Publisher
As a publisher, Stansby's most significant work was certainly the 1616 Jonson folio, which represented the first instance of a collected edition of the stage plays of a contemporary dramatist. He also published Thomas Coryat's famous travelogue Coryat's Crudities (1611), and Thomas Lodge's translation of the works of Seneca (1614, 1620). George Sandys's translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid came from Stansby's presses in 1626.
Stansby continued to publish some works and authors originally issued by his master Windet. Perhaps the important example was Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; Windet had published editions in 1597 and 1604, and Stansby continued with editions in 1611, 1617, 1622, and 1631–32.
Like most printers who published, Stansby had to arrange for retail sale of his works. The title page of his 1620 edition of Jonson's Epicene specifices that the work is sold by the bookseller John Browne.
Stansby's editions of two works by John Selden, Titles of Honour (1614, 1631) and Mare Clausum (1635), were notable for being among the earliest English books that printed Arabic and Turkish words. The former book, in both editions, used carved woodblocks for its non-English terms; the latter was the first English book that used movable type to print Arabic.
One of Stansby's later projects was the 1634 edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which would be the last edition of that work prior to the revival of interest in Malory and his book in the nineteenth century. Stansby eventually sold his business to stationer Richard Bishop for £700.
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Famous quotes containing the word publisher:
“No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.... I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“A publisher is a specialised form of bank or building society, catering for customers who cannot cope with life and are therefore forced to write about it.”
—Colin Haycraft (b. 1929)