Miss Marjorie Plant has pointed out, in her always readable economic history, The English Book Trade, that there was once a time when "the person who was of no account whatever in the early years of the book industry was the author." At a later period when the printer was dominated by book-seller and publisher, Dr. Johnson wrote in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1739, "We can produce some who threatened printers with their highest displeasure for having dared to print books for those who wrote them!"
In the history of English literature the relations of author, printer and publisher have often been bitter and obscure, posing many problems in bibliography and textual criticism. Dr. McKerrow, introducing the literary student to bibliography, suggests that "the best way of obtaining a clear and lively comprehension of the processes by which the books of Shakespeare's time were produced" would be by actually composing a sheet or two in exact facsimile of an Elizabethan quarto and printing it on a hand-press. "Once he does this," he adds, "he will find that the material book, apart altogether from its literary content, can be a thing of surprising interest."
The surprise of Dr. McKerrow's student trying to disentangle the impositions by which the Penguin edition of more than a million copies of Shaw's plays were produced on modern perfector printing presses and automatic folding machines would indeed be considerable. Nevertheless it is to be doubted whether there are as many bibliographical vagaries and obscurities in Shaw as in the folios and quartos of Shakespeare. Certainly there is something of the same fascination in the printing and production of the "material" books of the later playwright; apart from the literary antics of an ebullient Irish author with that most emotional of all romantic characters: seemingly hard-headed Scots printers.
Since we are presenting the romance of playwright and printer, without benefit of publisher, let us set our characters in their dramatic place and scene. The place is Edinburgh; the scene R. & R. Clark; the principal characters, Edward Clark, Bernard Shaw and William Maxwell; with a faint echo off-stage from that habitual bankrupt, Grant Richards, later deserted for the more solid attractions of a "commissioned" Constable.
Shaw's original shorthand draft of his letter to Maxwell on the centenary of R. & R. Clark in 1946.
Professor G. M. Trevelyan, in one of those two brilliant chapters on Scotland in his English Social History, points out that rapidly developing eighteenth-century Edinburgh "was hardly less important than London in the British field of letters."