by Anne Scott
The most telling words in the Letters Patent are those about the mess bukis and portuus – Mass Books and Breviaries – further emphasised later where they are to be usit generally within al our Realme alssone as the samynn may be prentit and providit, and that na maner of sic bukis of Salusbery use be brocht to be sauld within our Realme in tym cuming .
The emphasis explains the King’s urgency to have a Press in Scotland at this time when the Scots form of the Mass was being, as he saw it, infiltrated with English forms unacceptable to Scottish worship, and particularly offensive to the powerful William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen and adviser to King James, who had his own Scots Breviary ready for printing. Seen in this light, the Edinburgh Printing Press was a national instrument of religious defence.
What false beginnings followed, what hard winter days and rough exchanges between Scot and Frenchman? What sweating anxieties in Myllar and Chepman? We can never know. But by the fourth day of aperile the yhere of God MCCCCC and viii yheris – 4th April 1508 – they had ready the first dated printed book in Scotland. This was a long poem by John Lydgate, a Romance work named The Maying or Disport of Chaucer Or The Complaint of the Black Knight.
Over the next months, nine separate booklets making up a series of poems and prose pieces, came off the Press, 216 pages in all, new-printed. There were poems by William Dunbar and by Robert Henryson, Romance verse and lyrical poetry and a piece of prose. Each book was six inches tall, fit for the hand so that a reader might carry Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, Dunbar’s Golden Targe and The Twa Merrit Wemen and The Wedow into gardens, where Readings took place and short dramatisations, to make time pass in carriages on journeys, into daily reading life. Reading as a solitary pleasure evolved. Where manuscripts had been too fragile to go, bound books were safe, and so Scots poetry was brought easily to the table as well as to the mind. The printed works cost less in time and money than manuscripts and were cheaper than French imports. Small personal collections began. Best of all, bookshops spread.
Perhaps the poems were test-runs for the press, and first tries for the printers, as some historians have argued, though there is no real evidence: but I believe Chepman and Myllar saw how their Press would spread the names of Scots poets through the two kingdoms as William Caxton’s printing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had spread his name. William Dunbar was already a Court poet, Robert Henryson writing in Dunfermline, was still to be acknowledged as a poet surpassing Dunbar, perhaps even Geoffrey Chaucer himself. But that accolade comes later, in the 20th century.
All the work of that year 1508-09 survives in only one single set of the poetry – the nine Chepman and Myllar Prints in The National Library of Scotland. The Scottish Breviary of The Mass was duly and successfully printed for Bishop Elphinstone and King James in late 1509 or early 1510.
And then there was no more from the Press. Andro Myllar was not heard of after 1510 and only Chepman’s name appeared on the Breviary. King James IV was killed at the battle of Flodden in 1513. His Renaissance Court at Holyrood declined and, with it, potential patronage for literature. His son, crowned James V, was a child: the Regency ensured he had no instrumental powers for seventeen years. In 1528 after a full and rewarded merchant’s life Walter Chepman died without any further reference to his amazing enterprise of 1507-1510
When in 1532 King James V revived the office of King’s Printer, Thomas Davidson from Birse in Aberdeenshire, now printer in the High Street of Edinburgh, was admittit to his heines prenntare. Ten years later, the King gave him premises for printing and bookselling ‘on the North side of the High Street,’ in a house where Walter Chepman too had lived.
David Chepman, Walter’s son, set up as Bookbinder in Edinburgh from 1526 to 1541 and had court business too. In 1539 he bound and laid about with gold, a matin buik for the Queen.
But of the great Press of 1508 and the Southgait printing bookshop, nothing is heard. It too had been a King’s servant, servitour to his duty as the Stewart defender of the Scottish Mass.
Yet James 1V had not foreseen, as his printers had done, that the first pieces from his Press, the poems, would be its greater work: and that they would send the names of William Dunbar and Robert Henryson to booksellers across Europe and into the mainstream of Renaissance writing. In 1604, 1605 and 1607 the Edinburgh publishing firm of Charteris brought out reprints of Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, for by then English lawyers and diplomats were using the poem to teach themselves Middle Scots, and Scottish ways, now that they had to serve a Scottish King, James VI and I, great grandson to James IV.
3. The Parrot, Saint Paul’s Churchyard, London 1609:
These to be Solde by Wm Aspley at His Shop
When William Aspley opened out the shutters of The Parrot, his new bookshop, in 1608, he had no vision of the momentous event he would stage there in the following spring. Already thirty bookshops traded for business in Paul’s Churchyard, crowded over a place of ancient burial. Aspley shared an inner wall with his neighbour to the east, Thomas Clarke at The Angel: and a narrow alley on the west side with Edward Bishop, trading at the long-fronted spacious Brazen Serpent.
The shop signs of this community of booksellers sped like flags along the Yard, brilliant in colour and design – The Ball, The Fleur de Lys, The Golden Lion, The Green Dragon, The White Greyhound, Holy Lamb, Peacock, Pigeon, Phoenix … A man could take his sign with him to his next shop and hang it there, as Francis Eglesfield did in 1642, moving with his Marigold blazon when he shifted three shops east. No two bookshops were alike. They differed in their size inside and on their pavement fronts. The King’s Arms had most space: it was almost 28 feet square as far as I can measure from the map drawn after the Great Fire in 1666 revealed the foundations.
The Parrot had some 18 feet to the front with a depth of about 23 feet. It seems not to have had storeyed accommodation above. Some of the Yard shops were in substantial tall houses and traded upward from at least the ground floor. Wherever possible, as at The Parrot, a good space was laid out with a book-table and chairs along the shelves.
Outside, a sloping board – the stall-board – hung protectively above the window, supported by struts to the street or to the shop wall: sometimes this would be over-reached by a further little roof, the penthouse or ‘pentice’. By contrast, a ‘shedde’ was essentially a stall with its stall-board and pentice hinged to act as enclosing shutters for the books inside, a structure close-kin to the ‘lucken-booths,’ the locking booths, in Edinburgh.
By 1600, both shops and sheddes were permanent on their sites, but in the 14th and 15th centuries, manuscripts, paper scrolls, handwritten almanacs and prayers were publicly sold by ‘stationers’ from their ‘stations’, portable fold-up booths and stalls ready to be whipped shut and carried to whatever space had a surge of likely customers gathering – scriveners, clerics, clerks, amanuenses. As those were just the kind of buyers to be found near St Paul’s Old Church, the Yard had early become a recognised trading place for readers. A fine place, as William Aspley knew, to be opening a shop in 1608.
The Parrot was his second shop, coming after he had traded for some years at The Tiger’s Head, a smaller place he could still see across the Yard, beyond The Ball and The Fleur de Lys. His new shop was shorter to the front, but deeper by far, allowing for more stock-space and ease for customers. He was now better placed.
He had been noticed early in the trade. When he turned fourteen in the Christmas of 1587, he was selected Apprentice by George Bishop, a distinguished publisher newly assigned to the full management of the Queen’s Printing House.Nine years of strict apprenticeship later, Aspley, at twenty-three, was received into the Mastership of his trade and twelve months after that, to the status of Freeman of The Stationers’ Company. This was a fast rise. In 1608, an experienced bookman about to open at The Parrot, Aspley was a figure to observe.
The Parrot had had four tenants since 1576 but now in 1608 its life stabilised and became one with its new man. For the fol
lowing thirty years, he would make this Bookshop his life. Over his counter, from his table, out of the displays on Saint Paul’s Yard, he would sell unprecedented books making their entrance into The Renaissance, into London, into time itself.
He brought an expertise in play publishing. At The Tiger’s Head he had published and sold William Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II and Much Ado About Nothing new-printed for him in Quarto form, as accurate as any quarto from its time, there being apparently no proven authenticated scripts coming from Shakespeare himself.
By this move, he established himself as publisher, bookseller and a trader habitual to commissioning a printer. In 1603 he was selling copies of speeches given before the new King, James I and VI, an enterprise diplomatic, and competitively done by commissioning his printer fast to do a careful work entitled Speeches Delivered To The King’s Most Excellent Majesty in The Name of The Sheriffs of London and Middlesex.
Six years on in 1609, Robert Waldegrave, printer in Edinburgh to The King’s Most Excellent Majestie, petitioned Aspley for the right to reprint the speeches. By then Aspley was at The Parrot and his note of agreement would go out from there. In 1609, too, he began issuing a Catalogue for customers, a certain sign of a more spacious shop, an extended stock and a name getting known.
Whatever he had to sell, Shakespeare could have bought. Did he come into The Parrot for William Strachey’s startling success The True Repertory of The Wreck, and to look at other accounts of the marvellous adventure just happened in Bermuda, and so begin the dream that would emerge into The Tempest in 1610?He had surely purchased his books widely in Paul’s Yard: not his own plays, perhaps, in misheard, misprinted quartos, but treatises On Melancholy, and John Florio’s 1603 translation of Michel de Montaigne’s essays on Love and Friendship, and Francis Bacon’s early 1597 essays: Lucius Plutarch’s Lives in Thomas North’s translation in 1579, Ralph Holinshed’s Chronicles two years earlier, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, The Courtier, Baldassare Castiliogne’s manual for ambitious diplomats, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe: the new dramatists Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Dekker – was Shakespeare there to buy those, all set out on tables for him ?
But he was at home in Stratford in May 1609 when William Aspley began to sell, under his own imprint, his four hundred copies of The Sonnets, riskily new and tensely perfect presented as –
Shakespeare’s Sonnets Never before Imprinted
At London for G. Eld for Thomas Thorpe
To Be Solde by William Aspley
What happened that spring day? Did the customers in The Parrot ask the questions that have crowded round The Sonnets for centuries? Did Thomas Thorpe have the rights to the poems when he published the Quarto? Had Shakespeare agreed and did he sell the work directly to Thorpe, whose name was good in that year when he had successfully published Ben Jonson and John Marston? Who was this ‘Onlie Begetter’ with no name, shadowing the title page? Why had Shakespeare left the poems undedicated? Who had chosen ‘The Parrot’ Parrot? Aspley could tell us, but if he answered in 1609, we have not heard him these four hundred years. A brother bookman William (or John) Wright sold the other half of the First Quarto print run under his own imprint from his shop at Christ Church Gate near Newgate.
Many of Aspley’s copies would be stitched, not bound, so that the buyer might choose his leather and lettering – red half Morocco with a gold frame line and lettering perhaps: or he could take them as they were, in leaf. Edward Alleyn, the star actor at Philip Henslowe’s Curtein Theatre, bought his Sonnets at The Parrot on 19th June and paid 5 pence before the binding. Four of the Aspley imprints exist still, living into their fifth century under glass in The British Library, The Bodleian Library Oxford, The Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California, and The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
Apsley secured his name at ‘ Parrot’ Parrot with this beginning. He became a publisher of further Shakespeare quartos, and in 1623 was confirmed as member of the Syndicate formed to bring out The First Folio, the Shakespeare canon, the plays gathered into the only accredited version of the best texts by John Hemynge and Francis Condell. In 1640, the year he died, he was splendidly elected to be Master of The Stationers’ Company.
He had endured long, through the execution in 1618 of Walter Raleigh whose poetry was on his shelves, and then in 1625 the death of King James who had signed the death warrant. With his bookman’s imagination, he saw how language and books were transformed by The Authorised Version of The Bible in 1611 – The King James Bible – with Shakespeare still alive to hear it. In the new reign of Charles 1, when John Donne’s son published his father’s poems in 1633, Aspley would have them. In 1637, there would be John Milton and Lycidas a new poet and a new poetry, a lifetime away from the spirit of The Sonnets of 1609. A bookshop’s lifetime too. The Parrot’s walls had sheltered the most transformative writers in the language, men who transfigured thinking itself.
In 1640 Aspley conveyed his lease to Luke Fawne who left The Brazen Serpent for The Parrot and kept it for twenty-six years. What was there for him to set out on the old shelves? Henry Vaughan’s metaphysical and divine poetry in 1646, Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler in 1655, John Harrington’s vision of a utopian republic, The Commonwealth of Oceania in 1656, lyric innovations by Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace in 1648.
The Parrot would have adapted its window display to the emergence of political writing and the new, great prose appearing now: in 1644 John Milton’s Areopagitica, his great argument for freedom of the press, and during the Cromwell Protectorate, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s scrutiny of sovereignty published in 1651 to a readership still shocked and divided by the execution of Charles I in 1649. The Parrot survived into the Restoration of 1660 and it may be that in that year Luke Fawne was seeing his customers changing in their tastes and needs. Possibly they were less scholarly and younger than Aspley had known, and now more varied as money for books spread more accessibly through the classes.
Browsers in ‘ Parrot’ Parrot would find the first popular satirical prose in the new voice of Samuel Butler. His Hudibras came out in two volumes in 1662 and 1663, sharp with modern scepticism and an ambiguous tone. Connected with this new direct critical purpose of literature are the beginnings of literary criticism as a genre in writing and as a source of reputation.
The Parrot would have John Bunyan’s books on the table too: not yet The Pilgrim’s Progress, but The Holy City in 1662 and Grace Abounding in 1663. There would be Edmund Spenser and John Donne, being bought and read again for what they had once written about change, mutability, mortality: Thomas Browne’s poetry for the same reason.
The Bookshops of Paul’s Yard struggled through the Plague of 1665. After The Great Fire in 1666, nothing is heard again of The Parrot. It disappears with all its books, all its neighbours and all their signs.
IBut in the rebuilding of St Paul’s Yard, as Christopher Wren’s Cathedral rises alongside, the little shop comes alive again. Its foundations now merged with The Angel next door, it opens for bookselling as The Rose and Crown. I should put ‘it seems probable’ in that sentence, but I don’t want to. There is a new bookshop on the site. What else can it be but The Parrot miraculously returned?
4. The Old Printing Press Bookshop, Iona:
Reckoning
This is a monastic cell with a beautiful low door and a step, a small window set into ancient deep stones, thick-white with paint. Limewashed it would have been in its earlier life as a shelter for hired harvestmen homeless on the island. Daylight passes from the road into the window and falls on a dark embroidered cover, a single closed book and some brass pieces, a cross, candlesticks, and a folded standing note of opening times. On darkish days there is a lamp in there, a tiny glow along this pilgrim track that leads on to The Street of the Dead and The Abbey Church where scribes once wrote, candled and quilled to keep a light alive.
There are two small rooms inside, arched apart. In the first the bookseller sits at a table, reading. C
ards are for sale, and some small painted nets for cross-stitching, elegant as bookmarks. The walls carry a few historical posters of boats – coracles, ferries, and, very beautiful, the sailing ships and steamships that stood out in Martyrs’ Bay to take off emigrants from 1750. A close-printed sheet with the history of the bookshop is pinned on the wall but too high for me to read. A round table carries blue booklets about Mull and Iona, local maps.
It’s right, of course, not to have widened this little place. Small light and space hallow it with so much quiet. People whisper at the shelves until the room feels like a scriptorium, in the right dimension, and divided in two by a wall of books. The bookshop – or bookhouse is better – has no attached neighbour. It is alone, white, thick, and curving inside. Who knows how it began?
Once its true work was to hand-print books when William Muir and John McCormick, local men, arrived eagerly to open The Iona Press because, they said, ‘Iona was a great seat of learning once’ and they dream they will ‘revive something of the ancient glory’.
They began with handmade printings of William Blake, his apocalyptic coloured visions emerging into the white northern space. They brought out Altus Prosator in English for visitors, only yards from where Saint Columba had written it in Latin a thousand years before. They bordered the pages with black and white Celtic patterns and these were finished by islanders who painted in the colour, working into the dark after the day’s long work, following the ancient crosses and circles with an art they had learned from The Book of Kells: and that Book was their own, begun on Iona but taken to Kells to find protection from invaders to Iona in the ninth century.
