Robert was married to Mary, and they had nine children. All but two of them died in early childhood:

• Dorothy: born 29 June 1619, died of the plague in August 1636.
• Daniel: born 3 May 1622, died 6 May 1622.
• Walter: born 20 September 1626, died 6 January 1627.
• Frances: born 18 November 1627, died of the plague on 25 August 1636.
• Thomas: born 9 November 1628, died 1 March 1630.
• Peter: born 7 February 1630, died of the plague on 7 August 1636.
• An unnamed daughter: stillborn on 12 January 1631 along with a living twin, Richard.

Only Richard, born on 12 January 1631, and Ann, born on 26 February 1632, seem to have survived to adulthood. Researching this family, particularly the three deaths in quick succession during the plague year of 1636, has upset me more than anything I have studied for quite a while.

On Christmas Day in 1611, a man wearing a black velvet-lined cloak slipped into the Chapel Royal at Whitehall while James I was taking communion. He tried to pick the pocket of Leonard Barry, a servant to Lord Harrington of Exton, but was caught red-handed. In one pocket was found a knife, and in other other Barry’s purse containing 40 shillings.

The man was John Selman, and he became something of a celebrity as a result. He appeared in Ben Jonson’s Twelfth Night masque Love Restored as the character of ‘the Christmas Cutpurse’. Meanwhile the real Selman confessed his crime and was sent to the Marshalsea prison. At this trial, he pleaded to be allowed a Christian burial and that his property should not be taken from his wife. The judges, who included Francis Bacon, agreed to this on condition that he turned king’s evidence, naming:

Those of your faculty and fraternity, who are still… ready to enter into the presence Chamber of the king.

Selman agreed to this, and his execution was set for 7 January 1612: the day after the Christmas period had ended. He was hanged near Charing Cross, not far from the scene of the crime.

Just as Jonson had rushed to include Selman in his masque, so London’s stationers hurried to produce accounts of his trial and death. The bookseller Thomas Hall registered the title of The araignment of Iohn Selman (London, 1612), printed by W. Hall, on the day after the execution. This was a standard pamphlet account of a crime, trial and execution, including a version of Selman’s gallows speech. The printer George Eld produced for the bookseller and ballad specialist John Wright a broadside titled The Captaine Cut-purse, also sold under an alternate, less catchy title of The arrainement, condemnation, and excution of the grand [--] Iohn Selman (both London, 1612). Two other ballads about Selman, which do not survive, were also registered with the Stationers’ Company.

My image is a woodcut from the title page of The araignment of Iohn Selman, imagining what Selman looked like. The same woodcut was also used for The Captaine Cut-purse and for  a ballad telling Selman’s story. Given that the pamphlet and ballads had different printers and undertakers, this suggests either a degree of commercial cooperation or a printmaker shopping his block around a number of stationers.

Happy Christmas to everyone who has read this blog during 2011, and may your 2012 be free of cutpurses and cony-catchers.

A few days ago, via Twitter, I came across Adrian Teal‘s brilliant proposal for The Gin Lane Gazette: a crowd-funded, illustrated eighteenth newspaper. The project is being taken forward through Unbound, a publishing company run by various alumni of QI and The Idler. The business model is based on readers contributing towards the cost of publication, who receive recognition in the final book and – depending on the level of funding – other rewards such as exclusive access to material by the author or other goodies. In Teal’s case, £1,000 gets you lasting immortality as a caricature and character in the book. In return, authors get higher royalties than they might expect from a traditional publisher.

The Gin Lane Gazette reminded me of an early modern example of crowd funding: that of John Taylor. Taylor was a waterman who first entered the book trade in 1612 with a collection of verses. From that point on he kept up a prolific stream of publications, including in 1618 an account of a journey on foot to Scotland published as The Pennyles Pilgrimage. In the previous year Taylor has published a similar account of his journey to Hamburg, but this book had two twists. The first was that Taylor had set himself the challenge of completing his journey without begging and relying on spontaneous offers of hospitality. The second was that Taylor tried to fund it through subscriptions.

From around the 1580s onwards, a class of professional authors had begun to emerge. Some relied on aristocratic patrons, but others were able to take advantage of the growing audience for print and pioneer a different form of patronage. The conventional business relationship was with an undertaker, most often a bookseller, who put up the capital for publication. They either commissioned works from authors or accepted proposals. In turn they paid the author, paid the printer for producing the work, and while bearing much of the risk also took much of any profit to be had. The undertaker also owned the copyright for any reprints. Authors tended not to do well from this deal. Sometimes payment was in kind – free copies of the book, which the author could sell themselves or sell to other wholesalers. Other times it was a fixed fee: a 1624 book, The Schollers Purgatory Discovered, mentions a fee of 40 shillings for ‘some needy IGNORAMUS to scrible’ whatever the stationer desired.

Taylor’s proposal cut the undertaker out of the equation. For The Pennyles Pilgrimage he managed to persuade around 1,650 subscribers to pledge money should he complete his journey successfully. Supporters do not seem necessarily to have just paid Taylor the sale price of the book: the actor-manager Edward Alleyn pledged one pound, well above the odds for a 54-page octavo, although this may have been more generous than most.  He then claimed to have paid around £60 to the printer Edward Alde to produce his book. This seems implausibly high, unless Taylor was planning astonishing print runs. It’s hard to calculate precisely how many books the printer could have produced for this, but it would be at least several thousands, and rather more than than the typical print of up to 1,500 copies (or in many cases, fewer than this) that most books had.

The deal for subscribers seems to have been a copy of the book, although it’s not clear whether they each received one or whether more generous subscribers might receive more. Taylor may have hoped to sell surplus copies to a wider audience through stationers. It’s also not entirely clear what Taylor actually spent the pledged money on. He set out on his journey with a packhorse and provisions, which slightly puts the lie to his rhetoric of completing the journey without any money. It’s possible this, and the loss of revenue from temporarily giving up ferrying passengers, may have been funded by prompt contributors. However, Taylor had significant problems chasing down many of his contributors. A year after his journey in 1619, he published A kicksey winsey: or a lerry come-twang. Its sub-title made clear the difficulties he had been having recovering subscriptions: ‘wherein Iohn Taylor hath satyrically suited 800. of his bad debters, that will not pay him for his returne of his iourney from Scotland’. in the book Taylor segmented his subscribers into seven categories:

• 1 Those that have paid.
• 2 Those that would pay if they could.
• 3 Those that walke invisible, and are not to be found.
• 4 Those that say they will pay, who knowes when.
• 5 Those that are dead.
• 6 Those that are fled.
• 7 Those Rorers that can pay, and wil not.

The vehemence Taylor directed towards his debtors suggests, on one reading, a determined attempt to recover his money. That may mean he made a loss on the publication. But it’s also possible he profited, and was concerned more to out defaulters for having broken their promise. What is also interesting is that, despite his system of micropatronage, Taylor also dedicated the work to a what might be termed a potential ‘macropatron’: the Duke of Buckingham.

We can see Taylor experimenting in The Pennyles Pilgrimage with alternatives to the established communication circuit of author, undertaker, printer and bookseller. The potential rewards were higher, but so too were the risks, and as the dedication to Buckingham suggests, it seems Taylor was reluctant to leave traditional business models behind. His collected works, for example, were printed as a collaboration between four printers at the commission of the bookseller James Boler. Still, he seems to have persisted on and off with the subscription model for the rest of his career.

It is hard to tell whether some of these were properly crowd funded – the imprints for some suggest an undertaker was involved, although this could represent a partnership of some sort. One book which does seem to have been properly crowd funded is Taylor’s account of a journey to the Isle of Wight in 1648, Tailors Travels. The imprint specified that it had been printed at the author’s charge, and that it was ‘no where to be sold. By this time Taylor had worked out a contract of sorts for his subscribers, with a set fee:

When John Taylor hath beene from London to the Isle of Wight, and returned againe, and that at his returne, he doe give or cause to be given to me, a Booke or Pamphlet of true newes and relations of Passages at the Island, and to and fro in his Iourney; I doe promise to give to him or his assignes, the summe of what I please in Lawfull money of England, provided that the sayd summe be not under 6 pence.

6d. is a fair bit more than one would have expected to pay for a 14-quarto at this time. Taylor may have been relying on his celebrity to encourage regular readers to cough up a bit more than usual. If so, the profits must have been fairly substantial. In another crowd funded work – John Taylors vvandering, to see the vvonders of the vvest, published in 1649 – he claimed to have signed up nearly 3,000 subscribers. Again, though, it is not clear how many of these made good their pledge.

The parallels between Taylor’s attempts at micropatronage and the model used by Unbound can be stretched too far. Taylor was attempting to become both author and publisher, whereas Unbound substitutes one form of publisher – the traditional publishing house – with another offering a different type of reward to authors. I think it’s possible, though, to see both Taylor and Unbound offering a new kind of experience to readers. Taylor offered otherwise anonymous readers a chance to achieve recognition as a literary patron, and made them a privileged audience for his journeys. Unbound does something similar with its exclusive access to author blogs and other material, and by crediting all its contributors in finished works. And more widely, I think it’s interesting that different but comparable forms of micropatronage seem to have emerged at times when traditional publishing business models were starting to break down in the face of technological changes, changes in market forces, and above all changes in the way readers consumed texts.

Given Teal is a caricaturist, it would be remiss of me not to use an illustration by one of his seventeenth-century forebears for this post. The picture is a woodcut of Taylor in his boat, drinking from the arse of a she-devil. The woodcut, by an unknown artist, was a prominent part of the title page of Taylors physicke has purged the divel (London, 1641) by Taylor’s rival, Henry Walker.

For some reason, it was always trilobites.

By the age of six, I was obsessed with fossils, and while dinosaurs were a big part of that, I was always fondest of trilobites. I remember having a book about prehistoric sea creatures and my eyes were always drawn to what was on the ocean floor rather than the icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs swimming above it. Maybe it was because they were similar to the woodlice I used to like to catch in the garden. By the time I was seven, I had been given a book about the Tudors and Stuarts and suddenly my allegiances shifted. But I’m still fond of trilobites: a geologist friend at university noticed me sneaking a glimpse at her book about them while we were revising in the library, and gave me a plaster cast of one after we finished our finals.

Trilobites, as any six-year old will tell you, are an extinct type of marine arthropod. They appear in the fossil record around 500 million years ago, and died out 250 million years later. The picture above is the fossil of a particular type of trilobite called Oxygiocarella debuchii. This specimen was found at Llandeilo in Glamorgan, by Edward Lhwyd at the end of the seventeenth century.

Lhwyd was the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and the author of the first English catalogue of fossils: Lithophilacii Britannica ichnographia [EEBO], published in 1699. As part of the research for this book, Lhwyd spent time in Wales, which is where he found his trilobite specimen alongside those of various shells and corals. He wrote to Martin Lister, a member of the Royal Society, about his findings and part of the letter – along with some wonderful etchings like the one above – was published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions. In his letter Lhwyd described the creature as best he could given the knowledge of the time:

The 15th whereof we found great plenty, must doubtless be referred to the sceleton of some flat Fish.

Although it was not identified as such, this is the first written record of a trilobite. I wonder how many readers of the Philosophical Transactions were as intrigued by the trilobite as I was, aged six. For me – and perhaps for some of Lhwyd’s contemporaries – they hinted at a foreign yet strangely familiar other world, now at a vast distance from us but visible all the same with the tap of a hammer on stone.

This post marks the Royal Society’s decision to make every copy of the Philosophical Transactions freely available online. For more on trilobites, I cannot recommend highly enough Richard Fortey’s wonderful Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution (2000), which sets out far more eloquently than I can what makes the trilobite  so alluring.