Booksellers in court: Approaches to the legal history of copyright in England before 1842

The history of publication copyright and of legal intervention in the English book trade is extensive (and not without controversy), but it might yet benefit from consideration of one cautionary idea: That it was individual action within market contexts that tested both state and guild policing and attempts at trade protection by sections of the trade. It is a mistake to consider legislation, proclamations, and civil and common law cases only in the abstract, without considering how effec-tively these declarations of law were actually enforced and policed, or indeed how they were avoided, misinterpreted, and semirealized. The often notorious history of the law in relation to copyright and the book trade generally is self-evidently the history of individuals creating, appealing, and challenging it. It is also a history of the change from rights in material objects (the manuscript and the printed book as physical entity) to rights in "texts".