Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers ( Stationers' Company for short ) is the livery company of the paper makers and newspaper publishers in the City of London .
The booksellers' guild, founded in 1403, received its Royal Charter on May 4, 1557 and controlled the publishing industry in England for parts of the 16th and 17th centuries . While the Stationers' Company only played a minor role in the Livery Companies group and never gained extensive influence over the fortunes of London trade, it played an important role in the development of press censorship and copyright law .
history
founding
The guild was formed in 1403 when the Corporation of London agreed to a petition from parcheminiers , scribes, illustrators and bookbinders to create a guild. The Stationers' Company asked the King and Queen for a royal charter in 1542, and they followed suit in 1557.
Royal Charter
In the preamble to the Royal Charter, Queen Mary gives the reasons for the establishment of the wish that the Stationers' Company should be a suitable antidote to the seditious and heretical writings printed daily. The royal charter restricted the publication of books to members of the Stationers' Company and gave Master and Wardens the right to break into foreign workshops, to confiscate illegally printed works and to detain their producers without trial. While the rights of the guilds were mostly geographically limited, those of the stationers applied to all of England and the queen's territory. The Royal Charter for the Stationers was just one of many means Mary used at the time to control an increasingly free and critical press. In the following year, she had an extensive censorship law passed in the British House of Lords . Even after the Catholic Mary had been replaced by the Protestant Elizabeth , she renewed the extensive charter in November 1559, for the same reasons as Mary.
activities
The activities of the Stationers' Company were particularly important in two respects: On the one hand, they successfully suppressed all competition and thus all publication activities by non-members at times. On the other hand, with the English Stock, she kept an extensive directory of published writings. From the stock she generated regular almanacs , which were an important source of income for the company. The Stationers' never played a significant role within the Livery Companies. In the traditional ranking it occupied an average place, while its membership was small and had comparatively little financial means compared to goldsmiths, grocers or cloth dealers.
However, the company was important for the English government, which granted the stationers monopoly rights that went beyond the rights of all other guilds. While each of the Livery Companies tried to control their business, the wide-ranging powers royalty granted the stationers made it particularly easy. In its role as the guardian of competition, the Stationers' Company grew up with a variety of hatreds as it was seen as a major obstacle to the development of a free press . In his protest paper Areopagitica against the censorship law of the Licensing Order of 1643 , John Milton explicitly turns against two main culprits: the ambition of some Presbyterian clergy and "the deception of some old monopoly in the book trade".
The company's influence began to wane in the late 17th century. After the government no longer needed the Stationers' Company to control the book trade, its role in book production dwindled. At the end of the 17th century there were as many publishers inside the company as outside. The Stationers' Company played a particular historical role in the invention of copyright law . Although the guild had in fact already lost control, it fought longer than other Livery Companies for its influence and only gave up this fight in 1856 when the City of London lifted all guild restrictions.
copyright
The Stationers had had a copyright that controlled new copies of existing books since the mid-16th century . The world's first formal copyright law, the Statute of Anne , was based on these rules, and came about through lobbying by the Stationers. While the stationers' system was a pure trade monopoly aimed at protecting publishers, parliament and the courts were more oriented towards authors; not without dissolving the internal system of copyrights, and turning a uniform area of law into an interconnected series of legal fragments.
The stationers' law was based on English law, which remained essentially the same between 1559 and 1694. The actual printing of the books depended on permission from the English Crown, but publication and trade depended on permission from the Stationers' Company, the right to copy, the copyright. Among other things, the Company set editions and prices, and in 1612 the Court of Assistants ruled that if the printing block of a book was sold to a guild member, that book could not be sold again without the buyer's permission. If the owner of a copyright died, the work could no longer be printed until the Stationers' Company granted a new copyright to the book. New licenses were only issued when all copies of the old print had been sold; in the case of unlimited licenses, these fell to the widow, provided she did not marry a man who was not a member of the Stationers.
Historic interior structure
Like the other Livery Companies, the Stationers' Company had an annually elected Master and Warden. Together with the Court of Assistants, they determined the fate of the guild. Master and Warden had the right to break into any building, search for illegally printed books, and destroy them. The court, in which Master and Warden were voting members, had extensive rights over the members, who also had to turn to the Court of Assistants in the event of disputes before they could use the regular jurisdiction. The court could, for example, impose corporal punishment against journeymen and apprentices, lock up striking employees and sentence masters who violated the regulations to fines. Below the court stood senior and junior renter wardens who collected the quarterly membership fees, as well as the clerk who administered the official documents.
Within the membership there were three groups of members, bookbinders , booksellers and printers . The printers occupied the most important positions within the guild at the time of the Royal Charter and were often still active on the side, publishing and selling the books they had printed. The guild evolved with the book trade, and just as the booksellers / publishers began to control the book trade, after a few decades they also dominated the Stationers' Company.
today
The Stationers 'Company continues to exist as an industry association that hosts social events, workshops and lectures in the Stationers' Hall . The guild has 800 members, both individuals and companies, mostly from the UK. Stationers' Hall in the City of London can be used as a function room. Until 1983 the company was involved in the operation of a private school, the Stationers' Company's School .
The Stationers' Company Entry Books served as the official UK copyright register between 1710 and 1923. While the company itself occasionally handled its materials carelessly, they were spared major destruction, so that the company's archive is of great value for book history and social history today. In 1950 she published a full edition of the Entry Books on microfilm for the first time , which was greatly improved in 1986.
Remarks
- ↑ a b c d Lyman Ray Patterson: Copyright in historical perspective Vanderbilt University Press, 1968 ISBN 0-8265-1373-5 p. 29
- ↑ a b c d Ernest Sirluck: Review: The Stationers' Company: A History, 1403-1959 in: The Journal of Modern History Vol. 34, No. 1 (Mar., 1962), pp. 81-82
- ^ A b c Lyman Ray Patterson: Copyright in historical perspective Vanderbilt University Press, 1968 ISBN 0-8265-1373-5 p. 32
- ^ Lyman Ray Patterson: Copyright in historical perspective Vanderbilt University Press, 1968 ISBN 0-8265-1373-5 p. 36
- ^ A b Lyman Ray Patterson: Copyright in historical perspective Vanderbilt University Press, 1968 ISBN 0-8265-1373-5 p. 31
- ^ Lyman Ray Patterson: Copyright in historical perspective Vanderbilt University Press, 1968 ISBN 0-8265-1373-5 p. 43
- ↑ Lyman Ray Patterson: Copyright in historical perspective Vanderbilt University Press, 1968 ISBN 0-8265-1373-5 pp. 47-48
- ^ Lyman Ray Patterson: Copyright in historical perspective Vanderbilt University Press, 1968 ISBN 0-8265-1373-5 p. 35
- ^ Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers: About Us
- ↑ Michael Robertson: Review article: The archives of the Worshipful Company of Stationers in: The Indexer Vol. 17 No. October 4, 1991 pp. 269-270 as pdf
literature
- Cyprian Blagden: The Stationers' Company: a History, 1403-1959 , Harvard University Press, 1960
