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By Root 2151 0

on the ancient universities and the principle of deposit, which dated back to 1610. In that year Sir Thomas Bodley had come to a private agreement with the Stationers' Company by which the Company agreed to provide a copy of every new book its members printed for Bodley's library at Oxford. By way of quid pro quo, the collection would be made available as a source of copy for subsequent editions.s Despite annual reminders, however, the Stationers had observed the agreement only patchily, and instead of the Latin treatises he had expected Bodley found himself receiving pamphlets and other English-language "riffe raffe" such as Shakespeare. Eventually Oxford's curators appealed to Archbishop Laud for help, and he incorporated the deposit agreement into a Star Chamber decree of 1637 establishing licensers of books. Void during the Interregnum, in 1662 it was then restored again as part of the new monarchy's Press Act that reinstituted the licensers. At that point three copies of every publication were required, to be lodged at Oxford, Cambridge, and the Royal Library in London (which in 1759 would become the library of the British Museum, and much later the British Library). But the Stationers remained desultory, and occasionally worse: in 1694, Tory bookseller Thomas Bennet rejected the impost in front of the king's own librarian, the renowned classicist Richard Bentley, with the remark that he "knew not what right the Parliament had to give away any man's property"6

FIGURE 9.1. The universal library Etienne-Louis Boullee, design for the royal library,, in Memoire sur les moyens deprocurer d la Bibliotbeque A Roi les avantages que ce monument exige (Paris, 1785). Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

Barely ayear later Bennet's implicit wish was realized. Licensing lapsed for the last time, and with it the requirement to deposit copies. The result, as we have seen, was fifteen years in which "piracy" was legal. In 171 0 the first copyright law was finally passed to meet the trade's complaints. As well as instituting the innovation of statutory copyright, it quietly restored and extended the deposit requirement. Now, after Anglo-Scottish union, six more libraries were added to the list of those entitled to volumes: Sion College, the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, and the university libraries at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen. A total of nine copies were now liable to be demanded, all on the best paper used in each edition. Booksellers obtained their statute against piracy, but at the cost of this benefaction to learning.

The trade proceeded to interpret this new law rather ingeniously. The booksellers decided that it represented a bargain. They rationalized it as a fee levied by the state in return for its safeguard against pirates. Logically, they then reasoned, the fee ought only to be paid for those works that they registered at Stationers' Hallfor such protection. They concluded that they were perfectly free not to register a given book, opting instead to risk its being pirated. In such cases they need not deposit the nine copies. And this became their standard practice. As a result, the books deposited were those most likely to be registered, and hence those most likely to be pirated: almost all in English, not Latin, and much of it hackwork. It was these, and not prized works of scholarship, that piled up at the universities. For more valuable works - and law books, for example, could be very expensive indeed- the booksellers reverted to trade civilities rather than statutory copyright, and, as Edmund Law put it, resolved to "trust one another." Declining to enter these titles, they escaped the need to provide free copies. Or in the case of series they might register just one volume, guessing that that would be sufficient to deter pirates. They would then offer to deposit just that one volume, effectively compelling the libraries to pay full price for the rest. Either way the effect was the same. The linking of deposit with copyright threatened to turn the university libraries into repositories