John Charlewood

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John Charlewood (died 1593) commenced business as a printer early in Mary's reign in partnership with John Tisdale, in Holborn.

He was a member of the Grocers' Company until about 1574, though he took out licences to print books. From 1562 to 1593 he printed continuously and issued a very large number of books. His address was the Half-Eagle and Key in the Barbican, and in one of the Marprelate tracts it is stated that as printer to the Earl of Arundel he had a press in the Charterhouse. He was known to be one of the ring-leaders of the gang of printers who printed pirated copies of texts to which they had no rights. His widow married James Roberts, who thus succeeded to the business.

Charlewood printed several books by Giordano Bruno: De la causa, principio, et uno (1584), De l'infinito universo et mondi (1584), De gli heroici furori (1585), and Cabala del cauallo Pegaseo (1585).

These four works and two others were all published during or immediately following Bruno's visit to Oxford University. They were obviously the backlog of works which he had accumulated during his years of wandering and exile. A fictitious foreign imprint of Venice helped the sales in England of a book in a foreign language. Charlewood obviously hoped that this stratagem would provide easier and increased sales for these books, which would allow the printing of a larger and more profitable edition. His hopes were apparently not realised since none of them were reprinted in Italian in Great Britain until modern times.

[edit] External links

• H. R. Tedder, ‘Charlewood, John (d. 1593)’, rev. Robert Faber, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 11 Jan 2008
• Works by or about John Charlewood in libraries (WorldCat catalog)