Jocelyn Hargrave’s research while affiliated with Monash University (Australia) and other places

This chapter presents a textual analysis of John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755), the publication of which occurred approximately 70 years after that of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683). Smith’s manual is significant to book-history research and editorial theory for two reasons as it was the first manual in English to instruct the print trade on the intricacies of punctuation, and its publication coincided with three fundamental shifts in the eighteenth century: typographical, grammatical and orthographic. Hence, Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar was truly unprecedented and, by necessity, resides at the pinnacle of the progress of editorial style towards standardisation.

This chapter examines the first appropriation, more or less verbatim, of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) and John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755) by Philip Luckombe, whose manual A Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing (1770) appeared 15 years after Smith’s own. The objectives of this chapter are twofold. The first is to determine the impact of Luckombe’s textual appropriation of Moxon’s and Smith’s manuals on the evolution of editorial style through a comparative textual analysis of these three manuals. The second is to reflect on the implications of such appropriation in early modern print culture in terms of plagiarism and copyright. Luckombe demonstrated unquestionably a determined vision—he sought to provide instruction to the print trade through a modern Britanno-centric lens. At times Luckombe succeeded; however, his personal contribution to editorial style was virtually non-existent and his adaptation of Smith’s text, which accounted for the majority of his editorial instruction, appeared inconsistent and indifferent to Smith’s original intent.

This chapter considers how Joseph Moxon’s commercial publications use, and therefore exemplify, the editorial practices manifest in Mechanick Exercises (1683). To do this, a comparative textual analysis of Moxon’s A Tutor to Astronomie and Geographie (1659) with Mechanick Exercises is conducted. Through this, the chapter develops the concept of ‘architecture of the page’ to demonstrate how Moxon’s published output worked towards standardising editorial instruction on, or documenting, the early modern living page.

This chapter considers how numerous editors of The Elements of Euclid, the first mathematics textbook, began their Euclidean journeys with virtually identical copy; however, their differing treatments, and their interpretations of their contemporary style guides, typify idiosyncratic editorial experiences. To demonstrate this, Barrow’s 1660, 1686 and 1705 editions are studied; and Simson’s influential 1756 edition is also treated briefly for comparative purposes. The editorial performances of Barrow and Simson are examined with reference to Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) and John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755), respectively.

This chapter relates not only how Caleb Stower emulated Philip Luckombe by appropriating Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) and John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755), but also how he pursued his own editorial path by sympathetically adapting and modernising the content of these manuals for his own publication, The Printer’s Grammar (1808). Stower’s editorial contributions included observing the standardisation of hyphenation and spelling; devising a more efficient, enduring word-based cast-off method; supplying the first exemplar that visually captured editorial practice at work and improving on the methods for correcting manuscript copy and typeset page proofs. However, emerging from analyses completed in the previous chapters, as well as understanding how little editorial innovation occurred from this point, is a picture of the punctuated evolution of editorial style through active stasis.

This chapter seeks to understand the extent of the influence of Caleb Stower’s The Printer’s Grammar (1808) on the presentation of Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s controversial 1813 folio edition of William Langland’s dream-vision poem, which was written in the fourteenth century. More specifically, it is through an examination of Whitaker’s usage of black letter and red ink and his punctuation style that this chapter demonstrates how Whitaker’s Romantic medievalism and interpretative but practical application of contemporary editorial style both assured the clarity of authorial content, and enabled Langland’s potentially anachronistic poem to be accessible to, and appreciated by, his nineteenth-century audience.

This chapter documents the start of editorial style in early modern England through critically mapping the first printer’s manual published in English: Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or The doctrine of handy-works applied to the art of printing (1683). Mechanick Exercises was not the first manual to be published, however: Hieronymus Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia (1608) claims this distinction. While Orthotypographia lies outsides this book’s scope, an effective critical mapping of editorial style in early modern England requires knowledge of the people or factors of influence from the past. Hence, Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia and its influence on Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises are also examined.

The conclusion brings together all observations and evidence provided in the book to discursively and visually demonstrate the punctuated evolution of editorial style in early modern England, from Hieronymus Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia (1608) to Caleb Stower’s The Printer’s Grammar (1808). This occurred through a process of generational intertextual inheritance. It is through this that this book offers an alternative textual bibliographic approach: by marrying theory and practice using early modern style guides as a catalyst yields insight into the hands-on technical labour of stakeholders such as authors, editors and printers and their specialised interactions in the negotiation and typesetting of content before proceeding to print.

This chapter explores how Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mark-up, or his marginal annotations, in Ashley MS 408 reveals his familiarity with using proof-correction marks, and how he both cohered to and adapted the instruction provided in contemporary style guides, specifically Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) and John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755). Through this, a more general understanding is obtained of not only how early modern style guides influenced authors’ correction of typeset page proofs, but also how marginal spaces on the typeset page offered authors the textual landscape to communicate with, and often judge the proficiency of, stakeholders within printing houses—in this case, compositors and printers. Marginal spaces thus represented the means by which authors were able to equitably share the same working spaces as their professional counterparts.