THE POEMS OF ISABELLA WHITNEY: A CRITICAL EDITION by ...

Printing History
The Copy of a letter was entered in the Stationers'
Register for 1566-1567 and licensed to Rycharde Jonnes
[sic] . As the title page showed Jones was dwelling "at the
Signe of the spred Egle," the work must have been printed
before 1576 when Jones had moved near St. Sepulchre's
Church. Whether the work went through more than one edition
is unknown, as later bibliographers were either unfamiliar
with it or did not always clearly identify the copy with
which they were familiar. Ames's Typographical Antiquities
(1749) and Ritson's Bibliographica Poetica (1802) both
failed to mention the work. Although the Bodleian copy is
an octavo, Brydges in 1812 described the work as a duodecimo
(Restitutia i. 234), while J. Payne Collier, in 1863,
claimed that "It is only not a chap-book by assuming the
more dignified form of a 4to" (ii). According to Alan Bold,
a chap-book, or cheapbook, "was a pamphlet made from a sheet
folded into four, eight, twelve or sixteen uncut, uncovered
and unstitched pages" (72). Because a chap-book could,
therefore, have been identical in size to a quarto.
Collier's description would seem to indicate that his
copy-text was bound and covered, or in some other way
distinctively different from a chap-book printing. Collier
also dated The Copy of a letter at 1580, "when Richard Jones
was in full business, and when he was producing many
publications, in prose and verse, adapted to the
xli