Book Distribution and Printing in Suffolk 1534-1850, by Tony Copsey

From the inside front fly leaf: Tony Copsey, Suffolk born and educated, has for nearly thirty years been a collector of books about Suffolk, with the inevitable result that his knowledge in the field is vast. In recent years he has come to be most interested in those who wrote, printed and published them. Two major studies spring from these enthusiasms, and this is the first to be published in a limited private edition. The other, biographies of Suffolk authors and list of their principal works, will build on David Elisha Davy's Catalogue and Biographical notices of Suffolk Authors, unpublished in manuscript in the British Library. In the same way for this work Henry Hallam, recently retired as one of Bodley's librarians and also living in Suffolk, started with the Reverend James Ford's Notitia Suffolciensis, another manuscript known in two versions, one in the Bodleian and the other in the Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich. Both authors have combed public and private collections for Suffolk printings from sixteenth century beginnings to 1850, and Tony Copsey has collected as much information as possible about those who produced and sold books in that time, often continuing the story of the printers and publishers which survived into modem times. For two reasons complications arise: few members of the book trade ever specialised in one area and stuck to it; and the process by which many of them joined and dissolved partnerships, died and left widows who first traded alone, then remarried with book-men, all makes for the weaving of a tangled web. Messrs Copsey and Hallam have elucidated much, and one can read of everything from the production of great works in small towns (what a Mecca for printers is Bungayl), and of obscure works from such unlikely places as Ballingdon, Dallinghoo and Fressingtield.

The condition of the book is generally good. The dust jacket has some minor scuffs and blemishes, and light wear along the edges and corners, but the spine is intact, and all pages are clean, intact, unblemished and tightly bound.