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By Root 1890 0

industry, but by creating his own. In 1813 he established a press at Lee Priory, engaging two printers from the same London house, John Johnson and John Warwick, to operate it as compositor and pressman. Warwick, intriguingly, had a background of commitment to printers' chapels reminiscent of Jacob Ilive's, having been jailed at the Old Bailey in 1798 for projecting an artisanal "parliament" in opposition to the master printers.45 And Johnson was fascinated by "typographical antiquities" in his own right, later authoring his own Typographia (1824) in praise of chapel skills. For some nine years their press remained in operation, ending in 1822, four years after Brydges himself had moved overseas. In that time it produced more than fiftyworks, plus ahundred individual sheets containing poems, electoral addresses, and the like. (Lee Priory volumes became collectors' items shortly after the press closed, and remain so today.)46 Some were Brydges's own compositions, others antiquarian and poetic efforts by his friends. But the majoritywere reissues of forgotten poetry and prose from the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. Not all of these, Brydges thought, were works of genius, but they did exemplify a realm of authorship in which genius could still be manifested. The point was that they were incompatible with the print culture of his day. So he printed them in small runs, never more than one hun- dred.47 That was never going to produce a runaway commercial success. But popularity was never the intent.

The Lee Priory press maybe seen in terms of a long history of"private" presses extending back almost to Gutenberg.48 Such operations were sometimes mere playthings, as was the case, for example, with Horace Walpole's in the mid-eighteenth century. But often serious motivations underpinned them-motivations that have been belittled because of their small size and short duration, as well as their denomination as private. They belong in a history of experiments in making print into a force for learning, scholarship, and civility.49 Brydges's in particular arose out of a conviction that the contemporary culture of print was hostile. Like earlier projects, it aspired to restore the past to view. Regiomontanus in the fifteenth century had wanted to print ancient mathematics; John Fell in the seventeenth had wished to restore patristic texts. Brydges wanted to republish old poetry. His choices were in part inspired by genealogyhe began with Margaret Cavendish, to whom he claimed to be related. But otherwise he simply preferred neglected poets of melancholic bent, dedicated to pastoral retreat. Raleigh he portrayed as someone who could have been great if not distracted by affairs. By stark contrast, the invention of copyright in 1710 counted as a tacit watershed: none of his reprints was of an author writing after that date. Pope, for example-the greatest property of the eighteenth-century book trade -he found trivial and artificial. Collins he approved of, but only as an Elizabethan apres la lettre.50

Brydges's project of bibliographical antiquarianism therefore had a point. He was convinced that genius was incompatible with contemporary print, because such print was built on copyright. While even a mass readership would salute genius in the long run, in the short term it was irremediably blind. A "leading principle" in selecting pieces for reprinting, Brydges therefore declared, was the assumption that prior to the commercial age, "popularity" had tracked authorial merit, but the two were now radically distinct.51 What was needed was a different kind of print-one as independent as possible of the metropolis, of commerce, of Grub Street, and of mass reading. Lee Priory was the exemplar of this new practice. What it produced was in effect an alternative genealogy of literary genius, extending from the invention of the press to the adoption of copyright. In sum, Brydges's press was a gesture toward the undoing of a print culture.

GENIUS, HISTORY, AND COPYRIGHT

As a principled despiser of the world that copyright was creating, and as the