For the Reader’s Digest

Even as travel guides and pilgrimage souvenirs encouraged readers to be interested in distant places, printers exploited a counterbalancing attention to the household. Chapter 6 looks at the printing of guides to husbandry (that is, land management), cooking, carving, and other practical topics related to the household. It explores how printers developed these reference works and shifted away from printing material of most relevance to those at the apex of society to guides relevant to a broader swathe of readers, including women. The chapter argues that printers recognized the potential demand for material related to domestic life and, by offering works that first tangentially and then explicitly concerned the household, gave it a greater visibility and importance in the early Tudor imagination, making it available for increased religious, political, and imaginative use from the 1530s onwards.

A Taste for Trifles

Chapter 3 focuses on how printers began to develop readers’ taste for cheap, entertaining pamphlets that frequently featured scurrilous humour or sensational episodes of a violent or sexual nature. It begins with Caxton’s prose romances and the way in which Caxton justified their reading by underlining their exemplarity. It then goes on to consider how, after Caxton’s death, the intervention of a Dutch printer, Gheraert Leeu, resulted in an increasing emphasis on the recreational pleasure to be had from reading romances rather than their moral function. It explores how de Worde built on this by first printing verse romances and then gests, but suggests it was another Antwerp printer, Jan van Doesborch, who exploited readers’ interest in the sensational to the utmost. The chapter ends by considering why a flourishing market in romances, jests, and bawdy fiction—for what were sometimes termed ‘nouelles’ and ‘tryfellys’—disappeared in the mid-1530s.

Dangerous Fruit

Chapter 2 examines the unique challenges printers faced in publishing evangelical material by writers like William Tyndale and John Frith: first, because it was potentially heretical or seditious and second, because the readers cultivated by printers until this point had been deeply enmeshed in traditional ways of thinking. The chapter takes issue with the assumption that there was a pre-existing market for evangelical works and demonstrates that printers, in particular Thomas Godfray, created demand by appealing to a wide range of religious sensibilities. By disguising or ameliorating evangelical material they overcame readers’ anxieties over purchasing and possessing it and created opportunities for readers to engage with different beliefs. It was this ability of printers to make controversial material attractive to tentative readers that facilitated the spread of Reformation thinking in England.

Sweet Consolation

Chapter 1 considers how printers persuaded readers to buy religious books other than primers, which might well have seemed non-essential. Focusing on the period up to 1525, it considers the sale of books that supported the laity in understanding the most basic aspects of their faith and those that guided them beyond the rote prayers of the Pater noster and Ave Maria into deeper practices of meditation and contemplation. It argues that de Worde recognized the spiritual ambitions of his contemporaries and the desire for a deeper knowledge of God amongst the laity. While the 1520s would see that channelled into demand for scriptural translation, in the first quarter of the century de Worde offered readers a richer relationship with God through contemplative practices.

Introduction

The Introduction foregrounds the ways in which printers paid attention to market developments, both in England and in Europe, and the successes and failures of the books they and their competitors printed. It establishes how books were physically sold in this period, including the role of printers’ advertisements, what bookshops were like, and the importance of browsing in the buying process. A final section summarizes the development of different paratexts to market books within that context, including title-pages, woodcuts, tables of contents and indices, and errata notices. It also considers how printers exploited similarities and complementarity between books to suggest sammelbände (compilations).

Afterword

By the middle of the sixteenth-century, the use of paratexts to market early printed books had become regular practice. Title-pages, tables of contents, prefaces, envoys, woodcuts, and marginalia might all be used to attract readers, but their use varied. Printers deployed them differently depending on the kind of text they sought to sell and the ways in which previous editions had been presented, usually conserving the features they deemed attractive while making innovations that might give their publication a competitive edge. The aim of this book has been to show the thought and strategy that went into the presentation of any work, while suggesting the implications printers’ marketing decisions had on what was read and how it may have been perceived....

Wide-Ranging Appetites

Chapter 5 focuses on pilgrimage guides and accounts that, like printed news, gave the reader a wider understanding of the world and their place within it, but for which demand was already well established in manuscript. It argues that Pynson’s innovative printing of guides for domestic shrines, which could also function as advertisements and souvenirs, placed new kinds of ephemera—in addition to indulgences—on a similar footing to more durable pilgrimage mementoes, like badges and ampullae. This gave the printed word an important function in the memorial reconstruction of a visit. Although the changing religious climate brought a temporary end to pilgrimage in England by the 1540s, this had the effect of creating an association between text and travel for many more readers than had been the case before and prepared the ground for the success of secular travel literature.

A Hunger for News

Chapter 4 explores how English printers developed a domestic market for a different kind of novel material: news itself, ranging from accounts of natural marvels through to polemical exchanges about current events. In doing so, they followed the example of their continental counterparts. Accounts of state affairs emulated Parisian publications, while news about calamitous events was frequently translated from best-selling European pamphlets. The chapter argues that printers persuaded readers to pay for what had traditionally been received free, by word of mouth, by emphasizing the reliability and veracity of the news they published rather than—as is often assumed—appealing to a taste for sensation or moralization. Concluding the chapter with a discussion of the news pamphlets and broadsides surrounding the Western Rebellion in 1549, it suggests that by the mid-sixteenth century printed news had gained sufficient status that its circulation could influence events, giving printers a potential power and responsibility they had not anticipated.