The Evolution of Editorial Style in Early Modern England

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 1-18

3. The Beginnings of Editorial Style in Seventeenth-Century England: Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 19-53

4. The Architectural Principles of Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: Documenting the Early Modern Living Page

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 55-82

5. The Pinnacle of Editorial Style in Eighteenth-Century England: John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 83-122

6. Eighteenth-Century Editorial Style at Work: The Editing of The Elements of Euclid by Isaac Barrow and Robert Simson

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 123-151

7. The First Appropriation of Editorial Style: Philip Luckombe’s A Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 153-183

8. Nineteenth-Century Modernising Inheritance of Editorial Style: Caleb Stower’s The Printer’s Grammar

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 185-212

9. Nineteenth-Century Editorial Style at Work: Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s Piers Plowman

   • Jocelyn Hargrave

   Pages 213-235

10. Authorial Editorial Practice at Work: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poems (Ashley MS 408)

    • Jocelyn Hargrave

    Pages 237-256

11. Conclusion

    • Jocelyn Hargrave

    Pages 257-263

12. Back Matter

    Pages 265-280

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This book provides a historical study on the evolution of editorial style and its progress towards standardisation through an examination of early modern English style guides. The text considers the variety of ways authors, editors and printers directly implemented or uniquely interpreted and adapted the guidelines of these style guides as part of their inherently human editorial practice. Offering a critical mapping of early modern style guides, Jocelyn Hargrave explores when and how style guides originated, how they contributed to the evolution of editorial practice and how they impacted the overall publishing of content.

• editorial style
• printer's style guides
• early modern print culture
• editorial guildelines
• typographical style
• editorial theory
• standardization of style
• British and Irish Literature

“Hargrave develops her ideas through careful and close readings of primary sources in conjunction with deep, long, and thoughtful engagement with a wide range of scholarship. Meticulously detailed, the book develops a useful rethinking of editorial work as politically and economically situated across several domains of knowledge and professions. The Evolution of Editorial Style in Early Modern England  will have wide-ranging appeal across disciplines—it will be interesting to book historians, bibliographers, scholarly editors, and literary scholars who wish to understand how a given author’s work was handled by a printer.” (Lisa Maruca, Associate Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA, and author of The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660-1760 (2007))

“Hargrave’s mapping of early-modern style guides constitutes a contribution to scholarship with lasting value, and the study overall shows ambition and rigor in responding to key questions in the field of book history and editing studies.” (Susan L. Greenberg, Senior Lecturer, University of Roehampton, UK, and author of A Poetics of Editing (Palgrave 2018))

• Monash University, Clayton, Australia

  Jocelyn Hargrave

Jocelyn Hargrave teaches writing, editing and publishing at Monash University, Australia, and the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her current research relates to colonial Australian print culture. She has worked in the educational publishing industry for twenty-two years, twenty as an editor.

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