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By Root 2216 0

or it might be a translation. It could even be a different work entirely, but dealing with the same subject in a way sufficiently similar that it would impinge on your sales. These too might-or might not-be deemed to offend. Deciding what constituted infringement of a register entrywas often not straightforward. To resolve the matter,youwouldgo to the experts at the Stationers' court.This court met every month at the Hall. Two senior members of the company would be assigned to investigate. Theywould examine the register, visit the rival premises, seek out the books, and compare them. Theywould try to decide whether any impropriety had occurred, and determine an appropriate recompense. Their criteria were two: whether the "substance" of the texts coincided (they need not be literally identical); and whether either infringed on a prior entry in the register. With their report in hand, the court would then decide on a resolution. The offending member would probably lose his impression and pay a small fine. But the aim was not to punish in any overt sense. The court sought to preserve the public character of an intrinsically harmonious craft, the virtues of which were seen to be virtues of print itself The entire process was thus to be kept confidential. Any Stationer who revealed it could be expelled from the trade-the most drastic sanction that the company could impose.

This regime formed the lynchpin to a largely unwritten code of conduct that extended across the trade in books. A principal task of the companies overseeing trades in early modern cities was to uphold such codes. They monitored the conduct of their members to ensure that they upheld the good reputation of the craft community as a whole. To that end, company wardens enjoyed certain powers, in particular the power to enter members' homes and conduct searches. In London, such a power was greater than any accorded the representatives of the state itself: Crown messengers were debarred by the Magna Carta, or so Londoners commonly believed, from entering properties without a specific warrant. In the case of the Stationers, the wardens-practicing printers or booksellers themselves-could and did conduct routine searches of printing houses, bookshops, and warehouses. They did so to exercise something like what we ourselves might call quality control. What they were searching for were not poorly made clocks, stale beer, or rotten meat, however, as might be the case with other companies, but (as it were) rotten books. A book might fall foul of them in three ways. Two related to the trade's relations with the commonwealth at large: it might have bad type, browned paper, or clumsy proofing, thus impugning the community's craftsmanship; or it might have seditious or blasphemous (or, from the late seventeenth century, obscene) content, thus impugning its citizenship. The third offended against the trade's internal order: it might intrude on the livelihood of a fellow Stationer by violating a register entry. Since it affected the trade community directly, it was the last of these offenses that became in practice the main occasion for routine searches.

The registration system and its attendant customs of policing were central to the practice of press regulation. All books were subject to the searching regime, although most were never licensed. Many were never entered in the register either: it was really a system of insurance as much as of property, providing some recourse in the event of a transgression, and things like pamphlets often did not warrant the expense and trouble of registration. Still, the moral associations of reprinting ran deep partly by virtue of this alliance between state and craft interests. For example, the trade developed a strong association between moral conduct and the carrying on of work in the home. A printing house was to be a printing house. At one point the law actually stipulated expressly that presswork could only be done at home. The idea was that activities carried out in a patriarchal household partook of the moral order implicit in that