign of Green Dragon’, which sign, despite moving premises, he kept for the entirety of his career. Crooke slowly but surely climbed the ranks of the Stationers’ Company. He took the livery in 1638 and was elected to the Court of Assistants in 1653. Crooke served as both under-warden (1660-1661) and upper-warden (1663-1664) before completing two terms as Master of the Company (1665-1667). Outside the Company, Crooke was also the representative of Farringdon Within for the city of London’s common council (1656-1657, 1659-1663, 1667). Crooke is perhaps best remembered as Thomas Hobbes’s publisher. He entered Leviathan, Hobbe’s most famous and most controversial work, in the Stationers’ Register in 1651. Crooke though was not only Hobbe’s publisher, but his agent more widely. He was responsible for a large part of Hobbes’s correspondence, which was directed through Crooke’s shop. From as early as 1673, Crooke’s nephew William succeeded to this position as Hobbe’s man and thereafter managed the philosopher’s letters, both written and printed. Andrew Crooke died on 20 September 1674.