the book collector
raphers seems to bear this out: Kearsley’s Table of Trades, for the Assistance of Parents and Guardians (London: for George Kearsley, 1786). 11 This is a wonderful resource for hundreds of trades, including twenty-two trades relating to printing and bookselling, giving apprentice fees, the sum required to set up in business, what the journeyman can expect to be paid with and without board, and whether the occupation is ‘laborious’. For example, we learn that to set up in business as a copperplate printer might cost between £ 50 and £ 200, a considerable sum it would seem, but not much compared with the £ 300 to £ 2000 needed to set up a printing house. A journeyman copperplate printer can expect to earn 2 to 3s per day, while his opposite number in the printing shop earns 3s to 4s 4d per day. Bowen and Imho V found that two centuries earlier the Antwerp copperplate printers earned about as much as a skilled stone mason. 12 Kearsley does not consider stone masons, but he does tell us that a brick-layer earns somewhere between a copperplate printer and a printer of books, 2s 4d to 3s 6d. The 5s to John Ebrallin in Cambridge must therefore surely have been for a press crew, not for a single workman. Further confirmation perhaps comes from Hanckwitz’s poem which describes a workshop employingthree men, though admittedly with three presses. The re-discovery of An Essay on Engraving and Copper-plate Printing is a significant addition to the literature of copper-plate printing, vividly evoking the working conditions of early eighteenth–century rolling press printers. 13 The work is an octavo in half sheets of sixteen 11 . I am grateful to the curators of the British Library exhibition Georgians Revealed where I came across this in the catalogue by Moira Go V , John Goldfinch, Karen Limper-Herz and Helen Peden, (London: The British Library, 2013). 12 . Bowen and Imhof p. 56. 13 . First proofs of the Universal catalogue of books on art, compiled for the use of the National Art Library and the schools of art in the United Kingdom (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870) p. 782; Howard C. Levis, A Descriptive Bibliography of the most important books in the English language relating to the Art and History of engraving and the collecting of prints (London: Chiswick Press 1912 and 13, reprinted by Wm Dawson & Sons Ltd. 1974), mis-spelling the author as ‘Hauckwitz’ and noting ‘I have not been able to find a copy of this book, so can give no details. It is mentioned in the Universal Catalogue of Books on Art and in other Bibliographies’ (p. 94 and a similar note on p. 5l4). The only copy now recorded is at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Paris, shelfmarkDuplessis 1147, ESTC N477145.
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