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Since William Caxton introduced the press to England in about 1471, an institution had arisen in London to oversee printing and bookselling. It was called the Company of Stationers. Although some such fraternity had existed since long before Caxton, the Stationers' Company received its royal charter only in 1557 from Queen Mary. The company was to embrace all participants in the trade, binders, booksellers, and printers alike (such distinctions were in any case rather inchoate at first). It had a remit to police its members to forestall seditious printing. To that end it adopted all of the mechanisms typical of early modern guilds or corporations. In essence, the company created and maintained conventions that together defined what it was to act properly as a member of the book trade. These conventions were many and various - they included, for example, notions of proper dress, deportment, and speech for particular occasions. But the ones that proved especially controversial related to a practice known as registration. And that brings us to the book still sitting in Stationers' Hall.

Stationers' Hall was an old castle just to the west of St. Paul's Cathedral. Members were expected to go there and enter into the register the titles of works they were publishing. At first, it seems to have been intended merely to record the fact that each book had been properly licensed. But it soon came to act as the lynchpin of a much more valued system of socalled propriety That is, titles entered in this volume came to be regarded as restricted to their enterers. By company custom, no other Stationer could subsequently print such a title without the authorization of the original enterer. In the late sixteenth century this became the principal element in Stationers' common notions of right and wrong conduct in the trade. The idea of registering a title would survive to be enshrined in legal notions of copyright for hundreds of years after this, long after the original purpose had been forgotten.

Here is how the system worked. Suppose you were a bookseller and intended to publish a certain book. In principle, your first step would be to get the manuscript licensed, perhaps by a chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. You would then go to Stationers' Hall to register it, paying the clerk a nominal fee to enter its details (title, author, maybe formal characteristics) into the book. Then you would have to invest a substantial amount in manufacturing it. You might finance its printing yourself, although you could ask the author to pay for the paper. You would probably see to its subsequent sale through your own bookshop, but also try to distribute it through a network of other booksellers in London and perhaps beyond. Meanwhile, a lot of capital would be tied up in type, warehousing, and stored copies. More would be exposed in the form of credit extended to other Stationers, and copies exchanged with distant Continental booksellers. So ifyou found a rival Stationer selling copies of the same work, perhaps even before your own arrived in your shop, you would be dismayed. There were various ways in which a rival might manage to do this. But one was simply to obtain sheets from the printing house itself. Increasingly, booksellers and printers had grown apart, forming distinct groups that lived and worked in different places. This created jealousies and opportunities. Your own printer might well have printed some "supernumerary" copies to make a profit on the side. Or perhaps some journeymen, acting on a long-honored artisanal custom, had gone home with extra sheets, in much the same way that butchers' apprentices were permitted to take home scrap cuttings. Both these practices, and more like them, were to be central to charges of piracy for centuries.

But perhaps no such straightforward appropriation had occurred. It might be that the other work was not exactly the same as yours. It might have a different title, for example,