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In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, this kind of oligarchy tookon anew significance. Speculation, risk, and debt seemedin the 169os to have become central elements in a newly commercial culture, in which credit played a central part. At a national level, the need to maintain a war effort involved a new kind of political economy symbolized by the national debt and the Bank of England. At the level of individual enterprises, it was a time, as Daniel Defoe proclaimed, of "projects." Projects were ambitious proposals for schemes of all kinds -inventions, trade ventures, lotteries, and so on. Theywere nothing new; a century earlier, Elizabethan London had been full ofprojectors.4 But now the projectors sought their investment less through court patronage than in the avowedlypublic realm of coffeehouse and pamphlet. From treasure-hunting expeditions to new steam engines for draining mines, projects of all kinds sought investment from lay subscribers lured by print and tempted by the promise of future returns. The phenomenon seemed to characterize a new age. And, of course, the book trade depended on projecting too. To propose a subscription for a new atlas or history meant asking others to trust that that project would be brought to fruition. At Garraway's or Jonathan's coffeehouses, customers might find themselves looking at printed proposals for a new edition of the church fathers or a new fen-drainage scheme, and the rhetoric in both would be remarkably congruent. And because many projects failed-editions as much as engines-questions of plausibility dogged the entire culture ofprojecting. The enterprise of books was credit dependent and risk prone at a time when risk was publicly notorious. It is telling that the most famous of all the swindles of the South Sea Bubble period was rumored to be that of a printer, who pocketed £2,000 from subscribers to his project for "an undertaking of Great Advantage, but no one to know what it is." What is even more telling is that the scam itself seems to have been a figment of Grub Street machinations-there is no substantive evidence that it ever really happened-5

It was this concern for credit that led major booksellers to band together to defend their interests. Their alliances began to appear as early as the 167os and 168os, and soon became known as congers. The original idea behind them was simple. In order to minimize and spread the risk of an impression, each participant agreed to take a certain number of copies. As they became more entrenched, however, so congers took on more lasting and quasi-institutional forms. Some even operated as semiformal jointstock operations. Their members-only sales - at first of real books sitting in warehouses, but before long of "copies" in the abstract-established the status of certain works as de facto properties. Members were forbidden to trade such works outside these events, and nonmembers were not allowed in. The "trade sales" consequently created a tiny, closed market in the most valuable titles of the book trade. It was secure enough that steady-selling works like Paradise Lost could be parceled out into what were effectively shares. No law reserved Milton's poem to anyone, but with "ownership" now distributed among the top booksellers, this elite took on a collective interest in combating any purported "piracy." They never posed the question of whether copies like this were really properties, because there was no reason to pose it and every reason not to. Literary propertywas a social fact. For perhaps fiftyyears, majorworks of all kinds appeared under these circumstances (with the partial exception of the novel, for novels were generally issued for a quick profit, with little thought for future editions). By the time the congers started to retreat from view in around 1740, they had done enough to entrench the London trade's reliance on what opponents denounced as "combinations" bolstering an ersatz property regime.7

There was no shortage of such opponents. Those outside the central