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streets."31 While there was inevitably a feeling of futility to such encounters, in fact the hawkers did change their practices as a result of the campaign, increasingly abandoning the thoroughfare as a place of trade. They instead went house to house, dropping printed catalogues through mailboxes and returning later to deliver any desired music to the householders. (In an example of the anti-Semitism occasionally evident in this struggle, Preston claimed that "alien Jews" specialized in this part of the trade.)32 The pirates eventually took this strategy to its logical end by circulating their catalogues by mail, eliminating the vulnerable figure of the street seller altogether.

Something of a midpoint between street and premises was represented by the market stall. Markets had long had this ambiguous status, back into the early modern period, and continued to display it in the industrial era, even after the major fairs were no more. Much prized by their operators, stalls had a strange and ill-defined status as both private and public at once. This meant that Preston had to argue repeatedly for his right to seize materials on stalls, even though they might be visible to passersby-or might be only thinly concealed. In Cardiff, for example, he was accused of trespassing, which led to an open debate in court about whether a stall was "as sacred as an Englishman's private house." "That one spot is," it was affirmed.33

People with real addresses - shopkeepers, coffeehouse men, publicans, and so on-were an altogether more serious matter. Their fixed premises meant they could often act as local centers of distribution. Generally, hawkers would be supplied from some such house, pub, or other outlet, with the actual warehouse being a small distance away down a back street. Two examples stand out as notable. One was the Manchester shop of a young man called by the press "Himie Cohen," where Preston found thirty hawkers collecting piracies to sell (some of them escaped out of a window). He also seized a memo book detailing average takings of £12 to £24 per week-an indication of the proceeds to be expected from a middle-of-the-road piracy outfit. The other was the Rose and Crown, a pub in East London. This was probably the most notorious of all pirate hubs. A man known as Tum Tum, or Tubby, held court here, handling the distribution of copies from a nearby storehouse in Compton Passage. Tum Tum and the backstage "wholesale man" were two examples of the kind of figure Preston particularly wanted to catch.34 Seizures from such men might come to five thousand or so-up to a thousand times what a hawker carried. Indeed, the numbers were large enough that they sometimes created problems of their own, as when Preston was told in a Sheffield courtroom to verify that every single sheet in his haul was pirated. It took hours; one bored spectator suggested that they pass the time by singing the songs.35

Preston also sought the printers who actually produced the piracies. But these were not as crucial as one might suppose. Like the hawkers, they were often, in Preston's much-repeated phrase, "men of straw" Frequently "foreigners," theyworked in garrets or cellars, and used rented equipment so as to minimize capital risk if they were detected. Since they owned nothing, nothing could be taken from them in punishment or to pay costs. Even if they did own something, they often handed it on to a spouse or relative, who would continue the business.36 ByJanuary 1904 Francis, Day and Hunter had pursued about three dozen injunctions against such figures, but had recovered costs in only three cases, all of which involved people with their own premises.37 Still, more can be said about their locations. Printers of pirated music seem to have been concentrated overwhelmingly, and as far as Preston was concerned perhaps exclusively, in London. The poor, overcrowded East End was their principal manor. But plates could be distributed anywhere a willing worker could be found, so there were also raids in, for example, the relatively salubrious precincts of Kensington.