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to start now. But in his view this was an advantage. Like many in post-civilwar England, Atkyns was convinced that the horrifying events of the previous generation had been fomented by the book trade. As Thomas Hobbes put it in his own history of the early 1640s, at first "there was no blood shed; they shot at one another nothing but paper"-yet it soon became a real war.24Atkyns maintained that the explanation for this lay in a shift in the basic nature of the book trade itself-one that the register system had brought about. He proposed to undo that shift and once more make print safe for the commonwealth.

The change Atkyns identified was real enough. It had been gathering pace since before 16oo, and would persist for another i$o years after his death. It formed the essential foundation for all the conflicts over piracy that would rage from the Restoration to the early nineteenth century, not just in London but in Europe, and at length in America too. It took the form of a relative decline in the status of mechanical craft with respect to that of financial craft- the craft of speculation and accumulation. The printers in whose name the company had originally been formed were losing influence to a new breed, the booksellers. And the booksellers' prosperity rested not on the exercise of any skill peculiar to print, nor even on retailing, but on the "undertaking" - the publishing, we would say -of editions. That is, they made a livelihood out of entries in the register. These proprietors of "copies," as entries were by now known, had become an elite that dominated the top ranks of the company. According to Atkyns that was a serious political problem, because they were creatures of untrammeled interest. They were prone to the mercenary corruptions that gentlemen routinely attributed to commercial life, without the leavening influence of a craft fraternity to impose some moral limit. And their mercenary interest led them to generate as much public discord as possible, because discord sold books. So social and cultural collapse had been a consequence of the establishment of a property regime in print.

Atkyns proclaimed a solution to this problem. It lay in the figure most trusted in early modern England to uphold truth and act for the common good: the gentleman. The great benefit of patents, in his view, was that they were granted largely to gentlemen, and therefore gave gentlemen powers over booksellers. Patentees must thus be made the lynchpin of a new order of print. They could come to know the trade as well as book sellers, Atkyns insisted, but their knowledge would lead in "different wayes" because it would be guided by the virtuous conventions of polite civility. The relation between undertaker and printer would then be morally renewed. The printer would not be a mere "mechanick," but a servant, incorporated into a civil enterprise.

This amounted to a call for a drastic restructuring of the entire culture of the book, in which the central customs of the trade would be radically degraded. Atkyns recognized this, but argued that the sweeping transformation could be achieved if only the king would agree to cast the medium itself as property. Charles II should proclaim that the art of printing belonged to the Crown. In effect, the myriad claims made by booksellers and authors would then become subordinate to this overarching property right, on the basis ofwhich the king could create a new class of gentlemen overseers.

The trouble with this claim was that it was distinctly implausible in the face of received historical knowledge. As Atkyns's antagonists pointed out, everyone knew that printing had been introduced by Caxton, a private subject, and had been pursued for generations as a real, autonomous craft. SoAtkyns responded as he had to: by audaciously bidding to reshape history itself. He rediscovered an old book apparently printed in Oxford several years before Caxton's first press, and from it concocted a rival tale. He claimed that in fact King Henry VI had employed Caxton to lure a journeyman from Gutenberg's workshop