Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [97]
What the guild did do was confirm the more informal protocols of deportment and civility that were as valued in Dublin as in London for their role in keeping the community intact. Apprentices had to become citizens of "good conversation." They must live with their masters in order to imbibe the correct principles of domestic morality. Members were not to dispute with each other loudly, nor "speak Evill of ye Mr or Wardens." No member was supposed to sue another without first trying to resolve the problem confidentially.33 And the calendar of feasts and rituals served to reiterate this commonality, especially on "swearing day," the feast of Saint Luke (October i8), when the newmaster andwardens started office. Finally, and most spectacularly, every three years the trade appeared as one when the lord mayor summoned all the guilds to ride in finery around the bounds of the city34 These were expensive events (so much so that from the late 1770s the guild refused to participate), demanding horses, fine dress, gold-edged hats, cockades, yellow gloves with red silk stitching, ribbons, armor, and swords.35 Carriages and musicians accompanied the printers and booksellers. In 1764, for example, the guild furnished an armored figure of Vulcan, a band of mounted drummers dressed as Turks and Tartars, a "bomb cart" full of "Ammunition ... for the Belly," and the guild officers themselves, garbed, in a patriot gesture, "in Irish Manufacture only" On most such occasions a press would be dragged along too, borne aloft on a livery carriage and hard at work with a full complement of hack authors, pressmen, compositors, and devils.36
Some of the poems produced on these ceremonial presses have survived, and give a flavor of the occasion. They are announced as "printed before the Company of Stationers"-a revealing nomenclature-and articulate the excellence and historic role of printing. Sometimes they take on a local edge -in 1755 a verse referred to printing as a "source of patriot strength" -but usually the terms are more safely conventional. Thanks to printing, declares one, future times will have access to "Newton, Entire," and need never "mourn an Addison, like Livy, lost!" George Grierson, the king's printer, issued a verse written by his wife, Constantia, that hailed printing as a "Mystick Art" enabling readers to dispense with "the hard Laws of Distance" and rule the earth via "the Telescopes of Thought." Other poems lauded the inventors of the press, withholding a verdict on whether Fust, Coster, or Gutenberg deserved the laurel.37
It can certainly be argued that this kind of communal expression played an important part in sustaining the civility on which Faulkner and his peers relied. Yet the guild never attained the practical authority that the Stationers' Company had once enjoyed in London. Most pertinently, it never managed to police literary property explicitly. It had no register book, and the terms copyright and piracy, as far as I can tell, appear nowhere in its records (which survive only in part). Yet the possibility was not entirely remote at the time that the guild might regulate property. There were certainly plans to create such mechanisms. Those ambitions did not bear formal fruit, but they indicate that some of its members at least saw it as the proper site on which to build a regime resembling copyright. This may have been because it already regulated the use of a "peculiar mark" by which every cutler was supposed to identify his work. These marks were to be "Entred in the Bookes of this Hall, with their NamesAnnexed." The guild did have a register after all, then-but of trademarks, not copyrights (and even this register seems not to have survived). In 1731 a similar protocol was mooted for print. The guild even established a committee "to Draw up heads of an order to prevent the Inconveniency of Stationers printing over one another."38 But it seems never to have reported, and the