Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The printing revolution, the subsequent revolution in literacy, and the development of sub-industries within and related to the book trade did not benefit only those who lived in households where income was sufficient to purchase books, to have access to collections of books, or later, to afford the not inconsiderable subscriptions to circulating libraries. Many of those who lived on the margins of these groups – at most times the majority of the population – also learned to read and they quickly formed a market for books and reading material that could not possibly be satisfied, given their low income, from the production of those printers based, while the monopoly of the Stationers' Company was in force, in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, from which came the texts that make up our idea of the corpus of preindustrial literature and scholarship. Nor, when the printing industry was liberalized, could the many provincial printers who soon set up shop satisfy this demand from their more prestigious output. Instead, the rural and industrial poor (though not exclusively these groups) depended for their reading matter on the chapbooks which circulated in vast numbers between the middle of the seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. Of course, there were many other ways in which such people could have had access to reading material, but the chapbook formed the staple diet ... log in or subscribe to read full text