The King’s Printer project (2002-09) was directed by Prof Graham Rees, who with Dr Maria Wakely as Research Fellow undertook a detailed analysis of the institution of the King’s Printing House, the men who worked in it, and the texts that it produced, during the reign of James VI and I.
Graham died in July 2009, and after his death Maria completed the book they had written together that was the main, but by no means the only, result of their research on this fascinating and under-studied aspect of early modern print culture: Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of James VI and I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
This website continues to be maintained by the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary both in order to archive project documentation, and more importantly to preserve the availability of valuable resources published by the King's Printer project.
Politics, Power and the Printed Word in the Reign of James I
- This AHRC-funded project aims to investigate the King's Printing House which, though little studied, was nevertheless one of the central institutions of Jacobean political and cultural life.
- The project is multidisciplinary: it will bring together the analytical-bibliographical, archival, business-historical, and other lines of inquiry.
- Archival researches will lie at the heart of the project. We have already identified and transcribed over a hundred documents bearing on the operations of the King's Printing House. Only a few of these documents have ever been studied and, taken as a whole, the evidence of this archive promises to transform our understanding of the institution, and so alter our understanding of the early-modern book trade in London as a whole.