Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [103]
There was a sharp edge to this confrontation. The company of booksellers was in fact only one of several alliances to arise in these years.Jour- neymen too formed "combinations" to shield their interests. The binders joined forces to enforce common prices, for example, and by 1791 had created a Company of Bookbinders. Most serious in its intent and consequences was an `Amicable Society of Printers" that appeared in 1766.57 Its intent was to protect what the journeymen saw as traditional chapel customs in the face of a nascent capitalism that threatened to turn ateliers into factories and reduce craftsmen into hands. It was a complaint arising everywhere in Europe-Jacob Ilive's rising in London being one case in pointand in many industries. But now it burst into the open in Dublin with startling viciousness. As midnight approached on Monday, September 12, 1766, a band of men smashed the door to the home of William Osborne in Golden Lane. Osborne was a journeyman printer, now sixtyeight years old and infirm. He should have commanded some esteem, being reckoned the oldest active tradesman of the entire fraternity. Once inside his house the intruders drew swords and attacked Osborne and his wife "in a most cruel and inhuman manner." He was badly wounded; she lost her hand. The mysterious assailants fled into the night, telling their victims that they had been targeted in retribution for working for John Exshaw, a pirate notorious for hiring excessive apprentices and eroding the chapel.
Five days later the trade convened to denounce the attack. It issued a public endorsement of Exshaw's "Candour, Integrity & Punctuality" and offered a reward of £5o for the "villains" responsible. At the same time the book trade took the opportunity to declare its general abhorrence of "seditious and illegal Associations" of "idle profligate and insolent journeymen Printers," who deserted their posts and put craftsmen "in Fear and Danger of their Lives."58 The attack, it transpired, had followed a campaign of anonymous threats. One letter, to another Exshaw worker named Daniel Donovan, was produced and read.
Mr: Donovan
As the Care of one's Life, is all the Enjoyment we have on this Earthly Hemisphere, and the Pleasure thereof we seek as much as possible and of such Pleasures you are likely to have but little, I, as your Friend, dear Dan: (tho' perhaps unknown) give you the Design of the Journeymen Printers, in the words following, which I heard from the Sultan's mouth (that is, the Head Man), That if you do not in three Days from the Date hereof, quit Mr Exshaw's House, that They the Printers, will make a horrid Spectacle of you, and as They term it, mark you, by taking at least a Leg, an Arm and an Ear offyou, which they hope will be a Warning to Buck, Ellison, Osbourne and the Corkman. Now dear Dan quit the Place, and be assured of the Mens Friendship, and remember three Days from this Date.
I am your Friend
J. Trueman.
The message had its effect: Donovan would shortly leave Exshaw. Given the professed objective of preserving the chapel community, however, the result for this man at least was sadly poignant. Having deserted his chapel, he found himself following a shiftless path. Donovan ended up an "outcast of almost every printing House in the Kingdom"-almost a personification of the outlaw described by Faulkner in his letter to Richardson.59
Secret societies pervaded Irish artisanal life in the last decades of the ascendancy The appeal to a mysterious "sultan" or "head man" was typical of them.60 Violence, intimidation, and obscurity were their hallmarks. In the case of the printers the actual violence seems to have died down after the attack on Osborne, but nobody could be sure that it would not return. In the 1770s the Amicable Society of Printers continued to publish a series of less than amicable notices renewing